Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 65

Cheney Is Lying

In his deeply revealing interview on Fox News last night, former vice-president Dick Cheney was asked which plots were foiled using torture, thereby saving thousands of lives. The first and only case he cited last night was the “West Coast” “Second Wave” plot against buildings in Los Angeles. He’s cited this many times before. And here’s the thing: It’s a lie. It’s not true. And we now know it’s not true, because the CIA itself admitted it last year, after a decade of lying about it.

Cheney hasn’t read the report, although he knows it’s “full of crap.” What that tells you about this man’s integrity and honesty I’ll leave to you. But here is what he hasn’t read.

The CIA, from the beginning, cited this case as a critical piece of evidence for the efficacy of torture, in all its briefings to officials. To take one random example, here is a legal memo from Steven Bradbury, at the OLC, conveying what the CIA was telling him:

So torture gave us the existence of the Guraba cell, which foiled the plot. The CIA told Bush the exact same thing:

This was a lie. How do we know? Because CIA operational cables and internal documents tell a different story. The FBI arrested two operatives in August 2001, including a “suspected airline suicide attacker” and that provided the leads for further identification of al Qaeda operatives involved in the Gubara version of the attack. Another plot on similar lines by some Malaysian nationals, coordinated by KSM, was foiled when one Misran bin Arshad was arrested in January 2002, revealing, by the way, that the attack had already been canceled the month before. Arshad spilled the beans after legal and non-coercive interrogations. So, according to the CIA, torturing KSM gave us nothing that we didn’t already have; and agents deduced that what intelligence they did get from KSM about this was because he knew that Arshad had already been captured – not because he had been tortured.

And the CIA admitted as much last year:

The CIA’s June 2013 Response acknowledges that “[t]he Study correctly points out that we erred when we represented that we ‘learned’ of the Second Wave plotting from KSM and ‘learned’ of the operational cell comprised of students from Hambali.” Here’s the full section:

But notice that they cannot quite admit what they have admitted. They accept that they misled the president, but called it “imprecision,” rather than untruth. Then they bizarrely continued to “assess this was a good example of the importance of intelligence derived from the detainee [torture] program.” Then they threw in another claim – that the capture of another figure, Hambali, had been critical to foiling the plot as well, and that his capture was a function of the torture program. But the CIA’s own documents show that Hambali’s capture was unrelated to to the program. After a while, when you read this report closely, you cannot avoid seeing that they’re flailing around. They’ve got nothing but bluster and bluff. And when you watch the amazing Cheney interview, you realize he has nothing else either. All he has is bluff. But what he said last night was wrong. The CIA itself has said it was untrue.

We have a former vice-president going on cable news and continuing to say things in defense of the CIA that the CIA itself admits are untrue. This is his p.r. strategy: asking the American people who they are going to believe: Dick Cheney or their own lyin’ eyes? More on the Cheney interview to come.

Team Torture

Look, quit navel gazing on this CIA torture report. Yea we engage in torture. Good. Big deal. Now go focus on defeating the Islamic enemy.

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) December 9, 2014

This cretin was in the US Congress https://t.co/CoaIBNS8Zt

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 9, 2014

Noah Millman believes that our reasons for torturing weren’t based on torture’s effectiveness:

Willingness to torture became, first within elite government and opinion-making circles, then in the culture generally, and finally as a partisan GOP talking point, a litmus test of seriousness with respect to the fight against terrorism. That – proving one’s seriousness in the fight – was its primary purpose from the beginning, in my view.

It was only secondarily about extracting intelligence. It certainly wasn’t about instilling fear or extracting false confessions – these would not have served American purposes. It was never about “them” at all. It was about us. It was our psychological security blanket, our best evidence that we were “all-in” in this war, the thing that proved to us that we were fierce enough to win.

Larison agrees:

Because of the bias in our debates in favor of hard-line policies, preventive war and torture not only become acceptable “options” worth considering, but they have often been treated as possessing the quality–seriousness–that they most lack. The belief that a government is entitled to invade a foreign country and destroy its government on the off chance that the latter might one day pose a threat is an outstanding example of something that is morally unserious. That is, it reveals the absence or the rejection of careful moral reasoning. Likewise, believing that a government should ever be allowed to torture people is the opposite of what comes from serious moral reflection.

Update from a reader:

Thank you for your superlative torture coverage. I am a writing to let you know of a revealing exchange I had recently on National Review Online. In reply to an article yesterday by David French accusing the torture report of being a “partisan mess,” and insisting on the usefulness of torture, I wrote the following:

If torture works, we want to be sure it works in the long run, not just the short run. I worry that even if via torture we foil a particular bomb plot in the short run, in the long run we will have just succeeded in making many more bombers, since the terrorists will successfully use the fact of American torture to recruit new terrorists.

One reply might be: so we should torture in secret. But that implies that everyone we torture must never tell about it. And the only way to guarantee THAT is to silence those we torture forever, by killing them or imprisoning them for life without trial. Is that where we really want to go as a country?

In reply, “Nightscribe” wrote:

I realize this is a waste of my time, but, the Republicans and I do NOT think interrogation/torture (if you like that word) is a recruitment tool for Islamic terrorists! It’s the WEAKNESS we show the world that we are willing to throw our military and their tactics under the bus for feeding them Ensure! For God Sake! Wake up!

And who gives a flying F*** if they tell anybody about it? We’re trading them off for deserters by the handful! They’re no doubt laughing so hard they can barely keep the blade straight on the next journalist’s neck!

I only hope the next torture tactic we use is eyeball with a grapefruit spoon! With VIDEO!

The rest of the comments contain many equally disturbing and deranged “hurray for torture!” claims. One common argument that crops up is the following: (i) We are civilized; (ii) our enemies are not; so (iii) we should torture them.

Do such people really not see that (iii) refutes (i)?

Quote For The Day

“The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of [this] Convention. It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.

The core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called ‘universal jurisdiction.’ Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution,” – Ronald Reagan’s signing statement on the ratification of the UN Convention on Torture.

Allow me to repeat:

“Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.”

(Photo: Getty Images.)

Mental Health Break

A reader is spent:

I hope you have one hell of a good MHB planned for today. As much as we all had a good idea of what we thought was going on at these prisons, the details of the Senate torture report are almost too disturbing to continue looking at. Reading your posts today is mentally exhausting and I’m actually getting nauseated as more details come out. Trying to sympathize with the captives, or even the interrogators, is impossible. I am numb at this point … and angry.

Another also needs a break:

If ever there was a time we needed cats vs printers, or really anything at all, it’s now. Even Shakespeare has moments of humor in the darkest tragedies. Please?

The Full Chaotic Horror Unfolds

CIA Torture Report

Shane Harris and Tim Mak report on the “most gruesome moments” from the torture report. Among them:

[T]he CIA also forced some detainees who had broken feet or legs to stand in stress-inducing positions, despite having earlier pledged that they wouldn’t subject those wounded individuals to treatment that might exacerbate their injuries.

The CIA’s utter incompetence is staggering:

While the CIA has said publicly that it held about 100 detainees, the committee found that at least 119 people were in the agency’s custody. “The fact is they lost track and they didn’t really know who they were holding,” the Senate aide said, noting that investigators found emails in which CIA personnel were “surprised” to find some people in their custody. The CIA also determined that at least 26 of its detainees were wrongfully held. But due to the agency’s poor record-keeping, it may never be known precisely how many detainees were held, and how they were treated in custody, the committee found.

Or whether they died. The NYT summary has this:

Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in American custody. With the approval of the C.I.A.’s medical staff, some C.I.A. prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the C.I.A.’s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.” C.I.A. medical staff members described the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a “series of near drownings.”

The report also suggests that more prisoners were subjected to waterboarding than the three the C.I.A. has acknowledged in the past. The committee obtained a photograph of a waterboard surrounded by buckets of water at the prison in Afghanistan commonly known as the Salt Pit — a facility where the C.I.A. had claimed that waterboarding was never used. One clandestine officer described the prison as a “dungeon,” and another said that some prisoners there “literally looked like a dog that had been kenneled.”

This is the professionalism we’ve been told so much about – the tightly controlled, thoroughly humane interrogation practices that the CIA could keep firmly within legal parameters. And what, exactly, did we get for this barbarism? Nothing:

The Senate Intelligence Committee reviewed 20 cited examples of intelligence “successes” that the CIA identified from the interrogation program and found that there was no relationship between a cited counterterrorism success and the techniques used. Furthermore, the information gleaned during torture sessions merely corroborated information already available to the intelligence community from other sources, including reports, communications intercepts, and information from law enforcement agencies, the committee found.

Stay tuned as we mine the actual report for more info.

The Right Pre-Spins The Torture Report

Krauthammer – who was a key intellectual architect of the torture program – worries that the report will compromise our intelligence relationships:

I wish he’d worried about that before he backed rushing into an unprecedented American torture regime, don’t you? Gee,who could have predicted that setting up special black sites to torture prisoners with Nazi and Communist techniques could lead to unraveling alliances with our Western democratic friends? Which is to say that Krauthammer seems to believe that violating the Geneva Conventions in the first place is less damaging than subsequently exposing the truth!

The awful truth is that we used our disproportionate power in these alliances to co-opt otherwise civilized countries into the most appalling acts of criminality – thereby staining and violating the core values that sustain these alliances. It was this violation of basic Western values that truly weakened our alliances and intelligence relationships. And this could get much worse. Other countries, unlike the US, take the prohibition of torture seriously, and will be forced by the rule of law to investigate and prosecute those implicated in war crimes. We could, in fact, in the near-future have torture prosecutions for those cooperating with these US-originating human rights abuses abroad, while the country that pioneered them refuses to do anything. How’s that for wrecking this country’s moral standing for good and all? And your response to this is that we should merely cover everything up? Does Krauthammer believe we still live in the 1940s and could do such a thing even if we wanted to?

K.T. McFarland of Fox News immediately reaches for the crudest partisan lever: that this report is not about democratic accountability for abuses at the highest levels, but about “punishing America” and “blaming Bush”. But notice something interesting about the op-ed: McFarland does not deny that the US tortured prisoners:

According to media reports, the report concludes that we tortured terrorists.

These are the same terrorists who blew up the World Trade Center, bombed the Pentagon, and tried to level the U.S. Capitol. These are the same terrorists that today have beheaded Christians, Westerners and, just this past weekend, another American citizen.

So … we did torture terror suspects, right? But they apparently deserved it. Which is a good summary of the reptilian brain in many neocons. Stephen Hayes tries another route:

Such matters should be subject to tough, dispassionate, fact-based investigation. Actual failings should be condemned by both Republicans and Democrats, by supporters of the program as well as opponents. That’s not what happened here. Instead, the report was produced by the Democratic staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Dianne Feinstein. Republicans declined to participate.

Feinstein required former CIA directors and deputy directors to sign nondisclosure agreements in order even to see the accusations made against them. Despite the fact that virtually all of the 500-plus-page report has been declassified for release, the Feinstein committee also imposed, as a condition of access to the report, severe restrictions on what those officials may say in their own defense. Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA, told The Weekly Standard: “Based on the nondisclosure agreement I signed, I cannot talk to you about the details of the Feinstein report, the Republican rebuttal, or the agency response—all as a condition of my being able to see it.”

In the clearest evidence that the committee was interested in blame rather than truth, the staffers did not seek to interview those involved in the interrogations.

The committee restricted itself to the CIA’s own documents not because they were trying to rig the results, but because those were the terms of the investigation, and because the millions of pages of documents they had to fight through were more than enough to handle. They did not interview the CIA agents because of an ongoing DOJ investigation into the same material. This was a self-consciously limited investigation. It was not set up to assign blame or responsibility for anything (and doesn’t). It collects the CIA’s own facts and documents with respect to the torture program in the various black sites. It was not tasked with coming up with the definitive account of the much bigger criminal apparatus that the Bush-Cheney administration set up to torture prisoners. It covers nothing in the military or JSOC or GTMO. It does nothing but examine the CIA’s own internal record.

As for the notion that the Republican refusal to participate somehow reveals the bad faith of Feinstein, et al, you just have to laugh. It merely highlights the appalling partisanship of the contemporary GOP, a party whose last nominee, Mitt Romney, was an enthusiast for torture. It demonstrates just how extreme the current GOP is, and how obstructionist they have been to a very basic act of oversight and due diligence. It doesn’t show Feinstein’s corruption; it exposes the GOP’s.

Then there is Nicole Wallace, who played the 9/11 card this morning:

On Tuesday’s “Morning Joe”, former Bush administration spokesman Nicolle Wallace offered a heated defense of the torture techniques, arguing that she “didn’t care” what officials did because it was in order to protect Americans.

“Months after 9/11, there were three people we thought who knew about imminent attacks and we did whatever we had to do and I pray to god that till the end of time that we do whatever we have to do,” Wallace said. “The notion that this somehow makes America less great is asinine and dangerous.”

No it’s not. It’s a matter of basic human decency and a minimal adherence to American values as they have been espoused from George Washington onwards. Wallace is directly attacking the West by her remarks. And all Western civilization has achieved.

How The CIA Won The Beltway Battle … Till Now

by Scott Horton

There’s a simple, foundational question behind the publication of today’s report on CIA torture: Are the people and Congress entitled to know about these programs and the legacy they have left behind? The conflict between the right of a democracy to know what’s being done in its name and the necessary secrecy of intelligence services is what’s really being tested right now. And looking back on the struggle between the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the CIA over the report due to be released today tells us a lot about the state of play.

On this score, the report is likely to document, without highlighting, an embarrassing failure of oversight during the period from 2002-2006, when the core programs were in effect. That failure is almost certainly a combination of misdirection and misinformation from the CIA to SSCI, a desire by the White House not to share certain information, and a failure by the SSCI itself to probe with sufficient determination to find the facts. But the report should help us weigh these considerations.

The history of the production of the SSCI report already suggests very strongly that the CIA has been far more skillful player in the struggle than the Senate. In her now-famous speech on the Senate floor, Dianne Feinstein set out many of the historical steps. These make clear that from the outset to the last stages, the CIA has played a subtle and effective game of slow-down designed to stretch the process out. It has been fighting for time, and taking the view that every week of delay is a victory. Some of the tactics used included:

• Insisting on internal review prior to disclosure to SSCI, and then hiring outside contractors (who would not otherwise have had access to the documents) to do the review;

• Raising claims of privilege and relevance to disclosures;

• Insisting that review occur in CIA offices, using equipment that was owned and provided by the CIA;

• “Disappearing” documents once they had been provided;

• Bringing accusations of security breaches by SSCI staff;

• Requesting a Department of Justice probe of their allegations;

• Demanding aggressive redactions from the text of the report designed to make the report itself incomprehensible.

These tactics were successful at least in that they slowed down the report by several years.

In my mind, it is utterly unsurprising that the CIA would reach to these tactics—that is precisely the conduct I would expect from officers loyal to their institution, who are struggling to avoid disclosure of information which they believe will prove harmful to the institution’s interests. What is truly surprising is the indulgent, understanding posture of Senator Feinstein and her staff, who gave ground to the CIA on point after point, in derogation of the Senate’s rights and powers. Perhaps Feinstein thought that being deferential would help her with the CIA. If so, that was exceedingly naïve.

Chalk this up, then, as a huge win for the agency over its overseers. The CIA demonstrated a mastery of the politics of the Washington Beltway that far outstripped its investigators. So far at least it has only won them time—but it has gotten them close to their mark. Another week of delay and the report could have been buried for ever.

The final gambit in the delay game was the claim that American personnel abroad may face danger as a result of the disclosures. But the SSCI report is not likely to make entirely new disclosures on the key points. These disclosures occurred in a steady trickle from April 2004 through early 2009. The use of torture and the creation of black sites did indeed have consequences abroad for the United States—it fueled recruitment for terrorist groups on one hand, it helped inspire the Arab Spring and the cries of “dignity” that accompanied it on the other. In any event, it greatly complicated U.S. operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and other theaters of operation. However, the consequences that the SSCI will have for U.S. personnel are likely to be different. It is likely to have consequences precisely for the persons who are today heard most loudly objecting to its release: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Michael Hayden and Jose Rodriguez. Their reputations will be tarnished further, and, no doubt, demands for accountability will be renewed. And there are plenty of U.S. citizens, and U.S. intelligence officers, who reckon that a very good thing.

(Photo: CIA director John Brennan testifies before a full committee hearing during his nomination hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, on February 7, 2013. By Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)

Awaiting The Torture Report

Glenn Greenwald and his team will be live-blogging (and we’ll be devouring and analyzing it as fast as we responsibly can):

[T]his will be by far the most comprehensive and official account of the War on Terror’s official torture regime. Given the authors – Committee Democrats along with two Maine Senators: Agnus King (I) and Susan Collins (R) – it’s likely to whitewash critical events, including the key, complicit role members of Congress such as Nancy Pelosi played inapproving the program (important details of which are still disputed), as well an attempt to insulate the DC political class by stressing how the CIA“misled” elected officials about the program. But the report is certain to lay bare in very stark terms some of the torture methods, including “graphic details about sexual threats” and what Reuters still euphemistically and subserviently calls “other harsh interrogation techniques the CIA meted out to captured militants.”

Micah Zenko wants us to remember how wide-spread support for these heinous actions was:

When reading the executive summary, Americans should try to look beyond these specific abuses and ask the fundamental question: How could senior officials at the CIA, White House, and the Department of Justice have unanimously approved the use of torture?

According to officials’ memoirs and historical accounts examining the four months between March 28, 2002, when al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan, and Aug. 1, when the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memo authorizing the enhanced interrogation techniques was completed, not one senior official aware of the program registered an objection to it. Current CIA Director John Brennan, who was the agency’s deputy executive director in 2002, later claimed he had “personal objections” to “waterboarding, nudity, and others,” but he never made this officially known, not even to the CIA’s top lawyer, John Rizzo, whose office was just 15 feet away.

Dafna Linzer previews the spin from the CIA and the Senate:

The report is likely to blame CIA leaders for false portrayals of the value of the interrogations or for keeping details from congressional leaders and even the White House. Expect every named former CIA official to deny it. And expect to never know the truth. The Senate didn’t investigate itself. There is no gathered evidence of what the committee – which routinely meets behind closed doors – was told exactly, what it authorized or what CIA leaders believed they were authorized by Congress to do.

How Massimo Calabresi frames the debate over the report:

What effect will assigning blame have? The CIA says it is so burned by the EIT program that it is permanently out of the business of interrogation and Dianne Feinstein, the hawkish head of the Senate Intelligence committee, says that’s fine. The purpose of her report, she says, is to ensure such a program is never again acceptable to Americans.

But plenty of others, from ex-CIA officer Jose Rodriguez, to former Vice President Dick Cheney, to former CIA chief Michael Hayden, say the program should be available for use if there is another major attack on the U.S. Even Obama’s CIA chief says only that the EIT program is not now “appropriate,” suggesting it might be in other circumstances.

Ultimately, the report’s value lies in answering that simple question: should we ever do it again?

Marcy Wheeler rejects the focus on “efficacy”:

The people who approved torture had the means of knowing — should have known — it would elicit false confessions. It’s just that no one can prove whether that was the entire point or not. … It’s not just a question of whether torture is “effective” at obtaining intelligence. It’s also whether the entire point of it was to produce spies and propaganda.

Finally, former interrogator Mark Fallon, who has long believed that torture doesn’t work, hopes that the report prompts Congress to act. He was to make sure we don’t torture again:

The report is essential because it makes clear the legal, moral, and strategic costs of torture. President Obama and congressional leaders should use this opportunity to push for legislation that solidifies the ban on torture and cruel treatment. While current law prohibits these acts, US officials employed strained legal arguments to authorize abuse.

A law could take various forms: a codification of the president’s 2009 executive order banning torture, for example, or an expansion of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act so that key protections in it would apply to the CIA as well as the military. However it’s designed, a new law would help the country stay true to its ideals during times of crisis and guard against a return to the “dark side.”

Our Technological Plateau

Michael Hanlon claims that the “true age of innovation – I’ll call it the Golden Quarter – ran from approximately 1945 to 1971,” during which time just about everything that “defines the modern world either came about, or had its seeds sown,” from the pill to computers to civil rights. One reason he believes we’ve stagnated? Our increasing risk aversion:

Apollo almost certainly couldn’t happen today. That’s not because people aren’t interested in going to the Moon any more, but because the risk – calculated at a couple-of-per-cent chance of astronauts dying – would be unacceptable. Boeing took a huge risk when it developed the 747, an extraordinary 1960s machine that went from drawing board to flight in under five years. Its modern equivalent, the Airbus A380 (only slightly larger and slightly slower), first flew in 2005 – 15 years after the project go-ahead. Scientists and technologists were generally celebrated 50 years ago, when people remembered what the world was like before penicillin, vaccination, modern dentistry, affordable cars and TV. Now, we are distrustful and suspicious – we have forgotten just how dreadful the world was pre-Golden Quarter.

Risk played its part, too, in the massive postwar shift in social attitudes. People, often the young, were prepared to take huge, physical risks to right the wrongs of the pre-war world. The early civil rights and anti-war protestors faced tear gas or worse. In the 1960s, feminists faced social ridicule, media approbation and violent hostility. Now, mirroring the incremental changes seen in technology, social progress all too often finds itself down the blind alleyways of political correctness. Student bodies used to be hotbeds of dissent, even revolution; today’s hyper-conformist youth is more interested in the policing of language and stifling debate when it counters the prevailing wisdom. Forty years ago a burgeoning media allowed dissent to flower. Today’s very different social media seems, despite democratic appearances, to be enforcing a climate of timidity and encouraging groupthink.

Resuscitating The Rust Belt

Joel Kotkin and Richey Piiparinen posit that America’s erstwhile industrial heartland “could well be on the verge of a major resurgence, one that should be welcomed not only locally but by the rest of the country”:

Two factors drive this change. One is the steady revival of America as a productive manufacturing country, driven in large part by new technology, rising wages abroad (notably in China), and the development of low-cost, abundant domestic energy, much of it now produced in states such as Ohio and in the western reaches of Pennsylvania.

The second, and perhaps more surprising, is the wealth of human capital already existent in the region.

After decades of decline, this is now expanding as younger educated workers move to the area in part to escape the soaring cost of living, high taxes, and regulations that now weigh so heavily on the super-star cities. In fact, more educated workers now leave Manhattan and Brooklyn for places like Cuyahoga County and Erie County, where Cleveland and Buffalo are located, than the other way around. …

The rustbelt revival relies not on mimicry but on embracing the regional culture that values production of things over simply their mere consumption. Cities like San Francisco, Portland and Seattle may have started with industrial roots, but their recent success has been tied to such factors as attractive geographies and, to Midwest sensibilities at least, mild climates. These regions have been enriched for decades by the migration of people from the rustbelt—Microsoft’s former President Steve Ballmer (suburban Detroit), venture capitalist John Doerr (St. Louis), and Intel co-founder Andrew Noyce (Iowa) are just a few examples.

But the cost of housing, among other factors, is changing the calculus:

Housing prices in most rustbelt cities, adjusted for incomes, are one-third those of the Bay Area and at most one-half those seen in the Los Angeles, New York, or Boston areas. This can be seen not just in distant exurbs or suburbs, but in prime inner-city neighborhoods. Whatever dreams millennials have are likely to center around affordable single-family housing, as they begin to marry and start families. The rustbelt offers this younger generation the kind of choices, and middle class standards, that are increasingly unattainable in the superstar cities.

(Photo: Monessen, Pennsylvania, 2007. By Flickr user christine592)