Relying on Foreign Intelligence Services

The accompanying article has a quite interesting summary of, and link to, a story about the U.S. relying on foreign intelligence services for all sorts of things, such as kidnapping people off the street, torturing them, and disposing of their bodies. That's kind of old news, though the story has the twist that President Obama's policies limiting what U.S. agencies can do "have left him with few options." Somehow, it escapes Mr. McShane that one of the President's options is to stop ordering the commission of illegal acts.

Here's a link to the original New York Times story http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/world/24intel.html?ref=todayspaper

On a more serious note, I don't see the problem with U.S. intelligence agencies providing other countries' police or intelligence services with information about suspected terrorists, given that we've accepted that other countries may not have judicial systems meeting our standards. The real problem is that we apparently want to contract out interrogation (torture), kidnapping, and murder, while evading responsibility for the consequences of our actions.

There is also the question of the practicality of a policy which has us turning suspected terrorists over to agencies, such as Pakistan's ISID, which may well have recruited and trained them in the first place.

And Now ... on the Tiny Screen

Those of us who are old enough to remember some of the early days of television, may recall the tiny screens. It seems to me that the trend toward watching movies and television programs on our computers, and especially on our hand-held devices, is taking us back to the eyestrain days of Your Show of Shows. Anyway, here's my first attempt at posting a video clip.

And the CIA Fights Back

The enclosed Washington post story includes a link to Leon Panetta's statement on Speaker Pelosi's comments.

Pelosi Takes on the CIA

This article is one week old, for which I apologize, but I thought it was still worthwhile to bring to your attention. I know this might sound amoral, but my main concern about this torture scandal has been that it would become an enormous distraction for a government that has many important initiatives on its plate. (Note President Obama's comment at his recent press conference about having more major issues on his plate than he had expected.) With Speaker Pelosi's effort to divert attention from her knowledge of possible torture by attacking the CIA, that danger has become substantially greater.

It will be hard enough for the President and the Congress to give legislative expression to the various programs under discussion. If the Speaker is hors de combat while fighting her personal battles with the intelligence committee, it will be that much harder.

The Torture Continues

The central assertion of Richard Fernandez's essay is that the liberals - President Obama and Speaker Pelosi - are trapped in a web of lies about the torture scandal. On the one hand, they want to denounce torture and have nothing to do with it. This position is weakened when we find out how early and how thoroughly Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the matter. And so, the Speaker may have fibbed a bit to conceal her apparent complaisance.

On the other hand, they don't really want to concede that torture produced any really useful information, because that would draw too starkly the choice between national ideals and national security. Fernandez may be right to say that they should have faced that choice, and that they should be prepared to explain when it is right to sacrifice a little public safety for the sake of our democratic ideals, and when it is better to give a little more scope to the pursuit of security.

What Fernandez does not say is that the same dilemma faced the Bush administration, and they too funked it. Oh, sure, you can point to the torture memos from the Office of Legal Counsel as exactly the sort of attempt to balance law and security that was needed. But those memos were secret. Those memos were kept very secret, because the administration didn't want to explain its reasoning to the public. Moreover, I suspect, the administration was concerned that the public would reject its reasoning.

Fernandez, by raising the possibility of public debate on such matters, raises yet another dilemma. What if the people's judgement about when it is appropriate to use torture (and polls have shown that, depending upon how the question is asked, a lot of people would approve of such methods) and that of the officials does not coincide? One could contend that the secrecy of renditions, enhanced interrogation techniques, and the paper trails generated by such activities, was driven by the dual fears that the public would either find the methods used to be criminal and unacceptable, and that the public would find them too half-hearted and ineffectively applied.

Given the choice, the Bush administration opted to try to enhance our security at the cost of the Constitution it is our purpose to defend. It may have damaged the Constitution without enhancing our security, or any gains in security may have been so marginal as not to matter. The Obama administration is trying to take a public position on how these things have been done up to now, and to take a clear stand against certain practices, while keeping a few of them available, just in case that choice between security and liberty raises its head again.

Torturing the CIA

Christopher Hitchens goes after the CIA for reasons beyond the current torture scandal, looking for reasons that the Agency would have been so desperate as to use such means. As usual, incompetence is a better explanation than any conspiracy or consciously evil intent.

This week one of the visitors to this blog commented on my review of Legacy of Ashes. He was of the opinion that the CIA was implicated in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I'm sorry, but the reason Kennedy's assassination looks like the work of a lone gunman is that it was the work of a lone gunman. If the CIA - which employed E. Howard Hunt at the time - had been involved, it would have left not fingerprints, but footprints all over the place.

Last July I read a book called Tears of Autumn. (I posted about it in my reading list XIX.) It was an enjoyable read, and its plot revolved around a rather plausible explanation of the Kennedy assassination: it was an act of revenge for the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. It made perfect sense; it was a very plausible story. But it was labelled a novel, a work of fiction. It would be nice if the authors of these conspiracy theories would be honest enough to label their work as fiction, too.

The Torture Debate - Summarized

John Dickerson has a nice way of summarizing major issues by presenting the major arguments on both sides. He calls it "Debate-o-matic." Here's the example from Friday, April 24, on the torture issue: This Week in Torture. Once you decide which side you're on, you can use some of these arguments on your opponents. Or, in another scenario, you can picture yourself using these arguments on your friends, and see how you like the image.

If You, Too, Have Never Heard of Jay Bybee

In the attached article from Slate.com, published on April 24, Frank Bowman argues that the Congress of the United States may not be able to impeach Judge Jay Bybee from his seat on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Mr. Bowman's article is rather well written and cogently argued, but my first question was: Who the Hell is Jay Bybee?

It turns out the Judge Bybee was the head of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department for some years, and was, therefore, responsible for, if he did not actually write, some of the infamous "torture memos." A man who is in favor of torture should not, some argue, be in charge of the administration of justice. It would make a lot of people feel a whole lot better to punish someone for advocating torture.

However, Mr. Bowman makes a good case that you can only impeach a Federal judge for misconduct on the bench. So, unless Mr. Bybee is caught taking bribes, or starts assigning cases only to lawyers with whom he has an arrangement, he may spend the rest of his life hearing cases in San Francisco.

Actually, considering just how conservative Mr. Bybee must be, having been assigned to the famous 9th Circuit may be punishment enough. Just think how badly he's going to feel when he has to rule that gay married couples are entitled to the same tax deductions as their heterosexual counterparts.

Like Fingernails on a Slate Blackboard

Slate.com has run a number of pieces lately bearing on the torture scandal. In the last paragraph of Today's Papers Richard Cohen of the Washington Post comes out four-square against torture. In Cohen's opinion, and mine, the efficacy of torture isn't relevant to the question. Torture is wrong and it shouldn't be used.

I have often been struck by the extreme examples proposed by advocates of torture. You know the sort of thing. Suppose a terrorist group (or a Communist cell, or agents of a foreign country, or aliens from another planet) has hidden a nuclear device in Madison Square Garden (or Yankee Stadium, or downtown Chicago), and we have captured a member of the group. In order to prevent thousands and thousands of deaths, wouldn't we use any means we could?

Well, maybe, and then again, maybe not. One of my problems with this scenario is that, in my opinion, if we knew enough about our captive to the sure that he was a member of the group, and to be really sure that he knew where the device was hidden, we wouldn't need any additional information from him. If we knew that much, we'd know where the group had hidden the bomb. (See, in order to have all that information, we'd have to have someone planted in the group.)

Moreover, having this captive where we could get out the old alligator clips and the crank-operated generator wouldn't change anything. We'd still have to try to evacuate New York or Chicago or wherever it was, because we couldn't be sure of obtaining enough information before the kaboom.

Anyway, I think it's just better all around not to mess with exceptions and gray areas. Torture is wrong. Torture is prohibited by law. Federal agents, military members, intelligence operatives, and Vice-Presidents are all subject to that law. Through Today's Papers you can find a link to Cohen's entire article.

Dahlia Lithwick also takes an absolutist position on torture. She is appalled that the debate has come down to whether or not torture works. It ought to be about whether it is wrong. And we know it is. I think it's a little much to say that we are all torturers, but we do seem to have become a little blase about the matter. One of my side questions is whether we'd be less insensitive if the people being tortured were nice-looking Americans.

More, much more, later.

Conservatives Unsure About A Truth Commission

This cute little article by Jenifer Rubin assumes that the Bush administration would be vindicated by a detailed examination of what the payoff was from harsh interrogation. But I note that one of her examples is Jose Padilla, whose plot was disrupted as soon as he was arrested in Chicago, before he was subjected to years of unlawful imprisonment and harsh interrogation. Oh well, read it and see what you think.

How Far Can You Go?

This is an interesting post comparing the total rejection of torture as a method with a vow never to yield up one's fellows, no matter how terribly one might be tortured. Fernandez' point is that no one knows what he can really take until he's in the situation. Maybe if Boston were really threatened with a nuclear attack, and the police had someone in custody who knew how to stop it, maybe Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe would change his mind about never, ever, condoning the use of torture.

On the other hand, I tend to think, and Fernandez' examples don't change my mind about this, that that sort of extreme situation is unlikely to arise. While torture will work, given time and resources, and may allow the torturers to round up dissident organizations, I don't see it working in a sufficiently timely fashion to be our salvation in a really critical situation. So, why should we reduce ourselves to the level of criminal sadists in order to obtain some marginally useful information?

Read Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana for more on the subject of torture and its uses in different societies. And then let's think about why we had allied countries to which we were able to send suspected terrorists to be tortured. Maybe we should reconsider allying ourselves with geriatric dictatorships and their machinery of torture.

Speaking of Movin' On

One of the most determined anti-torture, anti-Bush, anti-Cheney lawyers in America is Dahlia Lithwick. In this column, Ms. Lithwick seems to be taking the position that it's tacky for the Obama administration to try to move past the torture issue without at least a few exemplary show trials. Moreover, she thinks that you and I are also at fault, because our willingness to move on pay attention to, say, making a living, means that we're not as deeply sensitive to moral wrongdoing as, say, Ms. Lithwick herself.

Sorry, Dahlia, I agree with Barack Obama and Hank Snow: It's time to move on.

Would another speech on torture count as torture?

John Dickerson is one of my favorite journalists. He frequently appears on Washington Week in Review, on PBS. (No, that doesn't mean I'm a member of the Communist Party!) In this column, Dickerson argues that Obama may need to made a speech on the torture issue and, in particular, on what his administration plans to do going forward, in order to get people on track.

As I see it, the problem is that any attention to the torture issue, which is, after all, the Bush administration's issue, is already off the track. Paying more attention to it simply keeps us on this siding that much longer, when we need to be catching the express to economic recovery. There's an old Hank Snow train song called "I'm Movin' On." I think Mr. Obama wants that to be his theme song as far as the Bush administration's misdeeds are concerned.

An Eternal Story?

The attached article is entitled "The Unending Abuse Trail." When I started this series of posts, I said something about the tendency of the media to prolong a story as much as possible. I think this title contains a little bit of wishful thinking.

I might also note that one reason this story has legs is that it serves as a test of just how different the Obama administration is from the Bush administration. Just as many on the far right, those called "social conservatives" and "religious conservatives," for example, are disappointed when a Republican administration fails to impose the Christian equivalent of sharia law, so many on the left have been disappointed by Democratic administrations. The torture, abuse, intrusive intelligence issue - in short, the assault on civil liberties after 9/11, is a good test case for just how far left Mr. Obama and his people will go.

So far, the performance of the Obama administration has been equivocal. (Sort of "hate the sin, love the sinner," if you see what I mean.) On the one hand, staying in the wobbly center could prolong the controversy, and won't satisfy anyone. On the other, moving to satisfy the "hard left" will be seen as partisan and excessive. Believe it or not, there are people who don't want to see Dick Cheney behind bars.

It is worth remembering, though, that many of the "hard left" are also pacifist to the point of eschewing all forms of defense except chanting and strewing flowers. They see all of the military, all of the security forces, all of the intelligence people as essentially criminal. Their opinions on whether particular acts were illegal aren't worth a lot.

Don't Look Back!

Today's edition of Today's Papers has a lot on the Senate investigating committee findings about torture. There's a lot of "what did he know?" talk about former Secretary of State Colin Powell. But I think the most interesting point is made in passing. President Obama is being forced to deal with a mess created by his predecessor.

President Obama is fond of saying we shouldn't be looking backwards; we should be looking to the future. There are a lot of dimensions to that kind of talk, but one of the big ones is that Obama wants to work on his own priorities; he doesn't want George W. Bush to impose his priorities on an Obama administration. But that's just what's happening with the torture issue, the Office of Legal Counsel issue, the whole package that was driven by George Bush's obsession with 9/11, and his determination to extract payment from someone for those dark events.

I suppose it would be unrealistic to expect that the Obama administration could just ignore something into which the Bush administration put so much brainpower, manpower, and energy for seven years. So does Obama first have to work for seven years to marry the ugly sister, and only then be able to marry the one he wants?

Let's hope the one he gets doesn't turn into a pillar of salt.

Playing the Expectations Game

Slate for April 22 has yet another headline referring to the torture of detainees by various intelligence agencies. Speaking of intelligence, it is an article of faith on the liberal side of the free press that the Bush Administration didn't have any. There is a real problem for the anti-Bush group in how to portray W and his cronies as the worst threat to American liberties since George III, while also making clear that the Bushites were stupid, incompetent, and unqualified for their high positions.

Today's torture story synchs up with that image, and that's why it will be persuasive to many people. The assertion is made that before they adopted the program of harsh interrogation, the Bush people didn't do their homework. They didn't realize that some of these tactics were defined as torture in government manuals, they didn't realize that people had been prosecuted for engaging in some of them, and they even know that our training program was designed to render them ineffective - so how could they work on Al Qaeda?

Actually, there isn't enough "there" there to make that last point. After the Korean War, when it became obvious that a lot of American soldiers succumbed to torture, the military began counter-interrogation training. What we don't know is whether it was actually any good, or whether other countries adopted similar programs. Now, if John McCain is an example, the Vietnam-era military may have stood up to torture better than their predecessors in Korea. On the other hand, McCain was regarded as exceptionally heroic, he was an officer, he came from a naval family ... maybe we cannot generalize from his case.

Anyway, there is more to come of this story.

Surf's Up! Get Your Waterboards.

Was that title too cynical? Too facetious? Maybe, but I would like to note that, horrible though the story of the fellow who was waterboarded 183 after he'd spilled his guts, we have no basis for knowing if this was a really unusual occurrence (as I suspect), or something that was done frequently. This is headlining by exception, in which the "man bites dog" story grabs the headline.

I heard a radio interview today with Philip Zelikow. Those of you who have read my review of The Commission will know who Zelikow is. Zelikow asserts that there were those who spoke out against "harsh interrogation," and that he thought President Bush wanted to hear these contrarian opinions. The last assertion may be cast into some doubt when Zelikow notes that a memo he distributed while he was working at the State Department resulted in an order to gather up all of the copies and destroy them.

This is the way this kind of story grows legs. Every day there is a new revelation. The more investigations there are, the more sources for new revelations. It can become a self-sustaining cycle, and the signal to noise ratio can get into bad shape.

The Continuing Torture Saga

As I noted in my last post, the issue of torture is getting a lot of press attention. Moreover, it may be sucking some of the air out of other Obama administration initiatives. I'm not sure how serious this matter is, but I note that another Slate contributor, Ben Whitford this time, can't resist using "torture" in the title of his summary of the news for April 18. Again, there's a link to Mr. Whitford's piece under the title to this post.

The key paragraph here is this one:

An already-cooperative al-Qaida prisoner, initially believed to be a senior leader but later determined to be merely a personnel clerk, was water-boarded, slammed against walls, confined in boxes, and deprived of food, despite his captors' belief that he knew nothing of further value, reports the NYT. An official involved in the interrogation said the treatment, carried out on direct orders from CIA headquarters, plunged the prisoner into the "depths of human misery and degradation" but produced no new breakthroughs. "He pleaded for his life," the official said. "But he gave up no new information. He had no more information to give."

One of the things that is going to become a theme here is that the torture didn't result in any significant results. The government is denying that, and asserting that useful information was obtained, but they are handicapped by two things: 1) public skepticism about self-serving statements by government agencies, and 2) their inability to publish a lot of the intelligence that would support their case.

The Torture Story - A Major Distraction?

In case you're new to Blogger and its conventions, I have hidden a link to the April 17 edition of Today's Papers, from Slate.com, under the title above. If you click on the title, you'll go to a summary of the main national newspapers for that date. The digest was compiled by Daniel Politi, and the title was "Getting Away With Torture."

The title alone tells us the attitude, and this is an attitude common on the Left: "Why are these guys getting away with terrible things? Shouldn't they be punished? And what about Dick Cheney?"

Personally, I rather like the President's position, though President Obama hasn't firmed his position up as much as some would like. We're not going to start a witch-hunt for people who were acting in good faith and had legal opinions in their pockets to justify what they were doing. On the other hand, if someone thinks that he or she has knowledge of a crime, that information can be laid before an appropriate law enforcement agency, and we'll see if some broke the rules.

Mind you, it may be difficult for people who were rendered into the custody of the Egyptian or Syrian authorities to find a friendly U.S. law enforcement guy to talk to, but that's how the cookie crumbles.

My main concern here is that this issue will become the equivalent of "gays in the military." That is, the left will get all excited about doing something the right really hates, and the right will get all fired up to stop them. Then, while everyone is all involved in arguing about this issue, the president's other initiatives lose steam. Will it play out that way? We'll have to wait and see.