If you have any doubts that waterboarding is torture, take a look at this article from Salon which summarizes the contents of internal CIA documents recently released.
The documents … lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.
***
One of the more interesting revelations in the documents is the use of a saline solution in waterboarding. Why? Because the CIA forced such massive quantities of water into the mouths and noses of detainees, prisoners inevitably swallowed huge amounts of liquid – enough to conceivably kill them from hyponatremia, a rare but deadly condition in which ingesting enormous quantities of water results in a dangerously low concentration of sodium in the blood. Generally a concern only for marathon runners , who on extremely rare occasions drink that much water, hyponatremia could set in during a prolonged waterboarding session. A waterlogged, sodium-deprived prisoner might become confused and lethargic, slip into convulsions, enter a coma and die.
Therefore, “based on advice of medical personnel,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury wrote in a May 10, 2005, memo authorizing continued use of waterboarding, “the CIA requires that saline solution be used instead of plain water to reduce the possibility of hyponatremia.”
The entire range of techniques used by the CIA and explicated in the article is beyond sickening and horrifying. I cannot comprehend how this country could have allowed this to have happened, and to have planned the torture sessions in a careful and systematic manner to enhance the discomfort and terror of the victim.
How can the Obama administration continue to take the position that a criminal investigation of these activities is not essential to restore our country to the rule of law, both domestic and international?
I have always been on the record, in fact, since 2003, with the concept of living our values. And I think that whenever we’ve perhaps taken expedient measures, they’ve turned around and bitten us in the backside. We decided early on, in the 101st airborne division, we just said, we decided to obey the Geneva Conventions…
In the cases where that is not true [where torture takes place or international human rights groups aren't granted access to detention sites] we end up paying a price for it, ultimately,” he added. “Abu Ghraib and other situations like that are non biodegradable. They don’t go away. The enemy continues to beat you with them like a stick…. Beyond that, frankly, we have found that the use of interrogation methods in the army field manual that was given the force of law by Congress, that that works.
What can one say? The ethics review of the opinions issued by John Yoo and Jay Bybee conducted by the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that the two should be referred to their state bar associations for possible discipline. However, that report was overruled by a career lawyer within the DOJ. As the New York Times notes:
Some of the brutal interrogation methods that Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee approved for use on Qaeda prisoners, including wall-slamming and the near-drowning of waterboarding, had never before been authorized in American history, and the United States had condemned such treatment as torture and abuse when used by other countries.
History will be the ultimate judge of these two and the actions their opinions authorized.
Update: The full report (save for some shameful redactions by the government) is available here.
Here is a quote of what Cheney said over the weekend on national TV:
I was a big supporter of waterboarding.
Jonathan Turley points out this is a very dangerous thing to say, since waterboarding is a crime under international law.
We have now come to this: a Vice President who feels perfectly comfortable in bragging out his support for a torture program. It is a moment that is more of an indictment of Obama than (the unindicted) Cheney. It is fruit that comes from an Administration that chose politics over principle — even at the cost of precedent forged in the Nuremberg trials and the Geneva Conventions. Cheney’s statement should be a moment of unspeakable national shame.
Either this country is governed by the rule of law or it isn’t. Cheney’s clear admission of his central role in authorizing waterboarding and the clear evidence that such waterboarding did indeed take place means that prosecution must proceed.
Cheney himself just set in motion a chain of events that the civilized world must see to its conclusion or cease to be the civilized world. For such a high official to escape the clear letter of these treaties and conventions, and to openly brag of it, renders such treaties and conventions meaningless.
And where is the United States Justice Department in all of this? Why are they not enforcing the law or at least investigating whether a crime has been committed, given this admission by the former Vice-President?
Update: More from Scott Horton at Harper’s Magazine:
Section 2340A of the federal criminal code makes it an offense to torture or to conspire to torture. Violators are subject to jail terms or to death in appropriate cases, as where death results from the application of torture techniques. Prosecutors have argued that a criminal investigation into torture undertaken with the direction of the Bush White House would raise complex legal issues, and proof would be difficult. But what about cases in which an instigator openly and notoriously brags about his role in torture?
After months of delay the Office of Professional Responsibility report regarding the legal advice provided to the Bush administration is about to be released. Newsweek reports:
While the probe is sharply critical of the legal reasoning used to justify waterboarding and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques, NEWSWEEK has learned that a senior Justice official who did the final review of the report softened an earlier OPR finding. Previously, the report concluded that two key authors—Jay Bybee, now a federal appellate court judge, and John Yoo, now a law professor—violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted a crucial 2002 memo approving the use of harsh tactics, say two Justice sources who asked for anonymity discussing an internal matter. But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed “poor judgment,” say the sources. (Under department rules, poor judgment does not constitute professional misconduct.) The shift is significant: the original finding would have triggered a referral to state bar associations for potential disciplinary action—which, in Bybee’s case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry.
The Obama administration needs to conduct a full and open investigation of both the “legal” basis for Bush administration torture and the actual practice of torture. In order for change, there must be a full revelation of the way the country adopted clearly immoral behavior in response to terrorism.
The details of this critical report and the way it was handled at DOJ are little short of infuriating. Here is a critical report whose conclusions were already clear months ago: that Yoo, Bybee at al were guilty of flagrant incompetence in assessing the law in order to allow their political masters to torture at will. And yet, out of some sort of tradition, DOJ hands over the final version to a 70 year-old career Justice Department official who allowed former DOJ officials to dispute and review the report again and again, and then allowed its central conclusion to be watered down. It is one more sign – along with the blanket dismissal of the serious allegations of misconduct at Gitmo – that the Obama administration is circling the establishment wagons on defending Bush era torture and war crimes. They seem either a) incapable of understanding the gravity of what went on or b) deliberately refusing to tackle clear violations of the law out of the usual political cowardice.
The case of Maher Arar, a Candadian citizen, is appalling. David Cole, writing in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, outlines the terrible injustice done by the United States to this man, and the shameful failure of our court system to provide justice for violations of national and international prohibitions on torture. Here are the opening paragraphs, but read the entire story for yourself if you care about the duties of the United States that have been destroyed in the name of the war on terror
In the fall of 2002, Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen on his way home from Tunisia, was pulled out of line by US officials while changing planes at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport. He was locked up for twelve days, much of that time incommunicado, and harshly interrogated. When he was finally allowed to make a phone call, after a week in captivity, he called his mother in Canada, who found him a lawyer.
The lawyer saw Arar on Saturday. The very next night—a Sunday evening—immigration officials held an extraordinary six-hour hearing starting at 9 PM, orchestrated from Washington, D.C. When Arar asked to have his lawyer present, they told him that she had chosen not to participate in the hearing. In fact, the only “notice” they had provided was to leave a message on the lawyer’s office voice mail that Sunday night. She got the message Monday morning, and immediately called the immigration service. They told her, falsely, that Arar was being transferred to New Jersey, and she could contact him the next day. In fact, that night federal agents took him on a federally chartered jet to Jordan, and from there to Syria.
In Syria, Arar was handed over to intelligence officials who imprisoned him in a cell the size of a grave, three feet by six feet by seven feet. Syrian security agents tortured him, including beating him with an electric cable, while asking the same questions that FBI interrogators had been asking at JFK—was he a terrorist, was he linked to al-Qaeda, did he know various other persons thought to be associated with al-Qaeda? (The Syrian security forces are widely known for their use of torture, as the US State Department reports every year in its annual Human Rights Country Reports.) After a year, the Syrians released Arar, concluding that he had done nothing wrong.
A federal appeals court in California has denied immunity to a police officer who tasered a driver stopped for driving without a seatbelt. The driver posed no physical threat to the officer. From the New York Times:
In a vividly worded opinion issued by the court this week, Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw described a “bad morning” for Carl Bryan, a 21-year-old Californian who drove over large stretches of Southern California to retrieve car keys mistakenly taken by a friend and ended up being Tasered by a Coronado, Calif., policeman and breaking four teeth when he fell to the ground.
The inappropriate use of tasers is widely known. It is about time that some sort of national standards are set.
Update: More details from Jonathan Turley, who’s blog I highly recommend.
Andrew Sullivan makes an eloquent argument in favor of civil trials of terrorists. Read the whole thing, but here is an excerpt:
When you listen to the Fox News right speak about this, they reveal amazing levels of fear. They have been truly spooked by these men with long beards and chilling eyes. They are so scared of them they are willing to drop any and all legal principles that the West has historically used with respect to mass murderers. Their fear brought them to institute torture, and to engage in mass brutality against prisoners of war in every theater of combat in a manner that will tragically taint the honor of the US military for a very long time. It led them to establish Gitmo, to create for the world a reverse symbol of the Statue of Liberty, and imprint it on the minds and in the consciences of an entire generation of human beings, whose view of America will never be the same.
It made speedy prosecution of any of those who allegedly plotted and planned 9/11 impossible – and will make actual prosecution of any of them extremely hard. It turns out, then, that the primary (if not the only) thing we had to fear – was fear itself. It was our fear that gave al Qaeda so many propaganda victories.
And it is the refusal to be afraid that reflects the decision to bring this fanatic mass murderer back to the scene of the crime, to remind the world, all these years later, of why he is on trial, to restore a patriotic pride in the system we have, a system which it is al Qaeda’s goal to destroy.
I believe this is the best symbolic answer to 9/11: a trial, with due process, after tempers have calmed somewhat, that exposes this evil for all it truly was. And also reveals the tragedy of an American government that lost its nerve and has now, under a new president, regained it.
And they are also in favor of civil court trial of terrorists.
Who could they be? How about Grover Norquist (President, Americans for Tax Reform), Bob Barr (former Republican Congressman) and David Keene (Chairman of the American Conservative Union). Oh my!
And they say there are tired of Republican “scaremongering” on these issues.
Why do they favor this approach? Simply to restore Constitutional government.
More on their website here. A full list of the signatories is available here.
Needless to say, I believe that this is a terrific approach and I appreciate the notables who have signed on to the cause.
For those concerned about the likelihood of success in the upcoming 9/11 prosecutions in New York, you should understand that the DOJ believes it can be successful. For example, the United States Department of Justice, in a June, 2006, report, outlined its overwhelming success in prosecuting terrorism suspects in the United States courts. I would encourage reading at least the Executive Summary section of the report, which includes this:
Our international terrorism and terrorism-related cases draw on the full range of criminal charges available in the federal criminal code, according to the facts and circumstances of each case. The material support statutes have been a cornerstone of our success in terrorism financing cases as well as in a wide range of other cases addressing all types of support to terrorism. Our effective use of these statutes has allowed us to intervene at the early stages of terrorist planning, before a terrorist act occurs. We also have effectively used other terrorism and weapons of mass destruction statutes, and have drawn on more general statutes, such as immigration fraud and false statement offenses, where they apply in terrorism investigations. These statutes of more general application have been so important to our disruption efforts that U.S. Attorneys’ Offices around the country have undertaken numerous initiatives to expand their use of these statutes to further our prevention strategy.
Our successful prosecutions have produced cooperating defendants who have, in turn, provided intelligence information to investigators, prosecutors and national security officials, leading to further investigation, disruption and prosecution. This is one of a number of classic criminal enforcement approaches discussed below. Cooperation with our foreign partners has led to counterterrorism successes in foreign courts as well as in our own, and we discuss some of these cases in which such cooperation has been critical to success.
As for those concerned about the defendants making a spectacle out of the trial, and using it as a platform, I would ask why you believe that the statements from such individuals are more powerful than a presentation of the evidence against them in open court? Is our country (or our system of criminal justice) so fragile that it cannot stand strongly against the words of killers?
Further, compare the results obtained in terrorism cases in the courts versus the record of military convictions as of November 2008.
Although some have defended the commissions as an efficient form of military justice, their track record in prosecuting terrorism cases has been abysmal. Since their establishment, the commissions have concluded only three cases, two after trials and one based on a guilty plea. During the same time period, the federal courts have tried more than 107 terrorism cases, obtaining 145 convictions. Several defendants have been sentenced to life in prison.
Hold the trial of alleged 9/11 plotters in civil court, using American standards for criminal justice, and in New York, a scene of the attack, is an opportunity to show the world that our criminal justice system can handle the hardest cases, and at the same time provide defendants with fairness and openness. The complexity will be high, but the return to respect for the rule of law makes the effort worthwhile.
Republican lawmakers and the self-promoting independent senator from Connecticut, Joseph Lieberman, pounced on the chance to appear on television. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they said military tribunals are a more secure and appropriate venue for trying terrorism suspects. Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a former judge who should have more regard for the law, offered the absurd claim that Mr. Obama was treating the 9/11 conspirators as “common criminals.”
There is nothing common about them — or Mr. Holder’s decision. Putting the five defendants on public trial a few blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center is entirely fitting. Experience shows that federal courts are capable of handling high-profile terrorism trials without comprising legitimate secrets, national security or the rule of law. Mr. Bush’s tribunals failed to hold a single trial.
Did you know that the major countries around the world are in the process of negotiating a treaty to govern copyright law around the world? The treaty is called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). No surprise if you didn’t know, because the treaty is being negotiated in secret, based on claims of national security.
Despite the lack of transparency, provisions are leaking out. Those particularly that relate to the Internet are outrageous and over-reaching to a degree unprecedented. Take a look. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is working the issue and deserves your support if you care about unfettered access to the Internet.
The leaks confirm everything that we feared about the secret ACTA negotiations. The Internet provisions have nothing to do with addressing counterfeit products, but are all about imposing a set of copyright industry demands on the global Internet, including obligations on ISPs to adopt Three Strikes Internet disconnection policies, and a global expansion of DMCA-style TPM laws.
The Constitutional limitations on the Executive branch continue to be ignored, despite President Obama’s promised of change. Gary Wills, writing in the New York Review of Books catalogs the continued damage to the Constitution. The entire essay is worth a read.
George W. Bush left the White House unpopular and disgraced. His successor promised change, and it was clear where change was needed. Illegal acts should cease—torture and indefinite detention, denial of habeas corpus and legal representation, unilateral canceling of treaties, defiance of Congress and the Constitution, nullification of laws by signing statements. Powers attributed to the president by the theory of the unitary executive should not be exercised. Judges who are willing to give the president any power he asks for should not be confirmed.
But the momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed. It was not created by the Bush administration. The whole history of America since World War II caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch. The monopoly on use of nuclear weaponry, the cult of the commander in chief, the worldwide network of military bases to maintain nuclear alert and supremacy, the secret intelligence agencies, the entire national security state, the classification and clearance systems, the expansion of state secrets, the withholding of evidence and information, the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the cold war and the cold war with the “war on terror”—all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941–2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order.
Attorney/Dentist/Realtor Orly Taitz (see below here and here) has been sanctioned in the amount of $20,000 by a Federal judge for abusing the court system in her birther claims.
I guess the haters are always with us. Apparently the Christian God should control civil marriage in order to “protect our children.” What about the children of committed gay couples? And since when does the government impose religious views on the non-religious. Anyone opposed to gay marriage should do this: don’t get one. By the way, multiple marriage seems to have been approved by the same God that opposes same-sex marriage.
Update: I guess the ad is so good, that its creator won’t allow sites to embed it. So, use the “Sacred Ground” link below the video box to see it in all its wonder.