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Is Torture Really Over?
Without a hard look at the Bush administration's torture program, the United States could be condemned to repeat it, no matter what President Obama says.
In his statement announcing the release of the Bush administration's torture memos Thursday, President Barack Obama ruled out prosecuting whoever was in the room during the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" sessions. "In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution," he said.
Obama made it clear he is generally ready to move on from the whole issue. So don't expect David Addington, former counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and self-appointed interrogation expert, to be hauled into court anytime soon. "We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history," Obama said. "But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past."
In other words, the president turned the page. No prosecutions at any level, apparently. Based on Obama's move-on tone, there may not even be an independent commission to dig into this issue (though the administration won't formally rule that out for now -- an internal Justice Department review of the lawyers who authorized the torture is still ongoing). "We have taken steps to ensure that the actions described within them never take place again," Obama said. See -- he stopped the torture program. It's all fixed. End of story.
Another major issue is lingering, however. Did the torture "work"?
Former Bush administration officials, of course, continue to insist that they got a lot of good intelligence from forcing water into people's noses. Politico quoted one unnamed ex-Bush aide Thursday who blasted the decision. "It's damaging because these are techniques that work, and by Obama's action today, we are telling the terrorists what they are," the official said. "We have laid it all out for our enemies. This is totally unnecessary. ... Publicizing the techniques does grave damage to our national security by ensuring they can never be used again -- even in a ticking-time-bomb scenario where thousands or even millions of American lives are at stake."
Cheney went on CNN last month to specifically defend the United States' organized torture program -- which Cheney says was not torture: "I think those programs were absolutely essential to the success we enjoy, of being able to collect the intelligence that let us defeat all further attempts to launch attacks against the United States since 9/11," he said. "I think it's a great success story. It was done legally. It was done in accordance with our constitutional practices and principles."
There were no professional interrogators involved in the creation of the CIA's torture program. The pros would likely have balked, because they unanimously think torture is stupid and ineffective: People will tell you whatever they think will make you stop the treatment, never mind what the truth is. Those pros also chuckle at the thought of torture as an effective intelligence-gathering tool. News reports have seriously questioned the value of intelligence gathered through torture of suspected al-Qaida operatives like Abu Zubaydah.
So who is right? Is Dick Cheney Jack Bauer, or something more akin to an evil Col. Klink?
Without a rigorous investigation into the alleged efficacy of U.S. torture, we'll never know. A torture commission would have looked into this very issue. With Obama's blessing, Congress could try to appoint a nonpartisan group of experts to carefully evaluate whether the torture program was an effective way to gather valuable intelligence or, as interrogators suspect, simply made desperate prisoners say whatever they had to say to make the pain stop, yielding a few gems among a flow of muck. But Obama hasn't advocated a commission or any other vehicle to look into that, and today seems disinclined to do anything other than move on.
There are some indications that other Democrats are falling into line on ditching the commission idea, too. Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, a leading proponent of a commission, released a statement Thursday applauding the Obama administration for releasing the memos. Whitehouse didn't mention a commission that would look into whether torture worked. He referred only to an ongoing, and mostly secret, investigation of unknown scope by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
But while Obama has turned the page, many others haven't -- including the people, and their allies, who think waterboarding was a good idea. Without a commission, if Mitt Romney (the man who pledged to double the size of the prison at Guantánamo) is president in 2013 -- or 2017 -- we could start torturing all over again.
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34 Comments so far
Show AllThis is far from the first stain on America, only the latest. An intelligent man like Obama cannot help but contemplate the very real danger in allowing illegalities and constitutional violations to remain unpunished. Thus, by failing to allow his Justice Dept. to pursue prosecutions he becomes a party to them. We will either prosecute or forever be in danger of a repeat of these actions.
Of all the things our new President is doing or is failing to do, the refusal to allow real and proper justice to occur is the most damaging.
Makes me wonder whether someone found a skeleton in Obama's closet...
He's the skeleton. As usual, Amerika was FOOLED AGAIN!
Fooled?
The system presented us with only two choices: it was either a slick-talking lawyer with Wall St. backing or a half-senile old codger and a mentally challenged woman. What a great range of policy choices eh?
"Thus, by failing to allow his Justice Dept. to pursue prosecutions he becomes a party to them."
Yes, literally. He becomes an "accessory after the fact" and thereby leaves himself open to prosecution by the next president. He is as guilty as the perpetrators as long as he fails to prosecute.
I just sent the following to www.whitehouse.gov/contact --
TORTURE.
As President Obama must surely realize, having been a professor of constitutional law, his failure to allow the Justice Department to prosecute both those who committed torture, as well as those who ordered torture, makes the President an accessory after the fact. He is leaving himself open to prosecution by the next President.
I urge the President to do the right thing. If these despicable actions are not prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, similar actions will follow in the future. He knows it. I know it. We all know it. I am greatly disappointed in President Obama.
Douglas K. Shaw
Mechanicsburg PA
Is torture really over? Of course not. What a stupid question.
But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past."
--------------------------------
As Jonathan Turley said yesterday on Rachael Maddow appointing a special prosecutor, a career person with no politcal affiliation, and allowing him to go wherever the case leads and make all decisions based on the LAW is exactly how you AVOID getting into a politcal BLAME game.
Obama almost daily says he's looking forward. If he were truly looking forward he'd be trying to help the nation AVOID the next Dick Cheney. Instead, by not prosecuting anyone he's ENSURING the next Dick Cheney.
Also..
The media is doing a great job of obfuscating and conflating the CIA personnel who carried out the torture with the Bush legal team who wrote the torture memos. I listened to a half dozen accounts and would've been throughly confused by all of them if I didn't spend at least an hour on the internet taking the time to understand this matter.
This is quite obviously their strategy. Agree to release the memos then go into full blown misinformation and disinformation mode. Try to drive this story completely away and bury it after the Sunday morning political shows.
You'll see. By next Monday team Obama will simply say that all information has now been disclosed and they're movin' on.
"In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution,"
Apart from the royal "our intention" of this statement, it leaves things very ambiguous as to whether, as the author asks, the torture will continue. The use of the word WILL in the President's above-quoted sentence may make of the gap through which his otherwise-stated assurance that torture will not be repeated a gap through which a Mack truck can be driven. If he put CARRIED OUT in the past tense, why did he use not a past tense verb modifer (WOULD) when he indicated the prosecutorial consequences in that carrying out of duty? Depends on how the meaning of the word will will be interpreted (the is-is pun you know). Does it mean that those who have already committed crimes will not be prosecuted or that those not yet committed will not be?
It's a shade naive of Mr. Benjamin to project to a future Milt Romney presidency the possbility that Obama's action will encourage Bush/Cheneys of the future. I don't think operatives of the CIA will await that political outcome when their careers if not their asses are on the line and they are expected to produce the "intelligence" that their bosses demand so that the bosses of their bosses can carry out the military operations that they have in mind: like say, the invasion of Somalia or the bombing of Iran. With Obama having dropped the ball on real "national security" by failing to protect us from the consequences of such "routine" pervasions of intelligence using illicit teams of interrogation, why put off the danger to the next election and a possible change of the D or R in front of the name of the President?
http://www.nrcat.org/index.php
National Religious Campaign to End Torture
Torture is a moral issue
Broad based coalition including secular organizations focused on rooting out the paths to use of torture.
Well one benefit of all this is now I can argue in support of all the good things people like Mao, Stalin, Honecker, or Ceauchescu, or Saddam Hussein did to inprove their respective societies and defeat their nations respective enemies, and if they reply - "but they totured and murdered people!" I can simply reply: "Who doesn't?"
Just kidding about the above horrid bunch - but I genuinely will feel better defending the contributions of authoritarian socialist or anti-imperialist leaders like Kruschev and later soviet leaders; Milosevic, Castro, Hamas, HizbAllah, Assad. Their efforts to defeat the genuinely exitential, CIA-run enemies of their states positively pale in comparison to US violence and torture against it's totally phoney "existential threats".
Is torture really over. That can be answered in one word: Bagram. All Obama has done is put torture behind a curtain. Recently, he has gone on record as supporting indefinite detention for those prisoners kept at Bagram and has not ruled out torture for them, either. Guantanamo was such a public eyesore, he had to close that down. But a number of Guantanamo prisoners were transferred to Bagram, and the game goes on.
Is Torture Really Over?
Without a hard look at the Bush administration's torture program, the United States could be condemned to repeat it, no matter what President Obama says.
Not "could be" . . . WILL BE.
Jarhead
Ithink Obama is really covering for Eric Holder. Would Holder his valued friend truly be qualified to prosecute the bunch of thugs? One thing for certain I believe he and Unqualified Holder just cut four years noff their jobs in the future.
Then again we must look at the situation he was facing. Remember Dope head Bushs father is still in total control of the geatapo regime of the C.I.A. ehich issues orders to the President or the President ends up in a plot next to John Kennedy. Of course Eric Holder would never see anything wrong about that either.
What is to prevent defense attorneys, either criminal or civil, to use as their affirmative defenses that judges and juries should find their clients innocent and dismiss the charges against them because it is time to "move on"? Obama has set a terrible precedent which attorneys can quite possibly use to set their clients free of any wrongdoing that they may have committed. It would seem that by Obama's logic criminals should not be punished because it is time for the judicial system to "look forward."
How Obama can claim to have been a constitutional law scholar is simply beyond belief.
Mark Benjamin's irritatingly slick and illogical conclusion....
'But while Obama has turned the page, many others haven't -- including the people, and their allies, who think waterboarding was a good idea. Without a commission, if Mitt Romney (the man who pledged to double the size of the prison at Guantánamo) is president in 2013 -- or 2017 -- we could start torturing all over again.'
Whoa, wait a minute here! Obama has not 'turned the page' and has, in fact, done just the complete opposite by ruling out prosecution of those US officials responsible for Bush's crimes. Here he looks just exactly like Gerald Ford once did 'turning the corner', does he not?
Writers like Benjamin and magazines like Salon are merely wanting to sell us a phoney bill of goods and we are not falling for it. Is CD?
Why is it OK to kill three pirates holding one man hostage and not OK to waterboard a terrorist who has knowledge of a ticking time bomb in the middle of a city?
The administration justified the shooting of the pirates by stating that the hostage was in imminent danger of his life.
It is not OK to waterboard a terrorist because, not only is it inhumane, and the same thing can be done to our soldiers by the enemy, but no reliable information has ever been garnered that way. All you get is the victim promising to say whatever it is the torturers want him to say, including that he shot Abraham Lincoln!
It is because of such popular tv shows such as "24" that this myth of the effectiveness of waterboarding has gotten such a large currency among the American people.
So according to you its OK to allow the ticking time bomb to explode and possibly kill millions simply because it's inhumane to the terrorist.
" but no reliable information has ever been garnered that way".
I don't believe you. If the terrorist told the wrong information on the location of the bomb, then further and worse torture would follow until the right location is told.
Would you support waterboarding (or any other torture)if it worked?
Dude think,please.
The pirates were committing an act of kidnapping, threatening that captain with death. By and large, those being subjected to universally illegal means of interrogation have never been charged with a crime much less found guilty of one. These guys were, by and large, turned in for rewards not caught on battlefields. We do not know, not you, not me, not his interrogators, not anyone, whether they even do have ties to terrorism.
And even if they were full fledged members of any of the terrorist groups who is to say that they have any useful knowledge after six or seven or eight years of imprisonment.
Life is not TV, wake up.
Please read my question again. I didn't ask about someone who has been sitting in prison camp for 6 years. I asked: Is it OK to waterboard a recently caught person who has knowledge of the location of a ticking time bomb?
If you don't think this is unrealistic, please think again. Both the Iranians and the North Koreans have nuclear material that could be obtained by any number of extremist groups that could build a dirty bomb that could be exploded in a large city. Isn't this "threatening death" not to one person, but to millions?
Oy vey.. have you been completely brainwashed by your television?
yes then keanu reeves pulls the red wire, the ticking stops the world is saved.
BUILDING SEVEN. If we had caught that bomber , the cia agent could torture himself and tell himself where he put the bomb.
but the timer ticks down to one second.......mandatory Hollywood plot device.
It is very difficult to debate someone who believes a TV script bears a relation to real life, sorry.
But to answer your question, no, Jack cannot legally torture anyone for any reason anytime...never.
Law enforcement allows the shooting of criminqals when imminent threats are perceived, but our own morality and international law forbids torture.
Lest we forget, most experts on the subject say that information obtained by use of torture is unreliable as hell.
So it is OK to kill a person when there is an imminent threat but not OK just to give a person temporary pain to prevent an imminent threat. Some thing is wrong here.
I don't watch a lot of television. I'm guessing you must be glued to the set. Who is Jack?
According to the CIA memos just released a lot of intel was obtained.
You can line up experts either side of this issue. So if torture worked would you be for it?
Torture is far from "temporary pain", as far removed as you are from your conscience and your belief in rule of law. Yes, something is dreadfully wrong here, and it is your understanding of the constitution, the preamble thereof, and the necessity to live as civilized people.
For one who "doesnt watch much TV" you are certainly able to cite the script of '24'.
Further, and lastly as holding a discourse with Josef Mengele is distasteful as hell, discussions of torture do not involve "experts" only the belief in the sanctity of human life and man made laws.
How do you KNOW he has information? How did the Navy KNOW that the hostage captain was in "imminent danger"? They didn't KNOW. They claim that they "believed" he was in imminent danger. It's just legalistic crap to cover extra-legal (NON-legal = criminal) killing.
Every psychopath "thinks" he's doing the right thing.
You do the wrong thing, no matter what your "believing," you pay: you go on trial and if convicted, you get punished.
Well, when one has been held captive for days,when the negotiations for the release of the victim become increasingly hostile and threatening, when one finds a kidnapper holding an AK-47 directed at the back of that victim, I would posit that this shows imminent danger rather well.
Did you have another point?
You buy the Navy line: you "believe" the hostage was in imminent danger.
What you really believe: you worship the boss.
Posting like an idiot is a sure way to get people to believe you actually are an idiot.
So, the Navy towed that lifeboat for three days and then ,out of the blue, and for no discernible reason decided to shoot those three guys?
"Without a commission, if Mitt Romney (the man who pledged to double the size of the prison at Guantánamo) is president in 2013 -- or 2017 -- we could start torturing all over again."
Oh for Christ's sakes, we don't need another commission. As a matter of fact, what we need is a sea change of pols who just won't do their job. What is the guarentee that this new "commission" will be trustworthy and won't be rigged? When you're stuck with defective pols in power, no amount of additional commissions will suffice. All they'll do is choke us taxpayers even further. Besides, torture is ongoing and until the CIA is abolished, nothing will change for the better in the USA, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East, and even all over the world. And please don't give me lame brained excuses for keeping the CIA. It won't keep you safe and has in fact empowered terrorists.
Why would torture be over? Are Obama's actions not the highest-profile, lowest-cost means of denial?
"Look, America: My predecessor did it!"
The donkeys look great, the elephants (still) look awful; the donkeys get to carry on the occupations with improved rhetoric.
Bardamu
"...The donkeys get to carry on the occupations with improved rhetoric." Very well said. Dennis Perrin expounds upon this theme with his important and relevant book Savage Mules.
I was just reading about the Russian Revolution. In October, 1905, Tsar Nicholas II made some political concessions that implied an end to autocracy. That meant that the Tsar was no longer the ultimate legal and moral authority in the land. Opposition elements, liberals, radicals began to assert their own authority. But interesting to me is the fact that many elements that had been loyal to the Tsar, such as the army, also began to defy the government because the Tsar had invalidated its authority along with his own.
In the US, now, the rule of law--the legitimacy of law--is at risk unless blatant criminality is prosecuted. In the absence of such prosecution, new forms of authority may rapidly evolve, like the soviets.