The State Department has issued a document that endorses the findings of the Senate report on the CIA’s interrogation and detention practices after the 9/11 attacks. The document notably avoids references to “torture” but discussed now the CIA brutalized suspects and misled Congress. Putting aside such word substitutions of “brutalizing” for “torture” and “misleading” for “lying,” there remains one glaring omission: not a single CIA official was disciplined, let alone criminally charged. One official even publicly admitted to destroying evidence to avoid its use in court in a torture prosecution. He was allowed to retire with honors and accolades. The Bush and Obama Administration steadfastly refused to prosecute such officials. Indeed, soon after coming to power, Obama went to the CIA to assure officials that they would never face prosecution.
The document states to its credit that “This report tells a story of which no American is proud.” However, it then adds: “But it is also part of another story of which we can be proud. America’s democratic system worked just as it was designed to work in bringing an end to actions inconsistent with our democratic values.” Is this really how the system “was designed to work”? We are bound by treaty and federal law to investigate torture — a standard that we have applied to other nations. However, Obama kept his pledge to the CIA and moreover leaks have shown how the U.S. government threatened both Spain and England not to investigate American torture.
Now we have a celebration over the fact that we are willing to admit that the CIA committed such violations, including lying to Congress, while ignoring that no one was punished for these acts. Indeed, as we saw with the false statements given Congress over surveillance by James Clapper, there remains a pattern of protection for intelligence officials committing what many allege to be criminal acts like perjury.
I am impressed by the openness of the State Department under John Kerry on such issues. However, the disconnect with the absence of any accountability continues to erode the credibility of the country on human rights and civil liberties.
Notably, the State Department affirms again that no life-saving intelligence was actually produced from our torture of suspects. It still however refuses to call it by its proper and legal name: “[The Senate report] leaves no doubt that the methods used to extract information from some terrorist suspects caused profound pain, suffering and humiliation. It also leaves no doubt that the harm caused by the use of these techniques outweighed any potential benefit.”
The report does acknowledge obvious questions that continue to lack any real answer from the Administration:
“Doesn’t the report make clear that at least some who authorized or participated in the RDI program committed crimes?”
“Will the Justice Department revisit its decision not to prosecute anyone?”
“Until now the (U.S. government) has avoided conceding that the techniques used in the RDI program constituted torture. Now that the report is released is the White House prepared to concede that people were tortured?”
“Isn’t it clear that the CIA engaged in torture as defined in the Torture Convention?”
The mere fact that these questions even appeared in such a report is a triumph for Kerry and a positive development. It also admits that some ambassadors who were informed of the use of torture at black sites were instructed not to tell their superiors at the State Department.
I do believe that the State Department and John Kerry deserve credit for this frank discussion. It is the type of action that will help to restore our position in the world. However, we will never regain our position as the world’s leader on human rights and civil liberties if we continue to shield our own officials for accountability for such actions.
Source: Fox
There is a culture disconnect. To even compare Germany, the most technologically advanced country on the planet at the time to Iraq, is not comparing apples to apples. Plus, there is a span of time factor that has yet to doled out. Germany made the conscious decision not to retreat to the southern mountains and start a guerilla campaign, but to truly analyze where they were at in the world and choose to move ahead. Plus, they were smart enough to realize the brutality of vengeance by the red army. If they didn’t cut a deal when they did, many more Germans would have died in the salt mines.
Terrorism is the most available tool for war by the poor. Once again, maybe we should ask why have they declared war (instead of using convenient, broad nothings like “they hate our freedom.”).
No–the know-it-alls in DC (you know, the guys that knew how to fix healthcare but couldn’t build a web site…) decided they knew the way to “spread democracy” in that part of the world, which has proven to be worse than a miserable failure. When given the choices provided to them through democracy, the people in that part of the world have chosen to reject it in favor of their perceived cultural biases. It’s all very simple, really, but not when you are blinded by ignorance, deceit, and hubris. Nobody anywhere wants peace imposed on them by another’s terms. That’s just occupation. Can’t see us calling in the Chinese Army to deal with protestors here. Kind of like having British troops here, and that didn’t work out so well either.
We have Blackwater, XE, or whatever they are this month working covertly in Ukraine, and have been for quite a while. Once again, if an angry father of a Ukrainian son killed by our mercenaries flies a plane into our buildings, there will be surprise, uproar… etc.
But business is good for the weapons of war, and that won’t slow down anytime soon.
The song remains the same apparently.
Here’s the original AP report on this:
http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_268798/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=YPu5fAb3
Excerpt:
“The document then lists a series of questions that appear to be designed to gauge what reporters, members of Congress and others might ask about the Obama administration’s response to the Senate report.
“One questioned whether it was wise to release such a report during a time of unrest in the Mideast.
“Another question asked, “Doesn’t the report make clear that at least some who authorized or participated in the RDI program committed crimes?” the document asks, referring to the program’s formal internal name, the Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program. “Will the Justice Department revisit its decision not to prosecute anyone?”
“And: “Until now the (U.S. government) has avoided conceding that the techniques used in the RDI program constituted torture. Now that the report is released is the White House prepared to concede that people were tortured?”
“The document also says, “Isn’t it clear that the CIA engaged in torture as defined in the Torture Convention?””
Add: “We have prosecuted former Japanese soldiers for it and our own soldiers for it”
Perhaps terrorists are different in kind than conventional uniformed soldiers and the needs dictated by the different kind of war with terrorists are different than conventional warfare.
rafflaw: “Of course, “enforcing” those laws would have probably doomed the Administration politically.”
Giving up the fight against the terrorists would definitely have doomed the Administration politically.
I imagine that when Obama officials were on the job and privy to the reports that guided Bush officials on the matter, the necessity of the essential duties and responsibilities of the Office of the President was a bigger influence than political wind direction testing.
slohrss29: “We act like killing terrorists is the same as harvesting corn. Corn does not pass along vengeance.”
I agree that killing terrorists by itself, which seems to be Obama’s only strategy, is insufficient to win the War on Terror. President Bush agreed with us, too:
We killed a lot of Germans and Japanese in WW2. So why is it that we haven’t faced generations of German and Japanese vengeance seekers? After all, it would not have been out of character. The Germans and Japanese are not, by nature, pacific people. WW2 is attributed in part to German grievances over WW1 and the relentlessness of the Japanese martial spirit is legendary.
The fundamental switch for America as war victor is we didn’t just kill and destroy in WW2 and leave it there. Instead, we stayed to secure and build the peace. With the Bush Freedom Agenda, President Bush applied America’s proven modern, liberal peace-building strategy to the War on Terror.
http://learning-curve.blogspot.com/2013/03/10-year-anniversary-start-Operation-Iraqi-Freedom-thoughts.html#liberalgeorgewbush
We gain little from war itself because war is destruction. The prize of war is the power to build the peace on our terms. The long-term gains we historically associate with wars have actually been realized from our peace-building following those wars.
That’s why getting Iraq right was critical, more important even than Afghanistan, and Obama’s mistake of abandoning of Iraq was pivotal. The long-term, big picture effect of a pluralistic liberal geopolitically and culturally central Iraq on the greater peace could have addressed the very “vengeance” problem you describe. To resolve the Saddam problem and then leave Iraq without first responsibly securing the peace would have been a contradiction of all our acquired wisdom as leader of the free world, an inhumane abandonment of the Iraqi people, and a short-sighted, enormously risky gamble that invited new problems.
Against a very tough and resilient enemy, Bush’s liberal strategy was working, too, at the point that Obama tragically deviated from Bush’s course, instead of staying the course like Ike stayed the course from Truman.
http://learning-curve.blogspot.com/2013/03/10-year-anniversary-start-Operation-Iraqi-Freedom-thoughts.html#critics
To wit, in May 2011, President Obama marked Iraq’s “promise of a multiethnic, multisectarian democracy … poised to play a key role in the region if it continues its peaceful progress”:
In the same vein, the welcome statement on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad website anticipated “Iraq emerge as a strategic partner in a tumultuous region … that can act as a force for moderation … in the national security interests of the United States”:
So again, I agree that we can’t just kill our way to victory in the War on Terror. We need to stay to secure and build the peace, too. We need to find our way back to the liberal Bush Freedom Agenda strategy in order to win the War on Terror.
If you enforce our domestic laws against torture and the international laws that outlaw it, Pres. Bush and Vice President Cheney, who both have claimed to have authorized the Torture would have to be prosecuted, along with many members of their administration, along with the CIA and other defense agencies that participated. That should have been done on day one of the Obama Administration in my opinion. Of course, “enforcing” those laws would have probably doomed the Administration politically. Waterboarding is torture and the State Department report should have stated that fact. We have prosecuted former Japanese soldiers for it and our own soldiers for it, along with a sheriff who did it. So why is it OK now when we do it?
The CIA has been at work in the Ukraine fiasco too.
According to a pilot from that area, it has been brutal and misleading, especially concerning MH017.
Most Americans don’t know the half of it.
“It is the type of action that will help to restore our position in the world. However, we will never regain our position as the world’s leader on human rights and civil liberties if we continue to shield our own officials for accountability for such actions.”
What is a world leader?
America’s moral highground as a liberal ‘shining city on a hill’ is important to me, too. But our liberal moral highground is only as effective as our practical dominance and real difference-making activity when competing against ambitious illiberal forces that aspire to reify a different world order than one programmed along America’s preferred values.
Like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a world defined on top by “human rights and civil liberties” depends on necessary social environmental conditions at the base – most importantly, security and stability under the directional control of the liberal world leader.
If we fail to provide even that most fundamental basic need of social function, then as a world leader, America will be just as impotent on the world stage as the Bremer-led Coalition Provisional Authority was in Iraq, crafting high-minded liberal policy in the Green Zone with little practical effect on the ground, while the interrogators and MPs at Abu Ghraib were forced desperately to gather the time-sensitive intelligence needed to stop the terrorist insurgency that was tearing apart the nascent post-war Iraq and torturing, assassinating, and mass-murdering 100s of Iraqis, along with peace operators, by the day.
What is needed for America to be an effective world leader at the vanguard of “human rights and civil liberties” is an activist foreign policy version of the Petraeus-led Counterinsurgency that saved Iraq before we abandoned the Iraqi people.
Any leader must weigh aspirational wants and bottom-line needs, right? A world leader must be practically effective first, most of all in a zero-sum competitive environment with opponents who are highly practical in their pursuit of aspirations that are incompatible with our preferred values.
We will never regain our position as the world’s leader on human rights and civil liberties if we do not regain the dominant ‘alpha’ power and willingness to impose our preferred values on others. It’s not pretty to say it that way. It’s just the practical nature of competition. Human rights and civil liberties are ends, not means.
Reblogged this on sea-swoon.
Reblogged this on Dead Citizen's Rights Society.
“The Bush and Obama Administration steadfastly refused to prosecute such officials. Indeed, soon after coming to power, Obama went to the CIA to assure officials that they would never face prosecution.” – JT
Now, all three branches hand out immunity like candy.
Torture is an example of a society’s downward spiral. W’s unnecessary wars and Obama’s drone patrols will create generations of wounded people full of hate. We won’t have to worry about running out of terrorists any time soon. Created by the quality and moral clarity of our intelligence services, one day, there will be a really smart terrorist and we will realize the worst from our continual blowback. We act like killing terrorists is the same as harvesting corn. Corn does not pass along vengeance. It’s pretty amazing how short-sighted most people are in this discussion; however, it is good business. No slow down in arm sales soon when you have an industry that can bank on the consistency of vengeance.
Are we not exceptional? We are devo.
Oops. Fix: I agree it’s not a
bi-partisanpartisan issue.* A longer version of this comments seems to be stuck in moderation.
“life-saving intelligence”
How is “life-saving” defined? Is it narrowly defined as demonstrably stopping a demonstrably imminent attack? That’s a very thin margin.
Or is it more broadly defined as a thread of a larger tapestry or, more ambiguously, contributing a link in a chain that eventually in meandering conglomerate crosses the threshold of actionable intelligence (eg, the Zero Dark Thirty movie depiction)?
The murky process that leads to concrete kills or captures of terrorists (well, at least when we don’t release them back to the fight) don’t necessarily rise to demonstrable stops of demonstrably imminent attacks. However, I think reasonable people can agree that taking terrorists out of play is preventive.
I’m not privy to what has or has not worked in the intelligence gathering process in the War on Terror but I do know that with conventional “imminent” threat indicators stripped away in the counter-terror fight, preventive intelligence gathering has had heavier weight. While undoubtedly imperfect due to the nature of counter-terrorism, whatever we did following 9/11 was effective.
[Illustrative quote removed]
I agree it’s not a bi-partisan issue. From what I gather, the controversial counter-terror practices rose with the Clinton administration as the urgency grew with al Qaeda’s growing threat and scale of attacks. Then 9/11, of course, drastically increased the counter-terror operations tempo. The Obama administration came on-line proclaiming it would “reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals…. [those] ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience sake” (2009 State of the Union) but then quickly learned what its two immediate predecessors learned on the job: effective counter-terrorism isn’t that simple.
It’s a moral dilemma to be sure. Our ethical culture is emphatic on the issue. But the debate is disserved when we poorly account for high-stakes practical risks and rewards, especially when those risks and rewards are murky in the process and only clearer in the end result.
“life-saving intelligence”
How is “life-saving” defined? Is it narrowly defined as demonstrably stopping a demonstrably imminent attack? That’s a very thin margin.
Or is it more broadly defined as a thread of a larger tapestry or, more ambiguously, contributing a link in a chain that eventually in meandering conglomerate crosses the threshold of actionable intelligence (eg, the Zero Dark Thirty movie depiction)?
The murky process that leads to concrete kills or captures of terrorists (well, at least when we don’t release them back to the fight) don’t necessarily rise to demonstrable stops of demonstrably imminent attacks. However, I think reasonable people can agree that taking terrorists out of play is preventive.
I’m not privy to what has or has not worked in the intelligence gathering process in the War on Terror but I do know that with conventional “imminent” threat indicators stripped away in the counter-terror fight, preventive intelligence gathering has had heavier weight. While undoubtedly imperfect due to the nature of counter-terrorism, whatever we did following 9/11 was effective.
To wit, excerpts from a 2013 National Geographic interview with David Schanzer, Director of the Triangle Center of Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy (NG in italics):
I agree it’s not a bi-partisan issue. From what I gather, the controversial counter-terror practices rose with the Clinton administration as the urgency of the al Qaeda threat and attacks grew. Then 9/11, of course, drastically increased the counter-terror operations tempo. Then the Obama administration proclaimed it would “reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals…. [those] ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience sake” (2009 State of the Union) and quickly learned what its two immediate predecessors learned on the job: effective counter-terrorism isn’t that simple.
It’s a moral dilemma to be sure. Our ethical culture emphatic on the issue. But the debate is disserved when we base conclusions on moral bright lines that poorly account for the practical risks and rewards, especially when those risks and rewards are murky in the process and only clearer at the end.
All is fair in war. Lying obligatory, torture optional (only losers get charged with war crimes), alliance and then betrayal of a gullible enemy common. When secret files are viewed 50 years from now even more will be exposed. What’s new.
OK… so now what?? My bet is that this was scrubbed and put out there so they could sweep it under the rug.
Reblogged this on BLOGGING BAD w/Gunny G ~ "CLINGERS-AMERICA!".