Defining moment

by Henry Farrell on September 15, 2006

As “Michael Froomkin”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2006/09/will_the_us_legislate_torture.html says, the headline of this Washington Post “editorial”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/14/AR2006091401587.html is admirably blunt.

A Defining Moment for America: The president goes to Capitol Hill to lobby for torture

PRESIDENT BUSH rarely visits Congress. So it was a measure of his painfully skewed priorities that Mr. Bush made the unaccustomed trip yesterday to seek legislative permission for the CIA to make people disappear into secret prisons and have information extracted from them by means he dare not describe publicly.

Of course, Mr. Bush didn’t come out and say he’s lobbying for torture. Instead he refers to “an alternative set of procedures” for interrogation. But the administration no longer conceals what it wants. It wants authorization for the CIA to hide detainees in overseas prisons where even the International Committee of the Red Cross won’t have access. It wants permission to interrogate those detainees with abusive practices that in the past have included induced hypothermia and “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning. And it wants the right to try such detainees, and perhaps sentence them to death, on the basis of evidence that the defendants cannot see and that may have been extracted during those abusive interrogation sessions.

Both Michael and (as usual) “Marty Lederman”:http://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/09/at-last-issue-is-publicly-joined-and.html have more.

{ 27 comments }

1

Steve LaBonne 09.15.06 at 1:09 pm

Excuse my shouting but WHERE ARE THE F’ING DEMOCRATS? Why have three Republican Senators and a Republican former Secretary of State had to carry most of the water for opposition to this outrage, this shame on our country?

2

P O'Neill 09.15.06 at 1:40 pm

It just goes on and on. From today’s press conference

Now, the court said that you’ve got to live under Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. And the standards are so vague that our professionals won’t be able to carry forward the program, because they don’t want to be tried as war criminals.

From a White House “Fact Sheet” yesterday

MYTH: The Administration Is Proposing To “Reinterpret” The Definition Of Common Article 3 Or To “Redefine” Common Article 3.

FACT: The Administration Is Proposing To CLARIFY Common Article 3 – Not Reinterpret Or Redefine It

3

bi 09.15.06 at 1:47 pm

My guess is that the Democratic Party is busy rushing to the middle. To torture or not to torture? Well, perhaps we can, um, half-torture…

4

mpowell 09.15.06 at 3:03 pm

A lot of people say the dems are afraid of a political backlash- that they will lose this fight in the polls.

Personally, I just don’t believe it. A year ago, maybe. But nobody believes these are fraternity pranks anymore. Its serious shit. And some of these people have been innocent. I think the public is ready to turn against this policy.

5

abb1 09.15.06 at 3:30 pm

There’s something here I don’t quite understand. I always thought that these “professionals” (be they spooks or even just cops) will beat the crap out of suspects every time they feel like it without being afraid of anything – just because there will never be enough evidence to convict them (not to mention that the DOJ won’t be interested anyway).

For this to become such a huge issue there must be something really weird going on and/or it has to be happening on a really massive scale; not just your garden variety occasional torture of suspects. Right?

6

nick s 09.15.06 at 3:39 pm

My guess is that the Democratic Party is busy rushing to the middle.

Nah, they know that the ‘soft on terrorists’ ads are already made, with space for their names. I’d rather see them lose by doing the right thing than try to win by cowering.

7

Uncle Kvetch 09.15.06 at 3:44 pm

Why this assumption that “the Democrats” object to torture? A few of them have gone on record to that effect, but for most of them, I think the silence speaks volumes.

8

nick s 09.15.06 at 3:46 pm

For this to become such a huge issue there must be something really weird going on and/or it has to be happening on a really massive scale; not just your garden variety occasional torture of suspects. Right?

The issue may well be that unless Congress retroactively grants immunity, Bush himself is complicit in a host of felonies, encompassing both eavesdropping and torture. Suskind’s book claims that Bush took a personal interest in the interrogation of Abu Zubeydah:

“He was interested in a very specific, granular way all the time. He was constantly asking folks inside of CIA, ‘What’s happening with interrogations? Are these techniques working?’ Can we trust what we get? The president … is involved — some people say too involved — in the granular day-to-day grit of this war on terror.”

In short, he’s inoculating himself against the threat of impeachment.

9

abb1 09.15.06 at 3:58 pm

If this is what they’re trying to do, the congress could probably just grant immunity to a list of individuals without any “clarifications” to Article 3.

10

bob mcmanus 09.15.06 at 4:47 pm

“For this to become such a huge issue there must be something really weird going on”

I don’t know. The pre-Warren Court cop may have used the occasional truncheon to get a confession, but I think he would have had an objection to having the beatings sanctioned in writing. I am not sure why.

11

mpowell 09.15.06 at 4:48 pm

Abb1- it would be nice, right? I’d rather let these guys off the hook then risk encoding into law torture or permanently affecting americans’ political views on the matter w/ a strong republican effort to convince their base that torture is good this fall.

12

Anarch 09.15.06 at 7:16 pm

I’m curious: what would happen if the Dems waterboarded a willing “victim” in the middle of the Senate floor to illustrate the depravity the Bush Administration wants to unleash? That’d be some powerful campaign footage right there.

13

jet 09.15.06 at 8:21 pm

Anarch,
Given that CIA operatives who will be using the technique are required to undergo it, this would probably backfire, as it doesn’t appear that brutal. Modern waterboarding entails little danger of death and sounds much less worrysome than when my cousins used to hold me by my ankles and dip me into the pool until I nearly passed out (most people will probably have stories worse than the “wet cloth on the face with a picher of water poured on them ‘torture'”).

If this was shown on capital hill, I’d find it hard to believe anyone would call it torture as it isn’t even in the same ball park as to how torture is depicted in your latest block buster thriller. I mean this is pathetic, Human Rights Watch says the longest anyone has been waterboarded is 2 minutes. 2 minutes of non-permanent fear? If only that was all US soldiers faced when captured.

14

astrongmaybe 09.15.06 at 10:03 pm

Jet, are so busy trolling that you can’t even read what you link to? The article says the CIA people ‘caved in’ after ‘just’ 14 seconds. The ‘2 minutes’ is not an indication of the procedure’s mildness, rather of its brutality.

15

jet 09.15.06 at 11:46 pm

Astrongmaybe,
When I think of torture, I think of the Philippine’s secret police and car batteries hooked up to body parts or perhaps brass knuckles and a chain. I think of Vietnam and hanging from your arms, tied behind you, until they pull out of their sockets. I think of hours of brutal beatings leaving the person maimed or mutilated for life.

14 seconds of fear seems incredibly mild when compared to normal life in a US high school, let alone a torture room.

Or perhaps I’m missing something? Water boarding is putting someone on a board, leaning it so their head is slightly below their lungs (to minimize the chance of water being inhaled), putting plastic or cloth over their face , and then pouring water over it until they break ? And during this process they can still breath, but it is just extremely difficult? I could be wrong, but then again, I’m just getting my info from Human Rights Watch, the notorious pro-torture movement.

16

bad Jim 09.16.06 at 12:25 am

There is some concern that waterboarding can result in brain damage. Many of the techniques currently permitted to American interrogators can lead to permanent damage and have led to the death of detainees.

Should these prisoners ever be put on trial in public we will be able to judge their condition for ourselves. Many doubt that this will be permitted, presuming that their maltreatment has turned them into vegetables. The president’s proposed rules for trial could keep the defendants out of view, which would do nothing to refute such suspicions.

17

bi 09.16.06 at 1:23 am

How about jet get himself to undergo these 14 seconds of “non-permanent fear” first-hand, again and again, until he decides to confess to the assassination of JFK?

(Rush to the middle: 14 seconds divided by 2 = 7 seconds. Hey, we’ve got a winner!)

18

maidhc 09.16.06 at 1:50 am

I thought the strangest part of Bush’s press conference was when he was asked what he would think if an American soldier were tortured by North Koreans or Iranians, if they followed the same interpretation of the Geneva Conventions as his. He said he didn’t have a problem with it.

19

astrongmaybe 09.16.06 at 3:11 am

Jet, I’m kind of amazed that a patriot like yourself can just accept the denial of this benign and effect method of interrogation not only to police departments across the country, but to our armed forces. This president, eh? He obviously doesn’t have access to your criterion of ‘comparison to that movie I saw last week’, but even so…

20

abb1 09.16.06 at 3:24 am

…would have had an objection to having the beatings sanctioned in writing

Yeah, this is another aspect of this I don’t quite understand:

Bush “was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?”

I mean, c’mon, ever since the phrase “will no one rid me of this freaken priest?” was uttered, the human civilization has known how to deal with these problems. You call your top spook and you say: “do what you need to do to get the information”. And, I mean, unless you’re a some kind of a really sick fuck, you don’t want to know about the ‘methods’, right? I can’t imagine Stalin, for example, asking Beria about the methods.

And this guy, this “high-view” manager who says things like: “generals will decide the troops level”, this guy is really curious about the methods, fixated on the methods? He’s a sick bastard, psychopath, isn’t he?

21

Syd Webb 09.16.06 at 8:36 am

abbi wrote:

this guy is really curious about the methods, fixated on the methods? He’s a sick bastard, psychopath, isn’t he?

I don’t know about that. As someone who wages aggressive war (or ‘pre-emptive war’ or whatever you young people call it these days) he is, under the Nuremburg precedents, an alleged Class A war criminal.

I have to say ‘alleged’ because of the principle that he is innocent until he’s had a fair trial, a chance to clear his name, and is hung from the neck until dead.

Which I would regret. As the poet John Donne reminds us, “Any mans death diminishes me,” even an alleged Class A war criminal.

22

john m. 09.16.06 at 1:18 pm

“…And during this process they can still breath, but it is just extremely difficult?”

Oh, breathing is just extremely difficult and here am I thinking there was something bad happening but hey, if I can just about breathe everything must be fine. Jet evidences the single most seductive and yet utterly naive thought about all of this: that these things must only be happening to bad people who really deserve it. Breathes in, breathes out, without difficulty.

23

Sam 09.16.06 at 2:23 pm

The Post editorial reads, in part:

“Three Republican senators — John W. Warner of Virginia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee; Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina; and Mr. McCain — are bravely promoting an alternative measure that would allow terrorists to be questioned and tried without breaking faith with traditional U.S. values.”

My understanding is that the alternative bill proposed breaks with traditional U.S. values as completely as the Bush version. It still allows for trial without defense access to evidence deemed to be secret. It allows for the abolition of habeus corpus protections for defendents. It doesn’t allow for the detainess to seek protection from the federal judiciary. Unless I’m misinterpreting the new measure, it looks just like the Bush bill, sans waterboarding.

24

John Emerson 09.16.06 at 11:06 pm

I just came by to see which troll would make a fool of himself or herself. Hi, Jet.

25

Walt 09.17.06 at 1:12 pm

I have to admit that’s the sole reason I have to check certain comment threads. What bizarre offense to reason or morality will they come up with this time?

26

Ray 09.18.06 at 4:18 am

You have to credit jet with extra asshole points for “shucks, my cousins did worse to me all the time, didn’t do me no harm” gambit.

27

wildandweird 09.18.06 at 5:11 am

Well, several “veteran” soldiers subjected me and other “freshmen” to torture when I began my compulsory military service. Their 3-month seniority was their motive and justifying cause. I’m talking about mock executions, mock rape, and yes, waterboarding. I was mature enough to assume that they weren’t going to go too far, and indifference was my best weapon against it. Indeed, since I didn’t scream, they weren’t amused, so they let me go rather quickly. On the other hand, at least two of my fellow “freshmen” attempted suicide after a couple of torture sessions. My point is that, even if these techniques, individually considered, may *seem* to be somewhat innocuous, they can amount to very serious injuries and even death when *appropriately* combined and set in the proper context (war, performed by declared enemies, without the slightest indication of due process). Hey, jet, don’t take my word for it. Human Rights Watch has several rather somber episodes documented involving the CIA, in connection with the present War on Terror.

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