Why Torture Matters: The Banality of Bush White House Evil

Featured Post: Andy Worthington - Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?
Featured Post: Mark Danner - If Everyone Knew, Who’s to Blame?

Frank Rich in The New York Times

We don’t like our evil to be banal. Ten years after Columbine, it only now may be sinking in that the psychopathic killers were not jock-hating dorks from a “Trench Coat Mafia,” or, as ABC News maintained at the time, “part of a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement.” In the new best seller “Columbine,” the journalist Dave Cullen reaffirms that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were instead ordinary American teenagers who worked at the local pizza joint, loved their parents and were popular among their classmates.

On Tuesday, it will be five years since Americans first confronted the photographs from Abu Ghraib on “60 Minutes II.” Here, too, we want to cling to myths that quarantine the evil. If our country committed torture, surely it did so to prevent Armageddon, in a patriotic ticking-time-bomb scenario out of “24.” If anyone deserves blame, it was only those identified by President Bush as “a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values”: promiscuous, sinister-looking lowlifes like Lynddie England, Charles Graner and the other grunts who were held accountable while the top command got a pass.

We’ve learned much, much more about America and torture in the past five years. But as Mark Danner recently wrote in The New York Review of Books, for all the revelations, one essential fact remains unchanged: “By no later than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it.” When the Obama administration said it declassified four new torture memos 10 days ago in part because their contents were already largely public, it was right.

Yet we still shrink from the hardest truths and the bigger picture: that torture was a premeditated policy approved at our government’s highest levels; that it was carried out in scenarios that had no resemblance to “24”; that psychologists and physicians were enlisted as collaborators in inflicting pain; and that, in the assessment of reliable sources like the F.B.I. director Robert Mueller, it did not help disrupt any terrorist attacks.

The newly released Justice Department memos, like those before them, were not written by barely schooled misfits like England and Graner. John Yoo, Steven Bradbury and Jay Bybee graduated from the likes of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Michigan and Brigham Young. They have passed through white-shoe law firms like Covington & Burling, and Sidley Austin.

Judge Bybee’s résumé tells us that he has four children and is both a Cubmaster for the Boy Scouts and a youth baseball and basketball coach. He currently occupies a tenured seat on the United States Court of Appeals. As an assistant attorney general, he was the author of the Aug. 1, 2002, memo endorsing in lengthy, prurient detail interrogation “techniques” like “facial slap (insult slap)” and “insects placed in a confinement box.”

He proposed using 10 such techniques “in some sort of escalating fashion, culminating with the waterboard, though not necessarily ending with this technique.” Waterboarding, the near-drowning favored by Pol Pot and the Spanish Inquisition, was prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II. But Bybee concluded that it “does not, in our view, inflict ‘severe pain or suffering.’ ”

Still, it’s not Bybee’s perverted lawyering and pornographic amorality that make his memo worthy of special attention. It merits a closer look because it actually does add something new — and, even after all we’ve heard, something shocking — to the five-year-old torture narrative. When placed in full context, it’s the kind of smoking gun that might free us from the myths and denial that prevent us from reckoning with this ugly chapter in our history.

Bybee’s memo was aimed at one particular detainee, Abu Zubaydah, who had been captured some four months earlier, in late March 2002. Zubaydah is portrayed in the memo (as he was publicly by Bush after his capture) as one of the top men in Al Qaeda. But by August this had been proven false. As Ron Suskind reported in his book “The One Percent Doctrine,” Zubaydah was identified soon after his capture as a logistics guy, who, in the words of the F.B.I.’s top-ranking Qaeda analyst at the time, Dan Coleman, served as the terrorist group’s flight booker and “greeter,” like “Joe Louis in the lobby of Caesar’s Palace.” Zubaydah “knew very little about real operations, or strategy.” He showed clinical symptoms of schizophrenia.

By the time Bybee wrote his memo, Zubaydah had been questioned by the F.B.I. and C.I.A. for months and had given what limited information he had. His most valuable contribution was to finger Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the 9/11 mastermind. But, as Jane Mayer wrote in her book “The Dark Side,” even that contribution may have been old news: according to the 9/11 commission, the C.I.A. had already learned about Mohammed during the summer of 2001. In any event, as one of Zubaydah’s own F.B.I. questioners, Ali Soufan, wrote in a Times Op-Ed article last Thursday, traditional interrogation methods had worked. Yet Bybee’s memo purported that an “increased pressure phase” was required to force Zubaydah to talk.

As soon as Bybee gave the green light, torture followed: Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002, according to another of the newly released memos. Unsurprisingly, it appears that no significant intelligence was gained by torturing this mentally ill Qaeda functionary. So why the overkill? Bybee’s memo invoked a ticking time bomb: “There is currently a level of ‘chatter’ equal to that which preceded the September 11 attacks.”

We don’t know if there was such unusual “chatter” then, but it’s unlikely Zubaydah could have added information if there were. Perhaps some new facts may yet emerge if Dick Cheney succeeds in his unexpected and welcome crusade to declassify documents that he says will exonerate administration interrogation policies. Meanwhile, we do have evidence for an alternative explanation of what motivated Bybee to write his memo that August, thanks to the comprehensive Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees released last week.

The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.

Last week Bush-Cheney defenders, true to form, dismissed the Senate Armed Services Committee report as “partisan.” But as the committee chairman, Carl Levin, told me, the report received unanimous support from its members — John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman included.

Levin also emphasized the report’s accounts of military lawyers who dissented from White House doctrine — only to be disregarded. The Bush administration was “driven,” Levin said. By what? “They’d say it was to get more information. But they were desperate to find a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.”

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.

Levin suggests — and I agree — that as additional fact-finding plays out, it’s time for the Justice Department to enlist a panel of two or three apolitical outsiders, perhaps retired federal judges, “to review the mass of material” we already have. The fundamental truth is there, as it long has been. The panel can recommend a legal path that will insure accountability for this wholesale betrayal of American values.

President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won’t vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don’t need another commission. We don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s commitment to the rule of law.

Living the Bubble Life in Miami

The “great” American signer Jimmy Buffett wrote and sang of Margaritaville, a place where oblivion was the default position. Why Mr. Buffett is often referred to as “great” defeats me, but as he has a recording contract and I do not, I’d better leave this question alone. Indeed, I'll consider his oblivion.

Some nights ago, I was sitting at Sundowners, a bar/restaurant in Key Largo in Florida. I was the designated driver, hence no margaritas for me, but the setting was perfect, the food ambrosia, and even the plain iced water was nirvana. I watched, mesmerized, as the sun dipped into the ocean. It was good to know that, at my venerable age, I could still see a distance of 93 million miles.

My wife and I had been visiting our eldest daughter, who works for the Miami City Ballet. She was raised to think independently, but she has taken the idea too far: we did not tell her to have such thoughts 5,000 miles away from us. Nor did we expect that she would embrace a “bubble existence” in this city.

Still, her decision meant we could attend a performance at the interestingly named and fabulously comfortable Arsht Centre. I have witnessed my fair share of ballets over the years but would make no claim to being a connoisseur. However, my wife is. In her view, MCB can rival any ballet company in the world.

What astonished me was the audience. Maybe they weren’t as sophisticated as those attending Covent Garden or La Scala. Maybe there was spontaneous applause after an extraordinary solo or duet, when the piece had not ended. But the Miami audience dressed to kill. Men in jackets and ties, women in beautiful cocktail gowns, children dressed so smartly. I felt a little embarrassed as I was in slacks and a (very smart) T shirt. In my 30 years of visits to Miam, the dress code has always been casual or ‘down’. What has happened here?

Our visit coincided with Spring Week, which now seems to last a month. Coming back to the hotel on our first night, four young ladies sat in the Lounge, each one more beautiful than the other. I asked my wife whether I might have a chance of getting a date with one of them if I was forty years younger, fifty pounds lighter, and sixty times as funny. It took her no time to reply, “Not so much.”

At this time, Miami Beach is more replete with pulchritude than normal. Pretty girls and good-looking boys abound. The attraction is sunshine, the beach, and each other but, perhaps, subliminally, they seek the bubble existence after the rigours of college.

So there has been little conversation about the economy or Obama’s European trip. However, the decision by the Iowa state legislature to lift the ban on same-sex marriage attracted much attention. Not to be outdone in publicity, the Vermont Governor vetoed a bill to legalize same-sex marriage, setting the stage for an override vote in the legislature. Thus, these two states will be the centre of attraction for Miami Beach’s substantial gay community, gearing up for the Gay Pride Parade.

CNN, too, seem to have caught the bubble mood. After the Obamas’ tour of Europe, I expected some close analysis, but last night, a deadly serious Wolf Blitzer introduced a section on Michelle Obama. Was this related to her duties as First Lady, or FLOTUS, as they like to call her here? Not really. The piece was devoted to Mrs Obama’s wardrobe and the way she covered her upper arms.

Before I am accused of mockery or cynicism, I happen to think that a society that is willing to take on awkward topics like same sex marriage, abortion and even creationism has to be applauded. As Aaron Sorkin wrote, “America is an experiment in advanced citizenship.” The political debates in UK seem sterile and passive by comparison. Nevertheless, I am relieved the talking heads on Newsnight are not getting involved in Mrs. Obama's wardrobe.

Miami Beach may lack realism but it certainly has life. I regret that my daughter has chosen to live here, rather than stay in UK. For the sake of an extra hour or so in an aircraft, I might have preferred that she had moved to Portland or San Francisco. However, when one is young and the world still resembles an oyster, when total reality has yet to hit, when annual sunshine --- give or take a hurricane or two --- is the staple diet, maybe the bubble that is Miami Beach is not so bad.

Saturday Special: Is Barack Obama Another JFK?

Our colleague Bevan Sewell of the University of Nottingham and Libertas is a leading young scholar on US foreign policy in the 1950s and 1960s. Taking some of the lessons from that research, he looks at the foreign policy prospects of the new American President:

The rapid rise of Barack Obama to the White House has been accompanied by desire among leading commentators to find an appropriate historical analogy. The number one comparison so far has been between Obama and John F. Kennedy, President from 1961 until his assassination in 1963, who also rose to prominence at a comparatively young age. As early as 2007, Ted Sorenson, Kennedy’s leading speechwriter and one of his closest advisors, anointed Obama as a successor. In February 2008, William Rees-Mogg of The Times wrote:

[Obama] has built up an excitement such as no candidate has created since President Kennedy in 1960. He is, in my view, a better speaker than Kennedy. Like Kennedy, he combines personal magnetism with a strong appeal to American idealism.

Yet, beyond the immediate imagery of youthful leaders, accomplished speakers, and forceful men regenerating America politically, what do these analogies actually mean? Can any worthwhile comparison be drawn, or is this just the search by contemporary commentators for populist appeal?

At least with respect to US foreign policy, any analogy has to avoid the temptation of predictions about how Obama’s policy might work. Labeling him as the "new" Kennedy is not as hopeful as many commentators have suggested. In fact, the potential (if tentative) lessons of the Kennedy era are that, in a time of international flux, presidents are likely to make mistakes. Those errors may undermine the US national interest even if, ultimately, this does not result in disaster.

One of the most powerful moments of Obama’s Inaugural Address came when he spoke of those nations that wished America ill:

To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West - know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

In the summer of 1961, President Kennedy adopted a similar tone in the midst of an ongoing crisis over Berlin which had seen the Soviet Union and the US come to diplomatic blows over the future of the city. In an address to the American people, Kennedy sought to reassure them of the US commitment to waging the Cold War and of his willingness to use force if required. But he also included a message of conciliation and an offer to communicate with the Soviets if they acted appropriately:

So long as the Communists insist that they are preparing to end by themselves unilaterally our rights in West Berlin and our commitments to its people, we must be prepared to defend those rights and those commitments. We will at all times be ready to talk, if talk will help. But we must also be ready to resist with force, if force is used upon us. Either alone would fail. Together, they can serve the cause of freedom and peace.

In both speeches, there was a clear link between the American will to use force if required and the US willingness to negotiate given a suitable opportunity. Of course, the contexts were very different, but these examples suggest there are certain themes that repeat themselves during different eras. While it is going too far to take these as the basis for predictions about Obama’s foreign policies and possible outcomes, they can be useful in terms of moderating grandiose expectations.

Indeed, Kennedy’s foreign policy travails in his first year in office show the wisdom not expecting too much from leaders that have been heralded enthusiastically. They are, after all, human: mistakes will be made, readjustments will be necessary, and it takes time for a President to get a grip on the internal dynamics of the US foreign policy bureaucracy.

Upon entering the White House in 1961, the Kennedy administration wanted to jettison an over-reliance upon the threatened use of nuclear weapons and a fiscal conservatism that had limited the policies of President Dwight Eisenhower. Instead, Kennedy and his advisors would pursue a strategy marked out by the military concept of flexible response and by economic and social development based on modernization theory.

Clear intentions did not, however, make for clear policy. In its first year, the Kennedy administration faced crises in Cuba, Berlin, Laos, and Vietnam. Kennedy was verbally humiliated by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna and had to confront internal problems with his national security team.

The decision to give the go-ahead to a CIA-backed invasion Cuba, just three months into his term, was disastrous for Kennedy; the Bay of Pigs fiasco brought widespread criticism for the new president and undermined the credibility of the so-called “best and the brightest” that made up his coterie of advisors. Further problems were encountered in Berlin, where a lack of presidential leadership, an absence of a clear foreign policy structure, and too many competing voices crippled US policy. So chaotic was the situation in these early days that, in a candid and forceful memo, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy felt compelled to lay out a strident critique of the new president’s management of the foreign policy sphere:

The National Security Council, for example, really cannot work for you unless you authorize work schedules that do not get upset from day to day. Calling three meetings in five days is foolish-and putting them off for six weeks at a time is just as bad….Truman and Eisenhower did their daily dozen in foreign affairs the first thing in the morning, and a couple of weeks ago you asked me to begin to meet you on this basis. I have succeeded in catching you on three mornings, for a total of about 8 minutes, and I conclude that this is not really how you like to begin the day. Moreover, 6 of the 8 minutes were given not to what I had for you but what you had for me.

Bundy’s depiction of an incoherent national security structure suggested obvious difficulties for an incoming administration. Adversaries abroad and the situation inherited from Eisenhower were the catalyst for many of the problems that the administration faced, but there were also internal difficulties that had to be addressed if the administration’s foreign policy was going to function effectively.

For President Obama, similar problems are all too obvious. The renewed US support for the war in Afghanistan, a deteriorating situation in Pakistan, ongoing crises in the Middle East, the debate over diplomatic openings to Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela, and a state of flux in US-European affairs all provide ample evidence of an administration yet to establish a clear foreign policy identity. Reports of turf battles between Obama and his military advisors, echo the Kennedy era where factionalism and a lack of coherent command within the administration could strain the implementation of policy. And while Obama has been handed the poisoned chalice of the legacy of eight years of Bushian foreign policy, the struggle to learn how to ‘do’ foreign policy in his first months inevitably complicates matters for US officials.

Though Obama has a set of foreign policy priorities that he wants to pursue, his attempts to achieve these will be accompanied by ongoing difficulties. Shaking hands with Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez is an obvious example. The depth of enmity that existed between Bush and Chavez means that a rapprochement is welcome, but the wider connotations also need to be factored in. Chavez divides opinion in Latin America as much as among other nations of the world; therefore, the US relationship with him needs to be managed carefully lest it have an adverse impact on the already strained inter-American relationship.

Likewise, attempting to broker a diplomatic opening with Iran has multi-faceted elements that must be considered. For while Obama scores highly for trying to open constructive diplomatic links with Tehran, it is a gambit that can backfire if Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continues to make inflammatory international statements like his recent pronouncement to the UN World Conference on Racism.

Yet it is the internal schisms in the Administration that are potentially most damaging. During the Kennedy era the debates that arose between new advisors like Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and older hands like former Secretary of State Dean Acheson pointed not just to a lack of internal harmony but also to an absence of presidential leadership. The Berlin crisis was a clear examples with Kennedy prevaricating between policy alternatives while canny advisors like Acheson and General Lucius Clay used a bureaucratic vacuum to advance their own agendas. Obama’s disagreements with General David Petraeus and more broadly the Pentagon, vident in discussions over Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, are reminiscent of this.

Of course, the history of the Kennedy era does not suggest that there will be an episode as damaging as the Bay of Pigs or as climatic as the Berlin crisis during the Obama Presidency. But they do suggest that, however talented and however capable, Obama may struggle to develop a fully effective foreign policy until he can eradicate some of the difficulties that blighted the early hope of his Democratic predecessor almost fifty years ago.

Fox News Anchor: "We Do Not F****** Torture!"

Related Post: Discovering How the US Became a “Torturing Democracy”

Warning: Language in clip below may offend

Only three months after the Bush Administration left office, American society has passed a "tipping point" on the question of torture. In January 2009, even though those following the story knew the details of how George W. Bush and advisors set out the path to torture in December 2001 and formally authorised "enhanced interrogation" in summer 2002, it was not considered a "fact" in public discussion.

Now there is so much discussion of torture that even a 24/7 newssite can't keep up with the political developments. For now, here's a passionate, symbolic marker of the US crossing the Rubicon of the illegal, immoral activities of the Bush years.

On Fox News --- yes, Fox News --- anchor Shepard Stone, upset by attempts to rationalise torture's effectiveness, said clearly and loudly, if colourfully, ""We are America. I don't give a rat's ass if it helps. We are America! We do not fucking torture!"

Meet Your Next President of Texas: Mr Chuck Norris

Yes, folks, you read that right. Get excited: when Texas declares independence from the liberally decadent United States, its first leader will be the star of Missing in Action, Delta Force, Chuck Norris Meets the Martians, and, of course, Walker: Texas Ranger.

A poll by Research 2000 this week found that Republicans in Texas are now evenly split on "independence", with 48 percent favouring secession from the US and 48 percent opposing. Weak-kneed Democrats pull the overall figure for independence down to 35 percent, but we're sure Mr Norris's support for secession, backed by a few well-placed kicks, will start changing minds.

Norris launched his Presidential bid in March on the highly-esteemed political talk show, The Glenn Beck Program. After plugging his new book, Black Belt Patriotism: How to Reawaken America, and declaring, "Jack Bauer would last 5 seconds against Walker", Norris declared:

We could break off from the union if we wanted to....I may run for president of Texas.

Norris says that the remark was initially a "quip", but a week later, he got serious:

From the East Coast to the "Left Coast," America seems to be moving further and further from its founders' vision and government....[But] anyone who has been around Texas for any length of time knows exactly what we'd do if the going got rough in America. Let there be no doubt about that. As Sam Houston once said, "Texas has yet to learn submission to any oppression, come from what source it may."

So how about a President Norris? The mega-superstar writes, "That need may be a reality sooner than we think."

And for you liberals/radicals/socialists who don't think this is a serious prospect, you might not only wake up to an independent Texas but one on your doorstep, kicking your butts for Norris's "second American Revolution". Let me just remind of the title of Chuck's 1985 blockbuster:

Invasion USA