On Detention

(Cross-posted at Vim and Vinegar)

I'd like everyone to play "pretend" for a moment. Pretend that you are minding your own business in your own home. You are a taxpayer, a citizen, gainfully employed and well-liked. One day, the police come to your house and bring you in for holding. You're not necessarily under arrest, at least, you aren't charged with any crimes. The police are just concerned, because, you see, one country invaded another country after a group of terrorists blew up two buildings in the first country's largest city. Now, after a week of questioning, the local police have decided that you've not only done nothing wrong, but you are in fact completely innocent.
You think you're free to go. This sort of logic is, of course, wrong. It turns out the country who was attacked by the terrorists think that there is sufficient evidence to justify holding you as a terror suspect yourself. So rather than being released, you are transported - not to another prison in your home country, not even to the country who believes that you may be a terrorist. No, instead you are transferred to yet another country where the attacked nation leases a strip of land. You are kept away from the attorneys who are appointed to defend you against whatever charges will eventually be filed against you. You don't get to see the evidence against you because the Government believes that you will share that classified information with your terrorist cronies - as if you had any. You watch as others in your situation have tubes violently forced down their throats into their stomachs so that they are available for interrogations. You are subjected to and learn that others are denied sleep, slammed against walls, induced into hypothermia, have their phobias used against them. You hear stories of how others who are detained are strapped head down at an angle on a plank, a cloth over their mouth while gallons of water is poured over their head. You are threatened with death. You hear gunshots coming from other rooms, which you believe is the murder of other detainees.
This is necessary, you learn your captors argue, because they need to get the information that you, the worst of the worst, possess. You find out that leader of the government holding you captive has told his staff to write pieces of paper that say they can do all this to you and the others in your position, for an undisclosed period of time, forever, even, if they need, to keep their people safe. You find out that one of these authors believes that his president has the authority to "crush the testicles" of your son, if he believes that would prevent a terrorist attack. You learn that according to this Government, none of this qualifies as torture, even if they go beyond what is written on these pieces of paper.
After several years, your lawyers, who you hardly got to see and were unable to present any adequate defense with, has gotten your case before the court of the country to detained you. This court has determined that you are entitled to something called "habeas corpus," which means you can challenge the government's justification for holding you. It turns out that the government's position is pretty simple. They believe that because they think you might be a terrorist, they can keep you in prison forever, and do what they want to you within the limits of the pieces of paper written for the president, and the laws of the country don't apply to you, because you aren't, technically, in the country.
Your lawyer protests on your behalf.
And he wins. Which means you win.
It turns out there was no justification for your detention, and therefore, you are to be released. No harm, no foul, perhaps.

Unfortunately, for several years, this situation has borne out countless times. Enhanced somewhat to include more of what has transpired against the detainees in Guantanamo Bay, this narrative is similar to what Lakhdar Boumediene endured at the hands of our government.

The reason for this game this morning is because Mark Benjamin today wrote an article at Salon.com on waterboarding and just how stringent the protocol was to ensure proper interrogation. He writes:

[i]nterrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney "specially designed" to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner's nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also 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.

It turns out, however, that there's a new case that Judge Wayne R. Anderson is allowing - a suit filed against Donals Rumsfeld charging the former Secretary of Defense with authorizing torture. For space sake, I will link to the article at the Huffington Post here. the suit is Donal Vance and Nathan Ertel v. Donald Rumsfeld, United States of America and Unidentified Agents. We'll see what comes from this, but the allegations include the claim that "Rumsfeld informed Major Miller that his mission was to 'gitmo-ize' Camp Cropper." That would clear the road for destroying the potential to call the detainee abuses anything other than Torture.

Unchanged

One of my biggest criticisms about the Bush administration was its inability to be transparent about anything. The Obama administration thus far has done somewhat better, but on the issues upon which I had hoped he would demonstrate "change," we are seeing slow, if any, progress.

When asked at the press conference yesterday about Neda in Iran, President Obama was interrupted during his answer. As Glenn Greenwald (I'm telling you, you need to read him!) writes:

As Obama was answering -- attesting to how "heartbreaking" he found the video; how "anybody who sees it knows that there's something fundamentally unjust" about the violence; and paying homage to "certain international norms of freedom of speech, freedom of expression" -- Helen Thomas, who hadn't been called on, interrupted to ask Obama to reconcile those statements about the Iranian images with his efforts at home to suppress America's own torture photos ("Then why won't you allow the photos --").

The President quickly cut her off with these remarks:

THE PRESIDENT: Hold on a second, Helen. That's a different question. (Laughter.)

Of course, Ms. Thomas has a salient point, and one that deserves an answer, but she didn't get it. The most effective way to ensure that our nation doesn't repeat the travesties of the previous administration is to get all the dirt out in the open. Show the photos, let the country and the world see what we were when governed by a compassionate conservative.

Greenwald's article is superb, and truly deserves reading, not just for the commentary on this important issue, but also because he provides further evidence that the Conservative Bloggers are somewhat foolish in their criticism of President Obama fielding a question from the Huffington Post (one of the most difficult questions of the conference, he notes)...

All around good stuff.

Debunking a Chestnut

I have a very hard time understanding people who would defend the Bush Administration's clandestine approval of torture and its subsequent cover-up of the same. I suppose, if I wrap my mind around it enough, I can manufacture a scenario where I believe that a government that would lie about an activity it was performing would nonetheless be sincere in assessing the need, application, and efficacy of it. But I think that would take far more alcohol than I've ever consumed, or a frontal lobotomy.

One of the closest things to a cogent argument that I'd heard was the "But Lincoln suspended habeas corpus!" canard. Perhaps on the surface, that argument is on point, but on closer review, it doesn't hold water (no pun intended). To emphasize the point, I would direct you to Jonathan Zasloff's post at The Reality-Based Community. I don't want to take too much of his post here, because it should be read in its entirety, but his summary is crystal:

Had Bush and Cheney really believed that there was an emergency requiring torture, they would have 1) said so publicly; 2) taken responsibility for the decision and defended it; 3) gotten Congressional approval; and 4) limited it as much as possible.

But they couldn't have done that, because torture was never about a national security emergency. It was about proving an Iraq-Al Qaeda link for political purposes. Or establishing precedent for unilateral executive rule. Or about military dropouts and draft dodgers like Bush, Cheney, and Addington showing how tough they were. Or something.

Following Lincoln's 1861 precedent would thus have defeated the entire purpose of the torture program. And that shows us just how much these guys were a bunch of moral cretins.

Unequivocal Statements

Some time ago, all right, about 19 months ago, I made a statement that the War in Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. What I meant by that was pretty basic - there was no connection between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein/Iraq. Yes, this was one of the primary arguments in favor of the second AUMF for Iraq. Yes, it was wrong - there was no connection.

It turns out, of course, that the administration found this out pretty early on, yet they refused to believe it. We know now that the administration authorized torture, even as it was dismissing what happened at Abu Ghraib as the work of "a few bad apples." But, what did they do? Well, like anyone desperate to show they're right, they resorted to torture, which they derided publicly, yet embraced to prove their lie. I read about this first at Andrew Sullivan's site. It wasn't bad apples, it was top-down policy, complete with scapegoating.

I think the fact that this has happened in our name is deplorable. And I'm not sure how you can trust those who denied that they even tortured (h/t Mark Shea) when they now say that that torture led to useful information - particularly when the examples they provide are temporally impossible. (From the Slate - also first read on Andrew Sullivan)

I am fully in favor of special counsel being appointed. I most certainly believe Jay Bybee and John Yoo need to be disbarred. I think that all of this needs to be brought out in the open and aired publicly, so that the wounds can begin to heal, and we can begin to return to our place atop the moral high ground. Ignoring this, or walking away, helps nobody but those who violated the laws that those below them have already been punished for. (h/t Obsidian Wings)