[Reuters] Report: Bush Gave CIA Expansive Interrogation Power

I thought this came from an interesting article - and it made a great comparison IMO of torture to the death penalty. You can line up 'experts' on both sides of the aisle and in the end it comes down to opinion.

"IN 1995, the police in the Philippines tortured Abdul Hakim Murad after finding a bomb-making factory in his apartment in Manila. They broke his ribs, burned him with cigarettes, forced water down his throat, then threatened to turn him over to the Israelis. Finally, from this withered and broken man came secrets of a terror plot to blow up 11 airliners, crash another into the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency and to assassinate the pope.

''It worked,'' said Alan M. Dershowitz, a professor of law at Harvard who has written about the potential necessity of torture in the post-9/11 world. ''It took what is called 'torture lite' and nonlethal torture to break him down and reveal truthful information that may have saved many lives.''

Few Americans will say they support torture. But what if, as in the case of Mr. Murad, or if authorities had captured one of those engaged in planning the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, there was reason to believe that torture could produce information that would save many lives? Under those circumstance, does torture become necessary, if perhaps regrettable?

The search for an effective way to combat the very real threat of terrorism has forced Americans to confront such uncomfortable questions and the gap that at times exists between the nation's expressed values and its practices.

Federal investigators, for example, have used coercive methods against a select group of high-level terrorist leaders and operatives. They tried to extract information from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level Al Qaeda prisoner, by strapping him down and pushing him under water until he felt he would drown. Investigators called this ''water boarding'' and insisted that it stopped short of torture.

In the face of a dangerous, implacable enemy, such methods, and perhaps others still more extreme, may easily come to seem more acceptable. As Richard A. Posner, a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, wrote in The New Republic in September 2002, in a review of Mr. Dershowitz's book, ''Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge'': ''If torture is the only means of obtaining the information necessary to prevent the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Times Square, torture should be used -- and will be used -- to obtain the information.''

 

Hayes -- maybe i'm reading this article wrong. but this isn't merely torture. we've had that discussion here before. this is the US government snatching people from around the globe and dropping them off in other countries for torture-filled interrogation. the guy on 20/20 last night didn't know what happened to him. he was snatched in albania and taken to another country...i think his home was in kosovo. he was gone for like 4 months...he got back home after he was dropped on the side of the road somewhere in eastern europe...and his wife had left, gone back to live with her family. they had no idea where he was, and assumed he was dead. the only reason he found out the US govt was behind it was he saw the identifying number of the airplane he was taken in and memorized that number. he used amnesty international to track it down.

i don't know what they had on this guy. but after 4 months or so of torture, apparently they gave up. i'm bothered by that.

 

For every anectdote of legitimate information obtained from torture - there are just as many (if not more) bogus stories that were also obtained from torture (see, e.g. some of the info used by Powell at the UN, the confessions by Arar) - that's the problem with it.

Further, there is no proof that regular (non-torture) interrogation methods would not have worked in instances where torture was used. The ticking nuclear bomb scenario is frequently mentioned - but has never happened and seems like more of an ethical construct than a real-life scenario.

EDIT: I should say, at the margins and in the abstract, torture in the hypothetical ticking nuclear bomb scenario probably is justifiable - but those situations are hypothetical and the real world result has been seemingly innocent guys getting picked up, tortured, and released over far more mundane items.

It's not unlike the death penalty - sure it's a good idea when you think about assholes like the BTK killer or Osama Bin Laden - but in trying to implement the system, the reality is that you've got a substanial part of Illinois death row consisting of innocent men waiting to get the needle for crimes many of them could not have committed based on phony evidence.

 

I'm confused. The French torture of Algerians was a failure. The French failed in Algeria. That is an example of torture being a total failure and not it's effectiveness. Japanese torture during WW2 is another example of it's failure. If one of the examples you provide of why it works ended up as a failure, then that doesn't bode well for those that tout its effectiveness.

 

Two different things. The french eventually failed in Algier but they crushed several rebellions with information gained through torture.

 

Agreed. There are problems with it. If one has moral absolutes then the question is easy - no torture. If not, then it becomes more difficult. Are the leads gained, the terror strikes stopped, worth the torture to 'innocent' or at least passive actors? I think its hard to tell because we cannot quantify the success, only the failures.

There is no proof that other means of torture (depravation tanks vs beatings for instance) would not have worked in instances where this torture was used. And there is no proof that (non-torture) techniques would have worked in the instances where torture has worked.

Sam & Max, I'm agreeing with you both on the level that intuitively there is something that should give us pause when innocents are snatched up in our efforts to destroy terrorism. I'm just not sure where that line is, and I'm ok admitting that. Torture, as a tool in a specific situation, I am not absolutely against. As Sam points out the oft quoted nuke in Times Square example is hypothetical but I can't say with 100% certainty that in such a situation I would authorize or do myself (if I were in the situation to do so) whatever heinous torture might retrieve the information - and sleep just fine at night.

 

Which is one of the problems(I have a lots) I see with toture. It may save a life here or there, but in the end it is a losing proposition. It encourages the enemy to torture your side's soldiers, it builds more resistance to your side, and that may very well cause even lives to be lost in the long run than those saved. For potential allies it knocks your side off of the moral high ground, and it discourages allies enough, that may also cost lives, intel, and victories.

In the short run you may find where a planning session for the enemy is taking place. In the long run you may entrench the enemy so deeply that driving them out costs more lives than were saved by busting up one planning session.

 

Or it may cost one life and save thousands.

They already do that. We're talking about terrorists here. Hello?

Again, or it could not.

Since all of our allies do it, I don't think so.

 

With regard to torture, I am very much in favor of it if it can save US lives and protect our nation. If the people closest to the situation believe that a terrorist should be tortured, who are we to oppose that? They have more information than us and they are the ones putting their lives on the line. Not us. Them.

Khalid Shaik Mohammed has been in captivity for quite some time. I hope every day the troops that are holding him parade him in front of every cell in the prison and test out how far his 'ball bag' will stretch in front of every one. I hope this occurs daily.

 

Max, I'm glad to see a conservative standing up against torture here. Some of the posts I've read in this thread, and not all from NJRocket, I find very disturbing.

People, what if, during a sweep for suspects, your son or daughter, or you, were mistakenly detained and happened to fit the description of a wanted terrorist. You plead innocent, and ask for an attorney. Instead, they put you on a plane, and send you to a destination unknown to you, your family, or anyone from your local government.

When you get to where you're sent, they commence to torture using a host of different methods, many described here. You keep claiming innocence, but they laugh, and ramp up the torture. When you start spilling your guts about whatever you think they want to hear, even though you're making it up, they take notes, recordings, video, and put you in a cell.

After a length of time, they discover that they made a mistake, the stuff you told them was bogus, and they drop you off somewhere, assuming you aren't killed to coverup what they've done, leaving you trying to tell your story to whoever would listen.

What the hell kind of country do you want? One that condones this lunacy? Is life that cheap? More important than that, are our values that cheap? Is that what "we've" become? Those that we hate? Some of you should think about it a little bit.

I could think up a couple of scenarios where torture could be distasteful, but justfied. Some of you don't care about circumstances... it doesn't matter. Their skin color is different, or their nationality, or their religion, so if they are tortured and were innocent, so what? That's the way it goes. Hell, it should happen to you. I would find your thoughts on torture facinating, when you are the innocent victim.

If we stoop to their level, how are we different?



Keep D&D Civil!!

 

Actually a number of our soldiers who were released have not been tortured. To say they already do is speaking of a few and depends on the enemy.

We do have allies that do it, and we have allies that aren't providing all that much help this time around, and as we become known as a nation that disregards human rights and encourages torture we can look forward to even less cooperation in the future.

You say it could not, but Algeria and the French is prime example of that happening. The torture and human rights abuse only strengthens the resistence. Torture has a history of failure. The French who instituted torture as part of the regular process lost, and the torture plan failed, despite some short term successes.

 

Excellent post deck!

 

Agreed. America has become a Third World country under George W. Bush's leadership. We have forgotten what we stand for, and have sunk to the level of our enemy.

 

This is exactly the point. This thread has shown that some people's morality has already been a casualty and lost to the terrorist attack on 9/11. To me that is something far greater than the loss of life. At least the victims of 9/11 who lost their lives died in a world where we believed torture to be unequivocably wrong, and our moral compass was intact. Most of them probably died still believing those ideals themselves. However, it is clear now that the strikes against us on 9/11 was successful depriving some, including our leaders to an extent, to lose their moral compass, and adopt the morality, of those we fight against. Let us hope and pray that we can win that back, or that we don't suffer any tragic losses like that again.

 

Bush wielding secrecy privilege to end suits
National security cited against challenges to anti-terror tactics

By Andrew Zajac
Washington Bureau
Published March 3, 2005


WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration is aggressively wielding a rarely used executive power known as the state secrets privilege in an attempt to squash hard-hitting court challenges to its anti-terrorism campaign.

How the White House is using this privilege, not a law but a series of legal precedents built on national security, disturbs some civil libertarians and open-government advocates because of its sweeping power. Judges almost never challenge the government's assertion of the privilege, and it can be fatal to a plaintiff's case.

The government is invoking the privilege in an attempt to wipe out the heart of a lawsuit that seeks to examine rendition, the secretive and controversial practice of sending terror suspects to foreign countries where they might be tortured.

Use of the secrets privilege also could eliminate a suit by a former FBI contract linguist who charges that the bureau bungled translations of terrorism intelligence before and after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The Bush administration is also using the secrets privilege to seek dismissal of a third case not related directly to terrorism. And the administration has invoked the privilege in less sweeping ways on several other occasions.

The use of the state secrets privilege, critics say, is part of President Bush's forceful expansion of presidential secrecy, including a more restrictive approach to releasing documents under the Freedom of Information Act; limitations on the dissemination of presidential papers and curtailment of information on individuals rounded up in the war on terrorism.

Justice Department spokesman Kevin Madden declined to discuss any active cases. But he said, "The state secrets privilege is [asserted] only after a careful determination that, were a secret disclosed, it would adversely affect national security."

The secrets privilege is an especially powerful weapon because federal judges, reluctant to challenge the executive branch on national security, almost never refuse the government's claim to confidentiality.

That is true even though a growing body of declassified documents suggests that in the past, at least, the privilege has been used to protect presidential power, not national secrets, according to Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at the George Washington University, which works to expand public access to government documents.

There's even fresh evidence that the case leading to the Supreme Court's Reynolds decision, which enshrined the secrets privilege more than 50 years ago, may have been based more on concealing negligence than preserving national security.

In claiming the state secrets privilege, "the government always overreaches," Blanton said. "It always misleads and in some cases it lies, because it believes its authority is at stake."

That's not so, said Shannen Coffin, who oversaw state secrets litigation at the Justice Department from January 2002 until mid-2004.

"I don't think that's even a remotely plausible claim," said Coffin, now in private practice. "It's an extremely important privilege and one the government takes extremely seriously."

The Justice Department does not tally the government's use of the privilege. But according to a recent study, the U.S. has successfully asserted the secrets privilege at least 60 times since the early 1950s, and has been stymied only five times.

No court access

Unlike criminal prosecutions, where the law allows the disclosure of at least some secret information--for example, by allowing lawyers to view it in a restricted setting such as a judge's chambers--the secrets privilege keeps information completely out of court in civil cases.

More striking than the number of cases is the breadth of some recent demands for secrecy, say lawyers familiar with government secrets litigation.

For example, it would erase most of Maher Arar's suit over his seizure by U.S. officials in New York in 2002.

Arar, a Canadian citizen who was born in Syria, said he was shackled and flown to Jordan and then Syria where he was abused and imprisoned for 10 months.

His case is aimed at laying bare the arrangements between governments that underpin renditions, said David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University and one of Arar's lawyers.

If the government succeeds "in invoking state secrets, they will make renditions immune from legal challenge in court," Cole said.

Even attorneys fighting secrets claims acknowledge that the government needs to keep some information under wraps. But they argue that the demands for secrecy have gotten out of hand.

"It's not that the privilege shouldn't exist. It's become too broad and abused with very little accountability imposed by the judiciary," said Mark Zaid, a Washington attorney who is handling two of the cases in which the government is seeking dismissal of most or all of a lawsuit.

In one of those cases, Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI linguist, charged that she was fired in retaliation for questioning security lapses at the bureau.

Last July, a Washington judge accepted the government argument and dismissed her complaint.

Edmonds said she believes the Justice Department was concerned about potential liability in other suits.

"If this stuff comes out, it will be used by 9/11 families and various defendants, detainees," she said, referring to lawsuits by the families of Sept. 11 victims and by those held without charges in the subsequent security sweeps. Edmonds testified Wednesday before Congress, telling a House subcommittee that the government seems "to be far more concerned with avoiding accountability than protecting our national security."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...30247mar03,1,1855645.story?ctrack=2&cset=true

 

Thanks for the article. It looks like the administration once again holds accountability in low regard. This kind of thing sets a very dangerous example.

Saddam was bad. Why was he bad? One of the reason was his wide sweeps followed by imprisonment and torture.

Guess what Allawi, and the U.S. has been guilty of in Iraq and elsewhere? We need to take a stand. We should not tolerate the moral cowards who at the first sign of trouble dropped the principles and ran the other way, in the exact same way a cowardly soldier carries his weapon, but drops it and runs at the first sign of combat.

Torture is wrong. There aren't excuses that make it ok, and certainly none that our nation has been faced with.

 

It's good to be the king...I guess....

Sign an executive order authorizing torture and crush any dissent with executive privilege.

Brilliant!

 

I think your evaluation of our moral compass is just wrong. Let's use the hypothetical nuke in Times Square on New Years Eve. You have the terrorist. You can torture him and find out where it is, or not. Do you do it? I say yes, and almost everyone else says yes. That would have been true before 9/11 too. Would i have had a terrorist tortured if I could have found out what flights they were going to hijack on 9/11? Hell yes. You assert that we, as Americans, have always held morality in a vaccuum - untouched by outside events. This is not the case. We are human just as anyone else. Does that make us less 'great?' No.

 

78% of New Yorkers (you know...the place where the attack took place) that voted for Kerry proves you wrong.

People like NJ and texxx keep harping "the people have spoken"

indeed...

Why is that? Why, in the place where the attacks took place, are the people so against the policies of this administration?

 

I agree with you, in the situation you described above.

How about addressing the other side of the coin, which seems to be happening more often than not: an innocent person is whisked away to an unknown country, tortured, and then set free without charges being filed against him. What is your opinion of situation such as this? Do you file it under "oh well"?