Humpty Dumpty & Torture

Posted By: June
Posted on: Feb. 20, 2008 at 8:01 AM

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Sure, we waterboarded but that’s not legal now so we don’t do it anymore.

Oh sure, under certain conditions, we’d waterboard a terrorist - I mean, if L.A. were at risk…

Sure, interrogation techniques can be “uncomfortable, quite distressing, even frightening” - but they’re legal so long as they don’t “last very long or cause severe physical suffering and lasting pain.”

Hunh? Well, that was last week’s testimony of Steven G. Bradbury before a House Judiciary Committee subcommittee.

And Bradbury should know because he prepared two secret opinions in 2005 laying out the ground rules for CIA interrogations. One authorized torture - including head slapping, simulated drowning, and exposure to frigid temperatures which provoked then Deputy Attorney General James Comey to complain to his colleagues that they would be “ashamed” when the world learned of it.’

Bradbury refused the committee’s requests for those legal opinions, of course - on the grounds that disclosure would alert terrorists to our methods of interrogation which, in turn, would strengthen their training and resolve to resist.

Bruce Fein observes: “The beginning of the end of the rule of law has emerged under President Bush, i.e., a systematic twisting of language or precedents to advance a political agenda.

“The Bush administration has bettered the instruction of Humpty Dumpty in ‘Through the Looking-Glass, And What Alice Found There‘: ‘When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’

Morris Davis, in the NYT: “My policy as the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo was that evidence derived through waterboarding was off limits. That should still be our policy. To do otherwise is not only an affront to American justice, it will potentially put prosecutors at risk for using illegally obtained evidence.

"Unfortunately, I was overruled on the question, and I resigned my position to call attention to the issue — efforts that were hampered by my being placed under a gag rule and ordered not to testify at a Senate hearing. While some high-level military and civilian officials have rightly expressed indignation on the issue, the current state can be described generally as indifference and inaction.”

Ah, but as Davis points out - there’s been recent progress: the C.I.A. Director told Congress that waterboarding may be illegal under current law; the Director of National Intelligence told a reporter, “Whether it’s torture by anybody else’s definition, for me it would be torture”; the Attorney General, after being asked if waterboarding would be torture if done to him, said that “I would feel that it was”; and last Wednesday, Congress passed a law forbidding the C.I.A. to use waterboarding and other torture techniques.

Unfortunately, this awareness may be problematic if President Bush follows through on his threat to veto this latest piece of anti-torture legislation.

What can be done to recover the moral high ground? It’s not about who they are, it’s about who we are!

http://washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?A/20080219/COMMENTARY02/718853659/1012/COMMENTARY&template=printart

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/opinion/17davis.html?_r=1&em&ex=1203397200&en=243124b442240ec7&ei=5087%0A&oref=slogin

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prometheus

Feb. 20, 2008 at 10:22:22 AM

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Every time I cross paths with and speak with a foreign stranger (there are a lot of people from other countries here . . . same world though). I almost instantly bring up this current "FOREIGN" American administration and tell them "THEY AIN'T US". In general American people are basically good, and these freaks in power are about as UN-American as anyone ever from this country. WE AIN'T THEM ... THEY AIN'T US . . . and don't let the door hit ya in your fascist ass, Ya dim wit Bush

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June

Feb. 20, 2008 at 11:47:33 AM

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Agreed Spots! A lot of the time, I can't tell who's on the flatter learning curve - Bush or the public!

I have some globe-trotting Canadian friends who've lived in the Phoenix area for years - and they withdrew their citizenship applications some time ago! Would rather travel abroad with Canadian passports.

Makes ya think, hunh?

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AZ Moderate

Feb. 20, 2008 at 08:17:28 PM

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“Bruce Fein observes: ‘The beginning of the end of the rule of law has emerged under President Bush, i.e., a systematic twisting of language or precedents to advance a political agenda.’”

Something over two years ago Bob Herbert in his column in the NY Times asked the question all of us should be asking: “… is anything and everything O.K. in post-9/11 America? If torture and the denial of due process are O.K., why not murder? When the government can just make people vanish - which it can, and which it does - where is the line that we, as a nation, dare not cross?”

Our leadership pontificates about “Christian faith” and “family values” while secretly employing the evil un-American and un-Christian Gestapo tactics of torture.

"’Unfortunately, I was overruled on the question, and I resigned my position to call attention to the issue — efforts that were hampered by my being placed under a gag rule and ordered not to testify at a Senate hearing. While some high-level military and civilian officials have rightly expressed indignation on the issue, the current state can be described generally as indifference and inaction.’”

It bothers me greatly that too many Americans think a little torture is OK for the “greater good”. Some argue academically about torture’s definition. I’ll wager they would broaden those definitions considerably should torture become reality for them…

… as it may well under this barely contained NeoCoNazi regime in the White House.

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June

Feb. 20, 2008 at 10:53:31 PM

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Mody - the Bush administration’s gaming of the system is sucha relentless nightmare, it‘s little wonder that Obama‘s message of hope and change resonates!

In my country, when political leaders are accused of concealing wrongdoing, Congress investigates, uncovers what happened, and informs the American people. When political leaders are accused of breaking the law, courts decide whether it occurred. Neither branch of government behaves this way any more!

There’s torture but latest challenge to our “nation of laws” standing that has me off the wall is the Supremes refusal to hear a suit challenging Bush’s authorizing the NSA to intercept domestic phone calls and emails!

Bush’s lawyers successfully argued that (1) the plaintiffs must prove that their phone calls or e-mails were intercepted - otherwise they have no standing because they can’t show injury; and (2) the government said, the entire program was secret - and under the “state secrets privilege,” plaintiffs cannot obtain information on whether they were targeted for surveillance.

When combined, these two arguments are a classic Catch-22 making it impossible for challengers to win a hearing in court.

Over at Crooks and Liars, Jonathon Turley is quoted in an interview: "We know there's an NSA program; we know that it's illegal. There's been no showing nor is no showing possible that the President had the authority to order what he did. This is a crime, defined under federal law. So there's no mystery to the program, there's not a particular debate to its illegality. The only issue is standing: the ability of someone to come in and say, 'I can show I was individually harmed.' And they can't do that because the Courts won't give them the information they need and Congress will do nothing to force out into the public the information needed to get this type of relief. And as you noted, the Congress is going further in the opposite direction; they're trying to extinguish suits against telecom companies that have been successful.”

Damn, now all we need is telecom immunity! That will ensure that the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping is never investigated - forever secret and unexamined!

The price of liberty is vigilance? Maaaaan. in these times, vigilance can upset your stomach, big time!

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Hispanic Woman

Feb. 21, 2008 at 12:52:12 PM

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[This is a reply to comment by June on Feb. 20, 2008 at 10:53:31 PM]

June
Feb. 20, 2008 at 10:53:31 PM

Mody - the Bush administration’s gaming of the system is sucha relentless nightmare, it‘s little wonder that Obama‘s message of hope and change resonates!
In my country, when political leaders are accused of concealing wrongdoing,...

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June, you are absolutely right. Have you ever seen a dog chase its tail? (1) and (2) are the dog and tail of such a closed race track.

It sure keeps the dog busy though, doesn't it?

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June

Feb. 21, 2008 at 02:11:41 PM

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Yeah, HW, that's a rich image that reminds me of a quite un-PC fairy tale of my childhood - Little Black Sambo - wherein lions chased each other in a circle so furiously that eventually they changed to butter. A dog in a prolonged tailchase might make Mody's aborted How-To, Dog-Poo book a best seller because dogs may turn to something else - for sure, when Bush leaves office there's sure gonna be a legal mess to overturn and clean up!

Thanks for the high 5, too! Hmmm, somthing doesn't add up here - looks like there was another reader who stopped by only long enough to give this article a single star rating! Wonder who that might be...

Does that explain those ovis prints? HOO-AH!

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adam

Feb. 21, 2008 at 08:20:54 PM

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The Water Cure Debating torture and counterinsurgency—a century ago.

by Paul Kramer February 25, 2008

A picture of a “water detail,” reportedly taken in May, 1901, in Sual, the Philippines. “It is a terrible torture,” one soldier wrote.

Keywords Torture; Water Cure; Philippines; Philippine-American War; Interrogations; Riley, Charles S.; Glenn, Edwin

Many Americans were puzzled by the news, in 1902, that United States soldiers were torturing Filipinos with water. The United States, throughout its emergence as a world power, had spoken the language of liberation, rescue, and freedom. This was the language that, when coupled with expanding military and commercial ambitions, had helped launch two very different wars. The first had been in 1898, against Spain, whose remaining empire was crumbling in the face of popular revolts in two of its colonies, Cuba and the Philippines. The brief campaign was pitched to the American public in terms of freedom and national honor (the U.S.S. Maine had blown up mysteriously in Havana Harbor), rather than of sugar and naval bases, and resulted in a formally independent Cuba.

The Americans were not done liberating. Rising trade in East Asia suggested to imperialists that the Philippines, Spain’s largest colony, might serve as an effective “stepping stone” to China’s markets. U.S. naval plans included provisions for an attack on the Spanish Navy in the event of war, and led to a decisive victory against the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay in May, 1898. Shortly afterward, Commodore George Dewey returned the exiled Filipino revolutionary Emilio Aguinaldo to the islands. Aguinaldo defeated Spanish forces on land, declared the Philippines independent in June, and organized a government led by the Philippine élite.

During the next half year, it became clear that American and Filipino visions for the islands’ future were at odds. U.S. forces seized Manila from Spain—keeping the army of their ostensible ally Aguinaldo from entering the city—and President William McKinley refused to recognize Filipino claims to independence, pushing his negotiators to demand that Spain cede sovereignty over the islands to the United States, while talking about Filipinos’ need for “benevolent assimilation.” Aguinaldo and some of his advisers, who had been inspired by the United States as a model republic and had greeted its soldiers as liberators, became increasingly suspicious of American motivations. When, after a period of mounting tensions, a U.S. sentry fired on Filipino soldiers outside Manila in February, 1899, the second war erupted, just days before the Senate ratified a treaty with Spain securing American sovereignty over the islands in exchange for twenty million dollars. In the next three years, U.S. troops waged a war to “free” the islands’ population from the regime that Aguinaldo had established. The conflict cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos and about four thousand U.S. soldiers.

Within the first year of the war, news of atrocities by U.S. forces—the torching of villages, the killing of prisoners—began to appear in American newspapers. Although the U.S. military censored outgoing cables, stories crossed the Pacific through the mail, which wasn’t censored. Soldiers, in their letters home, wrote about extreme violence against Filipinos, alongside complaints about the weather, the food, and their officers; and some of these letters were published in home-town newspapers. A letter by A. F. Miller, of the 32nd Volunteer Infantry Regiment, published in the Omaha World-Herald in May, 1900, told of how Miller’s unit uncovered hidden weapons by subjecting a prisoner to what he and others called the “water cure.” “Now, this is the way we give them the water cure,” he explained. “Lay them on their backs, a man standing on each hand and each foot, then put a round stick in the mouth and pour a pail of water in the mouth and nose, and if they don’t give up pour in another pail. They swell up like toads. I’ll tell you it is a terrible torture.”

On occasion, someone—a local antiwar activist, one suspects—forwarded these clippings to centers of anti-imperialist publishing in the Northeast. But the war’s critics were at first hesitant to do much with them: they were hard to substantiate, and they would, it was felt, subject the publishers to charges of anti-Americanism. This was especially true as the politics of imperialism became entangled in the 1900 Presidential campaign. As the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, clashed with the Republican incumbent over imperialism, which the Democrats called “the paramount issue,” critics of the war had to defend themselves against accusations of having treasonously inspired the insurgency, prolonged the conflict, and betrayed American soldiers. But, after McKinley won a second term, the critics may have felt that they had little to lose.

Ultimately, outraged dissenters—chief among them the relentless Philadelphia-based reformer Herbert Welsh—forced the question of U.S. atrocities into the light. Welsh, who was descended from a wealthy merchant family, might have seemed an unlikely investigator of military abuse at the edge of empire. His main antagonists had previously been Philadelphia’s party bosses, whose sordid machinations were extensively reported in Welsh’s earnest upstart weekly, City and State. Yet he had also been a founder of the “Indian rights” movement, which attempted to curtail white violence and fraud while pursuing Native American “civilization” through Christianity, U.S. citizenship, and individual land tenure. An expansive concern with bloodshed and corruption at the nation’s periphery is perhaps what drew Welsh’s imagination from the Dakotas to Southeast Asia. He had initially been skeptical of reports of misconduct by U.S. troops. But by late 1901, faced with what he considered “overwhelming” proof, Welsh emerged as a single-minded campaigner for the exposure and punishment of atrocities, running an idiosyncratic investigation out of his Philadelphia offices. As one who “professes to believe in the gospel of Christ,” he declared, he felt obliged to condemn “the cruelties and barbarities which have been perpetrated under our flag in the Philippines.” Only the vigorous pursuit of justice could restore “the credit of the American nation in the eyes of the civilized world.” By early 1902, three assistants to Welsh were chasing down returning soldiers for their testimony, and Philippine “cruelties” began to crowd Philadelphia’s party bosses from the pages of City and State.
link:[www.newyorker.com]

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June

Feb. 22, 2008 at 07:53:08 AM

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Adam - thanks for the post!

It brings back memories of my high school American History & Government class - did I miss something about the 1900 presidential election? I recall McKinley and Bryant and mention of some flap about the Philippines but can’t recall even a hint about the “water cure”!

Could Rove and Bush be banking on such myopia when they say “history shall be the judge” of this administration’s effectiveness?

For sure, future historians won’t be able to overlook the importance of waterboarding in the 2008 election, particularly if John McCain is in the race. Don’t you agree that McCain, as a torture survivor, is a sick and monumental flip-flopper when he uses Bush's signing statement rationale to justify his NO vote on anti-torture legislation - particularly when that signing statement gutted McCain’s Anti-Torture Amendment?!

Such hypocrisy! Little wonder that Obama's Hope and Change resonates!

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AZ Moderate

Apr. 23, 2009 at 12:16:24 PM

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It’s beyond belief we Americans are debating how much brutality may be administered before it can be defined as torture.

Talk about picking the fly s*** of torture out of the pepper of semantics.

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