How ’07 ABC Interview Tilted a Torture Debate

NYTimes had a story Monday that should be required reading by all media and anyone who uses media to be informed about current events-- guess that's just about everybody. It's the tale of a former CIA official who said on an ABD interview that only 30-35 seconds of waterboarding forced the cooperation of the suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah in interrogations at a secret prison in Thailand.. This assertion was repeated by numerous other media sources over the next years

With the release of the recent torture memos by the Justice Department, it turns out that Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times.

"The conclusion that he revealed no new information after being waterboarded appears to be supported by a footnote to a 2005 Justice Department memo saying the use of the harshest methods appeared to have been "unnecessary" in his case. An official with direct knowledge of the case told The Times that watching his torment caused great distress to his captors." NYTimes.

Torture: why is anyone shocked?

This is purely a rant....I am sitting here about as furious as I can be that anyone can act surprised about the fact that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice all knew that Justice Department-authorized torture was taking place. Everyone I know was aware that this torture was authorized at the highest levels.

From the NYTimes: In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

I am particularly infuriated about the officers that were demoted and the enlisted personnel that were imprisoned for crimes that were actually NOT crimes-- in the legal sense, that is-- because those actions were approved by the Bush Administration. Yet no one-- not Bush, Cheney or anyone else-- stepped forward to defend them. They ALLOWED these people to suffer for them.

The lawyer for Charles Graner, currently serving a ten year sentence, plans to seek a presidential pardon. More info on possible appeals can be found at the Guardian.

Now, I understand that the "just following orders" excuse didn't cut it at the Nuremberg trials. But I do believe that the culture of the military makes it very difficult to do so. What do you think?

Don't let Bush and his pals get off easy

Do you think Bush and his co-conspirators should be able to steal away quietly, write books, get jobs with major corporations, and otherwise profit from their illegal actions?

I don't. It makes no sense to me that we should allow our chief elected and appointed officials to commit mayhem and then just move on as if nothing has happened. It's a kind of insanity. They should be held accountable for their actions, which damaged civil liberties, killed thousands of innocents, hurt the U.S. reputation-- but there's one word that haunts me the most:

torture torture torture torture torture torture torture torture torture torture

There's a petition up at the Care2 Petition Site calling on the new Attorney General to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate war crimes. Here's the text of the letter, and if you want to sign, go to the Petition Site.

Dear Attorney General Eric Holder,

We the undersigned citizens of the United States petition you to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate and prosecute any and all government officials who have participated in torture and other war crimes.

In the final days of their administration, President Bush and Vice
President Cheney admitted they authorized "enhanced interrogation" of prisoners, specifically including waterboarding. But "enhanced
interrogation" is simply a euphemism for torture, which was so severe that it caused the deaths of at least 70 prisoners.

As Major General Antonio Taguba, the Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison has stated:

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

The United States is a representative democracy. The actions of our
government officials are done in the name of its citizens. We are outraged that torture been committed in our name. We urge you to appoint a Special Prosecutor to prosecute those responsible for torture to the fullest extent of the law.

Photo from Takomibibelot's photostream at Flickr.

Danger! Drama! Laughter! Tears!

Minor key, mostly, just life...except for the tears (rage, sadness) from last night, listening to Homeland Security Adviser Fran Townsend being interviewed on CNN. She absolutely denied that the U.S. uses torture and absolutely refused to deny that waterboarding was one of the techniques used by U.S. interrogators. From AFP:
"We start with the least harsh measures first," Townsend told CNN television. "It stops ... if someone becomes cooperative."
But witness statements from former prisoners held in secret CIA jails or in the US military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have all testified to the use of systematic, and at times unchecked, of alternative interrogation techniques.
Former detainees, most of whom have been released without charge after several years in detention, have told of being held for months in solitary confinement.
They complained of being denied sleep, barred from seeing daylight, left naked in tiny, suffocating or freezing cells, forced to stand for hours in painful positions or being subjected to the onslaught of loud music."
I just can't believe this is my country, and that we've been so POWERLESS to stop this evil.

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Started out this morning running just a little behind, heading for a meeting in Holyoke. As I pulled onto Rt. 91, I noticed the air smelled like gasoline/oil. By the time I got to Rt. 391, I started wondering if I'd put my gascap back on the night before. (But of course I had, I knew that.) Pulled over on Main St. in Holyoke, puled under the car, gas was practically pouring from somewhere.

What to do? Triple A expired, or I'd have called them from there, but I don't have a cellphone anyway. So I decided to head back to Springfield as quickly as possible, before I ran out of gas, and made it (barely) to my garage. I'd grabbed the first book I put my hand on off my bookshelf this morning, so I sat outside and smoked cigarettes and read Sherlock Holmes VS. Dracula, or the Adventure of the Sanguinary Count, while my car was fixed (leak in the gas line).

"You might get sunburned sitting there," a familiar voice said, and I looked (way) up to see my friend Billy. I knew him from Sanctuary City. He looked great-- khakis with a sharp press, clean white tee-shirt tucked in, hair cut (as usual) a half inch from his scalp.

"Last I heard, you were in jail," I said.

"I did end up going back-- served out my time, so it's for the best," he said. "I'm still with Sandy," he said, some ruefulness in his voice; he knows I don't think she's good for him. "In fact, I'm on my way to see her now, she's in the hospital, she got a brain infection from shooting up."

"And you?" I said.

"I'm clean," he said, which might have even been true; he's gone long periods with his addiction inactive.

"Where are you staying?"

"I'm camping out," he grinned. "I know, doesn't look like it, does it?"

We talked a bit more and then the guy came out and said my car was ready, so we hugged and said goodbye.

Got in my car, which still reeked, and headed for the closest gas station.

"Hey, how you doing?" someone said from the next pump up.

"Hey!" It was Sonny, who I'd also known from Sanctuary City. When Sanctuary City closed, Sonny had moved in with a friend, gotten a little job, then got a beat-up pick-up truck, and now he supports himself doing carpentry and odd jobs. We chatted a couple of minutes, I got another hug, which was nice, then I headed for my office.

I have not stopped thinking about homeless people; I keep up with what's going on, and seeing Billy and Sonny freshened my thoughts. Of course I thought first of both of them, what different places they're in, how one has seemed to succeed while the other is still in the shadows. Yet Billy, like all of us, is on a journey, and the journey's not finished, and I'm not willing to think I know what his end will be.

Worthington St. shelter is full; people are sleeping on cots in the kitchen. A lot of folks are still camping out, thanks to global warming. The city forced the Open Pantry's Warming Place shelter to close but now is trying to get $40,000 out of the state for an emergency overflow shelter, seeing as plans to house homeless people have not developed quite as quickly as publicly promoted. (That's sarcasm.) I can't predict this winter, although it does seem the city is determined not to leave any opening for criticism.

Finally I got back to my office. Miss Lizzie, my senior aide, had left by then, but I had an odd feeling I was not alone. A few minutes later I heard what I thought was a bird-- possibly above the dropped ceiling? I started straightening up and when I picked up a small bag of grapes off the table, a creature flew out from behind and dashed under a desk so quickly it took me a few seconds to realize it was a chipmunk.

The chipmunk did not emerge even though I moved boxes and rattled papers all around, so I left my office door to the outside open all afternoon but as far as I know, the chipmunk was still inside when I left. (I'd put out a bowl of water and a few crackers; better a live animal than a dead one on Tuesday.)

Much organizing to do this weekend.

Bracketed between two wars

I went to Jon Weissman’s retirement party at the end of April. Jon was the contract manager for the National Association of Letter Carriers 46 and is now “retiring” to devote more time to Jobs with Justice.

Jon is one of the most idealistic and down-to-earth people I know. After his colleagues, daughter and wife celebrated him, Jon spoke and tried to sum up some of his conclusions about working for social justice for the past 40+ years. I’m still thinking about much that he said, but one of his comments struck me particularly—that in some sense, his life has been bracketed by two wars—Vietnam and Iraq. Of course, that’s true for me and for most people born in the fifteen years following World War Two.

The Vietnam and Iraq wars have a lot of similarities (don’t get me started) but one key difference is that we had a long lead-up to the Iraq war in which we had (we thought) an opportunity to stop the war before it began.

Another difference is that in the Vietnam war, we were spared the mea culpas of elected officials for a good thirty years. (I think Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, one of the war’s most hated policy-makers, started worrying about getting into heaven.)

(By the way, isn’t it interesting that war architect McNamara became president of the World Bank during the Vietnam war, and war architect Wolfowitz during the Iraq war?)

It drives me wild with rage and contempt to hear John Kerry, John Edwards and their Congressional counterparts apologize for their vote to authorize war in Iraq.

“We were deceived!” they whimper, leaving us to decide if they are lying now or were just that stupid then.

I never bought this damn war from before Day One, and personally knew hundreds of people who felt the same way. Through my listserves I knew thousands more, and hundreds of thousands who protested prior to March 20, 2003.

We all knew we were headed to war within hours of the terrorists’ destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11.

We also knew that Iraq was not behind the 9/11 attacks, that the war was a cover for the neo-con agenda, and doubted greatly that there were weapons of mass destruction left in the country.

We knew that the war would alienate international support, that the war would increase, not decrease, terrorism, and that military and civilian casualties would not be reported accurately.

We also knew that the war would be used an excuse to take away our civil liberties, that secret prisons, torture and prisoner abuse were bound to exist, and that war profiteering would reach new heights.

How come WE knew all this, and Congress and the media didn’t?

Well, the answer, of course, is that many of them did know, but kept their mouths shut and their courage locked away for reasons of political expediency.

I am not the kind of populist who thinks that the “wisdom of the common people” is pure and correct—not with the onslaught of propaganda coming across the airwaves and printed in our newspapers.

I have, however, found that many truly poor people were skeptical of the war from the beginning—furious at the attacks against our country, but so used to being lied to on a daily basis that they take nothing at face value.

The older I get, the less doctrinaire I become. I have no definite answer as to how our government can move into the hands of a well-informed citizenry, or even how a well-informed citizenry can be nurtured under the current circumstances. But I will keep trying to play my part. As Gramschi said, “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”

But today, as our military casualties stand at 3,444, and civilian casualties approach half a million, just for once, I want to say, “We told you so.”