Last week, when we wrote about testimony by Philip Zelikow and Ali Soufan to a Senate hearing on torture, reader John Birch wrote perceptively, “Zelikow was testifying about the organized use of toture as an interrogation method by the CIA….The photos [Obama] held back are of the abuse and even torture of prisoners by the U.S. military.” This prompted my response, “The connection is that the authorisation of torture by the CIA and US military, sanctioned from spring 2002 by Bush officials, made its way to Guantanamo Bay and then to Iraq, including Abu Ghraib,” notably via General Geoffrey Miller.
Writing for Salon, Mark Benjamin adds an interesting dimension: Gitmo general told Iraq WMD search team to torture
[Even] before Miller met with the Abu Ghraib officials, he first made a little-known visit to the Iraq Survey Group, which was in charge of the hunt for WMDs in Iraq after the invasion. Miller told the ISG they were “running a country club” by not getting tough on detainees….Miller recommended temperature manipulation and sleep deprivation.
Gitmo general told Iraq WMD search team to torture
It’s one thing if, as former Vice President Dick Cheney keeps saying, the United States brutally interrogated people to keep our kids safe from another strike by Osama bin Laden. If folks got tortured to provide a rationale for going to war with Iraq, though, that’s a whole different story. Read the rest of this entry »
The always excellent Dan Froomkin, blogging for The Washington Post, captures a lot of what I was trying to say — but finding it difficult because of anger and sadness — this morning. Drawing on other analysts as well as Obama’s own words, he takes apart the six excuses for refusing the court order to release the photographs of detainee abuse:
Deconstructing Obama’s Excuses
In trying to explain his startling decision to oppose the public release of more photos depicting detainee abuse, President Obama and his aides yesterday put forth six excuses for his about-face, one more flawed than the next.
First, there was the nothing-to-see-here excuse. In his remarks yesterday afternoon, Obama said the “photos that were requested in this case are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib.” Read the rest of this entry »
For the defendants of the use of torture by U.S. forces — still led by former Vice President Dick Cheney — this has been a rocky few weeks, with the publication, in swift succession, of the leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (PDF), based on interviews with the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006, which concluded that their treatment “constituted torture” (and was accompanied by two detailed articles by Mark Danner for the New York Review of Books), the release, by the Justice Department, of four memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in 2002 and 2005, which purported to justify the use of torture by the CIA, and the release of a 231-page investigation into detainee abuse conducted by the Senate Armed Services Committee (PDF.) Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
The Senate Armed Service Committee has just released a 263-page report, based on a review of more than 200,000 pages of documents and more than 70 interviews, on the Bush Administration’s detention and interrogation policies. The report was completed in May 2007 but held back until now because of political sensitivities.
This is the clear conclusion: “The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.”
Even as the Obama Administration has been pursuing engagement with Iran, Petraeus — both directly and through acolytes — has been loudly talking about Iranian support for insurgent operations against US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair (pictured) —- on the same day that the Obama Administration had to withdraw the nomination of Charles Freeman as Chair of the National Intelligence Council — has just set the scene for another political battle in Washington.
The overall situation — and the intelligence community agrees on this — [is] that Iran has not decided to press forward . . . to have a nuclear weapon on top of a ballistic missile. Our current estimate is that the minimum time at which Iran could technically produce the amount of highly enriched uranium for a single weapon is 2010 to 2015.
Blair’s assertion that Israel was envisaging a “worst-case scenario” about Iranian plans for nuclear energy was echoed by the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General Michael Maples, “The Israelis are far more concerned about [the Iranian programme].” Read the rest of this entry »
President Barack Obama will discuss Iraq and Afghanistan with U.S. defense officials at the Pentagon on Wednesday, part of ongoing talks with military leaders before making final troop deployment decisions.
We support Israel’s right to self-defense. The (Palestinian) rocket barrages which are getting closer and closer to populated areas (in Israel) cannot go unanswered….It is regrettable that the Hamas leadership apparently believes that it is in their interest to provoke the right of self-defense instead of building a better future for the people of Gaza.
I cannot find an explanation for this that fits any sensible strategy of diplomacy, apart from the possibility that Clinton is clinging to the idea of working with Israel and the Palestinian Authority, isolating and undermining Hamas. If that is the case, it’s a strategy whose time passed three weeks ago amidst the dead in Gaza. (cross-posted from the Israel-Gaza-Palestine thread)
1:40 p.m. All gone a bit quiet in Washington. We’ll be back later with an evening update.
11:40 a.m. You First. Iranian Government spokesman says, in response to possible engagement with Washington, “We are awaiting concrete changes from new US statesmen. On several occasions our president has defined Iran’s views and the need for a change in US policies.”
11:30 a.m. Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton really should talk to each other, that is, unless they’re carrying out a clever double act.
Minutes before Gates portrays the global menace of Tehran, the Secretary of State says, “”There is a clear opportunity for the Iranians, as the president expressed in his interview, to demonstrate some willingness to engage meaningfully with the international community. Whether or not that hand becomes less clenched is really up to them.”
11:20 a.m. How Dangerous is Tehran? Keeping an ear on the Gates testimony and this comes out as he speaks about Latin America: “These Russian manoeuvres [in the region] should not be of concern to us. On the other hand, Iranian meddling is of concern.”
Last week, when we wrote about testimony by Philip Zelikow and Ali Soufan to a Senate hearing on torture, reader John Birch wrote perceptively, “Zelikow was testifying about the organized use of toture as an interrogation method by the CIA….The photos [Obama] held back are of the abuse and even torture of prisoners by the U.S. military.” This prompted my response, “The connection is that the authorisation of torture by the CIA and US military, sanctioned from spring 2002 by Bush officials, made its way to Guantanamo Bay and then to Iraq, including Abu Ghraib,” notably via General Geoffrey Miller.
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The always excellent Dan Froomkin, 
Frank Rich in The New York Times
The Senate Armed Service Committee has just released a 263-page report, based on a review of more than 200,000 pages of documents and more than 70 interviews, on the Bush Administration’s detention and interrogation policies. The report was completed in May 2007 but held back until now because of political sensitivities.
The Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair (pictured) —- on the same day that the Obama Administration had to withdraw the nomination of Charles Freeman as Chair of the National Intelligence Council — has just set the scene for another political battle in Washington.
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