In a long and excellent post about torture and the Bush administration, Dan Froomkin compares a recent story in the Washington Post and the same facts reported three years ago by Ron Suskind in his book The One Percent Doctrine. The front page story in Sunday’s Washington Post
reported that “not a single significant plot was foiled” as a result of Zubaida’s brutal treatment — and that, quite to the contrary, his false confessions “triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms.”
Essentially, torture was being demanded and even directed from the highest levels of the government, and, in spite of the fact that it produced useless information, the administration kept pretending and justifying what they were doing. With the mainstream media essentially ignoring the facts Suskind reported, Bush was able to keep pretending successes he never had. And finally, in the last week, the Washington Post has caught up with Suskind. The Froomkin piece raises almost as many problems with the failures of the media as it does with the failures of the Bush administration.
h/t Brad DeLong.
“Bush was able to keep pretending successes he never had”, what?!? Call it torture if u want to, but it produces people talking. Ask our Special Forces, who are all waterboarded. We could try to as Daniel Pearl, but he has nothing to say.
In the same sense that I would apply a fabric of constitutionalism to Abe Lincoln’s supension of habeus corpus to explain preserving the Union, I would apply Bush’s ues of extraordinary war powers. Not all interrogations were useless. This article explores one that was useless.
WTBAL, you haven’t been reading much international news, have you? Research this topic, starting with Froomkin’s post and the article by Finn and Warrick that he links to (Suskind’s book could help you very much too). Obviously, your claims depend on utter ignorance of recent world events.
If you’d been following this story all these years, you’d know that the Cheney/Rumsfeld-ordered torture made the CIA’s interrogations useful only to Al Qaeda — to whom they’ve been horrifically productive. If only they’d been merely useless to the West! But they were worse than that for us, turning former and potential allies to enemies in the millions.
As the saying goes, you may be welcome to your own opinion, but you can’t have your own facts. Those you have to take as they are, instead of making up your own. READ, man, CATCH UP — then we’ll have something to debate (if you still feel the need).
WTBAL, I don’t mean to harsh on you, but it’s terribly frustrating to run across someone as intelligent, curious, and even fair-minded as I perceive you to be — and then find out he’s way back in the dark.
Speaking of which, here’s a movie you need to see: Taxi to the Dark Side. Watch that then just try ever to forget Dilawar.
WTBAL,
I’m gathering you didn’t read the linked piece in commenting? A major premise of it is that the torture produced people “talking” but they just say anything they think the torturer wants to hear– they invent stuff that makes the torture stop. So even if you don’t care about either the constitutional or moral issues, there’s the strictly pragmatic issue that it doesn’t produce results.
These methods are used to produce a confession the torturer wants to hear, not facts.
You can spin the prisoner interrogation stories to produce any result that makes you think you’re right, but there’s only one ultimate truth here, and I tried without success to communicate it effectively to our spineless Congressional delegation: THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA DOES NOT TORTURE PRISONERS.
It’s as simple as that.
The United States of America … MY United States of America … does not torture prisoners.
Y’all can shout back and forth all you want about whether torture does or does not produce useful intel, whether it’s expedient, whether it’s lawful, whether it’s justified under the circumstances at hand, blah blah blah. But you’re not gonna shout or bully your way ahead of the foundational truth: the United States of America does not torture prisoners.
Regarding anyone in the American military or civilian government who authorized, justified, approved, ordered, or participated in prisoner torture: he or she is culpable and should be forced to defend their actions before a court exercising legal jurisdiction.
I have to relate at this point, hesitatingly, that I was beaten up by jailers at the downtown jail in Jackson some 25 years ago and I have the crooked nose and scar on the bridge of my nose as proof to this day. My buddy also was beaten up to the tune of 10 stitches above his eye paid for by the city of Jackson. Side note: Bill Kirksey represented me pro bono, but he didn’t really do anything except to get me to file an Internal Affairs complaint. Chief Black owed my buddy’s lawyer a favor, as it was explained to me. So, let the IA complaint finding of “no basis” slide, and everybody just walks away. And there it ended.
Long story, short: That’s where I start from.
Lotus @ 6:04 , then 5:43 AM I haven’t seen “Taxi to the Dark Side”, but I have read about Dilawar. “Taxi” is a movie, and I take movies as an expression of the director’s perspective. He has a story to tell and does it on film. “Taxi” is not a documentary, its a film with a message. Several (27?) US service men were charged and the few convictions (less than 10?) resulted in puny (3 months in the brig and/or demoted to pvt) punishments. Dilawar suffered from brutal jailers, criminals in my opinion. Its been my experience that a lot of jailers are criminals.
NMC, I read both Froomkin and the Sunday piece that he referenced. In my opinion, Froomkin mischaracterizes what the original piece says. After the waterboarding commenced, the original piece states “The interrogations led directly to the arrest of Jose Padilla”. Also, apparently before the waterboarding started, about Zubaida’s knowledge of al-Qaeda the original piece states: “The counterterrorism official rejected that characterization, saying, “Based on what he shared during his interrogations, he was certainly aware of many of al-Qaeda’s activities and operatives.”
One connection Abu Zubaida had with al-Qaeda was a long relationship with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks, officials said. Mohammed had approached Abu Zubaida in the 1990s about finding financiers to support a suicide mission, involving a small plane, targeting the World Trade Center. Abu Zubaida declined but told him to try bin Laden, according to a law enforcement source.”
The original piece also describes Zubaida as the “jihadist’s travel agent”, while Froomkin links to his 6/20/2006 blog where he minimizes Zubaida’s activities as “al-Qaeda’s go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like” and Froomkin claims Zubaida was “mentally ill”
Which is it? Zubaida has always been mentally ill and the travel agent for the wives and children of jihadists, or is he is the jihadist’s travel-agent? Either way, my guess is he knows a lot about al-Qaeda operations.
Ben, not shouting here and I am no bully, but the fact of the matter is that OUR United States has chosen in the past to violate the Geneva Conventions a number of times. Including, but not limited to: CIA placed car-bombs in Lebanon and Damascus in the 80′s, free-fire zones in Viet Nam, reprisals at the close of WWII, and so on. Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the Geneva Conventions allow for the execution of non-uniformed combatants. My personal opinion is that we have to be tougher and meaner than those we are fighting. Period.
P.S. – A third-party observer may have easily concluded that my ass-kicking was well deserved. I take the view that I successfully scratched her knuckles with my nose. Take that, b-word, which is what started the ass-whipping in the first place. “My momma didn’t raise no b-word”. I’ll remember that until the day I die. It’s funny today, not so much then.