Torture memos released

[ih8music]

Sarcasm aside, how do any of the definitions under Article 4 apply to terrorists or Al Qaeda? I only ask, because after reading Article 4 numerous times, I don't see how you can call a captured terrorist a POW.

That's exactly the kind of thinking that got this program started in the first place - how can we parse the legalese so that we can justify something so blatantly against the intent of the law? If you can't define suspected terrorists - "enemy combatants" in our War on Terror - as POWs, then the definition of a POW is flawed. But that doesn't mean that anything goes and we have carte blanche to do whatever we want to these people.

 

And let's just say that for the sake of argument that they really are not POWs and should not be protected as such. Then what are they, lab rats? There are still basic human rights at play here that are protected, and torture up to the point of death/permanent injury is still in violation of those rights.

[Good Old Neon]

Since you keep avoiding the question, I'll assume you simply do not know. But the Geneva Conventions clearly go to the trouble of defining prisoners of war. Why, if it seemingly applies to anyone and everyone? I would argue that it doesn't.

 

Article 5 does mention some sort of tribunal if there is any doubt as to whether someone is a prisoner of war. I would argue that, in the case of terrorists or Al Qaeda, there is no doubt.

 

http://www.cdi.org/program/document.cfm?Do..../index.cfm

[John Smith]

I know it is slate but for those who believe Thiesens narrative on the Library Tower attacks

[bjorn_skurj]

Then what, exactly, are they? Enemy combatants? An Orwellian term that simply seeks to obscure the obvious.

They are either POWs or criminal suspects. That "enemy combatants" shit is for the birds, and just an attempt to rationalize treating them in an inhumane manner.

[John Smith]

Regarding the prisoners. I hope everyone knows that the Geneva conventions guide the behavior of the signors as much as anything. In other words we capture prisoners and we are obligated to treat them in accordance with the conventions regardless of who the prisoners are and whether they are signors of the conventions. On top of that contrary to the popular belief of the

[Hixter]

If we've learned anything, hopefully it's that these scumbags are more trouble alive than dead. With any luck we'll kill them all on the battlefield rather than arrest them and wade through the legal quicksand that weakens the nation and emboldens its enemies.

[John Smith]

If we've learned anything, hopefully it's that these scumbags are more trouble alive than dead. With any luck we'll kill them all on the battlefield rather than arrest them and wade through the legal quicksand that weakens the nation and emboldens its enemies.

 

Remember not everyone we have taken into custody has actually been fighting us. Many have been sold into captivity for the bounty. It's sad to see that you think laws and our legal system are what weaken us as so many throughout the years felt that is exactly what makes us stronger laws and the equal application of them. Our enemies are more embolden when we act in a mannner that is not reflective of how we say we act. Witness the increase in violence in Iraq after Abu Grhaib was exposed, note the many reports that AQ recruitment is way up. Trying to scare them into submission has not worked. Of course if you believe the previous adminsitration we won't kknow the true and full effect of these polices for another 20 - 30 years. Though we do know after 100days that Obama is an utter failure in all area's. Funny how that works.

 

lastly...

 

"What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight ... is how we behave. In

everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we

treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect. While we are

warriors, we are also all human beings. "

-- General David Petraeus (I believe he is a Fox News/Republican party hero, isn't he?)

[Good Old Neon]

If we've learned anything, hopefully it's that these scumbags are more trouble alive than dead. With any luck we'll kill them all on the battlefield rather than arrest them and wade through the legal quicksand that weakens the nation and emboldens its enemies.

 

Funny, I was just thinking the same thought, but mine included Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and

[bleedorange]

http://www.cdi.org/program/document.cfm?Do..../index.cfm

 

Are we dealing with anything post-Hamdan here?

 

By the way, Scalia's dissent, as usual, hits it out of the park.

[John Smith]

We definately have to disagree here...go figure.

 

Scalia hits it out of the park? Really? In his opening paragraph he pretty much states that he agrees with the DTA that no courts have any jurisdiction over the detainees. In other words these people have been exiled to a legal black hole. He argues that even the supreme court has no jurisdiction, even though it is their job to review laws passed by congress for congruency with the constitution. That is the crux of his dissent. If it were only that simple why could congress not pass every law with a caveat that it is not subject to judicial review, and if it is Scalia, Thomas and Alito

[bleedorange]

We definately have to disagree here...go figure.

 

Scalia hits it out of the park? Really? In his opening paragraph he pretty much states that he agrees with the DTA that no courts have any jurisdiction over the detainees. In other words these people have been exiled to a legal black hole. He argues that even the supreme court has no jurisdiction, even though it is their job to review laws passed by congress for congruency with the constitution. That is the crux of his dissent. If it were only that simple why could congress not pass every law with a caveat that it is not subject to judicial review, and if it is Scalia, Thomas and Alito’s position that congress can pass such legislation, then perhaps they should not be supreme court justices. Nope this dissent was ideologically drive swill written to order.

 

Dissents do serve a purpose they can lay the groundwork for getting around laws or in Scalia’s case he frequently uses his dissents to map out what he would consider to be a law the courts would have to review favorably. He has done that several times in the past, not so much this time though.

 

In my opinion Scalia rarely hits it out of the park. His decisions are the most ideologically based decisions possibly in the history of the courts. His writings stray back and forth between berating and insulting any SC justice who does not agree with him to questioning the very existence of laws that have existed in common law for hundreds of years. Heck, Alito in his hearings even said he did not believe in stare decisis which is one of the bedrocks of common law. No wonder he and Scalia vote together so much.

 

Why not explaina little bit why you agreewith what Scalia wrote. You won't convince me, but maybe you can convince others?

 

Huh? Are we discussing the merits of ouster clauses in general, or the specifics of this case?

 

I think you are a little confused. Here's a paragraph from the dissent:

 

Though it does not squarely address the issue, the Court hints ominously that “the Government’s preferred read-ing” would “rais[e] grave questions about Congress’ au-thority to impinge upon this Court’s appellate jurisdiction,particularly in habeas cases.” Ante, at 10–11 (citing Ex parte Yerger, 8 Wall. 85 (1869); Felker v. Turpin, 518 U. S. 651 (1996); Durousseau v. United States, 6 Cranch 307 (1810); United States v. Klein, 13 Wall. 128 (1872); and Ex parte McCardle, 7 Wall. 506).

 

It is not clear how there could be any such lurking questions, in light of the aptly named “Exceptions Clause” of Article III,

[John Smith]

Dealing with the specifics of this case Scalia in his dissent, which you whole heartedly agree with, says that congress limited the jurisdiction of who could hear these cases. Scalia argues, and you by extension agree, that congress stripped all jurisdiction including that of the supreme court. Congress does not have the right to strip all jurisdiction. Congress can limit jurisdiction over laws but cannot strip all jurisdiction. Someone has to have the ability to review the law. If it were the case that congress could ct all laws off from judicial review at all levels then I am positive the Bush era congress would have invoked those rights more often.

 

But what I was dealing with more is the fact that Scalia is an ideologue who is driven not by law but by more what he wants the results of a given case to be regardless of the facts and circumstances.

 

Either way the case is decided and it stands as is.

[bleedorange]

Dealing with the specifics of this case Scalia in his dissent, which you whole heartedly agree with, says that congress limited the jurisdiction of who could hear these cases. Scalia argues, and you by extension agree, that congress stripped all jurisdiction including that of the supreme court. Congress does not have the right to strip all jurisdiction. Congress can limit jurisdiction over laws but cannot strip all jurisdiction. Someone has to have the ability to review the law. If it were the case that congress could ct all laws off from judicial review at all levels then I am positive the Bush era congress would have invoked those rights more often.

 

But what I was dealing with more is the fact that Scalia is an ideologue who is driven not by law but by more what he wants the results of a given case to be regardless of the facts and circumstances.

 

You're still not reading it correctly, but whatever.

 

Since you're the most partisan-driven poster on this board, it always makes me laugh when you use that against others. I disagree that Scalia is an ideologue. He has clearly spelled out numerous times how he approaches jurisprudence, which has very little to do with party or ideology.

[bjorn_skurj]

If we've learned anything, hopefully it's that these scumbags are more trouble alive than dead. With any luck we'll kill them all on the battlefield rather than arrest them and wade through the legal quicksand that weakens the nation and emboldens its enemies.

Umm, no. Why do you think the government wants to keep them forever? So they can be pumped for information.

[MattZ]

But what I was dealing with more is the fact that Scalia is an ideologue who is driven not by law but by more what he wants the results of a given case to be regardless of the facts and circumstances.

 

I think this happens to be true, but I am not sure this case is your best example. This is typical Scalia territory here. When he thinks Congress has spoken clearly, he defers to Congress.

 

ETA: I happen to think Scalia is often disingenuous about how "clear" certain things are, and that this is where he is a results-driven idealogue. But let's face it, everyone on the court is.

[Tweedling]

I have enjoyed reading this. Thank you all!

[Hixter]

We have spies, don't we? Clandestine operations to ferret out plots and suspected terrorists. If the intelligence communities in this country had not been in competition instead of cooperation before 9/11 it probably would have been thwarted. They seem to be working pretty well now.

 

I think we'd all be shocked by how few spies we really have in certain countries. Everything I've read has lamented the fact that we have so few boots on the ground because it's so damned difficult to pull off. So that's why things like phone/e-mail taps and no-fly lists and interrogations are so important, yet they are under constant bombardment by the (usually) well-meaning press and the deluge of leaks and lawsuits only serve to make things more difficult on the agencies trying to protect us.

 

The blowback from the memo release has impacted the intelligence community in a very big way. Obama's waffling on the subject of prosecution is pushing the agencies into "cover your ass" mode and that will not lead anywhere good.

 

At the Central Intelligence Agency, it's known as "slow rolling." That's what agency officers sometimes do on politically sensitive assignments. They go through the motions; they pass cables back and forth; they take other jobs out of the danger zone; they cover their backsides.

 

Sad to say, it's slow roll time at Langley after the release of interrogation memos that, in the words of one veteran officer, "hit the agency like a car bomb in the driveway." President Obama promised CIA officers that they won't be prosecuted for carrying out lawful orders, but the people on the firing line don't believe him. They think the memos have opened a new season of investigation and retribution.

 

The lesson for younger officers is obvious: Keep your head down. Duck the assignments that carry political risk. Stay away from a counterterrorism program that has become a career hazard.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...9042102969.html

[tugmoose]

Shepard Smith, why do you hate America?

[Good Old Neon]

From Andrew Sullivan's blog:

 

When America Executed Waterboarders For War Crimes

 

Paul Begala gets his facts straight:

 

After World War II, an international coalition convened to prosecute Japanese soldiers charged with torture. At the top of the list of techniques was water-based interrogation, known variously then as 'water cure,' 'water torture' and 'waterboarding,' according to the charging documents. It simulates drowning." Politifact went on to report, "A number of the Japanese soldiers convicted by American judges were hanged, while others received lengthy prison sentences or time in labor camps."

 

Now, waterboarders, according to John McCain's former spokesman, are American heroes.

 

Link - (with a link to the Begala article) - http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_...war-crimes.html

[tugmoose]

What pinko leftist liberal anti-America president would ever sign this kind of international agreement?

[Good Old Neon]

So much for the idea that religion is required to live a moral life.

 

From Andrew Sullivan:

 

Some terribly depressing news. Here's the poll result:

 

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

 

So Christian devotion correlates with approval for absolute evil in America. And people wonder why atheism is gaining in this country. Notice the poll does not even use a euphemism like "coercive interrogation" - forcing Allahpundit to substitute it. (Even HotAir, it seems, finds it difficult to write the sentence: "Evangelicals are more likely to be conservative and conservatives are more likely to support torture.") But it remains a fact that white evangelicals are the most pro-torture of any grouping. Mainline Protestant groups were the most opposed. A mere 20 percent of non-Hispanic Catholics believe that torture is never justified.

 

In a similar poll last September, Southern evangelicals got suddenly secular on this question:

 

The new poll found that 44 percent of white Southern evangelicals rely on life experiences and common sense to determine their views about torture. A lower percentage, 28 percent, said they relied on Christian teachings or beliefs.

 

One wonders how many times evangelical preachers have inveighed against the evil of someone like me getting a civil marriage license compared with acts of cruelty inflicted on defenseless human beings in American custody. But one also sees the impact of a Catholic hierarchy more exercized on these social issues than on a categorical evil defended proudly by a former vice-president.

 

the link with additional links - http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_...-wept.html#more

[Tweedling]

So much for the idea that religion is required to live a moral life.

 

From Andrew Sullivan:

 

Some terribly depressing news. Here's the poll result:

 

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

 

So Christian devotion correlates with approval for absolute evil in America. And people wonder why atheism is gaining in this country. Notice the poll does not even use a euphemism like "coercive interrogation" - forcing Allahpundit to substitute it. (Even HotAir, it seems, finds it difficult to write the sentence: "Evangelicals are more likely to be conservative and conservatives are more likely to support torture.") But it remains a fact that white evangelicals are the most pro-torture of any grouping. Mainline Protestant groups were the most opposed. A mere 20 percent of non-Hispanic Catholics believe that torture is never justified.

 

In a similar poll last September, Southern evangelicals got suddenly secular on this question:

 

The new poll found that 44 percent of white Southern evangelicals rely on life experiences and common sense to determine their views about torture. A lower percentage, 28 percent, said they relied on Christian teachings or beliefs.

 

One wonders how many times evangelical preachers have inveighed against the evil of someone like me getting a civil marriage license compared with acts of cruelty inflicted on defenseless human beings in American custody. But one also sees the impact of a Catholic hierarchy more exercized on these social issues than on a categorical evil defended proudly by a former vice-president.

 

the link with additional links - http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_...-wept.html#more

I've never heard my preacher inveigh against the evil of someone like you getting a civil marriage license.

So like there's 1.

[Good Old Neon]

Andrew Sullivan:

 

The American Way of Torture

 

Greg Sargent notes another document secured by the ACLU. (Yes, Greenwald is right that it's bizarre the media in this country are second to the ACLU in demanding information from the government.) This document gives a detailed account of the torture techniques used by the Bush-Cheney administration in the elite CIA program. This is the most professional version of the widespread torture authorized by Bush and conducted in every theater of combat, by every branch of the armed forces, directed that all prisoners could be potential terrorists and therefore outside civilizational norms of humane treatment.

 

The document reads, like so much else from the Cheney years, like a document from a South American dictatorship in the 1970s or 1980s. If someone had told me a few years ago that it had popped up in the John_Walker_Lindh_Custody Soviet archives, I would have believed him. Read the whole thing if you can. It is a distressing document. Here's what the "CIA pros" did to prisoners (the non-CIA pros improvised the president's directive to torture and abuse prisoners in very similar ways): stress positions, nudity, hooding, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, long time standing, beatings, hypothermia, and walling. They key thing, according to the CIA, is to enhance "the potential dread a high-value detainee might have of US custody". Notice the shift from the standards of the past. In the past, the US was known for being a country whose soldiers would never mistreat prisoners; now, the US wants the world to know that US custody is something to be dreaded. That's what Cheney did to America. He's proud of it. If you are ever captured by a US soldier, and suspected of terrorism, you know that torture will be coming soon. The values of Washington and Eisenhower and Reagan are inverted. The reputation of the US as a defender of human rights is reversed. The point is that America must be feared for its willingness to abandon all human rights.

 

This is what the neocon right believe in, even as they prattle on about extending human rights as an American value. They say they believe in democracy. What they also believe in is what we saw done to innocent human beings at Abu Ghraib:

 

Nudity. The HVD's clothes are taken from him and he remains nude until the interrogators provide clothes to him.

 

Sleep deprivation. The HVD is placed in the vertical shackling position to begin sleep deprivation. Other shackling procedures may be used during interrogations. The detainee is diapered for sanitary purposes, although the diaper is not used at all times.

 

The diapers are necessary because when you shackle someone in the same position for hours and hours on end and feed him Ensure, he will shit himself. All torturing regimes deal with shitting torture victims. The US followed other regimes in both diapering prisoners or, better still, forcing them to lie in their own excrement, as was discovered by horrified FBI agents at Gitmo. Other torture regimes capture piss and shit in bowls beneath the torture victims. Various forms of nude shackling, sleep deprivation and dietary manipulation (all barred under Geneva and the UN Convention) are then supplemented by constant bombardment with light, loud noise, water-dousing and walling. These techniques can be used in combination. Some more details:

 

An HVD may be walled one time to make a point or twenty to thirty times when an interrogator requires a more significant response to a question. In an interrogation designed to be intense, an HVD may be walled multiple times in one session...

 

Current OMS guidance on cramped confinement limits confinement in the large box to 8 hours at a time for no more than 18 hours a day and confinement in the small box to two hours...

 

Interrogators will often use one technique to support another. As an example, interrogators would tell an HVD in a stress position that he [HVD] is going back to the walling wall for walling if he fails to hold the stress position until told otherwise by the HVD. This places additional stress on the HVD who will typically try to hold the stress position for as long as possible to avoid the walling wall.

 

John McCain will remember these techniques and variants of them from his time in the Hanoi Hilton. If this is not torture, then torture does not exist. And if this is America, and there is no accountability for these war crimes, then core American values have ceased to exist as well.

 

Link - http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/08/the-american-way-of-torture.html

[bjorn_skurj]

And to think of all the Americans who died in World War II to stop this kind of thing from happening. Sheesh. I mean, this is the kind of stuff the Jap(anese) did to Allied POWs.

[Atticus]

So Christian devotion correlates with approval for absolute evil in America