On the Contrary

Well the other shoe has dropped.  I hear the wailing now.  “We need to look ahead, not focus on our past.”  “This kind of an investigation could demoralize our intelligence community.”  And from the left of the left (that would be me), “It doesn’t go nearly far enough.”  Let me take them on one at a time since our media, as usual, is so far missing the point.  In short, we can’t move forward until we resolve the past; it will only demoralize those who grossly abused their power and position; and once you start digging, the finger pointing will begin and those fingers will point up the chain.

President Obama’s view and the political conventional wisdom quoted by Chuck Todd last week on the Bill Maher show is that an investigation will simply cause a political food fight (as though business as usual isn’t one already) and the President’s agenda will get mired down in this misdirection.  Sadly this overly simplified conclusion is actually counterproductive.

Yes the Republicans will throw up every roadblock possible to hide what occurred under their watch, but once the true extent of this is exposed, it is very unlikely that their super patriotic excuses will ever be believed again.  If the American people are kept in the dark about what really happened, then it is way too easy to say it worked, it was worth it, and on we go with the “24” fantasy.  Just think about what has happened with health care and the Republican’s false claims about what is in the plan mainly because we don’t have a plan yet to examine.

This is the difference between short term gains and long term gains.  In the short term the Republicans will throw a hissy fit with lies and misdirection that will complicate the Democrat’s agenda.  But in the long term as the facts come out, it will be clear that this program was a dismal failure, run by incompetents, and destroyed our moral fabric.  Then those who defend it will be forever tarnished and the Democratic agenda will have even more momentum.  It is the difference between the Sarah Palins of the world and real intellectual curiosity.  If you have intellectual curiosity you can learn from your mistakes.  If you are a Sarah Palin, you can continue to believe fiction about what is effective for our future and promote obvious lies.

Jane Mayer wrote the definitive book on what really happened (The Dark Side) and there were CIA officials who did unconscionable acts even when they had every reason to believe the person they were torturing was innocent.  There were levels of unprofessionalism and downright amateurism that became criminal.  These need to come out and the people involved need to be identified and punished.  And this goes directly to the second argument against these investigations, that it will demoralize hard working and patriotic intelligence professionals.

The real “hard working and patriotic” intelligence professionals were appalled by what was going on, especially in light of the failure of most of these programs and the lack of experienced professionals in the CIA to carry it out.  Political operatives and opportunists in the CIA were feeding the Bush Administration what they wanted to hear and ignoring the real professionals who saw through this program.  It will actually strengthen professionalism to go after those that abused the system getting information their supervisors wanted to hear instead of allowing real professional dissent to counter political pressure.  The rules and real professionalism have to be more important than political power and opportunity.

As for not going far enough and those at the top will not be exposed in this investigation, the devil is in the details.  Clearly the investigation can be limited to the more egregious offenders, those that went beyond the already egregious standards set by the Bush White House.  But when accusations are made, those accused will start pointing fingers.  In my mind there were facilitators up and down the system, or as I called them, political opportunists, who wanted to serve the political purposes of the White House and either facilitated these illegal interrogations, or turned a blind eye.  Either way they are just as culpable and will be identified in any real investigation.  As for those actually in the White House who originally authorized torture, from the Vice President and his Chief of Staff, David Addington, to John Yu and the other legal sycophants who rendered whatever legal opinion was requested, that is a very different issue.

This investigation only involves going beyond those despicable limits and therefore their actions will not be challenged.  But we are still waiting the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility recommendations on what should be done about these highly unprofessional legal opinions that later had to be withdrawn.  Disbarment might be the appropriate action

This is going to be a long torturous (no pun intended) process to get to all the facts.  But each day more and more of our scandalous and immoral behavior is being exposed and once there is a crack in the wall, it will slowly expand.  Thank goodness.

Related Post:  The Conventional Wisdom and Enforcing the Law

President Obama changed course today when he may have realized he was repeating George Bush’s mistake in trying to define when the law will be applied and when it won’t.  He now says that for those who crafted these obviously flawed legal memos to justify torture, he will leave the decision as to whether to investigate and prosecute where it belongs in the Justice Department.  Many of us think he has no choice but to prosecute if we are going to honor our own laws,  treaties, and international law.  Otherwise we have no standing in the world and we cannot expect anyone else in the world to follow the law either.

But this whole argument gets confused within several issues.  First is the legal one, did we violate our own law, international law, and treaties we have signed?  The second one is the moral issue, should we even be involved in this kind of behavior?  And the third one which is closely related to the second, does it work?  If it doesn’t work, the second question becomes more problematic.  We know we have violated the law and if we are a nation of laws, we must enforce them becasue picking and choosing which laws to follow means there are no laws.  In judging people who violated the law, the second and third issues come into play.  There are mitigating circumstances if they broke the law trying to prevent a more heinous crime.  If it is immoral, then was it justified if it worked and saved lives?  This last question is really the crux of the argument Dick Cheney is making on FOX news.  “Sometimes good people have to do bad things for the greater good.”

Now I would be the first one to say once we go down this road to institutionalized torture for Al-Qaeda suspects, we have lost our bearings about who we are and it does more damage than it prevents, both to our own psyche, and to the enhancing of recruitment and motivation for our enemies.  But let’s forget that argument for a minute and just ask the question, is it effective?  Now once again I have an opinion based upon multiple sources that says no.  But what do we really know?  I would argue that we need a full and open investigation to find out what we found out and when; what happened when the CIA took interrogations away from the FBI; and did they actually get anything new or useful that wouldn’t have been found out anyway, and maybe sooner?

Now enter Dick Cheney who is calling for the release of memos he says exist that prove that torture was highly effective and prevented many attacks on the United States. This is interesting on several levels.  First, we have Mr. Secrecy now wanting to release real intelligence findings that could be considered much more damaging than legal memos on the legal basis of torture.  Second, if these memos exist, I don’t think the CIA is going to release them and the reasons are obvious.

Do you remember the justification for attacking Iraq?  The Vice President went intelligence shopping and he cherry picked anything that supported his preconceived view of the threat Saddam Hussein presented, rewarded those who provided him that information, and punished those that did not.  Some of this intelligence came from suspects tortured that later turned out to be false.  That is how we got it so wrong.  There is no question in my mind that once he turned the CIA loose to torture, they fed him what he wanted to hear.  Am I saying they lied to him?  I think they stretched the truth and in some cases, the information they claimed the got, was already known.  In some cases they exaggerated the importance of a detainee, or they got out of him what they wanted to find and Cheney wanted to hear, not necessarily the truth.

But don’t take my word for it.  If those memos are released and unclassified, then government officials who might know what really happened are then free to talk about it.  And based upon what I have read about the competing interrogation teams, there are some interesting things to find out.  In other words if those memos are released, their veracity can then be questioned, and people are free to talk about what really happened.  You can bet your sweet bippy that there are many in the CIA who never want to let those memos meet the light of day.  Because when all the conflicting information really gets out, they are going to look like they were involved in Amateur Hour for torturers and interrogators.  What they really wish right now is that Dick Cheney would just shut up and go away. Much like the intelligence for Iraq, he got fed what he wanted to hear and the truth got lost somewhere.  He is so delusional he could not sort out the difference.

All of this leaves one with the undeniable conclusion that we need to fully investigate what happened, what we really found out, and what is the truth.  What we will find will not be pleasant, but it is necessary to end this sorry period in our history.  The one thing we will find out about Dick Cheney is that as George Lucas told Maureen Dowd, Dick Cheney is no Darth Vader.  Darth Vader was once a good person lead astray.  Dick Cheney is the Emperor, evil and flawed through and through.

Note:  Tonight as I write this, the New York Times released a story that those who authorized torture never looked at its use in the past or its effectiveness.  Why would they, they have all seen “24″.  What bothers me about this is that this is all documented in Jane Mayer’s book, The Dark Side.  Anybody read it?

On some topics my knowledge is intellectual, but not visceral, not first hand.  In this case, however, I know this one in my gut.   Back in the “day” I was trained to resist torture.  I spent some time in a simulated captivity and an interrogation facility.  I was faced with the real possibility when I flew in Viet Nam, and I debriefed Tom Storey when he came back after five long years in captivity in North Viet Nam.  It was heart wrenching.  I also was one of those guys who had to sign an agreement that I understood that the bombing of Cambodia was illegal and I would never violate the will of Congress following an illegal order.  That one seemed to slip by Oliver North and Crew about 15 years later.  This is probably ancient history for most of you, but this is what informs my feelings like electricity about the disclosures we are being handed about our conduct of torture.

So with the latest revelations and President Obama’s pledge to not prosecute those that thought they were following legally constituted orders, I had mixed emotions.  But with a little introspection, the fog disappeared.  First, is the obviously flawed “legal” memos themselves and the techniques that they revealed.  Actually nothing here is new since Jane Mayer, in her book, The Dark Side, has already described all of this in detail.  What she didn’t have were the actual memos, only accounts of them from interrogators and lawyers who knew their illegitimacy.  Now they are exposed for all of us to see.  If the techniques don’t sound bad to you I suggest you pick up her book and read how these and other techniques were applied and in some cases, killed detainees.  And of course they got them to talk.  Problem is they would tell you anything you wanted to hear.  Some of the “intelligence” that justified the Iraq war was nonsense from one of these interrogations that later turned out to be totally false.

Should President Obama have pledged not to prosecute those who thought they were following legal orders when they were actually performing torture that is illegal in this country?  Should we have let the guards who walked people into the gas chambers at Dachau go free because they were just following orders?  Is just following orders a justifiable defense?  I don’t think so if we don’t want a repeat of this episode.  If we accept this line of thinking, what is to prevent the next President (or in this case Vice President (Dick Cheney and his legal counsel David Addington)) from finding some sycophant like John Yoo to write horribly flawed legal memos justifying anything so those that carry it out have a get out of jail free card?  Nothing.

Now I don’t think most of these people (there were men, women, doctors, nurses, psychiatrists involved) were evil, but torture is torture and they should be duly tried and if deemed culpable, punished.  Most would never serve a day because they were really pulled in and thought they were doing the right thing for the country in tough circumstances.  But some killed people, or decided to keep prisoners when they knew they had the wrong person.  This has to come out and those that did this must face justice for their crimes.  The message is that we all know what torture is, in this country we don’t do it, and if you do, some get out of jail pass is not going to protect.  Under these circumstances there is very little likelihood that people won’t think first before they go down this road again.  The Japanese have an interesting philosophy that if you injure someone else, even though it was innocent and you had no intent, you still owe a debt.  These people would partook in torture owe a debt to those that they tortured and in some cases ruined innocent lives.

Then there is the Mulkasey and Hayden defense of torture and criticizing of the Obama Administration’s release of the memos in the Wall Street Journal, saying in effect that the administration was tying its hands in the war on terrorism, causing agencies like the CIA to be too timid in the future, and of course, torture worked.  Here are two individuals who need very badly to believe this because they let all of what followed happen.  They are two people who should never hold public office ever again.

Their argument that it ties our hands and lets the enemy prepare for “rough” interrogation is disingenuous if you consider that we are not going to do it any more.  Second, all the techniques that were used were already common knowledge.  Remember my training in torture resistance was just a short-term ploy to allow tactical information that I might have to become obsolete before they got it out of me.  What we learned in Viet Nam is that sooner or later they will get you to say whatever they want, true or not.  Finally, our own commanders in Iraq have told us that torture did us more damage by recruiting more al-Qaeda recruits than any information we might have gained (if we did) to prevent a terrorist attack.

By releasing the memos, we can now see how people in our government abused and misused the law to violate the law.  It demonstrates the fallacy of their legal thinking and hopefully drives a stake in any attempt in the future to use such flawed legal thinking to justify violating our laws.  Then there is their final argument that torture worked.  Oh really?  There is documentation from the FBI who were conducting these interviews without the torture, that they were making great progress before the CIA took over and then began getting confessions to things these guys never did.  We can go on forever having these arguments about whether torture works, or we can put an end to it by fully investigating what happened, what real intelligence we got, if any, and whether it was worth it.  I think after listening to many experts on interrogation, (See the Dark Side, Torture Team, etc.) what they got was nothing and spent most of their time on wild goose chases while causing irreparable damage to our nation.  They badly needed to believe what they were doing was justified and that became self-fulfilling.

So if we don’t investigate what happened and really understand where we went and for what, we are going to be left with an open wound.  The President must pursue these investigations at all levels.  But back to my gut.  I always wondered if I could match up to the bravery of our own POWs who endured hell in the prisons of Viet Nam.  But one thing that kept me going was knowing we didn’t do that kind of stuff.  We really were better than they were.  Now I know we aren’t.

Related Blogs:  Torture and Justice, Torture and Fiction