Despite the disapproval of many, 60s terrorist William Ayers graced Oakland University with his presence.
Protesters lined the lecture hall while holding signs demonstrating their distaste for Ayers attendance. With a full house, OU students Adrienne Kampman and Leah Lasota stood outside the room in disapproval of Ayers visit.
"I don't think Oakland University made a very wise choice," Lasota said.
Inside, Ayers was set to speak about education, but the conversation meandered frequently over to politics.
No matter. Ayers watched as pliable young college students continually nodded their heads as if in a brainwashed trance.
Appealing to the acceptance that young people so often crave, Ayers boasted, "I'm in the majority." He later added, "Chicago City Council agrees with me on handguns, the war in Iraq, gay rights and women's rights."
To Ayers credit, he didn't exhibit disdain for his adversaries who were present at the event. He respected the rights of protesters even though they were protesting him. It's doubtful, however, that he would've been so understanding if they had used a bomb to make their point as he had so many years ago.
Protesters lined the lecture hall while holding signs demonstrating their distaste for Ayers attendance. With a full house, OU students Adrienne Kampman and Leah Lasota stood outside the room in disapproval of Ayers visit.
"I don't think Oakland University made a very wise choice," Lasota said.
Inside, Ayers was set to speak about education, but the conversation meandered frequently over to politics.
No matter. Ayers watched as pliable young college students continually nodded their heads as if in a brainwashed trance.
Appealing to the acceptance that young people so often crave, Ayers boasted, "I'm in the majority." He later added, "Chicago City Council agrees with me on handguns, the war in Iraq, gay rights and women's rights."
Cathy Shafran, broadcast journalism professor at OU, questioned Ayers about his days in the Weather Underground. On behalf of her students, who also attended the event, Shafran asked
Ayers about his protesting in the 60's and what he would do differently.
"We became dogmatic. Everybody in the movement got rigid in their thinking," Ayers said, "We were too busy talking to ourselves and living in the well-lighted prism of a single good idea."
Though a wise and reflective statement, a better answer may have been, "I wouldn't have used violence to protest and I wouldn't have put innocent people in harms way."
To Ayers credit, he didn't exhibit disdain for his adversaries who were present at the event. He respected the rights of protesters even though they were protesting him. It's doubtful, however, that he would've been so understanding if they had used a bomb to make their point as he had so many years ago.
24 comments:
I have nothing to say regarding this post so I'll take the opportunity of the terrosim theme to share some new news:
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — A former State Department lawyer responsible for Guantanamo-related cases said Friday that the Bush administration overreacted after 9/11 and set up a system in which torture occurred.
Vijay Padmanabhan is at least the second former Bush administration official to publicly label "enhanced interrogation techniques" as torture. He said the administration was wrong in its entire approach when it sent detainees to the remote Navy base and declared it out of reach of any court.
"I think Guantanamo was one of the worst overreactions of the Bush administration," Padmanabhan told The Associated Press. He said other overreactions included extraordinary renditions, waterboarding that occurred at secret CIA prisons and "other enhanced interrogation techniques that would constitute torture."
"The idea that you're going to be able to hold someone and detain someone where there is not an applicable legal regime governing their detention, rules, treatment, standards, etc. is, I think, foolish," he said.
The criticisms from Padmanabhan, the department's chief counsel on Guantanamo litigation, are among the harshest yet made by a former Bush administration insider.
President George W. Bush always denied the U.S. tortured anyone. The U.S. has acknowledged that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described plotter of Sept. 11, and a few other prisoners were waterboarded at secret CIA prisons before being taken to Guantanamo, but the Bush administration insisted that all interrogations were lawful.
Padmanabhan said he believes these tactics _ which the International Committee of the Red Cross has also described as torture _ were approved because the White House was shocked by the Sept. 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, and wanted to prevent other horrors.
"These are not things that I think any American president would have authorized had they been in a calmer environment," Padmanabhan told AP in a telephone interview.
Wow, I finally wrote something that evoked no comment from you.
I think it's a fair assessment to say that if unreasonable punishment was used on suspected terrorists, it's because...
"The White House was shocked by the Sept. 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, and wanted to prevent other horrors."
I hate to see anyone get hurt, but if it's between innocent people going about their work day or suspected terrorists plotting to kill...they can go ahead with the latter in my opinion.
Yes, you did write something that evoked no comment but you were successful in baiting me through you acknowledgement. I'll nibble.
Being shocked doesn't give anyone the right to erode our civil liberties, due process and all those other things our forefathers died to protect and that are there to protect all Americans. Reacting by breaking the law is something a common criminal does, not our government, especially when they purposefully enlist others to help them determine ways to break the law but make it appear legal.
The very basis of this article is that those who were asked to contrive a legal basis to break our laws now wish they had not.
You cannot guarantee that all who went through renditions and torture were terrorists. In fact, some were innocent citizens.
You said yourself "suspected" terrorist and then contrasted that with "innocent people going about their work day." How do we tell the difference between these two? Oh, I forgot - we have laws regarding due process which I thought might have been covered at some point in your American history or even civics classes.
In this country everyone is innocent until proven guilty. Does that mean you want to selectively enforce the laws of our country? Who decides which laws and when?
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."
--John Acton
Where does it end and where does the slippery slope begin?
I'll say this with apology - and I'm not saying it about you, so it's your choice to be offended or not, but I am saying it about what you said - it was dumb and stupid and demonsytrates a lack of understanding in, as you said, my opinion. Your words and position disregards every life given by every soldier that died on a battle field or otherwise sacrificed to protect and defend our constitution. And I personally find that position short-sighted and offensive.
By the way, what happened to your 'pope post?"
No, I read it. I guess my point is...why does anyone care? Can you attach a link with proof to this allegation? I suppose I don't believe it because it's a stupid thing to lie about. There's nothing wrong with asking your family permission. I think it's a good sign of character.
Are you OK? You obviously posted this comment to the wrong thread. But while I'm at it - and work with me here - the point was that she said she asked her kids but she LIED. Get it now?? And obviously many people do CARE if one of the people out there that aspire to be president is a blatant LIAR about even simple things like this we need to be aware. We need to know. We need to keep score of the lies.
And now, completely on topic (terrorism):
The least popular vice-president in memory is not helping the Republicans regroup - according to this piece from the Hill. But Cheney is not giving these disgraceful and classless interviews to help the GOP. He's giving them because it is beginning to dawn on him that he is in very serious trouble - legally, politically, historically. As the full details of his obsession with the torture program emerge, and as the gruesome nature of the actual torture becomes clearer, he knows he will go down in history as a war criminal, defined for all time as the man who took America and the West to the dark side with no easy way back. He's trying to prevent that with the usual bluff and bravado. But even Bush isn't buying all of it any longer.
It seems to me that what we need is simply more disclosure of all the government knows about what Cheney and Bush did.
What Panetta and Rudman need to do is to find out and publish as much as possible about the facts of the torture techniques and, more saliently, what the results of the torture program were. We need to see what actual actionable intelligence we got from it, to evaluate the balance between false information and accurate information, and to find out just how intimately Cheney was involved in orchestrating, monitoring and presiding over the torture, from whatever distance. Until we know more facts, we cannot fully assess the damage. Right now, we just have blanket assurances from the accused that they did nothing wrong and saved many lives. What if that isn't accurate?
Cheney is out there hurting his party, helping the president, and sowing fear - because he has to if he is to survive as anything but a pariah. The one thing he cannot stand is sunlight. So let it in, Mr President. Let it in.
And now, moving back to the terrorism theme, I noticed this AP story on the wire this morning. It speaks for itself:
MADRID, (AP) — A Spanish court has agreed to consider opening a criminal case against six former Bush administration officials, including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, over allegations they gave legal cover for torture at Guantanamo Bay, a lawyer in the case said Saturday.
The ex-Bush officials are Gonzales; former undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith; former Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff David Addington; Justice Department officials John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee; and Pentagon lawyer William Haynes.
Spanish law allows courts to reach beyond national borders in cases of torture or war crimes under a doctrine of universal justice, though the government has recently said it hopes to limit the scope of the legal process.
The officials are charged with providing a legal cover for interrogation methods like waterboarding against terrorism suspects at Guantanamo, which the Spanish human rights lawyers say amounted to torture.
Yoo, for instance, wrote a series of secret memos that claimed the president had the legal authority to circumvent the Geneva Conventions.
President George W. Bush always denied the U.S. tortured anyone. The U.S. has acknowledged that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described plotter of Sept. 11, and a few other prisoners were waterboarded at secret CIA prisons before being taken to Guantanamo, but the Bush administration insisted that all interrogations were lawful.
Boye said he expected the National Court to take the case forward, and dismissed concerns that it would harm bilateral relations between the two countries.
He said that some of the victims of the alleged torture were Spaniards, strengthening the argument for Spanish jurisdiction.
Boye noted that the case was brought not against interrogators who might have committed crimes but by the lawyers and other high-placed officials who gave cover for their actions.
"Our case is a denunciation of lawyers, by lawyers, because we don't believe our profession should be used to help commit such barbarities," he said.
Guess who this is...
How about we contrast fear (another way to identify an aversion to risk) and its impact on both our financial institutions AND dumb decision that were made out of fear post-9/11 - and to this very day in the minds of some people who will remain nameless.
Here's the scientific article:
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Brad Delong summarizes an important point when it comes to evaluating whether or not the latest plan to rescue banks from their own toxic assets is going to work. In this interesting post, he contrasts his own tepid support for the plan with Paul Krugman's pessimistic opposition:
I think the private-sector players in financial markets right now are highly risk averse--hence assets are undervalued from the perspective of a society or a government that is less risk averse. Paul judges that assets have low values beceuse they are unlikely to pay out much cash.
I think one way to evaluate these dueling positions is to look at how people generate perceptions of risk. Investors have concluded that these toxic assets are simply too risky to invest in, at least without large infusions of government money. How rational are these perceptions of risk? Are investors wary of buying toxic assets because they have good evidence that the toxic assets are virtually worthless? Or are they wary of these investments because they're irrationally scared?
There's certainly no shortage of anecdotal evidence that people can misperceive risk. Look, for instance, at the very common fear of flying: More than 30 percent of people admit to being "scared or very scared" whenever they board a plane. And yet, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, flying on a commercial jetliner has a fatality rate of 0.04 per one hundred million passenger miles. In contrast, driving has a fatality rate of 0.86. This means that the most dangerous part of traveling on a commercial flight is the drive to the airport.
In other words, our perception of risk isn't always grounded in reality. Where, then, does the sense of riskiness come from? I think one of the most convincing theories of risk perception comes from the work of George Loewenstein, of Carnegie Mellon. In 2001, he co-authored a quite interesting paper that looked at risk through the prism of emotion. Here's the abstract:
Virtually all current theories of choice under risk or uncertainty are cognitive and consequentialist. They assume that people assess the desirability and likelihood of possible outcomes of choice alternatives and integrate this information through some type of expectation-based calculus to arrive at a decision. The authors propose an alternative theoretical perspective, the risk-as-feelings hypothesis, that highlights the role of affect experienced at the moment of decision making. Drawing on research from clinical, physiological, and other subfields of psychology, they show that emotional reactions to risky situations often diverge from cognitive assessments of those risks. When such divergence occurs, emotional reactions often drive behavior. The risk-as-feelings hypothesis is shown to explain a wide range of phenomena that have resisted interpretation in cognitive-consequentialist terms.
Here's an elegant example of how perceptions of risk are largely driven by our emotions, which makes use of a simple investing game invented by Baba Shiv, Loewenstein and colleagues. In each round, experimental subjects had to decide between two options: invest $1 or invest nothing. If the participant decided not to invest, he would keep the dollar, and the game would advance to the next round. If the participant decided to invest, he would hand a dollar bill to the experimenter. The experimenter would then toss a coin in plain view. Heads meant that the participant would lose the $1 that was invested; tails meant that $2.50 would be added to the participant's account. The game stopped after 20 rounds.
If people were perfectly rational⎯if they made decisions solely by crunching the numbers⎯then subjects should always choose to invest, since the expected value on each round is higher if one invests ($1.25, or $2.50 x 50 percent) than if one does not ($1). In fact, if people invest on each and every round, there is only a 13 percent chance of making less money than if they never invest and simply pocket the $20.
So what did the subjects in the study do? Those with an intact emotional brain chose to invest less than 60 percent of the time. Because we are wired to dislike potential losses, most people were perfectly content to sacrifice profit for security. In other words, they were irrationally risk averse. Furthermore, the willingness of people to gamble plummeted immediately after they lost a gamble⎯the pain of losing was too fresh. This is roughly analogous to where we are now: investors have just lost a lot of money in the market, and they're unwilling to make any new investments, even if the investments might be profitable over the long-term.
So far, so obvious. The flight to safety has happened countless times before. But the scientists didn't stop there. They also played the investing game with neurological patients who could no longer experience emotion. If it was a feeling that was causing these bad investing decisions, then these patients should perform better than their healthy peers.
That's exactly what happened. The emotion-less patients chose to invest 83.7 percent of the time, and gained significantly more money than normal subjects. They also proved much more resistant to the misleading effects of loss aversion, and gambled 85.2 percent of the time after losing a coin toss. In other words, losing money made them more likely to invest, as they realized that investing was the best way to recoup their losses. In this investing situation, being numb to their emotions was a crucial advantage.
So what should we do? I'm not advocating lobotomies for hedge fund managers. (In most instances, not being able to experience emotions is a profound handicap.) And, of course, there's also a good possibility that investors might have correctly perceived these toxic assets as too risky. (The name certainly doesn't help.) But I think it's important to keep in mind that our perceptions of risk are fallible feelings, so that these assets might be undervalued because investors are, at the moment, irrationally risk averse.
Understanding Cheney
This conversation between Anderson Cooper and an unidentified member of a drug cartel in Mexico helps explain what's always behind the decision to torture suspects:
UNIDENTIFIED DRUG CARTEL MEMBER: Yes, they do. They have got their ways of showing people who's killing who, where's it coming from. They have got ways of torturing people and killing people them the way they do, so that all the cartels will know who it's -- who it's coming from.
COOPER: Torture is common?
UNIDENTIFIED DRUG CARTEL MEMBER: Yes, it is.
COOPER: Why? Just to get information?
UNIDENTIFIED DRUG CARTEL MEMBER: To -- not to get information. Just the pleasure of doing it. They make it pleasurable, pleasurable (INAUDIBLE) doing it.
COOPER: So, it doesn't -- it doesn't yield useful information; it's just doing it because they enjoy it?
UNIDENTIFIED DRUG CARTEL MEMBER: Yes. Information, they have information from the government, so they have all the information they can get. Most of the -- most of the -- most of the torture is for pleasure.
COOPER: Does it also send a message? Does it also strike fear into the hearts of...
UNIDENTIFIED DRUG CARTEL MEMBER: Into the public, into other people, into other customers, you know, people in the business.
COOPER: Are there any rules of people who can't be killed? I mean, are -- or is anybody safe, women and children?
(CROSSTALK)
UNIDENTIFIED DRUG CARTEL MEMBER: No.
COOPER: Doesn't matter?
So, you're comparing Dick Cheney to this drug cartel member? Is that what I'm gathering?
You're saying that Cheney tortures people for fun and not to protect Americans? Yes?
Please tell me I've just had a long day and am going cross-eyed after working all day and going to my night class.
This comparison is going off the deep end. You're right, you may not be a democrat. This idea is not even out of left field...it's out of the friggin' sky.
You are just unwilling to understand the nature of torture and what can be gained from the activity. If you toture me I will tell you anything - AAAANYTHING - to make you stop. That's not information it is desperation.
Yes, I do think Chaney is a twisted individual that took pleasure in all this. I've been reading about torture and nothing else explains it since there is nothing else to be gained from torture but a confession of anything to stop the pain.
Chaney is sadistic.
I posted this on another thread but you apparently didn't read it. That's the only excuse i can give you.
___________________________
Ron Suskind long ago reported that the torture of Abu Zubaydah gave us no intelligence worth anything. The WaPo confirms that today. Money quote:
In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said. Moreover, within weeks of his capture, U.S. officials had gained evidence that made clear they had misjudged Abu Zubaida. . . . None of [their earlier claims] was accurate, the new evidence showed.
Abu Zubaydah was not who president Bush wished he was. Bush had declared him chief of operations for al Qaeda, but Zubaydah was far more peripheral. But here's the critical dynamic for the use of torture:
As weeks passed after the capture without significant new confessions, the Bush White House and some at the CIA became convinced that tougher measures had to be tried. The pressure from upper levels of the government was "tremendous," driven in part by the routine of daily meetings in which policymakers would press for updates, one official remembered. "They couldn't stand the idea that there wasn't anything new," the official said. "They'd say, 'You aren't working hard enough.' There was both a disbelief in what he was saying and also a desire for retribution -- a feeling that 'He's going to talk, and if he doesn't talk, we'll do whatever.' "
This is the rabbit hole you disappear into once you bring torture into the equation. Notice how very far this is from any ticking time-bomb scenario, the one routinely hauled out by Bush apologists. Notice how revenge is never easily separated from intelligence-seeking when it comes to torture. Notice the unintended consequences. This particular torture led to the torture of another person, Jose Padilla, an American citizen who also turned out to be far less significant a figure than the Bush administration suspected. It also led to dozens of false leads, wasted time, and bad information. (Remember how the critical bad information that Saddam and al Qaeda were connected came from torture as well.) Cheney and his apparatchiks continue to insist that they got reliable and vital information from these torture sessions, but they can never verify it:
Since 2006, Senate intelligence committee members have pressed the CIA, in classified briefings, to provide examples of specific leads that were obtained from Abu Zubaida through the use of waterboarding and other methods, according to officials familiar with the requests. The agency provided none, the officials said.
So, no follow up comment but you want me to respond to your catholic persecution position? Don't christians feel they are always being persecuted?
People tend to be overly certain of their opinions, and tend to ignore or devalue evidence that goes against their opinions (so-called cognitive dissonance). Now, this is true of some people, but hardly of all people, and it is indeed a mental failing, provided the issue is important and it is costly to make a mistake. But, how costly is it to have political opinions that are inconsistent with the evidence? One vote can't change an election, so what incentive to people have to change their ideas given the evidence? Of course, those who care about the truth for its own sake (like me), will pay close attention to the evidence. But those whose political positions give them pleasure for other reasons (religious, ideological, historical, etc.) have no interest in placing a lot of weight on the "evidence." Calling such people "irrational" is just wrong. Moreover, even most people in the cognitive dissonance camp eventually change their mind when there is enough evidence. If that were not true, democracy could not work.
It's been another huge day of data-gathering in the years-long bid to get to the bottom of the secret and illegal torture program set up by Bush and Cheney as their central tool in the war on Jihadist terrorism. You can download the leaked - and devastating International Committee of the Red Cross report http://www.nybooks.com/icrc-report.pdf. You can read about the chilling similarities between the Bush-Cheney techniques and those used by the Soviet gulag http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/04/how-america-became-the-soviet-union.html. You can read more details of how doctors were implicated in monitoring and measuring the torture of human beings http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/06/AR2009040603654.html. If you need confirmation that this new data is real and dispositive, then go read the partisan right blogs. Their total radio silence tells you something.
But Mark Danner's superb piece, after years of superb reporting, comes to an important conclusion that we should not miss. It is that we need to put all the data on the table - including both the precise techniques and who authorized and perpetrated them and also the alleged intelligence gains from the program. Danner sees why this latter point, which I have also endorsed, is so important. Until we can examine the claims from Cheney et al. that torture saved lives, we will never be able to remove the danger of a president reinstigating torture on the same basis in the future. The GOP is not ashamed of using this as a political weapon. Cheney has all but declared that without torture, America cannot be safe. Gingrich is reiterating that. Rove tried to run the 2006 election on the question of who has the balls to torture terror suspects more brutally. Unless we have clear data that can judge these claims, we cannot dispositively prevent a recurrence.
They explicitly recognized that the techniques they were authorizing were ones that we condemned other countries for using -- including as "torture" -- but nonetheless approved them, explicitly saying that the standards we impose on others do not bind us in any way.
And this is, in fact, the Bush-Cheney position. Because America did these things, they are not torture. This is also, by the way, the position of the news reporters and editors at the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Does anyone believe that if Iran, say, captured an American soldier, kept him awake for eleven days straight, bashed his head and body against plywood walls with a towel around his neck, forced him to stand and sit in stress positions finessed by the Communist Chinese, stuck him in a dark coffin for hours, and then waterboarded him, that the NYT would describe him as a victim of "harsh interrogation techniques"? Do you think Mike Allen would give anonymity to a top Iranian official who defended these techniques as vital to Iran's national security?
The last seven years have revealed that almost the entire American establishment views itself as immune to the moral and ethical rules it applies to every other country in the world. Now we know, at least. And you can be sure they will protecting each other to the bitter end.
"The Department of Justice will today release certain memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel between 2002 and 2005 as part of an ongoing court case. These memos speak to techniques that were used in the interrogation of terrorism suspects during that period, and their release is required by the rule of law.
My judgment on the content of these memos is a matter of record. In one of my very first acts as President, I prohibited the use of these interrogation techniques by the United States because they undermine our moral authority and do not make us safer. Enlisting our values in the protection of our people makes us stronger and more secure. A democracy as resilient as ours must reject the false choice between our security and our ideals, and that is why these methods of interrogation are already a thing of the past. But that is not what compelled the release of these legal documents today."
- President Obama
Abuse of Power:
The Bush Administration's Secret Legal Memos
On April 16, 2009, the Department of Justice released four secret memos used by the Bush administration to justify torture.
Read them here:
http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/olc_memos.html
I’m feeling overwhelmed with irony the last few days, and not just because of all the teabagging going on. There are a bunch of really good articles that I haven’t had time to report on, so I thought I would just list them here. All of them are worth a read.
Over at Salon, Glenn Greenwald has an excellent article talking about the new report from the Department of Homeland Security that warns of growing “right-wing extremist activity”. The ironic thing here is that the same right-wing pundits who who cheered on every domestic surveillance and police state program are now completely freaking out that these programs might get used against the right-wing lunatic fringe. This is doubly ironic because there are plenty of examples of right-wing terrorism in this country.
For that added touch of irony, Jonah Goldberg in the National Review claims that Obama’s Department of Homeland Security is now specifically targeting right-wing groups, and that the DHS has never and would never target “left-wing” groups in the same way. But as Greenwald points out, Goldberg’s article actually links to an article in the Washington Times that says:
In January, the same DHS office released a report titled “Leftwing extremists likely to increase use of cyber attacks over the coming decade.
Plus these pundits don’t bother to mention that preparation of the new report began more than a year ago, when Bush was still in office.
Our ironic radar also got a kick from an article in the Washington Monthly, which discusses the recent poll results that socialism is gaining in popularity in the US. The article points out that by accusing Obama — who continues to be hugely popular — of being a socialist, right-wing pundits like Rush Limbaugh are actually helping to increase the popularity of socialism. As they say “the irony is rich”.
Finally, the Huffington Post has an interesting article “The Five Strands of Conservatism: Why the GOP is Unraveling“. The point of this article is that it is amazing is that the Republican Party managed to hold together all the different conservative groups for as long as they did, when many of these groups hold wholly incompatible beliefs.
For example, Libertarians believe that things like drugs and abortion are none of the government’s business, while social conservatives want more government control of these areas. How did the Republicans ever convince these two groups to vote for the same candidates?
When senator Dick Durbin noted that many of the torture and abuse techniques being deployed by the US under president George W. Bush were identical to techniques once used by Stalin, the Gestapo and the Khmer Rouge, he was given the Full Hewitt. In the wake of both the Red Cross Report and the Bush Torture Memos, it's worth re-reading Durbin's full statement at the time:
Mr. President, there has been a lot of discussion in recent days about whether to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. This debate misses the point. It is not a question of whether detainees are held at Guantanamo Bay or some other location. The question is how we should treat those who have been detained there. Whether we treat them according to the law or not does not depend on their address. It depends on our policy as a nation.
How should we treat them? This is not a new question. We are not writing on a blank slate. We have entered into treaties over the years, saying this is how we will treat wartime detainees. The United States has ratified these treaties. They are the law of the land as much as any statute we passed. They have served our country well in past wars. We have held ourselves to be a civilized country, willing to play by the rules, even in time of war.
Unfortunately, without even consulting Congress, the Bush administration unilaterally decided to set aside these treaties and create their own rules about the treatment of prisoners.
Frankly, this Congress has failed to hold the administration accountable for its failure to follow the law of the land when it comes to the torture and mistreatment of prisoners and detainees.
I am a member of the Judiciary Committee. For two years, I have asked for hearings on this issue. I am glad Chairman Specter will hold a hearing on wartime detention policies tomorrow. I thank him for taking this step. I wish other members of his party would be willing to hold this administration accountable as well.
It is worth reflecting for a moment about how we have reached this point. Many people who read history remember, as World War II began with the attack on Pearl Harbor, a country in fear after being attacked decided one way to protect America was to gather together Japanese Americans and literally imprison them, put them in internment camps for fear they would be traitors and turn on the United States. We did that. Thousands of lives were changed. Thousands of businesses destroyed. Thousands of people, good American citizens, who happened to be of Japanese ancestry, were treated like common criminals.
It took almost 40 years for us to acknowledge that we were wrong, to admit that these people should never have been imprisoned. It was a shameful period in American history and one that very few, if any, try to defend
today.
I believe the torture techniques that have been used at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and other places fall into that same category. I am confident, sadly confident, as I stand here, that decades from now people will look back and say: What were they thinking? America, this great, kind leader of a nation, treated people who were detained and imprisoned, interrogated people in the crudest way? I am afraid this is going to be one of the bitter legacies of the invasion of Iraq.
We were attacked on September 11, 2001. We were clearly at war.
We have held prisoners in every armed conflict in which we have engaged. The law was clear, but some of the president's top advisers questioned whether we should follow it or whether we should write new standards.
Alberto Gonzales, then-White House chief counsel, recommended to the president the Geneva Convention should not apply to the war on terrorism.
Colin Powell, who was then Secretary of State, objected strenuously to Alberto Gonzales' conclusions. I give him credit. Colin Powell argued that we could effectively fight the war on terrorism and still follow the law, still comply with the Geneva Conventions. In a memo to Alberto Gonzales, Secretary Powell pointed out the Geneva Conventions would not limit our ability to question the detainees or hold them even indefinitely. He pointed out that under Geneva Conventions, members of al Qaeda and other terrorists would not be considered prisoners of war.
There is a lot of confusion about that so let me repeat it. The Geneva Conventions do not give POW status to terrorists.
In his memo to Gonzales, Secretary Powell went on to say setting aside the Geneva Conventions "will reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice . . . and undermine the protections of the law of war for our own troops . . . It will undermine public support among critical allies, making military cooperation more difficult to sustain."
When you look at the negative publicity about Guantanamo, Secretary Colin Powell was prophetic.
Unfortunately, the president rejected Secretary Powell's wise counsel, and instead accepted Alberto Gonzales' recommendation, issuing a memo setting aside the Geneva Conventions and concluding that we needed "new thinking in the law of war."
After the president decided to ignore Geneva Conventions, the administration unilaterally created a new detention policy. They claim the right to seize anyone, including even American citizens, anywhere in the world, including in the United States, and hold them until the end of the war on terrorism, whenever that may be.
For example, they have even argued in court they have the right to indefinitely detain an elderly lady from Switzerland who writes checks to what she thinks is a charity that helps orphans but actually is a front that finances terrorism.
They claim a person detained in the war on terrorism has no legal rights--no right to a lawyer, no right to see the evidence against them, no right to challenge their detention. In fact, the government has claimed detainees have no right to challenge their detention, even if they claim they were being tortured or executed.
This violates the Geneva Conventions, which protect everyone captured during wartime. The official commentary on the convention states: "Nobody in enemy hands can fall outside the law."
That is clear as it can be. But it was clearly rejected by the Bush administration when Alberto Gonzales as White House counsel recommended otherwise.
U.S. military lawyers called this detention system "a legal black hole." The Red Cross concluded, "U.S. authorities have placed the internees in Guantanamo beyond the law."
Using their new detention policy, the administration has detained thousands of individuals in secret detention centers all around the world, some of them unknown to members of Congress. While it is the most well-known, Guantanamo Bay is only one of them. Most have been captured in Afghanistan and Iraq, but some people who never raised arms against us have been taken prisoner far from the battlefield.
Who are the Guantanamo detainees? Back in 2002, Secretary Rumsfeld described them as "the hardest of the hard core." However, the administration has since released many of them, and it has now become clear that Secretary Rumsfeld's assertion was not completely true.
Military sources, according to the media, indicate that many detainees have no connection to al Qaeda or the Taliban and were sent to Guantanamo over the objections of intelligence personnel who recommended their release. One military officer said: "We're basically condemning these guys to a long-term imprisonment. If they weren't terrorists before, they certainly could be now."
Last year, in two landmark decisions, the Supreme Court rejected the administration's detention policy. The Court held that the detainees' claims that they were detained for over two years without charge and without access to counsel "unquestionably describe custody in violation of the Constitution, or laws or treaties of the United States."
The Court also held that an American citizen held as an enemy combatant must be told the basis for his detention and have a fair opportunity to challenge the Government's claims. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for the majority: "A state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens."
You would think that would be obvious, wouldn't you? But yet, this administration, in this war, has viewed it much differently.
I had hoped the Supreme Court decision would change the administration policy. Unfortunately, the administration has resisted complying with the Supreme Court's decision.
The administration acknowledges detainees can challenge their detention in court, but it still claims that once they get to court, they have no legal rights. In other words, the administration believes a detainee can get to the courthouse door but cannot come inside.
A federal court has already held the administration has failed to comply with the Supreme Court's rulings. The court concluded that the detainees do have legal rights, and the administration's policies "deprive the detainees of sufficient notice of the factual bases for their detention and deny them a fair opportunity to challenge their incarceration."
The administration also established a new interrogation policy that allows cruel and inhuman interrogation techniques.
Remember what Secretary of State Colin Powell said? It is not a matter of following the law because we said we would, it is a matter of how our troops will be treated in the future. That is something often overlooked here. If we want standards of civilized conduct to be applied to Americans captured in a warlike situation, we have to extend the same manner and type of treatment to those whom we detain, our prisoners.
Secretary Rumsfeld approved numerous abusive interrogation tactics against prisoners in Guantanamo. The Red Cross concluded that the use of those methods was "a form of torture."
The United States, which each year issues a human rights report, holding the world accountable for outrageous conduct, is engaged in the same outrageous conduct when it comes to these prisoners.
Numerous FBI agents who observed interrogations at Guantanamo Bay complained to their supervisors. In one email that has been made public, an FBI agent complained that interrogators were using "torture techniques."
That phrase did not come from a reporter or politician. It came from an FBI agent describing what Americans were doing to these prisoners.
With no input from Congress, the administration set aside our treaty obligations and secretly created new rules for detention and interrogation. They claim the courts have no right to review these rules. But under our Constitution, it is Congress's job to make the laws, and the court's job to judge whether they are constitutional.
This administration wants all the power: legislator, executive, and judge. Our Founding Fathers were warned us about the dangers of the executive branch violating the separation of powers during wartime. James Madison wrote: "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
Other presidents have overreached during times of war, claiming legislative powers, but the courts have reined them back in. During the Korean war, President Truman, faced with a steel strike, issued an executive order to seize and operate the nation's steel mills. The Supreme Court found that the seizure was an unconstitutional infringement on the Congress's lawmaking power. Justice Hugo Black, writing for the majority, said: "The Constitution is neither silent nor equivocal about who shall make the laws which the President is to execute . . . The Founders of this Nation entrusted the lawmaking power to the Congress alone in both good times and bad."
To win the war on terrorism, we must remain true to the principles upon which our country was founded. This administration's detention and interrogation policies are placing our troops at risk and making it harder to combat terrorism.
Former Congressman Pete Peterson of Florida, a man I call a good friend and a man I served with in the House of Representatives, is a unique individual. He is one of the most cheerful people you would ever want to meet. You would never know, when you meet him, he was an Air Force pilot taken prisoner of war in Vietnam and spent 6 1/2 years in a Vietnamese prison. Here is what he said about this issue in a letter that he sent to me. Pete Peterson wrote:
"From my 6 1/2 years of captivity in Vietnam, I know what life in a foreign prison is like. To a large degree, I credit the Geneva Conventions for my survival. . . . This is one reason the United States has led the world in upholding treaties governing the status and care of enemy prisoners: because these standards also protect us. . . . We need absolute clarity that America will continue to set the gold standard in the treatment of prisoners in wartime."
Abusive detention and interrogation policies make it much more difficult to win the support of people around the world, particularly those in the Muslim world. The war on terrorism is not a popularity contest, but anti-American sentiment breeds sympathy for anti-American terrorist organizations and makes it far easier for them to recruit young terrorists.
Polls show that Muslims have positive attitudes toward the American people and our values. However, overall, favorable ratings toward the United States and its Government are very low. This is driven largely by the negative attitudes toward the policies of this administration.
Muslims respect our values, but we must convince them that our actions reflect these values. That's why the 9/11 Commission recommended: "We should offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors."
What should we do? Imagine if the president had followed Colin Powell's advice and respected our treaty obligations. How would things have been different?
We still would have the ability to hold detainees and to interrogate them aggressively. Members of al Qaeda would not be prisoners of war. We would be able to do everything we need to do to keep our country safe. The difference is, we would not have damaged our reputation in the international community in the process.
When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here--I almost hesitate to put them in the record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:
"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."
If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime--Pol Pot or others--that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.
It is not too late. I hope we will learn from history. I hope we will change course.
The president could declare the United States will apply the Geneva Conventions to the war on terrorism. He could declare, as he should, that the United States will not, under any circumstances, subject any detainee to torture, or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. The administration could give all detainees a meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention before a neutral decision maker.
Such a change of course would dramatically improve our image and it would make us safer. I hope this administration will choose that course. If they do not, Congress must step in.
The issue debated in the press today misses the point. The issue is not about closing Guantanamo Bay. It is not a question of the address of these prisoners. It is a question of how we treat these prisoners. To close down Guantanamo and ship these prisoners off to undisclosed locations in other countries, beyond the reach of publicity, beyond the reach of any surveillance, is to give up on the most basic and fundamental commitment to justice and fairness, a commitment we made when we signed the Geneva Convention and said the United States accepts it as the law of the land, a commitment which we have made over and over again when it comes to the issue of torture. To criticize the rest of the world for using torture and to turn a blind eye to what we are doing in this war is wrong, and it is not American.
During the Civil War, President Lincoln, one of our greatest presidents, suspended habeas corpus, which gives prisoners the right to challenge their detention. The Supreme Court stood up to the president and said prisoners have the right to judicial review even during war.
Let me read what that Court said:
"The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions could be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism."
Mr. President, those words still ring true today. The Constitution is a law for this administration, equally in war and in peace. If the Constitution could withstand the Civil War, when our nation was literally divided against itself, surely it will withstand the war on terrorism."
In case you don't take the time to read through the previous post, at least read this about one of the best (and republican) generals we have ever had:
Alberto Gonzales, then-White House chief counsel, recommended to the president the Geneva Convention should not apply to the war on terrorism.
Colin Powell, who was then Secretary of State, objected strenuously to Alberto Gonzales' conclusions. I give him credit. Colin Powell argued that we could effectively fight the war on terrorism and still follow the law, still comply with the Geneva Conventions. In a memo to Alberto Gonzales, Secretary Powell pointed out the Geneva Conventions would not limit our ability to question the detainees or hold them even indefinitely. He pointed out that under Geneva Conventions, members of al Qaeda and other terrorists would not be considered prisoners of war.
There is a lot of confusion about that so let me repeat it. The Geneva Conventions do not give POW status to terrorists.
In his memo to Gonzales, Secretary Powell went on to say setting aside the Geneva Conventions "will reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice . . . and undermine the protections of the law of war for our own troops . . . It will undermine public support among critical allies, making military cooperation more difficult to sustain."
When you look at the negative publicity about Guantanamo, Secretary Colin Powell was prophetic.
Unfortunately, the president rejected Secretary Powell's wise counsel, and instead accepted Alberto Gonzales' recommendation, issuing a memo setting aside the Geneva Conventions and concluding that we needed "new thinking in the law of war."
A Majority Wants A Torture Probe
That's the bottom line from the Research 2000 poll, with 31 percent wanting an independent panel, 21 percent wanting a criminal probe and 22 percent wanting neither. Independents seem notably in favor of further investigation. The notion that maintaining the ban on torture - a key feature of Reagan Republicanism - is now a function of being on the hard left is merely an indication of how far to the authoritarian right the GOP has now gone. I remember when the first association with the right was freedom and limited government. Ha!
First they tortured in ticking time bomb cases but I didn't mind because it was a clear and imminent danger.
Second they tortured "slow-fuse" high value detainees and I didn't mind, because you never know what might happen.
Third they tortured Iraqi and Afghan prisoners who weren't high value, but who might have had useful information, and I didn't mind, because they were acting in good faith.
Fourth they tortured prisoners to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam, and I didn't mind, because surely there must have been such a connection.
Finally, they came to torture me, and nobody cared, because if I was being tortured, I obviously deserved to be tortured, and, as Peggy Noonan says, some things are just mysterious and it's best to just keep on walking.
I believe that the best way to restore the consistency and attractiveness of the conservative movement is for modern conservatism to return to its roots of skepticism toward governmental actions. This involves confidence in the capacity of individuals to make decisions not only in their own interests, but also usually in the interests of society at large. Such a shift in attitudes would require more flexible approaches toward hot button issues like gays in the military, gay marriage, abortions, cell stem research, and toward many other issues of this type. It will not be easy for the Republican Party to emerge from the doldrums if it cannot embrace such a consistently skeptical view of government.
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