One Small Step Away From Barbarity

by hilzoy

From ABCNews:

"The controversial interrogation technique known as water-boarding, in which a suspect has water poured over his mouth and nose to stimulate a drowning reflex, has been banned by CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden, current and former CIA officials tell ABCNews.com. (Image above is an ABC News graphic.)

The officials say Hayden made the decision at the recommendation of his deputy, Steve Kappes, and received approval from the White House to remove water-boarding from the list of approved interrogation techniques first authorized by a presidential finding in 2002.

The officials say the decision was made sometime last year but has never been publicly disclosed. (...)

While new legislation reportedly gave the CIA the leeway to use water-boarding, current and former CIA officials said Gen. Hayden decided to take it off the list of about six "enhanced interrogation techniques."

While welcoming the move, some critics say the CIA did not go far enough.

"I can say it's a good thing, but the fact remains that the entire program is illegal," John Sifton of Human Rights Watch told ABCNews.com.

As a result of the decision, officials say, the most extreme techniques left available to CIA interrogators would be what is termed "longtime standing," which includes exhaustion and sleep deprivation with prisoners forced to stand, handcuffed with their feet shackled to the floor."

As Marty Lederman notes, waterboarding is plainly illegal, and it's plainly torture. As I see it, so is "longtime standing", which our government still seems to find acceptable, for reasons best known to itself. It's a horrible thing that this should constitute progress, but it does.

But that one small step is just too much for Misha at Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, whose response is headlined 'CIA Wimps Hand Another Weapon To Al Qaeda':

"Leaving us only with the tried and true “no sugar for your tea unless you talk, Habib”, “pretty please?”, “pretty please with a cherry on top?” and “if you don’t talk right now, I shall have to ask you to talk AGAIN! Wewy wudely!” methods.

Terrorists all over the world, upon hearing the news, vowed to kill themselves rather than be taken captive. “No sugar with my TEA?”, Ahmed Falafel, a terrorist with al-Qaeda in Iraq, exclaimed when he heard about it. “What ARE you Americans? ANIMALS?” He then went back to sharpening his bread knife for an upcoming beheading of a captured Iraqi kindergarten teacher."

Sigh.

Comments

[Doctor Science]

Misha is joking, right? How is it possible to even think that without being joking? No, really?

[Doctor Science]

And while we're at it, how can any human *possibly* not think "longtime standing" is torture? I can understand "it's torture but we have to do it" or "we won't call it torture wink wink nudge nudge" but I literally cannot imagine thinking that it's not, actually, torture.

[Delicious Pundit]

He's saying it as a joke (or "joke"), but such polite interrogations have worked in the past. Excerpt:

He refused to rough up prisoners and he treated them as his equal. He always had larger objectives in mind.

''Otis believed in treating prisoners very well," the late Frank Gibney, another former Navy interrogator who became a prominent journalist and author of books about Japan, wrote a few years ago in an unpublished autobiography. ''He saw the Japanese as a lay missionary sees them, good grist to be talked to and milled, made friends with and, one hopes, ultimately brought to understand the virtues of American democracy, if not Christianity."

[togolosh]

Is it wrong of me to wish that Misha should spend maybe eight hours standing barefoot on a concrete floor? It's not torture, after all.

[Incertus (Brian)]

The funny thing is that if Misha were actually held captive and tortured for information, he'd be babbling like an AM radio talk show host before the torturers even got started. His blather hides deep-seated cowardice and fear that he'll be found out.

[Jesurgislac]

Terry Karney, and come to that other professional military interrogators, have said that the eagerness to torture (besides being morally repellent) is futile: the objective in an interrogation is to make the subject give you useful information. One of the examples I remember is of the interrogator going to see the newly-captured prisoner, sat down beside him, asked what was wrong - and the prisoner admits that what he wants more than anything is to call his wife, tell her where he is, check that everyone else in the family is alive. So the interrogator takes out his mobile phone, asks the prisoner for the phone number, dials it, and hands the phone to the prisoner, and the prisoner gets to talk to his wife for half an hour.

After which, the interrogator said, as far as the prisoner was concerned, the interrogator was his best friend and he wanted to do anything he could for him.

Pro-torture types usually spend their time arguing that it's important to torture prisoners because otherwise how do you know you've got all the information you want? Or they reach for the comic-book ticking timebomb justification. The analogy I used on Slacktivist once was that it's like boiling a pure black cat alive to obtain the magic bone of invisibility - it's both morally reprehensible and completely useless.

[Catsy]

Is there some reason why civilized human beings with even a shred of a moral center even pay attention to Misha, let alone link to him? I excommunicated him from my awareness a couple years ago and have been much happier since.

He's an amoral savage who would happily, and for the fun of it, drop to the level of the terrorists he claims to hate. Don't expand his audience.

[cleek]

the only time a person should link to Misha is in response to someone claiming lefty blogs are the real wretched hives of scum and villainy.

[john miller]

Forget Misha for a moment, although his type of thinking is not THAT much of an abnormality in this country.

It doesn't matter to those folks if something is calle dtorture or not. They actively want us to torture and there is nothing that they would place off limits.

For the rest the important question is , upon hearing of a particular type of treatment, what would they call it if one of our troops were subjected to that treatment.

By my account, everything remaining on that list would be called, by the majoriy of Americans, torture.

[Model 62]

It's a horrible thing that this should constitute progress, but it does.

I wouldn't call it progress. This policy change is the result of one man's whim. The next guy could undo it just as quickly (and just as quietly).

Laws not men is the American Way. Add that to the list of Bushwrecks the next President will have to fix.

[Ugh]

I was reading the post and was going to spoof that right wingers along the lines of "CIA surrenders to terrorists!!11!!!!", but then I saw that no spoof was required.

[nabalzbbfr]

Hopefully it means that they will switch to using liquids different from water.

[russell]

Hopefully it means that they will switch to using liquids different from water.

It's time to draw a nice, bright line in the sand. Or, more correctly, it's time to recognize that a nice, bright line has been drawn, and we all have to decide which side of that line we are on.

You reject torture, or you don't.
You insist on the rule of law, or you don't.
You demand responsible, transparent, accountable governance, or you don't.

There's no room any more for compromise, or for niggling debate about where the line is. We all know where the line is, and we all know exactly what has been going on in this country for the last six years.

We're currently ruled by people with no respect for the law, who feel no sense of responsibility for their actions, who resist every attempt to call them to account, and who are perfectly happy to destroy human beings to further their own ends.

They're supported by people for whom their blatant assertion of authority is their greatest appeal.

Had enough? I have.

Pick which side of the line you want to be on. Whichever side you pick, embrace it, because there's no room anymore for compromise. This crap has gone too far.

Thanks -

[john miller]

Russell, I agree.

Actually, as I mentioned on TIO, what it ultimately comes down to is the question of whether or not the "ends justify the means."

There is a significant protion of this country that believes that no matter how heinous the means, they are justified to reach a certain end.

Of course, for many, the end is not really defined or represents something that is not really meaning any ends.

Probably the biggest example are those that believe that unless we ustilize these means, this country will end up being ruled by Islamofascists. Of course, that is not even remotely possible (and I think many of them realize it) but preventing this takeover provides an excuse to be macho.

[Hartmut]

"ends justify means" does not cover everything. I guess that a non-negligible part of the torturing had no specific ends but came from a "because we can" mentality (let's leave sadists taking pleasure out of torturing aside for the moment).

[RepubAnon]

Despite all the evidence that torture does not yield a high-enough percentage of useful information to make it useful, and that non-abusive methods result in higher-quality intelligence, they persist in their odd belief that we need to be more evil and inhumane than our enemies in order to win.

I rather expect the wingnuts see this as a means to start sliding down a slippery slope toward their dream of a return to the "third degree" for police questioning suspects in the US. Get rid of those pesky Miranda rights, and go back to beating confessions out of suspects. Sure, the person confessing may be innocent of that crime - but they were probably guilty of something they weren't caught for anyway - or were planning on committing a crime in the future...

[Hartmut]

addition to my post above:
The wandering troll nabalzbbfr is a good example of that, I think. Its utterings here and in other places seem to indicate quite a disregard for effectiveness in favor of inflicting unpleasantness for its own sake, i.e. given the choice between effective means and those that require severe maltreatment nabalzbbfr will instinctively choose the latter, if its thoughts represents its posts. This apart from promoting on occasion preemptive genocide and (by implication) the murder of about 2/3 of the US population.

[Gary Farber]

"I rather expect the wingnuts see this as a means to start sliding down a slippery slope toward their dream of a return to the 'third degree' for police questioning suspects in the US. Get rid of those pesky Miranda rights, and go back to beating confessions out of suspects."

Um, beating suspects into confessions happens every day in the U.S., in every state. There's more than one happening right this moment.

No dream necessary; just SOP police work. It's perfectly easy to beat someone in a way that leaves no marks, and police departments have more than a century of experience.

Writing as if this wasn't going on all over at this very moment is very very weird. I mean, even tv shows (Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, Homicide: Life On The Street, The Shield, The Wire, etc., etc., etc.) have made no secret of it for decades.

Dream? It's a fantasy/dream to write as if this wasn't perfectly normal police behavior.

Hell, you can find plenty of public video of public police beatings: L.A., NYC, pick a large city.

[Lewis Carroll]

I think it's worth mentioning that despite its horrendous inherent qualities, torture pales in comparison to other methods that we've used in the past:

"Through 16 months of detention and trial, Ressam stayed true to his training and maintained the secrets of his jihad. But after his conviction, he was shaky — isolated from family and his Islamist brothers, and still taking medicine for the malaria he had caught in the Afghanistan camps.

He grew attached to his lawyers, in particular to Oliver, a small, light-haired woman fluent in French. He would not shake hands with her, as he did with his male lawyers, but he spoke to her gently.

Her terrorist client, Oliver said, was "very sweet. Very polite."

Ressam confided to his lawyers that he had found the trial surprisingly fair. The judge had treated him respectfully. The experience was not at all what he expected of the country he had been taught to hate.

Ressam also told Oliver he was unsure of the morality of his plan to massacre innocent holiday travelers. He said he needed to study the Quran to see if he had misunderstood passages.

So when Justice Department lawyers offered a deal to reduce his sentence, Ressam was ready to listen. (my emphasis) The terms were simple: His minimum sentence would be cut in half, to 27 years. In return, he had to testify against an associate, Mokhtar Haouari, and others. He had to reveal all he knew about al-Qaida — plots, training, tactics.

Ahmed Ressam became a terrorist turncoat.

On May 10, 2001, FBI Agent Fred Humphries questioned Ressam, the first of dozens of interviews. The information was invaluable — and terrifying. He explained how he was recruited in Montreal and funneled into the bin Laden camps. He talked in detail about training with Taliban-supplied weapons. He informed on Abu Zubaydah, Abu Doha and other top al-Qaida operatives. He provided the names of jihad fighters he had met in the camps. He revealed that he had contemplated blowing up an FBI office and the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C.

He also confirmed one of the greatest fears of the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies: The camps had trained thousands of men in chemical warfare.

Ressam told Humphries about putting on a gas mask, then watching as an instructor put a small dog in a box. The man added a small amount of cyanide and sulfuric acid, creating poison gas. The dog convulsed and died.

If you place this cyanide gas box near the air intake of an office building, the instructor had said, many people can be killed."

http://corrente.blogspot.com/search?q=Ahmed+Ressam

[Lewis Carroll]

I think it's worth mentioning that despite its horrendous inherent qualities, torture pales in comparison to other methods that we've used in the past:

"Through 16 months of detention and trial, Ressam stayed true to his training and maintained the secrets of his jihad. But after his conviction, he was shaky — isolated from family and his Islamist brothers, and still taking medicine for the malaria he had caught in the Afghanistan camps.

He grew attached to his lawyers, in particular to Oliver, a small, light-haired woman fluent in French. He would not shake hands with her, as he did with his male lawyers, but he spoke to her gently.

Her terrorist client, Oliver said, was "very sweet. Very polite."

Ressam confided to his lawyers that he had found the trial surprisingly fair. The judge had treated him respectfully. The experience was not at all what he expected of the country he had been taught to hate.

Ressam also told Oliver he was unsure of the morality of his plan to massacre innocent holiday travelers. He said he needed to study the Quran to see if he had misunderstood passages.

So when Justice Department lawyers offered a deal to reduce his sentence, Ressam was ready to listen. (my emphasis) The terms were simple: His minimum sentence would be cut in half, to 27 years. In return, he had to testify against an associate, Mokhtar Haouari, and others. He had to reveal all he knew about al-Qaida — plots, training, tactics.

Ahmed Ressam became a terrorist turncoat.

On May 10, 2001, FBI Agent Fred Humphries questioned Ressam, the first of dozens of interviews. The information was invaluable — and terrifying. He explained how he was recruited in Montreal and funneled into the bin Laden camps. He talked in detail about training with Taliban-supplied weapons. He informed on Abu Zubaydah, Abu Doha and other top al-Qaida operatives. He provided the names of jihad fighters he had met in the camps. He revealed that he had contemplated blowing up an FBI office and the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C.

He also confirmed one of the greatest fears of the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies: The camps had trained thousands of men in chemical warfare.

Ressam told Humphries about putting on a gas mask, then watching as an instructor put a small dog in a box. The man added a small amount of cyanide and sulfuric acid, creating poison gas. The dog convulsed and died.

If you place this cyanide gas box near the air intake of an office building, the instructor had said, many people can be killed."

http://corrente.blogspot.com/search?q=Ahmed+Ressam

[www.r10.net küresel ısınmaya hayır seo yarışması]

nice shot..

[russell]

Writing as if this wasn't going on all over at this very moment is very very weird.

Everybody knows it goes on.

What I want is some kind of recognition or acknowledgement that it shouldn't go on. What we get instead are promises of double the Gitmo, and folks lap it up.

When it goes on, the folks who are beaten should have access to some kind of remedy. The folks who do the beating should be held accountable. If the giving of beatings is enshrined in policy, the existence of that policy should be something we can discover and change.

I'm not bothered by television shows. I'm bothered by the fact that the nominal removal of waterboarding as an approved and sanctioned form of interrogation is supposed to be some kind of achievement. No slight intended toward hilzoy's original post.

The only achievement it represents is the discovery of how far we've gone wrong.

I'm sick of feeling like the nation is being run by the freaking mafia. Aren't you?

Thanks -

[Bruce Moomaw]

Actually, jokes about torture are quite common among the 101st Fighting Keyboarders. "Ace of Spades" and Tom Maguire (sometime regarded as one of the blogworld's more "intellectual" rightists)are, for instance, very fond of it. And note that Misha's last comment indicates that he thinks it should be used in ROUTINE military interrogations. (Virtually none of these twits is willing to unbend even to the point of saying that torture should be used only in extreme-emergency situations, and allowed only with the permission of multiple judges on a review board, as opposed to allowing one man to order it all by himself.)

[Nell]

Fine, fine, we're morally superior to Misha the Rotweiler.

Big. Fat. Deal.

Until the Democratic majority in the House and Senate make an effort to repeal the Military Commissions Act, we all own this horrific state of affairs. Congress legally blessed arbitrary, indefinite detention without due process and the cruelty that is the inevitable result of giving human beings power over other human beings in conditions of secrecy and impunity.

[russell]

Until the Democratic majority in the House and Senate make an effort to repeal the Military Commissions Act, we all own this horrific state of affairs.

Right on.

On my hard drive is a list of every Democrat who voted for the MCA. I saved it when that bill passed, so I could remember who voted yea, and who voted nay.

Every House member on that list will be running for re-election in '08. Something like a third of the Senators will as well.

I intend to fund any primary opponent of these folks, and to tell their campaigns why I am doing it.

When it costs them something, they'll get the message.

I'd be happy to send the list to anyone via email, or you can probably just google it up.

Are there any Republicans who voted against it? I'd consider giving them support, depending on their positions on other issues, and on who they were running against.

Thanks -