Obsidian Wings

Extraordinary Rendition

by liberal japonicus

The Guardian has a piece today about revelations about CIA extraordinary rendition network as revealed by recent court filings in upstate New York. This article (which confusingly has the same picture at the top and so could be confused with the previous one) gives more details while this companion opinion notes how the information was essentially hidden in plain sight.

This AP piece gives a bit more detail about what was revealed and how it was revealed.

I'm not sure how the case came about, but hope some of the lawyers in the commentariat might be able to point to it. I did find this European Parliament Working Paper (pdf) from 2006 on rendition flights, but it seems that the lawsuit was completely orthogonal to any questions of renditions. 

This topic is what I have always thought of as the meat and potatoes of this blog, but I'm certainly not the person to do this justice, so, absent the return of some of the folks on the left sidebar, if someone would like to do a guest post on this, please let me know at libjpn at gmail.

Barring that, I'd note a few points of intersection with recent discussions. First of all, I'd like to note my prescience in praising the Guardian earlier, which makes the score 1 correct to umpteen million wrong.

More interestingly, we've had a bit of a food fight about taxation and I wonder what the regulars would say about government "taking their stuff" to pay 

$301,113 relating to a series of flights over eight days that took the Gulfstream jet on an odyssey through Alaska, Japan, Thailand, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, tallies with the rendition of Encep Nuraman, the leader of the Indonesian terrorist organisation Jemaah Islamiyah, better known as Hambali.

or this

The Gulfstream IV executive jet was made available at a cut-rate $4,900 (about £3,000) an hour. Crew members were paid $800 a day, according to invoices submitted to the hearing. They would submit expenses claims for meals (pdf) – deli sandwiches at $19.95 a time, bottles of wine at $39.95 each – and stay in expensive hotels: $391 a head for one night's stay in Barcelona in January 2004, for example; $277 each for accommodation at Shannon on the west coast of Ireland the following August.

So, at the risk of putting the fox in the henhouse, have at it.

how do you like living in Omelas?

by fiddler

Despite eastern Virginia's steamy summers, the temperature can drop close to or below freezing at night in late fall, winter and spring. Concrete is not a good insulator against the chill in the ground, or in the air. And in a concrete cell in the brig at the Marine base in Quantico, VA, US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is being forced to go without clothing for hours at a time, including sleeping at night and for inspections.

De Nile Truly Is A River

by Gary Farber

There are many expert reporters on Egypt, obviously, and tons of scholars.  But let's start with the excellent generalist on international policy that everyone has, I hope,  been reading for many years -- and if you haven't you should start last year or whenever -- Laura Rozen. Some good news and bad news:

Earlier today, I was on a panel discussing coverage of the Egypt unrest, and someone mentioned that no one had seen it coming.

But that is not the case. Several foreign policy scholars and former officials have been urging the U.S. administration for months to prepare for the end of the Hosni Mubarak era and the instability that would accompany it.

Now that the administration has found itself scrambling the past few days to, first, try to avert a bloodbath in Egypt and more broadly, figure out what to do amid a hugely complicated power transition there with much at stake for the U.S., it's worth noting the people who have been pleading for policy attention on this issue long in advance. Chief among them, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Michele Dunne, a former NSC and State Department Policy Planning official, and the Brookings Institution's Robert Kagan, who co-chair a bipartisan working group on Egypt.

I (and others) wrote about their efforts to get the U.S. policy community to pay attention. See "W.H. pressed on Egypt democracy," from September:

One Way To Connect

by Gary Farber

ONE WAY TO CONNECT can be this:

This is America:

This is something we can do:

To Beat Back Poverty, Pay the Poor:

The city of Rio de Janeiro is infamous for the fact that one can look out from a precarious shack on a hill in a miserable favela and see practically into the window of a luxury high-rise condominium. Parts of Brazil look like southern California. Parts of it look like Haiti. Many countries display great wealth side by side with great poverty. But until recently, Brazil was the most unequal country in the world

Everything connects:

Don't Fear The Reaper

by Gary Farber

We must talk about the the War Logs of Wikileaks.

The amount of data is staggering.  Key stories abound. 

Let us start with death.

The Guardian's breakdowns include a breakdown of lethal casualties of the Iraq war.  (The New York Times approach is here; we'll get to that.)

America caused this.  It's a map of every Iraqi war-related death documented by the Coalition.

Hooray for freedom.

So Gross And Notorious An Act Of Despotism

by guest poster Gary Farber.

To bereave a man of life, or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole kingdom. But confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to gaol, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten; is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government. ...

-- 1 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 132-133 (1765)

I am not a lawyer; I'm just a guy who has cared passionately about civil liberties and our Constitution all his life, and who has read a lot of court decisions.

I'm quoting Blackstone, above, from a specific court decision, in fact: Hamdi et al. v. Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, et al. 

I'm quoting Justice Scalia quoting Blackstone, with whom Justice Stevens joined in dissenting. 

Which brings to yesterday's decision, Mohamed et al. v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

No Escape

By guest poster Gary Farber.

Prison rape jokes abound every time a heinous trial or crime is in the news. 

I don't need to repeat any: you've heard them.  Heh, heh, I'm not going to feel sorry for that mass murderer/rapist/con artist/thief, and what's coming to him.

Of course, few of us think we'll ever wind up in jail, let alone prison, and most of us won't. 

Prison rape is what happens to The Other. 

Which is where the laughing and the righteous vengeance arise: it's not so funny if you imagine yourself, or one of your loved ones, trapped in an injustice system, unjustly thrust into captivity, and subject to brutal sexual and violent abuse.

Last week, the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report: Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails Reported by Inmates, 2008-09.

As you imagine, it's not enjoyable reading. 

Dancing In The Dark

Guest post by Gary Farber.  Gary's home blog is Amygdala, and he invites you to read him there.

[Eric Martin: My friend Gary is going to be pitching in for a couple of days as I adjust to the enhanced parenting techniques that my son is submitting me too.  And yes, sleep deprivation is torture.]

On December 31, 2009, three provisions of "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001," aka the "PATRIOT Act,"  sunset and expire.

Bills to reauthorize or amend these three provisions have been moving through the Congressional Judiciary Committees in the past two months.

The three sections are:  

SEC. 206. ROVING SURVEILLANCE AUTHORITY UNDER THE FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE ACT OF 1978. Section 105(c)(2)(B) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1805(c)(2)(B)) is amended by inserting 'or in circumstances where the Court finds that the actions of the target of the application may have the effect of thwarting the identification of a specified person, such other persons,' after 'specified person'.

This is also known as "the John Doe" provision.

SEC. 215. ACCESS TO RECORDS AND OTHER ITEMS UNDER THE FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE ACT.

Also known as the section dealing with "national security letters," by which:

The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or a designee of the Director (whose rank shall be no lower than Assistant Special Agent in Charge) may make an application for an order requiring the production of any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities [....]

The third is:

SEC. 805. MATERIAL SUPPORT FOR TERRORISM.

What are these about, and why should we care?, you ask. As the ACLU explains:

The Method of Cheney's Madness

by publius

My views of Dick Cheney are hopefully clear by now.  So I'm not getting into the immorality of his torture stance.

But I don't think that "winning" the torture debate is his actual goal.  To me, the goal of his recent charm offensive is simply to kick up enough dirt to force a "draw."  That is, he wants to politicize the torture debate as much as possible -- to transform a profound debate about our country's values into just another everyday Republican/Democratic partisan squabble that makes people throw up their hands and despair of knowing "the truth."

If you've noticed, Cheney tends to pop up in the aftermath of damning evidence.  We just (re)learned, for instance, that our CIA agents murdered detainees, choked them, and threatened to rape their wives.  Normally, you would think these revelations would give pause to even the most ardent Cheney supporters.

But then Cheney comes along, and tries to reframe the whole story.  His intended audience isn't the nation as a whole, but conservatives.  He wants to make sure that they view these stories through partisan-tinted lenses.

And in this, he'll probably be successful.  Ideology is such a powerful force right now on the American Right that Cheney's strategy is probably a smart one.  I mean, just look at how thoroughly ideology has colored perceptions of end-of-life counseling, which shouldn't even be remotely controversial.  Heck, look at how thoroughly ideology is warping virtually everything these days.

And the press facilitates this process simply by reporting what Cheney said.  I'm not exactly blaming them for this -- he is the former Vice President, and you have to quote him.  But the mere fact of quoting his lines and airing his attacks helps trigger the ideological defense mechanism among conservatives.  They naturally want to rally to their "team's" side when they perceive that the hated Dems are attacking for political reasons.

In short, Cheney wants to transform what should a broad consensus against torture into a "he said/she said" partisan squabble.  And if most conservative blogs are any guide, he's probably been successful.

[UPDATE 3:00 -- Jonathan Bernstein, who recently started a new blog, has some additional thoughts.  Specifically, he argues that granting pardons might break the partisan/ideological impasse (he actually has a 3-part series on this).  Not sure I agree, but welcome to the Internets!]

Post hoc ergo propter hoc: Torture edition

By Lindsay Beyerstein

Washington Post reporters Peter Finn, Joby Warrick, and Julie Tate lend credence Dick Cheney's fallacious argument that because Khalid Sheik Mohammed began cooperating with U.S. authorities after he was tortured, torture made him cooperate.

The story is based the reminiscences of unnamed intelligence officers who observed Mohammed in 2005 and 2006. They say that he'd evolved from defiance to enthusiastic cooperation. But it's not clear whether any of these anonymous officials watched the metamorphosis from the beginning. The story seems to imply that they showed up 2 or 3 years after he started cooperating. In which case, why should we trust their hunches about what turned the prisoner?

And if they were around for the torture, how much stock should we put in anonymous anecdotes from people who might be facing criminal charges? Of course they're going to say that the program was dazzlingly effective. At this point, good PR is their best chance of staying free and employed.

The WaPo's sources claim to have observed Mohammed directly. Surely, only a handful of people would have been allowed access to the U.S.'s top terror detainee. Chances are, anyone who got that close has a vested interest in presenting the program in the most flattering light. For all we know, the WaPo interviewed Khalid Sheik Mohammed's torturers. If the reporters grappled with this potential conflict of interest, they don't let on. 

Cheney and his allies stress that KSM only started talking after he was waterboarded. The thing is, the CIA waterboarded him as soon as they got their hands on him--183 times during his first month of captivity.  We're supposed to believe that the hundred-and-eighty-third time was the charm? Good thing there was no ticking bomb. 

With no control group, we have no way of knowing whether KSM broke any faster than he would have with traditional rapport-based interrogation tactics. For all we know, torture actually prolonged the process. Torture can harden the victim's resolve to resist the torturer.

Note that torture defenders aren't even trying to argue that KSM gave up valuable information while he was actually being tortured. (He falsely confessed to all kinds of crazy stuff including the murder of Daniel Pearl.) You might think this is evidence against the efficacy of torture. But here's where the Cheney faction does a bit of logical jujitsu: They point to the fact that KSM started talking after he was waterboarded. So, the waterboarding must have softened him up. The more parsimonious hypothesis is that once U.S. stopped torturing the prisoner, the real work of interrogation could begin.

"When I was in Iraq, the few times I saw people use harsh methods [in Iraq in 2006], it was always counterproductive,” explained veteran interrogator Matthew Alexander, author of 'How To Break a Terrorist,' “the person just hunkered down, they were expecting us to do that, and they just shut up. And then I’d have to send somebody in, build back up rapport, reverse that process, and it would take us longer to get information.”

Interestingly, the anecdotes from the anonymous officials who observed KSM suggest that his captors got their best information by exploiting the his intellectual vanity, not by beating confessions out of him.

We learn that KSM's captors shrewdly gave him a blackboard and let him "lecture" CIA agents about terrorism while they took notes. A lot of crazy claims have been made about the efficacy of torture, but no one's going to claim that waterboarding put KSM in the mood to deliver his "Advanced Topics in al Qaeda" talk. That gambit was the result of an astute interrogator who got to know the prisoner well enough to exploit his weaknesses.

[x-post at Majikthise]

Update: Marcy Wheeler notes that after the CIA stopped torturing KSM, they went back to rapport-based interrogation. The WaPo doesn't mention that critical and widely reported fact, of course.