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By Kate, 16 June 2009

This is an excellent article in the L.A. Times about us. My favorite line is:

” ‘Secret,’ ” author Mark Danner has observed in the New York Review of Books, “has become an oddly complex word.” It refers not to things we don’t know but to things we won’t admit to seeing.

All I read about every day at my job is torture, and it is painful & disturbing. But, is torture really the biggest problem? The article is short. Please read it below.

Torture, the painful truth

It may be a blow to our self-image, but torture has been part of the American way for decades.

By Ben Ehrenreich
June 15, 2009

Perhaps we protest too much. Torture, after all, is a venerable American tradition. If not quite as homespun as apple pie or lynching, it is at least as old as our imperial aspirations. We were waterboarding captives in one of our earliest wars of occupation, the Philippine-American War, which cost as many as 1 million civilian lives. In 1902, Teddy Roosevelt himself wrote with laconic praise of “the old Filipino method.”

Other techniques, crude or sophisticated, have filled the war bag since. CIA interrogation manuals from the 1960s, which lay out the basic stress-position and sleep- and sensory-deprivation techniques later applied at Bagram and Guantanamo, have been public since 1997. Despite our protestations, we have little to be surprised about. The Bush administration’s great act of hubris was not to allow torture — that was nothing new — but to attempt to shelter it within the law. Now, when President Obama vows that “the United States does not torture” and spars with the former vice president over details, he crosses his fingers behind his back and saves himself a loophole. Via “extraordinary rendition” — a Clinton administration innovation — our government is still free to outsource torture and claim it doesn’t know. The Obama administration has been relying increasingly on foreign intelligence services to detain and interrogate our suspects for us. Our hands, in a way, are clean

Yet as more classified documents dribble into the headlines, we hold tight to our outrage. The scandal has been slowly breaking for five full years (I wrote about the abuse of detainees in these pages in April 2004), but still we claim not to recognize ourselves. Despite hundreds of front-page stories, we pretend we didn’t know, that it was all somehow kept secret from us. ” ‘Secret,’ ” author Mark Danner has observed in the New York Review of Books, “has become an oddly complex word.” It refers not to things we don’t know but to things we won’t admit to seeing. This blindness serves a function. By declaring torture anomalous, by pushing it once again to the margins of legality, we can preserve a vision of U.S. military power — and of American empire — that is essentially benevolent.

That vision — of our nation’s messianic role, its unique destiny to shower the world with freedom and democracy — has for more than a century been at the root of our self-image. Even when we know better, we are loath to let it go, even when we understand that those showers often take the form of 500-pound bombs and that self-determination is not something that can be bestowed at gunpoint. Maintaining military and economic hegemony over the planet remains an inherently bloody affair. Seen from the other side, empire is a synonym for subjugation, and hence for violence on a massive scale.

You don’t have to be Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to find our self-regard wanting. All that’s required is minimal attention to the fates suffered by the citizens of the nations to which we are currently delivering democracy. Take the residents of the Bala Baluk district of Afghanistan’s western Farah province, where, on the evening of May 6, U.S. airstrikes killed either 147 or 20 to 30 civilians, depending whether you prefer to believe, respectively, the people bombed or the ones who bombed them. Survivors described extended families wiped out, a nightmare landscape littered with human limbs. Being waterboarded 183 times suddenly doesn’t sound so bad.

That bombing was hardly extraordinary. You may remember the 37 civilians killed outside Kandahar last Nov. 4, the 90 killed near Herat on Aug. 22, the 47 killed in Nangarhar province on July 6 or the 15 killed in Nuristan two days earlier. If not, don’t blame yourself. Unless the body count approaches 100, these kinds of deaths barely merit a word on CNN’s crawl.

And as our war spreads into Pakistan, such incidents are on the rise. Missiles launched from unmanned drones have killed 700 civilians in Pakistan since 2006 and, we are assured, 14 Al Qaeda leaders. (Obama has been drastically increasing the number of drone strikes, which Leon Panetta, his CIA director, has called “the only game in town.”) Meanwhile, back in Iraq, one of the more moderate estimates of the civilian death toll hovers near 100,000. Doesn’t it seem odd that it’s only torture that appalls us?

As the deaths mount, we will continue to beat our breasts about the treatment of detainees. The outcry is not unjustified. My point is not to relativize torture: We should not torture anyone. But we do, and have done so, both directly and with the help of client states, for many years. Just as in war after war, the alleged costs of our well-being have been borne by people we will never see, most of them noncombatants.

This is the price of global sovereignty, of being, in Colin Powell’s words, “the biggest bully on the block.” President Bush and Dick Cheney knew this, and they were unapologetic. Obama knows it too, but he has worked hard to let us believe otherwise, to patch up the tattered fantasy that we are the country we imagine ourselves to be.

Our outrage over torture, like the president’s rhetoric, lets us maintain the belief that we had innocence to lose. It allows us to deny the everyday violence of empire and to forget the many thousands of lives that we continue to sacrifice for something that we persist in calling freedom. I don’t mean that we should be less outraged, but more, and more broadly. The rest of the world cannot afford our good conscience.

Ben Ehrenreich is the author of the novel “The Suitors” and a fellow of the Horizon Institute.

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By Kate, 5 May 2009

This is an interesting editorial from the Salt Lake Tribune. I included the whole article in the post, but you can also find it on the Tribune website. I have been thinking a lot about what it means to be a professional & hold the power you do with such an “advanced” degree. I have also been thinking about the pact that members of the American Psychological Association made to not participate in torture as a profession & how lawyers (or young, idealistic law students) should make a similar pact. A Hippocratic Oath for the legal profession.

Thoughts?

By David R. Irvine

An overheard conversation among several women at a local deli: “I can’t believe this country elected Obama as president; it must be a sign of the end times when the Constitution will hang by a thread.” The irony of this uniquely Utah political thread about church elders saving the Constitution might have shocked the lunch bunch had they read The Dark Side by Jane Mayer (Doubleday, 2008).

Reading Mayer’s disturbing book is likely to lead to the conclusion that the Constitution is more imperiled than ever; but it also reveals the troubling fingerprints of several of my fellow Mormons whose handiwork, not the Obama election, did so much to create the present crisis.

Although the decisions which put us in the grim business of torture, body-snatching, extraordinary renditions, making people disappear, indefinite confinement without charges and warrantless wiretapping were made by the president and vice president, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints served as helpful enablers. Not only did they provide the legal architecture, they provided the “scientific” patina for the plunge into the barbaric business of torture.

Take Latter-day Saint Timothy E. Flanigan, deputy White House counsel, who, along with David Addington, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, and Jim Haynes comprised the secretive “War Council” of lawyers — a self-appointed group Mayer describes as having virtually no experience in law enforcement, military service, counterterrorism or the Muslim world.

Together, they were the brain trust that devised the legal cover that Vice President Dick Cheney needed to work his will. They secretly crafted the warrantless surveillance program which allowed the National Security Agency to intercept telephone calls and e-mails to and from American citizens within the United States. They secretly devised the Bush military commissions, which were essentially kangaroo courts and legally insufficient to satisfy the minimal adjudicatory standards required under the Geneva Conventions, which, as provided by the Constitution and Congress, constitute the supreme law of the land. They secretly conspired to ignore the law and frame interrogation techniques around the methods of the Spanish Inquisition, the Soviet KGB and Chairman Mao.

Flanigan once told his LDS ward congregation that it was gratifying “to work in a White House where every day was begun with prayer.” In 2005, prior to his rejection by the Senate to be Gonzales’ deputy attorney general, Flanigan was asked whether waterboarding, mock executions, physical beatings and painful stress positions were off-limits. “[It] depends on the facts and circumstances… .” He went on: “‘Inhumane’ can’t be coherently defined.”

BYU law school graduate Jay S. Bybee was the assistant attorney general directing the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel. At the instigation of Addington and Yoo, Bybee issued official legal opinions that redefined the crime of torture to make it all but impossible to commit. Barbarity was not torture unless it created pain equal to death or organ failure. A newly-declassified Bybee memorandum lists 10 previously top-secret interrogation techniques approved for use by the CIA, including waterboarding.

Incredibly, Bybee seems to have been unaware that the United States had prosecuted waterboarding as a war crime after World War II. In 2003, before his role in authorizing U.S. torture was known, Bybee was given a lifetime judicial appointment on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Had his role in torture been known, it is unlikely he would have been confirmed.

Two devout Mormons also engineered the more grisly wet work. Because the CIA lacked personnel in 2001 with interrogation expertise, the agency turned to two psychologists, James E. Mitchell and John B. Jessen, who had worked with the Air Force’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape programs. Neither had an intelligence or interrogation background or had experience with Muslim terrorists, but, according to the FBI, they had experience in designing, testing, implementing and monitoring torture techniques that were illegal in the United States and elsewhere in the civilized world.

These two were responsible for “reverse-engineering” the SERE program — which was intended to toughen American pilots against torture (and the false confessions it had produced in the Korean War) — and they built the CIA’s surreal secret interrogation program around the same brutal coercion that had successfully forced American POWs to lie to their North Korean and Chinese captors. In other words, they assumed that the very brutality which had forced American soldiers to lie would magically force a Muslim terrorist to tell the truth, even if he had to be waterboarded 183 times.

Mitchell advised that suspects must be treated like dogs in a cage. “It’s like an experiment, when you apply electric shocks to a caged dog, after a while, he’s so diminished, he can’t resist.” The Mitchell/Jessen methodology became the basis for prisoner treatment at Guantanamo, Bagram, CIA secret prisons and Abu Ghraib. It involved isolation, sensory deprivation, disorientation, nudity, sexual humiliation, waterboarding, painful stress positions, withholding food and medical treatment, extended sleep deprivation and subjection to temperature extremes. These were used singly and, more commonly, in combination with one another.

Retired Air Force Col. Steve Kleinman, a former SERE instructor and interrogator, says of Mitchell and Jessen: “I think they have caused more harm to American national security than they’ll ever understand.”

David R. Irvine is a Salt Lake attorney and former Utah legislator residing in Bountiful. He was commissioned in the U.S. Army Reserve as a strategic intelligence officer in 1967 and retired as a brigadier general. He taught prisoner of war interrogation and military law for 18 years for the Sixth United States Army Intelligence School.