Where's the Outrage?

I’ve become somewhat overwhelmed by what my country, the United States, has done. While I’m still struggling with the definition of “torture,” I believe that some abuse (most of the things that I’ve read) can be classified as torture. We have a long history in our country of delineating good treatment from bad treatment of detainees (prisoners or soldiers).

I’ve come across a story of Khaled el-Masri (I found the story in Jane Mayer’s book, the Dark Side. Other accounts of this tale can be found here and here.)  El-Masri was a Muslim of Lebanese descent but became a German citizen in 2003. He had a German passport. Going across from Macedonia into Serbia for a vacation from the family, he was stopped at a checkpoint. For 13 days he was held by Macedonian authorities. He was not allowed to call his family. He was not allowed access to a lawyer. As it turns out, he has the exact same name as a terrorist the United States government was looking for. As a twist of fate, this happened around the holidays so the Macedonian authorities had difficulty verifying the new German passport.

Almost immediately the CIA was alerted of his capture. The CIA wanted him transferred to a prison in Afghanistan. So, basically we have a man who was stopped at a checkpoint. He is arrested and detained for 13 days without Macedonian authorities verifying that the redesigned passport was indeed an official German passport. United States officials, the CIA, desperately wanted to talk with this man.

After 13 days, El-Masri believed that he was going to be released. He was taken to the airport, where he was blindfolded and led into a small room. In this room, he was stripped of all his clothes, photographed and beaten. Earplugs were placed in his ears, a hood is thrown over his head and he was thrown on a jet, tranquilized and sent to Afghanistan. Over the next 149 days, a debate raged within the CIA. The head of the counterterrorism division believed that he, el-Masri, was in fact a terrorist, even though she has never seen or spoken with this man. CIA agents, in Afghanistan and at Langley, argue that they have no evidence against him. In Afghanistan, el-Masri was thrown in a cold dank cell. The water was foul and the food was even worse. He developed chronic diarrhea. He lost some 40 to 50 pounds. He was given frequent enemas.  According to reports, he was threatened with death. “You’re in a country where no one knows about you. There is no rule of law. If you die, you will be buried here. No one will ever know.”

After 149 days, El-Masri was released as only the CIA could do it. There is no explanation. He was simply flown to Albania. He was driven down the long winding road and given back his possessions, told to walk and not look back. He was met by three men who gave him some food and took him to the Tirana airport. From there he was flown home.

I have a problem understanding how you can whisk somebody away from their family for almost five months without one shred of evidence. I find this completely mind-boggling, nauseating and stupid.  One CIA officer call the program of rendition – Kidnap, Inc.

Tags: Bush Administration, Security, Torture by ecthompson
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What a sack of crap!! Glenn Beck has always been, in my opinion, out there. He has come up with some of the craziest, most unsubstantiated stuff that anybody on major network TV has ever afflicted on the American people. But this list is simply a lie for no particular reason. He wanted to portray the “liberals” of The View as elitist. He therefore made up the story. The women on the show call him on it. I congratulate the women of The View.

Keith Olbermann has a summary in his Worst Persons in the World. Take a look:

Tags: Countdown, Media, Party Politics by ecthompson
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Today, President Barack Obama delivered a fantastic speech on national security.

Watch it here:

Words from Obama’s speech given today:

After 9/11, we knew that we had entered a new era — that enemies who did not abide by any law of war would present new challenges to our application of the law; that our government would need new tools to protect the American people, and that these tools would have to allow us to prevent attacks instead of simply prosecuting those who try to carry them out.

Unfortunately, faced with an uncertain threat, our government made a series of hasty decisions.  I believe that many of these decisions were motivated by a sincere desire to protect the American people.  But I also believe that all too often our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight; that all too often our government trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions.  Instead of strategically applying our power and our principles, too often we set those principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford.  And during this season of fear, too many of us — Democrats and Republicans, politicians, journalists, and citizens — fell silent.

In other words, we went off course.  And this is not my assessment alone.  It was an assessment that was shared by the American people who nominated candidates for President from both major parties who, despite our many differences, called for a new approach — one that rejected torture and one that recognized the imperative of closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Now let me be clear:  We are indeed at war with al Qaeda and its affiliates.  We do need to update our institutions to deal with this threat.  But we must do so with an abiding confidence in the rule of law and due process; in checks and balances and accountability.  For reasons that I will explain, the decisions that were made over the last eight years established an ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism that was neither effective nor sustainable — a framework that failed to rely on our legal traditions and time-tested institutions, and that failed to use our values as a compass.  And that’s why I took several steps upon taking office to better protect the American people.

First, I banned the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques by the United States of America.  (Applause.)

I know some have argued that brutal methods like waterboarding were necessary to keep us safe.  I could not disagree more.  As Commander-in-Chief, I see the intelligence.  I bear the responsibility for keeping this country safe.  And I categorically reject the assertion that these are the most effective means of interrogation.  (Applause.)  What’s more, they undermine the rule of law.  They alienate us in the world.  They serve as a recruitment tool for terrorists, and increase the will of our enemies to fight us, while decreasing the will of others to work with America.  They risk the lives of our troops by making it less likely that others will surrender to them in battle, and more likely that Americans will be mistreated if they are captured.  In short, they did not advance our war and counterterrorism efforts — they undermined them, and that is why I ended them once and for all.  (Applause.)  (more…)

Tags: Obama administration, Security by ecthompson
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Diane Sawyer has done her homework. Instead of simply accepting the garbage that Newt Gingrich was feeding the American public, she had real examples of Republicans calling the CIA liars.

From TP:

This morning, former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich went on ABC’s Good Morning America and called on Democrats to pressure Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to resign her position as Speaker. He claimed that she has “disqualified herself” for the leadership spot, because “if I were a person trying to defend this country, I’d have very little confidence that the Speaker of the House had any regard for what we were doing.”

Host Diane Sawyer challenged Gingrich, noting that he never criticized Rep. Peter Hoekstra’s (R-MI) repeated criticism of the agency, including this statement in 2007: “We cannot have an intelligence community that covers up what it does and then lies to Congress.” Gingrich struggled uncomfortably and repeatedly attempted to change the subject:

GINGRICH: Well, in that case, he’s writing a specific letter asking them to change something they were doing. He did not say the CIA routinely lies —

SAWYER: “Lies,” he said —

GINGRICH: — to the Congress.

SAWYER: Well, he says “lies.” He says “what it does and then lies to Congress.”

GINGRICH: And I think they actually had to come back and testify.

But more hypocritical than his silence in response to Hoekstra’s criticisms of the CIA is the fact that in 2007 Gingrich himself accused the CIA, among other U.S. intelligence agencies, of not just misleading Congress but actively undermining the President of the United States. In response to the release of the 2007 Iran National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) — which concluded that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program — Gingrich said that he believed the NIE and its authors were “damaging to our own national security”:

[The NIE] is so professionally unworthy, so intellectually indefensible and so fundamentally misleading that it is damaging to our national security.

The NIE appears to be a deliberate attempt to undermine the policies of President Bush by members of his own government by suggesting that Iran no longer poses a serious threat to U.S. national security because we apparently have credible reports that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

More from Think Progress.

Tags: Bush Administration, Obama administration, Party Politics by ecthompson
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Torture has been very difficult for me to get my arms around. In spite of the relatively clear definitions of torture there are these odd words that appear in the definition like “prolonged.” How long is prolonged? And, as a friend of mine pointed out, being put in jail will surely cause mental suffering. Is that torture? I guess my answer is that society decides what is torture and what isn’t. We’ve decided that it is not acceptable to slap prisoners.

One of the problems in this “war on terror” is that we allowed the Bush administration to label terrorists as enemy combatants. We were allowed to dehumanize people who were captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Once you dehumanize someone, it becomes much easier to torture.

If I have some time later on this afternoon, I hope to provide more clarity. Scott Horton, who has been on my radio show several times, has an excellent post on one of the extremes of torture –

In a recent television appearance, one of the nation’s foremost retired military leaders, General Barry McCaffrey, said: “We should never, as a policy, maltreat people under our control, detainees. We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A.” The fact of dozens of homicides is frankly acknowledged in discussions with military and intelligence experts, but the press seems to regard the subject as taboo.

Writing at the Daily Beast, John Sifton takes us on a tour of the deaths that resulted from the Bush Administration’s torture policies. The Bush Justice Department knew about these homicides and did nothing. Here’s one that resulted from a formally approved practice that Capt. Ian Fishback described as “smoking a PUC,” a person under control, or prisoner:

in December 2003, a 44-year-old Iraqi man named Abu Malik Kenami died in a U.S. detention facility in Mosul, Iraq. As reported by Human Rights First, U.S. military personnel who examined Kenami when he first arrived at the facility determined that he had no preexisting medical conditions. Once in custody, as a disciplinary measure for talking, Kenami was forced to perform extreme amounts of exercise—a technique used across Afghanistan and Iraq. Then his hands were bound behind his back with plastic handcuffs, he was hooded, and forced to lie in an overcrowded cell. Kenami was found dead the morning after his arrest, still bound and hooded. No autopsy was conducted; no official cause of death was determined. After the Abu Ghraib scandal, a review of Kenami’s death was launched, and Army reviewers criticized the initial criminal investigation for failing to conduct an autopsy; interview interrogators, medics, or detainees present at the scene of the death; and collect physical evidence. To date, however, the Army has taken no known action in the case.

more of Scott’s post.

Tags: Bush Administration, Torture by ecthompson
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