A War Criminal Is Convicted And Sentenced

Last month Charles Taylor was convicted on war crime charges by an international court sitting in Sierra Leone. His sentence was handed down by that court on Wednesday:

Judges at an international war crimes court have sentenced former Liberian President Charles Taylor to 50 years in prison following his landmark conviction for supporting rebels in Sierra Leone who murdered and mutilated thousands during their country's brutal civil war in return for blood diamonds.

The Special Court for Sierra Leone found Taylor guilty last month on 11 charges of aiding and abetting the rebels who went on a bloody rampage during the decade-long war that ended in 2002 with more than 50,000 dead.

In effect, the court has given the 64-year-old Taylor a life sentence. The Los Angeles Times had an article last month which details some of those charges and the effects of Taylor's complicity.

Taylor armed and supported militias, traded arms for "blood diamonds" in Sierra Leone, and allegedly used child soldiers in the 1989-96 Liberian civil war, which killed some 200,000 people. ...

Taylor, in exchange for diamonds, facilitated huge arms shipments to the rebels and offered financial support, training and a base in the Liberian capital, Monrovia.

Imagine that: a guy is tried and convicted of war crimes for facilitating a war in another country in which hundreds of thousands are killed, maimed, raped for personal aggrandizement and increased wealth. And he will actually go to prison.

Of course, none of this has any relevance to our country. I mean, oil and rare earth minerals are different than diamonds, and crazy militias are different than mercenaries and private contractors with connections to the White House. Water boarding and forcing prisoners to stand naked for hours are totally unlike rape and the terrorizing of innocents. Furthermore, our new high tech weaponry is surgically precise, not like lopping off limbs indiscriminately, which is just savagery.

Most importantly, we are not Africans. We are Americans, the beacon of hope and freedom for the rest of the world.

Excuse me while I weep.

Looking Backward

I admit that at lease part of my desire for justice is often colored by a desire for revenge, but I try to keep that emotion under control. Schadenfreude is too easy, and usually means I'm willing to lower my integrity to match that of the people whose behavior I deem unacceptably egregious. I don't always succeed, of course.

I had the mixed emotion response to this article from Germany's Neues Deutschland with respect to the war crimes perpetrated by George Bush, Dick Cheney, and many others in that administration. I hesitated a bit before deciding to select this article from several others at Watching America this weekend. Ultimately I decided to cop to my lesser angel and then discuss just why we do need justice in the formal and civilized sense of that word when it comes to issues like torture.

George W. Bush standing in the dock – many people around the world would welcome such a decision. Murat Kurnaz would especially welcome it because the German-Turkish citizen had to spend five years in Guantanamo, the prison camp in legal no-man's land where the United States warehoused terrorist suspects from all over the world after the 9/11 attacks. Many spent years in custody there without being charged with any crime, enduring inhuman conditions that included torture.

That's why Kurnaz and three other ex-prisoners have demanded Bush be subject to a criminal investigation. Charges were reportedly filed against Bush yesterday during the ex-President's visit to Canada. Several days earlier, several human rights organizations asked that charges be brought against Bush since Canada is legally bound to do so as a signatory to the United Nations Convention Against Torture. Bush is also said to have approved the arbitrary CIA kidnapping of suspected terrorists.

Many of us hoped that President Obama would at the very least decry those foul crimes committed in our names. Obviously we were disappointed when the new president who promised us "change" announced that there would be no investigations, no indictments, no trials, no open discussions of what should happen to leaders who openly and proudly flout international law and general standards of human decency. He wanted us to look forward, not backward. That's pretty much what President Gerald Ford told us when it came to an investigation into the Nixon administration's attempt to steal an election via burglary. As a result, some of the same mischief makers found their way back into public service, some of them in the Bush administration.

By refusing to hold the national leaders and those who wield the power in this country accountable for those actions which contravened the international treaties this nation is signatory to, it allows them and their successors free rein to continue such behavior. It means that they are above the law, all law. It means there is a class of people for whom constraints are neither possible nor desirable. It means the Bushes, Cheneys, Yoos, and Gonzaleses, like the Khadaffis, are untouchable until the crowds rise up and violently extract revenge.

In a sense, we are seeing that kind of justice-avoidance repeating itself today, this time in the economic arena. The people who brought us this economic disaster continue to operate in the same manner and to collect ever larger sums of money. There is no downside for their behavior. Why should they stop?

Apparently laws and codes of decent behavior are just for the little people.

Aw, No Fun At All

In one of those Good New/Bad News articles in the Los Angeles Times this morning, I learned that President Obama has kept one promise: he's reined in the CIA a little. The agency is no longer able to kidnap and then beat the crap out of detainees in order to get "information."

...Under Obama, the CIA has killed more people than it has captured, mainly through drone missile strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas. At the same time, it has stopped trying to detain or interrogate suspects caught abroad, except those captured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The CIA is out of the detention and interrogation business," said a U.S. official who is familiar with intelligence operations but was not authorized to speak publicly.

Several factors are behind the change.

Widespread criticism of Bush administration interrogation and detention policies as brutal and degrading led Obama to stop sending suspected terrorists to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Public exposure also forced the CIA to close a network of secret prisons. That left U.S. officials with no obvious place to hold new captives.

In January 2009, Obama ordered the CIA to abide by the interrogation rules of the U.S. Army Field Manual, which guides military interrogators and includes prohibitions on the use of physical force against detainees. Critics warn that Al Qaeda operatives could study the manual, which is available on the Internet, to learn how to resist its techniques, although no evidence has emerged suggesting that has happened.

Of course, this doesn't make some members of Congress very happy. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Georgia) and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Michigan) believe the CIA has been hamstrung to the nation's detriment by forcing the agency to comply with international law. No surprise there.

And the CIA also is a bit miffed, or at the very least, a little nervous, for all sorts of reasons:

...some CIA officers are spooked by a long-running criminal investigation by a Washington special prosecutor into whether CIA officers broke the law by conducting brutal interrogations of suspected terrorists during the Bush administration.

So, is the nation now in grave danger because the CIA can't torture kidnapped "detainees?"

Not hardly. The CIA is still passing along tips to other countries about would-be terrorists, and once those alleged miscreants have been picked up by, say, Indonesia, the CIA also access to information gleaned by the holding country. US agents can even sit in on the questioning.

There is a downside, however. The CIA has switched its emphasis from torture to outright killing. Instead of kidnapping, the agency has used drones to target those believed to not have the US interests at heart.

What a country.

Shame On President Obama ...

... And shame on us.

What do the UK, Poland, Lithuania, Spain, Australia, Canada have in common? All have official investigations and/or legal cases pending over their countries' role in the CIA's Bush-era programs of kidnapping and torture. One country is noticeably absent from the list: the US.

And that is a shame.

From McClatchy DC:

Arar's case illustrates what lawyers and human rights groups call a shameful trend: While U.S. courts and the Obama administration have been reluctant or unwilling to pursue the cases, countries that once backed former President George W. Bush's war on terrorism are carrying out their own investigations of the alleged U.S. torture program and the role that their governments played in it.

Judges in Great Britain, Spain, Australia, Poland and Lithuania are preparing to hear allegations that their governments helped the CIA run secret prisons on their soil or cooperated in illegal U.S. treatment of terrorism suspects. Spanish prosecutors also have filed criminal charges against six senior Bush administration officials who approved the harsh interrogation methods that detainees say were employed at U.S. military prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and other sites. ...

The trend, although it's slow-moving and involves disparate plaintiffs, forums and legal strategies, could represent the end of a reviled chapter of the U.S.-led war on terrorism, which ensnared hundreds of detainees with the clandestine cooperation of dozens of countries. Now, some of those countries, led by new governments or under pressure from their citizens, are trying to pry open those secrets.

"This is the remarkable thing: Other countries are reckoning with the legacy of the Bush administration's torture program, and meanwhile the United States is not," said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's national security program.

"That's part of why we're so concerned. The Obama administration, rather than investigate the abuses of the last eight years, has increasingly become an obstacle to accountability." [Emphasis added]

The first excuse used by the Obama administration for not examining the actions of its predecessors was that we needed to "look forward, not backward." That justification soon wore thin as in case after case the Justice Department under President Obama used the same worn out legal argument to stop cases against the government from proceeding: "government secrets." When that strategy came under fire, the emphasis shifted to the bizarre legal theory that under the Authority to Use Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress, that government body ceded not only its own authority to declare war, but the power of the judiciary to examine crimes committed by the government.

That members of the Bush administration subscribed to the Unitary President theory was no surprise. That members of the Obama administration do so as well is absolutely shocking, especially in light of then-candidate Obama's pronouncements and promises on the campaign trail. Shocking and dismaying.

The question then becomes one for the rest of us. What are we going to do about it? If we continue to do nothing, saving our ire for bailed-out banksters and safety-eschewing oil companies, then we deserve the government we have and will continue to have, regardless of the color of the ties worn by its officials. The "New American Century" will be one in which American democracy lost its soul.

Move Along, Move Along ...

...Nothing to see here.

On Sunday, McClatchy DC published a commentary written by Jameel Jaffer and Larry Siems of the American Civil Liberties Union reminding us that this country still has done nothing about the crimes committed by our government with respect to kidnapping and torturing people suspected of terrorism. Eight years later, we still blithely turn a blind eye to the whole unholy and shameful episode of our nation's breech of international law.

The authors selected August 1 for their commentary because it was on that date in 2002 that the torture of Abu Zubaydah commenced and continued throughout the month. The torturers, freed from any constraints of common decency by a memo prepared by the US government, went to work:

Throughout August, drawing from the specific menu of "techniques" the memos offered, interrogators slammed Abu Zubaydah repeatedly into walls, locked him in "confinement boxes," deprived him of sleep, shackled him naked in stress positions, and waterboarded him 82 times. They stopped waterboarding him when they finally concluded he was not concealing information — and then officials flew from Washington to Thailand and insisted on watching an eighty-third session.

Horrific? Certainly. Horrific and absolutely useless when it came to gathering information. What the CIA and its contractors got was a series of stories invented by Abu Zubaydah to stop the torture. That didn't stop our government, however. The torture techniques were used against dozens, perhaps hundreds of other "detainees," and were justified by the government as necessary for "national security." Nobody stopped the torture, and everybody who engaged in it is still strutting around free.

Today, nobody argues that Abu Zubaydah wasn't tortured. His name has disappeared from dozens of charge sheets against other detainees because the information he gave was so clearly tainted by his treatment. And yet we have done practically nothing to address the abuse that he and many others suffered, as U.S. and international laws against torture require — no prosecutions or investigations of senior officials who oversaw the torture program, no meaningful acknowledgment or redress for the program's survivors.

President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, legal memo author John Yoo, and the other architects of the program brazenly discuss their crimes in public appearances, still pressing the memos' flawed line that the brutal treatment of prisoners was necessary, that it was justifiable as self-defense, or simply that the President can ignore the law in the name of national security.

The current administration has admonished us to look forward, not backward; to move on to more pressing issues like the economy and health care reform. The rest of the world, however, isn't quite so willing to move on. The governments of Great Britain, Australia, Poland, Lithuania and others have opened investigations into the roles of their own citizens in the torture and in their cooperation with the US government in this shameful period. These nations also have to deal with sickly economies and internal issues, but they understand the importance of investigating and punishing the wrongdoers. Justice demands no less. Honor requires it.

Apparently "justice" and "honor" are words that hold no meaning in this country. If they did, we too would look backward, recoil in horror, and vow to insure this never happens again by sternly punishing the miscreants.

I'm not holding my breath.

More Shame

Yesterday was another bad-news day all the way around. By mid-afternoon all I wanted to do was go home so I could climb into bed and pull the covers and the pillows over my head. Perhaps the one item that especially punched my abdominal region was the news of a report which had issued suggesting that doctors and other medical personnel colluded with the Bush torturers by studying ways to make torture techniques more painful, and (presumably) more effective.

Even the New York Times was outraged by the "white paper" prepared by Physicians for Human Rights if today's editorial is any indication.

Now Physicians for Human Rights has suggested that the medical professionals may also have violated national and international laws setting limits on what research can be performed on humans. ...

The group’s report focused particularly on a few issues where medical personnel played an important role — determining how far a harsh interrogation could go, providing legal cover against prosecution and designing future interrogation procedures. The actual monitoring data are not publicly available, but the group was able to deduce from the guidelines governing the program what role the health professionals played, assuming they followed the rules. ...

The group concludes that health professionals who facilitated these practices were in essence conducting research and experimentation on human subjects. The main purposes of such research, the group says, were to determine how to use various techniques, to calibrate the levels of pain and to create a legal basis for defending interrogators from potential prosecution under antitorture laws. The interrogators could claim that they had acted in good faith in accord with medical judgments of safety and had not intended to inflict extreme suffering.

The report from Physicians for Human Rights is available for downloading here. It is far from complete or exhaustive, but it was hampered right from the start by the usual government response to requests for information. The papers sent to the group were heavily redacted by the official censors. Enough was there, however, for the group to reach at least some tentative conclusions. Medical personnel actively violated the Hippocratic oath to do no harm.

That the Bush government would subvert the physicians and other medical personnel for such horrifying human testing and that the physicians and medical personnel would acquiesce is bad enough. But there's more: no one in the all-new-and-improved government, whether in the White House or Congress, seems to care, which I, and the New York Times editorialist find just as profoundly disturbing.

The report from the physicians’ group does not prove its case beyond doubt — how could it when so much is still hidden? — but it rightly calls on the White House and Congress to investigate the potentially illegal human experimentation and whether those who authorized or conducted it should be punished. Those are just two of the many unresolved issues from the Bush administration that President Obama and Congressional leaders have swept under the carpet. [Emphasis added]

I have given up holding my breath waiting for this administration or this congress to do anything with respect to the crimes of the last administration and congress. Nearly 18 months into the new regime it has become clear that no one has the slightest inclination to delve into the most shameful period of our history.

Hope?

Change?

Not likely.

Torture Is A Crime

It was kind of a dull day at Watching America yesterday. China is miffed at us for selling arms to Taiwan. Iran is still promising to become a nuclear power. Latin America is annoyed that President Obama is not paying more attention to its neighbors. Europe is fascinated by Sarah Palin. Interesting all, I'm sure, but none really grabbed me. Michael Harwood's column in "Comment Is Free" (England's The Guardian), however, did.

Mr. Harwood, in discussing the decision by the UK's judiciary to publish a memo prepared by US intelligence agencies on the torture of Binyam Mohamed, makes it clear that at least at this point neither country has gone completely over to the dark side. The judges of both nations are still digging their heels in.

The UK court ruling in the case of Binyam Mohamed demonstrates once more that judges on both sides of the Atlantic have had enough of governments hiding behind national security "secrets" to shield themselves from their many trespasses in the "war on terror".

The court's decision to publish a seven-paragraph summary of intelligence given to MI5 by the CIA has been met by the convenient, and wholly unbelievable, argument from British and American officials that the release could damage intelligence co-operation and sharing between the two allies.

Mr. Harwood calls "Bullshit!", and properly so. When the British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband whined that the court's decision would mean the end of cooperation between the nation's intelligence agencies, the White House sent out a spokesperson to nod in agreement, "Uh-huh, that's right. Now we can't trust you enough to let you know when your country is about to be hit." Hacks and flacks, however, are stupid instruments, as this particular case makes eminently clear.

I cannot imagine a scenario in which the US would not keep the UK apprised of any danger uncovered in any way. There really is a special relationship between the two countries. Furthermore, if word got out (as it usually does at some point or another) that the US failed to warn any country of an impending terrorist attack there would be hell to pay.

But Mr. Harwood's point goes beyond that:

...the seven-paragraph summary details that the interrogation practices endured by Mohamed while in American custody during 2002 constituted "at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment". It reveals nothing besides the fact the US and its proxies resorted to barbarous methods to extract information from captives they believed were al-Qaida terrorists.

Second, far more damning information on Mohamed's torture was published last year by a US court. In November 2009, US District Judge Gladys Kessler granted the habeus corpus petition of Gitmo detainee Farhi Saeed Bin Mohammed – another indicator of the cross-Atlantic return of the rule of law. The prisoner had been held indefinitely without charge at Guantánamo Bay since 2002, based partly on Mohamed's confessions to US interrogators. There was one problem, however: US interrogators coerced Mohamed's allegations against Mohammed through torture. "The government does not challenge Petitioner's evidence of Binyam Mohamed's abuse," Kessler wrote in her decision. It's important to note that the "abuse" Mohamed says he endured during his detention included having his genitals slashed by a razor.

In short order, the information the British court ordered released yesterday was neither intelligence nor secret. What it did show, however, was what we already knew. The US had systematically tortured detainees it deemed terrorists without due process, and British intelligence was complicit. [Emphasis added.]

Judge Kessler did her job, as have many other District Court Judges on the issue of torture, and as have her counterparts in Britain. How long that will be true in this country remains to be seen. Obviously the current US Supreme Court is a little dicey when it comes to such decisions, primarily due to the Democrats' obsession with dry powder the past ten years.

More troubling, however, is the fact that the current administration fought vigorously to have the memo of the torture suppressed in the British court, even as it continues to fight to have such information suppressed in current US court hearings. President Obama promised all of that would end, and yet his Department of Justice continues the battle on "state secrets."

This is just one more issue in which nothing has "changed." And, in the long run, it might just be the most important one.

Suffer, Little Children

It's hard to start the day after reading an article such as this one from the Washington Post. It concerns the treatment of two young men (children, really, at age 17 and 16) by Americans at the Bagram prison.

The two teenagers -- Issa Mohammad, 17, and Abdul Rashid, who said he is younger than 16 -- said in interviews this week that they were punched and slapped in the face by their captors during their time at Bagram air base, where they were held in individual cells. Rashid said his interrogator forced him to look at pornography alongside a photograph of his mother.

The holding center described by the teenagers appeared to have been a facility run by U.S. Special Operations forces that is separate from the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, the main American-run prison, which holds about 700 detainees. The teenagers' descriptions of a holding area on a different part of the Bagram base are consistent with the accounts of two other former detainees, who say they endured similar mistreatment, but not beatings, while being held last year at what Afghans call Bagram's "black" prison.

The boys, in addition to being punched by their captors, were also given a healthy dose of sleep deprivation along with some psycho-sexual humiliation when they were forced to strip naked for a "medical exam" performed in front of a dozen or so American soldiers who mocked and laughed at them. Any teenage boy would be scarred by such treatment, but in a culture which holds nakedness in front of others as deeply shameful, the actions of their captors must have been devastating.

Defense officials' only response was that there is no inhumane treatment going on at Bagram. At this point in history, I am inclined to call bullshit on any such assertion. Too much has happened the last nine years.

Here's the disturbing part, however. Because the "black" prison is not run by the US Army, but rather by the "U.S. Special Operations forces," that activity can and probably does continue.

There have been reports about the existence of an interrogation facility at Bagram that is run by Special Operations forces, but little has been disclosed about living conditions or interrogation methods there. Representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross have not been permitted access to the detainees at this facility. The site has continued to operate under the terms of an executive order that Obama signed soon after taking office, which forced the closure of secret prisons run by the CIA but not those run by Special Operations forces. [Emphasis added]

And so teenagers and tribal elders in Afghanistan, perhaps even women (Aafia Siddiqui, for example), are still at risk of inhumane treatment which is forbidden by international law.

Not much change there, eh?

Monsters.

Sometimes A Great Nation

I was gobsmacked by an editorial in yesterday's Los Angeles Times. The "center left" board actually got it right, all of it.

The subject of the editorial was the trial and conviction of 23 CIA agents for illegally kidnapping and torturing Muslim cleric Hassan Osama Nasr.

"Extrajudicial detentions" and "extraordinary renditions" were nicely scrubbed terms for the Bush administration's policy of capturing suspects in one country and spiriting them away to another, where they were harshly interrogated and even tortured. Now an Italian court has called this CIA practice by its real name -- illegal."

Noting that the judicial decision is largely symbolic (the defendants were tried in absentia and no request for extradition has been filed), the editorial makes it clear that the symbolism is powerful, something the US government would be well-advised not to shrug off as meaningless.

...Yet the decision matters. It repudiates President Obama's expressed desire to look away from the ugly past, and sends a strong message that the U.S. government cannot operate outside the law with impunity in the name of fighting terrorism. ...

Obama has since ended CIA interrogations in secret prisons and shut overseas jails used by the CIA, but he has not stopped the practice of extraordinary rendition. The difference between his and his predecessor's policy is that the administration will now demand credible assurances that prisoners won't be tortured, and that prisoners will be "rendered to justice" rather than held indefinitely without trial.

We don't like renditions and generally think even the most dangerous criminals are entitled to due process, including extradition hearings. A war against violent extremists cannot be won by immoral or illegal means; the U.S. can't outsource dirty work and claim to have clean hands. [Emphasis added]

Well said.

The current administration cannot and should not walk away from this finding by the Italian court. Nor should it assume that the decision doesn't matter. It does, if only by reminding the White House that the rule of law is a meaningless concept unless it is actually put into effect. Americans are notorious for their short memories, and unless the government puts the same effort into investigating and trying those who deliberately broke domestic and international law as it does into investigating and trying those who would wreak terror on the nation, the whole eight years of the Bush administration's malfeasance will be forgotten. The perpetrators who walk freely away from the mess will return, and their subversive ideas will be re-implemented.

If President Obama really wants to heal the divisions in this country, then let that healing begin by tracking down (or up, as the case is here) all of the law breakers and those who not only enabled the crimes but authorized them, and punishing them according to law. Putting a bandaid over an infected wound before cleaning it out is not only useless, it is dangerous.

The Justice Department (the home of many of the perpetrators in the last administration) should be instructed to investigate all of the crimes related to the kidnapping, unlawful imprisonment, and torture of people by American authorities. If the investigation leads directly to the Bush White House, then so be it.

The call is not for vengeance, but for justice. The nation and the rest of the world deserve no less.

Going Home

It looks like there just might be some real justice for one Guantanamo Bay detainee: Mohammed Jawad might be sent home to Afghanistan in three weeks, unless, of course, the Obama Justice Department operates the same way the Bush Justice Department did.

From McClatchy DC report:

The Obama administration on Wednesday said it plans to release a young Guantanamo detainee after military and civilian judges banned almost all evidence against him that they ruled was extracted through torture. ...

Government attorneys, however, reserved the right to file new charges in federal court against Mohammed Jawad if they find evidence against him before he's freed.

The Justice Department asked U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle to grant them 22 days to release Jawad — seven days to notify Congress of the release plans, as current law requires, and then 15 days until a cooling off period mandated by law expires.

If no new charges are filed during that time, the government said it would promptly release Jawad. The Justice Department didn't specify where it would send him, but his lawyers say they expect he'd be returned to his native Afghanistan.

There are several significant points in the story. The first is that the judiciary did the job they are sworn to do. By ruling inadmissible evidence garnered through torture, Judge Huvelle and the military commission judges made clear that the rule of law trumps torture and that such unlawful behavior by the government will not be tolerated by the courts.

The second point is that the government didn't make its usual noises about an immediate appeal, which hopefully means that the Department of Justice may have just blinked when it comes to "win at all costs" prosecution.

The third point is a bit more troubling, however. The prosecution has reserved the right to refile the charges if it can find enough evidence that hasn't been tainted by torture to do so, and it wants the court to give them that 22 days to find that evidence by claiming that the law requires such a delay, something young Mr. Jawad's lawyers noted:

Jawad's lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union said that while they're hopeful that their client will be sent home soon, they think the government should move more quickly.

"We're cautiously optimistic that they appear closer to recognizing that Mr. Jawad needs to be sent home as soon as possible," said Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer with the ACLU's National Security Project. "We remain concerned by some of the arguments they make with regards to the court's power to order an immediate remedy."

Hopefully the judge will rule quickly on the requested delay so that even if the government's request is granted, the clock will start running.

It's time for the release of Mohammad Jawad. It's long past time for an end to this obscene display of a government's power run amok.

Just Helping Out

Some congress critters got quite an earful about US treatment of the Uighurs held at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, according to this McClatchy DC article.

U.S. military personnel at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, actively helped Chinese interrogators question members of China's Uighur minority, including physically restraining them so they could be photographed against their will, according to testimony presented Thursday to a congressional subcommittee. ...

Human rights advocates have accused the U.S. of helping China gather information from the Uighurs for use against their friends and families back home, where tension between the predominantly Muslim Uighurs and the dominant Han Chinese frequently breaks into public protest and violence. [Emphasis added]

That assistance extended to "softening" the prisoners up in the days before the Chinese interrogators arrived and assisting the Chinese during the interrogations, which is bad enough. However, the military also handed over information gotten from the Uighurs after promising the information would be kept confidential:

Among the Uighurs' claims:

_ U.S. military personnel treated them harshly in the days before Chinese officials visited the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in an effort to soften them up for interrogation.

_ That harsh treatment included keeping the detainees awake, subjecting them to frigid temperatures, and keeping them isolated from one another and other prisoners. All of those techniques were approved for use on detainees by then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

_ U.S. soldiers followed Chinese officials' orders to restrain detainees they said weren't cooperating. One detainee testified that an American told him the harsh treatment he'd received after his interrogation had been at the direction of the Chinese. ...

The Uighurs also complained that information they'd given to Americans on the condition of confidentiality had been shared with the Chinese officials, who flaunted it during the interrogations.

Not only did the US complicity affect the Uighurs directly, it also extended to their family members and friends back in China. I think we can expect more violence in China with respect to the Uighurs, and the targets will be easier to locate thanks to the US assistance.

It's amazing the lengths a debtor nation will go to keep its creditors happy, eh? We'll even do their dirty work for them.

Shameful.

It's Not Just Looking Backward

President Obama has made it clear from the start of his administration that he didn't want his first term cluttered up with "looking backward" because there was so much to be done domestically: dealing with the failed economy and reforming health care were at the top of his list. For that reason, investigations into the criminal behavior of the past administration were effectively taken off the table, much to the fury of those of us on the left who recognized that the rape of constitutional and international law that took place the last eight years happened because Gerald Ford took the same approach.

It's beginning to look, however, as if President Obama isn't going to be able to avoid that "looking backward" because the perfect storm has begun developing over the past week which might very well make that impossible. The NY Times has a pretty good article summarizing the storm elements to date.

One of those elements has to do with investigating the US use of torture:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is also close to assigning a prosecutor to look into whether prisoners in the campaign against terrorism were tortured, officials disclosed on Saturday.

I found myself laughing bitterly at that line from the article. Whether? If? For crying out loud, even the torturers and those who authorized the torturers have admitted that they used and authorized techniques banned by the Geneva Conventions. The former Vice President of the United States bragged about the torture on television several times. Hello?

Why is Barack Obama, the self-proclaimed harbinger of change, even flinching at such an investigation? Well, for a very good reason. And for that reason, I have to shift gears a little.

I don't often refer to articles written in the mainstream press that are inaccessible (for free) on line, but this time I am going to. If you don't have a subscription to Harpers, then you need to either go down to the local news stand and buy the July, 2009 edition or go to your closest library and pull it from the stacks. Go to Luke Mitchell's essay entitled "We Still Torture." You'll find it on pages 49-55. Then brace yourself.

Mr. Mitchell starts off by noting the assumption that once George W. Bush left the White House all the torture stopped. That turns out to be an erroneous assumption.

We cannot be patient, though, and not simply because justice must be swift. We cannot be patient because not only have we failed to punish the people who created and maintained our torture regime; we have failed to dismantle that regime and, in many cases, even to cease torturing.

This last charge is the least heard. Although it is true that waterboarding is once again proscribed, it is equally true that the government continues to permit a series of "torture lite" techniques -- prolonged isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation, force feeding -- that even Reagan appointee Judge Susan Crawford had to acknowledge amounted to torture when she threw out the government's case against one accused terrorist. Like waterboarding, these techniques cause extreme mental anguish and permanent physical damage, and, like waterboarding, they are not permitted under international law. But unlike waterboarding, they remain on the books, in detailed prison regulations and field-manual directives, unremarked by anyone except a few activists. [Emphasis added]

Mr. Mitchell goes into graphic detail of some of the techniques still being used at Guantanamo Bay, such as force feeding, and his descriptions match those we have seen from those "activists" such as Candace Gorman, a lawyer who represents two men being held at Guantanamo Bay, at her blog. I urge you to read the article to get the full impact of just what is being done in our names.

And yet President Obama is "uncomfortable" about investigating and ending the torture? How can that be? Doesn't he know what that is doing to us as a nation and what that will do to his presidency? Doesn't he recognize that just as Afghanistan will become "his" war, torture will be "his" sin?

Luke Mitchell's concluding paragraph answers that question but his answer also implies the responsibility that we, as citizens in a democracy, also have in this issue:

Now we have a choice. We can continue our experiment with torture or we can harness the obvious horror the last eight years to rectify the more discreet horrors of the distant past and the darkening present, and in so doing at last become a nation whose actions embody its pretensions.

Selah.

The Cover-Up Exposed

Today, Dan Froomkin does us all proud in giving an excellent, comprehensive summary of the WH cover-up for torture, a cover-up that he follows through its disgraceful commission.

While several sources have dealt with the subject, including a NYT article that was yet another cover-up, White House Watch covers the whole dismal affair.

...in one e-mail, Comey describes an exchange with Ted Ullyot, then Gonzales's chief of staff: "I told him that the people who were applying pressure now would not be there when the s--- hit the fan. Rather, they would simply say they had only asked for an opinion."

Gonzales and Ullyot both came to Justice from the White House counsel's office. And Comey writes that "everyone seemed to be thinking as if they still work at the White House and not the United States Department of Justice."

Noting that he had already announced his resignation at the time, Comey expresses sadness that some top officials who were "too weak to stand up for the principles" that undergird DOJ.

This is exactly what many of us have been alleging for a long time.

In one e-mail, Comey describes a dramatic meeting with Gonzales, in which he warned that approval of the interrogation techniques would likely lead to criminal prosecution.

"In stark terms I explained to him what this would look like some day and what it would mean for the president and the government," Comey writes. "I sketched out the 'summation' that could be made to demonstrate that some of this stuff was simply awful. I told him it would all come out some day and be presented in the ways I was presenting it."
(snip)
"The AG began by saying that [then-national security adviser Condoleezza] Rice was not interested in discussing details and that her attitude was that if DOJ said it was legal and CIA said it was effective, then that ended it, without a need for detailed policy discussion," Comey writes. "Pat and I urged the AG in the strongest possible terms to drive a full policy discussion of all techniques."

Comey then writes about delivering to Gonzales that imagined "summation" in the case against the administration for torture. And, he adds: "I mentioned that there was a video of an early session, which would come out eventually."

Comey writes that later that day, upon returning from the White House, Gonzales "said the meeting had gone very well, and that there had been a full factual and policy discussion. He said the issues were fully presented and and he had drawn my 'worst-case scenario' for them. At the end, all the Principles approved the full list."

Comey's prediction that "simply awful" things would be eventually made public was proven correct. But the video he mentioned was one of many that the CIA conveniently destroyed less than six months later. And of course his vision of a criminal prosecution remains unfulfilled. Oh, to hear that summation -- either from Comey, or from a federal prosecutor.

As Froomkin says in the intro in his post, we have known how badly the government has been run, and seen it was from ex-Darth, but now we have documentation.

Crimes were committed, the effort to cover them up has failed, and we must prosecute. We do not have a right to claim that the Rule of Law prevails here if we don't. We lost a whole generation of 'conservatives' who were turned into monsters. We can't afford that to happen again.

**********************************************

On another atrocity; today is World Oceans Day.

The U.N. reports that 75 percent of seafood species are maxed out or overexploited and catches of nearly a third of these species are less than 10 percent of what they once were. Ninety percent of the big fish -- sharks, tuna, swordfish -- are already gone, according to a 2003 study in Nature.

Watching Monsters

How glad I am to be here at home watching Bill Kristol postulate, on a panel on interrogation techniques, that we will just kill suspects since we can't torture them. His preferred method is 'by drone'.

Human Rights First representative Gabor Rona is expressing wonderment at the concept. It would take a lot of practice for me to restrain myself to his level of mildness. He has interviewed Ali Souvane previously, and has passed on the practiced interrogator's opinion, that many years were wasted in chasing down bad leads from tortured suspects. If for no other reason, that should have kept it from ever happening. Sadly, not all of my fellow citizens are civilized, or in Kristol's case, even sane.

Had our highest office holders been reasonable and/or good public citizens, we would not be watching this horror, or hearing that the previous maladministration had reasonable methods and results, when only court orders pushed it back within the bounds of reason.

The present administration has a proposal that will move away from the worst of the mess, by changing administration of detention to the FBI. Leaving no indefensible history to defend, that should help to escape from the horrors they committed.

The FBI and Justice Department plan to significantly expand their role in global counter-terrorism operations, part of a U.S. policy shift that will replace a CIA-dominated system of clandestine detentions and interrogations with one built around transparent investigations and prosecutions.

Under the "global justice" initiative, which has been in the works for several months, FBI agents will have a central role in overseas counter-terrorism cases. They will expand their questioning of suspects and evidence-gathering to try to ensure that criminal prosecutions are an option, officials familiar with the effort said.

Though the initiative is a work in progress, some senior counter-terrorism officials and administration policy-makers envision it as key to the national security strategy President Obama laid out last week -- one that presumes most accused terrorists have the right to contest the charges against them in a "legitimate" setting.

The approach effectively reverses a mainstay of the Bush administration's war on terrorism, in which global counter-terrorism was treated primarily as an intelligence and military problem, not a law enforcement one. That policy led to the establishment of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; harsh interrogations; and detentions without trials.

The "global justice" initiative starts out with the premise that virtually all suspects will end up in a U.S. or foreign court of law.

Just as ex-Darth seems endlessly driven to defend his crimes as if they were the actions of a sane and reasoning official, the CIA will have to hold to its line that it was convinced that it was doing a reasonable act when it committed war crimes.

Punishment should follow crime. For now, this is one way at least of preventing further coverups.

Making Terrorists

(Thank you to TheImpolitic, while I'm on painkillers she did my thinking for me.)

No one could have predicted that incarcerating innocent men for years without charges and torturing them for information they didn't have would turn them into radicals.

One of the detainees whom a newly released Pentagon report says returned to the battlefield after he was released from the Guantanamo Bay prison camp told McClatchy that he was a local security leader in Afghanistan when he was arrested and became a radical Islamist only during his detention.

This in the context of the Pentagon's latest list of Gitmo releasees who "returned to the battlefield." Their criteria is, shall we say, flexible.

The report found that 27 were confirmed terrorism suspects and another 47 were suspected terrorists as of April 7.

The department defines suspected in part as "unverified or single-source but plausible" reported activities. In its 27 confirmed cases, the Pentagon said it has fingerprints, DNA, photos or reliable intelligence tying them to terrorist activity since their release.

Most of the confirmed and suspected terrorists the agency listed have either died in battle or in suicide attacks, or have been arrested by local authorities.

So in other words, it barely matters if they "returned to battle" because most of them aren't a threat any more. Not that anyone but McClatchy seems willing to mention this part. I swear, the vast majority of our media are a greater threat than terrorists.

Libby has hit on something here that we ought to use when developing policy, that we are by our violation of our own principles doing ourselves harm that is worse than the terraists are doing to us. Our national character is harder to get back than those twin towers, and more lives have been lost to those we made into our enemies than were on 911.

An End Around

It's no secret that the CIA and other US intelligence gathering agencies are smart enough to figure out ways to get around laws and court rulings that limit the way they prefer to do their business. An article in the NY Times gives yet another example of this intelligence. Because of the backlash against kidnappings, secret prisons, and the use of torture, the CIA is now handing over suspected terrorists to other nations for holding and questioning.

The United States is now relying heavily on foreign intelligence services to capture, interrogate and detain all but the highest-level terrorist suspects seized outside the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to current and former American government officials.

The change represents a significant loosening of the reins for the United States, which has worked closely with allies to combat violent extremism since the 9/11 attacks but is now pushing that cooperation to new limits. ...

Pakistan’s intelligence and security services captured a Saudi suspect and a Yemeni suspect this year with the help of American intelligence and logistical support, Pakistani officials said. The two are the highest-ranking Qaeda operatives captured since President Obama took office, but they are still being held by Pakistan, which has shared information from their interrogations with the United States, the official said.

The current approach, which began in the last two years of the Bush administration and has gained momentum under Mr. Obama, is driven in part by court rulings and policy changes that have closed the secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency, and all but ended the transfer of prisoners from outside Iraq and Afghanistan to American military prisons. [Emphasis added]

That's quite a nifty arrangement, especially for the CIA. Agents have been forbidden to use "enhanced interrogation techniques" and the agency has had to shutter its secret "black" prisons in the Middle East and Europe, so now agents assist other countries' intelligence services by sharing information and providing logistical support so that those other countries can do the kidnapping and torturing for them. CIA agents now have clean hands.

Of course, the new arrangement assumes that the information gleaned from the interrogations will be passed on to the CIA by the other nations and that the information is reliable. Those are some shaky assumptions, especially when it comes to Pakistan. It has been clear that at least for the past six years the Pakistani military and its intelligence service has been infiltrated by Taliban sympathizers who obviously have no great love for the US and for the CIA. It's hard to imagine that the information being passed on will not be subverted in some way.

Furthermore, most experts continue to assert that information gathered through the use of torture is itself not particularly reliable. The CIA, using diplomatic channels, is supposed to get assurances from the foreign government that the interrogations will not involve torture, but there is no way to know whether those assurances have any substance to them. In other words, it's the same game, just different players and different stadiums.

What's the answer? Well, it's not really that hard. When, through legitimate intelligence channels, a plot to attack the US is discovered, those involved should be arrested. If that arrest takes place on foreign soil, the US should move for extradition of the miscreant under existing treaties. Once the alleged miscreants are on US soil, they should be charged with the crime (conspiracy, most likely) and given a fair trial in a civilian court with all the attendant legal protections.

I know, I know: that's pre-9/11 thinking. Still, it managed to work for over 200 years. It worked for the first World Trade Center bombing. It even worked for the Oklahoma federal building bombing. There is no reason it shouldn't work today.

Rendition

Like Diane, I have a lack of sympathy for those who tortured, and now are not wanting to talk about it. If I understand properly, it's good therapy to get out what's troubling you, and in this case, it's the country's trauma that needs to be expunged.

Today at WaPo, Dana Milbank exercises a little irony, wanting to administer a little of the memory enhancement to the administrators. I expect that he will be getting lots of attention for it, and I want to add in my plaudits. Since our troops are now getting to deal with the standards our torturers set up, why not send a little demo their way as well? Milbank gives an account of a little presser from an agitator, Kevin Zeese, who had a suggestion as to how to treat the perpetrators there in D.C. yesterday.

If they are really guilty of war crimes, as Zeese charges, shouldn't the punishment be a bit more severe -- like, say, subjecting them to the same questioning techniques they approved?

That would have an elegant, eye-for-an-eye quality while avoiding years of messy legal proceedings. And, after all, the Bush administration lawyers said these techniques are perfectly legal and do not cause long-term harm.
(snip)
But Zeese found a flaw in the proposal: "Torture is illegal," he said. "For the same reason you can't do it to al-Qaeda, you can't do it to Justice Department lawyers."

Too bad. That leaves Zeese to rely on a labyrinth of due process -- and, likely, more of the frustrations of recent weeks and months. Zeese, representing the groups Velvet Revolution and Voters for Peace, listed the frustrations as he spoke in the Judiciary Square plaza yesterday.

The workings of our legal system that are being denied to detainees at Gitmo may be a kind of torture. In the end, hopefully, the guilty will be administered humane punishment. They should have had this much regard for our legal system themselves, and saved themselves this amount of just returns.

Keeping the Country Secure

This has been a week of tortuous arguments in public, and on This Week there was an interesting juxtaposition of the one person totally agreeing with ex-Darth, Liz ex-Darth, and Katrina VanDen Heuvel, a really outspoken clear thinker. Beginning their discussion, host George Stephanopolous questioned the panel about President Obama's decision not to release the torture photos.

STEPHANOPOULOS: ... How significant are these shifts and are they the right moves?

GEORGE WILL, COLUMNIST: Well, they come after he essentially affirmed warrantless wiretapping and escalated in Afghanistan. So you can see why a certain faction of the Democratic Party is unhappy.

On the other hand, he has changed his mind on the photographs, but he’s changed his mind by keeping a promise. The promise he made during the campaign was I will always consult with my commanders. He consulted with the commanders who said among other things, the 10 days after the Abu Ghraib photos were released, there was a spike of violence in Iraq. They strongly urged him not to release these and he won’t.

Now there is a court involved in this and the court has so far said that under the Freedom of Information Act, they have to be released. He can appeal that, he can lose, and he can then say I did my best and the photos come out.

STEPHANOPOULOS: That good enough?

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL, “THE NATION”: Obama was elected in part to correct the illegal shameful policies of these last eight years. I’m interested in the military commission’s decision. Because he sided ...

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you support him on the photos?

VANDEN HEUVEL: I don’t.
(snip)
STEPHANOPOULOS: But I want to press one thing there, because there was a report -- no, but you (LIZ CHENEY) explained one part of it. I just want to ask you to explain another part of it. The report, though, that the vice president’s office did ask specifically to have information about Iraq-Al Qaida connections presented to this detainee, do you deny that?

CHENEY: I think that it’s important for us to have all the facts out. And the first and more important fact is that the vice president has been absolutely clear that he supported this program, this was an important program, it saved American lives.

Now, the way this policy worked internally was once the policy was determined and decided, the CIA, you know, made the judgments about how each individual detainee would be treated. And the vice president would not substitute his own judgment for the professionals...

STEPHANOPOULOS: No one in his office either?

CHENEY: ... at the CIA. So I think it’s very important for us to look at exactly what the facts are. And the facts are that three people were waterboarded. The people that, you know, claimed to have been waterboarded in these articles are not any of those people. And I think, frankly, you’ve also got to look at the source of some of these allegations, and one of the big sources is Colonel Wilkerson. Now, Colonel Wilkerson gets coverage because of his associations with General Powell.

STEPHANOPOULOS: His former chief of staff.

CHENEY: And has made a cottage industry of out, you know, fantasies about the vice president...

The issue of torture being wrong has been kept pretty sidelined during all the discussions, but Wilkerson obviously has struck a raw nerve in insisting that the obsession with torture was part and parcel with the politicizing of the basic functions of government. What the former vice president insists was keeping it secure has reduced our security. Reducing government's function in the past maladministration to blasting away at our principles is increasingly evident as a major cause of our insecurity, growing disaffection on the major part of the Middle East.

From John Dean whose testimony helped save the country from the Nixon criminality comes an analysis that VenDen Heuvel should be familiar with.

From generals and admirals at the Pentagon to Foreign Service officers in Foggy Bottom, along with untold thousands of the nameless and unknown career civil servants who soldier on to protect our national security, there is anger and resentment. Most of these people are not political in the partisan sense; rather, they work in and for our government to keep the nation safe, and take pride in their work.

For the past eight years, the Bush Administration has marginalized them, manipulated them, and beaten them down. Dick Cheney, in particular, worked to keep the national security professionals submissive, and to ignore their good advice. In a move that was unheard of for a Vice President, Cheney created his own National Security Council...Cheney cost the nation blood and treasure with his preemptive Iraq war. He embarrassed the United States the world over by demanding (and continuing to demand) that we use torture.
(snip)
Rather than risk alienation, Obama has given in to them, at the expense of his natural constituency, the political progressives who find it appalling that the Bush/Cheney torture is not being fully exposed (and prosecuted) to prevent it from happening again -- and sooner, rather than later.

I would encourage those who are demanding exposure and prosecution to keep pounding their drums. Clearly, they are on the right side of this issue, and Obama knows it. While he is going to placate the national security bureaucrats from time to time in order to lead them effectively, hopefully the pressure for him to deal with the atrocious behavior of Bush and Cheney is only just getting started.

The president has a bumpy ride before him, and its purpose is to get the country functional again. So much destruction went into making the mess, it's going to take a long time to get the chaff sorted out from the good.

The president's talent in community organization will be sorely needed, in a community that has been so violated as this government. Reining in the abuses has been accomplished by defeat of the criminal element. Bringing the executive branch back into compliance with the law will take a concerted effort on all of our parts.

The Big Lie Is Back

Watching Kit Bond insist that House Speaker Pelosi couldn't claim that if CIA briefings were given her about torture she could not do anything about it anyway, I am once again seeing the putrefying lies wingers use to refute damaging charges. This morning on CBS news Bond claimed that she could have 'called for confidential hearings' - an action which was routinely ignored by the wingnuts in charge of the House at the time she was somewhat briefed.

Only those with short memories seem to inhabit the voter category for wingers, which is hardly a surprise. If memories include depression days, their deregulation mantra would long ago have been rooted out. As Timothy Noah pointed out yesterday at Salon, these days, in defeat, the wingers have returned to type, definitely not a nice one; t's a familiar pattern. ...When President Clinton submitted his first major domestic policy initiative to Congress—reform of the health care system—GOP strategist Bill Kristol famously urged congressional Republicans to reject any compromise "sight unseen." As President Obama and Congress prepare to introduce their own health care reform bill, history is repeating itself: GOP strategist Frank Luntz has already coached congressional Republicans on scare tactics to oppose it.

Speaker Pelosi has knocked the blocks out from under CIA and winger claims that she could have acted to stop torture if she had chosen. She has said that the briefing she actually got only described possible future use, and never established that such horrors had been committed by our own interrogators. Instead of arguing against the inhumane aspects of torture, once again the right wingers attack its opponents while clinging to their own failed ideology.

This morning, Huffington Post cites supporting evidence given by former Senator Bob Graham, another person braving what is sure to be outright bludgeoning by the faction that wants to keep torture, and keep the myth that we are protecting our security by ending our history as a civilized nation.

"What struck me...was the fact that in that briefing, there were also two staff members," he said. "As you know, the general rule is that the executive is to brief the full committees of the House and Senate Intelligence committees about any ongoing or proposed action. The exception to that is what is called "covert action," where the president...only briefs the Gang of Eight, which is the four congressional leaders and the four intelligence committee leaders. Those sessions are generally conducted at an executive site, primarily at the White House itself. And they are conducted with just the authorized personnel, not with any staff or any other member of the committee.... Which leads me to conclude that this was not considered by the CIA to be a Gang of Eight briefing. Otherwise they would not have had staff in the room. And that leads me to then believe that they didn't brief us on any of the sensitive programs such as the waterboarding or other forms of excessive interrogation."

The remarks made by Graham bolster the comments offered by Pelosi on Thursday. The Speaker told reporters that during her briefing session in the fall of 2002 she was not just kept in the dark about the issue of waterboarding, she was assured that it had not been used.

"Yes, I am saying that the CIA was misleading the Congress," she said.

However, records and testimony do show that high-ranking aides were present during a February 2003 briefing when waterboarding was discussed by the CIA with Reps. Porter Goss and Jane Harman.

Graham declined to speculate as to what took place during Pelosi's briefings, noting that the House and Senate had two entirely different sessions. But he did point out that, at the time, "the whole credibility of the intelligence committee, particularly the CIA, was pretty much in question" -- giving credence to Pelosi's claims that she was given faulty information.

"The irony," said Graham, "is that the whole series of events in late September of '02 were concurrent with the CIA's release of the first classified version of the National Intelligence Estimate, which was one of the key factors that led me to vote against the war in Iraq because I thought that their case was so weak.

The same CIA that asked for the torture memos to justify its war crimes is not going to accept its outing by a force for return to Geneva Conventions. While its position as the unfortunate agency ordered to carry out crimes by a maladministration that was trampling on the Rule of Law occasions some sympathy, the CIA will have to allow some great changes in its posture if it is to get through this latest crisis. Putting up a smokescreen isn't enough. Crimes have been committed, and punishment is going to be called for.

The CIA is in a position like that of the German high command following WWII. Its criminals will need to be prosecuted, not defended.

Speaker Pelosi is right to insist on getting the truth out, and the entire Congress needs to get to work with the prosecution of those who ordered, and committed, criminal acts. Anything else is betrayal of the country.

Of course, there will be lies. The Gang of No has nothing positive to run on, and will need to hide its record in the only way it knows. The big lies have been dragged out for its defense. That's all they've got.

Well, Bravo!

To my complete surprise but absolute relief, the center-left editorial board of the Los Angeles Times got it totally right with respect to releasing the photographs depicting US torture of detainees.

While acknowledging that the photos will inflame both our friends and our enemies, the editorial makes it clear that if we are ever to move past the shame of the past eight years, this country must come clean and admit to the horrors our military and intelligence agencies committed. Releasing those photos, as ordered by a trial judge and appellate court, is an important part of that process, even if in the short run the move will raise the danger level.

It's terrible that the president was faced with such an unpalatable choice, but it's just one of the many awful results of the culture of torture and lawlessness put in place by the Bush administration. This country has already alienated allies and seen its moral standing crumble. Now, as we try to get to the bottom of what happened during those years, we have to acknowledge that doing so might put us in further danger. ...

Photographs are part of the historical record. Think of these images: black men hanging from trees in the American South; emaciated concentration camp survivors; prisoners shackled into cramped "tiger cages" in South Vietnam. Would this be a better world without those photos?

Trying to cover up atrocities because someone might be angry isn't right and won't work. Instead, the Pentagon should release the photos while making it clear that the U.S. repudiates such barbaric behavior and is committed to dismantling the culture that allowed it to occur. [Emphasis added]

Exactly so. Acknowledging the shame we should be feeling at those atrocities is very much a part of the process of "moving forward." To hide the details belies the promise of a new culture, one which is humane, law abiding, and (above all) transparent.

I am grateful to the Los Angeles Times for taking this bold and very necessary stance, so grateful that I am going to pick up a paper copy of today's paper, clip the editorial and mail it to the White House with a quarter taped to the bottom. My message will be brief:

"Here, Mr. President. Now go buy a clue."