http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/26/cia_man_retracts_claim_on_waterboarding

John  Kiriakou, the telegenic CIA guy who very publicly went on ABC to claim that Zubaydah gave ginormous amounts of actionable information disrupting “a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks” now says that – er … ah … not so much. First of all, he wasn’t actually there at the secret prison in Thailand where the waterboarding (83 waterboardings) occurred. He was at his desk in Northern Virginia. He was just passing on what he had “heard’ and “read”. He also now claims (in his book, natch) that the CIA was using him to dispense inaccurate information about the efficacy of waterboarding. O those diabolical geniuses at the CIA,  deploying their  uncanny spycraft to protect lie to the American public.

This “exclusive” interview was cited constantly as evidence that torture “works” and was given a great deal of play at the time, but even in his first interview, Kiriakou said he was not actually there . From the article at Foreign Policy : After Kiriakou repeated his waterboarding-efficiency claims to the Washington Post, the New York Times, National Public Radio, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and other media organizations last year, a CNN anchor called him "the man of the hour."   He was the man of the hour because he gave us the inside CIA straight dope – torture works. This fit perfectly into the prevailing media narrative. It still does – that’s why you will see no coverage of the fact that Mr. Kiriakou has just admitted that everything he said was a pile of crap.

None of Mr. Kiriakou’s interview was actually true, but in “the age of the demolition of the fact” (Mark Danner) this is sad evidence that , while the facts are malleable, the narrative is not.

He who does battle with monsters needs to watch out lest he in the process become a monster himself. And if you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss will stare right back at you.
–Friedrich Nietzsche

Scott Horton reads Homer and Auden and is sensible of  their truth. Their words reach across centuries and decades to Guantanamo Bay.

From Scott’s post:
A society that tortures and kills those placed entirely in its power and passes this fact by as a matter of indifference truly is plunging into the dark side of the world which these two poets describe–one at the dawn of man’s recorded history, the other in the crucible of modernity. On the day of these deaths in 2006, the American commander in Guantánamo violated the Homeric rules of decorum by taunting the dead and afflicting their families. The deceased prisoners “have no regard for human life,” he said. But in the end we must ask to whom those words more appropriately attach–the prisoners or those who have orchestrated the tragedy at Guantánamo? Another saying of the Achaean epoch applies to this tragedy. Long associated with the story of the Minotaur on Crete, it was recalled near the end of the nineteenth century by a philosophy professor at the University of Basel who waded deeply into the history of the era. “He who does battle with monsters,” he wrote, “needs to watch out lest he in the process become a monster himself.”

Here is the entire article:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006423 

Scott Horton  finds that the “suicides” of 3 prisoners at Guantanamo were not suicides,  the “investigation” of the suicides was not an investigation and “The Justice Department” is not interested in justice.

The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

By Scott Horton

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368

Guantánamo: Justice as Paradox 

Jonathan Hafetz describes the Obama Administration’s “new and improved” legal options for convicting those accused of terrorism – the administration always wins.

“As long as the present menu of options for dealing with terrorism suspects remains in place, U.S. detention policy will remain essentially lawless. The government will be free to use federal courts when it is confident it can convict; employ military commissions if it has doubts about the strength of its evidence or faces other obstacles; and dispense with a trial altogether where its case is weakest. Welcome to Guantánamo 2.0.”

Detainees to Get “State Always Wins” System of Justice - Glenn Greenwald describing same

Jon Stewart with the most incisive commentary on the KSMtrial in New York.

Today Scott Horton writes about the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision in the Maher Arar case. He sadly recalls those golden days of yesteryear when the very same court in  Filartiga vs Pena-Irala “completely rejected its earlier narrow interpretation of international law and opened the door of the federal courts to civil actions by aliens and citizens alike for damages for human rights violations.” (http://www.ccrjustice.org/ourcases/past-cases/fil%C3%A1rtiga-v.-pe%C3%B1-irala  )

Here is Scott’s article : http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90006024

Here is the link to Filartiga vs Pena-Irala630 F.2d 876 :  http://openjurist.org/630/f2d/876/filartiga-v-pena-irala

From Filartiga vs Pena-Irala630 F.2d 876
 
United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit.
Decided June 30, 1980.

. Indeed, for purposes of civil liability, the torturer has become like the pirate and slave trader before him hostis humani generis, an enemy of all mankind.

Here is the last paragraph of that decision in full

I know this seems like a small thing, but I think it is indicative of the culture in which we live. This is how much of America conceives of activists who work for accountability on torture – we are the left wing equivalent of tea baggers.

From today’s New York Times:

“If it seems a little ironic that slender urban saplings are dressing like Paul Bunyan and the Marlboro Man, well, so what? In these increasingly polarized times, when one half of America thinks President Obama is the second coming of Adolf Hitler and the other half won’t be truly satisfied until we prosecute everyone from Dubya on down to Laura Bush for war crimes, it’s actually kind of nice to see bearded blue-state hipsters dressing like men who slaughter cattle and clear-cut forests for a living.” 

The Washington Post underwrites Dick Cheney’s Great Torture Tour

Commentary on same

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/08/29/post/index.html

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/08/the-washington-posts-support-for-torture.html

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/08/29/the-wapo-declares-itself-unable-to-find-the-truth/

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/083009a.html

The Evidence Mounts Still Further by Andrew Sullivan

At Best, A Baby Step Toward Justice For Bush's Torturers by Dan Froomkin, Huffington Post

Seven Points on the CIA Report by Scott Horton

The CIA Inspector General's Torture Report: First Reactions from CCR by Senior Managing Attorney Shayana Kadida

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#32545583