torture is wrong

When the Army Uses "Enhanced Interrogation" on an American Soldier

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joshua-kors/when-the-army-uses-enhanc_b_536727.html

From the article:

“Luther was one of thousands severely wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan now facing a lifetime without medical care. I had spoken to dozens of soldiers in his shoes. But his call haunted me. He sent me photos of the isolation chamber. It was the size of a walk-in closet and was crammed with cardboard boxes, a desk and a bedpan. Armed guards monitored him 24 hours a day. Luther told me how they stopped him from sleeping, keeping the lights on and blasting heavy metal music at him all through the night: Megadeth, Saliva, Disturbed. When he rebelled, Luther was pinned down and injected with sleeping medication.

"This was an aid station," he said, "but it felt a lot more like enhanced interrogation than medical care."

After a month, Luther was willing to sign anything — and did. Soon after he signed his name to a personality disorder discharge, he was whisked back to Fort Hood and informed about a PD discharge's disastrous consequences. No disability pay, no long-term medical care, and because he didn't serve out his contract, he'd have to pay back a portion of his signing bonus. "They told me I now owed the Army $1,500."

After Obama lets her slowly twist in the wind for 15 months, Dawn Johnson gets the message. 

Dawn Johnsen, Key Obama Justice Nominee, Withdraws Her Nomination

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/09/dawn-johnsen-key-obama-ju_n_532445.html

Johnsen had the support of Sen Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) but was regarded skeptically by Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) -- primarily for her positions on torture and the investigation of previous administration actions. A filibuster, in the end, was likely sustainable. Faced with this calculus, the White House chose not to appoint Johnsen during Senate recess, which would have circumvented a likely filibuster but would have kept her in the position for less than two years.

Today I responded to Alex Berenson, novelist and sometimes writer of the television series “24”.  I sent a response to his article “The Writer’s Room at “24” which appears in today’s Week In Review section of the New York Times.  Here is a link to the article.  Should you wish to respond to him – here is a link to page to contact Mr. Berenson.  Click on the link that says “send an email to Alex Berenson.

Here is my response to Mr. Berenson:

====

Dear Mr. Berenson,

I am appalled but unsurprised at your blithe article, The Writer’s Room at “24” , which occupies major real estate in the Week In Review section of today’s New York Times.

Although I am unsurprised to hear that the writers of “24” are a scotch drinking, cigar smoking, Maserati driving group of men in their 40’s and 50’s (according to the cliché grande” in your article), I will take issue with only one thing - the most important statement in your piece.  It is this paragraph:  “This real-time approach is also the reason that Jack so often resorts to torture.  He doesn’t have time to develop a rapport with the terrorists he captures.  He has to break them immediately.”

Torture is very effective at “breaking people”; people talk all the time when they are tortured – it is not very effective at eliciting accurate information and seldom does and certainly not immediately.  Regardless of the “Ticking TV Show Scenario” or any other of the sanctimoniously violent bedtime stories that the writers of “24” have invented, the reason that Jack Bauer so often resorts to torture is ratings, which have been achieved at the expense of the facts and the larger truth.  Torture is ineffective at eliciting accurate information – a fact which the Dean of West Point, General Finnegan, and a group of professional military interrogators unsuccessfully tried to communicate to the writers and producers of “24” when they met with them in November of 2006.

The unfortunate, non-artistic problem with your contention that “like most of life, “24” is best served unironically, at full speed ahead” is the fact that “24” has had a huge and morally corrosive effect on American opinion about torture and American actions in the use of torture.  That is not true of “every television show”, but it is true of “24”. 

“Spitball” that.

After 8 years of imprisonment and torture, Abdul Hamid Al Ghizzawi, an innocent man, is finally released

http://www.thetalkingdog.com/archives2/001430.html 

“In the meantime, Al-Ghizzawi languished at Guantanamo, and languished... as he has for the last eight years. And while he languished, his health deteriorated-- he suffered tuberculosis and liver disease, and at one point, was told by the military that he had AIDS... and then, when Candace brought a motion to demand access to his medical records... he was promptly told that he didn't have AIDS after all. His eyesight has deteriorated. We won't even talk about the mental state of a man cut off from his family--indeed, from all humanity as most of his confinement was in solitary confinement, in the company only of guards and interrogators.” 

This deeply disturbing article by Mark Benjamin is the definitive riposte to the often heard :”but it’s only a dunk in the water” and the” but they do the same thing to US soldiers in training” argument for waterboarding. Benjamin reveals what the official memos say and it is unnecessary to exaggerate or paraphrase them. They speak for themselves, in an antiseptic and oddly phlegmatic way – and they could hardly sound worse.

The behavior of medical personal, most specifically doctors and psychologists, in facilitating torture and assisting in the design of torture, is well documented. Their actions are certainly unethical and illegal, but not unprecedented. The Nuremberg Trials are famous for the Trial Of Major War Criminals but they were actually a series of trials, comprising several categories of crimes including crimes of medical professionals. These trials are known as The Doctors Trials. “The Medical Case, U.S.A. vs. Karl Brandt, et al. (also known as the Doctors' Trial), was prosecuted in 1946-47 against twenty-three doctors and administrators accused of organizing and participating in war crimes and crimes against humanity in the form of medical experiments and medical procedures inflicted on prisoners and civilians.” (From Harvard Law School’s Nuremberg Trials Project, http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/php/docs_swi.php?DI=1&text=medical )

This article is short and devastating and I urge you to read it. It provides the best and clearest and most clearly documented picture of the reality of America’s official  method of waterboarding. Here I must point out that Attorney General Holder’s prospective investigation will, if it ever happens, only focus on those who exceeded the instructions found in these documents.  

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/opinion/01xenakis.html?scp=1&sq=Xenakis&st=Search

From the article:

The shabbiness of the medical judgments, though, pales in comparison to the ethical breaches by the doctors and psychologists involved. Health professionals have a responsibility extending well beyond nonparticipation in torture; the historic maxim is, after all, “First do no harm.” These health professionals did the polar opposite.

Nevertheless, no agency — not the Pentagon, the C.I.A., state licensing boards or professional medical societies — has initiated any action to investigate, much less discipline, these individuals. They have ignored the gross and appalling violations by medical personnel. This is an unconscionable disservice to the thousands of ethical doctors and psychologists in the country’s service. It is not too late to begin investigations. They should start now. 

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Justice-Department-protect-by-Stephen-Soldz-100224-5.html

The circle is now closed and smoothed:

• White House desires torture
• CIA demands legal cover
• OLC asked to provide legal rationale
• CIA and White House tell what they want OLC memos to say; CIA provides the so-called "evidence" of safety of torture techniques
• OLC writes the memos, following instructions
• Obama White House then says no one can be prosecuted because they followed the memos
• Memo authors are immune because there was no standard saying that incompetent work on demand designed to legalize hitherto illegal activities is unethical
• Thus, patently illegal activities are able to carried out with no legal culpability for anyone 

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/02/25/the-mock-burial-in-the-opr-report/ 

http://www.slate.com/id/2243737/

Torture Bored - How we've erased the legal lines around torture and replaced them with nothing.

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate

http://www.slate.com/id/2245531/

David Margolis is wrong - Justice Department's ethics investigation shouldn't leave John Yoo and Jay Bybee home free.

Davis Luban at Slate

http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2010/02/when_you_are_done_reading_this.php

The OPR report: this era's 'Hiroshima

James Fallows at The Atlantic

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/02/hbc-90006587

Quid Pro Quo

Scott Horton at Harpers

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/02/hbc-90006582

Unredacting the OPR Report

Scott Horton at Harpers

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/02/22/opr/index.html

The flailing falsehoods of America's war criminals

Glenn Greenwald for Salon

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2010/02/yoo-bybee-and-hall-of-mirrors-of-legal.html

Yoo, Bybee, and the Hall of Mirrors of Legal Argument

Jack Balkin at Balkinization  

Margolis overruled the conclusions of the OPR Report ,which recommended that John Yoo and Jay Bybee be referred to the bar for disciplinary proceedings. Margolis said that John Yoo and Jay Bybee were not guilty of professional misconduct. It is clear from reading this exchange that John Yoo believes that the president has a legal exception for mass murder. Does the president have a legal exception for genocide? Slavery?  Does anything constitute legal misconduct in Mr. Margolis’s view? For elucidation on this question read Jack Balkin. - Bonnie

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/022010b.html

Jason Leopold at Consortium News:

“The OPR report included an exchange between an OPR investigator and Yoo regarding what he referred to as the "bad things opinion," what Yoo felt the President could do in wartime.

"What about ordering a village of [resistance] to be massacred?" an OPR investigator asked Yoo. "Is that a power that the president could legally-"

"Yeah," Yoo said.

"To order a village of civilians to be [exterminated]?" the questioner replied.

"Sure," Yoo said.