Decline and Fall

Spencer Ackerman has a written really interesting piece in the Washington Independent about the CIA's lack of experience in interrogations. Counter to what most of us assumed, they haven't been doing it that long, and they aren't the "experts" in interrogation most have assumed.

Surprising as it may be, the CIA has never really been in the interrogation business. After 9/11, it turned its back on its own limited history of interrogations and never consulted those in the U.S. with solid experience in that difficult art. Even in the seven years since it has built an interrogation capability mostly from scratch, the agency has never applied the best practices in behavioral science to improve its regimen. The result has been to privilege brutality out of ignorance, which, according to many experts and insiders interviewed, means that interrogation practices that produce faulty information are now at the very heart of the U.S. efforts against a mysterious and still-unfamiliar enemy.

The article suggests that the CIA consulted with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel--all countries who we already knew tortured--to develop its interrogation program. Nut I doubt that their use torture as an interrogation technique was as influenced by their consultation with Egypt, et al as this article suggests. The fact is that everyone who has ever seen a movie where the interrogator "does what has to be done" thinks they know what they're doing. I've been an interrogator for almost 15 years, and I would say that a good 50% of the people I meet who learn that about me imagine they know how I do my job. I've seen many, many completely untrained people go into the booth or offer their two cents, and that advice is always, EVERY TIME, to get vicious. These CIA agents were given the green light to do anything they wanted, and they licked their lips at the opportunity to play vigilante. They knew they could do some research into best methods, but that isn't nearly as fun as shaking your head as you lament that "desperate times call for desperate measures," is it?

So the problem isn't just that the CIA didn't have any sort of real interrogation program (I can't independently verify that, but it doesn't surprise me in the least), it's that everyone thinks they know how to interrogate, so when interrogators were needed, people volunteered themselves. The fact that there was no real oversight just confirms what Ron Suskind, Seymour Hirsch and others have been saying.

Labels: GWOT, interrogation, torture

Lots of links to this piece around the blogosphere, but abuses like this can't be publicized enough. This is happening in America. The "land of the free." Back when I was a kid, you only heard kind of behavior from the Soviets:

Last Sunday I and a few other girls began our trip to New York. We were going to shop and enjoy the Christmas spirit. We made ourselves comfortable on first class, drank white wine and looked forward to go shopping, eat good food and enjoy life. When we landed at JFK airport the traditional clearance process began.

We were screened and went on to passport control. As I waited for them to finish examining my passport I heard an official say that there was something which needed to be looked at more closely and I was directed to the work station of Homeland Security. There I was told that according to their records I had overstayed my visa by 3 weeks in 1995. For this reason I would not be admitted to the country and would be sent home on the next flight. I looked at the official in disbelief and told him that I had in fact visited New York after the trip in 1995 without encountering any difficulties. A detailed interrogation session ensued.

...

I was exhausted, tired and hungry. I didn't understand the officials' conduct, for they were treating me like a very dangerous criminal. Soon thereafter I was removed from the cubicle and two armed guards placed me up against a wall. A chain was fastened around my waist and I was handcuffed to the chain. Then my legs were placed in chains. I asked for permission to make a telephone call but they refused. So secured, I was taken from the airport terminal in full sight of everybody. I have seldom felt so bad, so humiliated and all because I had taken a longer vacation than allowed under the law.

...

I was completely exhausted, tired and cold. Fourteen hours after I had landed I had something to eat and drink for the first time. I was given porridge and bread. But it did not help much. I was afraid and the attitude of all who handled me was abysmal to say the least. They did not speak to me as much as snap at me.

...

I was hugely relieved when, at last, I was told that I was to be taken to the airport, that is to say until I was again handcuffed and chained.Then I could take no more and broke down and cried. I begged them at least to leave out the leg chains but my request was ignored. When we arrived at the airport, another jail guard took pity on me and removed the leg chains. Even so I was led through a full airport terminal handcuffed and escorted by armed men. I felt terrible. On seeing this, people must think that there goes a very dangerous criminal. In this condition I was led up into the Icelandair waiting room, and was kept handcuffed until I entered the embarkation corridor.

These aren't the actions of one rogue asshole at INS or DHS. This is the procedure when a dire threat to national security like a young Icelandic woman tries to enter our country. This is the result of the politics of fear. I am ashamed to be an American.

Labels: GWOT, liberty

Regarding the motivations of the insurgents I interrogated in Iraq, a week ago I wrote:

The vast majority of them weren't radical Muslims, bin Laden acolytes or Saddam hardliners; they were motivated by nationalism. They opposed the U.S. occupation of what they saw as their sovereign land (silly them!) so they lashed out in the most meaningful way they could: at the "collaborators" in their midst aiding and abetting the occupying, colonial power. It's basic insurgency doctrine, folks. In my experience, "religious fanaticism" is the veneer that some in Iraq, and even more in the West, use to cover what is essentially the struggle to get out from under the thumb of a strongman.

Later last week, The Washington Monthly published an article by Andrew Tilghman, former Stars & Stripes reporter, that came to a similar conclusion, and on Tuesday Gallup released a poll analysis that supports my anecdotal experience. (Thanks to Framing Science for the link) The pollsters discovered that political grievances, rather than religious ones, are the prime motivating factors behind Violent Islamic Extremism:

After analyzing survey data representing more than 90% of the global Muslim population, Gallup found that despite widespread anti-American sentiment, only a small minority saw the 9/11 attacks as morally justified. Even more significant, there was no correlation between level of religiosity and extremism among respondents. Among the 7% of the population that fits in the politically radicalized category -- those who saw the 9/11 attacks as completely justifiable and have an unfavorable view of the United States -- 94% said religion is an important part of their daily lives, compared with 90% among those in the moderate majority. And no significant difference exists between radicals and moderates in mosque attendance.

Gallup probed respondents further and actually asked both those who condoned and condemned extremist acts why they said what they did. The responses fly in the face of conventional wisdom. For example, in Indonesia, the largest Muslim majority country in the world, many of those who condemned terrorism cited humanitarian or religious justifications to support their response. For example, one woman said, "Killing one life is as sinful as killing the whole world," paraphrasing verse 5:32 in the Quran.

On the other hand, not a single respondent in Indonesia who condoned the attacks of 9/11 cited the Quran for justification. Instead, this group's responses were markedly secular and worldly. For example, one Indonesian respondent said, "The U.S. government is too controlling toward other countries, seems like colonizing."

The real difference between those who condone terrorist acts and all others is about politics, not piety. For example, the politically radicalized often cite "occupation and U.S. domination" as their greatest fear for their country and only a small minority of them agree the United States would allow people in the region to fashion their own political future or that it is serious about supporting democracy in the region. Also, among this group's top responses was the view that to better relations with the Muslim world, the West should respect Islam and stop imposing its beliefs and policies. In contrast, moderates most often mentioned economic problems as their greatest fear for their country, and along with respecting Islam, they see economic support and investments as a way for the West to better relations. Moderates are also more likely than the politically radicalized to say the United States is serious about promoting democracy.

Note how counter-intuitive this all seems from the Clash of Civilizations perspective through which the entire GWOT has been filtered for us. No significant difference in mosque attendance between radicals and moderates. The Quran cited only as justification for abhorring violence, not condoning it. American occupation and lack of respect are the reasons the radicals fight us, not the results of their fight against us.

The implications of a study such as this are enormous. The most obvious is that if we are going to claim to be serious about fighting terrorism, we need to focus our efforts on the factors that actually motivate people to become terrorists, not the factors we continue to insist motivate them. Killing or incarcerating a terrorist or insurgent may take one of them out of circulation, but if you create two new ones for every one you destroy, you are going backward, not forward.

I saw this dynamic when I was an interrogator in Iraq. Coalition forces would arrest an insurgent, humiliate him in front of his family, keep him in prison for months, and then release him without charges. In the meantime he learned to hate us (even if he hadn't before) and, more importantly, his family learned to hate us. While he was learning to hate us, he was in a population that was uniquely qualified to fan the flames of his hatred and teach him how he might better act on it. Meanwhile his family and close friends were now easy targets for recruitment. In getting rid of one "terrorist," we created several. Is it any wonder that the estimated number of insurgents in Iraq jumped from 5,000 (total) in 2003 to 70,000 (Sunni) in 2007, while the prison population skyrocketed from 10,000 to 60,000? (See pp. 25-26 of this Brookings Institute report for details.)

When will we realize that our presence in the Middle East and our support of tyrants such as Mubarek and the Saudi Royal Family are not only not helping ease the troubles in the region, they are the primary cause for those troubles? Middle Easterners are not stupid. They can see that America has a long history of supporting brutal dictators (remember the Shah?) and they have learned from that experience that we are not to be trusted. They see us stomping around the world with our big stick and turn to whatever means of resistance they can find to resist what they see as the assault on their culture by the biggest bully on earth. The fact that militant Islam is their only major option should not cause us to confuse their motives

Cross-posted at OOIBC.

Labels: Framing, fundamentalism, GWOT, interrogation, Iraq, Islam, OOIBC, personal, politics, terrorism

Another whistleblower-getting-stomped-by-big-government-thugs story, this one from a while back. Actually, it turns out that the Sibel Edmonds story has been out for a while, so this isn't exactly a breaking story. But it's new to me and this is exactly the kind of story that needs to get out, so I'm blogging it.

Some of it is almost laughably absurd, for instance the part where "even information about her birthday and the schools she had attended became classified, a so-called matter of national security too dangerous to disclose."

But this part should send chills down your spine:

"My attorney stood up and argued the case about the state secret's privilege. Then the court asked [us] to step out of the court...while the government argued its side. Can they do this? This is the United States of America. The guards escorted us out and they locked the doors. We don't know what [the FBI attorneys] told the judges. My attorneys could never know what they argued. As far as we know, they could have made the most outrageous lies. There was no one there to challenge them. We assume that they did because a few weeks later the court upheld the lower court's ruling."

Just another day in the War on the Enemies of Freedom.

She's got a website, by the way, which you ought to check out. See also the Let Sibel Edmonds Speak blog for further information, including the recent airing of information regarding her case that was previously classified.

Meanwhile, Pardon My Paradox looked up Bunnatine Greenhouse, one of the whistleblowers mentioned in the article linked to below, and her story appears to check out. He also found that Donald Vance received this year's Ridenhour Truth-Telling Prize (awarded annually to a whistleblower "for bringing a specific issue of social importance to the public’s attention").

Labels: GWOT, liberty

In Bush's brave new world, whistleblowers are repaid with jail time and interrogated at Camp Cropper:

One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.

Or worse.

For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers - all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.

The seller, he claimed, was the Iraqi-owned company he worked for, Shield Group Security Co.

''It was a Wal-Mart for guns,'' he says. ''It was all illegal and everyone knew it.''

So Vance says he blew the whistle, supplying photos and documents and other intelligence to an FBI agent in his hometown of Chicago because he didn't know whom to trust in Iraq.

For his trouble, he says, he got 97 days in Camp Cropper, an American military prison outside Baghdad that once held Saddam Hussein, and he was classified a security detainee.

Also held was colleague Nathan Ertel, who helped Vance gather evidence documenting the sales, according to a federal lawsuit both have filed in Chicago, alleging they were illegally imprisoned and subjected to physical and mental interrogation tactics ''reserved for terrorists and so-called enemy combatants.''

This is what happens when the supposed need for "security" is allowed to trump all rights, even for American citizens. This is what happens when you're "either with us or with the terrorists." Even when you are demonstrably not with the terrorists. Because the definitions of "patriot," "traitor" and "enemy combatant" are entirely subject to the arbitrary will of the king.

Labels: GWOT, interrogation, Iraq, liberty

A fascinating interview with Josh Rushing, the former Marine Public Affairs Officer who was told to stop speaking to the press because he had committed the unpardonable sin of defending Al Jazeera. He now works for Al Jazeera International, where he has seen, over and over again, the mind-numbing absurdity of America's new distrust of the press. The interview is worth reading in its entirety, but this section in particular was astonishing for its sheer absurdity:

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about that first story you went out on. Talk about going to North Dakota and what happened.

JOSH RUSHING: Yeah, you know, it seemed like a simple story. We were going to do a story about Small Town America, and there's actually a part -- and, you know, the country is obsessed with immigration, how many people are coming over the border. Well, there's part of North Dakota, this kind of western, northwestern North Dakota, where the towns are actually emptying out. All the kids are graduating, going away and not coming back, to the point there's actually small towns that will give you money to put your children in the school system there and land. They'll give you free land to build your house on, just trying to attract somebody to keep these communities alive. So I wanted to see what's the value in these communities. So it's a real nice, charming story, extolling the values of Small Town America.

Well, I go up, and it was kind of interesting, because a reporter came out on my first day there, a reporter from the local newspaper, and she said she was surprised at how I was dressed. And I thought, well, maybe I'm kind of casual to be on TV. I was in blue jeans. And she said, "No, I thought you'd be in robes and a head scarf." You've got to be kidding. Why would I be in robes and a head scarf? "Well, you're Al Jazeera, you know. And that's what we were looking for." So it was --

AMY GOODMAN: So she came out to do a story on you --

JOSH RUSHING: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: -- doing a story in her town.

JOSH RUSHING: Absolutely, right. And so, you know, I gave her a nice interview. She kind of got it. And a couple days later she called me, really terrified and upset. And she said a federal agent had been to her office, had asked her to step outside. She said, "Can I bring my reporter's notebook?" And he said, "No. I'll be the one asking questions," took her out and started asking her questions like, you know, "Who did you talk to? Did he seem like a citizen? Did he seem like an American? Did he have a camera? He didn't take pictures, did he?" "Of course, he took pictures. They're doing a story, you know? A news story."

And he said there were possible international implications to me being that close to the unsecured border. Let alone, I came from Washington, D.C., where my office is three blocks from the White House. Now I'm a danger in northwestern North Dakota. So it turns out he was from the Border Protection, Customs & Border Protection. He went around and did that to everyone I interviewed so that I couldn't go back and get another interview. We were going to go back and do the high school graduation, and we were unwelcome at that point, because people were worried. They were worried -- are there international implications they don't know about? Had they said something that would put the country at risk to me, or even worse, maybe put themselves at risk from their own country? At the time, it was the NSA wiretapping story that was in the news. And even this reporter worried about calling her mom, because was she now on the wiretap database, and would that put her mom on the list, as well? So I was going through this kind of weird time, where I'm being followed by federal agents. I'm just trying to do a story about the value of Small Town America.

It's hard to make up satire like this. The point Rushing has been making ever since he saw the way Arab news media were shunned by military commanders in Iraq is that if we aren't getting our message out to the Arab world, the mission of "building democratic institutions" over there, er, here, is utterly lost. Al Jazeera, contrary to what the right has asserted and the American "liberal media" has dutifully repeated, is actually one of the best signs that open societies might actually be on their way in that/this part of the world. Any news organization willing to rake enough muck to get themselves kicked out of a monarchy for offending the regime is good with me. As noted in this Washington Post op-ed,

Most people in this country have never watched al-Jazeera. But in so many minds, it has become synonymous with al-Qaeda. I'd guess that the only thing most people know about it is that it is always the first network to receive bin Laden's videotapes. What they don't know is that al-Jazeera started nearly 10 years ago as the first independent voice in the Middle East. With the courage to tell it like it is, it offended authoritarian regimes from Saudi Arabia to Jordan. Its reporters -- and at times the network itself -- have been routinely kicked out of countries for reporting the real news instead of acting like the sleeping pill known as state-run television news.

Al-Jazeera has even been labeled "Zionist" by the Arab street and its regimes. It is the only Arabic broadcaster to put Israeli officials on television and to report the Israeli side of stories. Israeli leaders such as Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres have been invited to appear on the network, although they ultimately did not. But Israel routinely sends Arabic-speaking officials to participate on various programs.

What many Americans also don't know is that, before Sept. 11, 2001, al-Jazeera was lauded and applauded by the Bush administration for this fearless attitude toward the dictatorships of the Middle East. High-ranking administration officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, made frequent appearances on the network.

My, how times have changed. But it's not surprising, really, when you consider that the U.S. is steadily declining on the worldwide press freedom scale. I can only hope that one of these days someone in our country's leadership will, perhaps out of benign curiosity, pick up the constitution and notice that it's actually pretty explicit about how important the press is in a free society.

Labels: GWOT, liberty, politics

For some reason, certain segments of the Christian world seem to think it's a good idea to demonstrate repeatedly that they are not just insane, they are standing on a street corner with a sign proclaiming the end of the world insane. This picture shows the city of Jerusalem minus the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam. It's from the website of Christians United for Israel (CUFI). But it's not just some picture they posted there. It's the logo. The masthead. The picture they have chosen to represent their organization. But what does it all mean? I'll let Bruce Wilson at Talk to Action explain:

As a possibly intentional provocation, the elimination of the Dome Of The Rock from CUFI's website logo is consonant with [CUFI Founder and Chairman] John Hagee's repeated vilification of Islam....

John Hagee has also repeatedly discussed, publicly and in his writing, his belief that, because history is unfolding exactly as described in Biblical prophecy, the destruction of the Dome of The Rock and the subsequent rebuilding of a Jewish temple on the site is inevitable.

Actually, "standing on a street corner with a sign proclaiming the end of the world insane" doesn't cover it. They're actually trying to end the world. Thank FSM this is isn't what constitutes mainstream opinion in Israel!

But, Pastor Hagee's, and CUFI's, political positions have no counterpart within Israel mainstream society. Rather, such views are held, in Israel, by groups considered to be on the extreme political fringe. A veteran Israeli journalist consulted for this story stated that, in mainstream Israeli political sentiment, actions, conspiracies, or even thoughts concerning the destruction of the Dome Of The Rock are considered "abhorrent" and repeatedly stressed the extremely marginal nature of such beliefs within Israeli society.

Unfortunately, what passes for "abhorrent" in polite Israeli society will get you an audience with prominent members of one of the two major parties in this one. John McCain and Roy Blunt have held private meetings with Hagee, and he was a keynote speaker at AIPAC's convention two months ago. Digby, as usual, put it best:

These crazy people (and I don't care if they do it in the name of religion, they are still crazy) really believe that all-out war is a positive thing and they are doing what they can to bring that about, including meeting with important American politicians. I believe in free speech, even for nuts. But for AIPAC, John McCain and Roy Blunt to pander to and fete people who are going out of their way to provoke a religious war for their own reasons by pulling ridiculous stunts like that really should be beyond the pale.

This is a country where a shock jock, who has been making racist and sexist comments for years now, is (rightly) forced to resign, but where Christian groups who beat the drums for armageddon confirm to the Muslim world exactly what they have suspected all along: that the (conflict formerly known as the) Global War on Terror is just another religious crusade against the infidel Saracens. It doesn't matter that the vast majority of Americans wouldn't kill anyone over religion (they especially wouldn't travel halfway around the world to do so), this is what al-Qaeda and the rest of their hateful breed preach, and it's believed, and acted upon, by a large enough minority in the Muslim world to be worth taking seriously.

Digby's right: this should be a slam dunk for the Democrats. Go after Hagee and his ilk (Jerry Falwell and Gary Bauer, for instance, who are members of CUFI's Executive Board). Show America and the world that this moron does not represent America, at least the non-crazy part. Repudiate these backwards lunatics in no uncertain terms. And for the love of all that is good in the world, stop hosting these jackasses on Capitol Hill!

Labels: conservatism, GWOT, religion

Per Dave W's suggestion in the comment thread to this post, let me be absolutely clear about something--Interrogators don't actually have the authority to turn any prisoner over to Iraqi police or military units that will, often, abuse them. Those transfers are made way above the head of the interrogator.

Having said that, it's in the interest of the interrogator (and the detainee, actually) to make the detainee believe that this is in the interrogator's power. It's an approach technique: make the detainee believe that the interrogator has the power to control what happens to him.

The fact remains that it is illegal and contrary to U.S. policy to send anyone to a place where American forces have reason to believe that he will be abused. But since the transfer of authority in June 2004, we're technically guests in their country. America doesn't make the rules there, even though we exercise wide influence over the internal laws of that country. In point of fact, everyone arrrested by us or by the Iraqis is subject to Iraqi law and goes before an Iraqi judge. It's their system, and we can't tell them, "no, you can't have custody of your own prisoner." We don't send them so much as they take them.

Large, continual efforts have been made to train Iraqi forces to treat detainees humanely, and there have even been cases where Americans have rescued Iraqi prisoners from Iraqi prisons where they were being mistreated. But the abuse most likely continues, and legally our hands are tied to stop it, except in cases like the one I just linked to. This is one of the many legal gray areas that results froom a battlefield that is also a population center, where there is no "front line" and the streets are patrolled by both the military and the civil police. It's a horrible situation to be in, but it's where we are in Iraq. That's just how things are in assymetrical wars.

One way to curb the abuse would be to aggressively pursue and punish abusers, be they American or Iraqi. So far I haven't seen a lot of evidence that this is happening, but I do know that the commanders over there are very, very afraid of another abuse scandal happening on their watch, so the message has gotten across to some extent. The real change in U.S. practices won't come until those at the top (Rumsfeld, Cheney and General Miller, for instance) are prosecuted for their role in the grotesque abuses of prisoners and the flagrant violations of international law that they authorized. I'm not holding my breath, though.

Labels: GWOT, interrogation, Iraq, torture

Jim Henley has an interesting post up at Unqualified Offerings about torture and its long-term ramifications. It's centered on a passage in Mark Bowden's Atlantic cover story on the events leading up to the killing of Abu Musab Zarqawi where the interrogator tells an important detainee: "You don't want to go to Abu Ghraib, and I can help you, but you have to give me something in trade." Byron York at The Corner believes this to have been a reference to the detainee's belief that torture is still practiced at Abu Ghraib prison, and both Henley and Eric Martin agree that's what it means, while coming to different conclusions about it.

I'm not so sure though. In my experience, Iraqi detainees were less afraid of Abu Ghraib because of those photos than they were afraid because of the spartan conditions, danger (it was one of the most frequently attacked places in Iraq and many of those attacks were targeted at the detainees themselves), disruption in their lives, uncertainty about their future, and the very real and widely-understood possibility that they would disappear down a bureaucratic black hole from which they might take years to escape. Abu Ghraib is a prison, and being in prison sucks, whether you're being tortured for information or ignored altogether.

Actually, detainees were far more fearful of going to an Iraqi-run prison. They knew that the Iraqi Police and Army were only too willing to beat, electrocute, cut, twist, or otherwise harm their prisoners, and they had no desire to be subjected to that. Keeping them in American custody was often an incentive, given their alternatives.

Labels: GWOT, interrogation, Iraq

This one's a few days old, but you shouldn't miss Belle Waring at Crooked Timber having a blast with a few responses to "various right-wing Morrisette-ironic talking points." I second Unqualified Offerings' endorsement of this rule of thumb:

if Solzhenitsyn recounts some practice as one employed in coercive interrogations at Lubyanka, it’s torture. So, false execution: definitely torture. Also torture: long-time standing; exposure to extremes of heat and cold; forcing prisoners to kneel or stand in painful positions; putting prisoners in cells so small they cannot stand or lie down; keeping them awake for days at a time. These practices were the meat and drink of the NKVD, who preferred them to fingernail extraction for the same reason certain American torture advocates do: they can be made to seem as if they are not torture, even though they are, in fact, actually torture.

And then there's this, which I am also only too happy to endorse:

“Liberals don’t condemn terrorist atrocities in Iraq, such as the latest chlorine bomb attacks, because they think Arabs are sub-human scum from whom nothing better can be expected.” Um, who thinks Arabs are scum now? Moving on, I have a strong sense that my condemning such attacks is pointless (still, obviously, I read about such attacks with surprise and horror and regard them as evil). Give me a lever long enough and I will…er, scratch my ass with it in a spasm of useless, self-righteous moral preening! By contrast, since I am a citizen of a democratic state, my efforts to change US policy by criticizing, say, Yoo’s depraved torture justifications may actually have some effect, however small. Additionally, it’s true that qua terrorists (rather than qua Arabs), I don’t expect much better from Sunni ultras. On the other hand, I am a US patriot. This means I have a lot invested in our city on the hill image and don’t want to see my nation’s honor dragged through the mud by a bunch of incompetent authoritarian dillholes.

You see, it's not that the left is more outraged by the awfulness of America than by the awfulness of more demonstrably awful countries, it's that the left is more outraged by the awfulness of America when America claims a certain moral high ground and then acts awfully. It pisses us off when we look at our own society and say, "gee, that doesn't look like a very nice place, does it"?

Labels: conservatism, GWOT, liberty, terrorism, torture

This post at Welcome to Pottersville resonated with me because I've been in a similar predicament before, and I know the feeling. But Iraq is long, long past its diagnosis stage. These words haunt me, even as I prepare to go back there:

Every day we keep our troops there, another two or three soldiers die. Ten more died over the Easter weekend. We don’t need surges and another hundred billion depleting our treasury or fancy strategies long on goal and short on policy. The backdrop of four plus bloody years tells us at 100 decibels that we don’t need any hi tech solutions to tell us what over 26,000 dead, maimed and injured bodies can at a fraction of the cost:

It’s time to pull the plug on Iraq because not only can we not solve the problems that we’ve created, not only can we not wait for the next administration to competently attack these problems, we are the problem. We are the cancer and we need to cut ourselves out regardless of the prognosis. Iraq believes that it’s strong enough to continue without American involvement.

I do, too.

I'm not ready to withdraw just yet, if only for the reason that this will tell the Islamists, the criminals and any other enemies of America that all they have to do is stir the pot and make things miserable for a while and we will abandon everything we said we stood for. I wish we hadn't gotten into this war, but we're there, and we can't afford to bow out disgracefully.

But I understand why that seems like a good option and I can't fault people for wanting the whole thing to be over and done with. It's certainly a better option than "more of the same."

Labels: Bush, GWOT, Iraq

It's odd that this hass to be a major story, but some people, particularly in the Bush Administration, still don't get it: Iraq was not working with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion. Period. But here's Dick Cheney, continuing the disinformation:

Remember Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist, an Al-Qaeda affiliate. He ran a training camp in Afghanistan for Al-Qaeda, then migrated after we went into Afghanistan and shut 'em down there, he went to Baghdad. He took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the Al-Qaeda operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene and then of course led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June. He's the guy who arranged the bombing of the Samarra mosque that precipitated the sectarian violence between Shi'a and Sunni. This is Al-Qaeda operating in Iraq, and as I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq. There's no way you can segment out and say, "Well, we'll fight the war on terror in Pakistan or Afghanistan but we can separate Iraq. That's not really, in any way, shape, or form related." It's just dead wrong. Bin Laden has said this is the central battle in the war on terror.

OK, let's just take this one bit at a time:

Remember Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist, an Al-Qaeda affiliate. He ran a training camp in Afghanistan for Al-Qaeda, then migrated after we went into Afghanistan and shut 'em down there, he went to Baghdad.

Well, no, he went to Northern Iraq, the Kurdish-controlled area, the part of Iraq where U.S. Special Forces were training Kurds and Saddam had almost no say in what went on. Zarqawi was not welcome in Baghdad.

He took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the Al-Qaeda operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene and then of course led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June.

Yes, but his connection to al-Qaeda proper, i.e., bin Laden and Zawahiri, was shaky at best. Zarqawi was considered a rogue by UBL and the al-Qaeda leadership, among other reasons for Zarqawi's insistence on fighting the Shi'a first.

He's the guy who arranged the bombing of the Samarra mosque that precipitated the sectarian violence between Shi'a and Sunni.

But Cheney can't even get this part right: believe me when I tell you that the Shi'a and Sunni were slaughtering each other long before the Samarra mosque was destroyed in early 2006. But this is exactly in line with the Administration's insistence that prior to that event the Shi'a, with the exception of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, were all blissfully pro-American and pro-Iraqi unification. They weren't, and everyone on the ground in Iraq knew that. That civil war began as soon as America "liberated" Iraq and Iraq's sectarian and ethnic groups started coalescing and relocating outsiders in 2003. To make any other claim is to be indifferent to the plain truth.
This is Al-Qaeda operating in Iraq, and as I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq.

There's no way you can segment out and say, "Well, we'll fight the war on terror in Pakistan or Afghanistan but we can separate Iraq. That's not really, in any way, shape, or form related." It's just dead wrong. Bin Laden has said this is the central battle in the war on terror.

Al-Qaeda went from enemy of the state to one of the many paramilitary organizations in Iraq at precisely the mopment America invaded. Iraq was not only segmentable, it was one of the few nations we might have felt secure in ignoring back when we were actually concerned with fighting al-Qaeda. Saddam knew that the Islamist threat to his regime was palpable, so he kept them at arm's length, while not seeking to alienate them completely. Iraq is only the central battle because America has made it so; UBL is only taking advantage of the opportunity we've given him.

It is unbelievable to me that the Vice President can go on the radio and say what he knows, what everyone knows, to be a blatant lie. But he's talking to his crowd here; Rush Limbaugh's audience doesn't care about the truth, they care about showing support for their President, no matter how far down he wants to drag his country.

But this kind of thing can be instructive, too. It's one thing to record what the Administration says to the world at large, but it's another to take note of what they say to a supportive audience. This is an example of craven coalition politics at work: keep the troops happy by feeding them a bunch of processed lies and they'll continue to doubt what the rest of the world knows to be true: their man in Washington is an incompetent, lying charlatan.

Labels: Bush, GWOT, Iraq

More reason to be worried about the sabre-rattling that has been going on with Iran: they're rattling theirs right back. The Iranian press has said that the IEDs that killed 11 people in southeastern Iran are linked to America. They've even posted pictures of the offending devices. That's right, just as our President is claiming that Iran is behind IED attacks in Iraq, someone in Iran is claiming that we're behind IED attacks in Iran.

I'm not worried that we're actually doing it. As The Left Coaster notes:

Even if the United States were behind the operation, it is unlikely the Iranians would find weapons and materials that would be identifiable as American. US organizations that are involved in covert operations are very good about not leaving signatures that can be traced.

At least I'd like to think our boys are that good.

This just gives Iran even more reason to ratchet up their anti-American propaganda in preparation for another war that we can not afford to get into. They can afford it, however, because they know that they would receive the support of all of those nations we've pissed off since the lies and slander (remember "freedom fries"?) we engaged in in the runup to the Iraq invasion. I suppose that turnabout is fair play, but this will cost lives. Many, many lives.

(OK, I just read the Wikipedia entry for Freedom Fries. "Liberty Measles"? WTF?)

Labels: GWOT, Iran, military

More perspective, this time from John Allen Paulos at ABC News. We throw terms like "billion" and "trillion" around but we scarcely understand just how big a number "trillion" is. Via 3 Quarks Daily, here's a helpful guide:

it would take almost three decades to spend a trillion dollars at $1,000 per second, and if spending at this rate occurred only during business hours, more than 120 years would be required to dispense the sum.

Another time analogy is illuminating. A million seconds takes approximately 11.5 days to tick by, whereas a billion seconds requires about 32 years. Fully 32,000 years need to pass before a trillion seconds elapse.

Of course, some might argue that the $1 trillion expenditure in Iraq has made us both more secure domestically and more respected internationally than ever before. Perhaps as many as a dozen people agree with Cheney's recent hallucinatory comment that "we've had enormous successes, and we will continue to have enormous successes" in Iraq."

At times, it seems that the nightmare and expense of these enormous successes will continue for the next trillion seconds.

Labels: Bush, GWOT, Iraq

I saw another documentary this week: Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. As a veteran of that place, I must say that the film-makers got a lot right, and I am glad their film came out. (Can I just interject a general thankfulness here for the fact that it's still OK to shine a critical spotlight on the government in this country? I can? Well gee, thanks!) Unfortunately, they got some things wrong too.

The most egregious example of missing the point has to do with their general theme of painting the Military Policemen in the photos as the poor little fall guys for a vast government conspiracy. Was there a vast government conspiracy to circumvent the Geneva Conventions and the Laws of War? Yes. Did Rumsfeld and others take proactive measures to blur the legal lines between acceptable military practices in interrogation and detainee abuse? Undeniably. Should the officers and administration officials be held responsible for their blatant violations of human rights? Absolutely. Were the likes of Charles Granger and Lynndie England hung out to dry in an effort to deflect criticism from the administration's close involvement in the circumvention of laws of war, the strict adherence to which America was once the examplar? Yes they were.

But that doesn't mean they were simply unwitting victims. They were allowed and encouraged to engage in despicable acts that have no basis in American policy. But as much as I am glad that they have been punished, the failure to punish those who ordered and condoned their behavior is unconscionable.

The administration's line that those photos were the result of a few bad apples who rejoiced in sadism was, like most lies, true to certain extent. Look at their smiles. There can be no denying the sadism of the people in those photos. The role that some unscrupulous interrogators played in that abuse is certainly significant. But to assert that the Army taught them to mimic electrocution and drag detainees nude from one end of the hall to another is a lie. I know this because I am a graduate of the Army Interrogator course and have taught interrogation at the Army Intelligence School, and I know from both first-hand experience and a thorough understanding of the relevant manuals that physical coercion has not been taught at least since 1992, when the version of the relevant Field Manual (34-52, since updated and re-numbered 2-22.3) that I learned from was published.

I remember well the admonitions of my instructors that physical coercion is both wrong and useless--we've all heard that people will say anything to get you to stop hurting them. The long-standing policy is that if a student violates the Geneva Conventions in the course of a practice interrogation in the schoolhouse, they fail the interrogation and are counseled. Too many counselings and they simply don't graduate, and are sent to an MOS where they won't have so much opportunity to break those particular laws. Interrogators are not merely not taught how to abuse detainees, they are discouraged in substantial ways at every turn from countenancing such behavior.

Unfortunately, there's no way for the schoolhouse to police the training in units once their students have graduated from the course. My guess, and I can't claim to know this for certain, is that the abuses recorded at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere were the result of bad--nay, wicked--training by morally unconscious NCOs after their soldiers had already graduated, and in direct contradiction to standard practice. Well, that and the active encouragement by sinister people such as the former Defense Secretary to "remove the gloves." Those interrogators knew better, because they were not trained in the uses of physical coercion by the Army Intelligence School.

One of the other things I learned as a student-interrogator also bears on this question. We were often told that "everybody thinks they know how to interogate." I've seen this in action: I once stood and smiled as an officer with no interrogation training tried to instruct me in the way to "get to" a detainee. He assumed, as so many people do, that interrogation is all about making the detainee miserable. It is not. One of the most effective tools I have used was the befriending and advocacy of the detainee. As the one official who the detainee talked to on a regular basis, I was in the unique position of actually knowing this person as another human being. Emphasizing that connection is a powerful, effective and humane tool for the collection of information that can and does save lives and shorten wars. Donald Rumsfeld, John Yoo and General Miller are not graduates of the interrogation course, but they, as so many others, think they know how to do the job. They do not. So I wish there had been a bit more balance in the film's treatment of the policies that led to the behavior that we have all heard about.

Overall, Ghosts of Abu Ghraib got the story right. But the film-makers' zeal to indict those at the top of the chain of command and the military intelligence community obscures the fact that these practices are not part of military doctrine for interrogators. A simple interview with a representative of the Army Interrogation Course could have addressed this, but it wouldn't have fit into their grand narrative. This is unfortunate, because we were never taught to behave dishonorably, except when those who don't know what they are doing attempted to intervene.

Labels: GWOT, interrogation, torture

As someone who once supported the Iraq War, I am keenly interested in those who have come around as I have. I'm also interested in those who have proposed actual solutions to that fiasco, instead of standing around making "Dubya's an idiot" jokes. (As much as I enjoy those.)

Robert F. Kaplan's cover story in the latest New Republic is a great example of giving a cogent account of the things that have worked and the things that haven't in our mess o' potamian project. He's also a fan of General Petraeus, and cites the progress made in Ramadi as a case-study in how to win, or at least not lose, the battle for hearts and minds. One of the big problems over there is the Baghdad-centric mindset of the war's strategists:

The problem in Iraq has never been a lack of military capability. The problem has been confusion--at the top--over how to use it. There has always been a self-defeating tautology at work in the management of this war: The absence of guidance from Baghdad encourages commanders to innovate, but it also means their innovations aren't elevated to the level of guidance. Lacking a framework for fighting the insurgency, one brigade confines itself to a city's edge, another blasts its way through, and a third finally gets it right. Across the country, the pattern repeats itself over and over. Hence the awful question mark that may double as the epitaph of the U.S. enterprise in Iraq: What if there were one true path all along?

As much as I am apalled by the Bush Administration's unwillingness (or, rather, unwittingness) to learn from the lessons of Tall Afar, Mosul and Ramadi, that doesn't mean those lessons can't be learned. I wish we had never attempted to rebuild Iraq, but now that we're there, it would be nice if we managed to leave without making the world unambiguously worse.

Labels: Bush, GWOT

The Eric Fair article is one of the most linked-to pieces this weekend, but it has surprisingly been missed by most of the right-wing blogosphere. Why is that, I wonder? Is The Corner too busy to bother with such an inconsequential story? Jonah? JPod? K-Lo? Don't any of you have an opinion on this? Apparently not. An example of the "he's just a whining pansy" meme is over at Jules Crittenden's blog. I hope he's proud of himself. But it's been mostly silent on the right, as seen in the lack of coverage at the Jawa Report, TCS and Pajamas Media, who managed to post just one tiny little article, garnering a typically brutish response.

But not nearly as brutish as the left-wing Brendan Skwire of Brendancalling, who wrote an Open Letter to Eric T. Fair, in which he tells Eric:

Your words are empty and hollow. I do not accept a single one of them. But let me offer you a suggestion if you want to do the honorable thing: kill yourself. Leave a note. Name names.

He is joined by his amen chorus of commenters in what I can only think of as a despicable example of the left being anything but liberal. Note that Skwire wants to have his cake and eat it too: Fair should "name names," but only in his suicide note; the suicide being what Skwire focuses his hopes and dreams on. Personally, I'd be horrified if Fair killed himself, but I'd love to see more names come out, particularly the names of those who ordered this abuse. But that's just me. I guess I'm a softy.

Brendancalling doesn't represent the vast majority of the lefty blogs, though. Many have credited him for his courage in speaking the truth to power. Some of the better ones I've seen were at Firedog Lake, Atrios, Welcome to Pottersville, and Catzmaw's Commentary.

America's North Shore Journal (not a lefty) helpfully pointed to a mention of previous articles by Fair, discussing Fair's evolution:

What had happened to Fair since last November? He doesn’t mention his earlier writing today, but this probably explains it: “While I was appalled by the conduct of my friends and colleagues [in Iraq] , I lacked the courage to challenge the status quo. That was a failure of character and in many ways made me complicit in what went on. I'm ashamed of that failure, but as time passes, and as the memories of what I saw in Iraq continue to infect my every thought, I'm becoming more ashamed of my silence.”

In fact, today’s step seems to have been a long time coming: A Web search turns up a rough draft of that earlier column posted in January 2006 at a veterans group's site.

Pardon My Paradox found an article by a survivor of Soviet torture, Vladimir Bukovsky, which is worth quoting at length:

Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one’s sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists.

Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin’s notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. And once the NKVD went into high gear, not even Stalin could stop it at will. He finally succeeded only by turning the fury of the NKVD against itself; he ordered his chief NKVD henchman, Nikolai Yezhov (Beria’s predecessor), to be arrested together with his closest aides.

Which points to the worst part about this whole ordeal: the human cost to everyone involved. Eric Fair has shown us that to descend into the dark hole of torture has long-lasting effects for those who go there. Unless they're sociopaths. Digby may have said it best:

I'm sure there are those who have no such self-awareness, or who truly believe that such sadistic treatment was warrented and correct. But it will blow back on them too, in some way, somewhere. Because it is a simple truth that when you treat human beings like animals, you become one yourself. And on some level, there is a part of every person that howls in protest against such debasement whether they are the perpetrator or the victim.

This man knows what he did and is speaking out as a way to redeem himself. Others will likely use far less positive means to exorcize themselves of this pain and degradation. And everyone will pay the price.

Labels: GWOT, interrogation, torture

I was remiss in not mentioning the Stanford Prison Experiment along with the Milgram Experiments in my post yesterday. (But Dakota Feinstein caught it.)

In the summer of 2004, we watched this video in the prison where I worked, followed by a discussion. Distressingly few of my colleagues took it seriously. That was one of the first examples of the disturbing reactions I alluded to below.

It should not be so difficult to get people to acknowledge that evil acts committed in the name of something good are still evil.

Labels: GWOT, interrogation, torture

Tyler Drumheller, former CIA Chief of European Operations, has made it very clear in this Der Spiegel interview who was responsible for the CIA's extraordinary renditions program:

Drumheller: It was Vice President Dick Cheney who talked about the "dark side" we have to turn on. When he spoke those words, he was articulating a policy that amounted to "go out and get them." His remarks were evidence of the underlying approach of the administration, which was basically to turn the military and the agency loose and let them pay for the consequences of any unfortunate -- or illegal -- occurences.

SPIEGEL: So there was no clear guidance of what is allowed in the so called "war on terrorism"?

Drumheller: Every responsible chief in the CIA knows that the more covert the action, the greater the need for a clear policy and a defined target. I once had to brief Condoleezza Rice on a rendition operation, and her chief concern was not whether it was the right thing to do, but what the president would think about it. I would have expected a big meeting, a debate about whether to proceed with the plan, a couple of hours of consideration of the pros and cons. We should have been talking about the value of the target, whether the threat he presented warranted such a potentially controversial intervention. This is no way to run a covert policy. If the White House wants to take extraordinary measures to win, it can't just let things go through without any discussion about their value and morality.

Notice what he identifies as the approach of the administration: to "turn the military and the agency loose and let them pay for the consequences of any unfortunate -- or illegal -- occurences." Unfortunately it's worse than that, because the administration specifically authorized those illegal programs and interrogation techniques. So they didn't just turn everybody loose, they set everybody up to fail and then let them twist in the wind when the failure inevitably happened.

Further down in the interview, Drumheller mentions his surprise to discover that intelligence he knew to be dubious, which he had specifically caveated as such, was used as the centerpiece of Colin Powell's famous U.N. speech laying out the argument for going to war with Iraq:

Drumheller: I turned on the TV in my office, and there it was. So the first thing I thought, having worked in the government all my life, was that we probably gave Powell the wrong speech. We checked our files and found out that they had just ignored it.

SPIEGEL: So the White House just ignored the fact that the whole story might have been untrue?

Drumheller: The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy. Right before the war, I said to a very senior CIA officer: "You guys must have something else," because you always think it's the CIA. "There is some secret thing I don`t know." He said: "No. But when we get to Baghdad, we are going to find warehouses full of stuff. Nobody is going to remember all of this."

It seems to me that this goes a long way toward answering the question of what the Bush Administration knew and when it knew it.

A commenter at A Tiny Revolution sees the Stalin parallel in an interview with Slavoj Žižek:

From the top, you received an order, say, "Cossacks should be liquidated as a class." It was not stated clearly what this order meant - dispossess them, kill them etc. That ambiguity was part of Stalin's logic. Being afraid of being denounced as too soft, local cadres went to extremes, and then, the interesting irony is that the only positive concrete intervention of Stalin was his famous dizziness with success. Here, he would say, "No, comrades, we should respect legalities." Stalin's obscenity was that he put in this kind of abstract, superego injunction which threw you into a panic, and then he appeared as a moderate.

Just remember, they hate us for our freedom.

Labels: Bush, GWOT, interrogation, torture

A former interrogator in Iraq has said in public what I have known to be the case since I was over there: prior to the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, the abuse of Iraqi detainees by American interrogators was systematic and officially sanctioned, the interrogators themselves knew better, and they did nothing.

American authorities continue to insist that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident in an otherwise well-run detention system. That insistence, however, stands in sharp contrast to my own experiences as an interrogator in Iraq. I watched as detainees were forced to stand naked all night, shivering in their cold cells and pleading with their captors for help. Others were subjected to long periods of isolation in pitch-black rooms. Food and sleep deprivation were common, along with a variety of physical abuse, including punching and kicking. Aggressive, and in many ways abusive, techniques were used daily in Iraq, all in the name of acquiring the intelligence necessary to bring an end to the insurgency.

I have heard this whispered in back corners, accompanied by winks and nudges from people who were there at the time and knew what was going on.

I know this because I too was an interrogator there. I arrived the week the scandal did, and spent my year-plus as an American interrogator in the post-scandal atmosphere of, "don't let the next scandal happen on my watch." My attitude was always that I didn't want to be the person who made the mistake, and I reported every claim of abuse that I heard.

There were many claims. A lot of them were false, as evidenced by what I have referred to as "waves" of abuse reports: we would go months without hearing anything, we'd hear a dozen reports per day for a few days, and it would quiet down again. People were so scared of another scandal that they would halt the interrogation to report the claim. The detainees figured this out pretty quickly, so word would get out and all of a sudden everybody had a tale of abuse to tell. Our policy was to document the claim and forward it to the proper authorities (who were also eager to make sure the next scandal didn't happen as a reult of their inaction) but not to allow the claim to interfere with intelligence collection. This tended to put the brakes on the waves of abuse claims, and put the question of whether the claim was accurate or not in the hands of others, which we were only too happy to do. I do not believe, however, that every report I heard was a fabrication. There were too many of them, humans have a tendency to go along with whatever horrors are de rigeur, and far too many people believe that the end justifies the means.

I never witnessed any violations of the Geneva Conventions. Again, I got there when the Geneva Conventions were all the rage. But who among my colleagues did, and failed to act? Who participated in cover-ups? Who secretly pined for the "good old days" when you could do a lot more to squeeze information out of an unwilling detainee? I don't know the answer to this question, and I frankly don't want to know. But the story must get out. Not to demonize those who participated in it, Milgram Experiment-style, but to have a full reckoning. To do whatever we can to ensure that this never happens again.

I am thankful that I didn't witness what Eric Fair witnessed. His story of sleepless nights resonates with me, because I have no doubt that I would be in the same boat were I witness to, and participant in, the horrors that he saw. I am also thankful that the timeline of my employment in Iraq shields me from suspicion on that count, if only a bit. It's a question I always have to answer whenever people find out what I do for a living.

What continues to disturb me, however, is the fact that I often get a very disturbing reaction: they're all a bunch of terrorists so they don't have any rights, and "they would do it to us, so why is it wrong for us to do it to them?" As if our yardstick for ethical behavior is Saddam Hussein and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Labels: GWOT, interrogation, personal, torture

This article on Gen. Petraus' Ph.D. brain trust is an encouraging sign that the administration is actually interested in fighting the war in Iraq with something more than bluster, sophistry and ass-covering. I don't expect it to work, both because the time to have taken this seriously is long past and Bush has such a distinguished history of screwing things up. If only Bush had done this three years ago, and actually heeded the advice of these experts, Iraq would look radically different today. Embarked upon at this late a date, I expect that Petraus will merely, as Thomas P. M. Barnett predicts, end up "midwifing" the sectarian violence. He will go down in history as the last guy to screw up Iraq (Leigh Ferrara agrees). It's a shame, because we've finally got someone good in there.

Labels: GWOT, Iraq