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Democrats fail to oppose torture
The Senate Judiciary Committee had a chance to grill Attorney General Ashcroft yesterday about the notorious torture-is-legal memo.
This would have been a good opportunity for the Dubya Squad to repudiate the memo’s conclusions about the power of the president to nullify laws and treaties, and about the legality of torture, if they cared to.
When asked whether the administration had decided that torture was legal and had approved of its use, the closest thing to a denial that Ashcroft came up with was this: “I want to confirm that the president has not directed or ordered any conduct that would violate the Constitution of the United States, that would violate any one of these enactments of the United States Congress or that would violate the provisions of any of the treaties as they have been entered into by the United States, the president, the administration and this government.”
All of which sounds good… until you realize that the memo in question was arguing that torture, when done with presidential approval, did not violate the Constitution, United States law, or any of the country’s treaty obligations because the president’s directives in the conduct of war are a higher law than any of these.
So instead of being denials, Ashcroft’s remarks are really just slippery.
When asked whether his department will prosecute Americans who commit torture, Ashcroft responds: “The Department of Justice will both investigate and prosecute individuals who violate the law” (emphasis mine), again begging the same question.
(However, he did say directly at one point that the president had not issued an order immunizing interrogators of Al Qaeda suspects from prosecution “based on the tactics they use.”)
Ashcroft even gave a strange back-door defense of the core argument of the memo: that the commander-in-chief’s war-conducting mandate puts him and those under his command above the law.
This happened when Ashcroft was defending his decision not to release the text of the memos to Congress.
In the course of this defense he read a quote* that he’d brought along from Frank Murphy, whom Franklin Roosevelt appointed as his Attorney General in .
Ashcroft:
He [Murphy] explained in part refusing to give his opinion to the Senate, citing what was already long-established practice of attorneys general in .
He put it this way.
And I’m quoting.
While the constitutional powers of the president in time of war, now the quote starts, “have never been specifically defined and, in fact, cannot be, since their extent and limitations are largely dependent on conditions and circumstances.
The right to take specific action might not exist under one state of facts, while under another it might be the absolute duty of the executive to take such action.”
I’m not doing anything other than to say that there is a long-established policy reason grounded in national security that indicates that the development and the debate of hypotheses and practice of what can and can’t be done by a president in time of war is not good government.
And so it goes for the length of Ashcroft’s answers — denials that the administration is doing anything outside the law, in the shadow of a memo that has concluded that nothing the president does or orders done in the furtherance of his war-conducting mandate can be outside the law.
The Committee’s chair, Senator Hatch, gave Ashcroft a little verbal wink in his concluding remarks: “You’ve had to be very careful with what you’ve said here today,” Hatch said.
“And I fully understand why.
And I think any reasonable person who looks at it understands why, too.”
I think I understand.
Anyone remember Abu Ghraib?
Seems like only .
Did you read about the recently-released Army investigation into the abuses there and elsewhere?
No?
It’s getting great reviews:
“effectively communicates the strategy of the military brass on the detainee affair, which is to focus blame on a few low-ranking personnel, shield all senior commanders from accountability, and deny or bury any facts that interfere with these aims… implausible and unacceptable.” ―Washington Post
“this 300-page whitewash… found no ‘systemic’ problem… The inspector general’s staff did not dig into the abuse cases, but merely listed them.” ―New York Times
The Democrats sure have been making a lot of noise lately.
Maybe they’ll show some remorse for giving Dubya a blank check to invade Iraq, for signing off on the “Patriot Act” with a salute, and for the rest of their cowardly cave-ins by showing some purposeful outrage now.
This shall not stand!
The United States will not wink at torture or enshrine it as a policy and our Democratic Party will not allow this to happen!
Cue Democrats.
I’m happy to say that I watched none of the convention, and I look forward to to devoting just as little attention to that of the Republicans.
But Zeynep Toufe of Under the Same Sun took a gander and failed “to hear the words ‘torture,’ ‘abuse,’ or ‘Abu Ghraib’ mentioned anywhere in the Democratic National Convention.”
Just to make sure it wasn’t just a bad sample, Zeynep searched through the transcripts of the speeches as they were posted to the Democrats’ website.
None of the transcripts mentioned those words, including the speeches by:
Roberta Achtenberg
David Alston
Rep. Tammy Baldwin
Marcia Bristo
President Jimmy Carter
President Bill Clinton
Senator Hillary Clinton
Howard Dean
Rep. Rosa DeLauro
Rep. John Dingell
Shirley Franklin
Rep. Richard Gephardt
Vice-President Al Gore
Teresa Heinz Kerry
Barack Obama
She checked the transcripts again the following day, when ’s prime-time speakers were up — including the darling of the left Dennis Kucinich.
Still no mention, so Zeynep kept adding to her list:
Senator Bob Graham
Governor Jennifer Granholm
Hon. Cheryl Jacques
Rep. Dennis Kucinich
Governor Bill Richardson
Al Sharpton
Did Kerry say anything about it in his acceptance speech?
I’m not even going to look, so if you think I’m being cynical about the Democrats’ great hope, go check it out for yourself and you can triumphantly send me the transcript if my cynicism is unwarranted.
Make note also of the amount of time the Democrats are crowing about how bravely John Kerry fought in the Vietnam War and how little time they’re talking about how bravely John Kerry fought against the Vietnam War.
Kerry’s decided to surrender in this battle to keep history from being rewritten by the Rambo Brigade — like he surrendered to Dubya and voted to give him the blank check — like he surrendered to Ashcroft and gave him the “Patriot Act” — and like he’s surrendering now when he could stand up and fight for something worth winning, rather than just a tarnished trophy like the presidency.
It seems that his days of bravery are behind him.
“But,” says the donkey on my shoulder, “would you expect Bush to make any brave or good decisions in a second term?
At least in Kerry you have someone who can point to an episode or two of genuinely honorable behavior in his life.”
Bush went from drunken ne’er-d’ye-well to much-less-of-a-fuck-up (though on a grander scale).
Not anything to expect an award for, but at least a move in the right direction.
Kerry on the other hand has effectively disowned his most honorable moment, glamorized the war that he should know as much as anyone was shameful to have fought, and has spent the last several years being a cowardly politician.
He may be easily no worse than Bush now, but I don’t like his momentum.
I imagine a President Kerry willing to do anything to keep Joe Lieberman or Fox News from questioning his commitment to the stupid hawkish patriotic bullshit he’s “proud” to support.
Just for fun… try to find the name “Abu Ghraib” or the word “torture” in the transcript of the first Bush-Kerry debate.
You might get a hit on “leash” but it’s either a false-positive or a Freudian slip.
A British diplomat has accused Britain’s intelligence service of using information obtained by foreign governments through the use of torture, according to a leaked document published today.
Craig Murray, the ambassador to Uzbekistan, said that information extracted from prisoners tortured in the central Asian republic’s jails was being passed on via the American CIA to MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service.
As well as denouncing the use of such material as morally and legally wrong, Mr Murray warned that information gathered in this way was unlikely to be reliable, as victims would say whatever they thought their tormentors wanted to hear.
“We are selling our souls for dross,” he wrote in the confidential Foreign Office report seen by the Financial Times.…
Mr Murray caused a stir by speaking out publicly in about “brutality” in Uzbek jails, highlighting the case of two men who were boiled to death.…
“This is morally, legally and practically wrong.”
Intelligence officers had argued that, as they did not know the precise source of the information they received, they could not establish whether the individual involved had been tortured or not, Mr Murray wrote.
“I will not attempt to hide my utter contempt for such casuistry, nor my shame that I work for an organisation where colleagues would resort to it to justify torture,” he said.
Of the hundreds of cases of political and religious prisoners he had looked into in Uzbekistan, very few had not involved the use of torture, he said.…
What a wonderful day it will be when a straight-shooting report like this gets leaked out of the U.S. government.
Some days it seems like “such casuistry” is all that’s left over on this side of the pond.
It amazes me how much we’re willing to tolerate and excuse.
Should the United States be held to the same standards as other countries?
Not if that means we can’t invade anyone we’d like any time we’d like for any reasons we can invent after-the-fact.
Can the most powerful military on Earth pummel civilian homes with guided missiles in total disregard for civilian casualties?
If that’s what it takes.
Is a “zero tolerance” attitude toward torture justified?
It’s not even worth discussing.
How is it that in America, after the shame of Abu Ghraib and the many legal memos that set the stage for it, the person challenging the Dungeonmaster-in-Chief doesn’t feel like it’s worthwhile to say “I don’t need a team of lawyers to tell me whether or not torture is wrong — in my administration, America will have a zero tolerance policy toward torture, no ifs, ands or buts”?
Kerry’d say it even if he didn’t mean it, if he thought it was a position he could use to distinguish himself from Bush and that would get him votes.
Clearly, his team has determined that as an issue, it’s a loser.
To distinguish himself from Bush as the one less likely to countenance torture just isn’t going to help him at the polls.
Which tells me that there’s a frighteningly large chunk of the electorate that’s told themselves “so, the United States is having people tortured, eh? I guess I can live with that.”
Well, would you just look at Salon today!
Full of news:
The Red Cross has been visiting Guantánamo Bay to inspect conditions and to minister to certain needs of the prisoners held there.
They have bought this rare access with their silence — by policy they do not comment publicly about what they see on the other side of the barbed wire, and in return they are allowed to be the only group independent of the U.S. government that is given any substantial access to the prison and the prisoners.
This puts the Red Cross in a delicate position.
The Dubya Squad frequently responds to criticism about conditions at Guantánamo by noting that the Red Cross is allowed to visit — the implication being that the Red Cross would blow the whistle if Gitmo were really a gulag or an Abu Ghraib.
The Red Cross, meanwhile, is under this gag order, which prevents it from speaking out even as it is being used as a fig leaf in this way.
In fact, the Red Cross has criticized conditions at Gitmo in the past, but it limits its public criticism to policies that are already public knowledge, like the lack of due process.
The Red Cross’s position on what it has observed of the conditions of detention is not for us to know.
, though, some White House memos summarizing the Red Cross’s concerns were leaked, giving us some idea of what the Red Cross is telling the folks in charge:
The International Committee of the Red Cross has charged in confidential reports to the United States government that the American military has intentionally used psychological and sometimes physical coercion “tantamount to torture” on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.…
The report of the June visit said investigators had found a system devised to break the will of the prisoners at Guantánamo, who now number about 550, and make them wholly dependent on their interrogators through “humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions.” Investigators said that the methods used were increasingly “more refined and repressive” than learned about on previous visits.
But I think we can expect the Red Cross reports to continue to get more alarmed and indignant and ignored:
There has to be something in how he won, in how the election was fought, that gave this Administration the distinct impression that it had been handed a “get out of the Geneva Conventions free” card.
That’s because the Administration was handed precisely such a gift — by John Kerry.
In the name of “electability,” the Kerry campaign gave Bush without ever facing serious questions about violations of international law.
Fearing he would be seen as soft on terror and disloyal to US troops, Kerry stayed scandalously silent about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay.
When it became clear that fury would rain down on Falluja as soon as the polls closed, Kerry never spoke out against the plan, or against the illegal bombings of civilian areas that took place throughout the campaign.
Even after The Lancet published its landmark study estimating that 100,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the invasion and occupation, Kerry repeated his outrageous (and frankly racist) claim that Americans “have borne 90 percent of the casualties in Iraq.”
His unmistakable message: Iraqi deaths don’t count.
By buying the highly questionable logic that Americans are incapable of caring about anyone’s lives but their own, the Kerry campaign and its supporters became complicit in the dehumanization of Iraqis, reinforcing the idea that some lives are insufficiently important to risk losing votes over.
And it is this morally bankrupt logic, more than the election of any single candidate, that allows these crimes to continue unchecked.
The real-world result of all the “strategic” thinking is the worst of both worlds: It didn’t get Kerry elected and it sent a clear message to the people who were elected that they will pay no political price for committing war crimes.
And this is Kerry’s true gift to Bush: not just the presidency, but impunity.
Yet another way in which I’m hopelessly out-of-touch with contemporary American values, I guess.
I still sometimes wake up in the morning thinking I’m in a country where the alarms will go off and the newspapers will switch to their big-font headlines if the Red Cross reports that we’re torturing prisoners by deliberate policy.
Nope: ho hum.
Mr. Gonzales, who faces criticism from Democrat senators over a memo he wrote seeking to clarify whether the Geneva Conventions apply to terror suspects, refused to answer further questions from committee members at his confirmation hearing.
White House spokesman Trent Duffy said President Bush hopes Senators will, at least, treat Mr. Gonzales according to Article 14 of the Third Geneva Convention, which states: “Prisoners of war are entitled in all circumstances to respect for their persons and their honour.”
Mr. Gonzales’ refusal to answer Senators’ questions did not affect the committee’s inquiry, which consists primarily of speeches to a gathering of journalists.
But seriously, folks… today’s Picket Line collects some of what this confirmation hearing has brought out.
At the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on his nomination to be attorney general, Mr. Gonzales repeatedly was offered the chance to repudiate a legal judgment that the president is empowered to order torture in violation of U.S. law and immunize torturers from punishment.
He declined to do so.
He was invited to reject a ruling made under his direction that the infliction of pain short of serious physical injury, organ failure or death did not constitute torture.
He answered: “I don’t have a disagreement with the conclusions then reached.”
Nor did he condemn torture techniques, such as simulated drowning, that were discussed and approved during meetings in his office.
“It is not my job,” he said, to decide if they were proper.
He was prompted to reflect on whether departing from the Geneva Conventions had been a mistake, in light of the shocking human rights abuses that have since been reported in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Guantanamo Bay prison and that continue even now.
Mr. Gonzales demurred.
The error, he answered, was not of administration policy but of “a failure of training and oversight.”
The message Mr. Gonzales left with senators was unmistakable: As attorney general, he will seek no change in practices that have led to the torture and killing of scores of detainees and to the blackening of U.S. moral authority around the world.
Instead, the Bush administration will continue to issue public declarations such as those Mr. Gonzales repeated yesterday — “that torture and abuse will not be tolerated by this administration” — while in practice sanctioning procedures that the International Red Cross and many lawyers inside the government consider to be illegal and improper.
―Washington Post editorial
I’ve been trying to ignore the political soap opera going on. I don’t much
care for it, or American Idol or any of ’em. But
this morning my inbox was full of friends gushing about Obama’s performance
last night. One asked, “Am I the only big baby who cried through all of
Obama’s acceptance speech?” Others assured her she was not. One added: “Does
anyone else find Biden completely adorable?”
Makes me feel like I’m hooked up to the Stepford
Wives chat room by mistake.
But I remembered that last time this circus was in town I took a little time
to see whether the
U.S. torture policy
was considered remarkable by the participants. It was not. You wouldn’t find
the word “torture” by searching John
Kerry’s campaign site, and you wouldn’t find any mention of it in
the prime-time convention speeches, and
Kerry didn’t think to bring up the subject
when he had a chance to debate
Dubya. This, though the Abu Ghraib photos were still fresh in the news.
What I concluded at the time:
How is it that in America, after the shame of Abu Ghraib and the many legal
memos that set the stage for it, the person challenging the
Dungeonmaster-in-Chief doesn’t feel like it’s worthwhile to say “I don’t need
a team of lawyers to tell me whether or not torture is wrong — in my
administration, America will have a zero tolerance policy toward torture, no
ifs, ands or buts”?
Kerry’d say it even if he didn’t mean it, if he thought it was a position he
could use to distinguish himself from Bush and that would get him votes.
Clearly, his team has determined that as an issue, it’s a loser. To
distinguish himself from Bush as the one less likely to countenance torture
just isn’t going to help him at the polls. Which tells me that there’s a
frighteningly large chunk of the electorate that’s told themselves “so, the
United States is having people tortured, eh? I guess I can live with that.”
I’m happy to report that things are a little different this time around.
Yesterday I searched some of the transcripts of the convention speeches to see
if anything had changed. Torture now has at least a bit part in the play,
though no role in the star’s own performance:
And I’m very proud to say that we reject torture.
Patricia Madrid (co-chair of the platform committee)
Barack Obama knows… that torture is not only morally repugnant, it’s
militarily ineffective. It doesn’t work. It puts our troops at risk. It
endangers our national security.
Claudia Kennedy (former Army general)
…What about the assault on science and the defense of torture?… My fellow
Democrats, America can do better than that. And Barack Obama will do
better than that.
Bill Clinton
In less than a decade we have gone from being perceived as the beacon for
democracy and justice all over the globe, to a country whose government
has little respect for even the most basic tenets of human rights. We know
that’s not us. We’re better than that.
Tom Daschle
After they abandoned the principle first laid down by
Gen. George Washington,
when he prohibited the torture of captives because it would bring, in his
words, ‘shame, disgrace and ruin’ to our nation, it’s time for a
change.
Al Gore
President Obama and Vice President Biden will shut down Guantánamo,
respect the Constitution, and make clear once and for all, the United
States of America does not torture, not now, not ever.
even John Kerry
It would be a mistake to look at this campaign rhetoric and to decide that the
Democratic Party or these individual politicians in it had a change of heart
and decided to oppose torture. This is all just carefully-crafted campaign
rhetoric and there’s no reason to expect honest revelations of any sort to
come directly out of it. But, going back to my analysis of torture’s complete
absence from the last campaign — that it went to show that Democratic
strategists didn’t think the voters they were trying to reach gave a good
goddamn whether America was torturing people or not — I think this time around
the strategists have changed their minds about that, and that’s encouraging.
