Volokh's sensitive spot on torture

Eugene Volokh thinks Michael Paulsen's testimony on the torture memos is that of "a serious and thoughtful scholar, and his views struck me as worth passing along."

His testimony amounts to a blanket endorsement of the Bybee/Yoo memos' legal correctness and validity, with scarcely any argument as to why that's the case -- "trust me," in so many words. (Tamanaha & commenters tore Paulsen down pretty effectively.)

Those of us who commented at Volokh's post that professors risk making themselves look bad when they praise hacks as "serious and thoughtful scholars" ... got our comments deleted as "sniping," even where we engaged Paulsen on the merits.

As I remarked in probably-deleted-by-now later comments, Volokh's sympathy for torture was noted at Crooked Timber a while back, and makes an ironic counterpoint to that Larison post I quoted this morning:

Perhaps the son or grandson of Russian emigres has a more keen appreciation for the rule of law because his family escaped from the grip of a totalitarian state; he does not take for granted what most of us and our ancestors have always known.

Or, hey, perhaps not.

Waterboarding is torture.

John Conroy tells about Bruce Moore-King, who underwent the Rhodesian army's version of SERE in the early 1970s, part of which was playing the roles of captured guerillas:

... an interrogator began asking him questions about the guerillas' operations. Moore-King, who was still hooded, refused to answer. His interrogators then put a hose to the outside of his hood just at his forehead. Water covered his face.

"You can almost breathe," he recalled. "The bag goes into your mouth and nose and you can suck a bit of air through it, but not enough to keep you going. The feeling of asphyxiation, of drowning, builds up slowly, so it hits you quite hard. The main thing is the fear. I was scared, and deep down inside I knew it was an exercise, but for some guy who doesn't even know if he is going to be killed or shot or whatever, the fear must be tremendous."

Moore-King went on to become a counterinsurgency soldier who himself tortured black Rhodesians, including near-drownings. It does not appear that he was in any doubt whether his own treatment would be torture applied to a real victim.

The question arises whether SERE was not always, on some level, about training torturers, not just training potential victims of torture.

... Regarding the 183 times that KSM was waterboarded, this reminiscence from a Uruguayan torturer about learning his trade is interesting:

The torture equipment consisted of a plank of wood, which the prisoner would be strapped to, and a tub, made from an oil drum, which was filled with water. The plank was attached to the tub with hooks so that when the interrogators lifted the board, the prisoner's head would be submerged.

* * * "[the interrogator] signaled two of the other persons and the put the prisoner's head into the water."

The prisoner was pulled out of the water, allowed to recover his breath, and asked the question again, and then, when he produced no information, he was again submerged. Garcia recalls that the first torture session lasted four to five hours with the whole class taking turns as interrogators or manning the plank. No one obtained any information of significance. * * * Sometimes, [the interrogator] said, people like this one have to go through this several times before they talk.

This "submarino" was "the preferred technique" over electrical shocks for instance, not only by Garcia but by another Uruguayan torturer: "There is something more terrifying than pain, he told me, and that is the inability to breathe."

Larison on Sotomayor

As usual, Daniel Larison looks at the "wise Latina" remarks from a conservative position, not a talking-points position ... and wonders what's "conservative" about Sotomayor's critics:

Horror of horrors, she was expressing pride in her particular identity, much as many conservatives claim they wish they could do more freely with respect to theirs without being called racist or racialist or some other derisive label. What is their solution? To call Sotomayor by a name that they usually regard as a bludgeon unfairly used against them all the time. Not only will this gambit fail in the immediate confirmation battle, but it will ensure that the limits of expression become even more constricting and stifling. This is what I don’t understand: why would conservatives want to make it easier to categorize innocuous statements as racist and/or racialist? There is virtually no social policy debate in which matters of race are not involved to some degree, and many, if not most, conservative social policy views already have to meet a rather exacting standard to avoid such charges. Why make that standard even more demanding and impossible to meet? Why water down the definition of racialist such that it seems to include any and all acknowledgment of the significance of these differences?

Then in the next post, the coup de grace:

If being a part of a certain white ethnic group is something that one is “entitled to celebrate” in a similar way, would we consider it racist for an Armenian or a Russian or German-American to express a similar pride in his heritage and express the hope that it would inform his judgments in such a way that he would be a better judge than someone not from that background? Perhaps the son or grandson of Russian emigres has a more keen appreciation for the rule of law because his family escaped from the grip of a totalitarian state; he does not take for granted what most of us and our ancestors have always known. Perhaps the grandson or great-grandson of German immigrants would be more attentive to the predicament of ethnic communities that are tied in the public’s mind with a foreign enemy in wartime. For that matter, perhaps the descendant of old-line English settlers deeply values the American constitutional heritage because he sees it as being inextricably interwoven with the heritage of his own ancestors, and so his support for the fundamental law has added significance for him. One could come up with other examples, but I think these already make clear that the statement in question-–on which so much of the resistance to Sotomayor seems to be based at this point–-may be many things, but racist is not one of them.

No wonder the smarter conservatives are standing aside and murmuring that the GOP had best let this one go through, and keep its powder dry for another time.

Aristotle on torture

Aristotle favored the use of torture in extracting evidence, speaking of its absolute credibility.

-- John Conroy, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture, at 27.

... I wish I knew what passage Conroy refers to here; his book is very good on modern torture in modern democracies, but he seems to've accepted some secondary source on faith here. Cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.15:

Examination by torture is one form of evidence, to which great weight is often attached because it is in a sense compulsory. Here again it is not hard to point out the available grounds for magnifying its value, if it happens to tell in our favour, and arguing that it is the only form of evidence that is infallible; or, on the other hand, for refuting it if it tells against us and for our opponent, when we may say what is true of torture of every kind alike, that people under its compulsion tell lies quite as often as they tell the truth, sometimes persistently refusing to tell the truth, sometimes recklessly making a false charge in order to be let off sooner. We ought to be able to quote cases, familiar to the judges, in which this sort of thing has actually happened.

The fact that he dwells on the arguments against torture's credibility, suggests to me that the opposite case could be assumed to be familiar to his reader. Then as now.

A passage in the Constitution of Athens does not suggest that torture is terribly reliable:

Aristogeiton was arrested, and perished later after suffering long tortures. While under the torture he accused many persons who belonged by birth to the most distinguished families and were also personal friends of the tyrants. At first the government could find no clue to the conspiracy * * *. According to the story of the popular party, Aristogeiton accused the friends of the tyrants with the deliberate intention that the latter might commit an impious act, and at the same time weaken themselves, by putting to death innocent men who were their own friends; others say that he told no falsehood, but was betraying the actual accomplices. At last, when for all his efforts he could not obtain release by death, he promised to give further information against a number of other persons; and, having induced Hippias to give him his hand to confirm his word, as soon as he had hold of it he reviled him for giving his hand to the murderer of his brother, till Hippias, in a frenzy of rage, lost control of himself and snatched out his dagger and dispatched him.

I google up some references suggesting that slaves and barbarians, lacking reason, are childlike and simply tell the truth under torture, rather than lie. Where this may be found in his works, and what it implies about "reason," I cannot say.

... Conroy cites Edward Peters' book Torture, pp. 13-14, but looking at those pages via Amazon, I don't find that they support his "favoring" torture or giving it "absolute credibility." Conroy is either misremembering his source or is simply mistaken.

In favor of whiteness

The same set of dumbasses who thought it was funny that Obama suggested keeping our tires inflated, now think it's funny that our Energy Secretary suggests painting our roofs white:

British reporters (and Matt Drudge) have been having gentle fun with Energy Secretary Steven Chu's recent remarks that we should paint our roofs white to slow the pace of global warming. But Chu's totally right! The science on this is clear: Replacing black asphalt on roofs, parking lots, and sidewalks with brighter material would reflect more of the sun's rays and do quite a bit to cool the planet. See these two old Vine posts for more.

To give an easy example, just refitting the 30 billion or so square feet of commercial roof space in the United States would be the equivalent of taking roughly 75 million cars off the road for a year. And, as a bonus, buildings with white roofs tend to stay 30 percent cooler than their black-topped counterparts during the summer, which curtails energy use.

Well, duh. I grew up (partway) in Miami, and in my neighborhood, *all* the houses had white roofs.

Biblical diplomacy

This seemed like such a surefire diplomatic maneuver with the French: an appeal to Scripture, as interpreted by Hal Lindsey!

In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France’s President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.

In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophecy:

“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle … and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:

“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”.

The story of the conversation emerged only because the Elysée Palace, baffled by Bush’s words, sought advice from Thomas Römer, a professor of theology at the University of Lausanne. Four years later, Römer gave an account in the September 2007 issue of the university’s review, Allez savoir!. The article apparently went unnoticed, although it was referred to in a French newspaper.

The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice. Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush’s invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs”.

Wonder what "Gog and Magog" are in French? Perhaps that was the stumbling-block.

... Meanwhile, events of Biblical proportions may unfold in Korea:

The U.S. and South Korea put their military forces on high alert Thursday after North Korea renounced the truce keeping the peace between the two Koreas since 1953.

The North also accused the U.S. of preparing to attack the isolated communist country in the wake of its second nuclear bomb test, and warned it would retaliate to any hostility with "merciless" and dangerous ferocity.

Seoul moved a 3,500-ton destroyer into waters near the Koreas' disputed western maritime border while smaller, high-speed vessels were keeping guard at the front line, South Korean news reports said. The defense ministry said the U.S. and South Korean militaries would increase surveillance activities.

Pyongyang, meanwhile, positioned artillery guns along the west coast on its side of the border, the Yonhap news agency said. The Joint Chiefs of Staffs in Seoul refused to confirm the reports.

Perhaps Bush's translation was in error, and the forces coming up out of the north are going to destroy Seoul? Curse these modern translations!

Bloggone?

No, but I've been lost in the workzone, exploring the paradoxical depths of Miss. Code Ann. 15-1-36. (No link provided, because you really don't want to read it.)

Weird stuff around the internets:

(1) Fill in the blank on the lawyer filing a federal appeal of the California Supreme Court's Prop 8 decision:

“For a long time I’ve personally felt that we are doing a grave injustice for people throughout this country by denying equality to gay and lesbian individuals,” _____ said in an interview with The Advocate. “The individuals that we represent and will be representing in this case feel they’re being denied their rights. And they’re entitled to have a court vindicate those rights.”

Your first guess was Ted Olson, right? Bullshit it was. And yet ... that's the answer.

When pressed about his service with the Bush administration, which in 2004 endorsed an amendment to the U.S. constitution that would prohibit same-sex marriage, Olson said he was personally against the amendment at the time, though he made no public statements on the matter.

As for the timing of the suit, Olson said that recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court “make it clear that individuals are entitled to be treated equally under the Constitution. I’m reasonably confident that this is the right time for these [injustices] to be vindicated.”

I look forward to Regnery Press's publishing his vindication of gay marriage.

(2) Who says that Sonia Sotomayor's legal qualifications are dubious? John Yoo. "Undistinguished," he says. I can't wait to see what OPR says about him. But a torturer's opposition to "empathy" is understandable.

(3) The Mississippi Court of Appeals has six judges who cannot understand the difference between "may" and "shall." Only law junkies need click through; the rest of you should just write to the Barksdale Reading Institute, asking them to provide emergency literacy assistance to the court.

(4) Torture in the news: While the OLC memos were pending, to whom did CIA turn for legal authority to torture Zubaydah? Gonzo. Not their own general counsel, Rizzo; not the AG; but the White House Counsel. In a country dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, and thus equally bound by the rule of law, that would merit its own paragraph in an indictment. In America, probably not. We can't punish past crimes, because that would be looking backwards, and Obama is all about hope for the future.

Reality-based conservatives

Via Yglesias (really Chait, but Yglesias provides a working link), we see that a Chicago talk-radio host scoffed so much at waterboarding, he decided to undergo it himself.

Whoops.

"I want to find out if it's torture," Mancow told his listeners Friday morning, adding that he hoped his on-air test would help prove that waterboarding did not, in fact, constitute torture. * * *

With a Chicago Fire Department paramedic on hand, Mancow was placed on a 7-foot long table, his legs were elevated, and his feet were tied up.

Turns out the stunt wasn't so funny. Witnesses said Muller thrashed on the table, and even instantly threw the toy cow he was holding as his emergency tool to signify when he wanted the experiment to stop. He only lasted 6 or 7 seconds.

"It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that's no joke," Mancow said, likening it to a time when he nearly drowned as a child. "It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back...It was instantaneous...and I don't want to say this: absolutely torture."

"I wanted to prove it wasn't torture," Mancow said. "They cut off our heads, we put water on their face...I got voted to do this but I really thought 'I'm going to laugh this off.' "

Of course, the real problem is the number of Americans who think that torturing (suspected) terrorists is okay. But I do love the toy-cow part.

Better luck next time

Yahoo News -- excuse me, Yahoo! News -- advises me:

"Wash. state has first death under new suicide law."

It was not, however, my ex-girlfriend.

I'll just have to enjoy my weekend some other way, it appears.

Einstein on atheism and determinism

What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos. * * *

The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who -- in their grudge against traditional religion as the "opium of the masses" -- cannot hear the music of the spheres.

-- Einstein, as quoted by Walter Isaacson. (I've mashed two sources together.)

The allusion to Nietzschean ressentiment is provocative.

But I do wonder about Einstein on determinism:

Einstein, on the other hand, believed--as did Spinoza--that a person's actions were just as determined as that of a billiard ball, planet or star. "Human beings in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free but are as causally bound as the stars in their motions," Einstein declared in a statement to a Spinoza Society in 1932. It was a concept he drew also from his reading of Schopenhauer. "Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity," he wrote in his famous credo. "Schopenhauer's saying, 'A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills,' has been a real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life's hardships, my own and others', and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance."

Considering some of the rather harsh behavior he showed regarding his first wife and child, one can see where determinism would be a consolation to Einstein. Which doesn't make determinism wrong, of course; one would have to be a deep cynic to find that everything which consoles is therefore false.

More fact-checking on "Nixonland"

I've been plowing through Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, a chronicle of the liberal collapse in the 1960s and the triumph and downfall of Nixon. I use the word "chronicle" advisedly; the structure of the book is "one damn thing after another," and while some of the author's theses are evident -- liberals too cloistered to know what was coming, the fundamental racism behind the "Middle American" backlash -- it's a bit short on analysis, at least by page 462 of 748. But the sheer detail and weirdness of the coverage makes the book worth reading, especially for those of us who weren't around at the time (or were more interested in when the next bottle of formula was coming).

George Will's review got some attention, and flak, for pointing out some careless errors of fact in a book teeming with facts. I think that's an inevitable result in publishing a history book today -- finding anyone to proofread, let alone fact-check, such a book, is apparently out of the question in today's budget-conscious publishing world. And no author is perfect.

That said, I seem to've found a couple more errors, where my own interests intersect areas outside Perlstein's expertise. Dien Bien Phu was "the first military loss for a European colonial power in three hundred years" (p. 100). This would have surprised the ghosts of the Italian dead at Adowa, March 1, 1896.

More amusingly, at p. 462, Perlstein describes Nixon's "favorite young dirty trickster," Tom Charles Huston, whom "Mark Felt of the FBI described ... as the White House gauletier -- a French word for the chief official of a district under Nazi control." This is sourced to a Bob Woodward article on "How Mark Felt Became Deep Throat," where we find:

Felt, a much more learned man than most realized, later wrote that he considered Huston "a kind of White House gauleiter over the intelligence community." The word "gauleiter" is not in most dictionaries, but in the four-inch-thick Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language it is defined as "the leader or chief official of a political district under Nazi control."

The word is not obscure to anyone who reads about Nazi Germany; the gauleiters were the chiefs of the Nazi Party in their appointed "districts" or gau. But it's certainly not a "French word," and while the French may perhaps have come up with "gauletier" as their pronunciation of gauleiter, the Woodward quote has nothing about any Frenchification of the German word; that seems to've been invented by Perlstein, perhaps to explain a misspelling of the German. The Felt quote is stronger than Perlstein suggests, since a gauleiter wasn't just a German official, but a high Nazi functionary -- and indeed, Woodward goes on to say, "There is little doubt Felt thought the Nixon team were Nazis." Perlstein slightly deflects Felt's jab at Huston.

Trivial errors, but as always, when one sees mistakes in areas one knows about, one becomes mistrustful of alleged facts regarding the areas one doesn't know about.

UPDATE: Elevated from comments, NMissCommentor points out other conspicuous colonial failures:

Does he mean only loss in a battle or an entire war? The British lost their entire army (and the war) in the First Afghanistan War in the 1840s. Famously, only one British soldier returned from the massacre of thousands. The opening battle of the Zulu War (Isandlwana) was a pretty serious debacle won triumphantly by the Zulus (although they didn't win thereafter).

"Military loss" seems to include losing a battle. I'm annoyed I didn't think about the First Afghan War, since I just read Flashman a few weeks back; the description of the bungling in Kabul sounds eerily like our early occupation of Baghdad, except our military superiority was too great for us to suffer our own retreat from Kabul. (Though I do recall that for a while, some military types were very nervous about the fragility of our supply lines.)

... Anyway, that's three glaring exceptions for Perlstein. I've actually taken a break from his book, tho not because of the fact-checking; America in the early 1970s is just a very depressing place to be.

Bush smarter than previously suspected

It turns out that Bush's reaction to the TV coverage of Katrina's aftermath in NOLA was a lot like yours and mine:

After the president had returned to the White House, he eventually convened a meeting in the Situation Room to discuss the government's response. Bush barked, "Rumsfeld, what the hell is going on there? Are you watching what's on television? Is that the United States of America or some Third World nation I'm watching? What the hell are you doing?"

That was the time to fire Rummy, if not earlier.

(From a Wash Monthly post on what appears to be a bitchin' GQ article by Robert Draper on just how bad a SecDef Rumsfeld was.)

We did not torture a confession out of them.

The allegations that Cheney directed torture be used to obtain "proof" of Iraq-Qaeda ties, while hardly proven themselves yet, have generated a little anonymous pushback:

Senior intelligence officials yesterday acknowledged that two al-Qaeda operatives, Abu Zubaida and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, had been questioned about alleged links between al-Qaeda and Iraq when the two men underwent CIA interrogation in 2002 and 2003. But the officials denied that the questioning on Iraq had included waterboarding.

"The two top priorities driving so-called enhanced interrogation techniques were information on the locations of al-Qaeda leadership and plots against the United States," one intelligence official said yesterday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the subject publicly. "Questions were asked about Iraq, but the notion that waterboarding was used to extract from either an admission that Iraq and al-Qaeda had a relationship is false, period," he added.

Emptywheel parses this and finds it omits a good bit:

Note, these two senior intelligence officials did not deny that Ibn Sheikh al-Libi was waterboarded to elicit a claim of an Iraqi-al Qaeda tie. They do not deny that Dick Cheney's office pitched waterboarding an Iraqi to get such a claim. They do not deny that the non-briefing of Congress on torture was part of a plan to hide the torture which might undermine the accuracy of Abu Zubaydah's claim of such a tie (note, KSM apparently never claimed there was a tie). And they do not deny that harsh methods were used by DOD to elicit such claims. In fact, they don't even deny that torture (but not waterboarding) was used in interrogations when KSM and AZ were asked about Al Qaeda ties with Iraq.

So the denial here falls short of even denying that the Administration used--and threatened to use--torture to trump up ties between al Qaeda and Iraq.

But can't we go even farther than that? Look at my two bolded portions in the first blockquote. The reporter denies that waterboarding was used in such questioning. But that's not what the source's quoted words say. The source says that "waterboarding was [not] used to extract ... an admission."

If neither KSM nor Zubaydah admitted any such thing under waterboarding, despite being asked to do so, then isn't the source's statement still literally true?

I tend to think these "anonymous" quotes are carefully worded in advance, so we may not be pushing too hard here. And of course, there's the issue how these sources even have a basis for their statement. Were they present? How do they know?

... And, as this article (via Yglesias) points out, Cheney at the time certainly acted like someone receiving reports of Iraq-Qaeda links from our torture centers:

Then-Vice President Dick Cheney, defending the invasion of Iraq, asserted in 2004 that detainees interrogated at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp had revealed that Iraq had trained al Qaida operatives in chemical and biological warfare, an assertion that wasn't true.

Cheney's 2004 comments to the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News were largely overlooked at the time. However, they appear to substantiate recent reports that interrogators at Guantanamo and other prison camps were ordered to find evidence of alleged cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein — despite CIA reports that there were only sporadic, insignificant contacts between the militant Islamic group and the secular Iraqi dictatorship.

The head of the Criminal Investigation Task Force at Guantanamo from 2002-2005 confirmed to McClatchy that in late 2002 and early 2003, intelligence officials were tasked to find, among other things, Iraq-al Qaida ties, which were a central pillar of the Bush administration's case for its March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"I'm aware of the fact that in late 2002, early 2003, that (the alleged al Qaida-Iraq link) was an interest on the intelligence side," said retired Army Lt. Col. Brittain Mallow, a former military criminal investigator. "That was something they were tasked to look at."

He said he was unaware of the origins of the directive, but a former senior U.S. intelligence official has told McClatchy that Cheney's and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's offices were demanding that information in 2002 and 2003. The official, who wasn't authorized to speak publicly on the matter, requested anonymity.

During the same period, two alleged senior al Qaida operatives in CIA custody were waterboarded repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times and Khalid Sheik Mohammed at least 183 times.

A 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee report said that the two were questioned about the relationship between al Qaida and Iraq, and that both denied knowing of one. * * *

The Rocky Mountain News asked Cheney in a Jan. 9, 2004, interview if he stood by his claims that Saddam's regime had maintained a "relationship" with al Qaida, raising the danger that Iraq might give the group chemical, biological or nuclear weapons to attack the U.S.

"Absolutely. Absolutely," Cheney replied. * * *

"The (al Qaida-Iraq) links go back," he said. "We know for example from interrogating detainees in Guantanamo that al Qaida sent individuals to Baghdad to be trained in C.W. and B.W. technology, chemical and biological weapons technology. These are all matters that are there for anybody who wants to look at it."

No evidence of such training or of any operational links between Iraq and al Qaida has ever been found, according to several official inquiries.

As the article goes on to note, al-Libi provided similar "testimony" under torture, but of course he wasn't at Gitmo. IIRC, the black sites were not being admitted yet; maybe Cheney said "Guantanamo" deliberately.

And as a commenter at the Emptywheel post above noted: are we supposed to believe that, on this supremely interesting issue, KSM was gently asked over a cup of tea whether Qaeda had links to Saddam, responded with a categorical denial, and the CIA said, "well, that answers my question -- thanks"? And then went back to torturing KSM to extract god knows what other TOTALLY UNRELATED information?

Too close to home

Andrew Sullivan has been all over our new commander in Afghanistan, Gen. McChrystal, and his unit's past complicity in torture in Iraq. Pretty creepy.

Which adds a new rationale to Obama's reluctance to investigate American torture: an inquiry may rebound on people he considers useful or necessary.

Our tortured justification for war

Not only does it seem that Cheney directed torture to "prove" an Iraq-Qaeda link as justification for the 2003 war ... it now seems that he was still eager to use torture after the occupation, in order to retroactively justify the war.

At the end of April 2003, not long after the fall of Baghdad, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi who Bush White House officials suspected might provide information of a relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime. Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi was the head of the M-14 section of Mukhabarat, one of Saddam’s secret police organizations. His responsibilities included chemical weapons and contacts with terrorist groups. * * *

[WMD inspector Charles] Duelfer says he heard from “some in Washington at very senior levels (not in the CIA),” who thought Khudayr’s interrogation had been “too gentle” and suggested another route, one that they believed has proven effective elsewhere. “They asked if enhanced measures, such as waterboarding, should be used,” Duelfer writes. “The executive authorities addressing those measures made clear that such techniques could legally be applied only to terrorism cases, and our debriefings were not as yet terrorism-related. The debriefings were just debriefings, even for this creature.”

Duelfer will not disclose who in Washington had proposed the use of waterboarding, saying only: “The language I can use is what has been cleared.” In fact, two senior U.S. intelligence officials at the time tell The Daily Beast that the suggestion to waterboard came from the Office of Vice President Cheney. Cheney, of course, has vehemently defended waterboarding and other harsh techniques, insisting they elicited valuable intelligence and saved lives. He has also asked that several memoranda be declassified to prove his case. * * *

Without admitting where the suggestion came from, Duelfer revealed that he considered it reprehensible and understood the rationale as political--and ultimately counterproductive to the overall mission of the Iraq Survey Group, which was assigned the mission of finding Saddam Hussein’s WMD after the invasion.

Emptywheel notes the story and cautions against uncritical reading of another portion, implying that the 9/11 Commission relied heavily on torture-obtained intel from KSM. But she passes over the foregoing part.

Meanwhile, Colin Powell's ex-aide Col. Wilkerson claims that

what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

If any of this is true, it seems astonishing that Cheney would not shut his mouth, rather than provoke such revelations and investigations. But perhaps he thinks that playing the partisanship card is the only way to keep an investigation from happening.

Increasingly, Cheney reminds me of this:

This officer in Intelligence, who had open access to Hitler, is reported to have given the Führer once again an urgent account of the atrocities and consequences of such methods, whereupon the Führer is said to have replied, "You're getting soft, sir! I have to do it, because after me no one else will!"

(Quoted in Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, at 85.)