After executing death row inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith by the controversial nitrogen hypoxia method in January, Alabama legislators have introduced a bill to ban the practice entirely. Ironically, nitrogen hypoxia—in which a prisoner is killed by being forced to breathe pure nitrogen—was originally introduced in Alabama as a supposedly more humane form of execution than lethal injection.
The Alabama Legislature passed a bill allowing the state to conduct executions by nitrogen hypoxia in 2018. At the time, the execution method was completely untested—a fact that caused it to quickly become controversial at the same time as Alabama death row inmates clamored to be killed using the hypothetical technique.
As lethal injection drugs have become increasingly difficult to obtain, alternate drug cocktails have led to a spate of grisly executions nationwide. Alabama in particular has conducted several botched executions in recent years, all stemming from prison officials' inability to correctly place an IV line for lethal injection drugs.
Smith, who had previously survived a botched lethal injection attempt, was killed by nitrogen hypoxia in January. Smith won the right to be executed by nitrogen hypoxia instead of lethal injection last year, though his lawyers reversed course in a last-minute attempt to save his life, arguing that nitrogen hypoxia would itself be overly cruel. He was the first known person to be killed by nitrogen hypoxia, and witnesses described how Smith "struggled against his restraints" and "shook and writhed on a gurney" as he was dying.
On February 27, state Rep. Neil Rafferty (D–Birmingham), introduced a bill to ban nitrogen hypoxia in Alabama—instead forcing a return to lethal injection in most cases. (Execution by electric chair is technically allowed in Alabama, but inmates are very unlikely to opt into it.)
The legislation, which isn't likely to pass, has been framed by many anti–death penalty advocates as an attempt to remove an inherently cruel execution method.
"I think [the bill] is a valiant attempt to reintroduce a modicum of humanity to Alabama that will most likely fail," Lauren Faraino, founder and director of The Woods Foundation, a criminal justice nonprofit, told the Alabama Reflector this week. "I don't think that any of our politicians have the interest or the courage to reverse what can only be described as torture."
But is it? While nitrogen hypoxia is clearly a terrible way to die, lethal injection executions are also famously cruel—the most popular drug cocktail is known to cause searing, burning pain before killing inmates. A world where death row prisoners are not able to opt into nitrogen hypoxia is not obviously one where Alabama is less cruel in how it executes inmates sentenced to die.
While horror at the gruesome nature of nitrogen hypoxia executions is understandable, the back-and-forth on the method—first hailed as more "humane" and then as cruel— shows an unfortunate truth: As it turns out, there's not really a gentle way to kill someone.
If Alabama legislators actually want to stop killing death row prisoners in hideous ways, then they should consider not killing them at all.
The post Alabama Discovers There Is No 'Humane' Way To Execute Someone appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last night, Alabama executed death row inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith in what is believed to be the first ever execution by nitrogen hypoxia. The experimental method has come under scrutiny in recent weeks, with a United Nations spokesperson going so far as to declare that the execution method "may amount to torture."
Smith, 58, was sentenced to death for the 1988 murder-for-hire killing of Elizabeth Sennett, a 45-year-old preacher's wife in Sheffield, Alabama. The state first attempted to execute Smith in November 2022 but ultimately called off the execution after prison officials failed to place an IV line to begin the lethal injection process.
Smith's first attempted execution was part of a series of botched executions carried out by Alabama, which led Gov. Kay Ivey to place a moratorium on executions in November 2022. However, she lifted the pause in February 2023, following an opaque internal investigation.
While Alabama began carrying out lethal injection executions again in July 2023, Smith had already initiated a legal battle to be executed instead by suffocation with nitrogen gas, a largely theoretical execution method approved by the state Legislature in 2018.
The state originally pushed back against Smith's request, arguing that they did not have proper facilities and procedures to kill Smith through the experimental method. But the Supreme Court disagreed, denying cert to the state's attempt to overturn an earlier ruling allowing Smith to choose execution by nitrogen hypoxia.
In an apparent attempt to save his life, Smith's lawyers have pivoted in recent months to instead argue that nitrogen hypoxia would lead to a tortuous death for Smith and that the experimental nature of the execution meant that the state could not guarantee a smooth execution.
"The evidence establishes that executing Mr. Smith by nitrogen hypoxia using the Protocol would subject him to a substantial risk of serious harm," Smith's lawyers wrote in December. "It is undisputed that depriving a human of sufficient oxygen (below normal levels but above fatal levels) can cause dire consequences short of death."
The Supreme Court rejected a last-minute attempt to halt Smith's execution earlier this month, and Smith's execution began shortly before 8 p.m. on Thursday night. According to a witness report obtained by CNN, Smith made an extended statement before he died, saying "Tonight, Alabama caused humanity to take a step backward," and adding." I'm leaving with love, peace, and light."
Witnesses reported that Smith was strapped to a gurney with a gas mask affixed to his face. Smith remained conscious for several minutes after nitrogen began flowing into the mask, and he appeared to be holding his breath for as long as possible. He "struggled against his restraints" and "shook and writhed on a gurney." Witnesses additionally reported that Smith eventually began breathing deeply, before his breathing slowed and finally stopped. He was pronounced dead at 8:25—about 15 minutes after prison officials began the flow of nitrogen.
"There was some involuntary movement and some agonal breathing, so that was all expected and is in the side effects that we've seen and researched on nitrogen hypoxia," John Hamm, the Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner, said in a press conference Thursday night. "So nothing was out of the ordinary of what we were expecting."
While prison officials were cavalier about Smith's execution, others who witnessed his death were not so relaxed about the apparently grisly process.
The execution was "the most horrible thing I've ever seen," the Rev. Jeff Hood, Smith's spiritual adviser, told CNN. "An unbelievable evil was unleashed tonight."
The post 'The Most Horrible Thing I've Ever Seen': Alabama Executes Inmate With Experimental Method appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As he works to unseat two-term incumbent Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah), Republican-turned-independent Evan McMullin has been eager to frame himself as the good guy.
In campaign ads, McMullin promises to be a "compassionate, selfless, and independent" candidate who won't get caught up in partisan extremism. Lee sold out his reputation and his values by engaging with former President Donald Trump's attempt to subvert the results of the 2020 election, McMullin argued to Politico a few months ago. "That's not what a constitutional conservative does," he said. On his campaign website, McMullin outlines 12 principles that he promises to adhere to if elected next month—including "reaffirm our founding beliefs," "defend the constitution," and "seek and promote truth."
And how better to illustrate all that than to have Luke Skywalker—that is, actor Mark Hamil—endorse McMullin's plucky underdog effort during the home stretch? "The Force is with us!" McMullin declared after the announcement.
Framing the race that way might work. In other Republican states, having Trump's endorsement and tenuous connections to the January 6 riot might be a boon for Lee. But in a place where Trump has never been very popular and where the other sitting senator is the famously Trump-skeptical Mitt Romney, that's not necessarily the case. Polls show Lee holding a slim lead, but McMullin is closing ground. The two candidates are scheduled to debate tonight at Utah Valley University.
But that frame should inspire a closer look at McMullin's own biography. McMullin's claims of being the morally upstanding character in this contest—not merely the Never Trump choice in this race, but the good guy—sit somewhat uncomfortably alongside his connections to one of the ugliest scandals in recent American history.
McMullin joined the CIA while still an undergraduate student at Brigham Young University, and he claims in campaign videos to have been at the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, on September 11, 2001. Shortly after the terrorist attacks, he was deployed to Southwest Asia on an assignment of "gathering information on the Taliban, developing intelligence for strikes on terrorists and searching for high-value al-Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden," according to a Washington Post profile published while McMullin was running for president in 2016. Though the details of his deployment are classified, several former CIA officers have vouched for his track record as an exemplary agent.
Fair enough. But McMullin's career as an intelligence officer during the War on Terror overlaps with the CIA's clandestine torture regime, which was detailed in an explosive report assembled by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2014. According to a 500-page executive summary of that report—the full report remains classified—CIA officers subjected detainees to waterboarding, forced feeding (including anal feeding), sleep deprivation, and other physical and psychological tortures at secret prisons known as "black sites." The Senate report also found that torture "was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees."
McMullin did not know about the torture, says Kelsey Koenen Witt, a spokesperson for McMullin's campaign.
"Though he was aware of 'black sites' where some captured terrorists were held, he never visited any of the installations and was unaware of the enhanced interrogation program," Koenen Witt writes in an email. "He was never involved in the program and was never read into it."
That's subtly different from how McMullin explained things when he was running for president six years ago. Then, in an interview with Buzzfeed, McMullin said he was "aware of" the CIA's torture program, though he similarly denied being involved.
"I was aware of it by virtue of where I was," he said. "I was serving in a place that was the kind of place where people entered that program from that place, but I never participated in it, I never went to a black site, never met with a detainee."
The shifting explanation is at once subtle and telling. Claiming to be unaware of what was happening at those CIA "black sites," as McMullin now says he was, might absolve him of some moral culpability. It might also be an easy way to avoid obvious follow-up questions about what exactly he knew and when he knew it.
On other aspects of the CIA's torture program, McMullin's answers have similarly evolved over time.
In that same 2016 interview with Buzzfeed, McMullin said that he did not support the use of torture against suspected terrorists—but he made a distinction for waterboarding.
"I don't believe in taking it easy on terrorists when they're incarcerated. But I also don't support the use of torture. There are gray areas," he said. "I believe that waterboarding is in a gray area."
To be clear, there is no gray area when it comes to waterboarding. The United Nations considers it a form of torture. It is prohibited by the U.S. Army Field Manual, which governs soldiers' behavior on the battlefield. In 2006, President George W. Bush signed a law forbidding the use of torture by the military—though the bill deliberately exempted the CIA.
McMullin offered that opinion of the technique two years after the Senate Intelligence Committee report had described the use of water-boarding as "physically harmful, inducing convulsions and vomiting," two years after the report detailed incidents where suspects were waterboarded until they passed out or required medical attention. One prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, was waterboarded at least 83 times.
John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer and one of the first whistleblowers to inform the Senate of the CIA's use of torture against Al Qaeda prisoners, tells Reason that McMullin's 2016 description of waterboarding is "utterly disingenuous."
"At the time that he made this statement, the Senate Torture Report already had been published. It was crystal clear, even to waterboarding supporters, that the act was a form of torture," says Kiriakou. "It was crystal clear that not only was waterboarding illegal, immoral, and unethical, it simply didn't work. McMullen makes a lot of his faith. I highly doubt that his faith would mandate waterboarding a prisoner."
McMullin's opinion on the matter has now changed, Koenen Witt tells Reason.
"Evan opposes torture including waterboarding and believes it is critical for the United States government to respect basic human rights at all times," she writes.
McMullin has not read the Senate's report on the CIA's use of torture, Koenen Witt writes, but he "believes the CIA and its vital mission is strengthened with strong congressional oversight and when it respects basic human rights."
That's exactly the answer that you'd expect from the current iteration of McMullin, the patriotic conservative who defends the constitution. But voters will never know anything more than McMullin is willing to share about his CIA career. His history will remain classified, even though the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are over.
The one thing we do know is that, unlike Kiriakou, McMullin didn't blow the whistle about the CIA's torture regime. Is that because he didn't know, or because he didn't care? More vital to this campaign might be a slightly different version of that same question: If McMullin wins, can Americans count on him to be an impartial investigator in the event of another CIA scandal?
"While Evan served as an undercover CIA operations officer, he was committed to the duties of that role. If he prevails in the Utah Senate race, he will approach his new role with the same commitment," Koenen Witt tells Reason. "Evan has always believed that the Agency and the nation are well-served when the intelligence community has strong congressional oversight."
One last thing worth noting is how much media coverage of the Utah Senate race is seemingly uninterested in McMullin's history with the CIA and his connections to the torture scandal—even though it drew scrutiny from the Post, Buzzfeed, and others during his quixotic presidential run in 2016.
The New York Times and Politico recently dedicated long feature pieces to the Utah Senate race, and both naturally included significant detailing of Lee's texts with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the run-up to January 6. But neither piece even made a passing mention of McMullin's CIA tenure or his previous wishy-washy responses when asked about waterboarding and the use of torture in America's post-9/11 wars.
In a recent interview with the Times, McMullin said Lee's involvement with the January 6 protests was "one of the most egregious betrayals of the American republic in its history." But history did not begin in January 2021. There's no need to downplay or dismiss Lee's involvement in Trump's attempt to cling to power, but a proper perspective on the Utah Senate race would show that both leading candidates have stains on their records.
The post In Utah Senate Race, Evan McMullin Has To Reckon With an Ugly History appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Judge Rotenberg Center is a residential psychiatric institution in Canton, Massachusetts. Since its founding in 1971, the Rotenberg Center has become infamous for its use of controversial methods to treat children and adults with behavioral problems and developmental disabilities. "Students" at the center are subjected to contingent skin shock, an extreme version of applied behavior analysis, which is a common treatment for autism and other developmental conditions.
The electric shocks given to individuals at the Rotenberg Center are severe. According to one expert, the shocks are at least six times more potent than the most powerful legal stun gun. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the Center's practices have been condemned by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, and six residents have died while in the center's care.
Despite scandals, according to FIRE, officials at the Rotenberg Center have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying government bodies to keep the center open. In 2020, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) formally banned the electric shock devices used by the center because they "present an unreasonable and substantial risk of illness or injury." However, the center successfully sued, reinstating its practices after a federal appeals court found that the FDA did not have the authority to ban the center's shock devices.
Disability rights groups have consistently opposed the Rotenberg Center's practices. While their efforts have not succeeded so far, shutting down the center remains a top priority for many autism rights groups and activists. However, one activist group now faces a lawsuit for speaking out against the Center's practices.
NeuroClastic is a small nonprofit and publication that runs stories by autistic writers who cover topics pertaining to disability rights. On its website, the organization writes that it seeks "to create a counter-point to messaging about autism that presents the autistic neurotype as a disease or disorder or a checklist of deficits."
In August 2021, NeuroClastic published "900 ABA Professionals Have Weighed in on the Use of Electroshock at Judge Rotenberg Center." The survey found that 89 percent of surveyed clinicians "strongly opposed" the practice, and 70 percent of respondents "believe the JRC should be shut down."
On April 27, the Rotenberg Center responded by sending a cease-and-desist letter to NeuroClastic, claiming that the organization's statements "are false and defamatory and are causing harm to JRC." The letter singles out NeuroClastic's survey of ABA professionals, claiming that NeuroClastic published a litany of false statements about the Rotenberg Center.
However, "all of NeuroClastic's statements are true or substantially true, and NeuroClastic believes them to be true based on publicly available sources that it cited at the time of publication," wrote FIRE Attorney Gabe Walters in a response to the cease-and-desist letter. Walters continued "The other statements [the Rotenberg Center] identif[ies] are plainly matters of protected opinion."
As noted by FIRE, many of the allegedly defamatory statements are in fact verifiable. For example, NeuroClastic stated that the Rotenberg Center has shocked residents while they were tied down on the floor. The center claims this is false. However, according to FIRE, that statement is "based on a video of a resident strapped to a restraint board and shocked 31 times. CBS Evening News broadcast footage of the video nationally."
"NeuroClastic shouldn't face litigation for advocating for its mission, which is to be a voice for autistic people. The Center is delivering painful electric shocks to autistic residents to try to suppress their autistic behaviors and NeuroClastic is obviously opposed to that practice, and speaks out about it," Walters tells Reason. "It can't enter one side of the debate on this public issue, and then try to shut down the other side by intimidating them with a meritless defamation suit."
The post A Psychiatric Facility Punishes Residents With Painful Electric Shocks. Now It's Trying To Sue Its Critics. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Supreme Court ruled today that the United States can continue to withhold information about the CIA torture of prisoners at black sites during the early years of the post-9/11 war on terror from lawsuits trying to hold those involved responsible.
In a complex, technical ruling, six justices ruled in the federal government's favor (though there were multiple separate opinions from different justices explaining their reasoning). Justice Elena Kagan agreed with part of the ruling and dissented in part. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor were the only full dissenters.
The case, United States v. Zubaydah, revolved around Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in Pakistan in 2002 and has been held by the U.S. since then under the belief that he was a senior Al Qaeda leader potentially planning further terrorist attacks against the United States. He was tortured extensively by the CIA, waterboarded dozens of times. He's currently a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay.
Zubaydah was reportedly held at a CIA black site in Poland as part of these interrogations. He has sued to try to hold the people who tortured him accountable. The European Court of Human Rights has already ruled that Poland violated the law when it cooperated with the CIA. The CIA and federal government, though, have refused to verify or validate that this black site actually existed. In the United States, the federal government has attempted to quash subpoenas of two former CIA contractors—James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the two psychologists who consulted with the agency to develop the interrogation program—as part of Zubaydah's legal challenges. Even though there has been extensive press coverage and reports about the extent of the U.S. torture of prisoners, the CIA insists that acknowledging the existence of a black site in Poland falls under "state secrets" and that courts cannot force them to disclose the info.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled against the federal government, believing (like the rest of us) that the location of the black site was now public knowledge and that confirmation of the site's existence can no longer harm national security interests. Today the Supreme Court ruled that even though this information has entered the public domain, it can still be classified as a state secret.
Justice Stephen Breyer wrote most of the court's opinion, accepting the government's claim that even just confirming the existence of a black site in Poland is a threat to national security. The ruling is deferential to the authority of the executive branch to decide what falls under a national security interest and, therefore, can be kept secret. In this case, the CIA says that revealing whether we had a black site in Poland could impact intelligence-gathering efforts and "sensitive" relationships.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito concurred separately because Breyer's opinion wasn't deferential enough to the government. The two worried that calling for the court to probe any claim of national security privilege more deeply will lead to "judicial second-guessing of core national-security determinations." Thomas concluded that Zubaydah had demonstrated only "a dubious showing of necessity" and would have dismissed his request for that reason. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, similarly wrote that Zubaydah had only demonstrated a "dubious" need for the information. The two, however, are open to a more thorough court review if they find the claims more serious than they did in Zubaydah's situation. Nevertheless, Kavanaugh writes, "In state secrets cases, a court's review from start to finish must be deferential to the Executive Branch."
Kagan wrote separately that while she agrees with the U.S. that forcing confirmation of the black site location would pose a "reasonable danger" to national security, she does not believe that should end Zubaydah's suit. She says she'd allow him to resubmit his requests to remove all Poland-specific references to obtain the testimony he needs without revealing the locations of the black sites.
Gorsuch, joined by Sotomayor, fully dissented from the rest of the justices. Gorsuch launched a 30-page dissent with "There comes a point where we should not be ignorant as judges of what we know to be true as citizens," quoting Watts v. Indiana, a Supreme Court case from 1949 that established that police can't use coerced confessions that violate the 14th amendment as evidence at trials.
Gorsuch details the many, many sins of the CIA's torture program, which failed to actually extract the information from Zubaydah that it was looking for. He notes that while the CIA may not be willing to reveal that the black site was in Poland, the European Court of Human Rights ruled as such and cited more than 100 pages of evidence. A former president of Poland has acknowledged its existence.
Gorsuch notes that the state secrets privilege is not all-encompassing. "Even a statute that constitutionally allows federal courts to pass on matters touching on foreign affairs in most cases may, in some applications, trench on powers the Constitution reserves for the Executive," he writes, arguing that the government can't use the privilege of state secrets to conceal violations over which the judiciary has been granted the authority to redress.
Gorsuch concludes with a barn burner of a paragraph essentially accusing the court of allowing the CIA to use the state secrets privilege simply to avoid embarrassment:
Really, it seems that the government wants this suit dismissed because it hopes to impede the Polish criminal investigation and avoid (or at least delay) further embarrassment for past misdeeds. Perhaps at one level this is easy enough to understand. The facts are hard to face. We know already that our government treated Zubaydah brutally—more than 80 waterboarding sessions, hundreds of hours of live burial, and what it calls "rectal rehydration." Further evidence along the same lines may lie in the government's vaults. But as embarrassing as these facts may be, there is no state secret here. This Court's duty is to the rule of law and the search for truth. We should not let shame obscure our vision.
This is not the first time Gorsuch and Sotomayor have found themselves on the same page trying to demand more transparency from the executive branch about clandestine behavior. In November, the two of them dissented from the majority's decision not to hear a case about whether the public has the right to see opinions released by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Gorsuch's concerns were similar in that case as well: The two of them both saw the court being far too deferential to the executive branch's ability to keep information secret by declaring it a national security issue. In this particular case, the Supreme Court is insistent that it can do so even when the information is technically no longer a secret.
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]]>There's an old argument among filmmakers about whether it's possible to make a truly anti-war film. In the 1970s, French New Wave director François Truffaut famously declared that every war film was inherently pro-war, because to depict war on screen was to glorify it, showing it as valorous and heroic. In response, Steven Spielberg, after making Saving Private Ryan, argued that "Every war film, good or bad, is an anti-war movie."
The Card Counter isn't a war film, or at least not what you'd normally think of as one. Much of the action does, in fact, take place inside casinos, just as the title implies, and there is plenty of card-game lore for those interested in such things. But it is, in its own way, an anti-war film, a movie about the dark legacy of America's post-9/11 war on terror, and in particular the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques—more rightly labeled torture—deployed on prisoners at Abu Ghraib. For what it depicts is not the glory of war on the battlefield, but the ugly, almost invisible psychological toll that wartime acts of inhumanity inflict long after a war is over.
Written and directed by Paul Schrader, it's the story of a professional card player who goes by the name of William Tell (a steely, salt-and-pepper-haired Oscar Isaac). Tell travels the casino circuit playing small-stakes games and winning a little at a time. He's a loner, quiet and intense, with some odd habits, including a practice of wrapping every object in his hotel rooms in white cloth, giving his surroundings a blank and ghostlike aesthetic.
Tell, it turns out, has a dark past: He was a torturer at Abu Ghraib, and he served time in military prison for his actions. Now he spends his days killing time, counting cards, and earning just enough to live on—that is, until he meets Cirk (Tye Sheridan), a young man whose father also served at Abu Ghraib, and later beat his wife and child before committing suicide. Cirk has a misbegotten plan to attack and torture an ex-military contractor, Major John Gordo (Willem Dafoe), an interrogation adviser who presided over the facility where both Tell and Cirk's father worked.
Tell invites Cirk to travel with him, effectively adopting him in what becomes an informal father-son relationship. Tell takes on a financial backer, represented by La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), and seeks to gamble his way into a fortune that he can use to set Cirk on the right path.
Schrader has long been taken with male rage and the sordid underbelly of American life, and the ways in which the right combination of vice, boredom, solitude, and obsession can poison a man's spirit, or give him twisted purpose.
He's the screenwriter of Taxi Driver and the writer-director behind 2017's widely praised tale of eco-terrorism First Reformed, among many other films, and he borrows from both films without simply repeating himself. He makes movies about lonely men with too much time on their hands and not enough direction in their lives.
The Card Counter is cast from a similar mold. Like Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle, Tell is a veteran and a diarist who reveals his thoughts in elliptical entries read in voiceover. The relationship between Tell and Cirk echoes the relationship between Bickle and Jodie Foster's teenage prostitute, Iris, as Tell, like Bickle, looks to save himself by embarking on a possibly doomed quest to save a damaged young person. Like First Reformed, however, The Card Counter is a sort of vengeful redemption story, in which an act of personal violence becomes a possible moral salve for a larger societal wrong.
I say possible, because the movie seems to want to have it both ways, resisting the impulse to violence, and preferring love and forgiveness to perpetuating the cycle of violence. Tell and La Linda maintain a pleasantly flirtatious relationship throughout the film that grows into something more, and Schrader seems to posit companionship and connection as a way to move beyond one's violent impulses.
But ultimately, Tell, and the film, give in to the cathartic release of vengeance. If there is a definite shift in Schrader's work over the years, it is in the way he has come not only to empathize with his angst-ridden male heroes, but to valorize them. Taxi Driver is an exploration of how a particular sort of postmodern male ennui can lead to violence, but it is not exactly a justification of such acts. The movie digs into Bickle's psyche, showing it, but not siding with it. First Reformed, on the other hand, seems, however haltingly and hesitantly, to side with eco-violence, or at the very least to suggest that it might be an unreasonable act, but in an unreasonable world, perhaps such unreason has its place.
The Card Counter tries to split the difference: Tell is so haunted by his past as a torturer that he has built an entire life around restraining the violent, angry impulses inside him. That past—depicted in a handful of horrific, hallucinogenic shots of military-run torture chambers—gnaws at him, flattens every interaction and every experience. Even though he tries not to confront it directly, it's the ever-present context for his life, because he knows he can simply turn off his empathy at any time.
Yes, he can occupy his mind by counting cards and calculating odds, trapping himself in an empty loop of low-stakes poker games—a feelings-dulling, time-killing prison of his own making. But he can never escape the awful things he's witnessed and done. And others, like Cirk's father, may not restrain themselves so successfully.
The Card Counter, then, isn't a movie about war, but a story about its grueling aftermath, the way that wartime acts committed in the name of protecting countrymen can poison individual psyches—and, inevitably, introduce that poison into the collective psyche of the society to which they return.
It's an intense film, a grim film, and it is sometimes difficult to watch. But it's also a gripping movie, psychologically astute and emotionally open in a way that Schrader's work is often not. The Card Counter is a movie about the loss of one's humanity, but it's nothing if not deeply humane.
The post <i>The Card Counter</i> Is an Unexpectedly Powerful Anti-War Film appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Black Banners (Declassified): How Torture Derailed the War on Terror After 9/11, by Ali Soufan, W.W. Norton & Co., 640 pages, $17.95
The terrorist has been captured, and the clock is ticking. FBI agents know they need to use humane interrogation methods to get the information that could stop a deadly attack. But clueless politicians in Washington want to use torture, wasting precious minutes and putting the mission at risk.
It sounds like a parody of a post-9/11 spy thriller. But it's a scenario that keeps recurring in Ali Soufan's autobiography, The Black Banners (Declassified). Soufan, a retired FBI agent who was pursuing Al Qaeda long before it was a household name, argues that secrecy and the thirst for torture made it harder to protect Americans. We would have been better served, he shows, if Washington had treated terrorism as a law enforcement problem, not an exception to the law.
Much of Soufan's story has already been told, both in the heavily censored 2011 edition of his book and in the official 9/11 Commission Report. In the months before September 11, 2001, the CIA failed to give the FBI crucial information that could have stopped the attackers and saved thousands of American lives. In the years that followed, the FBI-CIA rivalry continued to hinder counterterrorism efforts.
The new edition of The Black Banners—finally fully declassified after a lengthy legal battle—paints an even more disturbing picture. FBI agents had been waging an effective fight against Al Qaeda using ordinary interrogation tactics. But after 9/11, the Bush administration unleashed torture methods that were self-sabotaging as well as immoral.
Soufan had been tracking Al Qaeda since the 1990s, building an encyclopedic knowledge of Osama bin Laden's group. Sometimes he used this knowledge to catch suspects in a lie, flustering them and forcing them to tell the truth. Other times he got suspects to warm up to him with small talk and acts of kindness. Many terrorists knew they would have been viciously tortured by their home countries' security services; they had no idea what to make of the fearsome FBI sending a likeable Arab Muslim to chat with them over tea.
"Acting in a nonthreatening way isn't what the terrorist expects from a U.S. interrogator. This adds to the detainee's confusion and makes him more likely to cooperate," Soufan writes. "Because the interrogator is the one person speaking to and listening to the detainee, a relationship is built—and the detainee doesn't want to jeopardize it."
Soufan first caught an inkling of the 9/11 plot in 2000, while serving as lead investigator into the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. FBI agents on the ground discovered that Al Qaeda was transferring money to operatives abroad for something, and he wanted to find out what. But the CIA refused to share intelligence that, combined with the FBI's leads, could have led to the 9/11 hijackers.
Despite its failure to stop the attacks, the CIA grew more powerful after 9/11. The United States invaded Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda was based, and captured scores of militants. These captives were treated neither as criminal suspects nor as prisoners of war but as "enemy combatants," a legal term invented to imply that they had no rights. Some were held at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, while the CIA disappeared others to secret black sites.
The climax of Soufan's story occurred at one such black site and nearly led him to arrest CIA officers on the spot. Pakistani forces had captured Zayn al-Abidin "Abu Zubaydah" Muhammad Hussein, a senior official from a militant training camp in Afghanistan, and handed him to the Americans in March 2002. Soufan knew of Abu Zubaydah from a previous investigation, and he was rushed to a secret base to help interrogate the prisoner.
CIA censors selectively redacted much of what happened next from the 2011 edition of Soufan's memoir. What remained could give readers the impression that torture helped soften up Abu Zubaydah. Only the 2020 edition tells the full, damning story.
FBI agents spent 10 long days interrogating Abu Zubaydah as medical personnel fought to keep the badly wounded militant alive. He cooperated quickly, even naming Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. The FBI also learned that Abu Zubaydah had trained and assisted many high-level members of Al Qaeda but was not a formal member of the group.
The Bush administration, which believed (and told the public) that it had captured Al Qaeda's third-in-command, insisted that Abu Zubaydah had simply bamboozled the FBI. So the CIA turned to former Air Force trainer and psychological consultant James Elmer Mitchell. (Although he is named only by a pseudonym in Soufan's book, Mitchell has written his own account of these events.)
Mitchell's solution, as Soufan puts it, was to "make Abu Zubaydah see his interrogator as a god who controls his suffering." In other words, torture.
Mitchell had never interrogated a terrorist. In fact, he had never interrogated anyone at all. His methods were not just cruel but bizarre. Abu Zubaydah was left naked and sleep-deprived as CIA officers blasted loud music into his cell. An interrogator playing the role of God would say "Tell me what you know?" only to leave the room every time Abu Zubaydah responded, "What do you want to know?" At one point, the CIA left a crayon in Abu Zubaydah cell, hoping he would spontaneously write down valuable information. Even other CIA officers on the ground were uncomfortable with these techniques. The pressure to torture came from the highest levels of the Bush administration.
Higher-ups eventually noticed that the information had stopped coming and gave Soufan permission to try his own methods. The torture stopped, and Abu Zubaydah began providing useful information again, leading to the arrest of wannabe bomber Jose Padilla.
Even this intelligence was distorted for political ends. Padilla had wanted to set off a radioactive "dirty bomb," and the Bush administration publicly took credit for stopping an "unfolding terrorist plot" to irradiate an American city. Soufan emphasizes that Padilla was indeed a "committed terrorist" with malicious intent, but he notes that he was "a brain transplant away" from actually building a radiation weapon. The Bush administration's statements "unnecessarily instilled fear in the American people," Soufan writes, and "made us look foolish in the eyes of al-Qaeda."
The CIA had another turn at Abu Zubaydah, and then the FBI got to interrogate him again. The cycle repeated a third time. Finally, the CIA brought in a coffin to terrify Abu Zubaydah with a mock burial. That was the last straw. When Soufan threatened to start making arrests, then–FBI Director Robert Mueller ordered his agents out of the black site.
Abu Zubaydah was extensively tortured after that. His mental state deteriorated, and he lost an eye. The information he provided under torture did not stop a single terrorist plot, but the Bush administration used some of it to justify the invasion of Iraq. In 2005, CIA officers destroyed videotapes of Abu Zubaydah's interrogation in order to cover their tracks. The following year, Abu Zubaydah was transferred to Guantanamo Bay, where he told a U.S. military tribunal that he had made false statements just to make the pain stop.
Mitchell was paid millions for his services. Gina Haspel, one of the officers who destroyed evidence of Abu Zubaydah's torture, served as CIA director from 2018 to early 2021. Abu Zubaydah, who has not been charged with a single crime, is still imprisoned in Cuba.
Soufan managed to build a rapport with several detainees at Guantanamo Bay without torture. One prisoner—who knew bin Laden's wife, it turns out—even promised to provide more information if the FBI allowed him to call his family. Soufan agreed, but the U.S. military officers at Guantanamo Bay refused. Those officials "wouldn't let a detainee use a phone for a minute, which would have led to bin Laden," Soufan writes, "but they didn't mind disregarding the U.S. Constitution" with their harsh treatment of prisoners.
In September 2002, Pakistani forces handed militants Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Hassan bin Attash to the CIA. (Bin Attash is named only by a pseudonym in the book.) Soufan was given 45 minutes to interrogate them, against the wishes of CIA headquarters. Bin Attash knew that Soufan had previously treated suspects with kindness. Deciding to cooperate, he spilled the beans on Al Qaeda's plot to blow up an oil tanker in Yemen.
The CIA refused to believe that bin Attash was telling the truth and transferred him to an unnamed country to be tortured. Al Qaeda blew up the MV Limburg off the coast of Yemen the next month, just as bin Attash had warned. The attack killed one, wounded 12, and caused an oil spill.
Soufan left the FBI in 2005. He testified against torture to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2009 and remains an outspoken critic of the excesses of the war on terror. And he has something to say to his detractors: "If my account was not true, they would not have tried to censor it."
The post A Declassified Case Against Torture appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Authorities in Indonesia's Aceh province caned two men 77 times each for having sex with each other. The men were caught when neighbors broke into the room they were sharing and caught them. Aceh is the only province in Indonesia to enforce Islamic shariah law, which calls for up to 100 lashes for gay sex.
The post Brickbat: Raising Cane appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President-elect Joe Biden is being warned not to bring torture apologists who served under President Barack Obama into his administration.
The Daily Beast reported this week that Biden was considering Michael Morell as a potential CIA director, but Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) had objections. Wyden publicly warned that Morell, who served as deputy director of the CIA under Obama, shouldn't be considered due to his past ties in obscuring CIA torture. CNN subsequently interviewed Wyden:
"No torture apologist can be confirmed as CIA director. It's a nonstarter," Wyden told CNN, referring to Morell's previous suggestions that the agency's so-called "enhanced interrogation" of terrorists was both effective and moral—claims that go further than those made by other officials who have faced scrutiny over the agency's handling of detainees at black sites, including former Director John Brennan and current Director Gina Haspel.
Wyden isn't the only person trying to raise alarms about Morell. Over at Just Security, Scott Roehm, along with Daniel Jones (who investigated the CIA torture and wrote the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on it), also warned against Morell. They note Morell's role in essentially absolving CIA staff (including current CIA Director Gina Haspel) of responsibility for destroying tapes of CIA torture of suspected terrorists during the Iraq War. He was also responsible for the CIA's response to the Senate's torture report, insisting that the CIA's methods had resulted in actionable intelligence. They had not. Roehm and Jones write:
In an interview … Morell said he rejected the description of the CIA program as torture "because to call it torture says my guys were torturers" and "I'm going to defend my guys to my last breath." He would go on to vocally support Haspel and her candidacy for CIA director.
CNN reported that Nick Shapiro, a spokesperson for Morell, insists that Morell was not familiar or involved with the CIA's torture program, didn't learn about it until 2006, and has since said that "he believed that waterboarding is indeed torture."
Biden hasn't named his choice for CIA director yet, but he did name Avril Haines as his choice for director of national intelligence. But Haines comes with similar baggage. Haines also supported Haspel's nomination as CIA director. And as deputy CIA director for a year under Obama, CNN notes, Haines made the decision not to punish any of the CIA employees who were secretly snooping on Jones and other Senate staffers working on the torture report.
As we start transitioning back to a Democratic administration, this fight is a reminder about the bipartisanship that drives a lot of the worst tendencies of national intelligence behavior. For anybody who might have forgotten what that looks like, check out The Report, which dramatizes the Senate's investigation of the CIA and absolutely does not shield the behavior of leaders under Obama from criticism.
The post Will Obama Torture Apologists Make a Triumphant Return to Joe Biden's White House? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In Russia's Chechen Republic, gay people face violence not just from strangers on the street but from their own family members, encouraged by a culture that scapegoats and victimizes them. Welcome to Chechnya documents the sometimes harrowing efforts of activists running essentially a modern underground railroad to help at-risk gay citizens flee the predominantly Muslim country.
Chechnian leader Ramzan Kadyrov famously said in a 2017 interview that there were no gay men in his country. Welcome to Chechnya reveals the purges that seek to make this absurd claim true. Dozens have been imprisoned and reportedly tortured. Some, like singer Zelim Bakaev, disappear and are simply never seen again.
A young woman is blackmailed by her uncle in an effort to make her have sex with him. One man's entire family has to go into hiding and flee with him, because they've all been threatened with harm. The man tries to get the Russian government to intervene, but given Kadyrov's cozy ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin, his appeals fall on apathetic ears.
The post Welcome to Chechnya appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"You have to make this work! It's only legal if it works!" yells a CIA functionary overseeing the torture of prisoners in overseas black sites. It seems unlikely that an actual CIA leader would yell something so on-the-nose, but this is The Report, Amazon Prime's attempt to dramatize not just the "enhanced interrogations" that took place under President George W. Bush but the concealment of these tactics by the CIA (from Congress and Bush himself), the fight by the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate what happened, and ultimately the Obama administration's failure to hold anybody to account.
The name of the movie is actually The Torture Report, but the word torture is cleverly redacted. The torture is not redacted from the film, though; it's re-enacted in vivid flashbacks. The protagonist—Senate investigator Daniel Jones, portrayed by Adam Driver—attempts to determine what happened at these CIA sites, why, and what laws might have been broken.
That's just half the movie. The other half is the intense struggle to get any of the information into the hands of the public. We see how the CIA attempted to block the report's release and even engaged in illegal surveillance against Senate staff, then accused the staffers of hacking into the computer system of America's spy agency.
The Report ends on the dour real-world reminder that there's been no real punishment of the people involved in the decision to torture detainees—or even for the CIA staff who illegally snooped on Jones' work.
The post The Report appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"You have to make this work! It's only legal if it works!" yells a CIA functionary overseeing the torture of prisoners in overseas black sites.
She's yelling at the two smarmy psychologists who came to the CIA to design and encourage the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques"—torture—on the men the CIA had secreted away after the September 11 attacks. The psychologists had insisted these measures would result in the CIA learning new actionable intelligence to help keep Americans safe from new terror attacks. It wasn't working.
It seems unlikely that an actual CIA leader would yell something so on-the-nose, but this is The Report, a Hollywood attempt to dramatize not just the CIA torture that took place under President George W. Bush but the concealment of these tactics (from Congress and Bush himself), the fight by the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate what happened, and ultimately the Obama administration's failure to hold anybody to account for some truly terrible behavior.
The name of the movie is actually The Torture Report, but the word "torture" is cleverly redacted to indicate the secrecy level. The torture is not redacted from the movie, though; all of it (including waterboarding and a forced enema) is re-enacted in vivid flashbacks. The protagonist—investigator Daniel Jones, portrayed by Adam Driver—attempts to determine what happened at these CIA sites, why, and what laws might have been broken in the process.
The investigation itself (which was supported at first by almost the entire Senate Intelligence Committee only to see it become a partisan battleground during Obama's presidency) represents only half the movie. The other half is the massive struggle to try to get any of the information into the hands of the public. We see how the CIA attempted to block its release and even engaged in illegal surveillance against the Senate staff, then accused the staffers of hacking into the computer system of America's spy agency.
The movie's available now on Amazon Prime. It's a good time to watch it, given the American drone strike that just took out Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani. As information about the torture became public knowledge, the government's defenders insisted that this unauthorized and brutal behavior helped protect Americans and provided valuable actionable intelligence. But Jones' investigation showed that the torture failed to provide the CIA with any intelligence it didn't already have or was able to access by other means, a conclusion that was also reached by the CIA itself in an internal report (known as the Panetta Report after former CIA Director Leon Panetta). The investigation showed that many of the detainees the CIA tortured shouldn't have been taken in the first place and didn't even have useful information to share.
In hindsight, we can see that none of this helped stabilize the Middle East in any substantial way. We are most certainly not safer as a country as a result of the CIA's torture methods. One lesson of The Report is that people in positions of power have a vested interest in telling us that whatever brutal actions they back will help keep America safe, even if that's not really true.
And to be clear here, this is not a #Resistance movie. While The Report accurately portrays Senate Democrats as leaders who kept the investigation going, it also makes clear that the Obama administration is one of the forces working against them. Ted Levine plays former CIA Director John Brennan as a cocky and obnoxious jerk who seems interested only in protecting the CIA from criticism. Brennan, who tried to get Jones fired and possibly even charged with a crime, is unmistakably presented as a villain; his current critiques of the Trump administration do not shield him from criticism.
The film's handling of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.), by a no-nonsense Annette Bening, is also interesting. The Report does not shy away from Feinstein's authoritarian streak. She declares at one point in the movie that she believes whistleblower Edward Snowden is a traitor, and she later mentions her support for Obama's secret drone warfare (newly relevant after Thursday's assassination). Nobody challenges her views, unfortunately, but the movie also pivots from giving her the big anti-torture speech at the end to showing an actual clip of deceased Sen. John McCain (R–Ariz.) giving a speech on the Senate floor opposing the use of torture by the CIA.
The Report ends on the dour real-world reminder that there's been no real punishment of the people involved in the decision to torture detainees—or even for the CIA staff who illegally snooped on Jones' work. The current director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, oversaw one of the black sites in Thailand where waterboarding occurred. Brennan is now a television news regular as an intelligence analyst and expert. Advisors who push the country in harsh and violent directions rarely pay a price when they're wrong. Keep that in mind as these same voices insist that whatever violence the Trump administration has in mind for Iran will make our country and the Middle East safer.
The post To See How Our Last 'War on Terror' Went Awry, Watch <em>The Report</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It's been nearly five years since the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, after a long fight with the CIA and a reluctant Obama administration, released part of a heavily redacted report that described the extent of CIA abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. The report determined that the torture failed to gather new intelligence and was much more brutal than policy makers had been told.
Now that fight to investigate the CIA and release that information to the public has been dramatized in a movie, The Report, which Amazon Pictures is distributing to theaters November 15. Adam Driver (a.k.a. Kylo Ren in the new Star Wars trilogy) stars as Daniel J. Jones, the real-life lead investigator and author of the Senate's report on the CIA's detention and interrogation program. Annette Bening portrays Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.), who as then-head of the intelligence committee commissioned the investigation and fought for the public release of part of the report.
Here's the trailer that dropped yesterday:
The movie had its public premiere back in January at the Sundance Film Festival, and it received generally positive reviews. It's the anti–Zero Dark Thirty, highlighting how the CIA attempted to cover up its torture of terror suspects and then inaccurately insisted that this torture garnered valuable useful intelligence. According to a review at IndieWire, the movie specifically references Zero Dark Thirty, which has been criticized for allowing CIA officials to manipulate the story. The reference is apparently not a positive one. (The reason the movie's official title is so vague is because the word "Torture" is redacted in the marketing imagery for The Report.)
While the torture began under President George W. Bush, the fight to investigate the CIA's tactics and report out the results took place under President Barack Obama. According to Vanity Fair reviewer Richard Lawson, The Report does not shy away from the role Obama's administration played in attempting to keep this information out of public view:
What the investigation uncovers is horrifying: not only did the C.I.A. do this stuff, but the agency pretty quickly knew that it didn't yield any real intel. Yet it continued anyway, essentially to save face. What The Report also details is how the nascent Obama administration, though it swiftly ended the enhanced interrogation program after the inauguration, nonetheless worked to stifle the report in order to maintain a harmonious relationship with the C.I.A. If you aren't already frustrated with the knotted, gunky, favor-trading mechanics of Washington politics, here's The Report to give you another dose.
When the torture report initially dropped five years ago, I read as much as the redactions allowed and noted that outside the horrifying details of what the CIA actually did—not just waterboarding, but forced enemas, slamming people into walls, slapping them, and freezing them—much of the 500-page document was devoted to the complicated, opaque bureaucratic apparatus that shielded everybody from responsibility, even when the CIA secretly surveilled the Senate staffers putting the report together to find out what CIA records they were looking at.
Ultimately, after a round of news coverage of the worst details in the report—and some limp attempts by CIA officials to find fault with it, though more than a year later they quietly admitted the facts in the report were true—interest in the report faded. Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, Donald Trump declared his support for waterboarding suspected terrorists.
Lawson wonders how well the movie will perform, given that Amazon apparently paid $14 million for the global rights. As horrible as that torture was, it seems almost quaint now that we are abusing and neglecting detained immigrants in terrible conditions right here, right now, in the United States, and they're dying.
I'll be heading out to the movies in November to see how well The Report covers the details, politics, and bureaucratic ass-covering that took place back then. I might be pretty lonely in the theater, though.
The post Can Adam Driver Make Americans Care About CIA Torture Again? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A judge has ordered former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort to be transferred to the infamous Rikers Island Prison in New York City. Manafort could also face time in solitary confinement out of concern for his safety. Manafort's predicament presents a unique opportunity to have a conversation about a questionable prison tactic.
As previously reported, Manafort was convicted on charges related to tax evasion and fraud. He also ran into trouble for lying to the Department of Justice about fraud, money laundering, and his relationship with a foreign bank.
That hardly fits the bill of a hardened, violent criminal, as would be suggested by the judge's actions. His supporters are arguing the same. A source close to him said, "He's not a mob boss," in response to the news.
Neither was Kalief Browder, who spent three years at Rikers without ever seeing a trial. He was arrested by police after he was accused of stealing a backpack. Officers found nothing on his person and the accusations were later discovered to be dubious. Browder was subjected to violence by the guards and inmates, but experts believe the two years he spent in solitary confinement was the main factor that led to his 2015 suicide at the age of 22, about two years after his release.
Needless to say, there continues to be great hypocrisy in Manafort's case. Defenders of a harsher criminal justice system for average Americans have pitied Manafort. Others are saying the new development is "karma."
Scott Hechinger, public defender and policy director at Brooklyn Defender Services, wants those supporting the judge's decision in Manafort's case to see how turning a blind eye does a disservice to those like Browder.
Kalief Browder. Arrested at 16. For allegedly stealing a backpack. Stuck on Rikers on $3500 for 3.5 years. Hundreds of days in solitary confinement. Committed suicide upon release. Pretrial detention and solitary confinement killed him.https://t.co/wSV5e8M5HG
— Scott Hechinger (@ScottHech) June 4, 2019
"When we support pain, punishment, torture, harshness, pre-trial detention, solitary, guilt until proven innocent for one—no matter how much we might despise them or think they 'deserve it'—we further entrench an unjust system for all," he tweeted.
Any personal feelings of Manafort should be set aside to speak out against torture. And those with new thoughts on humanity behind bars should similarly be concerned that this is a reality for tens of thousands of Americans each year.
The post Nobody Should Be Placed in Solitary Confinement—Not Even Paul Manafort appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>W. Fitzhugh Brundage, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provides in Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition a timely overview of America's enduring and fraught relationship with the ancient practice of physically harming prisoners.
Although the American colonies prided themselves on leaving behind the barbaric corporal punishments that were common in the Old World, torture survived in various forms, under different names, and with an array of strained justifications. It flourished on the frontier, where one of the more fruitful sources of cultural exchange between European settlers and Native Americans was novel methods of torture, which both societies practiced with aplomb.
Despite the Enlightenment values enshrined in the Eighth Amendment, torture persisted through the American republic's early experiments with penitentiaries, where guards used floggings and simulated drowning—we call it waterboarding today, but back then it was known as "the water cure"—to break recalcitrant inmates.
Brundage traces the use of torture through slavery, the Civil War's brutal P.O.W. camps, the U.S. military campaign in the Philippines, all the way to the "enhanced interrogations" of the global war on terror. The book details the recurring ways the reality was justified and minimized to avoid admitting that America wasn't living up to its ideals: semantic gymnastics, exigent circumstances, insisting abuses didn't occur or that they were isolated incidents.
"Despite the Founders' care to inhibit the establishment of an oppressive central state, the nation's democratic institutions and traditions have proved far more hospitable to torture than many Americans assume," Brundage concludes.
Given the current president's cavalier attitude toward the grim practice, this book is essential reading on how torture has been used, debated, condemned, covered up, and excused over and over.
The post Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>NowThis, a news website that primarily caters to left-of-center millennials and Gen Z-ers, tweeted this on Wednesday: "The CIA's highest level positions are now all held by women—another stride towards progress." The tweet even included a flexed bicep emoji, a symbol of progress that invokes Rosie the Riveteer. Here it is:
The CIA's highest level positions are now all held by women — another stride towards progress pic.twitter.com/Sz4rDw4U7m
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) January 9, 2019
Most of the responses to the tweet involve people dunking on it, and for good reason. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) being run entirely by women is not another stride toward progress. A stride toward progress would be the CIA shutting down, or at the very least renouncing its past misdeeds: torturing prisoners, spying on American citizens, overthrowing foreign governments, etc., etc.
Yes, current CIA Director Gina Haspel is a woman. She also ran a CIA black site in Thailand and was personally involved in the waterboarding of at least one detainee. When asked about these activities during her confirmation hearings, she was unrepentant. She said, essentially, that she was just following orders.
I'm highlighting this tweet because it speaks to intersectionality's corruption of the modern progressive movement. Intersectionality, of course, is the academic tradition from the late 1980s that stressed group-based oppression: particularly racism and sexism. Over the years, proponents of intersectionality have added other areas of concern: everything from transphobia and homophobia to size-ism and able-ism. It's not that the intersectional thinkers are necessarily wrong—transphobia exists, and it's bad—but rather that a monomaniacal focus on group-based oppression can be naïve. Haspel taking over the CIA, for instance, might be a blow to sexism in some very narrow sense, but it does nothing to remedy the CIA's appalling record on civil liberties, something progressives purport to care about.
This is not the first time generic yaaassss slay kween feminism has been used to obscure Haspel's appalling awfulness: My colleague Scott Shackford made a note of The Advocate's coverage, which commended the CIA director for making "herstory" in a tweet that practically demands a barf emoji response.
Recall that some on the left complained Trump had threatened to drop "the mother of all bombs" on Afghanistan—not because killing yet more people in the war-torn country would be wrong, but because the phrase itself is sexist. This approach should frustrate true progressives. It certainly frustrates libertarians who would occasionally like to ally with them.
The post Millennial News Site Thinks the CIA Being Run Entirely by Women Is a Progressive Victory appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Jon Burge, the former Chicago Police commander synonymous with the city's history of police brutality and excessive force, died Wednesday at age 70.
If you need to know exactly why Chicago's law enforcement environment is such a disaster, just google Burge's name. The disgraced cop even has his own Wikipedia entry documenting allegations of his abuse and torture across two decades of more than 200 people, mostly black men, in order to secure confessions.
He and his detectives have been accused of beating, suffocating, burning, and even using cattle prods and full on electrotorture to force suspects to confess. Here's a description of how Burge chose to behave as a cop from the Washington Post:
Whenever Chicago Police commander Jon Burge needed a confession, he would walk into the interrogation room and set down a little black box, his alleged victims would later tell prosecutors. The box had two wires and a crank. Burge, they alleged, would attach one wire to the suspect's handcuffed ankles and the other to his manacled hands. Then, they said, Burge would place a plastic bag over the suspect's head. Finally, he would crank his little black box and listen to the screams of pain as electricity coursed through the suspect's body.
"When he hit me with the voltage, that's when I started gritting, crying, hollering. … It [felt] like a thousand needles going through my body," Anthony Holmes told prosecutors during a 2006 investigation into Burge. "And then after that, it just [felt] like, you know—it [felt] like something just burning me from the inside, and, um, I shook, I gritted, I hollered, then I passed out."
Burge did this to get Holmes to confess to a murder (it worked). Despite all the horrifying stories, many of which were proven to be credibly true, Burge was never actually convicted for torture. He was fired from the Chicago Police Department in 1993, after authorities determined that he had tortured a suspect accused of killing two police officers, but the statute of limitations precluded charges. He was instead convicted of perjury for lying under oath in a civil case. He served more than four years in federal prison, but was still allowed to collect a $4,000-a-month taxpayer-supported pension while retired in Florida.
Meanwhile, Chicago has shelled out more than $500 million paying off claims of police misconduct over the past 15 years and has created a special $5.5 million fund specifically for paying off Burge's victims. The city has spent more than $100 million on settlements specifically on Burge-related allegations.
But if you're looking for some introspection from police union representatives, forget it. Dean Angelo, the former head of Chicago's Fraternal Order of Police, says we're getting Burge all wrong, and the union posted condolences on Facebook and said Burge's "full story" has never been told. From the Chicago Tribune:
"Jon Burge put a lot of bad guys in prison that belonged … in prison," Angelo said in the lobby of the Leighton Criminal Court Building. "People picked a career apart that was considered for a long time to be an honorable career and a very effective career. I don't know that Jon Burge got a fair shake based on the years and years of service that he gave the city. But we'll have to wait and see how that eventually plays out in history."
The grotesque punchline here is that Angelo was at the courthouse to attend the trial of Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke, charged with murder for shooting Laquan McDonald in 2015, pumping 16 bullets into the 17-year-old's body almost immediately upon arriving on location.
Chicago citizens were outraged with how the city handled it, concealing body camera footage showing that the official police story—that McDonald lunged at them with a knife—was a lie. A judge had to order the city to release the footage. There were five police cars on the scene, but only two had operating dash cams and none had sound. There's subsequently been evidence showing that police officers in Chicago have been deliberately sabotaging their recording devices.
McDonald's family has been paid $5 million from Chicago over the teen's death. To put it bluntly, history is already evaluating what to make of the behavior of officers like Burge, and the documentation is in the form of court settlements and mass exonerations.
The post Jon Burge, Chicago's Most Famous Corrupt Cop, Is Dead at 70 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As laid out in this snippet of a Friday-night tweetstorm, there aren't a lot of libertarian-friendly policy recommendations or achievements one can associate with the late John McCain. He was for lowering tariffs, reforming entitlements, and, well, the list peters out pretty quick from there (although I did my level best with a September 2008 "Libertarian Case for McCain").
On the other side of the ledger lies his disregard for constitutional liberties, his distrust of individualism, his open hostility toward "libertarian orthodoxy," and arguably the most interventionist foreign policy of any post-Cold War politician. You know the drill.
But there is one issue where McCain was active with which I wholeheartedly agree with him: torture. As I write in today's New York Times, the P.O.W. turned senator spent more than a half-century trying to teach Americans that torture is both immoral and unproductive, that "every man has a breaking point," and that military personnel derive a motivational pride from America having higher moral standards than its debased adversaries. Excerpt:
That lesson is fading from view in 2018, disregarded both by a president who believes that torture "absolutely works," and by a #resistance cadre of ex-national security officials whose own brazen lies about the practice have yet to put a noticeable dent in either book sales or cable-TV contracts.
When Osama bin Laden "finally met the fate he deserved, the apologists for torture appeared in numbers on cable news shows and in the newspapers claiming bin Laden wouldn't have been found without intelligence gained through the use of EITs" — enhanced interrogation techniques, Mr. McCain snarls in "The Restless Wave." "In truth, most of the C.I.A.'s claims that abusive interrogations of detainees had produced vital leads to help locate Bin Laden were exaggerated, misleading, and in some cases, complete bullshit."
Whole thing here.
McCain's example demonstrated that you need not choose a side between Team #MAGA and the Deep State #Resistance Grifters. What will get mostly lost in this week's outpouring of D.C. grief is that the McCain/establishmentarian Third Way is itself not the only path out of our rancid political thicket. After all, McCain's old antagonist Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is plenty anti-torture and pro-trade, too.
If anything, as long as those high-minded, centrist-sounding political-class lamentations about bipartisan civility this week come unencumbered by even a hint of critical self-examination, they will almost surely repel swaths not just of Trump voters, but Americans of all stripes who haven't exactly fallen back in love with the establishment. As I wrote in a piece about the shrinking tent of McCainite conservatism back in May,
[I]t's hard to escape the conclusion that McCain and his Republican cohort—Sen. Bob Corker, former Gov. Jeb Bush, Sen. Marco Rubio, Gov. John Kasich, Sen. Lindsay Graham—helped midwife the conservative politics they now so clearly loathe. The twin follies of promiscuous war and unbridled GOP growth of government, lashed to sporadic and transparently insincere nods toward populism, has turned a generation of voters against the Republican establishment. It remains to be seen if the rejection will be permanent.
The post John McCain's Lessons About Torture appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>John McCain, the last great active American political figure of the 20th century, has lost his battle with cancer at age 81.
For both good and ill, McCain helped shape the purpose and application of Washington's considerable power for nearly half a century. Partly because of that mixed track record, his passing leaves as an open question what kind of future that McCain-style politics—with its robust, moralistic interventionism both at home but especially abroad—has in a political party and country that elected his rhetorical tormentor, Donald Trump.
Famously a former prisoner of war and two-time presidential candidate, McCain was a man whose irascible restlessness and sense of patriotic honor propelled him to defy his Vietnamese captors, tackle unusual legislative crusades, and wage periodic battles with his own party's leadership. Most enduringly, as the Cold War gave way to a U.S.-led new world order, McCain shook off his hard-earned Vietnam Syndrome to become a pivotal figure behind some of the most interventionist foreign policies in modern American history.
The namesake son and grandson of accomplished Navy admirals, McCain initially rebelled against his military destiny, graduating 894th out of an 1958 Annapolis class of 899. He drank and cussed, dated Florida strippers and Brazilian heiresses, and crashed an alarming number of planes before settling down to the family business of war.
Things did not start auspiciously. McCain was on the deck of the USS Forrestal when a stray bomb ignited a fire, killing 134 servicemen—the most deadly accident in Navy history. Three months later his own plane was shot down over Hanoi Harbor.
The aviator's rebellious nature served him well over the next five and a half years, as he inspired cellmates with loud acts of defiance and quiet organization of internal communications systems, despite enduring torture that permanently damaged his body.
That experience, combined with the domestic discord he witnessed upon returning stateside in 1973, shook his faith in the wisdom of American foreign policy. As a freshman congressman, McCain opposed Ronald Reagan sending Marines to Beirut. As a senator, he criticized Bill Clinton's nation-building adventures in Somalia and Haiti. He described U.S. military involvement in Yugoslavia as "the aspect of the future of this nation that bothers me more than anything else."
Yet by 1998 McCain would emerge as arguably the Senate's most influential hawk. So what happened?
The unexpectedly easy military successes in the Gulf War and Yugoslavia, plus Europe's abdication of post-Cold War global leadership, led the senator to re-embrace the Teddy Roosevelt-style belief in comparatively benevolent U.S. military supremacy that his family had rallied behind for a century. Vietnam, particularly after he helped spearhead the normalization of relations with his former captors, could be filed away as an aberration.
"Our loss in Vietnam afflicted America with a kind of identity crisis," he wrote near the conclusion of his 1998 memoir Faith of My Fathers. "We should never have let this one mistake, terrible through it was, color our perceptions forever."
For most of his political career, and certainly after the publication of that first successful (and rightly acclaimed) book, McCain was the media's favorite Republican. During his first presidential run against George W. Bush, journalists literally swooned over his military resume, his wisecracking style, and his willingness to break with GOP orthodoxy on issues such as cigarette taxes and campaign finance reform.
That mutual love affair with what McCain once described as his "base" soured once he won the Republican nomination. But even in 2008 the press frequently mistook the man's pragmatism for a lack of ideology. In fact it was anything but.
The senator had a distinctly martial view of citizenship, in which individualism should be subsumed to the greater good. His longest war was against "corrosive cynicism," so anything creating more of the stuff—from steroids in professional baseball to political advertising on Facebook—was in his crosshairs. That same sense of high moral dudgeon could also take him to better places, such as his opposition to torture, defense of the post-World War II trading order of mutual tariff-reduction, and his annual attacks on Pentagon waste.
The notion of sacrificing for the greater good is fundamental not only to military culture but to the way religion and other private association informs our choices. But when attached to government force, it can easily result in explicitly anti-libertarian statecraft.
In his also-excellent 2002 campaign memoir, Worth the Fighting For, McCain expressed relief that both he and his vanquisher rejected libertarianism. "I welcomed a greater, if still limited, role for government in national problems, anathema to the 'leave us alone' libertarian philosophy that dominated Republican debates in the 1990s," he wrote. "So did George W. Bush, I must add, who challenged libertarian orthodoxy with his appeal for a 'compassionate conservatism.' He based much of his more activist government philosophy in an expanded role for the federal government in education policy and in his support for contributions that small, faith-based organizations could make to the solution of social problems. I gave more attention to national service and to a bigger role for government as a restraining force on selfish interests that undermined national unity."
Understandably, it's McCain's profound sense of honor that obituarists will be emphasizing in the coming days. With his health already deteriorating in 2017, the senator led a remarkably vigorous global tour to reassure nervous American allies, called out eruptions of conservative bigotry, and cast the deciding vote against the flawed repeal of Obamacare. And to the end, he welcomed the opportunity to rebuke Trump.
"To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century," McCain co-wrote in his final book, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations, "to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is unpatriotic."
McCain could be disarmingly self-critical, copping to his own missteps from the mostly forgotten Keating Five scandal that nearly derailed his career, to the selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, which he now calls a "mistake," saying he should have chosen his hawkish pal Joe Lieberman instead. But aside from a few, usually vague nods in the direction of foreign policy overreach—"We haven't always used our power wisely," he writes in his new book. "We have abused it sometimes and we've been arrogant"—the senator was stubbornly unreflective about all the interventionist follies he championed, from Iraq to the shores of Tripoli.
Honor comes in many flavors, and there is no doubt that McCain was motivated throughout his lifetime by his familial and creedal sense of duty, leading to moments of iconoclasm, controversy, and leadership. But there is honor, too, in seeking a more humble conception of Washington's role in the world. The expensive failures of America's adventurism abroad over the past two decades helped quadruple the national debt, destabilize the Middle East, and produce the more inward-looking American populism that McCain always despised.
Like the journalistic class singing his praises this week, McCain was not overly reflective about the gap between aspiration and execution, between an expressed goodwill toward your fellow man and the real-world effects of America thumbing the scale. Since one of the senator's most endearing qualities was self-effacement and the recognition of human frailty, let us all submit to the lesson he could not quite bring himself to face: It is never enough to simply wish for the best then press the big red button marked "Do something."
Farewell, John McCain.
Video produced by Todd Krainin. Written and narrated by Matt Welch.
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The post John McCain, the Senate's Most Influential Hawk, Is Dead appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has an important message for Americans: He thinks y'all are dumb.
Clapper is best known around here for the time he lied to a Senate committee by denying that the feds were engaged in the mass collection of American citizens' phone and internet records. His lie was part of what prompted Edward Snowden to steal and release loads of classified documents revealing the truth.
Clapper has since insisted that he didn't actually lie but rather just totally forgot about this massive secret data collection program. He's been spinning that response for a couple years now. He brought it up again just recently on The View.
Clapper is making the rounds again to promote a new book, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence. Also providing publicity is his open feud with President Donald Trump, who is now taking his attacks on the "deep state" to the point where he's accusing the FBI of installing a "spy" in his campaign.
While it seems obvious that the FBI was monitoring Trump's campaign to determine the extent of connections with Russian interests, the "spy" claim seems absurdly overheated (for now, anyway). And so we've reached a point where Americans are "taking sides" between two men who have reputations for not exactly being honest and for treating Americans like stupid rubes.
In an interview this week with Judy Woodruff on PBS, Clapper makes it very clear how big a bunch of rubes he thinks Americans are. He believes not only that Russian interests attempted to influence the election—obviously true—but that they tipped the outcome.
This unprovable claim is based on the idea that Americans' votes are easily manipulated. Clapper acknowledges that his former agency has not made such a formal determination, but
as a private citizen, it's what I would call my informed opinion that, given the massive effort the Russians made, and the number of citizens that they touched, and the variety and the multidimensional aspects of what they did to influence opinion and affect the election, and given the fact that it turned on less than 80,000 votes in three states, to me, it just exceeds logic and credulity that they didn't affect the election, and it's my belief they actually turned it.
The evidence doesn't really show that the Russian influence campaign amounted to much. As Reason's Jacob Sullum has carefully detailed, the Russian social media campaign spending was a drop in the bucket when compared to overall online ad revenue, and the content seemed to focus on affirming preexisting beliefs. If it accomplished anything, it was to heighten already existing points of cultural conflict. It "exceeds logic and credulity" to think that this campaign of affirmation altered the election's outcome. Especially when you remember that this didn't happen in a vaccum: At the same time the Russians were buying Facebook ads, countless other groups were spending far more on election messages.
Woodruff asks Clapper why he's inflaming this feud now. He explains, "I am so concerned about the health and strength of our institutions and our values that I spent a lot of time defending, that I had to speak out."
Ah, the health and strength of those institution and its values. Let's scroll up the interview a little bit. When Woodruff asked whether the intelligence community had, indeed, sometimes gone too far in their work, here's the extremely vague way Clapper talks about the congressional committees that monitor intelligence agencies:
So the members on those committees have to represent our citizens to make sure that what the intelligence community is doing is legal, ethical and moral. And we have had cases where, depending on the situation, post-9/11, for example, where our intelligence community did things that, after the fact, people objected to.
Torture. He's talking about torture. What's amazing here is that he can't even bring himself to use the "advanced interrogation techniques" doublespeak that they had settled on. The intelligence community "did things." Just, you know, stuff. And people objected to it "after the fact," as though the totality of what they were up to hadn't been carefully concealed from us and the evidence destroyed.
I cannot imagine why Americans should be interested in the opinions about the norms and ethics of our federal institution from a man who won't speak honestly about Americans' distrust of our intelligence agencies, and who thinks we're so stupid that some Facebook ads can trick us into voting for candidates we don't want.
The post James Clapper Thinks Americans Are Dumb Enough to Vote for Trump Because of Facebook Ads appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Gina Haspel was formally sworn in yesterday afternoon as the first female director of the CIA. The identity-laden cultural dynamic of "First Woman to Ever X" was severely undercut by Haspel's troubled history with and relationship to the CIA's torture of suspected terrorists during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the subsequent destruction of evidence.
It's awful that anybody involved in the CIA's torture tactics in any way ended up in charge, but it's sadly not surprising that President Donald Trump would embrace her (remember, Trump is pro-torture), and it's also not surprising that the Senate would fall in line behind an "establishment-approved" candidate. I'm glad we had at least another public debate about torture tactics before the vote and swearing in.
Most media coverage attempted to acknowledge that she's the first female director while not ignoring the controversy. But then there was the Advocate, once the most prominent national magazine serving the LGBT community, blithely going all in on the "YAAAASSSS! SLAY KWEEN!" approach to Haspel's swearing in. Here's what the publication tweeted out:
#GinaHaspel has made herstory. https://t.co/34SvD7YDMJ
— The Advocate (@TheAdvocateMag) May 21, 2018
It gets weirder. The post at the Advocate is tagged "women" not "politics." It contains a short video obviously meant to be shared on social media with images of Haspel and some straightforward text, set to a disco beat for some baffling reason. It vaguely refers to the torture controversy as her "involvement" with the "detention system" used by the CIA under President George W. Bush. And that's it.
Even weirder, the attached "story" consists of just three sentences. And it's only the last one that matters: Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D–Wis.), who is an out lesbian, voted against Haspel's nomination. Baldwin said she was troubled that Haspel would not say that the tactics the CIA used to try to extract information from detainees were immoral and agreed with Sen. John McCain (R–Ariz.) that this was disqualifying behavior.
As a matter of fact, other than this one-sentence mention, there's no coverage of Baldwin's opposition to Haspel's nomination to be found at the Advocate. So the LGBT site weirdly downplayed the opposition of a lesbian senator in order to push the narrative of the history-making female leader.
There was a very interesting reaction that should be heartening for folks who worry that tribal identity is taking the place of principles and ethics. People who follow the Advocate on Twitter are absolutely repulsed by the tweet and the superficial manner in which the magazine covered Haspel's swearing in:
Yassss! C.I.SLAY Kween! Not a torturer! A torturHER!
— Brandon (@bnowalk) May 21, 2018
For the benefit of non-Twitter users (how I envy you!), there's a concept of the "ratio": If people are replying to your tweet in very high numbers, but they aren't clicking "like" or retweeting your tweet, that probably means they're mocking you and think your tweet is stupid or offensive.
As I blog this, the tweet from the Advocate has more than 900 tweeted responses, but only 42 retweets (one of which was me) and 95 "likes." Folks were not happy with the Advocate.
It's worth recognizing that sometimes the cultural conflict of "principles over principals"—where the identities or affiliations of a person are deemed more important than ethical or moral interests—is reflected more in media coverage than by the actions of a community itself.
The post Top LGBT Magazine Invokes 'HerStory' Covering Gina Haspel's Swearing In and Gets Smacked Down appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Senators on both sides of the aisle are calling for the release of a classified memo that could give lawmakers—and the general public—a better understanding of the role Gina Haspel played in the CIA's torture program. Haspel is Donald Trump's nominee to run the spy agency, and a key Senate committee is set to vote this week on her confirmation, which could go to the full chamber before the end of the month.
A potential stumbling block to her appointment is the so-called Durham Report, written at the conclusion of an Obama-era Justice Department's investigation into "whether federal laws were violated in connection with the interrogation of specific detainees at overseas locations." Haspel ran one of those secret prisons in Thailand for several months in 2002, and she oversaw the torture of at least one detainee: Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was involved in the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. Three years later, she drafted a memo ordering the destruction of videos showing the interrogation and torture of detainees.
The full report has never been released, and a Senate memo describing the parts of the report that concern Haspel's career is also being kept secret. The classified document, prepared by Democratic staffers on the Senate Intelligence Committee, includes "details some senators and aides have found disturbing," NBC reports, citing four sources familiar with the document.
"I have never in my life wished that more classified information could be available to the public," Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) told a Huffington Post reporter last week after she'd viewed the classified documents.
McCaskill can see the documents because she's a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which will vote Wednesday on whether to recommend Haspel's confirmation to the full Senate. But the rest of the chamber will be left in the dark, it seems, since the classified report has been removed from Senate servers in an apparent attempt to prevent leaks.
"It is critical that all senators have access to information detailing Ms. Haspel's role in the 2005 destruction of videotapes belonging to the CIA," Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) wrote in a letter to the Justice Department last week, requesting the release of the Durham Report. "It is critical that all senators have access to the same important, relevant information regarding the person nominated to the lead the CIA."
Will the memo change the course of Haspel's confirmation? Unnamed sources tell NBC that there is "nothing explosive" in the report capable of derailing her nomination, while The Intercept cites "people briefed on the contents of the memo" who say "it is not possible to read it and come away without serious doubts about whether Haspel ought to be confirmed." It would be nice to be able to read it and judge for ourselves.
During her confirmation hearing last week, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) pressed Haspel about whether she would object to the release of the Durham investigation.
"I haven't seen it, so I haven't read it, so I don't know," Haspel replied.
"So far, the American people have only been given information that is designed to help you get confirmed," said Wyden. "Everything else has been classified."
Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) are the only two Republican senators to declare their intent to vote against Haspel's confirmation, but their opposition could be canceled out by two Democrats, Sens. Joe Donnelly (D-In.) and Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.), who say they will vote for Haspel. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee and potentially a key swing vote, announced today that he would support Haspel's confirmation after getting a letter from the nominee clarifying her views on the torture program.
McCain's opposition to Haspel is a both personal and political. A torture survivor himself, McCain says Haspel's "refusal to acknowledge torture's immorality is disqualifying."
In her hearing, Haspel admitted that she did not believe torture "worked," but she blurred the line a bit by defending the long-standing claim that the CIA's torture program produced useful intelligence and valuable leads in the early days of the War on Terror. Defenders of torture have long argued that it helped produce key details in the search for 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden, despite a lack of evidence to back up that claim.
"When bin Laden finally met the fate he deserved, the apologists for torture appeared in numbers on cable news shows and in the newspapers claiming bin Laden wouldn't have been found without intelligence gained through the use of [enhanced interrogation]," McCain says in his just-released book The Restless Wave.
"In truth, most of the CIA's claims that abusive interrogations of detainees had produced vital leads to help locate bin Laden were exaggerated, misleading, and in some cases, complete bullshit," McCain writes.
McCain explains that he came to those conclusions—ones that "angered" him—only after being able to review other classified reports on the CIA torture regime. More than a dozen years after Haspel ordered the destruction of the interrogation tapes, it's time for everyone else to have a chance to see the evidence.
The post Senators Want to See Secret Torture Memo Before Haspel's Confirmation appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As Elizabeth Nolan Brown noted this morning, the Trump administration officially opened the new U.S. embassy to Israel today in Jerusalem, amid the horrific gunning down of scores of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers at the border in Gaza. "Like Lucy and the football," Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler had written back in 2012, "the pledge to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem is a campaign promise that is never fulfilled." But that was before the rise of Donald Trump.
On today's Reason Podcast, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman and yours truly drill down into policy areas where Trump has actually gone through with some of the insincere promises Republicans have long made to their voters, starting with the harsh policy announced last week to use family separation—ripping children from their parents—as a conscious deterrent to illegal immigration and in-person asylum applications. Other subjects covered include the Gina Haspel confirmation process, the re-litigation of torture, Trump's attempted tamping down of drug prices, and some apologetics for pre-2008 Reason headlines.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Relevant links from the show:
"Trump Calls the Congressional GOP's Bluff," by Matt Welch
"Trump's Official Policy: If You Cross the Border, We'll Kidnap Your Children," by Jacob Sullum
"Undocumented Immigrants Make America Safer," by Steve Chapman
"Do Family Values Stop at the Rio Grande for Conservatives?" by Shikha Dalmia
"Trump's Tribal Immigration Policies Hit a Wall of Facts," by A. Barton Hinkle
"Gina Haspel, Susan Collins, and the Folly of the 'Good Soldier' Defense of Torture," by Eric Boehm
"Gina Haspel's Confirmation Hearing Is a Reckoning for America's Use of Torture During the War on Terror," by Eric Boehm
"Under Trump, Republicans Have Become the Party of No Ideas," by Peter Suderman
"President Trump: Competition Is the Solution to High Drug Prices," by Ronald Bailey
"'All Gov't Support of Higher Ed Should Be Abolished': Live Debate in NYC, 5/14," by Nick Gillespie
"Reason at FEEcon 2018, June 7-9 in Atlanta!" by Nick Gillespie
Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:
Don't miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)
The post Is Trump Just Doing the Crazy Things Republicans Always Promised?: Podcast appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The most interesting moment of Gina Haspel's confirmation hearing on Wednesday morning occurred when Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a key swing vote in the Senate, took her turn at grilling President Donald Trump's pick to be the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Collins zeroed in on the most controversial part of Haspel's CIA career: the few months in 2002 that she spent overseeing a secret prison in Thailand where suspected al-Qaeda terrorists (including at least one pregnant woman) were subjected to torture—including waterboarding—in apparent violation of international norms and treaties outlawing such practices. Years later, Haspel drafted a cable ordering other CIA agents to destroy videotaped evidence of interrogations.
Collins began by asking Haspel whether she was involved in the creation of the CIA's so-called "enhanced interrogation program." Haspel said she was not. Collins followed up by asking whether Haspel was a senior executive at the CIA when the program was conceived. Again, no.
And when you did find out about the program, Collins continued, what did you think of it?
"I was told that interrogation experts had designed the program, that the highest legal authority in the United States had approved it, and that the President of the United States had approved it," Haspel replied.
This represents, in a nutshell, the best defense that Haspel and her supporters have been able to offer for her involvement in the CIA's torture program—that she was, in so many words, following the orders of people she trusted at a time when the nation was shaken by terrorism. It was the same line of reasoning offered by Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, at the outset of Wednesday's hearing when he praised Haspel for acting "morally, ethically, and legally" throughout her career and said he would not tolerate any significant digging into Haspel's connection to torture.
"Those who have issues with programs or operations conducted years ago should address those concerns and their questions to former presidents, former directors, and former attorney generals," Burr said. "This hearing is about how you'll lead the Central Intelligence Agency into the future, not how you've faithfully executed missions in the past."
Faithfully executed. Approved by the highest legal authorities in the country. Yes, Haspel might have engaged in some questionable activities, her defenders argue, but she was only doing what other people told her was right. The question of whether torture was legal, moral, or even effective should be put to other people. Leave Haspel alone, and vote to give her a promotion.
Collins seemed to be walking Haspel down that same path, letting the nominee parry each question by confirming that, no, she did not have anything to do with designing or approving the torture program. And, reiterating something she had said at the outset of the hearing, Haspel told Collins in no uncertain terms that she "would never permit CIA to resume an interrogation program."
Then, the senator snapped the trap shut.
"As a candidate, President Trump repeatedly expressed his support for waterboarding. In fact, he said we should go beyond waterboarding," Collins pointed out. If the CIA had a high value detainee, and "the president gave you a direct order to waterboard that suspect, what would you do?"
Haspel, for the first time all morning, looked uncomfortable. "I don't believe the president would ask me to do that," she offered, unconvincingly. Several awkward seconds ticked by before Haspel regained her balance and launched into a tangential explanation of current CIA policy about "debriefing" suspects. (The exchange between Collins and Haspel begins at 1:37:30 in the video below; Collins drops the hammer at 1:40:05.)
Moments later, Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) pointed out that Haspel had failed to answer the "what if the president told you to do it" hypothetical.
Haspel was more resolute. "Under no circumstances" would the CIA engage in that activity under her watch.
But the point lingers, doesn't it? This is exactly how the "good soldier" defense falls apart. Haspel, we are told, is not responsible for the decisions she made in the past because she was following orders and listening to the legal advice of others. Yet we are also supposed to believe that today she would disobey those same orders and ignore that same advice. Does chain of command no longer matter? Should Haspel have ignored it in Thailand?
Atop the logical problems exposed by Collins' line of questing, there are factual and historical hurdles to advancing Haspel with this reasoning.
For starters, it is untrue that Haspel was obligated to carry out the orders of her superiors while running the "black site" prison in Thailand where waterboarding took place. In fact, she had an obligation to refuse them. American military and intelligence officials have an affirmative obligation not to obey an illegal order, and a prohibition on torture is a fundamental principle of American and international law governing human rights, says Alberto Mora, a former general counsel for the U.S. Navy who reviewed, and opposed, the legal rationale for torture during the Bush administration.
"We should expect every American to know this, particularly highly trained officers in the CIA," he says. "She cannot claim that she was following orders."
The law prohibiting torture existed in 2002, and post-9/11 attempts to create legal loopholes for brutalizing suspected terrorists should have been questioned. Indeed, in some cases, CIA officers did push back against the order to torture, at least in part because—as Haspel pointed out during Wednesday's hearing, too—the CIA did not have an interrogation role historically.
"A lot of people in the CIA would probably agree that they should never have been in the business of detentions and interrogations," Navy Lieutenant Alaric Piette, an attorney for Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, one of the al-Qeada detainees Haspel tortured, told The Daily Beast this week. "Forcing them to shift that mission is part of the problem. But that is the point when she should have fought back. Other people did. She just didn't."
Even after Wednesday's hearing, it remains fairly unclear exactly how closely involved Haspel was to the waterboarding. The CIA has pushed back against news outlets like The Daily Beast and Propublica that have claimed she directly oversaw his torture, with mixed success in getting the story changed. The only way to know for sure what role Haspel played is to have more information about her time in Thailand declassified so senators—and, more importantly, the general public—can assess what she did or did not do.
Lacking that clarity, we are left with two contradictory messages about Haspel. She is simultaneously presented as being a good soldier who might have done some bad things, but only because she was told to do them—and as someone who would stand up to the president of the United States if asked to do the very same things today. Both of those things can be true, of course, but the limited evidence for the former assertion makes the latter one impossible to believe.
The post Gina Haspel, Susan Collins, and the Folly of the 'Good Soldier' Defense of Torture appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When senators gather Wednesday to consider Gina Haspel, President Donald Trump's nominee to run the Central Intelligence Agency, they'll also be reckoning with broader questions about the agency's use of torture during the first decade of the War on Terror.
Haspel's personal involvement in torture—she ran a CIA "black site" in Thailand, was involved in the waterboarding of at least one detainee, and later ordered the destruction of videotapes showing the waterboarding of another—should draw significant scrutiny from senators. But her own record is only part of the story. Critics charge that confirming her would send a clear message to CIA employees, foreign governments, and American citizens about how elected officials view the use of torture.
"It says that it's OK to engage in war crimes and crimes against humanity, and if you do it, you'll get promoted," says retired Gen. David Irvine, a former Army intelligence officer. "Don't worry about the law, don't worry about morality, don't worry that torture doesn't work. Do it anyway, and we'll cover for you. And you can destroy the evidence as well."
Irvine is one of more than 100 former American military officials who signed a letter urging the Senate to reject Haspel's nomination. It argues that "the torture and cruel treatment of prisoners undermines our national security" by hindering cooperation with allies, alienating local populations, and giving extremists a propaganda tool.
Confirming someone personally entangled with the torture program will undermine America's credibility in addressing global human rights issues, says Robert Ford, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria, one of dozens of former American ambassadors to sign a separate letter opposing Haspel's confirmation on the grounds that having her lead the CIA would make it more difficult for diplomats to work with foreign governments.
"Her confirmation is going to be interpreted not just as sweeping it under the rug," he said Tuesday on a conference call organized by Human Rights First. "People overseas are going to look at it as an implicit approval of that program."
Haspel currently serves as the CIA's deputy director. She has worked for the agency for 33 years, and she spent most of that time undercover. She was tapped by Trump to replace Mike Pompeo, who was elevated to the post of secretary of state last month.
Part of her undercover duties included, in 2002, helping set up the CIA's first secret prison for suspected Al Qaeda terrorists to be interrogated, The New York Times reported earlier this year. While there, she reportedly oversaw the waterboarding of at least one detainee, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was involved in the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole.
Though she left the so-called "black site" prison in 2003, Haspel was later involved in the destruction of videotapes showing the brutal torture of another detainee. According to declassified summary of the still-classified Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA's torture program, those tapes showed the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded at least 83 times. During one of those sessions, Abu Zubaydah "became completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth," according to a CIA cable included in the Senate report.
Following his torture, the CIA made plans "to get reasonable assurances that [he] will remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life." In 2005, Haspel drafted a document ordering the destruction of the tapes of Abu Zubaydah's torture, and then-CIA counterterrorism official Jose Rodriguez issued the order, according to Rodriguez' memoirs.
The torture program was approved by Haspel's bosses at the CIA, by the Justice Department, and by other higher-ups in the government. But Laura Pitter, senior national security counsel for Human Rights Watch, notes that "the culpability of other senior officials doesn't absolve her of responsibility."
The president has defended Haspel's record as being "tough on terror," and has tried to turn legitimate questions about her appointment into another partisan fight. He tweeted on Monday that "Democrats" want Haspel "out because she's too tough on terror." Trump has taken a glib view of torture in the past, saying during the 2016 campaign that he would "bring back waterboarding, and I'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding."
"With a president evidently committed to policies of torture," says Irvine, "we think this would be a dangerous step backwards."
In excerpts of her prepared testimony, released Tuesday, Haspel says she does not intend to resume the use of torture. "I can offer you my personal commitment, clearly and without reservation that under my leadership CIA will not restart such a detention and interrogation program," she will tell senators, according to NPR.
The extent of Haspel's involvement in the CIA's torture program is unknown. But senators on both sides of the aisle have raised concerns about her record.
Haspel has her own reservations about her confirmation. The Washington Post reported over the weekend that she considered withdrawing her nomination to avoid the spectacle of a hearing that could damage her own reputation and that of the CIA. According to the Post, the White House dispatched a team of aides, including Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, to meet with Haspel and reassure her of Trump's support.
Whether Haspel can win support from a majority of the U.S. Senate remains to be seen. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has said he will oppose Haspel's confirmation, but he previously threatened to torpedo Pompeo's confirmation as secretary of state before reversing his position on the day of the vote. Further complicating things is the absence of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who is back home ailing from brain cancer.
More than 15 years after her involvement in the CIA's torture of suspected Al Qaeda terrorists, Haspel's confirmation hearing will serve as an opportunity for some of America's most powerful elected officials to offer their perspective—on her career at the CIA, yes, but also on what that track record represents. And on what her appointment to lead the CIA would represent.
"She might be a great intelligence officer," says Ali Soufan, a former anti-terrorism official for the FBI, "but at the same time she has a lot of baggage that will stain—further stain—our reputation in the world."
The post Gina Haspel's Confirmation Hearing Is a Reckoning for America's Use of Torture During the War on Terror appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"On what level could torture ever be acceptable?" This weekend, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) declared that he would do everything in his power to block President Danald Trump's pick for CIA director, Gina Haspel, because of her role running a torture program at a secret detention facility during George W. Bush's administration. "There are a few things in life where it is worth standing up and saying, 'Enough is enough. This is wrong. This is, you know, this is beneath contempt,'" Paul said.
On today's Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and special guest Elizabeth Nolan Brown discuss Paul's filibuster threat, which also extends to Trump's secretary of state nominee Mike Pompeo; the emerging controversy over Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, a social media analytics firm that worked for Trump's campaign; and Trump's push for "reciprocal" tariffs with rival nations and whether it threatens the existence of the World Trade Organization.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Relevant links from the show:
"Rand Paul: 'A Tariff Is Simply a Tax'," by Matt Welch
"Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross Should Shut Up About Soup Cans, Already," by Eric Boehm
"Stone Age Statue Was Too Racy for Facebook," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
"Who Are the Republicans Warning About Firing Mueller, and How Many of Them Are Running for President?" by Matt Welch
"Trump Has Exposed the GOP's Shallowness on Fiscal Restraint and Free Markets," by Shikha Dalmia
"Trump to Rex Tillerson: Someone Has Told You That You're Fired!" by Matt Welch
"Trump Is More Like Recent Presidents Than Anyone Wants To Admit" by Nick Gillespie
Subscribe, rate, and review the Reason Podcast at iTunes.
Don't miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)
The post Rand Paul Threatens to Filibuster Trump's CIA Pick, Because Torture: Podcast appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Rex Tillerson, the Where's Waldo of the Trump administration's divided foreign policy shop, has been fired as secretary of state and replaced by CIA Director Mike Pompeo. According to the president, part of the reason was a difference of approach on the Iran-nuclear agreement. "We were not thinking the same," Trump told reporters. "With Mike Pompeo, we have a similar thought process."
The president's thought process about eighty-sixing Tillerson is likely to come under scrutiny, since the existing timeline doesn't make sense. White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders said today that Tillerson was informed Friday. The State Department, meanwhile, says the secretary found out today, from reading this Trump tweet:
Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State. He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his service! Gina Haspel will become the new Director of the CIA, and the first woman so chosen. Congratulations to all!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2018
Trump later told reporters that Tillerson will be "much happier now."
Steve Goldstein, State Department undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, has released this statement: "The secretary did not speak to the president and is unaware of the reason, but he is grateful for the opportunity to serve, and still believes strongly that public service is a noble calling. The secretary had every intention of staying because of the critical progress made in national security. He will miss his colleagues at the Department of State and the foreign ministers he has worked with throughout the world."
Tillerson, a government newbie who had spent the previous four decades at ExxonMobil, seemed frequently out of sync and even out of touch with the mercurial president. Yesterday, for example, Tillerson said that the poisoning of an ex-Russian spy in London was "an egregious act" that "clearly came from Russia," which was in sharp contrast to Huckabee Sanders' repeated reluctance to point the finger at Moscow. Last week, too, the secretary of state was clearly out of the loop when Trump decided to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. (Last October, in a reversal of those positions, the president said Tillerson was "wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man.")
Pompeo, a former congressman and Army tank officer, is seen as much more hawkish than Tillerson. He supports the bulk collection of Americans' metadata, the use of CIA black sites, enhanced interrogation methods, and the execution of National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Pompeo's replacement at the CIA, his former deputy Gina Haspel, had a "leading role in torture" during the Bush administration, according to this New York Times profile. Back when Tillerson/Pompeo rumors were heating up three months ago, the Weekly Standard pointed out that Haspel's prominence soothed some agency nerves frayed by Trump's sporadically intemperate criticisms.
So the out-of-touch realist is out at Foggy Bottom, the partisan pro-surveillance hawk is in, and Langley is now run by an in-house torturer. Meanwhile, Trump's personal assistant, John McEntee, has reportedly been escorted out of the White House due to security reasons. In other words, it's a normal Tuesday morning.
The post Trump to Rex Tillerson: Someone Has Told You That You're Fired! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A push to force the federal government to publicly release the full contents of a Senate report on the secret torture and detention of terror suspects ended quietly this morning with a simple rebuff by the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court declined to consider a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The ACLU had been suing under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to force the federal government to release the contents of a 6,000-page report from the Senate. The full report detailed not just the terrible treatment—waterboarding and other forms of torture—of people suspected (sometimes incorrectly) of terrorism overseas; it also argued that the violent interrogations failed to get useful information and that the CIA lied about the program to higher-ups in government to conceal what they were doing.
An executive summary—clocking in at more than 500 pages—was finally declassified and made public in heavily redacted form back in 2014 after a long fight over it. But the full report has been secreted away to the point that the Department of Justice has actually ordered federal agencies to not even open and read the report, and Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) has attempted to get federal agencies to give their copies of the report back to the Senate.
The ACLU's lawsuit is partly why. In defending against the ACLU's lawsuit, the federal government argued that the full torture report was a congressional record and therefore not subject to FOIA. The ACLU countered that passing the report along to agencies in the executive branch meant otherwise. Unfortunately, courts have up until now found for the government. This morning the Supreme Court denied certification for the ACLU's lawsuit, so their push ends here with a loss for transparency.
It is the end of this particular legal fight, Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU's National Security Project, tells Reason. "It is a very disappointing end because we think that the lessons of the full report are really necessary to learn."
Nevertheless, Shamsi felt as though the fight itself hasn't been a total loss. The outrage that followed the disclosure of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques led military and executive branch leaders to acknowledge the legal limitations to what they were permitted to do to prisoners of the war on terror, and the military has promised to use only interrogation techniques listed in the Army Field Manuals, meaning no waterboarding.
"Opposition [to torture] at the highest levels is going to be critically important," Shamsi said. That's particularly true because President Donald Trump campaigned fully in support of waterboarding and even harsher forms of torture as tools to fight the Islamic State.
The Supreme Court declining to hear the case means the legal fight is over, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the chance Americans will ever get to see the full report is completely gone. The president has the authority to declassify the full report's contents, but that seems extremely unlikely given Trump's positions. Before leaving office, President Barack Obama managed to save a copy in his presidential archive. So even if the Trump administration has all the copies of the full report destroyed, there's still one out there they can't touch.
When the executive report was initially released to the public, we made note of the outrageous incidents described in there. But while those violent incidents described in the report got the most media attention, huge chunks of the summary were devoted to whether proper procedures were followed or not and whether the torture actually got results or not. As I noted at the time, you could switch torture out and replace it with any other massive bureaucratic process the federal government put together and see the same kind of debates. So it seems likely that the massive full report would also be focused on the deep procedural issues of how the torture came to pass. Nevertheless, Shamsi says the full report would contain important information, and Americans should support its release.
"What we know is that the full report provides a lot more information about what was actually done and how, and critically … it sheds greater light on the essential corruption that [came from] a determination to torture—Which is that the CIA lied to the White House other parts of the executive branch and to Congress," she says. "Torture corrupts, and [the report] details the way torture corrupts and harms people along with institutions we care about."
The post You Won't Read a Full Accounting of America's Use of Waterboarding and Torture Anytime Soon appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Sen. Rand Paul stridently rejected the notion that American intelligence officials should resume the use of torture on detained combatants—something President Trump favors.
Trump recently declared that torture "absolutely works," and U.S. officials should use any and all legal means to extract intelligence.
Paul took the opposite view, telling CNN's Jake Tapper that "it's currently against the law and I hope it will remain against the law."
He pointed out that incoming Defense Secretary James Mattis is also against torture and believes that it doesn't work. He also argued that U.S. intelligence officials have previously detained the wrong people, casting additional doubt on the idea that enhanced interrogation methods were justified.
"The CIA detained 119 people, 39 of them were tortured, and the conclusion of the Senate committee's report was that it didn't work, but there was also something very alarming," said Paul. "Of the 119 people that the CIA detained around the world, 26 of them were mistakenly identified, sometimes with people who had similar names, but they detained the wrong people. I think most Americans would be alarmed if 22 percent of the people we picked up and tortured were the wrong people."
Paul went on to say that Mike Pompeo's support for torture was one of the reasons he voted against his confirmation as CIA director.
Watch the full video here, via Mediate.
Paul is one of just a handful of people in Congress consistently representing the interests of Americans who are concerned about big government, no matter which team is running the government. He has supported Trump on the (rare) occasions that Trump has staked out a libertarian position on an issue, but is not afraid to go against the president.
If more Congressional Republicans were as principled as Paul, they would actually have the numbers to force Trump to hew closer to the Constitution.
The post Bravo to Rand Paul for Saying President Trump Is Wrong, Torture Doesn't Work appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A day after the leaking of a draft executive order—which appeared to indicate the Trump administration's intention to return to some of the most controversial and legally questionable George W. Bush-era tactics for interrogating detainees—all that's clear is there is significant confusion within the ranks of the White House over the order itself.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said that the document obtained by The New York Times and Associated Press did not originate from the administration, but three other administration officials contradicted Spicer's assertion. According to the Times, those officials "said the White House had circulated the draft order among national security staff members in the same way that a flurry of other pending executive orders had been distributed for review: with no warning and scant time to provide comments."
The Times adds:
One of the officials said an email chain showed that at 8:41 a.m. on Jan. 24, a clerk had sent the draft order as an attachment to several National Security Council policy staff members, who forwarded it to others. The clerk works on the administrative staff of retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, the chief of staff and executive secretary of the National Security Council.
The subject line referred to the memo as Package 0048. Addressed to the council's legal, counterterrorism and defense units, the email said: "Please review the attached draft EO. Comment/concurrence due by 10 A.M. Thank you." Neither the email nor the draft order said who, or which office, had drafted the order.
The typo-riddled document was clearly never intended to be made public, and as Buzzfeed reported, it was essentially the exact same draft order Mitt Romney's campaign had created as part of the 2012 Republican presidential nomineee's plan for his first 100 days in office—only the Trump administration version excised some language and changed some verbiage, such as crossing out the word "jihadist" and replacing it with "radical Islamist."
President Trump campaigned on bringing back harsh interrogation tactics and dismissed any concerns that things like waterboarding, forced nudity, solitary confinement in small boxes, and exposure to extreme temperatures constituted torture. However, his Secretary of Defense James Mattis has vocally opposed such tactics, and for a time at least, seemed to have convinced Trump that there were more effective methods of securing a detainee's cooperation.
In an interview with ABC News last night, the president said he would defer to Mattis and CIA Director Mike Pompeo (who said during his confirmation hearings that he would would refuse to comply with a presidential order to violate current law and re-instate "enhanced interrogation" techniques). But, Trump says of torture, "I want to do everything within the bounds of what you're allowed to do legally. But do I feel it works? Absolutely, I feel it works."
Eli Lake raises an interesting point in a column for Bloomberg: Trump doesn't need to re-instate the practice of secret CIA prisons in foreign countries because "extraordinary rendition"—where harsh interrogations are outsourced to foreign countries on behalf of U.S. intelligence—has never gone away.
Lake writes that Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama all relied on extraordinary rendition to various degrees, and although Obama ended the CIA black sites and forbade torture, he still had prisoners interrogated in "third-world prisons," and sometimes those prisoners were beaten and kept in squalid conditions. Lake adds:
Those partnerships will likely be the reason that Trump, despite his bluster, will not revive the CIA's black sites program. He simply doesn't need to. In a narrow sense, this will be a victory for human rights and the rule of law. But given the history of America's third-world allies in the war on terror, that victory is pyrrhic.
Trump hasn't even been in office a week and yet his administration is awash with leaks and confusion. The draft order in question here is certainly newsworthy and disturbing, but given the fact that secret renditions continued even under the more international law-respecting President Obama, the U.S.'s indirect involvement in abuse of detainees might see an uptick under Trump, even without black sites.
The post Will Trump Really Bring Back CIA 'Black Sites'? Even If He Wants To, He Might Not Need To appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Trump administration intends to make the first moves toward re-opening CIA "black sites"—the secret prisons in foreign countries used for extraordinary rendition, interrogation, and sometimes torture during the Bush administration—according to a three-page draft executive order reportedly obtained by the The New York Times and Associated Press.
(Update: White House Press Secretary said today the administration has no plans to re-open "black sites," that the draft order did not originate from the White House, and that he doesn't know where it originated from.)
(Update 2: The draft order is a nearly-verbatim recycled version of one created for Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign, Buzzfeed reports.)
A day after President Trump put a gag order on a number of federal agencies, a "U.S. official" who "demanded anonymity" gave a copy of the draft order to the AP, who reports that the document makes clear that "U.S. laws should be obeyed at all times and explicitly rejects 'torture.'"
Neither The Times nor the AP have published the document, but both outlets report that part of the draft order instructs senior security advisers to "recommend to the president whether to re-initiate a program of interrogation of high-value alien terrorists to be operated outside the United States and whether such program should include the use of detention facilities operated by the Central Intelligence Agency."
That language is vague enough to read that the Trump administration is willing to be talked out of re-opening black sites—if the big security honchos say it's not worth the fallout—but in the meantime, a number of key points in the draft order would clear the way to make such conditions possible.
Two executive orders issued by former President Barack Obama shortly after he took office in January 2009—one ordering the closure of the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base (GTMO) military prison, the other to end the use of CIA black sites, allow the Red Cross detainee access, and restrict interrogators to use only methods permitted by the Army Field Manual—would be revoked if Trump's draft order became official.
However, Trump's draft order would reinstate a 2007 executive order issued by former President George W. Bush allowing the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," such as "extended sleep deprivation." The Bush administration insisted such tactics would not be considered war crimes, but they were among those methods disallowed by the Obama administration, according to the Times.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) issued a statement in response to the news of Trump's draft order reading in part, "President Trump can sign whatever executive orders he likes. But the law is the law. We are not bringing back torture in the United States of America."
McCain, a torture survivor and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is referring to the amendment to a defense authorization bill he co-sponsored—and which was signed into law last year by Obama—that makes the Army Field Manual the required standard of practices for interrogating detainees, and also permits the Red Cross access to detainees.
But McCain's case is not rock-solid: the secretary of defense can order the Army Field Manual's contents to be changed, and the next required review of the field manual is December 2017.
Throughout the presidential campaign, Trump insisted he would bring back waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques," at times refusing to concede that they constituted torture and at others, not caring if they did. The Times quotes Trump as saying, "if it doesn't work, they deserve it anyway." The president has also described the Geneva Conventions as "out of date."
Secretary of Defense James Mattis seemed to persuade Trump on torture's ineffectiveness back in November, but how Trump will reconcile his many policy differences with those of certain members of his cabinet remains to be seen.
When the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on CIA torture (a heavily redacted 500-page mini-version of a larger and still-classified 6,700 page report) was released in 2014, it revealed widespread use of torture in nine different countries, little or incompetent oversight, and a total failure by the CIA to "adequately evaluate the effectiveness of its enhanced interrogation techniques."
In a recent Reason magazine article by law professor and attorney Martha Rayner, she describes the experience of one of her clients, a "War on Terror" detainee who experienced a hellish odyssey of rendition and torture before landing at the military prison at GTMO, where he remains today:
After my client's disappearance, he was relocated multiple times—trussed like an animal, diapered, blindfolded with blackout goggles, made deaf with earmuffs, wrapped in tape, and strapped to a stretcher. Each transfer was accompanied by the uncertainty and dread of not knowing what was to come. One of the stops was at a CIA-run site in Afghanistan dubbed the "Dark Prison" by detainees who emerged to describe the complete darkness they had been held in, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. While there, Mr. al-Kazimi tried to kill himself on three separate occasions by hitting his head against the wall of his cell. Each time, his U.S. captors intervened and injected him with drugs that put him out.
Below you can watch my Reason TV inteview with ACLU attorney Hina Shamsi about her client—another GTMO detainee—and the diary he wrote while in captivity that became a best-seller.
The post CIA 'Black Sites' Could Be Back Soon, Per Leaked Trump Administration Draft Order appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It seems unlikely that the Senate Intelligence Committee's massive 6,700-page report on the CIA's use of torture in interrogations will be declassified at some point during the remainder of President Barack Obama's term. But in order to keep the reports from possibly being destroyed rather than released, the president will be saving a copy in his presidential archive.
There are legitimate fears the report will otherwise be destroyed (one copy of the report has already been "mistakenly" shredded). Though the heavily redacted 500 page executive summary of the report was released in 2014, interest in its contents lasted about a week and then the country moved on. It could very well be destroyed by an administration even more hostile to transparency than Obama's with probably not a huge public backlash.
It's a shame, really, particularly since President-elect Donald Trump has openly called for the return of waterboarding with likely no familiarity with the summary. When the summary of the report was released, it detailed how, in reality, the CIA often used waterboarding and torture not to gather information but to make sure there wasn't any more information they hadn't been told. The brutality of it, the fact that people were killed, and the reality that the CIA had even imprisoned the wrong people, is mostly culturally "lost," even with the documents intact.
The White House's move could keep the full report secret until 2028, but at least it will remain intact. Meanwhile, senators in the committee like Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) say they're going to continue to push for the study to be declassified now.
Read more about Obama's move here. Keep in mind that while Trump has openly supported waterboarding, he has selected a secretary of Defense, Gen. James Mattis, who opposes the use of torture. Mattis may have convinced Trump to reverse his stance. But as with every position Trump has taken (and to think of it, any president), what he actually does in office is going to be more telling than what he says in any given news cycle.
The post Obama Preserves Torture Report While Keeping It Secret appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In an interview with The New York Times yesterday, Donald Trump retreated a bit from his campaign promise to torture terrorism suspects, attributing his second thoughts to a conversation with retired Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, former head of the U.S. Central Command:
I said, "What do you think of waterboarding?" He said—I was surprised—he said, "I've never found it to be useful." He said, "I've always found, give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I do better with that than I do with torture." And I was very impressed by that answer. I was surprised, because he's known as being like the toughest guy. And when he said that, I'm not saying it changed my [mind]. Look, we have people that are chopping off heads and drowning people in steel cages, and we're not allowed to waterboard. But I'll tell you what, I was impressed by that answer….It's not going to make the kind of a difference that maybe a lot of people think. If it's so important to the American people, I would go for it. I would be guided by that. But Gen. Mattis found it to be very less important, much less important than I thought he would say.
Although Foreign Policy reporter Paul McLeary calls that "a stunning about-face," it is not exactly a promise not to torture people, especially given the comments Trump made while running for president. "I would bring back waterboarding," he said during a debate in February, "and I'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding." At another debate the following month, Trump said he expected military officers to carry out torture on his orders, even if it would be illegal: "They're not going to refuse me. Believe me." Trump defended torture not just as a way to extract information but as a way to exact revenge, as he explained at a rally in Columbus last November:
Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would. In a heartbeat. I would approve more than that. It works….And if it doesn't work, they deserve it anyway for what they do to us.
Given that rationale, Gen. Mattis's opinion about the effectiveness of torture is not necessarily decisive for Trump, which may explain why he told the Times, "I'm not saying it changed my mind." If "it's important to the American people," he said, "I would go for it."
A 2015 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 58 percent of Americans thought the "use of torture by our government could be justified against people suspected of terrorism to try to gain information about possible attacks in our country." A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted last March found that 63 percent of Americans though torture "against suspected terrorists to obtain information about terrorism" is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Neither survey asked about revenge torture.
When a prisoner is tortured for information, he may not actually be a terrorist, may not actually have the information, or may not be willing to surrender it even under torture. When a prisoner is tortured for revenge, there is a similar problem: He may have nothing to do with the injury for which revenge is sought. That may not matter to Trump, who also has said he would kill the relatives of terrorists to defeat ISIS, although it is not clear whether the main goal of such operations would be retribution or deterrence.
Retributive torture would be not just illegal but unconstitutional, violating the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishments." Trump claims to have read the Constitution, but maybe he did not get that far.
The post Trump Says He's Not Sure Torture Works but Might Use It Anyway appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>During a Republican primary debate in March, Donald Trump pledged under his presidency to use "interrogation methods more extreme than waterboarding" on terror suspects, adding of military personnel who refused to commit war crimes under his command, "They're not going to refuse me. Believe me."
At a different debate, Trump defended his stance to re-introduce a medieval torture tactic to the U.S. military because, "In the Middle East, we have people chopping the heads off Christians…They're Medieval times. I mean, we studied Medieval times. Not since Medieval times have people seen what's going on."
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) insisted in a CNN interview following Trump's election victory that "Waterboarding isn't torture." Cotton seemed confident that the tactic would return to American anti-terror efforts because, "Donald Trump's a pretty tough guy, and I think he's ready to make those tough calls."
Spencer Ackerman reports for The Guardian that a number of national security officials—the everyday machinery of the national security bureaucracy who are "formally apolitical and provide expertise and continuity across administrations"—are scared out of their wits over Trump's unpredictable temperament and the potential that as president, he could make them complicit in civil liberties abuses or even war crimes. Ackerman cites one source who is uniquely terrified of Trump as commander-in-chief because he thinks the next president "does not understand the 'tertiary consequences' of decision-making on a global stage."
Though the creeping accumulation of executive power is no secret to readers of Reason, it appears that many people who were all to happy to high-five over President Obama's boast that he has a "pen and a phone" to issue executive orders are slowly coming to the understanding that Trump will enjoy those tools, as well.
To be sure, it was an Obama executive order that ended the official use of torture as U.S. policy, and he admirably went one step further and helped get a bill passed in Congress (overwhelmingly so, with a 91-3 vote in the Senate) that enshrined a ban on torture into the U.S. Army Field Manual.
The problem is, the Army Field Manual can be changed by the next Secretary of Defense under President Trump. Not only that, unlike Obama (and even President George W. Bush late in his presidency), Trump not only wants to keep the legal black hole known as the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay open, he wants to "load it up with some bad dudes."
Whether Trump as president makes good on his promises to make U.S. military interrogations medieval again, we don't yet know. But it could happen, and if it does, it could even be done legally.
The post President Donald Trump Could Make Military Interrogations Medieval Again appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>More transparency is coming for the Chicago Police Department, much to the dismay of their union, which has vociferously opposed making public the details of the department's historically systemic abuse and brutality.
The chillingly named Chicago Torture Archive, which relies on previously secret documents detailing the torture practiced by officers under the command of former detective and commander Jon Burge from 1972-1991, is set to go live online in early 2017.
During that infamous 19-year period, upwards of 120 black men were brutally beaten to elicit false confessions and intimidate witnesses. The Atlantic provides one telling anecdote:
One of them was Philip Adkins, whose testimony about the hours that followed a 5 a.m. knock on his door is representative of some of the atrocities men like him endured at the hands of police officers. During the space of four to five hours, three detectives picked up, handcuffed, and detained Adkins without officially arresting him, reading him his Miranda rights, or allowing him to contact family or counsel.
The physical violence began when "without warning one of them slugged" him while he was handcuffed in the back of a patrol car. The three detectives then drove around parts of Chicago with him in the car, including during a stop at McDonald's, and interrogated him about suspected criminal activity from the night before. Finding his answers unsatisfactory, one of the detectives started poking him "with great force" in the groin area with a flashlight. As they continued to drive around, two detectives took turns delivering blows to his private parts, knees, elbows, and ribs.
The Citizens Police Data Project details Chicago PD abuses dating back to 2001, but it is a volunteer-driven database built around materials procured through FOIA requests. When the Chicago Torture Archive goes live online next year, over 10,000 documents will be available for public scrutiny. The delay in launching is reportedly a result of a need to protect the privacy of the victims by redacting personal and identifying information such as social security numbers and addresses.
In 2015, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel agreed to a $5.5 million "Reparations for Burge Torture Victims" ordinance.
The post Chicago Police Torture Archive To Go Online In Early 2017 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Yesterday the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) published a 27-page analysis of the constitutional and statutory violations entailed by some of Donald Trump's most outlandish policy proposals, including a ban on Muslims entering the United States, deportation of all illegal immigrants, heightened surveillance of Muslims and Americans generally, legalized torture, and relaxed rules for winning libel suits. Some highlights:
Muslim Ban. As Trump originally described it—"a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States," apparently including U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents—this proposal clearly would violate the Fifth Amendment's guarantees of due process and equal protection (understood to be part of due process in this context) as well as the First Amendment's guarantee of religious freedom and its prohibition of religious favoritism. Even if the Muslim ban were limited to tourists and other temporary visitors, the ACLU argues, it would still violate the First Amendment. Although the Supreme Court upheld blatantly racist immigration policies in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it says, "There can be no question that such racial exclusion laws would not pass constitutional muster today." In any case, "there has never, even during the period of racial exclusion, been an immigration ban on the basis of religion," a fact that "likely reflects the priority of religious neutrality since the nation's founding." The ACLU adds that Trump's Muslim exclusion plan would be unconstitutional even if it were disguised as a ban based on nationality, as he more recently suggested it might be, because "intent to discriminate on the basis of religion, even hidden behind pretextual religious neutrality, violates the Establishment Clause and Equal Protection."
Mass Deportation. While there is nothing inherently unconstitutional about deporting lots of people (a policy practiced by our current president, as the ACLU notes), the promise Trump has made—removing all 11 million unauthorized residents within two years—cannot be accomplished (assuming it can be accomplished at all) without massive violations of civil liberties. "Trump's mass deportation scheme would mean arresting more than 15,000 people a day on immigration charges, seven days a week, 365 days a year," the ACLU says. "There is no conceivable mechanism to accomplish the roundup that Trump has promised while respecting basic constitutional rights." Since "undocumented immigrants are not readily identifiable as such," such an undertaking would entail "tactics like suspicionless interrogations and arrests, unjustified and pretextual traffic stops, warrantless searches of workplaces and homes, and door-to-door raids in immigrant neighborhoods." If "practiced on a huge scale throughout the country, those activities would systematically violate the Fourth Amendment." The ACLU also argues that a lack of sufficient capacity in the immigration court system would make it impossible to respect the due process rights of residents who claim they are not subject to deportation.
The Great Wall. Like mass deportation, the wall Trump has promised to build along the border with Mexico (at the Mexican government's expense) would not by itself violate the Constitution. But the ACLU argues that it would "exacerbate the current wasteful militarization of our southwest border that daily confronts border residents going to school or work with checkpoints, roving patrols, almost 20,000 heavily armed Border Patrol agents, drones, and other weapons of war." Trump's vision would mean more routine hassles, including unconstitutional searches and seizures, for citizens and legal residents who live or travel near the border.
Muslim Tracking. Trump has spoken favorably of "profiling" Muslims, surveilling mosques, increasing the police presence in Muslim neighborhoods, and establishing a national database of Muslims living in the United States. "Trump's statements suggest that as president he would implement policies and programs that would subject American Muslims to surveillance or registration based solely on their religion," the ACLU says. "Any such federal action would single out and expressly discriminate against American Muslims, violating the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of equal protection, as well as the First Amendment's clauses relating to religion and freedom of expression."
Mass Surveillance. Trump supports the National Security Agency's routine collection of Americans' phone records, a practice that is now prohibited by federal law. Even if Congress changed the law, the ACLU argues, such suspicionless data collection would violate the Fourth Amendment. The ACLU rightly rejects the "third party doctrine" as a justification for seizing every piece of personal information that businesses store, no matter how sensitive or revealing. But Trump ventures beyond that pernicious principle, endorsing warrantless wiretaps of telephone conversations. In an MSNBC interview last November, the ACLU notes, "Trump stated that he assumes 'people are listening' every time he picks up a phone, and although he '[doesn't] like it,' he 'would really much err on the side of security.'" While the constitutionality of the NSA's phone record database remains controversial, there is no question that the Stasi-style eavesdropping Trump describes would violate the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches.
Torture. Although torture is unconstitutional as well as illegal, Trump promises to use interrogation/punishment methods "a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding." Defenders of waterboarding generally argue that it is not really torture, but Trump is untroubled by such niceties, since "they deserve it anyway, for what they're doing." The ACLU notes that "the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause bars treatment that 'shocks the conscience,' including interrogation by torture," while "the infliction of torture as punishment violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of 'cruel and unusual punishment.'"
Looser Libel Laws. If elected, Trump says, he will "open up our libel laws" so that "we can sue [news outlets] and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they're totally protected." By that he means that "if a paper writes something wrong" and "they don't do a retraction," they should have to pay up. One problem with this promise, the ACLU notes, is that the president of the United States has no power to change libel law, because people sue for libel under state law, and "there is no federal libel law." Even assuming that Trump had the power to rewrite libel standards, he would be constrained by the First Amendment, which according to the Supreme Court requires proof of "actual malice"—that is, proof that the defendant published a defamatory statement knowing that it was false or with "reckless disregard" for its accuracy—in cases involving public figures. "The primary reason for such robust protection in cases involving public officials or public figures," the ACLU notes, "is a longstanding recognition that in the context of public discourse, which is often heated, punishing all false statements 'may lead to intolerable self-censorship' by those who fear punishment for making an honest factual mistake." Trump, as a widely reviled public figure, dislikes the "actual malice" requirement for obvious reasons. But the standard he suggests—mere wrongness, presumably as perceived by him—would never pass constitutional muster, so there is "no chance that Trump would be able to 'open up our libel laws' in the manner that he has proposed."
Surprisingly, the ACLU does not discuss Trump's misguided, ahistorical attack on birthright citizenship. Less surprisingly, the memo does not mention Trump's alarming enthusiasm for eminent domain either. Like libel law, that's an area where Trump's narrow self-interest blinds him to the value of broad protections for civil liberties—the same sort of blindness that afflicts Hillary Clinton when she calls for censorship of her critics.
Speaking of which, the ACLU says "an analysis of Hillary Clinton's proposed policies and their civil liberties implications is forthcoming." I would suggest starting with the First Amendment, then moving on to the Second. But I have a feeling the ACLU will skip straight from the First (assuming it covers that) to the Fourth.
Damon Root has more on Trump and the Constitution.
The post The ACLU Counts the Ways Trump Would Violate Civil Liberties appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It was totally a mistake that the CIA's inspector general's office destroyed its copy of the classified Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was also totally a mistake that the office then destroyed the disk that contained the document. The office did stop short of "mistakenly" setting the computers or servers that stored the report on fire, so that's something.
Michael Isikoff at Yahoo! News today reports on the latest excuses why nobody is looking at or caring about the massive, 6,700-page report detailing all the terrible abuses by the CIA against detainees—torture that reportedly failed to get any useful intelligence:
"It's breathtaking that this could have happened, especially in the inspector general's office — they're the ones that are supposed to be providing accountability within the agency itself," said Douglas Cox, a City University of New York School of Law professor who specializes in tracking the preservation of federal records. "It makes you wonder what was going on over there?"
The incident was privately disclosed to the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Justice Department last summer, the sources said. But the destruction of a copy of the sensitive report has never been made public. Nor was it reported to the federal judge who, at the time, was overseeing a lawsuit seeking access to the still classified document under the Freedom of Information Act, according to a review of court files in the case.
A CIA spokesman, while not publicly commenting on the circumstances of the erasure, emphasized that another unopened computer disk with the full report has been, and still is, locked in a vault at agency headquarters. "I can assure you that the CIA has retained a copy," wrote Dean Boyd, the agency's chief of public affairs, in an email.
"Locked in a vault" is the best way to describe the status of the full report, the classified copies of which remain under wraps and generally unread. The ACLU has been suing under the Freedom of Information Act to have the full report declassified and released. Unfortunately, last week they were dealt a blow when a federal appeals court ruled that the full report is not subject to FOIA requests because it has been classified as a "work document" within Congress and is therefore exempt to public demands to be released. The matter is left up to the Senate Intelligence Committee itself. Current chair Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) has been hostile to the very idea of anybody even looking at it, and the Obama administration doesn't seem to be in any rush to take a peek:
To ensure the document was circulated widely within the government, and to preserve it for future declassification, Feinstein, in her closing days as chair, instructed that computer disks containing the full report be sent to the CIA and its inspector general, as well as the other U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Aides said Feinstein specifically included a separate copy for the CIA inspector general because she wanted the office to undertake a full review. Her goal, as she wrote at the time, was to ensure "that the system of detention and interrogation described in this report is never repeated."
But her successor, Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, quickly asked for all of the disks to be returned, even threatening at one point to send a committee security officer to retrieve them. He contended the volumes are congressional records that were never intended for executive branch, much less public, distribution.
The administration, while not complying with Burr's demand to return the disks, has essentially sided with him against releasing them to the public. Early last year, Justice lawyers instructed federal agencies to keep their copies of the document under lock and key, unopened, lest the courts treat them as government records subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Weeks later, in an effort to head off a motion for "emergency relief" by the ACLU, a Justice Department lawyer told U.S. Judge James Boasberg that no copies of the report would be returned to Congress or destroyed; the government "can assure the Court that it will preserve the status quo" until the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit was resolved, wrote Vesper Mei, a senior counsel in the Justice Department's civil division, in a February 2015 filing.
One wonders how many administrations will pass before Americans get a real sense of the extent of the torture administered to (sometimes innocent) terror suspects in our name. But given that the presumptive GOP nominee, Donald Trump, is promising to bring back waterboarding "and more" should he become president, one might wonder the actual extent that a huge chunk of Americans even care.
Fortunately, we do still have the 500-page executive summary of the full report, and it was chock full of details on its own. I read through that summary back when it was released and explained its contents here. Americans should demand the right to see the full report, but given that not terribly much happened once the summary was released, it doesn't appear there's going to be much pressure on this administration to do so.
The post Will We Ever Truly Know the Extent of CIA Torture During the War on Terror? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Tonight NBC News will be airing an interview with CIA Director John Brennan where he will declare that his agency will refuse to engage in any further waterboarding, even if ordered by the next president himself or herself.
This is not a new declaration, and it's clearly and obviously in response to Donald Trump promising to bring back waterboarding and "a hell of a lot worse" to try to get information from suspected terrorists.
You'll have to excuse me for raising a cynical eyebrow at the CIA's sense of propriety and for gently suggesting that there's greater concern that perhaps an unpredictable, emotion-driven president like Trump might simply demand that they do bad things without, say, setting up the appropriate legal framework to declare that these bad things aren't actually bad and are totally legal and legitimate and help catch terrorists.
I say this as somebody who has actually read the Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report when it was released in 2014. I noted at the time that while there were some lurid descriptions of abuses, the reason the report was so long (the part that was released was just a summary, and just that section was nearly 500 pages long) was that so much of the argument was over who was responsible for creating the rules, how the oversight worked (and failed), and whether the "enhanced interrogation" actually accomplished anything. At the time, I noted, "Strip out the torture and terrorism and you've got any other troubled government program."
Brennan's original response to the report was to acknowledge some problems with the interrogation program's oversight and operations but insisted at the time that the CIA's interrogation techniques actually got them useful information, a justification that has been used by any number of mainstream, Trump-disliking conservatives for supporting waterboarding and other forms of torture in interrogation. (And then later on the CIA quietly walked back even some of their own defenses when nobody was looking)
My larger point is not that we shouldn't be happy about Brennan's declaration (though we should resist assuming that he'll still be in place under a new president). Rather, it is extremely important to remember that the torture that actually happened was not implemented rashly or impetuously, like we might assume would happen under a Trump regime. Rather, many, many people working under a "mainstream" Republican president helped make it happen, and the leadership under a "mainstream" Democratic president may have ordered it to stop, but nevertheless defended its usefulness as an ass-covering move. Don't forget the CIA's involvement in Zero Dark Thirty, which suggested these interrogation techniques were needed to help track down Osama bin Laden in a movie put out for public consumption. As such, we should treat skeptically any public claims that the CIA would "refuse" to follow orders. They could just be complaining that Trump would not put the correct legal framework into place to protect them from the consequences.
The post Let Us Be Skeptical of the CIA's Support for Limits on Interrogations appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Donald Trump, Republican presidential
front-runner and founder of Trump University, has reversed his stance on ordering members of the military to commit war crimes.
Less than 24 hours ago at the GOP debate in Detroit, Trump insisted that no matter what people like former CIA Director Michael Hayden had to say about service-members refusing to murder the families of suspected terrorists or engage in illegal acts of torture, "They won't refuse. They're not going to refuse me. Believe me."
But much like Trump's positions on immigration (of which he said last night, "I'm changing, I'm changing!"), the candidate is evolving in real time on issues of international law and basic human morality.
In a statement released to the Wall Street Journal today, Trump wrote:
I do, however, understand that the United States is bound by laws and treaties and I will not order our military or other officials to violate those laws and will seek their advice on such matters. I will not order a military officer to disobey the law. It is clear that as president I will be bound by laws just like all Americans and I will meet those responsibilities.
Considering a significant part of Trump's appeal lies in his consequence-free ability to constantly say batshit-crazy things and never apologize for them, one wonders why he (or his advisors, whoever they are) deemed this particular outrageous sentiment (which he's voiced numerous times in the recent past) necessary to walk back.
Whatever the reason, it's a relief to know the likely nominee of one of the US' two major political parties understands that he too is "bound by laws just like all Americans."
The post Donald Trump Walks Back His Pro-War Crimes Stance appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>At the Conservative Political Action Conference today, former George W. Bush administration lawyer John Yoo led a breakout session to promote his new book, Liberty's Nemesis.
Yoo criticized in no uncertain terms "the inexorable growth of the administrative state" under President Obama. "One thing that should be for certain is that we all believe in narrowing the size of the federal government," he said. "The whole point of our Constitution is to keep limits on the government so we have space for our individual liberty."
That's a fine critique. I don't disagree in the slightest that Washington under Obama has grown bloated, or that bureaucrats in the various federal agencies have been given far too much authority to draft "rules" that function as laws no one ever had the chance to vote on.
Still, it's jarring to hear those arguments coming from someone best known for arguing that the Commander in Chief does possess broad powers, including the right to unilaterally send American troops into combat and the right to make use of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques."
Hypocritical? Yoo doesn't think so. When an audience member brought up the War Powers Resolution—a law that was intended to rein in the executive's authority to wage war without a declaration from Congress but that presidents have been happily ignoring for decades—Yoo drew a bright-line distinction between foreign affairs, on which he said the Framers wanted presidents "to act with energy and vigorousness," and domestic affiars, on which "they expected the president's main job to be to take care that the laws passed by Congress are faithfully executed."
Except, that is, the laws Congress passes specifically to restrain a president's war-making abilities—those laws he apparently doesn't think need to be respected. "I think the War Powers [Resolution] is a very bad law," he said. "It should be overhauled."
The post Obama Is Guilty of Executive Overreach, Says Lawyer Who Authored Bush Torture Memos appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>We all still remember that Senate torture report, right? Before consigning it to the dustbins of history do recall that Donald Trump just promised he would bring back waterboarding and do even "worse" to suspected terrorists if he were elected president.
At the time the report was released, after years of fighting between the Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA and President Barack Obama's administration, the official pushback from the CIA was an admission that torture ("enhanced interrogation") did happen inappropriately and the oversight wasn't always the best, and they detained people that shouldn't have been detained at all, but they did get "actionable intelligence" from the process and prevented terrorist attacks. That was the story, and they were sticking with it—yes, it was terrible, but it worked.
But then, it turns out, the CIA has quietly updated its official response in such a way that validates some of the Senate torture report's claims. Much like a newspaper hiding a correction at the bottom of an inside page among the advertisements, the CIA posted a "note to readers" without telling anybody. According to Ali Watkins at BuzzFeed, it sat online for a year before outsiders noticed its existence.
One of the big debates of the use of torture involved the interrogation of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohamed (KSM). Mohamed confessed to all sorts of things while he was being tortured, but according to the Senate's analysis, much of it was either fake or information the CIA had already gotten from other sources. The CIA resisted this interpretation, but now it has quietly admitted that the Senate's analysis is at least partly true. And the note also acknowledges some other mistakes:
Among the CIA's quiet corrections are that it did in fact misrepresent the importance of information obtained from 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, known informally as "KSM," and in some cases, already had certain information that it had previously said was "unavailable" prior to KSM providing it.
It also admits in its "Note" that it misrepresented the number of detainees in CIA custody to its own leadership, and that it did not notify the Secretary of State or Deputy Secretary of State of every black site detention facility.
In one instance, the CIA says, it misrepresented a timeline of information obtained from KSM in capturing an al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist known as Hambali. The issue, it writes in the "Note," was a "sequencing error."
By "sequencing error," they mean that the information they say they extracted from Mohamed via torture they had already gotten from other sources prior. Read more from BuzzFeed here.
Meanwhile, the Senate's analysis of the CIA's torture methods has also been bolstered by the chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay. Adam Goldman of The Washington Post has gotten his hands on an unreleased prosecutor's statement by Brig. Gen. Mark Martins that says the facts listed in the report about how KSM was treated are all accurate and actually occurred:
Three CIA prisoners, including Mohammed, were waterboarded in what agency medical personnel described as "a series of near drownings," according to the Senate report. Detainees were also beaten, forced into confinement boxes, deprived of sleep for long stretches and subjected to rectal rehydration. Unapproved techniques included mock executions, and one detainee died after being left in the freezing cold at a facility in Afghanistan. …
Defense lawyers want access to all documents about the treatment of their clients and ultimately plan to use the issue of torture as a mitigating factor to argue against the death penalty if the defendants are found guilty.
This agreement doesn't necessarily put Martins "at odds" with CIA Director John Brennan the way Goldman contends. Remember that the dispute between the Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA is not over the facts of what was done to these prisoners, but rather who knew what was going on, who was overseeing the program, and whether it actually worked. It was never about which terrible things were done to KSM or other terrorists (or innocent people confused with terrorists).
When I wrote about the Senate report back when it was released, the big takeaway was not the horrible descriptions of what the CIA did to people, though that certainly got the most press. Rather, it was the depressing, bureaucracy-driven nature of the conflict trying to establish timelines of who authorized what, who knew what, where information actually came from, and trying to penetrate layer upon layer of ass-covering concealing what actually happened.
And does it even matter anymore? In the wake of new terrorist attacks on American soil we have Trump promising to do whatever the hell gets cheers from the crowd. His unpredictability, deliberate vagueness, and willingness to outsource the actual solutions to "experts," combined with the secrecy of the CIA, should be of great concern. Getting kicked out of America under President Trump might be the least of a Muslim citizen's worries.
The post Experts Quietly Admit to Senate Torture Report's Accuracy, But Does Anybody Care Anymore? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Governor Andrew Cuomo announced last Wednesday that around a quarter of New York's 4,000 prisoners in solitary confinement will be moved out and into safer correctional facilities.
The reform is the outcome of a lawsuit brought on by the New York Civil Liberties Union against the state. After two years of negotiations other policy changes are being implemented to end inmate abuse by prison officials, such as stopping the practice of using food to discipline prisoners.
The state's correctional officers union, however, expressed concern for the safety of its 20,000 members, responding in a statement, "it is simply wrong to unilaterally take the tools away from law enforcement officers who face dangerous situations on a daily basis."
As Reason TV found out in "'For Their Own Protection': Children in Long-Term Solitary Confinement", the reclusive nature of prison systems makes reform extremely difficult and their use of solitary confinement isn't so judicious.
Sealed off from most public scrutiny, and steeped in an insular culture of unaccountability, prisons are, by their very nature, excellent places to keep secrets. Even more concealed are the solitary-confinement cells, described by inmates as "prisons within prisons."
Far from being limited to the most violent offenders, solitary confinement is now used against perpetrators of minor crimes and children who are forced to await their trials in total isolation. Often, these stays are prolonged, lasting months or even years at a time.
To learn more of solitary confinement's painful effects watch "'For Their Own Protection': Children in Long-Term Solitary Confinement" above or read the original article here.
The post New York Rolls Back Solitary Confinement appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
The Spymasters—CIA in the Crosshairs. Showtime. Saturday, November 28, 9 p.m.
Pardon the unintended wordplay, but the signature moment of Showtime's remarkable new documentary, The Spymasters—CIA In The Crosshairs, comes near its end, when a producer asks Mike Morrell, the agency's former acting director, about the implications of what are known in the killer-drone biz as "signature strikes"—missile attacks on unidentified people not because they're known terrorists, but because a drone operator thinks they might be based on the fact that they're carrying weapons or otherwise behaving suspiciously.
Morrell, earnest and cooperative until now, declares flatly that he's not going to say a word about signature strikes. As the production crew prepares to take a break, Morrell shakes his head incredulously. "I don't believe these [CIA] directors are talking about this stuff!" he says in a tone of wonder.
And yet they are, and not in background sessions with friendly reporters that will dribble out in unattributed quotes that can safely be denied, either. A dozen men who have headed the CIA—including John Brennan, the current director—appear on camera in Crosshairs, granting searching interviews on the agency's part in the war on terror over the past two decades.
The result is a fascinating window into the thinking at the top of a compulsively secret agency that has been the spearhead of the war on terror. There is probably some lying going on in Crosshairs (though probably no more, and possibly even less, than if you interviewed a dozen randomly chosen members of Congress) and certainly some spinning.
But there's also surprising candor. John Deutch, one of Bill Clinton's CIA directors, asked about the indefinite confinement of Al Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo Bay, bluntly calls it a humanitarian advance. "The old way would have been to put them in the back of a truck and shoot them," he says.
The interviews are sometimes testy. Jose Rodriguez, the agency's former chief of operations, is explaining that its so-called black sites—secret prisons where captured Al-Qaeda suspects were brutally interrogated—were used because they were more secure than other possible locations. He's interrupted by a producer who suggests an alternative explanation: "You wanted to be able to abuse this guy, you didn't want any rules." Retorts the CIA man with some heat: "Bullshit!"
Other times there is rambunctious (albeit long-distance; the interviews were conducted separately) disagreement among the officials themselves. That's particularly true in the lengthy debate over waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other forms of "enhanced interrogation" that look, to the non-national-security eye, remarkably like torture.
The CIA directors who spent most of their careers elsewhere before being appointed to head the agency vigorously disapprove of it. "Our constitution does prohibit cruel and unusual punishment," says William Webster, a former federal judge and FBI director appointed CIA chief by Ronald Reagan. "If it's cruel, we shouldn't be doing it." Obama appointee David Petraeus, who had plenty of experience with prisoner interrogations during his 37 years in the army, doubts the efficacy of torture: "If you want information from a detainee, you become his best friend. … It's a long process."
But time, say several of the directors who rose through the clandestine ranks, was what the CIA—already widely accused of an "intelligence disaster"—didn't have in the wake of 9/11. "These are the hardened, worst terrorists, responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans, in a period where we simply didn't believe we had time to become their best friends," says George Tenet, who served under Clinton and George W. Bush. And, Tenet and others say, the rough stuff did produce valuable information, notwithstanding the findings of a sharply divided Senate committee to the contrary. (They also note that the Senate seems curiously unconcerned about either the morality or the intelligence-gathering effectiveness of Obama's thousands of drone assassinations.)
The policy debates in Crosshairs are both cogent and framed in real-world terms rather than lofty moral generalities. But this documentary is much more than an exercise in video wonkery. Like the best journalism, it's festooned with arresting anecdotes, from a detailed description of what it's to like blow something up from the controls of a drone to vivid character sketches of men on both sides of the war.
Among the most memorable bits is the account of the questioning of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed provided by CIA operations chief Rodriguez, who describes him methodically ticking off 10 seconds on his fingers during each waterboarding, having figured out early on that that was when the water stopped. What really broke KSM, as he's universally known to his captors, was sleep deprivation. "Afterwards," Rodriguez says, "he wouldn't stop talking."
Rodriguez himself is one of the more indelible personalities in Crosshairs. The most remorselessly hard-case government security officer since G. Gordon Liddy's rat-roasting days, he sees not the slightest contradiction between his insistence that waterboarding was torture and his admission that (against CIA orders) he torched a stack of videos of the interrogations because "I knew the tapes would play as if we were all psychopaths."
The narrative skills on display in Crosshairs are hardly surprising; the producers include several veterans of 60 Minutes, the horrifying CBS broadcast 9/11, and other cream-of-the-TV-crop documentary series that have perfected the art of brisk, high-impact story-telling.
They have put together a show that is intelligent and engaging every step of the way. Crosshairs is a nuanced account of the moral and intellectual complexities of back-alley warfare against a vicious, implacable enemy that does not wear uniforms or move its troops around in a way that can be charted with battle lines on a map.
Much of what the CIA officials say in Crosshairs will not be accepted by critics of the national security state, in some cases rightly so. But their arguments are far more thoughtful and challenging than many of those critics acknowledge; these are not a bunch of yahoos from the kill-em-all- let-God-sort-'em-out school of global strategy. In fact, quite the reverse: One of the most startling sequences in Crosshairs is a montage near the end in which half a dozen or more of the former directors say, virtually in unison, that the U.S. government cannot kill its way out of this conundrum. What can it do? The rest, unfortunately, is silence.
The post Showtime Documentary Presses CIA Leaders on Drones, Torture appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>During the first Democratic presidential debate, Hillary Clinton denounced Edward Snowden as a criminal who simply refused to work through official channels. "He broke the laws," said Clinton. "He could have been a whistleblower, he could have gotten all the protections of being a whistleblower."
Would Edward Snowden be better off had he gone through official channels to blow the whistle?
No way, says his lawyer, Jesselyn Radack of ExposeFacts.org.
In an interview with Nick Gillespie, she points to intelligence whistleblowers who came before Snowden as evidence that her client would not have been provided legal protections. "Tom Drake, Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe, and Ed Loomis did go through the proper channels," she tells Reason TV, "and all of them fell under criminal investigations for having done so."
"For the people out there shouting that Edward Snowden should have gone through proper channels," she continues, "there aren't that many channels for national security and intelligence whistleblowers. They are excluded from most avenues available to other whistleblowers."
And when they do expose ugly, sometimes-unconstitutional behavior on the part of the government, the whistleblowers are more likely than not to be the ones hauled into interrogation rooms.
Radack discusses Snowden's future, why she left the Justice Department to defend whistleblowers, how the U.S. government is waging a war on information, and the rising tide of whistleblowing about the military use of drones.
For more on the government's battle with whistleblowers, watch Reason TV's interview with William Binney, the NSA whistleblower known as "Edward Snowden 1.0."
About 12 minutes.
Produced by Amanda Winkler. Camera by Joshua Swain and Todd Krainin.
Scroll down for downloadable versions. And don't forget to subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel for notifications when new material goes live.
The post Edward Snowden's Lawyer on the Government's War on Whistleblowers appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America's Stealth Warfare, by Scott Horton, Nation Books, 260 pages, $26.99
After 9/11, a con man named Dennis Montgomery convinced the feds that he was a software genius. His techniques, he told them, could reveal secret coded Al Qaeda messages in Al Jazeera broadcasts and positively identify specific terrorists from drone video. The New York Times reported in 2011 that Montgomery's lies "prompted an international false alarm that led President George W. Bush to order airliners to turn around over the Atlantic Ocean in 2003." And it looks like the feds paid handsomely for this misinformation. Montgomery's work for the government fell under contracts with the classified CIA Directorate of Science and Technology, but he claimed to have received a $30 million payout on just one contract. And he certainly spent money like he was an otherwise inexplicably wealthy man, including driving expensive Porsches and dropping nearly half a million in one day of gambling.
The government would prefer you never knew about any of that. When Montgomery was being sued by a former employer, then–Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte quashed any public court discussion of Montgomery's bizarre relationship with U.S. intelligence. He insisted that public revelations about how easily the country's protectors can be conned would constitute "serious, and in some cases exceptionally grave, damage to the national security of the United States."
Democracy is supposed to transmit the people's will to our governors, but it's hard to argue that's the case when said governors can keep us ignorant about what they're doing and what it costs. However, the U.S. government has become increasingly adept at waving the flags of democracy and national security simultaneously.
The journalist and activist Scott Horton explores the tension between those two realities in Lords of Secrecy. The title is Horton's term for the mostly unelected elites who run the country's foreign-policy, espionage, and war-making machines.
The book delivers far more theory than specifics of secret foreign policy practice—disappointing in the wake of WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden's National Security Agency revelations. Horton indulges in more academic speculations about the Athenian conception of democracy than his task requires, and less in the way of details about actual secretive doings (though he does relate a decent quick version of the Dennis Montgomery scam). He bends over backward to seem "reasonable" to members of an imagined loyal opposition that believes transparency might be well and good, but some serious matters still need to be decided by serious people behind closed doors.
Horton grants the need for some secrecy in some areas of foreign policy and security, stressing that he's mostly concerned about process and democracy, not the substance of our elite's behavior per se. But America's Lords of Secrecy, as Horton's book itself reveals, act from values and indulge in behaviors that should be considered unacceptable even if passed by overwhelming plebiscite. Too much of what they do involves imprisoning, killing, and torturing people—or, less sinisterly but still maddeningly, covering up gross ineptitude and idiocy.
Horton starts with a story of government at war with itself. In 2014, the CIA misled and spied on the Senate Intelligence Committee (including clandestinely breaking into Senate computer systems) in an effort to hide evidence of its complicity in criminal torture. The supposed checks and balances between spies and citizens didn't work. Justice Department officials tasked with keeping the CIA in check instead enabled them, both authorizing specific questionable torture techniques and finding almost nothing to prosecute over after years of Justice-appointed special prosecutor investigation, which ended in 2011. Their buck-stops-here boss, President Barack Obama, helped the agency conceal evidence of likely criminality in the torture program while trumpeting his dedication to openness.
The Lords of Secrecy are not in the habit of offering themselves up for independent journalistic profiling. Even publishing their names can earn a threat of criminal prosecution for violating the 1981 Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Horton writes of a CIA team leader responsible for the rendition and torture of a German grocer named Khalid el Masri—an official who "pressed hard for Masri to be imprisoned and tortured even when other CIA analysts doubted they had the right man and after the German government had confirmed that his German passport was authentic and he was therefore not the terrorist the CIA had been looking for." Horton also links this same woman's mistakes to pre-9/11 security failures and to a December 2009 suicide attack on a U.S. facility in Afghanistan that killed seven of her fellow agents. He further notes her strange yen for personally witnessing torture sessions. While Horton does not name her, she has been widely reported in other venues to be Alfreda Bikowsky. She's suffered no known professional trouble at the CIA.
A far worse fate awaits those who try to pierce the obfuscation and darkness. The most prominent have become larger-than-life media figures, such as the whistleblowers Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden and the leak facilitator Julian Assange. Less well known than Manning or Snowden are reporters who, in trying to do their jobs, have found the government prepared to make their lives miserable even if it's not prepared to prosecute them for reporting. Horton rushes over stories like those of James Risen (of The New York Times) and James Rosen (of Fox News), reporters who had their phone and email records seized during Espionage Act investigations of sources who spoke to them. (The government prefers just taking records under court order to forcing journalists to spill under subpoena.)
Neither case involved revelations any sane outside observer would consider damaging to legitimate ongoing national security concerns. As David E. Pozen pointed out in a huge 2013 Harvard Law Review article, leaking to the press is not actually the dire crime it's frequently made out to be. Instead, it is a common tool of internal political gamesmanship. The laws against it seem intended less to be obeyed than to serve as weapons for officials to use rarely and selectively against a government employee or contractor who sticks his neck out too far. (It's also a weapon deployed twice as often under Barack Obama as it was under all previous presidents combined since the Espionage Act was passed in 1917.)
Officials should not harass and punish First Amendment practitioners trying to give Americans a clearer sense of what our foreign policy and intelligence agencies do in our name. But generations of spies and spymasters have been empowered in the presumption that they can by the 1947 National Security Act. That law carved explicit legal space for endless secret war at any expense against a supposedly implacable foe.
Horton is overly impressed with the 1947 law's paper protections, such as the requirements that the president issue a written "finding" for covert actions, that such actions not violate either the Constitution or statute, and that CIA directors keep congressional intelligence committees fully informed of their skullduggery. He believes that "the architects of the national security state were keen to ensure that space for public debate was clear and sufficient information was provided to fuel [that debate]." That generation was apparently merely too trusting to realize that "the newly created institutions of the national security state would use secrecy to expand their power and authority beyond anything Congress anticipated." But failing to anticipate that these programs and agencies, acting in secret, would spread beyond their supposed good intentions rises to the level of political malfeasance, not mere naiveté.
Congress has largely ceded its traditional control over war to the executive. The Lords of Secrecy post-9/11 operate in a state of perpetual war, diminishing Congress' ability or willingness to rein them in. Drone wars especially provide an excuse to keep the doings of the elites under wraps. (If no actual American is in any physical danger, the logic goes, why do the American people need to know what's going on?) Drone war is as real as war can be, though, with U.S. forces killing around 4,000 people in other countries since 2002. We also have many reasons to believe drone strikes create more enemies than they kill. Yet Americans are kept in the dark about the hows, the whys, and the aftermaths of the targeting.
Control over the drones has been largely handed over to the CIA and to the Pentagon's secretive Joint Special Operations Command. This upsets the supposed balance between the military and the CIA that the National Security Act was meant to establish—giving, as Horton notes, the CIA its own Army and the Army its own CIA.
That said, most Americans don't seem to care what is being done abroad in our name. With wars conducted entirely overseas, fought by a volunteer army and flying robots, and causing little damage to the mainland since 9/11, Americans are overwhelmingly apathetic about the specifics of foreign policy. This endangers Horton's Athens-obsessed theme that the worst part of foreign policy secrecy is how it robs us of a truly "knowledge-based democracy."
Snowden is a case in point. Given how little effect his widely publicized revelations have had on electoral politics—is anyone going to win or lose an election over them?—why should we expect less secrecy would discipline our foreign policy elites? Thanks to Snowden, an alert American might know that our national security forces try to break into SIM card manufacturer networks, share metadata with domestic law enforcement, cooperate closely with and get their vision of the Middle East from extremely repressive regimes, harvest online images to improve their ability to identify people's faces worldwide, implant tracking devices in commercial network routers, and steal and analyze our text messages. We have no reason to believe any of this is effectively protecting the security of the citizens those intelligence agencies are supposed to serve. But there have been few negative consequences for the architects of those policies.
Even when Americans know how poorly our foreign policy mandarins' schemes work out, we have a terrible record of holding the people responsible to account. Wasteful wars, destructive meddling overseas, criminal torture that doesn't even work: None of it is really a secret, no matter how many documents are classified, journalists intimidated, leakers prosecuted. The real crime isn't that our foreign policy elites do what they do in secret. It's that they do what they do, period.
The post Secret Foreign Policy Is Bad for Democracy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The rescue crews weren't even through sifting the rubble of the Sept. 11 attack when the debate over torture broke out: Is it necessary in the pursuit of the war on terror, and does it work, and is it right? Oddly, the argument seemed to fasten on the utilitarian side–does it work?–rather than the moral side–is it right?–despite the fact that we had practically no empirical data with which to measure success or failure. We knew practically nothing of who the government was questioning, how, what information was being produced, or what action it was leading to.
Fourteen years later, we've learned a lot about what was happening inside the interrogation rooms of the war on terror, but it often seems we know even less than we started. The latest cryptic artifact of this debate is "Secrets, Politics and Torture," an episode of PBS' Frontline documentary series, which tries to puzzle out the truth in the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee's hotly contested report on CIA and torture. (The episode airs tonight on PBS at 10 P.M. ET; details at bottom of this article.)
Senate investigators spent six years and $50 million on the report, examining some six million pages of internal CIA documents before reaching the conclusion (among others) that the CIA's euphemistically labeled "enhanced interrogation techniques" were useless, producing no actionable intelligence that hadn't already been collected with the bare-knuckle approach.
But the report was hotly disputed by several of the committee's Republicans, and many of their objections cannot be dismissed as mere yahoo partisanship. The committee's exclusive reliance on documents–it did not conduct a single interview–leave it open to charges that it worked in a vacuum in which context and emphasis were not understood. And the fact that the report seems to concentrate its fire on former CIA director Michael Hayden, a Bush appointee who didn't take office until the interrogation program was nearly over, while sparing Clinton appointee George Tenet, the lifelong Democrat and former Intelligence Committee staff director who ran the CIA when the program was at its most brutal, certainly has a distinct whiff of politics about it.
The CIA gets its fair shot in "Secrets, Politics and Torture." Former deputy director John McLaughlin and general counsel John Rizzo (who was in charge of keeping the interrogations within legal, if not humanitarian, bounds) argue forcefully that they were carrying out Bush administration instructions with the legal blessing of the Justice Department, and that their work produced results. "It's a hit job on most of us," says the furious Rizzo of the committee report.
On the other side, Intelligence Committee members Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and former Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colorado), are equally forceful in charging that the CIA "lied to its overseers, destroyed and tried to hold back evidence," as Udall puts it, in propagandizing in support of a needless exercise in sadism.
There's much to be said for the way "Secrets, Politics and Torture" deftly tells the story of the interrogation program. It offers up the not unreasonable belief of CIA officials that the sort of "committed, remorseless, psychopathic personality" that would commandeer civilian airliners and crash them into skyscrapers was not going to surrender much information to an ACLU-approved interrogation complete with Miranda warnings and evidentiary hearings for search warrants.
But it also documents the appalling costs of coloring outside the lines, starting with the real nature those "enhanced interrogation techniques": not just waterboarding but beatings, threats of mutilation with cordless drills, forced rectal feedings, ice-water baths, and prisoners stuffed in what amounts to dog carriers or chained to walls in a standing position for 17 days at a stretch. Small wonder that one detainee, left half-naked in a near-freezing cell following a typical round of such non-torture, died of hypothermia.
The CIA insists none of this stuff meets the legal definition of torture, but as they say, it's close enough for government work. Certainly the CIA was not anxious for the world to inspect its handiwork; when it was revealed that agency officers had recorded some of their interrogations, the CIA's head of operations ordered the tapes burned despite instructions from Rizzo to keep them.
The human damage from these medieval encounters went well beyond the victims. "Secrets, Politcs and Torture" describes CIA interrogators, horrified at their own acts, begging Washington to let them stop. And slippery slopes opened up, most notably at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where American soldiers inflicted unspeakable acts of perversity and cruelty not on so-called high-value targets but random peasants.
Plenty of people viewing "Secrets, Politics and Torture" will conclude that nothing could be worth engaging in this kind of behavior. That, however, is very different than saying it produced nothing of value. And there, the documentary is much less convincing.
It makes much of the fact, for instance, that Khalid Shiekh Mohammad–the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, universally known as KSM–told some preposterous lies following his first round of waterboarding, including a yarn about sending operatives to Montana to recruit disgruntled black Americans for an al Qaeda terrorist attack.
But KSM and other detainees also lied when they weren't being tortured. And Sen. Feinstein's flat declaration that "waterboarding KSM 183 times did not work" simply fails the smell test. By all accounts, KSM provided a motherlode of useful intelligence to his captors. Are we seriously to believe not a single syllable of it ever followed a waterboarding? Feinstein and her allies seem to believe that a prisoner will say anything at all while being tortured, as long as it isn't true.
There's an interesting statistic presented in the Intelligence Committee report that does not appear in "Secrets, Politics and Torture," a claim that "seven of the 39 CIA detainees known to have been subjected to the CIA s enhanced interrogation techniques produced no intelligence while in CIA custody." Flipped on its head, those numbers tell a very different story: that 82 percent of the tortured prisoners talked. To me, that sounds very much like torture does work, at least in some ways at some times.
That's why the moral argument against torture–that its injuries are afflicted on the innocent as well as the guilty, and that it shreds the souls of the torturers as surely as it does the bodies of the tortured–is a lot better than the utilitarian one. Crime isn't wrong because it doesn't pay; it's wrong because it harms others.
Below, watch the first five minutes of tonight's episode of Frontline.
Frontline: Secrets, Politics and Torture: PBS. May 19, 10 p.m. EDT.
The post Does Torture Work? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>I'm a week late to note it, but this exchange in The New York Times deserves to be highlighted:
When [Sen. Dianne] Feinstein was asked in a meeting with reporters in 2013 why she was so sure she was getting the truth about the drone program while she accused the C.I.A. of lying to her about torture, she seemed surprised.
"That's a good question, actually," she said.
The post The Things That Don't Occur to Dianne Feinstein appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As reported by James Risen in the New York Times, a just-released report co-authored by seven "dissident health professionals and human rights activists," accuses the American Psychological Association of providing ethical and scientific cover to the Bush administration's use of "enhanced interrogation" or what is non-euphemistically known as torture.
Risen writes:
The report is the first to examine the association's role in the interrogation program. It contends, using newly disclosed emails, that the group's actions to keep psychologists involved in the interrogation program coincided closely with efforts by senior Bush administration officials to salvage the program after the public disclosure in 2004 of graphic photos of prisoner abuse by American military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
"The A.P.A. secretly coordinated with officials from the C.I.A., White House and the Department of Defense to create an A.P.A. ethics policy on national security interrogations which comported with then-classified legal guidance authorizing the C.I.A. torture program," the report's authors conclude.
The involvement of health professionals in the Bush-era interrogation program was significant because it enabled the Justice Department to argue in secret opinions that the program was legal and did not constitute torture, since the interrogations were being monitored by health professionals to make sure they were safe.
Crucially, according to the report, the A.P.A. dispensed with any skepticism of the administration's tactics just as "the C.I.A. torture program was threatened from within and outside the Bush administration."
One of the report's co-authors, Stephen Soldz, told Risen in an email:
"Like clockwork, the A.P.A. directly addressed legal threats at every critical juncture facing the senior intelligence officials at the heart of the program. In some cases the A.P.A. even allowed these same Bush officials to actually help write the association's policies."
The A.P.A. will not offer comment on the report, pending the results of an independent review they commissioned last November.
Read the full report here, and check out Reason's expansive archive on torture here.
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