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Tonight's: Wow Did He Miss The Point-Gate, Mortgage-Gate and Torture-Gate.

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Video courtesy Amnesty International.

A man using the pseudonym Matthew Alexander has written a truly remarkable op-ed for the Washington Post discussing effective interrogation of enemy combatants -- which most decidedly does not include torture:

I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.

Over the course of this renaissance in interrogation tactics, our attitudes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond.

Perhaps he should have. It turns out that my team was right to think that many disgruntled Sunnis could be peeled away from Zarqawi. A year later, Gen. David Petraeus helped boost the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and signed up with U.S. forces, cutting violence in the country dramatically.

Our new interrogation methods led to one of the war's biggest breakthroughs: We convinced one of Zarqawi's associates to give up the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader's location. On June 8, 2006, U.S. warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs on a house where Zarqawi was meeting with other insurgent leaders.

If the moral argument cannot persuade the defenders of torture, then perhaps the practical one will. "Alexander" has written a book on the subject that I'm ordering today.

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As David already discussed, constitutional-law expert Jonathan Turley joined Rachel last night to discuss the fate of top Bush administration figures involved in "harsh interrogation techniques." The White House has indicated that Bush will not be issuing blanket pardons, but the Wall Street Journal later reported that that's because it's "unnecessary" to do so.

Turley makes a critical point in the interview -- namely, that the moral burden of torture is on the backs of each one of us until these people are brought to justice. And it will be profoundly immoral to let them go:

"We have third world countries that when they have found that their leaders committed torture war crimes, they prosecuted them. But the most successful democracy in history is just, I think, about to see war crimes, do nothing about it. And that's an indictment not just of George Bush and his administration. It's the indictment of all of us if we walk away from a clear war crime and say it's time for another commission."

Turley lays out a powerful case that's pretty hard to argue with. A wave of reconciliation and forgiveness seems to be sweeping Washington, but sanctioning torture and destroying America's moral credibility around the world is something that can't simply be ignored. I'm not opposed to a commission per se, but the commission MUST be granted sweeping investigatory powers and a mandate to prosecute any and all wrongdoing found to have been committed. Anything less is unacceptable.

Full transcript below the fold:

(h/t Heather)

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Rachel Maddow had Jonathan Turley on yesterday to discuss the Wall Street Journal story reporting that the Bush administration had no intention of issuing pardons for the people involved in its torture operations because they don't think it's necessary.

And what Turley observed should be alarming to anyone concerned about whether or not Democrats are going to have the spine to return the U.S. to the rule of law -- by, among other things, holding torturers and the people who enabled them accountable:

Maddow: So the White House says now, at least to the Wall Street Journal, that they are not likely to pardon anyone who might have implemented or taken part in these torture policies because they believe that their Justice Department memos excuse them, so there's no need to pardon anyone. Are you buying that reasoning?

Turley: No. I don't believe that anyone seriously believes in the administration that what they did is legal. This is not a close legal question. Waterboarding is torture. It has been defined as a crime by U.S. courts and by foreign courts. There's no ambiguity in it. That is exactly why they have repeatedly acted to stop any court from reviewing any of this.

And so what's really happening here is a rather clever move at this intersection of law and politics. That what the administration is doing, is they know that the people that want him to pardon our torture program is primarily the Democrats, not the Republicans. The Democratic leadership would love to have a pardon so they could go to their supporters and say, "Look, there's really nothing we could do. We're just going to have this truth commission, and we'll get the truth out, but there really can't be any indictments now."

Well, the Bush administration is calling their bluff. They know that the Democratic leadership will not allow criminal investigations or indictments. And in that way the Democrats will actually repair Bush's legacy, because he will be able to say, "There was nothing stopping indictments or prosecutions, but a Democratic congress and a Democratic White House didn't think there was any basis for it."

There's been a certain amount of dismay expressed by progressives over the past week or so about Obama's emerging Cabinet and the lack of any real liberals within his administration so far; some of this is reasonable, some of it excessive.

But if Turley is right, and the Obama administration and congressional Democrats do what they've been doing all along -- going along to get along, and putting politics over principle -- when it comes to confronting the reality that torture was conducted under American auspices, then the resulting uproar and outrage will be fully deserved.

The campaign is already under way. In this morning's Washington Post, Jack Goldsmith -- who was up to his neck in the torture dealings, but who also made a principled stand against the policies -- launched the first effort to shoot down not just any prosecutions and indictments, even any "truth commission" at all.

So Democrats and Republicans will beat their teeth over it for a few weeks, agree to set up a toothless "truth commission," and let these war criminals walk slowly away.

It's going to be up to the public -- the ordinary citizens who want the black stain of torture removed the national fabric -- to remind their spineless representatives that torture is torture, war crimes are war crimes, and the rule of law requires those who flouted it to face the consequences -- go-along-get-along politics be damned.

(The above video is John Conyers grilling John Yoo about torture.Just another day in the life of George Bush.)

Whenever you see pieces like this, you know just the opposite is the truth. There is tremendous power in the words and views that we write about.

Brennan wrote in a Nov. 25 letter to Obama that he did not want to be a distraction. His potential appointment as CIA director has raised a firestorm in liberal blogs that associate him with the Bush administration's interrogation, detention and rendition policies.

Brennan, a 25-year CIA veteran, helped establish the National Counterterrorism Center and was its first director in 2004. He has privately and publicly said that he opposed waterboarding and questioned other interrogation methods that many in the CIA feared could be later deemed illegal.

"It has been immaterial to the critics that I have been a strong opponent of many of the policies of the Bush administration such as the pre-emptive war in Iraq and coercive interrogation tactics, to include waterboarding," he wrote. "It is with profound regret that I respectfully ask that my name be withdrawn from consideration for a position within the intelligence community. The challenges ahead of our nation are too daunting, and the role of the CIA too critical, for there to be any distraction from the vital work that lays ahead," Brennan wrote.

Especially on torture. Because of George Bush, America's legacy has been tarnished forever. Torture is never an option and the news about Brennan bowing out just makes a strong statement against it.

As Digby says:

Torture is not negotiable and it can't be redefined or "smoothed out" or anything else. This one is a bright line. I give Obama the benefit of the doubt at this point, of course --- nothing's been announced. But I'm nervous. The institutional pressure is going to be acute and I'm not reassured by the presence of people like John Brennan. The fact that he isn't as bad as Dick Cheney just isn't good enough.

John Woo should be tried an convicted along with any Bush loyalist that sanctioned these practices.

Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty...

Cassel: Also no law by Congress -- that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo...

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

Glenn Greenwald

In the same interview, Brennan even defended -- or at least justified -- Michael Mukasey's refusal to say whether waterboarding was "torture," on the ground that by doing so, Mukasey would be admitting that the President broke the law (as though that is a valid reason for a prospective Attorney General to refuse to opine on a legal matter)

Scott Horton has an excellent piece up about it when his name was being mentioned.

John Brennan may find an important role serving in a new administration. But he is morally unfit to serve as the Director of Central Intelligence.

And we all know the role FOX played in the use of torture.

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From the Nov. 17, 2008 edition of Countdown, guest host David Shuster, filling in for Keith Olbermann, talks to Jonathan Turley about the possibility of George Bush issuing blanket pardons for the crimes committed by himself and his administration and what it means for the rule of law that remains in the United States.

UPDATE (Nicole): Does anyone actually believe that Bush won't thumb his nose at the rule of law? As Will Bunch notes, it's clear that Presidents and their aides are officially above the law.

However, that's not the thing that took my breath away in this clip. Listen as Shuster and Turley both matter-of-factly admit that one of the problems that Obama has in committing to close Guantanamo is what to do with the detainees there because some of them could not go through our criminal justice system due to lack of evidence to hold them or because they've been tortured. No outrage. No wringing of hands that these people still exist, years later, within Guantanamo, as we count down the days until George Bush is finally out of office.

Yet the media can get up in arms about Hillary Clinton can "subvert her agenda" to serve as Secretary of State and rehash that ad nauseam? We can have an academic discussion on presidential pardons (and not fail to mention Clinton, mind you), but when it come to authentic crimes against humanity that merit a full blown trial in The Hague, the media yawns, as if it's just par for course.

My god, when did we lose our moral compass that this kind of atrocity is an academic discussion instead of a rallying call for justice? Per Robert Jay Lifton, this is our American Apocalypse.

The CIA is worried that Obama won't get their backs if things go wrong.

“I was with a group of intelligence officers today,” Roger Cressey, a counterterrorism official in the Clinton White House, said on MSNBC Thursday night, “and I think the most important thing for the president to say is, ‘We’ve got your back.’ That ‘we want you to take risks — risks that conform with our law and our values as a country.’

“What the intelligence community is afraid of more than anything is the game of ‘Gotcha,’” Cressey said. “Which is, if they make a mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, the White House doesn’t support them, they’re left out to dry, and Congress crushes them. And then you get into that risk-averse mentality, which we saw for awhile. So that is what they want. They want support, so they know that the president is going to be behind them. But also that he’s going to lead them.”

I agree with Digby on this one.

On torture, there can be no more blurring of definitions. There is plenty of scholarship that shows that there are better ways of obtaining reliable intelligence. Torture is not only immoral, it's lazy and counterproductive --- and is likely used most often out of some misplaced notion that being known to be brutal and ruthless is helpful to America's reputation.

That is wrong. The CIA needs to know up front that Obama will not have their back if they engage in torture --- and that the torture legal framework under Bush is no longer operative in any way. There really is no other choice on this and I expect that he will do it. He knows very well that his foreign policy will be in complete shambles the minute it is leaked --- and it will be --- that the Obama administration has sanctioned torture, either through commission or omission. His great opportunity across the world to prove that America has changed will be lost.

The AP reports an officially unofficial leak from the Obama team that closing Gitmo is a priority for the new administration.

Under plans being put together in Obama's camp, some detainees would be released and many others would be prosecuted in U.S. criminal courts.

That's good. This bit isn't so good:

A third group of detainees — the ones whose cases are most entangled in highly classified information — might have to go before a new court designed especially to handle sensitive national security cases, according to advisers and Democrats involved in the talks. Advisers participating directly in the planning spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans aren't final.

U.S. courts handle cases "entagled in highly classified information" on a reasonably regular basis and the forms for dealing with such cases are well established. That phrase is a euphemism (or "lie", to the unsophisticated).  Spencer Ackerman has it exactly right:

If there's anything the military commissions process should have taught, it's that reinventing the legal system doesn't work, as evidenced by the bevy of military lawyers who have resigned in protest of the commissions. The concern, stripped of euphemism, is that the evidentiary basis for many trials of Guantanamo detainees -- including, in many cases, torture -- would never be admissible in any court worthy of the name. That's the Bush administration's legacy. But it can't be the basis for cheapening our legal system.

So we'll wait to see what proposal actually emerges. But consider not only that this is one of the first initiatives that Obama is pursuing -- it's one of the first that he's leaking, as well. This is as clear a signal as can be sent that the Bush era isn't just over, it will be actively rolled back. How far it actually gets rolled back we'll have to wait and see. And pressure.

If the US cannot get convictions in either civil or military courts under the full panoply of law, even if those trials have to be held partially in camera to protect necessary national security secrets as provided for in law already, then the US has screwed the pooch and tainted those prosecutions indelibly with torture, illegal rendition and kangaroo justice. Under those circumstances even Hannibal Lecter would walk - and anyone who understands why these things are anathema to normal jurisprudence would say that was a good thing as a universal standard even if no-one would be happy about individual instances.

If the Obama administration cannot see that, then they will have made themselves complicit in the massive crime that the Bush administration has perpetrated through Gitmo, Bagram , Abu Graib, and a host of secret prisons and illegal torture flights. It doesn't matter whether travesties of justice are conducted on the mainland U.S., at the resort in Cuba or in some undisclosed location - they're still travesties of justice. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet and any "hybrid" having any relationship to Bush's rigged tribunals would stink just as highly.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

On Wednesday, the Washington D.C. Circuit Court gave the CIA permission to keep secret unredacted transcripts in which 14 prisoners now held at Guantánamo Bay describe abuse and torture they endured in CIA custody - without even looking at the evidence itself. (h/t Kat)

"The Court, giving deference to the agency’s detailed, good-faith declaration, is disinclined to second-guess the agency in its area of expertise through in camera review," Lamberth wrote (.pdf), referring to a procedure where a judge looks at evidence in his chamber without showing it to the opposing side.

The ruling comes in a case where the ACLU filed a government sunshine suit to force the government to unredact allegations from statements from so-called High Value Detainees such as 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheihk Muhammed that the CIA kidnapped and tortured them.

The judge's decision not to look at the blacked-out text to see if secrets are involved allows the Bush Administration to continue to hide its use of torture techniques, according to Ben Wizner, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project.

The CIA says that releasing the transcripts would harm national security - by revealing torturous interrogation techniques and which nations were complicit in facillitating those tortures. That's not how they phrase it, but that's what the double-speak actually means.

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October 21, 2008 CBC The National
Canadian security services probably contributed indirectly to the torture in Syria of three Arab Canadians who had been suspected of involvement in terrorist activities, an official inquiry found on Tuesday.

What a surprise. Dubya had his fingers crossed when he said his administration was looking at ways to shut down Gitmo.

Despite his stated desire to close the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, President Bush has decided not to do so, and never considered proposals drafted in the State Department and the Pentagon that outlined options for transferring the detainees elsewhere, according to senior administration officials.

Mr. Bush’s top advisers held a series of meetings at the White House this summer after a Supreme Court ruling in June cast doubt on the future of the American detention center. But Mr. Bush adopted the view of his most hawkish advisers that closing Guantánamo would involve too many legal and political risks to be acceptable, now or any time soon, the officials said.

Spencer Ackerman:

The “legal risks” are called “due process of law” and “adherence to universally-embraced standards of civilization.”

The place rightwingers profess to believe is some kind of "holiday camp" is still full of innocents who were tortured into confessions, too.

Like 17 Uighurs a federal court had ordered released, who now won't go free.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit stayed a federal judge's order releasing the men, and it ordered oral arguments in the government's appeal, to be heard Nov. 24.

U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina ordered the government Oct. 7 to release the men, all Uighurs, who have been held at Guantanamo Bay for nearly seven years. The same panel temporarily stayed Urbina's order a day later.

The government has been trying to find new homes for the Uighurs for years. It no longer considers them enemy combatants and provided no evidence in court that they posed a security risk. The men cannot be returned to their homeland because they face the prospect of being tortured and killed. China considers the men terrorists.

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OK, it's not like we didn't know about it, but it's still horrifying.

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Senior Bush administration officials held a series of meetings in the White House in 2002 and 2003 to discuss allowing the CIA to use harsh interrogation methods on Al Qaeda detainees, according to a written statement Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently provided to Senate investigators. Rice's written response to investigators on the Senate Armed Services Committee marks the first time a high-ranking White House official has formally acknowledged the White House discussions, which led to the CIA's use of waterboarding and other coercive methods...read on

Alex Gibney, the Academy Award winning director of  "Taxi to the Dark Side" discusses this revelation with Rachel Maddow.

    The ACLU has won a landmark ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which has slammed the Bush administration for using ridiculous arguments for withholding 21 graphic photos of detainee abuse which formed part of a FOIA request.

The government claimed that the public disclosure of such evidence would generate outrage and would violate U.S. obligations towards detainees under the Geneva Conventions because they would embarrass or humiliate the prisoners.

But the court ruled in the first instance that outrage (over abuse and torture, mind you, so it would be justified outrage) where no specific individual could be named as being at risk was too wide an exemption to grant.

"It is plainly insufficient to claim that releasing documents could reasonably be expected to endanger some unspecified member of a group so vast as to encompass all United States troops, coalition forces and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan," the appeals court said.

And in the second instance, the Court pointed to the way in which the US had published pictures photographs of dead, tortured and abused prisoners in Japanese and German prison and concentration camps after World War II.

"Yet the United States championed the use and dissemination of such photographs to hold perpetrators accountable," the court said.

The ACLU's attorney Amrit Singh told the AP that:

"These photographs depict abuse at locations other than Abu Ghraib," she said of the 21 pictures that the court ordered for release. "Their release is to hold government accountable for torture policies and bring an end once and for all to the abuse of prisoners."

And the ACLU's press release continues:

(T)he appeals court today rejected the government's attempt to use the FOIA as "an all-purpose damper on global controversy" and recognized the "significant public interest in the disclosure of these photographs" in light of government misconduct. The court also recognized that releasing the photographs is likely to prevent "further abuse of prisoners."
 
"This is yet another case in which the administration used national security as a pretext to suppress information relating to crimes that were endorsed, encouraged or tolerated by government officials," said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project. "The appeals court was correct to recognize both that the administration's suppression of the photographs was without legal basis and that disclosure will further the purposes of the Geneva Conventions by deterring the abuse and torture of prisoners in the future."  

Singh noted that the government admits it has other photos which are not part of this ruling, but I'd like to remind everyone that photos are just the tip of the iceberg. Back in February a Seton Hall Law report revealed that the US military military videotaped all of the interrogations at Guantanamo and other interrogation centers and retained them. There were around 24,000 recordings made, in all and the Bush administration have been highly evasive about their current whereabouts.

Still the release of these photos will once again show the Bush administration's institutionalized use of torture to the world - and they should have their feet held to the fire for such acts. Not only will the Muslim world be outraged - for does anyone doubt that most or all of the victims pictured will be Muslim? But European nations will also come under renewed internal pressure to eschew co-operation in illegal rendition with any US administration that perpetuates Bush policy.

And maybe, just maybe, someone in the press will hold up the pictures to John McCain and ask him whether he thinks what he sees there constitutes actual torture, not any lesser "enhanced interrogation techniques".

Graphic By Driftglass [click image for larger]

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

Andrew Sullivan pointed out that few at the Republican conference - and certainly not George Bush or Fred Thompson - seems to have been able to bring themselves to say outright that John McCain was tortured. Lots of descriptions of what McCain went through but no actual T-word, because Republican policy right now is that none of it is "torture".

And that sad fact made me think of this.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

On Fox News Sunday when asked to "assess the Bush presidency" by Chris Wallace, John McCain asserted that "history will judge the president" and ran through a litany of talking points attempting to differentiate himself from the current administration. One area he was most insistent about was that he is a "maverick" who continues to oppose the Bush administration's use of torture.

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McCain: I obviously don’t want to torture any prisoners. There’s a long list of areas that we were in disagreement on, but I also think ...

Wallace: You’re not suggesting he did want to torture prisoners?

McCain: Well, waterboarding to me is torture, OK? And waterboarding was advocated by the administration and according to published reports was used, but the point is, we’ve had our disagreements, and I've been called a quote "maverick," and I'm not the most popular person in my party.

Though McCain himself was a victim of torture and has been outspoken about his opposition to it, his voting record has not matched his rhetoric.

ThinkProgress:

McCain seems to forget that he voted against a bill that would have banned the CIA from using waterboarding. In fact, when the bill passed, McCain urged Bush to veto it, which he did. Thus, McCain’s claim that he “obviously doesn’t want to torture prisoners” rings hollow. Indeed, because of Bush’s veto, the CIA retains the option of waterboarding prisoners. ..(more)

And it wasn't just torture that John McCain was being disingenuous about. His oft-repeated claim that he is a "maverick" is a myth. His own home state paper, The Arizona Republic, concluded otherwise, finding through an analysis of his Senate votes over the past decade "that McCain almost never thwarted his party's objectives." Just like he did on torture, he oft pretends to be against something but only until his vote is actually needed to count, and whenever that happens he falls reliably in line.

Likewise, his attempts to differentiate himself from Bush would be laughable if so much weren't at stake. John McCain has voted with George W. Bush 95 percent of the time in 2007, and has voted with him 100 percent so far this year.

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