"Torture-lite"
Marty Lederman of Balkinization, who knows more about this stuff than I do (and probably more than you do), assesses the administration's legislative response to the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision:
Although section 6 in effect says that the U.S. will "comply" with Common Article 3 of Geneva even if such techniques are used, that's wrong. These techniques are -- at least in many cases -- "cruel treatment and torture" prohibited by Common Article 3. Thus, this bill would in effect authorize the United States to breach its treaty obligations. Perhaps that's something we should do -- perhaps not.* But if so, we shouldn't pretend that we're not engaged in such cruelty and torture, and we shouldn't engage in the fiction that we are in compliance with the Geneva Conventions. The decision to authorize such horrifying techniques, and to thereby be the first nation to adopt breach of Geneva as official state policy, is a solemn one, and it should be treated with the seriousness that it deserves -- without euphemism or obfuscation. (Emphasis added.)
Hear, hear. I doubt a winning case can be made for abrogating Geneva. But I'm willing to listen, honestly and straightforwardly, to any such case that's made honestly and straightforwardly. This, however, ain't that case.
UPDATE: Oops, forgot to say why this isn't that case: The president utterly misrepresented some key facts in order to suggest that torture had benefited our anti-terrorism efforts. Here's what he said about Abu Zubaydah:
"Within months of September the 11th, 2001, we captured a man known as Abu Zubaydah. We believe that Zubaydah was a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden. Our intelligence community believes he had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained, and that he helped smuggle al Qaeda leaders out of Afghanistan after coalition forces arrived to liberate that country. Zubaydah was severely wounded during the firefight that brought him into custody — and he survived only because of the medical care arranged by the CIA."After he recovered, Zubaydah was defiant and evasive. He declared his hatred of America. During questioning, he at first disclosed what he thought was nominal information — and then stopped all cooperation. Well, in fact, the 'nominal' information he gave us turned out to be quite important. For example, Zubaydah disclosed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — or KSM — was the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, and used the alias 'Muktar.' This was a vital piece of the puzzle that helped our intelligence community pursue KSM. Abu Zubaydah also provided information that helped stop a terrorist attack being planned for inside the United States — an attack about which we had no previous information. Zubaydah told us that al Qaeda operatives were planning to launch an attack in the U.S., and provided physical descriptions of the operatives and information on their general location. Based on the information he provided, the operatives were detained — one while traveling to the United States."
And here's the truth:
Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" — a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques. […]
"I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."
Spencer Ackerman at The New Republic puts it this way:
... most Americans don't remember--and can't be expected to remember--newspaper coverage of Al Qaeda for a seven-month stretch between the attacks and Abu Zubaydah's capture. Bush is exploiting that ignorance to tell the American people an outright lie in order to convince them that we need to torture people. As Bush once said in another context, if this is not evil, then evil has no meaning.
Lederman's footnote (asterisked in his excerpt above) explains why we don't need to torture people:
The thrust of the President's speech is that such techniques -- let's call them "torture light," since the President is so insistent that we never "torture" -- are absolutely necessary to preventing terrorist attacks. Apparently the Pentagon hasn't gotten the memo. At a briefing this [Wednesday -- Lex] morning, Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence John Kimmons forcefully argued that:
I am absolutely convinced [that] no good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tell us that. . . . Moreover, any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress, through the use of abusive techniques, would be of questionable credibility, and additionally it would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used. And we can't afford to go there.Some of our most significant successes on the battlefield have been -- in fact, I would say all of them, almost categorically all of them, have accrued from expert interrogators using mixtures of authorized humane interrogation practices in clever ways, that you would hope Americans would use them, to push the envelope within the bookends of legal, moral and ethical, now as further refined by this field manual.
We don't need abusive practices in there. Nothing good will come from them.
