These days, we're known as a nation of torturers, and that's not funny

1. King of Pain -- by Paul Krugman (from the NY Times)

We know that the world would see this action as a U.S. repudiation of the rules that bind civilized nations. We also know that an extraordinary lineup of former military and intelligence leaders, including Colin Powell, have spoken out against the Bush plan, warning that it would further damage America's faltering moral standing, and end up endangering U.S. troops.

But I haven't seen much discussion of the underlying question: why is Mr. Bush so determined to engage in torture?

Let's be clear what we're talking about here. According to an ABC News report from last fall, procedures used by C.I.A. interrogators have included forcing prisoners to "stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours"; the "cold cell," in which prisoners are forced "to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees," while being doused with cold water; and, of course, water boarding, in which "the prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet," then "cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him," inducing "a terrifying fear of drowning."

And bear in mind that the "few bad apples" excuse doesn't apply; these were officially approved tactics - and Mr. Bush wants at least some of these tactics to remain in use.

I'm ashamed that my government does this sort of thing. I'd be ashamed even if I were sure that only genuine terrorists were being tortured - and I'm not. Remember that the Bush administration has imprisoned a number of innocent men at Guantánamo, and in some cases continues to imprison them even though it knows they are innocent.

Is torture a necessary evil in a post-9/11 world? No. People with actual knowledge of intelligence work tell us that reality isn't like TV dramas, in which the good guys have to torture the bad guy to find out where he planted the ticking time bomb.

What torture produces in practice is misinformation, as its victims, desperate to end the pain, tell interrogators whatever they want to hear. Thus Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi - who ABC News says was subjected to both the cold cell and water boarding - told his questioners that Saddam Hussein's regime had trained members of Al Qaeda in the use of biochemical weapons. This "confession" became a key part of the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq - but it was pure invention.

So why is the Bush administration so determined to torture people?

To show that it can.

The central drive of the Bush administration - more fundamental than any particular policy - has been the effort to eliminate all limits on the president's power. Torture, I believe, appeals to the president and the vice president precisely because it's a violation of both law and tradition. By making an illegal and immoral practice a key element of U.S. policy, they're asserting their right to do whatever they claim is necessary.

And many of our politicians are willing to go along. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives is poised to vote in favor of the administration's plan to, in effect, declare torture legal. Most Republican senators are equally willing to go along, although a few, to their credit, have stood with the Democrats in opposing the administration.

Mr. Bush would have us believe that the difference between him and those opposing him on this issue is that he's willing to do what's necessary to protect America, and they aren't. But the record says otherwise.

The fact is that for all his talk of being a "war president," Mr. Bush has been conspicuously unwilling to ask Americans to make sacrifices on behalf of the cause - even when, in the days after 9/11, the nation longed to be called to a higher purpose. His admirers looked at him and thought they saw Winston Churchill. But instead of offering us blood, toil, tears and sweat, he told us to go shopping and promised tax cuts.

Only now, five years after 9/11, has Mr. Bush finally found some things he wants us to sacrifice. And those things turn out to be our principles and our self-respect.


2. Prisoners -- by George Packer (from the New Yorker)

If only political jujitsu were a useful weapon in the war on terror, the President's speech last Wednesday, in the East Room of the White House, would have struck a powerful blow on behalf of what he called "the cause of humanity, against those who seek to impose the darkness of tyranny and terror upon the entire world." In just thirty-seven minutes, he changed the subject from Iraq to terrorism, flummoxing a newly confident opposition; he basked in the applause of an audience that included September 11th families as he vowed to put Al Qaeda leaders on trial at Guantánamo, where, he announced, they had just been moved from the C.I.A.'s secret overseas prisons; he reassured the world that the United States doesn't torture prisoners in these "black sites," while essentially reserving the right to continue to do so. He simultaneously played the good cop and the bad cop, the principled advocate of the Geneva conventions and the hardboiled defender of "an alternative set of procedures" (which went unspecified). And he forced the Democrats into an agonizingly familiar position: the preëlection defensive crouch. A bill that the White House sent to Congress last week presented members with the choice of voting for the President's military tribunals, which would allow the use of evidence gained by coercion and deprive defendants of the right to hear all the evidence against them, or trying to rebut election-eve commercials that accuse them of wanting to see the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed go unpunished.

It was the kind of performance-part inspirational, part fear-purveying, part bullying-that used to be this President's signature. Its deftness and its timing were reminiscent of his successful effort in the weeks before the last midterm elections, in 2002, to force his opponents into rushed and politically difficult votes on the Homeland Security bill and the Iraq-war resolution. In Washington last week, the political class shook its head in admiration-you can't count him out yet! Within hours of the speech, the Republican leadership in Congress, which had been making unhappy noises at the smell of its own potential demise, reverted to its coöperative role and promised to bring the White House bill up for a vote in a matter of weeks, or even days. Senators John McCain, John Warner, and Lindsey Graham, whose alternative proposal would ban the tribunals from admitting coerced or secret evidence, will either stand up to their party leaders or find a way to declare technical victory while caving in. After five years, justice for Al Qaeda is suddenly so urgent that it has to be guaranteed before, say, November 7th. The Democrats hit back, but you could hear the quaver-not again!

Whether or not the public mood shifts to the President in time for the midterms, the recovery of his political skills will be of no help in the long struggle against radical Islam. In fact, it will be harmful. Everything about the speech that sparkled with tactical cleverness in terms of domestic politics contributed to an ongoing strategic disaster around the world. "The United States does not torture," the President said. "I have not authorized it and I will not authorize it." This was a lie, and most of the world knows it. The lie, and the reality that the phrase "an alternative set of procedures" is meant to conceal-simulated drowning, sleep and sensory deprivation, induced hypothermia, beatings, and other forms of torture that are responsible for some of the dozens of detainee deaths considered to be homicides-have done more to embolden America's enemies and estrange its friends than anything Osama bin Laden might say or do.

The speech was full of distortions: for example, the President's statement that the prisoners at Guantánamo are hard-core terrorists and that "we have in place a rigorous process to insure those held at Guantánamo Bay belong at Guantánamo" (innocent men have languished there for years); and his implication that the C.I.A.'s harsh interrogation methods led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (he was arrested on the basis of a tip that the C.I.A. received from an Al Qaeda walk-in willing to help the American side). Abu Zubaydah, the terrorist subject of most of the President's assertions, was described by some C.I.A. sources as a mentally ill Al Qaeda factotum. The President asked the public to accept on faith his assertions that terrorist plots were foiled and other terrorists seized thanks to the harsh methods. Perhaps, in some of these cases, Bush is telling the truth, but there's no compelling reason to think so.

By now, the President's relentless exploitation of September 11th has made even non-partisan Americans skeptical of his claims. In the Administration's current public-relations blitz, Bush has invoked Hitler, Lenin, and wars for civilization, while Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld compared Iraq-war critics to Nazi appeasers circa 1938. The purpose of the rhetoric is not to persuade-if the Administration believed in argument on the merits, Bush would have to defend torture-but to make reasoned debate impossible. With one half of the country whipped into a state of fear and the other half sunk in cynicism, Americans can scarcely think or talk clearly about whether, five years on, we need a profound change in strategy.

At almost exactly the same hour last week that the President was speaking in the East Room, Lieutenant General John (Jeff) Kimmons, the Army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence, was briefing reporters at the Pentagon on the military's new field manual for "human intelligence collector operations." The manual spells out which interrogation techniques will be forbidden. "Interrogators may not force a detainee to be naked, perform sexual acts, or pose in a sexual manner," General Kimmons said, in exactly the specific language that the President refuses to use. "They cannot beat or electrically shock or burn them or inflict other forms of physical pain, any form of physical pain. They may not use water boarding." When the General was asked whether he thought it was a mistake not to classify the list of permitted techniques, he showed that some members of the government and the military have learned from the mistakes of the past few years: the need for transparency, for working with allies, he said, is greater than the need for secrecy. And when a reporter asked whether some of the now forbidden forms of torture might have been useful in gaining information, General Kimmons directly contradicted what his Commander-in-Chief was saying at the White House:

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, tells us that. And, 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. So we don't need abusive practices in there.

Last week, in the guise of calling for fair trials, the President demanded that Congress give him the power to go on torturing detainees in secret prisons and use the evidence obtained against them. And last week the Army honorably closed the holes in moral conduct that the President, his counsel, the Vice-President, the Justice Department, and the Secretary of Defense pried open shortly after September 11th. It did so not only to remove the stain on its reputation and to protect its soldiers but because it cares more about the war than about the next election.


3. Judge, Jury, and Torturer -- by James Carroll (from the Boston Globe)

"Trust us. You're guilty. We're going to execute you, but we can't tell you why." That is how Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, characterized the Bush administration's recent proposal for a draconian new trial system to deal with accused terrorists. The plan includes a reinterpretation of prisoner protections guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions. Graham was joined in opposition last week by other Republicans, including Colin Powell. Remarkably , lawyers in the Pentagon also raised objections. But the White House argument is straightforward: terrorists are such a mortal threat that established due process must be suspended. In particular, the classified secrets of anti terrorist operations must be so closely held that the most basic pillar of jurisprudence - the accused's right to know and respond to evidence - must be discarded. The legislation was drafted by Franz Kafka.

The Congress will decide how to respond to administration proposals, and courts will review whatever system is enacted. All of this unfolds in the context, first, of the Supreme Court's decision in June that Bush-sponsored terrorist tribunals, centered in Guantanamo, violate international law and the Constitution, and, second, of the administration's admission two weeks ago that the CIA has been running a secret and extrajudicial prison system abroad, without any pretense of legal procedure. Nothing inhibits interrogation methods from approaching torture. Not exactly grounds for trust.

In the United States, there has been only vague unease about such revelations. It does not seem right to suspend hallowed legal protections, but questions about such Bush policies dating back to early days of the war on terrorism have not risen to the level of vigorous resistance, much less indignation. That's why the Supreme Court ruling was so surprising. Regarding the new White House proposals, The New York Times reported that, even with vociferous Republican objection, responses from Democrats were muted. They don't want to seem friendly to terrorists.

What reservations are expressed have less to do with innate rights of the accused than with possible repercussions when enemies apply such standards to captured US soldiers. Last week, 27 retired military leaders warned Congress, "If degradation, humiliation, physical, and mental brutalization of prisoners is decriminalized" then US soldiers will suffer similarly.

But the fabric of law is spun from a single thread and when the US government deems a few individuals to be less worthy of full protections against the abuse of power , everyone is threatened.

That's because the procedures of law - the requirement, in this example, that the accused be shown the evidence - protect not only the individual but the system itself. To say that justice must be administered blindly is to forbid favoritism toward the privileged, yes, but it is also to prevent prejudice toward the despised or dangerous.

Justice is measured in every society by how the worst malefactors are treated - the worst not only in culpability, but in capacity for general harm. The best way to combat terrorism is to wrap accused terrorists in the cloth of the law they would rip asunder. More important, to legalize the abuse of a class of prisoners is to prepare for the abuse of all.

In the novels and stories of Kafka, the guilt or innocence of the accused is not the issue. When hauled before the unknown accuser, without explanation of charges or evidence, Kafka's characters assume that they must have done something wrong. The surreal dislocation of the one imprisoned in the penal colony or the castle consists in solitude, vulnerability, ignorance. The anonymously oppressing power structure is Kafka's true subject, and it is characterized only by its radical unaccountability. "Trust us. You're guilty. We're going to execute you, but we can't tell you why." The absolute power of the oppressor depends on the absolute ignorance of the oppressed.

Kafka died in 1924, but his work was recognized as a prophecy of the totalitarian nightmares of the rest of the 20th century. Who would have thought his images would resonate again? And not this time in Berlin or Prague. To watch the Bush administration cavalierly dismantle the most basic structures of justice is to feel like the man in "Metamorphosis" who discovers upon awakening that, in the night, he has become a monstrous insect. But, in the United States today, instead of thinking of his body as the objection of gross mutation, he is thinking of his nation. Kafka's last novel was called "Amerika."


4. The Torturer Tries to
Save His Own Hide -- by Paul Craig Roberts

President George Bush, betrayed by the neoconservatives whom he elevated to power and by his attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, who gave him wrong legal advice, is locked in a desperate struggle with the Republican Congress to save himself from war crimes charges at the expense of America's reputation and our soldiers' fate.

Beguiled by neoconservatives, who told him that the virtuous goals of the American empire justified any means, and misled by an incompetent attorney general, who told him that the president of the U.S. is above the law, Bush was deceived into committing war crimes under Article 3 of the Geneva Convention and the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996. Bush is now desperately trying to save himself by having the U.S. Congress retroactively repeal both Article 3 and U.S. law.

Under the U.S. Constitution, retroactive law is without force, but desperate men will try anything.

President Bush has given no thought to the impact on America's reputation of his strident campaign to write torture into U.S. law. He has given no thought to what saving himself means for captured U.S. troops if the U.S. government guts Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

How could he care? This is the same president who prevented the world from intervening to stop Israel's slaughter of Lebanese civilians. This is the same president who describes tens of thousands of slaughtered Iraqi and Afghan civilians as "collateral damage." What sort of war is it when civilian casualties far outnumber casualties among combatants?

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was used by Bush to lie to the UN in order to create a pretext for Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq, denounced Bush's attempt to repeal Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Powell said Bush's proposal causes the world to "doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism" and will "put our own troops at risk." Republican Senators John McCain, John Warner, and Lindsey Graham agree with Powell, although their arms may yet be twisted out of their sockets.

Bush's claim that America cannot fight the "war on terror" without employing torture is just another Bush lie. It is a known fact that torture produces unreliable information. Torture can make people talk, but it cannot make them give reliable information.

Very few of the tens of thousands of "suspects" that the U.S. has detained are guilty of anything. We know this because the U.S. Iraqi Command says that 18,700 Iraqis have been released since June 2004. U.S. officers told the International Red Cross that 70 to 90 percent of the Iraqi detentions were "mistakes."

Most of these mistakes were people who were simply pulled out of their beds or grabbed off streets as "suspected insurgents," victims of military sweeps akin to the KGB street sweeps of the Stalin era, which resulted in so many Soviet citizens disappearing into the gulag. Others were sold to naive Americans by warlords who collected a bounty for turning in "terrorists."

When innocent people are tortured, they invent information in order to stop the pain. Sometimes they settle a score with a personal enemy or someone they dislike by giving their name. People who experienced Soviet torture and survived say they tried to remember names of deceased persons to identify as "enemies of the state."

An actual terrorist or insurgent who believes in his cause is not going to give accurate information. If his torturers demand information on a pending attack, he will give the wrong location. If they demand the identities of his group, he will give the wrong names. He is worth very little as an information source, because his colleagues, aware that he is captured or missing, will change plans and arrangements.

The U.S. military has not learned anything from torturing detainees and continues to lose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan despite its widespread use of torture.

Lying is now a full-time occupation for U.S. military spokespersons as well as for President Bush. Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin Curry, a spokesman for U.S. military detainee operations in Iraq, says that every detainee "is detained because he poses a security threat to the government of Iraq, the people of Iraq or coalition forces." President Bush says, "These are enemy combatants who are waging war on our nation." Someone needs to tell Bush and Curry that what they allege cannot be true if 70-90 percent of detainees are mistaken detentions and 18,700 detainees have been released in the last 14 months.

Baghdad shopkeeper Amjad Qassim al-Aliyawi is a good example. He languished in detention limbo for 20 months without charges and without apology when released.

Many studies have concluded that people who go into interrogation and police work are bullies who like to exercise power and hurt people. Bush is willing to make such people even less accountable in order to protect himself from war crimes charges.

If Bush were a real man, he would fire Gonzales and the neocons. He would say he was given bad advice, and regrets that he didn't know better than to follow it. He would order closed all the secret prisons, end the illegal policy of rendition, and order that all U.S. military detention facilities be run in strict accordance with the Geneva Conventions.

This would serve Bush and America's reputation far better than his attempt to legalize torture.


5. The Content of Our Character -- by Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith

In a significant rebuff to President Bush and his security-driven strategy for Republican victory in November, the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday rejected the President's military detainee bill and passed a radically different alternative. At stake in this standoff between the President and the Senate are legal and moral issues central to the Constitution and the character of the American people: the right to a fair trial, the use of torture, the accountability of high government officials for war crimes. It also tests the powers of Congress and the Supreme Court to rein in an errant executive.

In the run-up to the midterm elections, the Bush Administration seeks to position Republicans as tough in pursuing the "war on terror," and to present Democrats as soft. By revealing recently that the government had been holding captives in secret jails and aims to try them at Guantánamo Bay, Bush and his advisers signaled that they are clearly hoping for an upswell of public support for Republicans who are "tough on terror."

But it was Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee, not Democrats, who led the battle this week against the President's proposal: John Warner, Lindsey Graham and John McCain were joined in the 15-to-9 committee vote by Susan Collins of Maine.

The President's proposal seeks to roll back two important decisions rendered by the Supreme Court on the legal rights and treatment of terror suspects: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and Rasul v. Bush . It would establish tribunals at Guantánamo that would deny the most basic legal protections required by the Geneva Conventions, allow the use of hearsay evidence and evidence obtained by coercion, and allow defendants to be convicted on the basis of evidence they had never seen.

It also guts much of the War Crimes Act , which makes it a federal crime for an American to commit "grave violations" of the Geneva Conventions. While the Administration claims it is concerned about protecting CIA interrogators, its bill would also protect mercenaries and top government officials from prosecution. And it would apply retroactively to September 11, 2001.

The Senate Armed Services Committee bill, in contrast, aims to establish Guantánamo tribunals in accordance with the standards set out in the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision. And it would leave much more of the War Crimes Act intact. Nonetheless, the Warner bill has some significant flaws.

According to an analysis by Georgetown Law School professor and former Clinton official Marty Lederman, posted on his Balkinization blog, the Warner bill would reverse the Supreme Court's Rasul v. Bush decision by eliminating the power of the federal courts to hear the habeas corpus claims of any noncitizen detained overseas or any individual who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant "other than in very circumscribed appeals from decisions of the Civilian Status Review Commissions or military tribunals."

This provision would foreclose hundreds of Guantánamo detainee claims currently pending before the courts. J. Wells Dixon of the Center for Constitutional Rights told The Nation : "For more than 200 years our nation has adhered to the fundamental principle that our government is one of laws, not men. The Administration and Warner bills threaten that tradition by stripping the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear pending habeas cases brought by Guantánamo detainees. If enacted, these bills would authorize the life-long detention of more than 450 men who have been imprisoned in Guantánamo for nearly five years without ever having been charged with an offense or receiving a fair hearing. This is unconscionable. Every person detained by our nation must receive a fair hearing--one that does not rely on secret evidence or evidence obtained by torture or coercion--because fairness and due process are what America stands for. We would demand nothing less for members of our military if they were captured abroad by our enemies. Congress should reject any provision that abandons habeas corpus."

The Warner bill would also amend the War Crimes Act to provide effective legal cover for many of the CIA's "alternative" techniques--including use of hypothermia, sleep deprivation and threats of violence against detainees and their families.

In short, while some kind of trial for some alleged enemy combatants may well be appropriate, the Warner/McCain/Graham bill should not be seen as an acceptable alternative to the Bush bill. Basic human rights should not be abridged on the back of an envelope without hearings or debate.

Passage of the President's bill seems assured in the House of Representatives. Despite the objection of some Democrats, the House Armed Services Committee majority--including twenty of its twenty-eight Democrats--voted September 13 to send a bill incorporating the President's plans to the full House.

The most visible House dissent has come from a group of twenty-four Democrats led by Ed Markey of Massachusetts, who wrote, "We are opposed to any changes in the War Crimes Act that would have the effect of undermining the proscriptions against torture or other cruel or degrading treatment contained in the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture."

Senate majority leader Bill Frist has threatened to bring the Administration's bill, instead of the Warner measure, to the Senate floor, inviting a showdown. If and when that happens, Warner may try to amend it with the provisions of the committee's bill. The Administration may hold its fire until the House-Senate conference committee meets to negotiate a final text. But at present Warner and his allies seem to have the votes to block a conference committee bill that incorporates the President's proposal.

To complicate matters further, there may be an effort to roll the detainee bill together with another measure on warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency, of which House and Senate committees have passed radically differing versions. Since Congress is scheduled to adjourn in two weeks, deadlock seems at least as likely as new legislation. The good news is that with a deadlock, the Rasul and Hamdan decisions--as well as the War Crimes Act--remain intact.

Principle has played some role in the resistance to the Bush Administration. McCain has said he won't back down even if it ruins his chance of becoming President in 2008. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Bush's own military law chiefs and other military officials have made ringing defenses of the Geneva Conventions and have warned that tampering with them would threaten America's global reputation and the well-being of its military personnel captured in the future.

But the political context is also critical. Five years after 9/11, the Republican strategy has been to take attention off an unpopular war by railing against terrorism. But increasing concerns are surfacing within the GOP over the Administration's security proposals, the President's approval rate has plummeted and support for the Iraq War, which has now lasted longer than World War II, is waning.

House Republicans have responded to the President's order to "jump" by saying, "How high?" But as Jonathan Weisman wrote in the September 14 Washington Post , "by backing the president's legislative demands, the [Republican] leadership risks being labeled by Democrats as a rubber stamp for an unpopular president."

Republican support for a law that countenances torture, prisoner abuse and repudiation of the Constitution, the Supreme Court and the Geneva Conventions could provide an important issue for Democratic Congressional candidates. But Democratic House candidates can't criticize Republicans if they are supporting Bush's legislation themselves--as a majority of Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee have done. A strong Democratic position against the President's bill now could be a real boost for Democratic House candidates challenging House Republicans.

The fight over military tribunals and torture is far more than a partisan issue. In Connecticut, for example, religious activists affiliated with the National Religious Campaign Against Torture have initiated a campaign that seeks to hold all Senate and House candidates in the state accountable for their positions on torture and the abuse of executive power. They have begun meeting with Congressional candidates and injecting the torture issue into campaign events.

Connecticut is particularly important because it features three tight House races and the bellwether Ned Lamont-Joe Lieberman contest. The religious activists take some credit for having encouraged Lamont to adopt a much more outspoken position on torture. Lieberman is particularly vulnerable on the issue because he was one of only five Democratic senators who voted for a Republican bill to strip Guantánamo captives of the 800-year-old right to habeas corpus, and because he was one of only six Democrats who voted to confirm Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General--after endorsing the conclusions of Gonzales's notorious "torture memo." He's claiming to be a moral leader who is not in bed with President Bush. The religious activists are now organizing a media event with clerics from varied denominations to ask Connecticut's two senators, Lieberman and Dodd, to come out with a forthright stand against the President's bill.

(Legal scholar Brendan Smith and historian Jeremy Brecher are the editors, with Jill Cutler, of " In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond " (Metropolitan/Holt, 2005) ( www.americanempireproject.com ), and the founders of www.warcrimeswatch.org)