The unimaginable has come to pass - Bush and Cheney lobby for torture, AGAIN

Bush and Cheney bring shame on our nation with their support of torture, and tolerating torture techniques like water-boarding. Now they've been forced to a deal by leaders of their own party who've stood against their repulsive lobbying for torture. But if you read the report below carefully, it seems the President still has wriggle room to allow torture techniques. For example, waterboarding has NOT been outlawed. As The NY Times notes in an editorial this morning: "The deal does next to nothing to stop the president from reinterpreting the Geneva Conventions. While the White House agreed to a list of 'grave breaches' of the conventions that could be prosecuted as war crimes, it stipulated that the president could decide on his own what actions might be a lesser breach of the Geneva Conventions and what interrogation techniques he considered permissible. It’s not clear how much the public will ultimately learn about those decisions. They will be contained in an executive order that is supposed to be made public, but Mr. Hadley reiterated that specific interrogation techniques will remain secret."

[Waterboarding: The modern practice of waterboarding, characterized in 2005 by former CIA director Porter J. Goss as a "professional interrogation technique,” involves tying the victim to a board with the head lower than the feet so that he or she is unable to move. A piece of cloth is held tightly over the face, and water is poured onto the cloth. Breathing is extremely difficult and the victim will be in fear of imminent death by asphyxiation. Journalists Brian Ross and Richard Esposito described the CIA 's waterboarding technique as follows: "Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt. According to the sources, CIA officers who subjected themselves to the water boarding technique lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in. They said al Qaeda's toughest prisoner, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, won the admiration of interrogators when he was able to last over two minutes before begging to confess."

In the United States, military personnel are taught this technique, ostensibly to demonstrate how to resist enemy interrogations in the event of capture. According to Salon.com, military instructors shared their torture techniques with interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp.

Dr. Allen Keller, the director of the Bellevue/N.Y.U. Program for Survivors of Torture, has treated "a number of people" who had been subjected to forms of near-asphyxiation, including waterboarding. An interview for The New Yorker states: "Dr. Keller argued that it was indeed torture. Some victims were still traumatized years later, he said. One patient couldn't take showers, and panicked when it rained. 'The fear of being killed is a terrifying experience,' he said.]

Top Republicans Reach an Accord on Detainee Bill – by KATE ZERNIKE

WASHINGTON, Sept. 21 — The Bush administration and Congressional Republicans reached agreement Thursday on legislation governing the treatment and interrogation of terrorism suspects after weeks of debate that divided Republicans heading into the midterm elections. Under the deal, President Bush dropped his demand that Congress redefine the nation’s obligations under the Geneva Conventions, handing a victory to a group of Republicans, including Senator John McCain of Arizona, whose opposition had created a showdown over a fundamental aspect of the rules for battling terrorism.

“There is no doubt that the integrity and the letter and the spirit of the Geneva Conventions have been preserved,” said Mr. McCain, who was tortured during more than five years as a prisoner in North Vietnam. Members of Congress and administration officials announced the deal after emerging from a tense and intricate all-day meeting in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office in a Senate building.

The dispute revolved around how to define the rules governing the interrogations of terrorism suspects and providing legal protection to C.I.A. officers conducting interrogations. Under the deal, Congress would seek to codify the limits by outlining in the War Crimes Act, a domestic law, several “grave breaches” of the relevant provision of the Geneva Conventions, known as Common Article 3. The agreement says the executive branch is responsible for upholding the nations’ commitment to the Geneva Conventions, leaving it to the president to establish through executive rule any violations for the handling of terrorism suspects that fall short of a “grave breach.” Significantly, Senate aides said, those rules would have to be published in the Federal Register.

The agreement provides several pages describing “grave breaches” that would not be allowed, starting with torture and including other forms of assault and mental stress. But it does not lay out specific interrogation techniques that would be prohibited. Asked about one of the most controversial interrogation techniques, a simulated drowning known as water-boarding, Mr. Graham said, “It is a technique that we need to let the world know we are no longer engaging in.”

The senators agreed to a White House proposal to make the standard on interrogation treatment retroactive to 1997, so C.I.A. and military personnel could not be prosecuted for past treatment under standards the administration considers vague. On another point of contention, the use of classified evidence in prosecutions of terror suspects, the senators won agreement that suspects would be allowed to see any evidence the jury sees, which the senators say is in keeping with 200 years of American judicial tradition.


1. Into a Moral Desert -- by Harold Meyerson (from the Washington Post)

At its highest levels, the literature of war is often about a hero gone bad, a hero, in fact, who becomes indistinguishable from his enemy. Achilles, to begin at the beginning, outrages the gods by his desecration of the body of his slain archrival, Hector, and it takes a message from Zeus to persuade him to relinquish the body for burial.

In America, the closest we've come to having a Homer of our own, "an epic, tragic, national poet," is probably John Ford, the tormented, alcoholic Irish American director who invented both the classic Western and John Wayne in his 1939 film "Stagecoach." But it's the film Ford made immediately after that, "Young Mr. Lincoln," starring young Henry Fonda, that may be the single most lyrical and compelling evocation of the American ideals of justice and community ever crafted by an American artist. No one did heroes as well as Ford.

So it's all the more startling to see Ford's late Western "The Searchers," his ninth picture with Wayne, which came out in 1956. Suddenly, Wayne no longer personifies the chivalrous ideals he embodied as the Ringo Kid in "Stagecoach" or the military officers in Ford's cavalry films. In "The Searchers," Wayne plays a former Confederate cavalryman who rode off to avoid surrendering to the Yankees and who is possessed by a raging hatred of Indians. As the self-appointed protector of isolated frontier settlers who are subjected to murderous raids from a band of Comanches, he becomes as savage as the Comanches themselves -- his hatred culminating in a shot in which he scalps the Comanche chief he has tracked for five years.

Nor does Ford let even his beloved cavalry off easy, showing us the bodies of squaws killed in a raid on a Comanche encampment. In the film's famous closing shot, with the camera positioned inside a settler's home looking out the doorway to the desert beyond, the Wayne character returns his niece, whom the Comanches had kidnapped five years earlier, to the settler's family. She enters the house; other characters enter the house; and Wayne remains outside, looking in, then turning, then walking away into the desert as the door closes and the picture ends.

Defend civilization by becoming as barbaric as its enemies, Ford suggests, and you are no longer really part of that civilization. Or perhaps you are, but that civilization has lost some of its ideals, its raison d'être, in the process.

These thoughts of Homer and Ford on men in war are occasioned by the story of the Syrian-born Canadian computer engineer whom the Mounties misidentified as an al-Qaeda associate and whom our own government then spirited off to Syria in September 2002 so he could be tortured into revealing what he knew. After nearly a year of torture, it was clear that he knew nothing, because he wasn't an al-Qaeda associate.

What's striking about this story (and it's just one of many things that are striking about this story) is that we sent him to Syria, which was providing us with some assistance during the period between Sept. 11 and our invasion of Iraq but which also was an authoritarian regime that knew no constraints in the treatment of its presumed enemies. We sent him there because he'd be tortured, because the Syrians would do the kinds of things that the same administration officials who devised this policy feared the Syrians, given half a chance, would do to us.

But why rely just on the Syrians? At the same time, as the president acknowledged this month, we ourselves (that is, CIA employees) had embarked on our own round of torture of al-Qaeda suspects, some of them the genuine article, some not. As the president asserted during his news conference Friday, that doesn't mean that we've become our enemy, that we're in any sense the moral equivalent of al-Qaeda. But it most certainly means we've abandoned our own moral and legal norms, as the administration's determination to create a loophole in the Geneva Conventions makes unmistakably clear.

Lindsey Graham, John Warner, Colin Powell and above all John McCain know firsthand what war can do to men and why we need laws to keep men from becoming their nightmare image of their enemy. Their knowledge is as old as Homer, as American as John Ford.

As events would have it, though, our nation is led by men who have carefully avoided both war and literature. By men devoid of a sense of the nation's and their own moral fallibility. By men who have led us into a moral desert and aren't even looking for a way back home.

(meyersonh@washpost.com)


2. A Tortured Debate -- by Molly Ivins (from TruthDig)

AUSTIN, Texas - Some country is about to have a Senate debate on a bill to legalize torture. How weird is that?

I’d like to thank Sens. John McCain, Lindsay Graham—a former military lawyer—and John Warner of Virginia. I will always think fondly of John Warner for this one reason: Forty years ago, this country was involved in an unprovoked and unnecessary war. It ended so badly the vets finally had to hold their own homecoming parade, years after they came home. The only member of Congress who attended was John Warner.

A debate on torture. I don’t know—what do you think? I guess we have to define it, first. The White House has already specified “water boarding,” making some guy think he’s drowning for long periods, as a perfectly good interrogation technique. Maybe, but it was also a great favorite of the Gestapo and has been described and condemned in thousands of memoirs and novels in highly unpleasant terms.

I don’t think we can give it a good name again, and I personally kind of don’t like being identified with the Gestapo. How icky. (Somewhere inside me, a small voice is shrieking, “Are you insane?")

The safe position is, “Torture doesn’t work.”

Well, actually, it works to this extent—anybody can be tortured into telling anything that’s true and anything that’s not true. The more people are tortured, the more they make up to please the torturer. Then the torturer has to figure out when the vic started lying. Since our torturers are, in George Bush’s immortal phrase, “professionals” and this whole legislative fight is over making torture legal so the “professionals” can’t later be charged with breaking the Geneva Conventions, Bush has vowed to end “the program” completely if he doesn’t get what he wants. (The same thin voice is shrieking, “Professional torturers trained with my tax money?")

Bush’s problem is that despite repeated warnings, he went ahead with “the program” without waiting for Congress to provide a fig leaf of legality. Actually, we have been torturing prisoners at Gitmo, prisons in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan for years.

Since only seven of the several hundred prisoners at Gitmo have ever been charged with anything, we face the unhappy prospect that the rest of them are innocent. And will sue. That’s going to be quite an expensive settlement. The Canadian upon whom we practiced “rendition,” sending him to Syria for 10 months of torture, will doubtlessly be first on the legal docket. I wonder how high up the chain of command a civil suit can go? Any old war criminals wandering around?

I was interested to find that the Rev. Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition is so in favor of torture he told McCain that the senator either supports the torture bill or he can forget about the evangelical Christian vote. I’d like to see an evangelical vote on that one. I don’t know how Sheldon defines traditional values, but deliberately inflicting terrible physical pain or stress on someone who is completely helpless strikes me as ... well, torture. And, um, wrong. And I’ve smoked dope! Boy, everything those conservatives tell us about the terrible moral values of us liberals must be true after all.

Now, in addition to the slightly surreal awakening to find we live in a country that’s having a serious debate on a torture bill, can we do anything about it? The answer is: We better. We better do something about it. Now, right away. What do we do? The answer is: anything ... phone, fax, e-mail, mail, demonstrate—go stand outside their offices or the nearest federal building in the cold and sing hymns or shout rude slogans, chant or make a speech, or start attacking federal property, like a postal box, so they have to arrest you. Gather peacefully and make a lot of noise. Get publicity, too.

How will you feel if you didn’t do something? “Well, honey, when the United States decided to adopt torture as an official policy, I was dipping the dog for ticks.”

As Ann Richards used to say, “I don’t want my tombstone to read: ‘She kept a clean house.’”

(To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com)


3. Fish, barrel, drain the barrel
Torture provides Bush false evidence for monstrous lies
By Geov Parrish (from WorkingForChange.com)

It's almost too easy to write something castigating President Bush and Vice President Cheney for their unprecedented joint trip to Capitol Hill last week to, in the words of the Washington Post 's editorial headline, "lobby for torture." They were unsuccessful last week, but the fight is far from over, and once November 7 is safely past, cleaving Republican votes from the line of a now-toxic White House will get a little harder.

But still, it's too easy. Sort of like fish in a barrel. Except no gun: the appropriate analogy here is draining the barrel of all its water and watching the fish flop around for a while, for the fun of it. Maybe pour a little more water into the draining barrel, just to prolong the agony. Maybe they'll tell you something you want to hear.

That, not accurate intelligence -- which common sense and intelligence professionals agree is almost never produced by torture -- is the whole point of the Bush push for the right to torture. It helps destroy what's left of America's moral standing in the world, sure, and granted, it exposes U.S. soldiers captured by enemies to far greater risk. It brutalizes both tortured and torturer. And it's morally despicable. But it allows Bush and his cronies to lie credibly. And that's the point.

This can be seen most dramatically in several instances in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, best documented in the case of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. Al-Libi, an upper-level Al-Qaeda operative believed to have once run the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, was an early capture in the so-called War on Terror, handed over to the CIA by the Pakistanis and then rendered to Egypt. There, Egyptian torturers elicited from him a demonstrably preposterous statement that Iraq had been training al-Qaeda operatives in explosives and chemical weapons.

This claim, in turn, was included in President Bush's key Cincinnati speech to the country on October 7, 2002, just three days before the Congress voted on the war. It was repeated by the administration numerous times during its drumbeat for war, including Colin Powell's U.N. speech of February 5, 2003.

Intelligence agencies were skeptical of the claims all along, but their voices were stifled from above. Later, al-Libi himself managed to get out to the world the message that the "confession" was false and obtained through torture. We don't know, of course, whether the signed statement was waiting for him, dictated to him, or simply "encouraged." By this point, it scarcely matters. Torture had done exactly what the Bush administration wanted: provided seemingly credible "evidence" to back up a monstrous lie.

Another example: remember Jose Padilla? The "dirty bomb" plot for which Padilla, a U.S. citizen spent three and a half years charged with no crime and rotting incommunicado in a military brig, before a U.S. Supreme Court decision forced the feds to actually charge him with a crime and let him face trial? At which point the so-called "dirty bomb" plot wasn't even mentioned? That Jose Padilla? Ever wonder where the U.S. got their evidence for the "dirty bomb" allegations, presented as terrifying fact by John Ashcroft in June of 2002 (nine months after 9-11, and just as the White House was getting ready to push hard for war in Iraq)?

Well, it turns out the guy who ratted on Padilla was none other than 9-11 plotter Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded (at least) as part of his "aggressive interrogation." We can only imagine the circumstances under which Padilla's name was offered up, and by whom.

This -- not the admittedly necessary debate over moral imperatives, efficacy, risk to soldiers, and the like -- is the real heart of the matter. Bush and Cheney want the right to torture because they think it will help them lie with impunity, and they are so committed to needing to be able to lie, effectively, that none of the rest of those issues -- including the threat to troops and the damages it causes to the larger goal of preventing terror -- trump that.

As in, for example, the run-up to a military strike against Iran.

And then George W. Bush, presumably after an intimate chat with God, gets on camera and tells the nation that torture is necessary to make America safer. Which is another lie, of course, but beyond that, does he really think we're that stupid? Or that amoral? Is he even listening when he has his little talks with his Maker?

Remember, way back, when Dubya first took office, and his supporters (and new administration members) crowed that, finally, adults were in charge of running things? Set aside the fact that at the moment both Bill Clinton, with his Global Initiative, and Al Gore with his stumping for global warming solutions, are doing far more as private citizens to address serious issues than Bush, as a sitting two-term president, ever has. We can concede, via that semen-stained dress, that Clinton was in at least some ways stuck in adolescence.

But currently this nation is being run, it appears, by seven-year-olds who show no signs of maturing further. Specifically, not very bright, dissembling, lying, frightfully cruel and vicious seven-year-old boys, the type who put ants under a magnifying glass or pull the wings or legs off insects just to see what happens. Or causes up to 300,000 Iraqi civilian deaths (the April 2006 estimate of one of the authors of the 2004 Lancet epidemiological report), or tortures prisoners with not the least concern as to the effect on the victim. Or the torturer, or the soul of the country that embraces torture.

Maybe those ants, or insects, or fish, told the boys something they wanted to hear.


4. Reclaiming The Issues: "Keep George Out Of Jail" -- by Thom Hartmann

The Republicans are trying to keep George W. Bush out of jail. So far, the media and the Democrats haven't done much to stop them.

On the surface, it seems the Republicans are having a debate about "wiretapping terrorists" and "harsh interrogation of prisoners." These frames about the current "rebellion" by McCain, Graham, Warner, et al, are today embraced by both the Republican Party and the mainstream media.

But the real issue is whether Republicans in Congress will trade the principles of democracy and the rule of law to keep George W. Bush and several of his colleagues out of jail, or whether they'll uphold the rule of law and American democracy while abandoning him to face the consequences of his illegal acts.

On June 29, 2006, in the Hamden Case , the US Supreme Court ruled that Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration had violated the Geneva Convention and other international treaties with regard to the treatment and prosecution of detainees in the so-called " war on terror ."

The logic of the decision could subject Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, and Rumsfeld - along with those down the chain of command who followed their orders - to prosecution as war criminals both in the United States and internationally. If they violated Common Article 3 and others of the Geneva Conventions, they could be subject to lengthy imprisonment in the US for violating US laws, as well as being brought before the United Nation's International Court of Justice at The Hague, the same as Slobodan Milosevic.

A hastily convened conference call by the Justice Department to discuss the ruling caused Brian Roehrkasse at the Department of Justice Public Affairs Office to comment to those on the call that "the Supreme Court's holding indicates the military commissions, as currently constituted by DOD, while robust in affording enemy combatants more process than this or any other country has ever afforded enemy combatants, are not consistent with current congressional statutes, especially the UCMJ and treaty provisions, Common Article 3."

A plain English translation would be close to: "The Supreme Court said we've broken US law, we've broken the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and we've broken the Geneva Conventions' Common Article 3."

About six weeks later, on August 17, 2006, Federal Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled in Detroit that George W. Bush and his administration had committed numerous felonies with regard to wiretapping American citizens without a legal warrant, including violating the FISA act (which carries a 5-year prison term as the penalty for each violation) and violating the Constitution (which carries impeachment as its penalty). Later in the day, the Department of Homeland Security facilitated the arrest in Thailand of John Mark Karr for killing JonBenet Ramsey, sweeping the story off the front page and out of the weekend news analysis shows, but the ruling is still there.

Thus the Republicans are scrambling.

If either of these precedents carry forward or are seriously prosecuted - as could happen if Democrats take either the House or the Senate and gain the power to investigate crimes of the Bush Administration, or could simply happen as the normal course of events if lawyers in the Justice Department and the United Nations enforce the law - Republicans are faced with the very real possibility that George W. Bush and others in his administration could go to prison. Impeachment is a virtual given.

Thus the spin. And the compromises. And the debates within the Republican Party. And the corporate media's efforts to limit the discussion to the "wiretapping debate" and the "prisoner interrogation/torture debate."

Scratch the veneer off, though, and you quickly see that this is really about keeping George out of jail.

This one will be interesting to watch.

Will the Republicans bail George out the way Osama's half-brother, Salem Bin Laden (who soon thereafter died in a plane crash in Texas), did when Dubya's Harken Oil Company was going bust? Will they keep him from being prosecuted the way his father did when Poppy shut down an SEC investigation of Junior's inside trading? Will they keep him out of federal custody the way his daddy did when Dubya left the Texas Air National Guard to desert the military and go on a year-long drinking binge in Alabama?

And will the Democratic Party seize the frame - or use as an October Surprise - the fact of George W. Bush's vulnerability to criminal prosecution?

Or will the Republicans - and maybe even Poppy Bush (who's spending an eerie amount of time with his new surrogate son, Bill Clinton) - simply decide that after sixty years it's finally time for George to fend for himself, and leave our laws intact?

It could, after all, be the best way for a "maverick" Republican like McCain to reclaim the Republican party and pin all the blame for five years of High Crimes And Misdemeanors on Dubya, paving the way for a "cleaner" Republican slate in the '08 elections. Many of these same Republicans, remember, were pushing hard for jail time for Bill Clinton for lying to a Grand Jury about having sex in the Oval Office - and were quite vocal about how a president could be both impeached and prosecuted for crimes.

The next few weeks - and the fine print in the "compromises" being hammered out among Republicans in the Senate right now - will tell.

(Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show carried on the Air America Radio network and Sirius .www.thomhartmann.com. His most recent book is " Screwed: The Undeclared War on the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It .")


5. Clarifying Torture
Mr. President, what part of prohibiting "cruel treatment and torture" don't you understand?
By Ronald Bailey

At a press conference on Friday, President Bush expressed his displeasure that the Supreme Court of the United States would require his Administration to comply with an international treaty that had been signed by a predecessor and duly ratified by two-thirds of the Senate.

"The Court said that you've got to live under Article III of the Geneva Convention, and the standards are so vague that our professionals won't be able to carry forward the program, because they don't want to be tried as war criminals," declared a clearly annoyed Bush. The President specifically noted that "Common Article III says that there will be no outrages upon human dignity. It's very vague. What does that mean, 'outrages upon human dignity'? That's a statement that is wide open to interpretation."

Actually, to be specific, Article III subclause 3(c) to which the President is referring prohibits "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." But never mind—whatever distinctions might be made between "personal" and "human" dignity, we get the President's point. Human dignity is indeed a notoriously vague concept. But its very vagueness is, in this context, a valuable protection for all prisoners captured during hostilities.

The Convention is aimed chiefly at protecting captured soldiers—either foreign or insurgent. In general, "soldier" is defined by Article IV as people wearing uniforms and openly carrying arms. However, the question of whether or not operatives of Al Qaeda, the Taliban or other terrorist groups qualify is moot because the Supreme Court decided in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that Common Article III applies to them. The Hamdan decision disallowed the kangaroo court system that President Bush wanted unilaterally to establish for trying alleged terrorists. However, applying Common Article III carries wider implications for the treatment of prisoners held by the military and other federal agencies.

In any case, the vagueness of the phrase "outrages on personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment" is a real strength of the Convention, not a flaw. Why? Because those who hold prisoners captured on battlefields everywhere will have to think long and hard about what activities might violate that provision and lead them later to be charged with war crimes. It encourages military and other jailers to err on the side of caution when it comes to their treatment of prisoners. This is a point that Republican Senators McCain, Graham and Warner have made repeatedly—we would want those holding captured American soldiers as prisoners to treat them well physically and with the utmost respect for their rights. Also, the fact that some CIA operatives are buying legal insurance in order to pay for their legal costs should they have to defend themselves in court from accusations that they committed war crimes is evidence that Article III is working as intended.

Common Article III doesn’t just protect the "dignity" of prisoners. President Bush failed to mention that it also prohibits "violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture." The president wants to authorize CIA operatives to use " alternative interrogation procedures " which include such techniques as simulated drowning known as " waterboarding ." And however vague the terms "torture" and "violence to life and person" may be, they certainly do include the activities permitted by the Bush Administration's infamous " torture memo ." Torture, according to that Justice Department memo "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." I am not a legal scholar, but I believe the type of activities that the memo is describing are clearly torture and clearly violate Article III. Treatment far short of inducing pain equivalent to organ failure would shock the conscience of any civilized person and all Americans would certainly and properly protest if any U.S. personnel were "interrogated" in such a manner.

The President threatened that if Congress persists in trying to limit his ability to authorize "alternative interrogation procedures," aka "torture," that the "program will not go forward." Well, hooray for that.

At his press conference on Friday, the President declared, "It's unacceptable to think that there's any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective." Indeed it is; and by vigorously adhering to and defending the provisions of Common Article 3, the United States would make it clear, as a civilized nation, that any such comparison is now, and will always be, false.


(Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.)


6. Control the Dictionary, Control the World -- by Bernard Weiner (from The Crisis Papers)

Clinton tried to fudge the truth when he claimed he'd "never had sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," but he felt he could get away with that language because, in his mind, he defined "sexual relations" as referring to vaginal intercourse.

Bush, with a straight face, tells us that he has never authorized torture, and he thinks he can get away with that lie because the public is mostly unaware that his administration has totally altered the definition of "torture."

According to the infamous 2002 torture memos, which effectively set the policy, torture no longer means what we all understand that term to mean (physical beatings, shoving suspects under water to "drown" them unless they give up secrets, electric shocks to the genitals, unbearable stress, sexual abuse and humiliation, etc.). No, those internationally-understood definitions have become, under Bush&Co., "quaint" remnants from an earlier era.

Under the leadership of Alberto Gonzales and other lawyers - mainly from the White House, Rumsfeld's office, and Cheney's office - the Bush administration went through all sorts of moral gyrations and emerged with new definitions of what constituted torture. Basically, it's not torture if it doesn't kill you or if the excrutiating pain and injuries don't lead to organ failure.

You think I'm exaggerating? Check it out for yourself. The Justice Department's August 1, 2002, legal memo concluded that "the ban on torture is limited to only the most extreme forms of physical and mental harm," which the memo defined as akin to "death or organ failure." [See also "Bush's Torture Deceit: What 'Is' Is" and "Gonzales Grilled on Role in Torture at Confirmation Hearing." ]

So when Bush says the US doesn't torture and he would never authorize torture, in a sense he believes himself to be telling the truth, since he transformed the meaning of "torture" to give it a totally different, exceedingly narrow, interpretation. The administration apparently believes that as a result of interrogations under what Bush calls its "alternative set of procedures," only if the detainees die or are the victims of organ failure could officials rightfully be accused of authorizing torture. (Actually, it's estimated that perhaps as many as 100 detainees have died while in US custody, scores of them directly from torture.)

A Few "Exceptions" From Torture Laws

Furthermore, Bush is asserting that US laws against torture, and Congressional oversight of such activity, should apply only to interrogations that take place on American soil. If the CIA uses the "alternative procedures" in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or in the secret CIA prisons abroad, those don't count. Plus, the administration has moved to shield those who authorized and carry out "harsh" interrogations from national and international laws against mistreatment of prisoners. Meanwhile, of course, a few lower-level, enlisted "bad apples" have been tried, convicted, and sent to prison.

Likewise, according to the Bush administration, the "extraordinary rendition" of especially recalcitrant prisoners to friendly countries abroad that are notorious for extreme physical torture does not count as the US cooperating in the administration of torture. The Bush crew play variations on: "They were tortured there? Really? We are shocked, shocked! We don't approve of torture and had no idea it was used on prisoners entrusted to their care." Yeah, sure.

But recently, in making the case to Congress that it should pass the administration's draconian laws permitting such "alternative procedures," Bush let the cat out of the bag and admitted that several al-Qaida suspects gave up a good deal of valuable information while being interrogated in those secret CIA prisons abroad. But he still denies that his administration carried out "torture" there. Does he think we're stupid?

Do you see how it works? And the ramifications of how it works? In short, Bush&Co. have simply rewritten the dictionary to remove their legal liability for such crimes, and in the process have rewritten the rules under which they, and their subordinates, act. When reality doesn't meet their needs, they don't consider making alterations to their policies; they just change the definition of what's "real."

Bush Desperate for Torture Victory

In a sign of how desperate Bush is to maintain complete control of the torture definition - and thus keep himself and other top US officials out of the war-crimes court in The Hague - Bush took a rare visit to Congress last week to try to forestall defeat of his torture/military tribunals bill. It was a definition struggle again.

The Geneva Convention on the treatment of captured prisoners is quite clear and specific: no country is permitted to use "cruel" treatment or "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment" on prisoners in its care. Too "vague," says Bush. Instead, he suggests, CIA interrogators need "latitude" (euphemism: "clarity") in interrogating and torturing suspects so that they won't be nervously looking over their shoulders at war-crimes charges.

The Pentagon's senior lawyers think Geneva's definitions are quite clear and openly disagreed with the hardline Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld interpretation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Even Colin Powell bestirred his calcified conscience to point out that by trying to do an end-around Geneva, the US risked losing the moral high ground internationally. Also, as Senator John McCain (who was tortured as a POW in Hanoi) and others have pointed out, the US would put its captured troops in great jeopardy of "cruel and degrading" treatment - in other words, torture - similar to what the CIA was meting out in its secret prisons abroad.

Republican "moderate" senators McCain, Graham, Snowe, Warner and others have been demanding that the US remain consistent with the Geneva protections and also provide some legal safeguards to suspects on trial in military tribunals. But time and time again, these so-called "moderates," under extreme Roveian pressure, have caved and given Bush what he wants. As I write this, it's unclear whether they have the courage to stick to their guns this time. We shall see. In the meantime, get this: Bush threatened to close down the CIA's questioning of terrorist suspects unless Congress approves his bill. Talk about cutting off your nation's nose to spite your personal face! Blackmail as a pre-emptive veto.

The Immorality of "Pre-Emption"

Let's move to another definition, at another level. Bush's National Security Strategy asserts that the US can "pre-emptively" attack another country when it determines that country might possibly be thinking of attacking America or grossly harming our interests. In the "old days" - that is, pre-Bush - the definition of "pre-emption" meant that a country, in some circumstances, was permitted under international law to act first when faced with an imminent threat of attack.

In Bushspeak, it doesn't matter that the countries in question might be 10 or 15 years out from being a viable threat, or that, while they might be antagonistic to US policies, they have no intent of ever actually attacking America. No, according to the Bush Doctrine, you destroy possible or potential enemies first, long before they have the chance to even think of doing the US harm.

That's one of the administration's ex-post-facto justifications for having invaded and occupied Iraq. Once the early rationales for attacking were shown to be false - those big lies including that Iraq had stockpiles of WMD, and was allied with al-Qaida in the run-up to the 9/11 attacks - then the administration went back to its "pre-emption" rationalization, in effect asserting: "We had to attack before Saddam got close to reconstituting his weapons programs; even though US/UK intel was confirming that Iraq was well-contained and that it could be 10 years before they would be a believable threat to anybody, we had to act now, to abort that development in its blastocyst stage before that potentially dangerous fetus could grow and do us harm as an adult."

Transfer that rationalization theory to a trial for murder: "Your honor, I cannot be convicted of murdering the victim by shooting him six times. I fully believed he was thinking of doing me harm, maybe next year or the year after that, and so I took him out pre-emptively. It was a clear case of early self-defense." That explanation should satisfy a Bush administration jury.

No Court Review Permitted

Perhaps the most reprehensible aspect of the administration's desperation to avoid indictment for authorizing torture is a tactic they've used in other areas as well: Trying to eliminate judicial review of their actions. In taking this tack, they are making an open assault on the Constitution and several centuries of governmental precedent.

Despite the fact that Bush&Co. have packed the Supreme Court and the various appellate courts with their ideological brethren, they still don't have total control of the legal system, and therefore want to avoid judicial review whenever possible. They know how weak their Constitutional cases are. So they have had their flunkies in Congress introduce a variety of bills to prohibit court review of certain administration policies and laws - as if the Supreme Court would ever OK having its judicial prerogatives revoked.

But in the administration's military-tribunals bill currently before Congress, Bush&Co. also have inserted an in-your-face clause that would prevent civilian courts from intervening in, or reviewing the legality of, the proposed military tribunals. This would totally violate America's historic checks-and-balances system of governance, and would amount to the Executive Branch effectively controlling the Legislative and Judicial branches of government. In short, a budding dictatorship.

As noted previously , the administration has created what they consider to be an airtight legal justification for Bush to act outside the law whenever he claims to be doing so as "commander in chief" during "wartime." Since his "war on terrorism," by definition, is a never-ending war, this means his actions "in defense of the homeland" permanently cannot be challenged. Sounds like the ingredients for dictatorship.

The Court Slaps Down Bush

No wonder Bush is leery of courts ever getting near the justifications for his imperial presidency. The two times when the Supreme Court did review his behavior toward detainees in US care, he was reprimanded mightily, in no uncertain language.

In the 2004 case of Mr. Hamdi, a US citizen, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for the Court: "We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens.... Even the war power [of the President] does not remove constitutional limitations safeguarding essential liberties."

In the recent case of Mr. Hamdan, a foreign suspect, the court slapped down Bush's I-am-the-Law approach again. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority: "[I]n undertaking to try Hamdan and subject him to criminal punishment, the Executive is bound to comply with the Rule of Law that prevails in this jurisdiction."

Revolt of the Moderate Middle

The power to nominate new Supreme Court justices is just one of many reasons why the momentum of this outlaw administration must be broken as quickly as possible. Which brings us to the midterm elections in November.

The imminence of that election explains why Bush is trying to create a rushed, "crisis" atmosphere to get his bill passed; after all, his administration could have brought these suspects to trial anytime within the past five years. "We're running out of time," Bush says, by which he really means: "We've got to get this issue neutralized now, before the election, or else we can't smear the Democrats as pro-terrorist for blocking my bill, since it will be Republicans, with military credentials, who also are doing the obstructing."

Even if the GOP rebels hold their ground this one time, but especially if they don't, the American people - left, right and center - must speak with one enormous groundswell of revulsion against the ruling Republican Party in the Congress that has rubber-stamped virtually everything Bush&Co. have asked for. A convincing GOP defeat in the House would do great damage to the administration's momentum of lawlessness.

The current fracturing of the Republican Party in Congress is a testament to the revolt of the moderate middle in America against the Bush administration's catastrophic bungling in Iraq, its demonstrated incompetence in the Katrina debacle, its lies and deceits, its slimy denunciations of those who oppose the CheneyBush Iraq policy (which means about two-thirds of the American people) as terrorist-supporting traitors, etc., etc.

If the GOP can be roundly trounced two months from now at the polls, its defeat will be due in no small part to those honest, traditional conservatives who, appalled by the hijacking of their once-great party by extremists from the Far Right, are thoroughly fed up and have had enough of misrule on a grand scale. (Note: This election, given Rove's previous history, will require extreme vigilance, and probably court suits, to keep the voting honest and honestly-counted.)

Let us all - Democrats, Libertarians, Independents, progressives - join with these moderate Republicans, and start the process of moving our country back to common decency, earned respect, and a sane foreign and domestic policy based on reality and the true needs of the American people. Can I hear an Amen?

(Bernard Weiner, PhD in government & international relations, has taught at various universities, worked as a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle for 19 years, and currently co-edits the Crisis Papers . To comment: crisispapers@comcast.net)


7. Opponents of torture are true patriots
Republicans McCain, Warner, and Graham stand up to Bush/Cheney
By Joe Conason (from The New York Observer)

Naive citizens may be surprised to learn that some of the most morally upright of our fellow Americans, at least by their own estimation, are also among the most enthusiastic endorsers of the practice of torture. Even more startling than their zeal to abuse detainees -- many of whom are innocent of any offense -- is their eagerness to exploit those abuses for partisan political advantage.

The President has sent legislation to Capitol Hill that would "clarify" the parameters available to those who interrogate prisoners in the war on terrorism. His bill would apparently permit the use of "waterboarding," which simulates drowning, and "long time standing," which is exactly what it sounds like (with shackles), as well as sleep deprivation, constant loud noise and death threats.

To oppose any of these methods, or so the political advertising would claim, is to jeopardize national security, endanger our troops and coddle terrorists. That is how Republican strategists hope to make voters forget the incompetence and corruption on display in Washington, Baghdad and New Orleans and let the party escape disaster in the midterm elections.

Their strategy, however, has been thwarted so far by a single simple fact: The leading opponents of torture in the Senate include three Republican veterans -- John McCain of Arizona, John Warner of Virginia and Lindsay Graham of South Carolina -- and perhaps as many as nine other Republicans, along with most of the Senate Democrats. They refuse to sanction interrogation techniques that obviously violate Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Voting for the Bush bill means, in effect, not only legalizing those forms of abuse but, even more significantly, repealing the ratification of the conventions.

Whether George W. Bush and Dick Cheney realize it or not, official withdrawal from the Geneva Conventions, which date back well over a century and represent generations of military tradition, is an exceptionally heavy responsibility.

Clearly, Messrs. Bush and Cheney cannot comprehend the damage they are doing to American dignity, credibility and prestige. This is, after all, the same President who has repeatedly told the world that the United States doesn't use or condone torture. His public negotiations with the dissident Senators over torture techniques have created one of the worst spectacles in modern history.

But this blithe attitude toward barbarism only reflects the broader degradation of the Republican Party and the conservative movement under their present leadership. While there are courageous Republican politicians willing to fight the torture bill, the President knows that most of his party's leaders are on his side in this debate.

It is strange but true that the country's most prominent spokesmen for the Prince of Peace and for tradition and morality are also its most outspoken proponents of torture. These worthies are unfazed to learn that this government is responsible for the bloody medieval abuse of innocent men, like the Canadian citizen Maher Arar, who was sent to a Syrian dungeon on baseless suspicion.

The Reverend Louis Sheldon, who heads an organization called the Traditional Values Coalition, has indignantly warned Senator McCain that opposing torture may mean forfeiting the support of evangelical leaders in 2008.

What are we to make of the fact that men like the reverend, who refer to themselves as "Christian" while obnoxiously suggesting that other Christians are inferior in faith and character, now tell us that we must support the horrific abuse of prisoners?

What "traditions" and "values" do Mr. Sheldon -- and, for that matter, the devout Mr. Bush -- truly uphold? What kind of conservative promotes the violent abuse of people who have been convicted of no crime?

It can only be the same kind of conservative who hopes to use torture as a "wedge issue" to divide the nation and win the next election. That is the express desire of the editors of The Weekly Standard and of Grover Norquist, the leading Republican lobbyist and strategist. All of them are furious at Senator McCain, as Mr. Norquist put it, for "confusing the message."

We should hope that he and his colleagues continue to ignore the right-wing demagogues and opportunists, and instead heed the wise counsel of Lieutenant General John Kimmons, the U.S. Army's Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, who explained the other day why torture is such a costly mistake.

"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," said the general. "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."

His words summarize the view of the professional officers who have been working so bravely to restore the honor of the armed forces. It is they who represent tradition, values and patriotic faith.


8. Torture Is Torture -- by Eugene Robinson (from The Washington Post)

Bush's "program" disgraces all Americans.

I wish I could turn to cheerier matters, but I just can't get past this torture issue - the fact that George W. Bush, the president of the United States of America, persists in demanding that Congress give him the right to torture anyone he considers a "high-value" terrorist suspect. The president of the United States. Interrogation by torture. This just can't be happening.

It's past time to stop mincing words. The Decider, or maybe we should now call him the Inquisitor, sticks to anodyne euphemisms. He speaks of "alternative" questioning techniques, and his umbrella term for the whole shop of horrors is "the program." Of course, he won't fully detail the methods that were used in the secret CIA prisons - and who knows where else? - but various sources have said they have included not just the infamous "waterboarding," which the administration apparently will reluctantly forswear, but also sleep deprivation, exposure to cold, bombardment with ear-splitting noise and other assaults that cause not just mental duress but physical agony. That is torture, and to call it anything else is a lie.

It is not possible for our elected representatives to hold any sort of honorable "debate" over torture. Bush says he is waging a "struggle for civilization," but civilized nations do not debate slavery or genocide, and they don't debate torture, either. This spectacle insults and dishonors every American.

There is one ray of encouragement: the crystal-clear evidence that the men and women of our armed forces want no part of torturing anybody. The members of the Republican resistance - Sens. John Warner of Virginia, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina - have impeccable Pentagon connections and are not operating in a vacuum. Bush admitted in his news conference Friday that he had spoken to "the professionals" and that they would not carry out "the program" unless Congress specifically told them to.

In support of its torture bill, all the White House could manage to squeeze out of five top Pentagon lawyers was a four-sentence letter of non-objection that had all the enthusiasm of a hostage tape.

Colin Powell's strongly worded rejection of torture should have embarrassed and chastened the White House, but this is a president who refuses to listen to critics of his "war on terrorism" - even critics who helped design and lead it.

There should be no need to spell out the practical reasons against torture, but, for the record, they are legion. As Powell and others have argued, if the United States unilaterally reinterprets Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions to permit torture, potential adversaries in future conflicts will feel justified in doing the same thing. Does the president want some captured pilot to be subjected to the tortures applied in the CIA prisons?

And, as has been pointed out by experts, torture works - far too well. Torture victims will tell what they know, and when their knowledge is exhausted they will tell their torturers what they want to hear, even if they have to invent conspiracies. The president says that torturing al-Qaeda kingpins foiled serious plots against America, but how do we know those plots were real? How can we be sure that some of the detainees at Guantanamo aren't shopkeepers or taxi drivers who were snatched because Khalid Sheik Mohammed ran out of real terrorists to implicate and began naming acquaintances so he wouldn't get waterboarded again?

But we shouldn't have to talk about the practicalities of torture, because the real question is moral: What kind of nation are we? What kind of people are we?

Bush's view of the world is based on the idea of American exceptionalism: that this country is unique, that its ideas and values are not just worthy or admirable but superior to any others. This attitude annoys the rest of the world to no end - a lot of other countries think they're pretty special, too - but accept for the moment that the American system is in fact the best of all systems and that the great experiment begun by the Founding Fathers was a signal event in the history of mankind. Accept, if you will, Bush's view that the United States is steadfastly blessed by a loving God.

What do you imagine God might think about torture, Mr. President?


9. Gitmo Detainee Suffered Year-Long Abuse, Court Filing Claims -- by Andrew Selsky

A Saudi has been held in solitary confinement for a year at the Guantanamo Bay prison and is now so mentally unbalanced he considers insects his friends, lawyers said in a motion filed Monday seeking the man's removal from isolation.

Shaker Aamer, a 37-year-old resident of Britain, was placed in isolated confinement Sept. 24, 2005, and has been beaten by guards, deprived of sleep and subjected to temperature extremes, according to the motion filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

However, Aamer has said he had contact with fellow prisoners as recently as the beginning of June, one of his lawyers, Zachary Katznelson, said in a declaration to the court in Washington. Neither lawyer could immediately be contacted to explain the apparently contradictory information.

The treatment violates Geneva Conventions protections, Aamer's lawyers argued. The U.S. military denied he is being mistreated.

The allegations surfaced as President Bush and Congress wrestle over legislation to set rules for interrogating and trying terror suspects. Bush officials argue they need to establish ground rules so suspects can be interrogated to prevent horrors like the Sept. 11 attacks.

In the 16-page filing, Aamer's lawyers said that since he was put into isolation 360 days ago, except for infrequent meetings with his attorneys, he has had contact only with the Americans running the prison on this U.S. Navy base in southeastern Cuba.

"His only consistent contact with living beings beside his captors is with the ants in his cell. He feeds them and considers them his friends," Katznelson said in a statement filed with the court.

"There is no question in my mind that he is mentally unstable," he added.

The motion, a copy of which was provided to The Associated Press, said Aamer lives in a 6-by-8-foot cell containing a steel bunk, steel toilet, steel sink, a Quran and a thin mattress. The cell is contained entirely within a wooden shack.

Katznelson said that on June 9 "the day before three Guantanamo detainees committed suicide by hanging themselves in their cells" military police beat Aamer because he resisted providing a retina scan and fingerprints.

"They choked him," the lawyer said. "They bent his nose repeatedly so hard to the side he thought it would break. ... They gouged his eyes. They held his eyes open and shined a mag-lite in them for minutes on end, generating intense heat. They bent his fingers until he screamed. When he screamed, they cut off his airway, then put a mask on him so he could not cry out."

The motion said the treatment of Aamer, who is fluent in English and is known to military guards as "the Professor," violates Article Three of the Geneva Conventions, which states prisoners "shall in all circumstances be treated humanely."

Army Capt. Dan Byer, a Guantanamo spokesman, denied any of the roughly 450 Guantanamo detainees are subjected to such treatment. He said regulations prevent him from speaking about individual detainees, but that detainees are treated in conformance with the Geneva Conventions.

He discounted the allegation that Aamer was kept in solitary confinement.

"No detainee is in a situation where they do not have available human contact 24 hours a day," Byer said, but he declined to discuss whether Aamer has been kept apart from other detainees for a year.

Aamer told his lawyer the air conditioner in his cell is often turned off, leaving him sweltering in the tropical heat, or turned up full blast "so the cell is freezing cold."

Aamer claims he was working for a charity organization when he was captured in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The detainee won a measure of fame at the prison last year when he met with Army Col. Mike Bumgarner, who was then the warden, to end a hunger strike by detainees.

Aamer brought together a six-man prisoners council that attempted to negotiate improved conditions and advocated that detainees be tried or sent home, his lawyers said, but the talks failed and Aamer was put in solitary confinement.


10. Canadians Fault US for Its Role in Torture Case -- by Ian Austen (from The NY Times)

Ottawa - A government commission on Monday exonerated a Canadian computer engineer of any ties to terrorism and issued a scathing report that faulted Canada and the United States for his deportation four years ago to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured.

The report on the engineer, Maher Arar, said American officials had apparently acted on inaccurate information from Canadian investigators and then misled Canadian authorities about their plans for Mr. Arar before transporting him to Syria.

"I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constituted a threat to the security of Canada," Justice Dennis R. O'Connor, head of the commission, said at a news conference.

The report's findings could reverberate heavily through the leadership of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which handled the initial intelligence on Mr. Arar that led security officials in both Canada and the United States to assume he was a suspected Al Qaeda terrorist.

The report's criticisms and recommendations are aimed primarily at Canada's own government and activities, rather than the United States government, which refused to cooperate in the inquiry.

But its conclusions about a case that had emerged as one of the most infamous examples of rendition " the transfer of terrorism suspects to other nations for interrogation " draw new attention to the Bush administration's handling of detainees. And it comes as the White House and Congress are contesting legislation that would set standards for the treatment and interrogation of prisoners.

"The American authorities who handled Mr. Arar's case treated Mr. Arar in a most regrettable fashion," Justice O'Connor wrote in a three-volume report, not all of which was made public. "They removed him to Syria against his wishes and in the face of his statements that he would be tortured if sent there. Moreover, they dealt with Canadian officials involved with Mr. Arar's case in a less than forthcoming manner."

A spokesman for the United States Justice Department, Charles Miller, and a White House spokesman traveling with President Bush in New York said officials had not seen the report and could not comment.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Canada planned to act on the report but offered no details. "Probably in the few weeks to come we'll be able to give you more details on that," he told reporters.

The Syrian-born Mr. Arar was seized on Sept. 26, 2002, after he landed at Kennedy Airport in New York on his way home from a holiday in Tunisia. On Oct. 8, he was flown to Jordan in an American government plane and taken overland to Syria, where he says he was held for 10 months in a tiny cell and beaten repeatedly with a metal cable. He was freed in October 2003, after Syrian officials concluded that he had no connection to terrorism and returned him to Canada.

Mr. Arar's case attracted considerable attention in Canada, where critics viewed it as an example of the excesses of the campaign against terror that followed the Sept. 11 attacks. The practice of rendition has caused an outcry from human rights organizations as "outsourcing torture," because suspects often have been taken to countries where brutal treatment of prisoners is routine.

The commission supports that view, describing a Mounted Police force that was ill-prepared to assume the intelligence duties assigned to it after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. Arar, speaking at a news conference, praised the findings. "Today Justice O'Connor has cleared my name and restored my reputation," he said. "I call on the government of Canada to accept the findings of this report and hold these people responsible."

His lawyer, Marlys Edwardh, said the report affirmed that Mr. Arar, who has been unemployed since his return to Canada, was deported and tortured because of "a breathtakingly incompetent investigation."

The commission found that Mr. Arar first came to police attention on Oct. 12, 2001, when he met with Abdullah Almalki, a man already under surveillance by a newly established Mounted Police intelligence unit known as Project A-O Canada. Mr. Arar has said in interviews that the meeting at Mango's Cafe in Ottawa, and a subsequent 20-minute conversation outside the restaurant, was mostly about finding inexpensive ink jet printer cartridges.

The meeting set off a chain of actions by the police. Investigators obtained a copy of Mr. Arar's rental lease. After finding Mr. Almalki listed as an emergency contact, they stepped up their investigation of Mr. Arar. At the end of that month, the police asked customs officials to include Mr. Arar and his wife on a "terrorist lookout" list, which would subject them to more intensive question when re-entering Canada.

However, the commission found that the designation should have only been applied to people who are members or associates of terrorist networks. Neither the police nor customs had any such evidence of that concerning Mr. Arar or his wife, an economist.

From there, the Mounted Police asked that the couple be included in a database that alerts United States border officers to suspect individuals. The police described Mr. Arar and his wife as, the report said, "Islamic extremists suspected of being linked to the al Qaeda movement."

The commission said that all who testified before it accepted that the description was false.

According to the inquiry's finding, the Mounted Police gave the F.B.I. and other American authorities material from Project A-O Canada, which included suggestions that Mr. Arar had visited Washington around Sept. 11 and had refused to cooperate with the Canadian police. The handover of the data violated the force's own guidelines, but was justified on the basis that such rules no longer applied after 2001.

In July 2002, the Mounted Police learned that Mr. Arar and his family were in Tunisia, and incorrectly concluded that they had left Canada permanently.

On Sept. 26, 2002, the F.B.I. called Project A-O and told the Canadian police that Mr. Arar was scheduled to arrive in about one hour from Zurich. The F.B.I. also said it planned to question Mr. Arar and then send him back to Switzerland. Responding to a fax from the F.B.I., the Mounted Police provided the American investigators with a list of questions for Mr. Arar. Like the other information, it included many false claims about Mr. Arar, the commission found.

The Canadian police "had no idea of what would eventually transpire," the commission said. "It did not occur to them that the American authorities were contemplating sending Mr. Arar to Syria."

While the F.B.I. and the Mounted Police kept up their communications about Mr. Arar, Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs was not told about his detention for almost three days. Its officials, acting on calls from worried relatives, had been trying to find him. Similarly, American officials denied Mr. Arar's requests to speak with the Canadian Consulate in New York, a violation of international agreements.

Evidence presented to the commission, said Paul J. J. Cavalluzzo, its lead counsel, showed that the F.B.I. continued to keep its Canadian counterparts in the dark even while an American jet was carrying Mr. Arar to Jordan. The panel found that American officials "believed" quite correctly "that, if informed, the Canadians would have serious concerns about the plan to remove Mr. Arar to Syria."

Mr. Arar arrived in Syria on Oct. 9, 2002, and was imprisoned there until Oct. 5, 2003. It took Canadian officials, however, until Oct. 21 to locate him in Syria. The commission concludes that Syrian officials at first denied knowing Mr. Arar's whereabouts to hide the fact that he was being tortured. It says that, among other things, he was beaten with a shredded electrical cable until he was disoriented.

American officials have not discussed the case publicly. But in an interview last year, a former official said on condition of anonymity that the decision to send Mr. Arar to Syria had been based chiefly on the desire to get more information about him and the threat he might pose. The official said Canada did not intend to hold him if he returned home.

Mr. Arar said he appealed a recent decision by a federal judge in New York dismissing the suit he brought against the United States. The report recommends that the Canadian government, which is also being sued by Mr. Arar, offer him compensation and possibly a job.

Mr. Arar recently moved to Kamloops, British Columbia, where his wife found a teaching position.


12. Psychological warfare
Angered that their professional organization has adopted a policy condoning psychologists' participation in "war on terror" interrogations, many psychologists are vowing to stage a battle royal at the APA's annual meeting.
By Mark Benjamin (from Salon.com)

The 150,000-member American Psychological Association is facing an internal revolt over its year-old policy that condones the participation of psychologists in the interrogations of prisoners during the Bush administration's "war on terror."

Last summer, the APA adopted new ethical principles drafted by a task force of 10 psychologists, who were selected by the organization's leadership. That controversial task-force report, which is now official APA policy, stated that psychologists participating in terror-related interrogations are fulfilling "a valuable and ethical role to assist in protecting our nation, other nations, and innocent civilians from harm."

But Salon has learned that six of the 10 psychologists on the task force have close ties to the military. The names and backgrounds of the task force participants were not made public by the APA; Salon obtained them from congressional sources. Four of the psychologists who crafted the permissive policy were involved with the handling of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, or served with the military in Afghanistan -- all environments where serious cases of abuse have been documented.

APA president Gerald Koocher, who handpicked the task-force members along with the organization's former president Ronald Levant, said in an interview that the psychologists' military and national-security backgrounds did not raise conflict of interest or broader questions about the task force and its report. He defended choosing psychologists with such backgrounds, saying "they had special knowledge to contribute."

The 10-member task force enunciated the new principles for interrogations in a June 2005 report. The 11 pages of ethical obligations include 12 statements on interrogations, including one directing psychologists to report abuse and remember that suspects may be innocent. But detractors say its ban on "torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment" is pro forma, an insufficient safeguard in the post-9/11 atmosphere.

Critics of the APA's interrogation policy are planning an all-out assault during the organization's annual meeting Aug. 10-13 in New Orleans, using tactics that include taking out a full-page advertisement in the local newspaper.

Opponents argue that when psychologists use their technical training to help break down the resistance of a prisoner, they are performing in a role diametrically at odds with their professional mission to serve as a healer. "I do not believe that psychologists should be involved in interrogations which are intrinsically coercive and inherently harmful to the person being interrogated," said Steven Reisner, a psychologist and senior faculty member at Columbia University's International Trauma Studies Program.

Joining in this chorus of dissent, former APA president Philip Zimbardo said psychologists used "the wrong model" to come up with the interrogation ethics principles. As the architect of a famous 1971 Stanford prison experiment in which students who were instructed to pretend they were guards in a mock prison quickly began to exhibit sadistic behavior, Zimbardo has more than a passing familiarity with the dynamics of cruelty. He warned against "abandoning the high moral ground in unquestioned support for ideological banners of 'national security.'"

Reisner said in an interview that the revelations of the close ties between the Department of Defense and a majority of psychologists on the task force would help galvanize opposition to the policy. The biographies of the task force members underscore these extensive and questionable connections.

Task force member Col. Larry James was the chief psychologist for the intelligence group at Guantánamo in 2003. In 2004, James was at Abu Ghraib working as the director of the behavioral sciences group in the interrogation unit there. His biography said he was sent to Abu Ghraib "in response" to the abuse scandal. Requests to interview James were rebuffed; U.S. Army Medical Command spokeswoman Cynthia Vaughn referred Salon back to the APA.

Col. Morgan Banks spent four months during the winter of 2001 and 2002 "supporting combat operations" at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, where serious abuses have been reported. Banks told Jane Mayer of the New Yorker last summer he had also "consulted generally" on Guantánamo interrogations, but could not recall any specific cases. Banks' biography lists him as one of the founders and the senior psychologist at the Army's secretive Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program at Fort Bragg, N.C., where the military trains elite soldiers to resist torture in case of capture. The techniques used to harden those soldiers against torture -- sleep deprivation, isolation, sexual humiliation, bags on the head, long exercise -- have been used on detainees in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. (Salon reported last month on a military document showing that SERE instructors taught their techniques to interrogators at Guantánamo.)

APA task force member Capt. Bryce Lefever was assigned to the Navy's SERE school in the early 1990s and deployed with Special Forces to Afghanistan in 2002, "where he lectured to interrogators and was consulted on various interrogation techniques," according to his bio.

Two other members of the task force worked for the Department of Defense Counterintelligence Field Activity, which coordinates Pentagon security efforts. One of them, R. Scott Shumate, was in charge of a team of psychologists who "engaged in risk assessments of the Guantanamo Bay detainees." Another psychologist on the APA task force worked for the Navy.

Requests to interview the APA task force members who had military ties were unsuccessful, even though Salon approached them through both the APA and, in most cases, the military.

Zimbardo, the former APA president, warned that the task force members' independence could be curtailed by their ties to the Pentagon. "There likely would be implicit pressures on them to keep the scope of their recommendations restricted," Zimbardo said.

Some psychologists go so far as to wonder if the APA has allowed its interrogation policy to be set by the military. "The military seemed to be very well represented on that committee," Reisner said. "This issue, which is never spoken about, is the relationship between the American Psychological Association and the military. This has been in the back of my mind throughout this whole debate."

That relationship appeared to be codified last month, when the Pentagon effectively embraced the psychologists' interrogation guidelines. In May, the American Psychiatric Association reacted to the detainee-abuse scandal by barring psychiatrists' participation in interrogations. A month later, in June, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs William Winkenwerder Jr. unveiled a new policy clarifying the role of medical professionals in interrogations. It laid out a preference for psychologists (rather than psychiatrists) to advise on interrogations. That 10-page document also set other guidelines for military medical professionals who deal with detainees, such as establishing a barrier between acting as caregivers and those who advise interrogators.

Speaking to reporters last month, Winkenwerder said that, when the system works correctly, psychologists assess "the character, personality, social interactions and other behavioral characteristics of detainees." The psychologists, he explained, do not conduct the interrogations themselves, but instead "coach and counsel the interrogator in a way that allows him or her to build a relationship with the detainee."

Dr. Steven Miles, the author of "Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror," said that the use of psychologists in these interrogations flowed from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's orders to get tough with prisoners. "They devised interrogation plans to exploit the physical and emotional vulnerabilities of the prisoners," Miles said in a telephone interview. "They turned to psychologists because they wanted to find every way of breaking people down."

APA president Koocher, the editor of the journal Ethics and Behavior and a former associate professor at Harvard Medical School, said it was unfair to link task force members to abuses at Guantánamo or elsewhere, just because they worked there. "The conceptual leap required to conclude that the particular person on our task force was involved is unreasonable," Koocher said.

The task force was empaneled last summer as news reports were piecing together a disturbing portrait of medical professionals stationed at Guantánamo and in Afghanistan and Iraq -- rifling through medical files for interrogation tips, withholding medical treatment from detainees, omitting evidence of abuse from records, or just remaining silent about what went on around them. "Physicians have a checkered past on this," said Dr. Allen Keller, director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture. "Who knows better how to inflict pain and suffering, physically and psychologically, than somebody who has studied the human body?"

In response to the scandals, some medical organizations have raced to develop new ethical standards that would bar anyone from using their professional training to assist in breaking down prisoners. Typical was the unequivocal new policy of the American Psychiatric Association, adopted in May, that forbids participation in interrogations.

"I think it is wrong to use one's professional knowledge in the service of breakdown -- breaking people down," author and psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton said in a phone call from his home at Cape Cod, Mass. He called the psychological association's willingness to participate in interrogations "wrong." Lifton added, "Even though they do not take the Hippocratic oath, they are in the healing profession."

In defense of his association's position, Koocher pointed out that many psychologists are behavioral scientists, and as such aren't caregivers. The APA president cited examples such as psychologists who evaluate people's competence to stand trial or who train hostage negotiators.

To underscore the difference between caregiver and interrogation consultant, the APA's ethics principles bar the same person from performing both functions, stating that psychologists should "refrain from engaging in such multiple relationships."

APA director of ethics Stephen Behnke added that psychologists may actually help keep interrogations safe, by encouraging interrogators to talk to prisoners rather than employ harsher methods. "Psychologists take advisory or consultative roles in relation to interrogations to help ensure interrogations are safe, legal, ethical, and effective," Behnke wrote in an e-mail.

That may be true in some cases, but the presence of a psychologist did not prevent the interrogation of so-called 20th hijacker Mohammed al-Khatani at Guantánamo from turning brutal. Khatani was stripped naked, isolated, given intravenous fluids and forced to urinate on himself, and exercised to exhaustion during interrogations that lasted 18 to 20 hours a day for 48 of 54 days.

Part of the plan was to humiliate Khatani and submit him to extreme psychological stress. He became exhausted, disoriented and hopeless. He was called a homosexual, forced to wear a mask and dance, and leashed and made to perform dog tricks. Interrogators hung pictures of fitness models on his neck and had a female interrogator "invade his personal space," according to the unredacted interrogation log obtained by Salon.

To help break down Khatani's psyche, the interrogation team included a psychologist, Maj. John Leso, a member of the military's Behavioral Science Consultation Teams, called BSCTs. The teams are a newly minted tool in the "war on terror." They include psychologists who are supposed to help interrogators break down resistance and pry loose useful information. Former Guantánamo commander Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller called the teams "essential in developing interrogation strategies" in a September 2003 internal military report.

At various points during the questioning of Khatani, Leso's BSCT operators instructed interrogators to keep the prisoner awake, force him to stop staring at a wall, and advised on the effectiveness of techniques. "BSCT observed that detainee does not like it when the interrogator points out his nonverbal responses," reads an entry in the log from Dec. 29, 2002.

Leso's actions may not be typical. But the press has obtained a much more detailed record of Khatani's interrogation than that of any other "high-value" prisoner.

Leso's behavior would appear to violate the ethics principles that were later established by the APA task force, which bar "torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment." Those prohibitions might ordinarily appear to be unequivocal, but the Bush administration's "war on terror" has made them far murkier. As Zimbardo, the former APA president, noted, that kind of terminology is precisely the lexicon that Bush administration lawyers have turned into Swiss cheese. The Bush administration has "changed the definition of torture, the definition of detained prisoners, and the nature of their prolonged confinement without due process," Zimbardo said. In the Bush administration's eyes, Zimbardo said, "nothing done to such detainees qualifies as torture."

Several civilians close to the APA task force criticized the final product for failing to make a clear statement about the excesses of the "war on terror" and failing to explicitly say what psychologists can and cannot do. "It is a bunch of platitudes without any situational reality to it," said Jean Maria Arrigo, a civilian psychologist who served on the APA task force and founder of the Intelligence Ethics Collection at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. "This was not a politically adequate document. There are no specifics in it. We needed to at least say that we can't do waterboarding," Arrigo said.

Arrigo said she doesn't have any complaints with the military members of the task force. Instead, she blames Koocher for the vagueness of the APA position statement, which allows psychologists broad latitude in interrogations. "Koocher was involved in appointing the task force, he strongly guided and monitored it and had taken the position of representing the document," she said.

Other civilian psychologists on the task force agree that the fault lies not with individual military members of the task force, but with the APA leadership. Task force member Michael Wessells, a psychology professor at Randolph-Macon College, resigned from the task force in protest early this year. According to his resignation letter, which he provided to Salon, "At the highest levels, the APA has not made a strong, concerted, comprehensive, public and internal response of the kind warranted by the severe human rights violations at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay."

Wessels said that the ethics guidelines, which sailed through the APA's board of directors and Council of Representatives to become APA policy, never addressed such controversial questions. "I think by going this route, strategically, the organization was playing it safe," he said. "As a response to the nature of the situation, it was completely inadequate." Despite promises that the standards would be further debated, Wessells said that there was never any follow-up. As a result, he said, "I felt more than a little exploited."

Both sides expect intense debate next month over the interrogation standards -- and the question may overwhelm the other items on the APA's agenda at the convention. Koocher has asked Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, the surgeon general of the Army, to come to New Orleans and address the organization's leadership.

Koocher acknowledged that his organization could revisit the issue in the future. "Remember that as far as APA is concerned, the issue is not over," Koocher said in a phone call.

But some psychologists are not satisfied with bland promises of further review. "At the moment, the American Psychological Association is complicit in the mode of interrogations going on at Guantánamo, by focusing on the justification for interrogation," said Reisner. "We are being used to further the ends of what amounts to torture."