For those of you who haven’t read it yet, make sure to take a look at the Washington Post article on torture.
I can understand the frustration of investigators when they couldn’t get the so-called 20th hijacker to cooperate. I can even see making a special exemption from the Geneva Conventions for this one individual. I would not be completely outraged if the exemption were specific, limited, and the tactics were known to be effective.
But I have doubts about the effectiveness of these tactics, and they were not limited at all to this one individual.
The techniques, approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for use in interrogating Mohamed Qahtani — the alleged “20th hijacker” in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — were used at Guantanamo Bay in late 2002 as part of a special interrogation plan aimed at breaking down the silent detainee.
Makes me think of that Chomsky quote: “If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise we do not believe in it at all”.. but in terms of human rights, do we believe in human rights if they don’t exist for those we despise?
I don’t have any sympathy for the 20th hijacker. Sometimes I wonder if I am a “civil rights absolutist”. There are are other important factors such as national security etc, but I don’t know.. I tend to believe that these years will be looked back upon as barbaric in terms of our disregard for international law.
I guess I add nothing to the conversation, just confusion, heh.
Not at all Deano.. i think in a roundabout way it’s an astute question that i think many peolle (including me have to puzzle over).
Aloow me to give you an answer (to the question I think you asked.
We should protect everyone’s right to free speech expression etc… The only limit to those rights are when they curtail the rights of others. Everyone has a right to be heard..but when people use their rights of expression to shout people down, attack their character, or otherwise limit OTHER people’s right to free expression then those people have abused their rights. To me, that’s an exception to free expression.. ie you have the absolute right to speak your opinion but you do not have the right to take someone elses’ rights of expression away and claim that your just exercising your rights.
I hope that made sense.. and yes.. it might not be popluar that i have set limits to free expression but i think thats a good limit.
I’m not entirely sure about my own free speech absolutist credentials. I mean, it sounds good in theory, but it begins to break down when you get into areas like Nazis and Klansmen, and definitely starts falling apart when we’re talking about child pornographers. I don’t really know where the line is.
But if the people who hold these, ahem, unpopular ideas start putting their ideas into action by burning crosses, breaking mosque windows and molesting children, then IMO they definitely have crossed the line and need to be locked up.
Yeah, when I usually talk or write about free speech I am referring to actual speech or writing etc. not to actions and other things. I don’t know that much about constitutional law.
But if the people who hold these, ahem, unpopular ideas start putting their ideas into action by burning crosses, breaking mosque windows and molesting children, then IMO they definitely have crossed the line and need to be locked up.
Right. Those people that burn crosses, etc, are crossing the lines of free expression to intimidation, repression, and alienation, which are anti-thetical to democracy. We’ve always had limits on speech and expression .. like the old crying “fire” in a theatre example..
I think my argument is probably influenced by utilitarian thinking in that it promotes the greatest possible expression for the greatest number of people. IN this case,however, even minorities should be protected since no one has the right to inhibit someone elses speech… but the problem remains as to how to decide what constitutes a supression of free speech.
Tricky 🙂
Anyway! thanks for stirring my brain pot!
Exactly. There is such a thing as a “speech act,” where the line between mere words and an action is crossed. Burning crosses and crying “fire” in a crowded theater are two great examples. Here are other types of speech that cross the line:
I’m sure there are many more examples, but this is a good sampling to show that violent and non-violent speech can both cross the line. The right to free speech is not absolute.
Thats interesting. As I was using that logic in regards to human rights I wonder how this would apply to this situation. It gets tough after the hijacker is in custody. He is in a sense out of causing harm (given the reality of our system, I’m pretty sure..)but we do have the potential to allievate suffering from his knowledge. It is different than the free speech example because of the actor’s inability to directly influence, at least for now.
I was listening to a local radio program this morning in Socal and when the host read the info you have above about torture, all the men in the group, about 5 starting laughing and making jokes about it along the lines of Limbaugh. BTW the host is an attorney…
This totally disgusting attitude is so prevelant in right wing radio,but this was not an especially right wing station, they vary during the day..right to left.
Yoo last night on Charlie Rose denied that the Gitmo aberrations were from the administration — that that was rogue behavior by a few guards.
that the WP article pretty much definitively shoots that theory down.
The current issue of the New Yorker has a Jane Mayer article in it called “The Experiment” (not available online), regarding the military’s use of techniques originally developed to train soldiers to withstand torture now being turned around by some units for its interrogations at Guantánamo. The magazine has posted a Q & A session which covers much of the same ground as the article, and there’s also a Democracy Now segment in which Amy Goodman interviews Ms. Mayer.
I diaried the first Jane Mayer DN! interview. She was on again the other day. Have the New Yorker but haven’t finished reading the article … doubt it’s online.
Thanks for letting us know about the online Q&A. Those are usually quite good.
C-span2 live has on the hearing of the ‘Personnel Committee’, with military testifying.
Torture is wrong. Period.
“Cruel and Unusual Punishements” are unconstitutional; torture is the very instance of cruel and unusual. This clause binds all of American law as there is no special clause saying, “except for terrorists and hijackers.” Either we accept the institution of just punishments as defined by the rule of law or we don’t. There isn’t any middle ground.
however, breaking the 20th hijacker was such a high priority that I can see authorizing some coersive tactics after everything else failed.
However, I don’t think they chose the right methods, and I think they went too far.
But much more important than what they did to this one person, is the fact that they then expanded to everyone they have in custody.
I’d be willing to forgive one incident, even while calling it wrong. They have gone so far beyond that, that people really belong on trial. Rumsfeld, at a minimum.
“But much more important than what they did to this one person, is the fact that they then expanded to everyone they have in custody.”
Which all by itself is an excellent reason for moral absolutism on things like torture or “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Like any bad behavior the first time is hardest but once you’ve done it once you start to rationalize reasons and excuses for doing it again. By the time you’ve done it three times you don’t even bother with rationalizing anymore.
We simply don’t do that.
thus the name of this diary.
I think it would be possible to craft a system whereby the President, a member of the Supreme Court and a bipartisan group of Congressional security experts could be petitioned to allow a specific one-time, one-person interrogation regime that is in technical violation of the Geneva Conventions.
Geneva is so restrictive that we cannot even push or threaten a suspect. There is some wiggle room between Geneva and cruel and unusual. If you can get a Supreme Court justice and Democrats to agree to a course of action, I think there is a consensus that the action is both needed and constitutional.
I’m not sure how you can violate Geneva without also violating the constitution, but under this scenario at least we’d have a consensus to look the other way and depoliticize it.
I don’t know if my suggestion is workable, but it would be a big improvement over what we have now.
No, I don’t like that idea at all.
However, I have said since Guantanamo first opened that it made complete sense to sit down and devise a new set of guidelines for stateless agents (or some such term). We have laws for criminals. We have the Geneva Conventions for Prisoners of War. Both are solid. I can see the argument that terrorists are neither. The Bush administration took this gap in legal guidelines to mean they had complete and total tyrannical power over these people. That is not right. What it really means is that a new set of law needs to be devised for handling them. I am not a lawyer, domestic or international, criminal or constitutional, so I lay no claim to knowing what that law should look like. All I know for sure is that there need to be very set and strict rules in the finest traditions of our nation and international cooperation and that the President does not get to make them up as he goes along.
could you clarify a little.
OTOH- you don’t like my suggestion
OTOH- you think we should devise new laws for handling terror suspects.
My idea is a new law for handling terror suspects, so what do you like and not like about it?
Let me flesh my idea out a little.
There is always one Supreme Court justice on-call so to speak. We could also designate one Dem and one GOP member from either the Intelligence or the Homeland Security committees to be on-call. And then the President, too.
If our interrogators wanted to use normally proscribed interrogation methods, they would appeal to the head of their agency. The head of the agency would contact the President and provide him with a plan. The President would then initiate a secure teleconference, and the plan would be discussed. Objections would be heard. The plan could be modified or scaled back, if necessary.
The point of this is that any coercive treatment of detainees would be taken seriously at the hightest levels, that there would be bipartisan agreement on the method, that the court would agree it was okay to do.
Anyone who mistreated a prisoner without going thru this process would be clearly guilty. And since it is a huge hassle to initiate such a process, people will be reluctant to initiate it without a really compelling reason.
Ok… we are both heading in roughly the same direction. What I objected to in your first description was that it appeared (and still does though you clearly have a procedure for review and control in place which is good) to be saying… “We’ll make it ok to break the rules sometimes in special cases.” I don’t really agree with that.
What I am saying is that we define a third catagory of rules to handle a third catagory of prisoner and we don’t break those rules at all.
In general I think these folks are criminals and should be treated as such but my limited knowledge of law has me thinking that we would not be able to hold or prosecute known terrorists in many cases where we knew but could not prove in a US court that they were a danger to the nation. Thus my desire for a third catagory of law.
I am completely uncomfortable with looser standards of interrogation. I am willing to consider it on a logical basis but I don’t think I can get past the moral hurdle.
The way to defeat terrorism is not through rougher interrogation of prisoners but through the elimination of the reasons that cause terrorism, a body of law for dealing with terrorist organizations, and a concerted international police and intelligence effort for stopping them.
I am willing to listen to and consider an argument for different standards and rules of interrogation but my moral standards leave little more than a sliver of room for that argument to slip through.
In all cases though I agree completely with the kind of standard you set for approval and review.
except for one point.
To me, the Geneva conventions are for prisoners of war, and not for terror suspects. Most of the principles of Geneva are based on universal human rights. But if we take them literally, you could not do anything at all:
no threats
no pushing
no slapping
no nothing
If you read the treaty, and the UN one as well, every police department in the country violates the treaty every day.
It’s unrealistic, and therefore everyone expects it to be violated. And once you violate it a little, it’s hard to draw the line on violating it a lot.
What I’d like to see is a more realistic standard for interrogating terror suspects. We know that torture is usually ineffective in getting the truth, but the threat of torture may be less so. I know that I am more inclined to tell you the truth if you are about to kick my ass if I don’t. However, once you initiate the ass-kicking I am as likely to tell you what I think you want to hear as I am to tell you the truth.
My thoughts are meandering here. Back to the point: would Ruth Bader Ginsburg sign off on hanging a man from the ceiling, and kicking him in the legs until he died? No. I don’t think even Pat Roberts would sign off on that.
Would John Kerry sign off on pissing on Korans? I doubt it.
But if they agreed that a suspect has information so vital that it was okay to subject them to loud noises, or pushing and slapping, or whatever else that doesn’t amount to cruel and unusual… then I think it’s safe to say that we are facing a critical situation.
They could also agree on what is acceptable under normal circumstances, that doesn’t require a conference call to clear up.
The net effect would be a lot less mistreatment and a lot more accountability. It would depoliticize the whole thing too, and free people from fear of prosecution.
It’s not perfect, but it’s a start. We need to do something.
Not much disagreement. I don’t think the Geneva Conventions apply to these guys either. Those are rules for your army and my army. That doesn’t apply. I really think these guys are criminals not soldiers. I’m ok with setting up a separate class of criminal law for these guys and I’m ok with a defined set of interrogation techniques. The only place I disagree with you is that your system sets up a loophole where it becomes ok to break the rules. I’m saying that if there are occasions where the rules are too restrictive right that into the rules the first time around and then don’t break the rules. Review and approval is required for all of this but I disagree with saying it’s ok to break the rules.
typo alert… write that into the rules….
and send me to bed. Excellent conversation. Thanks. G’nite.
Andrew has nailed it with: We have laws for criminals.
Terrorists are criminals. They should be handled as criminals. Anything else gives them an importance they do not deserve. If a terrorist doesn’t want to talk that is their Right. Do I like it? No. But I don’t like a goverment that has torture as one of its options for dealing with recalcitrant prisoners even less.
I’m inclined to agree. My only problem with that standard… and the reason I believe a new set of laws to handle a new catagory of criminal… the international, stateless terrorist… needs to be created is that U.S. law would not allow us to detain many known terrorists. We have very strict rules regarding evidence and proof… as we should… but those rules also require we let murders go and these guys are very dangerous. I am ok with setting a different legal standard for these guys. We haven’t done that though. What I am not ok with at all is having the President make it up as he goes along with an attitude of “trust me.” That is not how we do business in this country. Legal scholars, prosecutors, judges, and congress need to sit down and consider all the angles and craft a new standard that applies to stateless terrorists. American citizens must be handled under American law… terrorist or not. Perhaps American law needs to be modified too but I am loath to do that and our Constitution is explicit in limitations and rights of citizens… and I like it just as it is.
Sen Lindsey Graham let the generals have it on torture during the Personnel Subcommittee meeting. This is the second time I have seen him this fired up. He’s pissed that memos haven’t been declassified from the WH regarding techniques. “I have asked for them 1000 times. Literally.”
Are you watching the hearing manee, I am just so antsy(for lack of a better word), over some of these answers and especially this Barr fellow, former attorney general under Bush 1.
… is that despite the lies and white wash of the administration the whole thing was authorized by Rumsfeld and not just the actions of a few bad apples.
Authorized by Rumsfeld.
Rumsfeld.
When McNoComment doesn’t answer on Rove the media should proceed to hammer Scotty on Rumsfeld.