The morality of torture

A Pew Research Center survey reveals that, in general, the more Americans go to church the more willing they are to support torture. According to a CNN article:

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

What is taught about the morality of torture in the churches attended by these people who think torture is "justified?" I doubt that the ministers or priests in their churches are actually preaching torture.

Although I seldom see it talked about I think the difference between those who think that America should never torture and those willing to accept it is the attitude toward those likely to be tortured. I think that those who always oppose torture see the likely victims of torture as people fundamentally like themselves and those who think torture is justified assume that those tortured are "the other." I suspect that these regular churchgoers who think torture is justified have an us-against-them view of the world that trumps the Christian teachings of "love thy neighbor", "turn the other cheek", the parable of the Good Samaritan and the compassionate example of Jesus, the healer.

Gonzales, Yoo and 4 others may be indicted for War Crimes

According to the Associated Press a Spanish court has agreed to open a criminal case that could result in criminal indictments for six Bush Administration officals on charges of enabling torture at Guantanamo Bay.

Human rights lawyers brought the case before leading anti-terror judge Baltasar Garzon, who agreed to send it on to prosecutors to decide whether it had merit, Gonzalo Boye, one of the lawyers who brought the charges, told The Associated Press.

The ex-Bush officials are Gonzales; former undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith; former Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff David Addington; Justice Department officials John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee; and Pentagon lawyer William Haynes.

....

Spanish law allows courts to reach beyond national borders in cases of torture or war crimes under a doctrine of universal justice, though the government has recently said it hopes to limit the scope of the legal process.

Garzon became famous for bringing charges against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998, and he and other Spanish judges have agreed to investigate alleged abuses everywhere from Tibet to Argentina's "dirty war," El Salvador and Rwanda.

Read entire article.

It will be very interesting to see how the American public reacts to this news. Hopefully this will open people's eyes to how the reset of the world views the actions of the Bush Administration.

Forced to Prosecute

In a very interesting article in today's New York Times, reporter Scott Shane reports that the Obama Administration, simply by acknowledging the obvious truth that waterboarding is torture, could be forced to prosecute those responsible for torture as war criminals, despite Barack Obama and Eric Holder's protestations that they are disinclined to do so.

In the view of many historians and legal authorities, Mr. Holder was merely admitting the obvious. He was agreeing with the clear position of his boss-to-be, President-elect Barack Obama, and he was giving an answer that almost certainly was necessary to win confirmation.

Yet his statement, amounting to an admission that the United States may have committed war crimes, opens the door to an unpredictable train of legal and political consequences. It could potentially require a full-scale legal investigation, complicate prosecutions of individuals suspected of committing terrorism and mire the new administration in just the kind of backward look that Mr. Obama has said he would like to avoid.

The article goes on to point out the difficulties in prosecuting the low level people who carried out the orders.

Two obvious obstacles stand in the way of a prosecution: legal opinions from the Justice Department that declared even the harshest interrogation methods to be legal, and a provision in the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that grants strong legal protections to government employees who relied on such legal advice in counterterrorism programs.

Although the article does not say so, it seems to me that this defense should not and would not work for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell although it should absolve everyone below them in the chain of command. Picture Bush and Cheney being prosecuted for war crimes, claiming that as a result of legal rulings they directed the Justice Department lawyers to draw up, their orders to torture people were legal. Would such a defense have worked for the Nazis and Japanese Generals in the war crime trials following World War II?

War Crimes were committed

I think it is now clear to the vast majority of Americans that over the last 7 years the CIA and the United States military, following orders coming down from the Bush Administration, have been torturing people, despite repeated statements from President Bush and his spokesmen that "we do not torture." The latest evidence is in a book, "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals," by Jane Mayer. According to an article in the New York Times which received an advance copy of the book:

Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency's interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.

Now that the International Red Cross has concluded that war crimes were committed, will top Bush Administration officials, such as Richard Armitage, Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney, live the rest of their lives in fear of being arrested and tried as war criminals, ala Pinochet? Although indicting and trying Pinochet was not politically possible in Chile that was not the case everywhere in the world. Spain indicted Pinochet for war crimes and Britain honored Spain's warrant when Pinochet came to Britain for medical treatment.

Back in 2001 a high-level government official bragged to a reporter that they in the Bush Administration were creating reality by their actions, unlike those, like the reporter, who were in the "reality-based community." We now see what the world they were creating looks like. Although the rest of the country may be able to move on after November the former Bush Administration officials will have to deal with the consequences of their actions for the rest of their lives. They have created a Hell here on earth for themselves in which they have condemned themselves to live. I wonder how that will be working out for them.

Military ordered to become terrorists?

An article in this morning's New York Times reveals that when the US military received orders from the civilian leadership in the Bush Administration in 2002 that everything had changed after 9/11 and that they should now use interrogation techniques which had previously been illegal on the prisoners they had captured in Afghanistan, and later Iraq, they knowingly adopted techniques used by the Chinese Communists against US soldiers captured during the Korean War.

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of "coercive management techniques" for possible use on prisoners, including "sleep deprivation," "prolonged constraint," and "exposure."

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

Holy Manchurian Candidate, Batman! The military leaders who sent those trainers to Guantánamo Bay knew that those were not techniques to obtain "actionable intelligence." The idea that the torture was justified because it would reveal information about future acts of terrorism, allowing those acts to be prevented and thus saving lives, has been proven by this article to have been a post hoc rationalization.

We don't know even the approximate wording of the order that came down from the Bush Administration to the military that rescinded the ban on torturing prisoners but we now know that when the military implemented that order they started using techniques that they knew produced false confessions. What does that tell you about what the thrust of that order was?

If the primary directive the military was following was to obtain information about future plans would they have adopted those techniques? We are left with two choices. Either that the order was to obtain accurate information "by any means necessary" and the military was incompetent, implementing that order using methods totally unsuited to that purpose. Or the military competently followed an order which placed little or no importance on obtaining accurate information. Perhaps the order said simply: "to combat terrorism we are going to become terrorists."

Condi must go

A television ad that aired for the first time last night calls for the resignation of of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:



The people creating and airing the commercial issued the following press release:

WASHINGTON-- TrueMajority.org, Brave New Films, and Democracy for America are launching CondiMustGo.com and a new television ad campaign calling for the resignation of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. This week Americans were outraged by the news that Condoleezza Rice personally oversaw meetings where top Bush administration officials selected specific torture techniques.

The new site CondiMustGo.com will feature a petition demanding Secretary Rice's resignation and a new video by Brave New Films documenting her involvement in torture and how she lied to Congress and the nation. The petition reads, "America will not stand for a Secretary of State who approved torture and then misled Congress. We call on the Presidential candidates to ask Secretary of State Rice to resign."

TrueMajority.org, Brave New Films, and Democracy for America announced the next step in the grassroots pressure campaign: a television ad to air Wednesday night in Pennsylvania around the presidential debate. The ad, produced by Brave New Films and paid for by TrueMajority.org members outraged by Rice's role in authorizing torture, seeks to force discussion of this issue to the top of the public agenda.

"Condoleezza Rice helped decide how to torture people, that's the bottom line" said TrueMajority.org Online Director Matt Holland. "As Secretary of State, she is our country's face to the world, and now that the world knows that she spends her time in closed rooms personally planning the abuse of prisoners, we can't show our face."

"Secretary Rice's direct involvement is an embarrassment to our nation," said Jim Dean, Chair of Democracy for America. "Her shameful tenure as Secretary of State must come to an end."

"The very idea of a so-called Secretary of State planning torture gives Orwell a bad name. It is time to end this shameless and un-American abuse of power," said Robert Greenwald, President of Brave New Films.