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So many Americans approve of torture; what does this tell us about America?

Larry Kummer, Editor

It is something new, I believe, that so many Americans approve of torture by our government.  Perhaps this is another result of the horrific mixture of hubris and paranoia (described in America’s Most Dangerous Enemy) that has come to dominate our culture.  It so, I believe it a symptom of a serious illness afflicting our society.  Incidents like this provide a mirror, benchmarks by which we can see how America has changed.

This raises questions about the American project.

For a brief discussion of the legal basis for torture, and the complexities of prosecuting officials, see these posts at the Volokh Conspiracy:  here and here.

Contents

  1. Some applause for America’s torturers
  2. Excerpts
  3. Reports by our government, its officers and agents, and major NGO’s about torture
  4. Other articles about torture
  5. Update:  the My Lai Massacre — evidence we sometimes approve of torture
  6. Afterword and for more information

Sections 3 and 4 provide links to a wide range of sources.

(1)  Some applause for America’s torturers

Comments posted here and at Matthew Yglesias’ site about torture.  Thousands more are scattered about Internet.  Cry for America, for what we have become.

The difference is that you know Zubeydah or whoever is a bad man. (source)

Has M.Y. forgot about 9/11? These enhanced interrogation techniques are used only on the worst of the worst. Would you prefer that we Mirandize terrorists? If we stop using these techniques, then there will likely be another attack, but this time, the blood will on MY’s hands! Rudy/Palin 2012! (source)

I don’t think we need to apologize to the world for beating up knuckleheads who send even their children to blow us up. Rather it is our DUTY to do everything reasonable to save innocent lives. (source)

“Torture” and “Torturers” are loaded terms. I would hazard that most of these detainees were treated less harshly than most kids at the hands of bullies, every day in what pass for public schools. (source)

I still maintain that the idea that “waterboarding, slamming detainees against a wall, and stuffing a prisoner with a fear of insects into a small box with a bug” are torture is ludicrous. I’ve endured worse in resistance training. … should we just turn Gitmo into Club Med, provide Korans and chaplains, free massages, group therapy, and Prime Rib on Sunday in the hope that the Jihadist leaders we have busted our collective hump to capture will give up their info willingly? Get real. (source)

When it comes to how these people are being treated, you have to consider what you are dealing with. These terrorists don’t play the game by our rules, or by any rules of civilized conduct. To treat them as if they were just any John Doe in America who has been accused of a crime just plays into their hands, in my opinion. I really have no sympathy whatever for their complaints. Frankly I don’t understand all the sympathy these terrorists seem to be getting from some. Rather odd considering who these people are and what they are trying to do to innocent people.

To put it succinctly, these terrorists are the enemy. They should be treated as such. When they make up their minds that they want to play by the rules again and resume normal relations amongst the peoples of the world, then we can talk. Until then, we have to fight them until they are defeated. The methods described appear to me to be very mild. If anything, we are too damned nice to them. (source)

We’re using 21st Century, Western morality while fighting a 5th Century Islamic morality. Given the choice between losing half of Philly to a dirty bomb or being accused of having descended to the practices of our enemies then I’ll grant the latter. Turn on the AC. In our lifetimes some nitwit in Washington is going to feel too morally elevated to approve the waterboarding of an important captive. That decision will cost innocent Americans their lives and we’ll all be more vulnerable afterwards. I abhor the notion of torture. But, if my child were held by some demented masochist I’d be the first one pulling up the fingernails. (source)

(2)  Excerpts

(A)  Testimony of Dennis C. Blair (Director of National Intelligence) before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on 22 January 2009:

“Torture is not moral, not legal, not effective.”

(B)  Statement of Dennis C. Blair (Director of National Intelligence) on 21 April 2009 — Excerpt:

I recommended to the president that the administration release these memos, and I made clear that the CIA should not be punished for carrying out legal orders.  I also strongly supported the president when he declared that we would no longer use enhanced interrogation techniques. We do not need these techniques to keep America safe.

The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.

(C)  Book review of The One Percent Doctrine – Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 by Ron Suskind, Washington Post, 20 June 2006 — Excerpt:

One example out of many comes in Ron Suskind’s gripping narrative of what the White House has celebrated as one of the war’s major victories: the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002. Described as al-Qaeda’s chief of operations even after U.S. and Pakistani forces kicked down his door in Faisalabad, the Saudi-born jihadist was the first al-Qaeda detainee to be shipped to a secret prison abroad. Suskind shatters the official story line here.

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries “in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3” — a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail “what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said.” Dan Coleman, then the FBI’s top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.”

Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda’s go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was “echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President,” Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.” And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques.

… In interviews with intelligence officers, Suskind often finds them baffled by White House statements. “Why the hell did the President have to put us in a box like this?” one top CIA official asked about the overblown public portrait of Abu Zubaydah. But Suskind sees a deliberate management choice: Bush ensnared his director of central intelligence at the time, George J. Tenet, and many others in a new kind of war in which action and evidence were consciously divorced.

(D)  “My Tortured Decision“, Ali Soufan (the FBI supervisory special agent who oversaw the Zubaydah interrogations), op-ed in the New York Times, 22 April 2009 — Excerpt:

FOR seven years I have remained silent about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding. I have spoken only in closed government hearings, as these matters were classified. But the release last week of four Justice Department memos on interrogations allows me to shed light on the story, and on some of the lessons to be learned.

One of the most striking parts of the memos is the false premises on which they are based. The first, dated August 2002, grants authorization to use harsh interrogation techniques on a high-ranking terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, on the grounds that previous methods hadn’t been working. The next three memos cite the successes of those methods as a justification for their continued use.

It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence.

… There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.

(E)  Preface By Antonio Taguba (Major General, US Army, retired), from “Broken Laws, Broken Lives”, Report by the Physicians for Human Rights, June 2008.  Bold emphasis added.

This report tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the rest of these individuals’ lives on their bodies and minds. Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors.

The profiles of these eleven former detainees, none of whom were ever charged with a crime or told why they were detained, are tragic and brutal rebuttals to those who claim that torture is ever justified. Through the experiences of these men in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, we can see the full scope of the damage this illegal and unsound policy has inflicted — both on America’s institutions and our nation’s founding values, which the military, intelligence services, and our justice system are duty-bound to defend.

In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored. And the healing professions, including physicians and psychologists, became complicit in the willful infliction of harm against those the Hippocratic Oath demands they protect.

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

The former detainees in this report, each of whom is fighting a lonely and difficult battle to rebuild his life, require reparations for what they endured, comprehensive psycho-social and medical assistance, and even an official apology from our government.

But most of all, these men deserve justice as required under the tenets of international law and the United States Constitution.

And so do the American people.

About Antonio Taguba (Major General, US Army, retired):

Major General Antonio “Tony” M. Taguba (US Army, Retired) led the official US Army investigation into the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, testifying before Congress about his findings in 2004.

Major General Taguba served 34 years on active duty until his retirement on January 1, 2007. He has served in numerous leadership and staff positions, most recently as Deputy Commanding General, Combined Forces Land Component Command during Operations Iraqi Freedom in Kuwait and Iraq; as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs; and as Deputy Commanding General for Transformation, US Army Reserve Command.

(E)  “Drop by Drop: Forgetting the History of Water Torture in U.S. Courts“, Evan Wallach, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, May 2007 — Excerpt:

Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) American judges or commissioners heard American prosecutors roundly condemn the practice as it was applied to American servicemen, and voted to convict the perpetrators. The United States was not alone in prosecuting water torture before national tribunals, nor were the Japanese its sole practitioner. It is worth comparing those trials with Norway’s prosecution of German defendants for the same form of misconduct, and the United Kingdom’s trial and execution of Japanese interrogators who used the method. (p. 5)

… In all cases, whether the water cure was applied by Americans, to Americans, or simply reviewed by American courts, it has uniformly been rejected as illegal; often with severely punitive results for the perpetrators. (p. 10)

… The clearest exposition of the U.S. position on the use of the water treatment as torture is found in cases in which the Japanese armed forces applied it to Allied prisoners of war during WW2. Japan’s use of the technique was extremely common, and was part of the widespread use of torture as a tool of interrogation. An extensive discussion of the effectiveness of water questioning, and one with which some Americans might be expected to be familiar because of the fame of the victims, was found in the trial of Japanese officers responsible for the torture, trial, and in some cases execution, of crew members of the April, 1942 Doolittle raid on Tokyo. (p. 11)

… The United States tried a significant number of Class B and C war criminals before national tribunals. Among them were several conducted at Yokohama, Japan and one in the Philippines which elicited compelling descriptions of water torture from its victims, and which resulted in severe punishment for its perpetrators. {p. 16)

About the author:  Evan Wallach, a judge at the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York, teaches the law of war as an adjunct professor at Brooklyn Law School and New York Law School.

(F)  “A Dubious C.I.A. Shortcut“, Philip Zelikow, op-ed in the New York Times, 24 April 2009 — Excerpt:

The United States has plenty of its own experience to consider, in law enforcement (remember the frenzy a generation ago over the Supreme Court’s Miranda decision requiring suspects to be read their rights?) as well as in war. In World War II, the United States and Britain had special programs for “high value” captives. Thousands of lives were at stake. Yet, even in a horrifyingly brutal war, neither government found it necessary to use methods like the ones in this C.I.A. program. George Marshall would not have needed a lawyer to tell him whether such methods were O.K.

More recent history is also revealing. America inadvertently carried out an experiment in how best to question Qaeda captives. On the one side there was the C.I.A. effort, while on the other there was the military-run program against Al Qaeda in Iraq. The Iraq program, organized by the Joint Special Operations Command, was reformed after the Abu Ghraib scandals. It respected basic international standards. It used teams made up of experts from the military, the C.I.A. and law enforcement. The F.B.I. did not have to stay away, as it did from the C.I.A.’s “enhanced” interrogations.

Qaeda captives in Iraq were hard cases, often more seasoned in violence than captives taken elsewhere. Yet the program in Iraq was and remains highly successful. I was impressed when I observed it in 2005 as part of a wider look at our intelligence efforts. I know that Joint Special Operations Command leaders told the White House that they could interrogate captives effectively under the higher standards.

There is another variable in the intelligence equation: the help you lose because your friends start keeping their distance. When I worked at the State Department, some of America’s best European allies found it increasingly difficult to assist us in counterterrorism because they feared becoming complicit in a program their governments abhorred. This was not a hypothetical concern.

About the author:  Philip Zelikow, a professor of history at the University of Virginia, was the counselor of the State Department from 2005 to 2006 and the executive director of the 9/11 commission.

(G)  “Ice Water and Sweatboxes – The long and sadistic history behind the CIA’s torture techniques“, By Darius Rejali, Slate, 17 March 2009 — Excerpt:

In the 20thcentury, there were two main traditions of clean torture—the kind that doesn’t leave marks, as modern torturers prefer. The first is French modern, a combination of water- and electro-torture. The second is Anglo-Saxon modern, a classic list of sleep deprivation, positional and restraint tortures, extremes of temperature, noise, and beatings.

All the techniques in the accounts of torture by the International Committee of the Red Cross, as reported Monday, collected from 14 detainees held in CIA custody, fit a long historical pattern of Anglo-Saxon modern. The ICRC report apparently includes details of CIA practices unknown until now, details that point to practices with names, histories, and political influences. In torture, hell is always in the details.

The ice-water cure

“On a daily basis during the first two weeks I was made to lie on a plastic sheet placed on the floor which would then be lifted at the edges. Cold water was then poured onto my body with buckets. … I would be kept wrapped inside the sheet with the cold water for several minutes. I would then be taken for interrogation,” detainee Walid bin Attash told the Red Cross.

In the 1920s, the Chicago police used to extract confessions from prisoners by chilling them in freezing water baths. This was called the “ice-water cure.” That’s not its first use. During World War I, American military prisons subjected conscientious objectors to ice-water showers and baths until they fainted. The technique appeared in some British penal colonies as well; occasionally in Soviet interrogation in the 1930s; and more commonly in fascist Spain, Vichy France, and Gestapo-occupied Belgium. The Allies also used it against people they regarded as war criminals and terrorists. Between 1940 and 1948, British interrogators used “cold-water showers” as part of a brutal interrogation regimen in a clandestine London prison for German POWs accused of war crimes. French Paras also used cold showers occasionally in Algeria in the 1950s. In the 1970s, Greek, Chilean, Israeli, and Syrian interrogators made prisoners stand under cold showers or in cold pools for long periods. And American soldiers in Vietnam called it the “old cold-water-hot-water treatment” in the 1960s.

Cold cell

Abu Zubaydah, another detainee, says, “I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. … [T]he cell and room were air-conditioned and were very cold.” There, he was shackled to a chair for two to three weeks. “Cold cell” is one of six known authorized CIA interrogation techniques.

Since the 1960s, torturers have adapted air vents to put “the air in a state of war with me,” in the words of one prisoner. In the first recorded case in 1961, guards at Parchman, Mississippi’s state penitentiary, blasted civil rights detainees with a fire hose and then turned “the air-conditioning system on full blast” for three days. In 1965, detainees in Aden reported that British guards kept them “undressed in very cold cells with air conditioners and fans running at full speed.” In other countries, interrogators have forced prisoners to stand or squat for long periods in front of blasting air-conditioning units or fans, as in South Vietnam (1970s), Singapore (1970s), the Philippines (1976), Taiwan (1980), South Africa (1980s), and Israel (1991 to present).

In a scene eerily similar to the CIA interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, South Vietnamese torturers held Vhuen Van Tai, the highest-ranking Viet Cong officer captured, in a windowless white room outfitted with heavy-duty air conditioners for four years. Frank Snepp, a CIA interrogator who interviewed him in 1972 in the room regularly, described Tai as “thoroughly chilled.”

Water-boarding

Abu Zubaydah says that after he was strapped to a bed, “[a] black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe.” If the contents of the mineral-water bottle were carbonated, this would be a well-known Mexican police technique (tehuancanzo), documented since the 1980s. The Mexican signature mark is to mix in a little chili pepper before forcing the water down the nasal passage.

Water-boardingis not a technical term in torture, and reports have described several different water tortures under this name. The ICRC report puts to rest which kind the CIA used. It turns out to be the traditional “water cure,” an antique Dutch technique invented in the East Indies in the 17th century. It migrated here after American troops returned from the Philippine insurgency in the early 20thcentury. By the 1930s, the water cure was favored by the Southern police. Interrogators tie or hold down a victim on his back. Then they pour water down his nostrils “so as to strangle him, thus causing pain and horror for the purpose of forcing a confession.” Sometimes torturers cover the face with a napkin, making it difficult for the prisoner to breathe, as the ICRC report describes.

Sweatboxes and coubarils

Abu Zubaydah says, “Two black wooden boxes were brought into the room outside my cell. One was tall, slightly higher than me and narrow. … The other was shorter, perhaps only [3 feet 6 inches] in height.” The large box, which Abu Zubaydah says he was held in for up to two hours, is a classic sweatbox. Sweatboxes are old, and they came into modern torture from traditional Asian penal practices. If you’ve seen Bridge on the River Kwai, you know the Japanese used them in POW camps in World War II. They are still common in East Asia. The Chinese used them during the Korean War, and Chinese prisoners today relate accounts of squeeze cells (xiaohao, literally “small number”), dark cells (heiwu), and extremely hot or cold cells. In Vietnam, they are dubbed variously “dark cells,” “tiger cages,” or “connex boxes,” which are metal and heat up rapidly in the tropical sun.

Abu Zubaydah was also placed into the smaller box, in which he was forced to crouch for hours, until “the stress on my legs held in this position meant my wounds both in the leg and stomach became very painful.” This smaller type of box was once called a coubaril. Coubarils often bent the body in an uncomfortable position. They were standard in French penal colonies in New Guinea in the 19th century, where some prisoners were held in them for 16 days at a stretch.

Both kinds of boxes entered American prison and military practice in the 19th century. They were a standard part of naval discipline, and the word sweatboxcomes from the Civil War era. In the 1970s, prisoners described sweatboxes in South Vietnam, Iran (tabout, or “coffin”), Israel, and Turkey (”tortoise cell”). In the last three decades, prisoners have reported the use of sweatboxes in Brazil (cofrinho), Honduras (cajones), and Paraguay (guardia). And after 2002, Iraqi prisoners held in U.S. detention centers describe “cells so small that they could neither stand nor lie down,” as well as a box known as “the coffin” at the U.S. detention center at Qaim near Syria.

Standing cells

WalidBin Attash says, “I was put in a cell measuring approximately [3 feet 6 inches-by-6 feet 6 inches]. I was kept in a standing position, feet flat on the floor, but with my arms above my head and fixed with handcuffs and a chain to a metal bar running across the width of the cell.” Over the last century, many prisons had built-in, tall, narrow, coffin-size cells, in which prisoners were forced to stand for hours, their hands chained to the ceiling. In the early 20thcentury, the women’s prison in Gainesville, Texas, had a standing cell in the dining room so that prisoners could smell the food.

High-cuffing

Detainees routinely describe having their hands cuffed high above their heads while they stand with their feet on the ground. This is less damaging than full suspension by the wrists, which causes permanent nerve damage in 15 minutes to an average-size man. High-cuffing increases the time prisoners may be suspended, elongates the pain, and delays permanent injury. It is a restraint torture, as opposed to a positional torture, which requires prisoners to assume a normal human position (standing or sitting), but for a prolonged period of time.

High-cuffing is an old slave punishment of the Americas, once called “hanging from the rafters.” John Brown, a free slave, said of it, “Some tie them up in a very uneasy posture, where they must stand all night, and they will then work them hard all day.” American military prisons adopted the practice in World War I. High-cuffing was the standard prescribed military punishment for desertion, insubordination, and conscientious objection. Prisoners were handcuffed to their cell door eight to nine hours a day, in one case for up to 50 days. They described high-cuffing as excruciatingly painful, and the American public, otherwise unsympathetic with these prisoners, found the practice appalling, sparking a newspaper debate over “manacling” in November 1918. A month later, the War Department rescinded high-cuffing as a mode of punishment.

Towels, collars, and plywood

Sometimes torturers come up with something entirely new. “Also,” says Abu Zubaydah, “on a daily basis during the first two weeks a collar was looped around my neck and then used to slam me against the walls of the interrogation room. It was also placed around my neck when being taken out of my cell for interrogation and was used to lead me along the corridor. It was also used to slam me against the walls of the corridor during such movements.”

This is a novel approach to beating someone in a way that leaves few marks. For 30 years, I’ve studied a long and remorseless two centuries of torture around the world, and I can find only one instance of an account resembling the collars and plywood technique described in the ICRC report. It’s American. During World War I, conscientious objectors in military prisons report that their guards dragged them like animals with a rope around the neck, across rough floors, slamming them into walls. This one, as far as I can tell, is entirely homegrown.

About the author

Darius Rejali is a professor of political science and the author of Torture and Democracy, the winner of the 2007 Human Rights Best Book Award of the American Political Science Association.

(3)  Reports by our government, its officers and agents, and major NGO’s about torture

The best source of information about torture I’ve found is “EDUCING INFORMATION, Interrogation: Science and Art, Foundations for the Future“, Intelligence Science Board, National Defense Intelligence College, December 2006 — 372 pages. The authors are skeptical. Also, the Wikipedia entry on torture has valauble background information.

Remember, President Reagan sighed the United Nations Convention against Torture in 1988.

  1. “Treatment of Fourteen ‘High Value Detainees’ in CIA Custody“, International Committee of the Red Cross, February 2007 – except in the New York Review of Books, 9 April 2009 (aprox 24 pages)
  2. “Waterboarding is Torture, Period“, Malcome Nance (major heavy CI and Special Ops background, see his bio), Small Wars Journal, 31 October 2007
  3. “Broken Laws, Broken Lives”, Report by the Physicians for Human Rights, June 2008
  4. “Guantanamo and the SERE schools“, Pat Lang (Colonel, US Army, retired), Sic Semper Tyrannis, 2 July 2008 — Putting the above story in a larger context of good and evil, of America and its enemies.
  5. “Executive Summary of the Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody“, Senate Armed Services Committee, December 2008 (18 pages)
  6. Testimony of Dennis C. Blair (Director of National Intelligence) before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on 22 January 2009
  7. Statement of Dennis C. Blair (Director of National Intelligence) on 21 April 2009
  8. “My Tortured Decision“, Ali Soufan (the FBI supervisory special agent who oversaw the Zubaydah interrogations), op-ed in the New York Times, 22 April 2009
  9. Declassified Narrativeon DOJ Office of Legal Counsel’s Opinions on the CIA Detention and Interrogation Program, Senate Intelligence Committee, 17 April 2009
  10. Office of Legal Counsel memos about detention and questioning of prisoners:  OLC site, Wikipedia links.

(4)  Other articles about torture

  1. Book review of The One Percent Doctrine – Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11By Ron Suskind, Washington Post, 20 June 2006
  2. Book review of The One Percent Doctrineby Ron Suskind, New York Times, 20 June 2006
  3. “Drop by Drop: Forgetting the History of Water Torture in U.S. Courts“, Evan Wallach, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, May 2007
  4. “Verschärfte Vernehmung“, Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic online, 29 May 2007 — Comparing NAZI methods to ours.
  5. “Of Course It Was Torture“, Gene Healy, president of the Cato Institute, 20 April 2008
  6. “China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo“, New York Times, 2 July 2008 — Terrible news about our government.
  7. “The flawed thinking of the administration’s torture advocates“, Steven Kleinman, posted at Nieman Watchdog, 7 August 2008 — It doesn’t work.
  8. “Believe Me, It’s Torture“, Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair, August 2008
  9. “Cancel Water-Boarding 101“, David J. Morris, Slate, 29 January 2009 — “The military should close its torture school. I know because I graduated from it.”
  10. “Lincoln’s Laws of War“, John Fabian Witt, Slate, 11 February 2009 — “How he built the code that Bush attempted to destroy.”
  11. “Ice Water and Sweatboxes – The long and sadistic history behind the CIA’s torture techniques“, By Darius Rejali, Slate, 17 March 2009
  12. “Detainee’s Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots“, Washington Post, 29 March 2009 — “Waterboarding, Rough Interrogation of Abu Zubaida Produced False Leads, Officials Say”
  13. “Bush’s Torture Rationale Debunked“, Dan Froomkin, blog of the Washington Post, 30 March 2009
  14. “Report Details Origins of Bush-Era Interrogation Policies“, Spencer Ackerman, Washington Independent, 21 April 2009 — “Senate Armed Services Document Outlines How Pentagon Used Torture Resistance Training in Interrogations”
  15. “Report: Abusive tactics used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link“, McClatchy Newspapers, 21 April 2009
  16. “A Dubious C.I.A. Shortcut“, Philip Zelikow, op-ed in the New York Times, 24 April 2009 – He was counselor of the State Dept from 2005 to 2006 and the executive director of the 9/11 Commission.
  17. “Disbar The Bush Lawyers And Get A Special Prosecutor For The Rest“, comments by Lawrence Wilkerson (Colonel, US Army, Retired; former Chief of Staff to Sec State Powell), Huffington Post, 27 April 2009

Attorneys discussing the law:

  1. “Congress Shouldn’t Impeach Bybee“, Frank Bowman (Prof of Law at Uof Missouri-Columbia), Slate, 24 April 2009 — “Much as he deserves it.”
  2. Analysis at the Volokh Conspiracy:  here and here

The Brits are investigating their torturers:

  1. “Metropolitan police investigation fails to quell independent inquiry calls“, The Guardian, 27 March 2009
  2. “Torture victim Binyam Mohamed: don’t scapegoat MI5 officer“, The Guardian, 27 March 2009

(5)  The My Lai Massacre — evidence we sometimes approve of torture

An email from a reader alerts me to a example of torture widely approved by the US public.

(A)  From the Wikipedia entry about the My Lai Massacre

The My Lai Massacre was the mass murder of 347 to 504 unarmed citizens in South Vietnam, all of whom were civilians and some of whom were women and children, conducted by U.S. Army forces on March 16, 1968.

Many of the victims were sexually abused, beaten, tortured, or maimed, and some of the bodies were found mutilated.2 The massacre took place in the hamlets of Mỹ Lai and My Khe of Sơn Mỹ village during the Vietnam War. 3, 4  Of the 26 US soldiers initially charged with criminal offences for their actions at My Lai, only William Calley was convicted. He served three years of his life sentence. … Three U.S. servicemen who made an effort to halt the massacre and protect the wounded were denounced by U.S. Congressmen, received hate mail, death threats and mutilated animals on their doorsteps.5 Only 30 years after the event were their efforts honored.6

(B)  From How We Got Here: The 70’s The Decade That Brought You Modern Life (for Better or Worse), by David Frum (2000), page 84:

My Lai is remembered as a turning point in the war, and indeed it was, but not in the way people usually think.

  1. In the twenty-four hours after the military court declared Calley’s guilt, the White House received more than 5,000 telegrams and 1,500 phone calls. The messages ran 100:1 in Calley’s favor.
  2. Congressional liberals like Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut joined with conservatives like Georgia’s Herman Talmadge to condemn the verdict.
  3. Representative Don Fuqua, a Democrat from Calley’s home state of Florida, proposed inviting Calley to address a joint session. “We are his accusers. Let us invite this American serviceman here to tell his story.”
  4. The governor of Indiana ordered all state flags to be flown at half staff for Calley.
  5. The governor of Utah criticized the verdict as “inappropriate” and the sentence as “excessive.”
  6. Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia proclaimed “American Fighting Man’s Day,” and urged Georgia motorists to drive all week with headlights on.
  7. The Arkansas legislature approved a resolution asking for clemency.
  8. The lower house of the Kansas legislature demanded Calley’s release from prison. So did the Texas Senate and the state legislatures of New Jersey and South Carolina.
  9. The draft board in Quitman, Georgia, wired the White House that so long as the Calley verdict stood, it would not induct any more young men.
  10. Members of draft boards in Athens and Blairsville, Georgia, and in Elizabethtown, Tennessee, resigned.
  11. A Poughkeepsie, New York, radio station invited listeners to call in their opinions. It received more than 2,000 calls in just one hour. Only 36 defended the verdict.
  12. Governor George Wallace spoke at a rally in Calley’s defense at Columbus, Georgia, alongside Governor John Bell Williams of Mississippi.
  13. The Columbus rally was just one of a series of demonstrations across the nation; Jacksonville, Florida, Los Angeles, Kansas City, and Dallas quickly followed.
  14. By the end of the first week after Calley’s conviction and sentencing, 79% of Americans polled expressed disapproval of the verdict.
  15. Within the month, a Tennessee recording company announced that it had sold more than 200,000 copies of a song titled “The Battle Hymn of William Calley.”

(6)  For more information from the FM site

To read other articles about these things, see the FM reference page on the right side menu bar.  Of esp interest are:

  1. About America – how can we reform it?
  2. Good news about America, a collection of articles!

Forecasts about the American spirit, the American soul:

  1. Diagnosing the eagle, chapter IV – Alienation, 13 January 2008
  2. Americans, now a subservient people (listen to the Founders sigh in disappointment), 20 July 2008
  3. de Tocqueville warns us not to become weak and servile, 21 July 2008
  4. The American spirit speaks: “Baa, Baa, Baa”, 5 August 2008
  5. We’re Americans, hear us yell: “baa, baa, baa”, 6 August 2008
  6. This crisis will prove that Americans are not sheep (unless we are), 8 January 2008
  7. About security theater, a daily demonstration that Americans are sheep, 25 January 2009

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