The Only Way to Commemorate 9/11

Reading the whole painful, devastating thing is the most patriotic thing you will ever do in your life, just after voting and just before military service.

Charlie Pierce:

Getting someone to talk on the record is the eternal jackpot of investigative reporting, and, in today's Guardian, Ackerman hits the Comstock Lode with Daniel Jones, who was the chief investigator for the Senate intelligence committee when that committee was looking into the practice of rendition and torture and the other extraconstitutional horrors perpetrated in our name by the late Avignon Presidency, and who also looked on in anger as the CIA worked overtime to ratfck the investigation and to bury its result. This is the first of a three-part series. I'd say that the extended weekend forecast calls for fury and outrage.

It begins with a holy-shit moment straight out of a paranoid political thriller, except that it was real, and it happened here. From The Guardian:

There was one document in particular that proved it. Jones and his team had found it years before, placed mysteriously onto a shared computer network drive the Senate intelligence committee investigators were using in northern Virginia, not far from CIA headquarters. But they hadn't appreciated its full significance until the agency, in an attempt at refuting a report that was still far from publication, told Barack Obama's staff that the committee was pushing a hysterical interpretation of the agency's fateful post-9/11 embrace of torture. The document, prepared for Leon Panetta when he was CIA director, had reached the same conclusions about the torture program that Jones had. As long as Jones had it, he would be able to show that the agency knew full well how brutal the torture was; how ineffective its torturers considered it to be; and how thoroughly the CIA had covered all of that up. As long as Jones had the document, that is. Lurking in the back of his mind was the event that had led him to devote five years of ceaseless work, through nights and weekends: the CIA had already destroyed evidence of torture. It did that before the Senate had launched an investigation, and long before that investigation had turned acrimonious. Inside the small room in Virginia the CIA had set up for the Senate investigators, Jones reached for his canvas messenger bag. He slipped crucial printed-out passages of what he called the Panetta Review into the bag and secured its lock. Sometime after 1am, Jones walked out, carrying his bag as he always did, and neglecting to tell the agency security personnel what it contained. After years of working together, no one asked him to open the bag.

And thus was saved a document that gave the lie to everything the CIA ever said in public about how it squandered the moral authority of the United States in the world. It is important to note, as Ackerman does, that Jones didn't remove this document to leak it—no Ellsberg, he—but to make sure that the cover-up artists from Langley didn't burn the thing.

QOTD: Terrorism Fear-Mongering

Charlie Pierce:

We are back in the hands of the spooks again. In all of our institutions, secrecy and the magical thinking of the intelligence priesthood inflitrates itself like foul water after a storm, bringing rot we cannot see until it brings everything down. Then the members of the priesthood put on their most glittering robes and blame the heretics out there who did not believe, the infrastructure of disbelief that the priesthood's own mendacity constructed within the incense-clouded cathedral it has made of our fears.

Honor Those Who Said No to Torture

If we don't prosecute and imprison the torturers and the ones who planned, justified and excused it, then at the very least let us honor those who refused to torture.

Jon Weiner at The Nation:

Hidden in the Senate torture report are stories of some heroes—people inside the CIA who from the beginning said torture was wrong, who tried to stop it, who refused to participate. There were also some outside the CIA, in the military and the FBI, who risked careers and reputations by resisting—and who sometimes paid a heavy price. They should be thanked and honored.

But President Obama hasn’t mentioned them. Instead, he praised the CIA officials who presided over the torture regime as “patriots.”

We should “celebrate the ones who stood up for what was right,” says David Luban of the Georgetown University law school, author of Torture, Power and Law. Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, author of the definitive book on Bush administration torture, The Dark Side, calls them “the real torture patriots.”

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The heroes in the torture report include Ali Soufan, former FBI agent and interrogator of terrorists who, according to Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower, came closer than anyone to preventing the 9/11 attacks. Soufan has argued publicly against torture and in favor of “rapport-building” as the best technique to get information from suspects. The CIA heavily censored his memoir The Black Banners in what Wright called an effort “to punish a critic and to obscure history.” He was featured in a Frontline documentary made by Martin Smith and James Gilmore.

Another hero: Alberto Mora. As general counsel of the Navy in 2004, Jane Mayer reported, he tried to stop the torture program. He told his superiors at the Pentagon that the Bush torture policy violated the Geneva Conventions’ prohibition of torture and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” He described the Bush program as “unlawful” and “dangerous,” and warned that the torturers could face criminal prosecution. He was featured in the documentary Taxi to the Dark Side by Alex Gibney (which won the Best Documentary Oscar in 2007).

Some of the heroes were ordinary soldiers, like Sgt. Joe Darby, who first revealed the Abu Ghraib abuses. As a result,” Luban points out, he “had to live under armed protection for six months.” Others were high officials, like Philip Zelikow, an adviser to Condoleezza Rice, who, Luban reports, wrote an “anti-torture memo” that the White House “attempted to destroy.”

And there was Ian Fishback, an army captain who reported that his own unit was abusing Iraqi prisoners. Eventually he wrote an open letter to Senator John McCain, asking, “Do we sacrifice our ideals in order to preserve security?” His answer: “I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is ‘America.’ ”

Finally we have the case of Guantaánamo prosecutor Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, who refused to prosecute a teenager who had been abused in US detention in Afghanistan and Guantánamo. For that decision, Jameel Jaffer and Larry Siems report, Vandeveld was “barred from the prosecutors’ office, confined to his residence and threatened with dismissal from the Army.”

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The ACLU has set up a web page with a petition to President Obama to “honor those who said no to torture.”

And make sure everyone knows that waterboarding was the least of it and the CIA wasn't alone.

Digby:

I think people don't realize how much anal rape was going on. It wasn't just those "high value" detainees and it didn't happen just a couple of times.

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Folks, they were raping these prisoners and they knew they were raping these prisoners. It wasn't just the CIA, it was the Pentagon too.

They Knew It Was Wrong When They Did It

Gee, if only some powerful country had already - maybe seven decades ago - established the principle that "I was just following orders" is not an acceptable excuse for torture.

Digby:

Nobody's family deserves to be targeted and the government should protect them from harm if they are. But I  do not buy the excuse that the people who did this were just doing what they were told and bear no responsibility.  They could have said no.  Nothing terrible would have happened to them if they had.  And if they had resisted this program would likely not have gone forward.

I sincerely don't wish that any of these people become victims of violence. But there needed to be a reckoning for this hideous, immoral policy and this is the inadequate, weaselly way we've come up with.  It would be nice if I believed it would shock the consciences of Americans so much that they would insist it never happen again but from the looks of it, that's not going to happen.  After tomorrow, the Republican Party (and some Democratic hawks who operate out of fear and intimidation) are going to be officially pro-torture.

We will be fighting about this for a long time to come unfortunately.  And these operatives who could have said no bear some responsibility for that as well.

Murder By Cop In A Nation of Normalized Torture

Like military, like police, and I don't mean equipment.

Digby on the crybaby torturers:

This is why these people should have been fired:

“There is a feeling in the hallways that Brennan is not pursuing their best interest,” said a former intelligence official who talks to friends at headquarters. “That, in fact, he’s pursuing the White House’s best interest. And they’re getting thrown under the bus. It goes back to the one basic thing: Whether they did right or they did wrong, they were told to do something, they did it, and they feel like they had the rug pulled out from underneath them. They feel sold down the river, and Brennan is part of the sale process.”

Oh boo hoo hoo. What a bunch of sniveling cowards. They are not robots. If they had balked at doing it, they would not have been fired. After all, it was torture. Would the administration have risked them going public with that mess? No. They could have found other ways. They wanted to do it and so they did. And clearly, they're not sorry. Why should they be? There are no repercussions. If you like torturing people, which they apparently do, then it's all good.

And once more, let's all be aware of the fact that torture has been "normalized" by this episode. It's now a matter for "debate" as to whether we should do it and you can bet that we will do it if they feel the need:

Those disgruntled analysts and spies will find more vocal defenders in a group of former officials who’ve read the findings, and who pledged not to discuss them until they were made public. These officials have penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, which will be published soon after the report is publicly released. In it, according to a source familiar with the contents, the formers will lay out their fierce rebuttal of the committee’s findings—nearly all of which have already been leaked—and blast what they see as a biased, five-year process that culminated in a flawed history of the rendition, detention, and interrogation efforts.

Right. After all we won the War on Terror, pacified Iraq and ushered in a new era of peace and tranquility in the Middle East. It's been a big success. Why would we change a thing?

This is just sickening. The Republican Party is overtly pro-torture and they're proud of it. Democrats can barely raise their voices against it.

And people wonder why cops on the streets of American think they can chokehold people to death on the sidewalk? Why? This is who we are.

Kevin Gosztola at Firedoglake:

There currently is no law in the United States, which specifically criminalizes law enforcement who engage in torture. The United Nations Committee Against Torture has protested the fact that there is no law in the United States, however, three times now the US government has maintained that such a law is not required because there is a patchwork of other statutes that could be used against law enforcement or any other officials who committed torture.

A US delegation appeared before the UN Committee in November and faced questions, once again, about the fact that Chicago Police Department torture survivors have been denied justice.