Holte's corner

Thugs, CIA, and Democracy

In today's Washington Post is an article by a professional and former JAG officer who details the "unlearned lessons of Abu Gharaib." He is assuming that the Administration ever really cared about the science or the ethics of "aggressive interrogations" -- or the rule of law. This is an administration that never cared to learn the difference between Shia and Sunni, or to put enough "boots on the ground" to secure the country during the invasion. They are led by a man who has had the reverse Midas touch since his College days. But that is a side issue.

Anyway he says a number of important things:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/18/AR2006101801501.html

In his article The Unlearned Lessons of Abu Ghraib, By Christopher Graveline, Thursday, October 19, 2006; Page A29, Washington Post Christopher Graveline, a former JAG officer writes about the new "Torture legalization" legistlation:

He says it represents "Congress's latest attempt to clarify our country's position on proper treatment of detainees and the boundaries of legitimate interrogation techniques."

Unfortunately, as the Torture Memos show in parsed and "Camouflage" language, and Dick Cheney states pretty baldly in discussions detailed by Ron Ruskind in his 1% solution statements, this "clarification" isn't meant to "clarify" anything. It is meant to ratify the brutal and illegal procedures already being used by the CIA to conduct interrogations, and to cover up these legal violations by denying detainees rights to habeas corpus.

That is why he is being more than charitable when he says next:

"Unfortunately, this legislation demonstrates that both the administration and Congress have failed to learn important lessons from what Bush described as the "biggest mistake that's happened so far" in Iraq: the detainee abuses at Abu Ghraib."

They haven't learned any lessons, because this legislation wasn't about learning lessons, it was about avoiding culpability for demonstrated crimes by trying to legalize them after the fact and before Democrats or progressives could start using subpoena power to demonstrate just how awful those crimes really are.

He says next:
"By dissociating potential criminal responsibility from overly aggressive interrogation practices that could be classified as "minor" breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and setting up a situation in which different interrogation practices can be used by our military and the CIA, our national leadership has ensured more abuse scandals."

There is no such thing as a "minor breach of the Geneva Convention" when one is talking about water-boarding, sexual humiliation, and pain generating positioning. They are trying to set up a situation in which the military is held to international law, while the CIA is allowed to continue to flout it. Pure and simple.

He writes:
"As part of the Army judge advocate general team investigating and prosecuting the Abu Ghraib soldiers, I crisscrossed the globe interviewing witnesses, collecting documents and studying our national policies, searching for went wrong at that prison. The evidence demonstrated that most of the photographed abuse had little or nothing to do with interrogation; it was done for sport by prison guards."

Well and Good. But then he writes:

"But we also found disturbing conduct by military and civilian interrogators."

And those "disturbing conducts, were crimes that went unpunished because they were conducted under the cover of secrecy. As he notes later in his article:

"The CIA conducted its own internal abuse investigation but never reported the results to any military authority in Iraq, creating resentment, the impression of a double standard and confusion in the military ranks as to what were acceptable practices. Having strict controls over interrogations and the ability to hold individual interrogators responsible for their actions is another important lesson stemming from abuses seen in Iraq."

And the administration would like to reinforce and continue this double standard. They want the appearance of abiding by the Geneva Convention, while flouting it completely. But this doesn't work. It will further detroy the military (which might be a goal as well):

"The interrogation abuses could be linked to three main areas of breakdown: confusion in the military ranks about what was acceptable behavior, given the conduct of civilian contractors and "other governmental agencies"; migration of certain techniques within the intelligence community without an understanding of how to implement them properly; and exploitation of the ambiguity in apparently innocuous interrogation tactics."

Now these "certain practices" were the practices of "torture lite" which are designed to use psychological methods to completely break down the victim and thus get him, or her, to submit to his or her Jailors and spill everything to them. It works, more or less, but doesn't produce the best intelligence in the world, and many interrogators swear that there is no need to use torture at any point during such interrogations.

He concludes: "The new law does nothing to remedy these weaknesses."

Some of those techniques cross the line of legality and should never have been employed within the CIA itself, except that the CIA, apparantly, like most "Intelligence" services exempts itself from following the letter of the law for "Reasons of State," leaving it in the murky world of James Bond imagination and Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Hitler, Castro, and Pinochet reality. The whole idea of romanticized "Covert" activities is that sometimes normal laws and rules have to be violated to accomplish some noble end. He writes:

"First, our military and civilian intelligence agencies do not operate in mutually exclusive bubbles. A great deal of interaction occurs as military units capture suspected personnel, hand them over to interested agencies and, often, witness the interrogations. Our service members, especially Special Operations forces, will see the double standard -- the CIA's and the military's. This blurring was a main complaint of Abu Ghraib prison guards."

It also was demonstrated in numerous other incidents that never hit the radar screen but were hauntingly similar to Abu Gharaib, with the twist of not being "for sport" but being at the behest of Military "Intelligence."

"Army Maj. Gen. George Fay, who investigated Abu Ghraib, wrote in his report that "CIA detention and interrogation practices led to a loss of accountability, abuse, reduced interagency cooperation, and an unhealthy mystique that further poisoned the atmosphere."

This romanticizing of the CIA, epitomized by the famous cliche "If I told you I'd have to kill you" used by so many people with access to classified information. [The actual line should be 'if I told you I'd have to report myself and you, and we'd both be in a whole lot of trouble'] People think of Smiley or James Bond, but they don't realize that even the CIA has to operate in a world where ultimately even the executive is accountable to the people who elect him and nobody should be above the law. But the "mystique" is infectious.

"The power of the CIA's mystique to influence our soldiers should not be underestimated. Army guards reported seeing unknown men in civilian clothes dropping prisoners off and telling the guards not to give the detainees identification numbers, contrary to usual practices under the Geneva Conventions. The civilians exuded an air of confidence that suggested they knew exactly what they were doing and that this departure from the norm was allowed. Similar issues were unearthed in the interrogation booth, including one instance of a man dying during a CIA interrogation at Abu Ghraib."

After all, if the CIA can use brutal, ham-handed, and civil rights violating methods, then why not the rest of the military? Or the Police? Or the local police? Or Republican Operatives seeking to avoid prosecution for bribery? It is a slippery slope, and eternal warfare is what is making that slope so slippery.

"Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer, an Army interrogator, exploited the ambiguous language of the "harsh" interrogation approach to wrap an Iraqi general in a sleeping bag, tie electrical cords around the bag and sit on the man's chest in an attempt to scare him with suffocation. The general died. (This was not at Abu Ghraib.) Welshofer was convicted by the military of negligent homicide. But given the language of the new law, it is unclear whether a civilian interrogator performing the same actions would be prosecuted, since it would be impossible to prove that the interrogator "specifically intended" to torture or inflict 'severe or serious physical or mental pain.'"

I don't see how not. But military tribunals have a special way sometimes of interpreting the law. It is rare that someone actually says; "You want the truth, you can't handle the truth." Jack Nicholson was acting.

"The new law grants too much latitude in an area where precision and oversight are critical. If confusion reigned in Washington during the past several weeks over whether waterboarding or other, "harsher" techniques would be permissible under the legislation, imagine the results when our agents and service members are faced with the same question halfway around the world and years removed from this debate -- especially if the threat of criminal responsibility is gone."

Again, the key here is that the law had nothing to do with precision or oversight. It was Congress trying to legitimize illegitimate methods of getting information from victims. The whole idea was to legitimize further rounds of harsh interrogations, "disapearings" and perhaps set the groundwork for a future in which other "enemy combattants" can be designated and disapeared. For instance, should there be election fraud in Ohio again and people "take to the streets." Why not designate them "enemy combattants?"

He writes:

"The better route would have been to authorize mirror-image interrogation techniques for both the CIA and the military and to maintain the possibility of criminal prosecution if an interrogator exceeds these authorized approaches. All interrogators would have more than enough flexibility to obtain necessary information simply by using the approaches recently rewritten into the new Army field manual that governs interrogation."

Science? Integrity? From this administration?

"Now we must wait to see what interrogation rules the president will promulgate for the CIA. Given the administration's rhetoric, there seems little hope for a cure for the systemic problems exposed at Abu Ghraib."

We may not get to see what those rules are.

"The writer, who served as an active-duty Army JAG officer for more than seven years, participated in the prosecution of 10 soldiers for detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison."

Posted by cholte at October 19, 2006 05:11 PM