More and more former interrogators and counterinsurgency experts are using Dick Cheney’s recent ubiquity to expose his iniquity regarding the torture and abuse of detainees. Earlier this week, I wrote about Major Matthew Alexander, the former Senior Interrogator who conducted over 300 interrogations in Iraq and supervised 1,000 more. Alexander relied upon conventional means of interrogation, and his efforts led to the capture and killing of al-Qaeda leader Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi. Yet Alexander also witnessed the perilous consequences of Cheney’s torture policy.
In an exclusive interview with Brave New Foundation, Alexander said, “At the prison where I conducted interrogations, we heard day in and day out foreign fighters who had been captured state that the number one reason they had come to fight in Iraq was because of torture and abuse, what had happened at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.”
Today, MoveOn.org and VoteVets.org joined the growing movement to amplify the testimonies of former interrogators and reveal the repercussions of treating prisoners inhumanely. Their joint campaign features a video with Jay Bagwell, an Afghanistan veteran and counterintelligence agent, who reaffirmed Alexander’s assessment of Cheney’s torture policy. According to Bagwell, “Torture puts our troops in danger, torture makes our troops less safe, torture creates terrorists. It’s used so widely as a propaganda tool now in Afghanistan. All too often, detainees have pamphlets on them, depicting what happened at Guantanamo.”
Dick Cheney says that torturing detainees has saved American lives. That claim is patently false. Cheney’s torture policy was directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds if notthousands of American servicemen and women.
Matthew Alexander was the senior military interrogator for the task force that tracked down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq and, at the time, a higher priority target than Osama bin Laden. Mr. Alexander has personally conducted hundreds of interrogations and supervised over a thousand of them.
“Torture does not save lives. Torture costs us lives,” Mr. Alexander said in an exclusive interview at Brave New Studios. “And the reason why is that our enemies use it, number one, as a recruiting tool…These same foreign fighters who came to Iraq to fight because of torture and abuse….literally cost us hundreds if not thousands of American lives.”
As Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post reported this morning, “Alexander easily takes down Cheney’s arguments…The video is at once an effective rebuke of the former vice president and a sign of how the changing media landscape can flatten the field of political debate.”
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With the mainstream media obsessing over the personal feud between the President and the former Vice President instead of on the critical question of whether torture has led to thousands of American casualties, the work atBrave New Studios and your contribution are more important than ever.
This last act of political theater has been almost unbearable to watch. It has literally been a sexist witch hunt (watch the video below) against Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on the issue of torture.
Here’s the narrative: Pelosi has been one of the most vocal critics on the issue of using torture in interrogating terror suspects since the scandal at Abu Ghraib. Other than Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, she also happens to be the highest-ranking woman in political office.
The right-wingers have effectively pulled a bait and switch on the American people with the help of the ineffective mainstream media. Instead of asking who gave the orders, who was at fault, now all we should care about is whether Pelosi knew about it.
U.S. airstrikes slaughtered 95 Afghan children in the Farah province last week, leaving a total of 140 civilians dead. And yet as Tom Hayden pointed out in The Nation this week, our Democrat-dominated Congress seems unwilling to criticize the Obama administration as it rushes to approve $94.2 billion in supplemental wartime funding. The Congressional Progressive Caucus, which has been holding hearings over the past few weeks with U.S., Afghan, and Pakistani military advisers, assessed that the supplemental only “exacerbates” failed strategies by allocating $84 billion to military escalation, leaving $10 billion for foreign aid.
At a time when we’re facing soaring unemployment and an economic crisis, it’s incredible to me that Congress is so quick to simply go along with Obama on this one, particularly when the run up to the war in Iraq is so fresh in our minds and when we’ve seen this pattern before from Democratic Presidents. And there are many who share this incredulity. Here’s a sample of the messages people left for members of the Senate Appropriations Committee:
1) Capturing bin laden will have no more effect than the capture of Saddam; 2) There is no military solution for Afghanistan/Pakistan; and 3) We can’t afford it.” — Bernie Feldman
“I don’t know what to do. I have written the President and my representatives on this subject, just as I did in the run up to the Iraq disaster. Not only does it seem to do no good, I don’t even get replies, even the general bullshit ones.” — Tom S.
“Funding the war in Afghanistan will bring the running tab for Iraq and and Afghanistan to nearly $1 trillion in upfront costs. It will create, as Tom Engelhardt wrote recently ‘a vast financial hemorrhage, an economic sinkhole.’ When my husband and I can’t pay our bills we make changes in our home economy. It is time for our nation to do the same in our defense economy.” — Sophi Z
This is an unbelievable moment. Dick Cheney’s PR offensive over the last month actually worked. Barack Obama just crumbled and will follow Cheney’s command to not release the new set of detainee abuse pictures.
By the way, if you hadn’t figured it out by now, that’s why you saw every Cheney in the world on television arguing that torture works and that releasing more information would gravely harm the troops. They weren’t worried about what was already released; they were worried about what was going to get released. They were trying to preempt the most damaging thing of all — the pictures that show the torture.
Just talk about torture doesn’t really do it for the American people. But when they see pictures, they get it. That’s why Bush had to apologize profusely and throw a few low-level soldiers under the bus when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out. You think there would have been anywhere near that level of controversy or accountability (such that it was) without the pictures?
How did Jay Bybee breeze through a confirmation hearing for his appointment to the Federal Appeals Court in February 2003? Not a single Democrat questioned Bybee at the session, and the proceedings came to a quick conclusion. The following month he was confirmed by the full Senate.
Just six months prior to the hearing, Jay Bybee had signed legal memos providing cover for CIA agents torturing detainees — yet Congress voted him to a lifetime on the federal bench. How did this happen? And what will become of Judge Bybee now?
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times. We practiced sleep deprivation on him for 11 straight days. I don’t know how many times we smashed his head against a wall, slapped him in the face, put him in a stress position in a freezing room and/or put him in a coffin sized box in extreme heat. But the right-wing argues that it doesn’t matter because none of this is torture. They are adamant in saying that it is not even open to interpretation.
Because, remember, if it’s at least open to interpretation, we should investigate to see if laws were broken and we crossed the line into torture. Their logic is that this is so obviously not torture that it does not require any investigation at all! It’s an open and shut case.
Obviously, I disagree. It’s one thing to admit that this appears to have crossed the line but you have no problem with that because we should be torturing the bad guys to get information out of them (that is a less morally defensible position but at least it’s logically consistent). But it’s another thing to claim that all of these “enhanced interrogation” techniques are nowhere near torture.
So, let me ask you this — what if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had died during one of these extreme interrogations?
Here is a perfectly plausible hypothetical: He’s had no sleep for eight days, he’s exhausted and stuffed in a tiny box in a sweltering hot room with insects crawling all over him, we take him out, smash his head against the wall three times and then waterboard him for the 162nd time. And boom he goes into cardiac arrest and dies on the spot. Did we just torture him to death or was his death just coincidental? Was his interrogation so obviously clean that it doesn’t even require an investigation?
Let’s get real. If he had died, everyone in the world would have thought it was torture without a shadow of a doubt. As it was, he survived — so, it’s all kosher? No reasonable person can argue that these draconian techniques do not merit an investigation to see if they crossed the line into torture. Especially because we already know that we have in the past considered waterboarding such a serious crime that we have executed people for practicing it against our soldiers.
I know what conservatives are screaming into their computers right now: “But he didn’t die! None of them died. So, your question is an absurd hypothetical.” Well, here’s the problem with that. In fact, many of them did die.
Now, the folks who did this have the temerity to say that the people who exposed these crimes are making America look bad. How about the people who committed them in the first place?
They add that we should ignore the homicides and the beatings and the drownings because it would be political to look into them. In reality, the only thing that could stop an investigation of these clear abuses is politics. It’s their only shield. Otherwise, a Justice Department inquiry would be monumentally obvious.
If anyone outside of a politician had ordered these beatings, they would already be in the middle of a criminal trial. Obviously a regular citizen can’t do it. Cops can’t do it (imagine how a judge would handle the case if the cop admitted he got the confession by banging the guy’s head against the wall and then drowning him within an inch of his life … 183 times). As the former Bush officials claim that they are being investigated because of politics, the reality is the exact opposite. Politics is their best friend and their only refuge.
While the leadership of the Democratic Party remains silent on Obama’s refusal to hold torturers accountable, activists are demanding a special prosecutor and calling on Congress to impeach Jay Bybee.
In the Sunday New York Times, the paper’s editors call for the impeachment of Judge Jay Bybee, author of one of the now infamous torture memos released last week. Bybee is now a federal judge. In its editorial, “The Torturers’ Manifesto,” the Timesargued:
[The] investigation should start with the lawyers who wrote these sickening memos, including John Yoo, who now teaches law in California; Steven Bradbury, who was job-hunting when we last heard; and Mr. Bybee, who holds the lifetime seat on the federal appeals court that Mr. Bush rewarded him with.
These memos make it clear that Mr. Bybee is unfit for a job that requires legal judgment and a respect for the Constitution. Congress should impeach him. And if the administration will not conduct a thorough investigation of these issues, then Congress has a constitutional duty to hold the executive branch accountable. If that means putting Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales on the stand, even Dick Cheney, we are sure Americans can handle it.
Of course, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Cheney, Bush and a slew of others belong on trial with Bybee, not just as witnesses in his case and the Times should be calling for that as well. But let’s remember, this is the paper that the Bush administration used as a conveyor belt for its deadly lies so expectations of it should be low.
Yesterday I wrote about how John McCain has returned to echo the GOP’s NIMBY cries for transferring Gitmo detainees to any other country but ours now that President Obama is shutting the prison down. Well, here’s the Daily Show’s take; Stewart does a great job, as usual, of pointing out the GOP’s lunacy, while making a strong case for why Gitmo detainees should be taken to maximum-security prisons in our country.
Sadly, we’re #1 when it comes to locking people up per capita, with 2.3 million behind bars. But more than that, our government created the system of abuse at Guantanamo. The Bush administration threw the Geneva Conventions out the window and subjected prisoners to torture and unconstitutional tribunals, so shouldn’t the government now take the responsibility of prosecuting those detainees who still must face trial in US courts?
President Obama (words thrilling to write!) has wasted no following through on his promise to close the atrocious Guantanamo Bay prison facility. Just hours after yesterday's historic inauguration, Obama ordered prosecutors to request a 120-day suspension of legal proceedings regarding Gitmo detainees. This is the first step toward shutting down Gitmo and shuttering the unconstitutional military commissions put in place by the Bush administration.
The Obama administration's instruction came in the cases of five men charged in the 9/11 attacks (including Khalid Sheik Mohammed) and a sixth man, Omar Khadr, on trial for allegedly killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan when he was 15. Right now, there are 21 Gitmo detainees facing such war crimes trials, and 245 detainees total.
That this move came on Obama's very first day in office, coupled with the fact that it specifically applied to abused prisoner Mohammed, signals a fundamental depature with Bush's legacy of torture and human rights violations. Hopefully, it's just the beginning. What Obama must do next is shut down those controversial military tribunals altogether.
