I was on Warren Olney’s Which Way LA? on Wednesday night talking about the impending transfer of women inmates to various California counties—LA most prominently included—in order to finish their prison sentences at home. I was on along with California Department of Corrections spokesperson Terry Thornton and Don Thompson from the Associated Press.
AN INSIDER’S VIEW OF THE 9/11 PRISONER INTERROGATIONS
While we’re on the topic of podcasts, be sure to listen to the fascinating segment of NPR’s Fresh Air featuring former FBI agent and interrogator Ali Soufan who explains how it was that the U.S. government missed key opportunities to prevent terrorism attacks and find Osama bin Laden sooner because of “mismanaged interrogations and dysfunctional relationships within the government’s counterterrorism agencies.”
Then, as long as you’re on a roll, you also might want to listen to the Fresh Air interviewwith actress Margo Martindale, who absolutely must, must, MUST get a supporting actress Emmy for her role as Mags Bennett on the FX series Justified.
After 8 seasons, Monday night was the last night of the series, “24.”
Most times, no matter its popularity, a TV series is just a TV series. But in the case of this TV show, when the series’ main character, Jack Bauer, was referenced more than once on the floor of Congress, and Bauer’s actions were trotted out as an exhibit A in the middle of a panel discussion about torture and terrorism law, by none other than Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and then in 2007, the Dean of West Point, Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, along with some FBI interrogators and representatives of Human Rights First, traveled to LA to ask the show’s creative team to tone down the torture scenes because of the impact they were having both on troops in the field and America’s reputation abroad. ….I think we can safely say that we’re in some other kind of realm that transcends the “it’s only a TV show” trope.
The series showrunner and exec-producer, Howard Gordon, was on Fresh Air on Monday and had his own answer to the controversy:
“To say that we’ve been some … mouthpiece for some political point of view — it’s not only specious — but I promise you, it is insane. Any fly on the wall and anyone who’s been there would tell you the same. So unfortunately, look — the show is a show for one thing. It’s a thriller in the vein of Bourne Identity or Rambo or Dirty Harry. And the hero finds the bad guy and shakes out of him where the bomb is. And again, the real-time scenario lent itself really well to that. Frankly, for the first five years, I don’t think you could find a single article or op-ed piece that used the word ‘torture’ or described that this was somehow morally repugnant or corrosive or anything. I think what happened was, when Abu Ghraib happened and Guantanamo happened — the show certainly benefited from some kind of post-9/11 wish fulfillment; you had a guy who cut to the chase, who did whatever was necessary, and again there was some wish fulfillment involved — I do think the show experienced some of the blowback. We did understand that the climate had changed, because of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, it had changed. … [A]nd it put us into a conundrum. Honestly, at the end of Season 6 — where Jack had been acting a certain way — we had a choice: Either we renounce the series and admit we’re a bunch of torture-mongering, morally corrosive torture pornographers or we find a way of confronting this issue and this changed world that we’re in. And, in a strange way, it gave us fodder for the seventh season.”
Yes, well…
As a die-hard “24″ fan I have long been ambivalent about some of the show’s script choices, but have hung in faithfully because the delights of the series seemed always to outweigh its unsettling downsides.
(That is with the exception of 2007’s notorious Season 6, which went completely and creepily off the rails, both in terms of its over embrace of brutality, and frankly, in terms of the quality of the writing in general. But then, as Gordon said, it recovered in Season 7 where it articulated some of the moral issues around torture, plus had some very nifty plot twists, so all was forgiven.
Or sort of forgiven. It was somewhat vexing that both Fox and Friends and Glenn Beck—whose moral compasses, such as they ever were, seem to have long ago rusted—became so ooozily enamored of the show in Season 7, that they failed to perceive its ambiguities and still managed to use it as ajustificationfor torture not a caution against it.)
And, nearly any pronouncement from former “24″ producer, and co-creator, Joel Surnow, was enough to make some of us wonder if we were, oh, I don’t know, risking the health of our immortal souls by watching the show at all. But Surnow is thankfully long gone.
Now the last few hours of Season 8 have taken us into what is, in many ways, the darkest place of all.
In hour 20, we had to watch as Jack coldly executed the latest CTU insider traitor, Dana Walsh. (“24″ has pioneered a whole new class of evil broads—13 female villains in total. They have ranged from the queen of them all, Nina Myers, through the very, very bad first lady, Sherry Palmer, to this season’s Dana Walsh, who managed to project a sort of sloe-eyed, sexy spawn of Satan look that became its own kind of special effect.)
In hour 21, there was the matter of Jack disemboweling the Russian sniper/assassin who killed FBI agent and Bauer paramour, Renee Walker—AKA Jack’s Last Chance for Happiness. Now most of us might honestly have wanted to disembowel the guy too, but most of us also, I trust, would have stopped short of it (even if there was the vague justification of getting the guy’s recently swallowed cell phone sim card).
Hour 22 featured Jack clad in an Imperial storm troopers-like outfit as he prepared to kidnap the divinely Nixonian ex-President Charles Logan who, after seeing the scarily helmeted Bauer approach in the distance, screams in high hysteria to his secret service agent “That’s Jack Bauer, he’s coming to get me!” (A great “24″ moment, as were nearly all of actor Gregory Itzin’s scenes this season.)
Finally, there was the very last two hours—which I am reluctant to give away here if you haven’t yet watched the finale. I can tell you that the poet Rumi was quoted well in a crucial moment of foreshadowing—and that, in the end, everything came down to Jack and Chloe O’Brien—Mary Lynn Rajskub’s sour-faced and fabulously courageous character creation.—which was exactly as it should be.
I can also tell you that, for me anyway, the finale was a worthy two hours with which to cap the best of the eight seasons—complicated, multi-shaded, possessed of the courage of its convictions, and fraught with the knowledge that cleaving to what is just and right and true is the only worthwhile path, no matter the cost (and that there will be a cost), but when the cleaving grows too single-minded and brittle, it has its own soul corroding moral dangers.
So what, in the end did it all mean? Was it only a TV show as its producers say? Was it a pop cultural reflection of our desire for good and evil to be clearly demarcated with bright, shining lines in a manner that real life rarely provides? Or did it start to actually affect in troubling ways the culture it purported to merely reflect in fantastical broad strokes (with no meal times or bathroom breaks)?
Or was it all of the above—and, on occasions, like Monday night, satisfyingly more.
The University of California will form a special committee to study whether it should take over inmate health care for the state’s troubled prison system, the chairman of the university system’s Board of Regents said this week.
Regents Chairman Russell Gould announced the committee, which university officials said will study issues including the cost, effect on labor relations, and the university’s liability in inmate lawsuits. Health care has been so bad in the state’s 33 adult prisons that a federal judge appointed a receiver in 2006 to make improvements.
A study by a company affiliated with the University of Texas has criticized the receiver for running up costs as part of the improvement effort. It projected California could save more than $4 billion over five years and $12 billion over 10 years by shifting control to the University of California…..
The last ‘graph of Mayer’s review is clearly what she means to be the takeaway:
Thiessen’s effort to rewrite the history of the C.I.A.’s interrogation program comes not long after a Presidential race in which both the Republican and the Democratic nominees agreed that state-sponsored cruelty had damaged and dishonored America. The publication of “Courting Disaster” suggests that Obama’s avowed determination “to look forward, not back” has laid the recent past open to partisan reinterpretation. By holding no one accountable for past abuse, and by convening no commission on what did and didn’t protect the country, President Obama has left the telling of this dark chapter in American history to those who most want to whitewash it.
MEANWHILE, THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION IS DIVIDED ABOUT HOW TO HANDLE DETAINEES
Charlie Savage reports in the NY Times on Monday about the dueling secret memos dealing with how the US is—and isn’t—legally empowered to handle detainees who are deemed to be terrorism-related.
Here are the relevant 2 ‘graphs:
….behind closed doors, the debate flared again that summer, when the Obama administration confronted the case of Belkacem Bensayah, an Algerian man who had been arrested in Bosnia — far from the active combat zone — and was being held without trial by the United States at Guantánamo. Mr. Bensayah was accused of facilitating the travel of people who wanted to go to Afghanistan to join Al Qaeda. A judge found that such “direct support” was enough to hold him as a wartime prisoner, and the Justice Department asked an appeals court to uphold that ruling.
The arguments over the case forced onto the table discussion of lingering discontent at the State Department over one aspect of the Obama position on detention. There was broad agreement that the law of armed conflict allowed the United States to detain as wartime prisoners anyone who was actually a part of Al Qaeda, as well as nonmembers who took positions alongside the enemy force and helped it. But some criticized the notion that the United States could also consider mere supporters, arrested far away, to be just as detainable without trial as enemy fighters.
THE CHURCH CHILD ABUSE SCANDAL AND SHOOTING THE MESSENGER
More than just a few Catholic church higher-ups have suggested in the last few days that the criticism leveled at the church and at Pope Benedict XVI for actions not taken to protect kids from pedophile priests—here and in Europe—amounts to Catholic bashing, or things even more conspiratorial
The pope may have plausible deniability in the cases reported by the New York Times. But the best defense for the Vatican and its supporters is to contest the accuracy of these and other reports, not to accuse journalists (or activists) of selective criticism, let alone an ignoble conspiracy. Playing the anti-Catholic card just won’t work. The sex-abuse scandal in the United States should have demonstrated that.
(NOTE: The HP ad above was featured on the same page that contained Emily Bazelon’s Slate article below about the sexting and cyberbullying cases, and the juxtaposition struck me as…..um….amusing.)
LOOK, I TOO THINK JOHN YOO IS IN LEAGUE WITH SATAN, BUT GET A GRIP!
A group of lawyers and law students are demanding that Deputy Attorney General David Carrillo, who works in AG Jerry Brown’s office, drop his plans to teach a constitutional law class with the UC Berkeley professor John Yoo next semester.
In case you’ve dozed off on the matter, John Yoo is the guy who wrote the infamous torture memos to justify the actions of the Bush administration when he was a US Justice Department lawyer from 2001 to 2003.
By instructing a class with Mr. Yoo, you are helping to legitimize his illegal and unethical actions,” organizations led by the National Lawyers Guild said Tuesday in an open letter to Deputy Attorney General David Carrillo, a doctoral candidate and instructor at the university’s Boalt Hall law school.
They asked Carrillo either to teach the course by himself, if the school will allow it, or to leave it to Yoo. Signers included the law school’s chapter of La Raza Law Students Association and the Boalt Alliance to Abolish Torture.
Oh, please. I’m all for prosecuting Yoo. If someone can find a legal way to wrap the law around him and squeeze a bit, that’d be excellent. (Unfortunately, I don’t think they can.)
But, otherwise, if some nice liberal guy from the AG’s office wants to teach with him, leave them the heck alone. Good education—particularly a law school education—-thrives on differing points of view.
IN FLORIDA, CLEMENCY IS NOT DEAD
The horrible murders committed by Maurice Clemmons , and the subsequent attacks on Mike Huckabee, have not exactly encouraged the notion of clemency. Nevertheless, Wednesday a Florida woman named Jennifer Martin who was serving 16 years for manslaughter, was set free by a four person parole board that included Florida governor Charlie Crist.
THE 9TH CIRCUIT, THE SUPREMES & THE “PERILOUS FRONTIER OF CYBERLAW”
(I just like writing that: “….the perilous frontier of cyberlaw.“)
Anyway, regarding the two new Supreme Court cases we’ve already talked about here: the Ontario cop sexting case, and the issue with the rights of mean kids who cyberbully, Slate’s legal writer, Emily Bazelon, has written a good column that explores the two cases recently accepted by the Supremes, and notes that the California’s 9th Circuit of Appeals is smack in the middle of both of them. In each instance, the judges of the 9th came down on the side of the rights of the individual.
(In the case of the mean girls, I think they’re right. In the case of the sexting cop…. hmmmmm… maybe yes, maybe no.)
In any event, Baselon’s column engages in an informative discussion of both cases. Here’s a clip:
Before Jeff Quon got a pager from the Ontario Police Department, where he’s a sergeant, he signed a blanket statement that he had he had “no expectation of privacy or confidentiality” when using city equipment for e-mail or the Internet. But then his supervisor put in place an informal policy that undercut the official one. The supervisor told cops who had the pagers that they could send 25,000 characters worth of text messages a month and then after that, pay for the extra messages—and if they did, avoid an audit. Quon went above the character limit a few months in a row, paying each time. Then his chief started to wonder about whether Quon was wasting time on the job and asked the pager service for the texts. It turned out that lots of them were notes about sex Quon had written to his girlfriend. Quon sued, arguing that the search of his texts was a violation of his Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches at work.
In June 2008, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed with him. He had a reasonable expectation of privacy, the court said, given what his supervisor told him about paying for extra messages—the department’s “operational reality.” The court also found that there were other, less intrusive ways for the police chief to figure out whether Quon was frittering away his time: Warning him ahead of time to quit sending so many messages, asking him to count the characters himself, or asking him to cross out the personal parts before the department reviewed them.
This ruling, by Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw for a panel of three judges, implicitly recognizes that company pagers and e-mail accounts often turn into personal ones. Sometimes, that saves employees’ time: If I’m not toggling back and forth between my Slate e-mail account and Gmail, my day is more streamlined (or so I tell myself). If your boss says you can use company technology for your own business, then you should be safe from unnecessarily intrusive searches—even if he’s contradicting some official blanket disclaimer in which you signed away your privacy rights without really paying attention.
SF SUPERVISOR CHRIS DAILY DROPS F-BOMB ON GEORGE GASCON’S HEAD
Also in the SF Chron, it seems that new San Francisco police chief, George Gascon, was roundly cussed out by Supervisor Chris Daly.
(Gascon, if you’ll remember, a longtime LAPD cop, used to be the Assistant Chief under Bill Bratton. Before he took the SF job, Gascon was rumored to be the front runner to replace Bratton as the L.A.C.O.P. So we in LA we are justified as viewing him as one of ours.)
In any case here’s a clip that explains the situation:
Supervisor Chris Daly got up from his seat, approached Gascón, cut him off to introduce himself and was heard dropping the f-bomb as he left the chambers in a huff. Gascón looked surprised, said it was nice to meet Daly and continued testifying.
[SNIP]
Apparently Gascón hasn’t reached out to Daly since taking the job several months ago, despite his focus on cracking down on drug dealing in the Tenderloin, the heart of Daly’s district.
“I don’t know if it’s good politics or not, but if I was a new department head, I would certainly reach out to every decision maker,” Daly told us.
He said he appreciates the focus on the Tenderloin, but disagrees with the “nickel and diming” approach of going after low-level users which is overcrowding jails and causing the Sheriff’s Department to go over budget. He’d like to see the bigger fish nabbed instead.
We heard reports that Daly said “F- you, F-you!” as he left the chambers. So was the f-bomb directed at Gascón? “I was muttering to myself, yes,” Daly confirmed. “I think probably it was more like f-ing a-hole. It wasn’t directed at him, and you know, I’m sure very few people could hear it.”
(Favorite line: “We could use griffins but we don’t use griffins and I think that’s what separates us from them.”)
(Second favorite line: “I’m Juliana McCannis filling in for Clifford Baines…who is vacuuming.”)
MAYOR’S OFFICE RE-PROMISES THAT $500K TO HOMEBOY…BY SEPTEMBER
After reading Thursday’s blogpost about the money that the mayor’s office had promised—and not delivered—to money-strapped Homeboy Industries, Tim Rutten called Rev. Jeff Carr about the matter and Carr told him that Father Greg Boyle and Homeboy would have the money by September. Intending to hold Carr and the mayor to the promise, Rutten put it in his Saturday column.
Whether or not Homeboy will be able to keep its doors open until September, remains to be seen.
On Sunday, the New York Times had a very nice story about the mayor’s Summer Night Lights program. Here’s a clip:
“I used to stay away and stay at home at night,” he said. “But I’m really not an indoor type. Now we can be here and have support.” Maybe Maximum, he said, “could grow up more free.”
Laura Lomeli, 24, waiting in line for popcorn nearby, agreed. “It’s not just for the kids; parents come and get to know each other,” she said. “We start to know who lives next door.”
After the softball game ended, two women pushed strollers across the empty field under bright lights. A toddler ran ahead into the shadows. Juan Duran, 13, and Joey Martinez, 16, stood near small skateboard ramps on an outdoor stretch of asphalt.
“My school doesn’t have summer school this year,” Juan said. “So it’s pretty cool having this.”
“You meet more friends here” than by “having nothing better to do and getting in trouble,” said Joey, one foot on his board. “I always stay here until midnight.”
As news continued to break about former Vice President Cheney keeping information about…well…a whole lot of things from Congress, over the weekend both the Washington Post and Newsweek reported that Eric Holder may appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s interrogation practices—something that Obama chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel is dead set against.
(SIDE NOTE: When I was in D.C. last month, I saw Holder speak on an entirely different issue in a small-ish venue, and found him, at least in that instance, to be intelligent, cautious, deliberative to a fault—overly so, if anything—not in the least arrogant, and very thoughtful in his reasoning.
Friday night on his show, Bill Moyers was as fierce as any time within memory as he spent the hour showing the way that the big medical insurers like CYGNA and Blue Cross Blue Sheild have effectively controlled the discussion—and in some cases the media— when it comes to healthcare reform, while denying more and more Americans more and more coverage.
Moyers most impressive guest was former CYGNA executive-turned-whistle blower, Wendell Potter.
The whole program may be watched online—and I strongly recommend it. Moyers is furious. We all need to be enraged. And do something about it.
One of the things I’ve learned in nearly 20 years of writing about street gangs, is that for a man or woman who has been involved in gangs to truly rescue his or her life—and to heal from the scarring that deep involvement in gang life produces—one has to face the bad stuff, the damage that has been done—both by and to oneself. There are no short cuts. A reckoning is needed, a facing of the hard truths, a dark night of the soul, a clear-eyed assessment of whatever wreckage has occurred.
Anybody who’s been through therapy or some 12-step program or other knows that same rule: healing and health require that you take a good look at the wounds—both those caused, and those received.
The same is true for a nation. One cannot just sweep harmful acts under the rug and hope that they will all vanish. They won’t. The poison comes out one way or the other. Sunlight cleanses. A lack of open air merely causes festering.
To paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions.
That’s why the president’s flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse photos — whatever his motivation — is a fool’s errand. The pictures will eventually emerge anyway, either because of leaks (if they haven’t started already) or because the federal appeals court decision upholding their release remains in force. And here’s a bet: These images will not prove the most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come.
There are many dots yet to be connected, and not just on torture. This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists….
Read on.
(PS: Last night’s opening skit from SNL—embedded above— was pretty funny, and, in it’s own tangential way, relates.)
As the once-taciturn Dick Cheney gallops from cable news show to cable news showyammering about how many American lives would have been lost if the Bush Administration hadn’t ditched its morals and its regard for international law in order to enhancedly interrogate, the discussion about what if anything will be done about said interrogating continues to heat up.
NOTE: I really, really, really hope the White House releases all the paperwork that Cheney says he wants released.
UPDATE: It looks like at least some of that materialis indeed going to be released in the not terribly distance future.
THE POLITICAL RISKS OF TORTURE HEARINGS
Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle has a story that looks at the risks of having hearings on the Bush Administration’s interrogations policy—and the risks of not having them.
Of interest are the Chron’s couple of sidebars, one that details possible solutions to this political push-pull, and another that shows what California Dem politicians favor which torture probe solution.
A front page article in Sunday’s LA Times talks extensively about how and why sleep deprivation, as an interrogation technique, is WAY creepier than we might have originally thought.
LAWYERS WHO AUTHORIZED TORTURE DISGRACED THEIR PROFESSION
Over the weekend Ted Sorensen, former special counsel to US President John F. Kennedy, gave a commencement address at the University of Nebraska in which he said that the lawyers who authorized the use of enhanced interrogation techniques had “disgraced not only their country but their profession.”
And then the 81-year-old Sorenson really got irritated. Here’s just one small clip from the body of the speech:
One apologist for those mindless Justice Department opinions authorizing and justifying torture said by way of excuse: “Remember it was a time of high danger.”
High danger? Almost 47 years ago, the President of the United States learned that the Soviet Union had suddenly, secretly rushed nuclear intermediate-range missiles onto the island of Cuba, 90 miles from our shores, with the apparent intent of using them for either nuclear obliteration or nuclear blackmail; and we entered a period that historians have subsequently called the most dangerous 13 days in the history of mankind. President Kennedy did not seek or claim extraordinary emergency legal authority. He did not order the imprisonment, much less the torture, of all Communists or Cubans in our country, nor have their telephones tapped without a warrant. Mindful of international law, he took America’s case to the United Nations and the Organization of American States, and he redesigned a proposed blockade of Cuba into quarantine against offensive weapons, carefully balancing deterrence and defense with dialogue and diplomacy, thereby avoiding both nuclear war and a diminution of our security or our adherence to international law.
“I know some people say let’s turn the page,” said Lehey. “Frankly, I’d like to read the page before we turn it.”
Yep. A lot of us feel that way. In fact we deem it essential for the health of the country.
***************************************************************************************************************** PS: I hope that all of you who are mothers, have mothers, or know mothers had a delight-filled day yesterday. I had a wonderful day with my brilliant and handsome son, (plus his terrific girlfriend and a couple of happily beach-going dogs).
In the past I’ve written a little about the issue of the thousands of unprocessed rape kits , but yesterday, the NY Times’ Nicholas Kristof took quite a different angle in his interesting column on the problem titled, “Is Rape Serious?”
Here’s how it opens:
When a woman reports a rape, her body is a crime scene. She is typically asked to undress over a large sheet of white paper to collect hairs or fibers, and then her body is examined with an ultraviolet light, photographed and thoroughly swabbed for the rapist’s DNA.
It’s a grueling and invasive process that can last four to six hours and produces a “rape kit” — which, it turns out, often sits around for months or years, unopened and untested.
Stunningly often, the rape kit isn’t tested at all because it’s not deemed a priority. If it is tested, this happens at such a lackadaisical pace that it may be a year or more before there are results (if expedited, results are technically possible in a week).
Then Kristof goes on to say that he believes tthat, much of the problem is the fact that rape isn’t treated as seriously as other violent crimes. Read it. Then tell me what you think.
WATERBOARDED IN WWII: A SURVIVOR WRITES ABOUT IT
As we continue to talk about what is or is not torture, last year a former Japanese POW, who was a victim of waterboarding in 1943, recounted the damage it did to him.
“The physical damage suffered by victims of torture can usually be repaired,” he wrote. “But the psychological damage can never be repaired.”
If you read between the lines of Barack Obama’s answer to Jake Tapper’s question about waterboarding last night, it is clear that the issue of torture is not going to fade away any time soon. Here’s a clip.
I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, “We don’t torture,” when the entire British — all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat.
And then the reason was that Churchill understood — you start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what’s — what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.
UPDATE: Commenter “reg” flagged this column from the London Times. It speaks specifically to the issue of the British in WWII, captured spies, and even the incidents of “ticking time bombs.”
Then in this morning’s LA Times there is an Op Ed by Joseph Margulies, a lawyer for Abu Zubaydah. Abu Zubaydah, if you remember, is one of the handful of enemy combatants who has been used to justify the use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” a real big fish of terrorism—-and the first person to vanish into a CIA black site.
Or so we were told. Later, however, the WaPo and the NY Times interviewed DOJ officials and former intelligence officers who said that…actually Abu Zubaydah was far from being a leader or an insider; he was “a personnel clerk.” Our bad.
And how did we treat the personnel clerk?
First, they beat him. As authorized by the Justice Department and confirmed by the Red Cross, they wrapped a collar around his neck and smashed him over and over against a wall. They forced his body into a tiny, pitch-dark box and left him for hours. They stripped him naked and suspended him from hooks in the ceiling. They kept him awake for days.
And they strapped him to an inverted board and poured water over his covered nose and mouth to “produce the sensation of suffocation and incipient panic.” Eighty-three times. I leave it to others to debate whether we should call this torture. I am content with the self-evident truth that it was wrong.
Second, his treatment was motivated by the bane of our post-9/11 world: rotten intel. The beat him because they believed he was evil. Not long after his arrest, President Bush described him as “one of the top three leaders” in Al Qaeda and “Al Qaeda’s chief of operations.” In fact, the CIA brass at Langley, Va., ordered his interrogators to keep at it long after the latter warned that he had been wrung dry.
But Abu Zubaydah, we now understand, was nothing like what the president believed. He was never Al Qaeda. The journalist Ron Suskind was the first to ask the right questions. In his 2006 book, “The One Percent Doctrine,” he described Abu Zubaydah as a minor logistics man, a travel agent.
“They tormented a clerk,” writes Margulies. Then he goes on to explain the disintegrative effect that “enhanced interrogation” had on Zubaydah’s psyche.
“Already, he cannot picture his mother’s face or recall his father’s name. Gradually, his past, like his future, eludes him.”
************************************************************************************************************** PS: Remember when Barack Obama talked about things that are corrosive to a nation’s character….? That’s the kind of thing he meant.
PPS: Oh, yeah, and then there’s the Spanish judge who has just expanded his investigation of torture at Guantanamo. Details and more here on NPR’s Fresh Air.
September 15th, 2011 by 
Celeste Fremon
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