War Handwavium

In 2004, the CIA’s Inspector General John Helgerson found that there was no conclusive proof that waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques helped thwart any specific imminent attacks.

President Bush told a September 2006 news conference that one plot, to attack a Los Angeles office tower, was “derailed” in early 2002 — before the harsh CIA interrogation measures were approved, contrary to those who claim that waterboarding revealed it.

Some officials at CIA headquarters insisted on the repeated waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, the first prisoner to undergo the technique, even after the interrogators on the scene sought to discontinue the technique.

Some interrogators went beyond what the Justice Department initially authorized in an Aug. 1, 2002, memo

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/world/story/66895.html

Ali Soufan was an FBI interrogator at Quantanamo and reports some interesting facts.

“The first [torture memo], 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.”

But Ali Soufan had been interrogating Abu Zubaydah from March to June 2002.

“Under traditional interrogation methods, [Abu Zubaydah] provided us with important actionable intelligence.”

“We discovered, for example, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber. This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives.”

“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.”

“Defenders of these techniques have claimed that they got Abu Zubaydah to give up information leading to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a top aide to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Mr. Padilla. This is false. The information that led to Mr. Shibh’s capture came primarily from a different terrorist operative who was interviewed using traditional methods.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/opinion/23soufan.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

Dick “Palpatine” Cheney, the man who spent the last 8 years burying the truth of what the government was doing under layer after layer of secrecy and lies, has just announced that the government should release more torture memos to show what intelligence torture has produced.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/04/20/cheney-calls-release-memos-showing-results-interrogation-efforts-1862515294/

Never mind the fact that the entire time Cheney was in power, he wanted to keep as much power as possible, and now that he’s out of power, and more importantly, his actions as the Dark Sith Lord might land him in front of the Hague, now he’s calling for transparency in government.

Never mind that that Cheney trying to defend torture on the grounds that it “works” is morally equivalent to arguing that we should use criminals and the mentally and physically challenged as sandbagging material because they do in fact hold back water when tied up in burlap bags.

Never mind the fact that immediately after 9/11, the US tortured Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who then gave us the “intelligence” that al Quaeda had sent operatives to Iraq to acquire chemcial and biological weapons and training, that this “intelligence” was the entire basis for how Bush justified linking Iraq to 9/11, and that this entire linkage was not only a LIE, but it was a lie that Bush and Cheney eagerly believed so they could launch an invasion of Iraq in an effort to give reconstruction contracts to Cheney’s Haliburton company.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070517165922rn_2/www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5197853/site/newsweek/

http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/supporting/2005/DIAletter.102605.pdf

Never mind that Bush and Cheney’s precious “intelligence” , i.e. the NIE, to the US congress back in 2002 said with “high confidence” that Iraq “has now established large-scale, redundant and concealed BW agent production capabilities.” It said “all key aspects” of Iraq’s offensive BW program “are active and that most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf War.”

NEVER MIND THAT EVERY BIT OF THIS PRECIOUS INTELLIGENCE WAS WRONG. Never mind that this intelligence was used to justify a war we are still fighting years later and still have no exit in sight.

http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/iraq-wmd.html

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1120-01.htm

Never mind any of that.

What I realized was that Cheney is right, at least in this one particular instance. We need more transparency. We need to see ALL the things that EVERY PERSON EVER TORTURED BY US HANDLERS EVER CONFESSED TO. And put them all up side by side and see what there is to see.

I thought I’d provide a starting list. So, here are some of the things that people have confessed to while being tortured by US agents:

1) Hijacker of United Airlines Flight 175

2) Driver of small craft that attacked the USS Cole

3) Kaiten submarine crew

4) Selbstopfereinsatz pilot

When you’re tortured long enough, you’ll confess to anything that will make the torture stop. This is why the system of torture doesn’t work. It’s morally wrong, but it doesn’t work either. Darth Cheney wants to argue that torture does work that it did produce good information. Well, even a broken clock is right two times a day.

A group of people committed a massive number of crimes over the last few years. Do we prosecute them or not? Do we bring them before a court of law, give them due process, and let justice be served?

Put the Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein, Fortune’s Nina Easton, Time’s Rick Stengel, former GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey, and former Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr. in a room and ask them if we should prosecute people believed to have committed a crime. Apparently, their answer to that question for some people is: “It depends.”

Ask them if we should prosecute Bernie Madoff. I’m pretty sure they’ll say “yes”. Ask them if we should prosecute the people who committed war crimes, and suddenly the justice system is “vengence”, suddenly due process is “vindictive”, suddenly the notion of rule of law is “anger and retribution”. They will tell you with a straight face that it is more important that we “look forward” than it is to apply the rule of law.

For those of you just tuning in, here is what you need to know: The noise you’re hearing from these suckups and sycophants is nothing more than the henchmen arguing that Dr. Evil shouldn’t be prosecuted because they’re afraid that once Dr. Evil is convicted, then the justice system will then go after them. And they know they’ve helped Dr. Evil do illegal things.

Waterboarding is a war crime. We convicted Japanese soldiers of war crimes for waterboarding Americans during WWII. Now Americans have waterboarded a bunch of people and done it hundreds of times. And it’s exactly the same crime. It’s a crime to waterboard someone. It’s a crime for a superior to order people under their command to waterboard someone. It’s a crime to release “memos” trying to handwave the law away and declare that waterboarding is not illegal.

And while it isn’t a crime to be a right wing lackey mouthpiece working at some place like Fox News, it certainly doesn’t look good when you spend 8 years acting like a mindless cheerleader for the Bush administration, and then suddenly have it come out that Bush and all the behaviours that you were cheerleading were actually violations of international law.

So, all the noise you’re hearing from the blowhards saying we shouldn’t investigate these crimes? It’s coming from people who committed those crimes or people who spent the last eight years cheerleading those crimes. That’s all you need to know.

Prosecute war crimes.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/20/prosecutions/index.html

In 2005, Congresswoman Harman (D-CA) told an Israeli agent that she would encourage the Justice Department to reduce Espionage charges against two members of the Pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC. In exchange, the Israeli agent promised to help Harman get appointed to chair the Intelligence Committee.

The two AIPAC members were Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman who allegedly gave classified Pentagon documents to Israeli officials.

In October, 2005, the DOJ and FBI were investigating whether Harman and/or AIPAC violated the law. Around that time, DOJ lawyers concluded that Harman had violated the law.

But then Attorney General Gonzales ordered a stop to the investigation into Harman’s activities. In exchange for this, Gonzales wanted Harman to help defend Bush’s illegal wiretap program. Gonzales knew that the New York Times was about to break the story about the illegal wiretap program, and on 16 December 2005, the Times ran the article.

On Dec. 21, 2005, Harman issued a statement defending the illegal wiretap operation and slamming the Times, saying, “I believe it essential to U.S. national security, and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities.” On February 12, 2006, Harman condemned the Times for publishing the article and Harman suggested that criminal charges might be brought up against the Times and the whistleblowers who broke the story.

Because of Gonzales, the investigation into Harman’s possible criminal activity was scuttled.

http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=hsnews-000003098436&cpage=1

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html?ex=1292389200&en=e32072d786623ac1&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/20/harman/index.html

Update: Harmon was one of the biggest Democrat cheerleaders for Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. And today, she’s whining that her conversations offering to help Israeli spies was recorded without a warrant.

Pure hypocrite.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/21/harman/index.html

The Obama administration finally released the last four secret torture memos from the Bush administration that clearly show the Bush administration approved the use of torture.

http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/olc_memos.html

Obama then announced that “nothing will be gained” by prosecuting people who committed war crimes… because… they… were… Americans.

“Our national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future.”

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/countdown-special-comment-future-us-depend

I can’t tell if Obama is naive and thinks that Bush was a singular bad apple the likes of which America will never see again. (Bush will not be the last tyrant America will have to suffer. Future tyrants will see Bush’s ability to get away with 8 years of torture and take that as a green light to more tyranny.) I can’t tell if Obama is avoiding a political storm and merely hopes that it all magically goes away. (It won’t go away. Ignoring it will only make it worse.) But what I realized is that it doesn’t matter what Obama’s motivations are. What matters are his actions, his deeds. And his deeds are that of a man who is suggesting that we should not prosecute war criminals because they happen to be American.

Glenn Greenwald goes into the legal details here: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/17/prosecutions/index.html

To quote General Pace, http://www.antiwar.com/orig/hirsch.php?articleid=8678

“It is the absolute responsibility of everybody in uniform to disobey an order that is either illegal or immoral.”

Pace was saying this to Iraqi commanders before the US invaded, but it applies to everyone in uniform.

Anyone remember Abu Graib? The torture of prisoners by American soldiers? Ring a bell? Pfc. Lynndie England defended her part in the crimes committed at Abu Graib by invoking the “we were just following orders” defense. http://hnn.us/articles/5378.html

“We think everything was justified because we were instructed to do this and to do that.”

Abu Graib is not a precedence that America wants to continue with the crimes at Guantanamo and the crimes at the American base in Bagram, Afghanistan. We do not want to be a nation that acts solely on the moral compass handed to us by our superiors. We cannot.

And we become complicit if we allow our country to do that without strong vocal protest for justice, for transparancy, for rule of law, for democracy, for freedom, and for liberty. Because what is liberty if it is solely what our politicians decide they are willing to grant us? What is justice if it is solely what our politicians tell us? What is democracy if it is solely what our incumbent political leaders say it is, which they generally say is more of them.

Democracy only exists as long as it is sourced by “we the people”. If we sit back and allow this grand injustice to pass without comment, then we are no longer a democracy. We’re a volunteer tyranny.

Write your representatives and give them an earful. Let them know that Americans still demand rule of law, due process, and that criminals be prosecuted even if they were working for the government at the time. Tell them “I was just following orders” isn’t good enough. And tell them that the people in the Bush administration who gave the orders that others followed should be prosecuted first.

http://www.congress.org/congressorg/officials/congress/

April 8, 2009:

Pirates attack the US-flagged Maersk Alabama 400 miles east of Mogadishu. The Captain of the Maersk, Richard Phillips, orders his crew of 20 to lock themselves in their quarters, and then Phillips surrenders himself to the pirates. The crew overpowers one of the pirates and ties him up. The crew then attempts to trade the captured pirate for the captain’s return. The crew releases the pirate, but the pirates then refuse to release the captain.

The pirates take Captain Phillips and one of the lifeboats from the Maersk (an enclosed vessel designed to carry 30 people on the open ocean with food and water for 10 days) and begin a standoff.

The destroyer USS Bainbridge is dispatched to the area on April 8 and arrives early April 9.

April 9, 2009:

Standoff. The pirates hold Phillips in the lifeboat and want to negotiate a ransom: two million dollars and safe passage to Somalia. The USS Bainbridge maintains itself a few hundred yards from the lifeboat. A P3 Orion surveillance plane keeps an eye on the lifeboat.

While negotiating for a ransom, four more vessels operated by pirates leave Somalia and head towards the lifeboat. These four vessels carry hostages from previous piracy and the pirates are using them as shields. The strategy appears to be to get Phillips onto land to hide him and give the pirates more leverage to negotiate a ransom.

April 10:

Captain Phillips attempts to escape from the pirates but is recaptured.

April 11:

Standoff continues. The lifeboat is running out of fuel.

April 12:

The lifeboat has run out of fuel. Without fuel, it is at the mercy of the waves. The USS Bainbridge offers to tow the lifeboat to calmer waters. The lifeboat is pulled behind the USS Bainbridge by a 75 yard line.

The pirate who had been overpowered by the crew needs medical attention for his hand. He transfers to the USS Bainbridge to get medical attention and to directly negotiate a ransom.

(7:19 pm, after sunset) Navy SEALS on the USS Bainbridge use sniper rifles and kill the remaining three pirates in the lifeboat. Two pirates had exposed their head and shoulders outside the lifeboat. The third was visible through a window. Captain Phillips is rescued.

Abdullahi Lami, one of the pirates holding a Greek ship anchored in the pirate den of Gaan, said “in the future, America will be the one mourning and crying. We will retaliate for the killings of our men.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maersk_Alabama_hijacking

Piracy in Somalia started in the 1990’s when the country fell into civil war. In 2008 there were 111 attempted hijacking attempts resulting in 42 hijackings. Somali pirates received about 150 million dollars in ransoms in 2008.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_in_Somalia

Deaths related to Somali Piracy, from 2005 to 2009.

military (a member of any nation’s military force): 2
pirates (somali based pirates): 16
civilian crews (any crew member of a hijacked ship): 3 (total), 1 (after ransom was not paid), 1 (during pirate boarding), 1 (during rescue attempt)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ships_attacked_by_Somali_pirates

Problem:

Somali pirates have attacked ships hundreds of miles off the coast, creating a patrol area that is simply too large for a military navy to “occupy”. Approximately 20,000 cargo ships travel through the Gulf of Aden each year. The East African Seafarers’ Association estimates that there are at least five pirate gangs and a total of 1,000 armed men. In 4 years of piracy, 2 civilian crew members have been killed by pirates.

The pirates operate off the coast of Somalia in small fishing boats. They “fish” by day and if a target presents itself, they attempt to attack and board it. They often work with multiple boats and sometimes with a “mother ship”.

Possible solutions:

Navy patrols: Combined Task Force 150, whose mission includes preventing piracy off the Horn of Africa, currently has 15 ships from a number of different countries patroling the waters off Somalia.

But the sheer number of potential targets (20,000 ships per year) makes it impossible to assign an escort ship to each tanker or freighter in the area.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Task_Force_150

Weapons embargo: There has been a general and complete arms embargo against Somalia since 1992.

Arming private ships for self defense:

A total of 150 million dollars in ransom was paid to Somali pirates in 2008. The insurance rates for shipping companies would far exceed that amount if 20,000 ships all carried civilian crews with only basic training in using firearms in combat.

Also, with only 2 civilians being killed by pirates in 4 years, taking 20,000 ships and arming their crews of 20 to 40 with firearms will create a lot of potential for accidental deaths far bigger than the threat it is trying to counter. The cure should not be worse than the disease.

Lastly, the legal issues around firearms on civilian craft are that weapons must be legal at both ports. Generally the universally legally approved weapon for civilian ships is a shotgun, which has a much shorter ranger than an AK47 rifle and RPG (weapon of choice for Somali pirates). One could get around this by disarming freighters in local waters and arming them only in international waters, but this does not solve the problem of minimally trained civilians numbering in the tens of thousands with firearms.

Intelligence and Special Operations:

With a relatively small number of pirates, it may be possible to identify the pirates through a methodical collection of intelligence and then use military force against these individuals.

This would essentially be similar in approach to the US “War On Drugs”, except on a much smaller scale. That’s not exactly a good thing: The Mexican Drug war has been going since 2006, has involved tens of thousands of military personel, hundreds of thousands of drug smugglers, killed about ten-thousand people, arrested about 45,000 people. Just because it’s smaller doesn’t mean it is neccessarily easier.

The Somali pirates might be more of a comparison to the Taliban operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There are about 10,000 hard-core Taliban operating among the millions of Pashtun. The key difference is that while Taliban are driven by religious ideology, the Somali pirates are driven by profit. And while you can’t bomb someone into changing their ideology, you can bomb someone to the point that it isn’t profitable for them to operate as a pirate any more.

The problem then is avoiding civilian deaths. Since the pirates present themselves as “fishermen”, they are, at first glance, indistinguishable from the many fishing vessels operating off the coast.

One of Bush’s more heinous war crimes was having people black bagged and shipped off to Guantanamo to be held indefinitely without ever being charged. In 2008, the Supreme Court in Boumediene v. Bush ruled that detainees at Guantanamo still had basic rights like a right to habeous corpus, the right to due process, etc.

In response, Bush simply diverted all detainees to a different detention center, namely a base in Bagram, Afghanistan. His argument was that the Supreme Court ruling only applied to Guantanamo detainees and that detainees in other sites didn’t have any rights unless the Supreme Court specifically named each location where detainees had rights.

Whether Bush wanted an exhaustive list by city and country or whether he wanted them formatted in terms of latitude and longitude is unclear. What is clear is that interpreting the Supreme Court ruling as only applying to detainees in one particular geographic location was Bush’s attempt to gaming the system.

Fast forward to February 2009, Obama declared that he embraced Bush’s view that detainees in Afghanistan had no rights and could be detained indefinitely.

In March 2009, a Federal Court rejected this notion that the Supreme Court had to list the ten-thousand names of God before the Executive branch would be required to give detainees basic human rights.

Obama has appealed the ruling, making clear that he wants the power to inprison people indefinitely without giving them any rights to due process and the rule of law. And yet as a Senator and during his campaign, Obama stated that he was AGAINST Bush’s policies to strip people of their basic rights of due process.

Glenn Greenwald has all the gory details here:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/11/bagram/index.html

At a handover ceremony taking the seat as Israel’s new Foreign Minister, the fascist Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beitenu party, gave a speech saying Israel is not bound by the 2007 Annapolis conference.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/04/200941123925371818.html

The Annapolis conference marked the first time a two-state solution was articulated as the mutually agreed-upon outline for addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The conference ended with the issuing of a joint statement from all parties.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapolis_Conference

Instead of supporting the Annapolis conference resolution, Lieberman stated that Israel would give Palestinians their own state strictly on Israel’s terms, i.e. only after every single Palestinian alive stopped committing violence against Israel. If so much as one Palestinian blows themselves up in a suicide bomb, all Palestinians shall be refused their own state for another year.

The rocket attacks from Gaza had stopped for four months during a negotiated ceasefire when Israel invaded Gaza and killed several members of Hamas, which escalated into the full scale bombardment and invasion by Israel that killed a thousand Gazan civilians. Two dozen Israelis had been killed by rockets during the previous twelve months. Israel will use the least provocation to go to war. Israel will use the least provocation to collectively punish all Palestinians. Israel will use the least provocation to avoid a long term peaceful solution.

Anyone who seriously thinks that Israel is a partner for peace is a damned fool.

“Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China [Tiananmen Square], when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories.” (Israeli Journal Hotam, November 24, 1989) — Netanyahu, Israel’s new Prime Minister

Netanyahu on peace