Obama Flips on Release of Detainee Abuse Photos

A commenter at Hot Air sums it nicely:

Obama is doing “the right thing.”
He conferred with his mil advisers and changed his mind.
It is called intellectual flexibility and Machiavellian pragmatism.

Our take: Release o f the photos was a bone head idea. I'm pleased that the president, by virtue of intelligence and political pragmatism, caught a clue that it was indeed a bonehead idea. He does not need to create funky relationship atmospherics with the military. Clinton blew the relationship with the military right out of the gate with DADT. Obama has done something similar but a bit smaller in impact with the CIA by releasing the OLC memos. This would have been a compounding of that error.

I wish however that he had caught that clue in the first place.

Torture and the U.S. Intelligence Failure

By George Friedman - Honorary Political Season Contributor

The Obama administration published a series of memoranda on torture issued under the Bush administration. The memoranda, most of which dated from the period after 9/11, authorized measures including depriving prisoners of solid food, having them stand shackled and in uncomfortable positions, leaving them in cold cells with inadequate clothing, slapping their heads and/or abdomens, and telling them that their families might be harmed if they didn’t cooperate with their interrogators.

On the scale of human cruelty, these actions do not rise anywhere near the top. At the same time, anyone who thinks that being placed without food in a freezing cell subject to random mild beatings — all while being told that your family might be joining you — isn’t agonizing clearly lacks imagination. The treatment of detainees could have been worse. It was terrible nonetheless.

Torture and the Intelligence Gap

But torture is meant to be terrible, and we must judge the torturer in the context of his own desperation. In the wake of 9/11, anyone who wasn’t terrified was not in touch with reality. We know several people who now are quite blasé about 9/11. Unfortunately for them, we knew them in the months after, and they were not nearly as composed then as they are now.

Sept. 11 was terrifying for one main reason: We had little idea about al Qaeda’s capabilities. It was a very reasonable assumption that other al Qaeda cells were operating in the United States and that any day might bring follow-on attacks. (Especially given the group’s reputation for one-two attacks.) We still remember our first flight after 9/11, looking at our fellow passengers, planning what we would do if one of them moved. Every time a passenger visited the lavatory, one could see the tensions soar.

And while Sept. 11 was frightening enough, there were ample fears that al Qaeda had secured a “suitcase bomb” and that a nuclear attack on a major U.S. city could come at any moment. For individuals, such an attack was simply another possibility. We remember staying at a hotel in Washington close to the White House and realizing that we were at ground zero — and imagining what the next moment might be like. For the government, however, the problem was having scraps of intelligence indicating that al Qaeda might have a nuclear weapon, but not having any way of telling whether those scraps had any value. The president and vice president accordingly were continually kept at different locations, and not for any frivolous reason.

This lack of intelligence led directly to the most extreme fears, which in turn led to extreme measures. Washington simply did not know very much about al Qaeda and its capabilities and intentions in the United States. A lack of knowledge forces people to think of worst-case scenarios. In the absence of intelligence to the contrary after 9/11, the only reasonable assumption was that al Qaeda was planning more — and perhaps worse — attacks.

Collecting intelligence rapidly became the highest national priority. Given the genuine and reasonable fears, no action in pursuit of intelligence was out of the question, so long as it promised quick answers. This led to the authorization of torture, among other things. Torture offered a rapid means to accumulate intelligence, or at least — given the time lag on other means — it was something that had to be tried.

Torture and the Moral Question

And this raises the moral question. The United States is a moral project: its Declaration of Independence and Constitution state that. The president takes an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. The Constitution does not speak to the question of torture of non-citizens, but it implies an abhorrence of rights violations (at least for citizens). But the Declaration of Independence contains the phrase, “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.” This indicates that world opinion matters.

At the same time, the president is sworn to protect the Constitution. In practical terms, this means protecting the physical security of the United States “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Protecting the principles of the declaration and the Constitution are meaningless without regime preservation and defending the nation.

While this all makes for an interesting seminar in political philosophy, presidents — and others who have taken the same oath — do not have the luxury of the contemplative life. They must act on their oaths, and inaction is an action. Former U.S. President George W. Bush knew that he did not know the threat, and that in order to carry out his oath, he needed very rapidly to find out the threat. He could not know that torture would work, but he clearly did not feel that he had the right to avoid it.

Consider this example. Assume you knew that a certain individual knew the location of a nuclear device planted in an American city. The device would kill hundreds of thousands of Americans, but he individual refused to divulge the information. Would anyone who had sworn the oath have the right not to torture the individual? Torture might or might not work, but either way, would it be moral to protect the individual’s rights while allowing hundreds of thousands to die? It would seem that in this case, torture is a moral imperative; the rights of the one with the information cannot transcend the life of a city.

Torture in the Real World

But here is the problem: You would not find yourself in this situation. Knowing a bomb had been planted, knowing who knew that the bomb had been planted, and needing only to apply torture to extract this information is not how the real world works. Post-9/11, the United States knew much less about the extent of the threat from al Qaeda. This hypothetical sort of torture was not the issue.

Discrete information was not needed, but situational awareness. The United States did not know what it needed to know, it did not know who was of value and who wasn’t, and it did not know how much time it had. Torture thus was not a precise solution to a specific problem: It became an intelligence-gathering technique. The nature of the problem the United States faced forced it into indiscriminate intelligence gathering. When you don’t know what you need to know, you cast a wide net. And when torture is included in the mix, it is cast wide as well. In such a case, you know you will be following many false leads — and when you carry torture with you, you will be torturing people with little to tell you. Moreover, torture applied by anyone other than well-trained, experienced personnel (who are in exceptionally short supply) will only compound these problems, and make the practice less productive.

Defenders of torture frequently seem to believe that the person in custody is known to have valuable information, and that this information must be forced out of him. His possession of the information is proof of his guilt. The problem is that unless you have excellent intelligence to begin with, you will become engaged in developing baseline intelligence, and the person you are torturing may well know nothing at all. Torture thus becomes not only a waste of time and a violation of decency, it actually undermines good intelligence. After a while, scooping up suspects in a dragnet and trying to extract intelligence becomes a substitute for competent intelligence techniques — and can potentially blind the intelligence service. This is especially true as people will tell you what they think you want to hear to make torture stop.

Critics of torture, on the other hand, seem to assume the torture was brutality for the sake of brutality instead of a desperate attempt to get some clarity on what might well have been a catastrophic outcome. The critics also cannot know the extent to which the use of torture actually prevented follow-on attacks. They assume that to the extent that torture was useful, it was not essential; that there were other ways to find out what was needed. In the long run, they might have been correct. But neither they, nor anyone else, had the right to assume in late 2001 that there was a long run. One of the things that wasn’t known was how much time there was.

The U.S. Intelligence Failure

The endless argument over torture, the posturing of both critics and defenders, misses the crucial point. The United States turned to torture because it has experienced a massive intelligence failure reaching back a decade. The U.S. intelligence community simply failed to gather sufficient information on al Qaeda’s intentions, capability, organization and personnel. The use of torture was not part of a competent intelligence effort, but a response to a massive intelligence failure.

That failure was rooted in a range of miscalculations over time. There was the public belief that the end of the Cold War meant the United States didn’t need a major intelligence effort, a point made by the late Sen. Daniel Moynihan. There were the intelligence people who regarded Afghanistan as old news. There was the Torricelli amendment that made recruiting people with ties to terrorist groups illegal without special approval. There were the Middle East experts who could not understand that al Qaeda was fundamentally different from anything seen before. The list of the guilty is endless, and ultimately includes the American people, who always seem to believe that the view of the world as a dangerous place is something made up by contractors and bureaucrats.

Bush was handed an impossible situation on Sept. 11, after just nine months in office. The country demanded protection, and given the intelligence shambles he inherited, he reacted about as well or badly as anyone else might have in the situation. He used the tools he had, and hoped they were good enough.

The problem with torture — as with other exceptional measures — is that it is useful, at best, in extraordinary situations. The problem with all such techniques in the hands of bureaucracies is that the extraordinary in due course becomes the routine, and torture as a desperate stopgap measure becomes a routine part of the intelligence interrogator’s tool kit.

At a certain point, the emergency was over. U.S. intelligence had focused itself and had developed an increasingly coherent picture of al Qaeda, with the aid of allied Muslim intelligence agencies, and was able to start taking a toll on al Qaeda. The war had become routinized, and extraordinary measures were no longer essential. But the routinization of the extraordinary is the built-in danger of bureaucracy, and what began as a response to unprecedented dangers became part of the process. Bush had an opportunity to move beyond the emergency. He didn’t.

If you know that an individual is loaded with information, torture can be a useful tool. But if you have so much intelligence that you already know enough to identify the individual is loaded with information, then you have come pretty close to winning the intelligence war. That’s not when you use torture. That’s when you simply point out to the prisoner that, “for you the war is over.” You lay out all you already know and how much you know about him. That is as demoralizing as freezing in a cell — and helps your interrogators keep their balance.

U.S. President Barack Obama has handled this issue in the style to which we have become accustomed, and which is as practical a solution as possible. He has published the memos authorizing torture to make this entirely a Bush administration problem while refusing to prosecute anyone associated with torture, keeping the issue from becoming overly divisive. Good politics perhaps, but not something that deals with the fundamental question.

The fundamental question remains unanswered, and may remain unanswered. When a president takes an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” what are the limits on his obligation? We take the oath for granted. But it should be considered carefully by anyone entering this debate, particularly for presidents.

The Torture Memos: Why Did Obama Release Them?

The Obama administration released four memos from the Bush Justice Department that provided the legal basis for the CIA’s use of torture on captured terrorists. That move prompted harsh criticism from a number of quarters, charging that the administration has harmed the security of the United States and made the job of our security agencies more difficult by giving our enemies an advance look at our techniques.

The administration answered those criticisms in the President's statement on the release;

"First, the interrogation techniques described in these memos have already been widely reported. Second, the previous administration publicly acknowledged portions of the program and some of the practices associated with these memos. Third, I have already ended the techniques described in the memos through an executive order."

But when you think about it a little further, none of that really seems to stand as very strong rationales for releasing the details outlined in the memos. This was my primary question of the administration. Why release this? The answer to that question is in the President's statement as well;

".....withholding these memos would only serve to deny facts that have been in the public domain for some time. This could contribute to an inaccurate accounting of the past, and fuel erroneous and inflammatory assumptions about actions taken by the United States."

Its politics. Obama, with the release of these memos, is tarring the GOP as the party of torture. These memos make abundantly clear the manner in which torture was authorized and applied and by whom and on what authority. Republican operatives, spokespersons and luminaries vociferously castigated the President through the weekend, charging that he's made America less safe and in most cases, defending the use of torture, though sometimes trying to dance around using the word torture with the euphemism enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT) as former CIA Director Michael Hayden did on Fox this past weekend.

Obama has maneuvered the GOP into making a vocal and hearty defense of using torture. I'm sorry, but thats not a good look. Why? Because the average American is a decent human being and doesn't like the idea of their government engaging in the routine brutalization of human beings. Don't get me wrong. We expect the Jack Bauer's of the world to be out there, extracting information from the bad guys to prevent the release of that nasty biological or nuclear WMD in an American city and if some fingers gotta get broke to make it happen, so be it. BUT; we don't want to see it or know about it AND we give some leeway in an emergency. People seem to forget that those scenarios we love to watch on 24 Monday nights are events playing out over the course of 24 hours. Thats what we imagine happens in an emergency and we're a practical people. You gotta do what you gotta do.

But what Americans are not down for is the bureaucratization of torture. We're not down for the routine imposition of pain and suffering on people, even terrorist suspects, as our default methodology for getting information. And what the GOP defenders of the use of torture don't really seem to get is that the average American thinks thats what they are for. Hayden in his critique of Obama on Fox didn't qualify the use of torture at all. He just kept arguing for or it to be retained as a technique. Didn't say in the event of emergency or under proper circumstances. He just argued that we should be allowed to torture. Their in lies the evil genius behind Obama's release of the memos. He's got the GOP screaming at the top of their lungs, "we want to torture people, and Obama won't let us".

Gitmo Detainees: They Are Not the X-Men

Cong. McCaul was on Fox yesterday bleating his fears that Gitmo detainees would be released into the United States. The GOP is calling Obama a fear monger, but they are the ones running around wringing their hands about the ultra dangerous Gitmo detainees, and frankly sounding like a bunch of pansies in the process. Real republicans ain't no punks, but thats exactly how we sound.

None of these guys is going to be released to roam free in the United States. Point blank. Thats simply not going to happen. Bank on that for no other reason than because Obama is a competent politician,  if you simply refuse to believe he is capable of protecting America. Obama is not going to committ political suicide by letting any of these people free on US soil.

Gitmo is being closed because you can't sustainably justify at home or abroad an extra judicial facility for the explicit purpose of detaining and interrogating people indefinitely without charge or reasonable due process.  Thats what the Bush administration created and operated in broad daylight. 

One argument Cong. McCaul makes for keeping Gitmo open is that in fact the conditions are so great, better than federal prisons in fact. Why on earth are we spending money to house terrorist non-citizens in an island prison paradise while citizen criminals stateside are housed in crappy conditions? I don't understand that logic at all.

It is also repeatedly claimed that these Gitmo detainees are hard core and extraordinarily dangerous. To Cong. McCaul and others in the GOP trumpeting this line, I say to you "grow a pair'.  These guys are not the X-Men, requiring extraordinary measures to contain lest they use their super powers to escape. These guys are not any more dangerous than the multitude of vicious criminals locked up in maximum security prisons near our communities around the country. Our prisons are home to gang networks, the mob and horrific serial killers for crying out loud, and we manage just fine. The average citizen doesn't think twice about prisoners escaping or any such nonsense. Hell, many communities lobby to have prisons placed in their area for the job creation.  

You just don't spend your average day worrying about the criminal element locked up down the road. Why? Because if you go to prison in this country, you stay there and rot, unless somebody lets you out. This is doubly true if you are a criminal deemed worthy of a home at a Supermax facility, like Abdul Hakim Murad, of al-Qaeda's Operation Bojinka or Accardo Simonelli, gangster from the New Mexico mafia and a hitman with more than 30 counts of murder, both current residents of ADX Florence in Colorado.

Gitmo, like other sites around the world, was intended as an extra judicial interrogation site that would permit the United States to hold and interrogate prisoners without the complications of the Geneva Conventions or other restrictions imposed by US law. In the earlier years of the war against Al-Qaeda, it had a certain utility but the fact is that Gitmo has largely served its purpose. Al-Qaeda has been broken as a strategic threat to the United States. Moreover, the brazen manner in which the Bush administration operated Gitmo subjected it to constant and increasing scrutiny and the administration found itself fighting a slow motion legal battle that increasingly imposed practical limits on the utilization of the facility for its intended purpose. 

That being the case, there is really little rationale to continue holding prisoners there, since it cannot be operated as it was intended from the start. In fact, the very arguments put forward for keeping it open, that it is safe and humane, conforms to the Geneva Conventions and in fact is better than stateside prisons, are all good reasons why it should be closed. Why should illegal combatants who are not citizens get a penal experience superior to that which our own citizen criminals enjoy? Glenn Beck repeatedly states that you can't send Gitmo detainees to stateside prisons because they would be killed upon release into genpop.  Oh no, that means it's likely these hard core, worst of the worst TERRORISTS would be accorded about the same level of regard in the prison population as, Oh, I don't know...... child molesters?  Is this really a problem?   

They are not the X-Men and maximum security prisons stateside are more than adequate to hold them. Gitmo has outlived its national security usefulness. Considering it is now subject to regular inspection by the Red Cross to verify that its conditions are humane, it is no longer viable as an extra judicial interrogation site, its intended use. If nobody is getting tortured at Gitmo, then really, whats the point? No reason to leave it open. 

On Torture

Matt Damon paraphrasing a statement by Milt Beardon,

”Look, the best line about torture I’ve heard came from [retired CIA officer turned war-on-terrorism critic] Milt Beardon,” Damon says. “He said, ‘If a guy knows where a dirty bomb is hidden that’s going to go off in a Marriott, put me in a room with him and I’ll find out. But don’t codify that. Just let me break the law.’

I essentially agree with this point of view. You can't give torture legal sanction without relinquishing moral authority. More cogently, once you say its okay to torture people for one thing, where does that stop? Next thing you know, you're torturing people for all sorts of reasons. This IS the government we're talking about. I'm always amazed at how my fellow conservatives can be apoplectic about government decisions to regulate industry and yet are blithely relaxed about the government's decision to torture individuals. Because here's the thing; everyone likes to talk about the quintessential torture example...a guy knows where a nuke is thats going to go off in an hour and we have to make him talk to save lives. Well, the thing is, exigent circumstances like that are not the norm, they are the exception. More typical is you catch a guy and he knows stuff and you want him to talk. Are we gonna torture him to get that info? Well, its gets very easy to get there if you've already decided that torture is okay.

We shouldn't torture. No government should. But in the course of human events, there will be times when a Jack Bauer moment seems called for. Humans are highly fallible beings, prone to make such judgments wrongly. Codifying torture makes such wrong judgments more likely. Leave torture outside the sanction of law, so that any one who makes a decision to torture does so with a keen sense of responsibility and an understanding that they are outside the bounds of law and morality. In this manner, a person's rationale for torture must flow from circumstances where the tension between humane behavior and the duty to protect innocent lives are in unquestionable and irresolvable conflict.

Are We A Nation of Scared Punks Now?

The debate over the closing of Guantanamo Bay and the disposition of the remaining 240 detainees has plateaued out to a ridiculous level of near hysterical hyperbole on the right. My fellow conservative brethren are practically hyperventilating with fear at the prospect that Gitmo will be closed and its occupants shipped off to other countries or (horrors!) to maximum security prisons stateside.

Gitmo was from the outset part of a system of extra judicial prisons, intended from the get go to evade the jurisdiction of U.S. courts and exploit the shortcomings of the Geneva Conventions and other international laws. My fellow conservative brethren argue that Gitmo is necessary to house these dangerous terrorists plucked from the battlefield. There is merit to this arguement. Terrorists are an unconventional enemy. They wear no uniform, fight under no flag. The Bush administration was reluctant to bring these captured fighters into the US, but needed someplace to house and interrogate them at length. However, there are rules of war, even if the other side does not acknowledge them, and there are basic ideals and principles.

Gitmo's fundamental problem is that its practice is fundamentally at odds with American ideals. Taking people, even terrorists, and throwing them in a hole indefinitely, without a trial, without due process or any recourse to seek review of their situation simply does not square with American values. For the longest, that was Gitmo's practice and there were people detained for years who didn't warrant incarceration in Gitmo. Then under pressure, the administration and the congress developed the military tribunals and twice had the Supreme Court tell them their process was insufficient to render some level of meaningful due process. Several military lawyers have resigned from cases rather than operate under a system so lacking in real due process, the tribunals were a preconcieved result.

This brings us back to where I started. President Obama has now ordered the closing of Gitmo within a year, and a process for the disposition of the remaining detainees must now be developed. People are freaking now about how the detainees will be released to kill again, and how they are waaaayyy too dangerous to be housed anywhere stateside. PLEASE!

For sake of argument, lets stipulate that all are foreign fighters, killers of the first order, bent on our destruction. SO WHAT? American prisons are full of the most vile, violent and manevolent humans on the planet. Serial killers, gang bangers, contract killers, mobsters and more. All housed in prisons across America. These guys are not any more dangerous than some of the monsters we have locked up now. We're not talking about Lex Luthor type criminal masterminds who can bust out of jail whenever they please. The argument that the danger qoutient of any locale they might be located in will tip into the red is ludicrous, hysterical hyperbole. As conservatives, it is nothing but intellectual dishonesty for the sake of winning a political argument to suggest that we are justifiably concerned about these terrorist prisoners being anywhere near our neighborhoods, but we aren't saying boo about some of the hair raising criminal animals locked up in our states right now. We don't walk around worrying about the serial killers, mobsters and other vile criminals locked up in our regions. Why are these terrorist criminals different? Because they kill for political goals? They are not different and the same prisons that keep all the other scumbags locked away will do just fine for them.

I mean the arguments are ludicrous. I listened to ten minutes of O'Rielly advancing the argument that the detainees would prefer to stay at Gitmo (as though their preferences have any bearing on the issue in the first instance) because if they were to be released into the general prison population anywhere, they would be killed. My response to this: SO WHAT. How is it that the Gitmo detainees should be entitled to a better prison experience than the average American criminal?

Obama made the right call. Gitmo was justifiable as a brief abberation in the aftermath of 9/11, but its simply not a sustainable premise to say we will lock people up for as long as we want and they have no recourse to challenge this. Add on the issue of torture and the mess is compounded.

Members of Congress are calling Sec.Def Gates to tell him how they don't want any of these people in their backyards. What a bunch of wimps. If these guys were so damn incredibly hard core, they wouldn't still be in Gitmo. You stick them in a Super Max somewhere, they are not going anywhere, just like the other hardcore killers we lock up. The GOP sound like a bunch of fear mongers with this hysterical drivel.