demand the facts on al-Libi

In my blog item of Friday, May 15, I connected some dots to the curiously timed alleged suicide of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an al-Qaeda member captured by the U.S. and, for reasons not at all clear, imprisoned in Libya. Newsweek has now uploaded an article dated May 16 that takes the story further. According to the article, my suspicions were well-founded:

'Two weeks earlier, al-Libi was visited for the first time by human-rights workers investigating allegations that he had been tortured into making false claims connecting Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda. (Those claims, which al-Libi later retracted, were used by the Bush administration to bolster its case for the Iraq War.) Al-Libi also had been identified recently by U.S. defense lawyers as a possible key witness in upcoming trials of top terror suspects.'

The article also says that the Obama administration is demanding answers from the Libyan government about al-Libi's death. One question I would like answered is, did any members of the Bush-Cheney administration communicate with Libyan authorities about al-Libi since January 20, 2009, the date of President Obama's inauguration? Any such contacts should be catalogued and investigated. Another is, what information did al-Libi share with his recent visitors, and who had access to that information?

Closer to home, and regardless of the truth or falsity of the suicide, we should demand answers to the following questions:
—Why was al-Libi, a high-value detainee, never brought to Guantánamo?
—What so-called CIA 'black sites' was al-Libi brought to before being turned over to Libya?
—Whose decision was it to transfer al-Libi from a U.S.-controlled 'black site' to Libya, and what were the official reasons for doing so?

I have e-mailed Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts, to get some answers to questions about al-Libi. I will follow up with phone calls to him and other senators this week and will report on my progress, if there is any.

We have a right to know the truth and to demand justice. If it turns out that anyone acted to induce the Libyan government to kill al-Libi in order to thwart justice and accountability in the States, that person must be tried and punished in a court of law. President Obama has regrettably shown reluctance to allow anyone to be prosecuted for illegal torture-related actions undertaken in government service. Would that same reluctance apply to actions possibly undertaken after individuals have left government service?

I have a bad feeling that the worst revelations are yet to come. Will they be matched by commensurately serious investigation? That depends in part on us and how forcefully we demand justice.

the long arm of the lawless

New facts about torture in the Bush-Cheney years continue to emerge, thanks in part to Dick Cheney's unending torture roadshow. Cheney himself has nothing new to add. Instead, he has provoked others to come forward, like Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired army colonel and Colin Powell's chief of staff when he was secretary of state. On May 13, Wilkerson wrote an article for The Washington Note which included the following passage:

'Likewise, what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002—well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion—its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.'

Why is that significant? If true, it demonstrates that torture was not used simply by supposedly well-meaning agents and contractors trying to stop the supposed ticking timebombs, but that torture was used to provide cover for one of Bush and Cheney's bogus arguments for war: that Iraq bore responsibility for the attacks of September 11, 2001.

That much is plain from what Wilkerson himself said. But that's not all we learned on Wednesday. Meanwhile in Washington, the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts held an important hearing called 'What Went Wrong: Torture and the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Administration'. I watched it on C-SPAN and will try to post a link to the transcript when it becomes available.

One of the witnesses at the hearing was Ali Soufan, a former FBI counterterrorism agent who interrogated Abu Zubaydah, the high-value al-Qaeda detainee recently revealed to have been waterboarded eighty-three times in one month. Soufan testified that he got Zubaydah to reveal extremely valuable information without using torture. His interrogation was then stopped and contractors were brought in who then used torture on Zubaydah. The result: the contractors did not get anything valuable out of him. In short, the introduction of the ineffective torture techniques impeded the collection of information from Zubaydah.

The walls are closing in on Cheney and his gang, and there's nothing they can do about it—or is there? There was one more major piece of news this week, one that has received the least public attention but may deserve the most. All but one of the major captured al-Qaeda members are in U.S. custody: Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, Abu Zubaydah, and, at a federal 'supermax' prison in Colorado, Ramzi Yousef. The only one missing from U.S. custody is al-Libi, the guy whose torture produced the bogus information about Iraq's links to al-Qaeda. Where have they been hiding al-Libi? According to Newsweek for May 28, 2007, al-Libi was secreted away to Libya. Libya?! From the Newsweek article by Michael Isikoff:

'But Noman Benotman, a former Afgan jihad fighter who knew al-Libi and who is now a London-based Libyan political opposition leader, told NEWSWEEK that during a recent trip to Tripoli, he met with a senior Libyan government official who confirmed to him that al-Libi had been quietly returned to Libya and is now in prison there. Benotman said that he was told by the senior Libyan government official-whom he declined to publicly identify-that Al Libi is extremely ill, suffering from tuberculosis and diabetes. "He is there in jail and very sick," Benotman told NEWSWEEK. He also said that the senior official told him that the Libyan government has agreed not to publicly confirm anything about al-Libi-out of deference to the Bush administration. "If the Libyans will confirm it, it will embarrass the Americans because he is linked to the Iraq issue," Benotman said.'

Do you suppose al-Libi has been in Libya these past few years so that he could not answer anyone's questions? They could always call him back, no? No. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that al-Libi had just, ahem, committed suicide:

'A Libyan militant whose false information about links between Iraq and Al Qaeda was used by the Bush administration as part of its justification for war in Iraq has died in a prison in Libya, a Libyan newspaper reported. The militant, Ali Mohammed Abdel-Aziz al-Fakheri, known by his nom de guerre, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, hanged himself late last week, the newspaper, Oea, said.'

The one person whose existence most deeply contradicted Bush and Cheney's lies, whose continued torture was personally demanded by Cheney, whose story could potentially wreck their defense in a criminal trial if it ever comes to that, just happened to commit suicide in a Libyan prison just as the Congress begins its investigation and as the facts about torture come cascading down on the heads of the previous administration. Draw your own conclusions. All I've got to say is, Dick Cheney is a very dangerous man.

I smell change

There it is. Just like that, President Obama has signed the order to close the prison at Guantánamo. From the New York Times:

Saying that "our ideals give us the strength and moral high ground" to combat terrorism, President Obama signed executive orders Thursday effectively ending the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret interrogation program, directing the closing of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp within a year and setting up a sweeping, high-level review of the best way to hold and question terrorist suspects in the future.

"We intend to win this fight," Mr. Obama said, "We are going to win it on our own terms."

As he signed three orders, 16 retired generals and admirals who have fought for months for a ban on coercive interrogations stood behind him and applauded.

I am of the opinion that the United States should not torture people simply because this should not be a country that tortures people. But for those who think torture 'works', here is a previous blog item that makes the case for torture being an ineffective investigative tool.

torturers need not apply

According to news reports yesterday, Nelson Mandela and other members of the African National Congress appear on U.S. terrorist watch lists. What makes the situation even more ridiculous is that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice apparently has no idea of how to get them off the list:

'"This is a country with which we now have excellent relations, South Africa, but it's frankly a rather embarrassing matter that I still have to waive in my own counterpart, the foreign minister of South Africa, not to mention the great leader Nelson Mandela," Rice said.'

With the executive branch mired in such incompetence, Representative Howard Berman (D-CA) has proposed legislation, currently in the House Foreign Affairs and Judiciary Committees, to remove them from the list. The bill is H.R. 5690, 'To exempt the African National Congress from treatment as a terrorist organization for certain acts or events, provide relief for certain members of the African National Congress regarding admissibility, and for other purposes.'

My original intention in starting this blog entry was to revisit Dick Cheney's pro-apartheid votes in the U.S. House in 1986. He did indeed vote against a resolution calling for Mandela's release and against economic sanctions, but I was unable to corroborate a recollection I had from the 80's about something he may have said about Mandela in particular.

Instead, I found something more interesting in the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1182), the law which Berman's bill would amend. Here it is:

'§ 1182. Inadmissible aliens
(a) Classes of aliens ineligible for visas or admission. Except as otherwise provided in this Act, aliens who are inadmissible under the following paragraphs are ineligible to receive visas and ineligible to be admitted to the United States:[...]

(3) Security and related grounds.[...]

(E) Participants in Nazi persecution, genocide, or the commission of any act of torture or extrajudicial killing.[...]

(iii) Commission of acts of torture or extrajudicial killings. Any alien who, outside the United States, has committed, ordered, incited, assisted, or otherwise participated in the commission of—
(I) any act of torture, as defined in section 2340 of title 18, United States Code; or
(II) under color of law of any foreign nation, any extrajudicial killing, as defined in section 3(a) of the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991 (28 U.S.C. 1350 note), is inadmissible.'

How about that? Aliens who have committed, ordered, or even incited torture are not allowed to enter the U.S. I guess certain privileges are reserved for citizens.

torture helps the terrorists win

Torture has been in the news a lot this week. On Tuesday, in an interview with the BBC, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia justified the use of torture to extract information:

BBC: All I’m saying about it, is that it’s a bizarre scenario, because it’s very unlikely that you’re going to have the one person that can give you that information and so if you use that as an excuse to permit torture then perhaps that’s a dangerous thing.

SCALIA: Seems to me you have to say, as unlikely as that is, it would be absurd to say that you can’t stick something under the fingernails, smack them in the face. It would be absurd to say that you couldn’t do that. And once you acknowledge that, we’re into a different game. How close does the threat have to be and how severe can an infliction of pain be? There are no easy answers involved, in either direction, but I certainly know you can’t come in smugly and with great self-satisfaction and say, “Oh, this is torture and therefore it’s no good.” You would not apply that in some real-life situations. It may not be a ticking bomb in Los Angeles, but it may be: “Where is this group that we know is plotting this painful action against the United States? Where are they? What are they currently planning?”

Then yesterday, the U.S. Senate passed H.R. 2082, the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008, by a vote of 51-45. What does that have to do with torture? See sec. 327 of the bill:

'SEC. 327. LIMITATION ON INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES.
(a) LIMITATION.—No individual in the custody or under the effective control of an element of the intelligence community or instrumentality thereof, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by the United States Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations.
(b) INSTRUMENTALITY DEFINED.—In this section, the term ‘‘instrumentality’’, with respect to an element of the intelligence community, means a contractor or subcontractor at any tier of the element of the intelligence community.'

Simply put, the bill would outlaw torture techniques like waterboarding. Former torture victim and current flip-flopper John McCain voted against it.

Arguments against terrorism usually depend on considerations like moral high ground, the Geneva Conventions, the treatment of U.S. troops when captured by others, and, in a word, law. The pro-torture argument depends on the need to gather life-saving information as speedily as possible, hence the trope of the ticking timebomb. And really, what can one say to that? That respect for the rule of law is more important than saving lives? That the ticking timebomb is a foolish rhetorical figure?

While those may be winning arguments among reasonable people, these are not reasonable times. This is an age of hysteria, when appeals to law and reason carry little weight in many quarters. With that in mind, I propose a new argument against torture, one that addresses the ticking timebomb question head on, to wit: Is torture likely to help us find the ticking timebomb before we are blown to kingdom come?

This is not a question of law or constitutionality but, rather, a question of criminological reliability. No other basis for opposing torture has any chance of convincing people who have no regard for law. So let us ask then, does torture make us safer by yielding time-sensitive, reliable information or not?

I would not presume to answer this question myself, not being an experienced torturer and all. Let us turn then not to apologists for torture like, say, Alan Dershowitz, but rather to an actual U.S. military interrogator and see what he thinks of torture-generated information.

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties held a hearing on November 8, 2007 with just such a witness. The occasion's formal title was Oversight Hearing on Torture and the Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment of Detainees: The Effectiveness and Consequences of “Enhanced” Interrogation, and the star witness was

Steven Kleinman
Colonel, USAFR
Intelligence & National Security Specialist
Senior Intelligence Officer/Military Interrogator.

Suspiciously, the hearing transcript is still not available via Lexis-Nexis, but the House Judiciary Committee's website has a pdf of Kleinman's written statement to the Committee.

According to Kleinman, torture actually compromises interrogations:

'As the parties argue the legal and moral implications of using coercive methods to extract information that, according to the scenario, would save thousands of lives, there is an erroneous pre-supposition both sides seem too willing to accept: that coercion is ultimately an effective means of obtaining reliable intelligence information.

This conclusion is, in my professional opinion, unequivocally false.' [Italics his.]

How can he say such a thing? What experience does he have?

'Before addressing the concept of what has been described as “enhanced” interrogation methods, I believe it might be useful to present a brief summation of what over twenty years of operational experience has taught me about interrogation, both what it is and, perhaps more importantly, what it is not.'

Twenty years' experience is great, Captain America, but what about the ticking timebomb? Don't we need to extract the information by any means necessary? What about subjecting detainees to stressful situations until they can't take it anymore?

'Excessive stress, insufficient sleep, poor nutrition, and other environmental influences can result in substantial memory deficits. This is manifested not only as gaps in memory—that is, difficulty in recalling specific events—but also in unintended fabrication. What this suggests is that after exposure to the various environmental stressors, the source will be more likely to report some combination of real and imagined facts, believing sincerely that both are true, but ultimately being sincerely wrong on many counts. From an intelligence collection perspective, this is exceptionally problematic.'

But can't an experienced interrogator tell the difference? Here, in the absence of the hearing transcript, let us turn to one of the few news items to cover the hearing, from Talking Points Memo:

'But if a detainee has his hands tied, or if a detainee shivers because a room is chilled, then "I don't know whether he's shivering because the room is cold or because my questions are penetrating," Kleinman said. That degree of abuse "takes away a lot of my tools."'

According to one of the nation's most senior military interrogators, a man whose patriotism and intelligence are amply evidenced throughout his statement, torture actually makes it harder to get useful information out of detainees. It takes away the interrogators' tools, as he put it.

Why do Antonin Scalia and John McCain, to say nothing of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, want to take away our interrogators’ tools and tie their professional hands behind their backs? How can they claim to love America when they are cleearly helping the terrorists conceal information from interrogators? Are they more interested in torturing detainees than in protecting American citizens?

I think there's only one possible conclusion to draw from these considerations: George W. Bush and the other advocates of torture want the terrorists to win. Why else would they take away our interrogators' tools and help the terrorists conceal what they know? If the pro-torture people want to continue to plead on the terrorists' behalf, I think it's our obligation to tell the world whose side they're really on.