Inquisitions

Keith Olbermann reports on the failings of torture:

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I'm afraid that one night in the near future I'm going to turn on the TV at 3am and see Dick Cheney with his own infomercial selling torture. It's kind of like his own Snuggie... but at least the Snuggie works. Torture doesn't.

Why are we doomed to learn these lessons over and over? Six decades ago, the US military understood how to get information from prisoners of war:

"We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.

So why should we be surprised today when we read that "not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions"? Well, I'm not surprised, but I think I now understand why the CIA destroyed the videotapes showing these interrogations. Certainly Cheney is not embarrassed that the CIA tortured with his authorization. That fact is well established and advertised, but I believe those tapes would have shown just how crappy the extracted information was. That's why they got rid of them.

So the coming Spanish Inquisition can continue without the tapes. At least they have these infamous memos that President Obama recently declassified. However, I'm not certain how the Spanish courts will round up Alberto Gonzales, Douglas Feith, David Addington, John Yoo, Jay S. Bybee, and William Haynes. If our government chooses not to pursue trials in American courts, I doubt they're going to just hand these guys over to Spanish courts. Any Spanish arrest warrants would be simply symbolic...

So ask Attorney General Holder to appoint an independent prosecutor. Nobody is above the law. I only wish we didn't have to beg Obama and his administration to do their damn jobs.

In lighter news, that other snake-oil salesman -- the ShamWow guy -- was arrested for his own harsh interrogation techniques.

Twits on Twitter

I thought the days of investing millions in internet startups with no plans for profit were over. But apparently if that startup company is Twitter, it's raining money like 1997 all over again. One of the venture capital firms behind Twitter also invested in eBay in the early days... so I guess they've got some credibility.

In case you don't know what Twitter is, I'll explain as best I can. It's a "micro blogging" site where you enter your messages (or "tweets" as they call them) in 140 characters or less. You can submit them on the web site, through a 3rd party application, or from your cell phone. You can follow as many other Tweeters as you like and they can follow you.

The results should be an interesting mix of conversations. More so, I find it to be a bunch of people self-promoting their projects, products, and blogs... like me.

I try to be thought provoking and creative in my tweets, but ultimately it's the stupid messages like "should I drink this expired orange juice" that gets the responses from the strangers who are following me. It's all rather weird.

But I suppose the service is handy if you're a news correspondent who wants to get quick input from viewers.

And it's also perfect for a politician who wants to reach out to the masses... or potential terrorists. Rep. Peter Hoekstra made a rather bad judgment call when he gave detailed updates on his recent trip to Iraq via Twitter.

Now Karl Rove wants in on the fun. The former presidential political adviser recently twittered his Texas hunting trip. I admit that I'm slightly relieved that his tweets are no more exciting than mine. Yet I have to wonder -- what if Rove had been tweeting the last eight years? Might we have seen something like this:

KarlRove @JohnMcCain I know about your black baby.

KarlRove Damn! Misplaced my caging lists again!

KarlRove @W woke up with a great idea! Let's out a CIA agent for shits and giggles!

KarlRove I'm just going to blow off that whole subpoena thing today.

KarlRove Let's kill stuff.

So now that I have a direct link to Rove, I feel rather icky. But besides that, I'm wondering if I can craft the perfect 140 character message that will make him open his eyes, repent for his transgressions, and become a better man. Probably not, but I'm so glad we have the internet.

Torturing Democracy

"I have become an old man here. Death in this situation is better than being alive and staying here without hope." — Detainee #232

Those are the words of an unnamed Guantanamo detainee. The torture of prisoners in U.S. custody is documented in a new film Torturing Democracy (viewable online).

With exclusive interviews and little-known archival footage, the documentary traces how the secret U.S. military training program – “Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape” or SERE – became the basis for many of the harshest interrogation methods employed first by the CIA and subsequently by interrogators at Guantanamo and in Iraq. The tactics designed to “inoculate“ elite American troops mirror tactics used by “a totalitarian, evil nation with complete disregard for human rights and the Geneva Conventions,” according to Malcolm Nance, the former SERE master trainer for the U.S. Navy.

One of the most shocking memos -- more shocking than the infamous Yoo "torture memo" -- is the recently released JTF GTMO "SERE" Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure. This most disturbing document describes our government's cold standards on how to abuse prisoners including bureaucratic details on degradation, physical debilitation, isolation and monopolization of perception, and demonstrated omnipotence tactics.

The accused have faced many hopeless years of these tactics. It wasn't until June 2008 that the Supreme Court ruled that the detainees have the right to appeal to U.S. civilian courts to challenge their indefinite imprisonment without charges.

How are these trials going? The unsurprising answer is not so fairly. The surprising news, however, is who is blowing the whistle:

Darrel J. Vandeveld was in despair. The hard-nosed lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, a self-described conformist praised by his superiors for his bravery in Iraq, had lost faith in the Guantanamo Bay war crimes tribunals in which he was a prosecutor.

That's the prosecutor speaking out, and he is at least the fourth Guantanamo Bay prosecutor to resign under protest. His claims are explosive:

In a declaration and subsequent testimony, he said the U.S. government was not providing defense lawyers with the evidence it had against their clients, including exculpatory information -- material considered helpful to the defense.

Saying that the accused enemy combatants were more likely to be wrongly convicted without that evidence, Vandeveld testified that he went from being a "true believer to someone who felt truly deceived" by the tribunals. The system in place at the U.S. military facility in Cuba, he wrote in his declaration, was so dysfunctional that it deprived "the accused of basic due process and subject[ed] the well-intentioned prosecutor to claims of ethical misconduct."

I applaud anybody who stands up to the Bush administration, but there remains a bitter irony. The good guys leave, and the ones without a conscience keep on running the country.