CIA Welcomes End of Torture; Debra Saunders, Not So Much

This is interesting: according to an article by Spencer Ackerman, Obama's executive order prohibiting torture is likely to be welcomed by the CIA:

“It’s a great leap forward in terms of respect for human rights,” said John Kiriakou, the retired CIA official who supervised the early interrogation of Al Qaeda detainee Abu Zubaydah in 2002. “From the very beginning, the CIA should not have been in the business of enhanced interrogation techniques and detentions.” CIA interrogators waterboarded Abu Zubaydah, but not while Kiriakou supervised the interrogation....

Kiriakou said that the reaction to Obama’s harmonization of interrogations policy would get “a very positive reaction” inside the CIA.....“This should make people very happy. No one wants to be in harm’s way [legally]. Despite what the Bush White House and Bush Justice Department said was legal, I think people at the CIA understood that this was not legal and [the techniques] were torture.”

And if the name 'John Kiriakou' sounds familiar to IIRTZ readers, it may be because Debra Saunders quoted him in a column justifying torture. Once again, the guy who said the one thing on which her whole pro-torture rationalization rested Doesn't. Support. Torture.

Nor, in fact, does anyone else with an ounce of decency or honesty or integrity. Which, again, leaves out Debra Saunders.

Debra Saunders: Still an Idiot (Torture Edition)

It turns out Bill O'Reilly isn't the only one who cites fiction to justify torture; Debra Saunder's column yesterday also quoted Jack Bauer putting those Senate weasels in their place. Saunders might understand that 24 is fiction (O'Reilly obviously doesn't), but I wouldn't bet on it.

But that wasn't the stupidest thing in her column. That would be this: More...

Former CIA operative John Kiriakou told ABC's Brian Ross that the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah "disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks." That's a lot of lives. Operatives didn't act on impulse, a la Jack Bauer. Kiriakou explained that agents had to ask the deputy director for operations before using any coercive technique.

Never mind that Kiriakou didn't actually witness the interrogation he says worked (after "about 35 seconds") to save lives.

Or that Kiriakou's account contradicts other sources who were actually there, who say Zubaydeh provided information before he was tortured.

Or that Zubaydeh wasn't the high-level target the CIA made him out to be.

Never mind any of those things she could have learned in five minutes using The Google on the Stevens Tubes. At the very least, even if she remained blissfully ignorant of all of the above, she could have included the other thing Kiriakou himself said about torture:

I've come to the belief that not only is it unnecessary, but that as Americans, we're better than that and we shouldn't be engaging in a practice like waterboarding.

To sum up: torture: still wrong; Debra Saunders: still an idiot. Any questions?

Going Out of Business

60 Minutes (via Kevin Drum):

Mr. Obama: Yes. I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that. I have said repeatedly that America doesn't torture. And I'm gonna make sure that we don't torture. Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America's moral stature in the world.

Get your vicarious sadomasochism while it lasts.

Il Portiere di notte: the Blog

Speaking of Kathryn Jean Lopez, here. She. Goes. Again:

Only in New Jersey [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

Star-Ledger:

It's eerie dark in the exhibition hall at the New Jersey Convention Center in Edison. Usually, the room is reserved for trade shows. But this summer weekend, it's been transformed into a 40,000-square-foot dungeon for sexual fantasy.

Welcome to The Floating World, three days of suspended reality geared toward those who explore extremes in carnality. The program encompassed bondage, sadomasochism and role playing — including Gitmo-inspired interrogator/detainee "torture" sessions.

08/18 07:53 AM

Oh well, whatever puts the movement into your conservatism.

Yoo Who?

As major newspapers around the country are reporting today, the ACLU has forced the Pentagon to release a torture-enabling memo written for the Bush administration by John Yoo, a lowly Republican former Deputy Assistant Attorney General.

Here's Glenn Greenwald on the significance of the Yoo memo:

John Yoo's Memorandum, as intended, directly led to -- caused -- a whole series of war crimes at both Guantanamo and in Iraq. The reason such a relatively low-level DOJ official was able to issue such influential and extraordinary opinions was because he was working directly with, and at the behest of, the two most important legal officials in the administration: George Bush's White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and Dick Cheney's counsel (and current Chief of Staff) David Addington. Together, they deliberately created and authorized a regime of torture and other brutal interrogation methods that are, by all measures, very serious war crimes.

Greenwald points out that the administration's actions with regard to this memo constitute the kind of conspiracy to commit war crimes that it has sought to apply to its own War on Terror enemies. And in an update to his original post, Greenwald quotes Harper's Scott Horton on just what sort of a lawyer the American president and vice-president were looking for and found in John Yoo:

These memoranda have been crafted not as an after-the-fact defense to criminal charges, but rather as a roadmap to committing crimes and getting away with it. They are the sort of handiwork we associate with the consigliere, or mob lawyer. But these consiglieri are government attorneys who have sworn an oath, which they are violating, to uphold the law.

Citing Marty Lederman, Kevin Drum asks a very good question about the memo:

[N]ow that we know what was in the memo, what justification was there for classifying it in the first place? It wouldn't have been moot in 2003, and there was nothing in it that compromised national security either then or now. The only thing it compromised was the president's desire not to have to defend his own policies — policies that led directly to the abuses at Abu Ghraib, among others.

So what sort of a defense is the loyal opposition offering to these important and thoughtful inquiries from the left? On my regular beat over at The Corner, I could find not so much as a mention of Mr. Yoo's name today. If I thought they were capable of it, I might have begun to suspect that they were ashamed.

But then the reliably detestable Cliff May finally stepped up with The Corner's only apparent statement on this base chapter in US presidential history:

They're Going to Wish They Were in Guantanamo [Cliff May]

Reuters reports:

Turkish police have detained 45 people in Istanbul for suspected links to Islamic militant group al Qaeda, state news agency Anatolian reported on Tuesday.

[...]

04/02 01:48 PM

So there you have it: according to conservatism's flagship blog, the United States is better than Turkey (to be tortured in). Doesn't that just get the hair up on the back of your neck? USA! USA. U...s...a...

History Has a Stutter; It Says, "W-w-w-watch Out!"

Paul Kramer has a fascinating article in the New Yorker about the last debate over torture--100 years ago, when American troops were fighting to suppress an insurgency in the Philippines. The lede:

Many Americans were puzzled by the news, in 1902, that United States soldiers were torturing Filipinos with water. The United States, throughout its emergence as a world power, had spoken the language of liberation, rescue, and freedom.

Of course it was worse than anyone knew; of course denial, rationalization, and cover-up were the order of the day. Tell me if this sounds familiar:

Confronted with the facts...Administration officials, military officers, and pro-war journalists launched a vigorous campaign in defense of the Army and the war. Their arguments were passionate and wide-ranging, and sometimes contradictory. Some simply attacked the war’s critics, those who sought political advantage by crying out that “our soldiers are barbarous savages,” as one major general put it. Some contended that atrocities were the exclusive province of the Macabebe Scouts, collaborationist Filipino troops over whom, it was alleged, U.S. officers had little control. Some denied, on racial grounds, that Filipinos were owed the “protective” limits of “civilized warfare.” When, during the committee hearings, Senator Joseph Rawlins had asked General Robert Hughes whether the burning of Filipino homes by advancing U.S. troops was “within the ordinary rules of civilized warfare,” Hughes had replied succinctly, “These people are not civilized.” More generally, some people, while conceding that American soldiers had engaged in “cruelties,” insisted that the behavior reflected the barbaric sensibilities of the Filipinos.

Same as it ever was.

The article is currently available online; by all means, go read the whole thing.

Update: Thanks for the link, Melissa! First-time visitors from Shakesville, take some time to look around--we've got a smart bunch of contributors and a lot of great posts, and on the whole we're fairly hospitable.

Gitmo Girl

Yet another odd story has captured our K-Lo's imagination. And bound and gagged and tortured it to within an inch of utter bliss:

Pay to be "beaten, interrogated and shouted at" [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

Gulag nostalgia at a theme park in Lithuania.

01/27 11:43 AM

You know, one day -- one day soon, I hope -- we'll be able to look back on Guantanamo and the Bush CIA's black sites. Most Americans will feel great shame. But a very special few of us will have an orgasm.

Steynaro Pe Gergerac

Mark Steyn's late-night column fires K-Lo's morning imagination:

A Mark Steyn Classic [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

Fantasy is a by-product of security: It’s the difference between hanging upside down in your dominatrix’s bondage parlor for half-an-hour after work on Friday and enduring the real thing for years on end in Saddam’s prisons.

10/28 07:29 AM

Just as plagiarism is a by-product of wingnut welfare journalism: It's the difference between developing your own crackpot argument about your political opponents and stealing the one published two days earlier by Peggy Noonan.

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

Torturers, torturees and the tortuous titillations of today's swinging rightwinger:

I'm Pretty Sure [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

I have a crush on Duncan Hunter.

Who else gives you chills during a debate?

10/21 08:30 PM

[...]

"I was tied up at the time" [Kathryn Jean Lopez]; [link added--ahab]

Hunter isn't the only chill inducer tonight.

10/21 08:57 PM

Ahhh, let's call the whole thing off...