Wired reports that studies show that “enhanced interrogation”, far from being a reliable source of information, can actually make someone less of an intelligence asset because the stress involved changes the biochemistry of the brain:

“There is a vast literature on the effects of extreme stress on motivation, mood and memory, using both animals and humans,” writes Shane O’Mara, a stress researcher at Ireland’s Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience. “These techniques cause severe, repeated and prolonged stress, which compromises brain tissue supporting memory and executive function.”

[...]

A report published by the Intelligence Science Board in 2007 found that no research existed to support the use of enhanced interrogation. And O’Mara’s review, published Monday in Trends in Cognitive Science, describes a wealth of science that supports ending the practice.

O’Mara derides the belief that extreme stress produces reliable memory as “folk neurobiology” that “is utterly unsupported by scientific evidence.” The hippocampus and prefrontal cortex — the brain’s centers of memory processing, storage and retrieval — are profoundly altered by stress hormones. Keep the stress up long enough, and it will “result in compromised cognitive function and even tissue loss,” warping the minds that interrogators want to read.

What’s more, tortured suspects might not even realize when they’re lying. Frontal lobe damage can produce false memories: As torture is maintained for weeks or months or years, suspects may incorporate their captors’ allegations into their own version of reality.

What’s frustrating about the torture debate to me is that all of the professionals who are experts in the field are routinely ignored by the pro-”enhanced interrogation” side of the debate. Just so we’re clear, in addition to the biochemical evidence above, here’s a few posts and articles that we’ve seen over the past few months:

• We’ve seen that an Air Force officer with counterterrorism experience and experience interrogating al-Qaeda members opposes enhanced interrogation on the grounds that it doesn’t gather effective intelligence.

• We’ve had military psychologists who work on the SERE program, which trains soldiers to resist “enhanced interrogation,” claim that the use of same on detainees to be counterproductive.

• We’ve seen an FBI counterintelligence agent who specialize in counterterrorism and also had experience interrogating al-Qaeda members find no evidence of the effectiveness of “enhanced interrogation.”

• We’ve seen another FBI counterintelligence agent explain that the use of “enhanced interrogation” makes it much harder to recruit reliable intelligence assets.

• We’ve seen a Marine Corps interrogator point out the uselessness of such techniques even if there’s a “ticking time bomb” scenario.

Against this, we mostly have the claims of Dick Cheney who says that the 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report demonstrates that the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” enabled the United States to gain significant amounts of intelligence, particularly from the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Muhammed. The problem is, of course, is that this claim doesn’t survive scrutiny. Most of Cheney’s claims involve intelligence that was already known prior to KSMs capture, or organizational information that was obtained from KSM’s computer and paper files–not his actual interrogation. Indeed, most of what KSM said under “enhanced interrogation” was useless. It wasn’t until it stopped and the traditional American methods of interrogation employed instead that he actually provided anything of value.

The pro-”enhanced interrogation” side of the house loves to throw out hypotheticals and vague claims that these techniques are valuable, but the evidence doesn’t bear this claim out. These techniques do not provide any signficant or usable intelligence; they make useless people who might be turned into valuable intelligence assets, as noted above; they provide a powerful rallying cry for the recruitment of people into our enemies’ cause; they make it less likely that our enemies will surrender to our troops, which exposes them to unnecessary risk of harm; they make it more likely that our soldiers, when captured, will be tortured; they make it harder to recruit counterintelligence assets; they force us to waste time and resources in following false leads and finally, they undermine the moral authority of the United States.

What’s the upside?

(cross-posted to Heretical Ideas)

Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent and an expert on al-Qaeda operations who has interrogated al-Qaeda members reviews the claims that the Bush Administration’s torture techniques were effective and finds them wanting:

The inspector general’s report distinguishes between intelligence gained from regular interrogation and from the harsher methods, which culminate in waterboarding. While the former produces useful intelligence, according to the report, the latter “is a more subjective process and not without concern.” And the information in the two memos reinforces this differentiation.

They show that substantial intelligence was gained from pocket litter (materials found on detainees when they were captured), from playing detainees against one another and from detainees freely giving up information that they assumed their questioners already knew. A computer seized in March 2003 from a Qaeda operative for example, listed names of Qaeda members and money they were to receive.

[...]

Supporters of the enhanced interrogation techniques have jumped from claim to claim about their usefulness. They have asserted, for example, that harsh treatment led Mr. Mohammed to reveal the plot to attack the Library Tower in Los Angeles. But that plot was thwarted in 2002, and Mr. Mohammed was not arrested until 2003. Recently, interviews with unnamed sources led The Washington Post to report that harsh techniques turned Mr. Mohammed into an intelligence “asset.”

This latest claim will come as news to Mr. Mohammed’s prosecutors, to his fellow detainees (whom he instructed, at his arraignment, not to cooperate with the United States) and indeed to Mr. Mohammed himself. He told the International Committee of the Red Cross that “I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear.”

Read the whole thing, which demonstrates quite effectively that the torture techniques employed by the CIA did not provide us with information about al-Qaeda operations. They did not enable us to stop any terror threats. They were counterproductive and not worth the costs.

As Adam Sewer rightly points out,

We’re not seeing too many “professionals” argue the case for torture–instead we see those who believe fighting terrorists is about some kind of contest of will between Islam and the West romanticizing criminal behavior as “necessary” because, for some reason, they think protecting American society requires that take our cues from those we’re fighting.

This is very much the case. Time and time again, people with actual experience with interrogating terror suspects and actual experience and knowledge about the effectiveness of torture techniques have come out to explain that they are ineffective and that their use threatens national security more than it helps.

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Thomas Paine all supported the fair and decent treatment of even our enemies. Both the Redcoats and Hessian mercenaries were treated with decency and respect. Our Founding Fathers did this even though more American soldiers died as prisoners than died on the field of battle. They knew that American ideals meant something, and that fair and decent treatment was not only the right thing to do but the practical thing to do (many Hessian mercenaries stayed here and became loyal American citizens, for instance). Surely we can learn something from the wisdom of our Founding Fathers.

(link via Jim Henley)

Via Patrick Appel, former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa explains how the use of torture can undermine the United States’ ability to both obtain information and recruit double agents.

A second and arguably more important goal of the FBI is to persuade some of these people, or “targets,” to change sides and share the information they have about their own governments and countries with us. It’s the real-life James Bond scenario: developing “double agents” and obtaining critical foreign intelligence in the interest of national security. The FBI uses the fact that it operates on American soil to its advantage. FBI agents, unlike their CIA counterparts, can operate openly, rather than covertly. FBI agents also do not have to worry about hostile host governments discovering their activities and disrupting their intelligence networks. This means that the FBI is in a relatively strong position to produce a steady stream of valuable intelligence that is difficult to obtain abroad.

[...]

But getting people to flip is primarily a psychological game rather than a material one. After all, the FBI is asking its targets to commit the ultimate act of disloyalty to their country—treason. Few people are willing to make this leap quickly, even in exchange for the most lucrative or attractive offer. It’s an FBI agent’s job to slowly win the target’s trust and help him rationalize his decision to switch his allegiance. In my experience as a former FBI agent who both participated in and observed successful recruitments, it’s much easier to do this when a target has, at some level, a sense of admiration and respect for the United States. A nugget of goodwill toward America offers an agent the chance to step in, gain the target’s confidence, and convince him that playing for Team USA is worth the risk.

Policies like the use of torture make it more difficult for the FBI to develop relationships based on trust. Even when torture is used on a few people and in another country, and by a different agency, it casts doubts on the U.S. government’s overall willingness to act in good faith. Targets often project the skepticism about the United States that torture fosters onto individual FBI agents, who are often the only face of the government they see. In short, torture is fundamentally at odds with the image of the United States as a country that will play by the rules, and that is how the FBI must be perceived in order to do its job.

Considering that we’ve obtained virtually no useful evidence from the use of torture, even against high value targets like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the security/morality tradeoff here doesn’t even exist: On both moral and utilitarian calculations, there’s simply no justification for the use of torture.

The Obama Justice Department has appointed a criminal prosecutor to look into alleged abuses of the CIA under the Bush administration.

[Attorney General Eric] Holder has named longtime prosecutor John H. Durham, who has parachuted into crisis situations for both political parties over three decades, to open an early review of nearly a dozen cases of alleged detainee mistreatment at the hands of CIA interrogators and contractors.

The announcement raised fresh tensions in an intelligence community fearful that it will bear the brunt of the punishment for Bush-era national security policy, and it immediately provoked criticism from congressional Republicans.

Legal analysts said the review, while preliminary, could expand beyond its relatively narrow mandate and ensnare a wider cast of characters. They cited U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s investigation of the leak of a CIA operative’s identity, which culminated with the criminal conviction of then-Vice President Richard B. Cheney’s chief of staff.

In a statement Monday afternoon, Holder cautioned that the inquiry is far from a full-blown criminal investigation. Rather, he said, it is unknown whether indictments or prosecutions of CIA contractors and employees will follow. Lawyers involved in similar reviews said that any possible cases could take years to build because of challenges with witnesses and evidence.

There are reasonable grounds to believe that serious crimes were committed as the Bush administration muddled through the early years of the War on Terror. A society that believes in the rule of law, then, should investigate such charges.

Doing so, especially in the person of a special prosecutor, however, opens up multiple cans of worms. First, it puts our intelligence agencies in CYA mode, making them even more skittish than normal. Second, it provides additional fodder for our enemies. Third, it opens up a rift between our law enforcement and intelligence communities.

I take Holder at his word that he intends only to find the truth and that he has no zeal for putting intelligence professionals or Bush officials in jail. The problem, however, is that these investigations take on a life of their own. Even prosecutors whose independence and judgment were previously thought beyond reproach seem to succumb to the enormous pressure to charge people with something. Otherwise, the tens of millions of taxpayer dollars they spend on their investigation looks like a waste and those who expected the investigation to yield criminal charges will never believe there wasn’t a cover-up.

Will Durham be any different?

Though a registered Republican, Durham generally is regarded as apolitical, and attorneys general from both parties — including Janet Reno, Michael B. Mukasey and Holder — have tapped him for their most difficult assignments. Hugh Keefe, a longtime Connecticut defense lawyer who has often squared off against Durham in court, called the prosecutor “the go-to guy for Justice whenever they get a hot case.”

[...]

Mark Califano, a former prosecutor in Connecticut, described Durham’s approach as “clinical.” He said Durham “very rarely” has walked away from a case without bringing criminal charges. “He likes to make cases when there is evidence there,” said Califano, the son of former Heath, Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph A. Califano Jr. “You’ve got to balance whether that kind of information exists. . . . You can’t move forward if you don’t have the evidence.”

[...]

“The thing about the U.S. attorney’s office in Connecticut is that they take the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt seriously in deciding whether to indict,” Keefe said. “If Durham can’t make a case beyond a reasonable doubt, he won’t indict.”

Also of interest:

Durham risked unpopularity a decade ago when he untangled questionable relationships among FBI agents, Massachusetts police and Boston mob kingpins. Ultimately, he turned over evidence that prompted a federal judge to dismiss several murder cases and he won a conviction against a longtime federal agent who had grown too close to organized crime figures. The investigation later attracted a mass audience in the Academy Award-winning film “The Departed.”

One wonders whether this will spawn a movie as well.

An amusing headline from NYT: “Cheney Is Linked to Concealment of C.I.A. Project.” I mean, obviously, Cheney is going to be linked. He’s everyone’s favorite evil mastermind.

The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.

Now, if there’s anything we know about the CIA during the Bush years, they only kept secrets when they felt like it. Senior CIA officials routinely leaked to the press to cover their own backsides or when they disapproved of administration policy. Do we really think were going to break the law by lying to Congress on the orders of the vice president?

For that matter, it’s not entirely clear why they would consider Cheney part of their chain of command. Until early 2005, the CIA Director was dual hatted as Director of Central Intelligence, reporting directly to the president. Subsequently, the roles were split and the CIA Director reported to the Director of National Intelligence. The vice president has only referent power based on the strength of his relationship with the president. Indeed, some would argue that Dick Cheney wasn’t even a member of the executive branch!

UPDATE: Steven Taylor observes, “The broader problem here is that the current congressional oversight process over intelligence doesn’t work very well (if at all).”   Ultimately, that’s the key takeaway. CIA simply doesn’t feel like it answers to Congress.

The CIA has been lying to Congress about somethingoranother for years now, sources tell NYT.

The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta, has told the House Intelligence Committee in closed-door testimony that the C.I.A. concealed “significant actions” from Congress from 2001 until late last month, seven Democratic committee members said.

In a June 26 letter to Mr. Panetta discussing his testimony, Democrats said that the agency had “misled members” of Congress for eight years about the classified matters, which the letter did not disclose. “This is similar to other deceptions of which we are aware from other recent periods,” said the letter, made public late Wednesday by Representative Rush D. Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, one of the signers.

In an interview, Mr. Holt declined to reveal the nature of the C.I.A.’s alleged deceptions,. But he said, “We wouldn’t be doing this over a trivial matter.”

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Silvestre Reyes, Democrat of Texas, referred to Mr. Panetta’s disclosure in a letter to the committee’s ranking Republican, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, Congressional Quarterly reported on Wednesday. Mr. Reyes wrote that the committee “has been misled, has not been provided full and complete notifications, and (in at least one occasion) was affirmatively lied to.”

Via Twitter, Teresa Kopek is asking me to speculate on the subject matter but, honestly, I haven’t a clue. Presumably, given that waterboarding ended years ago under the Bush administration and has been decried by the Obama administration, it’s not about interrogation techniques.  Otherwise, though, who knows?

And, in the remarkably long series of ways in which Obama is like Bush, we have this entry:

In a related development, President Obama threatened to veto the pending Intelligence Authorization Bill if it included a provision that would allow information about covert actions to be given to the entire House and Senate Intelligence Committees, rather than the so-called Gang of Eight — the Democratic and Republican leaders of both houses of Congress and the two Intelligence Committees.

Obama, like Bush, is right.  You can’t conduct intelligence activities without safeguarding the most sensitive secrets.  One could argue for sharing beyond committee chairmen and ranking members, certainly, but there’s no logical rationale that a member of, say, the agriculture committee has a need to know.

James Gordon Meek has a very interesting two-part story on how FBI Special Agent George Piro successfully interrogated Saddam Hussein.  Shockingly, it does not involve waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, nudity, or German shephards.

The FBI prides itself on “rapport-based” interrogations that have a high success rate for yielding confessions from the likes of 1993 World trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and CIA headquarters killer Mir Aimal Kasi. There was no “ticking bomb” scenario with Saddam – just inherent political pressure – so the interrogation proceeded carefully and cautiously over months.

The strategy involved executing a subtle emotional attack, digging out Saddam’s soft spots and exploiting them. Prick his ego.

Saddam had revealed little, so far – and neither had Piro – other than stating he remained in Baghdad until the day before his capital fell to American-led forces in April 2003. He said he instructed his henchmen in a final meeting, “We will struggle in secret.” After fleeing Baghdad, he gradually dispersed his bodyguards one by one to avoid drawing Coalition forces’ attention. Saddam had evaded capture for nine months, until U.S. viceroy Paul Bremer made his famous exultation in December 2003: “Ladies and gentleman, we got him!”

Piro asked if Saddam ever used body doubles, as was widely believed. “No, of course not,” he scoffed. “This is movie magic, not reality.”

But as the fourth interrogation began on Feb. 13, Saddam wanted answers from Piro.

“Let me ask a direct question. I want to ask where … has the information been going? For our relationship to remain clear, I want to know,” he demanded. Piro replied that he was a “representative of the U.S. Government” and told Saddam many U.S. officials saw his reports, and that readership “may include the President of the United States.” Saddam seemed pleased, commenting that he did “not mind” if the interviews were published.

Much more of Part 2 at the link. See Part 1 here.

Via Meek’s Counterterrorism Blog post.

“It appears that waterboarding – a torture technique popularized by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney – has been picked up overseas.” -  Andrew Sullivan

Now, look, I’m opposed to torturing suspected terrorists.  But the United States Government waterboarded a grand total of three of them during the Bush-Cheney tenure.  So let’s not pretend it was somehow a favorite pastime of the administration.

Moreover, as Andrew himself has reminded us on numerous occasions, waterboarding has a long, long history.  Not only were much more severe forms used during the Spanish Inquisition and  by the Khmer Rouge and the Gestapo, but there’s been a long use by police, military, and intelligence agencies.  Including by the United States.

Further, it’s not as if Bush and Cheney hatched up a plan on how to best interrogate prisoners and Cheney turned to his boss and said, “Let me tell you about this thing called waterboarding. . . .”  Rather, professional interrogators decided what techniques would work best and were on this side of 18 U.S.C. §§ 2340-2340A as described to them in the so-called Bybee Memo, written by then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee to his boss, then-AG Alberto Gonzales in response to a request from the CIA for guidance as to where the lines were.

Beyond that, do we really think Scotland Yard never engaged in dubious interogation techniques before now?  Or that they relied on the Bush administration for clues?

Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Carl Levin claims that former Vice-President Dick Cheney is lying when he claims that classified CIA memos show that Bush Administration ordered torture/enhanced interrogation techniques produced actionable intelligence that saved American lives.

Levin, speaking at the Foreign Policy Association’s annual dinner in Washington on Wednesday, said an investigation by his committee into detainee abuse charges over the use of the techniques — now deemed torture by the Obama administration — “gives the lie to Mr. Cheney’s claims.”

The Michigan Democrat told the crowd that the two CIA documents that Cheney wants released “say nothing about numbers of lives saved, nor do the documents connect acquisition of valuable intelligence to the use of abusive techniques.”

“I hope that the documents are declassified, so that people can judge for themselves what is fact, and what is fiction,” he added.

According to the article, the CIA is refusing to declassify the documents because they are subject to two pending lawsuits.

On May 14, the CIA rejected the former vice president’s request.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano, in a written statement, said the two documents Cheney requested are the subject of two pending lawsuits seeking the release of documents related to the interrogation program, and cannot be declassified.

I’m not familiar with this area of law, so I don’t know whether President Obama can legally declassify the memos in question or not. Anybody have a firmer idea? As it stands, if he can declassify them, I would hope that he would.

One thing I am curious about is whether Cheney’s request includes the 2004 CIA Inspector General report. A quick Google search didn’t reveal one way or another. The 2004 report was released at one point, but it was heavily redacted. However, Justice Department summaries have been released which seem to indicate that the report concluded

that there was no conclusive proof that waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques helped the Bush administration thwart any “specific imminent attacks,” according to recently declassified Justice Department memos.

Frankly, I say bring on the declassified memos and let’s judge the facts ourselves. Personally, I would state that whether or not any valuable intelligence was obtained doesn’t change the fact that such actions are both illegal and immoral (as I am not a utilitarian or a moral relativist), but that doesn’t mean that these facts aren’t relevant to the debate.

Modified NYT Photo by Stephen Crowley.

The video embedded below features arguments presented by Dick Cheney in favor of torture (or, if you prefer, “enhanced interrogation techniques”), which are ably demolished by Matthew Alexander, a former member of the United States Air Force who served as an Interrogator in Iraq. He was part of a task force charged with determining the location of Abu Zarqawi.

There’s much more from Alexander here.

The former vice president is confusing harshness with effectiveness. An effective interrogation is one that yields useful, accurate intelligence, not one that is harsh. It speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of interrogations, the goal of which is not to coerce information from a prisoner, but to convince a prisoner to cooperate.

Finally, the point that is most absent is that our greatest success in this conflict was achieved without torture or abuse. My interrogation team found Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the former leader of Al Qaida in Iraq and murderer of tens of thousands. We did this using relationship-building approaches and non-coercive law enforcement techniques. These worked to great effect on the most hardened members of Al Qaida — spiritual leaders who had been behind the waves of suicide bombers and, hence, the sectarian violence that swept across Iraq. We convinced them to cooperate by applying our intellect. In essence, we worked smarter, not harsher.

Read the whole thing.

(video link via Andrew Sullivan)

Apparently, a lot of people who use Yahoo! are searching for “Rumsfeld bible quotes” today.

This rather odd happenstance is apparently a function of a story that circulated earlier in the week about Rumsfeld putting bible verses on the cover sheets of “Worldwide Intelligence Updates” intended for President Bush.  Apparently, the story is largely untrue.

One thing that’s also worth noting in the debate over the Bush Administration’s torture program is that while the Office of Legal Counsel did sign off on the techniques used (with memos so bad that the lawyers in question are soon to be under investigation for a breach of their professional duties), the fact remains that the Administration also sought the expertise of military lawyers. And then promptly ignored their findings. This is ably summarized in the Senate Armed Services Committee report released last year. Here are some important snippets:

[Department of Defense’s Criminal Investigative Task Force]’s Chief Legal Advisor wrote that certain techniques in GTMO’s October 11, 2002 request “may subject service members to punitive articles of the [Uniform Code of Military Justice],” called “the utility and legality of applying certain techniques” in the request “questionable,” and stated that he could not “advocate any action, interrogation or otherwise, that is predicated upon the principle that all is well if the ends justify the means and others are not aware of how we conduct our business.”

[...]

The Chief of the Army’s International and Operational Law Division wrote that techniques like stress positions, deprivation of light and auditory stimuli, and use of phobias to induce stress “crosses the line of ‘humane’ treatment,” would “likely be considered maltreatment” under the UCMJ, and “may violate the torture statute.” The Army labeled GTMO’s request “legally insufficient” and called for additional review.

[...]

The Navy recommended a “more detailed interagency legal and policy review” of the request. And the Marine Corps expressed strong reservations, stating that several techniques in the request “arguably violate federal law, and would expose our service members to possible prosecution.” The Marine Corps also said the request was not “legally sufficient,” and like the other services, called for “a more thorough legal and policy review.”

The bottom line? These legal opinions were rejected by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

On January 15, 2003, the same day he rescinded authority for GTMO to use aggressive techniques, Secretary Rumsfeld directed the establishment of a “Working Group” to review interrogation techniques. For the next few months senior military and civilian lawyers tried, without success, to have their concerns about the legality of aggressive techniques reflected in the Working Group’s report. Their arguments were rejected in favor of a legal opinion from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel’s (OLC) John Yoo.

Shortly after this, torture techniques were re-authorized by Rumsfeld. And they continued at both Gitmo and in Abu Ghraib.

It’s also worth noting in the Armed Services report that the OLC memos by Yoo, Bybee et al. were actually rejected by the Office of Legal Counsel in 2003. Additionally, the Department of Defense was notified at that time that it should not rely on those opinions.

As the events at Abu Ghraib were unfolding, Jack Goldsmith, the new Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel was presented with a “short stack” of OLC opinions that were described to him as problematic. Included in that short stack were the Bybee memos of August 1, 2002 and Mr. Yoo’s memo of March 2003. After reviewing the memos, Mr. Goldsmith decided to rescind both the so-called first Bybee memo and Mr. Yoo’s memo. In late December 2003, Mr. Goldsmith notified Mr. Haynes that DoD could no longer rely on Mr. Yoo’s memo in determining the lawfulness of interrogation techniques.

It is worth noting that despite the fact that the DoD was notified that Yoo, Bybee, and Bradbury’s memos were not to be relied upon anymore, torture continued under Rumsfeld’s watch.

Read the whole report. And my hat’s off to the many, many brave members of the United States Armed Forces who did not sit idly by while this was going on. They did their duty in notifying the chain of command that interrogators were being ordered to violate the law. Their notifications were clearly ignored.

In his speech on national security before the American Enterprise Institute today, Former Vice-President Dick Cheney made the rather surprising argument that debate over the treatment of detainees makes American look weak.

And when they see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, or whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don’t stand back in awe of our legal system and wonder whether they had misjudged us all along. Instead the terrorists see just what they were hoping for – our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity.

I didn’t realize that devotion to American ideals such as free speech and democratic governance is something that makes America weak. Quite the contrary, it’s what makes America strong. Now, if Cheney wants to argue that it makes us “look weak”, what’s his solution–that we avoid debate?

I’m also more than a little surprised at his okay of the “just following orders” defense of the legal memos that supposedly “justified” torture.

And at the CIA, operatives are left to wonder if they can depend on the White House or Congress to back them up when the going gets tough. Why should any agency employee take on a difficult assignment when, even though they act lawfully and in good faith, years down the road the press and Congress will treat everything they do with suspicion, outright hostility, and second-guessing? Some members of Congress are notorious for demanding they be briefed into the most sensitive intelligence programs. They support them in private, and then head for the hills at the first sign of controversy.

I’ll give Cheney points on rightly pointing out the cravenness of Congressional “oversight,” but if he implies that American officials should get a pass on breaking the law just because a lawyer said it was okay and without further contemplation, that’s absurd. Now, we all know that a criminal investigation of American officials for violation of statues against torture will never happen, as President Obama holds politics as a higher value than accountability in this matter. But if criminal investigations did happen, there’s no question that the legal memos guiding CIA agents and others would be considered a mitigating factor in the determination of guilt, but they certainly wouldn’t be dispositive. Does Cheney really mean to suggest that it’s okay to break the law if you can get a lawyer to say that it’s okay to? Really?

Read Cheney’s whole speech–it’s a breathtakingly brazen defense of undermining democracy and the rule of law in the name of “fighting terrorism.” I will give him this, though: he does correctly call President Obama out for speaking out of both sides of his mouth on these issues. I am deeply disappointed that Obama is caving to political pressure on this matter, but I’m really not surprised. If there’s one thing that American history teaches us, it’s that if your rich and/or powerful enough, it’s okay to break the law–you’ll almost never be held accountable unless there’s sex involved.

Link via Chris Bodenner.  AP Photo by Luis M. Alvarez.

“Well, conservative, conshmervative – even Karl Rove would pay good money to see Pelosi handcuffed to Dick Cheney.” – Kate McMillan responding to news that the then-Minority Whip and top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee was briefed on the use of “enhanced interogation techniques” in the fall of 2002 and “gave it her stamp of approval.”

And, no, the fact that this is just corroboration of old news doesn’t make it any less amusing.

Stephen Walt repeats the popular lament (and specifically Gareth Porter’s) that the United States Government employs a ridiculously small number of Pashto speakers and that this negatively impacts us in Afghanstan.   Pat Porter agrees but issues some important caveats:

1) Languages are extremely hard to develop at a sufficient level. Except for the most outrageously talented, most folk can study intensively for years and develop the language skills equivalent to a reasonably intelligent ten year old. Brokering deals amongst local leaders and conducting skilled diplomacy presumably demands skills far beyond this;

2) Prime Minister Anthony Eden was one of those outrageously talented people,  who spoke Farsi and Arabic, had a First Class Honours degree from Oxford in Oriental Languages (which was probably even harder than Cinema Appreciation). None of this was enough to prevent his blunder in the Suez invasion of 1956. In other words, there is no substitute for good strategic judgement;

3) Other than foreign mercenaries, most British troops were pretty fluent in the local language against certain mutinous subjects between 1775 and 1783;

4) How do you say ‘we are destroying your opium crop’ in Pashto? If policies are misguided, all the vocabulary and nuanced knowledge in the world may not win over the population.

Quite.

Beyond that, by the time we get people sufficiently trained in Pashto to be useful, they’ll be able to command far more money outside government — or as government contractors.  Not to mention that, unless we plan to remain for decades, it’s a skill set that with an expiration date in terms of the utility of having legions of them.