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Abu Ghraib - You Decide
There are at least two sides to every argument. Here are the two sides to Abu Ghraib. Yes, Americans tortured (are still torturing) at Abu Ghraib. Some find it acceptable, even laudible. Others, reprehensible, sub-human. You decide.
Source: The TIP, 2004-07-20
Candidate: Big Government
Seymour Hersh : The US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison.
"The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."
SOURCE FILE
Transcript of Seymour Hersh's ACLU Keynote Speech Here
07/14/04 "EdCone.com" -- He called the prison scene "a series of massive crimes, criminal activity by the president and the vice president, by this administration anyway…war crimes."
The outrages have cost us the support of moderate Arabs, says Hersh. "They see us as a sexually perverse society."
Hersh describes a Pentagon in crisis. The defense department budget is “in incredible chaos,” he says, with large sums of cash missing, including something like $1 billion that was supposed to be in Iraq.
"The disaffecion inside the Pentagon is extremeley accute," Hersh says. He tells the story of an officer telling Rumsfeld how bad things are, and Rummy turning to a ranking general yes-man who reassured him that things are just fine. Says Hersh, "The Secretary of Defense is simply incapable of hearing what he doesn’t want to hear."
The Iraqi insurgency, he says,was operating in 1-to-3 man cells a year ago, now in 10-15 man cells, and despite the harsh questioning, "we still know nothing about them...we have no tactical information.”
He says the foreign element among insurgents is overstated, and that bogeyman Zarqawi is "a composite figure" hyped by our government.
The war, he says, has escalated to "fullscale, increasingly intense military activity."
Hersh described the folks in charge of US policy as neoconservative cultists" who have taken the government over, and show "how fragile our democracy is."
He ripped the supine US press, pledged to bring home all the facts he could, said he was not sure he could deliver all the daming info he suspects about Bush administration responsibility for Abu Ghraib.
And then there's Byron York. Byron York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail: byork@thehill.com
Torture? Whatever it was, it worked.
Reading the Sept. 11 Commission’s staff report on the genesis of the terrorist plots against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, you have to be impressed by the extraordinary level of detail the panel’s investigators have compiled.
There will no doubt be much more in the commission’s final report. But in the brief staff report, there is an enormous amount of information about what went on between Osama bin Laden and top lieutenants Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, usually known as KSM, and Ramzi Binahshibh in the long planning process that led to the Sept. 11 attacks.
There are dozens of flat, declarative sentences like these:
• “Bin Laden quickly provided KSM with four potential suicide operatives ...”
• “KSM taught three of these operatives basic English words and phrases and showed them how to read a phone book, make travel reservations, use the Internet and encode communications ...”
• “Binalshibh confirms that Bin Laden preferred the White House over the Capitol [as a target] ...”
• “In a mid-August phone call to Binalshibh, Atta conveyed the date for the attacks, which Binalshibh dutifully passed up his chain of command.”
• “Bin Laden had been pressuring KSM for months to advance the attack date ...”
Now here’s a question. Where do you think the commission got all that information?
Do you think commissioners invited KSM, Binalshibh and other al Qaeda types into the office for a bit of friendly back-and-forth while note-takers got it all down?
Not exactly.
In fact, the commission didn’t get anywhere near those high-value al Qaeda prisoners.
“Much of the account in this statement reflects assertions reportedly made by various 9-11 conspirators and captured al Qaeda members while under interrogation,” the commission staff says in the introduction to its report. “Our information on statements attributed to such individuals comes from written reporting; we have not had direct access to any of them.”
Many of the interrogations cited by the commission were conducted by the CIA at undisclosed locations around the world.
Where? Who knows. The most important prisoners aren’t at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib; they’re somewhere out there, in the custody of the U.S. government.
Now, it’s possible that they gave their American interrogators information because they just wanted someone to talk to. But it’s also possible they talked because the Americans got rough with them.
And that leads to the question: Should the Bush administration let the current vogue for fastidiousness in the treatment of even the most notorious terrorist prisoners keep investigators from gathering key information in the war on terror?
To some of the administration’s opponents, the answer is a resounding yes. And, apparently, to some in the administration, the answer is a resounding yes.
That’s why the CIA, according to The Washington Post, has stopped using “enhanced interrogation techniques” while the Justice Department re-reviews their legality.
“Everything’s on hold,” a former senior CIA official told the Post. “The whole thing has been stopped until we sort out whether we are sure we’re on legal ground.”
Those “enhanced” interrogation techniques may be precisely the ones that have gotten so much information from KSM, Binalshibh and other key prisoners.
If those techniques hadn’t been used, the Sept. 11 Commission — and the public at large — might know little more about the origin of the attacks today than was known nearly three years ago. And the government might know less about al Qaeda’s plans for the future.
Nevertheless, because of the current mood, the CIA has, in effect, said, “Let’s take one of the most effective measures we have in the war on terror and stop using it.”
KSM, Binalshibh and their al Qaeda colleagues can breathe a bit easier.
Of course, it is not clear whether any of the treatment visited upon top al Qaeda prisoners could be called “torture” under the definition accepted by the United Nations, the United States and most of the world.
At the moment, no one seems to know just what has gone on with KSM and his colleagues. If you ask people close to the Bush administration whether the United States has tortured anyone in the war on terror, you’ll get very careful answers.
Mention Iraq, and they’ll say that we know what happened at Abu Ghraib. It was bad, but it wasn’t torture.
Mention Guantanamo, and they’ll say, we’re pretty sure there’s been nothing there that even approaches the definition of torture.
Mention KSM, Binalshibh and the undisclosed locations, and they’ll say, well, we don’t really know what’s going on.
Whatever it was, it worked, to some significant extent — at least before the Bush administration, bowing to pressure from Democrats and the commentariat, stopped doing it.
So what now? What will American intelligence do if it bags a high-value al Qaeda figure in the future?
One would like to think interrogators would be able to do what is needed to uncover information that could save lives.
But don’t bet on it.
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