Obama on Torture

I'm going to ask again that you quote me.

There is a huge difference between defending the practice and defending (admittedly erroneously, again) the absence of action to stop it.

Dial down the moral outrage for a second.

And I am saying I find that wholly unacceptable, and to be tantamount to apologism for torture. It indicates that you just don't think that the torture is important enough to immediately address and this represents a level of acceptance of torture that I don't find acceptable.

Clearly I love torture as long as Obama does it. You've caught me.

Not only that, but I apparently think that addressing some torture is good, even if it doesn't stop all torture.

I have to agree with those that say he hasn't stopped it -- certainly not to the level of his campaign promises (as quoted in the NY Times article). The door is certainly still open for people to be sent to other countries to be tortured.

FreeDuck wrote:

Clearly I love torture as long as Obama does it. You've caught me.

Could you provide a quote where I said this?

Funny, after all those requests for quotes insinuating that I'm misrepresenting you, when I'm merely passing judgment you don't agree with, this actually is a misrepresentation.

We may not also agree on what torture he stopped, if any. I have to go back to work, but I recall several people (who were involved in the interrogations) saying that certain programs stopped during the Bush administration.

I'm not sure what, other than make speeches, statements and promises, he's actually done about it. In short he might have only stopped what had already been stopped.

I'd argue that doing that may be more dangerous, it took the wind out of the anti-torture sails, and convinced a lot of people who follow politics relatively closely that he's taken care of it. Meanwhile not much at all has changed.

I'd go so far as saying he's being completely two-faced about it. The talk about trying to assure that they aren't tortured in foreign countries ignores that that is the main purpose of sending them there.

I know. It was my lame attempt at sarcastic humor. (For the record I believed you were misinterpreting, not misrepresenting me. I asked for the quote so I could understand where it was coming from since, as you say, I didn't agree with your judgment.)

He ordered the CIA to use the Army Field Manual as a guide for interrogations -- something that I and others argued for. He ordered that all people detained by the US be treated according to the Geneva Conventions. That was in January which is also when he ordered a commission(? working group, something like that) to look into the whole interrogation thing and make recommendations. The report cited in the article is a summary of those recommendations. Everything I've read seems to be going under the assumption that he adopted these recommendations, but I haven't seen that explicitly stated.

So yeah, he may not have stopped any actual torture sessions, but he appears to be putting systems in place to prevent it from happening again.

I'm not quite there but I hold open the possibility that you're right.

I don't think there's misinterpretation either, just different values on torture. I get that you weren't aware that he'd explicitly promised to end rendition, I also get that you didn't know he'd then decided to sanction it, and I even get that you don't condone torture. But all that aside I just don't think there's room for any political compromise on torture. I have no understanding for delay in stopping it, and I was very surprised to see you advocate patience and forgiveness for it.

Simply put, I have a zero tolerance for torture, and had expected you to as well. I do think that compromise about it is a moral outrage, and am not sure if you agree or not but can't see how else you can forgive delay on such matters.

Failure to act immediately against torture is a significant moral failure in my opinion. And in that, at least, it seemed that you did not agree. If I misinterpreted that, then there was misunderstanding, if not then my position stands. I find any acceptance of failure to act against torture to be morally indefensible.

I have very mixed feelings about this. See, this is the old status quo, where torture went on when the CIA felt like it but nobody cared and everyone pretended that we were above torture.

So while I like his words on torture, and how he emphatically refutes it, I don't see how he can possibly reconcile that with sanctioning outsourced torture. I welcome that he's rolled back the public debate about whether it's acceptable, by saying it isn't, but if he's unwilling to punish those who tortured, and if he's willing to outsource it I have to wonder if he's advanced this cause or just made political hay out of it while continuing business as usual. Telling the CIA that they can't do it directly but that they can outsource it is really not much of a change from Bush.

The Bush administration was unique in that it actually publicly argued for torture, and Obama's a breath of fresh air when it comes to the rhetoric about it but I am not happy with just giving lip service to this issue. I want it to stop.

I'm not completely there, in that I don't completely believe he accepts torture morally, but I think he's too afraid of loss of political capital through a terrorist attack that comes after him being seen as soft on terror. My main qualms about Obama are his moves to not be seen as a dove in case that happens.

The rendition issue is completely duplicitous, there's no reason at all for Egypt and Syria to be interrogating anyone we capture except for the fact that they are willing to torture and don't worry about answering to their people about it. Portraying it as a matter of oversight is also duplicitous, there are Americans watching these torture sessions, feeding the questions and supervising the whole affair. Torture in rendition is no accident, it's the whole point of the rendition. Otherwise they could let the interrogation happen in Germany, or whatever friendly country they are captured in.

Then why are they being sent to other nations?

extradition, transfers pursuant to immigration proceedings, transfers pursuant to the Geneva Conventions, transfers from Guantanamo Bay, military transfers within or from Afghanistan, military transfers within or from Iraq, and transfers pursuant to intelligence authorities.

It's also worth noting that the Bush administration (specifically Condoleezza Rice) denied that it was used for torture as well, and said that we don't send the kidnapped individuals to countries to be tortured.

Not much different from the Obama administration there either.

A reader writes:

As a trial attorney with the Department of Justice, I am familiar with the al-Rabiah case (however, to be clear, I am not a trial attorney who worked on the case). My opinions stated GITMOmarkwilsongetty herein, of course, are not the opinions of the Department. I write for myself and myself alone.

I had a long conversation regarding the al-Rabiah case with colleagues when the decision came down. Our expertise and experiences are varied, but we all work on matters ranging from criminal matters to civil habeas cases. We are litigators, and we know what makes a case, and when a case is weak.

The conclusion drawn by each of my colleagues – some of whom are liberal Democrats, some of whom are conservative, law-and-order Republicans – is, to a person, that the detention and interrogation programs the United States implemented in the months and years following 9/11 is not only a complete abrogation and violation of international law and, in many cases, federal law – it is also fundamentally immoral. We also agree that the al-Rabiah case is by far the most egregious yet to come to light. To repeat: yet to come to light. I can only guess that there are other, far worse cases.

That said, I am surprised you did not highlight what me and my colleagues agreed was the single most horrifying passage from the Court’s decision. It was the Court’s quotation of something an interrogator said to al-Rabiah during his interrogation. The interrogator told al-Rabiah:

“There is nothing against you. But there is no innocent person here. So, you should confess to something so you can be charged and sentenced and serve your sentence and then go back to your family and country, because you will not leave this place innocent.”

Court Memorandum and Order, p. 41 (emphasis mine).

This was an agent of the United States saying this.

This was not a statement pulled from the transcripts of the Nuremburg trials, nor archival evidence taken from reports smuggled out of one of Stalin’s gulags. This was a statement made by an agent of this government less than 7 years ago to a detainee. The enormity of that is nearly incomprehensible.

But even worse – far worse – is the fact that the government would nevertheless still seek to convict based on the resulting confession.

To those of us who read that passage and who vowed and make it our vocation to serve and protect the Constitution of the United States, that fact is a gut-punch. For me and my colleagues, it literally took our breath away. It makes one wonder how far down into the abyss we have allowed ourselves to drop. And whether there is the political will to find our way out.

I do agree but that conversation was a rather fact free toss of hypotheticals in which I'm not very comfortable. It wasn't clear to me what, in fact, Obama had done or not and what it was he was expected to do about rendition that he had not.

Well, I thought he had acted immediately against it and was making the assumption that if he had not ended rendition completely it was because it was something that is not easy to end. Perhaps that was an unreasonable assumption, but I hadn't thought it made me a torture apologist.

Making the standards the same for the CIA and the military seems to me to be a big deal. Is the question whether or not the CIA can then just disregard the Army Field Manual because there's no oversight?

One of the reasons why I value Obama's words is that I thought that the public debate about whether torture was acceptable was extremely dangerous. Having the leader of the country imply that it's acceptable or even debatable to me leads the way to a very widespread practice of torture above and beyond any systematic practices put in place by those attempting to control it. It opens the door to the sadists inside all of us. Words do matter and I certainly hope the current practice is in line with Obama's words.

I agree I just don't know if this is actually still what's going on. Not saying it doesn't or can't, just that I don't know.

I see a distinction, though. Saying that we don't send detainees to other countries to be tortured to me is just saying, hey, that's not why we sent them there and we can't help it if it happens. But saying that we don't send detainees to countries who we know torture is more restrictive. That's an easy thing to catch them doing. You sent someone to Syria or Egypt? You violated your pledge.

Well then color me confused, I don't get how you can agree on having zero tolerance for torture, and defending delay in stopping it. Something is lost in translation along the way. The only thing I can think of is that you started the position without some of the very significant facts that caused my reaction and then were largely just defending against the reaction.

But let's see if we can clear that up: all the fact aside, can you really defend failure to stop torture for political reasons?

I wouldn't blame him if he took a moral stand on it, but had trouble getting the rank and file to come along with it. Undoing the rendition really will take time, there's tough questions like what you do with dangerous individuals that you've been illegally torturing. Those don't have easy answers.

But all that shouldn't excuse failure to take an immediate moral stand on the issue. That shouldn't take time, that doesn't need a political delay and that is what I find morally unacceptable in the situation.

What they were doing was already illegal, so yes that is a big concern for me. I can't tell if it's just lipservice or not, and without any real action to stop it (e.g. stop approving renditions, punish the folks who torture) it isn't very comforting to me.

FreeDuck wrote:

I see a distinction, though. Saying that we don't send detainees to other countries to be tortured to me is just saying, hey, that's not why we sent them there and we can't help it if it happens. But saying that we don't send detainees to countries who we know torture is more restrictive. That's an easy thing to catch them doing. You sent someone to Syria or Egypt? You violated your pledge.

Ok, I see that. But I think the plausible deniability thing is still almost as easy. They just don't "know" that Syria or Egypt currently tortures. If they get caught torturing, then now they know but they didn't back then of course.

But other than words, how do you go about taking this immediate moral stand? Anything more official sort of needs to have answers to those questions worked out already.