THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ VI

ican

I'm afraid I cannot go along with your argument above, for precisely the reasons Dworkin forwards. Your 'hellish tradeoff' turns you (you meaning America or Australia or Belgium or any country who evicerates legal and moral codes to such an extent and for unknowable result) into a functional police state. You possibly understand that I think this argument, if followed, is a much greater threat to your liberty than is Usama.

As to the folks who are signatories to the letter, it is unecessary that they propose some solution for the present situation, or what he ought to have done previously. On both these questions, there is much to be found within the US government itself, and certainly elsewhere.

But the point is that even if they have no such plan, they are fully entitled to say what they've said. If you are driving a car which has a safety problem from some design or manufacturing defect and this contributes to or causes a crash that kills a family member, you do not have to have any engineering solution at all to properly insist that whoever was responsible for is removed from his position.

I do understand this is what you think, and I do respect your opinion on this regardless of our disagreement on this. I see it as a very tough call.

"A temporary coup"

Author Thomas Powers says the White House's corruption of intelligence has caused the greatest foreign policy catastrophe in modern U.S. history -- and sparked a civil war with the nation's intel agencies.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Mark Follman

June 14, 2004 | The U.S. is now waging three wars, says intelligence expert Thomas Powers. One is in Iraq. The second is in Afghanistan. And the third is in Washington -- an all-out war between the White House and the nation's own intelligence agencies.

Powers, the author of "Intelligence Wars: American Secret History From Hitler to Al Qaeda," charges that the Bush administration is responsible for what is perhaps the greatest disaster in the history of U.S. intelligence. From failing to anticipate 9/11 to pressuring the CIA to produce bogus justifications for war, from abusing Iraqi prisoners to misrepresenting the nature of Iraqi insurgents, the Bush White House, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies they corrupted, coerced or ignored have made extraordinarily grave errors which could threaten our national security for years. By manipulating intelligence and punishing dissent while pursuing an extreme foreign-policy agenda, Bush leaders have set spy against U.S. spy and deeply damaged America's intelligence capabilities.

"It's a catastrophe beyond belief. Going into Afghanistan was inevitable, and in my opinion the right thing to do. But everything since then has been a horrible mistake," Powers says. "The CIA is politicized to an extreme. It's under the control of the White House. Tenet is leaving in the middle of an unresolved political crisis -- what really amounts to a constitutional crisis."

The bitterest dispute, though not the only one, is between the CIA and the Pentagon, whose own secret intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, aggressively promoted the war on Iraq. While departing CIA Director George Tenet played along with the Bush administration -- a fact which Powers says reveals the urgent need for a truly independent intelligence chief -- much of the agency is enraged at the Pentagon, which put intense pressure on it to produce reports tailored to the policy goals of the Bush White House. The simmering tensions between the Pentagon, with its troika of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith, and rank and file CIA personnel boiled over in July 2003, when the White House trashed the career of veteran CIA operative Valerie Plame by leaking her identity. The move was a crude retaliation against Plame's husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had exposed the Bush administration's specious claim that Saddam had sought "yellowcake" from Africa to build a nuclear bomb.

The struggle between the CIA and the Defense Department reached a bizarre climax a few weeks ago when Ahmed Chalabi's office was very publicly ransacked by officers working under the command of the CIA; the Iraqi exile leader was later accused of leaking vital information to Iran, among other allegations. The abrupt fall from grace of the man hand-picked by neoconservative policymakers to lead post-Saddam Iraq, says Powers, lays bare the brutal turf war between the two sides.

"It reveals an extraordinary level of bitter combat between the CIA and the Pentagon. It's astonishing that the CIA actually oversaw a team of people who broke into Chalabi's headquarters -- which was paid for by the Pentagon -- and ransacked the place. The CIA single-handedly destroyed him."

The collapse of U.S. intelligence and the arrogance and extremism at the top of the Bush administration are also at the root of the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib prison, Powers says. With U.S. troops facing a mounting insurgency from an enemy they couldn't find, Powers believes Bush officials signed off on a systematic policy of hardcore interrogation in a frantic attempt to deal with the problem. He says that while it's unlikely Defense Secretary Rumsfeld gave specific orders as to what type of abuse should be meted out to the Iraqi prisoners, there is strong reason to believe Rumsfeld "issued blanket permission for them to turn up the heat."

In an explosive conjecture, Powers also speculates that the Israelis, "who've had the most experience," cooperated with the U.S. on the techniques used to humiliate and break Arabs, including sexual degradation.

As for the dubiously timed Tenet resignation -- with its fairy-tale like cover story of "I'll be spending more time with my family" -- Powers thinks one possibility is that the CIA director may have been forced out after Pentagon officials, enraged by the Chalabi debacle, pressured Bush to get rid of him.

But what troubles Powers the most, he says, is that the Bush administration completely subverted American democracy, browbeating Congress and the national security agencies to launch a war. "They correctly read how the various institutions of our government could be used to stage a kind of temporary coup on a single issue: Whether or not to go to war with Iraq."

The amount of lives at stake don't matter? But the comfort of a terrorist does matter? What kind of rationale is that?

I agree it is okay not to bend your morals for potential problems in the future. I specifically asked what is moral when it comes to interrogation of a terrorist? I have my point of view and stated it clearly.

What is your point of view about that?

Mostly because they already rely on torture...

I don't understand how we can spend more money on intelligence than the rest of the world combined, and still have to resort to torture to find out intel.

But I don't see it as a tough call, though I do acknowledge that problem is complex.

... The fundamental and ever-present tool of denying others their humanity and denying the rights that arise from their humanness is demonizing them with descriptors such as 'evil' therebye suggesting not only that they deserve inhumane treatment but also that we play into the demon's hands by granting them humanity.

I don't think I would be comfortable demonizing prisoners.

Its clear the torture policy was approved at the highest levels of the US govt. Why?