The Worst President in History?

WASHINGTON - The White House and three powerful GOP senators reached an impasse Wednesday over a Bush administration plan to allow tough CIA interrogations, underscoring election-season divisions among Republicans on the high profile issue of security.

In a direct challenge to President Bush, Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said his panel would meet Thursday to finalize an alternative to the White House plan to prosecute terror suspects and redefine acts that constitute war crimes. Warner, R-Va., said the administration proposal would lower the standard for the treatment of prisoners, potentially putting U.S. troops at risk should other countries retaliate.

The White House said Warner's proposal would undermine the nation's ability to interrogate prisoners and arranged an extraordinary conference call with reporters in which the nation's top intelligence official criticized Warner's plan.

"If this draft legislation were passed in its present form, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency has told me that he did not believe that the (interrogation) program could go forward," National Intelligence Director John Negroponte said.

Sen. John Warner has shown again his intelligence and his sense that this administration is attempting to disolve whatever moral standards this nation has left.

Who is the world doesn't say "yeah, sure, whatever" whever this President proclaims that America doesn't condone torture.

Joe(geez, how far we have fallen)Nation

Joe Nation wrote:

Sen. John Warner has shown again his intelligence and his sense that this administration is attempting to disolve whatever moral standards this nation has left.

Who is the world doesn't say "yeah, sure, whatever" whever this President proclaims that America doesn't condone torture.

Joe(geez, how far we have fallen)Nation

And you have some reason to think that we do condone torture? Anything you're able to share?

Lieutenant General Schmidt, who had overseen the report on FBI allegations of abuse at Guantanamo, later testified that Rumsfeld had been "personally involved," and was being given "weekly updates" on the interrogation of one detainee, who was kept near-freezing and led around naked on a leash. Interrogation logs later showed that the detainee's heart rate became so slow during his "cold" treatment that he nearly died. Another prisoner in CIA custody in Afghanistan died of hypothermia.

McCain expressed bewilderment at an administration stand that he said would tamper with interpretations of the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war. That stand is firmly opposed by top military lawyers. "The overwhelming majority of retired military people are weighing in on this issue and saying, 'Don't amend Common Article 3 [of the Geneva Conventions] because then you are allowing other nations' " to conclude that they, too, can change the conventions, McCain said.

McCain and his allies were unable to persuade White House negotiators to agree that an alleged enemy combatant could not be convicted on the basis of classified information that is not shared in some form with the defendant. "We're still gridlocked on that," McCain said. "They want to turn 200 years of criminal procedure on its head."

With prodding from Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 10 to 8 along party lines to approve a bill negotiated with the White House to allow -- but not require -- Bush to submit the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program to a secret court for constitutional review.

That bill, which could come before the Senate next week, is considered by many to be a ratification of the administration's current surveillance program, which monitors the overseas phone calls and e-mails of some Americans when one party is suspected of links to terrorism. The program has been attacked by Democrats and civil liberties advocates as an excessive encroachment on Americans' privacy.

WASHINGTON - A rebellious Senate committee defied President Bush on Thursday and approved terror-detainee legislation he has vowed to block, deepening Republican conflict over terrorism and national security in the middle of election season.

Republican Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record) of Virginia, normally a Bush supporter, pushed the measure through his Armed Services Committee by a 15-9 vote, with Warner and three other GOP lawmakers joining Democrats. The vote set the stage for a showdown on the Senate floor as early as next week.

Earlier in the day, Bush had journeyed to the Capitol to try nailing down support for his own version of the legislation.

"I will resist any bill that does not enable this program to go forward with legal clarity," Bush said at the White House.

The president's measure would go further than the Senate package in allowing classified evidence to be withheld from defendants in terror trials, using coerced testimony and protecting U.S. interrogators against prosecution for using methods that violate the Geneva Conventions.

The internal GOP struggle intensified along other fronts, too, as Colin Powell, Bush's first secretary of state, declared his opposition to the president's plan.

"The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism," Powell, a retired general who is also a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in a letter.

The Myth of the Ticking Time BombAs in so many of these ticking-bomb tales, Bush's supposed successes crumble on closer examination. Just four days later, The New York Times reported that the FBI claimed it got the key information from Abu Zubaydah with its noncoercive methods and that other agencies already had much of his supposedly "vital" intelligence.Advocates of the ticking bomb often cite the brutal torture of Abdul Hakim Murad in Manila in 1995, which they say stopped a plot to blow up a dozen trans-Pacific aircraft and kill 4,000 innocent passengers. Except, of course, for the simple fact that Murad's torture did nothing of the sort. As The Washington Post has reported, Manila police got all their important information from Murad in the first few minutes when they seized his laptop with the entire bomb plot. All the supposed details gained from the sixty-seven days of incessant beatings, spiced by techniques like cigarettes to the genitals, were, as one Filipino officer testified in a New York court, fabrications fed to Murad by Philippine police. After fifty years of fighting enemies, communist and terrorist, with torture, we now have sufficient evidence to conclude that torture of the few yields little useful information. As the ancient Roman jurist Ulpian noted 1,800 years ago, when tortured the strong will resist and the weak will say anything to end the pain.

History is replete with examples of the strong who resisted even the most savage tortures. After the July 20, 1944, bomb plot against Hitler, the Gestapo subjected Fabian von Schlabrendorff to four weeks of torture by metal spikes and beatings so severe he suffered a heart attack. But with a stoicism typical of these conspirators, he broke his silence only to give the Gestapo a few scraps of vague information when he feared involuntarily blurting out serious intelligence.

Then there are the weak. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a senior Al Qaeda leader, under torture told his captors that Iraq trained Al Qaeda in chemical and biological weapons. This raises the possibility that he, like Murad, had been tortured into giving fabricated intelligence. Colin Powell relied on this false information in his now-disavowed speech to the United Nations before the Iraq War.

As Yale legal historian John Langbein puts it, "History's most important lesson is that it has not been possible to make coercion compatible with truth."

Proponents of torture present a false choice between tortured intelligence and no intelligence at all. There is, in fact, a well-established American alternative to torture that we might call empathetic interrogation. U.S. Marines first used this technique during World War II to extract accurate intelligence from fanatical Japanese captives on Saipan and Tinian within forty-eight hours of landing, and the FBI has practiced it with great success in the decades since. After the East Africa bombings of U.S. embassies, the bureau employed this method to gain some of our best intelligence on Al Qaeda and win U.S. court convictions of all of the accused.

One of the bureau agents who worked on that case, Dan Coleman, has since been appalled by the CIA's coercive methods after 9/11. "Have any of these guys ever tried to talk to anyone who's been deprived of his clothes?" Coleman asked. "He's going to be ashamed and humiliated and cold. He'll tell you anything you want to hear to get his clothes back. There's no value in it." By contrast, FBI reliance on due process and empathy proved effective in terror cases by building rapport with detainees.

Bush's example of Zubaydah actually supports Coleman's point. FBI agents say they were getting more out of him before the CIA came in with gloves off.

"Brutalization doesn't work," Coleman concluded from his years in FBI counterterrorism. "We know that. Besides, you lose your soul."

Number three: Once we agree to torture the one terrorist with his hypothetical ticking bomb, then we admit a possibility, even an imperative, for torturing hundreds who might have ticking bombs or thousands who just might have some knowledge about those bombs. "You can't know whether a person knows where the bomb is," explains Georgetown University Law Professor David Cole, "or even if they're telling the truth. Because of this, you end up going down a slippery slope and sanctioning torture in general."

Most of those rounded up by military sweeps in Iraq and Afghanistan for imprisonment at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo had nothing to do with terrorism. A recent analysis of the Pentagon listing of Guantánamo's 517 detainees reveals that 86 percent were arrested not by U.S. forces but by Northern Alliance and Pakistani warlords eager to collect a $5,000 bounty for every "terrorist" captured.

Ironically, though, torture of the many can produce results, albeit at a surprisingly high political price.

The CIA tortured tens of thousands in Vietnam and the French tortured hundreds of thousands in Algeria. During the Battle of Algiers in 1957, French soldiers arrested 30 percent to 40 percent of all males in the city's Casbah and subjected most of these to what one French officer called "beatings, electric shocks, and, in particular, water torture, which was always the most dangerous technique for the prisoner." Though many resisted to the point of death, mass torture gained sufficient intelligence to break the rebel underground. The CIA's Phoenix program no doubt damaged the Viet Cong's communist infrastructure by torture-interrogation of countless South Vietnamese civilians.

So the choices are clear. Major success from limited, surgical torture is a fable, a fiction. But mass torture of thousands of suspects, some guilty, most innocent, can produce some useful intelligence.

Number four: Useful intelligence perhaps, but at what cost? The price of torture is unacceptably high because it disgraces and then undermines the country that countenances it. For the French in Algeria, for the Americans in Vietnam, and now for the Americans in Iraq, the costs have been astronomical and have outweighed any gains gathered by torture.

Official sources are nearly unanimous that the yield from the massive Phoenix program, with more than forty prisons across South Vietnam systematically torturing thousands of suspected communists, was surprisingly low. One Pentagon contract study found that, in 1970-71, only 3 percent of the Viet Cong "killed, captured, or rallied were full or probationary Party members above the district level." Not surprisingly, such a brutal pacification effort failed either to crush the Viet Cong or win the support of Vietnamese villagers, contributing to the ultimate U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War.

Similarly, the French army won the Battle of Algiers but soon lost the war for Algeria, in part because their systematic torture delegitimated the larger war effort in the eyes of most Algerians and many French. "You might say that the Battle of Algiers was won through the use of torture," observed British journalist Sir Alistair Horne, "but that the war, the Algerian war, was lost."

Even the comparatively limited torture at Abu Ghraib has done incalculable damage to America's international prestige.

In short, the intelligence gains are soon overwhelmed by political costs as friends and enemies recoil in revulsion at such calculated savagery.

Indeed, the U.S. Army's current field manual, FM: Intelligence Interrogation 34-52, contains an implicit warning about these high political costs: "Revelation of use of torture by U.S. personnel," it warns, "will bring discredit upon the U.S. and its armed forces while undermining domestic and international support for the war effort."

Non-coercive tactics, baloney--Everyone knows the Bushies sent the AlQaeda to be interrogated by the inhuman beasts in Eastern Europe. When the true stories come out, we will hear of electric probes being attached to genitals, the removal of fingernails and the use of rubber truncheons. The Bushies are beasts!!!

Non-coercive tactics, baloney--Everyone knows the Bushies sent the AlQaeda to be interrogated by the inhuman beasts in Eastern Europe. When the true stories come out, we will hear of electric probes being attached to genitals, the removal of fingernails and the use of rubber truncheons. The Bushies are beasts!!!

Are you so naive as to believe that the brave Al-Qaeda soldiers dedicated to Islam would give information if they were not brutally tortured. You don't know that they were not tortured. You weren't there. But we do know that they gave information. They would not have done that unless they were brutally tortured.