William Quinn, twenty-five, is a Detroit native who served as an interrogator in the Army in Iraq from 2005 to 2006 and is now a student in international politics at Georgetown, and he’s been there –
Human beings possess a terrifying capacity for brutality. As an interrogator in Iraq in 2005, I was appalled as an Al Qaeda detainee told me how he had repeatedly electrocuted and beaten a man with a rubber hose until the man confessed to being an informant for the Americans.
“What did you do to him when he confessed?” I asked.
“We killed him.”
I explained that a man might confess to anything if he was tortured, but my subject would not hear any of it.
“I knew he was guilty,” he said. “I could see it in his eyes.”
As for Quinn himself –
One morning, while reading the Stars and Stripes, one of the obituaries of those recently killed in Iraq caught my eye. She was Elizabeth Jacobson, a 21-year-old airman with a pretty face. She had been killed near Camp Bucca, where EFP attacks had become increasingly common.
I was furious. In retrospect, I suppose there was a bit of sexism in my response. But I also felt a twinge of guilt. If I had been more successful, perhaps she would not have died.
Later that day, outside the interrogation booth after listening to another series of denials, I told my interpreter that I wished I could throw the guy up against a wall and hit him until he provided some information.
“After all,” I said, “I might break his nose, but he’ll still be alive. Not like all the people he’s killed.”
Human beings have quite a capacity for self-justification. I was justifying my desire to torture a detainee, an act I had repeatedly condemned.
He says he will never know whether he actually would have tortured anyone, but he knows he wanted to, but it gets complicated –
In my meetings with detainees, it was often hard for me to understand how the calm and pleasant person with whom I was speaking could have committed the brutal acts to which he confessed. I couldn’t help but wince every time I heard an American refer to the people we were fighting as “barbaric” or “inhuman.” I had learned never to dehumanize my enemy, but to maintain a concrete understanding of him as a human being. That realization helped me understand that I was every bit as capable as they were of committing their crimes.
So we get this –
Nearly six years after the 9/11 attacks, we’ve succeeded in killing a lot of people. We’ve invaded two countries, captured thousands of terrorists, and set up new, democratic-style governments in place of the dictatorships we ousted. It has been an incredibly therapeutic six years - at least it felt good at the beginning - but it hasn’t been effective at stopping or even slowing terrorism.
The people who decide our counterterrorism strategy are far better informed than I, but I suspect that, when we are successful, it will be because we recognize our enemies as human and develop plans that recognize their humanity. We need to be tough, and we shouldn’t back down from a fight, but we also need to learn that empathy can be as powerful a weapon as missiles.
He must be one of those phony soldiers Rush Limbaugh says betray us.
And in the Boston Globe there is this letter to the editor from someone in the military –
All of the approaches to interrogation supported by President Bush as “nontorture” (head slapping, freezing temperatures, water boarding) qualify as torture under international law (Bush backs interrogation of suspects,” Page A2, Oct. 6).
During my last year in Vietnam, 1968 to ‘69, I was in charge of US Air Force interrogation of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army prisoners. None of what Bush labels as legal was legal under the Geneva Conventions, to which the United States is still a signatory. US Army, Marine, and Army of Republic of Vietnam personnel were constantly amazed at the interrogation results produced by the Air Force, and we were never allowed to touch prisoners, let alone head-slap them. Every human being has needs, and we learned those needs and exploited them. Neither Bush’s bullying approach in the Mideast nor his unlawful interrogation program has worked. Sophisticated psychological methods are not being used by the Bush people, so the alleged “nontorture” bullying will continue.
Matthew Yglesias comments –
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, but systematic torture is not a policy you find associated with polities experiencing crime-fighting success (the FBI’s crackdown on the mafia, say) or war-fighting success (the US military during the second world war). Rather, when the ideological needs of the powers that be run in the direction of creating demand for false confessions (Stalin’s Russia, witch hunts, the Spanish inquisition) out comes the torturing.
And he then points to this – Mitt Romney’s campaign staff sending out emails to brag “that their man will be more cavalier in his disregard for Americans’ civil liberties than will his GOP rivals.” Wiretap everything, no warrants, no exceptions. It sells.
Also see this Mitt Romney ad (video), and consider this response –
The idea that we should be laying [sic] awake at night afraid that a group of at most several thousand people who control almost no territory or valuable military equipment might establish a universal caliphate or “collapse freedom loving nations like us” is ridiculous. Al-Qaeda’s goals are absurd, and obviously so, and one ought to say so confidently. The fact that a relatively small group of people with lunatic goals can nevertheless knock down giant office buildings and murder a huge number of people is, indeed, something to be afraid of but not nearly on the grand geopolitical level Romney is postulating here.
On top of that what does this have to do with Iran?
And if you follow this from the high-powered Greg Djerejian, it seems Robin Wright in the Washington Post is reporting something very odd – “More than two dozen Iranian American and human rights groups have launched an appeal to Congress to reduce or eliminate new financial support of up to $75 million aimed at promoting democracy inside Iran.”
Yglesias – “Predictably, the Bush administration’s efforts to co-opt the Iranian democracy movement and fold it into the American right’s bizarre geopolitical schemes has tended to backfire and displease actual Iranians and human rights advocates.”
Short form – “No, thank you very much. Things don’t work that way when no one trusts you.”
And see Bill Maher –
New Rule: Show me a man wearing an American flag pin in his lapel, and I’ll show you an asshole. I’m sure there are exceptions, but in general people need to remember that lapels aren’t for wearing pins to create the illusion that you’re supporting the troops. They’re for wearing ribbons to create the illusion that you’re helping cure a disease.
Last week we had the first genuine controversy of the presidential campaign: the shocking news that Barack Obama doesn’t wear an American flag lapel pin, so apparently he and America are no longer going steady. “No lapel pin, Senator? It’s like not wearing pants. Why don’t you just stab the Statue of Liberty in the eye while bitch-slapping a 9/11 widow?” Another in a series of bullshit non-stories that have zero effect on the troops, the war or anything in the real world - or, as Fox calls it, “Breaking News.”
A reporter in Iowa asked Obama why he doesn’t wear the pin and Obama explained that, to him, wearing the pin had come to seem like a “substitute for true patriotism.” Bravo, Senator. And then, in yet another shining example of why the media is part of the problem, ABC’s Claire Shipman said, “TMI, too much information - all he had to say was, ‘Don’t judge me by what I wear, move on.’ He played into the idea that he’s not ready for prime time.”
What, schoolgirl? “Too much information?” What is she, twelve? This is typical press hypocrisy - they say they want somebody who doesn’t give pat political answers, but when they get one, they call him a loser. They say they don’t like safe robots like Hillary, but they create conditions where only that species can survive. And they give cover to people like Sean Hannity, who reported on “no pin” gate and then had to call a doctor because his fake outrage hard-on lasted longer than 72 hours.
There’s more at the link, but you get the idea –
When I see the little flag right here, the first thing I think is, you voted for, and still like, George Bush, the man who has gotten more troops unnecessarily killed and maimed by failing to plan for their mission, by pushing their units to the breaking point, by letting his corporate enablers like Halliburton, Bechtel and Blackwater rape and pillage not just the Iraqis, but our own army.
Can you imagine how apoplectic the flag-pin people would be if these same transgressions against the military were being made by Bill Clinton? Oh, who am I kidding? They’d still be obsessing about the blow job.
Okay, then. Mitt wins.
And Condoleezza just doesn’t understand irony –
The Russian government under Vladimir Putin has amassed so much central authority that the power-grab may undermine Moscow’s commitment to democracy, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Saturday.
“In any country, if you don’t have countervailing institutions, the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development,” Rice told reporters after meeting with human-rights activists.
“I think there is too much concentration of power in the Kremlin. I have told the Russians that. Everybody has doubts about the full independence of the judiciary. There are clearly questions about the independence of the electronic media and there are, I think, questions about the strength of the Duma,” said Rice, referring to the Russian parliament.
Right – you go, girl. They should have checks and balances over there, although we here cannot afford that luxury at the moment.
But these people in DC are just keeping us safe. Some things much be done because of the grave threat we face now, unless you notice that the filings in the appeal of former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio’s insider trading case let slip that the Bush administration was pressuring telecommunications companies to cooperate in a massive domestic spying operation well before the September 2001 attacks –
Nacchio’s account, which places the NSA proposal at a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, suggests that the Bush administration was seeking to enlist telecommunications firms in programs without court oversight before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 attacks have been cited by the government as the main impetus for its warrantless surveillance efforts.
And at that geek thing “Wired” see this –
Qwest CEO Not Alone in Alleging NSA Started Domestic Phone Record Program 7 Months Before 9/11
Ryan Singel, October 12, 2007
Startling statements from former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio’s defense documents alleging the National Security Agency began building a massive call records database seven months before 9/11 aren’t the only accusations that the controversial program predated the attacks of 9/11.
… And in May 2006, a lawsuit filed against Verizon for allegedly turning over call records to the NSA alleged that AT&T began building a spying facility for the NSA just days after President Bush was inaugurated. That lawsuit is one of 50 that were consolidated and moved to a San Francisco federal district court, where the suits sit in limbo waiting for the 9th Circuit Appeals court to decide whether the suits can proceed without endangering national security.
Okay – all the domestic spying, the courts and congress and the law be damned, has always been justified by saying it was a necessary response to 9/11. But it is clean now that there’s good reason to believe these programs were conceived and initiated well before the September 11th attacks.
Try this assessment –
If Qwest’s competitors were already abetting this bloodless(?) coup before 9/11, then the “administration’s” domestic spying not only has little if anything to do with response to terrorism, but it also objectively failed to prevent 9/11.
So the next time Congress is threatened with having the “responsibility” of a threatened attack on its conscience if they don’t knuckle under to the Bush junta, as was the case in the August FISA capitulation, perhaps they’ll give some thought to the demonstrated record of failure the program evidenced with regard to the single biggest attack on American soil ever perpetrated.
And when they’re asked to roll over once again, this time granting immunity to the companies that agreed to sell out your inalienable rights to the “government” in exchange for contracting money (taken out of Qwest’s pocket, for refusing to play along), do you think maybe they should take five to figure out just what the hell’s going on before they vote?
Or from Kevin Drum this –
At a guess, I’d say that the program Nacchio objected to was one that involved data mining of telephone network metadata (see here and here for more).
Interestingly, it’s this program, rather than the NSA’s actual domestic eavesdropping, that might have been the provocation for the great Justice Department showdown in John Ashcroft’s hospital room in 2004.
That could be. We may have lost everything we stand for.
