The Heretik

DIRTY GAME

JOSE PADILLA IS THE DIRTY bomber or the anti-christ.  Padilla was never charged as the dirty bomber but he is the dirty bomber or the anti--christ.  The government wants you to forget he is a United States citizen.  Just remember he is the dirty bomber the anti-christ.  The United States government which so loudly but never formally charged Padilla as the dirty bomber now quietly seeks to make us forget how dirty its business has been.   Another United States Court has ruled on how unclean the government's hands have been. MORE HERE

SLIPPING INTO DARKNESS

THE GREAT VICTORY ON TORTURE John McCain “won” on Thursday is now over. Open now the gates of hell and of Guantanamo. Torture is back in business, big time.  What the left hand gives, the right takes away.  Rights and dignity in McCain’s measure against “torture” sit side by side with a Graham amendment in a single Defense spending bill. Justice and decency are bid for in the dropping of coins from our national treaury, then they drop from sight.  Let the victory tour roll on.  The Graham Levin amendment limits appeals of detainees for justice and um not incidentally allows “coerced testimony” to be used in military courts.

Thomas B. Wilner, a lawyer who represents a group of Kuwaiti detainees at Guantánamo Bay, said in an interview that the new language would render the McCain restrictions unenforceable at the Cuban prison. "If McCain is one small step forward, enactment of this language would be two giant steps backwards," Mr. Wilner said.
Two of the main Senate sponsors of the measure, Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, defended the changes made to the language that the Senate passed last month, 84 to 14.
Mr. Graham acknowledged the measure's intention to make it possible to use information obtained by coercive interrogation techniques in military panels that evaluate whether detainees at Guantánamo are being rightfully held as "enemy combatants." He argued that the techniques were not abusive.

LEVIN SHOULD BE PARTICULARLY ASHAMED in this pass the buck pas de deux.  In this dance of the damned, he says he had to choose between two bad alternatives.  Evil wins when good gives up and chooses the lesser rather than fighting for the better.  The New York Times has an editorial out that says  Ban All Torture, which is what you would think happened in with the McCain amendment.  But what really happened is a case of you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours and don’t look at whether we just scratched the eyes out of some poor bastard or worse. 

JUSTICE IS BLIND to what will now go on, but the architects of this minor atrocity will pat each other on the back.  Call in the cameras. We have an announcement. Torture is banned, but it isn’t.  Are the cameras ready? Done.  You scratch my balls, I’ll scratch yours. Such announcements sound like  the scratching of fingernails on a chalkboard.  Chalk one up for tearing out fingernails. We do not torture, but tortured testimony is cool.  Or something

KAFKA MEETS MISTER MACABRE in the form of David Addington, whose name never fails to add up as a minus where  a man’s dignity, the political process, and language meet.

Mr. Addington, who was a primary architect of the presidential order [establishing the military commissions], argued in the debates earlier this year that by explicitly prohibiting evidence obtained by torture, the administration would raise an unnecessary red flag. suggesting at least implicitly that prisoners in American custody were, in fact, being tortured, officials said.

SO THE ADMISSION COMES in the denial.  We cannot deny what we do because that would admit what we do.  So we slip into darkness, back into the black sea, and our reptilian past.

MORE VOICES IN THE SOUND AND THE FURY
EMILY BAZELON The Get Out of Torture Free Card: How will McCain and Graham-Levin-Kyl play out in practice? One reading of the twin provisions is that a government interrogator who tortured a detainee could be prosecuted for violating McCain's ban, even as the testimony he elicited is used to keep that detainee or another one behind bars. Talk about sending mixed signals. In practice, though, it's hard to see how claims of torture will come to light in any of these proceedings.

SOME WILL SAY Bush and more particularly Cheney won on this. No one won. We all lost.

BODY AND SOUL Jeanne has an assignment: This is confusing, and it's meant to be. While the headlines blare that Bush finally agreed that torture and abuse will not be allowed, and that the Army Field Manual will determine how prisoners are treated, it looks like the final agreement will be that torture is forbidden, but if one of our guys happens to do it, he can argue that a "reasonable person" wouldn't have considered an act contrary to the Army Field Manual to actually be unlawful, and if a victim confesses under the stress of that accidentally unlawful treatment, we can still use the information in a tribunal. And if you happen to find yourself in that unhappy position, you will have no right to ask why you're being held.

THE HERETIK SUSPECTS some teachers may offer more assignments of reading Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. 

WAPO GETS IT RIGHT well half right, when it says: In short, restoring the rule of law over an administration that deliberately chose lawlessness in its treatment of detainees may be an arduous process. And yet the McCain amendment is a vital, and hard-won, opening move.

THOSE WHO FORGET the bad faith this administration has engaged in may soon see worse.  The Post seems to have jumped on the McCain train and neglected to connect how the Graham Levin Kyl amendment kills it.

PESSIMIST at Left Coaster sees the cartoon aspect: What was it Boris Badinov used to say? Ah, yes: "Never underestimate the power of a schnook!"

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH gets the bottom line on this: If passed into law, this would be the first time in American history that Congress has effectively permitted the use of evidence obtained through torture.

A DECENT DAY

IT IS A GOOD DAY to be John McCain, to see the White House see the light and  agree on the language of McCain’s torture amendment.  Whether Cheney is screaming in frustration about not being able to work the dark side, no one currently knows.  Whether this agreement will be honored will require vigilance from those who demand decency in the treatment of detainees.  It will not be enough if the words on paper are not put to practice, if what we see hear is lip service.

THE WHITE HOUSE will not admit McCain won on this one.  The White House take says: President Meets with McCain & Warner, Discusses Position on Interrogation. Bush managed to use the announcement of an agreement on something the White House didn’t want to agree on in the first place to pitch his take on Iraq as the central front on the war on error terror everything TM. But McCain made sure the agreement part of the announcement on the discussion agreement was clear.

This agreement basically does two things: One, puts into the Army Field Manual the specific procedures for interrogations. And two, it prohibits cruel, inhumane -- or torture.
In our negotiations, there was legitimate concerns raised by the administration concerning the rights of interrogators. And taking language from the Uniform Code of Military Justice, we provide them with legal counsel and certain protections that a reasonable person might view as carrying out of orders, not to contradict the Nuremberg decision, which, of course, said that obeying orders is not a sufficient defense.

AND SOMEWHERE Stephen Cambone is now reviewing the new rewriting of the Army Field Manual he had rewritten earlier this week.   Somebody should ask what  Cambone and his boss Rumsfeld were thinking when they tried that move.

 

MINIMIZING THE McCAIN EFFECT was evident before the announcement was made. Scott McLellan made that clear in this exchange during the White House Press Briefing.

Q Scott, does the White House have an agreement with Senator McCain on legislative language to ban torture in the interrogation of terror suspects?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, first of all, let me just correct one thing: Torture is already banned. It's banned in our laws. It's banned in international treaty obligations. And the President has made it clear that we do not condone torture, nor do we engage in torture. And if people cross that line, they are held accountable -- as people have seen.
And second of all, in terms of the discussions with Senator McCain, we've been having very good discussions with Senator McCain. We will be having more to say I expect soon. I don't have any announcement to make at this point. I would not be the one to make the announcement, but we will keep you posted as we move forward.
We've been working very closely with Senator McCain, his staff and others on -- others in Congress to make sure that we have a legal framework in place to address the detentions and interrogations while making sure that we still are able to have the tools necessary to prevent attacks from happening in the first place. So these are difficult issues, as we talk about the different kind of war we're engaged in. But we've had good discussions with Senator McCain. I expect we'll be saying more soon, and we'll keep you posted on that.

Q If you would, the reports that there is an agreement?

MR. McCLELLAN: As I said, I expect we'll have more to say soon, but these discussions have been going on not just with Senator McCain but other members of Congress, too. And we want to let those discussions come to a conclusion, and then I suspect we'll have more to say at that point
.
Q Would that be the President who has it? Who is the "we"?

MR. McCLELLAN: I'll keep you posted on it. We'll let you know.

A GOOD QUESTION NOW would be if torture has always been illegal and we have never worked that dark side, why was this agreement necessary in the first place?  We will now be told again and again we do not torture, we must look forward to a bright future.  But if this agreement was necessary, those who worked Cheney's dark side and did torture should be held accountable. How likely is that to happen?  And if we don't hold our previous bad actors, all the way up to top, accountable, the world will look on this as too long a pause on the way to truth.

UPDATE and it could be a downer
LANGUAGE TAKES A BEATING today. AP reports: Bush Accepts McCain’s Torture Policy.  This sounds like three stages of Kubler Ross Grief over dead White House policy.  Discussion. Agreement. Acceptance.

As passed by the Senate and endorsed by the House, McCain’s amendment would prohibit “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” of anyone in U.S. government custody, regardless of where they are held. It also would require that service members follow procedures in the Army Field Manual during interrogations of prisoners in Defense Department facilities.
In discussions with the White House, that language was altered to bring it into conformity with the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That says that anyone accused of violating interrogation rules can defend themselves if a “reasonable” person could have concluded they were following a lawful order.
Officials say the language also now includes a specific statement that those who violate the standards will not be afforded immunity from civil or criminal lawsuits.

THE QUESTION MUST BE ASKED if policy against torture is clear, how can any “reasonable “ person believe the order to torture is lawful?  Maybe this is a four stage Kubler Ross: Discussion. Agreement. Acceptance. Denial.

A "DISAPPEARING" QUESTION If the White House continues to insist some detainees cannot be seen by the Red Cross or any other third party, how will we ever know if the detainees most likely to be tortured are being treated humanely? If the black site prisons that the White House denies exist are in fact in some legal and moral black hole still, how will those detainees and justice ever see the true light of day?  What at first looked like a clear victory for McCain now looks far more opaque.

BAD FAITH

WITH AN APPEAL the devil himself might appreciate, Assistant Secretary Secretary of  of Defense  Stephen Cambone is at the center of an effort to get around John McCain’s no torture amendment.  Even as the House gave notice of support for the McCain amendment that would limit interrogation techniques to what is listed in the Army Field Manual, in the midst of this Cambone has worked a new secret addendum of “enhanced interrogation techniques” into  . . .  the Army Field Manual.

The Army has approved a new, classified set of interrogation methods that may complicate negotiations over legislation proposed by Senator John McCain to bar cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees in American custody, military officials said Tuesday.
The techniques are included in a 10-page classified addendum to a new Army field manual that was forwarded this week to Stephen A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence policy, for final approval, they said.
The addendum provides dozens of examples and goes into exacting detail on what procedures may or may not be used, and in what circumstances. Army interrogators have never had a set of such specific guidelines that would help teach them how to walk right up to the line between legal and illegal interrogations.

MUCH WILL BE MADE of the House bill just passed, but its support of McCain’s provisions are suggested, not binding unlike some of torture’s enhanced interrogation techniques.  The Senate wants to know where the secret prisons are and what is going on there.  Everyone is close to agreeing on what everyone agreed on before.  "Torture" is wrong.  We knew that back before Abu Ghraib.  Every time a new definition of what is not allowed or a restriction on conduct we already know is wrong is put on paper, somebody like Stephen Cambone finds a way around the latest rules.  If someone says you have to go by the book, is it any surprise Cambone would re write the book?

ABOUT STEPHEN CAMBONE Jason Vest wrote in The Nation: On Saturday, May 15--twenty-four hours after The Nation published "Implausible Denial"--The New Yorker posted on its website Seymour Hersh's latest Abu Ghraib-related investigative report. Its central revelation: The interrogations at Abu Ghraib were part of a highly classified Special Access Program (SAP) code-named Copper Green, authorized by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and ultimately overseen by Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone. Originally a joint CIA-Pentagon program in Afghanistan that utilized highly trained Special Operations personnel, Copper Green eventually expanded to Iraq, Hersh reports, where Cambone decided it would begin using non-Special Operations personnel--including military intelligence officers and other military personnel--to begin questioning prisoners whose status was outside the program's original brief. The CIA objected and withdrew from the program, while Cambone apparently tasked Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, former Guantánamo Bay interrogations chief, with "Gitmo-izing" Iraq's prison system.

GOOD MEN MAY do their best, but one man acting in bad faith can negate what other good men do.  It is well and good that we have new laws against torture, but if men don't obey them where will we find ourselves?

CAMBONE WITHOUT IRONY in response to a question on intelligence in Iraq: The problem everybody is struggling with is you have a regime which is, if it is noted for one thing beyond its brutality, it is its ability to deceive, to deny, to compartment, to mislead, to misdirect. And it is through that haze, that fog, that deliberate set of misdirections and deceptions that they are trying to work. For you to have that impression is probably not surprising.

CAMBONE Undersecretary of Defense for Doublespeak testified before the Senate: To grant terrorists the rights they so cruelly reject would make a mockery of the Geneva Conventions. Nevertheless President Bush did order -- did order that detainees held at Guantanamo be treated humanely and consistent with the convention's principles and, in fact, those detainees in the war on terror are being provided with many of the privileges typically afforded to enemy prisoners of war.
The notion that this decision in some way undermined the Geneva Convention or create a poor climate is false. To the contrary, the administration made this decision with the objective of assuring that those who would claim protection under its auspices and not act in keeping with its intent did not abuse the Geneva Convention. Far from disrespect, the decision was made out of a notion of respect.

RECOMMENDED ADDITIONAL READING on Stephen Cambone
SPENCER ACKERMAN on Cambone and The Rumsfeld Power Grab. MORE FROM JASON VEST Implausible Denial [part one]
SPIN DENTIST at All Spin Zone recommends Helen Thomas.

VICIOUS CIRCLE

KILL THEM TO DEATH or worse.  Let them live and make them wish they were dead.  Is there any hope for civilization in a time of war?  And if the Global War on Error Terror Everything TM will last forever or longer, will we ever see the face of civilization again?  If god civilization is dead, what are we defending?

TAKE NO PRISONERS Take no prisoners unless information may be harvested from the wreckage of their psyches and souls.  Suffer no illusions.  No soul will be lost.  No soul may exist in the acrid atmosphere of this artless age.  No art, only science.  The realists who somehow climb the slippery slope in arguments about ends and means in torture and war are right.  There is no slope, only the slip and the slime. What we do to others will surely be done to us.  Outrage will echo and fade.

DOOMSDAY AND DOUBLESPEAK

SOME TIME BEFORE the next Doomsday, the United States must decide what kind of nation it officially is and whether it thinks only the means of barbarity can prevent the end of civilization.  The last Doomsday September Eleventh will be forever cited as reason we might need to torture our enemies.  The so often cited past and future
ticking bomb scenario is a cover for the moral implosion our society suffers now.  The natty arguments for our need for torture leave us lost in our dread.
BUSH AND CHENEY ARE simply dishonest about torture.  Why all the denials we don’t do it? Why the need for an exemption?

President Bush said Monday that he was "confident" that he could reach an agreement with Senator John McCain over legislative restrictions on American interrogations of captives in the fight against global terrorism.
Mr. Bush added that "we want to make sure we're in a position to be able to interrogate without torture" because there are "people who still want to hurt us."

DEFENSE OF THIS DOUBLESPEAK has been left to Stephen Hadley.  Our policy is clear.  No torture. The orders are out there. No torture. But we might need to defend  but not discipline some Jack Bauer clone who takes the law into his own hands. Senator Lindsey Graham is doing heavy lifting for torture in the media for the White House.

"We've got a problem here: How do you protect the operative in the field who is making snap, quick decisions under stressful circumstances to protect their own freedom?" Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and ally of Mr. McCain, said Sunday on the NBC News program "Meet the Press."
"I'm willing to provide a defense to an operative who is acting reasonably and responsibly, following the law, making hard judgment calls," Mr. Graham said. "What we cannot do, what Senator McCain cannot allow to happen or our country cannot allow to happen, is to create immunity or exceptions in the law that has protected us for 60 years."

WE'VE GOT A PROBLEM HERE with morality.  And with language. Sorry, Lindsay Graham.  The operative in the field who tortures is not acting reasonably and you are creating an exception and immunity.
[Meet the Press transcript] The rest of the world looks upon as exercising an American case of exceptionalism. Do we accept the conventions against torture or not?

TORTURE ROUNDUP
IRAQ DENIES TORTURE  The Iraqi Interior Ministry insisted Monday that none of the 625 prisoners discovered last week in an Iraqi detention center had been tortured or abused, despite assertions by American officials to the contrary.
BRITISH NOBLES ON RULE COMMON DIGNITY  British lords rule torture unacceptable in court. LORD HOPE: "Torture is one of most evil practices known to man. Once torture has become acclimatised in a legal system it spreads like an infectious disease, hardening and brutalising those who have become accustomed to its use ... Views as to where the line is to be drawn may differ sharply from state to state. This can be seen from the list of practices authorised for use in Guantánamo Bay by the US authorities, some of which would shock the conscience if they were ever to be authorised for use in our own country.

SUKABI at All Spin Zone has some additional worthy reads.

TORTURE FOR DUMMIES Kinsley rips Krauthammer.  Needs to be read in full, excerpt won't cut the salami. Or would cut it too thin.

MISTER PADILLA MEET MISTER KAFKA

THE ENEMY COMBATANT yesterday is not one today, but could again be one tomorrow.  Words so arbitrary render language and justice lifeless.

Some legal analysts said the [Padilla] case was not moot because the government could later declare again that Mr. Padilla was an enemy combatant. The Justice Department said Friday that while such a move was possible, it was too speculative to say the case was not moot.

THE CURIOUS CASE of Jose Padilla continues to confound the norms of language and reality.  The government clutches his body even as its case runs through its hands. 

ON OTHER FRONTS in the endless night, "counterterrorism" continues. 

WE KNOW where you are, even if you don't know it.

"THE DISAPPEARED" fade to a further black, an obsidian oblivion beyond all hope.  Despair alone may feed them.  Some may not sample even a sip from the cup of justice.  A moral anarchy spills upon us.

BLACK SITE, BLACK NIGHT

BLACK NIGHTS OF RENDITION brutally torture both the body of the victim and the body of evidence the torturers seek.  In the use of extraordinary means that seek in the end some “truth” the results so often prove false and who tortures proves false to the civilization he defends.  Critics will say all torture is not equal and they may be right, but all torture is wrong because it affronts the dignity of man and worse for those who believe a man has a soul. Oh, and the “evidence” tortured out has problems at its core, hollow and rotten.

WARS SHOULD BEGIN only for good reason.  Passion later will have its day.  It seems a certain al Libi previously mentioned here gave evidence false to those who sought ”the truth.” Such truth so slam dunked has more recently taken a dunking.

The fact that Mr. Libi recanted after the American invasion of Iraq and that intelligence based on his remarks was withdrawn by the C.I.A. in March 2004 has been public for more than a year. But American officials had not previously acknowledged either that Mr. Libi made the false statements in foreign custody or that Mr. Libi contended that his statements had been coerced.

THE HERETIK NOTED EARLIER just such a cynical probablity  on November 5, when this news on al Libi was first breaking.

So the war begins with lies, a tortured truth Americans will have to endure.  A related question may be how al-Libi’s testimony was found out to be false.  Given the urgency  the White House place on getting intel no matter the cost, the more cynical may ask whether al-Libi was tortured to provide it. At a point when Cheney seeks a torture exemption for the CIA and John McCain would see torture explicitly banned, what kind of “evidence” we get from torture may soon be treated quite harshly.

CYNICISM NOW has its day as rendition has had its nights. Al Libi was tortured and the “truth” was as well.   We end up with the “intelligence” we gained. In the process we lose our minds and our reason and quite possibly our souls.

MORE BLACK MARKS
DAMNED DOD MEMO on torture motivated transfer cited The March 17, 2004, Defense Department memo indicated that American officials were frustrated in trying to obtain information from Ahmad, according to the description of the classified memo in the court petition. The officials suggested sending Ahmad to an unspecified foreign country that employed torture in order to increase chances of extracting information from him, according to the petition's description of the memo.

HOW THE CIA BLEW its prisons cover  Mr. Aftergood said the secrecy of the program may also have been doomed by the sharp increase in the frequency of renditions after September 11, 2001. "This is an ambitious program that crosses many geographical and political boundaries. As such, it's very difficult to keep secret indefinitely," the analyst said. He noted that some conservatives believe some in the CIA who are disgruntled with the Bush administration are deliberately leaking information in order to shut down certain programs. Mr. Aftergood said he did not believe that was the case with the renditions program.
THIS IS AN AMBITIOUS PROGRAM that crosses many geographical and political boundaries?  Though it is not noted, The Heretik suspects some moral boundaries were crossed as well.

ALSO Helena Cobban Perils of the Inquistion. Torture evidence not admissable in UK courts.
PLUS another horror story: Dark Days in Prisons at Home and Abroad. 

CONDOLEEZA RICE statement on rendition and torture. BRITISH UNDERSTATEMENT The defence of the practice of transferring prisoners around the world for interrogation relies a great deal on a definition of torture.  FOUR STORIES unlikely to go away. Al Masri update.

TORTURE FOR DUMMIES

WE DO NOT TORTURE  Condoleezza Rice reveals that New American English is a language foreign to reality. We do not torture?  That depends what “torture” is.  Some seem to be buying the latest spin. Torture comes with a broad disclaimer.  And the Bush administration counts on the media repeating what it says with the knowledge that people bite on the first sounds they hear in the news. Or read in the papers.

The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post all reported Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's December 5 statement that the United States "does not permit, tolerate, or condone torture under any circumstances," without noting that the Bush administration's definition of torture has been criticized as overly narrow. In contrast, The New York Times reported on December 7 that the administration's circumscribed definition of torture is at odds with international standards. The New York Times noted that Rice's statement has been criticized as misleading given that under the administration's definition, U.S. interrogators are free to employ methods that fall outside of the narrow category of "torture" but that violate the United Nations' Convention Against Torture. All three broadcast news outlets challenged directly or featured sources who challenged Rice's misleading statement, noting that it rested on the administration's limited definition of torture.

MEDIA MATTERS has more. The Heretik would say Bush counts on the medium counting more than the true message. But that may depend on what the definition of truth is.

DON’T MISS WHAT'S MISSING in the discussion of abuse enhanced interrogation techniques “torture.”

A BIT ABOUT THE TORTURE DISCLAIMER Typically, when faced with a problem, the first thing Bush administration officials do is reach for their dictionaries to pretzel and torture words into whatever shape best suits them. Then they declare themselves simply to be following precedent (which turns out, of course, to be whatever they've wanted to do all along). In this way, in the famous torture memos that flowed from the White House Counsel's office, the Justice Department, and the Pentagon, the meaning of "torture" was at one point in 2002 redefined into near nonexistence ("must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death") and then made dependent on the mind and intent of the torturer. As a result, "torture" became, by definition, a policy we didn't engage in even as we waterboarded suspects in our global network of CIA-run (or borrowed) secret prisons. In a similar fashion, this administration has managed to redefine aggressive war, kidnapping, the President's powers to detain both citizens and non-citizens, assassination, the meaning of various international agreements and American laws, and the Constitution itself. Then, definitions in hand, administration officials have marched defiantly into the world, armed to the teeth, and done exactly what they pleased.

WHAT RICE MISSES Avedon Carol on law, “policy,” and responsibility: The Geneva Conventions qualify under this clause and have the full force of US law. The actual policy of this administration clearly involves torture and just as clearly involves refusing to acknowledge any responsibility for doing it.

THE HERETIK WONDERS why the Bush administration continues to view its treaty obligations as optional.

JOHN BOLTON uber alles:  He [Bolton] added: "I think it is inappropriate and illegitimate for an international civil servant to second-guess the conduct that we're engaged in in the war on terror, with nothing more as evidence than what she reads in the newspapers."
Arbour, a former Canadian Supreme Court justice, did not name the United States in her statement. But she criticized two elements of U.S. counterterrorism policy: the use of severe interrogation techniques -- which the CIA has authorized -- and the rendition, or transfer, of suspected terrorists to countries that have engaged in torture.
She also questioned the value of the U.S. practice of obtaining diplomatic assurances from governments that they will not torture such individuals. "There are many reasons to be skeptical about the value of those assurances," she said. "If there is no risk of torture in a particular case, they are unnecessary and redundant. If there is a risk, how effective are these assurances likely to be?"

CLEAR AS MUD Charles Hawley in Speigel: According to David Luban, a Georgetown University law professor, Rice's comments marked a dramatic shift in policy. "I think if Rice meant what she said, that's a big change," Luban told the International Herald Tribune.
Others, however, aren't so sure. After all, the controversial practice of "extraordinary renditions" allegedly relies on terror suspects being delivered to authorities in third countries for interrogation by foreign intelligence personnel. Furthermore, the United State still hasn't come up with a satisfying definition for torture or for "inhuman and degrading treatment." It is unclear, for example, where waterboarding -- a technique which sees prisoners strapped to a board and dunked into water to simulate drowning -- would fit into Washington's interpretation of the UN convention.


ORWELL v KAFKA Sydney Blumenthal says:  Rice's legal interpretations were authoritative, bland and bogus. It is hard to say whether they should be called Orwellian for their intentional falsity or Kafkaesque for their unintentional absurdity.

AND DON'T MISS Condi's Travelogue, Torture Glossary I, II, III, plus Tortured Rationale, The German Reaction: Fried Rice and Mashed Merkel.
RELATIVE CLARITY Jeanne at Body and Soul is so often a poet with other people’s words.  The title alone is hers: Let me make one thing perfectly clear.

CONSPIRACY TO TORTURE  The Nation places responsibility for torture right where it belongs, at the top: Consider just two words: "command responsibility." Those words stand among the most resolutely enduring principles established after World War II by the Nuremberg Tribunals. Today they pose a special threat to President Bush, Vice President Cheney and the other officials who actively promote what Secretary of State Rice, in Germany, insisted the Administration "does not authorize or condone." To carry out physically and psychically brutal interrogations outside all international norms has required the Administration to corrupt the ordinary meaning of language itself.

THE HERETIK KNOWS history has a habit of harshly judging those who treat the imprisoned harshly

BLUE ON BLACK

EUROPE IS BLUE ON BLACK site prisons and extraordinary rendition.  Europe wakes today to a United States blind to the public relations and human rights disaster it sets on the table before the world.  The United State admitted and then stopped admitting mistakes plural yesterday.

If anything, relations are worse now. [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel irritated US officials by telling journalists after the meeting that the US government had admitted making a mistake in the case of Khaled al-Masri, a Lebanese-born German citizen who was abducted by the CIA and claims that he was tortured while held in secret custody.
"We discussed the one case which was accepted as a mistake by the government of the United States," Merkel told a joint news conference with Rice after their meeting on Tuesday. US officials later told journalists that Rice had done nothing of the sort. "We are not quite sure what was in her head," Reuters quoted a senior US official as saying.
US officials said the US government had informed the German government about al-Masri's case but had not admitted making mistakes. Rice had merely given assurances that any errors made by the CIA would be corrected as and when they arose, officials said.

WHAT OFFENDS the Germans is the offending party the United States now plays the offended party.  The world is upside down and the shake out will not be pretty.  The one mistake admitted by the United States is the five month long kidnapping of non terrorist German citizen Khaled al Masri.  Rice ironically was once instrumental in getting him released.  Al Masri was dumped in Macedonia, far from home.  You could call that a metaphor for United States policy now: headed toward decency, but not quite making it home.

SKEPTICISM RISES in Europe on Condoleezza Rice’s response.  Words don’t say what they mean, don’t mean what they say. It’s a wordy rapping hood reality.

"I think what she means is, 'We don't use it as an official way to do things, but we don't look at what is done in other countries,' " Monika Griefahn, a Social Democratic member of [the German] Parliament, said in regard to Ms. Rice's comment on torture. "And that's the problem for us."

A PROBLEM FOR EUROPE will be a problem for Washington if it doesn’t come clean on torture.  Reaction across the continent is harsh,
but you wouldn’t think it has crossover appeal in the White House.  While some say George Bush is the least poll driven President ever, the lastest word is perhaps Bush is hoping “ticking bomb” scenarios and a culture soaked by shows like 24 will let him wring out more than a draw in the polls on a policy just short of drawing and quartering.

In America, 61 percent of those surveyed agreed torture is justified at least on rare occasions. Almost nine in 10 in South Korea and just over half in France and Britain felt that way.

CONGRESS MAY STAND UP and while the White House may back down on the McCain ban on torture, it continues to fight a back battle on prosecution of CIA torturers.

. . . administration officials concede that Mr. McCain's provision, which would also require a uniform standard on how to interrogate detainees, stands a strong chance of becoming law, despite a White House threat to veto any legislation containing it. The measure has already passed the Senate, 90 to 9, and senior House Republican staff members say it would probably pass by a large margin in the House.
Faced with that reality, administration officials said, Mr. Hadley has now retreated to seeking narrower language that could make it harder to prosecute intelligence officers charged with violating torture standards.
Mr. Bush, speaking to reporters Tuesday morning, repeated his statement that "we do not torture."

BLACK IS WHITE White is black.  Black sites continue to make the Euros blue, but some will continue to see red.

PREVIOUS HERETIK POSTS on Rice and Extraordinary Rendition: Condi Must Be Tripping, Extraordinary BS 

ALSO The German Media Roundup

BEYOND THE PALE POLL Kathy at Liberty Street: Bush's "war on terror" has not changed the terrorist value system one iota. But it has changed our value system. Today, it would be far easier to find an American who thinks pulling out fingernails or delivering electric shocks to genitals is fine "if there's a good reason" than it would be to find a follower of Zarqawi who thinks religious pluralism is a fine thing.

THE HERETIK SHARES concern what now is most tortured is the American soul