Forza Italia! After years of appeals, Italy’s highest court has upheld the conviction of 23 Americans involved in a CIA kidnapping of a man off the street in Milan, whom the CIA shipped to Egypt to be brutally tortured.  This ruling could result in Italy demanding their extradition.  For, you see, the 23 are living comfortably in the United States.  They look just like decent people.  They blend in.  I don’t advise Italy to kidnap (or “rendition”) these Americans just because President Obama says that’s legal.  But I do encourage Italy to demand extradition.  And I hope that one or another of them will be so good as to seek sanctuary in an Ecuadorean Embassy, just to see how many heads explode in Washington as people try to determine what they’re supposed to think of that.

For background on this case, sadly still relevant, here’s something I wrote on November 6, 2010:

One Place to Cut Spending: Kidnapping and Torture

“Self-purification through suffering is easier, I tell you: easier — than that destiny which you are paving for many of them by wholesale acquittals in court.  You are merely planting cynicism in their souls.” –Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The United States Congress is outraged.  Russia, it seems, may have wrongly imprisoned, tortured, and murdered a whistleblower.  In the land of the free, our good representatives are outraged, I tell you.  And not just I.  NPR will tell you.  This calls for action.  There’s a bill in the Senate and a bill in the House.  The Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act.

Who wouldn’t support the rule of law and accountability?

Well, let me think.

Oh, I know. The United States Congress.

Bush and Cheney are selling books confessing to the crime of war and all that comes with it, including lawless imprisonment and torture.  They have openly confessed in their books and on television, repeatedly, to a form of torture that the current Attorney General of the United States admits is torture.  Bush’s torture program tortured numerous people to death.  And what has Congress wrought?

No impeachments.

No enforcement of subpoenas.

No defunding of operations.

No criminalizing of secrecy.

No protection of whistleblowers.

No mandating of diplomacy, reparations, foreign aid, or commitments to international standards.

In other words, we have no Congress with the right to talk about the Rule of Law or Accountability without being mocked.

But keep hope alive.

Change is on the way.

Look!

Up in the sky!

It’s Captain Peace Prize!

Obama launches wars without bothering to lie to Congress or the United Nations, has formalized the powers of lawless imprisonment, rendition, and murder, and places the protection of Bush and Cheney above almost anything else — certainly above the rule of law or accountability. Read the rest of this entry →

Not yet 30, Evan Knappenberger has already lived several lives.  His story destroys the U.S. government’s case against whistleblower Bradley Manning, exposes the toxic mix of fraud and incompetence that creates U.S. war policies, and highlights the damage so often done to soldiers who come home without visible injuries.

Knappenberger, seen in this video, was trained as an “intelligence analyst” at the U.S. Army’s Intelligence Training Center at Fort Huachuca, Arizona in 2003 and 2004, the same school attended by Bradley Manning.  In April of this year, the PBS show Frontline, responding to an article Knappenberger had published, flew him to Los Angeles on a private jet, and interviewed him for four hours.

Knappenberger told Frontline that he, like Manning, had had access to the U.S. government’s SIPRNet database when he had been in Iraq.  Knappenberger told Frontline that 1,400 U.S. government agencies put their information on SIPRNet, and that 2 million employees were given access to it.  SIPRNet has secret blogs, secret discussions, and its own secret Google search engine.  At one point, the Pentagon encouraged gambling on SIPRNet on the likelihood of future terrorist attacks.  Knappenberger also pointed out that the United States had given the Iraqi Army access to the database, knowing full well that many members of the Iraqi Army were also on the U.S. target list as enemies fighting U.S. troops.

Knappenberger was in Iraq in 2006, but said he believes the practice of sharing SIPRNet with the Iraqi Army began in 2005.  The U.S. Army ran cables to laptops in Iraqi command posts, and gave each post a CPOF (command post of the future) super computer.  Each Iraqi command post had access to everything Bradley Manning allegedly leaked to Wikileaks.  At some point in 2006, the U.S. Army decided to get serious about security by assigning two U.S. soldiers with security clearances to guard each site.  Each soldier was on guard for 12 hours and off for 12.  Another step taken to boost security was the creation of passwords to access SIPRNet, but because no one could remember the passwords they were written on sticky notes and stuck to the backs of the computers.  Knappenberger says he had the password on the back of his computer and has read that every computer in Manning’s unit had it too.

So, Knappenberger related this kind of information to Frontline for four hours and says that for three or four months afterwards he expected to go to prison for violating nondisclosure agreements. He popped a lot of PTSD pills and gained a huge amount of weight as a result of nervousness, he says.  Then, the day before he expected the Frontline story to air, he says, the show told him it would not be airing.  Frontline was afraid of being held liable for inducing Knappenberger to violate his nondisclosure agreements.

Knappenberger has made the same information public without any charges being brought against him.  Frontline would simply have made it more public.  Like Bradley Manning, Frontline would not have provided enemies of the United States with tools to be used against us.  Rather, like Bradley Manning, Frontline would have informed more of us what our government was doing in our name.  And some of what it has been doing is extremely hard to look at without turning away.

This past January, Knappenberger says he testified on the record, via telephone, to the office of the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner on the topic of torture.  Knappenberger was not qualified to “interrogate” people, but Donald Rumsfeld’s reorganization of the Army found ways to put non-combat troops into combat roles.  Used to test this model was Knappenberger’s First Special Troops Battalion.  These cooks, military police, signals and chemical specialists, clerks, and analysts were called on to fight terror and spread freedom.  Knappenberger says his platoon sergeant was a payroll specialist who “got his legs blown off in combat he was never trained for,” while a first sergeant “got his head blown off, and he was an intel geek.”  Knappenberger says his roommate was a specialist in fixing radios who lost his hearing and suffered traumatic brain injury on an IED squad.

Knappenberger says that recruiters had told him he’d do desk work.  But he also says that when he joined up he was ready to kill people.  He ended up doing double duty.  There would be 10 or 12 hours at your normal job, he says, followed by 8 hours on a combat job.  Knappenberger’s combat job was not a shooting one.  It was his duty to tell others where to shoot, what to blow up, whom to kill.  Knappenberger at age 20 was one of three “intel” people in his unit at Camp Taji north of Baghdad, the other two being women aged 25 and 26.  None of the three had experience, but they took over for eight well-trained veterans who had been there for two years, and some of whom even spoke Arabic.  The 26-year-old woman in charge was a drone pilot now placed in charge of a combat area with 100,000 people around Camp Taji.  Many FREs (former regime elements) lived right outside the base.

As the only male, Knappenberger says he was assigned to do the questioning of suspects brought in.  Lacking any census, the only database of individuals Knappenberger possessed came from the oil-for-food program.  A friend had found the information in Baghdad and typed it in.  When someone was pulled over, soldiers would radio to Knappenberger who would search for them in the database.  Usually they’d be released.  If someone was caught “with a bloody knife or a tube of mortars” Knappenberger says, “they’d be brought in.”  But without really good evidence they could not be booked for lack of space.  So, good evidence had to be obtained within 24 hours.  The method of choice was coerced confession.

Knappenberger told me they used sensory deprivation on these suspects.  They blindfolded them, put bags on their heads, handcuffed them, sat them on the cold ground in their underwear, etc.  In one case that he described to me, they drove a man in circles around the base blindfolded in a truck, put him on the ground, and gave him a cigarette.  The man “freaked out because he thought he’d been driven to the middle of nowhere to be executed.  But we never told him that, so it was legal.”  The more common approach, Knappenberger said, was to tell someone you would drop him off in the middle of the market and give him $100.  This would amount to framing someone with turning in others, and the penalty would likely be death . . . for the individual and for his family.  “We’d show them pictures of dead bodies and say ‘This is what’s going to happen to you,’ and we’d talk about their wives and girlfriends.”  Knappenberger says he did not engage in physical abuse, but that others did while he literally turned his back.  Iraqi interpreters, wearing masks, hit, slapped, grabbed hair, etc.  Turning your back was understood by the U.S. Army as making you a non-witness, Knappenberger says.

This went on from January to March, 2006, until “I finally got into trouble.”  Afraid that a prisoner would file a complaint after being booked, Knappenberger’s boss promoted him from the tactical to the operational command staff.  Knappenberger’s new job, too, provides a window into the madness of war.

Knappenberger came up with an analysis of likely weapons caches.  Some were in junk yards and other random sites.  But the largest was in a munitions depot supposedly guarded by the Iraqi Army.  The further one moved away from this depot, Knappenberger found, the fewer weapons caches were found.  Similarly, Knappenberger identified likely locations of ethnic killings as Iraqi Army checkpoints.

The Oil Protection Force, a special unit of the Iraqi Army, was headquartered in one of the hottest spots for IEDs in all of Iraq, Knappenberger says.  “We were paying them and they were stealing oil out of the pipeline they were supposedly guarding.”  When Knappenberger’s unit arrested the head of the Oil Protection Force for leading a Sunni militia against U.S. troops, within an hour, he says, a DIA helicopter arrived and “the guys in suits took him and put him back out on the streets.”  Shortly afterwards the pipeline blew up and burned for 30 days.

Another Iraqi whom Knappenberger had an interesting encounter with is Ali Latif Ibrahim Hamad el Falahi.  “I spent eight months trying to find that guy,” he says.  Knappenberger met Falahi at a civil affairs dinner at a sheik’s house his first week in Iraq and spoke with him for about an hour.  Three days later, Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll was kidnapped.  Knappenberger says Falahi was “the suspect” and was “our number two target for a year and a half” as he engaged in ethnic cleansing, decapitation, and ambushing Shiite units in the Iraqi Army.  “I spent 8 months trying to have him killed.  We killed dozens of people trying to find him.  We had a gunship fly around his orchard because of heat signals there.  Thirteen people died there, none him.”  Falahi was reportedly later killed in the same sheik’s house after failing to set off a suicide vest beside a U.S. soldier.

“I think about that guy every day,” says Knappenberger.  “We raided his house.  I had his diary translated.  I had a whole file on this guy.”  Remarkably, Knappenberger recognizes humanity in Falahi, saying “I don’t think he was a bad person because I didn’t get that vibe from him when I talked to him.”  Knappenberger uses the example of Hitler to suggest that there is good in the worst of people.  Of Falahi he says, “He did very bad things.  He killed a lot of people.  There were even allegations that he was raping women.  But before the Americans came he was just a hardworking farmer taking care of his aunt.”  Falahi had gone to his Imam and argued over how to get Americans to leave without violence, says Knappenberger.  “Falahi and his nephews went through Camp Taji and took a bunch of weapons the day Saddam disappeared.  And it was supposed to be for protection.  They set up a militia to guard the village.  They had check points on the road in and out.”  Then the United States armed the Shiites as the new Iraqi Army, and Paul Bremer cut out the Baath Party and banned possession of over 30 rounds of ammunition per family.  “That’s when he got radicalized.”

Evan Knappenberger says he began as an Ayn Rand fan, an atheist and a Republican (and you thought Karl Rove was the only atheist Republican!).  Knappenberger has since turned against Ayn Rand and rightwing politics including war, and gone religious.

Evan says that he found the Army to be “a pretty socialist institution,” in which people are encouraged to protect their friends as a way to motivate them to kill.  But, he says, “I was willing to kill without that.”  Why?  As revenge for 9-11, he says, and as an expression of hatred that Evan says he harbored even before 9-11.  He remembers reading Readers Digest as a kid and learning about “terrorists who want to kill us.”  In the end, Evan says he did not shoot anyone.  But he prepared packets of information on targets, including maps to their homes, photos of them, the reasons they were targets, and what was to be done to them (kill/capture, exploit, source, etc.)  Artillery officers, who Evan says are “notoriously stupid,” became a targeting cell, and whatever he told them (“This guy is bad.  This is where he lives.”) they would work from to plan bombings and raids.

My impression from speaking with Evan Knappenberger is that what turned him against war and militarism, even more than the SNAFU experience in Iraq, even more than the gradual exposure of the lies that launched the war, and more than the “socialism” within the military, was coming into contact with radical inequality of wealth and power within the Army, mirroring our society at large.

On a two-week leave, completely exhausted, in the middle of his year in Iraq, Evan flew back to Charlottesville, Virginia.  On the last leg from Atlanta, he was one of two people in uniform on the plane.  The other was a JAG general with a gold watch and a leather briefcase but no combat patch.  Evan, in contrast, hadn’t had a shower in a week, and it showed.  Apparently the two of them regarded each other with mutual contempt.  While on leave, Evan attended a jobs fair in Crystal City for people with security clearances like his.  At lunch time, he says, lots of officers came over from the Pentagon looking for high-paying jobs.  “I was the lowest ranking person in the room.  And the thing that really shocked the hell out of me: You go six months in Iraq and the highest ranking person you see is a colonel.  And I’m in a room full of generals and sergeant majors of the army and chief warrant officer fives, and not one of them had a combat job in the whole big ball room — not one of those m—– f—— had been in a combat zone for 30 days to get a combat patch — or if they did they weren’t proud of it.  And these were the people making the decisions and making my life hell — and that had a lot to do with turning me against the war.”

Another factor was the unfairness of the policy of stop-loss.  The Army had messed up Evan’s paperwork when he had shipped out, delaying him, and as a result his date for completing his contract just barely made it into the group the Army chose to hold over for additional “service.”  To avoid being stop-lossed, Evan cut a deal with his commanders that would allow him to be honorably discharged for minor misbehavior.  However, a brand new division commander gave Evan a general discharge, eliminating his GI Bill and other benefits.  Evan says it took him three years to get any disability coverage from the V.A.

Evan still has PTSD, as well as a skin problem he attributes to toxic chemicals and garbage burned in open pits in Iraq by the U.S. Army.  On tower guard duty adjacent to such a pit, Evan says he lost his sense of smell and coughed up a black substance.  “That whole year was like a nightmare,” he says.  “Getting mortared every night.  Rockets coming in.  The first couple of times I got shot at on guard duty I had no idea what was going on. . . .  I thought it was bats. . . .  I got so used to getting mortared.  I was at the airport getting ready to leave and was in the portapotty when a siren went off.  Then there were booms and after the last boom dirt clods falling on the portapotty.  I walked out, doing up my belt, and there was a major and a sergeant major under a truck face down in the mud.  And the guy screams at me: ‘Get to the bunker!’”  Evan’s response was a casual “Whatever.  It’s over now.”

In April of 2007, Evan Knappenberger came back to Charlottesville.  He says he’d been dating long distance and had a bad break up on the phone while driving.  He just kept driving for three months, living out of his car and spending his Army money.  He ended up in Bellingham, Washington, where he met a woman at a peace vigil and married her in October.  The marriage has “almost been ruined a few times by PTSD.”

Evan has done a lot of antiwar activism in Bellingham, including helping AWOL soldiers make it to Canada.  He built and did guard duty on a tower in Bellingham and then in Washington, D.C., to protest the stop loss policy.  I organized a press conference for his mother in Charlottesville.

Evan was nothing if not outspoken.  This included informing an Ohio couple that their son was dead, despite a government coverup and propaganda campaign.  In 2004 Iraqis produced a video of a U.S. soldier, Matt Maupin, held hostage, and then another of him being killed.  According to Knappenberger, the DIA used facial pattern recognition and a study of the blotches on his uniform and was 100% certain that Maupin had been executed.  But the military told the media to suppress the video, and the U.S. media complied.  Maupin’s parents campaigned for Bush’s “reelection” in the swing state of Ohio in ’04 because “John Kerry wants to leave Matt behind,” even though Knappenberger says the government knew that Matt was dead.  As part of the public relations push, Maupin was repeatedly promoted in rank, and his pay was placed in an account for when he was found.

Evan saw the video in 2006.  In 2007 he told a Washington Post reporter who filed a FOIA and was told the information was classified.  So, in September 2007, Evan says he told Maupin’s parents, who were reluctant to believe him.  An hour later, an Army intelligence officer called Evan and threatened him with jail.  According to Knappenberger, he replied, “If you tell the parents I won’t have to.  If you don’t I will.”  Meanwhile, says Knappenberger, “the poor dad was putting together a team to go find Matt.”  Maupin’s dad, Evan says, told him “I’ve got Andrew Card’s number.  I’m calling him right now.”  Two weeks later he was allowed to watch the video at the Pentagon.

One’s heart breaks for those parents and so many others like them, and for the vastly greater number of Iraqis whose loved ones have been killed by U.S. loved ones.  One’s heart breaks for Evan Knappenberger as well.  He says he is committed to nonviolence, but it is a process he is working at.  He grew up in a violent culture and was trained to use and value violence.  Since getting out of the Army, he has repeatedly been accused of threatening violence.  He recounted to me an incident in which he threatened President Bush with violence.  He has threatened rightwing war supporters with violence in blog posts.  Evan’s been hospitalized twice for PTSD.  He’s had an on-again off-again relationship with antiwar groups like IVAW (Iraq Veterans Against the War).

During what Evan describes as a “really bad breakdown” in January 2009, he showed up at the V.A. hospital in Seattle.  It was full, and he was told to come back Monday.  He called a senator, and had an appointment within an hour.  Within another hour, he says, he was loaded up with antidepressants and on the street.  Four weeks of antidepressants later, he had a worse breakdown that landed him in jail following an attempted suicide and what he says was an unfounded charge of “unlawful imprisonment” of his wife, which he pled to a misdemeanor.

Despite everything our society places in the way of it, Evan Knappenberger has obtained an associate’s degree and is working on a bachelor’s.  After a troubled but useful contribution to Occupy Charlottesville (he says he quit, others say they evicted him), Evan is headed back to Bellingham to work on his marriage and his mortgage payments.  I wish him well and thank him for speaking out.

Two Years Ago Obama Decided Not to Prosecute Torturers
Now We Get An Account of Why
By David Swanson

If you can think back all the way to January 2009, back when wars were ending, Guantanamo was closing, the Pentagon was getting oversight, employees were going to have free choice, the rich would start paying taxes, the air would be getting cleaner, and so forth, you’ll recall that the Obama transition team was acting super populist and high-tech.

They had questions from ordinary people for the President Elect submitted on their website and voted up or down. The top question at the end of the voting had come from Bob Fertik of Democrats.com and it was this:

“Will you appoint a Special Prosecutor – ideally Patrick Fitzgerald – to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping?”
-Bob Fertik, New York City

Not only was the answer no, but it had to be inferred because President Change U. Wish refused to answer the question. I’ve always assumed I could guess why: a president wouldn’t want previous presidents subject to the rule of law, because then he would be too. Just this week I was suggesting that allowing the Justice Department to enforce laws against Cheney could save Obama’s electoral prospects at the risk of seeing Obama, too, land in prison some day. I have no doubt that this really is a factor.

However, we now have an account from someone involved in the decision process way back when. And he reports two other reasons for the decision to let all the war criminals off and devote vast energies to protecting them and covering up their crimes. The first of the two reasons is not terribly shocking: the CIA, NSA, and military would revolt if their crimes were exposed and prosecuted. This explains the cover-up portion of the past two-and-a-half years’ immunity-granting campaign particularly well. It fits with the known record, which has included seven former heads of the CIA publicly writing to President Obama to tell him not to prosecute torturers in the CIA.

The second reason, we’re now being told, was that if laws were enforced against Bush, Cheney, or their subordinates, the Republicans in Congress would retaliate by trying to block any useful piece of legislation. This is sort of morbidly funny in that the Republicans in Congress have spent the past two-and-a-half years trying to block any useful piece of legislation and many horrendous ones as well. They’ve just done it with the background hum of war criminals on promotional book tours. This explanation fits with the theme of “looking forward, not backward.” Just as House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers told us in 2008 that it was more important to elect Obama than to impeach Bush or Cheney (as if you couldn’t do both), Obama’s preference in early 2009 (and in 2008 when he had told Will Bunch the same thing) was for looking forward to the passage of hideously corporatized legislation rather than enforcing laws against anyone powerful (as if you couldn’t do both). Nonetheless, there is something jarringly pathetic about the notion that Dick Cheney is unindicted because Barack Obama was dreaming of a working relationship with the party Cheney had left behind in Washington.  This shouldn’t be as jarring now as it might have seemed in 2009, however, after watching Obama “negotiate” away anything Republcans opposed in any number of areas.

So, who is the source of these belated explanations?

The Dean of the University of California at Berkeley Law School Christopher Edley, Jr. His comments will probably be showing up on video, but here is a report I was just sent by long-time peace and justice activist extraordinaire Susan Harman:

“World Can’t Wait (in orange) and I (in pink) attended a surreal panel on 9/11 today at Boalt (UC Berkeley Law School), where John Yoo teaches.

“That should be surreal enough. But (unintentionally, I think) each of the panelists mentioned one of Yoo’s policies (warrantless domestic surveillance, aggressive war, and that old favorite, torture). One even talked about the need for accountability. I felt dizzy, and could barely speak.

“I said I was overwhelmed by the surreality of Yoo being on the law faculty, and having just been appointed the new head of the sponsoring Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law, when he was singlehandedly responsible for the three worst policies of the Bush Adm.

“They all burbled about academic freedom and the McCarthy era, and said it isn’t their job to prosecute him.

“Duh.

“Then Dean Chris Edley volunteered that he’d been party to very high level discussions during Obama’s transition about prosecuting the criminals. He said they decided against it. I asked why. Two reasons: 1) it was thought that the CIA, NSA, and military would revolt, and 2) it was thought the Repugnants would retaliate by blocking every piece of legislation they tried to move (which, of course, they’ve done anyhow).

“Afterwards I told him that CIA friends confirmed that Obama would have been in danger, but I added that he bent over backwards to protect the criminals, and gave as an example the DoJ’s defense (state secrets) of Jeppesen (the rendition arm of Boeing) a few days after his inauguration.

“He shrugged and said they will never be prosecuted, and that sometimes politics trumps rule of law.

“It must not, I said.

“It shouldn’t, he said, and walked off.

“This is the Dean of the Berkeley School of Law.”

Another approach was taken to the divergence of official conduct from clear demands of morality by an activist at Berkeley in 1964 named Mario Savio, who said,

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious — makes you so sick at heart — that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

That’s the plan. Join in here: http://october2011.org

On September 18, 2009, seven former heads of the CIA publicly told President Barack Obama not to prosecute CIA torturers.  On April 16, 2009, Obama had already publicly told Attorney General Eric Holder not to prosecute CIA torturers.  On September 18th, Holder publicly reassured the CIA.

The coast was clear.  The books started flowing.  George W. Bush and John Yoo put their books out in 2010, Donald Rumsfeld in 2011, and Dick Cheney’s also later this summer.

Just as the torture techniques drifted down the chain of command from these dealers in death to the rank and file, so too the book contracts.  The cogs in the machine are now documenting their bit parts in the past decade’s torture epidemic with pride and publishing deals.

Witness “The Interrogator: An Education” by Glenn L. Carle.  This is the story of how a none-too-bright, self-centered, insecure, careerist bureaucrat with weak principles, a fragile ego, a troubled marriage, and no interrogation experience, but the ability to actually speak Arabic, was chosen to lead the interrogating (or “interviewing”) of an innocent man the CIA boneheadedly believed to be a “top al Qaeda terrorist” when they kidnapped him off a street and flew him to an undisclosed location outside any rule of law.

As to who got an education in the process of living, writing, or reading this book, your guess is as good as mine.

You may have spotted the author in the media last week, since he managed to get James Risen at the New York Times to print his revelation that the Bush White House had asked the CIA to investigate American blogger Juan Cole.  That story is not in the book, but was apparently timed to boost the book’s sales.  Who knows what other nasty anecdotes Carle is sitting on in hopes of productively producing them when and if he writes a sequel.  Even with that prospect, let’s hope fervently that he does not.

What an awful book!  What an awful example of how to live!

Yes, Carle asserts what all of the experts agree on: torture and abuse are not useful interrogation techniques.  The most effective tools for eliciting useful information are the legal ones.  But Carle simply asserts this.  He provides no new evidence to back it up — not that there was a shortage.

Carle is like a veteran soldier joining in demonstrations against the war he was part of but still talking about how he “served” his country.  “I made it possible for American children to sleep safe at night,” he brags.  How exactly did he do this?  Why, by participating in criminal operations that enraged billions of people against the United States of America.  Good going, Glenn!

Carle discusses, by way of background, the “victims of the Iran-Contra scandal,” by which he means not the men, women, and children illegally killed, but the criminals prosecuted or otherwise inconvenienced.  When Carle was yanked out of his cubicle to employ his linguistic skills in interrogating a kidnapping victim, he was not long in coming to view himself as the victim of most concern to the reader.  He had concerns about what he was being sent into, but he “was not about to question the apparent basis for my involvement in a very important case.”

“Suppose our partners do something to CAPTUS [the kidnapped man] that I consider unacceptable?” he asked a superior.

“Well, then, you just walk out of the room, if you feel you should.  Then you won’t have to see anything, will you?  You will not have been party to anything.”

Wow, with that defense, get-away drivers aren’t guilty of robberies anymore.  And that defense was plenty good enough for Carle.  He was largely interested in venting his own emotions, he tells us, just as he must have been when composing the book:

“Every American — and perhaps we in the CIA more than anyone — was outraged and determined to destroy the jihadists who had killed our countrymen [on 9-11] and had been attacking our countrymen for years.  I was being sent to the front lines, as it were.  I was going to be part of the avenging and protective hidden hand of the CIA, striking al Qaeda for us all.  I WANTED to interrogate the S.O.B. and play a key role in our counter-terrorism operations.”

I for one would prefer he had settled for tweeting a photo of his penis.

Carle presented himself with the important moral dilemma of whether to screw up this immoral operation or do it right:

“This conversation — this case — was clearly one of the key moments in my career; I needed to GET IT RIGHT, to exercise refined judgment, to see and act clearly where values and goals conflicted, in the murky areas where there might be no right choice, but one had to choose and act nonetheless.”

Why did one?  Why was resigning and going public at any moment not always an available option?

Carle read one of John Yoo’s torture memos, thought it was illegal, and went along anyway:

“I recall thinking when I read it (a view shared by many colleagues at the time [not a one of whom said a damn word to the American people about it]) that it was tendentious and intellectually shoddy, an obvious bit of hack work, a bit of legal sophistry to justify what the administration wanted done, not a guideline and interpretation of the spirit and intention of the laws and statutes that had guided the Agency for decades [except for all the times they didn't]. . . . Challenging a finding, though, was, as the expression goes, way beyond my pay grade, and in any event, would be viewed as presumptuous and out of place at the moment.”

God forbid!

“We were talking about what some, what I, might consider the torture of a helpless man,” Carle recalls.

“What about the Geneva Convention?” he asked his superior.

“Which flag do you serve?” was the reply.

“I flew out of Dulles two days later,” Carle recounts, having chosen knowingly and inexcusably to become a cog in a machine of kidnapping, torture, and death.

Was it really rage over 9-11 that drove Carle onward?  He tells us that when the planes hit the towers, he was too busy being petty and self-centered on the telephone to be bothered to watch.  He then tried to go shopping and couldn’t get clerks in stores to stop obsessing over 9-11 long enough to help him.

Carle’s wife inexplicably became an alcoholic, resulting in this touching scene:

“One evening I was working on the computer in the bedroom, not wanting to think about work, or home; I just wanted to turn off my brain [how would one tell?].  Sally was cooking in the kitchen.  I heard a plate crash.  I paid no attention and was barely aware of it.  Ten minutes later I wandered into the kitchen to get a soda from the refrigerator.  Sally lay unconscious on the floor.  I was angry, disdainful.  I decided to leave her there to sleep it off.  I stepped over her into a huge and growing pool of blood.  It covered half the kitchen floor. ‘Oh no!  Sally!  What have you done?’”

Carle describes his interrogation of “CAPTUS,” whom he knew to have been kidnapped and who he knew was being held outside of any legal system.  Carle repeatedly threatened him with harsh treatment by others.

The interrogation was helped by Carle’s preference for humane tactics, even while threatening others, as well as by his openness to recognizing the man’s innocence.  But it was hampered by the CIA’s incredibly incompetent failure to get Carle access to the documents that had been seized along with his victim, and by the CIA’s refusal to consider the possibility that CAPTUS was not who they thought he was.

Carle took a don’t ask / don’t tell approach to the question of whether CAPTUS was being tortured in between periods of interrogation at the first location where Carle interrogated him.  Carle did ask, but the CIA blacked out in the book whatever he tried to tell us, about what was done to CAPTUS upon relocating him to a different lawless prison.

When Bush gave a speech pretending to oppose torture, Carle “found this speech infuriating.  I knew what we were doing; our actions soiled what it meant to be an American, perverted our oath, and betrayed our flag.  Lawyers could argue our actions were legal.  But I had lived what we were doing.  I knew otherwise.”

Did Carle quit and go public?  Of course not.

Did any of his colleagues?  Of course not.

Carle sat in on meetings discussing blatantly false propaganda aimed at launching the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  He saw through the lies.

Did he then, in that moment when a million lives could be spared, quit and go public?  Of course not.

Carle concludes his book by opposing prosecuting anyone involved in the crimes he was involved in.  “Punishment metes out no justice,” he claims.

Justice, these days, is presumably measured in book sales.

Brilliant and humane playwright Karen Malpede has produced another play that grabs this country by the lapels, shakes it, caresses its cheek, and kicks its ass.  The play is called “Another Life” and the life it leaves me thinking about is the life of our dreams.

The play is not so much a national nightmare or a national fantasy as a surreal reproduction of the mixture of horrors and hopes that most dreaming is: the most gruesome and graphic and taboo of our collective fears without exactly the fear itself, the deepest of longings and desires in immediate and mundane form but recognizable as revelations upon awakened reflection.

I’ve read “Another Life” as military commissions have just been officially reinstated and the Pentagon has just defended forcing a lawlessly imprisoned young man to stand naked for review each day.  The broken poetic dialogue of the half dozen characters of “Another Life” draw me in as they present  what a decade ago would have been sick ravings and are today the understandable concerns lurking in the shadows of all of our minds: torture, terrorism, sadism, racism and religious bigotry, the sufferings of the victims and of the victimizers, mistaken identities, exposure, surveillance, humiliation.  Scene 1 ends with these words, which make perfect sense when arrived at:

“And, now, he’s going to talk.  No more of this.  Mr. Nice guy.  Picked her up.  We know who you are.  We know what you did.  You want to see your wife, again, your kids.  You want your wife raped, just like that, blood on the floor, you want to watch.  You want your daughter deflowered.  You want your virgins in the sky.  We’ll have your eyeballs in highballs.  We’ll have your cock in plastic wrap.  A stick up your arse.  The gloves are coming off.  I’ll crush your balls in the palm of my hands.  Eat them like olives.  You’ll give me what I need.  Believe me.  You’ll tell us what we want to know.”

This is a scene in a home, where foreign relations and family relations have merged, and things Dick Cheney or John Yoo once said have seeped into the air.  An old man has become the Global War of Terrorism and Erik Prince and Grandpa, while a young man is all things decent in public life going bad and possibly recovering and bearing a strong resemblance to Ali Soufan, and a young woman is the U.S. public becoming an accomplice and a whistleblower as well as a widow and a lover.  Her tragic loss, the loss of 9-11, is depicted in scenes in which she speaks with her dead fiancé.

And as one reads this it begins to sink in that every single person complicit in and resisting the horrors of our age has personal pleasures and goals and losses and deep fears.  Meanwhile a man in the coffee shop where I’m reading is ignoring a table full of toddlers, one of whom is screaming in fury, so that he can persuade a waitress who probably doesn’t care that the United States needs to send the Marines into Libya.

A torture victim in “Another Life” mutates into an “illegal” in the Homeland and from there into a slave, traveling back through the history it seems of our national criminal record.  Then real, named torture victims enter the drama: al Libi, perfectly named for the alibi he provides warmakers; Zubaydah; and Emad Khudayir Shahuth Al-Janabi.  The dead fiance remains in the September 10th mentality, the straightman to our national mental health crisis.  And the play looks both backward and forward, like a dream, as the men in this coffee shop talk a little too loudly about the failure of Alcoholics Anonymous to help them find jobs, and I wander outside.

And there’s Thomas Jefferson staring at me from a statue, a guy who sent war ships to Tripoli when not enslaving human beings at his house on that hill, promoting the genocide of the native people of North America, or fighting wars for democracy.  And there’s not a single thing a president could do today that anyone would punish him for, the accountability groups of the Bad Illiterate President Era are down to about 8 active members nationwide, and Chris Hedges says we’re all Easter Island on a course for catastrophe.  But that’s only if we fail to change course.  And if feeling in our bones the course we are on will help us change it, we can be grateful that Karen Malpede keeps writing.

If you’ve wanted to be part of a powerful effort to bring Bush-era officials to justice for their crimes, now is your chance. We’ve joined a national effort to reach out to the people of Spain, whose courts are considering prosecuting six of Bush’s lawyers under international law. Our campaign includes an open letter and ads in prominent Spanish newspapers and billboards.

Even though the Obama administration has been working hard behind the scenes to stop this, our friends at the Center for Constitutional Rights have already submitted proof to the Spanish courts that our government is not taking action under international law and treaties. Now is our chance – we can keep the wheels of justice turning by doing people-to-people diplomacy now.

Here’s what you do: Read and sign the letter to the Spanish people at http://rootsaction.org

WarIsACrime.org’s name is behind it.  The letter will go to the Spanish embassy and consulates across the country on Monday – Valentine’s Day.  We’ll also bring Spanish officials flowers and invite the media.  You can join us in these events.  Get details at http://rootsaction.org

*****

To the people of Spain

From the people of the United States of America

We are writing to thank you and to ask for your support as your courts consider cases to bring American officials to justice for the crime of torture.  A Spanish judge, acting under international law, will soon decide whether to investigate US officials’ roles in authorizing torture. We hope you agree that such cases must go forward, despite pressure from the Obama administration to drop them.

The organizations signing this letter represent hundreds of thousands in the American public who believe the US government must be held to the same rule of law as other countries. We are profoundly disappointed that our own government refuses to prosecute former officials, despite open admissions and government documents showing that they approved torture.

It will take a public show of support for the case to withstand pressures from Washington.  WikiLeaks cables show the extremes to which U.S. officials have gone to thwart any attempt by Spain or other countries to uphold justice.  We applaud the courage shown by Spanish officials who insist on giving priority to the rule of law.

Despite earlier assertions by President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder that waterboarding is torture, former President George W. Bush publicly stated three times last year that he authorized waterboarding and added proudly that he would do it again.  In a TV interview aired on November 8, Bush said he considered waterboarding legal “because the lawyer said it was legal.”  Waterboarding and other forms of torture were banned by the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, ratified by the United States in 1994.

If international law is to serve any useful purpose, other countries must condemn violations “by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment,” in the words of the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg.

We sincerely hope that the citizens of Spain and its judiciary will dispel the notion that any country is above the law.

Signed,
Code Pink Women for Peace, High Road for Human Rights, Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, National Accountability Action Network, National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance, Pax Christi USA, Progressive Democrats of America, Psychologists for Social Responsibility, Robert Jackson Steering Committee, RootsAction.org, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Tackling Torture at the Top Committee of Women Against Military Madness, Veterans for Peace, Voters for Peace, War Criminals Watch, WarIsACrime.org, WeThePeopleNow.org, and World Can’t Wait.

Along with:
Amnesty International USA, Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Council for the National Interest, Democrats.com, Fellowship on Reconciliation, United for Peace and Justice, Velvet Revolution, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, War Resisters League, and Witness Against Torture.

http://rootsaction.org

*****

A la gente de España, de la gente de los EEUU

Escribimos para agradecerles y para solicitar su apoyo mientras sus cortes consideran procesos contra oficiales norteamericanos por el crimen de haber autorizado la tortura. Conforme con la ley internacional, un juez español pronto decidirá si va a investigar la complicidad de oficiales estadounidenses en tal autorización. Esperamos que Uds. estén de acuerdo que estos casos deben seguir, pese a  las presiones por la administración de Obama para abandonarlos.

Las organizaciones que firman abajo representan a cientos de miles de personas en los EEUU que creen que el gobierno estadounidense debe obedecer las mismas leyes como otro paises. Sentimos profundamente desanimados que nuestro gobierno rehusa procesar a los ex-oficiales aunque sus plenas declaraciones y los documentos gubernamentales manifiestan que autorizaron la tortura.

Se requiere una amplia y pública manifestación en favor del caso para resistir las presiones desde Washington.  Los cables de WikiLeaks demuestran el afán vehemente de los oficiales estadounidenses para prevenir cualquier intento por España y otros países para sostener la justicia. Aplaudimos el coraje de los oficiales españoles que insisten en defender el estado de derecho.

Pese a las anteriores afirmaciones del Presidente Barack Obama y del Procurador General Eric Holder que el “waterboarding” (ahogo simulado) es tortura, el ex-presidente George W. Bush dijo públicamente  tres veces el año pasado que autorizó el waterboarding y añadió orgullosamente que lo haría de nuevo. En una entrevista transmitida en televisión el 8 de nov., dijo Bush que consideró el waterboarding legal “porque asi dijo el abogado.” El waterboarding y otros métodos de tortura se abolieron por  la Convención de las Naciones Unidas Contra Tortura y Otros Tratamientos y  Castigos Crueles, Inhumanos, y Degradantes, ratificada por los EEUU en 1994.

Para que la ley internacional tenga alguna eficacia, los otros países deben condenar las violaciones “por otras naciones, incluyendo aquellos que ahora juzgan,” según las palabras del acusador estadounidense en Nuremberg.

Esperamos sinceramente que los ciudadanos y la magistratura de España  refuten la idea que cualquier país puede violar la ley.

En solidaridad,

Code Pink Women for Peace, High Road for Human Rights, Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, National Accountability Action Network, National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance, Pax Christi USA, Progressive Democrats of America, Psychologists for Social Responsibility, Robert Jackson Steering Committee, RootsAction.org, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Tackling Torture at the Top Committee of Women Against Military Madness, Veterans for Peace, Voters for Peace, War Criminals Watch, WarIsACrime.org, WeThePeopleNow.org, and World Can’t Wait.

Along with:
Amnesty International USA, Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Council for the National Interest, Democrats.com, Fellowship on Reconciliation, United for Peace and Justice, Velvet Revolution, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, War Resisters League, and Witness Against Torture.

It’s quite a pleasure to spend a morning sitting in Charlottesville, Va., where all the bookstores display thrillers by local boy John Grisham, and read a thriller as good or better than any of Grisham’s and written by one of us — a blogger who supports what is now a strictly leftwing concept: the rule of law.

"Inside Out" by Barry Eisler is written, as are Grisham’s novels, like a movie, complete with gratuitous sex interest and predictable plot twists. The illumination it shines on the nature of torture and the politics of torture could be removed. The political analysis of the last 50 pages could be deleted. And 90 percent of the book could be turned into a mindless Hollywood thriller.

But the insights into the emotions of the characters come from the author’s honest assessment of torture, murder, and what these things do to the torturers and the murderers. There is plenty of machismo and stupidity and narrow vision in the characters in this book, but none in the writing of its author. The plot imagines, plausibly enough, that the CIA’s torture video tapes have been stolen, not destroyed. What follows from that premise is likely enough, although manipulated in the direction of allowing the fate of the universe to come down to fist fights.

For an anti-torture novel, the protagonists seem at first to be improbable choices. There are no victims here and no opponents of torture, no lawyers and no journalists — just the rather jarring practice of naming the characters with the real names of progressive bloggers. There is, however, on sharp display, the process through which participants in the system and on its edges are corrupted — those who might become whistleblowers or might, on the contrary, sell their souls.

There’s something else that gives the author insight into just that sort of character, something explicitly spelled out in the analysis that creeps into the closing chapters: fatalistic, nihilistic, spectatorship. The lesson of this book is not that we are farther gone down the road to fascism than we thought and need to pull ourselves together quickly with greater sacrifices. The lesson is that we’re too far gone. It is too late. All is hopeless. And if the narrative didn’t make this as clear as a brick to the forehead, the author spells it out in a 48-word end note.

The premise of the novel is that the American public would object to the practices of torture long documented with the written word if videos were released. But this book seems to assume that Americans will no more react to a book about the videos than they have to written descriptions of the torture. That may very well be true. But can Eisler really have written this book without even a glimmer of a spark somewhere deep down inside him telling him it just might make a little bit of difference?

Maybe he did. But that doesn’t mean we have to agree. That doesn’t mean that when we persuade our torture-supporting friends to read "Inside Out" we shouldn’t hold out the possibility that it might do some good. None of Eisler’s characters accept each other’s wisdom or desires or, of that matter, orders delivered with a gun to their head. Why should we? The wisdom to understand the severe corruption of the current moment still falls short of the wisdom to see that past moments of the same sort have never lasted forever. Whether we can observe people as well as Eisler does or not, we can know better than to believe that our responsibility stops at observation.