More on Torture

ignatius is so hostile to the idea of american exceptionalism that he thinks it's okay when we act like a third-world country. he doesn't deserve to live here.

Joe
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What you and Ignatius don't seem to get or even consider is that its probably a GOOD THING if the CIA is now more deliberative when they decide to interrogate a subject. Or do you not believe in the Constitution? And when Ignatius says President Obama can't have it both ways I am thinking both he and you should take a look in the mirror. You can not on the one hand say you believe in the Consitution and on the other hand say you believe torture is warranted in any circumstance because it would abrogate our responsibilities to the Conventions Against Torture which as a treaty is covered under the Constitution. There is sufficient evidence out now that the CIA knew what they were doing was wrong no matter how many ass covering memos they requested and recieved from the Bush administration. It would be nice if you Joe would finally speak truth to power and express that if there are CIA agents who are upset that they can no longer torture then perhaps they are in the wrong MFing business.
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And then there is this
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXCT7-j7HiU
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I am sure the CIA agents in the audience were just "acting" though right?
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One last thing that hasn't been addressed. The very reason why we know thst we tortured these people is because Bush was so intent on doing something institutionally that he knew was illegal and he was forced into covering the the people who he ordered to carry out these crimes. I am not so naive to believe there aren't still black ops going on that people never know about. However when you try to make torture a norm this is what will happen and should happen.

as far as what it "accomplished", the so-called "plot" that waterboarding KSM "foiled" was broken up a year before KSM was captured! what idiot would believe such a thing? david ignatius.

oh, and here's a link from an actual news source

The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist

and the ignatiuses and kleins of the world applaud, or at leat 'keep walking'. disgusting

Keep your head down. Duck the assignments that carry political risk.
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Horse$hi^!!!
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Deciding whether to waterboard someone 183 times or if 182 is sufficient is not a question of "political risk". It's a quetion of sociopathy. The lesson is that if your behavior is likely to horrify 80% of the people who hear about it, you probably shouldn't do it.
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Fortunately I don't think most actual CIA operatives are nearly as monstrous as Dave Ignatius is arguing that they need to be. Torture is not a political question. And as has been said before, if agents don't need to worry about what possible repurcussions their actions might have, then there's nothing to stop them from the worst possible sorts of abuses. Free rein is NOT good for our security.

It's such a weird, weird world in the Village.
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It is somehow a bad thing that CIA officials will be unwilling to engage in illegal, immoral acts if ordered to do so by their superiors.
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But it's not just that it's somehow a bad thing--it's that it is self-evidently the case that it is important to CIA morale that they not have to worry if they commit "extra-legal" acts.

the CIA wants us to believe that its use of torture was a limited and isolated phenomenon.
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nevertheless, the disclosure of this "limited and isolated" phenomenon is somehow affecting the operation of the entire CIA organization.
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of course, this makes no sense -- and the real question is why are people like Klein and Ignatius so intent on ensuring that the torturers are not held responsible for their crimes? Could it be that JK and DI are protecting people responsible for crimes against humanity because they are friends and/or sources?

It seems to me that David Ignatius, who knows a thing or two about the clandestine service, is precisely right about the impact of the torture memos on the CIA.
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lets see now. Obama releases a few Justice Department memos exploring the legal justification of the use of torture by the United States government. At the same time, the Senate Armed Services committee is about to publish a massively detailed report on the CIA's torture operation. But the reason for the morale problem at the CIA is the legal memos.....
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at this point, the question is whether Klein is on someone's payroll, or simply advancing a phony agenda for other reasons....

Could it be that JK and DI are protecting people responsible for crimes against humanity because they are friends and/or sources?
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plukasiak,
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Bingo! By definition, their "friends" would never do anything morally, legally or ethically questionable without a good reason.
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Whatever that reason might be . . .

Very good blog post Joe Klein. You are spot on in identifying Obama's actions as totally shutting down our very important CIA at a critical time in history.
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Hopefully, we will not be attacked again as a result. I however, will not be surprised in the least with Obama's actions to date on this matter as well as his appeasement foreign policy tactics.

You are spot on in identifying Obama's actions as totally shutting down our very important CIA at a critical time in history.
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Exactly WHAT has President Obama "totally shut down", Rusty??
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By "appeasement foreign policy tactics", I assume you believe we should still be starting fights with ANYONE/EVERYONE who doesn't think like we do and agree with us?
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EXACTLY how much "personal" skin have you ever had in this country's foreign policy game, Rusty?

This is bizzaro America. The victims are the people who tortured? The victims are those who crafted the policy? The moral/ethical sewer of the last 8 years will take a long time to crawl out of.

Another quesion is did the CIA torture BEFORE the Bybee memo?
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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/04/levin-torture-interrogation-senate-report.html

Another quesion is did the CIA torture BEFORE the Bybee memo?
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sgwhite,
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Yes. This has been another episode of SATSQ.

Maybe if "shadow warriors" had slow-rolled on interrogations in the first place, there wouldn't be any interrogation memos whose release would be so damaging to morale. They asked for the job because they liked it,for the power because they wanted it, and morale is damaged now because it all seems not everybody shared their opinions on what was necessary for god and country. Plenty of people could have told them where this was heading a long time ago. Plenty did, but I guess they weren't patriots.

Ignatius sounds like Jack Nicholson.

Forgive my stupidity if I missed something in the article, but the main thesis seems to me to be that because of the release of memos justifying illegal and inhumane treatment of people during interrogation, CIA operatives are now reluctant to engage in legal, humane interrogation of subjects. Even so far as pocket litter and examination of cell phones. I missed any points presented that logically explain the concern. On a 1-10 BS scale, this is about a 7 or 8. Not off the chart, but not helpful, either.

Ignatius writes, with Klein's strong approval:
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"Put yourself in the shoes of the people who were asked to interrogate al- Qaeda prisoners back in 2002. One former officer told me he declined the job, not because he thought the program was wrong, but because he knew it would blow up."
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By his imprimatur of "precisely right", Klein is saying that, like Ignatius, he can accomplish the feat of putting himself in the shoes of that officer. He can easily imagine declining to waterboard a man who started out half-insane for the 70th, 80th, 90th time - not because he thought it was wrong, but out of a patriotic concern for his own skin.
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So Ignatius and Klein don't think torture is wrong. They don't think the 70th, 80th, 90th, 180th waterboarding after all the previous ones came up dry is wrong. Or at least, not so obviously wrong that they can't feel deep empathy for a guy who is sure it's the right thing to do, that the country is placed in the gravest danger by a failure to do it, and that he'd rather subject the country to that grave danger than endanger his personal career.
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No one with a simulacrum of conscience could imagine himself in that guy's shoes, because the simulacrum would warn him the very first time, to say nothing of the 160th, that this was torture, this was inhuman and this was wrong. Even were he convinced the act was somehow both necessary and permissible, no one with a scintilla of patriotism would prefer his own security to his country's.
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But to Joe and David, these are the heroes to whom we owe undying solicitude. To the tortured, we owe nothing, not even the prospect that anyone will hesitate to torture again when the next President orders it.

I thought the argument against following the constitution and the law was there were too many progressive policies on the table that might be slowed down. Now we learn it is really because we may upset the moral of people who presumably are hired to uphold the law.
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This things gets wackier all the time.
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How about this as a solution? Why don't people in the government simply not break the law so as to avoid shocks to their moral in the future?
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Let's see the evidence that torture actually works and then explain why using it justifies breaking the laws we have sworn to uphold. In the process explain why the objectives obtained by torture could not be obtained in any other way.

I guess we'll never see the article titled "How Bush/Cheney's Decision Hurt the CIA."
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Right now I feel a bit like the animals at the end of Animal Farm. The Beltway insiders knew all along that "rule of law" was an empty slogan. They never took it seriously, and now they are genuinely surprised that the hicks believed it meant something.

Mr. Klein, I understand your concern however I think you are giving Mr. Ignatius' reasoning too much credit. To whit:
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The lesson for younger officers is obvious: Keep your head down. Duck the assignments that carry political risk.
Stay away from a counterterrorism program that has become a career hazard.
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I understand that would be a possible, perhaps even likely, reaction by many. However, the potential longterm negative fallout is predicated on POTUS and his administration leaving it at that. The President has shown a tremendous talent for managing human relationships. I expect that he is keenly aware of the potential consequences in the field of his choice to release the memos. I would be shocked if he did not continue to carefully manage and ameliorate the damage on a very personal, even individual, level. He'll lose some but not all is my prediction. The recent Langley rah-rah was an opening strategy, not the entire game plan.
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Obama was deferring to the attorney general whether to prosecute "those who formulated those
legal decisions," whatever that means.
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There is no confusion about what POTUS meant. The author is engaging in hyperbole. Obama's aim, and I believe DOJ's aim, will be at those legal Machiavellian's who distorted the research data to justify their ends. Those implementing the orders in the field are safe and I believe both he and the DOJ will continue to emphasize that message.
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Obama seems to think he can have it both ways -- authorizing an unprecedented disclosure of CIA operational
methods and at the same time galvanizing a clandestine service whose best days, he told them Monday, are "yet to
come." Life doesn't work that way...
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His conclusion is based on a false argument. No, that would NOT be a typical outcome BUT I don't have any reason to believe that POTUS is that simpleminded. This is not a one shot deal. A relentless patient approach is his watchword. I'll buy the first premise, that he has made such an authorization. I'm not a CIA historian so I don't know if it is entirely unprecedented. However, it is entirely reasonable to expect that POTUS can shift, remobilize, and, yes, galvanize his clandestine troops. If you assume Obama will take no other action to build a stronger, effective relationship with CIA personnel then you choose to ignore one of his strongest, most effective skills. Given his past experience in the urban trenches as a professional organizer, the effectiveness of his campaign, and the adroit manner he has thus far demonstrated in the foreign relations arena, how could one make that assumption?
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IMHO, this issue will run its course and I predict that one year from now concerns about poor morale and covert operators choosing to be less than effective due to political concerns will be nearly non-existent. The focus will be consumed by investigations of the real culprits in the Executive Branch of he who shall not be named.
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Comments welcome.

Dang. I hate HTML codes. S/B italics closed after "Life doesn't work that way." Forgive me.

Shorter Ignatius: The CIA needs a free hand to carry out misguided policies that ultimately harm America's national interests.
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The fact that the U.S. trained and supported Guatemalan death squads is a blot on our moral conscience. But in Ignatius' twisted view, ending that support counts as a "chilling effect."

"You can not on the one hand say you believe in the Consitution and on the other hand say you believe torture is warranted in any circumstance because it would abrogate our responsibilities to the Conventions Against Torture which as a treaty is covered under the Constitution."
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"I am sure the CIA agents in the audience were just "acting" though right?".
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It's not difficult for authoritarian followers to hold an ideal in their heads while, at the same time, violate that ideal in the act of following authority. It's actually a feature, not a bug (see: Republicans). Those rank-and-file CIA employees who were thrilled to see Obama turn over the rock they've been living under are not part of the power-elite that Klein and Ignatius worship. Those people are at least partially represented by the smaller group of clandestine officers who were willing to follow their orders no matter how pointless and sadistic. Get the picture?

But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."
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http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/66622.html
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Just in case anyone wonders why I was always adamant that McCain's embrace of Randy Scheunmann as a foreign policy guru was the number one reason to oppose his candidacy.
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related:
http://phd9.blogspot.com/2008/07/must-publicize.html

Joe Klein asserts: "David Ignatius, who knows a thing or two about the clandestine service, ...." About as much as members of the Washington press corps know about the United States military and military operations, to wit: nothing.