Hamid Karzai, Najibullah’s Ghost, and the Gold of Bactria

Do not be naïve about what you are facing. They will bring a destruction you cannot imagine.

In the opinion of America’s counterinsurgency boffins, there are no bad doctrines—only bad clients.

Unsurprisingly, the Obama administration’s response to the rather dire situation in Afghanistan is to blame ineffectual and corrupt governance, rather than NATO’s hitherto halfassed and under-manned campaign against the ferocious Taliban.

The United States’ desire to give Hamid Karzai the boot has been unambiguously conveyed and much will no doubt be made of the electoral shenanigans Karzai apparently committed in the recent presidential elections.

Whether the United States really believes that its favored candidate, Abdullah Abdullah, a Tajik, will emerge as savior of the NATO enterprise, or Karzai is simply being eased out so Gulbuddin Hekmatyar or someone like him can be lured out of the insurgency and into the central government as the indispensable Pashtun strongman remains to be seen.

In any case, I don’t share the easy contempt and condescension so many observers express for Hamid Karzai, the “mayor of Kabul”.

Karzai’s father, a leading Pashtun political figure, was murdered by Taliban assassins when he started to organize opposition to Taliban rule. After 9/11, Karzai recklessly entered Afghanistan with a handful of followers; instead of being welcomed with flowers, collecting a swelling train of followers, and leading a triumphal procession into Kabul a la Napoleon's 100 days, he became the target of a Taliban manhunt and barely and ignominiously escaped back into Pakistan.

On his second trip in, Karzai was under direct U.S. sponsorship. In a moment of what he probably considers bizarre symbolism, Karzai narrowly escaped death from a misdirected American airstrike while talking face to face with his CIA liaison.

As president, Karzai’s continual efforts to slip the U.S. leash, build alliances with warlords and tribes outside the core of the Taliban, and ignore the diktats of the ever-infallible Zalmay Khalilzad—the Afghan-borne supremo of America's Central Asian foreign policy who midwifed the creation of compromised, unpopular bourgeois pro-U.S. regimes from Baghdad to Islamabad and reportedly covets the presidency of Afghanistan for himself—seemed to reflect an understanding that a regime that relied on U.S. backing rather than local power had no future.

As he stands revealed as a superfluous great power client and embodiment of unpalatable on-the-ground realities, Karzai probably also remembers the fate of Muhammad Najibullah, who was the last president of the Soviet-backed Republic of Afghanistan.

When the Taliban entered Kabul in 1996, they dragged Najibullah from UNICEF compound where he had taken refuge three years before when a deal to extract him from Kabul collapsed, tortured him for hours with the special ingenuity that Afghani warlords apparently can always bring to bear on such situations, and hung his castrated corpse from a lamppost.

Najibullah is routinely reviled as a despot and a torturer.

Like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Najibullah stood for secularist, socialist, and pro-Soviet policies that suppressed Islamic fundamentalism with extreme violence and a certain degree of success. Like Hussein, Najibullah was destroyed by the United States, with rather grisly consequences for his nation.

Najibullah was well-educated, and perfected his English during his years of confinement in Kabul. A career UNICEF official, Alan Brady, came to Kabul just before the city fell to the Taliban, and wrote an eerie, evocative account in the Virginia Quarterly Review of a call he paid on the fallen dictator in 1995 shortly before his death.

During the two years I was working in Afghanistan, I had become fascinated by the story of Najibullah. Here was a man of great intellect, educated as a doctor and pediatrician to “do no harm.” He was at the same time a political activist who received training in the Soviet Union. In 1981, he returned to Afghanistan to head the KHAD, a Secret Police organization notorious for torture and executions. Five years later, he emerged as president of his country during times of vicious conflict. Undoubtedly, there was blood on his hands.

Yet many people described him as enlightened. My colleagues who had worked with the Najibullah government from 1986 to 1992 spoke highly of his leadership and support for the country’s social development, especially public health and education. It was an anomaly, throughout the 1980s, that the West was empowering mujahideen groups who were burning down schools, banning girls from being educated, trying to cut women off from basic opportunities or even health care, and preaching ideologies of xenophobic hatred. The CIA and others did all of this in the interest of bringing down a government that, in the areas of social development at least, stood for secular and progressive Western values. The fight against Communism made for many strange bedfellows for more than four decades, perhaps nowhere more so than in Afghanistan.

For a long time, I had harbored a curiosity about Najibullah and what changes might have occurred in him as he sat in that UN house in Kabul with nothing to do except read and reflect. Did such reflection give him second thoughts about the life he had lived and the things he had done? …
…
To say that this man was pleased and charmed by our arrival would be a grave understatement…Before I knew it, each time he spoke, he would start with the words, “dear Alan.” Over many cups of tea, sitting together on the couch, sharing chocolates from the newly opened box on the table before us, he spoke honestly and freely about what he had been going through, and then his complaints about the UN and how it had betrayed him.

At last I got up the courage to ask the questions that were on my mind. It is not an easy subject to broach, this question of his role as head of KHAD and the blood he must have had on his hands…

I could see the look in his eye change as my question sank in… Like the flexing of a relaxed muscle, the power and charisma at the core of this man reappeared in sharp relief, and with a loud shout of “NO!” his fist came down with an explosive sound on the table before us, sending teacups flying upward.
…
“Dear Alan,” he was saying. “Do not be naïve about what you are facing. They will bring a destruction you cannot imagine.”

His message to me, at our New Year meeting in 1995, was one of no regrets for whatever he had done to stand against the Islamists. He was absolutely clear about that; he would do it again.

In the quiet of that evening, he laid out for us what the lines of conflict would be, in a world where Communism was finished. “After the fall of the Berlin Wall,” he said, “I wrote to Bush. I explained all of this, I told him that the Reds are finished, and the enemy of the United States is no longer the Reds, it is the Greens. I offered to work together with him.”

The “green” that Najibullah was referring to was the green flag of the Islamists, and the Bush he wrote to was the first President Bush—George H.W. He never received an answer.

The secularist Najibullah was probably responsible for saving the “Bactrian Hoard”-- a collection of 20,000 gold artifacts from Afghanistan's pre-Islamic past that dated to before the Common Era and symbolized the country's traditional role as the crossroads of Central Asia--from looters and the Taliban.

The trove was discovered by Soviet archaeologists in six burial mounds of Bactrian nomads in northern Afghanistan.

When the Taliban approached and Afghanistan fell into chaos, Najibullah apparently arranged for the treasures to be removed from the Kabul Museum and hidden in the vaults of the National Bank of Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai eventually assisted in effecting their rediscovery.

Wikipedia tells the story:

The doors of the vault were locked with seven keys which were distributed to trusted individuals who were based abroad. The vault, which could only be opened if all the keys were available, provided security to the Bactrian Hoard, protecting it on numerous occasions from attempts by the Taliban to steal it. During the invasion of Afghanistan by American forces, the Taliban, who were unaware that all seven keys were needed in order to open the vault, made one last attempt to get their hands on the treasure by planting bombs on the vault door. Before they could detonate the bombs, American troops arrived at the central bank and the militants were forced to flee…

In 2003, after the Taliban was successfully defeated, the new government wanted to open the vault, but the keyholders (called "tawadars") could not be summoned because their names were purposefully unknown. Hamid Karzai had to issue a decree authorizing the attorney general to go ahead with safecracking. But in time, the seven key-holders were successfully assembled and the vault opened.

An exhibition of the Bactrian artifacts is currently touring the United States. It will finish up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on September 20, 2009.

National Geographic’s website has further information and a photo gallery of some of the artifacts.

As Karzai is surrounded by his American advisers and Afghan enemies, I expect he also reflects on the fate of Afghanistan’s previous secular ruler, the pervasive violence, destruction, and intolerance that seem impossible to escape, worries about the non-stop battering that his nation and the Afghan people and society are enduring, and wonders what kind of legacy he might leave his country.

Image of Bactrian artifact from website of Embassy of Afghanistan, Washington

Torture, Inc.

America’s torture dilemma boils down to three letters: CAT.


They stand for the "United Nations Convention Against Torture", a treaty that the United States ratified and made part of U.S. law under Statute 2340.


Under U.S. law, the United States is obligated to prosecute its torturers. The door is also open for other nations to detain and prosecute alleged torturers under the principle of "universal jurisdiction".


Certain do-gooder states such as Spain have even asserted their right to try torturers in their courts even if offenses weren’t committed against their own nationals.


That’s awkward.


Because the United States did, by its own admission, torture during the first administration of George W. Bush.


And the people we tortured-especially the so-called 20th hijacker, Mohammed al-Qahtani--would appear to have the right to their day in court.


This has created some embarrassment for the Obama administration as well.


The U.S. detention system has produced significant suffering, both through design and abuse, for foreigners detained during the Global War on Terror at Guantanamo, camps and jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in black site prisons around the world. Physical and psychological maltreatment were (and apparently still are) employed as a "control measures" to render detainees cowed and compliant; to soften them up for interrogation; and during the interrogation process itself.


Sometimes the methods, crudely and zealously applied with the tacit or express approval of superiors, resulted in the death of detainees.


Fortunately for the guards and interrogators who screamed, slapped, punched, kicked, clubbed, and pepper-sprayed their way through the Global War on Terror, CAT exempts ordinary brutality-- a.k.a. "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment"-from its purview.


However, what the United States did to high-value al-Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo rose to a higher level: torture.


CAT defines torture as "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession".


Under the euphemism of "enhanced interrogation techniques", U.S. government behavioral scientists working under General Geoffrey Miller at Guantanamo developed and applied a program of intense physical and psychological coercion, fully documented by meeting minutes and logs and acknowledged by Bush administration in the intensive efforts by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel to provide a legal color to the proceedings.


A statement by a CIA functionary during one of the meetings called to design the program gives an idea of where things were headed:


If the detainee dies you’re doing it wrong…Any of the techniques that lie on the harshest end of this spectrum must be performed by a highly trained individual. Medical personnel should be present to treat any possible accidents. (Counter Resistance Strategy Meeting Minutes, October 2, 2002 cited in Guantanamo and Its Aftermath, Human Rights Center, University of California, Berkeley, Nov. 2008 Appendix A)


Mohammed al-Qahtani was apparently the guinea pig for this program. The United States totally went to town on this guy and gave him 40 days of hell.


A 2007 article by Steven Miles in the American Journal of Bioethics drew upon interrogation logs to describe what was done to Qahtani during five weeks of interrogations in December 2002 and January 2003. It should be quoted at length to give a full idea of the program, in terms of its severity and also its systematic and planned character.


Connoisseurs of bureaucratic mil-speak will note the creation of standardized DoD gobbledy-gook (Pride Down; Ego Down) to describe the psychological strategies that, if successful, would presumably be applied to conduct subsequent interrogations (and advance careers) inside the American Gulag.

The Interrogation of Prisoner 063
…
According to the Army investigation, the log covers a period in the middle of al-Qahtani’s interrogation that began in the summer of 2002 and continued into 2003. For eleven days, beginning November 23, al-Qahtani was interrogated for twenty hours each day by interrogators working in shifts. He was kept awake with music, yelling, loud white noise or brief opportunities to stand. He then was subjected to eighty hours of nearly continuous interrogation until what was intended to be a 24-hour recuperation. This recuperation was entirely occupied by a hospitalization for hypothermia that had resulted from deliberately abusive use of an air conditioner. Army investigators reported that al-Qahtani’s body temperature had been cooled to 95 to 97 degrees Fahrenheit (35 to 36.1 degrees Celsius) and that his heart rate had slowed to thirty-five beats per minute.

While hospitalized, his electrolytes were corrected and an ultrasound did not find venous thrombosis as a cause for the swelling of his leg. The prisoner slept through most of the 42-hour hospitalization after which he was hooded, shackled, put on a litter and taken by ambulance to an interrogation room for twelve more days of interrogation, punctuated by a few brief naps. He was then allowed to sleep for four hours before being interrogated for ten more days, except for naps of up to an hour. He was allowed 12 hours of sleep on January 1, but for the next eleven days, the exhausted and increasingly non-communicative prisoner was only allowed naps of one to four hours as he was interrogated. The log ends with a discharge for another sleep period.

Medical Treatment during Interrogation

Clinicians regularly visited the interrogation cell to assess and treat the prisoner. Medics and a female medical representative checked vital signs several times per day; they assessed for dehydration and suggested enemas for constipation or intravenous fluids for dehydration. The prisoner’s hands and feet became swollen as he was restrained in a chair. These extremities were inspected and wrapped by medics and a physician. One entry describes a physician checking for abrasions from sitting in the metal chair for long periods of time.

The doctor said everything was good. Guards, medics and a physician offered palliative medications such as aspirin to treat his swollen feet.

Intravenous fluids were regular administered over the prisoner’s objection. For example, on November 24, the prisoner refused water. A Captain-interrogator advised him that the medic can administer IV [sic: the log’s contraction for intravenous fluids of an unspecified volume is used throughout this article] fluids once the Captain and the Doctor on duty are notified and agree to it. Nine hours later, after taking vital signs, medical personnel administered two bags of intravenous fluids. Later that day, a physician evaluated al-Qahtani in the interrogation room and told him that he could not refuse medications or intravenous fluids, and that he would not be allowed to die.

The next day, interrogators told the prisoner that he would not be allowed to pray if he would not drink water. Neither a medic nor a physician could insert a standard intravenous catheter, so a physician inserted a temporary shunt to allow an intravenous infusion. The restrained prisoner asked to go the bathroom and was given a urinal instead. Thirty minutes later, he was given three and one-half bags of IV [sic]?and he urinated twice in his pants. The next day, the physician came to the interrogation room and checked the restrained prisoner’s swollen extremities and the shunt. The shunt was removed and a soldier told al-Qahtani that he could pray on the floor where he had urinated.

From December 12 to 14, al-Qahtani’s weight went from 119 to 130 pounds (54 to 59 kilograms) after being given six IVs. On December 14, al-Qahtani’s pulse was 42 beats per minute. A physician was consulted by phone and said that operations could continue since there had been no significant change. Al-Qahtani received three more IVs on the December 15 and complained of costophrenic pain. A physician came to the interrogation cell, examined him, made a presumptive diagnosis of kidney stones and instructed the prisoner to take fluids. The next day blood was drawn in the cell.

Psychological Treatment During Interrogation

In October 2002, before the time covered by the log, Army investigators found that dogs were brought to the interrogation room to growl, bark and bare their teeth at al-Qahtani. The investigators noted that a BSCT psychologist witnessed the use of the dog, Zeus, during at least one such instance, an incident deemed properly authorized to exploit individual phobias. FBI agents, however, objected to the use of dogs and withdrew from at least one session in which dogs were used. Major L., a psychologist who chaired the BSCT at Guantanamo, was noted to be present at the start of the interrogation log. On November 27, he suggested putting the prisoner in a swivel chair to prevent him from fixing his eyes on one spot and thereby avoiding the guards. On December 11, al-Qahtani asked to be allowed to sleep in a room other than the one in which he was being fed and interrogated. The log notes that BSCT advised the interrogators that the prisoner was simply trying to gain control and sympathy.

Many psychological approaches or themes were repetitively used. These included: Failure/Worthless, Al Qaeda Falling Apart, Pride Down, Ego Down, Futility, Guilt/Sin Theme (with Evidence/Circumstantial Evidence, etc. Al-Qahtani was shown videotapes entitled Taliban Bodies and Die Terrorist Die. Some scripts aimed at his Islamic identity bore names such as Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, Judgment Day, God’s Mission, and Muslim in America. Al-Qahtani was called Unclean and Mo [for Mohammed]. He was lectured on the true meaning of the Koran, instruction that especially enraged him when done by female soldiers. He was not told, despite asking, that some of the interrogation took place during Ramadan, a time when Moslems have special obligations. He was not allowed to honor prayer times. The Koran was intentionally and disrespectfully placed on a television (an authorized control measure) and a guard intentionally squatted over it while harshly addressing the prisoner.

Transgressions against Islamic and Arab mores for sexual modesty were employed. The prisoner was forced to wear photographs of sexy females and to study sets of such photographs to identify whether various pictures of bikini-clad women were of the same or a different person. He was told that his mother and sister were whores. He was forced to wear a bra, and a woman’s thong was put on his head. He was dressed as a woman and compelled to dance with a male interrogator. He was told that he had homosexual tendencies and that other prisoners knew this. Although continuously monitored, interrogators repeatedly strip-searched him as a control measure. On at least one occasion, he was forced to stand naked with women soldiers present. Female interrogators seductively touched the prisoner under the authorized use of approaches called Invasion of Personal Space and Futility. On one occasion, a female interrogator straddled the prisoner as he was held down on the floor.

Other degrading techniques were logged. His head and beard were shaved to show the dominance of the interrogators. He was made to stand for the United States national anthem. His situation was compared unfavorably to that of banana rats in the camp. He was leashed (a detail omitted in the log but recorded by investigators) and made to stay, come, and bark to elevate his social status up to a dog. He was told to bark like a happy dog at photographs of 9/11 victims and growl at pictures of terrorists. Some psychological routines referred to the 9/11 attacks. He was shown pictures of the attacks, and photographs of victims were affixed to his body. The interrogators held one exorcism (and threatened another) to purge evil Jinns that the disoriented, sleep deprived prisoner claimed were controlling his emotions. The interrogators quizzed him on passages from a book entitled, What makes a Terrorist and Why?, that asserted that people joined terrorist groups for a sense of belonging and that terrorists must dehumanize their victims as a way to avoid feelings of guilt at their crimes.

Yes, that’s torture.


And in 2008 the Bush administration itself let the torture CAT out of the bag:


"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.
…
Detainee Tortured, Says U.S. Official, Bob Woodward, Washington Post, Jan. 14, 2009

The Bush administration had been acutely aware of the legal jeopardy involved, both to the interrogators and to the administration officials-all the way up to the president-who reviewed and authorized the program.


Unwilling to take the political step of withdrawing from the CAT or attempting to repeal its enabling U.S. statute, the Bush administration turned its lawyers loose on the problem, resulting in the notorious memos of 2002.


Beyond asserting a special, protected role for the president of the United States to disregard U.S. law as commander in chief in time of war, the primary purpose of these memos was to raise the bar for the definition of torture-and for legal jeopardy of U.S. personnel-so high it would never be cleared.


The Department of Justice’s Jay Bybee obligingly defined torture as "not the mere infliction of pain or suffering on another, but is instead a step removed. The victim must experience intense pain or suffering of the kind that is equivalent to the pain that would be associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure, or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body function will likely result."


Also, according to the logic of the Department of Justice lawyers, anything an interrogator did still wasn’t torture unless it met the also rather subjective criterion that it was inflicted for the purpose of gratuitous recreational sadism, and not to extract information.


In the words of the Bybee memo:


"…because 2340 requires that a defendant act with the specific intent to inflict severe pain, the infliction of such pain must be the defendant’s precise objective…If the defendant acted knowing that severe pain or suffering was reasonably likely to result from his actions, but no more, he would have acted only with general intent."


"Further, a showing that an individual acted with a good faith belief that his conduct would not produce the result that the law prohibits negates specific intent…A good faith belief need not be a reasonable one." [emph. added]


The clear intent of the Bush administration was to create a definitional muddle that would hamstring any efforts to accuse anybody of torturing, let alone prove it.


Apparently these tortured rationales were unpersuasive to the FBI and significant elements inside the Department of Defense (the CIA and its contractors apparently had fewer qualms), especially since the tormented detainees were apparently producing little in the way of useful intelligence.


During the second Bush administration, the effort to establish "enhanced interrogation techniques" as the official norm for dealing with important detainees apparently collapsed.


The legal mess-and the fear of interrogators and bureaucrats that they could be hailed into court for prosecution on torture charges--remained for the Obama administration to try to clean up.


The Obama administration has, rather commendably, decided to make an effort to repair America’s international standing by officially acknowledging the obvious fact that the United States had tortured-and by promising never to do it again.


However, it does not wish to alienate the U.S. national security apparatus or a sizable portion of the U.S. electorate by handing over Bush administration authorizers or practitioners of torture to courts at home or abroad.


Mr. Qahtani, by the way, is unlikely to obtain his day in court to sue his abusers. He is still under extralegal detention while the FBI works to build a "clean" case that will obtain his conviction without using information obtained or tainted by his torture.


President Obama has refused to endorse an independent truth commission to investigate torture.


On April 16, 2009, the Department of Justice issued a statement indicating that government employees who followed the flawed Bush administration guidelines in good faith had nothing to fear from the Obama Department of Justice.


Quite the contrary, in fact:




Holder also stressed that intelligence community officials who acted reasonably and relied in good faith on authoritative legal advice from the Justice Department that their conduct was lawful, and conformed their conduct to that advice, would not face federal prosecutions for that conduct.


The Attorney General has informed the Central Intelligence Agency that the government would provide legal representation to any employee, at no cost to the employee, in any state or federal judicial or administrative proceeding brought against the employee based on such conduct and would take measures to respond to any proceeding initiated against the employee in any international or foreign tribunal, including appointing counsel to act on the employee’s behalf and asserting any available immunities and other defenses in the proceeding itself.


To the extent permissible under federal law, the government will also indemnify any employee for any monetary judgment or penalty ultimately imposed against him for such conduct and will provide representation in congressional investigations.


"It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department," Holder said.


Attorney General Eric Holder, recently portrayed on the cover of Newsweek magazine standing on a Washington street corner in an attitude of befuddled nobility, has, in the form of a classified report by the CIA’s inspector general, powerful documentation of U.S. torture that he finds difficult to ignore.


Holder would like to prosecute American torturers who exceeded even the Bush guidelines in their mistreatment of detainees.


However, the Obama administration doesn’t even want to go there.


The torturers’ defense would undoubtedly involve an excruciating parsing of the torture memos. This would expose both retired and serving government bureaucrats to embarrassment or worse.


Court proceedings would inevitably involve the presentation of evidence that other national courts might seize upon on the principle of universal jurisdiction, especially if the U.S. courts acquitted (or even worse, the Obama administration pardoned) offenders in an attempt to secure what CAT is specifically designed to preclude: legal impunity for torturers.


The Obama administration is working overtime to pre-empt the possibility of foreign prosecution of American torturers. For the most part, the European countries have been obliging.


Certainly, the German government under Angela Merkel was unwilling to countenance a war crimes indictment against U.S. government and military officials.


In a 2007 decision quashing a war crimes suit filed by Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo victims against Donald Rumsfeld et. al., the Prosecutor General at Germany’s Federal Supreme Court availed himself of the excuse that, although the purpose of the law was to compel war crimes prosecutions when the home jurisdiction declined to do so, the German courts could still decline to pursue the case if they decided ahead of time that they couldn’t convict:


[I]t is necessary to counteract the danger that complainants will seek out certain states as sites of prosecution-like Germany in this case-that have no direct connection with the acts complained of, simply because their criminal law is favorable to international law (so-called forum shopping; Kurth, ZIS 2006, 81, 83; Ambos, NStZ 2006, 434, 435), and in this way force investigative authorities into complicated, but ultimately unsuccessful investigations.


The Spanish government, with the joint approbation of the United States, Israel, and China, is seeking to rein in its National Court, which is investigating 16 cases of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity under the principle of broad "universal jurisdiction" i.e. when no Spanish link exists, including two Guantanamo cases.


However, the universal refusal of national courts to hear war crimes cases against American officials cannot be assumed. There is always the threat of what Jay Bybee referred to as "rogue prosecutors".


And there is the danger that persuasive documentation of actual abuses during interrogations will sway public opinion and the courts in some country to push for indictment of American government officials.


Under these circumstances, it would not appear prudent for the Obama administration to provide carefully-vetted, U.S. government-endorsed evidence of torture that could be used in foreign courts.


Therefore, the White House appears determined to deny foreign courts the hard evidence of actual torture that they would need to conduct meaningful prosecutions.


In CIA Director Panetta’s declaration opposing the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act request for information concerning "enhanced interrogation techniques" or EITs, he makes the awkward but necessary distinction that it was one thing to release the Office of Legal Counsel memos detailing "EIT descriptions in the abstract" but records of actual "EITs as applied" "must continue to be classified TOP SECRET".


The Obama administration has demonstrated that it has no stomach for an emotional and divisive debate that forces it to stand with decency and tortured foreigners and puts it on the wrong side of the national security and sovereignty equation.


The Newsweek article itself, while presenting Eric Holder as a decent and capable Attorney General, clearly communicated the idea that he was out of step with the White House on the torture issue and he would be hung out to dry if he persists on the issue.


In the best "going forward" tradition, the United States will be happy to say that "torture happened".


However, as to "who did what, where and when and to whom", it doesn’t look like the victims-or the American people-will get many answers for now.

Keeping Up With the Wickershams

I have an article in the current print edition of Counterpunch on the Wickersham Commission report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement, under the pen name of Peter Lee.

This article will provide enlightenment to anyone who ever wondered why the abusive apes in Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who were named the “Wickersham Brothers”.

More significantly, this report, prepared eight decades ago for Herbert Hoover by Harvard law professor Zechariah Chafee, the most distinguished guardian of civil rights in the first half of the twentieth century, anticipates and repudiates virtually all of the arguemnts in favor of—and abuses committed under the color of—“enhanced interrogation techniques” or, as they were known back in the Roaring Twenties, “the third degree”.

Chafee identified four reasons why beating people up to get information was a bad idea: false confessions, the corruption of police procedure as “fists trump wits”; the tainting of prosecutions; and the collapse of police reputation in the public eye.

Somewhat prescient, n’est pas?

If the Bush administration held motivations beyond mere retributive atavism, it might have referred to the Wickersham Report—which underlies the current federal protections against self-incrimination in the United States—before it embarked on its ruinous program of “enhanced interrogation techniques” in 2002-2003.

As it is, EIT is a signature Bush policy: dishonest, ineffective, and with catastrophic consequences that will long survive its morally and intellectually obtuse authors.

Typically, the Bush administration spent more mental energy defending the program than it did in its design or execution, first in the reams of bogus legal opinions enshrined as the “torture memos”, and currently with the non-stop spin by ex-Bush officials concerning the purported efficacy of the odious methods.

A good deal of rhetorical gymnastics is devoted to efforts to evade the “torture” label for enhanced interrogation techniques. As far as the impact, consequences, and shortcomings of coercive interrogation, it’s a distinction without a difference. Chafee uses the terms “torture”, “abuse”, and “the third degree” interchangably in his report.

The only reason everybody is loath to apply the description of “torture” to the intense mental and physical duress inflicted on detainees during the Global War on Terror is that the U.S. is a signatory to the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which is specifically designed to remove any and all justifications for giving torturers legal impunity…and Congress, in the reign of Bush I, enshrined the obligation to prosecute U.S. torturers under U.S. Statute 2340, the domestic enabling legislation for the treaty.

The Obamas administration is also determined to obfuscate the issue, because frankness and honesty on the issue would expose U.S. practitioners and sanctioners of torture to prosecution both under U.S. statute and, under the principle of” universal jurisdiction” by other signatories to the U.N. Convention Against Torture and cause no little political heartburn for the current administration.

Coercive interrogation is an issue that’s the subject of a lot of confusion, muddled thinking, and outright dishonesty. Hopefully the article on the Wickersham Commission will help clear things up.

The subscription link for the Counterpunch print edition is here.

The one issue that the Wickersham Report does not address is the favored excuse of those who condone torture: the ticking time bomb defense.

The fact that torture has defused few if any ticking time bombs has not dimmed the ardor of its champions.

I can bring some perspective to this issue from Asia and justify a China Matters link to the debate.

The historical record indicates that motivated and trained terrorists and insurgents anticipate torture and have already developed effective countermeasures to protect their conspiracies and their networks.

As Claude Shannon, the father of information technology, might put it, the problem with torture is the signal to noise ratio.

All that’s needed to degrade the transmission of useful information is to bury it in increasing amounts of useless noise.

China in the 1930s and 1940s witnessed the life-and-death battle between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party.

It seems the only successful organization inside the dysfunctional KMT was Dai Li’s burgeoning and remorselessly efficient secret police empire.

Did Dai Li waterboard?

Certainly.

Among other things.

In 1932 [Harold] Isaacs summarized the Guomindang methods of torture as follows: beatings, pouring kerosene, urine, and feces through the nose of the victim and having the guards drive their knees into the stomach of the victim; strapping prisoners to chairs and giving them intermittent electric charges; placing pieces of bamboo between the fingers, which were then crushed; intermittent dislocation of bone joints; “tiger’s bench”, an ancient Chinese method of torture “by which the ligaments beneath the knee are pulled out”; imprisonment for months in cages where the prisoner must crouch like an animal for weeks or months; single or double pairs of shackles; and mutilating the reproductive organs of both sexes.

From Frederic Wakeman, Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service, University of California Press; Berkeley 2003

Dai Li had an unwavering commitment to torture.

And torture, in its simplest iteration works. Everybody breaks down sooner or later.

But, as the Chinese say, for every tactic there is a countertactic.

In its struggle with Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT, the Chinese Communists figured out how to deal with torture of their operatives, as Wakeman writes:

In fact, most people broke sooner or later under secret police torture. What Communist prisoners appeared especially skillful at doing—perhaps because they were trained ahead of time for the experience of interrogation—was providing false information that would help other members of their organization get away. Often, for instance, a CCP agent being tortured in the zhencha dadui would pretend to reveal the location of the headquarters organization but actually give an address one or two blocks away. Until the secret police caught on to this trick, they would launch a raid against a totally harmless address close enough to the real headquarters to alert the party leadership to seek safer refuge elsewhere.

Apparently energetic application of torture sans scruples, restraint, or any legal hindrance was unable to save the KMT from eventual defeat by the Communists.

One might notice how insidious the red herring defense is.

Once Dai Li’s secret police “caught on to this trick”, they would have to torture beyond the original legend to get at the truth.

But what if the second confession was still a fraud?

And how would they know?

The more Dai Li tortured, the more the noise of additional bogus confessions would overwhelm the unrecognized signal—the truth.

It wasn’t just a problem for Dai Li.

As someone who participated in coercive interrogations of high-value targets inside Iraq told Human Rights Watch:

If [the detainees] were going to lie, they were going to stick with it—
unless it became too harsh and they would break, or whatever. But then
you get into the too-harsh area. . . and that’s when you don’t know if
you’re getting the right information—are they doing it just because of
the pain or the discomfort?

Jeff said he was concerned that harsh tactics were not as effective as more traditional
interrogation methods. When detainees provided information, yielding to abusive or
harsh techniques, it would take time to corroborate and determine whether the
information was accurate, whereas with traditional techniques, interrogators would
usually determine immediately whether the information was accurate.

You know, the time difference of checking out the story, and this and
that. Because if you’re talking to somebody and you break them using a
mental tactic or so forth, you just know when that person breaks. But
from what I’ve seen of harsh physical tactics, where they supposedly
break, that’s harder to tell [whether the information is accurate] because
they’re just saying something to stop the discomfort.

From No Blood, No Foul; Soldiers' Accounts of Detainee Abuse in Iraq, Human Rights Watch, 2006.

Recall that Khalid Sheihk Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times. Potentially, that’s 183 different stories.

KSM’s statements at his Combatant Status Review Tribunal offer little reassurance that the United States got a lot of actionable, real time intel out of him:

…be under questioning so many statement which been some of them I make up stories just location UBL. Where is he? I don’t know. Then he torture me. Then I said yes, he is in this area …KSM CSRT transcript pg. 15

Attention Watchmen Fans!

Brad Bird Has Your Squid!

Watchmen, created by Alan Moore and David Gibbons and issued in twelve installments in 1986-87, is acknowledged to be one of the apex achievements of the graphic novel. An intoxicating combination of detective noir, science fiction, alternate history, and political critique, it was selected in 2005 by Time Magazine as “One of the hundred best English-language novels” (from 1923 -- when Luce-time began—to “the present”).

The property finally received its big-screen/mega-budget due in 2008, courtesy of director and uberfan Zack Snyder, after decades in development hell (and Moore’s refusal to participate in or endorse any filmed version or even accept an on-screen credit). The movie achieved $180 million in box office and awaits its entry into the Valhalla of celluloid profitability upon the release of the 186-minute Blu-Ray/DVD director’s cut on July 21.

Watchmen is a damn good novel. It cleverly deconstructs the superhero genre, depicting its costumed crime fighters—Comedian, Rorschach, Nite Owl, Silk Spectre, and Ozymandias—as marginalized eccentrics who exercise their compulsions for kicks, suffering, self-esteem, fame, and fortune by dressing up in bizarre outfits to dispense vigilante justice.

In one of the book’s sliest moves, the only character with genuine superpowers—the accidentally irradiated time-and-space-shifting immortal blue giant Dr. Manhattan—becomes increasingly alienated both from humanity...and his government-issued costume.

First Dr. Manhattan sheds his headgear, then his trim black uniform—he wins the Vietnam War while swanking around in a Speedo-esque pair of skintight shorts—and finally, in a move that caused the faithful Zack Snyder a certain amount of R-rated heartburn—abandons clothing and modesty altogether for the rest of the book.

Aside from the fate of the universe, Doc Manhattan’s main preoccupation is his love life, a perpetual cycle of abandonment of inexorably aging girlfriends for new, nubile partners to his eternal and eternally on-display full-frontal azure perfection.

On the other hand, the all-too-mortal Nite Owl, his insecurities writhing beneath the ineffectual shield of a middle-aged pot-belly, discovers to his embarrassment that he can only overcome his sexual dysfunction while wearing his borderline-absurd bird costume.

The Snyder movie version eschews this kind of subtlety for a straight reading of the story from the point of view of the book’s narrator, Rorschach, a virtuous psychopath dealing out street justice from beneath a mask made from a swirling swatch of textile that had belonged to the martyred Kitty Genovese (!).

Snyder’s amped-up Mickey-Spillane-goes-to-Toontown approach contains enough violence and sadism (further elevated in the Director’s Cut) to gratify the all-important and hypercritical fanboy base.

However, discriminating viewers may decide that the definitive Watchmen movie, one that captures the subversive essence of the book, was already made in 2004: Brad Bird’s Oscar-winning animated feature The Incredibles.

Perhaps because of a dread Pixar/Disney code of omerta, the only detailed examination of The Incredibles’ debt to Watchmen that I could find in mainstream media outlets was one article by the Baltimore Sun’s movie critic, Michael Sragow.

However, the parallels have been noted and discussed on message boards for years, and acknowledged, albeit very briefly and gingerly, by Watchmen’s co-creator and artist, David Gibbons.

They include:

· Forcible retirement of superheroes by government edict
· A mysterious campaign of extermination against said superheroes
· A plot to wreak an enormous calamity under false pretenses when the superheroes are out of the way
· A lot of asides about moonlighting superheroes, the dangers of capes, etc.
· The squid

Warning: here be spoilers.

I read Watchmen blithely oblivious to the plot similarities between Moore’s remorselessly dark and adult superhero fantasy and Bird’s hit movie (which, in the company of a junior family member, I have watched a gazillion times but also commend to adults as one of the finest pieces of mass entertainment unleashed by Hollywood in the last twenty years), until one image in Chapter 12 of the book triggered a Proustian flood of associations.

Chapter 12, the finale of Watchmen is, quite frankly, a train wreck.

Constrained by a pre-determined 12-issue format, Moore and Gibbons abandon the highly effective and mysterious noir atmospherics of the previous chapters for a blizzard of exposition, advanced by the villain blabbering unchecked at his superhero captives--a fatal breach of the fourth wall infamously mocked in The Incredibles as the dreaded “monologuing”.

The action is capped by a deus ex machina or, more accurately, the corpse of a genetically-engineered mind-melting supersquid barfed into New York at the villain’s behest in order to persuade humanity—for plot purposes that don’t withstand very close examination--of the imminent threat of invasion from an alien dimension.


This bizarrely unsatisfying out-of-left-field apparition was abandoned decisively and early on in Watchmen’s twenty-year hegira through the Hollywood development process and replaced with a plain-vanilla last-act hazard that made less onerous demands on the audience’s credulity: a simultaneous nuclear attack on the world’s capitals.

Only the most ardent fans mourned the banishment of the squid from the silver screen.

Only the fans…and Brad Bird.

When I viewed the deceased supersquid’s despondent tenticular mass in Chapter 12 of Watchmen, I had my epiphany: involuntarily, I recalled the strikingly similar attitude of the overthrown Omnidroid at the conclusion of The Incredibles.

Brad Bird had figured out a way to integrate the problematic squid into the film when the rest of Hollywood had given up on the challenge.

In other words…

The Squid Stays in the Picture!

With the release of the Watchmen film on home video, viewers have the opportunity to discover and dissect the parallels between three remarkably complementary and rewarding works—the triptych of the original novel, Zack Snyder’s film, and The Incredibles--at their leisure…

…complete with squid.


(If you don't see the links below to Amazon for the various works cited in this post, click the Refresh button)

Obama to Africa: Drop Dead

I have a certain respect for what I see as President Obama’s clear-eyed exercises in foreign affairs triage.

Obviously, his plate is full with Iraq/Iran/Pakistan/Afghanistan and keeping Europe on board for the whole global-recession-fighting deal, and the Obama administration has shown little interest in looking for solutions (or trouble) in strategic backwaters of the world like Burma and North Korea...and, apparently, Africa.

I was rather surprised at the favorable response not only by the middle-finger humanitarians who populate the Wall Street Journal's editorial page but also by some reform-oriented Africa aid activists to President Obama’s July 11th speech in Ghana and its signature statement: “We must start from the simple premise that the future of Africa is up to Africans”, followed by the condescending get your house in order/good governance/democracy tropes that have been a mainstay of Western rhetoric toward Africa for the last few years.

That line might have had more credibility in the pre-recession boom years, when there was a rising tide to lift all boats and the prospect of economic growth and increased trade and investment justified calls for Africa to do its fair share of bootstrapping (clamping down on corruption and capital flight, getting governments’ fiscal houses in order, liberalizing economic policies, bringing the informal economy into the banking system, etc.) to generate more internal capital for investment.

But now that the geniuses of Western finance have sent the global economy off a cliff, the three vital engines for market-based economic growth in Africa—international trade, foreign direct investment, and inward remittances—are all taking 20%-plus hits as a result, and the United States and Europe are putting billions on the line to stimulate demand and prop up their financial institutions while at the same time honoring the commitments of the Gleneagles G8 summit for increases in aid to less developed countries “in the breach” as it were, it takes a certain amount of crust to tell the Africans to suck it up.

China doesn’t see it that way. I have an article up at Asia Times under the pen name “Peter Lee”, entitled “China Doubles Down in Africa”, describing some major post-crash initiatives Beijing is undertaking in Africa.

I also look at signs that China’s position in Africa is evolving into a more sophisticated engagement in response to the stresses of the global recession and China’s own shortcomings in Africa policy, and conclude:

It appears that China hopes to emerge from the global recession not only with its economic standing intact; it intends to enhance its position and present itself in Africa as the responsible, perhaps indispensable stakeholder that the West has claimed to yearn for but is perhaps not anxious to see materialize.

Hey, read the whole thing!

Going Forward on North Korea with Kurt Campbell

Kim Jung Il has been very good to me. I have an article up on North Korea at Asia Times under the pen name Peter Lee, titled A convenient North Korean distraction.

Kim Jung Il has also been very good to the United States and Japan, providing a conventional security threat that plays to America’s most conspicuous advantage and justification for continued involvement in Asian affairs: our unchallenged military pre-eminence.

The point of the article, however, is that we won’t have Kim Jung Il to kick around forever, but we—especially the Japanese--don’t seem to be making contingency plans for what to do in Asia once the DPRK ceases to exist in its present form.

The two money quotes from the article are:

The North Korean crisis represents a collision of two anachronisms: the world's last Stalinist state versus a fading Cold War alliance ill-equipped to face the challenge of China, a burgeoning regional power determined to expand its influence through investment, trade and diplomacy and avoid confrontation on the United States' primary terms of advantage: military power.

…

North Korea is going to open up someday. Probably not through reform, regime change or collapse, or through the application of American or Japanese military force.

But it will open up.

There is too much money and strategic advantage at stake for the interested nations of North Asia to stand idly by and simply watch North Korea disintegrate.

Maybe change will come by means of a controlled implosion, jointly managed by China and South Korea, the two neighboring regimes that covet North Korea's cheap labor, resources and markets, and abhor the consequences of Pyongyang's chaotic disintegration in equal and extreme degree.

If and when that happens, Chinese and South Korean businesses will flood into North Korea and the entire Korean Peninsula will become part of the zero-sum equation bedeviling Tokyo. Japan may find itself on the outside looking in at North Asia's burgeoning new economic frontier ... together with the United States.

The article draws on the confirmation testimony of Kurt Campbell, founder of the Center for a New American Security, as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia. Laura Rozen reported on June 25 that he was finally officially confirmed when some Republican senator withdrew a hold.

To me, Campbell’s testimony was remarkable for three things:

First, Campbell’s clear unwillingness to support any attempt by Japan to establish its own regional security presence by unleashing the Self Defense Force, presumably since he realizes it will come at the expense of American influence and credibility in the region. That’s bad news for the LDP, which sees a forward military presence in Asia for Japan under the U.S. aegis as one of the few measures available to it to counter China’s rise.

Second, the unrelenting use of the term “going forward”. Apparently this is Obama-speak for “We don’t want to get dragged into politically distracting and costly battles over the transgressions and lapses of the Bush administration, so let’s just assume we’re starting with a clean slate.” Of course, the slate is nowhere near clean, the GOP will not display any gratitude or restraint toward the Obama administration for turning a blind eye to its eight-year reign of error, and it remains to be seen whether the president’s unwillingness to openly identify and repudiate the numerous authors of our national economic and foreign policy clusterfugue turns into a political advantage or a liability.

Third, the Democratic chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Jim Webb of Virginia, has a genuine bug in his ear about rapprochement with Myanmar.

He spent most of his question period pressing Campbell to acknowledge the logic of reaching out to the junta, instead of letting the situation fester indefinitely. Campbell, obviously unwilling to expend any political capital on this diplomatic backwater by needlessly antagonizing the left and right-wing supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi, awkwardly but determinedly dodged the question several times.

Article Up on Asia Times: China, Copper, the Democratic Republic of Congo--and the IMF

As an illustration of how the IMF and China really don’t get along—despite Beijing’s interest in the IMF in a source of gold and SDRs—I've written a piece for ATol entitled China’s copper deal back in the melt, on a high-profile tussle in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The IMF is openly lobbying the Congolese government to renegotiate a $9 billion copper and cobalt deal with China, for the stated reason that the project encumbers the DRC government with sovereign debt (an allegation that the Chinese dispute) at the same time the IMF is mediating with the Paris Club to forgive a chunk of the $10 billion tab run and embezzled in the name of the predecessor state of Zaire by kleptocrat-in-chief Mbuto Sese Seko.

In a classic example of the witless stenography that passes for Western reporting on Asian and African issues, the actual story - IMF threatens to withhold debt relief unless the Chinese deal is renegotiated - got a bit of a twist - as in Voice of America's "Chinese Mineral Deal Blocking Congo's IMF Debt Relief."

To get the real story, one perhaps has to dig even deeper—to the case of the Freeman MacMoRan-operated Tenke Fungurume copper mine.

The website operated by whistleblowing ex-Freeport MacMoRan employees with the buzzkilling name “FCXsucks.com” (“FCX” is Freeport’s NYSE ticker symbol) provides some interesting details and analysis.

The TF project is similar in scale to the Chinese project, and will take somewhere between $2.7 billion to $3 billion in copper out of Congo annually when it gets up to speed.

By a remarkable coincidence, at the same time the IMF is complaining about the Chinese deal, the DRC government is trying to renegotiate the sweetheart deal that the TF project got from the Sese Seko regime—a deal that capped the Congolese share in the project at 17.5%.

To compare and contrast, the DRC share in the Chinese project is already at 32%.

The FCXsucks people think the Chinese deal turns out worse than the TF deal despite the higher percentage because the Congolese partner, Gecamines, walks away with less money per year.

But that’s because the Chinese loan disbursement is bigger than the Freeport investment and covers a range of do-gooder infrastructure items not directly related to the deal. From the overall perspective of the DRC, adding the infrastructure improvements to Gecamine’s own ROI, the Chinese deal doesn’t look too bad.

President Kabila reportedly wants to see the DRC’s share in the TF project boosted to 45%, over the vigorous opposition of the project’s investors in the United States and Canada, and the U.S. government.

At the same time, the President is no doubt all ears to the IMF’s insistence that the interest rate on the Chinese project be dialed back from more expensive commercial terms to government-to-government concessional rates, like those China gave Angola.

Perhaps the DRC is less interested in the IMF’s proposal that the Chinese project get scaled back to $6 billion, as that would decrease the quantity of nice things the Chinese would build there in the next few years.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is flat on its back in terms of economic and social infrastructure. China coming in with a fast-track project to help rebuild the country (as the PRC did for Angola, in return for crude oil) is probably more welcome than a lecture from the IMF on Mbuto Sese Seko’s debt.

However, it will not be surprising if President Kabila—eager not to alienate either China or the West—finds a way for both deals—and debt relief--to go ahead.

The war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (previously Zaire) since 1998 has killed an estimated 5.4 million people, making it the bloodiest conflict since World War II.

Although the conflict has attracted intensive meddling from outsiders fixated on the country’s vast mineral reserves, the immense human suffering has inspired little in the way of the high profile attention and assistance.

The website Friends of the Congo provided this chilling perspective on how things are in the eastern end of the republic (the main copper deposits are in the south, in Katanga, which also saw fighting during the wars):

The International Center for Transitional Justice, the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley and the Payson Center for International Development at Tulane University conducted a survey of 2,620 Congolese between September and December 2007. The study focused North and South Kivu, Ituri, Kinshasa, and Kisangani. The results of the survey were predictable but shocking nonetheless. A summary of the survey revealed:

• 80 percent of respondents said they had been displaced at least three times in the last 15 years
• 75 percent said their cattle or livestock had been stolen
• 66 percent said their home had been destroyed or confiscated
• 61 percent of those polled in the east said they witnessed the violent death of a family member or friend
• 60 percent said one more of their household members had disappeared
• 34 percent said they themselves had been abducted for more than a week
• 53 percent reported being forced to work or being enslaved by armed groups
• 31 percent said they had been wounded in fighting
• 35 percent said they had been tortured
• 46 percent had been threatened with death
• 23 percent had witnessed sexual violence
• 16 percent had been sexually violated and 12 percent multiple times
• 85 percent of people polled believe "those responsible for the violence should be held accountable"

In North Kivu, at the epicenter of the violence, responses to the question "who protects you" were quite revealing. Respondents answered God (44 percent), the army (25 percent), the police (8 percent), nobody (7 percent), U.N. peacekeepers (6 percent).

Emphasis added.