Bob McDonnell’s Tortured Response and the Origins of Cheneyism
Jan 28, 2010 The End of History, Underwear Bomber, dick cheney, torture
In his response to the president’s SOTU last night — before a curiously packed and well-coached statehouse — Virginia’s new governor took up the anti-Obama mantle. Not only did his remarks remarkably seem off-key, considering the president’s actual speech, but McDonnell’s message was utterly tone-deaf and media-blind. Overall, it was a good argument for the tradition of the SOTU response time being changed to allow a prepared rebuttal, or else simply allowing this tradition to die.
But McDonnell pushed a personal button, about which I must rant this morning:
We agree that victory there is a national security imperative. But we have serious concerns over recent steps the Administration has taken regarding suspected terrorists.Americans were shocked on Christmas Day to learn of the attempted bombing of a flight to Detroit. This foreign terror suspect was given the same legal rights as a U.S. citizen, and immediately stopped providing critical intelligence. (Emphasis mine)
Bullshit. Worse, it’s transparent bullshit stinking of Cheneyism. It’s a naked invocation of post-9/11 paranoia and the Pavlovian fear response: we can’t give the terrorists rights, or else they’ll blow up the United States with nukes. And of course, it’s also a flat-out lie: Abdul Mutallab immediately gave the intelligence that linked him to Yemen. That was probably about all he knew, since he hadn’t been a volunteer for martyrdom all that long. The boy’s something of a useful idiot, to all reports.
To be sure, he knows more than he thinks he knows. But not all that he knows is useful, and not everything he might think is true will turn out to be true. This is why the US Army’s Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogations (PDF) has always been quite clear about torture: it doesn’t work. Instead, professional interrogators are trained to ask questions. Not in a fantasy-TV Jack Bauer confrontation kind of way, but in a simple conversation. In short, to make a prisoner talk you just get them talking. It’s how suspects are interrogated in every police station in America — not because we’re too nice to torture Americans, but because it works a lot better than torture. Exhibit A:
“The quickest way to get most (but not all) captives talking is to be nice to them. But what does it mean to be “nice” to a subject under interrogation? … It means, ideally, getting to know the subject better than he knows himself and then manipulating him by role-playing, flattering, misleading, and nudging his or her perception of the truth slightly off center. The goal is to turn the subject around so that he begins to see strong logic and even wisdom in acting against his own comrades and cause.”
The information is then checked. When proven reliable, you can follow up with the detainee, who may still be ready to trade information. In other words, you establish a kind of relationship with the captive.
Cheneyists say this response is the wrong approach to an act of underpants terrorism. Instead of immediately processing and interrogating the street-level al-Qaeda volunteer about his contacts, we must bind him, fly him to points unknown, and visit him there with medieval tortures. We can only trust information that comes from putting the underpants bomber to the question instead of just asking the bloody questions.
On what planet does that make a damn bit of sense? In what universe?
The truth is that torture’s only benefit is visceral punishment — that endures until the subject breaks and confesses. But by this time, the object of their confession is to make the torture stop. Meanwhile, the severe and prolonged stress damages the detainee’s brain, especially his memory functions, leaving him prone to fantasy. This renders any information you might actually gain by the torture unreliable and probably useless. The detainee is going insane; he is no longer a source of intelligence — just confession.
One need look no further than the example of John McCain, who experienced waterboarding himself. As we all know, he gave up no useful information; and given that he’d been healing for a while before they dared do it, whatever information John McCain might have had was already irrelevant or out of date. So he made shit up; but the Vietnamese kept torturing him. Eventually, he confessed to being an “air pirate,” at which point they stopped.
That is the awful truth about torture: its objects are always, forever, and inevitably political. Cheney insisted on torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammad several times a day until he gave up the Iraq-al Qaeda “link” the vice president so desperately wanted to have Powell deliver at the UN. The price has been thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and trillions of dollars in debt in Quixotic pursuit of global fossil-fuel supremacy.
Torture is a sickness of mind that had supposedly been banished from the American world, and not just because it’s wrong but because it doesn’t provide useful or timely information. If you don’t believe me, then ask John Kiriakou, the CIA agent who once championed waterboarding and now admits it doesn’t work. Ask Matthew Alexander, whose interrogations resulted in the locating and killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Or juist read the damn field manual like I did.
Furthermore, the idea that Abdul Mutallab will somehow be more dangerous inside a Supermax prison than a cage in Cuba…well, it just doesn’t stand up to rational scrutiny. Moreover, I am past patience with media figures who entertain Cheneyan worries about the suspects turning their trials into media circuses when the media itself, and not the American court system, has the editorial prerogative to prevent that scenario.
The central tenet of Cheneyism comes from the Pentagon’s 1987 decision to stay out of the terrorism-fighting business. Until September 11th, 2001, American military culture considered terrorism a law enforcement problem — even as the American serviceman paid a price in blood throughout the nineties. Army and Navy brass practiced “force protection,” a wholly-defensive posture in which we took fire but offered none. This, too, will be a surprise to most minds raised on a diet of popular culture, but until 2001 the much-vaunted special forces had never, ever carried out an anti-terrorism mission. So the Cheney doctrine went to the opposite extreme: there was to be no more posse comitatus, the legal separation of military and civilian power the Pentagon invoked in passing up the war on terror prior to 2001. In fact, the entire legal and constitutional apparatus of American life — habeas corpus, the Geneva Convention, etc. — was cast aside, and to no good end, even as good old-fashioned interview and investigative techniques were breaking up plots.
But upon surveying the most recent successes in the “war on terror,” one finds that they are mostly a result of good law enforcement; Predator drone strikes are second. There are today thousands of terrorists being held safely in jails around the world, with hundreds in the United States. What part of this doesn’t make sense to the Cheneyists?
It is disturbing to realize that Cheneyists are still getting their bullet-points into the GOP agenda. It is even more disturbing to realize there are still idiots out there who think this extreme shift remains the only alternate option; the military has a role in combating terror, and it is to go where civilians cannot…when it is absolutely necessary to go there.
ADDING: Last night, lefties on Twitter snidely suggested Gitmo’s continued existence is a sign of bad faith by Obama. Actually, Obama was talking to the reason why Gitmo remains open; like much else, the problem is a Congress where reform goes to die. Anyone who counts themselves a “progressive” should realize the president is the least of our problems, especially when it comes to politics at the water’s edge.
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