READ THIS NOW!

Please. Then impeach Bush. Impeach Cheney too:

A tale of two decisions (or, how the FBI gets you to confess) (PsychSound by Steve Bergstein): The next day, the Court of Appeals reissued the Higazy opinion. With a redaction. The court simply omitted from the revised decision facts about how the FBI agent extracted the false confession from Higazy. For some reason, this information is classified. Just as the opinion gets interesting, when we are about to learn how an FBI agent named Templeton squeezed the "truth" out of Higazy, the opinion reads at page 7: "This opinion has been redacted because portions of the record are under seal. For the purposes of the summary judgment motion, Templeton did not contest that Higazy's statements were coerced."

So the opinion, while interesting, is much less interesting because now we don't know how the FBI extracts false confessions from people. Looking at things from another angle, we don't know how the FBI gets suspected terrorists to tell the truth. Except that we do know this, because the... horse is out of the barn, and the classified portion of the opinion is embedded in the Internet... we can see the part of the ruling that the Court redacted:

Higazy alleges that during the polygraph, Templeton told him that he should cooperate, and explained that if Higazy did not cooperate, the FBI would make his brother “live in scrutiny” and would “make sure that Egyptian security gives [his] family hell.” Templeton later admitted that he knew how the Egyptian security forces operated: “that they had a security service, that their laws are different than ours, that they are probably allowed to do things in that country where they don’t advise people of their rights, they don’t – yeah, probably about torture, sure.”

Higazy later said, "I knew that I couldn't prove my innocence, and I knew that my family was in danger." He explained that "[t]he only thing that went through my head was oh, my God, I am screwed and my family's in danger. If I say this device is mine, I'm screwed and my family is going to be safe. If I say this device is not mine, I’m screwed and my family’s in danger. And Agent Templeton made it quite clear that cooperate had to mean saying something else other than this device is not mine.”

Higazy explained why he feared for his family:

The Egyptian government has very little tolerance for anybody who is —they’re suspicious of being a terrorist. To give you an idea, Saddam’s security force—as they later on were called his henchmen—a lot of them learned their methods and techniques in Egypt; torture, rape, some stuff would be even too sick to . . . . My father is 67. My mother is 61. I have a brother who developed arthritis at 19. He still has it today. When the word ‘torture’ comes at least for my brother, I mean, all they have to do is really just press on one of these knuckles. I couldn’t imagine them doing anything to my sister.

And Higazy added:

[L]et’s just say a lot of people in Egypt would stay away from a family that they know or they believe or even rumored to have anything to do with terrorists and by the same token, some people who actually could be —might try to get to them and somebody might actually make a connection. I wasn’t going to risk that. I wasn’t going to risk that, so I thought to myself what could I say that he would believe. What could I say that’s convincing? And I said okay.

That's how they do it, folks. If a foreign national is suspected of terrorist activity, the FBI will threaten to have a brutal foreign government punish his family. And punishment in a place like Egypt is not like punishment here. Punishment here consists of solitary confinement and a very long prison term. Punishment over there is torture.

Comments

[piotr]

Very prolonged solitary confinement inflicts psychiatric damage, probably irreversible, so I would classify it under "a failure of a main organ (the brain", and thus torture.

Widespread application of prolonged solitary confinement is one of the terrible aspects of American prison and jail system. So perhaps we have more in common with Egypt than with Western Europe and Canada.

[supersaurus]

"And punishment in a place like Egypt is not like punishment here. Punishment here consists of solitary confinement and a very long prison term. Punishment over there is torture."

solitary confinement isn't torture?

[me]

Don't worry, I am sure the new AG will say that's OK.

[bvgiwr]

[The issue is the corruption of the Second Circuit--that's the scary thing.]

Find a better case - all that happened in this one were threats by the interrogator. Police everywhere use them all the time. A good case to be indignant about would be one where a family really suffered from the foreign intelligence at the request of FBI.

[Kate G.]

find a better case? Its illegal under US law to threaten a suspects family because its illegal to threaten *illegal punishments* to persons who are not guilty of a crime. That is what makes the punishments "illegal" since they are, by definition, not meted out to the person guilty of a crime after his guilt or innocence has been adjudicated in a court of law. Under US law--whether it has ever been breached on a TV show like Homicide or not--actually threatening rape or bodily harm to *even a suspected criminals* family is no different from threatening rape or bodily harm to any other innocent person. its a crime. Its an *even greater crime* when done under color of authority.

To see how bad things have gotten under Bush/Cheney Rules you have only to see how easily our once proud citizenry gives up its rights and allows itself to become a subject population. Anything is ok as long as authority tells you so. And, in fact, that's no hyperbole resulting from a mere misreading of bvgiwr's post. Didn't John Yoo argue in a memo or an interview that the President absolutely had the authority to torture (crush the testicles of) a (definitionally innocent) small child if he decided it was necessary in the war on terror? There is literally no line these people won't cross--haven't crossed--whether of law, custom, or morality and there is literally no crime they won't defend as both 'business as usual' and 'newly necessary because of the evillness of our enemies.' Pogo said it all, I won't repeat it.

kate G.

[Neal]

bvgi wr:

Some questions for you:

Have you heard about "extraordinary rendition"?

Why do you think they went to places that we used to decry for their use of torture?

What could be done there that would excite the moral corncern of those who have no problem with water-boarding, head-slapping, etc?

Have you read anything at all about the tactics of the police in those countries?

Are US police in the habit of threatening a suspects family?

[anne]

http://www.juancole.com/2007/10/us-air-strike-kills-49-in-sadr-city-pkk.html

October 22, 2007

US Air Strike Kills 49 in Sadr City
By Juan Cole

So the US military went into Sadr City or the Shiite slums of East Baghdad in search of the leader of a "special group" or cell of the Mahdi Army whom they suspected of being part of a kidnapping -for- ransom ring. Then they took hostile fire from, well, hostile Shiite slum militiamen. The troops called in an air strike on the building from which the fire came. You can't, obviously, avoid killing civilians if you bomb a heavily populated slum from the air. So the real question is how many civilians they killed this way. The Iraqi government maintains that the victims were mostly children and innocent non-combatants, and PM Nuri al-Maliki has ordered an investigation-- to mollify the very angry Iraqi Shiites who saw the bombing as a war crime.

The US military did not catch the cell leader they were originally after.

[anne]

http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/10/the_stakes_1.php

October 21, 2007

The Stakes
By Matthew Yglesias

Heaven forbid we would show the sort of cruel indifference to the fate of the Iraqi people that might prevent us from continuing a military operation in which air strikes accidentally kill Iraqi toddlers and other civilians who "were people sleeping on roofs to seek relief from the heat and lack of electricity." *

* http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

[anne]

Kate G:

"'Find a better case?' Its illegal under US law to threaten a suspects family because its illegal to threaten *illegal punishments* to persons who are not guilty of a crime."

We are so routinely brutal, we cease to understand that we are.

[anne]

Picasso understood what it was to indiscriminately bomb a city so many years ago when "Guernica" was painted. But, we do not understand and through the occupation we have repeatedly bombed in Iraqi cities. A tapestry of Guernica hangs outsie the United Nation Security Council hall where Colin Powell argued for a needless senseless tragic war. The tapestry was purposely covered on the day of Powell's address. I was appalled, and have been appalled since.

Bombing in a city, as destroying the city of Fallujah, is essentially collective reprisal and should be unthinkable for America as a moral leader, but it is no more unthinkable and beyond selective notice little considered by Americans. Collective reprisal is however morally untenable. We must leave Iraq immediately and completely.

We are so routinely brutal, we cease to understand that we are.

[anne]

Seymour Hersh * wrote several years ago of what should have been obvious but was rarely noted even after the attacks on Fallujah, that in the occupation of Iraq we had turned to urban air-bombings as an accepted tactic. Well, not accepted by me, and I cannot imagine how such a tactic could be considered a viable strategy.

We are so routinely brutal, we cease to understand that we are.

* http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/051205fa_fact

[bvgiwr]

Kate G: find a better case? Its illegal under US law to threaten a suspects family because its illegal to threaten *illegal punishments* to persons who are not guilty of a crime.

Neal: Have you heard about "extraordinary rendition"?

I am as willing as the next guy to decry a real case of "extraordinary rendition". That did not happen in this case. As for whether it is legal to threaten illegal punishments, threats and verbal abuse are a routine police practice.

[The issue is the corruption of the Second Circuit--not your beliefs about what routine police procedure ought to be.]

[anne]

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/print/174851/Tomgram%253A%2520%2520Do%2520We%2520Already%2520Have%2520Our%2520Pentagon%2520Papers%253F

October 19, 2007

Bush's Pentagon Papers: The Urge to Confess
By Tom Engelhardt

They can't help themselves. They want to confess.

How else to explain the torture memorandums that continue to flow out of the inner sancta of this administration, the most recent of which were evidently leaked to the New York Times. * Those two, from the Alberto Gonzales Justice Department, were written in 2005 and recommitted the administration to the torture techniques it had been pushing for years. As the Times noted, the first of those memorandums, from February of that year, was "an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency." The second "secret opinion" was issued as Congress moved to outlaw "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" treatment (not that such acts weren't already against U.S. and international law). It brazenly "declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard"; and, the Times assured us, "the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums." ...

* http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/washington/04interrogate.html

[anne]

"Can you find a single case in US history where a criminal was let go by the courts because of threats and verbal abuse by the police?"

Words of lunacy.

[bvgiwr]

[Again, you mistake my issue: my issue here is not Hagazy or Yusuf and Abed, but the corruption of the Second Circuit]

Here, you want a better focus for your indignation?

http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAMR510932007

In September 2002, Yusuf al-Khalid (then nine years old) and Abed al-Khalid (then seven years old) were reportedly apprehended by Pakistani security forces during an attempted capture of their father, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was successfully apprehended several months later, and the U.S. government has acknowledged that he was in the U.S. Secret Detention Program. He is presently held at Guantánamo Bay.

In an April 16, 2007 statement, Ali Khan (father of Majid Khan, a detainee who the U.S. government has acknowledged was in the U.S. Secret Detention Program and is presently held at Guantánamo Bay) indicated that Yusef and Abed al-Khalid had been held in the same location in which Majid Khan and Majid’s brother Mohammed were detained in March/April 2003. Mohammed was detained by Pakistani officials for approximately one month after his apprehension on March 5, 2003 (see below). Ali Khan’s statement indicates that:

Also according to Mohammed, he and Majid were detained in the same place where two of Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s young children, ages about 6 and 8, were held. The Pakistani guards told my son that the boys were kept in a separate area upstairs, and were denied food and water by other guards. They were also mentally tortured by having ants or other creatures put on their legs to scare them and get them to say where their father was hiding.(13)

[Kate G.]

bvgiwr,

Uh, there's a whole lot of case law on point with police stepping outside the bounds of proper procedure in which various parts of the police case were thrown out. Remember "fruit of the posion tree?" Remember Miranda? Remember (or find out for yourself) that in fact we are about to have a hell of a time actually trying people we tortured because of the well founded fear that the courts might throw the cases out because torture is illegal and evidence obtained under duress is illegal? Jeebus, do you not even read the newspapers?

But in any event:--do your own damn homework or pay lexis/nexis to do it for you. No one here is responsible for your education on the bare facts of the law in this society,--even if we all pay for the brutalization of your mentality.

Kate G.

[Rich Gibson]

Kate and bvgiwr,

You are both being strongly off point, argumentative, and just plain annoying.

bvgiwr: you are intentionally missing Kate's whole point about _threatening an innocent party_ Threatening a 3rd party in an interrogation is fucked up.

"I will crush your testicles" is one thing, "I will hurt your family" is another.

If you are actually defending that then you are defending something horrible.

Kate: don't be such an abusive troll. bvgiwr didn't argue in favor of torture, he said 'find a better case.' He didn't even say that police should be allowed to do what they did. He said it wasn't a strong case. He might be wrong, but he did nothing to justify your personal invective. In fact, nothing justifies your personal invective in this case.

He even quoted a more outrageous case, as an example of this idea of a 'better case.'

Why did you need to resort to personal attacks on him? Your failure to be convincing does not give you license to be abusive.

[Neal]

So I guess if we don't do worse than the Pakistani security forces we're OK?

[anne]

Like Kate, do not like you. How is that, but no threat there personal or family?

[Barry]

Rich, people like him are scum, period.

[Rich Gibson]

Barry,

I'm missing the antecedent. Who are scum? The FBI agents involved are scum. No question.

But bvgiwr? No, I don't think you become 'scum' for what he did.

Becoming personally abusive in a discussion thread (which, full confession, I have done more than once :-/ _is_ a pretty scummy behavior.

[Rich Gibson]

Barry,

I'm missing the antecedent. Who are scum? The FBI agents involved are scum. No question.

But bvgiwr? No, I don't think you become 'scum' for what he did.

Becoming personally abusive in a discussion thread (which, full confession, I have done more than once :-/ _is_ a pretty scummy behavior.

[c.l. ball]

"Didn't John Yoo argue in a memo or an interview that the President absolutely had the authority to torture (crush the testicles of) a (definitionally innocent) small child if he decided it was necessary in the war on terror?"

No, that is not what Yoo wrote; the 'torturing the child' question was a hypothetical posed by a Notre Dame law professor. For Yoo, the issue at stake was what constituted torture under US law and US treaty commitments (and remember, the president can abrogate treaties at will under US domestic law). The Yoo arguments are all about what we should do with in the 'tough cases make bad law' scenarios.

But that is irrelevant here -- a US official on US territory cannot legally threaten to harm someone else's family or have them harmed *illegally*.

What makes this incident excreble is that the court countenanced the redaction of the material. There is no obvious classified info. there. Higazy was at the interrogation; if the information was properly classified then the FBI agent improperly disclosed it to Higazy, who obviously was not cleared for classified information. Why was the redacted material under seal?

[Paul G. Brown]

I'm with c.l.ball.

Why were these details redacted? What possible national security interest is served? Who would be harmed by the revelation?

Free societies require an informed citizenry. I feel that the redaction is a bigger scandal than the original offense!

[Barry]

Yes, Rich, he is. Or perhaps, wannabe scum.

[wood turtle]

READ THIS NOW!!

Are you kidding? With a microscope?

[Rich Gibson]

Barry,

Take a look at what bvgiwr actually wrote. He didn't advocate any position, he wasn't personally abusive, he behaved in a totally upright fashion.

What makes him scum? And more to the point, by focusing on him do you believe that Kate is not acting abusively?

Rich

[kris]

Why is this not a good case. Clearly both the FBI interrogator and Higazy knew that this was not an idle threat. This is very clear from the passage excerpted above. Police may use threats all the time, but this fact does not make it right, and I think KateG is right on this point. Further, that this was not an idle threat is clear from Higazy's response to confess to something he did not do. It is not at all unlikely that the interrogators would have done exactly as they threatened if Mr Higazy did not comply, and given the lack of due process in Egypt, it is very likely that his family would have been tortured as well.

I do agree with anne and KateG that bvgiwr was wrong on this matter. The redaction by the court is also disturbing and shows poor judgement on its part. Furthermore, bvgiwr's response is a classic example (although probably unintentional) of how to bury such incidents by trivializing them and belittling the magnitude of the crime committed here by the interrogators.

[anne]

The objection is to use of coercion in interrogation, and threatening a person's family is a stereotypical coercion that several years ago would have been considered impossible for a lawful American interrogation and bring to mind wholly abusive governing systems. That was the objection.

We are engaging in practices from Iraq to home, that may sadly occur but in coming to be known should be immediately understood as intolerable for practice by a democratic people.

[anne]

Asking whether threatening a person's family during interrogation, is moral lunacy. There is the objection. We are so routinely brutal, we are ceasing to understand that we are.

[Rich Gibson]

Anne,

I don't actually understand your last two posts. In the last message you wrote "Asking whether threatening a person's family during interrogation, is moral lunacy."

I can't figure out what that means. Perhaps you forgot an important word?

I do not see where bvgiwr advocated for anything even slightly improper. What is happening in your mind which makes it okay for you to verbally abuse another human being for, as near as I can tell, not agreeing that a particular case is the best example of American abuse of authority?

[Maynard Handley]

"
US Air Strike Kills 49 in Sadr City
By Juan Cole
"

Mike Davis, in _Buda's Wagon_, calls car bombs "the air force of the poor". This is a striking phrase (I don't know if it's original to Davis) which, I think, does a good job of clarifying things. As Cole points out, it's not like these air strikes magically kill only bad people.

[MobiusKlein]

bvgiwr, if your conscience is not shocked at that behavior, I think you need to get it checked. We allow the FBI would threaten his family with torture (indirectly), and they get off with not even a slap on the wrist?

Additionally, you wish to retry his innocence? Would you feel better if they framed a guilty man?

[bvgiwr]

Brad: Stop deleting my posts, damn you! Half of this thread are follow-ups on my comments and you dont let me respond to any of them.

[christofay]

If Hillary gets elected this will change, but to what degree. She's already signed on to war on Iran, all that needs to happen is Cheney to pull the trigger.

Oh, Greenspan is the greatest ever central planner. I saw him play keno once in Atlantic city and he won 37 times in a row.

[robertdfeinman]

The unasked question is why is there so little public outrage? Guesses:

1. The public (implicitly) approves of the tactics. Call it the "24" mind set - after the TV show which glorifies torture.

2. The public is unaware of what is going on. Thus the need for secrecy to prevent public revulsion. This seems plausible, but unnecessary as the Abu Ghraib images should have awakened even the most inattentive.

3. The public is in denial. It's the "I don't want to know how the sausage is made" attitude. I vote for this one. People are reluctant to take responsibility for actions done on their behalf, especially when what is being done is to support the SUV lifestyle.

[Jim]

My question is as always: what are the Democrats doing about this? They were elected in 2006 to change things and get rid of the mess this administration has made of things. But in fact they have done next to NOTHING. In fact they have been rolled over by this administration and now won't even promise to end the illegal occupation of Iraq or get our troops out. The Democrat party has betrayed the public trust. So in fact there is no political organization with any power in the US that can be respected.

[bigTom]

I really think this slippery moral slope we are descending is a deliberate Rovian strategy. The desire is not to directly gain intelligence, or intimidate potential foreign enemies, that is known to fail. Rather a more sinister attempt to force Democrats of behavior they consider to be morally egregious enough that they have to oppose it. The later group can then be painted as traitorous surrender monkeys for their lack of support of the war on terror. Of course if the tactic succeeds, our country will be gaining speed in our descent down that slippery slope. In my opinion this is really the critical battle for America of our time.

Even if we win, I don't think America's reputation will fully recover in my lifetime, the damage done by the 04 re-election was too great. If we were to follow Brads advice and impeach that would be a good first step, but I consider that very unlikley to occur.

[Barry]

Rich, stop playing games. He defended the behavior, and you're backing him.