ABC Doesn't Know How to Play the Game

For me, the most interesting thing about John Kiriakou's offhand acknowledgment that his pants are on fire (about the effectiveness of waterboarding) is that evidently ABC--the network that ran with Kiriakou's fantasy allegations in the first place--has known that it was a dog's breakfast for a long time. They dealt with it the same way you'd expect the CEO of MegaCorp to deal with the news that he'd just deployed company money to buy his mistress an executive jet: they tucked it into a plane brown envelope and slipped it under the door, trusting that before anybody actually got to read it, the janitor would have tossed it away.

What's so remarkable about the ABC response is that it is so amateurish. This is journalism, after all: the name of the game is "shameless." Recall how Grandmaster William Randolph Hearst dealt with the Brooklyn Bridge. The Hearst Newspapers drummed up a pandemic of hysteria about supposed engineering/construction defects in the city's latest adornment. Then when a city engineer hauled them in and proved by chapter and verse that there stories were all a farrago of falsehoods, the Hearst papers ran with the headline:

Good News! The Bridge is Safe!

So, go for it ABC. Run with the climbdown and enjoy the ill-gotten spinoff from your own prior irresponsibility.

We Have Ways of Making You Talk

I was driving and I may have misheard, but I think NPR rather sat on the real story in its interview this afternoon with Col. Steven Kleinman, the Air Force Reserve Officer who says he protested harsh treatment in Iraq.

If I understood him right, what he observed was not waterboarding and such but rather particular techniques developed, as they say, by the Russians and used by the Chinese.

But the point that got buried, I think, is that these were techniques designed not to extract the truth, but to get the subject to lie--Commie show-trial style, to get him to confess to everything. Here's Kleinman:

Even before the Korean War, during the Soviet show trials that occurred shortly after World War II, we as the U.S. government observed very odd and inexplicable behavior — people claiming to be CIA agents who weren't on the CIA payroll. More intelligence came in to describe these … interrogation methods that were being used to compel people to produce what can be described as propaganda — a mixture of truth with a heavy overlay of falsehoods.

The interviewer (Robert Siegel) appeared to ignore the point, but I think it is huge. Compelling people to lie? Why could we possibly want a subject to lie? Certainly not for show trials (or at least not yet). The only reason I can think of is bureaucratic: somebody was demanding information and the interrogators (or their handlers) wanted to provide it.

So, aside from torture we've got the problem of a bureaucracy gone mad.

Annals of Journalism: WSJ on Torture

Number of column inches in my (paper) Wall Street Journal this morning on the release of the torture memos: 18 (on page A5, under a headline reading "Obama Grants Immunity...").

Number of column inches in an op-ed by a former CIA Director and a former Attorney General on why we must keep torturing: 42.

Number of column inches to a front-page (plus jump) story on a comic-book typeface: 34.

A Fragment on Torture

Hlzoy and Glenn Greenwald and others are doing a superb job of staying on the issue of possible prosecution for those who left their fingerprints on the late administration's policy of torture.  I won't presume to track all they are saying, but I will offer one thought: if we are going forward with prosecutions, let's make sure we will focus on something other than the mugs on the front line.   Let's make a general rule: heads near the top of the totem pole must roll, or no heads may roll at all.

The relevant example is Abu Ghraib.  If Wiki has it right, one general (a woman) got her library card suspended busted to colonel. A couple of colonels drew some brisk slaps on their wrists. But for the brass, that was the end of it.

Meanwhile, seven grunts went to the stony lonesome. Let's stipulate that these are adults we are talking about, old enough to be responsible for their own conduct. Let's stipulate also that they are a pretty sorry lot: in particular, Charles Graner, who seems to have been a kind ring-leader, appears to be a specially unpleasant piece of business (though apparently it did not prevent him from impregnating one of his colleagues and marrying another; women like bad-news guys).

Let's stipulate all of this but let's remember also: there is an issue of leadership reponsibility here.  Granted that the defendants were all adults, still they were by every account unsophisiticated, gullible and lacking in any kind of foundation that you might expect them to need to make right decisions.  The Army  knew that, or had every reason to.  The Army took them, and the Army took on the responsibility to make sure they did not misbehave.  And the civilians who are responsible for the Army fall into the same bin.

It is commonly said that criminals are mostly pretty dumb.  I have said so myself, but I want to revise the point: dumb criminals are dumb, and wind up going to jail, often for conduct that was engineered by others.   Smart sociopaths learn to avoid the vulgarity of mere crime; learn to work in the white space around the letter of the law, and to let others do their dirty work while they stay back with the brandy and cigars (recall that nobody can document Hitler ever saying "go kill all the Jews."  Of course that is exactly what he wanted, but he knew how to make it happen without ever leaving a pheremone behind).

Smart sociopaths are, correspondingly, desperately difficult to convict.  So be it.  But let's make a deal with ourselves: if it is clear that we cannot get somewhere near the top of the chain of command, let's let it go.  Let's promise ourselves not to try to delude our conscience by hanging out to dry some of the mules who ought to have known better, but who did not know better, while letting the chariot drivers whirl away.

Not a Team Player, That Boy

The two-star general who led an Army investigation into the horrific detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib has accused the Bush administration of war crimes and is calling for accountability.

(link).

[Note: irony/sarcasm protocol applies.]

This Just In: Torture is Wrong

I've been waiting for this. For weeks we've been discussing the instrumental status of torture: Does it get good information? Does it diminish our prestige? --yadda yadda.

At last comes Ariel Dorfman with the Elephant-in-the-room point: Torture is wrong. It is wrong whether or not is instrumental, and it corrupts us to ignore or elide the point.

Here is Dorfman in a WP op ed yesterday:

I will leave others to claim that torture, in fact, does not work, that confessions obtained under duress ... are useless. Or to contend that the United States had better not do that to anyone in our custody lest someday another nation or entity or group decides to treat our prisoners the same way.

I find these arguments -- and there are many more -- to be irrefutable. But I cannot bring myself to use them, for fear of honoring the debate by participating in it.

Can't the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and the perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the "intelligence" that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?

Are we so morally sick, so deaf and dumb and blind, that we do not understand this? Are we so fearful, so in love with our own security and steeped in our own pain, that we are really willing to let people be tortured in the name of America? ...

Exactly right. And way overdue. Dan Froomkin showcased his comments in "White House Briefing" today. Dorfman is on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" even now as I type. Would be nice to see him do an hour at Larry King.