Leon Panetta admits that enhanced interrogation was part of locating bin Laden.

On "Meet the Press" today:



"Yes, some of it came from some of the tactics that were used at that time, interrogation tactics that were used. But the fact is we put together most of that intelligence without having to resort to that."

"We will look forward to interrogating [John Kerry] mercilessly.... We will bring back for the only time waterboarding to get the truth out of him."

John McCain makes a torture joke.

Is that okay?
	Yes, because McCain has a special privilege to speak however he wants about torture.
	Yes, because waterboarding is enhanced interrogation and not torture.
	Yes, because I'd like to see Kerry, in particular, tortured (mildly).
	No, because torture should be taken with the utmost seriousness.
	No, because it's just not funny enough.
	No, because Kerry is a fine man of stunning gravitas.
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Torture in "Zero Dark Thirty": "It’s enough to make you wretch. It’s arguably the best and most important part of the movie."

Spencer Ackerman — whose wretched spelling may make you retch — struggles with the question that's plaguing movie fans today: Does the much-praised, Oscar-worthy Kathryn Bigelow film approve of torture?

One scene features a bloodied, disoriented and humiliated man strapped to a wall with his pants around his ankles. A second scene depicts the same man having liquid forcibly poured down his throat; later, he’s shoved into a box that could barely hold your stereo...

I'm no longer willing to view movies like this. (And I saw "3 Kings," which had a man getting liquid — crude oil — poured down his throat.) But this is what perhaps counts as serious film art these days. Crappy film entertainment is also full of torture (horror films).

Ackerman defends Bigelow: the film "presents a graphic depiction of what declassified CIA documents indicate the torture program really was" and "does not present torture as a silver bullet that led to bin Laden; it presents torture as the ignorant alternative to that silver bullet."

Bigelow's critics, linked in Ackerman's article, are worried that the film may convince people that torture is effective and worthwhile. This all sounds too rational. What does sitting quietly in a dark room with a crowd of comfortable strangers, watching huge, bright, clear moving pictures of actors pretending to be tortured do to our souls? I know the stock answer is: It's worse to live comfortably and complacently with a head free of any such picture. But the stock answer assumes that our souls are already dead.

"They detained me in a room... They kept beating me hard... After five days, they gave me an injection and I slept... When I woke up my hand was not there."

When Ansar al-Sharia ruled Yemen's Abyan province.

Eric Holder announces the end of "the Obama administration’s limited effort to scrutinize the counterterrorism programs carried out under President George W. Bush."

The NYT reports:

The Justice Department did not say publicly which cases had been under investigation. But officials had previously confirmed the identities of the prisoners: Gul Rahman, suspected of being a militant, who died in 2002 after being shackled to a concrete wall in near-freezing temperatures at a secret C.I.A. prison in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit; and Manadel al-Jamadi, who died in C.I.A. custody in 2003 at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where his corpse was photographed packed in ice and wrapped in plastic.

Mr. Holder’s announcement might remove a possible target for Republicans during the presidential campaign. But the decision will disappoint liberals who supported President Obama when he ran in 2008 and denounced what he called torture and abuse of prisoners under his predecessor.

It's one thing to run for office, quite another to occupy it. You can criticize and express all manner of outrage from the sidelines, but when you are on the inside, it's different, and by cycling the Democratic Party into power, the American people got to learn something about what the Bush Administration did. Those who don't like Obama should see the value of what we learned.

"Dad's accused of boiling people alive – but Googoosha... just wants to be a star."

"Amazingly rhythmic sounds of torture... I never knew the sounds of children labouring in the hot sun for 12 hours a day could be so relaxing and Enya-esque."

Rebranding the Guantanamo military tribunals.

The NYT reports:

As the United States restarts its effort to prosecute — and ultimately execute — five detainees accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks, it has fallen to Brig. Gen. Mark S. Martins both to prove them guilty and to show the world that the tribunal system is now legitimate....

The five had been arraigned at Guantánamo Bay before, in 2008, but the Obama administration shut that case down upon taking office, then tried to move it to federal court in New York, before surrendering to a political uproar.

As he reboots the case, General Martins is also trying to rebrand the system by emphasizing changes that Congress made in 2009 — notably, a higher bar to “hearsay” evidence and a prohibition against using statements made during cruel or degrading treatment. Obama administration officials echo those arguments, saying that the current tribunals are fair, unlike those during the Bush administration...

Martins attended Harvard Law School and worked alongside Obama the law student at the Harvard Law School. Obama, as a senator and presidential candidate opposed Bush's military commissions "which the Supreme Court struck down because Congress had not authorized them, and he voted against the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which revived them."

A torture victim cannot sue the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian Liberation Organization under the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991.

Says a unanimous Supreme Court, in an opinion (PDF) written by Justice Sotomayor. Sotomayor — why, by the way was nominated by a President who said was looking for a Justice with "empathy" — explained that the statute created a claim against "individuals," and that word only includes natural human beings and not artificial entities.

And no one, we hazard to guess, refers in normal parlance to an organization as an “individual.”...

Congress does not, in the ordinary course, employ the word any differently. The Dictionary Act instructs that “[i]n determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, unless the context indicates otherwise . . . the wor[d] ‘person’ . . . include[s] corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals.” 1 U. S. C. §1 (emphasis added). With the phrase “as well as,” the definition marks “individual” as distinct from the list of artificial entities that precedes it.

In law, it's the norm to see an organization as a "person," but not as an "individual."

ADDED: My post title, picking up language in the case syllabus, says "Palestinian Liberation Organization" when the real name of the defendant is "Palestine Liberation Organization." The same error appears in Sotormayor's opinion for the majority and Breyer's concurring opinion.

"Most vegetarians look so much like the food they eat that they can be classified as cannibals."

Finley Peter Dunne, quoted in "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present."

Meade just read that out loud to me, and it caused me to do a search for the word "cannibals" in the book I had open in Kindle, Kurt Vonnegut's "Welcome to the Monkeyhouse." I was delighted to find that old Kurt had used the word in his delightful collection of stories, and the line is even one that other readers — 3 to be precise — have highlighted. (Kindle lets you see other people's highlighting.)

But he faced the problem that complicates the lives of cannibals — namely: that a single victim cannot be used over and over.

The "he" is not, of course, a cannibal, just a man with a problem that cannibals have, the need to look for more victims.

As for that Finley Peter Dunne quote, Meade said it puts a different spin on the old saying "You are what you eat." If you are what you eat, you're a cannibal. That seems like something that's been said before, but the closest I get, Googling that, is somebody at Yahoo Answers asking "If you are what you eat then are Cannibals the only True Humans?" Before answering that yourself — assuming you feel so inclined — please read Michel de Montaigne's "On Cannibals":

I am not so concerned that we should remark on the barbaric horror of such a deed, but that, while we quite rightly judge their faults, we are blind to our own. I think it is more barbaric to eat a man alive than to eat him dead, to tear apart through torture and pain a living body which can still feel, or to burn it alive by bits, to let it be gnawed and chewed by dogs or pigs (as we have no only read, but seen, in recent times, not against old enemies but among neighbors and fellow-citizens, and--what is worse--under the pretext of piety and religion.  Better to roast and eat him after he is dead.

Recent times... in 1580.

"Tripoli Files Show CIA Working With Libya."

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Central Intelligence Agency and Libyan intelligence services developed such a tight relationship during the George W. Bush administration that the U.S. shipped terror suspects to Libya for interrogation and suggested the questions they should be asked, according to documents found in Libya's External Security agency headquarters...

The files provide an extraordinary window into the highly secretive and controversial practice of rendition, whereby the agency would send detainees to other countries for interrogation, including ones known for harsh treatment of detainees. The program was ramped up for terror detainees after the Sept. 11 attacks.

When taking over the CIA at the outset of the Obama administration, then-director Leon Panetta said the agency would continue to use rendition, but would seek assurances that the detainee wouldn't be tortured—which has been the standing U.S. policy...

"A physician was to drop acid... into the eyes of Majid Movahed... to punish him for throwing acid in the face of Ameneh Bahrami seven years ago."

Bahrami, who was blinded, had insisted on the eye-for-an-eye punishment, under Islamic law:

"However in the last minute, Ameneh changed her mind and asked the proceeding to be halted," the Islamic republic's Fars state news agency reported.

This week marks the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan in the Islamic world, and pardons and commuted sentences commonly occur as a show of compassion leading into the holiday....

The sentence was to be carried out in May 2011, but a court postponed it after Amnesty International protested against it on the grounds of cruelty.

Bahrami forgave her attacker in part for her country, she told state news agency ISNA, "since all other countries were looking to see what we would do."

The Effigies of Madison, Wisconsin — 1906 version.

An emailer writes:

I just finished John J. Miller’s “The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football” which describes how intercollegiate football almost became banned 100 years ago. Reading in your blog about the double standard regarding effigies in the latest Madison demonstrations, I thought you might enjoy this excerpt from Miller’s book (p. 211). The year was 1906.

“At the University of Wisconsin, frontier historian Frederick Jackson Turner railed against football, calling for its prohibition or at least its suspension, and tried to mobilize administrators and professors against it. On the night of March 27, when a rumor hit campus that football would be banned, hundreds of students took to the streets, chanting “Death to the faculty!” They surrounded Turner’s home. The professor faced them on his porch. “When can we have football?” shouted a student. “When you can have a clean game,” he yelled back. Turner tried to engage the young men, but they replied with catcalls. Later in the evening, they built a bonfire. The fire department showed up as the mob tried to burn three professors in effigy. The firefighters managed to save the last one. It was labeled 'Prof. Turner.'”

Fascinating! Pro-football protests! These effigies were burned, not hung. We've been debating about whether the Prosser effigy was actually hung, since it is sitting down. Obviously, there are many ways to torment an effigy. There is hanging. Burning. And, as commenter EDH said:

The garrote, a specific form of execution, is often performed seated.

The garrote, unlike a proper hanging, kills by suffocation, so it is, in fact, much closer to the choking accusation leveled by Justice Prosser's character assassins.

But enough about effigies. Let's go back to the history of football. Here's Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine interviewing John J. Miller about "The Big Scrum." A very substantive interview with crisp, quick speaking, so... worth clicking.

"Is Harold Koh the Left’s John Yoo?"

One might well ask.

"I simply do not know how the brutal torture of children can be surpassed as an example of pure evil."

"What is happening in Syria has become morally intolerable even under the standards of the Middle East."

"Consider how the intelligence that led to bin Laden came to hand."

"It began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information—including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden."

Writes former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

The harsh techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA....

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations....

The Obama administration has ended these interrogations and is investigating CIA employees who conducted them.

Eric Holder is asked but won't answer whether he'd have opposed a military trial for bin Laden if bin Laden had been taken alive.

Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee:

“That’s a hypothetical. I’m not sure it’s particularly relevant,” Holder said in response to a question from Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.)....

“I think it’s fair to ask, since you opposed a military trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whether you would have opposed a military trial for Osama bin Laden,” Lungren said.

Again declining to answer, Holder said that his position on military tribunals has often been mischaracterized. He noted that, on the same day in November 2009 that he announced a civilian trial for Mohammed, he announced that five other detainees would get military trials.

“I think our military commissions, especially since they’ve been modified, are constitutional and can give fair trials,” he said.

Holder also pushed back against another line of questioning from Lungren, about whether information provided by detainees who underwent “enhanced interrogation techniques” like waterboarding contributed to finding bin Laden. Holder said there was “a mosaic of sources” of intelligence, and he did not go into details.

The failure to answer speaks for itself. To me, it says that he considers it wrong/illegal but wants it done anyway. Wants it done, but doesn't want to be the one to say "do it."

ADDED: Let's remember that last month, after Obama announced that KSM would be tried before a military commission in Guantanamo, that Eric Holder was adamant about the correctness of his original decision to try him in federal court in Manhattan. He blamed Congress for making it impossible to do that, and he basically stomped out of the room when asked about it.

And in March, 2010, Holder avoided the question of how he'd deal with a captured bin Laden: "The reality is that we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama Bin Laden - he will never appear in an American courtroom." Pushed, he got angry:

When Rep. John Culberson (R-Tex.) said that if Bin Laden himself were arrested, it would be absurd to give him the same due process afforded Manson, Holder erupted.

Charges he coddles terrorists get his "blood boiling," the attorney general conceded....

Holder repeated - slowly - to the Texas congressman that "the possibility simply does not exist" that Bin Laden will ever be arraigned in any court....

"The possibility of capturing him alive is infinitesimal - he will be killed by us or he will be killed by his own people," Holder said.

So... was bin Laden shot because he resisted — the official story — or because a live, captured bin Laden would have torn the Obama administration apart?

"He was caressing my head in this sick way, this tender way, saying: 'You’re going to die tonight. You’re going to die tonight.'"

Lynsey Addario, one of 4 NYT journalists — the only female — who were captured by the Libyan government, describes her ordeal.

"Horrific video footage has emerged of Taliban insurgents stoning a couple to death for alleged adultery in northern Afghanistan."

"Hundreds of villagers can be seen on the video standing around as the woman, Siddqa, is buried up to her waist in a four foot hole in the ground. Two mullahs pass sentence before the crowd begins to throw rocks at her head and body as she desperately tries to crawl free...."

Michael Vick: "I would love to have another dog."

"My entire life I grew up with a pet in my house. The last few years were the first that I haven't had one. My daughter is used to it, my son is used to it. It's just different. I feel bad for them and the entire situation, what I did. It could be part of my rehabilitation process showing people I do care about animals sincerely and genuinely... Whatever animal I'd have would live a happy life.... I know that."

Would you let Vick get a dog?
	Yes, people can change and dogs can help them change.
	Yes, the important thing is the transformation of a human being, and a dog is a means to an end.
	Yes. He served his sentence, and he's earned a fresh start.
	No. He was released on condition that he not get a dog. That's it.
	No. He tortured and killed dogs. All dogs are forever entitled to be free of him.
	No. It's an important deterrent to others to see that Vick can never have a dog.
	Yes, but only because of the kids. Kids are more important than dogs.
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Bush says "damn right" he approved of the waterboarding of 3 detainees and he'd do it again — and the American people approve.

Overwhelmingly. Mostly silently. To the distress of the small sliver of the population that includes Dahlia Lithwick.