Andrew Sullivan has been summing up a lot of my thoughts on the memos, in particular the hypocrisy and the twisting of language, the banality of evil that allowed the torture to not only occur but by sanctioned.

I haven't had the heart to read the full memos, as what's in them is heartbreaking, not so much for what they are, but for the fact that we've seen this sort of thing before. Americans like to think of themselves as better than this, as superior, as liberators, but in reality, we can at times be no better than the worst of the worst. Any reasonable person understands this, knows that people are still people and are capable of horrible deeds, but to see it so up close and personal from your people, under the flimsiest of pretexts, is not only discouraging, but frightening.

I haven't read them yet either. I just don't have the right mindframe yet.

Nowadays I have a hypothesis that believing in your own heroic/liberating role actually makes this kind of thing more likely. Believing you're saving the world may be what lets you do all kinds of horrible stuff with a clean conscience.

Also: it has chilled me sine Day 1 of this regrettable war that there's a very strong strain of hatred that's encouraged these kinds of acts. They're not human, they're terrorists! They don't have rights! You're either with us or with them! Etc. It was there from the first days, and it's weaker now but still strong enough for "secret Muslim" to be persistent and widespread smear against Obama in the present. It's a signal of the weakening hatred that he was elected anyway, but a signal of the persistence that he handled it with extreme caution and even went so far as to move women in headscarves at a rally.

It's easy to say "well this is justified, we'll do whatever it takes!" in times of great fear and hatred. And people in the grips of that fail to see that the rules they discard in those times are explicitly written for those times.

The post-memo flurry of opinion pieces and radio discussions and talk show appearances basically saying the torture thing, it's not really torture, torture causes extreme pain, but so what if it is torture, it gets the job done, and it protects us, what do you want, the terrorists to win? is freaking me out.

Such as this one.

More on the math of the waterboarding. Also some information undermining the story that the technique helped the CIA get new and valuable information:

Last week, The New York Times made a similar claim in an article on the interrogation of Zubaydah, who was mistakenly believed to be a high ranking "lieutenant" in Al Qaeda before interrogators realized he was just "a helpful training camp personnel clerk," the Times reported.

Interrogators, who spoke to the Times on condition of anonymity, said they believed Zubaydah told them everything he knew before waterboarding began. They communicated this to agency higher-ups in Washington, who nonetheless insisted on the use of the practice, and asked to watch it take place.

"You get a ton of information, but headquarters says, 'There must be more,' " recalled one intelligence officer who was involved in the case. As described in the footnote to the memo, the use of repeated waterboarding against Abu Zubaydah was ordered "at the direction of C.I.A. headquarters," and officials were dispatched from headquarters "to watch the last waterboard session."

They communicated this to agency higher-ups in Washington, who nonetheless insisted on the use of the practice, and asked to watch it take place.

Ah yes, the finger pointing and "every group for themselves" phase. Wonderful.

On Point was a chilling show last night. Blood pressure warning: people call in.

I'll read the memos instead. The link above, the Washington Post editorial, bothered me. He's citing the memos as proof that torture was justified, since they got good intel from waterboarding, but he's only quoting a few lines of one 46 page memo, something smells fishy to me.

Yeah, he really pissed me off. Especially the part that concludes: "The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely." We help the terrorists (which they all are by default) be better! Yaaaay!

The writer was/is part of the Bush PR machine. Literally, former Bush speechwriter. This is the kind of justification going on, back when it was happening and now.

Lovely, the first memo is going through the 10 techniques, in detail, used against Zubaydah.

Sleep deprivation sounds utterly stupid. Once a person is tired, they'll say anything to get some sleep. The memo says they kept Zubaydah awake for 72 hours, with no ills effects.

This memo is from the Office of Legal Counsel to John Rizzo, General Counsel of the CIA. The OLC mentions many times, just in the first few pages, the CIA orally told them things, i.e. i wasn't put in writing.

Supposedly the techniques have been tried on various military personal. "Of the 26,829 students trained from 1992 through 2001 in the Air Force SERE training, 4.3 of those students had contact with psychology services. Of those 4.3 percent, only 3.2 were pulled from the program for psychological reasons." So according to the CIA, these techniques don't cause long term problems.

They seem to be defining torture as that which inflicts severe physical or mental pain, such as beating with weapons or burning the prisoner, using drugs, threatening to apply these to another person. Since those techniques weren't used, severe physical or mental pain could not have occurred, just discomfort and that's ok.

Jesus that's shitty thinking.

The reasoning is truly bizarre and rather semantic. It's like they're gesturing for us to ignore the giant Psychological Torture category. And convinced they just cleverly made it up, and we won't even catch on.

And those 2 guys must've been waterboarded several times a day, right? Does it really not become "mentally painful" to feel like you're drowning so damn often?

Abusive tactics were used to find Iraq-al Qaida link

I think the headline should read "to search for" since they never found one.

According to the memo, the Jay Baybee at the OLC had concluded it wasn't "mentally painful" because the "...specific intent to inflict prolonged mental is not present, and consequently, there is no specific intent to inflict severe mentai pain or suffering. Accordingly, we conclude that on the facts in this case the use of these methods separately or a course of conduct would not viOLate Section 2340A."

As Iraq-al Qaida link, yeah, that was debunked long time, almost when they first brought it up.

More on the background from NYT today.

Yeah I know there's no link, and I doubted there ever was. But this is new: that they tortured people to try to get them to say there was a link. The NYT article is far too kind.

In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Their Past Use

This is so not what the CIA conveyed to the OLC in the first memo. They gave the appearance they had looked at historical implications of its use and found that the techniques weren't really damaging.

After years of recriminations about torture and American values, Bush administration officials say it is easy to second-guess the decisions of 2002, when they feared that a new attack from Al Qaeda could come any moment.

9/11 did change everything, but the Bush administration forgot to change how it was change them. They clearly went a bit insane and this isn't said for dramatic effect. I think a lot of the country did and reason went out the window and that's understandable from a human perspective, but doesn't excuse the administration's actions.

The attack was designed to rattle our cage and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. We, as a nation, responded like scared rabbits, frightened of the next attack. The fear is understandable, the wholesale willingness to abandon principles and just strike back was a terrible idea.

There's a meme going around about Dennis Blar, the Director of National Intelligence. In a private memo, he said "High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country", thus implying that torture works. Here's what he really said.

It's really annoying to have this constant twisting of words.

More about that Washpo editorial by Bush speechwriter March Thiessen.

The "plot" against the West Coast Library (called Liberty by Bush) Towers was foiled in 2002, yet Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was supposedly planning it, wasn't captured until March 2003, so torturing him couldn't have foiled the plot without time travel, and everyone knows you need a Class 5 starship to do that.

Looking at the wikipedia page on Sheikh Mohammed and his list of confessions, wasn't there speculation that torture had caused him to just start spouting crap? Yes, there was.

Wow, excellent fact checking. Yeah this is all about twisting the meanings of things that actually have very clear meanings. It's very disturbing to me how effective that is, too. It makes me feel a little insane.

I think this is why shows like the Daily Show became a primary outlet for anger during the Bush administration. What they're saying we should believe about their actions is absolutely absurd, yet it's the subject of earnest debate. I heard a pundit seriously compare this to WWII internment camps as a favorable historical precedent. The argument was that both were necessary. WTF?! Really biting humor seems to be the most effective method for showing this for the ass-covering pseudologic that it is.

Someone really should satirize all this "but is it really torture?" bullshit.

The Daily Show feels like voice of sanity amidst all the crazy bs. I think it speaks to a more media savvy populace that trends younger and grew up noticing all the bs that goes on.

Either that or Khalid Sheilk Mohammed is also responsible for turning people away from America

Hee, I thought the Daily Show had mentioned Mohammed before.

NPR has a timeline. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed isn't on there.

What if someone set the words of one of the memos to music? (YouTube, not as tasteless as it sounds)

Sec of Defense Robert Gates has an interesting take on the release of the memos: "Pretending that we could hold all of this and keep it all a secret even if we wanted to, I think, is probably unrealistic, so we just have to deal with it,"

Heh, there's a resigned sensibility to that statement which speaks well of Gates. He doesn't answer the question of right or wrong about the torture, but does stick to running the Department and protecting employees he thinks acted in good faith. It's like an island of calm in the insane amount of information being blasted out about this.

Fascinating look at the debate in the administration about releasing the memos:

Seated in Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's West Wing office with about a dozen of his political, legal and security appointees, Obama requested a mini-debate in which one official was chosen to argue for releasing the memos and another was assigned to argue against doing so. When it ended, Obama dictated on the spot a draft of his announcement that the documents would be released, while most of the officials watched, according to an official who was present. The disclosure happened the next day.

Ok, I will admit I still carry a serious liberal geek torch for the fictional Bartlet administration. That said, Obama's re-enactment of my favorite scenes from it is starting to creep me out a little.

Obama is a flipflopper on torture investigations!

Eh, seems more like he's taking a strictly practical approach as President. There's a lot of things he wants to do, so getting bogged down in this would derail some of that. It would be interesting to see if his stance would be different if he didn't have so much on his plate.

Naturally, the Republicans would love to see grow into a large issue.