Pruning Shears

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the FBI to release its interview with Dick Cheney on the FBI leak case. This is especially good news because this week the agency showed a definite willingness - even eagerness - to stifle attempts at transparency.

The military looked even worse than the FBI, though. Air Force Maj. David Frakt is the attorney for former detainee Mohammed Jawad, and Kathleen Miller interviewed him about the Pentagon’s refusal to investigate the story of Jawad’s treatment in US custody:

“Why has no one—no one has been held remotely accountable for this,” Frakt said in an interview with Raw Story. “This is a mandatory investigation. It’s not optional, you can’t just sweep it under the rug…but they did as far as I can tell.”

dday has the clause of the week: “Alan Greenspan, lapdog to Ayn Rand, perhaps the only person in America not to recognize the possibility of human greed in the financial markets,”

Andy Worthington had the most important story of the week, a long and detailed account of how we tortured a man we knew was innocent. The idea of torturing someone to produce a known false confession in order to justify a course of action really does take us back to a more savage time. I know I’ve previously used A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman to compare our treatment of detainees with medieval practices, but this from page 484 really does seem especially relevant:

His most famous conflict came with the Church and ended in the canonizing of his victim. Its cause lay in the usual struggle of temporal versus ecclesiastical authority. Enmity reached a peak in 1393 when the Archbishop of Prague ordered his Vicar-General, John of Pomuk, to confirm the election of an abbot chosen by the monks over the candidate preferred by the King. Wenceslas in a fury threw the Archbishop, the Vicar-General, and two other prelates into prison; then, after releasing the Archbishop, tortured the others to extract a confession of the hierarchy’s hostile designs. Maddened by their silence, the King himself reportedly seized a torch to apply to the victims’ feet. Frightened by what he had done, he then offered to spare their lives in return for their promise on oath not to tell of their torture. When John of Pomuk proved too broken and suffering to sign the oath, Wenceslas, in a compulsion to destroy the evidence, had him bound hand and foot and thrown from a bridge into the Moldau to drown. John of Pomuk was subsequently canonized as a martyr and made the patron saint of all bridges.

JANE, UNPACKED: In August of last year I posted a short excerpt from The Dark Side, a feature that I believe has concluded my Sunday posts every week without interruption. This is the last of the passages I made a note of as I read it. I hope regular readers have found it worthwhile and I think Mayer’s book will only gain relevance with the passage of time. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this period in our nation’s life. From page 319:

On July 24, 2005, [John] McCain introduced an amendment to the Defense Department’s budget prohibiting military interrogators from using more force than allowed in the Army Field Manual, even if the commander in chief ordered it. The proposed bill also prohibited other U.S. personnel- including the CIA - from engaging in torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of U.S.-held prisoners anywhere in the world.

Cheney personally went up to Congress to lobby against McCain’s proposed torture ban. He met three times with McCain. What transpired has never been told. But according to a well-informed congressional official, “With Cheney, it was all about how to stop the next terrorist attack. Will this help it or hurt it?” He was “absolutely convinced” that the CIA wouldn’t be able to get the information any other way, he said. When McCain asked for evidence that coercion worked, “They would just say, ‘We can’t tell you - but trust us.’” All that Cheney and the other defenders of the program pointed to were a handful of specific cases. There was no scientific study or larger analysis. Moreover, the CIA experts admitted that much of the information they got was unreliable.

“The administration’s position was relentlessly short-term and narrow,” said the congressional official. McCain liked to travel, and everywhere he went in any country, he had noticed, torture and Abu Ghraib would come up. He believed it was making it harder to get foreign cooperation. It was also radicalizing the Muslim population. Cheney, however, told McCain that the terrorists hated America and would try to attack regardless of U.S. policies. Torture, as he saw it, was just an excuse. Cheney also made clear to McCain that, as the official put it, “he wasn’t worried about winning popularity contests.”