Responding to a question from a Stanford University student who noted that, even in moments of actual existential peril like World War II, the United States never resorted to techniques like waterboarding, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a pretty startling claim about the relative threat posed by Al Qaeda:

Q: Even in World War II facing Nazi Germany, probably the greatest threat that America has ever faced –

RICE: Uh, with all due respect, Nazi Germany never attacked the homeland of the United States.

Q: No, but they bombed our allies –

RICE: No, just a second, just a second. Three-thousand Americans died in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

Q: 500,000 died in World War II –

RICE: Fighting a war in Europe.

Q: — and yet we did not torture the prisoners of war.

RICE: We didn’t torture anybody here either.

Watch it (segment begins at 3:28):

What’s interesting here is that the “threat” that Rice is talking about has nothing to do with the actual threat posed to the United States by a few hundred committed jihadists, but rather with the threat that she and others in the administration “felt” in the days and months after 9/11:

RICE: I’ll tell you something, unless you were there in a position of responsibility after September 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans. And I know a lot of people are second guessing now, but let me tell you what the second guessing that would really have hurt me: If the second guessing were about 3,000 more Americans dying because we didn’t do everything we could to protect them.

If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans jump out of 80 story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people, then you were determined to do anything you could — that was legal — to prevent that from happening again.

It’s hard not to read this as an admission by our former Secretary of State that terrorism works — or at least it worked on her, to the extent that it induced her to embrace interrogation methods that previous American administrations prosecuted as crimes.

No one should pretend that these aren’t tough questions, or forget the trauma we all felt after 9/11, but being a nation of laws means we can’t just jettison those laws through fancy lawyering when the going gets tough and we get freaked out.

I would also remind Dr. Rice that it is a fact that quite a few more than 3,000 more Americans have died as a result of the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism policies, and a good portion of those as a direct result of the detention and interrogation methods that she continues to defend as necessary to protect Americans.

In tonight’s press conference, ABC’s Jake Tapper asked President Obama if he believes “that the previous administration sanctioned torture,” in light of Obama’s recent release of Bush-era torture memos. Obama refrained from saying the Bush administration committed criminal acts, but he said, “I do believe that it [waterboarding] is torture.” The President added that the legal guidance that Bush lawyers provided were a “mistake”:

QUESTION: Do you believe the previous administration sanctioned torture?

OBAMA: I believe that waterboarding was torture. And I think that the — whatever legal rationales were used, it was a mistake.

Watch it:

Although Obama has repeatedly said that waterboarding is torture, his response saying that the “legal rationales” were “a mistake” is important because it discredits 9th Circuit Court Judge Jay Bybee’s recent claim that his flawed OLC memos were legally sound.

Yesterday, Bybee “broke his silence” and talked to the New York Times about his torture memos. While anonymous friends of Bybee said that the former OLC head regretted signing off on the torture memos, Bybee defended his memos as legally “correct“:

[H]e said: “The central question for lawyers was a narrow one; locate, under the statutory definition, the thin line between harsh treatment of a high-ranking Al Qaeda terrorist that is not torture and harsh treatment that is. I believed at the time, and continue to believe today, that the conclusions were legally correct.” [...]

“The legal question was and is difficult,” he said. “And the stakes for the country were significant no matter what our opinion. In that context, we gave our best, honest advice, based on our good-faith analysis of the law.”

Obama’s belief that the notorious memoranda written by Judge Bybee were legally flawed add further justification to the need for Bybee to resign his seat on the federal court.

Please join our campaign calling on Congress to begin impeachment hearings against Jay Bybee.

One of Tom Friedman’s favorite column-writing techniques is to feature an Egyptian cab driver/Lebanese hotel clerk/Emirati businessman whose pithy comment conveniently underscores the point Friedman wants to make.

Interestingly, none of these characters appear in Friedman’s column today, in which he exhumes the “flypaper” argument for the Iraq war:

I believe that the most important reason there has not been another 9/11, besides the improved security and intelligence, is that Al Qaeda is primarily focused on defeating America in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world — particularly in Iraq. Al Qaeda knows that if it can destroy the U.S. effort (still a long shot) to build a decent, modernizing society in Iraq, it will undermine every U.S. ally in the region.

You’ll remember that after the WMD and “Saddam-Al Qaeda relationship” arguments for the war disintegrated, the “fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” argument — which Richard Clarke mockingly termed the “puppy dog” theory of counterterrorism — became popular for a time. President Bush infamously taunted the insurgents to “bring ‘em on” — which they did. They brought it on so much that, six years later, Iraq accounts for more than half of all suicide terrorist attacks in the world since 1981, according to a study (pdf) by Assaf Moghadam of Harvard’s Belfer Center.

Who have been, and continue to be, the targets of these attacks? Mostly Iraqi civilians — tens of thousands of whom have been killed, with many more maimed and permanently disfigured and disabled. This, then, is what Tom Friedman — in antiseptic language designed to leave elite consciences undisturbed — would like to portray as successful American policy: Using the Iraqi people as bait to attract jihadists from around the region and distract them from attacking the American homeland.

But let’s say we grant this argument, intellectually dubious and morally repugnant as it is. Add it to the numerous other costs of the Iraq war, and what did it all earn us? A “long shot” chance at building a stable Iraq — one dominated by Shia factions with close ties to Iran, and viewed with deep suspicion by America’s allies in the region.

It’s not hard to understand why none of Friedman’s usual local interlocutors make an appearance in the column. I doubt he could ever find an actual Iraqi who would second such an argument, any more than you might expect to find an Israeli who would praise the strategic brilliance of Arab propagandists in directing jihadist rage toward Israel.

Earlier today, I attended a presentation at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy by Todd Hinnen, Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Law and Policy in the Department of Justice’s National Security Division. The division was created in 2006 by the USA Patriot Reauthorization and Improvement Act, merging the core national security functions of the DOJ, as recommended in March 2005 by the Iraq Intelligence Commission.

Hinnen described his team at the DOJ as doing the “30,000 foot level strategic thinking, policy development and legal analysis” for the Department’s national security work. Hinnen stated his belief that the development of an appropriate and enduring legal framework was “essential to effectively combating terrorism for reasons that are both principled and pragmatic.”

It is essential on grounds of principle because the law has defined this nation, a nation of laws, since its founding…It would be a Pyrrhic victory if, in our struggle the preserve this country against the threat of international terrorism we sacrificed so central a part of what this country stands for and why it has been a model for the rest of the world.

It is essential on grounds of pragmatism because a lawless response to terrorism — one for instance that includes torture, black site prisons, and indefinite detention without due process — undermines our moral credibility and standing abroad, weakens the coalitions with foreign governments that we need to effectively combat terrorism, and provides terrorist recruiters with some of their most effective material.

It’s good to hear government officials expressing this kind of understanding of what it is that really makes America exceptional — and what really makes us safe.

Our guest blogger is Nina Hachigian, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

In his column this morning, David Brooks claims that the response to swine flu “suggests that a decentralized approach is best,” relying on nations and localities to deal with the threat. He rejects the idea of building “centralized global institutions that are strong enough to respond to transnational threats,” an idea he attributes to G. John Ikenberry, of Princeton.

Dan Drezner, quoting an email exchange with Ikenberry himself, makes the point that jumped to my mind, (as I was muttering “no, no, no!” at the breakfast table) which is that the two are not mutually exclusive. Both a local response and international coordination are necessary to fight a global threat.

Why do you need those international architectures, like, in this case, the World Health Organization (WHO)? There are many reasons, but to name a few:

1. To track the spread of the flu globally, and see how it is mutating as it goes, you need flu samples from around the world. Some countries, for political reasons, would not offer them freely to the US. Only a politically neutral body like the World Health Organization can collect those (and sometimes, not even it can).

2. The WHO helps create and foster the very networks among scientists and government officials around the world that Brooks cites as useful.

3. Some countries don’t have the capacity to mount what Brooks calls a “bottom-up, highly aggressive response.” Some organization needs to help create that capacity and call attention to its absence as a weak link in the global chain. If every country had a CDC like ours, there would be less reason to worry. But they don’t. Not even close.

Global threats need a global response. Nations are the ultimate actors, but international organizations can go a long way toward making the global response more effective.

Demonstrating the peculiar conservative belief that a central component of American exceptionalism is the constant assertion of “American exceptionalism” by American politicians, Jamie Kirchick accuses President Obama of giving the wrong answer when asked about this at the NATO conference earlier this month:

Rather than endorse the proposition — as every president in recent memory has done one way or another — Obama offered a strange response: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

This is impossible. If all countries are “exceptional,” then none are, and to claim otherwise robs the word, and the idea of American exceptionalism, of any meaning. Besides, American exceptionalism is demonstrable — Cuban journalists, Chinese political dissidents, Eastern Europeans once again living in the shadow of a belligerent Russia and, yes, even some Brits and Greeks look toward the U.S. and nowhere else to defend freedom.

Yes, isn’t it amazing how, if you take one small section of a longer answer, you can generate an entire op-ed’s worth of outrage?

Leaving aside how silly it is to insist that the president go around insisting how much better his country is than every other country, looking at Obama’s answer in its entirety reveals Kirchick’s tendentiousness. After noting his pride, and the rightful pride of all Americans, of the fact that he stood on European ground that had been liberated by American troops and rebuilt with American money, Obama continued:

I see no contradiction between believing that America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity and recognizing that that leadership is incumbent — depends on our ability to create partnerships because we can’t solve these problems alone.

Watch it:

It was President Bush’s open belligerence and defiant unilateralism — what author Michael Signer has called “vulgar exceptionalism” — that represented the genuine departure from the traditions of American foreign policy. In seeking to re-establish the United States as the moral leader in an international system based upon the rule of law, President Obama is trying to reinvigorate those traditions.

I understand that this more nuanced and rigorous understanding of American exceptionalism is a bit complex for many conservatives. As evidenced by their continuing support for the policies of George W. Bush, they tend to be much more delighted by simple assertions of American power than by policies that actually strengthen it.

Just before launching his invasion of Iraq, President Bush went on national television to issue an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, urging him to leave his country within 48 hours. Bush also had this message for “all Iraqi military and civilian personnel”:

War crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be punished and it will be no defense to say, “I was just following orders.”

Watch it:

George Washington law professor Jonathan Turley argues that this statement by Bush shows that “he and his administration knew that there is no ‘good faith defense’ in committing war crimes.”

Bush also understood the need for full investigations and accountability when it comes to torture. After the Abu Ghraib scandal, Bush told Al Arabiya: “It’s important for people to understand that in a democracy, there will be a full investigation. In other words, we want to know the truth. In our country, when there’s an allegation of abuse … there will be a full investigation, and justice will be delivered.” (See the video here.)

Steve Benen responds, “It seems to me if Democrats are looking for an excuse to do the right thing, they don’t have to say much more than, ‘We’re doing what Bush told us to do.’”

Please join our campaign calling on Congress to begin impeachment hearings against Jay Bybee.

Our guest blogger is Micah Zenko, Fellow in the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations.

In an interview with Fox News last week, former Vice President Dick Cheney announced that he had “formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos,” which reportedly demonstrate the “success” that enhanced interrogations had in compelling high-value Al Qaeda operatives to provide intelligence that helped to protect the United States from terrorist attacks. Shortly thereafter, an unnamed senior U.S. intelligence official told Politico.com that “The Agency has received no such request from the former Vice President.” This led to a further revelation from Cheney’s daughter Liz that the former Vice President had actually requested the CIA memos from the National Archives. At some point last Tuesday, the National Archives finally forwarded the request to the Agency, where it probably should have arrived in the first place.

Yesterday, on Meet the Press, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs noted that Cheney’s request is “in the very same process that if somebody else determined that a memo should be declassified…It’s a process that takes about three weeks. “ As anyone who has ever made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for CIA documents knows, this is an unprecedented time-frame, especially for memos that contain such highly sensitive raw intelligence. All of which raises questions about how and why the Obama administration is expediting the former Vice President’s request at this time.

In the experience of this analyst, CIA FOIA requests take anywhere from six to eighteen months to receive a formal ruling of whether the document can be declassified (often in redacted form), or whether it should be exempted on national security grounds.

The three weeks that Robert Gibbs described refers to the language in the FOIA law, which requires federal agencies to “determine within twenty days (excepting Saturdays, Sundays, and legal public holidays) after the receipt of any such request whether to comply with such request and shall immediately notify the person making such request of such determination and the reasons therefor (sic).” What this means in practice, is that a month after filing a CIA FOIA request, which can only be done via snail-mail or fax, you receive a letter that provides a case number and notification that your request is under review. Over the following months, you can call one of two CIA Public Liaison officers, who are friendly and responsive to voice mails, at 703-613-1287 in an effort to expedite the process, but they generally will only re-remind you that your request remains “under review.”

It is not clear under what authority former Vice President Cheney’s FOIA request for the CIA memos has been awarded fast-track preference by the Obama administration. Executive Order 12958 (as amended in 2003), allows for “Access by Historical Researchers and Former Presidential Appointees” for individuals who have “previously have occupied policy-making positions to which they were appointed by the President.” While this might apply to providing an open channel for Cheney to reference classified information as he writes his memoirs, it should not speed up what is the normal declassification process.

There should be greater transparency over the CIA’s detention and interrogation programs that were created after 9/11. The CIA memos requested by Cheney should eventually be declassified in the normal time-frame as part of that process. They should not, however, be rapidly declassified to score points on one side of the ongoing and intense political debates about the legality and effectiveness of the CIA programs.

Foreign Policy magazine “asked some of the best foreign-policy minds in Washington and beyond” to rate President Obama’s first 100 days in office. “The result? 11 As, 16 Bs, 7 Cs, and a D,” Foreign Policy noted. Some of these “best foreign-policy minds” also included a number of neoconservatives and President Bush’s staunchest defenders. Surprisingly, not all of them trashed Obama’s first 100 days:

– Meghan O’Sullivan, Bush’s deputy national security adviser: Grade – B+ “President Obama deserves the high marks for his treatment of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan in his first 100 days. [...] On Iraq in particular, he deserves kudos and gets an A-.”

– Robert Kagan, Carnegie Endowment fellow: Grade – A-/B+ “President Obama scores high on Afghanistan and Iraq. [...] His policy toward Iran makes sense, so long as he is ready with a serious Plan B if the negotiating track with Tehran fails. His policies toward Russia are sound.”

While Kagan’s opinion of Obama’s Iran policy appears slightly enhanced from just last month with the added caveat of “a serious plan B,” he later said he would have given Obama an A- had he not “thrown a bouquet” to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at the summit of the Americas last week.

But the rest of the Bush loyalists on Foreign Policy’s list weren’t so friendly. Much of their displeasure with Obama seemed to center around the notion that Obama has somehow been spending his first 100 days in office apologizing to the world:

– Elliot Abrams, served on Bush’s National Security Council: Grade – D “The ‘apology tours’ are not the administration’s worst offense, and would only merit a C. The D reflects the abandonment of brave men and women throughout the world fighting for human rights and civil liberties.”

– Danielle Pletka, American Enterprise Institute: Grade – C “Some will be tempted to inflate their grade, as Obama has fashioned himself the anti-Bush. But ‘I’m not him’ is not a foreign policy, nor is an almost pathological proclivity to apologize for American power and leadership. [...] Obama looks increasingly desperate.

– Peter Feaver, Duke University Professor: Grade – B- “What will matter is not whether Chávez says nice things about Obama, but whether the revived soft power brings real results. And it will get harder and harder to win applause lines by apologizing for the policies of your predecessor when you continue them in important respects.

“I think it expresses confidence,” Vice President Joe Biden said of Obama’s interactions with Chávez during an interview that aired last night on 60 Minutes. He also specifically took issue with critics who say Obama is apologizing to the world for the U.S. “I don’t know what he’s apologized for. For example, saying we should close Guantanamo is not an apology. That’s not an apology saying…we don’t engage in torture. He didn’t go out and say, ‘Oh, my God, the fact that the last administration did these things — we’re so sorry.’ He did say – he just said, ‘We don’t do torture any more.’”

Last week, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) repeated his view that the United States had conducted torture by authorizing waterboarding. Saying the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times was “unacceptable,” McCain declared, “One is too much. Waterboarding is torture, period.”

However, discussing torture on CBS’s Face the Nation today, McCain insisted, “We’ve got to move on” and ignore the Bush administration’s torture program. Indeed, McCain refused to support the impeachment of Judge Jay Bybee — even as he acknowledged that Bybee had broken both U.S. and international law in authorizing torture:

MCCAIN: He falls into the same category as everybody else as far as giving very bad advice and misinterpreting, fundamentally, what the United States is all about, much less things like the Geneva Conventions. Look, under President Reagan we signed an agreement against torture. We were in violation of that.

McCain claimed that “no one has alleged, quote, wrongdoing” on the part of Bush administration lawyers, only that they had given “bad advice.” And yet minutes later McCain himself acknowledged that Bybee’s advice led the U.S. to be “in violation” of both U.S. and international law. Watch it:

Later on Face the Nation, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who supports holding broad investigations about torture, pointed out that McCain supports a commission to investigate the causes of the financial crisis. “But just as important as losing our money, what happens when we lose our national honor? That’s what we should look at,” Leahy said.

Yesterday, the blogger dday asked Sen Barbara Boxer (D-CA) whether she would support a Congressional inquiry into Bybee, including the possibility of impeachment. “I’m very open to that,” Boxer said. “There is an ongoing investigation at the Justice Department into his work, and we’ll see how that goes. But I’m very open to that. And I’ll remind everyone that I didn’t vote for him when his nomination came up. I was one of 19 to do so.”

Please join our campaign calling on Congress to begin impeachment hearings against Jay Bybee.

Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union this morning, Center for American Progress Action Fund President and CEO John Podesta called on Congress to commence impeachment hearings against Jay Bybee, should he decide not to voluntarily resign his seat on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Podesta said:

The one thing I disagree with you and David [Gergen] about is I do think there’s a distinction between going back and prosecuting in criminal courts the actors who were involved in these memos and letting Judge Bybee continue to sit on a court one step removed from the Supreme Court. He’s acting and listening to cases, making judgments of others, and we know he authorized things that were illegal under U.S. law and violated the U.S. obligations under international treaties.

If he would do the right thing, he should just simply resign. If he doesn’t, I think this is one matter where he continues to sit — he doesn’t have the moral or legal authority to continue to do that. And I think a simple matter would be to remove him from office.

Podesta added that he suspects the White House doesn’t agree with the call for impeaching Bybee. The other panelists — David Gergen and former Reagan chief of staff Ken Duberstein — disagreed with the call for impeachment. Watch it:

Also, Podesta delivered a letter this morning to House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI), laying out the case for impeaching Bybee.

The letter (pdf) informed Conyers that ThinkProgress has collected nearly 20,000 signatures from concerned citizens “who have expressed their deep-felt and sincere desire to see that Judge Bybee is held to account for authorizing torture.” Podesta’s letter affixed the names of everyone who signed our petition calling on Congress to begin impeachment hearings against Bybee. (It required 71 three-column double-sided pages.)

Thanks for all your help! This could not have been possible without the support of all of you who signed the petition. If you have not already done so, please consider joining the effort by clicking here.

Read Podesta’s full letter below: Read more

The Weekly Standard’s Noemie Emery thinks we should tell the truth about Bush’s war on terror:

Let’s tell the truth about Bush’s conduct of the war on terror, which is that it’s been a success. His ultimate legacy hasn’t been written–Iraq is improved, but not out of danger–but the one thing that can be said without reservation is that the country was kept safe. He delivered on the main charge of his office in time of emergency, in a crisis without guidelines or precedent. Attacks took place in Spain, and in London, in Indonesia and India, but not on American soil, which was the obvious target of choice. Bush couldn’t say this before he left office, for obvious reasons, and after he left, attention switched to the new president.

Actually, Bush said this a lot before he left office. In fact, he delivered a special last formal address to the nation specifically to make that point.

As for Emery’s claim that no attacks took place on American soil, apart from the largest mass casualty terrorist attack on American soil in history, this is true!

But don’t worry, Emery remembers 9/11 later when it’s time to defend torture:

Let’s get at the truth too about the word “torture,” which to different people, means different things. Some think “torture” means standing on the 98th floor of a burning skyscraper and realizing you have a choice between jumping and being incinerated. Some think torture is being crushed when a building implodes around you. Some think torture is not thinking you might drown for several minutes, but looking at burning buildings on television and knowing that people you love are inside them. They remember that being crushed, incinerated, or killed in a jump from the 98th story happened to almost 3,000 blameless Americans (as well as a number of foreigners), and that 125 Pentagon employees were killed at their desks, while many survivors suffered terrible burns. They think the choice between stopping this from happening again by slapping around or scaring the hell out of a cluster of brigands, or leaving the brigands alone and letting it happen again, is a no-brainer.

Notice how Emery moves smoothly from offering a morally relativistic metric, in which the Bush administration’s torture methods are indexed to the suffering of the people murdered on 9/11, to offering a false choice between torturing the people responsible for 9/11 and doing nothing. It’s almost as if she’s just flailing around, trying to defend the indefensible…

As has probably been the case since the beginning of human existence, groups under threat tend to impute all manner of strange and frightening characteristics to their enemies. The Greeks told scary, fantastic stories about the vile Persians, as did the Ottomans about the hated, unwashed European barbarians. Allied soldiers and citizens during the First World War were taught to fear the uniquely barbarous German Hun. During the Cold War, Americans were raised to believe that, in the immortal words of Gen. Jack D. Ripper, “your Commie has no regard for human life, not even his own.”

Similar sorts of exceptionalist arguments have been a standard part of America’s post-9/11 political discourse, running the gamut from Michael Rubin’s theologically questionable presentation of the Iranian regime as “religiously sanctioned” liars to Marty Peretz’s outright racist assertion that the mass atrocities taking place in Iraq are “routine in their [Arab] cultures.”

One such example that has cropped up recently in relation to the torture debate is the idea that, in addition to being especially resistant to torture because of their religious commitment, Al Qaeda detainees actually require the application of torture in order to the help them fulfill their religious obligation to resist.

Pivoting off of a statement from Abu Zubaydah in the released CIA memos (“Brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardships”), former Bush administration speechwriter Marc Thiessen rationalized in the Washington Post that “the job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely.”

In Thiessen’s world, not only does torture help protect America, it helps our enemies to be better Muslims.

Cliff May picked up this argument today in NRO’s The Corner, writing that “Islamists [sic] believe their religion forbids them to cooperate with infidels — until they have reached the limit of their ability to endure the hardships the infidel is inflicting on them.”

In other words: Imagine an al-Qaeda member who would like to give his interrogators information, who does not want continue fighting, who would prefer not to see more innocent people slaughtered. He would need his interrogators to press him hard so he can feel that he has met his religious obligations — only then could he cooperate.

But just try to get anyone in the “anti-torture” camp to seriously debate any of this.

I think the reason why May is having trouble getting anyone in the anti-torture camp to seriously debate this is because it’s not a very serious argument. It’s pretty safe to say that a member of Al Qaeda “who does not want continue fighting and who would prefer not to see more innocent people slaughtered” has effectively given up his membership in Al Qaeda. The idea that such a person — having already abandoned the key tenets of Al Qaeda’s jihad — would then continue to hold out simply in order to be able to check the “resist torture” box is extraordinarily weak stuff. But then, so is the argument for torture.

The idea that Al Qaeda detainees pose some special interrogation challenge by virtue of their religious belief is likewise pretty weak. All detainees operate under a certain code governing what information they may and may not reveal (American servicemen are famously only allowed to reveal their name, rank, and serial number when captured) and I haven’t seen any evidence that Al Qaeda members are any more or less resistant to interrogation simply on the basis of their faith. And certainly not to the extent that would justify the United States’ violating its prohibition on torture.

Our guest blogger is David Sullivan, Research Associate with Enough, The Project to End Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity.

Enough’s latest strategy paper, “A Comprehensive Approach to Congo’s Conflict Minerals,” proposes a new strategy to sever the links between the trade in valuable minerals essential to everyday electronics products such as cell phones and the ongoing crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, home to the worst sexual violence in the world.

In eastern Congo, the same armed groups that reap enormous profits from the mineral trade regularly commit conscience-shocking atrocities as they jockey to control the region’s most valuable mines. The four most profitable ones produce the metals tin, tantalum and tungsten — the 3T’s — and gold, which together generate as much as $183 million annually for armed groups. Without alternative sources of income, these miners and their families remain virtually enslaved to these groups and the conflict minerals trade.

The international community has spent billions of dollars on elections and peacekeeping in Congo but has largely ignored the primary economic driver of the conflict. The Congolese government lacks the capacity and political will to combat corruption and legitimize their mineral wealth. Congo’s neighbors — including Rwanda and Uganda — have often encouraged continued instability in Congo because they also profit from the illicit trade. A renewed cooperative approach between Congo and its neighbors to establish legitimate trading mechanisms could offer the best prospects of a long-term solution.

The complexities surrounding this conflict prove that there is no silver bullet solution. However, if the international community and regional actors work in conjunction with the private sector to align their efforts around the common goal of a revitalized legitimate mineral trade in eastern Congo, long-term efforts could have a major impact in resolving the conflict. There are four main components to a new strategy for such efforts:

1. Shining a light on the supply chain. Push electronics companies— the principal end-users of the 3T’s and gold—to change the way they practice business by working together with their suppliers to create a tracing system paired with credible monitoring of the system by independent third parties. This would provide a critical step towards demanding greater accountability for corporate behavior and transparency. With 80 percent of consumer electronics companies trading on U.S. stock markets, U.S.-based activists have some of the most powerful opportunities for leverage on this part of the supply chain.

2. Identifying and securing strategic mines. The United Nations should collaborate with the Congolese government identify key mining sites under the control of armed groups. Properly integrated Congolese security forces, supported by U.N. peacekeepers, should secure these sites and transit routes. This approach must be grounded in a more comprehensive and coherent effort to advance broad security sector reform in Congo.

3. Reforming governance. The international community should work hand in hand with the Congolese government to exercise control over mining and commerce in eastern Congo. With Congo sorely in need of international funds, there is an opportunity to press for not just commitments but demonstrable reforms to the regulation of mining, commerce, and taxation.

4. Supporting livelihoods and economic opportunities for miners. Impoverished Congolese miners and their families are dependent upon their meager incomes and have few viable economic alternatives. Efforts to end the trade in conflict minerals absolutely must be accompanied by international support for livelihoods and economic opportunities in eastern Congo.

Congo’s conflict minerals problem is complex, but the roadmap to a solution exists. Efforts will not succeed, however, unless individual consumers in the United States and around the world step up and demand a change. Calling or emailing top electronics manufacturers and telling them to ensure that their products are conflict-free will help to create the conditions necessary to end the war in Congo. You can also ensure that your voice is heard by endorsing our Conflict Minerals Pledge.

Via Andrew Sullivan, Derek Thompson examines a new Brookings Institution report in which economist James Hamilton argues that the economic crisis was caused by the sharp rise on oil prices that occurred over the last several years:

Hamilton went back to 2003, when crude oil was around $30 a gallon and forecast what an oil shock like the one we experienced in 2007-08 (when oil peaked around $140) would do to GDP. He graphed the result through the end of 2008 and, lo and behold, it was damn close to actual GDP. [...]

What about real estate, subprime mortgages and defaults? Hamilton says the housing industry had been tightening up long before the recession — “subtracting 0.94% from the average annual GDP growth rate over 2006:Q4-2007:Q3.” And housing is factored into Hamilton’s analysis. It was just one of a handful of multipliers that always turn down during oil shocks.

When considering the impact that oil prices had on the U.S. economy, it’s also obviously worth considering what impact the Iraq war — by creating greater uncertainty and risk in the world’s leading oil producing region — had on oil prices. According to a leading oil economist, Dr. Mamdouh Salameh, the Iraq war “tripled the price of oil…costing the world a staggering $6 trillion in higher energy prices alone”:

Salameh, who advises both the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organization (Unido), [said] that the price of oil would now be no more than $40 a barrel, less than a third of the record $135 a barrel reached last week, if it had not been for the Iraq war.

This is part of the combined impact of the war on the U.S. economy that economist Joseph Stiglitz placed at around $3 trillion, possibly going as high as $5 trillion. Of course, these are just the economic costs — there are numerous political and security costs still to be tallied, but they all need to be kept in mind when confronted by conservatives arguing that the Iraq war was, in any sense, “worth it.”

Today, Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) went on MSNBC to attack the Senate Armed Services Committee report on the Bush administration’s treatment of detainees. When host Chris Matthews asked Ensign whether he was shocked that our interrogation practices were based on those used by Chinese Communists to elicit false information from U.S. troops, the senator criticized him for being “inflammatory.”

When Matthews insisted that he wasn’t being inflammatory because he was reading directly from the report, Ensign tried to discredit the entire document by saying it was a “Democrat partisan” report:

ENSIGN: Chris, the reason I said it is because you didn’t preface that with saying that was a Democrat report. That was a Democrat partisan report. And you have to understand where the people who were doing that report — where their ideology comes from.

MATTHEWS: Well, apparently, Sen. John McCain is part of what you call a “Democrat report.” It’s the full committee report. … [I]t’s the Armed Services Committee report. It went through three months of review by the Defense Department, until its final release just yesterday. It seems to me this was vetted, sir. And you say this was some Democrat report.

ENSIGN: The Democrats are in control of all of the committees. This was a Democrat majority report. This was not with the participation of the minority where the minority signed it, “Yes, we agree with these views.”

Watch it:

Ensign is right that there are often committee reports produced and released by only the minority or the majority. This report, however, was not one of them. The first page of the detainee report makes it clear that it is a document from the “Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate.” ThinkProgress spoke with a committee spokesman who confirmed that the full, unanimous committee released the report. When talking with Levin today, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell noted that Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham also endorsed the report.

Additionally, documents clearly show that the Bush administration’s interrogation program was based on the U.S. military program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE), which is used to train U.S. troops if they are ever tortured by an enemy that doesn’t adhere to the Geneva Conventions. As the report notes, SERE techniques “were based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to elicit false confessions.”

Transcript: Read more

Don’t they? Here’s a May 17, 2004, editorial on the perpetrators of the Abu Ghraib atrocities:

They have endangered any American unlucky enough to find himself at the mercy of our enemies in the war on terror. They have impeded our progress in that war. More fundamentally, they traduced their mission, betrayed their fellow soldiers, and disgraced their country. Anyone up or down the chain of command who was criminally complicit should be prosecuted, too.[...]

There’s only one way to drain this poison, and it isn’t further breast-beating, from the administration or its foes. Bring on the trials, and the punishment.

Quite right! As the report (pdf) of the Senate Armed Services Committee makes (even more) clear, the abuses at Abu Ghraib were the direct result of policies implemented by the Bush administration:

Once they were accepted, the methods became the basis for harsh interrogations not only in CIA secret prisons, but also in Defense Department internment camps at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan and Iraq, the report said.

Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the committee, said the new findings show a direct link between the early policy decisions and the highly publicized abuses of detainees at prisons such as Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

“Senior officials sought out information on, were aware of training in, and authorized the use of abusive interrogation techniques,” Levin said. “Those senior officials bear significant responsibility for creating the legal and operational framework for the abuses.”

Speaking to CBS this morning, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who ran Iraq prisons in 2003, including Abu Ghraib, “was insistent that all orders on interrogation practices came from the top down during the Bush administration.”

“These soldiers didn’t design these techniques on their own…we were following orders,” Karpinski told Harry Smith. “We were bringing this to our chain of command and they were saying whatever the military intelligence tells you to do out there you are authorized to do.”

So will the Weekly Standard editors stand by their previous assertion that those complicit should be prosecuted? Or are they still happy to let the grunts go to jail while their friends in the Bush administration get off?

Late yesterday, the Senate Armed Services Committee made public an unclassified version of its November 2008 report, “Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody.” The report reveals that top Bush administration officials were so eager to start harsh interrogations on detainees that they often ignored warnings from military advisers, skipped a thorough legal review process, and failed to fully investigate the origins of the dangerous techniques. Moreover, the consequences of their actions trickled down to lower-ranking officers and led directly to the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Here are some highlights from the report:

– Top Officials Were Unaware Of The Gruesome Origins Of The Interrogation Program. The Bush administration’s interrogation program was based on the U.S. military program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE), which is used to train U.S. troops if they are ever tortured by an enemy that doesn’t adhere to the Geneva Conventions. However, none of the top CIA, Cabinet, or congressional officials who approved of the Bush administration’s recommendations knew that SERE was designed around “torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War…that had wrung false confessions from Americans.” These officials were unaware that veteran SERE trainers said the methods were ineffective for getting useful information and the former military psychologist who recommended that the CIA adopt SERE “had never conducted a real interrogation.” One CIA official called the process “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm.”

– Military Officials Warned That Harsh Interrogation Was Illegal And Ineffective. In November 2002, the Deputy Commander of the Defense Department’s Criminal Investigative Task Force at Gitmo raised concerns that SERE techniques were “developed to better prepare U.S. military personnel to resist interrogations and not as a means of obtaining reliable information.” The Air Force cited “serious concerns regarding the legality of many of the proposed techniques.” The Army, Navy, and Marine Corps raised similar issues, citing “maltreatment” that would “arguably violate federal law.”

– Abusive Tactics Were Used To Search For A Non-Existent Al-Qaeda/Iraq Link. In 2006, former U.S. Army psychiatrist Maj. Charles Burney told investigators that interrogators at Gitmo were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between Iraq and al Qaeda, even though they were ultimately unsuccesful. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link…there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”

Read more

Shedding some well-needed light on why it could have possibly been necessary to waterboard someone 183 times, McClatchy reports that according to “a former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue,” former Vice-President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld “demanded that intelligence agencies and interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.”

“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.

“The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.” [...]

“There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.

I suppose it’s fitting, if disturbingly ironic, that techniques adopted wholesale from methods intended to extract false confessions were used in an attempt to generate evidence of a non-existent Al Qaeda-Saddam operational relationship.

In addition to the basic issue of illegal torture, however, we have the issue of mis-allocation of resources. The time spent and assets used in attempting to torture out a justification for what we now know was a predetermined Iraq invasion could have been better spent actually protecting America. In other words, the Iraq war was damaging U.S. national security even before it began.

On Sunday, CQ reported that the NSA had wiretapped Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), listening in on a call in which she apparently offered a quid pro quo to a lobbyist group. Harman has vigorously denied the reports. Today, she appeared on MSNBC to express her shock and outrage that her phone calls were listened to, saying she was “disappointed” that the U.S. could have allowed such “a gross abuse of power”:

HARMAN: I’m just very disappointed that my country — I’m an American citizen just like you are — could have permitted what I think is a gross abuse of power in recent years. I’m one member of Congress who may be caught up in it, but I have a bully pulpit and I can fight back. I’m thinking about others who have no bully pulpit and may not be aware, as I was not, that right now somewhere, someone’s listening in on their conversations, and they’re innocent Americans.

Watch it:

Harman’s anger seems a bit disingenuous, considering that she was one of the earliest supporters of Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. When the practice was revealed by the New York Times in 2005, she defended it as “essential,” though admitted she was “concerned” about its scope:

“I have been briefed since 2003 on a highly classified NSA foreign collection program that targeted Al Qaeda. I believe the program is essential to U.S. national security and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities,” Harman said. “Like many Americans, I am deeply concerned by reports that this program in fact goes far beyond the measures to target Al Qaeda about which I was briefed.”

In fact, in 2004 she “urged that The [New York] Times not publish the article” revealing Bush’s program.

Indeed, she issued a press release in 2007 specifically highlighting that the updated FISA bill she approved of would fully allow warrantless wiretapping:

This bill does a good job — a far better job than the bill reported last month by the Senate Intelligence Committee. … This legislation arms our intelligence professionals with the ability to listen to foreign targets — without a warrant — to uncover plots that threaten US national security. The bill also protects the Constitutional rights of Americans by requiring the FISA court, an Article III Court, to approve procedures to ensure that Americans are not targeted for warrantless surveillance.

To her credit, Harman warned against “a slippery legal slope to potential unprecedented abuse of innocent Americans’ privacy” and stated her opposition to granting telecommunications companies retroactive immunity. Perhaps her outrage at being a target of wiretapping herself will force her to realize that the program she deemed “essential” invaded the privacy of untold millions of Americans.