In the wake of the release of the OLC torture memos, right-wing torture supporters have been insisting all over cable that torture works. For example, torture supporters Marc Thiessen and Cliff May:

MARC THIESSEN on FOX: The dirty little secret of this ["enhanced interrogation"] program is it worked. It stopped the next terrorist attack… This whole thing is dozens and dozens of unredacted information about the techniques. And then all of a sudden you get to the point where they start talking about the results of the techniques and guess what? They pull out their black little pen and this is what’s there [holds up redacted page.] What is behind here, Mr. President, is what I want to know. What is behind here is proof that the terrorist interrogation program stopped the next 9/11.

CLIFF MAY on MSNBC: We have real world experience. If you think that some hardened terrorist will talk to you because you ask him nicely, and you don’t think that coercive interrogations ever work, you don’t know the evidence.

To listen to Thiessen and May’s claims about “evidence” about torture’s effectiveness, you might think that evidence about torture’s effectiveness actually exists. It does not. While actionable intelligence was obtained from terror detainees such as Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and Abu Zubaydah, this intelligence was obtained before they were tortured. There is no evidence that any actionable intelligence has been produced by torturing terror detainees, which is why Marc Thiessen is reduced to insisting that evidence of torture’s effectiveness must be what was redacted.

As military interrogator Matthew Alexander wrote last November, not only doesn’t torture work, it actually makes Americans less safe. “The No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked [to Iraq] to fight,” wrote Alexander, “were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.”

Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.

So, on one side you’ve got a couple of right-wing hacks who insist — based on unseen evidence — that torture works, and on the other you’ve got an actual military interrogator who insists — based his own first-hand experience — that it doesn’t. This isn’t really a tough one.

Our guest bloggers are Peter Juul, Research Associate and Colin Cookman, Special Assistant for National Security at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Yesterday, the Pakistani supreme court released Maulana Abdul Aziz, a militant ideologue and leader of Islamabad’s Red Mosque. During the siege of the Red Mosque in July 2007, triggered by his supporters’ unchecked vigilantism in Pakistan’s capital finally provoked a reaction from Pakistani security forces, Aziz was arrested attempting to escape dressed as a woman. The siege, in which at least a hundred were reportedly killed, has since become a rallying cry for a disparate array of militant groups along the country’s northwest border and in the heartland of Punjab itself. Conducting Friday prayers at the mosque today, Aziz told the crowd of followers that “the blood of those who were martyred here will usher in an Islamic revolution.”

While Aziz’s release should raise alarms, as Joshua Frost at Registan.net notes, the Supreme Court decision is part of a broader ongoing rebuke by the judicial establishment and civil society of the Musharraf regime’s use of indefinite extra-constitutional detentions as a means of handling terror suspects — a problem the Obama administration itself is attempting to grapple with itself as it examines options for closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Aziz still faces 26 charges, including abetting murder and incitement, but the government’s failure to bring any of those to court during his nearly two years’ long imprisonment speaks to the incapacity of Pakistan’s judicial system to effectively respond to those who seek its overthrow. The pattern of reluctance or inability of the government to carry out swift legal action in the case of major terror suspects such as Aziz, Rashid Rauf, and several Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives linked to the Mumbai attacks has increased tensions with Pakistan’s neighbors and international allies, fueling suspicion that Pakistan’s security services are playing a double game to preserve their former militant clients.

In both the long and short runs, the goal of the United States must be to help build an effective, democratic Pakistani state able to defend itself from an aggressive internal insurgency. Without an effective, efficient justice system, a democratic Pakistan will remain weak and unable to enforce its own laws throughout the country. As the New York Times article on the rise of the Swat valley Taliban makes clear, the absence of effective state institutions to rectify societal inequities -– especially a fair and efficient judicial system –- give militants the space in which to seize power and impose their own rules.

Contrary to Maulana Abdul Aziz’s claim that “the whole country resounds to cries for the implementation of Islamic law,” the vast majority of Pakistanis voted for secular political parties in the most recent national elections in February 2008. Pakistan’s most recent large protest movement was not for the state enforcement of religious regulations, but the reinstatement of the Musharraf-dismissed chief justice of the Supreme Court. Pakistanis, as far as can be determined, want an effective democratic state, not a brutal religious dictatorship.

But in the short term, at least, the release of Aziz will serve to empower militants at a time when they are already buoyed by the open establishment of parallel government structures in the Northwest Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Aziz’s vow to build on the Taliban’s success in Swat should be taken seriously by the Pakistani government and the United States. The increasing infiltration of militancy into the heart of Pakistan will only continue to accelerate. At a certain point, the United States will have to decide if it wants to persist in its efforts to build up the Frontier Corps to deal with the Taliban in the border areas, or perform triage and build up the Pakistani civilian security apparatus –- especially the police -– in the “settled areas” of Pakistan.

Yesterday, as he released four Bush-era legal memos authorizing the torture of terrorist suspects, President Obama made it clear he would not support any prosecutions of low-level interrogators who actually carried out Bush’s policies. “[I]t is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.”

Obama also added, “This is a time for reflection, not retribution,” and said “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.” Some progressive commentators were outraged; Keith Olbermann pleaded, “Prosecute, Mr. President.” CBS’s Andrew Cohen interpreted this to mean Obama would not support any prosecutions for torture:

One by one, the hammer blows fell upon civil libertarians and millions of other Americans who believe that the people who legally sanctioned and then implemented torturous “enhanced interrogation tactics” should have had to defend their conduct in our courts of law. One by one, those enthusiastic supporters of the Obama administration’s legal values and policies realized that they had just lost a battle (been wiped out, in fact) that they had every reason to believe they would win. There will be no torture trials. Period.

However, Obama’s statement was carefully worded to include only “those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice” — not the Bush officials who actually gave out that advice. ACLU lead counsel Jameel Jaffer told Glenn Greenwald that Obama did not shut the door to all prosecutions:

I think it’s a mistake to read the grant of immunity too broadly. I don’t think that President Obama’s statement should be taken as a sign that there’s no chance that the architects of torture program will be prosecuted. And even with respect to the interrogators, it’s only the interrogators who relied “in good faith” on legal advice who are protected.

Indeed, Marc Ambinder reported yesterday that “senior administration officials have made it clear” to him that the immunity would not apply to those officials who “who did NOT act in good faith, or who did not act according to the guidelines spelled out by the OLC.” Obama himself seemed to indicate that some sort of investigations have already begun, telling CNN en Espanol, “I think that we are moving a process forward here in the United States to understand what happened.”

Greenwald notes that the door for investigations and prosecutions is still open, but it will take enormous pressure from the American public to push Obama through. “[T]he burden is on us to demand that something be done,” he writes.

Dr. Tariq Al-Abdullah is a tribal sheikh in Iraq’s Anbar province, and one of the leaders of what became known as the “Awakenings” movement, in which members of Sunni tribes — many of them former insurgents — allied with U.S. coalition forces against Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Yesterday I spoke with Dr. Al-Abdullah about the current situation in Iraq, specifically the state of Iraq’s political reconciliation in the wake of a series of battles between Awakenings forces and Iraqi government troops. Dr. Al-Abdullah offered a discouraging diagnosis. “I can assure you,” he said “that it [reconciliation] doesn’t go even slowly, it is stopped completely. There is no action regarding reconciliation.”

My dream, like any other Iraqi, we are looking for stability and democracy and freedom, and we think we cannot deliver…these things if we are not united. And because we have our own government, our elected government, they should deal — even if there are many concerns about the election as we heard, and you heard in the past time — but it’s a matter of fact that they are existing and we should deal with them and they should deal with the situation as a government for the whole Iraq. To bring stability and progress and the reconstruction of Iraq I think they should be looking for the unity of the Iraqis, and reconciliation. And here when we say we want reconciliation, we want a real reconciliation.

Watch it:

While Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had promised that significant numbers of Awakenings members would either be incorporated into Iraq’s security forces or provided other government jobs, a promise that Maliki’s government has thus far failed to keep.

Full transcript below. Read more

Our guest blogger is Shiyong Park, an intern with the National Security team at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

On April 13th, China released the National Human Rights Action Plan of China (2009-2010), becoming the 26th country to respond to the call by the United Nations for such a plan. In the 54-page document, first announced last November, the CCP outlined reforms ranging from increased transparency to rural health care. Although China’s first comprehensive human rights plan warrants praise, it should only be welcomed with a critical eye.

The document states “While respecting the universal principles of human rights, the Chinese government, in the light of the basic realities of China, gives priority to the protection of the people’s rights to subsistence and development,” reaffirming the regime’s intention to promote development at the cost of human rights when necessary. In a time when even its neighbor Russia’s President Medvedev rejects the idea of giving up rights in exchange for prosperity, the CCP’s stance is inadequate, and it is important to recognize that the Chinese people cannot enjoy the benefits of economic prosperity without basic rights.

The most notable failures of the plan are in the protection of civil and political rights. While the plan sets to eliminate “illegal detention” by law enforcement, it does not abolish the administrative system of “re-education through labor,” in which civic leaders and political dissidents are often sent to labor camps for up to four years without a trial.

The promise of curbing torture, forced confessions, and arbitrary arrests are also undermined by the conditions in more than 2,700 pre-trial detention centers and an unknown number of unregistered jails. The New York Times and Amnesty International report that since February, at least seven inmates have died under suspicious circumstances while in police custody.

Despite the shortfalls, the publication of the two-year plan is a significant step for a nation with a history of neglecting basic human rights. But it is not enough to simply reaffirm the principles already enshrined in the Chinese Constitution. China must open up for discussions of concrete cases, such as the conviction of Hu Jia, a prominent AIDS activist, and the detention of Liu Xiaobo, one of the authors of Charter 08. In both instances, the men’s “right to be heard” outlined in the Action Plan and the freedom of speech engraved in the Constitution were violated, and the situation must be addressed.

In the shadows of the U.S. State Department’s negative China human rights report in February, the ambitious Action Plan provides a reason for optimism. However, we cannot let the promises of a better future cloud our sight in observing the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, nor can we forget about the current reality of neglected and systematically violated human rights. To overcome its stigma, China must couple the reaffirmation of principles with tangible actions.