Don't Like Torture? CIA Says You're Too Emotional

Senator Ron Wyden blasted former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden when he suggested Dianme Feinstein was "too emotional" about torture undertaken by the CIA during the Bush administration.

General Hayden’s suggestion that Chairman Feinstein was motivated by ‘emotion’ rather than a focus on the facts is simply outrageous.  General Hayden unfortunately has a long history of misleading the American public – he did it on domestic surveillance when he was the head of the NSA, and he did it on torture when he was the CIA Director.
The best way to correct this culture of misinformation is to give the American people a chance to review the facts for themselves, and I’ll be working with my colleagues and the administration to ensure that happens quickly.

Quotes on Torture Alberto Mora

Alberto Mora
General Counsel, U.S. Navy

(2001-2006)

Alberto Mora was appointed general counsel for the United States Navy in 2001. One of Mora's great uncles had been imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp; another was tortured before he was hanged.
If the individual doesn't have the right to be free from torture and to enforce those rights, to some sort of judicial process, then individual rights cease to have significant meaning. The notion of rights become trivialized because if the right to be free from cruelty is not a right, then what else is left? Property rights, some types of free speech rights, these are important, but nothing is as important as the preservation of human dignity through freedom from cruelty.

One subscribes to the Geneva Convention because it makes enemy soldiers more likely to not resist capture than to resist capture. If an enemy soldier knows he'll be treated humanely if he's captured, he's not likely to fight to the last bullet. On the other hand, if an enemy soldier understands he's likely to be abused, then that increases his likelihood that he'll continue to fight and that American soldiers will be hurt or killed as a result. So there are a variety of factors that underlie the Geneva Convention and there's a large body of scholarship, all of which it is the principle domain of the JAGs to understand. 

When you saw the package of documents, you also saw Secretary Rumsfeld's signature, which shocked you, but you saw a handwritten note as well.

At the very bottom of the top page, Secretary Rumsfeld, in his handwriting, notes in reference to the request for authority to apply stress positions in standing for periods of time, something like, "Why are they limited to four hours a day? I stand at my desk from eight to ten hours a day."

...
if we were to apply cruelty now, it would necessarily imply a repeal and repudiation of our historic commitment to human rights as a foreign policy objective. Ever since World War II and arguably before then, the nation has been aggressively promoting human rights very successfully, successfully in the sense that it's altered other nations' and other individuals' behavior around the world. And all of this has been to the benefit of the United States and our long-term national security interests. And if we were now to allow the use of cruelty as a national policy, that was to say that other countries could also apply cruelty as a matter of their policy. It would repudiate all of the major human rights conventions that have been largely the result of American advocacy since World War II. How could we do that?

Quotes from the torture report

Malcolm Nance, Navy SERE 1997 - 2001
Malcolm Nance is a former master instructor and chief of training at the U.S. Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape
school, who has himself been waterboarded as part of the training.
A long-time intelligence specialist who speaks five languages, including Arabic, Nance has been deployed on counterterrorism operations in the Balkans, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa.
I have no idea who the idiot is that took the entire history of the brutality and inhumanity and -- of all of the American captives in the history of this nation and would flip that on its head and take the techniques from the torturers and murders who had held our service people and civilians and hostages in captivity, and could somehow take that template which we called SERE school resistance training, and say, hey, this would be a great template for Guantanamo Bay.

Whoever did it, did it consciously, knowing that they were choosing totalitarian tactics, which we were defending against, and applied them as an American technique to handle detainees. Now, was it pain, was it revenge, was it just mindless attempt to get deeper into the war? I don't know. But all I know is that it will hurt us for decades to come. Decades. Our people will all be subjected to these tactics, because we have authorized them for the world now. How it got to Guantanamo is a crime and somebody needs to figure out who did it, how they did it, who authorized them to do it, and shut it down because our servicemen will suffer for years.

I was watching al-Jazeera, and I was listening to the Arabic, and it was a captive who had been released from Guantanamo Bay. And he got up on television, and he started showing a stress position against a wall. And I said, hey. That's a stress position. You know. Stress positions are what we do at SERE, you know, in an effort to show how pain can be inflicted upon a person with no marks. And this guy was saying, I was held up for hours and hours. And I thought hours? Hours? In that position? I said I couldn't go five minutes. Most of our students can't go a minute. But they were forced up and they were held up. And I thought, oh, my God.

I e-mailed a buddy of mine. I said, "Hey, I just saw something on al-Jazeera. Why is this guy describing SERE tactics?" And he goes, "I don't want to be the one to tell you, but they came and they got our manuals," you know. JPRA, Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, asked for all of our manuals to be sent to them. Each of the SERE schools. Our manuals on how we carry out our "simulated totalitarian evil nation, which has a complete disregard for human rights and Geneva Convention."
...
People who are, you know, pro waterboarding. Let's be frank here. If you believe in this, and you think it's a technique we need to have on the book, you're pro torture. Period. There is no black -- there is no grey area here. You are either for torture, all right, which means that you are against what it is that this country stands for, for the last 200 years. Or you are anti torture, and it means that you are standing up for the honor of this nation. That's the only way that I'll describe this discussion.
Someone needs to go to jail. That's all there is to it. This is disgusting. Thousands of service members, thousands, went through that process and were tortured around the world. People died to -- so that we could have those techniques brought out and shown our service member how to resist it. It's disgusting. How could they dare take this? How could they so -- how could they dishonor us like that? Every ex-captive in this nation should be standing up against this. They literally went and took the techniques of the North Vietnamese and said we could use it to break them? I didn't know that, by the way. I'm pretty pissed. I mean this is ridiculous.

The Dark Side

 Dick Cheney said 5 days after 9/11

"We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective." 

 He then had the Department of Justice concoct a (now repudiated) legal justification to sanction torture.  Despite the reluctance of the current Obama Administration to cooperate, the Constitution Project sponsored a bipartisan blue ribbon panel to document torture during the Clinton, Bush and Obama Administrations.  They took the better part of three years, interviewed hundreds of people all over the world, and documented it all in a 575 page report that is a black eye for the United States government's disregard of the rule of law for 2 decades, and continues today.

The three administrations did it all, torture - many times torturing people to death, "suspending" the Geneva Convention rules against torture whenever they pleased, kidnapping suspects and sending them to countries that tortured them, and of course we still incarcerate them at Guantanamo without charges or trial or due process.

There were the torture instigators, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, and Yoo.  There were a number of principled people who opposed them, Alberto Mora, John McCain and Nance Pelosi to name a few.  One quote from Alberto Mora, General Counsel for the Navy (Retired) in a later interview stood out,

The argument that we have to apply abuse to detainees in order to protect American lives I find to be violative of our deepest values and to the very safety of our country. We fight not only to protect lives, we fight to protect our principles.

Well said.