Wow. A quick study from his experience with John Yoo, the Daily Show's Jon Stewart was in rare form Tuesday Night as he interviewed former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen. Thiessen was there to peddle his torture-glorifying book, Courting Disaster.
As Jane Mayer writes in her review of the book,
[Thiessen] got his start as a publicist for conservative politicians, among them Jesse Helms, the late Republican senator from North Carolina. After Bush’s election in 2000, he began writing speeches for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and, eventually, became a speechwriter in the Bush White House.
In his book, Thiessen explains that he got a rare glimpse of the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program when, in 2006, he helped write a speech for President George W. Bush that acknowledged the program’s existence and offered a spirited defense of it. "This program has given us information that has saved innocent lives," Bush declared. (My own history of the Bush Administration’s interrogation policies, The Dark Side, mentions this speech, and says that it supplanted a different version, prepared by Administration officials who disapproved of the interrogation program; Thiessen, in his book, disputes my reporting, insisting that although "many edits" were suggested by critics of abusive tactics, there was "no rival draft.") In an effort to bolster the President’s speech, the C.I.A. arranged for Thiessen to see classified documents, and invited him to meet agency interrogators. He says that he emerged convinced of the program’s merit. While researching his book, he was granted extensive interviews with several of the program’s key architects and implementers, including Vice-President Dick Cheney; Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence; and Michael V. Hayden, the former C.I.A. director. The book, whose cover features a blurb from Cheney, has become the unofficial Bible of torture apologists.
"Courting Disaster" has a scholarly feel, and hundreds of footnotes, but it is based on a series of slipshod premises.
Watch Part 1 of the interview here.
Watch Part 2 here.
Watch Part 3 here.
I've only commented on the first 11:27 of the interview, ie, part 1.
As my handle indicates, I'm a primary care physician, have been for a long time. I'm not a lawyer. The only times I've been in a courtroom were for my arrests for nonviolent demonstrations, something I would do again in a heartbeat.
That said, last night's interview of Marc Thiessen demonstrated the importance, the absolute necessity of American citizens being informed about human rights and standards, the Constitution, international law, and current events.
By now most Americans have heard of the Geneva Conventions (GC).
Whether they know what:
- is addressed by the GC
- is not addressed by the GC
- the rationale for the GC is, or
- America's history with the GC is, is unclear to me.
Moreover, I do not know what other treaties, protocols or laws govern conduct internationally.
I know this: Conservatives have long assailed America's participation with other countries, whether it is the League of Nations or the UN, or the Hague or ICC. Perfectly reflecting their self-absorbed, childlike Manichean simplicity of the world, they don't want us to play with other countries or abide by agreed upon boundaries, even if those rules may protect us. Furthermore, like children, Conservatives often project onto others malicious intent, and show a preference for Fear as a tool to manipulate getting what they want.
During the eight years of Bush, after 9/11, Conservatives ramped up the propaganda campaign to frame the Geneva Conventions as something that if followed, would threaten the lives of Americans and weaken national security.
That takes us to last night's (Tuesday's) interview:
Thiessen started by taking up the defense of the "unfairly maligned" Liz Cheney and the seven Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee (Jeff Sessions, Orrin Hatch, Chuck Grassley, Jon Kyl, Lindsey Graham, John Cornyn, Tom Coburn), that the identities of the lawyers representing enemy combatants should be known to the public (presumably so Conservatives could harrass and malign them, with pejorative names such as the "The Al-Qaeda 7"). A few conservatives have critized Cheney for her lawyer-bashing.
Thiessen, who did not go to Law School, at the outset conflated the lawyers often employed by crime organizations to defend them in court with those that work probono.
Thiessen, who surely knew the difference between the two, made the clumsy analogy that:
If a mob lawyer was hired [by the mob] to handle cases in the Justice Department, it would be legitimate to ask, "WHO are they? WHO do they represent? WHAT CASES are they involved in?"
Thiessen said after all, "We would ask these questions about drug cartel lawyers," ie, lawyers who were hired by the crime organization to represent the drug lords in cases prosecuted by the Justice Dept.
Jon Stewart caught on to Thiessen’s trick of trying to manipulate the audience.
Stewart:
Mob lawyers and drug cartel lawyers depend on the mob and the drug cartel... they work for them... [In contrast, the lawyers representing "enemy combatants" are public defenders or are from the private sector who have volunteered to work probono, whose law practice is usually not sustained by such cases.] This [pro bono work] is not their main [bread and butter kind of case. You can’t earn a living working probono, after all!]
Perhaps one of the biggest uninvestigated stories, we know that many of those labeled "enemy combatants" are civilians unaffiliated with the Taliban or Al Qaeda, who were kidnapped by opportunists cashing in for rewards/bounties paid by the US. A 2005 Amnesty International report estimated that at least 70000 were detainees were held outside the USA by the US during the "war on terror". 70 000 people! The exact number of detainees, of course, is unknown.
The TimesOnline (UK) has reported that Colin Powell's Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson, "in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantanamo" has said that "George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror". The article goes on to say:
the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He [Wilkerson] said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken.
He also claimed that one reason Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld did not want the innocent detainees released was because "the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were". This was "not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]".
Referring to Mr Cheney, Colonel Wilkerson, who served 31 years in the US Army, asserted: "He had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent ... If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it."
Read the whole thing here. It'll make your blood boil.
And as Greenwald wrote in January, Obama has continued this policy of indefinite detention, contrary to what he promised during the campaign.
Anyway, Thiessen tried to cast these probono lawyers as going cell to cell, freeing dangerous individuals into our communities:
They work pro bono to spring enemy combatants captured and held according to the laws of war.
Really? Which laws of war? This is where Jon Stewart being a comic and not, say, Glenn Greenwald, hurts. Stewart, while he does an impressive job, doesn't have the training or the mastery of law to trump Thiessen's lie.
But still, Stewart doesn't disappoint. He deflates Thiessen's innuendo about the intention of these pro bono lawyers
Didn’t they argue in front of the Supreme Court, in [Bin laden driver] Hamdan [vs Rumsfeld] and the Supreme court agreed...
Greenwald summarized the SCOTUS decision in Hamdan vs Rumsfeld
The Supreme Court ... by a 5-3 decision, held that the Bush administration's military commissions at Guantanamo (a) exceed the president's legal authorization given by Congress and (b) violate the law of war, including Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions which, the Court held, applies to all detainees in any armed conflict, including Al Qaeda members
Thiessen acknowledged:
THAT was the Hamdan decision...
Stewart:
So the Supreme Court agreed with them [ie the detainees]
Thiessen:
The Supreme Court agreed with them... [but gave...] in our view the wrong [decision]
Stewart:
So we should call them [ie, the Supreme Court] the "Al Qaeda Nine?"
Earlier in the show, Jon Stewart had mentioned John Adams representing in court the accused British soldiers for their participation in the Boston Massacre.
Thiessen says that the right to legal representation is only available to people charged of a crime.
Here is where the Bush-era invented category of "enemy combatant" is relevant. For a wonderfully insightful paper on the consequences of legal definitions and in particular on the Bush Administration's creation of the new category of "enemy combatant", see J Singh, MD's review article. In the paper, Dr. Singh talks about how the Bush-era term of "enemy combatant" can facilitate the moral detachment of professionals such as physicians and psychologists, and allow their complicity in detainee abuse, torture, and yes, even murder. Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, has written about the effects of long-term solitary confinement.
Singh writes
"Prisoner of war" status entitles detainees to basic rights under several international treaties, including the 1949 Third Geneva Convention. The American government has side-stepped these obligations by labeling many Afghan war detainees and terrorist suspects "unlawful combatants". To assess the legitimacy of this classification one must distinguish between using the words ["unlawful" combatant] to denote a concept / notion and using the term ["unlawful combatant"] to denote a distinct label.
The use of the term "unlawful combatant" to classify the above persons into a distinct category of detainees is problematic for two reasons. First, while the notion of an "unlawful" combatant is arguably recognized in international law (for example, it could be said that those who commit war crimes lose some of their protected status as they are "unlawful" combatants) this is not applicable to the Afghan detainees and other terror suspects (who have neither been charged with, nor found guilty of, war crimes). Second, the use of this particular classification as a distinct label is unrecognized in international law.
Disregard of international humanitarian law can easily lead to degrading and/or abusive treatment of detainees. This could impact negatively on the mental and physical health of detainees. The term "unlawful combatant" could potentially give rise to two disturbing possibilities: (a) detainees classified as such would arguably not be protected from questionable interrogation techniques considered unlawful in international law; [15] and (b) detaining authorities could potentially subject detainees to poor detention conditions with impunity.
To the best of my recollection -- and please correct me if I'm wrong --we've never had a serious discussion here on DKos with legal experts, philosophers, and ethicists weighing in, on Just War theory, the Laws of War, noncombatant immunity, Humanitarian Law. When it comes to these important issues, we often cite opinion writers like Bob Herbert (who had an excellent piece back in June 2008 on Torture) or Greenwald or Chomsky or Walzer. But we ultimately hit a wall in knowledge. I'm just a layman when it comes to anything outside of my slim understanding in medicine.
Understanding the legal and political implications of terms such as "POW," "legal combatant," and yes, even the torture-enabling Bush-coined "enemy combatant" (Who ever dreamed that he was a wordsmith?!), and understanding why we have any protections for people imprisoned during times of peace or war (without end), is important.
What do sadistic unpatriotic chickenshits like Thiessen and Cheney think will happen to the next US soldier who is captured?
Thiessen says that "enemy combatants" cannot expect to have legal representation as allowed under the 6th amendment:
John Adams had actually represented people who had been accused of crimes. There is a vast difference between representing someone who have been accused of crimes...everyone gets a lawyer under the 6th amendment if you’ve been accused of a crime.
Note how easily Thiessen forgets the neocons’ argument that the Constitution doesn’t apply to noncitizens here:
The people in Guantanamo bay have not been accused of a crime... They are being held as enemy combatants in a time of war.
What about the 1985 UN Declaration on the Human Rights of Individuals Who Are Not Nationals of the Country in Which They Live? Oh, wait, THAT's why they're held outside the US. Right.
If I understand correctly:
- First the Bush administration pays suspicious people in Afghanistan and other inteternational areas bounties for the unquestioned capture of individuals—incentivizing the kidnapping of tens of thousands of people
- Then, because the Bush Adminstration doesn’t want to follow the international standards, creates a category to exist OUTSIDE of those very laws, a category which has not been approved by any international body, and
- On the basis of this newly created category, deprives these individuals from due process and constitutional rights, and moreover, justifies torture, detention, and murder of these very same captured individuals,
- All the while raising the specter that if the individuals were actually given their day in court--forget the outcome of the kangaroo trial, we know the media and the Right would bias the process with prejudice –- American national security would be threatened.
- (Updated info!) We learn from the TimesOnline that Colin Powell's top aide, Lawrence Wilkerson (Powell's Chief of Staff) has signed a declaration affirming that Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld knew the majority of detainees at Guantanamo were innocent but that didn't stop the Bush Administration from imprisoning boys 12 years old or old men 93 years of age illegally without any charges. Read the whole thing here.
Amazing.
Why Thiessen and other torture apologists aren’t rounded up and treated the same way is beyond me. Let them taste for a year the same treatment that they so readily inflict on others.
Thiessen continued:
In the 234 year history of the US, until 2004 never once has a successful habeus corpus petition been made to free an enemy combantant.
Thiessen was being clever here, and Stewart didn't catch on. The reason no enemy combatants had successfully petitioned was that the term was invented during the Bush era.
Thiessen, feeling he had the upper hand, followed up with:
Nowhere in the Geneva convention does it say that you have a right to a lawyer or the right to petition to be released before the end of hostilities. [Adding, with a nice touch to make himself appear omniscient] These are controversial questions.
No, Mr. Thiessen, they're not.
Grave breaches of the Geneva convention include "willfully depriving one of the right to a fair trial," implying that one has a right to a fair trial.
Stewart pointed out Thiessen's double standard in protesting the left’s criticism of Yoo, Bybee and other Bush Justice Dept lawyers for the Torture Memos and now simultaneously siding with Liz Cheney's "Al Qaeda 7" nonsense.
Theissen responded weakly, that such demonization "isn’t even comparable."
Stewart asked whether a lawyer’s decision to represent an individual accused of crimes X makes that lawyer sympathetic to the crime of X; for example, did Thiessen
think that lawyers representing pedophiles were sympathetic to pedophiles?
Giggling like the puerile sociopath he is, Thiessen said:
Lawyers who would spend all their [probono] time representing pedophiles would raise some questions about their motivations. Why are you trying to free these people?
Stewart roared back, juggernauting through Thiessen's interruptions:
If you believe in the rule of law...and that the country’s fabric, isn’t decided by the easiest cases but by the hardest cases to take...
Thiessen maligned the defense by accusing them of holding "radical views". In particular, he singled out the brilliantly qualified HRW attorney Jennifer Daskal.
Thiessen criticized Daskel:
Jennifer Daskel has said anyone not charged with a crime should be released from Guantanamo...[and then adding, without any evidence] even though we know they may go out and kill American soldiers.
In January 2008, Daskell wrote in an article titled, "How to Close Guantanamo"
A smart counterterrorism policy would instead focus on arresting, detaining, and trying the high-value al Qaeda members –- the planners, financiers, masterminds, and technological experts who, if let loose, would add the kind of value to al Qaeda and other terrorist networks offered by few others.
Some such detainees are already at Guantanamo, and they should be tried and held publicly accountable for their crimes. In contrast, the detainees for whom the United States lacks any evidence to convict should be released from Guantanamo's system of indefinite detention without charge, where they are likely of more value to the al Qaeda terrorist network than they would be if they were back home in Kabul or Lahore.
Where is Thiessen's evidence that these detainees -- many of whom are innocent, many of whom were just kids or youth who were kidnapped for money -- why does Thiessen think that they are any more likely to kill Americans than non-prisoners?
Thiessen claimed, I assume referring to this Pentagon story
Al Qaeda terrorists who have been released as a result of habeus corpus cases have gone and killed American soldiers.
Stewart doesn't question Thiessen's claim that some released detainees have returned to fight Coalition forces.
Why not?
We know from experience, and from military scholars such as Andrew Bacevich that the national security apparatus has been compromised by political and economic special interests. I certainly don't trust what I read by the Generals or the intelligence community. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now has at least twice featured exposes by the New York Times' Pulitzer Prize Winning journalistDavid Barstow, who wrote about the Pentagon Pundits and The Nation's Sebastian Jones who revealed the massive Media-Lobbying Complex.
Stewart kept his focus and asked Thiessen weren't these alleged terrorists released under Bush?
Thiessen ceded
Because of the pressure of the Habeus campaign.. 500 prisoners were released during Bush’s term.
Seizing the opportunity, Stewart tried to use Right-wing talking points to hook Thiessen
So the Bush administration made us less safe...
Thiessen
The Bush administration... made mistakes.
[Again, notice that no one questioned the Pentagon report or its claims about detainees and risk of violence.]
Up to this point in the first part of the interview it seemed to me that the speaking time had been approximately equal between the two. I didn't have a stopwatch and if I had to guess, would say that Thiessen had spoken longer than Jon.
Stewart shared he wanted to say something and then they would go to commercial break before resuming the discussion. Thiessen pouted, protesting, acting like a little bitch. Stewart reassured him that the interview in its unedited entirety would be available on the web.
In a statement that was reminiscent of his takedown of John McCain in 2007 Stewart spoke about the dishonest claim of authority/monopoly over security by the Right:
The thing that I object to is the idea of safety. The idea that that can be a concrete certainty. [mocking the conservatives] "This makes us safe... This doesn't." These are all subjective realities, the idea that something makes us safe. You [Thiessen and conservatives] can make the argument that Guantanamo keeps us safe because there are bad people in it. They [the progressive critics and the rest of the reality-based world] can make the argument that having Guantanamo open allows easier recruitment for terrorists that ultimately [compromises American safety.]
Thiessen interrupted him with
I disagree with that [ie the idea that Guantanamo is a recruiting tool]
Stewart:
I know you may disagree with that but that is a valid argument.
Thiessen:
I don’t think it is.
Stewart answered that just as with the topic of climate change, on safety/security, republicans/conservatives claim to know the equation, that they know all the variables and associations and outcomes, that they can "solve the unsolveable", ie fight an ideology that has no military solution.
And this was just the first 11:27 minutes of the interview.
Wow.
Update: I wanted to share this excerpt from Wallace Shawn's Essays:
We all are "Americans." We all live in the United States. And we have to think about being Americans, because this is a very unusual moment in the history of this country or any country.
A few months ago, the American public, who in political theory and to some extent even in reality are "sovereign" in the United States, were given a group of pictures showing American soldiers tormenting desperate, naked, extremely thin people in chains—-degrading them, mocking them, and physically torturing them. And the question arose, How would the American public react to that? And the answer was that in their capacity as individuals, certain people definitely suffered or were shocked when they saw the pictures. But in their capacity as the sovereign public, they did not react. A great public cry of lamentation and outrage did not rise up across the land. The president and his highest officials were not compelled to abase themselves publicly, apologize, and resign, nor did they find themselves thrown out of office, nor did the political candidates from the party out of power grow hoarse with denouncing the astounding crimes that were witnessed by almost everyone alive all over the world. As far as one could tell, over a period of weeks, the atrocities shown in the pictures had been assimilated into the list of things that the American public was willing to consider normal and that they could accept. And so now one has to ask, Well, what does that portend? And so we have to think about being Americans and living in the United States.
Update #2 Jane Mayer takes on Marc Thiessen in this March 29 piece in The New Yorker
excerpt:
Thiessen is better at conveying fear than at relaying the facts. His account of the foiled Heathrow plot, for example, is "completely and utterly wrong," according to Peter Clarke, who was the head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorism branch in 2006. "The deduction that what was being planned was an attack against airliners was entirely based upon intelligence gathered in the U.K.," Clarke said, adding that Thiessen’s "version of events is simply not recognized by those who were intimately involved in the airlines investigation in 2006." Nor did Scotland Yard need to be told about the perils of terrorists using liquid explosives. The bombers who attacked London’s public-transportation system in 2005, Clarke pointed out, "used exactly the same materials."