Torture: McCain vs. Mukasey

Mukasey in the WSJ on the 6th:

McCain yesterday in the Post:

Mukasey today:

 

I understand that the Constitution doesn't apply to terrorists in foreign secret prisons, but from a principles standpoint, isn't the entire reason for Miranda rights domestically that we consider involuntary confessions unreliable?

Not to open the always sensitive Miranda can of worms. But why wouldn't those principles carry over? (One possible answer: Miranda was wrongly decided.)

 

Mukasey is wrong. Simply because counsel to the President writes a memo does not make it legal.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, qt. Doesn't it basically just protect the president from criminal or civil liability because it gives him a basis for qualified immunity.

 

Really good story in Reuters on the entire hunt of Bin Laden.

Sources claim that the identity of courier did come from Khalid Mohamid.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/12/us-binladen-kill-idUSTRE74B6H820110512

he debate is unlikely ever to be settled. But multiple U.S. intelligence officials told Reuters the real breakthrough that led to bin Laden came from a mysterious CIA detainee named Hassan Ghul. Ghul, who was not captured until 2004 at the earliest, was not subjected to waterboarding, the CIA's roughest and most controversial interrogation technique. It had already been phased out by the time he was captured. But two U.S. officials acknowledged he may well have been subjected to other coercive CIA tactics, possibly including stress positions, sleep deprivation and being slammed into a wall.

It was Ghul, the officials said, who after years of tantalizing hints from other detainees finally provided the information that prompted the CIA to focus intensely on finding Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti, pseudonym for the courier who would lead them to bin Laden.

Much about Ghul remains obscure, including his nationality. Two U.S. officials told Reuters, however, that at some point the CIA turned him over to authorities in Pakistan. The officials said their understanding is that in 2007, Pakistani authorities released him from custody. The officials said the U.S. government now believes Ghul has once again become a frontline militant fighter.

 

Just saw a clip of a McCain floor speech on the Ed Show regarding this.

He badly mispronounced Mukasey's name. How the hell does McCain no know how to pronounce Mukasey's name?

 

This will not be cleared up until after the 2012 election at the earliest. Both sides have a vested political interest in their version being correct, so both sides will continue to tell their version of what happened. As for McCain, he is a doddering old fool, a total moron that cannot be trusted. If he would have been elected it would have been just like Bush's third term. At least this is what I have learned from the Democrats...that John McCain is a villian. You can't take him seriously.

 

I am a Democrat, and I take villians very, very seriously.

 

Except in this case he is coming out against the the side that the Republicans are defending. He is going against his own party. When some does that I tend to believe them because they won't do it that unless they are certain they are right.

 

We should have just flipped all the cards and went right to SEAL Team 6.

 

McCain has more credibility than most when the subject is torture. Whether he or Mukasey is right here, I don't know. But Mukasey and the people who are claiming that waterboarding/torture worked and allowed us to get Bin Laden are missing the point. Our decision to torture or not torture should not and does not turn on whether it works.

Dahlia Lithwick nailed this on Slate last week:

"The fact that we have swamped a debate about the killing of Osama Bin Laden with a distraction over torture is another national embarrassment. Why aren't we debating the efficacy of any of the other intelligence-gathering or surveillance methods that also contributed to the success of the hunt for bin Laden? We are being conned yet again, and allowing ourselves to be conned again, by a handful of people who want to justify their own crimes. Remember all those debates about the need to be allowed to torture in "ticking time bomb" scenarios? We are now having a discussion about an alleged ticking time bomb that took eight years to blow—if it blew at all.

"There is just one question about America and torture: whether we should do it. The answer to that, after hundreds of years of legal thinking and moral progress, not just in America but around the world, is no. It's bad for those asked to torture, and it's bad for our soldiers who will be tortured by others. A bunch of Bush officials secretly changed that answer for a time, based on misapprehensions of its efficacy, but for serious interrogators, ethical thinkers, and lawyers, the answer has always been no.

"The folks who think otherwise are now using half-facts and unverifiable assertions to ask another question: Does torture work? Unsurprisingly, they claim that it does. That's nice. Let's ignore them. As former interrogator Matthew Alexander explains, even if it did work, we still wouldn't do it—because it's immoral and leads to all sorts of false claims and wasted time. The answer to question No. 1—should America torture?—has nothing to do with the bogus questions being raised today.

"In short, if you are being led by a handful of torture apologists to "reconsider" the efficacy of torture, ask yourself whether you have yet heard even one credible account that water-boarding led us to Bin Laden. I haven't. At most, I have heard that it may have played some very small part in a vast tangle of intelligence and surveillance and patient detective work, all of which is unproven and—more important—impossible to disprove. A handful of cynics may want to relitigate the efficacy of torture based on facts not in evidence. The rest of us should continue to remind them that they have been answering the wrong question all along."

http://www.slate.com/id/2293043/