ISA 2016

Looking back at the archives, I forgot to blog about the ISA conference in Atlanta during mid-March. While at the conference I  caught up with some old friends, watched the first round NCAA Kansas basketball victory, drank some good local beers, and served as a discussant and/or chair of three different panels.

I also delivered a paper, "Popular Culture and Public Deliberation about Torture" that needs a good deal of work even though it is too long. That link takes you to the working draft at academia.edu.


Visit this blog's homepage.

For 140 character IR and foreign policy talk, follow me on twitter.

Or for basketball, baseball, movies or other stuff, follow this personal twitter account.

Happy Birthday W

George W. Bush is 65 today.



Visit this blog's homepage.

Bush memoirs: definitive takedown

Dan Froomkin has posted "The Two Most Essential, Abhorrent, Intolerable Lies Of George W. Bush's Memoir." Read it. I was going to quote some of the best parts, but there are simply too many to excerpt.

Froomkin has written a lengthy and link-laden piece demonstrating that George W. Bush was NOT reluctant about attacking Iraq. The former Yale cheerleader was also cheerleader-in-chief for war. Moreover, despite Bush's claims, torture was NOT a legitimate weapon in the war on terror.


Visit this blog's homepage.

File under "political hack"

Last Saturday, May 9, Senator Mitch McConnell gave the convocation address at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law. It created a small stir locally -- probably because the Senator did not shy away from controversial political subjects. And his take was purely partisan.

Of course, McConnell was also dead wrong on several key facts. For example, McConnell wants to pretend that the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have been unique evil-doers:

the current Administration has announced a deadline to close the secure detention facility at Guantanamo Bay within nine months—without having any kind of plan to contain these deadly killers.

“I hope it does not take that step without a plan to make America safer as a result. And I certainly hope it does not transfer these terrorists to American soil. Such a move will likely raise more legal questions than it settles. And it will increase the risk to the American people.

“The men housed at Guantanamo are ruthless killers.

Yet, as Ken Ballen and Peter Bergen reported last October, this is factually incorrect:

...according to the Pentagon itself, only 5 percent of detainees at the prison were ever apprehended by U.S. forces to begin with. And only another 4 percent were ever alleged to have actually been fighting at all.

Why is that? Almost all of the detainees were turned over to U.S. forces by foreigners, either with an ax to grind or, more often, for a hefty bounty or reward. After U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan in late 2001, they doled out rewards of about $5,000 or more to Pakistanis and Afghans for each detainee turned over. Contrary to standard law enforcement practice, the U.S. military accepted the uncorroborated allegations of the award claimants with little independent investigation.

Now, under much pressure, the Pentagon has released more than 500 detainees over the past three years ...new statistics provided to us by the Ministry of Interior in Riyadh, zero of the 121 Guantánamo detainees received by the Saudis were deemed dangerous and ineligible for release.

It gets worse. Of those detainees returned to Saudi Arabia from Guantánamo, more than half have been released and are now free, most after spending a period of time in a halfway house designed to promote a smooth return to society. Only six former Guantánamo detainees have been rearrested in Saudi Arabia for any reason—an astonishingly low recidivism rate of less than 9 percent among those released.

Although the Saudi efforts to reintegrate these prisoners into society are certainly commendable, the only reasonable explanation for such a low recidivism rate is that the detainees were never guilty of terrorist acts in the first place.

Don't want to take the word of the Saudis? Consider this:

Information released in May by the Department of Defense further buttresses the Saudi findings of a very low recidivism rate. The department’s list of named released detainees who have subsequently engaged in militant or terrorist activities anywhere in the world shows that 12 have done so, a recidivism rate of just 2 percent. In fact, the Pentagon can cite only six instances in which an inmate released from Guantánamo actually took up arms against the United States.

...new statistics from the Saudi Ministry of Interior, corroborated by the Pentagon’s own findings, show that the overwhelming majority of individuals detained at Guantánamo not only were not terrorists, but were likely innocent of any crime.

McConnell also played fast and loose with the facts about the interrogation memos recently declassified by the Obama administration:

It was a mistake for the administration to reveal to al Qaeda terrorists the interrogation methods they can expect to face if captured. Releasing those memos has made America less safe.

As I've blogged before, scholars have been studying American torture techniques for years. They are well-known already.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel pointed out that the Bush administration had already disclosed most of the techniques:

Let me say this, one of the reasons the president was willing to let this information out was that much of the information was already out. So if they're saying that you've basically exposed something, it's been written . Go get the New York Review of books. It's there. So the notion that somehow we're exposing something -- it's already out. In fact President Bush let a lot, a lot of this information out. So the notion that somehow this is all of a sudden a game-changer, doesn't take cognizance that its already in the system and in the public domain. Therefore, it's not new.

If you don't believe Emanuel, look at this article in the October 4, 2007, NY Times. Or this piece from June 2004 in the NY Review of Books.

Numerous Bush officials were questioned about waterboarding by Congress over the past few years, especially after the November 2006 Democratic victory. John Kerry opposed Bush Attorney General Mike Mukasey over this issue in 2007.


Visit this blog's homepage.

Transparency and the GWOT

The Washington Monthly torture issue includes a diverse array of writers, but their message is fairly redundant. Despite the resonance of the anti-torture argument, the US government nonetheless acted against this collective wisdom.

Unfortunately, the repetition is absolutely necessary.

Future administrations should heed Lawrence Wilkerson's warning about transparency:

The worst horrors of our war have yet to be revealed—but they will be. Secret prisons, renditions, homicides, torture, and innocents swept up in a vast network of detention—all will be revealed. It is the nature of our openness that it be so.

Given the inevitability of disclosures, politicians should think pretty carefully about their dubious secret policies.


Visit this blog's homepage.

Low marks from the Canadian judge

The January 18 Washington Post had this unsettling news from Canada:

In Canada, the United States has joined a notorious group of countries -- Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Afghanistan and China, among others -- as a place where foreigners risk torture and abuse, according to a training manual for Canadian diplomats that was accidentally given this week to Amnesty International lawyers.

The manual is intended to create "greater awareness among consular officials to the possibility of Canadians detained abroad being tortured." Part of the workshop is devoted to teaching diplomats how to identify people who have been tortured. It features a section on "U.S. interrogation techniques," including forced nudity, hooding and isolation.

The story includes a quote from a Canadian spokesperson denying that this reflects Canadian policy -- after all, it is merely a training manual.

The January 20, The New York Times reports that Canada will rewrite the manual:

“I regret the embarrassment caused by the public disclosure of the manual used in the department’s torture awareness training,” Mr. [Maxime] Bernier [the Canadian minister of foreign affairs] said in a statement. “It contains a list that wrongly includes some of our closest allies. I have directed that the manual be reviewed and rewritten.”

Canada currently has a conservative government; Amnesty's lawsuit is seeking to stop Canada from handing prisoners seized in Afghanistan over to that government.


Visit this blog's homepage.

A Question of Torture

Monday evening, I attended a fascinating and somewhat depressing lecture about torture delivered by University of Wisconsin historian Alfred McCoy. The local UN Association was marking International Human Rights Day a bit early (it is December 10).

McCoy focused on a psychological torture, which his research indicates is a distinctly American contribution to the practice of interrogation. Under the auspices of the CIA, the US has developed a method based on sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain that serves to break individuals.

McCoy's latest book is A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. From the publisher comments on Powell's website:

McCoy traces the spread of these practices across the globe, from Vietnam to Iran to Central America, and argues that after 9/11, psychological torture became the weapon of choice in the CIA’s global prisons, reinforced by “rendition” of detainees to “torture-friendly” countries. Finally, McCoy shows that information extracted by coercion is worthless, making a strong case for the FBI’s legal methods of interrogation.

McCoy discussed all these concerns -- and more.

He noted, for instance, that the Bush administration has essentially operated outside both domestic and international law and that both Congress and the new Attorney General performed a farce when the former appeared to believe the latter's claim that he didn't know anything about waterboarding.



Visit this blog's homepage.

PG-13: Too much coverage of Cheney

According to Mingle², my blog is rated PG-13:

Mingle²

Here's the best part:

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

* suicide (3x)
* dick (2x)
* torture (1x)

OK, the blog is explicitly anti-torture, as the sidebar makes clear. So what's the problem?

I cover Vice President Cheney too much -- and solo Iraqi bombings -- and thus did not earn a PG.


Hat tip: Dan Drezner, who runs a less family-friendly blog.


Visit this blog's homepage.