New Evidence of Torture Prison in Poland

As pressure mounts on Obama to launch an investigative commission to research who breached the Covenent Against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, new details are starting to come out about other countries that will potentially be implicated as aiding and abetting the US in committing such crimes.   Der Spiegel has an article online today (here) that discusses the newly revealed evidence about the black site used in Poland by the CIA to use harsh interrogation techniques against the mastermind of 9/11 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed when he was en route to Guantanamo.

The article states that – “Journalist Mariusz Kowalewski at Rzeczpospolita and two colleagues have been searching for months now for proof of the existence of a secret CIA base in Poland. The journalists have discovered flight record books from Szymany that had been declared lost, and based on refueling receipts and currency exchange rates, they have reconstructed flights and routes, and spoken with informants. Over the past few weeks, their newspaper and the television network TVP Info have revealed new details on an almost daily basis.

Kowalewski has collected a wide range of documents on his white Apple laptop. He is convinced, though, that he only knows “a fraction of what actually happened.” He is certain that there was a CIA base in the Masuria region, where high-ranking al-Qaida prisoners were brought. All that is missing is the final piece of evidence. There are rumors circulating that one of the most important interrogators of Sheikh Mohammed, an American named Deuce Martinez — the man who didn’t torture him, but rather had the task of gently coaxing information out of him — was in Poland at the time.”

With the discovery of such evidence pieces are starting to fall into place.  Now comes the more complex legal questions about who will be held accountable.  It is clear that over time the actions of CIA officials, non-US intelligence agents, contracted groups (such as Jeppesen Dataplan or Aero Contractors), and a whole raft of others.  As Chinua Achebe said in Things Fall Apart “if oil finds one finger it soils the others,” which is a very real way to think about how many individuals and country stand to be potentially tainted by the revealing of the US’s actions during the war on terror.

If Everyone Knew, Who’s to Blame?

Mark Danner had a great piece in the Sunday Washington Post (here) that discusses one of the central paradoxes of the current furor over the torture memos – that it was first reported over 5 years ago in 2004.  So if the information was public knowledge for the entire second term of the Bush Administration, why did nothing happen?

As Danner states – “Unlike Watergate or Iran-contra, today’s scandal emerges not from a shocking revelation of wrongdoing but from a long process of disclosure during which Americans have stared at blatant lawbreaking with apparent equanimity. This means Democrats as well as Republicans, including those in Congress who were willing to approve, as late as September 2006, a law, the Military Commissions Act, that purported to shield those who had applied these “enhanced interrogation techniques” from prosecution under the War Crimes Act.”

He also discusses the calculated nature of the memos and how they were written exactly for the current moment – to make persecution nearly impossible without dragging a broad spectrum of the American government into the public spotlight in a way that few high level politicians would ever want.

It is worth reading and reminds us how difficult it is going to be for Obama to successfully navigate this issue without getting his image potentially tarnished.

Reclaiming America’s Soul

Krugman hit the nail on the head today in today’s NY Times opinion page, even if I have a natural aversion to an analysis that have as an underlying basis American exceptionalism.  Krugman’s wonderfully simple breakdown of all the reasons why Obama should establish a truth commission to investigate instances of torture and human rights abuses during the Bush administration’s war on terror.  Therefore, I have decided to reprint the overwhelming majority of it below –

“In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. “This government does not torture people,” declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.

And the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.

What about the argument that investigating the Bush administration’s abuses will impede efforts to deal with the crises of today? Even if that were true — even if truth and justice came at a high price — that would arguably be a price we must pay: laws aren’t supposed to be enforced only when convenient. But is there any real reason to believe that the nation would pay a high price for accountability?

For example, would investigating the crimes of the Bush era really divert time and energy needed elsewhere? Let’s be concrete: whose time and energy are we talking about?

Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to rescue the economy. Peter Orszag, the budget director, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to reform health care. Steven Chu, the energy secretary, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to limit climate change. Even the president needn’t, and indeed shouldn’t, be involved. All he would have to do is let the Justice Department do its job — which he’s supposed to do in any case — and not get in the way of any Congressional investigations.

I don’t know about you, but I think America is capable of uncovering the truth and enforcing the law even while it goes about its other business.

Still, you might argue — and many do — that revisiting the abuses of the Bush years would undermine the political consensus the president needs to pursue his agenda.

But the answer to that is, what political consensus? There are still, alas, a significant number of people in our political life who stand on the side of the torturers. But these are the same people who have been relentless in their efforts to block President Obama’s attempt to deal with our economic crisis and will be equally relentless in their opposition when he endeavors to deal with health care and climate change. The president cannot lose their good will, because they never offered any.

That said, there are a lot of people in Washington who weren’t allied with the torturers but would nonetheless rather not revisit what happened in the Bush years.

Some of them probably just don’t want an ugly scene; my guess is that the president, who clearly prefers visions of uplift to confrontation, is in that group. But the ugliness is already there, and pretending it isn’t won’t make it go away.

Others, I suspect, would rather not revisit those years because they don’t want to be reminded of their own sins of omission.

For the fact is that officials in the Bush administration instituted torture as a policy, misled the nation into a war they wanted to fight and, probably, tortured people in the attempt to extract “confessions” that would justify that war. And during the march to war, most of the political and media establishment looked the other way.

It’s hard, then, not to be cynical when some of the people who should have spoken out against what was happening, but didn’t, now declare that we should forget the whole era — for the sake of the country, of course.

Sorry, but what we really should do for the sake of the country is have investigations both of torture and of the march to war. These investigations should, where appropriate, be followed by prosecutions — not out of vindictiveness, but because this is a nation of laws.

We need to do this for the sake of our future. For this isn’t about looking backward, it’s about looking forward — because it’s about reclaiming America’s soul.”

The president is having trouble straightening out his position on torture

Over the last week there have been a downpour of analysis about the potential political implications and impact of Obama releasing four memos (here) that explicitly discussed the use of torture in the fight against terrorism during the Bush administration.  Those on the left feel Obama didn’t go far enough – in that he has stated that he will not seek criminal charges against the CIA agents and their proxies – and those on the right, like Cheney, feel that he went too far – in that it exposes America’s dirty laundry for the world to judge and doesn’t discuss the (alleged) valuable intelligence that these tactics produced.  In many ways none of this need be so complicated – crimes against humanity were committed by those who engaged in terrorism and those who tortured the suspected terrorists in Guantanamo, Bagram Airbase, Abu Ghraib and any number of CIA black sites.  So why has Obama struggled so much with his handling of this?

I found John Dickerson’s piece at Slate (here) particularly useful, in that Obama has done this several times since assuming the presidency.  In particular, the problems that emerged after the AIG bonus scandal became a populist phenom overnight and sent people crawling through the Connecticut suburbs looking for vengeance.   In both instances, what becomes clear is that Obama wants to try and put the messes of the Bush administration behind him without having to fully explain himself, at least not initially.

One the one hand, I can understand why Obama doesn’t want to have his first term consumed with something like a Truth Commission, since the Republicans and Fox would turn it into a media spectacle that would make the OJ trial look like an afterschool mini-series.  But, on the other hand, these issues are not going to disappear and the truth must come out if America is to regain its moral standing – whether it deserved it in the first place is also debatable.  So here is my humble opinion on what should happen –

1) Debar the individuals from the Office of Legal Council that provided the legal cover for torture to occur, namely, Jay Bybee (who would need to be impeached from his Federal Court seat and summarily disbarred), John Yoo, and Steven Bradbury.

2) Establish a Truth Commission with subeona power and call Dick Cheney, David Addington, Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzalez, along with any other high level officials to testify about everything they knew, approved of and requested.

3) Reveal the companies that were contracted out by the CIA to conduct this work and conduct a thorough investigation about who approved these acts and make them pay damages in some form that can be used to either prevent acts of torture from happening again, compensates victims of torture in general, and strip them of their licenses for doing any future work with the US government.

Naturally, this simplifies matters, but it is what I believe needs to happen.   As impressed as I was that Obama released these memos (see Marc Ambinder article here), he really does seem to have lost the threat on being able to follow through on the implications of releasing such information.  I still in my heart of heart am convinced that Obama wants to do the right thing on this issue, but I just wish that he would do it then, rather than continually trying to hedge his bets.  As vocal as the Republicans and ex-VP Cheney have been about Obama’s betrayal of the nation and its security, he knows that they have no chance of regaining power through such antics alone.  Time will tell.

What Burma Needs From the White House

South Africa’s Desmond Tutu has a timely editorial in the Washington Post (here) about the need for the Obama Administration to address the situation in Burma.  As he points out, the US is currently reviewing is its policy towards Burma, much like Cuba, but often this can easily make it seem as if the process is largely being driven by inertia.   Considering that Burma has very very few defenders – mainly the Chinese and to a lesser extent ASEAN – it would seem as if the US could move more quickly in deciding what its policies and priorities will be to one of the most notorious authoritarian regimes in the world.

As Tutu points out “It stands to reason that every aspect of U.S. engagement with this country needs to be made more effective, more targeted and more broadly supported by key countries around the world. But as we wait for the results of this thought process, as America’s allies wait, as the United Nations waits, as the Burmese people wait, we should remember that the Burmese government is not waiting. Each day, it moves a step closer to its goal of eliminating opposition and consolidating power, with another stage-managed “election” looming in 2010.”

We’ll see.  While I think that Desmond Tutu underestimates the extent to which the military already has consolidated its control over the society.   Since  the Saffron Revolution raised hopes of a democratic transition happening in the autumn of 2007, Than Shwe brutally cracked down on the peaceful demonstrators, most of whom were Buddhist monks, and put politics ahead of disaster relief for the people of the Irrawaddy River valley after Cyclone Nagris, while the rest of the world did almost nothing.

Still, I certainly hope that his opinions reach the ears of the US policy makers with an ability to take action on behalf of the people of Burma, since it looks like few others will.

Obama exempts CIA ‘torture’ staff

As Obama heads off to the Summit of the America’s, he has decided to release a wealth of documents that reveal the methods used by the CIA in the war on terror, but with the caveat that he does not see any value in prosecuting the individuals who committed these atrocities.

According to the NY Times’s article (here) “Mr. Obama condemned what he called a “dark and painful chapter in our history” and said that the interrogation techniques would never be used again. But he also repeated his opposition to a lengthy inquiry into the program, saying that “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.””  I find this a poor rationalization for al that transpired in Guantanamo, Bagram and the dozens of black sites that the CIA maintained during the Bush administration.  It may make for good politics, but it will play into the hands of those seeking to portray the US as morally corrupt and hypocritical when it comes to human rights issues.

I still am hoping that there will be some independent inquiry or truth commission that is empowered to look into this “dark and painful chapter” of US history, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be something that will happen anytime soon.  Upon the releasing of the memos, the BBC reported (here) that Obama “gave an assurance that “those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice… will not be subject to prosecution.”  In many ways this would seem to be the classic Nuremberg defense – we were just following orders, etc etc, but what seems so troubling is that there is no effort or political will to go after those who made it possible for such orders to be given (John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Stephen G. Bradbury) and those who actually helped to make sure that those in the field knew that these tactics were condoned (Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Addington).  I can understand that it might be a waste of time to go after individuals in a military hierarchy that can easily claim that they were simply doing what they were told to do, but why not go after those that truly made such a shameful set of acts possible?

The Washington Post’s editorial board was quite pleased with Obama’s approach (here), but did go on to say that “the decision to forgo prosecutions should not prevent — and perhaps should even encourage — further investigation about the circumstances that gave rise to torture. What has become clear as more of the so-called torture memos are released is that common sense and established legal doctrine were often contorted to justify abhorrent techniques. An OLC memo dated May 30, 2005, and released yesterday reveals that at that time, the CIA had custody of 94 detainees and had used a variety of enhanced interrogation techniques against 28. All the techniques were deemed legal as long as they did not inflict prolonged or severe physical or mental pain. More light needs to be shed on how decisions were made and why. And more information is needed on who in the Bush administration made the ultimate decision to authorize the use of techniques that have long been considered torture and a violation of domestic and international legal strictures.”

The US should quit Nato

Andrew Bacevich has a surprising editorial in today’s Guardian (here) that outlines why hew believes that the time has come for the US to quit NATO.  In essence, Bacevich argues that Europe is capable of defending itself and that since the end of the Cold War has lost its way to the point that it should be put to rest.

While on the one hand I agree with Bacevich’s argument that Europe is more than capable of funding its own defenses, I simply can’t see the US leaving NATO anytime soon.  The main reason is the one piece that isn’t directly mentioned in Bacevich’s article – the military industrial complex.

The US has taken deliberate steps to prevent the European Union from developing its own military structure – money.  As expensive as it is for the US to pay for the new interventionist model of NATO and for much of the costs of its Eastern expansion, all of this has ensured that the market for US weapons systems was growing.  It was a simple capitalistic solution to losing it raison d’etre when the Soviet Union collapsed unexpectedly between 1989 and 1991.  Furthermore, it was a win-win-win scenario for the major players involved.

Western European powers could save massive amounts of money to maintain their expensive social welfare systems, agricultural subsidies, and heavy industry; the former communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe were allowed to upgrade their armed forces on the US dime which largely removed the threat of the Russian returning; and the US military was given yet another reason to be so large and so expensive.   How else could the US justify a military budget that is bigger than the other 19 members of the G20 combined?

All of that being said, I do think the time has come for the US to reshape its role in NATO.  First and foremost, the US should scraps its plans for putting missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic.  The system does not work and it has clearly been used as a stick for poking the Russian bear, while simultaneously asserting that the US will go to great lengths to keep Europe from developing its own defense mechanisms.  Abandon plans to bring Georgia and the Ukraine into NATO on a fast-track, since they are years away from meetings the necessary criteria.  Tie the completion of the NATO mission is Afghanistan to continued US presence in Europe, either Europe will commit the troops and resources necessary or the US should reduce its commitments to Europe.

Lastly, the US should focus on nuclear proliferation and safety, which would mean working with Russia, China and Pakistan rather than antagonizing them.  Fortunately, Obama seems much more committed to discussing such things openly, rather than unilaterally telling people what they are going to do.

America the Tarnished

In the lead up to the G20 Summit in London, economists Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Simon Johnson all put out impressive articles outlining the serious short falls of Tim Geithner and Larry Summers economic recovery plans for the US (and the rest of the world).  In total, these commentaries paint a fairly depressing picture – in that they cast doubt on the possibility of success due to the tarnishing of America’s reputation (Krugman’s article), the socializing of losses and the privatizing of potential gains that make it a losing proposition for the American taxpayer (Stiglitz’s article) and the lack of really reigning in those responsible for making this mess (Johnson’s article), but they are important to read none the less.

I have to say that I have been extremely underwhelmed by Geithner’s plans so far, in that he really seems to be trying to rebrand the core elements of the Bush/Paulson approach to the financial crisis, rather than calling for sacrifice and genuine accountability.  Furthermore, his plans for getting investors involved in buying toxic assets seems way to reminiscent of the steps taken to insure against major investor losses during the Mexican Peso crisis of 1994 and the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997/1998.  While is may be unrealistic to think that wealthy investors want to take any level of risks buying the CDOs and subprime mortgages that are hidden away, to insure that they won’t lose money is just as insane.

Simon Johnson, who functioned as a chief economist for the IMF, and Stiglitz, who was a chief economist for the World Bank, have experience dealing with financial systems in a state of collapse.  Ironically, it is now the US’s turn to hear the lecture on fiscal responsibility, greed, cronyism, etc. that they have tried to give so many others over the last 25 years.  Here is what Johnson says:

“In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again). In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay. This is precisely what drove Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy on September 15, causing all sources of funding to the U.S. financial sector to dry up overnight. Just as in emerging-market crises, the weakness in the banking system has quickly rippled out into the rest of the economy, causing a severe economic contraction and hardship for millions of people.”

Sound familiar.  I highly recommend reading all three before trying to interpret what ‘breakthroughs’ might be coming out of London during the G20 summit.

Toxic Assets Were Hidden Assets

Hernando de Soto, the author of the Mystery of Capital, has an interesting opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal (here), which pins much of the blame for the financial crisis on ‘derivatives’ and the lack of regulation around their use.

De Soto first takes on those who want to blame subprime mortgages for the mess where in, but argues that the numbers simply don’t add up.

“Today’s global crisis — a loss on paper of more than $50 trillion in stocks, real estate, commodities and operational earnings within 15 months — cannot be explained only by the default on a meager 7% of subprime mortgages (worth probably no more than $1 trillion) that triggered it. The real villain is the lack of trust in the paper on which they — and all other assets — are printed. If we don’t restore trust in paper, the next default — on credit cards or student loans — will trigger another collapse in paper and bring the world economy to its knees.”

This could also be seen as a reminder of why so many people are worried about abrogating contracts with AIG, since contracts are another piece of paper that only have value based on trust.

As De Soto explains “derivatives are the root of the credit crunch. Why? Unlike all other property paper, derivatives are not required by law to be recorded, continually tracked and tied to the assets they represent. Nobody knows precisely how many there are, where they are, and who is finally accountable for them. Thus, there is widespread fear that potential borrowers and recipients of capital with too many nonperforming derivatives will be unable to repay their loans. As trust in property paper breaks down it sets off a chain reaction, paralyzing credit and investment, which shrinks transactions and leads to a catastrophic drop in employment and in the value of everyone’s property.”

I have always found De Soto’s perspective refreshing in that he manages to balance capitalism and social democratic ideals better than most.   So far it does not seem as if the Obama administration agrees with this perspective, but that could be subject to change.  Considering how volatile things are these days, i.e. populist outrage over AIG bonuses, it wouldn’t take much for this to become the new focal point of the general public’s concern.

What De Soto makes clear is that any ideas of ‘letting the markets work it out for themselves’ should rightly be abandoned.  The neo-liberalism twisting of laissez faire capitalism hopefully has come to an end, but perhaps that is just wishful thinking.  However, as De Soto points out that “Adam Smith and Karl Marx both recognized, finance supports wealth creation, but in itself creates no value.”

The Mugabe of the Andes?

Scanning through headlines can be a surreal experience sometimes, as was the case when I saw this headline in the current issue of the Atlantic (here)  “The Mugabe of the Andes.”  The title of the piece comes from a quote by a member of the Bolivian opposition that says that Evo Morales “had the chance to be the Mandela of Bolivia, but instead he chose to be the Mugabe,”  which though eye catching seems to misrepresent about everyone involved in the quote in some way.  Mainly it is because it is a gross oversimplification and that it is trying to take apples and oranges and make them the same.

Morales is neither a Mandela figure, nor a Mugabe, even if it is an intriguing turn of phrase.  First off, Mandela’s image of being the savior of South Africa stems from the 28 years he spent in prison during apartheid – now it might be possible to compare the racial divide in Bolivia highlands to apartheid in some ways, but this doesn’t seem to be the issue at hand for the man that made the quote Luis Eduardo Siles.  While Mandela has certainly been deemed a saint for what he suffered, Mugabe is the opposite in that his name has become synonymous with evil.  Regardless of what role Mugabe played in Zimbabwe’s independence struggle in the 60s and 70s, he has come to epitomize the dangers of authoritarian rule.  He has stolen the last two elections, bankrupted his country (which used to be one of the wealthiest in Africa), and become and international pariah all while conditions for the people in Zimbabwe have gotten worse and worse.

Now in all fairness, Eliza Barclay’s article is not trying to claim that this Evo is a dictator, but she does seem to see him as more of a divider than a uniter. Ms. Barclay article states that as Evo “has consolidated power among the patchwork of indigenous groups in the western highlands, Morales has deployed a rhetoric studded with racial references aimed at his opposition, which is led by wealthy, mostly white businessmen and concentrated in the lowland eastern region that includes Santa Cruz.”  This seems to be a rather biased point of view, in that Morales has often been left no choice as wealthier people in Eastern Bolivia have talked of seceding and the US has tried to make it seem as if Bolivia is another domino that has fallen in a new version of the Cold War led by Hugo Chavez.

I have high hopes for Evo Morales and think that he will do what is right for the majority of Bolivia’s people, over 2/3 of whom are indiginous and have been marginalized from power for centuries.  And while it is true that his current victory in January (article here) does seem eerily like a play out of the Chavez playbook, it doesn’t mean that he is trying to set himself up as a president for life or a classic caudillo.

What will be interesting to see is how his latest moves to redistribute land (here) unfold.  In general land reforms have either laid the groundwork for long term changes or led to an invasion from the North.  So far it seems like a relatively small amount of land has changed hands, but the elites across Latin America, especially in the poorest countries have never been known to take such actions lying down.