Veterans for Common Sense

    In deciding not to follow through on his threat to veto Sen. John McCain’s amendment against torture, Bush actually surrendered very little. Torture is still in the eyes of the beholders in the defense and intelligence communities.

    The unseemly spectacle of Vice President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush openly opposing the McCain amendment banning torture for a torturous five months has done irreparable harm to America’s standing abroad. The damage will not be attenuated by the president’s reluctant acquiescence to the McCain amendment yesterday. The most that can be said is that the harm would have been still greater if McCain caved in to Cheney’s incredibly obtuse opposition, or if Bush had to veto must-pass defense legislation in order to defeat the amendment.

    The Bush-McCain compromise changes very little. The interrogation practices banned are limited to those not authorized by the United States Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation, which can be – is being – revised. The New York Times reported on Wednesday that the Army has approved a 10-page secret addendum to the Army field manual, a move that one Pentagon official described as “a stick in McCain’s eye.” McCain’s chief of staff minced no words in describing the move as “politically obtuse” and undertaken without “one molecule of political due diligence.”

    The new manual, to be issued this month, spells out authorized interrogation techniques, but these remain classified. Having faced down Cheney, it will be interesting to see if McCain’s courage extends to facing down Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s transparent attempt to vitiate the amendment. Or will McCain and his congressional colleagues settle for a Potemkin-village-type victory, and leave the field for the clever lawyers around Cheney and Rumsfeld. The pleasant noises that McCain was making yesterday and premature comments of eager-to-please Jane Harmon, vice-chair of the House Intelligence Committee, suggest that, in the end, most legislators will settle for Potemkin.

    The Crooks and the Crux

    One Army officer involved bemoaned the fact that confusion persists because of lack of clarity on what constitutes torture. “‘Cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment’ is at the crux of the problem,” he said, “but we’ve never defined that.”

    The section of the McCain amendment applying to CIA and other civilian interrogators also hinges on what qualifies as cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, but the amendment’s attempt to define it by referring to provisions in the US Constitution and the UN convention against torture leaves ample room for ambiguity and wide interpretation.

    Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said yesterday that the dispute between the White House and McCain was over “what constitutes cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment” and used the rhetorical device of reductio ad absurdam, pointing out, “In some countries … those words mean you can’t even insult someone when you question them.” Appearing on CNN, Gonzales added:

    “Congress has defined what torture is, and it is intentional infliction of severe – I emphasize the word severe – intentional infliction of severe physical or mental pain or suffering.”

    Gonzales would not say whether this definition would include waterboarding. Those watching CNN will not have much reason to believe that anything has changed.

    National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley said yesterday that his negotiations with McCain centered on providing legal protection for interrogators. McCain had said earlier that granting such protection would undermine his amendment, but under the compromise with the White House, CIA officers and other civilians accused of abuse in interrogation would be able to argue that they believed they were obeying a legal order and would have the right to government counsel. In practice, this will make it very difficult to hold anyone accountable in US courts. A prosecutor would have to prove that a higher-up’s orders were so unreasonable that they fit the category of Nazi atrocities.

    No effort has been made to disguise what lies behind the administration’s position. Even Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a lawyer who has been considered a moderate on the issue of torture, has conceded that the “problem” is to find a way to protect interrogators who go too far. Perhaps it is my lack of legal training, but I do not think one can square this circle. There remains too much of a disconnect, for example, between the “we-do-not-torture” rhetoric and, for example, Gonzales’s refusal to rule out waterboarding.

    Other Fallout
• Dick Cheney, dubbed “Vice President for Torture” by the New York Times has been dealt a resolute rebuff. His open advocacy of torture, coming on the heels of the indictment of his chief of staff, has put a huge chink in his armor. Today’s revelations that he played a key role in the latest scandal, the use of the National Security Agency for warrant-less eavesdropping on US citizens, could be strike three. Despite the president’s protestations that the two have never been closer, Bush may soon be forced to put a considerable distance between himself and his éminence grise.

• The imperial presidency has been struck a blow – not fatal yet, but nonetheless damaging. Congress has summoned the courage to face Cheney and the president down, at least overtly, and that chips away at the image of invulnerability carefully cultivated by the administration. Congress people and Senators seem newly aware that their oath is to the Constitution, not the White House, and this can spell big trouble in the months ahead.

• The press is beginning to act like a responsible fourth estate. True, the New York Times sat on the NSA story for a whole year, but it was published before the final vote on the so-called Patriot Act – perhaps even in time to have some impact.

• After two years of intimidation by what happened to Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie, patriots within the national security establishment are showing a new willingness to reveal abuses to the press. “According to current and former intelligence officials” has become familiar attribution in major stories that blow the whistle on abuses and deceit.

• The George W. Bush White House is no longer the well-honed machine it once was. Clearly, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney are preoccupied with their legal problems, and the gaping hole left by their lack of timely advice has left the president to his own devices. His failure to do the smart thing last summer and meet with Cindy Sheehan, his identification with Cheney’s doomed stance on torture, his recent off-the-cuff appraisal of Iraqi casualties, his gratuitous remark that Donald Rumsfeld is doing “a heck of a job” (like the late Michael Brown of FEMA?) – all attest to a lack of adult supervision these days at the White House. And as Libby goes to trial, and if Karl Rove is indicted, things are likely to get still more dicey.

    Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 – In an unusual bipartisan rebuke to the Bush administration, the House on Wednesday overwhelmingly endorsed Senator John McCain’s measure to bar cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners in American custody anywhere in the world.

Although the vote was nonbinding, it put the Republican-controlled House on record in support of Mr. McCain’s provision for the first time, at the very moment when the senator, a Republican, is at a crucial stage of tense negotiations with the White House, which strongly opposes his measure.

The vote also likely represents the lone opportunity that House members will have to express their sentiments on Mr. McCain’s legislation. The Senate approved the measure in October, 90 to 9, as part of a military spending bill. But until Wednesday, the House Republican leadership had sought to avoid a direct vote on the measure to avoid embarrassing the White House.

The vote was on a motion to instruct House negotiators, who had just been appointed to work out differences between the House and Senate spending bills, to accept the Senate position on the McCain amendment.

The House bill, providing $453 billion for military programs, has no provision like Mr. McCain’s, but if the negotiators follow these instructions to the letter, the final bill passed by Congress will.

The House vote was 308 to 122, with 107 Republicans lining up along with almost every Democrat behind Representative John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who sponsored Mr. McCain’s language and who has become anathema to the administration on any legislative measure related to Iraq since his call last month to withdraw American troops from Iraq in six months.

“Torture does not help us win the hearts and minds of the people it’s used against,” Mr. Murtha said on the House floor. “Congress is obligated to speak out.”

Unlike the tumultuous three-hour debate that Mr. Murtha’s Iraq-related measure provoked last month, this measure met with just 10 minutes of statements to a nearly empty House chamber.

Mr. Murtha, a former Marine colonel who is the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, said Mr. McCain’s legislation was essential to standardizing American interrogation methods and sending a clear signal to the world that the United States condemned the abusive treatment of detainees.

“If we allow torture in any form,” Mr. Murtha said, “we abandon our honor.”

Representative C. W. Bill Young of Florida, head of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, was one of 121 Republicans who voted against Mr. McCain’s language. One Democrat, Jim Marshall of Georgia, voted against it; 200 Democrats and one independent supported it.

Mr. Young was quick to point out that he was in no way endorsing torture as an interrogation technique, but said he opposed the measure because it wrongly bestowed the full protections of the Constitution to terrorists and tied the hands of Congressional negotiators.

Another Republican who voted against the measure, Representative Todd Tiahrt of Kansas, said he opposed it because he said laws already barred torture and abusive treatment.

“It’s absolutely unnecessary,” said Mr. Tiahrt, who is on the House Intelligence Committee.

It was unclear what effects the vote would have on the negotiations between Mr. McCain and President Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, and on the Congressional negotiators for the two military bills now in conference committee. A spokeswoman for the Arizona senator, Eileen McMenamin, said Wednesday night that he had no comment on the vote.

“I don’t think it will have any effect on the negotiations,” Mr. Young said.

Mr. Murtha said the vote bolstered his previous assertions that the military spending bill would include Mr. McCain’s provision after the conference committee completed its work.

“It’s going to be in there, period,” Mr. Murtha said after the vote.

Earlier in the day, Senator Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican who is the senior member of the Appropriations Committee, echoed Mr. Murtha’s prediction, telling reporters that Mr. McCain “wants it in there, and I think it will stay in there.”

The negotiations over provision intensified on Wednesday. Early in the morning, Mr. McCain met in his office with Mr. Hadley. When asked whether the two had narrowed their differences, Mr. McCain told reporters: “We’re still talking. We’ll get this resolved one way or another. We have the votes.”

Mr. McCain also attended the weekly Senate Republican policy lunch on Wednesday, but senators who attended the private gathering said that Mr. McCain did not address his colleagues and that the subject of his amendment did not come up.

After the lunch, however, Mr. McCain was mobbed by reporters seeking comment on his talks with Mr. Hadley. Mr. McCain was uncharacteristically tight lipped, saying he did not want to discuss details of the continuing discussions.

Two Senate Republican colleagues who voted for Mr. McCain’s measure in October said Wednesday it was important for Congress to back the language.

“We need to have clear guidance, in law, that makes it very clear that inhumane treatment of detainees in American captivity is absolutely unacceptable,” Susan Collins of Maine said. “This problem is hurting us around the world. It’s contrary to our values, and we simply must have this as part of the final bill.”

Senator John Thune of South Dakota said: “Because it has become such a high-profile issue here of late, not only around the country but around the world, I think it’s in our best interests to address it. A strong unequivocal statement that we don’t apply or tolerate torture in any form is probably right now a good thing to do.”

American military officers will inspect hundreds of detention centers and embed with Iraqi police commando units and other Interior Ministry forces to try to halt widespread abuses uncovered by raids on two Iraqi-run detention centers in Baghdad in the last month, the American ambassador pledged Tuesday.

The ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, said at a news conference that “over 100” of the 169 detainees whom American troops found on Nov. 15 in an Interior Ministry bunker in the Jadriya neighborhood had been abused, a far higher figure than the Americans had previously disclosed.

In the second raid last week, on another makeshift detention center run by a notorious police commando unit, the Wolf Brigade, as many as 26 of the 625 detainees jammed into the overcrowded center had been abused, Mr. Khalilzad said.

He gave no details of the abuse.

An Iraqi official said Tuesday that some of the detainees held by the Wolf Brigade had been “severely” tortured. The official insisted on anonymity, citing a clampdown on discussing the latest raid that he and other Iraqi officials said had been ordered by high-ranking Iraqis who were concerned about the effects that new disclosures about torture might have on the election on Thursday.

Most victims in the two detention centers were Sunni Arabs, already estranged from the Shiite-led government.

One Iranian-backed Shiite religious party in the alliance that is favored to win the biggest bloc of seats in the election, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or Sciri, has controlled the Interior Ministry under the transitional government that took office in May. The minister, Bayan Jabr, is a senior Sciri official. He has been widely accused by Sunni Arabs of infiltrating hundreds of members of the paramilitary wing of Sciri, the Badr Organization, into the police force, and allowing them to form death squads, and to run torture centers. Mr. Jabr has vigorously denied the accusations.

Although Mr. Khalilzad said Tuesday that “the United States does not endorse” any group in the election, American policy has placed a high premium on attracting a large Sunni turnout that will give Sunnis a major voice and an incentive to turn away from the insurgency.

The Americans, so long seen as patrons of the Shiites and Kurds, are eager to send the message that they are determined to protect Sunni interests, too.

The raid by American and Iraqi troops last Thursday, on a converted stable once used to keep racehorses owned by Uday Saddam Hussein, eldest son of the ousted dictator, was the first conducted by a joint American and Iraqi investigative unit that was established after the initial raid on the Jadriya bunker.

With hundreds of other Iraqi-run detention centers due to be inspected, American officials here appear to be concerned that the torture of detainees that was an entrenched feature of the Hussein years has reasserted itself under his successors.

“I want to let the Iraqi people know we are very committed to looking at all other facilities” run by the Interior Ministry, Mr. Khalilzad told a news conference in the fortified compound known as the Green Zone, the principal center of American power in Iraq.

He said it was “unacceptable for this kind of abuse to take place” and added that he wanted Iraqis to know that American officers were being assigned to police commando units and other Interior Ministry forces, as well as “security institutions” under ministry control, “so that they can observe how raids are carried out, how people are taken into custody.”

The Wolf Brigade has been implicated by Iraqi human rights groups and Sunni Arabs in a wide pattern of torture and killing, mostly of Sunni Arabs who the commandos have sought for links to the insurgency raging across the Sunni heartland or in revenge for the widespread torture and killing in Mr. Hussein’s years in power.

The brigade was established this year under a Sunni Arab officer who was imprisoned under Mr. Hussein, Gen. Adnan Thabit, and was armed and financed under an $11 billion American program to develop new Iraqi security forces.

An Interior Ministry official who agreed to talk about the raid on Thursday said the former stable was a half-mile from the old Oil Ministry headquarters in eastern Baghdad that the Interior Ministry is using. The official insisted on anonymity, citing the clampdown on discussing details of the abuses.

According to numerous human rights reports, Uday Saddam Hussein ran his own torture center nearby, in what was the National Olympic Committee headquarters, and used the stable for the Arabian thoroughbreds that were frequent winners at the main racetrack here.

On April 9, 2003, as American marines entered eastern Baghdad, looters led the horses from the stables. The horses broke loose amid the pandemonium and were not seen again.

The Interior Ministry official said the stable was taken over as a detention center last year, after Iraq had regained sovereignty from the American occupation authority. He said it was widely known in the ministry that the rooms once used as the stableboys’ living quarters had been used for torture in the last year.

“Torture has been common practice among the police commandos,” he said.

Mr. Khalilzad’s remarks at the news conference suggested that top American officials here were exhausting their patience with the transitional government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari over the torture accusations.

Within hours of American troops’ seizing control of the Jadriya bunker last month, Mr. Khalilzad and Gen. George W. Casey of the Army, the American military commander, visited Mr. Jaafari at his headquarters in the Green Zone and insisted that a joint American-Iraqi inquiry examine what had occurred in the bunker.

The Americans demanded a second inquiry to look at all detention centers across Iraq and root out the mistreatment of detainees.

The results of the Jadriya inquiry, ordered to report in two weeks, have not been disclosed. But Mr. Khalilzad’s impatient tone on Tuesday suggested that the torture there had been worse than the Americans thought.

“It was far worse than slapping around,” the ambassador said, referring to reports that he had seen on the 100 abused detainees.

Some Iraqi officials have suggested that the techniques at Jadriya and other Interior Ministry detention centers the have included extracting fingernails, suspending victims upside-down from roof hooks for long periods, applying electric shocks to the genitals and other sensitive body parts and pressing lighted cigarettes to the bodies.

Mr. Khalilzad said the raid on the second detention center last week, involving American troops and embassy officials, as well as Iraqi forces, had convinced the Americans that the review of other detention centers needed “to be accelerated.”

The implication appeared to be that with the first two centers raided by American troops disclosing torture, the likelihood was that more abuse might be found in the several hundred detention centers that American military officers say they believe may exist across Iraq.

The ambassador’s statement that the American command had decided to embed officers with Interior Ministry units suggested that the practice of having American officers attached to commando units like the Wolf Brigade, common when they were established over the last year, had fallen away as the buildup of Iraqi forces accelerated.

Although American policy has been to assign “military transition teams” of up to 10 soldiers to each brigade-level Iraqi army unit, the free-wheeling police commandos appear to have had little American oversight in recent months. Mr. Khalilzad acknowledged as much when he said of the plan to embed Americans with the Interior Ministry units, “It’s a new phenomenon.”

Why the commandos have been left to operate unsupervised has been a burning question among Iraqi rights groups, who say the Wolf Brigade, among other special Interior Ministry units, established an early reputation for brutality.

When the issue has been pressed with American commanders, they have said the effective use of limited American troops has meant that “hard choices” had been made on where embedded American units were most needed.

Unlike many Iraqi police and army units, the Wolf Brigade established early that it was capable of functioning effectively on its own, the commanders have said.

But many Iraqis, including many Sunni Arabs, have been reluctant to believe the Americans’ insistence that they had no evidence of torture by Interior Ministry units until the raid in Jadriya. The critics have noted that uniformed American officers and other Americans in plainclothes are an obtrusive presence in the Adnan Palace, the high-domed edifice in the Green Zone that was once a retreat for Saddam Hussein and where most top Interior Ministry officials, including Mr. Jabr, the minister, now work.

General Thabit, founder of the Wolf Brigade, has an office along a corridor from Mr. Jabr’s, and American officers shuttle back and forth on the floor.