The View from Right Field

Thoughts on Interrogation Techniques, Torture and the Way Forward

Here are several comments on the controversy over certain interrogation methods used by the United States in the early days after 9/11 and whether they might constitute torture.

                                                           1.

Probably the best comment on this whole question was made by Director of National Dennis Bair who talked about how easy it is to judge "on a bright sunny day in April 2009." It is hard to remember how we felt that day almost eight years ago and the days that followed: the fear, even expectation, of another attack; the flags flying from houses up and down the block; the determination to fight back. According to Porter Goss, chair of the House Intelligence Committee from 1997 to 2005, and later CIA director, when the leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees were briefed on what our intelligence agencies were doing to get information to protect us from further attacks after 9/11, the concerns were whether we were doing enough, not that we were doing too much. But now that have been no attacks for over seven years, it is easy to forget. And it is easy to judge people on standards that few would have applied back then.

                                                             2.

The media has reported that President Obama has said individual CIA agents who followed legal advice in using these harsh interrogation techniques will not be prosecuted. However, if I were a CIA agent, I would not feel at all comfortable – for a couple of reasons.

First, and most obviously, two days after Rahm Emanuel said on a Sunday news show that nobody in the Bush administration would be prosecuted for their roles in these matters, President Obama said that, while CIA officers would not be prosecuted, it was up to Attorney General Holder whether top people would be prosecuted. With even more documents scheduled to be released in the near future, who knows which way the wind will be blowing a year from now and whether the administration might change its mind again. And even if President Obama doesn’t change his mind, what might some private group or some foreign government try to do – or even some members of Congress?

Second, look closely at what President Obama said:

"For those who carried out some of these operations within the four corners of legal opinions or guidance that had been provided from the White House, I do not think it’s appropriate for them to be prosecuted."

Note the President’s wording. He did not say these people are not going to be prosecuted. He said they would not be prosecuted as long as they operated "within the four corners of legal opinions or guidance" they were given. This "four corners" language is a big loophole in the President’s commitment to not prosecute. What is or is not within the "four corners" of the official advice may not be clear. Also, it is likely there will be situations that are not specifically covered by the advice. Then you have to interpret: How do these circumstances fit within the "four corners" of the advice? Proving that every single one of your actions was within the "four corners" of the formal advice will not be easy, especially when the alleged victims will lie and many of your fellow citizens already think you are guilty.

Third, if your boss orders you to do something illegal or if the legal advice you receive is determined to be illegal, how can following that order or advice be okay? Following orders is not a defense when the orders are illegal.

                                                            3.

One of the silliest comments in the whole debate is this one from Paul Krugman in last Friday’s The New York Times:

"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."

The truly amazing thing about this quote is that Mr. Krugman seems to actually believe it, even though it is, obviously, nonsense. Messrs. Geithner, Orszag and Chu may not be involved in these investigations, but Congress will be, as Mr. Krugman says. Congress’ involvement in the investigations it is conducting, and its interest in investigations others are conducting, will take time and attention away from other issues. Regardless of what Mr. Krugman may think should happen, with these investigations proceeding, Congress will not have enough time to deal with all of the programs President Obama is proposing.

Also, to get big programs passed and implemented, you need media coverage, to involve the people and the Congress. Maybe it shouldn’t be necessary, but it is. And if "torture" investigations are continuing, every article on those investigations will mean less space is available for other things.

And the public’s attention will be diverted, too. Maybe people ought to be able to follow three or four or five big stories at once, but they can’t – and they won’t. Perhaps there are some so interested in politics that they will do it. But real people won’t. They have jobs to do, children to raise, churches to attend*; in other words, they have lives to live. If investigations are continuing, other matters will get less attention. And without broad public support, many of Obama’s programs aren’t going to get passed, no matter what Mr. Krugman may think.

Whether this is good or bad may be a difference of opinion.

                                                          4.

A final comment. President Obama has won the battle as to what "torture"/harsh interrogation techniques the United States will use in the future. He’s president and he gets to decide. As for the past, President Obama has said (see above) that we will not prosecute CIA officers who did their jobs in reliance on legal advice they were given (as long as their actions were within the "four corners" of that advice). Prosecution of higher-ups, however, is to be left to the Attorney General. I commented above on some of the problems with this position. Therefore, let me suggest another way to proceed, one that fits with the President’s other stated desire, to move forward.

President Obama likes to compare himself to Abraham Lincoln (to the point of using the same Bible Lincoln used to take the oath of office and even taking a train into Washington for his inauguration). With that in mind, consider what President Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural Address:

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

Lincoln spoke of charity for all, not just charity for the enlisted men or lower level officers. Thirty-six days later, at Appomattox Courthouse, the surrender terms that General Ulysses S. Grant gave to Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia put President Lincoln’s words into practice:

"The officers to give their individual paroles not to take up arms against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged, and each company or regimental commander sign a like parole for the men of their commands. … This done, each officer and man will be allowed to return to their homes, not to be disturbed by United States authority so long as they observe their paroles and the laws in force where they may reside."

In other words, the entire Army of Northern Virginia was allowed to merely go home. Once again, it was not just the enlisted men or the lieutenants and captains. It was the entire army, including Robert E. Lee himself. And what Robert E. Lee and the other generals in the Army of Northern Virginia did was a whole lot worse than writing legal memos defining what might or might not be torture. They committed treason, and it resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. And yet President Lincoln knew what we needed to do to start re-uniting our country – and General Grant did it.

Is President Obama willing to do the same? Will his party let him?

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* Some of us also have baseball teams to follow.

Update (4/28/09 12:30 a.m.): I changed the title and corrected a typo in the fouirth paragrpah of #4. 

Public Opinion on Torture - and Abortion

I hope to post a few thoughts on the "torture" question sometime in the next few days. Given that it looks like this issue will be going on for a while, I don’t think waiting a day or two will make my comments untimely. In any case, I wanted to mention one thing today.

On Thursday the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released their most recent poll on the public’s opinion on whether torture of accused terrorists is acceptable. The results were as follows: 15% say that "torture to gain important information from suspected terrorists is justified" often. 34% say it is justified sometimes. 22% say it is justified rarely, and 25% say it is never justified. (4% didn’t know.) Pew interpreted these results as follows:

"[N]early half say the use of torture under such circumstances is often (15%) or sometimes (34%) justified; about the same proportion believes that the torture of suspected terrorists is rarely (22%) or never (25%) justified."

I would interpret these numbers differently. Instead of combining "often" and "sometimes" on one side versus "rarely" and "never" on the other, I would look at it this way: 56% say torture is justified sometimes/rarely; 15% say it is justified often; and 25% say it is never justified. I would look at it this way because it seems to me that often and never are the extreme positions, while sometimes and rarely are just variations on a theme.

Also, when you look at these numbers this way, they compare interestingly to another emotional issue. Look at these numbers from a Gallup poll taken in May of last year: Do you think abortion should be: legal under any circumstances – 28%; legal under most circumstances – 13%; legal only in a few circumstances – 40%; or illegal in all circumstances – 17%.

These numbers can be looked at two ways, also. A little under half (41%) think abortion should legal in all or most circumstances; a little over half (57%) think it should be legal under no or very few circumstances. But that is not the way Gallup combined the responses. Rather, Gallup isolated the "all circumstances" and "no circumstances" responses by themselves and combined the other two in a "legal under only some circumstances" category that gives you a middle ground of 53%.

Look at the breakdowns for the two issues: Abortion: 17–53–28. Justifiability of torture: 15–56–25. What these numbers say to me is not that the United States is divided evenly. Rather they say that there is a solid, perhaps sensible, majority in the middle, with more absolute positions on either end attracting only about a fifth or a fourth of the population.

Something interesting to keep in mind.

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Update (4/27/09 12:12 a.m.):  Corrected a minor typo: inserted "a" before "solid" in the last sentence of the second-to-last paragraph.

China Tells Obama Not to Meet With the Dalai Lama

According to an Associated Press report:

"China said Thursday that President Barack Obama should not meet the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, when he visits the United States in October. …

'We firmly oppose the Dalai's engagement in separatist activities in any country under whatever capacity and under whatever name,' Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said when asked to comment on a possible meeting.

'We have made representations to the United States urging the U.S. to honor its commitments and not allow the Dalai to engage in separatist activities in the United States,' she told a regular news conference."

In other words, our largest creditor, a country that the Obama administration has to be relying on to buy even more U.S. debt, so we can finance the trillions of dollars of deficits President Obama’s plans envision us running over the next few years, doesn’t want President Obama to meet the Dalai Lama. What are we going to do?

When the United States became General Motors’ biggest creditor, or at least its most important creditor, and the Obama administration did not like GM’s plans for reforming itself, President Obama fired its president.

China can't fire our presdient, but what will President Obama do? I’m thinking that the Obama administration will limit the Dalai Lama to some kind of unofficial thing, maybe a short chat with the President, but nothing formal. That way President Obama can claim he met with the Dalai Lama while telling China it wasn't a real, full-blown visit.

It’s a problem when you have to rely on somebody else for money. They get to have some say in what you do, sometimes even important things.

"I Dreamed a Dream"

One of the things I especially like about baseball is the dreams part of it. Kids growing up dreaming of playing ball, baseball or softball. It is true is for all sports, but sometimes it seems particularly true with baseball. And everybody’s dream can be different. Sometimes it is in Little League. Other times it is high school or college or maybe even the minor leagues. For the luckiest few it is the majors, sometimes a Hall of Fame career, other times a single game.

There are stories like this every year. This year’s story for the Cubs (as I mentioned here) is Koyie Hill. In the fall of 2007 he had a horrific accident involving his throwing hand and a table saw. But he came back, played in Iowa last year, and made team in spring training.

There was another story back in 2006. On Tuesday, August 15, 2006, the Cubs played an 18-inning night game in Houston, which they won. But in the process they used every player on their roster, all 25 of them. (It appears to be the only time in major league history, at least since they went to 25-man rosters, that a team used every single one of its players.) The problem, of course, was that they had another game the next afternoon, and they did not have any pitchers left. But the Iowa Cubs, the Cubs’ top farm team, was playing in Round Rock, Texas, about 165 miles from Houston. So, at 6:00 a.m. the trainer for the Iowa Cubs was knocking on Ryan O’Malley’s door. Ryan had been in the Cubs’ organization for almost five years, but he had never made the big leagues. But Wednesday was his day to pitch, and so, instead of pitching for the Iowa Cubs in Round Rock, Texas, he pitched for the Chicago Cubs in Houston, Texas. He threw eight innings of shutout ball, Michael Barrett hit a home run in the sixth, and Bobby Howrey closed out the Astros in the ninth. Ryan O’Malley won a 1 to 0 shutout in his major league debut. Unfortunately, he hurt his arm a little in his next start, and he did never get back to the Cubs. But he did have that one moment. It isn’t as much as he wanted, but when he is older hopefully he will see it as awfully good.

Which brings me to another story, that of Susan Boyle. Some of you may have already heard of her (the story has been out for ten days), but I only read about it yesterday.

Susan Boyle is 47 years old. She lives in England and is unemployed. For a long time, she cared for her mother, who died in 2007 at the age of 91. Susan always wanted to be a professional singer, so after her mother died, Susan auditioned for a show called "Britain’s Got Talent". The name of the show, plus the fact that Simon Cowell is one of the judges (I mention that for "American Idol" fans), gives you some idea of what the show is about.

In any case, please click on this link for the You Tube video of Susan’s appearance on "Britain’s Got Talent." It’s seven minutes, but watch it. You will be glad you did.

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Note: For more information on what has happened since Susan’s appearance, see here.

Only in Chicago and Cook County

A Chicago Tribune article on the latest story of corruption and/or incompetence in Cook County included a sentence that could only happen in Chicago and Cook County. But first the story.

Things are a little unclear, but it appears that last fall Todd Stroger, President of the Cook County Board, hired Tony Cole, a bus boy at a local steak house, to be an administrative assistant at a salary of $48,289. Several months before Cole was hired, he had been charged with domestic battery. Shortly after he was hired, he was arrested for violating a protective order when he harassed the woman. Cole’s bail was posted by Stroger’s cousin, Donna Dunnings, who just happens to be Cook County’s chief financial officer. (Gee, I wonder how she got that job.)

Then, in January, Cole’s bail was increased, because he was allegedly still harassing the woman – and once again Dunnings put up his bail.

Earlier this month, Cole was not home when authorities made an unannounced visit, as he was supposed to be. So he was arrested and his bail was raised yet again; this time a lot. As the story hit the media, Stroger told Dunnings she had to resign.

According to the Tribune yesterday, "Dunnings could not be reached for comment, and Stroger declined to answer most questions about the situation." Which brings us to the sentence that could only happen in Illinois: "Cole could not be reached for comment because he was in Cook County jail …."

Only in Chicago and Cook County would you see stories with a sentence like that. "Cole could not be reached for comment because he was in … jail". What a great state.

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Update (4/20/09 10:40 p.m.): Corrected a typo in the first sentence of the second paragraph, changing "busy boy" to "bus boy".

Do Our Politicians Want to Run Our Banks – Or Just Tell Them What to Do?

Consider the following stories that have appeared in the last week. Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal reports that some big U.S. banks, in order to get around the new restrictions that make it harder to hire foreigners on H-1B visas*, are offering international jobs to new hires and sending them to overseas offices, instead of having them work in the United States.

Goldman Sachs is selling new shares of common stock in an effort to raise money so it can repay the loans it received from the Troubled Asset Relief Program ("TARP"). According to Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, Goldman doesn’t like the restrictions on compensation that the government has imposed on recipients of TARP money, so they want to pay the money back.

On the other hand, an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily last week noted reports that some smaller banks have found it hard to pay loans back to the government. Apparently, the Treasury isn’t keen to get repaid.

An article in Monday’s Wall Street Journal says that the Congressional Oversight Panel which is overseeing the bailout of banks, is investigating increases that banks receiving TARP funds have made in fees and interest rates on certain loans and credit cards. The head of the committee, Elizabeth Warren, is quoted as saying: "The people who are subsidizing the activities of the banks through their tax dollars are the same people who are furnishing the high profits through consumer lending. In a sense, we’re asking taxpayers to pay twice."

There is something interesting going on here. Is a bailout that was absolutely needed to prevent the collapse of our financial system last fall morphing into a backdoor way to control banks and financial institutions? Last fall the Federal Reserve forced strong banks to take money so that it would not be so obvious when the weak ones took money.

But now, the fact that banks received TARP money is being used to control, or at least threaten to control, who they hire, how much they pay their employees, and how much they charge their customers. (One comment on the quote from Ms. Warren above: How are the banks supposed to pay back the money they borrowed from the government if they can’t increase their profits?)

I understand the concept that, if you take money from somebody, that somebody is going to feel they have some say in how you use the money. But what seems to be happening here is more than that. This isn’t about trying to make sure the government gets its loans paid back.** This has the potential to result in a kind of governmental control of and/or interference in the day-to-day operations of banks. It is one thing for regulatory agencies to set standards to better ensure financial safety. But what we are seeing is interference based on political concerns: Don’t hire foreigners in a recession. Don’t pay your executives more than we think is fair. Why are you increasing your interest rates and fees?

There is a trend here that is concerning, a trend that may take a long time to run its course and that will not be good for us as it does.

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* For a post about these restrictions, see here.

** In fact, as I mentioned above, it is a little unclear how quickly the government wants the loans repaid. After all, once loans are repaid, the government will not be able to use the existence of the loans as a justification for imposing restrictions on the banks.

Jesus Christ Is Risen Today

For Easter:

"Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia!
Our triumphant holy day, Alleluia!
Who did once, upon the cross, Alleluia!
Suffer to redeem our loss, Alleluia!

Hymns of praise then let us sing, Alleluia!
Unto Christ, our heavenly King, Alleluia!
Who endured the cross and grave, Alleluia!
Sinners to redeem and save, Alleluia!

But the pains which He endured, Alleluia!
Our salvation hath procured, Alleluia!
Now above the sky He’s king, Alleluia!
Where the angels ever sing, Alleluia!

Sing we to our God above, Alleluia!
Praise eternal as His love, Alleluia!
Praise Him, all you heavenly host, Alleluia!
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, Alleluia!"

"We Can't Run Deficits Forever"

A week ago Steny Hoyer wrote an Op-ed in The Wall Street Journal with this title. You can read what Representative Hoyer wrote here.

In response to his Representative Hoyer’s article, I wrote the following letter to the editor:

"In ‘We Can’t Run Deficits Forever’ (Op-ed, April 2), House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer says ‘the single most important thing we can do to get our budget under control is to deal with the costs of our entitlement programs.’[*] We know what we need to do, he says, ‘We simply need the bipartisan will to choose and implement such reforms.’

If Representative Hoyer really wants bipartisanship, instead of the specious kind of ‘you-agree-with-me-and-we’ll-call-it-bipartisan bipartisanship’ that some try to pass off as the real thing these days, then the best idea that has been proposed in a long time has just been reintroduced in the House of Representatives by Cooper (D-TN) and Frank Wolf (R-VA).

Representatives Cooper and Wolf propose a commission, the SAFE Commission (‘Securing America’s Future Economy’), modeled after the federal base-closing process. Everything would be considered. Taxes. Spending. Everything. And Congress would be required to vote, yes or no, on the commission’s recommendations. They couldn’t ignore them, and they couldn’t amend them into meaninglessness with one pork-barrel vote after another.

The base closing process has enabled Congress to save billions of dollars and improve our national defense at the same time. The SAFE Commission would take that same approach and apply it across the whole budget. It’s easy to talk about needing the bipartisan will to pass reforms. The SAFE Commission sets up a process that will actually get the job done."

A very slightly altered version of this letter was published in today’s Wall Street Journal. See here.

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* Note: I think this phrase should have read as follows: ‘you-agree-with-me-and-we’ll-call-it-bipartisanship’. I think there may have been a typo in what I sent to The Wall Street Journal and it got published the way I sent it in.  I'm not sure.

Who Do You Trust? Experts or People?

In their article in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, David Shaywitz and Thomas Stossel talk about the difficulty of getting new drugs to market and about the criticism of those in academia who accept funding from and cooperate with pharmaceutical companies in efforts to develop new drugs and new treatments. To read the whole article and the arguments Drs. Shaywitz and Stossel make on this subject, see here. I just want to focus on this one quote from the article:

"Human biology is maddeningly complex, laboratory models are necessarily simplistic, and scientific understanding remains painfully limited."

This statement states the essential problem that many of us have with many of the Obama administration programs. The underlying premise of much of what the President is proposing is that government knows best and can do things best. The best and brightest experts can design programs to deal with problems, or perceived problems, as diverse as global warming, what cars to build, how to turn around our economy while at the same time making sure nobody makes more than they are entitled to, how to provide more health care for more people at lower cost, etc.

But what the Obama administration is missing is the same thing that the financial whiz kids with their superfast computers and super-complicated formulas missed in the housing bubble and subprime crisis: People and what they do and how they react are much more complex than any group of experts, no matter how smart, or any computer program, no matter how sophisticated. The programs may be faster and the experts may be individually smarter, but people are more complex and their decisions and interactions are more complicated and more varied than those programs or those experts can predict or control. The knowledge of the experts and the decision-making capability of the programs are inherently more limited and simplistic than the knowledge and decisions of people themselves.

Whether or not you agree with the last sentence in the prior paragraph is probably a pretty good indicator of whether you think President Obama’s various plans and programs will work or whether they won’t.

And They Complained Sarah Palin Didn't Know Anything About Foreign Countries

While on his tour of European countries, President Obama had this to say about the 60th anniversary meeting of NATO:

"'It was also interesting to see that political interaction in Europe is not that different from the United States Senate,' said Obama, a former senator. 'There's a lot of — I don't know what the term is in Austrian — wheeling and dealing, and, you know, people are pursuing their interests, and everybody has their own particular issues and their own particular politics."'

I know I have always been glad I know both Austrian and German when I have traveled in Europe.

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Note: Thanks to James Taranto and "Best of the Web Today" for this story.