This might be a wake-up call. American status abroad does not depend on a personality, because the personality doesn't translate to other societies.

Here's an example of what powers perception can have. Consider: when the Israeli Army outfits its troops with the Galil rifle instead of the M16, their Arab opponents see less American involvement; it all of a sudden isn't the USA shooting at them. Do you think the purchase of the Obama family dog matters one lick to these people?

CNN is claiming "sky-high approval ratings" yet again. For what, and from whom? I'm not seeing it.

Aren't those awesome clothes the Emperor has? And he's just ripped!

If Al-Quaeda want photos for propaganda and recruitment, all they need is a copy of Photoshop. They don't exactly foster a spirit of independent critical thinking and skepticism in their members. Cartoons of Tom and Jerry may be sufficient in some cases.

Publishing the photos is more of a catharsis for the west. Under Bush, we took several steps away from the moral high ground, which has been extremely damaging to our morale, and our standing in the rest of the world. This high ground must be recovered, and that's what publication's about.

If the photos are published, it will cause pain. But then, after a time, suppose no more photos are published. What will that mean? It will mean there are no more photos to publish - no guilty secrets hidden away. It will mean it is hard to accuse the west of hypocrisy, of lies, and so on. Absence of evidence will indeed be evidence of absence. People will be able to believe what the west says, whether they agree with it or not. That is the moral high ground.

If the photos are published, it will cause pain. But then, after a time, suppose no more photos are published. What will that mean? It will mean there are no more photos to publish - no guilty secrets hidden away. It will mean it is hard to accuse the west of hypocrisy, of lies, and so on. Absence of evidence will indeed be evidence of absence. People will be able to believe what the west says, whether they agree with it or not. That is the moral high ground.

Precisely wrong, Norman.

There is no catharsis here. The purpose of publishing these photos is to emphasize the left's belief that the United States is the fount of evil in the world, and the innocent islamists are merely our victims.

The fact of there being no more photos is simply evidence that we stopped allowing pictures to be taken. Remember, the enemy we are fighting STILL believes the blood libel that Jews use the blood of muslim and Christian children to make matzoh.

I don't know about you, but my morale wasn't damaged until Bush decided that PR was more important than dead islamists on the sand.

and our standing in the rest of the world. This high ground must be recovered, and that's what publication's about.

What you mean 'we', white man? The United States has NEVER had 'standing' in the rest of the world except that they feared us enough not to fuck with us. The only thing publishing photos of islamist shitballs with panties on their heads does is "prove" to the world that we are as bad as they've always believed we are, and that we need to be put in a box somehow.

Those who want these photos published are not anti-war. They're simply on the other side.

WHere DO they get these sky-high numbers? Rasmussen has him at 35% approve, 31% don't. That's not sky-high!

"Under Bush, we took several steps away from the moral high ground, which has been extremely damaging to our morale, and our standing in the rest of the world. "

Bull. We give the most aid (by money, time, and # of people involved) of any country in the world. Maybe the rest of the world needs to put their money and lives where their mouth is.

Even if we didn't, there are several thousand dead and many many thousand more grieving, who couldn't really give a shit about the high ground. It didn't keep them alive, did it? Nor would it keep any others from being victims. These people hate us, for our mere existence. Period. There's no changing that.

Brian - Thanks for your exposition. It's always good to hear a different point of view.

"... blood of muslim and Christian children..." - that illustrates my point. If lack of photos won't make any difference, neither will the presence of photos. The main effect of the photos will be on US citizens (and I don't mean they'll get attacked more).

Re 'we' - I though that would be picked up. The UK has only one-tenth as much military presence as the US, but it is there, and the UK is only one-fiftieth the size of the US. Don't diss your allies.

The US did and does have standing, not just power. It has been an inspiration to many. It still is, and I hope it will be more so.

"Those who want these photos published are not anti-war. They're simply on the other side." I'm not on the other side. Or anti-war. I'm for more effective war, ie war that achieves its objectives with less cost in men and material.

Teresa's better half needs to decide which side he is on. If the jihadis win, do you really think Democrats and Obama voters get a pass? Like Lenin's useful idiots, they will be the first to be shot.

There is no good that can or will come of this, but there may be some political capital for Obama. I had exceedingly low expectations for this president, and even those have not been met.

I don't get it. Since everyone here agrees these techniques of "enhanced interrogation" do not constitute torture, what could these photos show? I agree with Dick Cheney, let's release them along with the information demonstrating how successful these techniques were.

The problem in your argument Amy, is that these techniques were approved at the very highest levels in the White House, and not done purely by some miscreants in the Army. Everyone in that story and some people in the threads here cheerled and encouraged those behaviors on. And now, having been found not just guilty morally, but found to have been complicit in undermining the security of America and having gained no useful information from the torture, well, now we all want taksie backsies and a coverup and let's not talk about how and why we got here, let's just look forward.

Those who forget history (or fail to learn from it) are doomed to repeat it.

That was true with the Banksters, and it's true with torture too.

NOT releasing the photos and discussing these issues is similar to demanding that the Danish cartoons not be published, or that the novel about Mohammed and Ayesha not be published.

Release them and investigate and we can all see what was done in our name, and the citizens around the world will also see that America acts completely differently from their despots and religious leaders.

Note re: "Teresa's better half needs to decide which side he is on.". Raspberries to you. The "decide which side you're on!", "you're a traitor", "love it or leave it" was lame back in the 50s when McCarthy tried it. Get some new material.

> The Push To Be The Un-Bush

Watch this episode of Bloggingheads for much more on the need of the Obama-noids to distinguish themselves from the Bush administration, and their failure to do so. (Also, you'll see a creepy liberal whipped like a barnyard mule.)

> not detaining President Obama from
> handing al-Qaeda a veritable public
> relations coup

The President of the United States should make a habit of noting that no one in the last twenty years –hell, no one in history– has done more to defend living, breathing Muslims than the United States. On three continents. At exquisite cost, in treasure and blood.

I care a lot less about PR with the rest of the world. But America needs to know what was done in our names and what it yielded us. Let's have an honest discussion, with all of the facts, of the torture policies of the previous administration, of the laws that were broken, and decide whether it was worth it and whether we want to amend our laws and treaties to permit it.

Because there's no doubt it was illegal:

"The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of the Convention . It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.

The core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called 'universal jurisdiction.' Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution."

I mean really, what sort of wuss would have signed a law prohibiting torture and allowing for universal jurisdiction? Wouldn't be #40, would it?

Here's another crazy lefty, NRO's Jim Manzi

I stand with Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root and the United States military, and with a 100-year tradition of our nation, against the specific practice of waterboarding captured combatants as strategically ineffective and morally repugnant. It is beneath us; beneath our dignity, and beneath our enlightened self-interest

We need to show this stuff, and make it public, not because of anything in the Muslim world. We need to do it for ourselves. If we don't, it's going to turn into a circus somewhere else (ahem, Spain).

Agreed

Cheezburg -

The Democrats have an unassailable majority in the House of Representatives. Why have they not taken the action they are allowed (some would say required) by the Constitution to do?

I'll tell you why. Because they know that there was no torture going on. They know that we got information that saved lives here and abroad. And they do not want to be on record as opposing that.

See, when it all plays out, here's what it looks like for the Democrats. They can leave it alone and say "we need to move forward", and drive their left-wing base insane with hatred and rage. Or they can prosecute Bush, find nothing, and be on record as putting the temporary comfort of a mass murderer above the lives of civilians world-wide.

Obama's calculated partial leak of the methods (but curiously not the results) of interrogation was meant to appease the base and shock the rest. If he ever fully releases the results of those interrogations, there's not a politician in DC that would vote to convict.

Spain's only interest in prosecuting Bush is the hope that another Madrid 3/11 might be avoided if they can be seen to genuflect before the Islamists. It won't work. It never does.

But this didn't happen under Obama; it happened under Bush, and everyone understands that.

Bush came into office a quasi-isolationist with a mostly-domestic agenda. He campaigned specifically against the "nation-building" of the Clinton Administration.

That didn't stop "them" from plowing planes into our building and killing 3,000 people fewer than nine months after he took office.

"They" don't care who is or was president.

BTW, some of that "nation-building" involved the expenditure of American blood and treasure to save Muslims from being conquered and/or exterminated.

This is not about Muslims. It's about you.

If it wasn't torture and if it saved lives, then why, oh, why, aren't people going public with everything? It would really help a lot. End the speculation, clear the air.

The Obama admin knows it will be a huge mess to do a full investigation, they don't want to deal with it, and neither does Congress (enough of them were complicit). So they won't go forward unless there's a public outcry.

You say it wasn't torture. Is Palestinian hanging torture? Sleep deprivation of more than a week? Inducing hypothermia? Christopher Hitchens sure thought waterboarding was torture after they did it to him - willingly, in an environment where he was safe and people would stop whenever he asked.

Was John McCain tortured in Vietnam?

At the beginning of the last American elections, I knew we would had either four more years of Bush or four more years of Carter as a presidency. I stand corrected on this.

In a moment where Iran, their allies and Russia don't have the resources to match the West due to the low cost of crude oil, we should apologize instead of going for the knock-out blow?!? This is something the United-States will pay dearly in the near future if a terrorist attack succeed on American soil or if the Pakistani government is overrun by Talibans.

Was John McCain tortured in Vietnam?

There are so many things wrong with this it's difficult to know where to begin.

Yes, McCain was tortured. He was tortured for the amusement of a bunch of psychotics. He was tortured in an attempt to get him to betray his country. And, most important, HE WAS A PRISONER OF WAR. He was subject to the Geneva Conventions. There was no information he had that would have made the war stop sooner or stop anyone in North Viet Name from being killed.

I would expect a weak-kneed journalist to call waterboarding torture. To hear them talk, when the hotel bar runs out of gin ought to be a hanging offense in the Hague.

The Obama administration doesn't want to do an investigation because they know that they will only find two things. First, that what was done to these animals hardly counts as torture by any reasonable definition. And second, that what we did worked, and if we hadn't done it people would have died.

Look, it's really simple here. Torture is something that is done to inflict pain. Torture is something that causes permanent physical harm.

What KSM and the rest of the towel-head crew at Club Gitmo endured was no worse than a fraternity hazing. Nothing they were subjected to is any worse than what our volunteer army recruits are subjected to in basic training.

They were unlawful combatants, and as such were not subject to the POW protections in the Geneva Conventions. In fact, the only thing that can be said is that they were entitled to be shot on sight.
They had information that we wanted. I sleep fine knowing that we beat it out of them.

The only winners when we decide that we're too good for that are our enemies. Because they now know that they can plan with impunity, and nobody will try to stop them.

They had information that we wanted. I sleep fine knowing that we beat it out of them.

Most credible reports say we got nothing from them but disinformation. The good information didn't come from beating it out of them, it came from traditional methods of interrogation.

Beating it out of them did nothing more than create terrorists, jihadists, and insurgents.

For instance, you may wish to investigate just why it is that Army recruits undergo very very similar techniques. It's because these specific techniques were used to torture our Army troops during WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, and it is understood these techniques got nothing out of our troops but disinformation, just like we got from the assholes we tortured.

I do realize you sleep just fine. Is it possible you could wake up?

Jerry - I don't know where you're getting your "credible reports". The ones I read say that at least two actions in the US were broken up and cells apprehended as a result of the interrogation of Khalid alone.

Oh, and if you believe that we create jihadists, then you understand nothing of jihad.

Finally, our troops undergo such training so they know how to resist interrogation. Just like they take tear gas during training -- so they know they can survive it.

It might surprise you to learn that our enemies are trained to resist interrogation as well.

This whole argument goes back to something I said a few years back. Ultimately, islamist aggression will be stopped by one of three things: reformation, isolation, elimination.

We're still attempting reformation. That involves destroying the enemy's will to fight. You might not believe it, but there haven't been any attacks on US soil since 2001. That might be coincidence, it might be luck, or it might be that we stopped one or two from happening. These same people managed to hit London and Madrid, so I don't think that it's either of the first two possibilities.

Jerry, trust me. Once you've thought the entire issue through, you'll sleep much better knowing that if we beat the shit out of a few jihadists now, we might avoid annihilating the entire populace of the muslim world. Beat a few to save a billion kind of thing.

It's math!

I'm gonna take a couple of tacks here.

First Logical problems:
1. Fraternity hijinks are sufficient to break down hardened criminals? The die-est of die hard jihadis? Either these guys are pussies or this was worse than hijinks (that we've killed people suggests the latter).

2. It's not torture because we use same methods to train our soldiers to resist torture? How's that work? SERE training you describe is again, done in safe conditions with people you trust and want to impress. And nobody in that group gets waterboarded 183 times.

3. Not torture without permanent harm? Sa-weet! So second degree burns not torture. Cool. You can burn a lot of a person with no scarring. Do their kids, too, they heal even better. Methinks you need to find a better criteria, unless you want to defend those.

Second tack:

I find that we tortured people - that we used techniques that were extensively employed by Pol Pot and Stain - to be absolutely horrifying. I think it's a national disgrace, and that the people who set that policy belong in jail. I've read nothing to read that this produced anything useful.

You think that it was useful and necessary and not all that bad, really, given the alternatives. And that it saved lives. And that it would be a no brainer in court.

We cannot both be right. This is why things need to come to light and we need to know what happened and what it produced.

"Beating it out of them did nothing more than create terrorists, jihadists, and insurgents."

Oh, gosh, we were soooo short on these before! Why, they didn't even exist during Carter, right? That great wimpy appeaser? It's Bush that made them hate us, really!

Cheezburg -

You do understand what's going on here, right? The precedent is being set to criminalize both policy, and interpretation of law.

In other words, the Democrats are trying to create a situation where the policital decisions of a previous administration are being cast as CRIMINAL. If you don't see the dangerous precedent there, I can't help you.

Would you dare to insist that FDR or LBJ be tried for war crimes for the incineration of Nagasaki?

This is mother fucking war. Our enemies do not abide the laws of war. They use the fact that we are expected to against us. Fuck them.

Pol Pot didn't strap people down and pour water over their heads to get information. He burned people alive so he could get his rocks off.

Unless you are one of these freaks that believes that Dick Cheney was beating his dick like it owed him money, there's really no comparison between the CIA strapping a piece of shit to a board and pouring water on his head and Mao slaughtering 40 million people for the crime of being insufficiently ideologically pure.

The last thing you do in war is draw a line and say "We will do this in our defense, but no more."

Either you are committed to killing the bad guys, or you are not. Peaceful coesixtence with a hostile force is not an available option.

If it was shown (after completely compromising operational security, and also essentially prohibiting everyone involved from ever travelling abroad lest they be kidnapped and hauled off to hostile nations for politically-motivated kangaroo court trials) that we got usable intel from waterboarding a bearded goatfucker, would you and your fellow bed-wetters change your tune?

Somehow, I doubt it. You'd rather end up like Daniel Pearl than compromise your precious moral high ground.

News flash: WAR IS IMMORAL. Better to fight it as viciously as possible and get it over with quickly.

Chezzy's third tack: The presumption that something good came from this misconduct is laughable.

Nonetheless, the second tack gets us where we need to go.

And there's a fifth tack from earlier in the comment stack: The reason democrats don't pursue this more clearly isn't that they no there was no torture going on, or that it yielded helpful info. It's infinitely more likely that Cheney had them signing off on it every step of the way, but the result were negligible. (The best book to date about this, despite the partisanship, is here.) I would want and expect the San Francisco liberals to set the streets on fire if they found out that Pelosi or Feinstein knew needless pain had been inflicted by Americans under order.

(I don't care about this topic enough to be tidy with the tack numbering: Chezzy's gonna get this boat across the lake by one tack or another.)

> News flash: WAR IS IMMORAL.

This is simply not so. It's obviously not so. I can't imagine, or care, what personal rages could cause to you to pack so much stupidity in five short words (under a sarcastic top hat, too).

It is well that war is so terrible, lest we should grow to fond of it.

I'm a soldier by trade and by legacy, and proud of it. But even I will say that war is immoral.

But we do not live in a moral world.

The most we can do is ensure that we go to war out of necessity, not out of some vain desire for glory.

The argument that war is immoral is an empty one, similar to the argument by children that "That's not fair."

The fact is that "torture" as it is defined, is no less immoral now than it was when the first tribal leader picked up a stick and beat the hell out of a captive bandit to find out where the rest of them were planning to attack.

However, immoral or not, it IS effective if properly done, if it were NOT effective, the practice would have been discontinued long before our nation became a nation.

It would be nice if we could all hold hands around the world and sing kumbiya, but we can't and we don't. Certain ways of life are so violently opposed to our own that they are willing to die to destroy it, not least because it is believed that our way of life will change their way of life.

So there are two options, do what must be done, moral or not, to see the conflict through to a victorious end.

Or do not, and lose.

Make a choice.

You do understand what's going on here, right? The precedent is being set to criminalize both policy, and interpretation of law.

I don't see this. There's policy - matters in which an administration has broad discretion - and then there's law - matters where laws proscribe certain actions. Reagan signed to the convention against torture; it's the law of our land. From what I can see, these people broke the law, and it doesn't matter who they are. Nation of laws, not men.

You and Robert seem to think that torture is the only way we can defeat these people. I think that our past history has demonstrated our ability to overcome far greater enemies without such tactics.

But yes, let's have this debate publicly. It's high time that it happen.

Cheezburg - what is being 'debated' on the left is not whether or not torture is illegal, or even that what was done was torture - they've already stipulated both.

What they are now arguing is whether or not the lawyers who determined that waterboarding was legal under US law were doing something that is itself a war crime.

Consider: You ask your attorney if a specific thing is legal. Under his considered interpretation of the law, it is. A politician who does not like you decides that his interpretation of the law was incorrect. Is your lawyer a criminal?

What is being alleged here is that the OLC committed a war crime by telling the Bush administration that the interrogation methods they proposed were legal.

I think that our past history has demonstrated our ability to overcome far greater enemies without such tactics.

Yes, because the fire-bombing of Dresden and the atomic annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were so fucking polite.

If my lawyer willfully misrepresents the law to provide me with the answer I want, then yes. The legal work of Bybee and Yoo would have earned a 1L a failing grade.

The left (and a number of the right, too) have decided it was torture and illegal. But of course the Republicans and many in the middle have not. And the courts have not had their say. The situation is far too muddled, and too many people are in limbo. This is why we need to go ahead with a full investigation. To clearly determine where our nation stands on these things, to hold people to account, and to establish what the law is with respect to how we treat prisoners.

Since you've clearly stated there's no likelihood of anyone being convicted of anything once we know all of the awesome things torture has done for the USA, you should welcome it.

I would want and expect the San Francisco liberals to set the streets on fire if they found out that Pelosi or Feinstein knew needless pain had been inflicted by Americans under order.

I missed this before. Few things in American political life would make me happier than these two women being out of our government. Won't happen. But would be saweet.

Cheezburg -

One very important thing to note about pretty much all those who have "decided" that it's torture have in common - they all hated George Bush before he ever contemplated invading Iraq.

Just like it's important to note that the bulk of those who "know" that human-generated CO2 is warming the planet to death have one thing in common - they all hate industrial capitalism to some degree.

The only reason I don't want to expend any effort on a trial is because those who would be in charge of it (I'll give you a hint, they aren't judges, and they aren't neutral) would make the HUAC look like an episode of Laugh In.

This country won't be in a position to analyze the events of the past decade for another 20-30 years. The hatred on the left needs to be purged from the system first.