Perhaps the most important foreign perspective worth considering is that of our enemy:  Al Qaeda.  How is the argument over torture within the U.S. perceived by Osama Bin Ladin ?  More importantly, how does it impact their recruiting capacity?  To a certain extent, we already know the answers.

One extremely informed opinion was published at The Daily Beast last week.  Writing under the pseudonym, Matthew Alexander, a 14 year Air Force interrogator offered his assessment in a April 20 post.  Responding to Christopher Buckley’s and Michael Mukasey’s criticisms of Obama for releasing the previously classified Office of Legal Council torture memos, Alexander wrote:

Our policy of torture and abuse of prisoners has been Al Qaida’s number one recruiting tool, a point that Buckley does not mention and is also conspicuously absent from former CIA Director General Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s argument in the Wall Street Journal. As the senior interrogator in Iraq for a task force charged with hunting down Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the former Al Qaida leader and mass murderer, I listened time and time again to captured foreign fighters cite the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as their main reason for coming to Iraq to fight. Consider that 90 percent of the suicide bombers in Iraq are these foreign fighters and you can easily conclude that we have lost hundreds, if not thousands, of American lives because of our policy of torture and abuse…

In addition to increasing Al Qaeda’s pool of recruits, the torturing of detainees has undoubtedly led counter terrorism officials to waste time and resources chasing invented threats.  Former Middle East CIA field officer, Robert Baer noted in the May 4 print issue of Time that the Bush Administration selected their techniques from a 1957 paper regarding communist efforts during the Korean War:

The Crucial point, though, is that even the communists suspected that torture can’t be relied on to produce more than false confessions — because people will say anything to make the pain stop.  This is the history that Bush officials chose to ignore…

I’d love to know what you think.  If you’re able, set aside the moral and legal implications of the Bush Administration’s treatment of captured enemy combatants.  Then consider the implications of the above informed commentators, Alexander and Baer; respectively, that torturing our prisoners makes it easier for our enemies to recruit, and that waterboading, specifically, is more likely than not to produce false information from a prisoner.  These tactics, then, are quite contradictory to the maintenance of U.S. national security.

(Originally posted at Care2.com, Political Causes Blog 28 April 2009)

                          

“Well, the stimulus package passed and look at the stock market.”

Senator, Lindsey Graham (R – SC)

What an absurd statement.  Sen. Graham is probably aware of its absurdity, which leads me to ponder:  why would he say such a thing?  Of course, he would love us to believe that Obama is responsible for the lowly state of the stock market.  I suspect from what he said next on Sunday’s Meet the Press, Graham’s motives for the insinuation were even more misleading.

Graham finished, (emphasis added) “I think the president has quite frankly, in his budget, told us a lot about who he is and what he believes, and it’s scary.”

The implication that we should fear Obama’s beliefs is nothing but a backdoor accusation of a “socialist” agenda represented in the president’s budget.  In effect, Graham has found a way to accuse Obama of such a program without actually saying it.

The senator should leave such tripe for the conservative pundits who, incidentally, have received far too much press as of late. For that reason they shall remain unnamed in this post…

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The first month of the Obama administration has been a whirlwind. The president signed the American Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act–the most comprehensive (and most expensive) legislation in American history–into law on Tuesday in Denver. The following day, Obama began to implement the economic recovery package, no doubt continuing the frenetic pace established since his inauguration. Congress, however, will likely set about getting some answers out of the Bush administration.

That the Congress and the President will be traveling separate paths is inconsequential and should be expected. As Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com perceptively posted on Sunday, the liberal, or progressive, electorate is by no means a homogeneous bunch. He describes progressives as being divided into “rational” and “radical” contingents with countless individual members falling somewhere between the two.

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We may have to wait a while for it to happen, but George W. Bush will likely face charges of war crimes.  Stubborn, dejected Senate Republicans are postponing prospective Attorney General Eric Holder’s confirmation vote, presumably to seek assurances that the Department of Justice won’t go on a war crimes “witch hunt” while under Holder’s direction.

Of course, no such assurances will be made.  The whole situation is dripping with irony:  Republicans are concerned about DOJ scrutiny after using the department as a partisan political blunt object for beating Democrats over the head with during last decade.  (Don Siegelman is spinning in his grave, and he isn’t even dead yet.)

What do they expect Holder to say?  They can’t expect him to ignore the complaints of Susan Crawford, a lifelong Republican and the Bush official in charge of bringing “enemy combatants” to trial at Guantanamo Bay.  Crawford refused to bring charges against suspected terrorist, Mohammed al-Qahtani, upon her discovery that he had been tortured.  Discussing the matter with Bob Woodward, Crawford described her feelings:

I was upset by it. I was embarrassed by it. If we tolerate this and allow it, then how can we object when our servicemen and women, or others in foreign service, are captured and subjected to the same techniques? How can we complain? Where is our moral authority to complain? Well, we may have lost it.

Further, Obama and Holder are already facing external pressure from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture.  As a signatory nation at the UN convention on torture:

“Judicially speaking, the United States has a clear obligation” to bring proceedings against Bush and Rumsfeld…

Constitutional Law Professor Jonathan Turley is of the opinion that if the Obama administration fails to heed the statements of Crawford and others, the new president runs the risk of appearing culpable in the mistreatment of detainees.  Here’s Turley discussing the matter with Keith Olbermann last week:

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See Also – Olbermann:  Bush Guilty of Torture, 19 January 2009.