4-21-09

The "Do-Do" Has Hit the Fan, Is Glenn Greenwald Responsible? Cheney Admits he is in on 911

Sometimes life can be interesting, and the last week has been one of those times. comrade Obama has definitely gotten my attention in a way my Cafe Du Monde Coffee and Chicory hasn't. Obama's release of the torture memos, although I have yet to find them to read, is simply, What a bomb! Of course Obama's release of the torture memos is a good bomb. Thank you God. We may not get another good bomb, but at least we have received one good one. Someone pushed Obama one toke over the line, and he responded. The CIA damage control department has gone into a full court press.

Although I have yet to find and read the memos myself, I have found them it is just that they don't come up on my computer, it is reported that the recently released May 2005 interrogation memo says that Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, who has confessed to planning the September 11, 2001, was subjected to water boarding183 times in March 2003. Now this is simply a bombshell of a revelation. So much so that since Dick Cheney has gotten into the interrogation memo fight, my take is that Cheney is effectively saying he is/was in on September 11. All thinking people know that Khalid Sheikh Mohamed did not plan Sept. 11. The planes were flown by remote control and there were bombs placed in the buildings to bring them down in a controlled demolition fashion. Khalid Mohamed and Sunni Arabs, that's al Queda, simply do not have the know how or the means to fly planes by remote control or place bombs, probably nuclear bombs, in the Twin Towers and also Building # 7. Khalid Sheikh Mohamed may have wanted to be responsible for Sept. 11, but he wasn't. Without the news of the 2005 interrogation memo stating Mohamed was water boarded 183 times in one month, I stated Mohamed was tortured in to confessing to a crime, responsibility for 911, that he did not do. My position is that no person would confess to a crime that guarantees the confessor is given the death sentence. It makes no sense that Mohamed would confess to being responsible for 911. Logic dictates that the only reason Khalid Sheikh Mohamed confessed to planning 911 was because he was water boarded tortured into confessing to a crime he did not do. Cheney has chimed in and said water boarding solves crimes. Not so in the Khalid Sheikh Mohamed case. It is becoming clear that one of the reasons the Bush Administration insisted on water boarding torture is to cover up a crime they are responsible, Sept. 11. To my mind the bomb shell of the interrogation memos released is the May 2005 memo and the bottom line is that the Bush Administration is in on Sept.11. Every time I see this picture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to the left I get angry with the bad guys. Have you ever seen a dumb er looking guy? It is a total and complete insult to my intelligence for the communi$t$ to try and sell the idea this guy planned Sept. 11.

It is great Obama has gotten the Department of Justice to release the torture memos, but why did he do it? In my opinion Glenn Greenwald was doing a fantastic job of explaining and revealing Obama's flip flop on Habeas Corpus. Some may know Obama's Habeas Corpus flip flop as the Bagram, Afghanistan case. Greenwald writes," In the wake of the Boumediene ruling, the U.S. Government wanted to preserve the power to abduct people from around the world and bring them to American prisons without having to provide them any due process. So, instead of bringing them to our Guantanamo prison camp (where, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, they were entitled to habeas hearings), the Bush administration would instead simply send them to our prison camp in Bagram, Afghanistan, and then argue that because they were flown to Bagram rather than Guantanamo, they had no rights of any kind and Boudemiene didn't apply to them. The Bush DOJ treated the Boumediene ruling, grounded in our most basic constitutional guarantees, as though it was some sort of a silly game -- fly your abducted prisoners to Guantanamo and they have constitutional rights, but fly them instead to Bagram and you can disappear them forever with no judicial process. Put another way, you just close Guantanamo, move it to Afghanistan, and -- presto -- all constitutional obligations disappear.

Back in February, the Obama administration shocked many civil libertarians by filing a brief in federal court that, in two sentences, declared that it embraced the most extremist Bush theory on this issue -- the Obama DOJ argued, as The New York Times's Charlie Savage put it, "that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team." Remember: these are not prisoners captured in Afghanistan on a battlefield. Many of them have nothing to do with Afghanistan and were captured far, far away from that country -- abducted from their homes and workplaces -- and then flown to Bagram to be imprisoned. Indeed, the Bagram detainees in the particular case in which the Obama DOJ filed its brief were Yemenis and Tunisians captured outside of Afghanistan (in Thailand or the UAE, for instance) and then flown to Bagram and locked away there as much as six years without any charges. That is what the Obama DOJ defended, and they argued that those individuals can be imprisoned indefinitely with no rights of any kind -- as long as they are kept in Bagram rather than Guantanamo.

Last month, a federal judge emphatically rejected the Bush/Obama position and held that the rationale of Boudemiene applies every bit as much to Bagram as it does to Guantanamo. Notably, the district judge who so ruled -- John Bates -- is an appointee of George W. Bush, a former Whitewater prosecutor, and a very pro-executive-power judge. In his decision (.pdf), Judge Bates made clear how identical are the constitutional rights of detainees flown to Guantanamo and Bagram and underscored how dangerous is the Bush/Obama claim that the President has the right to abduct people from around the world and imprison them at Bagram with no due process of any kind (click image to enlarge):"

Well, Obama got a little fed up with the direction his Administration was going, down the Rothschild/Rockefeller/Little George destroy the US Constitution path, thanks to Glenn Greenwald's hard work and good communication skills which explained this to the world and possibly Obama, and Obama decided to make a quick turn. Obama's quick turn was the release of extremely redacted memos. The new information came out over the weekend thanks to the investigative work of bloggers like Marcy Wheeler, who found it in the footnotes of Bush administration interrogation memos released last week and posted it to her blog emptywheel. Oh "do-do"! No one in the DOJ or the Obama Administration realized the May 2005 memo revealed that Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, who has confessed to planning the September 11, 2001, was subjected to water boarding183 times in March 2003!

Tilt. The CIA is going nuts. Hillary is going nuts. Iran is going nuts. Israel is going nuts. Everyone on the planet knows the USA is being run by the Rothschilds and Rockefellers and they are engaged in horrible dirty deeds, but proof, water boarding a guy 183 times in one month, truth like that is not supposed to be made public.

Although there are many stories out there which are bazaar, and in my opinion, the stories are "going nuts" stories because of Obama's release of the torture memos, my favorite is an Iranian court sentencing an Iranian free lance reporter, Roxana Saberito, to 8 years in prison for being an US spy. This story is incredible mainly because it seems to be in direct response to the release torture memos, and totally and completely manipulated by the CIA. It shows that the CIA and Iran are totally and completely in cahoots. Why do I think the CIA is responsible for Roxana Saberito being sentenced to 8 years in prison? Well I think it hurts Obama, and the CIA is angry with Obama and the CIA is striking back at Obama's torture memos release by pulling strings to get Ms. Saberito convicted of spying. The last time the CIA may have gotten this angry with a president goes back to 1963 and JFK, and they murdered him. Will the CIA murder Obama? Probably not.

Iran sentences US reporter to 8 years in jail

Intl. Support Mounts for Jailed Journalist

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0420/p99s01-duts.html

Is waterboarding effective? CIA did it 266 times on two prisoners
The number, much higher than previously reported, comes out as President Obama visits CIA headquarters today.
By Liam Stack
posted April 20, 2009 at 9:05 am EST

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• A daily summary of global reports on security issues.

The ongoing debate over the ethics and usefulness of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding received new fuel on Sunday night, with a New York Times report that two Al Qaeda suspects were subject to the method, which simulates drowning, a combined 266 times.

That number is higher than previously reported, and will no doubt cast a long shadow over President Obama's first scheduled visit to CIA headquarters today, where he will publicly address employees.

The New York Times reports that, according to a recently released May 2005 interrogation memo, Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding 83 times in August 2002.

Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, who has confessed to planning the September 11, 2001, attacks as well as personally beheading Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was subjected to waterboarding 183 times in March 2003.

That version of events is starkly different than the one reported by ABC News in December 2007, when former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who was involved in the interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah, claimed he had only been waterboarded once for 35 seconds.

"The next day, he told his interrogators that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate," said Kiriakou in an interview...

"From that day on, he answered every question," Kiriakou said. "The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."

The sheer frequency with which waterboarding was apparently used on these two suspects may cast doubt on past Bush administration assertions that they were strictly obeying guidelines on the use of the practice, says the Times. It also notes that "a footnote to another 2005 Justice Department memo released Thursday said waterboarding was used both more frequently and with a greater volume of water than the CIA rules permitted."

The new information came out over the weekend thanks to the investigative work of bloggers like Marcy Wheeler, who found it in the footnotes of Bush administration interrogation memos released last week and posted it to her blog emptywheel.

Information on the frequency of the practice, and the amount of water used each time, was redacted from some copies of the memos but not from others. The numbers were not included in initial reporting on the release of the memos.

Writing on her blog, Ms. Wheeler points out that it is unclear how the CIA could use the method on these suspects so many times and still mange to abide by its own guidelines.

The same ... memo passage explains how the CIA might manage to waterboard these men so many times in one month each (though even with these chilling numbers, the CIA's math doesn't add up).

"...where authorized, it may be used for two "sessions" per day of up to two hours. During a session, water may be applied up to six times for ten seconds or longer (but never more than 40 seconds). In a 24-hour period, a detainee may be subjected to up to twelve minutes of water application. See id. at 42. Additionally, the waterboard may be used on as many as five days during a 30-day approval period."

So: two two-hour sessions a day, with six applications of the waterboard each = 12 applications in a day. Though to get up to the permitted 12 minutes of waterboarding in a day (with each use of the waterboard limited to 40 seconds), you'd need 18 applications in a day. Assuming you use the larger 18 applications in one 24-hour period, and do 18 applications on five days within a month, you've waterboarded 90 times–still just half of what they did to [Khalid Sheikh Mohamed].

The new information is certain to invigorate critics of the practice who say it is an ineffective way of obtaining information from detainees.

Last week, The New York Times made a similar claim in an article on the interrogation of Zubaydah, who was mistakenly believed to be a high ranking "lieutenant" in Al Qaeda before interrogators realized he was just "a helpful training camp personnel clerk," the Times reported.

Interrogators, who spoke to the Times on condition of anonymity, said they believed Zubaydah told them everything he knew before waterboarding began. They communicated this to agency higher-ups in Washington, who nonetheless insisted on the use of the practice, and asked to watch it take place.

"You get a ton of information, but headquarters says, 'There must be more,' " recalled one intelligence officer who was involved in the case. As described in the footnote to the memo, the use of repeated waterboarding against Abu Zubaydah was ordered "at the direction of C.I.A. headquarters," and officials were dispatched from headquarters "to watch the last waterboard session."

http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/olc_memos.html

RELEASED: The Bush Administration's Secret Legal Memos
On April 16, 2009, the Department of Justice released four secret memos used by the Bush administration to justify torture.
Read the release >> A 18-page memo, dated August 1, 2002, from Jay Bybee, Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA. [PDF]
A 46-page memo, dated May 10, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA. [PDF]
A 20-page memo, dated May 10, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA. [PDF]
A 40-page memo, dated May 30, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA. [PDF]

Demand Accountability for Torture! >>

For more than five years, the ACLU and other advocacy organizations have been seeking the release of Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos that supplied the basis for the Bush administration's interrogation, detention, rendition, and warrantless surveillance policies.

The OLC, which is a component of the Justice Department, was created to provide objective legal advice to the Attorney General and to resolve legal disputes among federal agencies. During the Bush administration, however, the OLC became a facilitator for illegal government conduct, issuing dozens of memos meant to permit gross violations of domestic and international law. Some of these memos have become public through leaks to the media and through the ACLU's litigation under the Freedom of Information Act. But most of them are still secret.

As the ACLU wrote in a January 28, 2009 letter to the OLC, the release of the memos would allow the public to better understand the legal basis for the Bush administration's national security policies; to better understand the role that the OLC played in developing, justifying, and advocating those policies; and to participate more meaningfully in the ongoing debate about national security, civil liberties, and human rights.

A prisoner of Iranian politicsOpinion is divided on how to 'read' the case of Roxana Saberi, but it is clear the jailed US journalist has become a political pawn

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/20/iran-roxana-saberi

Henry Newman guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 April 2009 16.00 BST Article historyThe trial of Roxana Saberi was patently unjust. In Tehran last Saturday the 31-year-old Iranian-American journalist was convicted on charges of espionage for America and sentenced to spend the next eight years in prison. The kangaroo court met for only one day entirely behind closed doors and has presented no evidence in public. Her father, Reza Saberi, told me by phone that for the first 15 minutes of the trial she and her lawyer were under the mistaken impression that they were at a meeting to determine the date of the hearing.

The trial was conducted through the Islamic Revolutionary Court, an institution created during the terror that followed Iran's 1979 revolution and infamous for its former chief, Sadegh Khalkhali, the "hanging judge" who some consider responsible for sending up to 8,000 supposed counter-revolutionaries to execution.

The court heard Saberi's "confession" which her father insists she was coerced into making: "They told her if she made the statements they would free her … It was a trick."

Saberi's case proceeded clumsily: initial reports suggested she had been detained for buying alcohol; later statements referred to work without a press card; then on 8 April came the espionage charge. High-level sources repeatedly hinted at her imminent release, seemingly unaware of the progression of her fortunes.

In this and some others respects, Saberi's case resembles that of Haleh Esfandiari, another Iranian-American charged with espionage. Esfandiari's story is bizarre: she was robbed en route to the airport and had both passports stolen. Only when she applied for a new passport did she discover she was on the list of those forbidden to leave Iran. Then she was interrogated for several weeks while living at home, until eventually she was imprisoned on 8 May 2007. After more than a hundred days in solitary confinement she was released. The clumsiness – the almost haphazard nature of both cases – could point to the absence of coherent plans by any element within the Iranian regime, or perhaps a degree of political fragmentation or infighting that precludes the implementation of coherent plans.

Within Iran, initial responses to Saberi's trial were timid: the Persian press covered the case but in a largely factual manner. Her case was not a show trial and there was neither parading of the convicted "spy" nor broadcasting of her "confession". Back in 2007, Esfandiari and fellow detainee Kian Tajbakhsh appeared, during their detention, on the television programme In The Name of Democracy in which they were questioned about their anti-regime activities. No such programme has yet been suggested for Saberi. The differing trajectories of their cases seem to reveal more about the changed political circumstances than anything else.

Opinion is divided on how to "read" Saberi's case: is Iran trying to raise its bargaining position, to improve its hand and show its strength, ahead of possible negotiations with America? Or might extreme elements engaged in a domestic power struggle be attempting to sabotage possibilities of rapprochement with the west? Or perhaps is Iran responding tit-for-tat to the continued detention in Iraq of Iranian citizens on espionage charges.

Frankly these are all possibilities – reading Iran's political landscape offers many of the same pitfalls that faced Kremlinologists. Political power in Iran is fragmented: between multiple political groupings that defy simplistic characterisation as "hardliners" and "reformists", among various individuals not limited to the supreme leader and the president, and across institutions from the judiciary to the Guardian Council and the Bonyads (powerful quasi-governmental bodies). Iranian politics do not work according to some uniquely esoteric logic but, without further information, no single explanation is fully convincing.

It is far too early to write off the possibility of a thaw in US-Iran relations, though Barack Obama has expressed his deep disappointment at Saberi's conviction. On Sunday President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, possibly trying to defuse the situation, released a letter calling for justice for Saberi and asking the judiciary to allow her to assert her "legal right" to defend herself in the forthcoming appeal. Saberi may yet prove a crucial bargaining piece in determining the course of US-Iranian rapprochement: Iran, in a gesture of magnanimous fist unclenching, may decide to release her.

It is clear that the broader political context is significant: Saberi is a pawn in both domestic and international politics.

Conspiracy theories abound in Iran and were prevalent long before the Islamic republic: Iraj Pezeshkzad in his 1973 novel, My Uncle Napoleon, lampoons Iranian paranoia by joking that everything is the work of the English. It bears recollection that the history of "interference" in Iranian domestic affairs is long, dating from the Anglo-Russian Great Game politics of the 19th century, through the CIA-backed coup that deposed Prime Minister Mosaddegh and restored Muhammad Reza Shah in 1953. Iranian officials, aware of the extent of popular dissatisfaction with their government, are all too keen both to imagine foreign threats and to blame an external foreign hand for every calamity.

There is a widespread conviction in Iran that western countries are attempting to overthrow the Islamic regime through a "velvet" revolution spearheaded by NGOs, charities and other international organisations. Dual nationals travelling between Iran and diaspora communities in the west are seen as a fifth column (despite Iran's policy of non-recognition of dual nationality). Putting aside the political context of her case, Saberi has fallen victim to these suspicions. So too did Esfandiari: during her detention it was announced on a state-run television channel that she had confessed that the American academic centre for which she works was funded by the Soros Foundation – an organisation Iran (with perhaps a shade of antisemitism) imagined as bent on spreading "velvet" revolutions.

Behind all the political machinations there is a human story: Saberi turns 32 on 26 April. While she has been spared the death sentence she faces detention till her 40th birthday. It remains possible that an appeal may free her or a deal of some sort might be struck; Iran's Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi has joined her defence team and this morning the Chief of the Judiciary ordered a "quick and fair appeal". Saberi seems to have been physically well treated in prison, however her mental health has, unsurprisingly, suffered gravely and her family talk of her plans to start a hunger strike.

Sadly, in her predicament she is not alone: Hossein Derakshan, an Iranian-Canadian blogger, is also detained in Evin Prison on spurious charges. There are many others, Iranians and dual nationals alike, who have been harassed, detained and in some cases even disappeared.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/04/20/cheney-calls-release-memos-showing-results-interrogation-efforts/

Cheney Calls for Release of Memos Showing Results of Interrogation Efforts
Former Vice President Cheney says he knows how successful the interrogation techniques were in collecting intelligence for the United States and wants that information to be released to the public as well as the legal memos explaining the decision to allow the heavily criticized methods.

FOXNews.com

Monday, April 20, 2009

In an interview with FOX News' Sean Hannity to be aired on "Hannity" Monday night, Cheney questioned the point of releasing the legal decisions behind the interrogations but not the outcome of them.

Watch "Hannity" at 9 p.m. ET on FOX News Channel.

"One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn't put out the memos that showed the success of the effort," Cheney said.

Cheney said he's asked that the documents be declassified because he has remained silent on the confidential information, but he knows how successful the interrogation process was and wants the rest of the country to understand.

"I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country," Cheney said. "I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was."

Cheney's interview at his home in McLean, Va., came just hours before President Obama traveled to nearby Langley, Va., to offer CIA employees his "full support" in their mission.

At the same time, the president defended his administration's decision to release documents that showed how the Department of Justice came to conclude certain methods of interrogation like waterboarding were harsh but legal.

"I acted primarily because of the exceptional circumstances that surrounded these memos," Obama said, adding that he has "fought to protect the integrity of classified information in the past and I will do so in the future."

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a former prisoner of war in Vietnam and Obama's foe in the 2008 election, has repeatedly criticized the use of certain techniques that have been described by critics as torture. But McCain told FOX News earlier in the day that the decision to release the Justice Department memos "helps no one."

"(The release) doesn't help America's image, does not help us address the issue and I think it was a serious mistake," McCain said.

Obama: US journalist jailed in Iran was not a spy

The significance of Obama's decision to release the torture memos

4-23-09 The torture debate and the Roxana Saberi journalist story continues. For now I think I am just going to cut and past the articles which interest me here. The Roxana Saberi story is highly interesting and its timing and motive intrigues me. I think the Roxana Saberi story hurts Obama and the CIA is behind her conviction. So how does Saberi hurt Obama? Obama wants to nuke Iran, and Saberi opens up the truth that USA is connected to what is going on in Iran. Saberi conviction may make it more difficult for the USA to nuke Iran rather than easier. The Saberi story changes the route Obama can now take to nuking Iran.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/04/22/2009-04-22_dick_cheney_full_of_crap_official.html

U.S. officials slam Dick Cheney's claim that waterboarding 9/11 mastermind 183 times was a 'success'
BY James Gordon Meek
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

Wednesday, April 22nd 2009, 4:00 AM

U.S. counterterrorism officials are reacting angrily to ex-Vice President Dick Cheney's claim that waterboarding 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed 183 times was a "success" that produced actionable intelligence.

"Cheney is full of crap," one intelligence source with decades of experience said Tuesday.

Another retired counterterrorism official who read reports when they arrived in Washington detailing the confessions of Mohammed, known as "KSM," said most of the information he coughed up during the waterboarding sessions involved things he thought his CIA-contract interrogators already knew, or were just his ideas for mayhem.

"Most of the (cables) were reports of actions that KSM was only remotely thinking of undertaking - they didn't even reach the planning stage," the retired counterterrorism official said. "So it's a bit of a stretch for Bush administration officials to say these were attacks they had disrupted."

On Monday, Cheney complained that President Obama had declassified Justice Department torture memos - but not all of them.

"They didn't put out the memos that showed the success of the effort. And there are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified," Cheney told Fox News' Sean Hannity.

A third senior former counterterrorism official who worked at the CIA and read the reports of KSM's grilling said there was "a lot of speculation" at Langley about possible plots, based on what the Al Qaeda "military commander" said during the waterboarding sessions.

"Just after he was caught, I remember the warning that came out about flights to and from the Pacific rim," the former operative recalled.

One remarkable fact is that at a hearing on Feb. 7, 2008, ex-CIA Director Michael Hayden said waterboarding was stopped by CIA officials in the early spring of 2003. A senator asked when the technique was shelved and Hayden replied, "Just a few weeks short of five years (ago)."

How can this be possible? KSM was captured Mar. 1, 2003. Does it mean KSM was waterboarded 183 times that March before it was stopped? A CIA spokesman declined comment or explanation.

"It was an intense period," recalled one of the former officials.

In March 2007, KSM confessed at an open hearing in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to hatching 30 plots including the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the slaying of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

Former CIA official John Brennan, who now serves as Obama's White House counterterrorism adviser, told the Daily News then that Mohammed was "quite creative, and threw out a lot of seeds to see if they would actually germinate."

"They didn't have the people or capability to do all of those," Brennan said of the 30 plots KSM claimed to have conceived of.

http://www.fff.org/blog/jghblog2009-04-21.asp

The Cancerous Rot at the Center of the Empire
by Jacob G. Hornberger

In obvious response to growing calls for the prosecution of Bush administration personnel who tortured people or who authorized the torture of people, former Vice President Dick Cheney has called on the CIA to declassify information showing that that the torture delivered “good” intelligence. Maybe he is referring to the 183 times that the CIA waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or to the 83 times the CIA waterboarded Abu Zubadah.

My question is: Why limit torture to suspected terrorists? Why not expand it to suspected murderers, drug dealers, robbers, and kidnappers? After all, can’t those types of people commit just as heinous an act as terrorists?

Consider, for example, the drug dealers along the U.S.-Mexico border. They’re killing law-enforcement officers, judges, and other public officials. Suppose the U.S. military or Border Patrol takes a suspected drug dealer into custody. What would be wrong with torturing him into providing information about plans to kill government officials? Wouldn’t this information be just as valuable as information extracted from a suspected terrorist?

Couldn’t the same be true of suspected kidnappers? Wouldn’t the forcible extraction of information help save the life of a kidnap victim? What would be wrong with torturing the person into telling where the victim is being held?

There are, of course, solid and important reasons why it would be wrong, both legally and morally, for U.S. law-enforcement officers to torture criminal suspects in their custody.

For one thing, the U.S. Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land that controls the conduct of government officials, bars government agents from inflicting cruel and unusual punishments on people. It also protects a person from being forced to give information that might tend to incriminate him.

Secondly, in the United States the American people, through their elected representatives, have, by statute, made it a criminal offense, for law-enforcement officers to torture or abuse criminal suspects.

Third, as a moral matter, ever since the founding of our nation the American people have stood squarely in opposition to the power of government officials to torture people, no matter how heinous the crime and no matter how valuable the information that they might be able to disclose.

Finally, there is always the distinct possibility that a criminal suspect might be innocent or might not posses the information that the torturer is seeking.

Several years before 9/11, I visited The Torture Museum in San Gimignano, Italy. It was the most gruesome place I have ever seen in my life. Here are two links that give you an idea of what the place was like, but don’t click on them unless you’re prepared to see some horrible methods by which government officials have tortured other people, including a depiction of waterboarding in medieval times: http://www.corkscrew-balloon.com/balloon/98/siena/img/torture.html http://www.corkscrew-balloon.com/balloon/99/siena/torture.html

As I was walking through that museum, the last thing I would have ever figured was that a time would come when there would actually be a national torture debate in the United States, one in which people were actually debating whether torture should be permitted along with the relative “benefits” of torture. For that matter, it was the last thing I would have ever thought would be considered when I was taking civics and social studies classes in the public schools I attended as I child.

The fact that a torture debate is even taking place in the United States of America convinces me more than ever that it isn’t external enemies that ultimately bring down an empire. Instead, it’s the cancerous rot that the empire produces from within that ultimately destroys the moral foundation of the society.

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation, publisher of The Case for Free Trade and Open Immigration.