torture

Destabilizing Afghanistan: the Quagmire Expands

by Hans Bader on May 5, 2009 · 1 comment

in Agriculture, Economy, Features, International, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Trade

The anti-American Taliban extremists are resurgent not only in Afghanistan, where they once sheltered Osama Bin Laden, but also in neighboring Pakistan (which has nuclear weapons) as well. Thousands of Pakistanis are fleeing the Swat Valley, which is dominated by the Taliban.

But the Obama Administration stubbornly refuses to learn from the Bush Administration’s mistakes in Afghanistan. It’s stepping up efforts to wipe out the mainstay of the Afghan economy, by eradicating the opium poppies that Afghan farmers cultivate. Afghans are so poor that the poppies are 60 percent of their economy: a bigger fraction of their economy than agriculture and manufacturing combined are of the U.S. economy. Many Afghans have little choice but to grow opium: the Soviet invasion and occupation destroyed their irrigation works (and roads), making large-scale food production and transport extremely difficult. And when food prices went up in 2006 and 2007 as a result of ethanol mandates and rising demand for food in India and China, thousands of Afghan children starved to death. The Bush Administration’s attempts to eradicate the poppies turned many Afghans against America, and helped fuel the Taliban’s resurgence.

Jacob Sullum gives a number of reasons why the Administration’s anti-opium campaign will backfire and is probably doomed to failure, such as:

2. “The terrain is a guerrilla’s dream. In addition to acres of shoulder-high poppy plants, rows and rows of hard-packed mud walls, used to stand up grape vines, offer ideal places for ambushes and defense.”
3. “The opium is tilled in heavily populated areas…The prospect of heavy fighting in populated areas could further alienate the Afghan population.”
. . .
5. Opium poppies are “by far the most lucrative crop an Afghan can farm.”
6. “The opium trade now makes up nearly 60 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, American officials say.”
7. “The country’s opium traffickers typically offer incentives that no Afghan government official can: they can guarantee a farmer a minimum price for the crop as well as taking it to market, despite the horrendous condition of most of Afghanistan’s roads.”

Some will argue that the U.S. supported drug-eradication programs in Colombia, despite its civil war, so why not in Afghanistan. But the two countries are vastly different. Colombia was and is a much more prosperous country, with income levels ten times greater, and life expectancies 30 years longer, than in Afghanistan, which is one of the world’s poorest (and most warlike) countries. There are viable alternatives to growing drugs in Colombia, unlike in arid, impoverished Afghanistan.

In a war, you can’t be too fastidious about local customs. In World War II, the U.S. fought the Japanese with the assistance of Naga headhunters. We didn’t give them lectures about their practice of collecting the heads of their enemies (not that I would suggest that growing drugs is as bad as killing people). In the Vietnam War, the U.S. allied itself with tribesmen in Laos and Vietnam who grew opium and other drugs. We didn’t try to destroy their drugs. That would have made them kill us rather than support us.

If you want to win a war in a country you are occupying, sometimes you have to try to win the hearts and minds of the local people, rather than telling them what to do.

For those who think that tolerating drug cultivation is somehow an extraordinary measure: is it remotely as extraordinary as using torture, as the Government did in the aftermath of 9/11 (producing false information and bogus orange alerts in the process)? Keep in mind that for most of American history, there were no bans on drug cultivation (the federal government did not regulate marijuana until the 1930s), but torture to obtain confessions has always been illegal in the U.S.

If we can do something like torture (which I opposed) to win the War on Terror, why not something far less extreme and less historically-unprecedented, like allowing Afghan farmers to keep cultivating opium poppies?

And for those of you bleeding-heart liberals who objected when the phone companies were given protection against lawsuits for assisting the federal government in its antiterror surveillance programs (something I supported; such surveillance would be perfectly legal in many countries, like Sweden): is it not far worse to make Afghan families starve by destroying their crops?

When Government Spending Gets Really Obscene

by Richard Morrison on April 23, 2009

in Culture, Regulation, Tech & Telecom, Zeitgeist

My good friend and Bureaucrash ally Xaq Fixx recently altered me to an interesting story on the intersection of politics, technology and free speech. It seems that the state government of California, through the California Employment Training Panel, is paying contractors who train in-state workers in new skills – an effort to boost the Golden State’s notoriously sagging economy. Nothing too unusual there.

Enter SF Weekly’s Matt Smith, who noticed that the list of recipients of this state-subsidized training were employees of Cybernet Entertainment LLC. Cybernet in turn is the proprietor of a number of websites which feature videos catering to adult and, ah, highly specialized interests. Kinky but legal, in other words. Smith submitted a public records request regarding the company’s participation to the state, and received a reply to the effect that “the government had been unaware that Cybernet was in the business of narrowcasting videos depicting sexualized torture.”

Thus informed, however, officials at the Employment Training Panel promptly canceled Cybernet’s participation in the program, citing a policy of not working with the adult entertainment industry. The company’s COO Daniel Riedel, has vowed to fight the state to keep the subsidy. Interestingly, scribe Smith goes on to cite the possibility that denying participation in the program based on the content produced by Cybernet may violate the First Amendment:

Does the state’s refusal to train porn-makers violate constitutional free-speech guarantees? I’m not joking. Some serious and credible people says it’s worth considering whether it’s legal to deny training to porn workers merely because they film naked, shackled women with live electrodes clipped to their genitals.

Smith then goes on to cite experts from the California First Amendment Coalition and the UC Hastings College of the Law to the effect that there might, in fact, be a case here for Cybernet. And, of course, they have their natural allies within their own industry – porn titan Vivid Entertainment Group is also opposed to the decision.

So what do we think, OpenMarket readers? Assuming that there’s going to be an employment training subsidy program in place at all, should the people running it have discretion to deny participation to legal businesses because they don’t like the product being pedaled? Should vegan grant administrators, for example, be able to veto applications from meat processing plants, or Catholic administrators applications from health clinics that provide abortions? Tell us what you think in the comments section.

Torture Prosecutions for Thee, But Not for Me

by Hans Bader on April 23, 2009 · 1 comment

in Bailout Watch, Economy, International, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony, Stimulus to Nowhere

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants Bush Administration officials prosecuted for facilitating torture. Fair enough. But if they get prosecuted, she should get prosecuted, too. She knew of the torture and knowingly funded the very programs that engaged in it. She only objected to it after Bush’s poll ratings went down.

Andrew Sullivan, who detests the Bush Administration, observes that “The Speaker was briefed on waterboarding and other torture techniques used by the White House. She was part of the select group of congressmen and women told of the program. She did nothing to stop it.” Indeed, said the CIA’s Porter Goss, “Not only was there no objection, there was actually concern about whether the agency was doing enough” to extract confessions.

Similarly, lawyer John Hinderaker notes that Senator Diane Feinstein (D-Cal.), who wants to investigate the Bush Administration, “enthusiastically endorsed waterboarding and other ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques back in the days” following 9/11.

Liberals like Pelosi can’t logically object to being held responsible for “aiding and abetting” torture by knowingly funding it, without engaging in hypocrisy. After all, they support punishment based on very broad theories of “aiding and abetting.” For example, liberals support the massive, and worthless, $400 billion Alien Tort Claims Act lawsuits against American companies that did business in South Africa, under the theory that merely by selling products in South Africa, the companies thereby “aided and abetted” South Africa’s apartheid regime — never mind that South Africa’s current, democratically-elected, black-majority government is utterly opposed to these lawsuits, and that the companies now being sued complied with a set of human-rights principles known as the “Sullivan Principles” while operating in South Africa.

Torture produced lots of false information that wasted the CIA’s time and money, and produced bogus orange alerts that inconvenienced travelers. But the creepy Dick Cheney is still defending torture, making claims that are as illogical as his ridiculous claim (now echoed by the Obama Administration, which is running up record deficits in violation of Obama’s disingenuous “net spending cut” pledge) that “deficits don’t matter.”

Obama has been vague about the possibility of torture prosecutions. He seemed open to them on Tuesday, but not on Thursday “when it became apparent that any investigation would . . . include Congressional Democrats who signed off on the interrogations.”

While Andrew Sullivan is to be commended for not deliberately overlooking liberal complicity in the Bush Administration’s torture (the way most bloggers advocating torture prosecutions have), he has been less consistent in his attempts to defend the policies of the Obama Administration, such as his attacks on the tea-party anti-tax protesters.

Sullivan erroneously attacked the tea parties as “opposition to the Obama administration’s spending plans, manned by people who made no serious objections to George W. Bush’s” — even though the protests focused on the bailouts as well as the $800 billion stimulus package, which the Congressional Budget Office says will actually shrink the economy in the long run.

But after it became clear that many of the protesters had opposed the costly bailouts over the past year, including the Wall Street and auto bailouts during the Bush Administration, Sullivan switched gears to defend that wasteful spending, which even many original supporters of the bailouts now regret (and which even Treasury Secretary Geithner, an architect of the bailouts, admits have had “mixed” results). Sullivan now attacks the tea party protesters because they OPPOSED the bank bailout last year pushed through by the Bush Administration.

To Sullivan, criticism of Obama’s wasteful spending seems suspect regardless of whether the critic supported or opposed Bush’s fiscal policies.

Sullivan, the self-described “fiscal conservative” and believer in “limited government,” now supports Obama’s massive $800 billion stimulus package, sneering at people who “think the recession demands no fiscal stimulus” — seemingly oblivious to the Congressional Budget Office’s finding that Obama’s pork-filled stimulus package will actually shrink the economy in the long run by exploding the national debt.

Andrew Sullivan, not the tea party protests, was once a cheerleader for one of the most costly items on George Bush’s agenda: the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, Sullivan bashes Bush for invading Iraq. But Sullivan long advocated invading Iraq before Bush did so, at times even chiding Bush for his perceived slowness to act against Saddam Hussein. Ironically, he now trumpets the idea of prosecuting Bush Administration officials. He cites the Administration’s use of torture, which I have also repeatedly criticized; but one of those Sullivan wants prosecuted, Doug Feith, staunchly opposed the use of torture. Feith’s real sin was to espouse the same cause Sullivan once did with such zest: the perfectly lawful, although extremely costly, invasion of Iraq.

Sullivan may variously claim to be conservative or libertarian in an effort to lend weight to his endorsement of big-spending liberal politicians like John Kerry and Barack Obama, but it would be more accurate to describe him, as Forbes magazine did, as a liberal journalist.

Torture Caused Bogus Orange Alerts

by Hans Bader on March 29, 2009 · 2 comments

in International, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Sanctimony

Many of those bogus orange alerts that inconvenienced and alarmed travelers since 9/11 had an unsavory source: torture. The Bush Administration, with the tacit support of Congressional leaders of both political parties, tortured terrorists and other detainees into confessing imaginary plots. (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.), who recently called for an investigation of the Bush Administration, herself knew of the torture for years, having received over 30 intelligence briefings, and Congress knowingly funded the precise programs that practiced torture).

“When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader . . .The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads. In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions. . .Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida — chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.” And it turns out that “Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda.”

All of this waste of money and resources could have been avoided simply by following our country’s obligation, under treaties like the Convention Against Torture, not to subject detainees to torture or inhuman treatment. (By torture, I do not mean long-term confinement. I repeatedly criticized the Bush Administration’s use of torture. But interning enemy combatants at places like Guantanamo — where little if any of the torture occurred — violates no international obligations. The ceaseless romanticizing of the Guantanamo detainees, many of whom are dangerous terrorists who need to be kept confined to prevent future attacks, is downright annoying.)

The federal government has also messed up airline security. The federal Transportation Security Administration fails to catch fake bombs three times as often as private security companies, and 2.5 times as often as the private companies the TSA replaced after 9/11.

ADDENDUM, March 30: As readers have noted, the most recent Washington Post article I linked to in this blog post has a headline that inaccurately suggests that no plots were foiled as a result of information obtained under torture — even though, buried deep in the article, is the authors’ tacit concession to the contrary, in stating that no “significant plots” were uncovered as a result of that information. The article does, however, indicate that more useful information was obtained from Zubaida before the use of torture than after its use — and that the use of torture produced a large amount of false information and false alarms (as the title of this blog post indicates) that wasted valuable time and money. Thus, on balance, it still undermines the case for using torture, although somewhat less than the Post’s headline suggests.