We hear about Yoo’s and Bybee’s contributions all the time, but I suspect that Feith was behind some of their “legal opinions” and he is barely mentioned.

Israel has produced a surprising yield of academics who support torture and seek its legitimization, if not legalisation

Here’s a nice summation of those, like Feith, connected to U of Chicago & Strauss: The ‘Ignoble Liars’ Behind Bush’s Deadly Iraq War (Interesting, quirky website, lots of other stuff there, read ready to critique.)

And this is what we can expect in the future irt Feith’s “clever way”…

Yuval Ginbar author of, Why Not Torture Terrorists?: Moral, Practical and Legal Aspects of the “Ticking Bomb” Justification for Torture, writes:

In 1999 Israel’s Supreme Court prohibited issuing the General Security Service (GSS) with instructions on how to inflict what was euphemistically called “moderate physical pressure” on Palestinian detainees, as had been the custom until then, and ruled that GSS agents cannot be authorized to inflict such “pressure”. The Court cited the absolute prohibition on torture in international law. So far so good. However, when it comes to “ticking-time bomb” situations, the Court ruled that the case of a GSS interrogator who tortures (the Court too preferred a euphemism: “applied physical interrogation methods”) would then be considered by the Attorney-General, and if need be by the courts, where “his potential criminal liability shall be examined in the context of the ‘necessity’ defence” – a criminal law defence which, as currently held in Israeli law, justifies actions in extreme situations if they produce the “lesser evil”.

The result has been predictable. Within a couple of years the GSS itself was admitting it was torturing – oops! – euphemism time again: using “exceptional interrogation measures” – in dozens of cases annually. All were cases of “ticking bombs”, of course. Figures from human rights NGOs, such as the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, have been much higher. Number of GSS interrogators convicted of torturing (or any other offence)? Zero. Prosecutions? Zero. Criminal investigations? Zero. Once introduced as a means of legitimizing torture, the “ticking bomb” and its legal corollary, the “necessity defence”, have overwhelmed the system.

Feith thought he’d found a clever way to do this, which on the one hand upheld Geneva as a matter of law—the speech he made to Myers and Rumsfeld—and on the other pulled the rug out from under it as a matter of reality. Feith’s argument was so clever that Myers continued to believe Geneva’s protections remained in force—he was “well and truly hoodwinked,” one seasoned observer of military affairs later told me

(my emphasis)

I linked to this book review for TheraP the other day.

From the author:

I am referring to a possibly less exciting phenomenon, which is all in the public domain. To me, however, it is no less worrying: Israel has produced a surprising yield of academics who support torture and seek its legitimization, if not legalisation. Publishing widely, including in the most prestigious journals and publishing houses, they advocate the use of interrogational torture in the “war on terror”.

There are variations, of course. One favours torture to be authorized by a “public committee” – a variant of Alan Dershowitz’ “torture warrants” idea. Others propose allowing “only” methods that are “short of torture,” including one who attempts to show Americans how some forms of “coercive interrogation” would accord with their Constitution.

snip…

But perhaps the speciality of pro-torture Israeli academics is devising schemes which would, they say, enable an absolute legal prohibition on torture to co-exist with allowing its use in “ticking bomb situations” – a “relativized” absolute prohibition, as one of them (seriously) quipped. Some have proposed that while torture should be prohibited by law absolutely, if a leader orders torture in extreme situations, his act would later undergo “ex post-facto ratification”. Others propose a modification of deontological morality so as to allow torture in extreme situations, as long as it is not “officialized”.

snip…

However heavily endowed with academic titles the writers are, however extensive and thorough their research is, and however rich their essays and books are with references, cases and footnotes, the results are invariably absurd, as the very combination they seek is self-contradictory. In my book I analyse several of these “have-your-cake-and-eat-it” solutions. Actually, perhaps a more apt – and updated -description would be the “yeah-but-no-but” approaches to torture…

Perhaps this explains Feith’s “clever way.”

Sorry I am late to the comments…

And thanks for that second article. And the conclusions of the psychiatrist. I especially like her summation, because it rings so true to me. True of a clinician to write that way. And true for any competent, caring clinician to think the same about certain things:

“If you put 12 clinicians in a room and asked them about this interrogation log, you might get different views about the effect and long-term consequences of these interrogation techniques. But I doubt that any one of them would claim that this individual had not suffered severe mental distress at the time of his interrogation, and possibly also severe physical distress.”

I so agree.

…I appreciate this response to my earlier requests, as well as the opportunity to personally review the relevant Memoranda for the Record yesterday afternoon at CIA Headquarters on such short notice.

While our records suggest that there may have been a few additional briefings, on the whole the information provided was helpful. However, my personal review of the Memoranda for the Record has only reinforced my view that those documents provide the best record of briefings that were memorialized with such record…

(My Bold)

So, the gist of Crazy Pete Hoekstra’s illogic is that the CIA Torture briefing list is incomplete and inaccurate, but that somehow their MFRs are amazingly complete and accurate.

The fact that both can’t be true seems to escape Crazy Pete Hoekstra entirely.

And for the record (consider this my own MFR *g*), might I suggest that the CIA has always had an institutional bias for not keeping accurate records of things?