The pay is pretty good, and I guess we now know what a soul is worth: at least a few million dollars.
The man called “CIA Officer 1” in the Senate report on torture has been identified as Matthew Zirbel. Zirbel was a fuck-up from the get-go, but he still got appointed to be in charge of the Salt Pit, the torture dungeon in Afghanistan.
Zirbel was on his first foreign tour for the CIA and colleagues, according to the Senate report, had recommended that he not be allowed access to classified material due to his “lack of honesty, judgment, and maturity,” according to the Senate report. A Senate aide who briefed reporters about Zirbel said the CIA officer had “issues” in his background, the Daily Beast reported, and should never have been hired by the CIA.
He still killed people, anally raped them, and tortured the innocent as well as the guilty. I guess you don’t need to be competent if your job is simply to ruin lives — even a fuck-up can do that well.
You might be wondering what happened to a professional murderer-torturer in modern America. It seems that Zirbel’s case was one of constantly falling upwards.
In 2005, it was recommended that Zirbel be punished by…being suspended without pay for 10 days. Even that didn’t happen, since the corrupt director of the CIA (literally, he was thrown in prison for fraud) gave him amnesty.
Since then, Zirbel has been working as a State Department foreign service officer in various agencies in Saudi Arabia. Apparently, he’s been raking it in.
It’s not clear if Zirbel currently works for the CIA, or government, but wherever he is, he certainly doesn’t appear to he hurting for money. Public records show he owns several properties, including the house in Great Falls, which he bought in 2006 for $1.3 million and still owns. The house sits on five wooded acres and is apparently being rented for $4,500 per month, so Zirbel lives elsewhere.
Of course, Zirbel is one of the small fry. Dick Cheney still stalks the earth, appearing on Sunday morning talk shows as if he was a respectable human being instead of a soulless revenant sowing malignant evil beneath his feet as he marches uncaring amongst the populace.
I have to say this for Germany: after the war, they openly faced the horrors of the Nazi regime and cleaned house, and to this day have a strong aversion to any proponents of that vileness. In the US, we let our war criminals walk free and profit mightily.
The article says it was the agency’s executive director, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, was the one who decided not to punish him. I was wondering, as I didn’t know any Directors of the CIA had gone to prison.
The Salt Pit?
America has a torture dungeon called “The Salt Pit?!”
That’s not just evil, that’s CARTOONISHLY evil!
It’s the American Dream! That if we work hard enough, believe hard enough, and do what we’re told, we can be heartless sociopaths too!
Why is this article written like he is the exception? Isn’t he the rule?
Sounds a little like The Peters Principle. Everyone rises to the highest level of their incompetence. In other words: Fail Upwards. “To get the incompetent out of damaging the company, promote him!”
But this story is truly different than the Scenarios Peters was discussing. Peters was not discussing Torturers/Sociopaths. I am gobsmacked that this kind of occupation actually existed and was “protected” from any kind of overview.
Vae victis.
Firstly revenants complain about having a lich included in their number.
Secondly, you just know that the ethically challenged will be going round justifying this.
Thirdly, my F’n Government F’n well cooperated with this travesty!
I’m so tired of the media interviewing these people who are out walking around when they ought to be in prison and treating them like it’s acceptable to defend the things they’re defending. Even NPR has now taken to using some new euphemism for torture when they interview these people. Not the exact same one the outright defenders of torture are using, but not torture. It’s absurd. When I hear Cheney or that awful CIA lawyer interviewed it’s like they’re cordially interviewing Joseph Goebbels. I stand by my Godwin, when my government has people in its employ whose job is to defend its use of torture to the media, I get to compare them to Goebbels.
And honestly, the former lawyer for the CIA is being interviewed on this, ad nauseum? His job title is essentially “professional liar”. Why is anyone treating anything he says as if it has credibility?
Who is more psychopathic, the psychopath, or the psychopath that hires the psychopath to do his murder and torture for him?
Listening to Dick Cheney say, out loud, in an interview with Chuck Todd that it doesn’t really bother him to kill or torture or imprison a few innocent people if “we achieve our objectives” is still causing my brain to malfunction. I am stunned.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/cheney-torture-report-innocent-detainee
Which Bush and Cheney never did get.
It was Obama who found and killed Osama bin Laden.
But Cheney was happy to credit his torture program for it.
What do you expect? It’s the CIA. Everything the CIA does is both horribly evil and carried out incompetently. The former shouldn’t surprise anyone — you don’t need a secret agent to do something which is good, or even justifiable, you only need one when it’s something you don’t want anyone to know is happening at all.
@11, raven:
And magically, that made everything all better, right? The government of Iraq magically put itself back together and we got back all the money (one million dollars per year per soldier, by the Pentagon’s own figures) we spent on keeping the army in the desert, right?
We didn’t? Oh, well, at least we regained the moral high ground by showing the world that we put criminals on trial instead of summarily executing them.
Oh, that’s right, we didn’t do that either.
Obama proved that he’s just as horrible as Bush and Cheney by doing this; people who think that killing Bin Laden is a feather in Obama’s cap are morally reprehensible.
As a minor character in Mass Effect 3 put it “Black ops groups always go bad. If you have to deny the action, it was a crappy action.”
@twas brillig #5
But doesn’t the Peter Principle involve a person being somewhat competent in their current position? This guy seemed to have been a fuck-up at every level.
The Peter Principle seems to apply to much of the Bush II administration though; put some of the most hubristic jackasses (and in Cheney’s case, quite sadistic) in charge for the better part of a decade and see how much damage they can do. I’m not sure what’s worse; that they ordered all this shit to be done, or that they’re still defending it even to this day.
Justice Scalia also recently defended torture in an interview last week on Swiss National Radio:
And here is Justice Scalia speaking in 2007 at a law conference in Ottawa:
We are not in a TV show. Jack Bauer is fiction.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/antonin-scalias-spirited-defense-torture
PZ
I’m sorry to say, but that is really not true.
East Germany did a pretty good job at doing so, West Germany gave everybody a “Persilschein” and they made careers in govenment and politics like Glöbke and Filbiger and Kiesinger (the later two were Ministerpräsidenten, kind of like your Governors). The law system, police, education and military remained firmly in the hands of old Nazis, foreign SS members got paid generous pensions but those forced to work for the Nazis were ignored for decades. Western Germany paid Eastern Germany lots of money to buy SS KZ commanders “free” and then treated them as victims of injustice
Right now we have “Pegida” marching through the towns, that’s “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamification of the Occident”. 10.000 people strong in Leipzig. Refugee homes are burning again.
So, no, we never cleaned house, we just pretended that with the Nürnberg Trials all Nazis had vanished.
Oh, and remember Eichmann? The man who’d discovered his whereabouts had passed that information on to the Western German authorities. They simply ignored it. That’s why he was found by Mossad and tried in Israel (and Western Germany was very afraid about the trial caus they knew Eichmann could name many high officials as the Nazis they were)
Giliell@17: You beat me to it. Germany’s treatment of it’s history is not a shining example.
It took nearly two decades, till the late 60s when a new generation of politicians, policeman, judges, teachers and historians emerged that the open discussion of the topic and the prosecution of war criminals actually started.
And yeah, there have always been and still are in Germany outright Nazis and way to many average people who definitely are not Nazis but do think that not everything Hitler did was bad and are not racist but…
@Lynna (#16): Apparently Scalia has not read the 8th Amendment?
And man, I really hate 24 because so many people seem convinced that that’s actually the world we live in. I used to watch it as sort of a dark comedy. The notion of a sitting Supreme Court justice treating it as if it has some relevance to real world law is simply terrifying.
The mormon connection:
http://www.examiner.com/article/psychologist-who-devised-cia-interrogation-tactics-resigned-as-mormon-bishop
More on Dick Cheney:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/torture-dick-cheney-minute
I hope someone is keeping a list.
Scalia sez:
Going back to the wizard nuke thread! These scenarios almost never seem to be purely academic exercises. They nearly ALWAYS seem to be meant as a JUSTIFICATION of the horrendous, a sort of reverse slippery slope proceeding from the extremes to the mundane. First it is a nuke vaporizing millions in New York. OK, but how about a regular old bomb in Denver that will only kill thousands? OK, but what about a pipe bomb in a restaurant that might kill a handful? OK, but what about a firebomb in an animal testing facility that might result in some property damage? OK, well what about no bomb at all, but the location of the guy who might be making a bomb? Who MIGHT kill millions, thousands, dozens, one or two, burn down some buildings?
Moreover, how often have we been faced with a situation in which we KNOW we have the mastermind and we KNOW their info is still good and we KNOW what the outcome will be? The answer is NEVER. This situation has never happened and likely never WILL happen. You are positing these extremes in order to justify run of the mill torture on ho-hum terror suspects to extract useless information that will probably never be acted on and even if it was actionable probably could have been gotten just as easily, in fact more easily, via much, much more humane methods. Because somehow getting opponents to concede to one single justifiable instance of torture means it is all justifiable somehow. Fuck that shit sandwich.
For fuck sake, can somebody tell me the last time the Constitution was invoked for the good and not in defense of mass shootings and torture and gamergate douchebags and the rights of corporations to swipe elections? I’m frankly a little sick of the fetishization of a document that supposedly sez hell no to providing healthcare to poor kids but ‘Murica fuck yeah to torture and unbridled gun ownership. Without a decent judiciary, the damn thing ain’t worth the paper it is printed on. Somebody should get Scalia a T-shirt saying “Judges Don’t Kill People! The Constitution Kills People!”
“Todd pressed Cheney, asking if he was okay with the fact that about 25 percent of the detainees interrogated were actually innocent.”
I am amazed that someone who is questioning Cheney unthinkingly accepts the narrative of the war on terror. This being that our enemies are actually “guilty” of something. Because it appears that under this framing of the issue the only “innocents” are those who have nothing whatsoever to do with the “Terrorists”. Thus I suspect that many of the so-called “guilty” could be persons who are simply members of the Taliban and / or Al Qaeda or frankly simply those who oppose the USA in some manner. Thus opposition to the USA is criminalized has something people are “guilty” of.
But then the whole “unlawful” combatants stuff which was used to justify the myriad violations of civilized norms during the “war on terror” was little more than an excuse to get rid of inconvenient things like the Geneva Conventions, and the rule of law.
Concerning the mormon connection in comment 20, an ex-mormon said that he pitied the sheeple who were subjected to worthiness interviews by Bishop Jessen.
Mormons are subjected to temple worthiness interviews and tithing settlement interviews conducted by their Bishops.
gusssnarp @19, Scalia puts on special glasses to read the Constitution. The glasses guarantee that he will see what he wants to see and not what is there. I think his take on the torture issue can be summarized as, “We can’t torture people to punish them as part of a court sentence, but otherwise we are free to torture people who have not been sentenced in a court of law.”
Scalia, you missed this part of The Constitution:
Scalia, where, in your definition of torture, is “cruel and unusual” not included? I think you need to realize that, although they are amendments, they are fully part of The Constitution you are supposed to be upholding. Or do you think torture should be “usual” punishment? If so, GTFO.
twas brillig @ 26:
I think he’s under the impression that it’s not “punishment” when it’s nominally done during an investigation.
I mean, it’s not like recent events give much reason to think many U.S. conservatives believe summary execution by the police is objectionable…
This is a follow up to comments #20 and 25. James Mitchell is also a mormon.
Mormons. No moral compass. So much arrogance and narcissism that even the CIA was irritated by the two psychologists. Yep. Sounds like rightwing mormon priesthood holders.
More on the mormon connection:
From “Kings of Torture Who Made [$81 Million] Inflicting Pain: The Incredible Story of How Two Mormons with No Expertise Conned the CIA,” by Tom Leonard, for “The Daily Mail,” New York, 11 December 2014
Daily Mail link.
He’d just say that, in light of the fact the 8th amendment also talks about excessive fines and bail, the framers OBVIOUSLY only meant torture when imposed as a punishment by a court. He’d probably also quibble about the actually cruelty and unusualness of things like waterboarding and sleep deprivation. Given he is best known for using his Originalist Ouija board to consult the brains of the dead white slave holders who devised the fucking 3/5ths compromise, he probably doesn’t think it is all that bad.
More on the mormon connection, from ex-mormon “NYCGal”:
@Giliell 17,
Yeah, yeah, all the old Nazis apart from the highest echelons were still in office, weren’t they – out of pragmatism, I was taught, in order to secure an uninterrupted functioning of the young republic.
Concerning the pegida thing and the raids, wow that’s disappointing. I’m still operatimg under the del… I mean, hope that these people are en gros better than the FN and similar groups in neighboring countries.
Oddly, the Nazi density today is not really lower now in the former bulwarks of antifascism – I suppose that has simple economical reasons because the rural economy is crap in parts of the east?
Move coverage of the mormon connection:
Three years after Jessen was outed as a devisor of torture techniques, the Spokane Spokesman-Review reported on Jessen’s promotion in the LDS church:
More mormons in the mix:
It really took the youth of the 68s to establish a culture of confrontation with the Nazi past. That was the generation of my teachers, and it showed.
Mitt Romney, über mormon, speaking in December of 2011:
Doesn’t do much to serve the LDS church’s claim to nurturing a superior form of morality within its members.
Cheney’s is the kind of attitude more usually associated with a military dictator or the head of a secret police than with one of the top elected officials in a democracy, but it seems like Cheney has a very authoritarian personality. One of his core beliefs is that the president and his subordinates should be able to do anything they want in the name of national security, regardless of treaties, laws, or ethics.
Only because they lost the war and didn’t have much choice. It was the Nuremberg trials, which Germany didn’t conduct, that got the ball rolling.
CIA joke:
Q: how do you know the CIA didn’t kill Kennedy?
A: he’s fucking dead
Alternate answer: it was done for less than $1bn
Alternate answer: other people in the motorcade survived
Justice Scalia responded with a defense of Agent Bauer, arguing that law enforcement officials deserve latitude in times of great crisis.
Sleazy religious liar Scalia undercuts his own life’s work: the law. Fact is, what you do with Jack Bauer is try him before a jury. If he really did save LA he’ll plead guilt, and get convicted and sentenced to a night in jail, probation, and a ticker-tape parade.
The point is that the system would work except for the suspicious characters trying to get around it. Scalia ought to believe in the system and it says quite a lot that he apparently doesn’t!
Marcus
there is a lot of that going around
Well torture is certainly cruel, but it’s far from unusual.
uh, no.
if you’d look just a tad further back in history…
they lost the first world war too. and they felt like they had no choice. and yet… it turned out quite differently.
don’t kid yourself. people ALWAYS have a choice.
most of the extreme authoritarians in Germany were killed in the second war. that’s why things changed; there weren’t enough of them around to try and repeat the process that happened after the first world war.
Even so, the people of Germany are to be commended for indeed realizing there was a problem, and, frankly, making damn sure that it wasn’t going to happen again.
I worry the US has not learned that lesson.
I have to say this for Germany: after the war, they openly faced the horrors of the Nazi regime and cleaned house, and to this day have a strong aversion to any proponents of that vileness. In the US, we let our war criminals walk free and profit mightily.
It’s called Siegerjustiz and Vae victis. Germans didn’t purge the nazi regime themselves: Nurenberg trials were held by victors of WW2 that were occupying Germany. Said victors also made sure that only those who most vocally condemned Nazi policies (which were rather shitty, but no matter) were able to visibly participate in new governments.
Of course, many useful old nazis got whitewashed, but they were by definition not stupid and knew to keep their mouths shut about embarrassing history. After all, there was a cold war going on…
As for the United States: No sitting president will set the precedent of putting their predecessor on trial for simple game-theoretical reasons: They know that such trial will be inevitably political and that they will be next on the dock when their terms run out and/or political winds shift. No matter how squeaky-clean they are themselves.
It’s not just. It’s not fair. It’s simply how things are and how the cold equations of realpolitik have settled down.
Oh for fuck’s sake, Lynna. For the first time in this whole clusterfuck I’m actually scared! You’ve got someone on the Supreme Court who is so unwilling to think things through that he actually falls for the scenario!!!
I want to shout.
It took me half a minute to read this sentence, because some lackwit was scared shitless that a comma in front of and would automatically be an Oxford comma (which isn’t the case!!!) and therefore had to be avoided at all costs. I kept thinking he was on his first foreign tour both for the CIA and for his colleagues!
That trope is Older Than Feudalism: the Catholic Church has always been using it, and calling it promoveatur ut amoveatur – “may he be moved forwards/promoted so that he may be moved away”.
That’s one reason.
Another is that the Quite German But Anything But Democratic Republic was just about as authoritarian as what came before it, especially till 1953*. It was just the same thing again, only with the official meanings of “good” and “evil” inverted. Besides, if everything you do is “antifascist” – the Berlin Wall was “the antifascist protection dam” –, maybe fascism doesn’t sound so bad in the long run…!
Yet another was that the East was much more isolated than the West. There were almost no visitors and almost no immigrants there. People didn’t have much of a chance to get rid of their Nazi-era prejudices; communist education just put a heavy lid on them instead of trying to do anything against them.
* Stalin’s death.
Again, that only began in earnest in 1968.
Free market!!
Fuck this planet (ok, the planet’s ok, but it’s got a bit of an infestation….).
nich@23 – you’ve given me an idea. How about, for all those people considering the Wizard Nuke scenario, we counter with the following:
If you are sure enough that torturing someone, and possibly killing them, is justified by the chance of the massive number of lives you think you might save, then you must be sure enough to put your own liberty on the line too. What is your liberty, compared to all those lives you’re going to save?
Therefore, if you are sure enough that torturing someone to try and obtain information is going to be “worth it”, you should be completely prepared to happily hand yourself in and accept a prison sentence for life without possibility of parole afterwards. If, on the other hand, you are not prepared to risk your own liberty for this cause, you don’t get to risk someone else’s health, sanity or life for it either.
In the case where multiple people are involved in the torture, as in a military chain of command, the life-in-prison should apply to everyone in the chain who facilitated the torture, from the highest person who gave authorisation, down to the person(s) who carried out the work. All have to be willing to give up the rest of their unincarcerated lives for the people they’re trying to save.
And do you know what the best thing about this plan is? We don’t even need to stop making torture illegal to implement it!
This is a followup to my comments 20, 25, 28, 29, 31, 33, and 35 concerning the mormon connection to the torture of CIA detainees.
A group of physicians has urged an investigation of the two mormon psychologists, Jessen and Mitchell, who were hands-on for some of the torture, and who developed the torture guidelines used by others.
Salon link.
Amazon News link to PDF of the report.
I am seriously wondering that since 9/11 worked out so well for these psychopathic mass murderers and their looting class cronies, if they are hoping for another terrorist attack to justify more oppression and to distract the public from how they are getting fucked over by the 0.01%.
The ticking time bomb scenario relies on the same fallacy the 9/11 troofers and other conspiracy theories rely on. The conspirators have to be fiendishly clever enough to carry out the plot without it being detected beforehand and mind numbingly stupid at the same time to get caught.
Would anyone smart enough to build a nuclear bomb and plant it in a city, be dumb enough to have let who could possibly get caught know where it was being planted or if this was not avoidable, have a check-in system, so they knew if the person had been captured and would then detonate the bomb remotely when someone misses a check-in or just have someone stay with the bomb to detonate it if the police show up. Another fail safe would be for all the conspirators who are vulnerable of capture to kill themselves once they have completed their role in the mission.
Unfortunately, this is not just a problem in the American government. The problem is also in our culture. Try reading this depressing PEW survey: http://www.people-press.org/2014/12/15/about-half-see-cia-interrogation-methods-as-justified/
About half of Americans believe that torture was justified. That is right; half of Americans have a moral belief equivalent to believing that slavery is economical.
To make matters worse, 43% of Americans believe that voters do not deserve to know anything about CIA interrogation methods.
America believes that torture is righteous, but it ought to be hidden.
It is a kind of creationist morality; assert that you are right, and try to hide the evidence that indicates otherwise.
The evidence is clear: the results of torture were used to advocate misguided wars that cost millions of lives.
Yet a huge portion of Americans is responding with the equivalent of “It was righteous, and I want to be lied to about it!”
when you get a country that is populated by about half authoritarians?
fascism is inevitable.
#10 (being more worried about missing the opportunity to punish the guilty than the possibility of wrongly harming the innocent) reminded me of something that happened – on a much smaller scale, naturally – to my family when my sister was attending a church school. I thought the attitude displayed then might be enlightening here.
My sister was in sixth grade, about 10 or close to 15 years ago, and I was just out of high school. My sister’s teacher had seen another student (a girl in her grade) talking to my sister and then throwing something in the trash. The teacher fished the something out of the trash and found a note that said something mildly obscene and very nonsensical. The teacher never saw my sister writing a note or handling the note, but somehow determined that this was a situation that required my sister to be roundly punished. (I imagine the other student was also in for it, but that was not addressed in my presence or my mother’s.) My parents were recently divorced and my sister’s father was not available, so when the school called a meeting, with the church’s pastor, the principal, and the teacher, my mother brought me and another member of the pastoral staff she felt more comfortable with and we all had a major sit down over this silly situation. The school’s suggestion was that they give my sister – who was in sixth grade, remember – a lie detector test to see whether she was lying about not knowing what the other student’s obscence comment meant. If she passed it, the school would pay for it, if she failed, then my mother would. They refused to let her come back to school until my mother either let them punish her for the situation or put her through a lie detector test.
My mother pulled her out of that school and put her in public school (one of the very few sane parenting decisions, especially during that period, that I remember). But what still sticks with me to this day was all those adults around that table arguing that they could not take the chance that a high school student might get away with something, and really drastically overboard measures absolutely had to be taken to avoid any possibility of it happening.
I can’t help wondering if that attitude isn’t one that too many Americans share. I hesitate to blame it on religion – my mother is generally more religious than anyone else I know – but maybe it’s a religious artifact.