In fact, Amherst’s offer is meaningless, as Congress has voted to prohibit the resettling of detainees anywhere in the U.S.  But still, Amherst is the first municipality in the country to vote for such a resolution…which is worth noting when even towns that just wanted to volunteer to imprison former Gitmo detainees have been frightened out of it by their elected representatives.

And Amherst actually has two particular detainees in mind: a former ballet dancer from Russia, and a soccer player/accountant (what a combo) from Algeria cleared of wrongdoing years ago.

The chairwoman of the town’s select board opposed the resolution, saying she feared it would frighten parents who might otherwise send their children to college there – not an unreasonable fear, though considering the Congressional ban, parents would have to be counting on an awful lot of hypotheticals to genuinely worry about Gitmo detainees sharing the local ice cream parlor with their kids.

The Christian Science Monitor also noted this objection:

Town meeting member Stanley Gawle also did not support the resolution. He said he will start carrying a gun if anyone from Guantánamo actually moves to Amherst.

“That will give me a reason to carry it,” he said.

Which raises the obvious question: What’s that guy doing living in Amherst?

But the Justice Department goes further than that.  Under President Obama, the government is arguing not only that it wasn’t clear what rights detainees were entitled to back in 2006 [when they claim they were tortured at Guantanamo], but that even today the prisoners have no right to such basic constitutional protections as due process of law or the right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment. The “Fifth and Eighth Amendments do not extend to Guantánamo Bay detainees,” writes the Justice Department in its brief.

…

Ultimately, the Obama administration is arguing, victims of torture at a U.S.-run detention center abroad have no right to redress from the federal government.

Notwithstanding the fact that the Bush administration succeeded wildly in muddying the legal waters, that last sentence is rather astounding.  Regardless of legal specifics, is it really possible that if people were kidnapped, locked up for years, and tortured by the U.S. government, there’s nothing they can do about it?

Today, Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian human rights activist, told McClatchy that while she thinks he deserved his Nobel for what he’s done, she also hopes it will push the President to focus more on human rights:

The Nobel award forces a commitment on Mr. Obama to peace and human rights around the world.

Perhaps it will force such a commitment closer to home.  After all, it certainly adds quite some dissonance to the following sentence:

President Barack Obama, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, argues that detainees held by the United States are not entitled to protection from cruel and unusual punishment.

“The administration’s opposition to the core of this bill came as a complete surprise and doesn’t show much concern for compromise. This turns the bill’s near-certain passage into an uphill fight,” [Senator Chuck] Schumer said.

Presumably the senators who were preparing to move a federal reporter shield law through the chamber assumed that Obama would have no problem with it…after all, he advocated a strong federal shield law during his campaign:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, who spoke later at an AP luncheon, has endorsed the shield law to protect reporters but told editors that courts should decide whether a confidential source deserves protection.

But now, it’s exactly that – courts weighing the public’s right to know against the government’s need to keep information secret – which Obama opposes.  Instead, the White House wants any shield law to require that courts defer to the government when it claims that a journalist’s source has committed a “significant” security leak…and put a journalist in jail if s/he refuses to divulge the source.

In addition to numerous journalist advocacy groups, the New York Times editorial board on Monday came out against the White House’s proposed weakening of the law, tying it to other retreats Obama has made on transparency promises.  And even the Washington Post editorial board – which has pretty consistently supported presidential prerogative over traditional judicial review – smacked Obama for this one.  (The Post Company supports the bill, as without one, its reporters can be subject to imprisonment if they don’t divulge sources.  A snarkier observer might say something like, “Yeah, it hurts when it happens to you, doesn’t it?”)

I would make two points on this.  First, I think the idea that we have a problem with reporters casually printing sensitive national security information is ludicrous.  If anything, reporters – especially beltway reporters – are quite deferential to the national security prerogatives of the government.  Go pick up the nearest Times or Post and find an article about terrorism or government spying or what have you.  It will likely be filled with, and perhaps even built around, anonymous sources given more or less free reign to give the government’s version of events.  And while the White House beat its chest about going after leaks and even reporters in the wake of the big warrantless wiretapping story in the Times in December 2005…it’s also worth remembering that the Times held that story for over a year at the government’s request.

Which leads to my second point: why did the Times hold the warrantless wiretapping story for so long?  Because government officials told them that it would harm national security.  But the administration was breaking the law, and spying on Americans without their knowledge – and the whole point of having a free press is that reporters have to be able to alert us to these things…and governments can’t hide behind the claim of national security to cover up law-breaking.

This isn’t to say that the government shouldn’t be able to keep certain things secret.  But – as with the objections to the Obama administration’s new state secrets policy – should the government be entrusted to police itself, to decide when journalists’ sources get protection from government and when they don’t?

Obama has quietly decided to bypass Congress and allow the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects without charges. … The move…has sparked serious concern among civil liberties advocates. Such a decision allows the president to unilaterally hold “combatants” without habeas corpus…

But in fact, while civil liberties groups are of course “concerned” about indefinite detention, the question in this case is not whether suspects will be indefinitely detained but under what authority.  And there are two ways to look at this development, as evidenced by the headlines in the New York Times and the Washington Post:

Obama to Use Current Law to Support Detentions

Administration Won’t Seek New Detention System

While civil liberties groups are obviously against using current law to detain people indefinitely, they’re even more opposed to codifying indefinite detention as the law of the land. At the moment, the Obama administration, like its predecessor, cites the power granted it under the Congressional resolution passed after 9/11, authorizing the president to use force against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Whether that resolution actually allows the executive to detain suspects indefinitely is obviously up for serious debate, and continues to be worked out by the courts. But, as the ACLU put it in an email to supporters Tuesday, entitled “Thanks to you, nothing happened”:

…legislation or…an executive order on indefinite detention…would have made it more permanent and harder to end.

And the ACLU credits the pressure its members put on Congress and the White House with bringing about Obama’s decision not to take such a definitive step.

A less…diplomatic take on why this is a positive development for civil liberties advocates comes from Glenn Greenwald, who writes that Congressional legislation might have been much broader and far-reaching than anything the White House had in mind.

…when the Obama administration and Congress are at odds, it is Congress demanding greater powers of executive detention (as happened when Congress blocked Obama from transferring Guantanamo detainees to the U.S.). Any process that lets Lindsey Graham, Joe Lieberman and Dianne Feinstein anywhere near presidential detention powers is one that is to be avoided at all costs. …it [is] a very good thing that the Congress is not going to write a new law authorizing presidential preventive detentions.

It’s unlikely that Congress would seek to write such a law absent a request from Obama, as only a direct request from him would give political cover to enough Democrats to support it. And this leaves the door open for Congress to restrict presidential detention powers, if advocates are able to push them in that direction. Meanwhile, the courts will continue sorting out how broad the administration’s detention powers are…a process that has not gone well for the White House thus far. (And it should be noted that certain Obama supporters believe that he wants the courts to limit his powers, because though he supports limited executive power he feels that politically he can’t curtail his own detention powers.)

What the DoJ came up with are guidelines preventing the use of the privilege except when information can be “reasonably expected to cause significant harm to national security.”  And to determine whether that standard has been met, a more stringent process will be employed, involving several layers of review and approval by the Attorney General personally, any time a government agency wants the privilege invoked.

There are two categories of objection that are emerging in response to the new policies (leaving aside the argument that the government should not be curtailing its secrecy powers at all.)

One camp sees the whole thing as a farce – a promise to self-regulate that is as disingenuous as it is unenforceable.  Says Adam Serwer at the American Prospect, “the new policy seems to formalize the process by which we got the results that had civil liberties groups crying foul in the first place.”  After all, while there wasn’t a specific process in place in the Bush DoJ under which the Attorney General had to approve personally all state secrets arguments…but it’s not like there’s any doubt that every Bush AG would have done so.

Giving credence to this view is the fact that, on the very morning the Obama administration was touting its new constraints on the Bush-era state secrets practices, government lawyers went to court to once again maintain the Bush state secrets arguments in a five-year-old lawsuit over allegations of illegal wiretapping by the government.  Says the ACLU, these new policies are great on paper, but the administration doesn’t seem to have any intention of following them.

Another view is less cynical, but not entirely satisfied, as articulated by Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), one of the sponsors of legislation that would reign in the privilege:

These are all critical steps toward transparency and increased due process, and I believe that the Obama Administration has undertaken them in good faith, with both national security and justice in mind. Nevertheless, these reforms fall short of what is necessary.

…we must ensure that all of the necessary reforms are codified into law in order to prevent any future administration from abusing the state secrets privilege.

And Roger Strother of OMB Watch, who hailed the new policies on first read, was moved to revisit the issue later in the day to lay out a list of the good and the bad in the DoJ order – though he still calls it a “net positive.”  (It should be noted that one thing everyone seems to agree on is that the new policies lack adequate guidelines/requirements for judicial oversight – i.e., courts ought to be able to review the evidentiary support for a state secrets claim.)

This latter argument gets at something fundamental about this debate: you don’t have to think the Obama administration is craven or disingenuous to think it’s a bad idea for the executive branch to regulate its own secrecy policies.  Even if you think Attorney General Holder will be a champion of open government and will deny applications to use the state secrets privilege except in the most dire circumstances, you also know that “running it by the boss” wouldn’t have been much of a check on secrecy in the previous administration…and it might not be in a future one.

Of course, some people are ok with that – they point out that elections matter, and every President gets to make changes based on his mandate from the people.  But it’s worth remembering that many of the arguments about Bush-era civil liberties and secrecy policies were, at base, arguments about executive power.  It’s not just a question of whether you like a President’s policies, but whether the President ought to have the power to, say, keep secret anything he wants, or detain people indefinitely on his say-so, or order torture.

One of the most striking things about the Obama administration’s approach to these issues has been that, even where it has executed a major break with the previous administration, it has generally done so on its own, avoiding involvement by Congress or the courts.  Obama has unilaterally decided to halt “enhanced interrogation techniques,” to close CIA black sites, to brief Congress more on intelligence matters, to give certain rights to detainees, to better review state secrets arguments.  But it’s fought attempts by Congress to mandate more intelligence oversight, and attempts by the courts to adjudicate the state secrets issue, and attempts by both to give more rights to detainees.  Regardless of how one feels about the policy decisions of any particular administration, there’s a fundamental question of executive power – and how it’s steadily grown – that deserves real debate.

But the ACLU, in a court brief filed Friday, makes a compelling argument from the opposite side, this time in an effort to get the Obama administration to release transcripts of prisoners at Guantanamo who describe abuse and torture endured in CIA custody (h/t Daphne Eviatar):

No court has ever upheld the suppression of descriptions of government misconduct on the ground that those descriptions would inflame the nation’s enemies.  To do so would enshrine into the [Freedom of Information Act] the fundamentally antidemocratic principle that the more egregious the government misconduct at issue, the more protected it would be from public disclosure.  A law enacted “to ensure an informed citizenry, vital to the functioning of a democratic society, needed to check against corruption and to hold the governors accountable to the governed,” writes the ACLU, citing the Supreme Court, would thus be “transformed into an instrument of cover-up.”

It goes without saying that these situations are morally complex – and the government has to have the ability to control some information.  But the ACLU’s point is well-taken: what’s the point of a disclosure law if the government only has to disclose those things it deems not damaging?

Less covered was the administration’s court filing Monday, in which it asked judges not to give those detainees the same right to challenge their detention that Guantanamo detainees have. It’s an argument the White House has made repeatedly – both under its current occupant and the last. The current administration has certainly been more generous with detainee rights than the last. But human rights and civil liberties groups continue to be disappointed that the Obama administration is only willing to grant very certain and circumscribed rights, while continually fighting the courts over any rights beyond those.

As NPR’s Ari Shapiro notes, this schizophrenia – “We want you to have rights”/”We don’t want you to have rights” – is particularly pronounced in one Obama administration official:

Neal Katyal, who became a legal superstar when he successfully argued the case of detainee Salim Hamdan before the Supreme Court, famously fought the Bush administration’s rules at Guantanamo. Now he is on the other side of this argument.

The Hamdan ruling gave Guantanamo detainees greater court access than the Bush administration wanted. Now, Katyal works for the Obama Justice Department.

Several human rights lawyers said they are baffled to see his name on this brief arguing against the same court access for Bagram detainees.

What may be most concerning about these latest developments is that they potentially – and I stress potentially, not certainly – suggest that the Obama administration is engaging in what Glenn Greenwald calls a “shell game” with detention and interrogation practices. After all, what’s the significance, practically, legally or morally, of closing Guantanamo if any and all detainees can simply be sent to Bagram, where the same rights don’t apply? Several commentators picked up on this passage from the New York Times piece on the new Bagram rights:

Officials say the importance of Bagram as a holding site for terrorism suspects captured outside Afghanistan and Iraq has risen under the Obama administration, which barred the Central Intelligence Agency from using its secret prisons for long-term detention and ordered the military prison at Guantánamo closed within a year.

Stipulating that this is the position of anonymous officials as interpreted by reporters, and may not accurately reflect the entirety of the Obama administration rationale, that’s a pretty odd statement don’t you think? It would seem to suggest that the point of those executive orders was not to end certain practices (long-term and/or secret detention) but the places in which those practices were implemented…which is not, to put it politely, how the President framed his moves to the public.

This week, the CIA had a judicial deadline to either turn over a trove of documents on secret prisons or to explain why it would not.  You can guess which it chose.  The ACLU, which brought the lawsuit requesting the documents, says the CIA’s arguments are nonsensical, or at the very least “disconnected from the Obama administration’s stated positions”:

On the one hand, President Obama has publicly recognized that torture undermines the rule of law and America’s standing in the world, but on the other, the CIA continues to argue in court that it cannot disclose information about its torture techniques because it would jeopardize the CIA’s interrogation program.

Meanwhile, Spencer Ackerman finds it “curious” that the administration would object to the documents’ release, given that they all relate to already-disclosed information.

Of course, we’re not nearly through gleaning all the information contained in the stack of documents released the previous week, including the 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report.  For instance, Daphne Eviatar compares that report to the earlier-released Office of Legal Counsel memos, and determines that “the CIA did not have a coherent or consistent policy about the use and legality of sleep deprivation as an interrogation tactic.”  And while sleep deprivation tends to sound pretty benign in the context of some of the other “enhanced interrogation techniques,” it’s serious enough that John McCain went out of his way to insist that he never condoned it – contrary to the claim of a recently-released 2007 DoJ memo.

(And by the way, as the New York Times noted this week, the ACLU has revolutionized the use of Freedom of Information Act requests, and that is the only reason we know virtually anything about any of this stuff.)

Also, a report by Physicians for Human Rights released this week finds that U.S. doctors and psychiatrists may have essentially experimented on detainees in U.S. custody – a gross violation of medical ethics – by collecting data on detainees’ reactions to interrogations to better their effectiveness.  The group is calling for an investigation.

I feel like this is the place where I say: As more and more concerning information comes out, the chorus is building in Washington for further investigation.  But it’s not.  As Glenn Greenwald notes, the New York Times editorial board stands virtually alone among mainstream press outlets and pundits in its call this week for full criminal investigations of torture that go all the way up the chain of command.

Meanwhile, everyone seems to dislike the investigation Eric Holder has designed.  Civil libertarians and the Left clearly dislike it because they feel it makes no sense to potentially prosecute people at the bottom and not those who may have violated the law at the top.  But the argument (or one of them) against investigation of CIA interrogators from Republicans and self-styled Centrists is odd: they start from the premise that higher-up officials shouldn’t be prosecuted, because that would be to prosecute policy differences.  Then, they say that it’s unfair to prosecute interrogators when you’re not prosecuting those who gave them orders.  Whether you agree with that argument or not, you’ve got to admit – it’s a perfect circle.

On that note…I’m on vacation until Sept 15th.  Let me know if I miss anything.

Washington Post

I can’t replicate for you the dark, foreboding, melodramatic tone and style of the piece, but here’s the basic idea: now that a terrorist knows he can’t be waterboarded, nor can he or his family be threatened with sexual abuse and death, when we capture him he will laugh at our attempts to coax information out of him in non-abusive ways. In fact, he will actually remind his interrogators that the Justice Department is watching, and ask them if they are willing to risk their careers by getting rougher.  This detained terrorist will sit patiently, knowing that he just has to sit through casual chats with interrogators for as long as is needed for whatever attack he’s planned to be carried out.  “You and I know he exists, has existed, and will exist again,” says Cohen.

Actually, I don’t.  There is in fact little evidence that such a person exists – that is, the alleged terrorist who, in his religious zeal, is impervious to traditional interrogation techniques and laughs at our quaint American human rights concerns.  And what evidence there is, is inconclusive or the product of anonymous intelligence agency sources with who-knows-what agenda.  As many have been irresponsibly doing in recent days, Cohen claims that:

The CIA inspector general’s report on the quite brutal interrogation of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the so-called Sept. 11 mastermind, suggests he only turned cooperative when he was repeatedly waterboarded and that the information he provided saved lives.

In fact, it suggests no such thing, as has been documented by innumerable journalists and news outlets – and even former Bush officials.  In fact, the original FBI interrogator of Abu Zubaydah, the highest-value terror suspect next to KSM, has said repeatedly, and in testimony before Congress, that most of his high-value information came from traditional interrogation methods.  Ali Soufan also pointed out that we will never know if the rest of the information Zubaydah gave could have been also been gotten that way, because Zubaydah was soon taken into CIA custody and waterboarded dozens of times.

Cohen goes on to say:

No one can possibly believe that America is now safer because of the new restrictions on enhanced interrogation and the subsequent appointment of a special prosecutor.

Really?  John McCain does.  Not the special prosecutor part, but he told CBS that he felt the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” harmed the U.S. by providing a recruitment tool for al-Qaeda and inhibiting cooperation with our allies.  And in that sentiment he’s joined by dozens of retired military generals and admirals, among many others too numerous to name. But nevermind.

The captured terrorist of my fertile imagination, assuming he had access to an Internet cafe, knows about the special prosecutor. He knows his interrogator is under scrutiny. What person under those circumstances is going to spill his beans?

The assumption here is that the only reason that any terrorist suspect talks, under any conditions, is that he has a credible fear that conditions could get worse.  I can’t prove that’s untrue – nor do I have any interest in doing so.  But there‘s just no hard evidence on which Cohen and others can base this belief.  There’s certainly no basis for making that assumption the underlying rationale for all our interrogation procedures.

Rather, this figure of fear – the unbreakable superterrorist, buoyed by solid, unflinching faith in some twisted version of Islam, who scoffs at the tactics of Western countries, who responds only to physical suffering – is nowhere to be found in any report or document or testimony.  He is found lurking in the dark recesses of Cohen’s mind – as well as, obviously, the mind of Dick Cheney and countless others.  (I am not comparing Richard Cohen and Dick Cheney, just noting that these fears haunt the minds of the politically powerful, as well as public intellectuals.)

This imagined terrorist is found in projections of our worst fears, like 24.  I’m an avid viewer of 24.  I enjoy it for the same reason I enjoy any morally clear-cut revenge fantasy; movies and television and trashy novels are where we can live in the world we wish we lived in: where, for instance, we know beyond doubt that every detainee is in fact a terrorist with high-value knowledge, and every infliction of torture gets the info we need, and is justified by the pure evil of the person being tortured.  (Though I think my favorite 24 moment was a few seasons ago when a Muslim terrorist mastermind, picked up by CTU, calls a Jewish human rights attorney, who shows up in minutes to get in Jack Bauer’s way with his whiny concerns about civil liberties.  In a universe with a modicum of irony – which 24 is not – such a scenario could only be satire.)

But we don’t live in such a world, which is one of the reasons we have laws – international and domestic – against torture.

After his inaccurate statement about the CIA inspector general’s report, Cohen says:

Yet so much was redacted from the report that it is not clear that this is unambiguously the case. Maybe no lives were saved. Maybe Mohammed was waterboarded more than 100 times for nothing. It is an appalling possibility.  …  I am torn between my desire for absolute security and my abhorrence of torture.

As many of the commenters on Cohen’s piece point out, there’s no such thing as absolute security – something I thought was painfully obvious.  Not to be too snarky, but if this is the first time Cohen and others who grant his premise are realizing that our laws and values are inconsistent with absolute security, then I’d like to welcome them to life in an open democratic society.

Let me be clear – I’m not suggesting we have nothing to fear.  If I may get personal for just a moment, I lived through 9/11, and have lived in New York City, this tempting terrorist target, every day since.  I’ve seen first hand the evidence that there are those who wish my home and its inhabitants harm.  Lots of things worry me on this front: when I experience the mind-numbing incompetence of the TSA; when year after year goes by without more stringent security requirements being placed on chemical plants and ports; every time I hear that our intelligence agencies aren’t coordinating with each other, or have ludicrously outdated computer systems, or don’t have enough Arabic translators.  That my government is publicly forswearing torture is not one of the things that worries me, because I have no evidence that more alacrity in torture has kept, or would keep, us safe.

My goal here isn’t to argue with Richard Cohen.  He has every right to believe, or to fear, that publicly banning torture will make us less safe.  But I do think it’s important to point out that there’s this major strain of argument in our national debate over interrogation, torture and terrorism, that would appear to be based on imagined scenarios with fictitious terrorist bogeymen that haunt the dreams of many powerful men in Washington.  As Cohen himself admits, his terrorist is the product of his “fertile imagination” – but he’s not based on any figure of whom we’ve actually seen evidence.  Again, no one can prove that imaginary scenarios won’t come to pass…but let’s be clear that’s what they are: the dark imaginings of very frightened people.

Photo by werkunz1

If you don’t have the patience, time, or stomach to read the entire 160-page CIA 2004 Inspector General’s report released today, Greenwald lays out some of the key excerpts.  This is the report, classified for years, that reportedly “disgusted” Attorney General Eric Holder and led him to appoint a special prosecutor to look into possible torture by CIA employees and contractors.  The report found that interrogators threatened detainees and their families with death and sexual assault, staged mock executions, and engaged in all manner of physical abuse never before reported.  Death threats explicitly violate U.S. anti-torture laws.

Republicans are reportedly trying to spin the report as offering evidence that torture techniques did indeed produce valuable, life-saving intelligence.  Michael Isikoff told The Rachel Maddow Show Monday night that there are a few passages that can be read that way.  But Spencer Ackerman calls that reading “laughable.”  Ackerman also says he’s gotten a hold of the documents Dick Cheney claimed would show the efficacy of the torture techniques…and that those too fail to bear out that argument.

Now, the second thing that happened today: Holder appointed that prosecutor: John Durham, who’s already investigating the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes.

Several Democratic lawmakers, and the ACLU and other civil liberties groups, are welcoming the decision but encouraging Holder to widen the probe.  They want it to include Bush administration officials who authorized certain techniques or created an environment of “anything goes,” instead of just focusing on those particular interrogators who may have gone beyond what was authorized in the Jay Bybee/John Yoo “torture memos.”

Meanwhile, nine Republican senators in a letter immediately denounced Holder’s decision to open an investigation of any kind.  They were joined by many other Congressional Republicans.  Margaret Talev of McClatchy, in an article cheekily titled, “If you liked health-care brawls, you’ll love CIA torture probe,” writes:

Attorney General Eric Holder has struck a middle course that isn’t likely to satisfy anyone and could complicate President Barack Obama’s broader political agenda.

Perhaps, but I’m skeptical of that analysis.  Given that the Republicans attack Obama no matter what he does in any policy arena, and liberals are already dissatisfied with his approach to health care and the economy, I’m not sure further partisan rancor over a torture probe will make that much difference either way.

Daphne Eviatar at the Washington Independent suggests it may be hard for John Durham to avoid looking at the Justice Department lawyers up the chain from the CIA interrogators.  And Jane Mayer – perhaps the world’s expert on this stuff – tells Keith Olbermann that any interrogator brought in for questioning will most likely claim he was authorized to do what he did, pushing the investigation up the chain.

Greenwald and Marcy Wheeler say that Holder must also release the DoJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility report – which reportedly found that DoJ lawyers Jay Bybee and John Yoo violated their ethical duties by knowingly producing bad legal opinions on interrogation techniques.  Otherwise, they say, any investigation is at risk of being a whitewash, only implicating the lowest people on the totem pole.

As if that’s not enough, we learned a couple other things today:

- The Obama administration is creating a new terrorism interrogation unit that the White House will oversee via the FBI.

- The Obama administration apparently decided not to file new charges against Mohamed Jawad, releasing him to his native Afghanistan yesterday.  He spent 7 years in Guantanamo Bay after being arrested in Afghanistan when he was as young as 12.  Military prosecutors and several judges found the evidence against him to be wildly insufficient, and his confessions obtained by torture.

- The Obama administration will continue the Bush administration policy of rendition, though it pledges to give the State Department a more vigorous role in assuring that detainees are not mistreated.