In my previous post, Bush on waterboarding: ‘Damn right’, I quoted from a news article quoting from George Bush’s memoir.

The former president writes, “His understanding of Islam was that he had to resist interrogation only up to a certain point. Waterboarding was the technique that allowed him to reach that threshold, fulfill his religious duty, and then cooperate.” Bush elaborates that Zubaydah gave him a direct instruction, “‘You must do this for all the brothers.’”

I asked why Bush wasn’t suspicious that this instruction from Zubaydah had been coerced from him.

I may have to give credit to the Cheney forces for some humanity after all.  Perhaps they didn’t coerce Zubaydah into making that statement.  Perhaps they were kind enough to just lie to the President about it.

I can picture it now, Cheney turns to an aide and says, “Bush is about to go soft on torture.  What can we do to ease his conscience so that he doesn’t take to drink again?”

The aide and Cheney hatch this plot to concoct this unbelievable directive from Zubaydah.  They knew that Bush was so troubled by what was going on that he would grasp at any straw to assuage his guilt.

Remember that Zubaydah’s attorneys said that after Zubaydah’s 83 waterboardings,  Zubaydah’s mind had been so destroyed that he was unable to contribute to his own defense.  Yet we are to believe he wrote a lucid directive to President Bush? Maybe it wasn’t humanity on Cheney’s part, maybe they couldn’t get anything more from Zubaydah.

If you read the book “The Shock Doctrine” you will learn how the idea of destroying a person’s mind came to be an acceptable goal in psychiatric circles. I know some of this information first hand without having to have read it in the book.

Anyway, Cheney and his aide were probably horrified to see this line published in his memoir.  They knew that people with a clear conscience wouldn’t fall for such nonsense.

This only apparently applies to people with clear conscience.  Even Bush’s main speech writer repeated this nonsensical claim in a debate moderated by Christine Amanpour.

Even if you saw this interview on the TV, it is worth watching the complete 70 minute interview on the web. Seeing the whole thing in the order in which it actually evolved, it starts to make more sense than the way it was edited for TV.

In case you saw this on the television and didn’t catch the URL to the CBS web site, go to Obama: The Full “60 Minutes” Interview. Not only will you find this video, but you will also find transcripts of the interview. I know some people enjoy reading it more than they do watching it.

From many of the things that the President said, I could swear he must be reading this blog. I couldn’t have been more pleased to hear all the things that he said.

I found this excerpt from the Congressional Record on an anti-war site under the title, Senator Whitehouse on Torture: It’s Worse Than Everybody Thinks.

[Congressional Record: June 9, 2009 (Senate)] [Page S6359-S6361]

As recently as May 10, our former Vice President went on a television
show to relate that the interrogation process we had in place produced
from certain key individuals, such as Abu Zubaida–he named him
specifically–actionable information. Well, we had a hearing inquiring
into that, and we produced the testimony of the FBI agent who actually
conducted those interrogations.
Here is what happened. Abu Zubaida was injured in a firefight and
captured in Afghanistan. He was flown to an undisclosed location for
interrogation. The first round of interrogation conducted
professionally by Soufan and his assistant from the CIA produced such
significant intelligence information that a jet with doctors on it was
scrambled from Langley–from this area–and flown to the undisclosed
location so that the best medical care could be provided to Abu Zubaida
so he could continue to talk. That was the first round of information.

In the second interrogation, conducted consistent with professional
interrogation techniques, Abu Zubaida disclosed that the mastermind of
the 9/11 attacks was Khalid Shaik Mohammed. That may be the apex piece of
intelligence information we have obtained during the course of the
conflict.

At that point, the private contractors arrived, and for some reason
Abu Zubaida was handed over to them so they could apply their enhanced
interrogation techniques. Ali Soufan testified that at that point they
got no further information. What triggered the first round of
information was that Soufan knew about Zubaida’s pet name that his
mother used for him. When he used that nickname, Zubaida fell apart. He
didn’t know how to defend himself, and he began to disclose this very
important information.

Knowledge, outwitting people, playing on mental weaknesses, taking
advantage of our skills as Americans–that is what worked and got the
information about Mohammed. He was

[[Page S6361]]

turned over to the private contractors for enhanced techniques and they
got nothing.

It was then determined that because the interrogation had become
unproductive, he should be returned to the FBI agent and CIA agent who
had twice interrogated him. It was in the third round that he disclosed
information about Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber, which was
so important that Attorney General Ashcroft held a press conference, I
believe in Moscow, to celebrate the discovery of this information.
Again, for some reason, he was turned back again to the private
contractors for the application of more abusive techniques, and again
the flow of information stopped.

For a third time, he was returned to the FBI and CIA agents again for
professional interrogation, but by now he had been so compromised by
the techniques, even they were unsuccessful in getting further
information.

As best as I have been able to determine, for the remaining sessions
of 83 waterboardings that have been disclosed as being associated with
this interrogation, no further actionable information was obtained. Yet
the story has been exactly the opposite. The story over and over has
been that once you got these guys out of the hands of the FBI and the
military amateurs and into the hands of the trained CIA professionals,
who can use the tougher techniques, that is when you get the
information. In this case, at least, the exact opposite was the truth,
and this was a case cited by the Vice President by name.

You might want to compare this information with Torture debate: conducted by Christine Amanpour on CNN.

The article Bush on waterboarding: ‘Damn right’ is on the CNN web site. In this article there are excerpts from Bush’s memoir.

Though Bush confirms that he knew the use of waterboarding would one day become public, and acknowledges that it is “sensitive and controversial,” he asserts that “the choice between security and values was real,” and expresses firm confidence in his decision. “Had I not authorized waterboarding on senior al Qaeda leaders, I would have had to accept a greater risk that the country would be attacked. In the wake of 9/11, that was a risk I was unwilling to take,” he writes.

Bush further declares that the new techniques proved effective, yielding information on al Qaeda’s structure and operations, and leading to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, the logistical planner of the 9/11 attacks who was captured on the first anniversary of 9/11.

And if there were any lingering doubts or conflict about the use of waterboarding, Bush discloses that he received reassurance from an unlikely source: terror suspect Abu Zubaydah.

The former president writes, “His understanding of Islam was that he had to resist interrogation only up to a certain point. Waterboarding was the technique that allowed him to reach that threshold, fulfill his religious duty, and then cooperate.” Bush elaborates that Zubaydah gave him a direct instruction, “‘You must do this for all the brothers.'”

Intelligence gleaned from interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and other suspects led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Bush writes. During a raid on Mohammed’s compound, agents discovered more plans for terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.

Prompted by the discoveries, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet asked if he had permission to use enhanced interrogation techniques including waterboarding on Mohammed.

Who does George Bush thinking he is fooling except for his tortured conscience?  What kind of person would write in his memoir that the person that was tortured told him that he should torture “all the brothers”? If he weren’t suspicious that the guy was tortured into writing that, he might at least think his readers would be suspicious.

On December 5, 2008, I posted an item How to Break a Terrorist.

A book titled How to Break a Terrorist is about to be published.  Its author is a former special intelligence operations officer who, along with his team of interrogators, “successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war.”

Contrary to George Bush’s assertions, this interrogator and his team did not use torture to gain the information that led to this result.

In the post from which I just quoted there were also a couple of links. One leads to the article Former U.S. Interrogator: Torture Policy Has Led to More Deaths than 9/11 Attacks.

In the article, he says torture techniques used in Iraq consistently failed to produce actionable intelligence and that methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, which rest on confidence building, consistently worked and gave the interrogators access to critical information.

There was also a link to an OpEd piece in the Washington Post, I’m Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq.

I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they’re listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of “ruses and trickery”). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.

Over the course of this renaissance in interrogation tactics, our attitudes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond.

Perhaps he should have. It turns out that my team was right to think that many disgruntled Sunnis could be peeled away from Zarqawi. A year later, Gen. David Petraeus helped boost the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and signed up with U.S. forces, cutting violence in the country dramatically.

Our new interrogation methods led to one of the war’s biggest breakthroughs: We convinced one of Zarqawi’s associates to give up the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader’s location. On June 8, 2006, U.S. warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs on a house where Zarqawi was meeting with other insurgent leaders.

But Zarqawi’s death wasn’t enough to convince the joint Special Operations task force for which I worked to change its attitude toward interrogations. The old methods continued. I came home from Iraq feeling as if my mission was far from accomplished. Soon after my return, the public learned that another part of our government, the CIA, had repeatedly used waterboarding to try to get information out of detainees.

I know the counter-argument well — that we need the rough stuff for the truly hard cases, such as battle-hardened core leaders of al-Qaeda, not just run-of-the-mill Iraqi insurgents. But that’s not always true: We turned several hard cases, including some foreign fighters, by using our new techniques. A few of them never abandoned the jihadist cause but still gave up critical information. One actually told me, “I thought you would torture me, and when you didn’t, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That’s why I decided to cooperate.”

Torture and abuse are against my moral fabric. The cliche still bears repeating: Such outrages are inconsistent with American principles. And then there’s the pragmatic side: Torture and abuse cost American lives.

I didn’t want to lengthen this post too much.  I have written an additional post, When Torture Starts Information Flow Stops. You might want to compare what is in that article with a Torture Debate that Christine Amanpour conducted on CNN. In the debate, you get an idea where Bush’s words come from.

The Philadelphia Inquirer (I thought they had gone out of business) had the interesting article Another polarized ‘wave’ election Moderates fed up with both parties have led to rapid swings in control of Congress – much like the start of the 1900s. by Thomas Fitzgerald Inquirer Staff Writer.

In 1994, voters gave control of the House to the GOP for the first time in 40 years. But in 2006, Democrats got it back as the midterm elections became a referendum on the unpopular Iraq war and the presidency of George W. Bush. The party’s gains continued in 2008, when it picked up 21 seats as President Obama was elected.

Experts who study voting trends trace the phenomenon to accelerating polarization of the two parties, with Republicans growing more conservative and Democrats more liberal, leaving a large bloc of unattached moderates up for grabs. At least since 2000, this has led to close presidential elections and more frequent switches in control of Congress.

He concludes with  the following:

Some analysts wonder whether the political instability will continue, and ask how a polarized country can work out solutions to its long-deferred difficult problems, such as the national debt and the underfunding of the Social Security and Medicare programs.

In the days when the rest of the world was stumbling around as badly as we were, there was time to get our act together.  Now that there are rapidly rising countries that seem to be able stick to one direction for a while, we run the risk of losing our place in the race to the top.  We might even be vying for the race to the bottom.

Sort of reminds me of my brief stint at Sylvania semiconductor division.  It had a new CEO just about every year.  Do you hear about the great microprocessors now dominating the market from Sylvania?  Does Sylvania even do semiconductors anymore?  Even at the time, I thought that if they had to change CEO every year, maybe the problem was not with the CEO.

Steve,

This morning Governor Tim Kaine, Chair of the Democratic National Committee, called me to congratulate us on bucking national trends by electing John Kitzhaber as Governor and re-electing our entire Democratic Congressional Delegation. He told me we are "a bright spot in a tough election."

Under the leadership of Trent Lutz, Executive Director of the Democratic Party of Oregon and campaign director of Oregon's Democratic Coordinated Campaign, we had an unparalleled field and volunteer plan that made all the difference in this campaign. We knew that races this close are decided by field campaigns and that if we worked hard every day to discuss the differences on the issues between John Kitzhaber and Chris Dudley, we'd bring our supporters home and win.

Here's the story: 

In mid-August, the Democratic Party of Oregon was called upon to mount an aggressive statewide field campaign that would persuade independents, solidify support among Democrats and get out the vote among low-likelihood voters.

With the generous support of Senator Ron Wyden, our Congressmen, and individual donors, the DPO was able to establish field offices and dispatch staff across the state to connect with volunteers like you and get the job done.

With your help and the help of dozens of partner organizations, we made a total of over 446,000 contacts by phone and over 303,000 door knocks. The result?

That’s the power of field operations and grassroots organizing. For months we worked to get the word out about John Kitzhaber and our Democratic candidates on the phones and at the doors, and Tuesday's victory was the fruit of those labors.

Thank you for everything that you did over the course of the campaign.

Yours in democracy,

Meredith Wood Smith
Chair, Democratic Party of Oregon

Paid for by the Democratic Party of Oregon • www.dpo.org • Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee

In the article Assessing midterm losses, Democrats ask whether Obama’s White House fully grasped voters’ fears By Karen Tumulty and Dan Balz Washington Post staff writers, I found a paragraph that triggers my disdain for how political reporting is done.  I sent the authors the following email:

The following quote epitomizes what is wrong with political reporting these days.

“But there will be many tough calls to make as Obama tries to decide how far he can go toward compromising with the Republicans without alienating the left in his own party.”

You think that politics is all about wining and losing elections. Did you ever stop to think that politics is about governing the country?

You could just as easily have said:

“But there will be many tough calls to make as Obama tries to decide how far he can go toward compromising with the Republicans without destroying his plan for repairing the country’s economy.”

Both statements may be true. One shows that politics is a game of winning and losing. The other shows that politics is about governing to promote the success of the country.

If cynicism has deprived you of the ability to relate to what is important, perhaps it is time to transfer to a different beat.

I cannot imagine Walter Cronkite or any of the leading news anchors of his time (except perhaps for David Brinkley) treating, on the air, the serious issues of politics and governing of this country as something to laugh at and trivialize while ignoring the importance of the impact on the future of the country and the world.

President Barack Obama has learned the lesson.  He is putting more effort into explaining what he is doing.  In The New York Times column Exporting Our Way to Stability, he explains the reason for his Asian trip.

AS the United States recovers from this recession, the biggest mistake we could make would be to rebuild our economy on the same pile of debt or the paper profits of financial speculation. We need to rebuild on a new, stronger foundation for economic growth. And part of that foundation involves doing what Americans have always done best: discovering, creating and building products that are sold all over the world.

Perhaps you read the idea of exports powering our way to the future on this very blog. In my August 2 post titled Defining Prosperity Down, I said the following addressed to my friend ScottC:

So what will power our economy in the future?  It has to be exports.  There are places in the world where this over consumption from a real estate bubble did not happen.  In fact there is under consumption in these places compared to the rising real wealth (standard of living) of the people in those countries.  You probably know from your own experience with coworkers and customers that India, China, Korea, and Viet Nam are growth areas, to name a few.

Also look at the April post Romer: Recovery to be export fueled and the January post Capitalism Is The Path To Prosperity.

The Los Angeles Times published the “news” story, A tale of two housing busts: Why is California recovering and Florida still struggling? Now here is a newspaper with a story to sell, oops tell.

On page 1 of the story, you have:

But in the last year or so, California’s housing market, though still weak, has begun recovering, while Florida’s remains on the critical list.

There are several reasons for the difference, but many experts say a key one is the approach to foreclosure.

California keeps things less complicated and largely outside the courtroom, making it easier for banks to seize and resell homes. Like 22 other states, Florida requires that repossessions be approved by judges, which some argue provides extra protection for homeowners but can delay the process for months.

Other reasons they say.  What could they possibly be?  They give you two pages to think of your own other reasons.  Then on page 3, they say:

Faster foreclosures are only one factor boosting California’s housing market. The industry has been buoyed by the state’s more diverse and dynamic economy, and the coastal cities didn’t get the kind of unrestrained development that Florida’s beachfront cities saw.

“The enormous amount of speculation that occurred in Florida certainly contributed mightily to the decline, whereas in California you never had quite the tremendous supply of condominiums, and certainly there weren’t as many along the water,” said Lewis M. Goodkin, president of Goodkin Consulting Corp., a real estate research and advisory firm in Miami.

“Prices jumped dramatically, and now people are buying for 50 cents on the dollar, and I still don’t think it’s a bargain,” he said.

Did I mention the trouble buying hurricane insurance in Florida while there has been no problem with earthquake insurance in California?  I guess I didn’t, and neither did the Los Angeles Time.

I found the article Americans Outlive English, Study Finds on webMD. The sub headline was “Despite Being Less Healthy, Americans Live Longer Than U.K. Residents”.

Older Americans are not quite as healthy as their English counterparts, but do live just as long, if not longer, according to a new study in Demographics.

In the new study, Americans aged 55 to 64 and 70 to 80 had higher rates of chronic diseases than same-aged English people, but they died at about the same rate. And Americans aged 65 and older — while still sicker than their English peers — actually lived longer than similar-aged people in England.

The article concluded with:

The researchers speculate that this may be because these same illnesses are more likely to be fatal in England than in America, or that English people may be diagnosed at later stages in their disease, which would result in a higher mortality rate.

“Both of these explanations imply that there is higher-quality medical care in the United States than in England, at least in the sense that these chronic illnesses are less likely to cause death among people living in the United States,” Smith says.

I think it was Nicholas Taleb who said it is one thing to present data, but quite another thing to think you know the explanation for the data.

I kept thinking that there must be other possible explanations.  Then it hit me.

Perhaps the English health care system focuses on preventing disease while the US system focuses on prolonging life at the end.  This very focus in the US is where a large amount of our costs for health care are spent.  So the English may be getting about the same longevity for far less cost. Moreover, is it better to be healthy as long as you can and then go quickly when your time comes, or is it better to be sickly all your life and prolong your last agonizing days as long as possible with heroic but degrading mechanical efforts to keep you “alive”?

Upon further thought, I came up with the possibility that our fee for service model makes it financially better for the health care provider to administer expensive end-of-life care procedures than it does for maintaining good health up to that end stage.

In following Nicholas Taleb’s warning, all I said was that perhaps my explanation could be an alternative.

After coming up with these thoughts, I decided to write this post. While trying to retrieve the link to the WebMD article for this posting, I stumbled across another article.

U.S. Life Expectancy Falls Behind Major Countries, Despite Highest Health Spending

The researchers say that the failure of the U.S. to make greater gains in survival rates with its greater spending on health care may be attributable to flaws in the overall health care system. Specifically, they point to the role of unregulated fee-for-service payments and our reliance on specialty care as possible drivers of high spending without commensurate gains in life expectancy.

“It was shocking to see the U.S. falling behind other countries even as costs soared ahead of them,” said lead author Peter Muennig, MD, MPH, assistant professor of Health Policy and Management at the Mailman School of Public Health.

More than conjecturing an explanation similar to mine, this study seems to even contradict the raw findings of the story I alluded to first.