That might be the question a year from now, as Third World dictators arrest those identified in diplomatic cables as talking to representatives of the U.S. government. See Joshua Keating's summary of the state of play. He notes that two Zimbabwean generals and an Ethiopian journalist already are in the hot seat.

So yeah, I think Wikileaks has been wildly irresponsible. And people who helped it should probably be ashamed of themselves. Maybe tithe 10 percent of your income to Amnesty International as penance.  

In February 1968, a U.S. soldier was court-martialed simply for holding down a Vietnamese man while two Vietnamese soldiers waterboarded him, according to Guenter Lewy's America in Vietnam. (329)

I mention this because both George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney now have publicly admitted they were approving of waterboarding, a form of torture that once was a crime in the eyes of the U.S. government -- and still is under international laws.

The Washington Post reports that in his new memoir, My Pointy Head, President Bush's response to a request to waterboard 9/11 big nut Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was, "Damn right." (Meanwhile, Cheney stated earlier this year that, "I was a big supporter of waterboarding.")

The Post quotes Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch: "Waterboarding is broadly seen by legal experts around the world as torture, and it is universally prosecutable as a crime. The fact that none of us expect any serious consequences from this admission is what is most interesting."

That said, it will be interesting to watch whether either of these guys, or their campaign-contributor ambassadors, ever travel in Europe. I suspect that one day we could see a lower-ranking type detained for questioning upon de-planing in EU territory.

One blogger I consistently enjoy is Ta-Nehisi Coates. Recently he discussed the mass northward migration of black Americans, and apologetically ended, "It's not the Civil War -- but it kinda is." TNC, I think is more than "kinda!" Major combat operations ended in 1865, but we lost the peace, and so, I think, Phase IV of the war only ended 99 years later with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Greg Mitchell has a good piece on a soldier who killed herself after being pressed to participate in torture as part of interrogations early in the Iraq war. The piece strikes me as credible.

I do think that until there is a complete investigation of what was done in our names, in part by the military but mainly by civilians involved in intelligence, that the stain will be with us, mentally, politically and socially. We need a truth commission. 

The above photo is taken from the burial service of Spc. Alyssa Peterson.

An Army officer writes about being a lesbian in the 10th Mountain Division -- and, in a courageous move, does it on the division commander's discussion board. I think this is one of the best pieces of writing I have ever seen on the subject. Imagine your partner not being able to wrap you in his or her arms when you come home from a deployment.

Although many think homosexuality is a behavior, I beg to differ. I used to pray to God every night to change the way I am. Ever since I was in Elementary school I have known I've been different. My friends all had boy crushes and never talked about liking other girls. I did and felt all alone. I asked my dad what a "lesbian" was after reading about a woman named Ellen who came out publicly that she was gay. My dad told me that it was a girl who liked another girl and she was going to hell because of it. I cried myself to sleep that night and for many years after. I did not want to like girls. I tried dating boys with no success of changing my feelings. I figured I'd live a lonely life, until I allowed myself to be who I am. I was raised Catholic and my family was very homophobic until they realized they had a gay daughter. My other siblings are heterosexual. That was not conditioning, a trend, or some form of faulty upbringing that made me who I am today. I believe in God and know that he made me who I am. No one else can judge me but him and I put my full faith in him everyday as I go through life.

I also currently serve as an officer in the Army. I know exactly how hard it is to serve knowing that my career could end at any moment if someone were to find out about my sexuality. I have never gawked or looked at a woman inappropriately whom I serve with. That is not out of fear of being caught, it's out of respect for other women. I would never want someone gawking at me while I change, so I don't do that myself. I have deployed with 10th Mtn proudly and when I came home I was not able to share my relief and joy with my girlfriend as others could at the welcoming home ceremony. I live in constant fear that my career could end at any moment. I hate having to hide who I am and there's not a day that goes by that I don't struggle with it. When I ended my relationship of 7 years, I couldn't talk to anyone about it. My relationship lasted longer than most military marriages and yet I have no support. I still go to work everyday having to put up a front that everything is fine, because as far as anyone was concerned I wasn't even dating anyone.

I can't express the insurmountable stress it causes to have to hide a piece of who I am. When DADT is overturned, I won't be jumping out of my office screaming "I'm gay" to the world. I'll just be able to breathe easier knowing that my job is secure and relax. I won't discuss my personal life with coworkers because it's none of their business, but at least I would have the option to. I wouldn't have to pretend to have a crush on a guy or go on a date with a fellow CPT in order for others to not get suspicious.

For those saying that gays shouldn't be allowed in the military, the news flash is that we currently do and are allowed to. Under the current policy, no one is allowed to accuse us without evidential proof nor ask us questions about our sexuality. I am also not able to talk about my relationships as others are free to discuss their husbands/wives/girl/boyfriends. Could you heterosexuals imagine not being able to say anything about your partner? What if the policy said no one discusses their relationships, period? I bet the suicide rate would skyrocket. Don't discuss your wife's new attitude or husband's infidelity. Don't talk about your girlfriend getting pregnant or boyfriend proposing. Imagine going throughout your entire career not being able to discuss your relationships and not being able to bring your loved one to any military function. I bet you couldn't.

It's easy to say the policy should stay the way it is when you don't have to live it.

Meanwhile, in the May issue of the Marine Corps Gazette, 2nd Lt. Matthew McCallum argues that the right and honorable thing to do is to let gay Marines be openly gay: "The Marine Corps needs to keep its honor clean and allowed declared homosexuals to serve with pride."

Bottom line: I'm with these guys. I think some people are born gay. Who are we to second-guess God?

Roxana Saberi, the journalist jailed for 100 days last year by the government of Iran, calls on people to continue to pay attention to people executed by Iran for political activities: "If the international community fails to condemn such atrocities, Iran's regime will continue to trample on the basic rights of individuals, many of whom have been detained simply for peacefully standing up for universal human rights."

Speaking of human rights, I was struck yesterday by one of the responses to my Chinese vampire item that seemed to dismiss the situation as simply right wingers against the Chinese government. I am not a right winger, and I don't see human rights as an issue of right or left. I am for people having the right to speak out. This doesn't mean I am automatically for sanctions. I think sunlight is the best disinfectant.

And while we are in the neighborhood, someone kidnapped and killed a young Kurdish reporter recently in Irbil. Protestors blame the authorities. They wonder how a car with a dead body in it made it through 11 checkpoints to where the body was dumped in Mosul.

Jane Mayer deserves some sort of special prize for all her writings -- a book and articles -- on the U.S. government's shameful and counterproductive use since 9/11 of torture in interrogations. I mention this because of her terrific review in the new issue of the New Yorker of a book by Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush, who makes all sorts of wild claims about how well torture worked in protecting the country.

Here's a taste of the masterful job Mayer does of exposing the Thiessen book:

Yet Thiessen is better at conveying fear than at relaying the facts. His account of the foiled Heathrow plot, for example, is "completely and utterly wrong," according to Peter Clarke, who was the head of Scotland Yard's anti-terrorism branch in 2006. "The deduction that what was being planned was an attack against airliners was entirely based upon intelligence gathered in the U.K.," Clarke said, adding that Thiessen's "version of events is simply not recognized by those who were intimately involved in the airlines investigation in 2006." Nor did Scotland Yard need to be told about the perils of terrorists using liquid explosives. The bombers who attacked London's public-transportation system in 2005, Clarke pointed out, "used exactly the same materials."

Nothing beats an on-the record response from those involved. The line I am getting from Theissen's defenders is that, Well, he criticized her, too, in his book. Let's see: One person is a reporter who worked alongside me the Wall Street Journal. The other was a flack for Jesse Helms and Rumsfeld. Who am I more likely to trust? It puzzles me that my old newspaper, The Washington Post, would hire Theissen to write for its op-ed page. How many former Bush speechwriters does one newspaper need?

As I blimblam around the country, I've been spending my time on airplanes reading (in addition to the usual histories of World War II -- I mean, just how big a jerk was Bernard Law Montgomery?), a new history/memoir about U.S. Army interrogation approaches in Iraq during that strange, disconcerting first year of the war. Pretty specialized I know, and pretty damn depressing. But this book, The Fight for the High Ground, written by Maj. Douglas Pryer and published by the CGSC Foundation Press, actually has a bright spot in it, because it looks at why some units didn't abuse or torture prisoners.

Pryer, who was there, concludes that the "root cause" of the abuses

...  was not over-crowded detention facilities, untrained guars, immature interrogators, or any of the plethora of other reasons ... investigators have cited as the causes of abuse for a particular case. The fundamental reason why interrogation abuse in Iraq occurred was a failure in leadership. The answer is that simple.

He respectfully but explicitly calls out Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, now retired, as the key figure in that failure. 

He also offers up this interesting quote from Chief Warrant Officer 2 John Groseclose, who he says won the Defense Department's "Top HUMINT Collector of 2003 Award." Groseclose, he reports, had only contempt for interrogators who beat, froze, or otherwise scared detainees:

For an interrogators to resort to techniques like that is for that interrogator to admit that they don't know how to interrogate. Personally, I'm offended by it."

Unless the Army does a better job in ethical teaching and training of soldiers, Pryer warns, it is likely to repeat the mistakes of Iraq. Anyone listening? 

PS: New Monty facts: After World War II, he proved even more incapable of getting along with colleagues than he did during the war. And then he skipped his mother's funeral.

Ol' Pat Lang likes peeing all over CNAS, but no worries, if that's what keeps him ticking. I do like his idea of trying the worst of the 9/11 guys on Governor's Island, smack dab in the New York harbor, not far from the World Trade Center site, and in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. Like the Attackerman says, the city that gave the world gangsta rap and The Godfather shouldn't be afraid of a few dissolute middle class Arab wankers. "I swear, on the souls of my grandchildren...."

Oh yeah, gonna make you an offer . . . .

Here is more from that terrific speech retired Army Col. Stuart Herrington gave on the disastrous recent history of American interrogation operations. The talk, given at Fort Leavenworth late last year, was sponsored by the CGSC Foundation, which plans to publish the speech in a book this spring about ethics and law in contemporary conflict. I am quoting from the speech with the CGSC Foundation's permission.

The U.S. military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was worse than a crime in his view, it was a blunder. "Guantanamo was the diametric opposite of how I would have set up a facility," said Herrington, a seasoned interrogator who advocates treating prisoners with respect and decency -- not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it is the most effective way to gather intelligence.

"Iraq was worse," he continued. He arrived there in December 2003 on an official trip to review U.S. military intelligence operations in the new war there. He was shocked by what he found. "I reported, in writing, that the Special Operations Task Force was brutalizing detainees at their Camp Nama facility before turning them in to the Baghdad Airport confinement facility." He was surprised to have his warning disregarded:

"I expected a major investigation of rogue activity, but a feeble attempt to investigate was quickly dropped. Investigations into Camp Nama were unwelcome, because, we know now, the excesses that I and others reported were sanctioned at very high levels of the U.S. government . . . .

He also inspected the Abu Ghraib prison and reported that it was a disastrous mess, "a squandered and lost opportunity." So it was no surprise, he said, a few months later when the news of the abuses broke, with "the sheer depravity of mistreatment, [and] the idea that American soldiers would descend to such depths of conduct," that the global media seized on it.

Hats off to Army Maj. Gen. George Davis, who vigorously objected to waterboarding and other forms of torture. He wrote that:

No modern state, which is a party to international law, can sanction, either expressly or by a silence which imports consent, a resort to torture with a view to obtain confessions, as an incident to its military operations. If it does, where is the line to be drawn? If the ‘water cure' is ineffective, what shall be the next step? Shall the victim be suspended, head down, over the smoke of a smouldering fire; she he be tightly bound and dropped from a distance of several feet; shall he be beaten with rods; shall his shins be rubbed with a broomstick until they bleed?

Fwiw,  General Davis made that comment in September 1902, when he was the senior lawyer in the Army. He is quoted in the new, Winter 2010 issue of Army History magazine. 

We've been hearing from the League of Concerned Former CIA Directors recently, so I was interested to see in the new issue of Parameters, one of the Army's professional magazines, an empassioned article by John Wahlquist supporting the Obama administration's recent moves to curtail the American government's use of torture.

Wahlquist, a veteran interrogator who now teaches at the National Defense Intelligence College, writes that:

President Obama's executive order on interrogation provides an excellent opportunity to end abusive practices and to propose a new agenda for intelligence interviewing that increases the capability to collect accurate information from enemy detainees effectively and humanely. Seizing this opportunity is essential to increasing the chances of success for counterterrorism operations worldwide and reducing risks to the lives of American service members and civilians, as well as detainees. Doing so enhances the broader national security agenda without sacrificing American values.

In other words, treating detainees decently improves our intelligence, makes us safer, and protects our system. 'Nuff said.

Here is a note an Army National Guard lieutenant colonel I know sent to the columnist Charles Krauthammer, who didn't respond:

Mr. Krauthammer,

I don't usually make a point of responding to the talking-head proselytizers in my Sunday paper but your column prompted me to do so.

I'll make this simple. There are NO circumstances under which torture is acceptable. Jack Bauer's "24" makes for great TV but even in a ticking timebomb situation such behavior is inappropriate and illegal. Torture is counter to our moral code, a violation of the Geneva and Hague conventions to which we subscribe and perhaps least understood, but most significantly, counterproductive and ineffective. Nothing else really needs to be said, but if you want more details read on.

I have friends who have been to SERE and instructed SERE students and acted as interrogators. All agree that waterboarding and other such 'enhanced' techniques are good for training (in a strictly controlled environment) our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines on what to expect in captivity. They also agree that it is torture to anyone outside that training environment. Finally, they all agree that torture rarely results in actionable intelligence, as the victim is willing to say most anything to end the torture.

So you must wonder, by what authority is this letter writer speaking? Well, as a Lieutenant Colonel and Combat Arms Battalion Commander in the Army I am responsible for the welfare, training, good order, and discipline of my soldiers. I am responsible for everything they do or fail to do. I am also responsible to follow and issue only those orders that are legal, ethical and moral. Torture of another human being is illegal, unethical and immoral, and I would be duty bound to disobey any such order...just as PFC Lynndie England and SPC Charles Graner (and their many counterparts, senior officers and NCOs at Abu Ghraib) should have done...just as any of my soldiers should disobey should I give such an order. We all have the lessons of Nuremburg to rely upon anytime such questions come to mind; "I was just following orders" is never justification for committing crimes against other human beings.

Before deploying to Iraq last year, I explained these things to my troopers. It is difficult to explain to young (practically) kids, with little experience, and poor knowledge of the world...but if you are caring and committed, and repeat yourself often enough they learn and understand. I told them the most important thing they needed to take away from all their preparations was that while it would be terrible to lose one of them or have one of them seriously physically injured, it would be worse to have them come home physically well and mentally broken because they had somehow lost their humanity. Torture destroys our humanity, and any equivocation (feel free to exercise the Kantian absolutist vs utilitarian argument to your heart's content) on the matter is just bullshit.

. . . If captured I would honor our Armed Forces Code of Conduct to the best of my ability and go to whatever my fate, resolute in the knowledge that our nation remains a last bastion of what is right (or ought to be right) in the world. Torture has no place in America, and Americans have no reason to employ it. War ain't fair, but we have to fight it while maintaining a level of dignity and humanity, jus in bello. This is rough work for people bound to a code of Duty, Honor, Country. Proselytizers, who say but do not act, need not apply. 

To summarize: Those who endorse torture need to think twice about the effect it has on the moral and discipline of our troops. Also, think about his point that torture has two victims: the person suffering it, and the person inflicting it.  

Billie/PartsnPieces/flickr 

Atrocities happen in war -- got it. We have the military chain of command and justice system to handle those violations. So the goal should be to go after those who crossed the line and made torture official policy. That was wrong, and I think illegal. 

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images