The Gitmo Myth and the Torture Canard

The Gitmo Myth and the Torture Canard

Lets get past all the politics of Obama appeasing his supporters and take a look at the "torture" of Getmo, why people where there and what Obama has really done to "change" what Bush did. (If you want me to save you th e read, the torture happened to 3 people. Obama made no changes,but the media is happy and so are the people who support Obama but hated Bush. What really happened is political and media manipulation against Bush and for Obama. Oh and of course making all of the US military look bad and gave a base for the Obama World Apology Tour so terrorists have more to be angry about.




On January 21, 2009, President Barack Obama issued his first executive order: He was closing the detention center at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba and calling a halt to the military commissions created in late 2001 to try terrorist suspects detained there. Like the startling opening chord of a Beethoven symphony, Obama’s action was intended to herald a new tone in America’s “war on terror” and a restoration of America’s moral standing. The response was electric. The facility at Guantánamo (Gitmo for short) had become “America’s most notorious prison,” as Fox News put it. In the minds of many, it was the American equivalent of the Bastille or the KGB’s Lubyanka prison: a dungeon used to isolate, intimidate, and torture generally hapless inmates, many of whom were innocent of any crime against the United States. Dana Priest of the Washington Post took to the paper’s front page to proclaim joyously that “with the stroke of his pen,” Obama had “effectively declared an end to the ‘war on terror,’ as President George W. Bush had defined it.” Now Obama could begin the process of rehabilitating America’s image around the world, the very image Gitmo had done so much to blacken.

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Then several strange things happened. Obama’s order “closing” Gitmo actually left it open for a year, ostensibly until new arrangements could be made for the 240 or so inmates still detained there—though Obama admitted privately it might have to stay open longer than that. Later, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that, far from being “the Bermuda Triangle of human rights” that Human Rights Watch’s Wendy Patten had dubbed it, Gitmo was in full compliance with the humane-treatment provisions of the Geneva Convention. Meanwhile, the military commissions, which Human Rights Watch and others groups had denounced as a travesty of justice, were only being suspended for 120 days, pending a review—and, indeed, following that review, will be reinstated almost exactly as they were before.

If one adds to this mix:
• the twelve separate inquiries into the abuses alleged by critics and former detainees at Gitmo that found no evidence of those abuses taking place;
• the revelation during the release earlier this year of the so-called “torture memos” that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques had been applied to exactly three suspects in the course of eight years and had never been standard operating practice at Gitmo;
• the evaluation by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point that 73 percent of Gitmo detainees were “a demonstrated threat” to Americans;
• and, finally, the fact that the detention facility was created in the wake of a declaration by Congress in September 2001 that “all necessary and appropriate force” should be used “against those nations, organizations, or persons” [emphasis added] responsible for the attacks of September 11;
—one may be permitted to wonder why, exactly, the pressure to close the prison facility has been so intense and long-lasting.

The standard argument is that the public shift in attitude toward Gitmo was gradual, and reflected a growing disillusionment with the war on terror as the sordid details of how George W. Bush and his assistants chose to wage it came out, including the supposed secret use of torture. Once the detention center had become a cesspool of human-rights abuse, the evil spawned there then seeped into other facilities where prisoners in the Bush war on terror were being held, most notoriously the Iraqi prison at Abu Ghraib. In 2004, former Vice President Al Gore announced that Abu Ghraib “was not the result of random acts by a ‘few bad apples’: it was the natural consequence of the Bush administration policy” of retaining and interrogating inmates at Gitmo.

What this account and others like it fail to take into consideration are the aggressive and unending efforts of a cadre of lawyers, activists, left-leaning Democrats in Congress, and civil libertarians against the facility, its purpose, its goal, and its existence. These efforts began even before it was opened, in November 2001, and continue to this day. The anti-Gitmo forces worked tirelessly to shape the public perception that Gitmo was the red-hot center of an aggressive policy approach that led the leftist financier George Soros to declare: “The biggest terrorist in the world is George W. Bush.”

The enemies of Bush and Gitmo have succeeded brilliantly. But in so doing, they have done grave violence to the truth about the Guantánamo Bay facility, have aided in the release of prisoners who have since committed acts of terrorism outside the United States, and may yet succeed in having Barack Obama’s government release young men with terrifying ambitions for murder and mass destruction onto the soil of the United States.

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WHY GITMO?

In October 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan to crush the al-Qaeda terrorists who had free run of the country and the Taliban government that was housing them. Within weeks, the U.S. military found itself holding tens of thousands of prisoners, including foreign al-Qaeda fighters who had been training in terrorist camps in the Afghan hinterland.



The tale would later be told that many of these prisoners were hapless shepherds, farmers, and even tourists caught up in the fighting, and that the Northern Alliance, the Afghan guerrilla group with which the United States was allied in the fight against the Taliban, was handing over innocent men whom they falsely dubbed al-Qaeda members in order to collect a money bounty.

In point of fact, the military captured more than 70,000 men and put every one through a rigorous screening process. Ten thousand were released immediately. By the time the military had completed its work, only 800 remained in custody. These were the ones they had deemed hard-core trained terrorists who could not be released without running the risk they would rejoin the battle. The question was what to do with them.

From the beginning, the Department of Defense and its head, Donald Rumsfeld, were deeply reluctant to take on the job of detaining these prisoners who, unlike normal POWs, fought for no country, wore no uniforms, and had systematically broken the rules of war. In a conventional war, prisoners are held to keep them from being returned to the fight. The problem here was that there was no conventional battlefield; in a war of terror, a combatant can theoretically strike anywhere in the world. It was not clear to anyone what was to be done with this new model of stateless combatant. Rumsfeld “hated the idea of being a jailer,” as his aide Douglas Feith relates in his memoir, War and Decision, in large measure owing to the fact that they were not automatically covered under the Geneva Convention. Deciding how they were to treated or tried posed immense legal difficulties that no lawyer at the Department of Defense was eager to take on.

Finding a place to put them proved the easy part. In 1987, a prison had been set up for the United States Southern Command at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The site was a military location and therefore secure—so secure that eventually the CIA transferred its “high-value” al-Qaeda detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed there. It was not in a Muslim country, which lessened the possibility of a prison break or other political complications. Finally, it was under United States control but not on United States soil—which, according to a 1950 Supreme Court decision in Johnson v. Eisentrager, meant that prisoners could be lawfully brought under American custody from various international locations to be detained and processed without the involvement of civil courts.

Gitmo was never meant to be a prison where inmates were to serve sentences for crimes. It was, in the words of a Defense Department document, a detention facility set up in order to prevent “enemy combatants from continuing the fight against the US. and its partners in the war on terror.” Its goals were military and tactical, not juridical or penal. Still, the conditions under which these unconventional prisoners were to be held did involve questions.

The questions were especially complex because the facility became a place where military, FBI, and CIA interrogators would all become involved in questioning al-Qaeda suspects to determine who was guilty of involvement in the 9/11 plot and whether other attacks were being planned or were imminent. Since all these agencies operate under different legal strictures, sorting out who could do what was immensely difficult.

In the end, addressing all these legal questions fell to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), then led by John Yoo.

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THE MEMOS

Yoo was tasked with providing a set of ground rules for detention, interrogation, and trial of the detainees. The Department of Defense had wanted to treat these as three separate issues. However, Yoo and the OLC lawyers believed they had to be handled as parts of a single policy—especially since at the same time they were also setting guidelines on how the CIA would be allowed to question suspects that fell into its hands.

Those rules and memos were assembled over the course of many months bridging 2001 and 2002, in the immediate shadow of 9/11 with the possibility of a second massive attack looming on the horizon. Later, the press would brand them “torture memos,” and the Obama administration’s decision to release the full texts of those memos in April 2009 fed the frenzy. However, they could just as well be branded “anti-torture memos.” Yoo and his colleagues used them to define the boundaries at which interrogation of unwilling and uncooperative prisoners would cross over into the category of torture. Once those boundaries were breached, any action would be illegal under United States law and international treaties, including the 1994 United Nations Convention Against Torture. They looked to practices by Israeli as well as British intelligence services that had undergone legal scrutiny in their own countries, and they also considered historical norms about torture since the Middle Ages.

The OLC understood as well as any of its later critics that torture—the cruel and needless infliction of pain in order to dominate and control others or to exact confessions or information—was barbarism. It was precisely in order to prevent such barbarism that the memos were drawn up in the first place. It was also why then, and later, army and CIA interrogators tried to avoid even drawing close to those boundaries without explicit authorization.

Critics further assert that the OLC memos “denied” Geneva Convention status to the al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners at Gitmo. One key lawyer, Michael Ratner, has claimed that by “ignoring” the Geneva Convention in this way, the Justice Department rules were in “violation of half a century of U.S. precedent.” This is incorrect. Yoo and the OLC were not making policy in the memos. They were attempting to describe the law as it stood. As Yoo has pointed out, it was up to the president and the president alone to decide whether the Gitmo prisoners should be treated in accordance with Geneva Convention standards (which he did, in 2002). The prisoners in no way fit the standard of “lawful combatant” as defined by the Geneva Convention’s Common Article 3 and therefore could not automatically be accorded the treatment the Convention required. Indeed, because they were not in uniform and were fighting under no flag, the rules applying specifically to that category could not apply without violating the sense of the Convention itself—although that did not mean they could be treated in any way the Gitmo guards and commandant saw fit.

There were other practical reasons for refusing to treat the Gitmo prisoners like German or Italian POWs in World War II, or somewhat later, Iraqi soldiers captured in Operation Iraqi Freedom (no one, then or later, ever suggested that the Geneva Convention, including Common Article 3, did not apply to prisoners captured in Iraq). Al-Qaeda recruits are trained in the arts of conspiracy, assassination, and murder. A system of open barracks, as in a conventional POW camp, would allow detainees to organize plots, even rebellions, within the compounds (organizing riots in a POW camp is a violation of Common Article 3 of the Convention), and to take vengeance on their own number who were suspected of confessing or cooperating with American authorities. Detention in separate cells, as in a conventional prison, seemed the only way to overcome this logistical nightmare.

The rules on Gitmo detention and on interrogation constituted a valiant attempt to deal with an unprecedented legal situation. The same was true of the system of military “commissions” or tribunals for trying suspects at Gitmo. Here the Justice Department largely followed the precedent of tribunals used by the American military during World War II, and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1942 decision Ex Parte Quirin.

Again, critics of the tribunals would accuse Yoo and the Bush administration of trying to make an end run around the United States criminal-justice system by establishing a separate judicial review process for terror suspects and turning Gitmo into a secret offshore detention haven outside the scrutiny of the American justice system. In fact, Yoo and his colleagues were trying to protect the American legal system from stepping into a political-military minefield. Imagine that the Gitmo terrorists had been put into the standard criminal-justice system, with its time-consuming rules about due process, habeas corpus, and countless appeals. Imagine, further, that in the course of all this there had been a second major attack like 9/11, or an al-Qaeda-inspired riot occurred in a U.S. prison that had involved the taking or murdering of hostages. There would have been immense public pressure for the administration to “do something,” to bend or break normal rules in the interest of swift justice. That highly plausible scenario, made reality, would have threatened the integrity of the American justice system. The commissions were intended as a prophylactic means of protecting the American legal system from an unprecedented situation it was not designed to manage.

The plan backfired. The enemies of the Bush White House and the war on terror were working on their own political agenda, involving an attack on the Gitmo system through the courts.

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ENTER STAGE LEFT

When President Bush announced in November 2001 the establishment of the detention center and plans for military commissions to try cases, Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights was furious. “The idea that you could pick up people anywhere in the world and hold them forever without a trial is outrageous,” he later told the magazine Mother Jones. Ratner immediately began organizing an effort to offer legal counsel to the first detainees, and organized teams of attorneys working pro bono from some of Washington’s largest law firms to bring suit on behalf of the detainees.

Ratner is a veteran of the ideological wars inside the United States. The Center for Constitutional Rights was founded by the late William Kunstler, who had served as defense attorney for the Chicago Seven, the Black Panthers, and other violent radical groups. Ratner himself had been at the head of the National Lawyers Guild, once a Stalinist front group, before representing Fidel Castro, members of Hamas, and Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh who organized the original bombing of the World Trade Center back in 1993. One of Ratner’s colleagues, Lynne Stewart, was eventually convicted of providing material aid to Rahman while acting as an officer of the court. Ratner publicly defended Stewart’s actions, and was a dedicated foe of the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Ratner’s allies in the fight for the detainees included Islamist lobbying groups willing to spread the notion that the Gitmo detainees were victims of racial and religious discrimination; liberal lawyers at prestigious Washington firms who had been taught by their law professors that the law’s role is to effect social and political change and who wished to do something more meaningful than work on corporate mergers; and eventually a Democratic party understandably looking for an issue it could use to undermine public support for George Bush (running in the mid-80s in early 2002) and get them back in the political game.

In February 2002 Ratner filed his first petition for habeas corpus for a British-born Gitmo detainee named Shafiq Rasul—a petition that would have fateful consequences two years later. At the time, however, the focus of Ratner and his allies was not torture or the interrogations at Gitmo. Instead, they worked to plant the idea in the public’s mind that most, if not all, of these inmates might be innocent victims, picked up on the battlefield by mistake.

The inmates themselves were happy to oblige. Shafiq Rasul, for example, told Ratner and anyone who would listen that he was no terrorist. He was an innocent tourist whom the Taliban had abducted while he was traveling in Afghanistan, and that during the American invasion he had been forced to take up an AK-47 to use in self-defense. Rasul’s story and similar ones told by two other Gitmo captives born in the English town of Tipton, Ruhal Ahmed and Afiq Iqal (later known as the Tipton Three), became the centerpiece of Ratner’s campaign to open the gates at Gitmo. Their picture adorns his 2007 book, The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld.

Clearly, Ratner insisted, an injustice had been done to these and other foreign nationals caught in the American net after the war in Afghanistan. The fact that Bush had excluded Gitmo from normal judicial review meant that the innocent were bound to suffer, while the remote location of Gitmo ensured that they were left to the mercy of their jailers.

Ratner’s portrait of Gitmo’s detainees was wildly off the mark. But it did reflect the fact that, in its early months, conditions at Gitmo were chaotic. The population of the naval base had swelled from 2,000 to 10,000, among them military personnel, FBI, CIA, Army as well as Drug Enforcement Agency interrogators, doctors, Arab translators, and Muslim chaplains, and of course, the detainees themselves. One of the first structures in the prison camp was a trailer for the International Commission for the Red Cross, which had full access to the detainees and collected mail to be sent to their relatives.

New soldiers and units were constantly rotating through. No one had yet properly defined how Gitmo would function as both a detention and an interrogation facility. In addition, there were no rules on how to punish inmates who attacked their guards or otherwise violated camp rules. There was, and never has been, a disciplinary system for prisoners at Gitmo. To this day prisoners are not punished for their crimes or offenses, even when they attack guards or pelt them with feces.

In fact, before Major General Geoffrey Miller took charge as commandant in November 2002, Gitmo was, according to one eyewitness, “an island of divided loyalties and waning morale.” The environment had grown so stale and hermetic that it became a breeding ground of rumor about unorthodox and bizarre interrogation tactics, including inmates who claimed they were being slapped, shouted at, or subjected to loud music; interrogators pretending to defecate on the Koran; and female interrogators sitting on detainees’ laps in order to humiliate them, or splashing them with red ink pretending it was menstrual blood. Every one of these was investigated and proved false, but the rumors were passed along by FBI interrogators in memos that expressed concern about Gitmo interrogation tactics being used by personnel working for other cabinet agencies. They seemed to verify the picture painted by Ratner and others that the facility was reeling out of control.

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THREE CATEGORIES

In point of fact, the main problem was that Gitmo was proving an ineffective facility when it came to uncovering intelligence. Given the hardened nature of the terrorists being held there, and the urgency of getting information from them, an experienced Army interrogator named Paul Rester (who arrived at Gitmo in 2002) had assumed that the “gloves would be off” in interrogation tactics. To his shock, he found the rules were stricter even than the Army field manual’s: “It was a much more restrictive environment than anywhere else I’ve conducted interrogations.” Prisoners were allowed to defy their questioners and treat them with contempt, even as FBI and Army interrogators were often working at cross-purposes.

Perhaps the best case study was that of Muhammad el-Qahtani, a Saudi national caught by U.S. forces on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan in December 2001. Like other al-Qaeda operatives, Qahtani claimed that he was an innocent man who had only been visiting Afghanistan to buy and sell falcons. Interest in Qahtani changed abruptly in July 2002, when the FBI learned that he was the same Qahtani who had been denied entry at Orlando Airport on a flight from Canada on August 4, 2001—and that Muhammad Atta, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, had been waiting at Orlando Airport that same day.

Suddenly deemed a “high-value” detainee, Qahtani was moved on orders of the Navy to its brig on the base for isolation. There the FBI took charge and for 30 days carried on a desultory interrogation with its usual, buttoned-down, fully Miranda-warning-inspired style of criminal investigation—and got nowhere.

After thirty days, the Army stepped in and took charge. The FBI was furious at its removal from the case, and its investigators sent e-mails decrying the military’s attempts at breaking Qahtani’s will, which included yelling, calling him names, subjecting him to sleep deprivation and loud music, and duct-taping his cell shut. “It was stupid and ineffective,” Paul Rester later said. “But it wasn’t torture or abuse.”

However, one FBI agent saw the guards bring a growling dog into the interrogation room, which he assumed was being used to intimidate Qahtani—although subsequent investigation showed that dogs at Gitmo were used to escort prisoners back and forth to their cells, not to threaten them. Since that detail was included in the FBI e-mails, and later leaked, the idea that dogs were used to abuse prisoners would become a fixture in the false portrait that was being painted of the goings-on at Gitmo.

Interrogators were still getting nowhere, so on October 11, 2002, the head of the Southern Command, General James Hill, was asked to approve an enhanced interrogation schedule, divided into three categories of coercion beyond those covered in the U.S. Army field manual:

Category I, yelling and deception.

Category II, stress positions for up to four hours, light deprivation, removal of clothing, shaving of facial hair (very shaming to a Muslim male), and exploitation of fear phobias, including fear of dogs.

Category III, “the use of scenarios” to convince the detainee that his life is in danger, including waterboarding.

On November 15, against FBI objections, Hill approved the use of Categories I and II, but not Category III. He also approved a plan for applying them to Qahtani by degrees on a thirty-day schedule beginning on November 23. On December 2, Rumsfeld weighed in with his own authorization, which, again, did not include waterboarding. Rumsfeld had his doubts in any case, and on January 15 rescinded his authorization pending further review.

Still, that proved to be enough time to break Qahtani. He was subjected to 20-hour interrogation sessions, being tied to a dog leash (no actual dogs were involved), having water poured continually on his head (but no waterboarding), while women’s clothes were dropped on his face and a bra strapped across his clothed chest. These and other humiliations, including turning up the air-conditioning to uncomfortable levels, did result in Qahtani’s brief hospitalization in early December with brachyocardia. However, none remotely approached the definition of torture defined by the OLC’s August 2002 memo as administering physical pain equal to the intensity “accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,” or psychological harm “lasting for months or even years.”

By then, Qahtani had confessed that he worked for al Qaeda. One by one, without hesitation, he picked out pictures of all nineteen of the 9/11 hijackers and called out their names—and admitted that he, not Zacarias Moussaoui, had been slated to be the twentieth hijacker. He also revealed that the true mastermind of the attack was Osama bin Laden’s deputy Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Qahtani also fingered another Saudi al-Qaeda operative, Adnan el-Shukrijumah, who was in the United States organizing another 9/11-style attack for the summer of 2004. Khalid Mohammed’s subsequent capture in Pakistan in March 2003 revealed still more details which, we now know, enabled the Bush administration to foil a second wave of suicide attacks directed at Los Angeles.

Whether Qahtani’s interrogation constituted “torture” might be a matter of debate, but not, it seems, to the new Obama administration. For according to an argument advanced by Obama’s Justice Department in May regarding the possibility that the concentration-camp guard John Demjanjuk would be tortured were he to be deported to Germany, the Qahtani interrogation could not be judged to have risen to the standard of torture because meeting that standard would have required “his prospective torturer [to] have the motive or purpose” of inflicting extreme pain and suffering. That was certainly not the case with Qahtani.

By any standard, his interrogation had also yielded valuable, actionable intelligence that saved American lives. It also established two unquestionable facts about Gitmo. The first was that coerced interrogations were the extreme exception, not standard practice, at the facility. The other was that Rumsfeld and the Bush administration were extremely reluctant to endorse any of these techniques, to the point of overriding the wishes of their own officers in the field, and that the administration was prepared to withdraw permission for enhanced techniques, up to and including waterboarding, almost as soon as they were granted.

However, the leaked FBI memos allowed critics to obfuscate both these points. They felt free to claim that the extraordinary measures taken against Qahtani were standard practice at Gitmo for all detainees; and that far from being reluctant to use these techniques even within the guidelines set out by the OLC, the Defense Department couldn’t wait to use them. Still, those counterclaims gained little traction until the revelations about Abu Ghraib broke in the spring of 2004.

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ABU GHRAIB

It is important to remember that the exposure of the abuses at Abu Ghraib came not from a reporter or human-rights advocate or international agency, but from within the Department of Defense itself. It was the classic case of a government agency learning about abuses and violations of specific guidelines, thoroughly investigating the abuse, alerting higher-ups of the problem, and then dismissing and punishing those responsible—while developing additional guidelines to prevent it from happening again. The Abu Ghraib investigation, in short, was government at its most responsive and effective.

All the same, it was a propaganda gold mine for Ratner and his allies. Now they could attach a series of disturbing visual images to their stories about treatment of Gitmo detainees—in fact, in The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld, Ratner has exterior pictures of prisoners at Gitmo’s Camp X-Ray followed immediately by interior snapshots from Abu Ghraib, as if they were in actual sequence. The implication was that what happened at Abu Ghraib was normal procedure in Gitmo.

By that spring, also, Democrats were looking for a campaign issue to derail President Bush’s reelection chances. The Bush administration’s “culpability” for Abu Ghraib was made to order. “Shamefully,” Senator Edward Kennedy said on the floor of the Senate, “we now learn that Saddam’s torture chambers [are] reopened under new management: U.S. management.” Reading the FBI memos in light of the Abu Ghraib pictures, Senator Dick Durbin compared the Gitmo jailors to Nazis and the Soviets in the gulag, henchmen of some “mad regime—Pol Pot and others—who have no concern for human beings.”

So Democrats were quick to embrace the thesis put forward by Seymour Hersh in his book Chain of Command: Even if Bush and Rumsfeld hadn’t actually ordered the abuses at Abu Ghraib, still, their “hard” approach to the war on terror, denying Gitmo suspects American-style civil rights and allowing coercive interrogations, had created an atmosphere in which torture was condoned and even common. Hersh attempted to make this explicit by pointing out that Gitmo’s former commandant, Geoffrey Miller, had been sent to Iraq to advise on interrogations in August 2003. Here was clear evidence, Hersh and others claimed, that the Bush administration had wanted to extend Gitmo’s “reign of terror” into occupied Iraq. But the opposite was true. Miller had been sent to Iraq precisely to make sure that American prisoner detention facilities there lived up to the rigorous standards applied at Gitmo under Miller’s tenure.


Footnotes

1This was demonstrated by the case of Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, where inmates used their mosque (deemed off limits to U.S. personnel) to dig an escape tunnel and build a cache of homemade weapons, including concrete shards and bombs built from feces, socks, and flammable hand sanitizer. When the tunnel was discovered in March 2005, prisoners rioted for four days, injuring several U.S. soldiers; ultimately infantry units and a Black Hawk helicopter had to be used to restore order. As Kyndra Rotunda relates in her book, Honor Bound, the Camp Bucca incident, almost completely ignored by the American press, weighed heavily on the minds of Gitmo staff.

2 Meanwhile, the 2004 commission headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger cleared the Defense Department and Bush administration of any responsibility for what had happened at Abu Ghraib.

3 According to Richard Clarke’s memoirs, Against All Enemies, Vice President Al Gore cheered them on. Clarke tells the story of Gore coming to a 1993 NSC meeting where the idea of “extraordinary rendition” was proposed. While White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler had his doubts, Gore had none. “That’s a no brainer,” Clarke says Gore declared, “of course it’s a violation of international law. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.”


About the Author

Arthur Herman’s Gandhi and Churchill was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction. His last article for COMMENTARY was “The Return of Carterism?” (January 2009).