The Torture Apologists
The killing of Osama bin Laden provoked a host of reactions from Americans: celebration, triumph, relief, closure and renewed grief. One reaction, however, was both cynical and disturbing: crowing by the apologists and practitioners of torture that Bin Laden’s death vindicated their immoral and illegal behavior after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Jose Rodriguez Jr. was the leader of counterterrorism for the C.I.A. from 2002-2005 when Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other Al Qaeda leaders were captured. He told Time magazine that the recent events show that President Obama should not have banned so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. (Mr. Rodriguez, you may remember, ordered the destruction of interrogation videos.)
John Yoo, the former Bush Justice Department lawyer who twisted the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions into an unrecognizable mess to excuse torture, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the killing of Bin Laden proved that waterboarding and other abuses were proper. Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, said at first that no coerced evidence played a role in tracking down Bin Laden, but by Tuesday he was reciting the talking points about the virtues of prisoner abuse.
There is no final answer to whether any of the prisoners tortured in President George W. Bush’s illegal camps gave up information that eventually proved useful in finding Bin Laden. A detailed account in The Times on Wednesday by Scott Shane and Charlie Savage concluded that torture “played a small role at most” in the years and years of painstaking intelligence and detective work that led a Navy Seals team to Bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan.
That squares with the frequent testimony over the past decade from many other interrogators and officials. They have said repeatedly, and said again this week, that the best information came from prisoners who were not tortured. The Times article said Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times, fed false information to his captors during torture.
Even if it were true that some tidbit was blurted out by a prisoner while being tormented by C.I.A. interrogators, that does not remotely justify Mr. Bush’s decision to violate the law and any acceptable moral standard.
This was not the “ticking time bomb” scenario that Bush-era officials often invoked to rationalize abusive interrogations. If, as Representative Peter King, the Long Island Republican, said, information from abused prisoners “directly led” to the redoubt, why didn’t the Bush administration follow that trail years ago?
There are many arguments against torture. It is immoral and illegal and counterproductive. The Bush administration’s abuses — and ends justify the means arguments — did huge damage to this country’s standing and gave its enemies succor and comfort. If that isn’t enough, there is also the pragmatic argument that most experienced interrogators think that the same information, or better, can be obtained through legal and humane means.
No matter what Mr. Yoo and friends may claim, the real lesson of the Bin Laden operation is that it demonstrated what can be done with focused intelligence work and persistence.
The battered intelligence community should now be basking in the glory of a successful operation. It should not be dragged back into the muck and murk by political figures whose sole agenda seems to be to rationalize actions that cost this country dearly — in our inability to hold credible trials for very bad men and in the continued damage to our reputation.
Washing Away the Fields of Iowa
To an untrained eye, the fields of Iowa have a reassuring solidity. You cannot tell that the state has lost half its topsoil in the past century. According to a new report from the Environmental Working Group, Iowa’s soil is washing away at rates far higher than anyone realized.
For Iowa — and other Corn Belt states facing similar problems — this means an increasing loss of fertility that has to be replaced chemically. It marks a failure of stewardship, since these soils will have to feed future generations. And every particle that washes away causes problems downstream, including sedimentation — which can increase the risk of flooding — and the alarming dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, the result of runoff of the chemical fertilizers farmers apply to make up for lost fertility.
The Agriculture Department says that a “sustainable” rate of topsoil loss for most of Iowa is 5 tons per acre per year, and the actual average soil erosion is 5.2 tons. But using Iowa State University statistics and an aerial survey, the Environmental Working Group concluded that average annual soil loss in much of Iowa is double the federal government’s estimates. This pace of erosion is caused partly by an increasing number of intense storms. As the report says, it has been exacerbated by a fundamental bias in federal farm policy and supports. In the dozen years before 2009, Iowa received nearly $17 billion in subsidies that fostered high-intensity farming and less than $3 billion to support conservation. In the recent budget battles, conservation programs were the hardest-hit farm programs.
Meanwhile, the race to profit from high crop prices — especially corn for ethanol — and the sobering jump in the cost of rented land in Iowa means that there is an intense push to create greater yield on more acreage and less incentive than ever to practice sound soil conservation.
This is all the more tragic because the techniques for conserving soil are well understood. It requires planting buffer zones between fields and rivers and contour strips on sloping fields and planting regimes that keep crop cover on the soil by rotating between 3 and 4 crops, not just soybeans and corn. It also requires comprehensive conservation regulations and enforcement and, above all, facing the fact that erosion is not nature or bad farmers at work. It is the legacy of bad agricultural policy.
A Chance to Rebuild SUNY
Even before the fiscal crisis, the New York State Legislature was doing a terrible job of managing the State University of New York System. Lawmakers who voted to cut financing to the 64-campus system also starved it by forbidding reasonable tuition increases and then hijacked tuition revenue for use in the general state budget. In recent years, administrators have had to cut class offerings, limit enrollment and rely far too much on part-time faculty.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has now thrown support behind two sensible ideas. He endorsed a “rational tuition” bill, pending in both houses, that would allow the SUNY system to create a fair and predictable five-year tuition plan for in-state students, with a limit of no more than 5.5 percent per year. That would finally allow both schools and students to do more rational financial planning.
Mr. Cuomo also said he would support a proposal that would allow flagship campuses — those with research programs and the most high-powered faculty — to propose their own higher undergraduate tuition increases. And he announced a plan to give the research universities $140 million to finance campus expansions in hopes of promoting local economic development.
The Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, seems set against differential tuition, fearing that it would price poorer students out of the best schools. But New York’s current tuition costs are significantly lower than those in other northeastern systems.
In New Jersey’s, the range of public four-year annual tuition plus required fees for full-time state resident undergraduates is $4,883 to $13,898. At SUNY, that range is $5,195 to $7,136.
It is necessary to avoid overly sharp tuition increases. But it costs more to educate students at high-cost research universities. Unless all of the state universities have a more rational budgeting process, the system will continue its decline, and New York’s students will suffer.
Big Brother Goes to West Egg
Kings Point, N.Y., on Long Island’s gilded North Shore, wants to do criminal checks on every car that enters its placid realm. It has the technology — license-plate cameras hooked up to police computers — and is borrowing the money to install 44 of them. For about a million dollars, it will get what village trustees say is the snuggest security blanket money can buy.
Kings Point is not a gated community or club. It’s F. Scott Fitzgerald’s West Egg, 3.5 square miles of estates, McMansions and shady streets, home to about 5,000 people. It has little crime, though there has been a recent frightening spate of break-ins by a voyeur who snuck into girls’ bedrooms. Mayor Michael Kalnick says the cameras predate that and have been discussed for years as a good way to spot lapsed registrations, suspended licenses and stolen cars. They were approved in August, but most people didn’t know until Newsday published a big article.
Villagewide car surveillance seems like a big leap into the chilly postprivacy age. But at a village meeting last week, I waited in vain for someone to complain about civil liberties. Mayor Kalnick took some testy questions: Why are taxes rising 9.8 percent? Why is the police commissioner getting a raise (to $199,756)? Why wasn’t the camera contract put out to bid? Why didn’t you tell us about the last budget meeting? Why doesn’t the village have a working Web site?
He didn’t have to answer the privacy question because nobody asked it. I’m not sure why, but Big Brother lost to taxes as the bigger menace. Only one young man, who said he was from outside Kings Point and drove through on his way home, bristled a little. How come I wasn’t asked about this camera thing? he asked. If you’ve done nothing wrong, Mr. Kalnick told him, you should have nothing to worry about.
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