After The Obama-Abbas Meeting: A Palestinian Stuck between Washington and Tel Aviv

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Video and Full Transcript of Obama-Abbas Meeting(28 May)

At his meeting with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, President Obama again highlighted the significance of an Israeli freeze on settlements in the West Bank. Obama did not mention any timeline for his demand being accepted by the Israeli authorities, indicating that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needed time to persuade his Cabinet; however, he also did not want his position to be seen as weak and passive. So Obama stated that he would not wait until the end of his first term to make progress; if is no action on the Israeli side, US pressure is likely to be applied on Tel Aviv. Obama also stated his general hope for a settlement “if they (Israel and Palestine) keep in mind not just the short-term tactical issues that are involved, but the long-term strategic interests of both the Israelis and the Palestinians to live side by side in peace and security".

Mahmoud Abbas, however, does not have the luxury of general aspirations and time: every passing hour undermines his authority.

Abbas acted fast to form a new government last week after the failure to form a unity administration between Fatah and Hamas. Abbas wanted to strengthen his hand before his visit to Washington; however, the new government was rejected not only by Hamas but also by many in Fatah and by several other Palestinian factions such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Palestinian People's Party amidst accusations of nepotism, cronyism, and lack of accountability or transparency.

In Gaza, Hamas has been increasing its support since the end of Israel's Operation Cast Lead. So Abbas needs the symbolic as well as practical support offered by the popularity of President Obama. That is why the Palestinian politician told Jackson Diehl and Fred Hiatt, in his audience with [italics]The Washington Post[/italics]:
[blockquote]
The Americans are the leaders of the world; they can use their weight with anyone around the world. Two years ago they used their weight on us. Now they should tell the Israelis, "You have to comply with the conditions."
[/blockquote]
But, even if Obama is happy to be Abbas' saviour, there's the small matter of the Israeli dynamic. Even if Prime Minister Netanyahu wanted to freeze settlements, he might be have trouble convincing 30 Ministers in his Cabinet. Nor is Obama's "more time" likely to alter the situation, with the Israeli public becoming more intransigent as time goes by.

For the time being, the Netanyahu Government is trying to fudge the issue. The Prime Minister Netanyahu has already stated that there would be no freeze in current settlements, but new settlements would not be authorised and illegal outposts would not be tolerated. Rhetorically, however, Netanyahu's ministers are dismissing the issue. Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya'alon told Israel's Channel 2, “Settlements are not the reason that the peace process is failing, they were never an obstacle, not at any stage."

Netanyahu may not have staked himself to the rhetoric of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman: “Peace for Peace” without any preconditions. Yet it is difficult to see what Tel Aviv is willing to offer, especially when Arab states backing the peace initiative have declared that they are ready to recognise Israel.

Thus Obama, less than a week before his Cairo speech, still has nothing --- not even a modest Israeli concession --- to anchor his general wishes for peace. Stiil, in comparison to others, he might be considered fortunate. For Mahmoud Abbas does not even have the trappings of authority as the non-peace process drags on.

The Great Congressional Bailout: Guantanamo (Part 2 --- Dan Froomkin)

The Great Congressional Bailout: Guantanamo (Part 1 — The Daily Show)
Keeping Guantanamo Open: Will Obama Give Way?

It's now less than 15 minutes until President Obama's news conference on Guantanamo Bay, 30 minutes until former Vice President Dick Cheney launches his latest assault on the Administration (and, if you'll forgive the editorial comment, decency) with a speech at the American Enterprise Institute.

So in anticipation and as an extension of our commentary this morning, here is Dan Froomkin's excellent blog on The Washington Post website taking apart the Congressional bailout, particularly by Obama's Democrats, on Guantanamo:

With Friends Like These

Here's one thing that hasn't changed in the Obama era: Republicans are still able to come up with scare tactics that turn Senate Democrats into a terrified and incoherent bunch of mewling babies.

It's hard to imagine anything more ridiculous than the suggestion that bringing some of the terror suspects currently incarcerated in Guantanamo to high-security prisons in America will pose a threat to local communities.

It is nothing more than a bogeyman argument, easily refuted with a little common sense. (Isn't that what prisons are for?) But that's assuming you don't spend your every moment living in fear of Republican attack ads questioning your devotion to the security of the country. Or that you have a modicum of respect for the intelligence of the American public.

Ah well. Old habits die hard, I guess. And Senate Democrats apparently remain an easily frightened bunch, after eight years of faint-hearted submission.

Here's a question. Democratic congressional leaders ostensibly want to close Guantanamo, which they recognize has become the ultimate symbol of the Bush administration's violations of human rights. They acknowledge that keeping it open only makes the country less safe -- and that any number of the detainees there have been imprisoned sometimes cruelly and often under false pretenses, for as long as seven years. So they want all the detainees there to -- what? Vanish? Die? How do they expect any other country to take custody of anyone if we refuse to do it ourselves?

Worrying about releasing prisoners here is one thing. But refusing to even consider putting them in our prisons is nonsense. It it tantamount to insisting that Guantanamo stay open.

But as Shailagh Murray writes in The Washington Post: "Under pressure from Republicans and concerned about the politics of relocating terrorism suspects to U.S. soil, Senate Democrats rejected President Obama's request for funding to close the Guantanamo Bay prison and vowed to withhold federal dollars until the president decides the fate of the facility's 240 detainees...

"As recently as last week, Senate Democrats had hoped to preserve a portion of Obama's Guantanamo funding request. But their resolve crumbled in the face of a concerted Republican campaign warning of dire consequences if some detainees ended up in prisons or other facilities in the United States, a possibility that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has acknowledged."

Specifically, as the Associated Press is now reporting, the Senate voted 90 to 6 today for an amendment that would keep any detainee held in the Guantanamo prison from being transferred to the United States.

Here's the transcript of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's nonsensical news conference yesterday.

Reid: "I think there's a general feeling... that the American people, and certainly the Senate, overwhelmingly doesn't want terrorists to be released in the United States. And I think we're going to stick with that...."

Q. "No one's talking about releasing them. We're talking about putting them in prison somewhere in the United States."

Reid: "Can't put them in prison unless you release them."

Q. "Sir, are you going to clarify that a little bit? I mean -- "

Reid: "I can't -- I can't -- I can't make it any more clear than the statement I have given to you. We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States. I think the majority -- I speak for the majority of the Senate....

Q. "[I]f a detainee is adjudicated not to be a terrorist, could that detainee then enter the United States?"

Reid: "Why don't we wait for a plan from the president? All we're doing now is nitpicking on language that I have given you. I've been as clear as I can. I think I've been pretty clear...."

Q. "But Senator, Senator, it's not that you're not being clear when you say you don't want them released. But could you say -- would you be all right with them being transferred to an American prison?"

Reid: "Not in the United States."

Q. (OFF-MIKE)

Reid: "I think I've had about enough of this."

Joseph Williams writes in the Boston Globe: "The decision to buck the president on Guantanamo left Democrats on the defensive and Republicans reveling at the discord....

"Caroline Frederickson, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington legislative office, said she and others...believe that the White House and Democrats are reacting to Republican fearmongering about terrorists on US soil.

"Any legitimate terror suspect, she said, would almost certainly be held in remote, high-security 'supermax' federal prisons, which are already home to convicted terrorists like British shoe bomber Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged 20th hijacker of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"'That's what these prisons are designed for,' she said."

David M. Herszenhorn writes in the New York Times: "On Tuesday Republicans, including the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who has been warning for weeks about the dangers of closing the prison, applauded the Democrats' decision.

"At a news conference, Mr. McConnell said he hoped it was a prelude to keeping the camp open and dangerous terrorism suspects offshore, where he said they belong."

Herszenhorn writes: "Administration officials have indicated that if the Guantánamo camp closes as scheduled more than 100 prisoners may need to be moved to the United States, including 50 to 100 who have been described as too dangerous to release.

"Of the 240 detainees, 30 have been cleared for release. Some are likely to be transferred to foreign countries, though other governments have been reluctant to take them. Britain and France have each accepted one former detainee. And while as many as 80 of the detainees will be prosecuted, it remains unclear what will happen to those who are convicted and sentenced to prison."

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said yesterday that Obama will be giving a speech tomorrow on his Guantanamo plans, as well as other issues relating to detainees and detention policy.

"Thursday he'll outline his thoughts on detainee and detention issues, as well as the other issues like photos and memos," Gibbs said. "He'll outline the reasoning of why he strongly believes, and many in both parties believe, that closing Guantanamo Bay is in our best national security and foreign policy interest. And he will go through a number of the decisions related to that and other issues that we've discussed in the last few weeks that all relate to it."

Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei write for Politico: "Obama advisers are comparing Thursday's speech to his big-picture Georgetown University speech on the economy last month — not intended necessarily to produce 'hard news' but a sustained effort to describe and defend his policies and the political and intellectual assumptions behind them."

They also note that former vice president Cheney will be giving his own national-security speech tomorrow morning at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Glenn Greenwald blogs for Salon: "The 'debate' over all the bad and scary things that will happen if Obama closes Guantanamo and we then incarcerate those detainees in American prisons is so painfully stupid even by the standards of our political discourse that it's hard to put into words."

One key step in the process, Greenwald writes, entails "'Journalists' who are capable of nothing other than mindlessly reciting what they hear...depicting the Right's frightened neurosis as a Serious argument, and then overnight, a consensus emerges: Democrats are in big trouble politically unless they show that they, too, are as deeply frightened as the Right is."

Kevin Drum blogs for Mother Jones: "His own party won't support him against even the most transparent and insipid demagoguery coming from the conservative noise machine. The GOP's brain trust isn't offering even a hint of a substantive case that the U.S. Army can't safely keep a few dozen detainees behind bars in a military prison, but Dems are caving anyway. Because they're scared."

Also see Jon Stewart's take on the issue from last night's Daily Show.

Meanwhile, in a bit of related news, Josh Gerstein reports for Politico: "A federal judge has rejected aspects of the Obama administration's definition of who can legally be held as a prisoner in the war on terror.

"In a 22-page decision issued Tuesday evening, U.S. District Court Judge John Bates ruled that members in Al Qaeda or the Taliban could be detained, but that mere support for Al Qaeda activities is not a sufficient basis for the government to hold prisoners at Guantanamo Bay or elsewhere.

"Bates said he pressed the Justice Department to explain why rendering assistance to Al Qaeda was enough to lock someone up without criminal charges.

"'After repeated attempts by the Court to elicit a more definitive justification for the 'substantial support' concept in the law of war, it became clear that the government has none,' wrote Bates, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush."

Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press takes a somewhat different view of the ruling, writing that the judge did allow the United States to hold some prisoners indefinitely.

The Torture Photos: Obama's Six-Step Sidestep

The always excellent Dan Froomkin, blogging for The Washington Post, captures a lot of what I was trying to say --- but finding it difficult because of anger and sadness --- this morning. Drawing on other analysts as well as Obama's own words, he takes apart the six excuses for refusing the court order to release the photographs of detainee abuse:

Deconstructing Obama's Excuses

In trying to explain his startling decision to oppose the public release of more photos depicting detainee abuse, President Obama and his aides yesterday put forth six excuses for his about-face, one more flawed than the next.

First, there was the nothing-to-see-here excuse. In his remarks yesterday afternoon, Obama said the "photos that were requested in this case are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib."

But as the Washington Post reports: "[O]ne congressional staff member, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the photos, said the pictures are more graphic than those that have been made public from Abu Ghraib. 'When they are released, there will be a major outcry for an investigation by a commission or some other vehicle,' the staff member said."

The New York Times reports: "Many of the photos may recall those taken at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which showed prisoners naked or in degrading positions, sometimes with Americans posing smugly nearby, and caused an uproar in the Arab world and elsewhere when they came to light in 2004."

And if they really aren't that sensational, then what's the big deal?

Then there was the the-bad-apples-have-been-dealt-with excuse. This one, to me, is the most troubling.

Obama said the incidents pictured in the photographs "were investigated -- and, I might add, investigated long before I took office -- and, where appropriate, sanctions have been applied....[T]his is not a situation in which the Pentagon has concealed or sought to justify inappropriate action. Rather, it has gone through the appropriate and regular processes. And the individuals who were involved have been identified, and appropriate actions have been taken."

But this suggests that Obama has bought into the false Bush-administration narrative that the abuses of detainees were isolated acts, rather than part of an endemic system of abuse implicitly sanctioned at the highest levels of government. The Bushian view has been widely discredited -- and for Obama to endorse it suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of the past.

The notion that responsibility for the sorts of actions depicted in those photos lies at the highest -- not lowest -- levels of government is not exactly a radical view. No less an authority than the Senate Armed Services Committee concluded in a bipartisan report: "The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own....The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees."

But as The Washington Post notes: "[N]o commanding officers or Defense Department officials were jailed or fired in connection with the abuse, which the Bush administration dismissed as the misbehavior of low-ranking soldiers." And the "appropriate actions," as Obama put it, have certainly not yet been taken. The architects of the system in which the abuse took place have yet to be held to account.

Then there was the no-good-would-come-of-this excuse.

Obama said it was his "belief that the publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals."

But the photos would add a lot. It was, after all, the photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that forced the nation to acknowledge what had happened there. There is something visceral and undeniable about photographic evidence which makes it almost uniquely capable of cutting through the disinformation and denial that surrounds the issue of detainee abuse.

These photos are said to show that the kind of treatment chronicled in Abu Ghraib was in fact not limited to that one prison or one country. They would, as I wrote yesterday, serve as a powerful refutation to former vice president Cheney's so far mostly successful attempt to cast the public debate about government-sanctioned torture as a narrow one limited to the CIA's secret prisons.

Then there was the "protect-the-troops" excuse.

Said Obama: "In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger."

But the concern about the consequences of the release, while laudable on one level, is no excuse for a cover-up.

Glenn Greenwald blogs for Salon: "Think about what Obama's rationale would justify. Obama's claim...means we should conceal or even outright lie about all the bad things we do that might reflect poorly on us. For instance, if an Obama bombing raid slaughters civilians in Afghanistan..., then, by this reasoning, we ought to lie about what happened and conceal the evidence depicting what was done -- as the Bush administration did -- because release of such evidence would 'would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.' Indeed, evidence of our killing civilians in Afghanistan inflames anti-American sentiment far more than these photographs would. Isn't it better to hide the evidence showing the bad things we do?...

"How can anyone who supports what Obama is doing here complain about the CIA's destruction of their torture videos? The torture videos, like the torture photos, would, if released, generate anti-American sentiment and make us look bad. By Obama's reasoning, didn't the CIA do exactly the right thing by destroying them?"

Then there was the chilling-effect excuse.

Said Obama: "Moreover, I fear the publication of these photos may only have a chilling effect on future investigations of detainee abuse."

But how so? Under questioning, press secretary Robert Gibbs failed miserably to explain that particular rationale at yesterday's press briefing.

"[I]f in each of these instances somebody looking into detainee abuse takes evidentiary photos in a case that's eventually concluded, this could provide a tremendous disincentive to take those photos and investigate that abuse," Gibbs said.

Q. "Wait, try that once again. I don't follow you. Where's the disincentive?"

Gibbs: "The disincentive is in the notion that every time one of these photos is taken, that it's going to be released. Nothing is added by the release of the photo, right? The existence of the investigation is not increased because of the release of the photo; it's just to provide, in some ways, a sensationalistic portion of that investigation.

"These are all investigations that were undertaken by the Pentagon and have been concluded. I think if every time somebody took a picture of detainee abuse, if every time that -- if any time any of those pictures were mandatorily going to be necessarily released, despite the fact that they were being investigated, I think that would provide a disincentive to take those pictures and investigate."

Get that? Yeah, me neither.

And finally, there was the new-argument excuse.

Gibbs said "the President isn't going back to remake the argument that has been made. The President is going -- has asked his legal team to go back and make a new argument based on national security."

But as the Los Angeles Times reports, the argument that releasing the photographs could create a backlash "was raised and rejected by a federal district court judge and the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which called the warnings of a backlash 'clearly speculative' and insufficient to warrant blocking disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

"'There's no legal basis for withholding the photographs,' said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's National Security Project, 'so this must be a political decision.'"

Margaret Talev and Jonathan S. Landay write for McClatchy Newspapers: "The request for what's effectively a legal do-over is an unlikely step for a president who is trained as a constitutional lawyer, advocated greater government transparency and ran for election as a critic of his predecessor's secretive approach toward the handling of terrorism detainees.

"Eric Glitzenstein, a lawyer with expertise in Freedom of Information Act requests, said he thought that Obama faced an uphill legal battle. 'They should not be able to go back time and again and concoct new rationales' for withholding what have been deemed public records, he said.

"The timing of the president's decision suggests that a key factor behind his switch of position could have been a desire to prevent the release of the photos before a speech that he's to give June 4 in Egypt aimed at convincing the world's Muslims that the United States isn't at war with them. The pictures' release shortly before the speech could have negated its goal and proved highly embarrassing. Even if courts ultimately reject Obama's new position, the time needed for their consideration could delay the photos' release until long after the speech."

Peter Wallsten and Janet Hook write in the Los Angeles Times: "President Obama's decision Wednesday to try to block the court-ordered release of photographs depicting alleged abuse of detainees by U.S. soldiers sets him on a confrontational course with his liberal base. But it is a showdown he is willing to risk -- and may even view as politically necessary...

"Obama now can tell critics on the right that he did his best to protect the nation's troops, even if the courts eventually force the disclosure.

"Obama has been facing intense criticism from former Vice President Dick Cheney and other conservatives, who have argued that the new administration's efforts to roll back Bush-era interrogation policies have made the country less safe.

"The praise for Obama that came Wednesday from Republicans such as House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina can only help undercut those arguments."

But, Wallsten and Hook write: "Obama's dilemma is that he risks undermining one of the core principles he claimed for his presidency: transparency."

The Washington political-media establishment seems to approve of Obama's decision.

Rick Klein writes in ABC News's The Note: "In the broader context, it's cast as a sign of political maturation, maybe even classic Obama pragmatism. This is what it's like to be commander-in-chief -- one of those tough choices where there's no easy answer, and no shame in reversing yourself."

Ben Smith and Josh Gerstein write in Politico that Obama's reversal "marks the next phase in the education of the new president on the complicated, combustible issue of torture."

Washington Post opinion columnist David Ignatius blogs: "Is this a 'Sister Soulja' moment on national security, like Bill Clinton's famous criticism of a controversial rap singer during the 1992 presidential campaign -- which upset some liberal supporters but polished his credentials as a centrist?"

But anti-torture bloggers reject the comparison.

Andrew Sullivan blogs: "The MSM cannot see the question of torture and violation of the Geneva Conventions as a matter of right and wrong, of law and lawlessness. They see it as a matter of right and left. And so an attempt to hold Bush administration officials accountable for the war crimes they proudly admit to committing is 'left-wing.' And those of us who actually want to uphold the rule of law ... are now the equivalent of rappers urging the murder of white people."

In a separate post, Sullivan writes: "Slowly but surely, Obama is owning the cover-up of his predcessors' war crimes. But covering up war crimes, refusing to proscute them, promoting those associated with them, and suppressing evidence of them are themselves violations of Geneva and the UN Convention. So Cheney begins to successfully coopt his successor."

Sri Lanka: The Hidden Slaughter

Related Post: Sri Lanka - "Why is the World Not Helping?"

UPDATE: The closing paragraphs of this piece were significantly rewritten after attention was drawn to errors in the original entry. Please see the readers' comments for details.

The comment was fleeting, but significant. Steve Clemons, a prominent Washington journalist, posted on Twitter after an discussion with British Foreign Minister David Miliband yesterday: "Surprised AfPak [Afghanistan-Pakistan] wobbliness not the core topic in New America new media chat with UK For Minister Miliband. Steve Coll pushed Sri Lanka mess."

It is estimated that the "Sri Lanka mess", in which Government forces are fighting the insurgency of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam has killed an estimated 6500 civilians in recent weeks. Yet it has been effectively a non-story in US and British media. Both The Washington Post and The New York Times only noticed it on Monday, when a United Nations spokesman revealed a death toll of almost 400 from a weekend artillery barrage.

There are obvious reasons (excuses?) for this. Afghanistan and Pakistan are at the epicentre of US foreign policy. Sri Lanka is not. It can claim no connection with the "War on Terror", at least as it has been defined in Washington. No Osama bin Laden lurking in a border town, no nuclear weapons that can be seized by insurgents. So broadcasters and major newspapers don't expend increasingly limited resources on a bureau near Colombo.

Atttention spans may be changing, however. Whether it is because a British minister has dared put this hidden war above the visible one from Islamabad to Kabul, because the concern of the United Nations is finally have an effect, because the Tamil protests in London have unveiled the issue, or because journalists are catching up with the reality of the carnage, Sri Lanka has made the news today in Britain. The Times forcefully declares, "The world must force Colombo to halt the shelling of trapped civilians," and The Guardian has a Page 1 eyewitness account by Vany Kumar (reprinted in a separate blog) of shelling in the "no-fire zone".

Perhaps the most intriguing attention comes in an opinion piece by Andrew Buncombe in The Independent as he quotes a doctor's analysis of the conflict: ""In any military operation there is collateral damage. In Pakistan it's killing, in Sri Lanka it's slaughter."

The piece is well worth considering not only for its thoughtful attention to the relative coverage of the two conflicts but also to wider issues. Buncombe, as the Asia Correspondent of The Independent is having to make decisions on how he expends his own resources of time and energy between covering Pakistan, where he has been writing about the exodus of residents from fighting in the northwest of the country, Sri Lanka, and other countries. It also highlights the relative ease with which a journalist can file stories about and from Pakistan, even in the midst of the campaign against the insurgency, versus the difficulties in getting access to and bringing out information from Sri Lanka.

Beyond these logistical and practical considerations, however, there remains the question, at least looking out from Washington. In the midst of the politics and military posturing around "Af-Pak", will the collateral damage in eastern Sri Lanka ever merit sustained attention?

Torture Then: When "Enhanced Interrogation" Started

You could be forgiven for thinking, amidst the deluge of revelations on the Bush Administration's authorisation of torture, that we only learned about the existence of "enhanced interrogation"  recently.

Actually, despite the secrecy of the Bushmen as they expanded (and rationalised) Executive power to pursue "enhanced interrogation", it was with us all along.

Researching the book on the early years of the Administration, I discovered this article from Walter Pincus of The Washington Post, dated 21 October 2001:

FBI and Justice Department investigators are increasingly frustrated by the silence of jailed suspected associates of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, and some are beginning to that say that traditional civil liberties may have to be cast aside if they are to extract information about the Sept. 11 attacks and terrorist plans.

According to Pincus, the four most significant suspects, were "Zacarias Moussaoui, a French Moroccan detained in August initially in Minnesota after he sought lessons on how to fly commercial jetliners but not how to take off or land them; Mohammed Jaweed Azmath and Ayub Ali Khan, Indians traveling with false passports who were detained the day after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks with box cutters, hair dye and $5,000 in cash; and Nabil Almarabh, a former Boston cabdriver with alleged links to al Qaeda". Moussaoui was later convicted as the "20th hijacker"; as far as I know, the other three were never charged with criminal offences.

At the time, however, a senior FBI official said, "Frustration has begun to appear" [because] "we're into this thing for 35 days and nobody is talking." Another agent put the quandary:

We are known for humanitarian treatment, so basically we are stuck. . . . Usually there is some incentive, some angle to play, what you can do for them. But it could get to that spot where we could go to pressure . . . where we won't have a choice, and we are probably getting there.

US officials were considering "using drugs or pressure tactics, such as those employed occasionally by Israeli interrogators, to extract information". Then there was a concept called rendition:"extraditing the suspects to allied countries where security services sometimes employ threats to family members or resort to torture".

In the short term, the more extreme methods were not adopted; an FBI agent noted, "You could reach a point where they allow us to apply drugs to a guy....I don't think this country would ever permit torture, or beatings." He continued, "If there is another major attack on U.S. soil, the American public could let it happen."

He was wrong. It did not take another major attack; only the capture of Abu Zubaydah in spring 2002 and a demand by Bush Administration officials for the "right" intelligence, especially information linking Saddam Hussein to 9-11.

And so the closing words of the article, uttered by the former chief of the FBI's counterterrorism section, were despatched to history:

[Torture] goes against every grain in my body. Chances are you are going to get the wrong person and risk damage or killing them.