y DAVID BROOKS A Time to Mourn
By DAVID BROOKS
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January 1, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
A Time to Mourn
By DAVID BROOKS
have this week's front pages arrayed on the desk around me. There's a picture of dead children lined up on a floor while a mother wails. There's a picture of a man on the beach holding his dead son's hand to his forehead. There are others, each as wrenching as the last.
Human beings have always told stories to explain deluges such as this. Most cultures have deep at their core a flood myth in which the great bulk of humanity is destroyed and a few are left to repopulate and repurify the human race. In most of these stories, God is meting out retribution, punishing those who have strayed from his path. The flood starts a new history, which will be on a higher plane than the old.
Nowadays we find these kinds of explanations repugnant. It is repugnant to imply that the people who suffer from natural disasters somehow deserve their fate. And yet for all the callousness of those tales, they did at least put human beings at the center of history.
In those old flood myths, things happened because human beings behaved in certain ways; their morality was tied to their destiny. Stories of a wrathful God implied that at least there was an active God, who had some plan for the human race. At the end of the tribulations there would be salvation.
If you listen to the discussion of the tsunami this past week, you receive the clear impression that the meaning of this event is that there is no meaning. Humans are not the universe's main concern. We're just gnats on the crust of the earth. The earth shrugs and 140,000 gnats die, victims of forces far larger and more permanent than themselves.
Most of the stories that were told and repeated this week were melodramas. One person freakishly survives while another perishes, and there is really no cause for one's good fortune or the other's bad. A baby survives by sitting on a mattress. Others are washed out to sea and then wash back bloated and dead. There is no human agency in these stories, just nature's awful lottery.
The nature we saw this week is different from the nature we tell ourselves about in the natural history museum, at the organic grocery store and on a weekend outing to the national park. This week nature seems amoral and viciously cruel. This week we're reminded that the word "wilderness" derives from the word for willful and uncontrollable.
This catastrophic, genocidal nature is a long way from the benign and rhythmic circle of life in "The Lion King." It's a long way from the naturalist theology of Thoreau's "Walden" or the writings of John Muir.
The naturalists hold up nature as the spiritual tonic to our vulgar modern world. They urge us to break down the barriers that alienate us from nature. Live simply and imbibe nature's wisdom. "Probably if our lives were more conformed to nature, we should not need to defend ourselves against her heats and colds, but find her our constant nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds," Thoreau wrote.
Nature doesn't seem much like a nurse or friend this week, and when Thoreau goes on to celebrate the savage wildness of nature, he sounds, this week, like a boy who has seen a war movie and thinks he has experienced the glory of combat.
In short, this week images of something dark and unmerciful were thrust onto a culture that is by temperament upbeat and romantic.
In the newspaper essays and television commentaries reflecting upon it all, there would often be some awkward passage as the author tried to conclude with some easy uplift - a little bromide about how wonderfully we all rallied together, and how we are all connected by our common humanity in times of crisis.
The world's generosity has indeed been amazing, but sometimes we use our compassion as a self-enveloping fog to obscure our view of the abyss. Somehow it's wrong to turn this event into a good-news story so we can all feel warm this holiday season. It's wrong to turn it into a story about us, who gave, rather than about them, whose lives were ruined. It's certainly wrong to turn this into yet another petty political spat, as many tried, disgustingly, to do.
This is a moment to feel deeply bad, for the dead and for those of us who have no explanation.
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January 1, 2005
EDITORIAL
Trouble in the Forests
he Bush administration is proceeding briskly with its demolition job on the environmental regulations it inherited from previous administrations, especially the rules protecting the national forests against commercial exploitation.
Over the last four years, the Forest Service has weakened agreements aimed at preserving old-growth trees and wildlife in the Pacific Northwest and in the Sierra Nevada. It persuaded Congress to adopt its misnamed "Healthy Forests" initiative that helps timber companies as much as it helps communities at risk from forest fire. It threatens to overturn President Bill Clinton's popular roadless rule protecting the most remote areas of the forests, and it has already removed those protections from the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. Then last week, just before Christmas - the administration's preferred time for unveiling bad news - it announced a radical overhaul of the rules governing the management of the nation's 155 national forests.
The ostensible purpose of the change is to streamline a cumbersome management process and give individual forest managers more flexibility to respond to threats like wildfires and the increasing use of the forests by off-road vehicles. But the new rules would also eliminate vital environmental reviews, as mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, jettison wildlife protections that date to President Ronald Reagan, restrict public input, and replace detailed regulations, like those limiting clearcuts and protecting streams, with vague "results-based" goals. These are unacceptably high costs to pay for regulatory efficiency.
More broadly, the whole idea of giving local managers more flexibility defies history, however reasonable it appears on the surface. The main reason Congress enacted the National Forest Management Act in 1976 was that the public had lost confidence in the Forest Service, not only local foresters but also their bosses in Washington, who seemed mainly interested in harvesting timber no matter what the cost to the forest's ecological health.
There are, of course, forest mangers who act responsibly. And the administration promises that forest plans will be regularly audited under an "environmental management system" it has borrowed from private industry. But it is not clear who will be conducting these audits (indeed, it's entirely possible the timber industry could end up monitoring itself). Nor, given the vagueness of the new guidelines, are there any longer clear standards against which foresters and their plans can be measured.
This is a recipe for trouble. Forest supervisors have always been subject to fierce pressures from timber companies and the communities that depend upon them for jobs. Unless the law unambiguously requires them to protect nature - giving them legal cover to resist industry pressures - we could see a return to the days when what counted on a r�sum� was not whether a manager harmonized the competing needs of nature and commerce but whether he met his annual "cut."
Representative Tom Udall and others in Congress may try to overturn these rules legislatively. Their chances in this Congress are slim to none. It's also true that in a purely statistical sense, the stakes for both sides are not as high as they were 15 years ago, when about 30 percent of domestic timber production came from the national forests. Today that figure is about 5 percent, partly because of shifting industry priorities and partly because of court rulings protecting endangered species like the spotted owl and their forest habitat. Still, there's plenty of room for mischief, especially if President Bush succeeds in rescinding the roadless rule. People like Mr. Udall are right to keep fighting.
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January 1, 2005
Fresh Details Emerge on Harsh Methods at Guant�namo
By NEIL A. LEWIS
ASHINGTON, Dec. 31 - Sometime after Mohamed al-Kahtani was imprisoned at Guant�namo around the beginning of 2003, military officials believed they had a prize on their hands - someone who was perhaps intended to have been a hijacker in the Sept. 11 plot.
But his interrogation was not yielding much, so they decided in the middle of 2003 to try a new tactic. Mr. Kahtani, a Saudi, was given a tranquilizer, put in sensory deprivation garb with blackened goggles, and hustled aboard a plane that was supposedly taking him to the Middle East.
After hours in the air, the plane landed back at the United States naval base at Guant�namo Bay, Cuba, where he was not returned to the regular prison compound but put in an isolation cell in the base's brig. There, he was subjected to harsh interrogation procedures that he was encouraged to believe were being conducted by Egyptian national security operatives.
The account of Mr. Kahtani's treatment given to The New York Times recently by military intelligence officials and interrogators is the latest of several developments that have severely damaged the military's longstanding public version of how the detention and interrogation center at Guant�namo operated.
Interviews with former intelligence officers and interrogators provided new details and confirmed earlier accounts of inmates being shackled for hours and left to soil themselves while exposed to blaring music or the insistent meowing of a cat-food commercial. In addition, some may have been forcibly given enemas as punishment.
While all the detainees were threatened with harsh tactics if they did not cooperate, about one in six were eventually subjected to those procedures, one former interrogator estimated. The interrogator said that when new interrogators arrived they were told they had great flexibility in extracting information from detainees because the Geneva Conventions did not apply at the base.
Military officials have gone to great lengths to portray Guant�namo as a largely humane facility for several hundred prisoners, where the harshest sanctioned punishments consisted of isolation or taking away items like blankets, toothpaste, dessert or reading material. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who was the commander of the Guant�namo operation from November 2002 to March 2004, regularly told visiting members of Congress and journalists that the approach was designed to build trust between the detainee and his questioner.
"We are detaining these enemy combatants in a humane manner," General Miller told reporters in March 2004. "Should our men or women be held in similar circumstances, I would hope they would be treated in this manner."
His successor, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, told reporters in November that he was "satisfied that the detainees here have not been abused, they've not been mistreated, they've not been tortured in any way."
Journalists who were permitted to view an interview session from behind a glass wall during General Hood's tenure were shown an interrogator and detainee sharing a milkshake and fries from the base's McDonald's and appearing to chat amiably. It became apparent to reporters comparing notes in August, however, that the tableau of the interrogator and prisoner sharing a McDonald's meal was presented to at least three sets of journalists.
In addition to the account of Mr. Kahtani's treatment, the new interviews provide details and confirm some of the accounts in other recent disclosures about procedures at Guant�namo: the November report in which the International Committee of the Red Cross complained privately last summer to the United States government that the procedures at Guant�namo were "tantamount to torture"; memorandums from F.B.I. officials, most of which were released in December as part of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union; and another set of interviews with The Times in October in which other former Guant�namo officials described coercive and abusive techniques regularly employed there.
The information from the various sources frequently matched, providing corroboration of the use of specific procedures, which included prolonged sleep deprivation and shackling prisoners in uncomfortable positions for many hours. One F.B.I. agent wrote his superiors that he saw such restraining techniques several times. In the most gruesome of the bureau memorandums, he recounted observing a detainee who had been shackled overnight in a hot cell, soiled himself and pulled out tufts of hair in misery.
Military officials who participated in the practices said in October that prisoners had been tormented by being chained to a low chair for hours with bright flashing lights in their eyes and audio tapes played loudly next to their ears, including songs by Lil' Kim and Rage Against the Machine and rap performances by Eminem.
In a recent interview, another former official added new details, saying that many interrogators used a different audio tape on prisoners, a mix of babies crying and the television commercial for Meow Mix in which the jingle consists of repetition of the word "meow."
The people who spoke about what they saw or whose duties made them aware of what was occurring said they had different reasons for granting interviews. Some said they objected to the methods, others said they objected to what they regarded as a chaotic and badly run system, while others offered no reason. They all declined to be identified by name, some saying they feared retaliation.
Lt. Col. Leon H. Sumpter, the spokesman for the military command at Guant�namo, said in a statement that officials would not comment on accusations about the treatment of any individual detainee including Mr. Kahtani, who was captured in Afghanistan.
"We do not discuss specific interrogation techniques nor do we identify any specific detainee," Colonel Sumpter said in a statement. "All detainees are safeguarded and are assured food, drink, clothing, shelter, health care and basic rights, all in accordance with the Geneva Convention. The U.S. does not permit, tolerate or condone torture by any of its personnel or employees."
Colonel Sumpter said that the interrogation regimen at Guant�namo had produced useful intelligence "based on trust and not out of fear or duress."
The intelligence officials who spoke with The Times said that the interrogation personnel and their assigned prisoners were divided into five groups. Four were geographically based - one for Saudi Arabia, one for the Gulf States, another for Pakistan and Afghanistan and the last for Asia, Europe and the Americas. The fifth, termed "special projects," included Mr. Kahtani.
There was a high confidence among military intelligence officials that Mr. Kahtani was a dangerous operative of Al Qaeda. The federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks concluded in its June report that he was denied entry into the United States on Aug. 4, 2001, at the Orlando airport, the same day that Mohamed Atta, the plot's ringleader, was there and most likely intended to meet him.
The officials who spoke about the detainees' treatment said, however, that very few of the other prisoners had much value. "So much of the questioning was about Afghanistan," one intelligence official said. "Most of it was dated. Information about facilitators and recruiters was useful only in style, not in facts."
The clearest indication that senior commanders at Guant�namo were aware of and supported what was occurring may be in some F.B.I. memorandums. One, dated May 10, 2003, and written by an unidentified agent, describes a sharp exchange between bureau officials and General Miller and Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, who was in charge of the intelligence operations at Guant�namo then.
"Both sides agreed that the bureau has its way of doing things and the D.O.D. has their marching orders from SecDef," the memorandum said, using abbreviations for the Department of Defense and the secretary of defense. "Although the two techniques differed drastically, both generals believed they had a job to do."
The frustration caused by Mr. Kahtani's refusal to cooperate set off a high-level review of allowable interrogation techniques, according to documents released earlier by the Pentagon. After officials at Guant�namo asked for more leeway in dealing with Mr. Kahtani, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in December 2002 approved a list of 16 techniques for use there in addition to the 17 methods in the Army Field Manual. He suspended those approvals the next month after some Navy lawyers complained that they were excessive and possibly illegal. But after a review, Mr. Rumsfeld issued a final policy in April 2003, approving 24 techniques, some of which needed his permission to be used.
None of the approved techniques, however, covered some of what people have now said occurred. Mr. Kahtani was, for example, forcibly given an enema, officials said, which was used because it was uncomfortable and degrading.
Pentagon spokesmen said the procedure was medically necessary because Mr. Kahtani was dehydrated after an especially difficult interrogation session. Another official, told of the use of the enema, said, however, "I bet they said he was dehydrated," adding that that was the justification whenever an enema was used as a coercive technique, as it had been on several detainees.
In order to carry on the charade that he was not at Guant�namo, the military arranged it so Mr. Kahtani was not visited by the Red Cross on a few of its regular visits, creating a window of several months, said a person who dealt with him at Guant�namo. Officials at the Washington office of the Red Cross, which makes periodic visits to each of the Guant�namo detainees, said they would not discuss their meetings with any prisoners as part of their agreement with the United States government.
Two interrogators confirmed several of the complaints in the Red Cross report, including the notion that interrogators were able to obtain prisoners' medical records easily, which human rights groups say could discourage inmates from seeking medical care. The interrogators also discussed another factor in the Red Cross report, the use of a Behavioral Science Consultation Team, known as Biscuit, comprising a psychologist or psychiatrist and psychiatric workers. The team was used to suggest ways to make prisoners more cooperative in interrogations.
"They were supposed to help us break them down," one said.
The same former interrogator said the Red Cross report was correct in asserting that some female interrogators used sexual taunts to harass the detainees.
It is unclear whether the Justice Department's new, broader definition of torture, posted on the department's Web site late Thursday, would have affected operations at Guant�namo.
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