Re: Ted Koppel: 'The Price of Security'


ThienHo wrote:
ww wrote:
"You want absolutely security? You want to be totally protected
against terrorism? I have a proposal for you: A one way ticket to
Panmunjom in North Korea. Guarantee you, they have absolute security.
You will have absolute protection against terrorism." Ted Koppel

*******
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5784313

Ted Koppel: 'The Price of Security'
Hear a Town Meeting on Civil Liberties vs. Security

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who
has represented Guantanamo detainees, on torture: 'It's illegal, it's
immoral, and a lot of the time, it doesn't work.'

Marilynn Rosenthal, the mother of a Sept. 11 victim: 'My greatest
concern now is how issues are being framed and how the American
language is being used.'

Viet Dinh, former assistant attorney general for legal policy, on the
separation of powers during wartime: 'This is the Constitution at work
and not some sort of crisis or diminution in democracy...'

Alberto Mora, former general counsel of the U.S. Navy: 'America will
cease to be America if we accept the application of cruel and human and
degrading treatment, or torture, as one of our tools in the war against
terror.'

NPR.org, September 11, 2006 · Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress has
passed new laws to combat terrorism. The Bush administration is pushing
the limits on intelligence-gathering. Thousands of suspects have been
detained at home and abroad. But many people wonder whether the balance
has shifted too far away from freedom in favor of security.

NPR Senior News Analyst Ted Koppel has prepared a documentary,The Price
of Security, premiering on the Discovery Channel on Sept. 10. He also
hosts a town meeting (audio), where he discusses these issues with
current and former members of the Bush administration, military experts
and policy analysts.

Koppel discussed the documentary with Talk of the Nation Host Neal
Conan. Below are excerpts from their conversation.

Neal Conan: At the beginning and then at the end of this documentary,
you focus on the fear that was manifest on 9/11 and the hours and days
that followed, and the conviction of key administration officials that
what we saw was not a criminal act but an act of war.

Ted Koppel: Initially, Neal, on the very first day -- on 9/11 itself --
when the president came on, he spoke of it as being a criminal act. He
referred to bringing the perpetrators to justice. But that focus of
what happened on 9/11 as being a criminal act which the police or the
FBI would have to pursue and then bringing people to justice -- in
other words, into our court system -- that lasted less than a day.

By the next day, he was already speaking of this as being an act of
war. And from that day forth, the Bush administration has treated what
happened on 9/11 and what they fear might happen at some point in the
future as being an ongoing war.

Conan: Not a single act, not an incident, but the first act in a
campaign. The first act in a war.

Koppel: But certainly not a criminal act in the sense that if you find
someone in the commission of a criminal act, you almost have to wait
until they've done it. Only then can you send the police after them,
and then you have to read them their rights and give them access to a
lawyer. The difference in a war, of course, is that as one former
associate White House counsel put it, sometimes the application of
justice is as slight as the application of the pressure of an 18 year
old's finger on a trigger.

Conan: The thinking that led to these new security policies comes out
of an unprecedented sense of urgency. You talked with current and
former administration officials who were at the White House and were
involved in the decision-making those days.

Koppel: In a sense... the White House believed in the immediate
aftermath of 9/11 and believes to this day that there is the
possibility not of another 9/11, but of something infinitely worse, of
the weapons in the hands of terrorists being weapons of mass
destruction -- be it a chemical weapon, a biological weapon or a
nuclear weapon. And if that were to happen, it would undermine
everything that we stand for. Therefore, we are able to turn certain
American laws and certain American legal preconceptions on their head
because we have to.

Conan: Less than a month after the events of Sept. 11, the U.S.
military began a military campaign in Afghanistan, Operation Enduring
Freedom. One of the most controversial issues since Sept. 11 is how the
United States has dealt with alleged terrorists, alleged enemy
combatants that were picked up on the battlefields of Afghanistan --
some turned over war lords, some found out in Pakistan, and many of
them who found their way to Guantanamo Bay.

Koppel: And it's key that they not be called prisoners of war. Because
even though we are in a war and the administration uses the paradigm of
war at all times, these men are very pointedly referred to as
detainees. And the question of how long they are to be detained is
really an open one, which is essentially true in any war. A prisoner of
war is always held until the war is over. The difference with this one
is no one really expects this war to be over not only anytime soon, but
probably not even within some of our lifetimes.

Conan: A lot of people have a hard time even defining victory in the
war.

Koppel: Exactly. I mean, it is an ongoing process. But it has been one
that has caused some legal and ethical nightmares for the people who've
had to handle these detainees.

Conan: As the documentary stresses, in the days after some of these
people were picked up -- and some of them were al-Qaida members, some
high-ranking al-Qaida members -- the administration, based on this fear
of the existential threat, felt that we needed to find information.
Whatever information they had needed to be extracted and thus begins
the -- well, you'll excuse me -- but the torturous process of ending up
quite near torture.

Koppel: Yes. And the question of where, for example, strenuous
interrogation ends and torture begins is one that the administration
actually tried to define. There is a young man who worked for the
Justice Department at the time by the name of John Yoo who wrote a now
infamous 50 page memorandum in which he rather painfully -- again, no
pun intended -- but rather painfully tried to define in the course of
that memorandum where appropriate interrogation techniques ended and
torture began. It's a very, very difficult thing to do.

Conan: You interviewed Alberto Mora -- the Navy's most senior lawyer at
that time -- who raised questions about torture after Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved the use of dogs, stress positions
which you were just talking about, and non-injurious physical contact
on detainees. After reading memos and documents about this, Mora was
surprised... [He] told you that he thinks U.S. law should criminalize
the application of cruelty, but he also said there were circumstances
under which he himself might apply cruelty.

Koppel: He went actually further than that, Neal. He said there were
circumstances under which he would apply torture. And what he was
saying and the distinction he was drawing -- and it's a really
interesting and I think important distinction. He said, let's assume
for the sake of argument that we had our hands on someone who knew
about a ticking bomb, a nuclear device that was going to go off in an
American city. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of lives at
stake.

He said under those circumstances, I might apply torture to that person
in order to prevent that from happening. But, he said, it should only
be done in the context of a legal system in which I applied torture
knowing that I would then be subject to legal action being taken
against me for having broken the law. And the distinction that he was
making is that the Bush administration tried to redefine it so that
interrogators who actually were using certainly inhumane treatment and
possibly torture had been told before the fact, don't worry about it.
You're covered. You will not be prosecuted.

That -- as I think he correctly points out and others on the program
correctly point out -- leads to a downward slide where inhumane
treatment quickly becomes cruel treatment, quickly becomes torture if
people are under the impression that they're not going to be prosecuted
for it. So I respect him for the honesty of his response. That he says
look, I would do it. But I want to do it only in the context of knowing
that I could be prosecuted for having done it afterwards.

Conan: And administration officials, Secretary Rumsfeld, have said
look, there were abuses, but they were very few. It was not systematic.
These were rogues, situations happening in the night, according to the
investigation of Abu Ghraib.

Koppel: Well, I mean, that is -- I think Secretary Rumsfeld was being a
little bit disingenuous in saying that, just as he was when he said as
soon as we found out we put a stop to the practice. Mora had been
trying to bring it to Rumsfeld's attention for about six weeks, and it
was only after he, Mora, said I'm going to put this down in writing.
And there will be a memorandum to the file from the general counsel
saying the United States government is doing this. When he said that,
all of a sudden that day, it ended.

Conan: Your documentary also covers an aspect of the balance between
security and civil liberties that may affect us all, and that's the
gathering of electronic surveillance. There's an extraordinary moment
in the documentary where you describe the president, the White House,
putting out a memo to all its various intelligence agencies and saying
what do you need? What do you need to really do the job now after 9/11?

Koppel: Actually, primarily being put out to the National Security
Agency. And they come back and they say well, you know, we'd like to be
able to tap into people's phones if we could.

Koppel: As a reporter for The Washington Post whose beat this is told
us, they really didn't expect the president to come back and say yes.
But he did.

Conan: And this has gone on since then in a series of presidential
authorizations. I think it's every 30 days or so the president re
authorizes this. Which went on, nobody knowing about it, until The New
York Times disclosed it.

Koppel: The New York Times disclosed it. A federal court has now said
it is unconstitutional. But it is still in practice because the
administration is appealing that federal court's finding. And very
likely, the federal court decision will be overturned. So it will
continue to happen.

Conan: Ted, as you evaluate this, they have access to all kinds of
intelligence that you and I simply don't have access to. The American
people don't have access to. Is there any way to know whether the
threat justifies these actions?

Koppel: No. Because what they say is absolutely true. We -- that is,
those who are protecting the United States -- have to be successful 100
percent of the time. They -- that is to say, the terrorists, or those
who wish harm to the United States -- only have to be successful once.

Now when you're dealing with that kind of an equation, there is nothing
you can do. I mean, I haven't said it in the program, but I'll say it
here. You want absolutely security? You want to be totally protected
against terrorism? I have a proposal for you: A one way ticket to
Panmunjom in North Korea. Guarantee you, they have absolute security.
You will have absolute protection against terrorism. There is no
terrorism in North Korea except the terrorism, of course, that is
wielded by the state itself. Because there is no privacy, there are no
constitutional rights, there is no freedom. But you've got security.

So at some point or another, this is all a calibration between how much
security and how much freedom.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Ted Koppel: The Price of Security
    ... Guarantee you, they have absolute security. ... Ted Koppel: 'The Price of Security' ... Neal Conan: At the beginning and then at the end of this documentary, ... what we saw was not a criminal act but an act of war. ...
    (soc.culture.vietnamese)
  • Re: Ted Koppel: The Price of Security
    ... You will have absolute protection against terrorism." ... Ted Koppel: 'The Price of Security' ... Neal Conan: At the beginning and then at the end of this documentary, ... what we saw was not a criminal act but an act of war. ...
    (soc.culture.vietnamese)
  • Re: Crazy humanity: war against crimes against humanity and racism - or racist monopoly
    ... World war II govern-mental power where power decides, orders, ... I claimed child terrorism, perhaps they were ... somehow all the security features didn't apply to that one connection. ... human rights activist and wants world war. ...
    (sci.astro)
  • Re: Ted Koppel: The Price of Security
    ... Guarantee you, they have absolute security. ... You will have absolute protection against terrorism." ... Ted Koppel: 'The Price of Security' ... what we saw was not a criminal act but an act of war. ...
    (soc.culture.vietnamese)
  • Re: Crazy humanity: war against crimes against humanity and racism - or racist monopoly
    ... World war II govern-mental power where power decides, orders, ... All I did is portray I am a hacker, ... I claimed child terrorism, perhaps they were ... somehow all the security features didn't apply to that one connection. ...
    (sci.astro)