At a lunch session for the Texas delegation, State Director Peggy Venable criticized Mayer’s approach to the piece. She accused Mayer of misrepresenting the intention of the article when interviewing subjects:

She [Mayer] didn’t register with the media … And yet she was interviewing folks, and she told me she was doing a piece on tea parties. She called our board chairman and his giving covert. Now what is more covert than media coming in to a hit piece on our board chairman. She was not doing an article on Tea Parties, she was doing a hit piece on Charles and David Koch.

[...]

We get a very small, small, small single digit of our funding from our board.

She went on to say that Koch has never directed any of the activities for that state chapter of Americans for Prosperity, and that Mayer’s piece was “full of holes.”

In Mayer’s article, Venable is quoted as saying:

I was part of the Tea Party before it was cool!

And:

They’re [the Kochs] certainly our people. David’s the chairman of our board. I’ve certainly met with them, and I’m very appreciative of what they do.

Organizers for the event have also pushed back against President Obama’s remarks about the group during his Austin fundraising trip earlier this month. At the fundraiser, Obama said:

Right now all around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates all across the country.  And they don’t have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are.  You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation.  You don’t know if it’s a big oil company, or a big bank.  You don’t know if it’s a insurance company that wants to see some of the provisions in health reform repealed because it’s good for their bottom line, even if it’s not good for the American people.

Obama’s remarks have been brought up at three of the four events I have attended so far today. At a breakout session this morning covering leadership training for “November is Coming” — AFP’s organizational efforts during the midterm elections — the panel played an ad rebuking Obama’s comments on a projection screen. AFP President Tim Phillips also raised the president’s criticism during his opening session remarks, saying, “Were going to have some fun with that” at the Reagan dinner later tonight.

While the Kochs are reluctant to admit any direct ties to the tea parties that have swelled across the nation, David and Charles’s efforts to promote libertarian ideas by spending more than a hundred million dollars on right-wing causes have arguably contributed more momentum to the movement than those of any other individuals:

“Ideas don’t happen on their own,” Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, a Tea Party advocacy group, told me. “Throughout history, ideas need patrons.” The Koch brothers, after helping to create Cato and Mercatus, concluded that think tanks alone were not enough to effect change. They needed a mechanism to deliver those ideas to the street, and to attract the public’s support. In 1984, David Koch and Richard Fink created yet another organization, and Kibbe joined them. The group, Citizens for a Sound Economy, seemed like a grassroots movement, but according to the Center for Public Integrity it was sponsored principally by the Kochs, who provided $7.9 million between 1986 and 1993. Its mission, Kibbe said, “was to take these heavy ideas and translate them for mass America. . . . We read the same literature Obama did about nonviolent revolutions—Saul Alinsky, Gandhi, Martin Luther King. We studied the idea of the Boston Tea Party as an example of nonviolent social change. We learned we needed boots on the ground to sell ideas, not candidates.” Within a few years, the group had mobilized fifty paid field workers, in twenty-six states, to rally voters behind the Kochs’ agenda. David and Charles, according to one participant, were “very controlling, very top down. You can’t build an organization with them. They run it.”

Citizens for a Sound Economy later split into two groups — FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity — both of which have provided direct education, training, and support to Tea Party activist groups across the nation. AFP has offerred “Tea Party Talking Points,” urged citizens to protest by sending tea bags to Obama, and provided directions to protests. It is now hosting “Defending the American Dream” summits across the county, the next one scheduled in Washington, D.C. for this Friday and Saturday. The event package includes transportation to Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor Rally” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial this Saturday.

Also of note are the strange echoes in the rhetoric of today’s Tea Party candidates of the ideas put forward by David Koch when he ran as vice-president on the Libertarian Party ticket to the right of Ronald Reagan:

Many of the ideas propounded in the 1980 campaign presaged the Tea Party movement. Ed Clark told The Nation that libertarians were getting ready to stage “a very big tea party,” because people were “sick to death” of taxes. The Libertarian Party platform called for the abolition of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., as well as of federal regulatory agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Energy. The Party wanted to end Social Security, minimum-wage laws, gun control, and all personal and corporate income taxes; it proposed the legalization of prostitution, recreational drugs, and suicide. Government should be reduced to only one function: the protection of individual rights. William F. Buckley, Jr., a more traditional conservative, called the movement “Anarcho-Totalitarianism.”

In May, following a wealth of disclosures about the role of the Survival Evasion Resistence Escape program, which trains U.S. troops to resist torture, in shaping the Defense Department and the CIA’s interrogation programs under the Bush administration, it appeared that one of the biggest unanswered questions was how and why the CIA under George Tenet knew to turn to contract psychologists with SERE experience like James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen for assistance in devising interrogation programs. Retired FBI agent Ali Soufan testified that one such contractor — identified by Jane Meyer as Mitchell — on the Abu Zubaydah interrogation, the wellspring from which all future CIA “enhanced interrogation” emerged, overrulled all his FBI and CIA colleagues in order to experiment with SERE techniques.

That raised an additional concern: how deeply did CIA interrogation involvement with Mitchell and Jessen, who started a consulting firm after leaving SERE, actually run? Apparently pretty deeply: CIA Director Leon Panetta canceled all contractor involvement in interrogations in the spring, although Mayer reports there are some caveats to that. But it’s unclear, and so I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA for “all contracts signed between the CIA and the firm of Mitchell Jessen & Associates between September 2001 and April 2009″ including those where M-J are subcontractors. After I filed it, I realized it was imprecisely worded: since there was no Mitchell Jessen & Associates in late 2001, I probably wouldn’t be able to answer my first question anyway.

As it happens: moot point! Today I got my response, courtesy of Delores M. Nelson, the CIA’s information and privacy coordinator:

… [T]he CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to your request. The fact of the existence or nonexistence of requested records is currently and properly classified and is intelligence sources and methods information that is protected from disclosure by section 6 of the CIA Act of 1949, as amended. Therefore, your request has been denied pursuant to FOIA exemptions (b)(1) and (b)(3).

Now, the fact of Mitchell Jessen & Associates contracting for CIA is not a secret. In addition to Mayer’s reporting, Katherine Eban delved deeply into the company’s history with CIA for Vanity Fair in 2007. The company even replied to her questions. And yet the CIA contends that even confirming the existence of any contracts it signed with the company would jeopardize national security. There’s an appeals process for my rejected FOIA request; I’ll be taking full advantage of it.

“That’s an overt act; lying to the Red Cross, hiding prisoners from them,” Mayer said.

The ICRC is supposed to be the neutral body that monitors’ countries compliance with the Geneva Conventions and other international law. So, is lying to the Red Cross akin to obstruction of justice?

So does it matter if the interrogation techniques that were used, authorized and encouraged by senior officials in the US government for use on suspected Taliban or al Qaeda detainees – as confirmed by the recent Senate Armed Services Committee Report on the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody – are called “torture”?

You bet it does.

The role of language in the ongoing debate over what to do about the Bush administration’s authorization of torture and other “extreme” interrogation techniques was the subject of a thoughtful discussion last night in New York sponsored by PEN America and the American Constitution Society.

New Yorker writer Jane Mayer, author of the highly influential book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, warned against getting hung up on the label “torture” and focusing instead on the fact that either way, this was “deliberate cruelty” and morally wrong.

But as every lawyers knows, there are consequences to the language used. The advice of lawyers may well be why, as the lawyer and Harper’s writer Scott Horton observed last night, much of the mainstream news media, including such supposedly liberal-leaning newspapers as The New York Times and The Washington Post, have steadfastly refused to use the word “torture” — even when describing waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation and other interrogation techniques that were used by US officials on detainees and have long been considered torture by US authorities.

As I’ve written before, waterboarding in particular has for more than half a century been prosecuted by US authorities as a form of unlawful torture. A US federal judge has publicly made the same point. (And VP Dick Cheney recently admitted to authorizing it.) Still, producers for PBS’s Jim Lehrer News Hour told Horton, as he was being prepared to appear on that show recently, that he musn’t rush to judgment in describing the techniques while on camera. Using the word “torture” on the show, Horton understood, was verboten.

The result is that the mainstream media has allowed the Bush administration to give itself a pass, to whitewash what it did as “harsh,” “tough,” or “extreme interrogation” — which after all doesn’t sound unreasonable in a war against terror – and to consistently deny that this conduct violated the law.
As Goldsmith wrote in his book, The Terror Presidency, quoted in the recent Senate report, Bybee’s memo essentially said to administration officials: “Violent acts aren’t necessarily torture; if you do torture, you probably have a defense; and even if you don’t have a defense, the torture law doesn’t apply if you act under the color of presidential authority.”

The Administration’s lawyers – Bybee, David Addington, John Yoo and AG Alberto Gonzales – all knew full well that it matters what you call it. Because if the defense of “acting under presidential authority” fails – in other words, if it turns out that the president is actually required to follow the law – then if they’d committed torture, in violation of the federal torture statute, the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention against Torture – then they could all be in big trouble.

That is, of course, what many of them are probably worried about now, and why legal scholars and human rights advocates worry that the Bush administration will issue a blanket pardon to everyone who was involved.

After all, a lame duck can still lay eggs.

As I reported earlier, the 34-year-old computer consultant of Syrian descent was apprehended by U.S. authorities in 2002 while he was changing planes at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, on his way home to Canada after visiting relatives in Tunisia.

After a harsh interrogation without access to counsel in New York, he was flown to Syria against his will, where he was kept in a tiny underground prison cell and tortured until he eventually “confessed” to training for terrorism in Afghanistan; in fact, he’d never even been there.

For those with a strong stomach, here’s the federal district court’s description of Arar’s early days in Syrian detention, which he claims was coordinated with US authorities:

During his first twelve days in Syrian detention, Arar was interrogated for eighteen hours per day and was physically and psychologically tortured. He was beaten on his palms, hips and lower back with a two-inch-thick electric cable. His captors also used their fists to beat him
on his stomach, face and back of his neck. He was subjected to excruciating pain and pleaded with his captors to stop, but they would not. He was placed in a room where he could hear the screams of other detainees being tortured and was told that he, too, would be placed in a
spine-breaking [*11] “chair,” hung upside down in a “tire” for beatings and subjected to electric shocks. To lessen his exposure to the torture, Arar falsely confessed, among other things, to having trained with terrorists in Afghanistan, even though he had never been to Afghanistan
and had never been involved in terrorist activity.

Arar was eventually deemed innocent and returned home to Canada in 2003, where the Canadian government confirmed that he’d done nothing wrong and apologized for its role in his arrest.

With the help of the Center for Constitutional Rights and Georgetown law professor David Cole, in 2004 Arar sued American officials in a U.S. federal court for sending him to Syria to be tortured.  But his case was dismissed on the grounds that an investigation might reveal state secrets and harm national security.  The court also ruled that, as a foreigner deported by immigration authorities, he had no right to challenge his treatment by the United States.

Although a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit affirmed the district court’s ruling, holding that Arar has no right to sue federal officials no matter what was done to him, the full court  of appeals in August made the highly unusual decision to re-hear the case.  All 12 active judges of the court are scheduled to hear the arguments from both sides at 3 p.m. in New York.  The argument will stream live on C-Span.org.

For more on the Arar case and the US government’s program of extraordinary rendition, check out Jane Mayer’s excellent piece on the subject in the New Yorker.