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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > August > 31
Monday, August 31, 2009
Editorial: Torture in Dayton-linked case might have worked, but bad idea
The big fight Washington has been having about torturing prisoners in the war on terror turned out last week to have a Dayton angle.
In 2003, when 9/11 was like yesterday, an Ohioan was arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist. He lived in Columbus, but he drove a truck for a company in Moraine, and he had made deliveries to Dayton International Airport, a fact which got the attention of some local people.
Dayton didn’t figure into the charges against Iyman Faris, a transplanted Pakistani. The charges had to do, most memorably, with the Brooklyn Bridge, which he had been tasked by al-Qaida to case, to see if there was a way to blow it up. He reported back that there wasn’t.
He also performed other services. He pleaded guilty to providing material support . He was sentenced to 20 years. And he gave authorities the names of two other Columbus men who have since pleaded guilty to similar charges, Nuradin Mahamoud Abdi and Christopher Paul.
The Faris case returned to the news last week. A 2004 government report about Central Intelligence Agency interrogation techniques was released in censored form.
The report is harshly critical, calling some CIA techniques “unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented.”
It specifically mentions extreme forms of waterboarding, threats against family members, mock executions, running electric drills next to naked, blindfolded people and more.
The report says the CIA’s detention and interrogation program resulted in terrorist arrests. But it said that assessing whether the torture itself worked “is a more subjective process and not without concern.”
However, it does suggest that torture might have worked, if not in other cases, at least on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. (He’s the heavy-set guy who was portrayed on Saturday Night Live as complaining that the most common photograph of him caught him at a bad time.) He didn’t give up much before he was waterboarded (183 times). But eventually he became valuable, naming Mr. Faris, among others.
So much of the report is blacked out that interpretation can be dangerous. But there’s enough there to give anybody pause. (The report is at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/torture_archive/comparison.htm.)
Actually, though, the FBI was apparently interested in Mr. Faris even before it heard from the CIA. The Columbus Dispatch reported in 2005, “On March 19, 2003, two (FBI) agents approached Faris in Cincinnati and briefly interviewed him. On March 20, they met again, and Faris allowed them to search his apartment. … Later that day, the FBI learned that Mohammed, who had been captured in Pakistan, had fingered Faris.”
Some will see justification for waterboarding in the arrest of Mr. Faris. But they should confront, too, the report’s concern that innocent people were tortured, and that such techniques endanger Americans who are taken prisoner, while making a mockery of the country’s word. (This country has promised to abide by international anti-torture standards.)
One needn’t be a naive outsider to worry about torture. Even some FBI agents refused to participate. After the report, CIA Chief George Tenet was disturbed enough to put a hold on waterboarding. It was later reinstituted as an option (with new controls), but was not used.
When he came into office, President Barack Obama prohibited waterboarding and other forms of torture, in favor of the accepted forms of interrogation that prevailed before 9/11 under an Army manual. His decision is supported by a lot of people in the intelligence field, who doubt the efficacy of torture, and who think the country must be better than its enemies.
In fact, the CIA inspector general who did the report says he undertook his investigation precisely because of concerns and complaints from within the CIA. One needn’t pretend that no good whatsoever comes from a particular policy to see that, on balance, it does more harm.
One old CIA hand told a reporter of the widespread view in the agency that “there’s got to be a better way.” Indeed, Iyman Faris or no Iyman Faris.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, terrorism
Martin Gottlieb: Ohio terrorists not the most impressive enemies
Ever since Iyman Faris was arrested in 2003, he has intermittently been a poster boy for the Bush administration and some of its critics.
The truck driver with the Dayton connection (see the editorial above) was a symbol of everything that was right about the administration’s war on terror — or of everything that was wrong.
The first person to raise a fuss was Jimmy Breslin, the legendary columnist in New York. He was appalled that the media had treated the news about Faris matter-of-factly. After all, the news surfaced all at once that he had been taken into custody, pleaded and been sentenced. That is certainly not the official, normal American way.
Breslin referred repeatedly to his “kidnapping” by the government. He said the police had held Faris long enough to do plenty of torturing. Yet the media said nothing.
“It could be time,” he said, “for me to begin thinking about leaving this news business. It is not mine anymore.”
However, when Faris did get lawyers, they did not complain about him being kidnapped or tortured. They did say that he asked repeatedly for a lawyer before pleading and didn’t get one (which the feds deny).
But Faris seems to have wanted the secrecy himself, out of concern for his relatives in Pakistan.
The way the Faris story surfaced was suspicious. Newsweek reported that he had pleaded guilty, and it suggested that his whereabouts were unknown. At that point, the feds went to court to ask that the records of his case be unsealed, because the public impression was that he was at large. They wanted it known that he was in custody.
The judge said this is odd: the government asking for disclosure and the defendant opposing it. Usually in national security cases, it’s the opposite. But the judge saw no reason not to tilt in favor of the public’s right to know.
The suspicion is hard to avoid that the feds leaked the story to Newsweek in the first place because they wanted public credit for the arrest.
In 2004, President George W. Bush, seeking re-election, came to Ohio to highlight the case. He said the arrest was an outgrowth of the controversial Patriot Act, which he was trying to get renewed.
Now Faris is pointed to by former Vice President Dick Cheney and others as somebody whose arrest resulted from the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. That’s the practice some call torture and Cheney calls a “no-brainer,” meaning its use is obviously legitimate, if the goal is to prevent other terrorist acts.
Besides the secrecy and torture controversies, there’s also the matter of wiretapping, specifically the Bush administration’s highly dubious claim that the war on terror gave it the power to tap without a court warrant.
Through wiretapping, the FBI may actually have been on to Faris before the CIA got on to him through Mohammed.
The controversies about methods notwithstanding, certain things about Faris are not being disputed. He did travel to an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan, where he reportedly met Osama bin Laden. He did favors for al-Qaida, like buying sleeping bags. And he sent a message saying he didn’t think it would be realistic to attack the Brooklyn Bridge, a possibility he had been asked to check out.
In cooperating with the feds, he offered the names of two acquaintances in Columbus, Christopher Paul and Nuradin Abdi, with whom he apparently discussed various possible terrorist plans. They’ve pleaded guilty, too, after investigations by the office of southern Ohio U.S. Attorney Gregory Lockhart.
None of the three is connected to any violent terrorist act that actually happened. If you go back through the news clippings relating to the three cases, you get the impression of naive, feckless losers.
One went to Africa looking for a terrorist training camp but never found it. In one often noted incident, they met at a Caribou Coffee shop. One of them suggested blowing up an unnamed mall (or shooting it up; that’s in dispute). Another said that was an awful idea. Such was the sophistication.
They and their al-Qaida connections had no conception of the difficulties of various schemes, like blowing up the Brooklyn Bridge or messing with railroad tracks to send a train over a cliff. (That was reportedly the Hollywood-induced fantasy of one of their connections.)
One has apologized for everything, saying he was never anti-American, but was just furious about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and was talking dumb.
They might have done something terrible eventually. Who knows? You needn’t be competent to shoot up a mall. And, yes, conspiracies to do such things must be prosecuted.
Still, if these are the country’s greatest internal enemies, it’s a fortunate country.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, terrorism
Terry Ryan: Kettering takes unfair hit in ratings
Judging schools based on student academic performance is more art than science.
This fact was never depicted more clearly than in the recent release of state report cards that gave the Kettering City School District a rating of “continuous improvement” — a C — even though it met 29 of 30 academic standards.
The state expects Kettering to get at least 75 percent of its students to proficiency or above on 28 academic tests, while also having an appropriate attendance and graduation rate. Kettering met all these goals except for one (achievement in 8th grade social studies).
Further, Kettering saw its overall student achievement results increase from 2007-08 when the district was rated “effective,” which translates to a B.
Justifiable anger
Not surprisingly, the rating has flummoxed and angered local officials. A C is hard to explain when one considers Kettering’s state rating is identical to far lower-performing districts like Elyria City School District (it met 11 of 30 indicators); and Cincinnati Public Schools, Columbus City Schools and Akron Public Schools, all of which met just six indicators.
So, what’s going on? Kettering took a hit because it failed to meet federally mandated Adequate Yearly Progress goals with two sub-groups of students — “students with disabilities” and “limited English proficient students.”
What this means in practice is that Kettering schools failed to deliver students with disabilities (which make up about 15 percent of all district students) and students with limited English (which make up about 1.5 percent) to proficiency targets in reading.
In fact, the district failed to meet these targets for three consecutive years. The district did, however, meet Adequate Yearly Progress goals with seven other subgroups.
Overall solid results
The district failed with a minority of students, but overall it delivered solid academic results for the vast majority, in the vast majority of subjects tested by the state. With this in mind, it is hard to say the district’s C is proportionate to its actual student achievement. Fair-minded people would have to say the district was given an unfair rating.
What should be done about this? Many will be tempted to argue that the rating for Kettering is evidence of a broken accountability system that needs to be thoroughly overhauled or even snuffed out. That’s a mistake.
My organization, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, has been analyzing the academic performance of schools in Dayton and in other Ohio cities for six years. We’ve witnessed the evolution of the state’s assessment system and have evaluated it along the way.
In fact, earlier this year we issued a report entitled the “Accountability Illusion” that reported “schools with greater diversity and size face greater challenges in making AYP.”
The Kettering City School District was punished for not succeeding with some of its most diverse students. The fact that the system makes it obvious that Kettering needs to do better by its special needs students and students with limited English is a good thing.
The state shouldn’t do away with metrics that enable this evaluation. Transparency and accountability are important for ensuring all students receive the best education possible.
However, the fact that Kettering received a state rating identical to school districts with far inferior academic achievement across the board is a genuine problem. The rating confuses parents, students, teachers, business and community leaders, and it could put the district at risk of losing students and the trust of voters and supporters.
Change the system
Ohio needs to improve how it rates its schools and school districts. The “continuous improvement” rating is far too encompassing and, as such, is largely meaningless. The state has put together a solid system of assessments, and it now needs a school and district rating system that does it justice.
It is time to right the accountability ship before it sinks in the shoals of faulty ratings.
Terry Ryan is vice president for Ohio Programs & Policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Education, Guest Columns, Ohio government
