Some Things Just Never Get Old

Like Dan Froomkin calling bullshit on Dick Cheney and the media coverage of him.

Beautiful!

Why Does John McCain Hate America And The CIA And The OLC?

At this point you would have to say that the authors of the OLC memos could have a very lucrative careers as fiction novelists.

U.S. Senator John McCain, a torture survivor from his days as a captive during the Vietnam War, says his private comments about harsh interrogation methods were misrepresented by the Bush Administration in a recently released legal document intended to justify a six-day-long course of sleep deprivation for one CIA detainee in November of 2007.

The newly declassified memo by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel mentions a secret briefing McCain and other members of Congress received sometime before October 17, 2006. The memo says the lawmakers were told about six CIA interrogation techniques, including prolonged sleep deprivation.

The memo recounts McCain's reaction this way. "[S]everal Members of Congress, including the full memberships of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and Senator McCain, were briefed by General Michael Hayden, Director of the CIA, on the six techniques that we discuss herein," writes Steven G. Bradbury, a deputy assistant attorney general in the July 20, 2007, memo, which cites a CIA summary of the discussions. "In those classified and private conversations, none of the Members expressed the view that the CIA detention and interrogation program should be stopped, or that the techniques at issue were inappropriate."

A spokeswoman for McCain said that contrary to those claims, the Arizona Republican repeatedly raised objections in private meetings, including one with Hayden, about the use of sleep deprivation as an interrogation technique. "Senator McCain clearly made the case that he was opposed to unduly coercive techniques, especially when used in combination or taken too far — including sleep deprivation," says Brooke Buchanan, a spokeswoman for McCain.

An aide to McCain said that in meetings with Hayden and others, McCain raised the story of Orson Swindle, a friend of McCain's who suffered forced sleep deprivation through stress positions as a captive of the North Vietnamese. During the his last presidential campaign, McCain repeatedly spoke publicly of prolonged sleep deprivation as a form of torture.

snip

The contention by McCain and others that private discussions were misrepresented are important because they call into question the legal conclusions that allowed harsh interrogation in late 2007. The CIA account of the congressional briefing was used by Bradbury to argue that prolonged sleep deprivation did not "shock the conscience," a legal standard based on the Constitution's Fifth Amendment right to due process. While "not conclusive on the Constitutional question," Bradbury argued that the lack of objections from members of Congress following the classified briefing contributed to providing "a relevant measure of contemporary standards." If Bradbury had concluded that extended sleep deprivation did "shock the conscience," the technique would have been illegal under the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which applied constitutional standards to the treatment of CIA detainees.

The U.S. State Department has long characterized extended sleep deprivation by foreign countries as a form of torture, though Bradbury in his memo dismissed this fact as not providing "controlling evidence" on the issue of contemporary standards. The U.S. Army Field Manual, which regulates military interrogations, also prohibits extended sleep deprivation, but Bradbury dismissed this standard as failing to provide "dispositive evidence" of the government behavior.

snip

In late 2007, after a presidential campaign event in Iowa, McCain said that he supported the prosecutions of any government employee who violated laws governing detainee treatment after October of 2006, when the Military Commissions Act was passed. "After we passed the Detainee Treatment Act, the Military Commissions Act, then obviously anybody who violated any law of the United States would have to be held responsible," McCain told reporters.

Well at least McCain is willing to back prosecutions of people who broke HIS laws lol. But this story just keeps getting better and better. At this point nobody involved in the torture program has any credibility and its likely that we are still only scratching the very surface of this issue. But we gotta look back and not forward, right?

Yep, just keep on walking.....

More Than A Trial Balloon

Its beginning to look like Attorney General Eric Holder may just be moving towards some prosecutions.

From the New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s ethics office has recommended reversing the Bush administration and reopening nearly a dozen prisoner-abuse cases, potentially exposing Central Intelligence Agency employees and contractors to prosecution for brutal treatment of terrorism suspects, according to a person officially briefed on the matter.

The recommendation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, presented to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in recent weeks, comes as the Justice Department is about to disclose on Monday voluminous details on prisoner abuse that were gathered in 2004 by the C.I.A.’s inspector general but have never been released.

When the C.I.A. first referred its inspector general’s findings to prosecutors, they decided that none of the cases merited prosecution. But Mr. Holder’s associates say that when he took office and saw the allegations, which included the deaths of people in custody and other cases of physical or mental torment, he began to reconsider.

With the release of the details on Monday and the formal advice that at least some cases be reopened, it now seems all but certain that the appointment of a prosecutor or other concrete steps will follow, posing significant new problems for the C.I.A. It is politically awkward, too, for Mr. Holder because President Obama has said that he would rather move forward than get bogged down in the issue at the expense of his own agenda.

The advice from the Office of Professional Responsibility strengthens Mr. Holder’s hand.
The recommendation to review the closed cases, in effect renewing the inquiries, centers mainly on allegations of detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Justice Department report is to be made public after classified information is deleted from it.

The cases represent about half of those that were initially investigated and referred to the Justice Department by the C.I.A.’s inspector general, but were later closed. It is not known which cases might be reopened.

Mr. Holder was said to have reacted with disgust earlier this year when he first read accounts of abusive treatment of detainees in a classified version of the inspector general’s report and other materials.

In examples that have just come to light, the C.I.A. report describes how C.I.A. officers carried out mock executions and threatened at least one prisoner with a gun and a power drill. It is a violation of the federal torture statute to threaten a prisoner with imminent death.

Mr. Holder, who questioned the thoroughness of previous inquiries by the Justice Department, is expected to announce within days his decision on whether to appoint a prosecutor to conduct a new investigation; in legal circles, it is believed to be highly likely that he will go forward with a fresh criminal inquiry.

I'm not going to get too worked up about this until we actually see whether Holder is going to move on this or not for sure, but I have to say that it sounds like an investigation is a lot closer to being a reality than not.

Our Media Fails Us

This back and forth between Norah O'Donnell and Matt Yglesias just tipifies how shitty journalism is in this country. The whole time Matty Y is making the case that the Republican pushback on Nancy Pelosi could end up creating the needed buzz for a Truth Commission, Norah O'Donnell won't even consider his point because she is adamant that there won't ever BE an investigation. Never once does it cross her mind that as a journalist on a "cable news" network SHE should be pushing for an investigation also. Nope, she is much more comfortable hiding behind President Obama and his administration's stance that there be no investigation. Its not even worth pointing out to her that President Obama has no ability to block such an investigation should they take it up in Congress. It is amazing how people who have no clue what it means to be a journalist are given a prime platform. You have to wonder why they invited Matty Y on in the first place unless they just wanted to pour cold water on his article in the Daily Beast. Just pathetic.

Its A Villager Rebellion!

I think somebody must have sent MoDo to rehab or something because she now has written two coherent columns in a row, and in her column today she (gasp) is calling for INVESTIGATIONS!

Ali Soufan, the ex-F.B.I. agent who flatly calls torture “ineffective,” helped get valuable information from Abu Zubaydah, an important Al Qaeda prisoner, simply by outwitting him. Torture, he told Congress, is designed to force the subject to submit “through humiliation and cruelty” and “see the interrogator as the master who controls his pain.”

It’s a good description of the bullying approach Cheney and Rummy applied to the globe, and the Arab world. But as Soufan noted, when you try to force compliance rather than elicit cooperation, it’s prone to backfire.

The more telling news last week was yet another suggestion about Cheney’s reverse-engineering the Iraq war. Robert Windrem, a former NBC News investigative producer, reported on The Daily Beast that in April 2003, after the invasion of Baghdad, the U.S. arrested a top officer in Saddam’s security force. Even though this man was an old-fashioned P.O.W., someone in Vice’s orbit reportedly suggested that the interrogations were too gentle and that waterboarding might elicit information about the fantasized connection between Osama and Saddam.

In The Washington Note, a political and foreign policy blog, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff at State, wrote that the “harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 ... was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and Al Qaeda.”

More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

I used to agree with President Obama, that it was better to keep moving and focus on our myriad problems than wallow in the darkness of the past. But now I want a full accounting. I want to know every awful act committed in the name of self-defense and patriotism. Even if it only makes one ambitious congresswoman pay more attention in some future briefing about some future secret technique that is “uniquely” designed to protect us, it will be worth it.

Now make no mistake, Villagers have their thumb in the wind constantly. What I think this is an indication of more than anything else is that MoDo feels the political winds shifting and she just wants to be ahead of the pack. Her column is one of the only ones that has even brought up the testimony of Ali Soufan that should have been a game changer when it happened last week. I imagine that soon and very soon you will see more Villagers "reluctantly" coming around to investigations. None of them should be praised for it but at least the Villagers may help put pressure on President Obama to do the right thing. Means to an end

Look Back

We are now quickly moving towards a line where President Obama will no longer be able to close his eyes and think the calls for an investigation into torture is going to go away. Looking forward and not back is a nice slogan but it is no way to govern nor lead. Those who do not learn from the past are destined to repeat it and as I and many others have pointed out even if President Obama outlaws torture during his Presidency, that is no guarantee that his successor will do the same. For that matter torture was outlawed when the Bush Administration did it, how exactly did that turn out?

Now with the revelations about the Bush Administration torturing to try to get political cover for the war in Iraq and several Congressional Democrats led by Speaker Pelosi asserting that the Bush Administration misled them on what was being done to detainees and even the new assertions about Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsefeld using Bible verses to manipulate President Bush its time to break out the sunlight and find out exactly just how many crimes were committed over the last 8 years. Frank Rich points out in his column today that we may not have even scratched the surface yet on all of the scandals perpetrated on the American people by those thugs:

But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)

What’s up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary’s actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world’s apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout “would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”

snip

What happened on Jan. 14 was the release of a report from the Pentagon’s internal watchdog, the inspector general. It had been ordered up in response to a scandal uncovered last year by David Barstow, an investigative reporter for The Times. Barstow had found that the Bush Pentagon fielded a clandestine network of retired military officers and defense officials to spread administration talking points on television, radio and in print while posing as objective “military analysts.” Many of these propagandists worked for military contractors with billions of dollars of business at stake in Pentagon procurement. Many were recipients of junkets and high-level special briefings unavailable to the legitimate press. Yet the public was never told of these conflicts of interest when these “analysts” appeared on the evening news to provide rosy assessments of what they tended to call “the real situation on the ground in Iraq.”

When Barstow’s story broke, more than 45 members of Congress demanded an inquiry. The Pentagon’s inspector general went to work, and its Jan. 14 report was the result. It found no wrongdoing by the Pentagon. Indeed, when Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize last month, Rumsfeld’s current spokesman cited the inspector general’s “exoneration” to attack the Times articles as fiction.

But the Pentagon took another look at this exoneration, and announced on May 5 that the inspector general’s report, not The Times’s reporting, was fiction. The report, it turns out, was riddled with factual errors and included little actual investigation of Barstow’s charges. The inspector general’s office had barely glanced at the 8,000 pages of e-mail that Barstow had used as evidence, and interviewed only seven of the 70 disputed analysts. In other words, the report was a whitewash. The Obama Pentagon officially rescinded it — an almost unprecedented step — and even removed it from its Web site.

Network news operations ignored the unmasking of this last-minute Bush Pentagon cover-up, as they had the original Barstow articles — surely not because they had been patsies for the Bush P.R. machine. But the story is actually far larger than this one particular incident. If the Pentagon inspector general’s office could whitewash this scandal, what else did it whitewash?

In 2005, to take just one example, the same office released a report on how Boeing colluded with low-level Pentagon bad apples on an inflated (and ultimately canceled) $30 billion air-tanker deal. At the time, even John Warner, then the go-to Republican senator on military affairs, didn’t buy the heavily redacted report’s claim that Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were ignorant of what Warner called “the most significant defense procurement mismanagement in contemporary history.” The Pentagon inspector general who presided over that exoneration soon fled to become an executive at the parent company of another Pentagon contractor, Blackwater.

But the new administration doesn’t want to revisit this history any more than it wants to dwell on torture. Once the inspector general’s report on the military analysts was rescinded, the Obama Pentagon declared the matter closed. The White House seems to be taking its cues from the Reagan-Bush 41 speechwriter Peggy Noonan. “Sometimes I think just keep walking,” she said on ABC’s “This Week” as the torture memos surfaced. “Some of life has to be mysterious.” Imagine if she’d been at Nuremberg!

The administration can’t “just keep walking” because it is losing control of the story. The Beltway punditocracy keeps repeating the cliché that only the A.C.L.U. and the president’s “left-wing base” want accountability, but that’s not the case. Americans know that the Iraq war is not over. A key revelation in last month’s Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees — that torture was used to try to coerce prisoners into “confirming” a bogus Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link to sell that war — is finally attracting attention. The more we learn piecemeal of this history, the more bipartisan and voluble the call for full transparency has become.

And I do mean bipartisan. Both Dick Cheney, hoping to prove that torture “worked,” and Nancy Pelosi, fending off accusations of hypocrisy on torture, have now asked for classified C.I.A. documents to be made public. When a duo this unlikely, however inadvertently, is on the same side of an issue, the wave is rising too fast for any White House to control. Court cases, including appeals by the “bad apples” made scapegoats for Abu Ghraib, will yank more secrets into the daylight and enlist more anxious past and present officials into the Cheney-Pelosi demands for disclosure.

It will soon be every man for himself. “Did President Bush know everything you knew?” Bob Schieffer asked Cheney on “Face the Nation” last Sunday. The former vice president’s uncharacteristically stumbling and qualified answer — “I certainly, yeah, have every reason to believe he knew...” — suggests that the Bush White House’s once-united front is starting to crack under pressure.

I’m not a fan of Washington’s blue-ribbon commissions, where political compromises can trump the truth. But the 9/11 investigation did illuminate how, a month after Bush received an intelligence brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on his and Cheney’s watch. If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.

Pelosi Got Swag

When Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi comes out and says the CIA lied to her in 2002what effect would you think that's gonna have on the push for investigations into the Bush Administration torture program? I would say it would have a PROFOUND effect on moving us closer to some kind of Truth Commission investigations.





Well played Madame Speaker, well played!

BREAKING: Minority Leader John Boehner Wants Torture Investigations!!!

He doesn't exactly come out and say it plainly but in his press conference in response to Nancy Pelosi that was the feeling I came away with.

"Lets just get it all on the table"

"Lets find out who knew what and when and what they did about it"

"If we are going to get into these interrogation techniques we also ought to give the American people a bigger picture"

"Lets get all the facts on the table"

Certainly sounds like a call for an investigation to me.

Frank Rich Exposes The TRUE Ticking Time Bomb

Frank Rich almost by himself justifies the continued existence of the New York Times. Today he focuses on the OLC memos along with the Senate Armed Services Committee Report on torture. He especially on the new revelations contained in both. The last couple off days I have heard from different corners including on some center left blogs that nothing in these reports and memos were new. Well that's simply untrue. In point of fact, as Rich points out, the very genesis of the torture program was exposed for all to see in the SASC report. It turns out that there was in fact a ticking time bomb scenario for the Bush Administration, but it didn't mean what you think it means...

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.

Last week Bush-Cheney defenders, true to form, dismissed the Senate Armed Services Committee report as “partisan.” But as the committee chairman, Carl Levin, told me, the report received unanimous support from its members — John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman included.

Levin also emphasized the report’s accounts of military lawyers who dissented from White House doctrine — only to be disregarded. The Bush administration was “driven,” Levin said. By what? “They’d say it was to get more information. But they were desperate to find a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.”

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.

Levin suggests — and I agree — that as additional fact-finding plays out, it’s time for the Justice Department to enlist a panel of two or three apolitical outsiders, perhaps retired federal judges, “to review the mass of material” we already have. The fundamental truth is there, as it long has been. The panel can recommend a legal path that will insure accountability for this wholesale betrayal of American values.

President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won’t vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don’t need another commission. We don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s commitment to the rule of law.

Burying The Lede

Today the New York Times has an article by Scott Shane which tries to change the framing of the torture issue from its legality to its efficacy. This is of course an absurd, albeit predictable, premise for a major newspaper to put forth in an article on the subject. If I am broke robbing a bank might work to get me money but I will still be arrested for it because its illegal. It matters not whether torture works, most assuredly it probably does at least on a superficial level, what matters is that the United States does not torture. Period. Full stop. And less we forget it was that Commie, Pinko, Liberal, Pacifist, Ronald Reagan, who signed us onto the Conventions Against Tortue and referred to the practice as abhorrent. It would be nice if some MSM folks would ask the pro torturists in the GOP if they disagree with Reagan.

However buried deep inside this ridiculous article is a footnote that should have been the focus from the beginning. Take a look at this:

On Mr. Mohammed, the record is murkier. The memorandum says that “before the C.I.A. used enhanced techniques,” Mr. Mohammed “resisted giving any answers to questions about future attacks, ‘Simply noting, ‘Soon, you will know.’ ”

But the same memorandum reveals in a footnote that Mr. Mohammed, captured on March 1, 2003, was waterboarded 183 times that month. That striking number, which would average out to six waterboardings a day, suggests that interrogators did not try a traditional, rapport-building approach for long before escalating to their most extreme tool.

This is a major deal that I haven't seen really explored in the MSM nor in the blogosphere. Just how soon did the CIA give up on traditional interrogation techniques and turn to torture to extract information from Khalid Sheik Muhammed? Its a very very important question for a variety of reasons. For one these methods were supposed to be employed AFTER the detainee was found to be resistant to traditional interrogation methods. For two there was supposed to be a progression from less harsh "enhanced interrogation techniques" to the obvious torture of waterboarding. Since the record on this seems to be very clear from the memos, only a couple of options are plausible. Either the CIA never even tried to build rapport and get information from KSM at the beginning and bypassed every other less harsh technique and went straight to torture, OR they were waterboarding KSM at least double or more times a day than was initially thought. Either way its a very damning statement to the treatment he received after being picked up.

It might be time for people a lot more powerful than I to try to get to the bottom of this mystery. I don't think in either scenario one could argue that his torturers were "working in good conscious" and should therefore be subject to investigation and or prosecution. I have no love at all for KSM but we deserve clarity on what was done in the name of all of our safety.

(h/t Greg Sargent)

Meet Pro Torturist Congressman Dan Burton

Scared of his own shadow, repeating lies about nonexistent plots, lobbying for torture. What else is there left for me to say?

Sometimes Its Better To Just STFU

Dick Cheney has a bad case of diarrhea of the mouth since he has been out of office. Yesterday he went on propandist Sean "Have you heard of Jeremiah Wright?" Hannity's show and once again took shots at President Obama and his foreign policy. Now considering the fact that most people believe that Cheney himself was the architect of the torture program at GITMO and that he bears most of the responsibility for the subversion of the Constitution during the Bush Years, you would think this clown would want to go somewhere and hide and hope nobody ever asks questions. Instead he has decided to antagonize from his wheelchair and try to gin up outrage against the Obama administration. Well President Obama had an answer for Dick Cheney today:

President Barack Obama is leaving the door to open to possible prosecution of Bush administration officials who devised harsh terrorism-era interrogation tactics.

snip

Obama has said he doesn't support charging CIA agents and interrogators who took part in waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics, acting on advice from superiors that such practices were legal. But he also said that it is up to the attorney general whether to prosecute Bush administration lawyers who wrote the memos approving these tactics.

*Now updated with video

Be afraid Dick. Be VERY afraid!

*Just want to give a h/t to frequent commenter Jack T who posted the link to the story about President Obama opening the door to torture prosecutions in another thread.

Not So Fast...

Turns out Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón who has been pushing for investigations and prosecutions of BuschCo is moving ahead even though the prosecutor voiced his opposition last week. To put it succinctly they ain't out of the fire just yet!

183 Times

For all of the torture apologists on the right I just have one question. If waterboarding was so effective, why did the CIA have to waterboard Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in one month and Abu Zubaydah, whom we now know wasn't the high level al Queda agent that the CIA initially thouoght he was, 83 times in one month. Until you can answer that question you don't have a right to even engage in the conversation about whether those who ordered torture should be prosecuted.

Of Torture Memos And Presidential Statements

I am not going to be all cute with my links in this blog post, I will link to several sites for you to go and get the information. But this is more of a rant for me so I am just going to give it to you from my perspective.

I was heartened earlier today to learn that President Obama and the Department of Justice had decided to release the OLC memos from the Bush Administration that authorized torture on enemy combatants. This good feeling was soon dashed after reading the accompanying statement from President Obama. The statement was problematic on several levels for me so I will just tick them off.

President Obama justified releasing the memos basically by saying he did it because the information was already out there. Let that sink in for a moment. In his own words he told us bluntly that he wasn't doing this for the public good or for transparency's sake. No he was doing it because hell we were only going to see what was already widely reported. So the question becomes, what about the memos and the methods or torture that we DON'T know about that happened under Bush?

Secondly President Obama reaffirmed his right to prevent judicial review of documents much like the OLC memos by invoking the states secrets clause. Not only was a 180 degree turn from then Senator Obama's rhetoric on the campaign trail decrying Bush's excessive use of the clause it also came off to me as pretty obstinate in reading it. As in he seemed to be saying "Just because I released this stuff don't think it means anything has changed". That for me was pretty fucking discouraging. Is it the end of the world? No. But it does bring down considerably my respect for the man. You are only as good as your word, and that applies even to politicians.

Thirdly there was the wording that President Obama used to describe why he feels we should move on. "Now is the time for reflection not retributions"....Really? Well then I would love to ask Obama what exactly is justice if not retribution? Do we put people in prison to make them better people or to punish them for the things they have done? And ironically just a little further on in the statement President Obama invoked the rhetoric "We are a nation of laws". So how does that work? We are a nation of laws but we aren't going to prosecute the people that we know broke those laws? Then what use are the laws in the first damn place?

Fourthly and this isn't my fight but I understand those who are upset about this, why in the hell give amnesty to the people who actually committed the acts of torture? I personally would much rather just investigate the prosecute the people who ordered it, but I was struck by something very blatant in those memos. These memos were written in such a way as to be seen as a response to an inquiry. So someone was REQUESTING the ability to torture. Not only that, time and time again in these memos the Bush Administration lawyers referred to information provided to them by the people requesting the ability to torture, that was meant to help make the case that what they were requesting wasn't torture. In fact if the memos are factually correct, then it was the people who were requesting the ability to torture that provided the lawyers with the SERE information that figured largely in the memos themselves to justify things like waterboarding and stress positions. It seems apparent that the torturers were not just innocent bystanders but willing accomplices. And if careerist at the CIA have a problem with that maybe its time for a purge. With the unemployment rate being as high as it is some how I would think there are plenty of people on the street that would love to have those jobs and have the requisite background.

Now the truth is today the only thing that changed is that I actually decided to listen to what President Obama has been saying instead of trying to give him excuses for his words on the subject to this point. In the past when he has said he wanted to look forward not backward I came up with all manner of excuses for why he was using that rhetoric. And "clearly" it was all just a fake out and that eventually he would sanction investigations. But if it wasn't clear then, its abundantly clear now that the truth is President Obama has no interest whatsoever in investigating the Bush Administration for torture and war crimes. And as I said before its VERY dissappointing.


Now I am just a nobody with a blog so who cares right? Well I can tell you this much, for as much as President Obama is given credit for his campaign's use of new media to help get him elected, actual people still had to do the phone banking and networking, voter registrations and the GOTV efforts. And what I can tell you is that Obama's campaign was so successful with this because most of the volunteers were so impressed with him as a candidate. He seemed so much more than just a regular politician who would care more about covering his ass than the public good. Who would care more about helping middle class families than getting re elected. If President Obama continues to at least appear to be covering for President Bush quite a bit of that luster will be knocked off of him. He won't be hope and change anymore, instead he will be same old same old. And if he loses those most loyal fans of his ironically enough he is going to hurt his chances at getting re elected immensely rather than help them.

I hope that at some point he either reads the polls or notices the tone in this country and reverses field with respect to investigations but for now I am taking the man at his word. He wants to look forward not back and thats just something we have to accept. But it doesn't mean we have to back off from pressuring him on it. Instead if anything it means we need to put MORE pressure on him to get him to change his mind. I don't care how much you support President Obama the thing you have to realize is that at some point he will no longer be President. Whether its after 4 years or 8 at some point someone else will be sitting where he is sitting. If these people don't get investigated its likely that at least a few of them will find their way back to Washington. All you have to do is look at the Cabinets of Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43 to realize that this kind of recycling goes on when we drop the ball on investigating these kinds of abuses. So unless you want to see Bybee or Bradbury or any of the other authors of those OLC memos back in Washington circa 2016 I suggest you make your voices heard.

Links to stories about the OLC memos


Ackerman

TPM

Glenzilla

Swampland

Greg Sargent

Think Progress

Steve Benen

Also, what Keith said:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Its About To Hit The Fan

Something tells me Bush and nem won't be doing much travelling outside of the country for the foreseeable future.

From Horton's

One of America’s NATO allies—which supported the Bush Administration’s war on terror by committing its troops to the struggle–has now opened formal criminal inquiries looking into the Bush team’s legacy of torture. The action parallels a criminal probe into allegations of torture involving the American CIA that was opened this week in the United Kingdom.

Spain’s national newspapers, El País and Público reported that the Spanish national security court has opened a criminal probe focusing on Bush Administration lawyers who pioneered the descent into torture at the prison in Guantánamo. The criminal complaint can be examined here. Público identifies the targets as University of California law professor John Yoo, former Department of Defense general counsel William J. Haynes II (now a lawyer working for Chevron), former vice presidential chief-of-staff David Addington, former attorney general and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, now a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and former Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith.

snip

The Spanish criminal court now may seek the arrest of any of the targets if they travel to Spain or any of the 24 nations that participate in the European extraditions convention (it would have to follow a more formal extradition process in other countries beyond the 24). The Bush lawyers will therefore run a serious risk of being apprehended if they travel outside of the United States.

Judge Baltasar Garzón is involved in the investigation, according to the El País report. Garzón is Europe’s best known counterterrorism magistrate, responsible for hundreds of cases targeting the activities of ETA and related Basque terrorist organizations. He also spearheaded the successful investigation of Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist organizations operating in the Maghreb region, including Spanish enclaves in Morocco. But Garzón is best known for his prosecution of a criminal investigation against Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet that resulted in the issuance of an arrest warrant for Pinochet while he was visiting England.

I guess Spain doesn't have our politicians' reluctance to investigate the Bush Administration for war crimes. Good on them for stepping up to the plate and this should embarrass the hell aout of all of our elected officials including those of the Democratic persuasion.

President Obama, Is THIS Clear Enough For You?

Recently President Obama repeated his favorite response when asked about whether his administration would investigate Bush Co for abuses of power.

"My view is . . . that nobody's above the law, and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen.

Well if this isn't clear enough for him I don't know what will be. And the truth is if there is not an investigation then these kinds of stories will prove that President Obama doesn't have the courage of his convictions and or his rhetoric when it comes to keeping his promise that no one is above the law. Now I hope he proves me wrong but right now I get the feeling that he is going to disssappoint a lot of us in the end.


(h/t atrios)

62%

According to USA Today a new Gallup poll reveals that 62% of Americans want some kind of investigation into Bush Co's abuses of office.


Frog March

Frog March

Frog March

Frog March

Frog March

THIS Is Who You Want To Protect?!?!?

Meet John Yoo, the guy who helped to "authorize" torture in the Bush Administration. I keep hearing people say that investigations would be bad for the country but do you really know what kind of sleaze bags you are attempting to shield from prosecution? Well allow me to present Professor Yoo's take on President Obama banning torture.

While these actions will certainly please his base -- gone are the cries of an "imperial presidency" -- they will also seriously handicap our intelligence agencies from preventing future terrorist attacks. In issuing these executive orders, Mr. Obama is returning America to the failed law enforcement approach to fighting terrorism that prevailed before Sept. 11, 2001. He's also drying up the most valuable sources of intelligence on al Qaeda, which, according to CIA Director Michael Hayden, has come largely out of the tough interrogation of high-level operatives during the early years of the war.

Right, because we NEVER stopped terrorist attacks before 9/11. Maybe someone should remind this jackass of the PDB that was entitled "bin Laden determined to strike in the United States" that was NOT the product of any torture interrogations. But what he's not done...

What such a review would have made clear is that the civilian law-enforcement system cannot prevent terrorist attacks. What is needed are the tools to gain vital intelligence, which is why, under President George W. Bush, the CIA could hold and interrogate high-value al Qaeda leaders. On the advice of his intelligence advisers, the president could have authorized coercive interrogation methods like those used by Israel and Great Britain in their antiterrorism campaigns. (He could even authorize waterboarding, which he did three times in the years after 9/11.)

Attorney General Eric Holder pay attention. I think we have a public admission of guilt here. And we didn't even have to use torture to get it!

The CIA must now conduct interrogations according to the rules of the Army Field Manual, which prohibits coercive techniques, threats and promises, and the good-cop bad-cop routines used in police stations throughout America. Mr. Obama has also ordered that al Qaeda leaders are to be protected from "outrages on personal dignity" and "humiliating and degrading treatment" in accord with the Geneva Conventions. His new order amounts to requiring -- on penalty of prosecution -- that CIA interrogators be polite. Coercive measures are unwisely banned with no exceptions, regardless of the danger confronting the country.

Eliminating the Bush system will mean that we will get no more information from captured al Qaeda terrorists. Every prisoner will have the right to a lawyer (which they will surely demand), the right to remain silent, and the right to a speedy trial.

At this point I am reminded from a quote I posted a couple of days ago coming from retired Major General Paul Eaton “torture is the tool of the lazy, the stupid, and the pseudo-tough." John Yoo is a typical NeoCon who is scared of his own shadow yet is a cheerleader for torture. What I would love to see is him get waterboarded much like journalist Christopher Hitchens did and then see him give another legal opinion that it is not torture.

Now could someone find for me the section of the Geneva Conventions that deals with a right to an attorney or a right to remain silent? Those are rights afforded to United States citizens not enemy combatants or even for that matter for captured soldiers of another country. Or maybe they just forgot about all that during WWI and WWII. It should say something that the guy who said torturing enemy combatants didn't violate the Geneva Conventions doesn't have a good understanding of the Geneva conventions in the first place.

It is naïve to say, as Mr. Obama did in his inaugural speech, that we can "reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." That high-flying rhetoric means that we must give al Qaeda -- a hardened enemy committed to our destruction -- the same rights as garden-variety criminals at the cost of losing critical intelligence about real, future threats.

Is it naive to believe that our ideals should really mean something in this country or cynical to assert that they shouldn't? Again thats the kind of guy some of you out there want to get away scott free "for the good of the country". And what happens the next time a Republican wins the presidency? What will stop John Yoo from being appointed to a position that doesn't require confirmation? While you think on that let me provide you with his coupe de grace.

But in his decisions taken so precipitously just two days after the inauguration, Mr. Obama may have opened the door to further terrorist acts on U.S. soil by shattering some of the nation's most critical defenses.

So there you have it ladies and gentlemen. In order to justify his own and the rest of the Bush Administration's advocation of torture John Yoo practically invites terrorist attacks on our soul. What a great American he is. How proud many of you Bush apologists must be. If we as a country don't have the heart to investigate and prosecute this asshole and his asshole bretheren for ripping up our Constitution and our international treaties then we don't deserve to be called a democracy.