You Had Me At Your First Graff

My gut reaction on reading Marc Thiessen's new book, Courting Disaster, was: "Why is a speechwriter who's never served in the military or intelligence community acting as an expert on interrogation and national security?" Certainly, everyone is entitled to a voice in the debate over the lawfulness and efficacy of President Bush's abusive interrogation program, regardless of qualifications. But if you're not an expert on a subject, shouldn't you interview experts before expressing an opinion? Instead, Thiessen relies solely on the opinions of the CIA interrogators who used torture and abuse and are thus most vulnerable to prosecution for war crimes. That makes his book less a serious discussion of interrogation policy than a literary defense of war criminals. Nowhere in this book will you find the opinions of experienced military interrogators who successfully interrogated Islamic extremists. Not once does he cite Army Doctrine—which warns of the negative consequences of torture and abuse. Courting Disaster is nothing more than the defense's opening statement in a war crimes trial.

Former Senior Military Interrogator "Matthew Alexander"

Trust me, it only gets better from there. You will want to read it all the way through.

Will The MSM Ask The Cheney's About Their Lies?

Don't worry, that was a rhetorical question.

From Michael Isikoff:

A crucial CIA memo that has been cited by former Vice President Dick Cheney and other former Bush administration officials as justifying the effectiveness of waterboarding contained “plainly inaccurate information” that undermined its conclusions, according to Justice Department investigators.

Cheney has publicly called for the release of the CIA’s still classified memo and another document, insisting their disclosure will bolster his claim that the rough interrogation tactics he vigorously pushed for while in the White House yielded actionable intelligence that foiled terrorist plots against the United States.

But a just released report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility into the lawyers who approved the CIA’s interrogation program could prove awkward for Cheney and his supporters. The report provides new information about the contents of one of the never released agency memos, concluding that it significantly misstated the timing of the capture of one Al Qaeda suspect in order to make a claim that seems to have been patently false.

snip

The CIA memo, called the Effectiveness Memo, was especially important because it was relied on by Steven G. Bradbury, then the Justice Department’s acting chief of the Office of Legal Counsel, to write memos in 2005 and 2007 giving the agency additional legal approvals to continue its program of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.” The memo reviewed the results of the use of EITs – which included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and forced nudity – mainly against two suspects” Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the report states. One key claim in the agency memo was that the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogations of Zubaydah led to the capture of suspected “dirty bomb’ plotter Jose Padilla. “Abu Zubaydah provided significant information on two operatives, Jose Padilla and Binyam Mohammed, who planned to build and detonate a ‘dirty bomb’ in the Washington DC area,” the CIA memo stated, according to the OPR report. “Zubaydah’s reporting led to the arrest of Padilla on his arrival in Chicago in May 2003 [sic].”

But as the Justice report points out, this was wrong. “In fact, Padilla was arrested in May 2002, not 2003 … The information ‘[leading] to the arrest of Padilla’ could not have been obtained through the authorized use of EITs.” (The use of enhanced interrogations was not authorized until Aug. 1, 2002 and Zubaydah was not waterboarded until later that month.) “ Yet Bradbury relied upon this plainly inaccurate information” in two OLC memos that contained direct citations from the CIA Effectiveness Memo about the interrogations of Zubaydah, the Justice report states.

As Newsweek reported last year, the information about Padilla’s plot was actually elicited from Zubaydah during traditional interrogations in the spring of 2002 by two FBI agents, one of whom, Ali Soufan, vigorously objected when the CIA started using aggressive tactics. The Justice report faults Bradbury for not pushing the CIA to backup its effectiveness claims. “We question whether it was reasonable for Bradbury not to have demanded more specific information before concluding that the use of EITs was both essential and effective in disrupting terrorist attacks,” the report states.

Look I like the show "24" as much as the next guy, but that isn't real life. At some point the folks who think it should some kind of "toughness" to torture detainees are going to have to wake up to the reality that not only didn't it work but the time invested in torturing took time away from doing the really effective interrogation techniques that actually DO work and put everyone at risk if there really was a so called ticking time bomb scenario.

It is what it is.

(h/t Greg Sargent)

In Which I Disagree With Adam Serwer

Adam Serwer has a post up complaining about Jon Stewart's interview last night with John Yoo. Now on the substance of all the things Stewart could have called Yoo on, I totally agree with Serwer's assessment. But I think he missed some of the points that Stewart DID make. Points for which Yoo had no answer. I am posting the second part of the unedited version from The Daily Show's website. In this clip, although there aren't many laughs, I think Stewart put in some good work. The most telling moment to me is when Yoo tries to claim that having terrorist attacks against our country was unprecedented and that is why the Bush administration was justified in looking for ways to torture that would have been otherwise illegal. Stewart pushes back with specific terrorist attacks that had happened in this country and all Yoo can muster in response basically was that 9/11 was bigger. And when Stewart presses him on how many people have to be murdered in order for it to rise to the level where the President overlooks our treaties and goes his own way, Yoo totally tries to change the subject because he knows he has been nailed.

Now maybe the audience missed that point, but I surely didn't. And I guarantee you that Yoo will never get asked questions that hard on the rest of his book tour.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - John Yoo Extended Interview Pt. 2
http://www.thedailyshow.com/
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

It Was All Bullshit

If you needed any more proof that in fact the Bush administration was full of shit and NOT acting in good faith in ordering torture on GITMO detainees you don't have to look any further than the very recently released FBI memos which are now redacted further to show just how far the FBI and the CIT went in trying to convince the Pentagon and the adminstration not to use those techniques. And as you can see for yourself there objection had as much or more to do with the fact that the techniques were unreliable at best and counterproductive at worst as it did to do with the legality of it which still was not a minor point.

I'll say this, we have a major health care fight on our hands and I understand that, but after we win this long standing battle we simply MUST look back. No ifs ands and buts about it. This can not be allowed to stand. Not just because of the crimes committed against the people we tortured, but also because the Bush administration put all of our lives in danger by experimenting with unproven and unsuccessful torture techniques instead of relying on tried and true approaches just so they could satisfy their own repugnant blood lust. These fucking imbeciles thought it was more important to be able to beat their chest and claim some kind of macho toughness than actually catching the sons of bitches who wish to do us harm!

I am getting pissed off all over again just thinking about it.

For Pete's Sake, Is Anybody At GITMO Guilty?

I was pretty sure there were before but I am beginning to have my doubts...

Ali Soufan Calls Bullshit On Dick Cheney And The Rest Of The Torture Advocates

Former FBI interrogator, Ali Soufan, is back with another op ed in the New York Times. This time he takes apart Dick Cheney's assertion that the CIA IG report vindicated his position that torture "worked". Spencer Ackerman has a really good post up about it and I suggest reading that in addition to the op ed but I wanted to highlight a particular part of the op ed which should be repeated over and over like an echo whenever Dick Cheney or his wingnut daughter Liz appears on any cable news shows again.

It is surprising, as the eighth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, that none of Al Qaeda’s top leadership is in our custody. One damaging consequence of the harsh interrogation program was that the expert interrogators whose skills were deemed unnecessary to the new methods were forced out.

Mr. Mohammed knew the location of most, if not all, of the members of Al Qaeda’s leadership council, and possibly of every covert cell around the world. One can only imagine who else we could have captured, or what attacks we might have disrupted, if Mr. Mohammed had been questioned by the experts who knew the most about him.

The Mr. Mohammed Soufan is referring to is Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Now this is the central point that I feel like liberals and progressives are loathe to explore because whether torture worked or not, it was illegal and should have never been pursued. I get the sense that many of us on the left also are hesitant to press the case because we think there is a chance that torture did yield useful information. Now on the one hand I am sure that torturing normal people is prone to making them tell more than they would without it. But members of Al Qaeda are not regular people anymore than our soldiers are regular people. And above and beyond that no matter how much information was given up, there still is the question of if it was credible. We have a culture whereby we have been conditioned to believe that because torture works in movies or on popular Tee Vee shows then it works in real life. But the truth, as counterintiutive as it might be to some of us, is that it doesn't.

As Ali Soufan points out, if torture was so effective then why the hell haven't we caught the Al Qaeda leadership, all of whom were know to KSM? Why didn't he tell us where they were and what they were up to? Why don't we have bin Ladin's head on a platter right now when instead, 8 years after 9/11 the guy is still putting out propaganda tapes? Can anybody answer that one? Can one single torture advocate answer that question?

Traditional interrogation was never tried on KSM, and that's the dirty little secret that nobody, including the mainstream media, ever wants to talk about. Soufan points out in the op ed all the information extracted from other HVDs who were tortured because the FBI was still allowed to use traditional interrogations either before or after the torture. When they were able to use traditional interrogtions prior to the torture they were able to extract information just fine and the torture wasn't even necessary and only ended up making the detainee shut down to the point where the FBI had to be called back in time and time again just to get them to start back talking. In the cases where traditional interrogation was used after the detainees were tortured the interrogators had to work their asses off to undue the harm the torture had done just to get the detainees to talk. In short, torture made it harder and less likely to get information out of the detainees in just about every single instance. This isn't some DFH saying it, its a hardened FBI interrogator who actually was in the room and got good information from several members of Al Qaeda and helped prosecute them both here and abroad.

Now I realize that torture advocates will never admit that torture didn't work and actually harmed our efforts to head off more attacks, but its time for everyone else to start calling bullshit on them too. Its not enough just to stick to the legality of the situation when the other side is appealing to people's primal instinct for revenge. People need to know that our ability to extract revenge was actually hurt by people like Dick Cheney ordering torture. As Soufan infers with his rhetorical question the very reason we don't have Al Qaeda's leadership dead or in custody now is precisely because Cheney ordered the torture of the men who could have led us right to them.

At some point we have to say that and keep repeating it until it sinks in to the public's consciousness. Otherwise we leave open the possibility that Dick Cheney gets to revise history to his benefit. And I don't think any of us wants that to happen.

DNC Kisses Cheney

Nice to see somebody touching this fool up. I'll have a post up on Cheney and a lie he told awhile back that still bothers me before the night is over.

Cheney, Torture, And The Gestapo

For all of the fault that I find with many of Andrew Sullivan's positions on government spending, on torture he may "get it" more than any other blogger in the country. Or rather I should say he may "get it" and be able to explain it better than anybody else. This at the end of his post about torture in which he PWNED his colleague, Marc Ambinder, should be repeated all over the liberal and progressive blogosphere because its real, and it resonates.

Nonetheless, the US-run court ruled that Cheney-style EITs, deployed by the Gestapo with the same justification as Cheney, constituted prosecutable torture:

As extenuating circumstances, [accused torturer] Bruns had pleaded various incidents in which he had helped Norwegians, Schubert had pleaded difficulties at home, and Clemens had pointed to several hundred interrogations during which he had treated prisoners humanely.

The Court did not regard any of the above-mentioned circumstances as a sufficient reason for mitigating the punishment and found it necessary to act with the utmost severity. Each of the defendants was responsible for a series of incidents of torture, every one of which could, according to Art. 3 (a), (c) and (d) of the Provisional Decree of 4th May, 1945, be punished by the death sentence.

And they were executed for war crimes.

The question Americans have to ask themselves is why they hold the former president and vice-president to lower moral and ethical standards than the United States once held the Gestapo. That's all. And that's everything, isn't it?

When he puts it in those terms I think its hard for most average people to support the torture that the Bush/Cheney Administration ordered no matter how many episodes of "24" they have watched.

Some Things Just Never Get Old

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

Beautiful!

Using Cheney Logic

Dick Cheney was his usually morally repugnant self yesterday on FoxNews Sunday, shamelessly advocating torture. And there is a lot in the interview for people to take apart but I want to focus on something he said early on. Its one of the best recent example of Orwellian double speak that I could possibly even imagine. First lets look at the question and answer in its entirety and then we can take it apart a little.

WALLACE: This is your first interview since Attorney General Holder named a prosecutor to investigate possible CIA abuses of terror detainees.

What do you think of that decision?

CHENEY: I think it's a terrible decision. President Obama made the announcement some weeks ago that this would not happen, that his administration would not go back and look at or try to prosecute CIA personnel. And the effort now is based upon the inspector general's report that was sent to the Justice Department five years ago, was completely reviewed by the Justice Department in years past.

They made decisions about whether or not there was any prosecutable offense there. They found one. It did not involve CIA personnel, it involved contract personnel. That individual was sentenced and is doing time. The matter's been dealt with the way you would expect it to be dealt with by professionals.

Now we've got a political appointee coming back, and supposedly without the approval of the president, going to do a complete review, or another complete investigation, possible prosecution of CIA personnel. We could talk the whole program about the negative consequences of that, about the terrible precedent it sets, to have agents involved, CIA personnel involved, in a difficult program that's approved by the Justice Department, approved by the National Security Council, and the Bush administration, and then when a new administration comes in, it becomes political.

They may find themselves dragged up before a grand jury, have to hire attorneys on their own because the Justice Department won't provide them with counsel.

It's a terrible, terrible precedent.

Ok lets work backwards here. Dick Cheney is worried about a special prosecutor looking into whether or not any CIA personnel broke the law by going outside the guidance of the OLC memos. He says the fallout from such a probe woudl be:

We could talk the whole program about the negative consequences of that, about the terrible precedent it sets, to have agents involved, CIA personnel involved, in a difficult program that's approved by the Justice Department, approved by the National Security Council, and the Bush administration, and then when a new administration comes in, it becomes political.

They may find themselves dragged up before a grand jury, have to hire attorneys on their own because the Justice Department won't provide them with counsel.

It's a terrible, terrible precedent

So he says that it will set a "terrible precedent" and that the decision to look into the program is "political" He then goes further shortly after in another answer to describe what he thinks will be the impact of this investigation.

CHENEY: Well, you think, for example, in the intelligence arena. We ask those people to do some very difficult things. Sometimes, that put their own lives at risk. They do so at the direction of the president, and they do so with the -- in this case, we had specific legal authority from the Justice Department. And if they are now going to be subject to being investigated and prosecuted by the next administration, nobody's going to sign up for those kinds of missions.

It's a very, very devastating, I think, effect that it has on morale inside the intelligence community. If they assume that they're going to have to be dealing with the political consequences -- and it's clearly a political move. I mean, there's no other rationale for why they're doing this -- then they'll be very reluctant in the future to do that.

So this investigation is going to lead to nobody wanting to "sign up for those kinds of missions" and its going to have a "very, very devastating...effect...on morale inside the intelligence community".

Well my goodness who knew that just investigating to see if any wrongdoing occured should have such adverse effects on the intelligence community? But wait, there is one thing that isn't really adding up to me here. If investigating the CIA for wrong doing creates so many problems, why did the Bush administration do just that?

Lets go back to the Cheney's answer again.

And the effort now is based upon the inspector general's report that was sent to the Justice Department five years ago, was completely reviewed by the Justice Department in years past.

They made decisions about whether or not there was any prosecutable offense there. They found one. It did not involve CIA personnel, it involved contract personnel. That individual was sentenced and is doing time. The matter's been dealt with the way you would expect it to be dealt with by professionals.

So wait, Dick Cheney himself admits that the Justice Department while he was still Vice President did in fact investigate and prosecute at least one bad actor in this whole situation. He makes the distinction that it was a CIA contractor but the truth is the two men who actually orchestrated the torture program were ALSO CIA contractors too so its a distinction but not much of one. Now using his own logic shouldn't this have devastated the CIA?! Shouldn't they have all been pulling out their fainting couches and refusing to protect the nation after that prosecution? Shouldn't we have been attacked by bin Ladin many times over due to the fact that DOJ even looked into the allegations put forth by the CIA's Inspector general? And wasn't Alberto Gonzales who led that inquiry ALSO a political appointee?

Oh wait, I keep forgetting, Its Okay If You're A Republican.

What would be great would be if some journalist points out this contradiction in the man's logic, but I won't hold my breath.

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.....

President McCain

Imagine my fellow Democrats, Liberals, and Progressives, that the unthinkable happened and John McCain won the election last year. At this point he is putting together plans to bomb Iran, making the Bush tax cuts permanent, and taxing our health care. In the middle of all this he gives this explanation for why he will never allow anyone to look into torture committed by contractors and sanctioned by the Bush Administration over the previous 8 years.



Now, would you accept President McCain telling you that we have to look forward and not back lest we "damage" the CIA? Would you hold your tongue when he says he won't investigate because its distracting from his policy agenda?

Then why are you accepting those same arguments from President Obama?

Food for thought.

Greg Sargent Keeps PWNING Sock Puppet Stephen Hayes

Please for the love of God and all that is sacred in blogging, somebody throw in the towel for Stephen Hayes. He didn't really want it with Hov Greg!

A The Torture Technique That Only David Vitter Could Love

Prolonged diapering!

Seriously.

They Didn't Know What The Fuck They Were Doing

More great reporting from Spencer Ackerman:

In the August 1, 2002 memo written by Bybee and Yoo, the lawyers summarize and refer repeatedly to what the CIA told them about how the “enhanced interrogation techniques” are supposed to work, as well as to assurances that the lawyers then consider material for whether the proposed actions violate U.S. laws. For instance, discussing waterboarding, they write, that water would be applied “in a controlled manner,” and that the CIA orally informed them that “this procedure triggers an automatic physiological sensation of drowning that the individual cannot control even though he may be aware that he is in fact not drowning.”

Just one problem: CIA medical personal objected to the description that OTS gave to the Justice Department as factually inaccurate.

Addressing the discrepancies between how waterboarding worked in the SERE school and how it worked at CIA and other torture techniques that changed between on-paper justification and in-the-field practice, a footnote to the inspector general’s 2004 report reads:

According to the Chief, Medical Services, OMS [the CIA's Office of Medical Services] was neither consulted nor involved in the initial analysis of the risk and benefits of EITs [”enhanced interrogation techniques,” nor provided with the OTS report cited in the OLC opinion. In retrospect, based on the OLC extracts of the OTS report, OMS contends that the reported sophistication of the preliminary EIT review was probably exaggerated, at least as it related to the waterboard, and that the power of this EIT was appreciably overstated in the report. Furthermore, OMS contends that the expertise of the SERE psychologist/interrogators on the waterboard was probably misrepresented at the time, as the SERE waterboard experience is so different from the subsequent Agency usage as to make it almost irrelevant. Consequently, according to OMS, there was no a priori reason to believe that applying the waterboard with the frequency and intensity with which it was used by the psychologist/interrogators was either efficacious or medically safe.

I ask that you read that excerpt several times slowly and let it sink in. Bush, Cheney et all trusted our national security, basically our very lives, to two guys who didn't know what the hell they were doing with no evidence that what they were proposing would work. And that is notion is supported by FBI interrogator Ali Soufan, who himself pulled a lot of information out of high value Al Qa'ida detainees using traditional methods, in his testimony before Congress earlier this year.

A major problem is that it is ineffective. Al Qaeda terrorists are trained to resist torture. As shocking as these techniques are to us, the al Qaeda training prepares them for much worse – the torture they would expect to receive if caught by dictatorships for example.

This is why, as we see from the recently released Department of Justice memos on interrogation, the contractors had to keep getting authorization to use harsher and harsher methods, until they reached waterboarding and then there was nothing they could do but use that technique again and again. Abu Zubaydah had to be waterboarded 83 times and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed 183 times. In a democracy there is a glass ceiling of harsh techniques the interrogator cannot breach, and a detainee can eventually call the interrogator's bluff.

In addition the harsh techniques only serves to reinforce what the detainee has been prepared to expect if captured. This gives him a greater sense of control and predictability about his experience, and strengthens his will to resist.

A second major problem with this technique is that evidence gained from it is unreliable. There is no way to know whether the detainee is being truthful, or just speaking to either mitigate his discomfort or to deliberately provide false information. As the interrogator isn't an expert on the detainee or the subject matter, nor has he spent time going over the details of the case, the interrogator cannot easily know if the detainee is telling the truth. This unfortunately has happened and we have had problems ranging from agents chasing false leads to the disastrous case of Ibn Sheikh al-Libby who gave false information on Iraq, al Qaeda, and WMD.

A third major problem with this technique is that it is slow. It takes place over a long period of time, for example preventing the detainee from sleeping for 180 hours as the memos detail, or waterboarding 183 times in the case of KSM. When we have an alleged "ticking timebomb" scenario and need to get information quickly, we can't afford to wait that long.

Bush and Cheney ordered torture not because it would keep us safe but because it would make them feel macho. Like they were "real" men. And they put all of us at risk in the meanwhile. Anybody who claims to be concerned about terrorism and national security should be outraged about this. Unfortunately Republicans only care about their party at this point so there won't be any accountability forthcoming from their side fo the aisle.

It is what it is.

Attackerman Ethers Dick Cheney

Thanks to Spencer Ackerman's fine work on the two torture documents that Dick Cheney sought to release, ostensibly to prove that torture worked, we now have it confirmed that Cheney is a lying sack of shit!

For months, former Vice President Dick Cheney has said that two documents prepared by the CIA, one from 2004 and the other from 2005, would refute critics of the Bush administration’s torture program. He told Fox’s Sean Hannity in April:

“I haven’t talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country,” Cheney said. “I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was.”

Those documents were obtained today by The Washington Independent and are available here. Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney’s claims that the “enhanced interrogation” program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.

The first document, issued by the CIA in July 2004 is about the interrogation of 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and whom, the newly released CIA Inspector General report on torture details, had his children’s lives threatened by an interrogator. None of that abuse is referred to in the publicly released version of the July 2004 document. Instead, we learn from the July 2004 document that not only did the man known as “KSM” largely provide intelligence about “historical plots” pulled off from al-Qaeda, a fair amount of the knowledge he imparted to his interrogators came from his “rolodex” — that is, what intelligence experts call “pocket litter,” or the telling documentation found on someone’s person when captured. As well, traditional intelligence work appears to have done wonders — including a fair amount of blundering on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s part:

In response to questions about [al-Qaeda's] efforts to acquire [weapons of mass destruction], [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] revealed that he had met three individuals involved in [al-Qaeda's] program to produce anthrax. He appears to have calculated, incorrectly, that we had this information already, given that one of the three — Yazid Sufaat — had been in foreign custody for several months.

This is a far cry from torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed into revealing such information. It would be tendentious to believe that the torture didn’t have any impact on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — he himself said that he lied to interrogators in order to get the torture to stop — but the document itself doesn’t attempt to present a case that the “enhanced interrogation” program was a factor, let alone the determinant factor, in the intelligence bounty the document says he provided.

The second newly released document — a June 2005 overview of information extracted from detainees — is, if anything, more caveated. In making a case that “detainee reporting” was “pivotal for the war against [al-Qaeda],” it says that “detainee reporting is often incomplete or too general to lead directly to arrests; instead, detainees provide critical pieces to the puzzle, which, when combined with other reporting, have helped direct an investigation’s focus and led to the capture of terrorists.” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the prime example here.

The document also discusses unraveling the network of Indonesian al-Qaeda affiliate Hambali after Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s capture. There are repeated references to the value of “debriefings,” which the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report says are distinct from the “enhanced interrogation techniques” but can be used after they occur. For instance, “Debriefings of mid-level [al-Qaeda] operatives also have reported on specific plots against U.S. interests.” Indeed, in a section titled “Aiding Our Understanding [al-Qaeda],” a listed example is:

Abu Zubaydah’s identification early in his detention of [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] as the mastermind of 11 September and [al-Qaeda's] premier terrorist planner and of ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri as another key [al-Qaeda] operational planner corroborated information [REDACTED].

Those revelations, as former Abu Zubaydah interrogator Ali Soufan has testified, came before Abu Zubaydah was tortured.

snip

Again, perhaps the blacked-out lines of the memos specifically claim and document that torture and only torture yielded this information. But what’s released within them does not remotely make that case. Cheney’s public account of these documents have conflated the difference between information acquired from detainees, which the documents present, and information acquired from detainees through the enhanced interrogation program, which they don’t.

I had to exerpt heavily because everything in the piece was tied together and notable but again this is all Spencer Ackerman who put the pieces of he puzzle together and he deserves all the credit. Hopefully there will be some Democrats on the Hill with balls big enough and spines strong enough to use his analysis to beat back the whinefest that we all know is now coming from the GOP.

Someone Had To Intercede

Check out this allegation included in the CIA IG report on torture.

Al-Nashiri was required to kneel on the floor and lean back. On at least one occasion an Agency officer reportedly pushed Al-Nahshiri backward while he was in this stress position. On another occasion [redacted] said he had to intercede after [redacted] expressed concern that Al Nashiri's arms might be dislocated from his shoulders. [redacted] explained that, at the time, interrogators were attempting to put Al-Nashiri in a standing stress position. Al-Nashiri was reportedly liftted off the floor by his arms while his arms were bound behind his back with a belt.

I wonder if Joe Scarborough will continue to try to claim that the stress positions were no big deal.

Breaking!!!

MSNBC just reported that Attorney General Eric Holder will in fact appoint a special prosecutor to investigate torture and prisoner abuse from our war on terror.

As the saying goes, stay tuned!

Update: From the Washington Post

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has decided to appoint a prosecutor to examine nearly a dozen cases in which CIA interrogators and contractors may have violated anti-torture laws and other statutes when they allegedly threatened terrorism suspects, according to two sources familiar with the move.

Holder is poised to name John Durham, a career Justice Department prosecutor from Connecticut, to lead the inquiry, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the process is not complete.

Durham's mandate, the sources added, will be relatively narrow: to look at whether there is enough evidence to launch a full-scale criminal investigation of current and former CIA personnel who may have broken the law in their dealings with detainees. Many of the harshest CIA interrogation techniques have not been employed against terrorism suspects for four years or more.

The attorney general selected Durham in part because the longtime prosecutor is familiar with the CIA and its past interrogation regime. For nearly two years, Durham has been probing whether laws against obstruction or false statements were violated in connection with the 2005 destruction of CIA videotapes. The tapes allegedly depicted brutal scenes including waterboarding of some of the agency's high value detainees. That inquiry is proceeding before a grand jury in Alexandria, although lawyers following the investigation have cast doubt on whether it will result in any criminal charges.

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.

Meet The Torturers

This story just keeps getting worse. And you just have to know that if nobody is ever brought to justice for this, it WILL happen again.