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.

Options

Phillip Zelikow's memo is now on the web and although he wrote the memo in 2005. well after the Bush Adminstration ordered the waterboarding of at least 3 detainees at GITMO, it still shows that there was a dissent in the Administration over how we should be treating detainees captured in the war on terror.

U.S. handling of detainees captured in the war on terror should be durable – politically, legally, and among our key allies.

We do not adopt legal standards in our behavior as a favor to terrorists. We do it for ourselves, and to be able to exemplify the values that distinguish us from the terrorists.

In practice, we are already adopting de facto standards of conduct that are good and defensible. In some of the most challenging operations we now conduct, by Special Operations forces against the Zarqawi network in Iraq, our forces have found, for example, that they do not need physical coercion in their interrogations. But these practices are not yet reflected in a legal framework to underpin them.

Now many questions still remain, not the least of which is was this kind of dissent going on in the Administration in 2002. Before we can look ahead as President Obama would like us to, we have to look back to see what we are averting our eyes from. Otherwise, whether its waterboarding or some other form of torture, it likely will happen again.

Bipartisan Support For A Truth Commission

Poor Michael Steele. He won't be RNC chairman for much longer if he keep bucking his party like this on national Tee Vee.

Jim Webb Chooses Politics Over Policy

I have had a lot of good things to say about Jim Webb over he past few months. His willingness to try to bring reform to our prison system and his keeping an open mind about legalizing marijuana made me somewhat a fan of his. But this morning Jim Webb was a major dissappointment. He embraced NIMBY as a political stance obviously because he fears Republican attacks on him and he rejected the idea of a truth commission.




First on the subject of the Uigyurs obviously Jim Webb contradicts himself. First he says detainees should get their day in court and then we should accept what happens. Then he says he wouldn't want the Uigyurs coming to Virginia. But Uigyurs DID have their day in court and a judge decided they were not guilty and not dangerous. Now coincidentally just the other night hilzoy had two really good posts on who the Uigyurs are and how they got to be conflated with terrorists in the first place. The first one focused on who they are.

Here's a description (pdf, see pp. 211-212) of the Uighurs from an FBI report filed in 2004, and describing a visit in 2002. It follows what seems to be an account of abuse of one of the Uighurs:

"The Uighurs are moderate Muslims who occupied East Turkestan, which was taken over by the Chinese and renamed the Xinjiang province of China. The Uighurs were offered land in Afghanistan in order to gather personnel opposing Chinese oppression. They were often inspired by Radio Free Asia, which [redacted] was often a broadcaster for. The Uighurs considered themselves to be fighting for democracy, and they idolized the United States. Although the Uighurs are Muslim their agenda did not appear to include Islamic radicalism. They claimed to have no political connection to Islamic terrorists or the Taliban. However, their camp in Afghanistan was bombed, and they fled to Pakistan. The Uighurs were captured by the Pakistanis, with half being transferred to US custody, and half being remanded directly to Chinese officials. It was alleged that the Uighurs who were transferred directly to the Chinese were immediately executed. At the time of my TDY, US officials were considering whether to return the Uighurs to the Chinese, possibly to gain support for anticipated US action in the Middle East. The Uighur detainees at GTMO were convinced that they would be immediately executed if they were returned to China."

That's not a defense lawyer speaking; it's an FBI agent, interviewing them about a year after their detention. These are not terrorists. These are people we picked up by mistake

And the other focused on who they aren't.

The Uighurs were at a camp, or a village, run by ETIM in 2001. Abdul Haq is supposed to have been a member of al Qaeda's shura since 2005, years after the detainees had anything to do with him. If there is evidence that he or his group were affiliated with al Qaeda in 2001, I do not know of it, and the Uighurs have consistently denied any affiliation with al Qaeda.

So Jim Webb is either ill informed or is willingly fearmongering so as to hold up the closing of GITMO. You know I hate to say it but when Democrats allow themselves to be played like this by Republicans then they actually deserve to get their asses kicked in the next election. There is no need for them to allow the right wing to dominate this issue in the way that it has but its going to take someone with brass balls to stand up to them. I kinda thought it might have been a guy like Jim Webb. Obviously I was wrong.

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.

Deep Thought

If Republicans are truly convinced that Speaker Pelosi is lying, why don't they support a Truth Commission? Wouldn't it help them politically if the Democratic Speaker of the House was found to have been lying to the public? What are they afraid of?

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.

Tell Em Why You Mad Son

There is an opinion piece over in the Washington Post written by two lawyers who formerly served in the Reagan White House and the Bush41 White House claiming that there shouldn't be any truth commission nor prosecutions of Bush Co over "policy differences". Oh and the best part is they have comments open so I think you should go over there and give them YOUR opinion on it. So far a lot of people aren't exactly agreeing with them in the comments section. I think they are going to have the unintended effect of showing just what the sentiment is out there in terms of people wanting to see Bush Co frog marched.