Why Bushies Are Pussies

Im glad to see that Keith Olbermann allowed Lawrence O'Donnell onto his show to finish his thoughts from yesterday morning about former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen. The point he made that stood out the most to me is that Bushies are allowed to say whatever vile and despicable thing they want to about President Obama but if you say anything at all in response, even things that are factually true, they act like you kicked their dog or something and go running for cover. Their poutrage is so over the top as to be laughable, but when they have allies in the media like Joe Scarborough they have nothing to worry about. They can spew all the venom they want and he will cut people's mikes off and go to commercial when you lob the bombs back at them.

Pussies, the lot of em.

And I Bet He STILL Gets Quoted By WingNuts On Waterboarding

Well, it's official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn't know what he was talking about.

Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency's intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC's Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.

"From that day on, he answered every question," Kiriakou said. "The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."

No matter that Kiriakou wearily said he shared the anguish of millions of Americans, not to mention the rest of the world, over the CIA's application of the medieval confession technique.

The point was that it worked. And the pro-torture camp was quick to pick up on Kiriakou's claim.

snip

Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up.

"What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts," he writes. "I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence."

But never mind, he says now.

"I wasn't there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I'd heard and read inside the agency at the time."

foreignpolicy.com

"Waterboarding kept us safe" was, is, and always has been a load of bullshit meant to justify the indulgences of cowards. Sadly, no matter how many of these stories come out now, the wingnuts and many other people who just don't follow the news closely will never acknowledge and or realize just how opposite it was from the truth.

Memory Relapse

Rachel Maddow is simply the best TV pundit in the game right now and she made sure last night to tear Rudy Giuliani to shreds over his idiotic comments about there having been no terrorist attacks under Bush's watch. I and others have long not only pointed to the anthrax attacks but also the DC sniper attacks as at least two terrorist attacks that happened after 9-11 under Bush but until now you hardly if ever saw a TV journalist include the DC snipers in that context. Congressional Democrats as well as the White House should grab this bit of video and distribute i far and wide to discredit not just Giuliani, but the rest of the GOP/NeoCon fools who keep trying to have their own selective memory lapses about what really happened under President Bush with respect to terrorism.

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Are You Fucking Kidding Me?

Conservatives like to complain about the Obama administration pointing out that they inherited the financial crisis and one of the worst recessions in our history from the Bush administration. Well I would love to see those assholes response to Mary Maitlin claiming that Bush inherited 9/11.

Yeah, personal responsibility and all that. Get the fuck outta here with that bullshit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Of Course They Did

I'm no doubt outraged, but not at all surprised that Tom Ridge has confirmed that the Bush Administration politicized national security so as to gain electoral victories. i don't know of any credible person who was paying attention for the last 8 years who could have claimed that not to be the case. But it is always a punch to the gut to see it acknowledged by one of the players involved.

"The darkest possibilities of the politics of terrorism became obvious in the summer and fall of 2002 as the midterm elections approached," Mr. Ridge writes. "Members of my own party carried out a campaign of shameless character assassination."

He describes how GOP operatives painted then-Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., a triple amputee from wounds he suffered in Vietnam, as being soft on terrorism because, over personnel issues, he had voted against the creation of the department Mr. Ridge would lead. The assault included a campaign commercial twinning Mr. Cleland's face with that of Osama bin Laden.

"It was an early and brutal example of playing the patriotism card and set a new standard for low," Mr. Ridge said. "But the tactic worked and the GOP picked up a Senate seat. But in the end it was very much a pyrrhic victory. The accusation that we were playing politics was something we dealt with often, and the Georgia campaign gave those accusations a basis in fact."

Mr. Ridge is adamant in rejecting the contentions of Bush administration critics that the often-derided color-coded warning system he helped devise was manipulated for political ends. He depicts an atmosphere, however, in which the motives of some senior officials and Cabinet colleagues sometimes left lingering questions on that score.

The most dramatic example -- and one that Mr. Ridge said would help him confirm his previous plans to leave his post -- came on the eve of the 2004 election between Mr. Bush and Sen. John Kerry.

Osama bin Laden had released a videotape with one more ominous sounding but unspecific threat against the United States. Neither Mr. Ridge nor any of the department's security experts thought the message warranted any change in the nation's alert status.

" . . . at this point there was nothing to indicate a specific threat and no reason to cause undue public alarm," he writes.

But that view met resistance in a tense conference call with members of the intelligence community and several other Cabinet officers including Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"A vigorous, some might say dramatic, discussion ensured. Ashcroft strongly urged an increase in the threat level and was supported by Rumsfeld."

Noting the correlation found between increases in the threat level and the president's approval rating, Mr. Ridge writes, "I wondered, 'Is this about security or politics?' "

Keep in mind that this is from a book that Ridge wrote freely, imagine how many more details would come out if he was ever deposed. It is evident at this point that we will never really know just how slimy the Bush Administration was, but from all we already know I can't think of anybody who was any worse.

Thanks, But No Thanks Rich

Even Republicans think NRO is America's shittiest website.

In a January 2007 email, White House political director Sara Taylor wrote:

Prior is going after Griffin. He's made this his cause.... We need to find some folks to defend Tim and his credentials, not to mention our policy.

Your thoughts? Rich Lowry offered to help Tim

The best part? Taylor went on to ask: "Anyone better?"

Ouch.

Lowry didn't immediately respond to a request for comment about whether he felt dissed.

Another Trial Balloon?

If Eric Holder is going to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate torture allegations I wish he would do it already and get it out of the way, rather than constantly having these trial balloons leaked to the media.

From The LA Times:

Reporting from Washington -- U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. is poised to appoint a criminal prosecutor to investigate alleged CIA abuses committed during the interrogation of terrorism suspects, current and former U.S. government officials said.

A senior Justice Department official said that Holder envisioned an inquiry that would be narrow in scope, focusing on "whether people went beyond the techniques that were authorized" in Bush administration memos that liberally interpreted anti-torture laws.

Current and former CIA and Justice Department officials who have firsthand knowledge of the interrogation files contend that criminal convictions will be difficult to obtain because the quality of evidence is poor and the legal underpinnings have never been tested.

Some cases have not previously been disclosed, including an instance in which a CIA operative brought a gun into an interrogation booth to force a detainee to talk, officials said.

Other potentially criminal abuses have already come to light, including the waterboarding of prisoners in excess of Justice Department guidelines, and the deaths of detainees in CIA custody in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2002 and 2003.


Opening a criminal investigation is something Holder "has come reluctantly to consider," the Justice Department official said, emphasizing that Holder had not reached a final decision but noting that, "as attorney general, he has the obligation to follow the law."

Others familiar with Holder's thinking say that such an investigation seems all but certain, and that a prosecutor will probably be selected from a short list that Holder asked subordinates to assemble.

There is a lot to pick through here. Obviously it will be chickenshit if they just go after the CIA agents who carried out the torture and not the people who ordered it. But more disturbing to me is this sense of cowardice that I get from reading all of these trial balloons. I don't for the media to keep portraying Attorney General Holder as some kind of tortured soul or something. He is SUPPOSED to make tough decisions and he shouldn't be factoring in potential political cost. That is not why people supported him to be Attorney General and its not what his job is supposed to be all about. I keep hearing all this talk about "rule of law" from this administration and about how no man is above it. Well its time for them to put their money where their mouth is and investigate the whole thing from top to bottom.

Ill try to take it apart a little more later today or just link to Glenzilla or Marcy Wheeler should they offer their insights and opinions on it.

Rule Of Law Is For Suckers

CIA Director Leon Panetta takes to the Washinton Post to write an op-ed in pursuit of the Peggy Noonan view of Congressional oversight, when they see something illegal "just need to keep on walking". It would be funny if it wasn't so nauseating. We didn't vote in a new administration just to have them cover up the crimes of the previous adminstration. The political price they pay for not investigating may end up being a lot bigger than the price they would pay for holding people accountable. President Obama and the rest of the people around him seem to be missing the fact that in their quest to grab some of the middle they may lose all of the base. It is what it is.

Holding Them Accountable

Go on and check out Glenn Greenwald's podcast with Chuck Todd.



Go on I said!

I Am Fresh Out Of Passes

After delaying the release of the CIA's Inspector General's report on torture several times, now the Obama administration is looking to push it back yet again until August 31st. Now I don't know about you, but I have pretty much run out of plausible excuses for why they continue to kick this down the road. Right about now it seems to me that what makes most sense is that they are pushing it back so that the issue falls off of the radar and doesn't impede other parts of their agenda.

Well I am calling BULLSHIT on that. If President Obama is going to be using that "nation of laws" verbiage then he for damn sure needs to start living up to it. This is much too serious to keep playing games with it. And if accountability is going to continue to be a buzz word with his administration then at some point we are going to need to actually see some. This is weaksauce plain and simple.

Holla His Name And Witness Game Official, Its So Sick

Let me just say that I have been calling for pundits to invoke the name Richard Clarke for weeks now whenever Dick Cheney or his daughter Liz decide to make one of their many appearances on Tee Vee. The reason being is that they keep trying to promote some Orwellian revisionist history about 9-11 whereby "nobody knew who attacked us". They use that propaganda to try to make their case for why torture was sanctioned for use on suspected terrorists at GITMO. But you see quite a while back Mr Clarke wrote a book laying out just how much was known about al qaeda before the attacks and just how hard he had been pressing the Bush Administration to take the attackc to Bin Ladin long before they struck on that fateful day in September of 2001. I even sent a tweet to Carlos Watson before his interview with Liz Cheney they other day yet asking him to press her about Mr Clarke's warnings should she bring that weaksauce again. Unfortunately it was all for naught and he declined to push her on the issue.

Well as the saying goes, if you want something done right you have to do it yourself and thankfully now Richard Clarke has spoken out in an op ed in the Washington Post. And the man goes hard!

"Unless you were there, in a position of responsibility after September 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans," Condoleezza Rice said last month as she admonished a Stanford University student who questioned the Bush-era interrogation program. And in his May 21 speech on national security, Dick Cheney called the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, a "defining" experience that "caused everyone to take a serious second look" at the threats to America. Critics of the administration have become more intense as memories of the attacks have faded, he argued. "Part of our responsibility, as we saw it," Cheney said, "was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America."

I remember that morning, too. Shortly after the second World Trade Center tower was hit, I burst in on Rice (then the president's national security adviser) and Cheney in the vice president's office and remember glimpsing horror on his face. Once in the bomb shelter, Cheney assembled his team while the crisis managers on the National Security Council staff coordinated the government response by video conference from the Situation Room. Many of us thought that we might not leave the White House alive. I remember the next day, too, when smoke still rose from the Pentagon as I sat in my office in the White House compound, a gas mask on my desk. The streets of Washington were empty, except for the armored vehicles, and the skies were clear, except for the F-15s on patrol. Every scene from those days is seared into my memory. I understand how it was a defining moment for Cheney, as it was for so many Americans.


Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. "If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of eighty-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people," Rice said in her recent comments, "then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again."

I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.

Thus, when Bush's inner circle first really came to grips with the threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock -- a bad state in which to develop a coherent response. Fearful of new attacks, they authorized the most extreme measures available, without assessing whether they were really a good idea.

Richard Clarke makes the point here that I believe every mainstream media pundit has failed to make. And that is that had the members of the Bush Administration been paying attention to what their own national security team was telling them we would have either been able to prevent 9-11 or at the least been a helluva lot more prepared for it when it actually happened. Now that is just a fact and has nothing to do with partisan politics. Its impossible to buy the argument that Cheney et al didn't have a clue who al qaeda was in the days after 9-11 when we all know that President Clinton attempted to kill Bin Ladin shortly before leaving office. And if they really didn't know about al qaeda then the only possible explanation for that is that they simply weren't listening.

But Mr. Clarke makes another point that I haven't seen expressed or explored either in the mainstream media. And that is that the Bush Administration having not listened to their national security team before 9-11 and then being caught in a state of shock, never asked around about what techniques were most efficient at extracting information. Instead of bringing in the best interrogators from all of our intelligence services and asking their opinion, they just assumed that torture worked and embarked on an effort to legally justify it.

On detention, the Bush team leaped to the assumption that U.S. courts and prisons would not work. Before the terrorist attacks, the U.S. counterterrorism program of the 1990s had arrested al-Qaeda terrorists and others around the world and had a 100 percent conviction rate in the U.S. justice system. Yet the American system was abandoned, again as part of a pattern of immediately adopting the most extreme response available. Camps were established around the world, notably in Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners were held without being charged or tried. They became symbols of American overreach, held up as proof that al-Qaeda's anti-American propaganda was right.

Similarly, with regard to interrogation, administration officials conducted no meaningful professional analysis of which techniques worked and which did not. The FBI, which had successfully questioned al-Qaeda terrorists, was effectively excluded from interrogations. Instead, there was the immediate and unwarranted assumption that extreme measures -- such as waterboarding one detainee 183 times -- would be the most effective.

You haven't heard Dick Cheney speak one word on how he decided that torture or his euphemistic Enhanced Interrogation Techniques were chosen to be used on detainees other than the process by which they were deemed legal. Where are the memos on meetings inside the Bush Administration to discuss what techniques were most efficient? Why haven't any of Cheney's most ferverent defenders ever brought up any such discussions that might have happened? We saw in the release of the OLC memo page after page of studies that were falsely presented as evidence that the torture techniques that were chosen didn't cause long term damage, but where are any other studies that the Bush Administration comissioned to determine why those techniques would work any better than say presenting a detainee with sugar free cookies?

We don't hear about it because they probably don't exist.

However out of all of these misguided discussions cable news stations engage in every single day about whether torture was effective or not, nobody questions how the Bush Administration came to the conclusion that they were most effective BEFOREHAND.

I would like to think that perhaps after people read Mr. Clarke's column tomorrow that this will end up being a part of the discussion but as anybody who reads my blog regularly knows I don't have a lot of faith in our mainstream media these days. So if they won't do it then its up to us as private citizens. The next time you are around any friends or family members who believe that you "do what you have to do" when it comes to preventing attacks, press them on the point about how Cheney determined that torture was most effective. Write letters to the editors of your local paper asking them the same question. Send emails to cable news anchors and ask them to ask any pro torturists who come on the show to answer that question. I know we sometimes feel like there is not a lot we can do to press for accountability from the people who ordered torture, but these are little things we CAN do to try to at least shape public opinion on the subect. If enough people start demanding accountability then President Obama and his administration will be forced to give it to us. We can not put this ugly chapter behind us as a nation until we do a little looking backward to hold peoples' feet to the fire.

GITMO And Transparency

Today President Obama delivered a speech on National Security. Here is the video.

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Here are what I thought were the high points of the speech.

First President Obama led of the speech by going through all of the measures he has initiated since assuming office that helps our national security including redirecting resources to the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan, investing in 21st century technology to help with intelligence, working on nuclear non proliferation that will attempt to track down all "loose nukes" within the next four years, protecting the border, renewing alliances in the war on terror and renewed diplomacy. He said our fundamental values are what help keep us safe and that the founding documents of our country are what we need to cling to in our search for liberty and justice. He made the point that we can't turn our back on those values just for expediency sake.

He made the point that in the past WE were the ones who shut down torture chambers from all over the world.

He made the point that post 9-11 we had to come up with new tools in order to prevent attacks along with prosecuting them after they had been committed or attempted.

He said in the past (see during the Bush Administration) we made national security decisions out of fear rather than facts for expediency's sake.

"We went off course"

Obama made the point that both he and Senator John McCain called for the closing of GITMO and the voters in both parties made them their general election candidates which indicates they agree.

The President before he came into office we were working with an ad hoc legal approach to fight terrorism which was neither effective nor sustainable.

I liked that President Obama used the phrasing "so called" in reference to EITs which most of us know is just a euphemism for torture.

President Obama said HE is the one who sees all of the intelligence and he categorically rejects the notion that waterboarding was or is the most effective method of gaining information and that it undermines the rule of law, is a recruitment tool for terrorists, increases the will of our enemies who will no longer surrender because they believe we will torture them, puts our troops' lives in danger, and did not advance our war on terror.

He made note of the fact that Senator McCain has also spoken out about the propaganda value of torture for terrorists trying to recruit more people into their ranks.

Obama shifted to closing GITMO. He talked about the fact that the Military Commisions have only convicted 3 detainees in 7 years.

The President pointed out that in 2006 the Supreme Court invalidated the Military Court system.

He points out that the whole premise of opening GITMO was to put detainees somewhere that the Bush Administration felt they could hold them beyond the law and that the Supreme court rejected that notion.

He says GITMO itself helped to weaken our National Security.

President Obama asserts that the costs of keeping GITMO open far exceed any complications from closing it.

Obama also pointed out that he was cleaning up a mess that he hadn't created.

He says the problems that exists aren't from GITMO closing, they are from GITMO opening in the first place.

He refuses to pass this problem off to the next President.

He calls out those who have politicized the issue of closing GITMO with fear mongering. He said that those who would do this are using their words to scare people rather than solve the problem.

Unequivical statement that he will not release anyone who threatens national security and or the American people.

He points out that some detainees will end up in SuperMax prisons where nobody has ever escaped in the history of this country.

He references a statement from Senator Lindsey Graham where he said the notion that we couldn't handle these detainees in American jails is ridiculous.

President Obama put detainees into 5 categories.

1. Those that will be tried in federal courts. Points out we have tried many terrorists in federal courts for a long time.

2. Those who have violated the laws of war will be tried into the military commisions courts which have been a tradition in this country. He points out that this is not a reversal of his position and that in 2006 he wanted reform of the military commission that did not happen but he didn't reject the institution outright. He further stated that he will put in the reforms now that he called for then to make them compliant.

3. Those who have been ordered released by the courts of which there are 21 people who fall into that category now. 19 of those 21 were ordered released before he got into office. Because we are a nation of laws he has to respect the courts' decisions.

4. Those who can be tranferred to another country. Fifty people so far fit into that category.

5. Those who can't be prosecuted but also can't be released because they are dangerous. He says he will exhaust all legal avenues to insure they never get out.

President Obama acknowledges the political difficulties of closing GITMO. He references fear mongering 30 second Tee Vee ads and direct mailings. But he says we can't govern out of fear and the American people want him to get it right, not political posturing.

Then President Obama shifted to Security and Transparency. He contrasted his decision to release the 4 OLC memos recently with his decision to block the release of the torture photos. Makes the case that sometimes its appropriate to keep some things secret if members of the military's lives are at stake.

But he says that he will insist on oversight from both the Congress and Judicial branches of government. He says someone must always watch over the watchers.

He is concerned about overuse of the states secrets doctrine but has to be used at times.

He says he will not hold back information from the public just because it reveals an illegal act or something that is embarrassing.

He wants a stricter legal test for invoking states secrets.

Obama once again says he will focus on bringing more oversight from "co equal" branches of government.

He then talks about how some people still want to relitigate debates they have lost. IE Dick Cheney still advocating torture.

He is more interested in the Congress and DOJ investigating wrong doing from the Bush Administration than an independent commission.

President Obama talks about the two differing sides on torture on the extremes. On the left those who think we should reveal even our most important intelligence secrets. On the right there are those who, in President Obama's words, think "anything goes". Those who think the President can do whatever they want provided its a President they agree with. He says both sides in that debate are wrong.

Maybe the strongest part of the speech was the ending where President Obama said national security has to be an issue that brings us together not something that divides us. He talks about how some people (*cough*Republicans*cough) try to use national security as a wedge issue. But this is a time for the American people to come together to insure all of our safety.


I thought the speech while not necessarily strong on details of how he will ultimately deal with GITMO was pitch perfect for the American people and what a lot of people in the middle needed to hear from them. We simply can not allow fearmongering to take hold again in this country when we are talking about the serious task of keeping us all safe.

I Bet She Shuts Her Ass Up Next Time

Wingnut supreme of "The View", Elisabeth Hasselbeck evidently thought she could use a few Sean Hannity talking points and change Jesse "The Body" Ventura's mind about torture and waterboarding. What ensued was a rhetorical ass whupping that is probably going to sting for months. PWNED is probably too nice a word for what he did to her and her argument. Somebody should have told her that FauxNooz rhetoric doesn't work on people who know and know that they know.




I wish Ventura could come by and PWN her every single day. And I don't even watch the show lol.

(h/t CN

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.

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