Another GITMO Cover Up

This is a fascinating read from Harpers on how three almost simultaneous deaths of GITMO prisoners were covered up and called suicides. Unbelievable...


(h/t Attackerman)

Cue The Wingnut Freakout And The Cheney's On TV

The Obama administration will announce today that they will be transferring GITMO prisoners to a prison in Illinois.


I think I am going to turn off the TV and unplug for the rest of the week.

From The Mouth Of A Rational Republican

I guess at least one Republican in the country is tired of the fearmongering from his party over GITMO.

The prospect of transferring detainees from Guantanamo Bay to a maximum-security prison in Thomson, Illinois, generated an interesting response from a Republican state lawmaker who represents a neighboring area.

Representative Jim Sacia of the state's 89th District accused Republicans in Washington -- including Senate candidate, Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill) -- of risking thousands of local jobs in their demagoguery of the detainee issue.

"My thinking on this is extremely positive," Sacia told the Huffington Post. "If we lose this opportunity. All I can think of is we literally are idiots. I mean that sincerely."

"I understand I'm on different pages of music with others in my party. First of all this should not be a partisan issue in anyway. If President Obama brings the detainees on U.S. soil and we sit here with a brand new state-of-the-art, max security prison, sitting vacant for the last eight years, and pass on an opportunity to sell it to the federal government, which we would fill it with 1,500 regular prisoners and 800 detainees, what is the problem? The building was designed to do that.

"The only reason we have rhetoric now is because of the closing of Gitmo," Sacia concluded. "It makes no sense at all. This is a tremendous opportunity and we would be idiots to waste it."

I can't wait to see what kind of backlash Sacia faces from saying just about the most sensible thing I have heard from a Republican all year.

Im sure Boss Limbaugh will have something to say.

Finally, Justice

Eight years later Khalid Sheik Muhammed and various other terrorist will now be brought to justice.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and four other men accused in the plot will be prosecuted in federal court in New York City, a federal law enforcement official said early on Friday.

But the administration will prosecute Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri -- the detainee accused of planning the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen -- and several other detainees before a military commission, the official said.

The decisions to give civilian prosecutors detainees accused of the 2001 terrorist attacks and keep the case of the Cole attack within the military system are expected to be announced at the Department of Justice later on Friday by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.

We've been through all the arguments before, but I guarantee we're about to have the same tiresome debate all over again. We'll hear that a U.S. criminal court couldn't possibly be equipped to hear a case against a terrorist suspect -- except for all the U.S. criminal courts that have already proven that they're well equipped to hear cases against terrorist suspects. We'll hear that KSM, if convicted, will end up in an American supermax facility that's ill prepared to house terrorists -- except for all the terrorists that already safely locked away in American supermax facilities.

I've simply never understood the right's weak-kneed panic over the U.S. justice system.

Contra Steve Benen who I have a great amount of respect for, this all makes perfect sense to me. Right wingers only talk about the values this country was founded on in abstract terms but they don't really believe in them. They believe that THEY are the only arbiters of the right way to do things and how justice should be carried out in this country. Its why they try every way possible to undermine existing laws without going through the normal channels to change them. Its why they can promote stuff like torture just to make themselves feel tough. Its why they are so against any bill that ensures equal rights for everyone. For the right its all about their own ego and in this case because they are scared of their own shadow they think everyone else should be too.

And its really that simple. For them they don't care what the law says. Instead they would rather just lock these guys away and throw away the key without even so much as a hint of a trial. They don't trust their fellow citizens to be able to bring back a guilty verdict and therefore they don't think they should have to rely on them. Its really funny to watch them constantly invoke the founding fathers when it suits them when the truth is they either have no idea and or have no respect for what this country was really founded on.

It is what it is.

Update: Utterly predictable...

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...

Shoot It To Me Straight

Its pretty apparent that White House counsel, Greg Craig has been offered up as sacrificial lamb over President Obama's failure to keep the closure of GITMO on his own self imposed timeline. Now the truth is the real failure came from the White House when Republicans and their wingnut allies in the blogosphere and on talk radio took to the airways to fear monger over bringing GITMO detainees to America in order to make sure they faced justice. Not only did the White House not attempt to counter this ridiculous messaging, they didn't even support the Democrats in Congress who tried to do so on their behalf.

Now I remember one of the members of Congress who was most forceful in pushing back on the right wing bullshit was Congressman Jim Moran. It turns out that he isn't happy about how Craig is being treated and he doesn't mind telling it like it is.

"Those of us on the Hill who wanted to defend the administration's policy because we knew we had the facts on our side got no back up, no support, no information," Moran said, speculating that the Obama team simply didn't want to spend political capital on the issue.

That became clear to Moran and others in Congress in May, when the war funding bill was moving through Congress and Republicans took to the airwaves to decry the plan to shudder the prison. "We were at the Alamo, and the cavalry was galloping in the other direction," said Moran, "I think it was a political decision. I don't know who made it, but I very much doubt it was Greg Craig."

Other key appropriators who were trying to fund the effort, such as defense subcommittee chairman Jack Murtha, D-PA, and Appropriations chairman David Obey, D-WI, couldn't and wouldn't fight the Republican machine without Obama's help.

"They talked to the White House and the White House wasn't willing to stand alongside them," said Moran. The thinking among Democrats was, "If we can't take advantage of Obama's credibility on this issue, we probably are not going win."

Now the administration is trying to press the reset button on Guantánamo, but Moran argued the damage is done and it is now nearly impossible to sell the idea of moving the prisoners to U.S. soil.

"This is their first major fuck up, and it's an enormous fuckup, because now that you've lost ground you're not going to be able to recover it," said Moran.

Moran is harsh here but exactly on point also. To me this situation along with the fight over the stimulus bill showed that the White House was somewhat gun shy on their own legislative agenda. This signaled to he right wingers that as long as they were loud and as long as they were repetitive, they could make President Obama and his White House back away from issues they saw as politically difficult. It will be interesting to see where we go from here because Moran doesn't seem very hopeful about the closing of GITMO anymore. And honestly considering how he himself put his ass on the line only to get sold out by he White House, can you blame him at all?

A The Torture Technique That Only David Vitter Could Love

Prolonged diapering!

Seriously.

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.

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.

The Release Of The Holy Grail Is At Hand

It looks like the CIA IG's Report on torture from 2004 is set to be released on Monday. Rachel Maddow had Michael Isikoff on to discuss what his sources have already told him about the revelations in the report. Definitely explosive stuff.

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

A


I am positive that mock executions is a violation of the Conventions Against Torture. How the people who committed these acts will get away with it after all of this talk of no man being above the law is totally beyond me and disgusting on its face.

A GITMO Alternative

The AP is reporting that the Obama administration is looking at creating a military/civilian prison to house all of the GITMO detainees. Such a site would also house a courtroom so that detainees would not have to be shipped all over the country to be put on trial which would potentially give Republicans an opening to fear monger. I won't excerpt any of the article because we all know the AP is tripping right now but Gotta Laff has a pretty good write up on it at her blog, Political Carnival.

Let Him Go Home

Mohammed Jawad might be going home after a judge threw out most of the evidence against him because it was gleaned from torture.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Wednesday said that it's willing to send a young Guantanamo detainee home to Afghanistan after military and civilian judges banned almost all evidence against him as tainted by torture.

In a court filing, government attorneys, however, reserved the right to file new charges against Mohammed Jawad if they find evidence against him before he is released.

The Justice Department asked U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle to grant them 22 days to release Jawad — seven days to notify Congress of the release plans, as current law requires, and then 15 days till a cooling off period mandated by law expires.

If no new charges are filed during that time, the government said it would promptly release Jawad and send him back to Afghanistan. Huvelle, who earlier had scheduled a hearing for Thursday in the case, did not immediately rule on the request.

The Justice Department filing came as another federal judge in Washington ordered the release of Kuwaiti detainee after concluding that the government did not have enough evidence to continue to hold him.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said Khalid al Mutairi should be released as soon as arrangements can be made for him to travel to a third country and congressional notification requirements have been met.

Kollar-Kotelly's full opinion was classified, but she ordered that an unclassified version be released in two days.

Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said the department's handling of the Jawad case showed that the administration has “made a dramatic break with the policies of the past by rejecting the use of torture without exception or equivocation.”

“It is clear that, in addition to serving as a recruiting tool for terrorists, the status quo left behind by the previous administration at Guantanamo is legally unsustainable,” she said. “We are working to close Guantanamo and develop a new legal framework to govern detention policy that is grounded in the rule of law and will strengthen our national security."

I sincerely hope the Obama administration just gets the hell out of the way and lets this kid go home. Reports say he may have been as young as 12 when he was first picked up and he was put through torture, literally, just to incriminate himself. He didn't help stop any attacks or lead anybody to al Qaeda leadership. Its a shame that it even took this long for us to order his release. Its time to do the right thing and send him back to Afghanistan so we can truly start a new day in this country.

Update: It looks like he is going home after all!

A judge ruled today that one of the youngest detainees brought to Guantánamo Bay is being held illegally and must be released.

US district judge Ellen Huvelle's order does not end the case of Mohammed Jawad, however. Deputy assistant attorney general Ian Gershengorn told the judge that as the United States negotiates with the detainee's home country of Afghanistan for his return next month, the US justice department also is pursuing a criminal investigation.

Gershengorn said Eric Holder, the US attorney general, has not yet decided whether to indict Jawad, who allegedly threw a grenade that wounded two US soldiers and their interpreter in December 2002. That means it's possible he could be brought to the United States for a criminal trial.

Huvelle said she had no authority to prevent an indictment, but she encouraged prosecutors to think hard about problems with the case, including Jawad's mental competency to stand trial and the fact that he's already been incarcerated for six and a half years. "After this horrible, long, tortured history, I hope the government will succeed in getting him back home," she said. "Enough has been imposed on this young man to date."

Huvelle gave the government three weeks to fulfil legal requirements to report to Congress about any national security risks and diplomatic agreements for Jawad's release. She ordered the government to report back to her by 24 August and said she hoped by then he was on a trans-Atlantic flight.

Yet Another Reason To Close GITMO

Can someone explain to me precisely how Congress is supposed to exercise oversight over GITMO when they aren't allowed to actually SEE some of the prisoners?

Whiskey Tango Fire?!

A fight is brewing between Capitol Hill and the Pentagon over allegations that Chinese government agents were allowed to interrogate some detainees at Guantánamo Bay.

Jay Alan Liotta, principal director of the Defense Department office responsible for detainee policy, told a House subcommittee on Thursday that he would not publicly comment on whether officials from China or any other nation were granted access to foreign citizens held at the detention facility.

He offered to release that information to the committee during a closed, classified session.

Lawmakers weren’t happy about his answer.

Rep. James P. Moran , D-Va., said he would introduce an amendment to strip funding for Liotta’s office if the Defense Department does not disclose, in open session, whether a Chinese delegation was allowed to question Guántanamo detainees who are members of a Muslim minority in China called the Uighurs.

“Unless we get a full and accurate answer, I intend to offer an amendment to defund that office, and I intend to go as high as we need to go,” Moran said. “To not allow members of Congress to have communication with detainees, but you allow foreign intelligence agents ... that is an absolute insult to the U.S. Congress.”

Members of Congress have been routinely denied access to the Guantánamo detainees.

“The American people have a right, without compromising national security, to understand what happened at Guantánamo, particularly in this case of the Uighurs,” said Rep. Bill Delahunt , D-Mass., chairman of the subcommittee that conducted the hearing. “The answer that it should be in a classified setting is absurd.”

Ranking Republican Dana Rohrabacher of California agreed, saying he recently was denied access to terrorism detainees.

“Elected officials with oversight responsibilities have every right to talk to federal prisoners of any kind, and we thought with the change in administrations there would be a change in attitude,” Rohrabacher said.

Notice that this isn't a partisan issue either. Politicians on BOTH sides of the aisle have been denied access. Well I for one hope Congressman Moran follows through and defunds these assholes if they refuse to answer questions in an open session.

(h/t BlueGirl)

Congressman Moran Speaking Truth To Power!

Can we get more of this please!



Time for Democrats to get back to being Democrats!

A Rare Moment Of Truth From Lindsey Graham

Lindsey Graham admits what we on the left always knew, Bush and Cheney were cowards.



It is remarkable to me that Lindsey Graham says here unequivically that what President Bush and Vice President Cheney did with respect to torture and GITMO was not something borne out of rational thought. When he says these things were done out of fear that necessarily means that what they did was irrational. And he obviously knows what was done was wrong but tries to excuse it because Bush et al were afraid. Well I would love to see a murder suspect try to use that defense in court.

"Your honor I only killed that guy because I was scared someone else was going to kill me."

I am sure that would turn out fine.

But I once again raise the point Richard Clarke made the other day. If these people were operating out of fear, then why didn't they consult with people who weren't afraid about what kind of interrogations we should be engaging in and how we should be treating our detainees? We now know that at least one person, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, disagreed with some of these choices made out of fear and let them know he disagreed. Yet they allowed fear to overrule the courage of sticking to our values. And in the end they put the country at risk and for that they should be held accountable.

Catch 22

I have been thinking quite a bit since I posted the other night about Richard Clarke's op ed. Its funny how you may have missed an angle on a story and then all of a sudden it comes into focus. That's how I feel about the moment when I read Clarke's column and he pointed out that the Bush Adminstration never tried to find out what the most effective form of interrogation was before ordering EITs. As I noted when I blogged on it, the remarkable thing is that nobody has brought up that fact in the recent months that torture has been discussed extensively. Almost all of the conversation has been about their legality or lack thereof or whether or not they worked. Nobody thought to ask why the Bush Administration thought it would work in the first place.

Now following up on that lets not forget that we know from the OLC memos that these interrogation techniques were basically new and untested in terms of interrogation methods. Two men reverse engineered the torture techniques by using SERE school guidelines. Why that is important is it means that there was no record going in on how effective these methods would be. The point of SERE school was and is to prepare our soldiers who are going into theaters of war for what might happen if they are captured. They were being prepared not to resist giving up vital information, but to resist giving false confessions which could be used as propanda for our enemies.

Based on the fact that so much effort was put into trying to find a way to term these torture techniques as being legal under the Bush Administration would lead me and most reasonable people to similarly believe that such tactics had never before been authorized. If they had then there would have already had been legal precedent for what the CIA was about to do.

Of course that doesn't necessarily mean that the techniques had never been employed but if it had been done in the past that would mean that it had been done without legal cover.

But back to the issue at hand. What is apparent now after having thought it over is that Bush et al put the safety of our country at the peril of interrogation techniques that had no previous track record to go by. Other than the fact that it would come across "looking tough" there was no real reason to believe that EITs or torture or whatever you choose to call it, would work any better than traditional interrogation techniques. And that goes hand in hand with Ali Soufan's account that these torture techniques did more harm than good when it came to the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.

And yet no one in the media has brought this point up.

And when you think about it, the only way the Bush Administration could claim to know the techniques worked before using them would be if they admitted that the techniques had been employed before they were deemed legal. Or worse they would have to say that the SERE school was really a way for our military to use men and women headed to war as guinea pigs. Because if neither one of those are true, and I personally don't think they are, then its apparent that the Bush Administration ordered these kinds of interrogations just because they "believed" that might is always right. That pain will always yield the best results. That force was the answer to any problem.

And really, based on everything else we saw from the Bushies, doesn't that just make perfect sense?

When oh when will our mainstream media try to get to the bottom of this?

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.

Gen Petraeus: "We Ought To Live Our Values"

Still waiting for someone in the MSM to ask Liz or Dick Cheney if they are calling General David Petraeus a liar.






I won't hold my breath.

When Will Someone At MSNBC Push Back On Liz Cheney?

Crossposted at Attackerman

Yesterday MSNBC gave Liz Cheney a platform to deceive yet again.



Now interestingly enough Carlos Watson asked for questions to ask Liz Cheney before she came on for the interview. I myself submitted probably 10 good questions to ask her. Nothing over the top, just straight forward questions that she probably would have a hard time answering and which would expose her as being there purely for propaganda purposes. Several other people endorsed many of the questions. Sadly maybe at the most one of my questions were used. Not only that he allowed Liz Cheney to make up shit out of whole cloth. Like for instance when she said that Bush saying torture saved lives meant thats exactly what happened. Or when she claimed DNI Dennis Blair said that torture saved lives which he didn't.

Maybe the most frustrating thing was that Carlos Watson used the "some people say" device when interviewing her instead of being specific. The President of the United States says she is wrong. The Director of the FBI says she is wrong. The FBI interrogator who extracted the most useful information from Abu Zubaydah says she is wrong. But Watson seemed content with generalities allowing her to frame it as if just partisan politicos were the ones who were saying she was wrong.

Watson also refused to say that waterboarding is "illegal" using that word, or that the CIA may have "broken the law", instead using the weaksauce euphemism "crossed the line". What the hell does "crossed the line" mean? And what in the hell is so hard about being honest about what is at stake here?

Well now Greg Sargent is reporting that the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Carl Levin, has now come out and said that Liz Cheney and her daddy Dick are both full of shit.

Levin’s comments are highly newsworthy because they give us the most detailed picture yet of what’s in the documents Cheney wants. You can watch Levin’s speech right here at TPM. This is what Levin said about the documents:

Mr. Cheney has also claimed that the release of classified documents would prove his view that the techniques worked. But those classified documents say nothing about numbers of lives saved, nor do the documents connect acquisition of valuable intelligence to the use of the abusive techniques. I hope that the documents are declassified so that people can judge for themselves what is fact and what is fiction.

If this is true, it’s big. A Senator who has seen the documents Cheney claims will prove that torture saved lives says that those docs contain absolutely nothing about whether the torture techniques were actually responsible for yielding any valuable intelligence.

Networks such as MSNBC have given literally hours of airtime to Cheney and his daughter Liz to claim endlessly that these docs will prove Cheney’s torture assertions. These claims have gone almost entirely unchallenged, due to the classified nature of the documents. You’d think that a contrary claim from a well-respected Senator who has also seen the docs would merit a few passing mentions, too.

Yeah you would think that but for some reason I doubt it will happen. For whatever reason MSNBC has decided to allow Liz Cheney to come on their show and have free reign. I don't know if the edict has been handed down from on high, but its pretty evident that either no anchor has been allowed to really press her on specifics or every anchor who has interviewed her is woefully inept. I happen to have a pretty high opinion of Carlos Watson so I am going to go with the former. But the question is when will people start holding MSNBC accountable for absolutely failing their audience by giving these softball interviews? I can't think of one credible reason for them continuing to have a blatant propagandist come on their network and spew misinformation. Can you?

Like it or not Liz Cheney can move public opinion on this issue. That means that every time she is allowed on MSNBC they are basically helping to push against accountability for torture. That is not only morally wrong but also irresponsible. We should demand better.