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.

Criminal Negligence.

Today in an appearnce at the National Press Club, Dick Cheney was asked about the criticism leveled at him by Richard Clarke in an op ed published in the Washington Post yesterday. In typical Dick Cheney fashion he avoided answering the actual charges that Mr. Clarke laid out against him, and instead decided to try to lay blame for 9-11 at the feet of Mr. Clarke. Anybody paying attention wouldn't be suprised by Dick Cheney's dickish behavior, hey that's who he is. But unfortunately for him the record is clear, if there was anybody who failed America leading up to 9-11 it was he and his idiot partner in crime President Bush.

From ThinkProgress:

In fact, it was Cheney who “missed” the warning signs, not Clarke. New York Times reporter Philip Shenon’s book, “The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation,” reprinted some of Clarke’s emphatic e-mails warning the Bush administration of the al Qaeda threat throughout 2001:

“Bin Ladin Public Profile May Presage Attack” (May 3)

“Terrorist Groups Said Co-operating on US Hostage Plot” (May 23)

“Bin Ladin’s Networks’ Plans Advancing” (May 26)

“Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent” (June 23)

“Bin Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats” (June 25)

“Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks” (June 30)

“Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays” (July 2)

Similarly, Time Magazine reported in 2002 that Clarke had an extensive plan to “roll back” al Qaeda — a plan that languished for months, ignored by senior Bush officials:

Clarke, using a Powerpoint presentation, outlined his thinking to Rice. … In fact, the heading on Slide 14 of the Powerpoint presentation reads, “Response to al Qaeda: Roll back.” … The proposals Clarke developed in the winter of 2000-01 were not given another hearing by top decision makers until late April, and then spent another four months making their laborious way through the bureaucracy before they were readied for approval by President Bush.

And that is why we should never EVER let assholes like Dick Cheney get away with acting as if 9-11 didn't happen on their watch or that they had no clue it was coming. The information was in front of them, Richard Clarke was practically begging them to act, but they did nothing and look where that got us. Everytime he invokes the memory of 9-11 there should be someone around to remind him that he and the rest of Bush Administration failed the American people.

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.

A Verbal Evisceration Courtesy Of Richard Clarke

If there is one guy in this country who I sincerely hope has the ear of President Elect Barack Obama on terrorism and national security issues its Richard Clarke. It was largely because of Clarke in my opinion that we know the depth of the EPIC FAIL President Bush was when he never acted on information indicating that Osama bin Ladin was determined to strike America. Well in today's New York Daily News Clarke once again exposes the FAIL that is Bush along with Karl Rove and his "Bush Legacy Project".

George Bush, still President, is engaging in a legacy tour of media outlets. This comes despite his earlier having said he did not know how history would judge the Iraq war "because we'll all be dead."

Actually, many people are already dead because of Bush, and that is the point to keep in mind when he talks about his legacy.

snip

Bush stopped terrorist attacks? Yes, some of the many alleged plots cited by the White House probably would have matured into attacks had not the U.S. intelligence community acted. Many were more aspirational than operational, and others were the pure inventions of FBI informants. (In the Miami Liberty City case, an FBI informant apparently bribed people who previously had no interest in Al Qaeda. When they swore the oath to Osama Bin Laden, they were then arrested for doing so.)

snip

There wasn't a second 9/11? That's obviously true, but it misses the point. First, we must remember that Al Qaeda terrorists are patient, deliberate planners who often wait years between strikes. Second, there was the first 9/11 - and it happened on Bush's watch. Without rehashing the entire 9/11 Commission Report, the historical record is pretty clear by now that Bush did virtually nothing about the repeated warnings to him that those cataclysmic attacks were coming. Unfortunately, I can personally attest to that as well.

Bush saved American lives? Tell that to the families of the 4,200 U.S. military personnel who have perished in the needless war in Iraq. While they served heroically and deserve the great thanks of the American people, the tragic truth is that they were engaged in a war we should not have been fighting and which was sold to the Congress, the media and American people with exaggerated and even false claims.

snip

Let George Bush keep pushing the buttons on the spin machine. That cannot change the facts. His administration's actions on terrorism, including Iraq, killed many more Americans than U.S. intelligence agencies saved in the past eight years.

You see this is why I don't buy into the fantasy that time will be kind to George W. Bush. Because I truly believe that every time that cats will try to revise his history there will be heros like Richard Clarke (or at least his historical accounts) to smack them down and remind us of the truth.