Lay Down With Dogs...

...and you end up with fleas!

This should be an abject lesson to both CNN and all other credible news outlets that treating Liz Cheney and her bunch of pro torture sychophant followers with anything other than disdain and scorn will end up tainting you with their stench.

Keep America Afraid

This is a dope web ad. Hope it spreads like wildfire!



By the way Democratic ad people, that song at the end of the ad, you know the same song featured prominently in the movie "Donnie Darko"? Yeah, that's good background music for attack ads.

Just sayin

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

Don't worry, that was a rhetorical question.

From Michael Isikoff:

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

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

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

snip

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

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

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

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

It is what it is.

(h/t Greg Sargent)

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.

On The New "Pre 9-11 Mindset" Talking Point

There is a really simple pushback to the new Liz Cheney et al talking point that putting Khalid Sheik Muhammed on trial shows a "pre 9-11 mindset". Just point to the several terrorist plots broken up recently by our national security apparatus.

Oh and for shits and giggles you can even point out that they were thwarted without the use of torture.

Its really not that hard Democratic strategists. Seriously.

P.S. If you wanna make them walk off the set in a huff then you can also point out who was in office in the months prior to 9-11. One thing is for sure, nobody can say that President Clinton wasn't paying attention to terrorism. Remember HE was the one who actually tried to kill Osama Bin Ladin before he left office.

They Are Who We Thought They Were

The Cheneys are immoral and reprehensible people and just a piss poor sychophantic family. Nobody should expect them to ever take the high road. They have not a wit of familiarity with it.

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

Somebody Put Something In Her Mouth, My Zippers Stuck

More bullshit from Liz Cheney. This time however she is going to have the unfortunate (for her) consequence of reminding everyone that neither her Daddy or President Bush never, not even once, went to visit our fallen soldiers coming back from the battlefield.

Yeah, have fun with that...

If You Skurred, Say You Skurred

The apple certainly doesn't fall very far from the tree when it comes to Liz Cheney does it? Talking all that smack but scared to go on Rachel Maddow's show because she know she will get her brains beat in. Yeah keep on going on Faux News and preaching to the choir, we know you don't really have the courage of your convictions.

Just like your sorry ass daddy.

You Don't Have To Believe Me, Unless You Want To Believe Me, But Its Real....So Real

When I got a chance to look at the CIA's IG report for the first time today at the Washington Independent's website I almost immediately noticed two things, one of which may not be a big deal, the other one is almost certainly a big deal.

Here was the first thing I noticed.

Several months earlier, in late 2001, CIA had tasked an independent contractor psychologist who had [redacted] experience in the U.S. Air Force's Survival, Evastion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training program, to research and write a paper on Al-Qa'ida resistence to interrogation techniques.

Now honestly I might just be uninformed about this issue but I, personally, didn't know until now that the CIA had set out to try to figure out ways to overcome Al Qa'ida's resistance to interrogation techniques torture so early on in the game. I mean basically at best if we captured Al Qa'ida operatives right after 9-11 and this edict came down at the end of 2001 then that means in the intervening 3 months basically the CIA found that these operatives were impervious to normal and accepted means of interrogation and were already looking to up the ante.

The problem, of course, is that even on the face of it this doesn't add up. It goes to a point I made a few months back and that is that the whole justification for supposed "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" was that they were supposed to be used when traditional methods of interrogation failed. But that clearly couldn't have been the case with Khalid Sheik Muhammed because he was waterboarded 183 times in the first month of us having him in custody. It didn't appear to be the case with Abu Zubaydah either who was supposedly the first high value target to be waterboarded. And in this passage in the IG report it would seem that the third man who was waterboarded, Al Nashiri,also wasn't given the opportunity to cooperate before EITs or torture take your pick, were employed.

The interrogation of Al-Nashiri proceeded after [redacted] the necessary Headquarters authorization [redacted] psychologist/interrogators began Al-Nashiri's interrogation using EITs immediately upon his arrival.

Now everyone knows that there is something seriously fishy that is connected to Al-Nahsiri because you hardly ever hear the current administration or the previous administration even mention this guy as one of the people who were waterboarded. Instead they just focus on Abu Zubaydah and KSM. Hopefully one day we will get to the bottom of what actually happened to him. I suspect that he might not have been who they thought was which would be terribly embarrassing if it got out that they waterboarded an innocent man.

The second thing I found was this passage about waterboarding and why the interrogators were not going strictly by the OLC memo guidelines as to how it would be administered. (thanks for the transcription Attackerman)

OIG’s [Office of the Inspector General's] review of the videotapes revealed that the waterboard technique employed at [REDACTED] was different from the technique as described in the DoJ opinion and used in the SERE training. The difference was in the manner in which the detainee’s breathing was obstructed. At the SERE School and in the DoJ opinion, the subject’s airflow is disrupted by the firm application of a damp cloth over the air passages; the interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth in a controlled manner. By contest, the Agency interrogator [REDACTED] continuously applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee’s mouth and nose. One of the psychologists/interrogators acknowledged that the Agency’s use of the technique differed from that used in SERE training and explained that the Agency’s technique is different because it is “for real” and is more poignant and convincing.

Now this is vital information for two different reasons.

The first reason its important is a legal one. When asked about the difference between what the OLC and DOJ memos outlined as being acceptable as waterboarding and what the psychologists and interrogators were doing in practice, at least one of those psychologists/interrogators acknowledged that not only was there a difference, but that it was also entirely intentional. Im no legal scholar but that sounds pretty much like an admission of guilty to a layman. Especially when this unnamed person invoked the words "for real" to describe the difference. I don't see a way that someone can explain away these psychologists/interrogators disregarding the already flawed OLC memos in order to intentionally treat the detainees in an even more harsh manner than was laid out for them. So it would appear that the Special Prosecutor whom Attorney General Eric Holder just chose to investigate torture will have some pretty nice targets right off the bat.

The second reason this is important is purely political and I make no apologies for that. For months torture apologists like Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Liz Cheney, just to name a few, hid behind our troops to try to make a bogus argument that waterboarding was not torture. Their meme which got repeated time and time again on FoxNews and in the wingnut blogosphere is that "it couldn't be torture because we do it to our own members of the military". Many of them took it further and tried to paint anyone who rightly labeled waterboarding as torture, as it has been prosecuted as such for decades, to be claiming that we also tortured our men and women in the military. Even for the GOP this was a particularly disgusting attack in their attempt to excuse the rancid bullshit that was perpetrated by the Bush administration, supposedly in the name of national security.

Well no longer can they make such a claim when it comes to what we did with these detainees. Not only did the CIA Inspector General observe for himself that they were not following the guidelines to waterboard a detainee as was proscribed in the OLC memos which were cribbed from SERE school teachings, at least one of the persons participating in the waterboarding acknowledged that it wasn't the same thing because with the detainees it was "for real".

Now the next step is that when liberals or progressives of Democratic members of Congress go on any cable news shows or Sunday talk shows to talk about demanding accountability for torture, they need to familiarize themselves with the information in this document. No longer should they allow Republicans and Conservatives to try to frame this issue as being not a big deal. I understand that we have our plates full with health care reform but if there was ever a time to demand accountability from the Bush administration I think its now. We have to try to strike when the iron is hot in my honest opinion. And we have to be armed with the facts not as we see them but as they are spelled out in this CIA IG report.

I will be posting more on the report as I comb through it.

Be Careful Of The Questions You Ask Because You Might Get The Truth In Response

David Shuster obviously had no idea that Charles Pierce would go all in on the media for giving Liz Cheney a platform to spew her venom and that he would take him through the recent history of the mainstream media allowing and some cases encouraging some of these conspiracy theories.

But it was great Tee Vee all the same.

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

It Was Just A Matter Of Time

As much as it has irritated the hell out of me to see Liz Cheney all over my Tee Vee over the past few months spewing invective at President Obama and lying through her teeth to try to keep her dad from going to jail, one of the more amusing side notes has been how many so called "pundits" have rushed to say that she would be some kind of viable political candidate in the future. Nothing about her appearances had suggested that this was the case, in point of fact she has been fact checked so mercilessly as to lead most rational Democrats to HOPE she tries to run for office so she can be publicly humiliated and we can get some measure of retribution for all of the hijinks she is pulling now. But I guess because she is a Republican and she can string a sentence or 50 together without taking a breath this meme persisted and indeed started to gain momentum with the Villagers.

Now for someone like Liz Cheney they are caught in a conundrum. On the one hand she has an almost unquenchable thirst for publicisty now and she wants to be out there as much as they will have her so she can continue her low risk high reward campaign against President Obama. But on the other hand she is also batshit crazy and she as well as her handlers have to know that sooner or later the more she talks the higher the likely hood that some of that crazy is going to slip out. This makes for an interesting balancing act.

Having already noticed this dichotomy it wasn't all that surprising to me last night when reports started trickling out about an appearance that Liz Cheney made on the Larry King Show where she defended the "birthers". Here is how Salon.com's Joan Walsh put it:

After King showed video of the crazy birther who disrupted a meeting with poor GOP Rep. Mike Castle, demanding he acknowledge Obama was born in Kenya (that's one birther claim); and after Carville denounced them as a "poor, pathetic" fringe group, King gave Cheney a chance to distance herself from them. But Cheney demurred, telling King the Birther movement exists because "People are uncomfortable with a president who is reluctant to defend the nation overseas."

The rarely shocked Carville seemed briefly speechless, and even King, not known to be the most combative interviewer, tried a second time to get an honest reaction from Cheney -- which I read as expecting her to separate herself from the crazies. But Cheney repeated her talking point about Obama inadequately defending the nation overseas. Unbelievable.

At the time of that post Walsh did not have a video of the interaction and so I had to rely just on her words. But even just with her characterization to go on I figured this was going to be bad. For one she had finally run up on someone who was way out of her league. What had been so irritating to me about Liz Cheney wasn't just that she was all over cable news, but that she was almost always paired with someone sympathetic to her or at the least someone who was not very confrontational. Because of this she was allowed to say whatever the hell she wanted to without much if any pushback or fact checking on the spot. But you had to know that James Carville wasn't going to go for that.

She also has a bad habit of filibustering with long ass diatribes so that the other party doesn't have time to respond and when they do respond she loves to try to talk over them. Again that wasn't likely to happen with Carville either. I have to believe that she didn't know she would be paired up with him or she wouldn't have shown up. Having finally seen the video, if she ever really had any electoral ambitions its likely that she will forever wish she never did show up.

At first I was a little ticked that I couldn't find the video anywhere but CNN and of course their video is pretty long. But the truth is I think its good to watch her whole appearance unfold as time goes on. Carville is masterful as usual not allowing her to talk over him and by the end of her time on the show Larry King himself is constantly admonishing her about interrupting. Not only that Carville kept pointing out her filibustering that by the end of her appearance Larry King was making note of it too. All in all it was a case study in how any opponent of hers can make her look like an ass and incompetent all at the same time. Oh she brings the same sloganeering as usualy but it falls completely flat when Carville challenges her with fact.

In the end her ridiculous "birther" comments are just the cherry on top, especially when Carville calls her and her party out for encouraginig those whackjobs.



If she ever decides to put her name on the dotted line to run for elected office you can expect more of that kind of EPIC FAIL.

We Got The Little Hooker On Tape

Somebody should tell Liz and Dick Cheney that in the 21st Century regular citizen can pull up videos of the shit they have said in the past. Since the media won't do it, people like Jed Lewison will expose you and people like me will be oh so happy to spread the word.





Better step your game up.

We Need A Break

Since MSNBC is bound and determined to shove Liz Cheney down our throats today, even though she is nothing but a dumb ass propaganda organ, I vote we just watch Jon Stewart's take down of her Dad every time they bring her on.

Enjoy

Dick (Uncut)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Dick (Uncut)
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Economic Crisis

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.

Better Pushback

I am thinking the next time some weak ass cable news network allows Liz Cheney on the air to spread propaganda for her daddy, which ever liberal opposite her should be ready with some better pushback lines to put her on the defensive.

When she says torture worked and valuable information came because of it the liberal/progressive should ask:

"Are you and your daddy calling decorated FBI agent Ali, Soufan who continues to put his life on the line to keept his country safe, a liar?!"

When she says there is no evidence that GITMO has been used for propaganda the correct response is:

"Is it a correct statement then that you and your daddy do not believe in General Petraeus and think him to be a dishonorable man when he says it was used to recruit al qaeda in Iraq?!"

When she says it was legal and authorized and kept this country safe the question put to her should be:

"So is it you and your daddy's position that President Bush endangered this country just because of political concerns?!"

And when she says President Obama is making us less safe because he is banning torture policies its time to go for broke:

"Why do you and your daddy hate the Constitution and America so much?!"

And yes, the combination of a "?" and a "!" is supposed to signal faux outrage.

You're welcome.

And Now For The Main Event!

Goodmorning America brings us the match up we have been hoping for. Liz Cheney vs Lawrence O'Donnell. Unfortunately because this was a "polite" setting O'Donnell couldn't unload the clip like I am sure he wanted to so it didn't quite live up to the hype. However make no mistake, this was absolutely an PWNING.



Did you notice that Liz Cheney had no comeback to any of Lawrence O'Donnell's questions? Did you also notice that she totally made up some shit about we only prosecuted people for waterboarding because they did "some additional things" other than waterboarding? I loved how O'Donnell hit back when Liz said 14% of detainees who were released from GITMO "returned to the fight" (which we know isn't true) by pointing out that it was her dad who let them out in the first place. Now if only we could get that same match up somewhere like "Hardball" or "Morning Joe"

PWNING Yourself

Does Liz Cheney know how to pronounce her own name?




(h/t Shuster)