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.

Someone Had To Intercede

Check out this allegation included in the CIA IG report on torture.

Al-Nashiri was required to kneel on the floor and lean back. On at least one occasion an Agency officer reportedly pushed Al-Nahshiri backward while he was in this stress position. On another occasion [redacted] said he had to intercede after [redacted] expressed concern that Al Nashiri's arms might be dislocated from his shoulders. [redacted] explained that, at the time, interrogators were attempting to put Al-Nashiri in a standing stress position. Al-Nashiri was reportedly liftted off the floor by his arms while his arms were bound behind his back with a belt.

I wonder if Joe Scarborough will continue to try to claim that the stress positions were no big deal.

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.

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 Wu Tang Of Interrogations

Looks like times are a changing when it comes to how we will handle high value terrorists and their interrogations.

President Obama has approved the creation of an elite team of interrogators to question key terrorism suspects, part of a broader effort to revamp U.S. policy on detention and interrogation, senior administration officials said Sunday.

Obama signed off late last week on the unit, named the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, or HIG. Made up of experts from several intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the interrogation unit will be housed at the FBI but will be overseen by the National Security Council -- shifting the center of gravity away from the CIA and giving the White House direct oversight.

Seeking to signal a clean break from the Bush administration, Obama moved to overhaul interrogation and detention guidelines soon after taking office, including the creation of a task force on interrogation and transfer policies. The task force, whose findings will be made public Monday, recommended the new interrogation unit, along with other changes regarding the way prisoners are transferred overseas.

A separate task force on detainees, which will determine the fate of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and future regulations about the duration and location of detentions of suspected terrorists, has not concluded its work.

Under the new guidelines, interrogators must stay within the parameters of the Army Field Manual when questioning suspects. The task force concluded -- unanimously, officials said -- that "the Army Field Manual provides appropriate guidance on interrogation for military interrogators and that no additional or different guidance was necessary for other agencies," according to a three-page summary of the findings. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters freely.


Using the Army Field Manual means certain techniques in the gray zone between torture and legal questioning -- such as playing loud music or depriving prisoners of sleep -- will not be allowed. Which tactics are acceptable was an issue "looked at thoroughly," one senior official said. Obama had already banned certain severe measures that the Bush administration had permitted, such as waterboarding.

I think this is the best course of action that we could have hoped for and having FBI in the lead not only should insure that we don't torture anymore, it will also probably yield a lot more reliable intelligence for our national security forces to use to help keep us safe.

Ezra Klein PWNS Joe Lieberman

Every Democratic strategist going on cable news this week should read this Ezra Klein post about Joe Lieberman's lame recession excuse against doing health care reform now because I can promise you that they will be hit over the head with what that asshole said yesterday on CNN.

Second, health-care reform is scheduled to begin in 2013, by which time we will almost certainly be out of recession, and if we're not, we have bigger problems. Lieberman might be uncommonly pessimistic about our prospects for growth, but that would imply support for health-care reform, as it will pump a trillion dollars into the economy and thus stimulate demand.

Third, the costs of reform largely manifest in the later years of the decade, namely 2015-2019, by which point we may or may not be in recession, but if we are, it will probably be a different recession than the one we're in now.

There is, in other words, no connection between whether GDP growth is slightly negative in the third quarter of 2009 and whether we should spend money between 2013 and 2019 building a universal health-care system. When people say we shouldn't do health-care reform because of the recession, they're saying something about their preferred approach to health-care reform, not to recessions.

Oh yeah, and by the way, FUCK JOE LIEBERMAN!

That is all.

Good On Congresswoman Yvette Clarke

It is so awesome to hear a member of Congress say clearly that they can not and will not support a health care reform bill that doesn't include a public option even if President Obama asks them to.



We need members of the Progressive Caucus in the house to speak bluntly just like she did when it comes to a public option. No option = No support.

Eating While Black

Is it time for another beer summit?

Baltimore Ravens undrafted rookie linebacker Tony Fein was arrested and charged Sunday with assaulting a police officer at a restaurant, authorities said.

Fein, 27, was eating dinner at Johnny Rockets in the Inner Harbor when a security officer thought he saw him pass a handgun to one of his friends, said police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi. It turned out to be a cell phone.

When police questioned Fein, 27, he became belligerent and shoved the officer, Guglielmi said. Sgt. Joseph Donato was knocked to the ground and had an injured elbow, a police report said.
Fein's agent, Milton Dee Hobbs, says it was the officer who was aggressive and that Fein didn't shove him. Hobbs says police approached Fein because he was a black man wearing a sweat suit and hoodie.

Hobbs also says Fein has never owned a weapon.

Police told the Baltimore Sun that the three identified men with Fein fled the scene. Fein did not have a handgun in his possession, according to the newspaper.

Fein attended Mississippi and was signed as a free agent in June following a minicamp tryout. He is an Iraq veteran who served in the Army for more than three years before playing college ball. In two seasons at Ole Miss, he had 136 tackles (77 solo) in 24 games and was given the Pat Tillman Patriot Award by the Military Order of the Purple Heart his senior year of college, according to the Ravens' Web site.

Is it too much to ask that a man be allowed to eat his meal in peace? I know some folks will point to the cops version of events about him being belligerent, because as we all know cops never lie, but give me a fucking break.

One of those officers should be fired but there is zero chance that that will happen.

More Than A Trial Balloon

Its beginning to look like Attorney General Eric Holder may just be moving towards some prosecutions.

From the New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s ethics office has recommended reversing the Bush administration and reopening nearly a dozen prisoner-abuse cases, potentially exposing Central Intelligence Agency employees and contractors to prosecution for brutal treatment of terrorism suspects, according to a person officially briefed on the matter.

The recommendation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, presented to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in recent weeks, comes as the Justice Department is about to disclose on Monday voluminous details on prisoner abuse that were gathered in 2004 by the C.I.A.’s inspector general but have never been released.

When the C.I.A. first referred its inspector general’s findings to prosecutors, they decided that none of the cases merited prosecution. But Mr. Holder’s associates say that when he took office and saw the allegations, which included the deaths of people in custody and other cases of physical or mental torment, he began to reconsider.

With the release of the details on Monday and the formal advice that at least some cases be reopened, it now seems all but certain that the appointment of a prosecutor or other concrete steps will follow, posing significant new problems for the C.I.A. It is politically awkward, too, for Mr. Holder because President Obama has said that he would rather move forward than get bogged down in the issue at the expense of his own agenda.

The advice from the Office of Professional Responsibility strengthens Mr. Holder’s hand.
The recommendation to review the closed cases, in effect renewing the inquiries, centers mainly on allegations of detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Justice Department report is to be made public after classified information is deleted from it.

The cases represent about half of those that were initially investigated and referred to the Justice Department by the C.I.A.’s inspector general, but were later closed. It is not known which cases might be reopened.

Mr. Holder was said to have reacted with disgust earlier this year when he first read accounts of abusive treatment of detainees in a classified version of the inspector general’s report and other materials.

In examples that have just come to light, the C.I.A. report describes how C.I.A. officers carried out mock executions and threatened at least one prisoner with a gun and a power drill. It is a violation of the federal torture statute to threaten a prisoner with imminent death.

Mr. Holder, who questioned the thoroughness of previous inquiries by the Justice Department, is expected to announce within days his decision on whether to appoint a prosecutor to conduct a new investigation; in legal circles, it is believed to be highly likely that he will go forward with a fresh criminal inquiry.

I'm not going to get too worked up about this until we actually see whether Holder is going to move on this or not for sure, but I have to say that it sounds like an investigation is a lot closer to being a reality than not.

Give Us The Truth

I highly recommend this op-ed from Neal Gabler in the LA Times entitled 'Truth' vs. 'facts' from America's media

I am just going to excerpt the ending:

Why don't we get the truth? Part of it, as I've said, is fear -- fear that if journalists dispel the rumors they will be bashed by the right, which is implacably against the president's reforms no matter how much sense they make. Part of it is a lack of expertise. Most reporters are not equipped to quickly and authoritatively tell truth from spin on an issue such as healthcare. And part of it, frankly, is sheer laziness.

Telling the truth requires shoe leather. It requires digging up facts that aren't being handed to you, talking to experts, thinking hard about what you find. This isn't easy. It takes time and energy as well as guts, especially when there are conflicting studies, as there are on healthcare. But finally, we may not have a journalism of truth because we haven't demanded one. Many of us are invested in one side of the story; we are for Obama or against him, for healthcare reform or against it. These are a priori positions. Truth won't change them.

Yet the danger of not insisting on the truth in a brave new world of constant lies is that it subjects our policies to whichever side shouts the loudest or has the most money to spend to mislead us. That is likely to lead to disastrous governance: a needless war, a great recession, a continuation of a failing healthcare system.

What it comes down to is that sometimes the media have to tell the truth not because anyone really wants them to but because it is the right thing to do -- the essential thing to do -- for the sake of our democracy.

Will The Media Ever Notice That Kent Conrad Is Lying?

Senator Kent Conrad appeared on "Face The Nation" this morning to peddle his lame co-op alternative to a public option in health care reform. Now I get that he is a ConservaDem and that he supposedly want to be seen as a big time deficit cutter so he has some ideological objections to health care reform. I have already explained yesterday where I thought he could shove those concerns when it comes to voting for cloture. However there is one thing he said today that he has said several times that nobody has called him out on. Here goes:

CONRAD: Well, I would say this. It is very clear that in the United States Senate, the public option does not have the votes. If we have to get to 60 votes, you cannot get there with public option. That’s why I was asked to come up with an alternative, and the alternative I came up with was this cooperative approach that, as Senator Grassley correctly describes, is not government run or government controlled, it’s controlled by its membership. But it does provide not-for-profit competition to insurance companies, so it has appeal on both sides. It’s the only proposal that has bipartisan support and if we’re going to get 60 votes we’re going to need bipartisan support

.

According to Conrad there is bipartisan support for co-ops but that is simply a lie. So far at best a handful Republicans have said that they would "look into" his proposal for co-ops but many of them have already come out and slammed it as just a public option by another name. The RNC fits into that category and Senator John Kyl the Minority Whip has said that no Republicans would vote for a health care reform bill anyway. So where does Conrad get this notion that he has bipartisan support fo co-ops?

Your guess is as good as mine.

Of course if just one journalist would dare ask him WHO in the Republican Party endorses co-ops we might just get the answer to that question. But our mainstream media does not seem to be in the questioning business anymore.

Joe Klein, Blogger For Swampland, Hates Bloggers

Or I should say left wing bloggers.

You have to check out this ancedote about Joe Klein from Aimai over at No More Mister Nice Blog. Its the way you would imagine a discussion about liberal and progressive bloggers would go with Joke Line but never really thought you would hear about.

Last week I went to a cookout on the beach here with some old friends (Sausages and seafood, but no cocktail weenies!) Every year they do a cookout, and then a birthday party, and for years I've known that one of their guests was Joe Klein. I never mixed it up with him because, after all, well...the opportunity never presented itself and while I'm pretty aggressive in print no one really goes up to someone and picks a quarrel with them, do they? Or maybe they do. Yes, I guess they do. I was standing at the cookout minding my own business when Klein started pontificating for the rubes on how “surprising” and “shocking” it was that Grassley, of all people, should have come out and endorsed the “death panels” lie. I walked up and said “why are you surprised?” [edited to remove typo] to which he, in best pundit debater fashion (never allow yourself to admit you were just posing!), shot back “who says I'm surprised?” I said “well, you did. You just started your lecture saying “Its surprising.”” Its not surprising, the republicans have nothing left to lose and nothing left to gain at this point outside of pleasing the crazy base and attacking Obama and the dems.”

We were off and running. He then said that its true the fringe republicans were “crazy” but perhaps no crazier than the “crazy left” under Bush. I thought he meant the “truthers” so I said “name me one person in congress or the Senate who was as crazy on any topic as these Republican senators and Congressmen who sign on to the birther and deather stuff are now?” Evading this question he said “well, Glenn Greenwald is crazy—he's a civil liberties absolutist.” Now, me, I come from a long line of civil liberties absolutists so I said “I admire Glenn Greenwald's work immensley but it must be very embarrassing for you, of course, because he's been eating your lunch for years.” (!) I think this must be something of a sore point for him. He began shrieking “Glenn Greenwald is EVIL! EVILl!..do you know what he did? He “sicced” his blog readers on my EDITOR and she was going through a DIVORCE at the time.” Really? I said, politely, that was very wrong, if it happened.

“We kept it very quiet” he said, backing off the claim of any real harm and, as a twofer, managing to imply that only those "in the know" had been kept informed.

People around us were clamoring to know what the debate was about so I laid it out, chapter and verse: I explained the Klein was upset because he had been caught out shilling for the Republicans on National Security Matters and on the FISA court legislation in particular and that he was still upset because he'd been held up for ridicule for his absurd statement that there was no problem with the secret Bush programs although he didn't know anything about them. And that this extended to the actual retroactive FISA legislation, which he also said was fine but didn't know anything about. This seemed to inflame things somewhat. Can't see why. He began shrieking at me that he hadn't been wrong, he'd been misled by a “democratic staffer” but really, I just began laughing at that point because “I didn't read the legislation” like “the dog ate my homework” is rather a lame explanation for a grown man, let alone a self described journalist.

I re-iterated that I was a big admirer of Glenn's work and that he had just received the I.F. Stone award for his excellence. That really got Klein's goat and he started screaming that he had been one of Izzy's readers for years and that Glenn was no Izzy, that he was crazily anti-national security which Izzy wouldn't have been, and at any rate I shouldn't talk about things I don't understand and I should realize that Klein has been on the right side of every argument since the Vietnam war.

Yes! I should read his stuff on the Vietnam war!” I said that I was, in fact, one of his readers—that I read his column and his blog and that it was precisely because I did know his history, in detail, that I accepted Glenn's critique of him, which of course has always been extensively documented and linked. And then, in what might be the piece de resistance of this little interaction, he screamed “you don't read me! You read WIKIPEDIA! AND THAT'S LEFTIST.” He then added that he had always been anti war and that I should “read his [Klein's] stuff from 1993." Hmm....1993, were we at war with Iraq then? I rather thought that was a different time, and even a different president. I take it that the rationale behind that bizarre interjection is that, as far as Klein is concerned, most of this is really old history at this point and what he really wants to be talking about is health care reform.

After this the e discussion, such as it was, devolved into the usual journalistic posturing and ranting against “those bloggers” who “don't do research” and who “don't have editors.” (There were many other well respected journalists at this dinner but they don't deserve to be dragged in here) to which I responded “jeezus christ on toast points you can say that to me after it came out today that John Solomon, then of the Washington Post, was writing fawning letters to the White House explaining to them how he could spin the US attorney scandal anyway they wanted? And hellooooo? Judy Miller?” Klein actually backed down on this topic and we agreed that McClatchey had done very good reporting but the main thing I took away from the discussion is that for journalists like Klein the world is divided into practitioners/insiders and totally ignorant outsiders. He was surprised that I brought up the Solomon story, or that I took seriously the Judy Miller issue, because in his world that's really inside baseball. In fact when I pointed out how abysmal the Washington Post's editorial page had been, under Fred Hiatt's tenure, he and another Journalist standing nearby assured me that Fred is an “editorialist” so the ordinary rules don't apply and I don't need to tar the whole paper with his sins. Its as thought they imagine that each story is a stand alone piece and that there's a hard and fast line between opinion and “fact” when every day, and every way, we've seen any pretense to that distinction run right into the ground. Has any adult person thought that since Media Whores Online (of sainted memory?).

Well you at least have to give the man points for consistency. Joke Line has actually come a long way since he first stated blogging at Swampland. He is at least willing to admit every blue moon when he gets something wrong now. But at heart he has this elitist attitude about the mainstream media of which he is a member in good standing in contrast to his readers and liberal and progressive bloggers. He holds himself and his profession up as some kind of gold standard while trying to pooh pooh any instances where he and his industry get the story completely wrong. To this day he won't concede that he screwed up his FISA article, choosing instead to blame everyone but himself. But really that is just the going mindset of Villagers anyway its just kind of amusing to see him verbalize it in an real life in person exchange with one of his readers.

The Mistake That Keeps On Giving

I can still vividly remember earlier this year when for about five seconds Joe LIEberman was on the hot seat. The members of the Democratic Caucus wanted to strip him of all of his chairmanships for his advocacy for John McCain in the Presidential race and because of the wildly inappropriate comments he made about then candidate Barack Obama at the Republican National Convention and beyond. But Joe LIEberman wasn't going to take this lying down. He threateded to bolt the caucus should he not retain his gavel. His demands were mostly met with a "good riddance" by the caucus and rank and file Democrats, especially liberals and progressives, because what he had done was so egregious that if losing him to the Republicans, who would never fully embrace him anyway, was a consequence of actually making an example out of him then it was really worth it.

But then like a knight in shining armor President Obama sent word down from on high that Harry Reid was to do "whatever it takes" to keep Joe LIEberman in the fold. I can still remember exactly the disgust I felt when I heard about that siutation. Once again Democrats had proven that they have no spines and no sense of party discipline. But some people were SO enamored of President Obama that they just felt like he must be pulling a Jedi mind trick. Despite all of he evidence to the contrary they tried to paint allowing LIEberman to give him his ass to kiss as being some type of great strategic victory.

Well over half a year after that debacle and LIEberman has proven time and again just how much of an asshole he still is and that he doesn't have even an inkling of respect for or deference to the man who allowed him to keep his gavels. From continuing to question President Obama's credentials on national security matters, to greatly watering down the stimulus bill, Joe LIEberman has been about as consistent a critic of the Obama administration and their agenda as many Republicans in the Senate. So it really should come to no surprise that he went on CNN this morning and tried to throw cold water all over health care reform.



I just want everyone out there who continues to try to make it seem as if President Obama can do no wrong or that he doesn't make any strategic mistakes to remember this clip every time you are about to express that opinion. I can guarantee that you will hear Joe Lieberman's words over and over again in the coming week while President Obama is out of town and on vacation which of course makes he timing by LIEberman even more appalling. But hey maybe its some great triple double reverse psychology by President Obama that makes it certain that health care reform will get passed this year. Right?

Fear Of A Filibuster

I wish I could embed this video of Senator Max "Captain Inneffective" Baucus talking to the editorial board of the Helena Independent record but even though I can't, I highly recommend you go to the link and watch it. For most of the video Baucus comes off as a pretty good choice to steer health care reform through the Senate, but two issues which are really one issue end up exposing not just his problem but also the problem of Democrats in the Senate being led by Harry Reid.

The two problems that come out in the interview is that for one Max Baucus has decided to bring in three Republicans to negotiate with three Democrats on the Senate Finance committee without paying any attention to the actual party make up of the committee nor the political leanings of the 3 Republicans he invited over. The only Republican out of the 3 that is even remotely reasonable is Olympia Snowe and she is a centrist of the worst kind. She doesn't look for a middle ground of policy, what she looks for is the least controversial course of action. Or at least what is percieved as least controversial. So she is not going to push for good policy if it can at all be painted as controversial. And remember she is the gold standard of this motley crew.

Then you have Senators Chuck Grassley and Mike Enzi who both claim to be staunch conservatives which really translates into being staunchly against Democratic governance. There is pretty much zero chance that either of these guys are going to vote for a final health care reform bill, and yet here they sit in negotiations no doubt watering down the bill while offering little if anything up as a sacrifice in these so called negotiatioins. Not only are the undermining the efforts inside these sham negotiations, they are also undermining them in public too by making several statements which were meant to validate bogus smears and rumors about the health care bills that have already passed and in the case of Chuck Grassley actually gloating about the fact that he helped to insure that no bill came out of the Senate Finance committee before the August break which gave the GOP and their insurance industry cohorts the opportunity to launch these ambush attacks at Democratic townhalls.

The second issue is Baucus' repeated insistence that he is trying to put together a bill that will get 60 votes. This is his response again and again when asked about whether or not he will include a public option in the bill. The clear implication, although he is too chickenshit to say it plainly, is that there is no way to get 60 votes for a public option. Now he gives a pretty lame excuse in my opinion at first when explaining that Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd are ill. I have to believe that if there was a vote for cloture on health care reform and Senator Kennedy's vote was needed that he would find a way to make it there if he wasn't on his death bed. And Robert Byrd, while ill, has been back to work since before the August break. Eventually you hear Baucus admit that there are also 4 or 5 other Democrats who say they are against a public option.

But here is my thing, I can accept that some of our more conservative Democratic members of the Senate may be against a public option and that they want to vote their conscious. What I can not accept, nor can I understand why the Obama administration is willing to accept, is that any of those members would support a Republican filibuster of health care reform. If there was ever an action that a Democratic member of the Senate could do to provoke a harsh backlash from the administration it should be supporting a filibuster on major Democratic legislation. That action should lead to that Democratic Senator becoming a parriah in the party and all financial support should be from that point on shut down. Any parochial interests ie earmarks should be cut from just about every appropriations bill and a suitable primary opponent should be sought post haste.

Voting no on an up and down vote is one thing but voting no to help prevent such an up and down vote on Democratic legislation is just beyond the pale.

Now back to Baucus, these two issues that he raises through out the interview are intertwined and that's where I think it shows he totally screwed the pooch when it came time for him to decide how this bill would be crafted. On the one hand he believes that he is going to need 60 votes for cloture to get the bill through because of course the Republicans are going to filibuster. Well to me that is even more of a reason to let the process play out as it normally would in the full committee. For one, most factions would all get a fair hearing and be able to put their ideas forth about the legislation. For two it would all be out in the open for the world to see exactly how these negotiations are happening. And for three and maybe biggest of all, the leadership would be able to gauge by their demeanor which Republican Senators might be ripe to be picked off for a vote.

If its true that Baucus feels like we need Republican support to over come a filibuster then the only legitimate votes he should have been looking for are those to replace Senator Kennedy's and Senator Byrd's. That means he basically needed to find two votes at the most. So how in the hell did he come up with Grassly and Enzi to try to accomplish that goal? Thats the question I want to ask because the truth is, if the public option dies, much of the credit or blame will and should go to his choice of these right wing buffoons as negotiating partners. In his quest for 60 votes he is negotiating with at least two people who have always been against a public option. And by keeping the negotiations behind closed doors he eliminaed even the slim chance that the negotiations themselves might have attracted support from othe Republicans in Congress. And now the threat of a filibuster compells him to not even give the public option a shot of being in the bill lest the two guys he is negotiating with whom are never going to vote for this bill anyway, won't vote for a bill with a public option.

My head hurts.

But there are several fixes to this situation if you ask me. The first would be to drop this Gang of Six bullshit and just take the bill back to where it belongs in the full Finance committee and push it through from there to the floor of the Senate. The other fix would be for the White House and the DNC to step in and threaten to destroy any Democrat in the Senate who supports a Republican filibuster while also courting the full range of potential Republican allies on health care reform like Senators Susan Collins, or George Voinovich, just in case Kennedy or Byrd can't make the vote. The fourth, and honestly what is most preferrable to me, is for Baucus to tell the Republicans in the Gang of Six to get bent and push a Democratic bill through committee with a strong public option and then dare the GOP to filibuster. Allow them to shut down the Senate and make sure that their actions are on CSPAN.

Now contra public belief if the Republicans want to filibuster a bill they do not have to talk continuously like Jimmy Stewart did in the movie Goes To Washington. However they do have to make several procedural moves hour after hour and day after day to keep a filibuster going. This is an issue that is so important and so decisive that it is the perfect opportunity to actually call the Republican's bluff. Let's see how many of them will continue to support a filibuster with the nation watching. Let's see how many of them are willing to stand between poor people getting health insurane. Let's see how many of them are committed to helping health insurance companies discriminate against people with preexisting conditions. And lets see how much resolve they have as people continue to lose their jobs and thus their health insurance and are waking up to what that really means.

But for that we would need a strong Majority Leader and unfortunately we don't have one. Harry Reid should have shut down Max Baucus from the moment he came up with his Gang of Six approach. He should have threatened to strip his chairmanship if he would not put the negotiations back in the full committee. And biggest of all Harry Reid shoudl have put the fear of God in any Democratic member of the Senate who dared to say they would ever consider supporting a filibuster of a health care reform bill.

Now the good thing is that there is still a little bit of time for wiggle room, but what we need right now is a strong Democratic leader to step forward and kick the caucus members in the ass and get them back on track. That could be President Obama, that could be Harry Reid, or better yet it could be a Senator like Chuck Schumer or Dick Durbin who wants to go for Reid's crown and uses this opportunity as a shot across the bow. I honestly don't care who does it but dammit it needs to be done. We can get a progressive bill with a public option through both house of Congress. All it takes is somebody with balls enough to stand up to the ConservaDems and get them to toe the line on a cloture vote and for someone to step to Max Baucus and tell him that his services are no longer needed.

The truth of the matter is that with a change in the process and a change in tactics I feel good in predicting that in the end we will still peel off a few Republicans. But first we need a bill out of committee to get them on board with in the first place and second of all we need a good bill with a public option so that all of the Democrats can feel good voting for cloture knowing that the bill will deliver on everything President Obama promised.

The question for me now is who, if anyone, will step up to the plate and assume the mantle of Democratic leadership. Its all right out there for somebody. I just hope it happens soon.

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

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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.