Better News in the Middle East

Possibly good news -- the chances of Israel unilaterally attacking Iran may have just lessened:

According to the media reports, Netanyahu forged an agreement with opposition leader Shaul Mofaz of Kadima shortly before parliament was set to vote to disperse.

Parliament Speaker Reuven Rivlin, a veteran of Israeli politics, said he had never seen such a last-minute political upheaval. “This is good for Israel because it brings stability, he said on Army Radio as he left parliament before sunrise.

The appointment of Mofaz, a former military chief and defense minister, is significant in Israel’s standoff with Iran, as he has been a vocal critic of Israel striking Iran’s nuclear sites on its own.

In the meantime, that pesky Al-Qaeda has evidently been foiled again:

The CIA and overseas intelligence partners disrupted an al-Qaeda plot to blow up civilian aircraft using an advanced explosive device designed by the terrorist network’s affiliate in Yemen, U.S. officials said Monday.
...

U.S. officials said the FBI is examining the device — modeled on the “underwear bomb” used in an attempt to bring down a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day 2009 — to determine whether airport security systems would have detected it.

U.S. officials said the CIA and other agencies tracked the plot for about a month before moving to seize the device in recent days in the Middle East outside Yemen, where the bomb was built.

Does Obama have another foreign policy or anti-terrorism success to achieve before the November election?

The Secret

Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney a.k.a. The Grand Vizier had at least one secret group inside the CIA doing his bidding. It now appears that he personally ordered them to lie to Congress about their activities. And while the cover story seems to be a revelation that it was an anti-Al Qaeda assassination ring, that's not exactly as scandalous as this conjecture, should it turn out to be true:

But two former ranking CIA officials have told TIME that there's another equally plausible possibility: The program could have required the Agency to spy on Americans. Domestic surveillance is outside the CIA's purview -– it's usually the FBI's job – and it's easy to see why Cheney would have wanted to keep it from Congress.

Both officials say they were never told what was in the program, and that they're only making calculated guesses. But their theory gibes with other reports, quoting ex-CIA officials, that say the program had to do with intelligence collection, not assassinations.

I've always thought that the warrantless wiretapping was actually political ops, ideally for Karl Rove's perusal. After all, Cheney was in Richard Nixon's Watergate White House and never once admitted that there was anything wrong with the illegal eavesdropping -- only that Nixon should have stonewalled all the way. And it was on Nixon's crime-ridden reelection campaign that young Rove made his bones as a dirty trickster.

If there's any justice, let's get to the bottom of it and air it out for all to see.

If there's any justice, Cheney in the docket.

Pelosi Vindicated

The rightwing smeared with glee, but Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was correct:

CIA Director Leon Panetta told lawmakers in a recent briefing that the intelligence agency he heads misled Congress on "significant actions" for a "number of years," a group of Democrats revealed on Wednesday.

In a letter written to Panetta on June 26 by seven Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee, the CIA chief is urged to "publicly correct" an earlier statement he made in which he insisted that it was not agency policy to mislead Congress.

As the letter details, Panetta apparently acknowledged in an earlier briefing that this statement was not, in fact, true.

Trust...but verify.

The Dirty, Dirty Truth

It's closer and closer to being revealed, hence the panicky Cheney gambit of playing the memo game, as if some Cheney-ordered memos to post-justify the criminal torture he ordered will grant him exoneration for the emerging story, per Josh Marshall:

At last, the torture debate looks to be heading toward what's been the big question lurking in the background all along: was the Bush administration using torture in large part to make a political case for the invasion of Iraq?

Writing on The Daily Beast, former NBC producer Robert Windrem reports that in April 2003, Dick Cheney's office suggested that interrogators waterboard an Iraqi detainee who was suspected of having knowledge of a link between Saddam and al Qaeda.

All the Cheney-Bush gang was concerned with at the time was pushing through the attack on Iraq they had planned before taking office, before 9/11, going all the way back to the father's decision not to press Desert Storm into Baghdad. Imagine Dick Cheney fuming ever since then, a decade of building resentment, his moment having arrived.

From this base sin, if it is proven to be true, all other evil grew including everything covered by Laura Rozen here. It's why they're going after Jane Harman who wanted evidence preserved. It's why they're trying to foist the hot potato on Nancy Pelosi, who never instituted a policy of torture and claims she was lied to by the CIA. It's why Porter Goss, hack GOP Representative turned hack CIA Director, is looking ripe for questioning. And possibly indictment with his co-conspirators, led by Richard Bruce Cheney himself.

And now it's reaching the mainstream media.

Dragnet

The battle of the memos begins:

On Monday, the Washington Post reported the impending release of a May 7, 2004 IG report that, the paper added, would show that in several circumstances the techniques used to interrogate terrorist suspects "appeared to violate the U.N. Convention Against Torture" and did not produce desired results. It is difficult, the report will conclude, "to determine conclusively whether interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks."

That's the Inspector General of the CIA. Is Cheney caught in a dragnet? Per one of Josh's astute readers, Cheney maybe spoke too much on Sunday:

Several interesting things just connected in my mind. Saw Jon Stewart show a clip of Cheney saying that Bush "basically approved" of the interrogation program. His answer was as woozy as it gets. Then on the replay of Hardball, watched Lawrence O'Donnell answer Chris Matthew's musings on a Cheney prosection by suggesting it would be for "usurping" Bush on the issue.

Really, where the torture scandal could break open is the exact nexus of who actually authorized the program and Cheney's frantic efforts to get information linking Saddam Hussein to the Iraq war. Wherever Iraq touches the torture question is going to be the flashpoint--it undercuts the "ticking time bomb" rationale for the program. Its also where politicals are going to have their deepest interactions with the program. That's where people need to look. Somebody needs to superimpose the timeline of the Iraq run-up over what we know about the timeline of the torture program. Anywhere Cheney, Iraq and torture meet is going to be radioactive.

This is where I wonder if we're heading deep into E. Howard Hunt territory, with old school CIA George H. W. Bush vs. the "younger" Cheney. The Bush/JFK Assassination conspiracy theory resonates; will someone spike his orange juice with Digitalis?

Shame on U.S.

It turns out torture may not be as efficient as Jack Bauer's creators would lead you to believe:

On page 37 of the OLC memo, in a passage discussing the differences between SERE techniques and the torture used with detainees, the memo explains:

"The CIA used the waterboard "at least 83 times during August 2002" in the interrogation of Zubaydah. IG Report at 90, and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM, see id. at 91."

Note, the information comes from the CIA IG report which, in the case of Abu Zubaydah, is based on having viewed the torture tapes as well as other materials. So this is presumably a number that was once backed up by video evidence.

The same OLC memo passage explains how the CIA might manage to waterboard these men so many times in one month each (though even with these chilling numbers, the CIA's math doesn't add up).

"...where authorized, it may be used for two "sessions" per day of up to two hours. During a session, water may be applied up to six times for ten seconds or longer (but never more than 40 seconds). In a 24-hour period, a detainee may be subjected to up to twelve minutes of water appliaction. See id. at 42. Additionally, the waterboard may be used on as many as five days during a 30-day approval period."

That's twelve waterboardings a day according to my calculator. So anyone saying we only did it a few times is drinking Kool-Aid. (My favorite flavor is cherry red.)

Per The New York Times, more Cheney-scented madness -- i.e. making a globally dehumanizing choice that flies in the face of evidence:

The first use of waterboarding and other rough treatment against a prisoner from Al Qaeda was ordered by senior Central Intelligence Agency officials despite the belief of interrogators that the prisoner had already told them all he knew, according to former intelligence officials and a footnote in a newly released legal memorandum.

The escalation to especially brutal interrogation tactics against the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, including confining him in boxes and slamming him against the wall, was ordered by officials at C.I.A. headquarters based on a highly inflated assessment of his importance, interviews and a review of newly released documents show.

Abu Zubaydah had provided much valuable information under less severe treatment, and the harsher handling produced no breakthroughs, according to one former intelligence official with direct knowledge of the case. Instead, watching his torment caused great distress to his captors, the official said.

Even for those who believed that brutal treatment could produce results, the official said, “seeing these depths of human misery and degradation has a traumatic effect.”

The article goes on to talk about the orders from above and the visit by a high level CIA official to watch some late torture. I mean, not like the America we've been sold by our parents, our teachers, our politicians, our shows. More like Leni Riefenstahl's America.

Or Rush's. Since he even uses John McCain's torture ordeal to stick up for us doing it:

LIMBAUGH: The idea that torture doesn’t work– that’s been put out from John McCain on down– You know, for the longest time McCain said torture doesn’t work then he admitted in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last summer that he was broken by North Vietnamese. So what are we to think here?

I mean, is Sen. McCain going to come out and kick his ass? Is there any Republican left to do so besides his daughter?

This shit is far from over. America has a lot of decisions to make this year, like whether to re-regulate the markets to pre-1980's levels, albeit updated in common sense ways, or go boom/bust again for the remaining days of the Republic. Are we going to open up our laws to gay marriage. Do we want to try for a nuclear-weapon free (or at least diminished) world.

Do we want torture to be an official military and intelligence policy of our nation. In my name. In yours.

Hail

The prodigal son returns, and ma is very, very happy:



Meanwhile Obama makes the brilliant choice of Leon Panetta, not a career intelligence guy, to head the CIA, is adding an almost Jacksonian, affordable Neighborhood Ball to the Inaugural festivities, makes cool unannounced appearances...and he's sending Joe Biden on a mission to Southwest Asia.

It's already a relief.