McCain: Torture Played No Part in Getting bin Laden

Credit where credit is due:

Waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques were not a factor in tracking down Osama bin Laden, a leading Republican senator insisted Thursday.

Sen. John McCain, who spent 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, also rejected the argument that any form of torture is critical to U.S. success in the fight against terrorism.

In an impassioned speech on the Senate floor, the Arizona Republican said former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and others who back those tactics were wrong to claim that waterboarding al-Qaida's No. 3 leader, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, provided information that led to bin Laden's compound in Pakistan.

...

"Not only did the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed not provide us with key leads on bin Laden's courier, Abu Ahmed, it actually produced false and misleading information," McCain said. He called on Mukasey and others to correct their misstatements.

Payback, perhaps, from Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to the President for bombing Libya as McCain wanted? In any case, nice to have John off the crazy train again and standing up for truth in torture.

Default Credit Swap

The GOP is going haywire, desperate to (a) at least share credit with President Obama for his leadership on eliminating bin Laden and, by extension, (b) desperately claim that this success means that torture works.

Neither is true. President George W. Bush, led by Vice President Richard Bruce ("Dick") Cheney overturned terrorism intelligence review policies put in place by President Bill Clinton, cockily ignored memos like "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Within U.S." and managed to get away with relatively little criticism for allowing the largest attack on U.S. soil in American history under their watch. Just imagine how they would have led a firestorm of criticism against a Democratic President had it happened under Clinton or Obama.

Then the Bush/Cheney Administration, after allowing bin Laden to escape in Tora Bora, admitted that they had stopped thinking about him, eventually dismantling the unit tasked with finding Most Wanted Terrorist #1. Not exactly leadership that contributed to President Obama's success in this area -- since Obama reinstated the mission of tracking down bin Laden once in office, eventually leading to the tip, eventually leading to the gutsy decision that could have ended his Presidency one week ago.

To wit:



And now:



The fact is that President Obama is a very different type of leader than George W. Bush. The most telling example is former Bush Chief of Staff Andrew Card, one of the "geniuses" behind the Mission: Accomplished chest-thumping debacle that began with his boss, W., landing in a flight suit, calling out President Obama for supposedly having "pounded his chest" over killing bin Laden. Really, Andrew? After you put up the banner and, it has been revealed, made secret plans for a bin Laden-killing celebration by the Bush Administration? How fucking hypocritical do you think you can be? Or are you just blinded by partisanship?

In fact, by not releasing the photo of bin Laden's corpse, by giving credit to the Navy SEALS, by refocusing on American unity, by swiftly countering false stories of bin Laden using his wife as a human shield, Obama's treatment of this success has been marked by a lack of swagger and lack of lies typical of the Bush/Cheney approach to war stories. Surely this is due to the fundamental insecurity of the previous Administration. Obama doesn't have to gloat -- he's a real great leader, not a fake one.

As for torture, not only does former CIA head Gen. Michael Hayden indicate that the intelligence that lead to bin Laden did not come from "enhanced interrogation," but Andrew Sullivan has a great post on how the Cheneys (Dick and Liz) are back in a desperate attempt to make torture the hero in their false narrative:

There is no evidence that torture was integral to capturing bin Laden. Of three tortured prisoners among the countless leads and tips and interviewees, one was deemed "quite cooperative" before being tortured, thereby leaving open the question of whether the shred of information he provided could have been gotten by non-barbaric methods; and two denied any knowledge of the courier under the torture technique called "waterboarding." So in order to defend torture, Cheney has to say that it's a success when the tortured tell lies. Heads he wins, tails we lose. Moreover, in the last two years or so, torture has been forbidden - although its legacy remains with war criminals protected by the US government, in violation of Geneva - and it was after those two years of a return to decency that bin Laden was found and killed. As for the Bush administration's over-arching goal - democratization of the Middle East - it was only under Obama that we got the Green Revolution in Iran, the successful revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, and the power-struggles now happening in Syria and Libya.

When these fanatics are presented with clear evidence that Obama has been far more successful against terror and its causes than they ever were, they return to their precious, their torture program, and claim ludicrously that, without it, bin Laden would not have been captured. Rumsfeld joined in the chorus of mass distraction this weekend on the same basis. All this really tells you is that these people realize that if their torture regime is found to have been counter-productive, if bin Laden was caught two years after the torture program was ended and with no evidence it helped, then their barbaric policy is exposed once again as unnecessary and a violation of core human values.

Bottom line comes from Bill Maher on his HBO show this week, in his final "New Rule" - why vote Republican for any reason:



Neither fiscally conservative, nor strong on defense. What gives?

Friday Night Stories

A beautiful story about Victoria Reggie Kennedy, new widow of Sen. Edward Kennedy, and the positive effect he had on the last eighteen years of his life.

The freakiest, hauntingest story of the year.

The heretofore untold story of enhanced interrogation techniques:


Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?

We Make Mistakes

I don't think there's anything wrong in making a well-intentioned mistake, but there is something wrong in not correcting it as quickly as possible, and something worse in making it uncorrectable. While Lakhdar Boumediene was not waterboarded, he was an innocent Algerian family man detained in Guantanamo for seven years:

In what he describes as an ugly mistake by U.S. authorities, Boumediene, an Algerian citizen, had spent seven years there as terrorism suspect No. 10005. Later he became the plaintiff in a landmark Supreme Court case, Boumediene v. Bush, that in June 2008 gave Guantanamo detainees the right to seek judicial review of their imprisonment.

Boumediene, in a lengthy interview in a Paris suburb, said he joined the case to represent the scores of prisoners held at Guantanamo charged with being "enemy combatants" and having no power to challenge the accusation in court...

Boumediene said he was interrogated more than 120 times during his stay in Guantanamo's Camp Delta, mostly about Arabs and other foreign Muslims in Bosnia. "At first I thought they were honest, and when I explained they would see I was innocent and would release me," he recalled. "But after the first two years or so, I realized they were not straight. So I stopped cooperating."

During one 16-day period in February 2003, he said, the interrogations went on day and night, sometimes with tactics such as lifting him roughly from the chair where he was strapped, so the shackles dug into his flesh. The interrogators, some dressed in military uniforms and others in civilian clothes, were assisted by Arabic interpreters who seemed mostly to be from Egypt and Lebanon, he recalled, and later included a few Moroccans and Iraqis.

"They were dogs," Boumediene said of the foreign interpreters, in his only show of anger. "They were dogs. They often started doing the interrogations themselves. They would tell the interrogators they could get more information."

This is yet another reason why torture is such a bad idea: we don't always collect only the guilty. Seven years of a man's life; imagine losing your life from age 36 to 43. At least he wasn't tortured beyond the description above.

And don't get me started on summary execution -- especially the Cheney kind.

Blinked

It's been one of the craziest weeks in recent American pop/politics history and, yes, I've chosen to focus on American Idol and Dick Cheney. Two of our finest media constructs. I can't help finding both so compelling, one for the hope, the other for the fear. And I believe the cat is out of the bag, with Liz Cheney revealing that the reason she and her father are both more out than Adam Lambert right now is because they are afraid, not for the country, but for his sorry ass:

Vice President Dick Cheney decided to speak out after learning that President Barack Obama might open prosecutions of former Bush Administration officials, his daughter disclosed Thursday.

Elizabeth Cheney told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that her father decided to speak out after he learned there was a possibility of legal action.

Which is exactly what should happen if someone abuses a powerful office and manufacture a fraudulent interpretation of the law to cover for their illegal actions. More developments this week include former Homeland Security Chairman, Republican Tom Ridge shooting down the Cheney tentpole argument that we're somehow less safe than under his regime; former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson fingering Cheney to the point of giving orders without informing his boss, then-President Bush (per my fisking of Cheney's tangled statement on the matter); and the waterboarding of a conservative radio personality who lasted six seconds and immediately decried it as torture:



What's important about populist conservative influencers like Mancow doing the now almost cliche waterboard-me stunt is that it yanks away perhaps the key tentpole of the Cheney Family argument, their dismissive wave that waterboarding is not torture. For they are even unwilling to admit that waterboarding is torture, which some of their fellow travelers have while still defending it, as if that first brick will bring the whole house tumbling down.

Like I always say, when you hear "enhanced interrogation technique" think "torture" -- and watch how much she blinks when called on it:



Ending with a debater's trick even lame for high school, Liz Cheney reinforces herself as liar, in the service of another, her dad.

How moving it might be, if not so criminal.

Know Your Enemy

Green Day has a new album and single:

Do you know the enemy?
Do you know your enemy?
Well, gotta know the enemy

Overthrow the effigy
The vast majority
Burning down the foreman of control

Silence is the enemy
Against your urgency
So rally up the demons of your soul

I'm with Jane Smiley on Dick Cheney. He's an American citizen so he has the right to speak freely, but I don't have to listen him, just as I wouldn't listen to a crazy person in the street. And with his speech filled with wall-to-wall lies, straw men, false analogies, history bending and general fear-mongering, I advise others to stop listening as well.

If he hadn't been quasi-Commander-in-Chief upending a reporting system that was working, opening us up to the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history under his watch; if he hadn't instituted a torture program for the first time in the history of our Federal government and had it debunked to the point that the elected President stopped it in 2004; if he hadn't masterminded the outing of a CIA agent because her husband spoke out against the disastrous Iraq War he was ginning up; if he hadn't tortured in vain to get the missing justification for the war, I might listen to him.

But Cheney is the Axis of Brutal America, that weak-minded, rigidly Manichean, easily swayed aspect of America that believes might makes right and trumps values. And that it is somehow a posture towards the world that will somehow allow the Republic to last forever. Right.

The President of the United States of America laid out his plan for handling terrorists in great rationality and detail today. This is policy, explained to us as it never was in the previous eight-year Administration, and it is true to the values about America I was taught as a kid. Not soft, strong and legal.

Then there was this crazy man who is not in power. Maybe he's pointing the way for his party: reclaim that fear mantle! It will certainly sway the weaker minds. It always does. It's not rational, it's based on the emotion of fear. It is the past in endless loop, while our elected President is trying to move us in the the future by embracing what has traditionally, throughout our history, made America great:

For seven years, President George W. Bush tried to frighten the American public — and successfully cowed Congress — with bullying and disinformation. On Thursday, President Obama told the truth. It was a moment of political courage that will make this country safer.

Mr. Obama was exactly right when he said Americans do not have to choose between security and their democratic values. By denying those values, the Bush team fed the furies of anti-Americanism, strengthened our enemies and made the nation more vulnerable.

It is an uphill battle. His party controls Congress and they are not yet willing to fund his Guantanamo plan, although a change in that may be the result of his landmark speech today. And the GOP seem to have cowed the Dems with their "Don't incarcerate them here!" meme, as if America can't keep however many terrorist clowns on Guantanamo safely locked up as long as they live in the continental United States, as we've doing with other terrorists -- still in prison until they die.

My take on the "detainees" and eventual convicted terrorists: Bring them here.

I say, frak them, no one is going to cow us on that one, least of all ourselves.

Compare and contrast:



And just remember this: whenever Dick Cheney uses the phrase "enhanced techniques" the word is actual "torture." And that's his gift to America, the World and History.

Do we all really want to be down with that?

Parsing Dick

The idea that then-Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney ordered up torture to wring a confession of connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq in order to justify his long-planned war is on the verge of metastasizing into the big story, with only the enormity of this possibility holding it back. Read Joe Conason for the latest roundup and check out David Waldman bringing it to a CNN discussion where no one can refute his main point, that if an elected official conducted torture for political purposes, that would be a crime beyond any post-9/11 panic judgment:



The other panelists are woefully underarmed for this and try their usual mis/re-direction and comparative morality distractions to no effect. This is the big story, and no one has called Cheney on it yet:

The single most pertinent question that Dick Cheney is never asked -- at least not by the admiring interviewers he has encountered so far -- is whether he, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush used torture to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq.

And as long as he stays out of investigations or hearings, he won't be asked -- not as long as he sticks to either conservative or wussified news media.

The question he was asked, by Bob Schieffer on this past Sunday's Face the Nation, was whether the President himself (W. Bush, remember?) authorized the torture policy. And his tangled answer, unusual for the always rehearsed and controlled-speech Cheney, has stuck in my mind all week:

Cheney: "I have every reason to believe that he [President Bush] knew [about the interrogation program]-- he knew a great deal about the program. He basically authorized it. This was a presidential-level decision and the decision went to the president and he signed off on it."

So let's take the man at his words -- and parse what he's really saying.

"I have every reason to believe that he [President Bush] knew [about the interrogation program]--

What, he doesn't know for sure if Bush knew about the program? He never had a direct conversation with him about it? He kept his hands clean by sending in his henchmen? Or maybe he slipped him the papers to sign in with everything else? Or maybe just never told him until the questions started coming?

-- he knew a great deal about the program.

What did you hide from him, Dick?

He basically authorized it.

He authorized it or he didn't? He didn't know he authorized it? You did it without authorization because of your Machiavellian view of the legal entitlements of the Vice Presidency? He played along later after he found out about it?

This was a presidential-level decision

Did Bush decider it or didn't he? Does that mean you did it as Vice President under the shield of the general Executive Office or your proximity to the President? Did you make the decision for the country and authorize it at the "presidential-level" yourself?

and the decision went to the president

Wait, so first someone (you?) made the "presidential-level decision" and only after you had decided (implemented?) the torture policy did the President rubber stamp it? Because it sure doesn't sound like the decision came from the President himself but was simply presented to him somewhere along the line without his even asking. (How different from our current Chief Executive.)

and he signed off on it."

And so Cheney comes to rest on this closer, recollecting himself, the plan from the moment he got the job of helping W. select his running mate, which Cheney of course made himself, that this would be the second coming of the Nixon White House only shrewder, standing behind rather than in front of the cameras, with the little self-deluded salesboy providing all the cover necessary to enact The Plans, all down the line.

All the way to indictment, ideally to cut it off at the pass.

This is the most revealing statement ever made by Cheney on the topic, and hats off to the crafty Bob Scheiffer (not as soft as you'd think) for tripping him up. The next question is going to be our will, not to mention our national morality. And if the nation's truthseekers are successful in pressing the question, then we're back to my thesis that either the Bush's close ranks with Cheney (they'll have to be completely sure that by doing so all will get a pass) or there will be a much, much more interesting situation.

I, for one, don't see Barbara Bush allowing her son to be dragged down with Dick.

But I've underestimated that family before.

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.

Served

Dick never served in the military, he got five deferments. He was wrong on Iraq and he directed the outing of a CIA agent. He's pro-torture, as is his family.

Jesse volunteered to be a Navy S.E.A.L.:

KING: You were a Navy SEAL.

VENTURA: That's right. I was water boarded, so I know -- at SERE School, Survival Escape Resistance Evasion. It was a required school you had to go to prior to going into the combat zone, which in my era was Vietnam. All of us had to go there. We were all, in essence -- every one of us was water boarded. It is torture.

KING: What was it like?

VENTURA: It's drowning. It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning. It is no good, because you -- I'll put it to you this way, you give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.

And, back to the real world, here's our new man in Afghanistan:

“If you asked me the first thing that comes to mind about General McChrystal,” said Leslie H. Gelb, the president emeritus of the council, “I think of no body fat.”

Seriously, McChrystal has Spock ears, check out the photo in the Times link above.

It's the Spock Administration.

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?

Always More Dick

Former Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney is the gift that keeps on giving. As the elected figure most appropriately labeled the head of his Party -- no figure more staunch or directive than Rush Limbaugh, who was never elected king -- he continues to invade the headlines with in his own (cloaked) self-defense:

"I don't believe that's true," Cheney said, when asked to respond to Obama's statement that interrogators may not have needed to resort to torture. "That assumes that we didn't try other ways, and in fact we did. We resorted, for example, to waterboarding, which is the source of much of the controversy, with only three individuals. In those cases, it was only after we'd gone through all the other steps of the process. The way the whole program was set up was very careful, to use other methods and only to resort to the enhanced techniques in those special circumstances."

The remarks, delivered during an interview with Scott Hennen, a conservative North Dakota radio host, glossed over the 266 instances in which the United States reportedly used waterboarding on two terrorist suspects -- a figure that would suggest the technique was either not effective or not really used as a last-resort option.

Nothing I like better than the Cheney passive mode. We = he, architect of the policy.

And he's got sage advice for his fellow Republicans:

"I think it would be a mistake for us to moderate. This is about fundamental beliefs and values and ideas...what the role of government should be in our society, and our commitment to the Constitution and constitutional principles," he said. "You know, when you add all those things up the idea that we ought to moderate basically means we ought to fundamentally change our philosophy. I for one am not prepared to do that, and I think most us aren't."

Keep 'em coming. Dick.

Ends vs. Means Test

I'd always said that when we eventually found out the truth about what happened behind the scenes in the Bush/Cheney Administration, it would be worse than whatever we were imagining. And sure enough, it now appears that Vice President Cheney ordered up a torture program for the personal purpose of beating out a link to justify the invasion of Iraq:

The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

There's a longstanding myth, bolstered by movie heroes of increasing amorality over the course of the 20th Century, that the only way to really get anything done is to break eggs, break the rules, break arms. Jack Bauer isn't the first or the worst, he's just one in a chain but the one most seems to inform the Bush/Cheney political era. He's the valorization, with the occasional dramatic flaw, of the ends-justify-the-means rationalization which has just enough grains of truth to tempt. After all, is there any of us who has not, at some point, chosen an arguably less ethical means in order to achieve an end. Maybe you needed a more tranquil result, so you held back information. Maybe you needed a little more time to get something done.

Whatever it was, I'm betting it wasn't on the scale of fixing a policy and then torturing individuals to get a pitchline for it.

So the big problem with a Nixon and a Cheney and their close advisers is that because they have chosen to override the moral compass of our nation based on the simple fact of ego, that they somehow know better than the laws man created to protect the republic, like the dictators of ancient yore, means that they cannot be trusted on anything. Because somewhere in their mind on every key issue is that they know best, the closed mind, the ruthless mind, the despot mind, stuck operating within the diametric structure of democracy, but pushing the edges, blurring the edges, crossing over so much they end up living on the other side.

If you can't trust any key players in that Adminstration about torture and the selling of the Iraq War, then how can you trust them about wiretapping? Or whether they abused the Patriot Act? Or their motives for choosing the head of FEMA? Or their haste to roll back taxes on the rich? Or their desire to privatize Social Security? Or why they fired a Federal Prosecutor? Or why they outed an undercover CIA agent?

It's just at 51% right now, but I wonder if the trickle will grow. We had the wool pulled over our eyes by the ultimate Ends/Means crew: Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Rove.

Will the chorus grow for accountability?

Cheney Family Values

Obama and his Administration now has its hammer.

With Ex-President Cheney unwilling to step out of the limelight for ideological or ass-saving purposes, he is now the highest ranking Republican going up against Barack Obama...but his party can't exactly follow him. We're well past kabuki now, or the emperor revealed without clothes. Every politician in D.C. knows that he was the architect of our nation's notorious torture policy and it's application as physical program, the Grand Vizier, the Grand Inquisitor, the Emperor. The most wrong man in politics.

Why on earth would any of the other scurrying elected Republican officials get too close to Cheney? For so many years now he's had the lowest approval rating of any of them by a longshot, and they were finally rid of him! And if he gets indicted, or simply goes down in history as the politician who brought the most shame to our nation since slavery, then do you really want to be the last guy people remember standing next to him?

If they line up right behind Cheney this time around, they're even more scared, because it would mean that amongst all the Republican "talent" in this country, he's still the strongest man around, the one they believe to be the most feared by his enemies -- and his elective career is finished. Kaput. So...better to swarm to the other Party Leader, Mr. Limbaugh, a non-elected radio pundit. After all, he's just an entertainer. Or whatever the apology is this week.

Here's what I think happened over this past week. Cheney still has moles embedded throughout the "permanent" government -- the Pentagon, possibly the State Department, other administrative areas where they have been watching Obama and delivering early warning to their master. Cheney must have gotten word that the memos would be released, directly implicating, indicting him as being the boss of the torture syndicate. Proving it, now by a timeline. So, like Rove (whom he must have tipped off as well), he immediately moved to "get out in front of it" by going on the Sean Hannity show.

In doing so, he's triggered this massive cognitive dissonance, as GOP figures attempt to thread some non-existent needle where we didn't torture, but it works -- because of some story the Dick Cheney apparatus told me (i.e. from the torturers themselves!) -- just accept it does, and it wasn't that bad what we did anyway (assorted nonsensical justifications), so maybe it is torture so if it is so what? Which leads to, so what are you going to do about it?:



That's right, that's former President Cheney's daughter out there fabricating right from the starting gun, attacking, playing the family arguments, claiming it's not torture, it's Navy Seal training tactics, lies about the information we "gained" from waterboarding, all passive tenses for Dick Cheney's involvement like he was just offering an opinion...you know, spinning like a dervish to try and keep her father off the stand and out of jail.

Since these revelations, on the very face of them, call for investigation and possibly indictments, it's clearly in Obama's interest to be the guy standing between the pitchforks and prosecuting the remnants of the GOP. This is the time for him to be soliciting bent-kneed favors godfather-style, especially on his potentially transformational national healthcare plan. The kind that really changes the trajectory of this nation.

Instead of prosecuting them, ostracize them with more transparency, more U.S. Iraq and Afghanistan prison photos on the way, force the decision to be made by society rather than government. Let some investigations go through, "against your wishes," and extract more legislative favors along the way. That's a longer game, and so far Obama's the master of that.

I mean, he's written two really good bestsellers, won a Senate seat, and won a Presidential primary and campaign.

Breaking Loose

All hell appears to be breaking loose, thanks to the breath-of-fresh-air Administration allowing America to get honest about the torture policy done in our name. Yep, now the evidence is in that Rice & Cheney personally approved the torture so now all of them and their cohorts are moving into CYA mode. That's your firestorm -- the firestorm of the guilty.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) is talking traditional Senate probe and even retired four-star General Barry McCaffrey is calling for an investigation of the Bush White House on all this torture.

It's even leaking into Fox News, thanks to Shepherd Smith:



But the best clip of the day was the one that made me fall in love with our new Secretary of State all over again:



Not much daylight between Sec. Clinton and Pres. Obama. Just try wedging them, Mike Pence -- she's not having any.

So the question is, how big is this moment going to be?

Torturous

Of course it's torture, even Ari Fleischer says so now. He's equivocating that it should never be done but sticking his chin out that it works. It's actually humiliating to watch grown men covering their collective asses in such a grudge-holding, adolescent way. Where do you stand, Ari, outside of the politics of it all?

Which is not to say that the Obama Administration is above using politics to combat politics. Cheney opens his mouth, Obama points to prosecutions up the foodchain, leaving the minions alone. Especially as someone leaks potentially damaging info about Rep. Jane Harman, who's on record with a letter to the then Presidente Bush opposing his use of torture in America's name.

This after destroying memos written by longtime diplomat Philip Zelikow opposing the legal reasoning of White House torture-justifiers Jay S. Beybee and John Yoo.

This after using torture to drum up a false link between al Qaida and Saddam Hussein to justify the lie of their invasion of Iraq. To enable more of their snowballing violence.

Yes, waterboarding is torture, as we've defined it in punishing other countries for war crimes, but Cheney and the rest of his morons didn't even know or care:

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

Let us first note that if this is true, the decision to abandon the Geneva Conventions was based on literally criminal ignorance. Anyone with a degree in history or a Google account could have found out any of these things if they had wanted to. I did, as soon as the cascade of evidence of abuse and torture unleashed by Bush came to light. And let us note secondly that this is not a defense. For Tenet to have proposed a criminal torture technique without inquiring as to its history and past use is a function of criminal incompetence. For that, a man who presided over the worst attack on the homeland in US history and compounded it with destroying the moral standing of the US was awarded a Medal of Freedom.

It's a new world now, thanks to the election of Barack Obama as leader of the generations on down and everyone older who's ready to change business as usual around the world. The accoutrements of Western Civilization have spread everywhere and continue to spur liberal thought, as in more personal freedom and interpersonal understanding. What's left are the reactionaries and jihadists on either side, and I just don't think they can grow in any lasting fashion while the rest of the world increasingly pulls together in greater scale than ever in human history.

Take it from the calmest man on Earth:



I mean, what the hell are we doing having the word waterboarding now used so often everyday speech?

Thank the Bush-Cheney Administration. This time there's no one else for them to blame.

Another Smug Loser

I used to get especially pissed off by El Presidente George W. Bush's smug expressions at the rare press conference or any place where asked a question by someone other than a handpicked stooge, and often even then.

But Bush is off the scene and seems a lot less assholish than Shadow President Cheney. And the guy who's still got a title and a speaking spot today in front of the world is the smug little Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Today, he was rewarded for his Anti-Semitic blatherings by a walkout:



My hope is that those religious clerics reported to actually be the real power in Iran will see this little man as a detriment to their interests on the world stage. After all, if so much of the Western world walks out on your representative, you're not really going to be heard.

However, hope does not run very deep for Iran right now. Whether intended as a bargaining chip or to send a chilling message, the U.S. journalists, Roxana Sabieri. arrested in Iran for supposed spying was just sentenced to eight years in a nightmarish prison, one where torture routinely is inflicted upon the prisoners. Of course, it would be nice if the U.S.A. wasn't guilty of some variety of torture ourselves, so we'd have the clearest of moral highgrounds, but there's still no excuse for this flagrant miscarriage of "justice."

I don't believe that going in and bombing this week will do anything to help change Iran for the better or give us any true victory over this repressive regime. I do believe that President Obama is correct to embark upon a strategic course of attempted engagement. And I fully expect that should all of our good attempts fail to change some key elements of the Iranian situation today, that he will take forceful action, this time with the world on our side.

To be for such an approach is not to be pro-Iranian government. And it certainly isn't to be pro-Ahmadinejad.

His destiny will come.

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.

Torture = Treason

Obama releases the torture memos, redacting the names of CIA persons appearing in them. Kevin Drum on the depths of the moral depravity:

Reading the OLC torture memos is enough to make you ill. The techniques in question are plainly and instinctively abhorrent by any common sense definition, and the authors of the memos obviously know it. But somehow they have to conclude otherwise, so they write page after mind-numbing page of sterile legal language designed to justify authorizing it anyway. It's not torture if the victim survives it intact. It's not against the law if it takes place outside the United States. Waterboarding is OK as long as it isn't performed more than twice in a 24-hour period. Sleep deprivation of shackled prisoners for seven days at a time is permissible as long as the victim's diaper is changed frequently. And on and on and on.

Do they know this is torture? Of course they do.

Jeffrey Toobin on a particular player who needs to be made accountable:

The author of the memo, which is dated August 1, 2002, is Jay S. Bybee, who was the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel. Bybee concludes that all of these various techniques, including waterboarding, do not constitute torture under American or international law.

Bybee is generally the forgotten man in torture studies of the Bush era. The best known of the legal architects of the torture regime is John Yoo, who was a deputy to Bybee. For better or worse, Yoo has been a vocal defender of the various torture policies, and he remains outspoken on these issues. But whatever happened to his bossë/p>

Today, Bybee is a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Of course he is. Membership has its benefits.

Is Obama daring us to call for investigations and indictments? The Administration announced policy not to indict CIA officials who participated in the torture program, leaving the door open for the higher ups to taste the courthouse air.

Dick, anyone?

Give Him Hell, Joe

Judge for yourself. Grand Inquisitor Richard Bruce Cheney came on TV last week to call the nation less safe under President Obama because he's not a Torturer-in-Chief:



Compelling stuff, if you ignore his record of being wrong over and over again these past eight year.

Now Vice President Joe Biden bites back:



I saw Joe da Plummo on Bill Maher last week criticizing Obama for admitting some of America's faults even while using it as a way to make his criticism of Europe's faults so much more credible than when we pretended we were perfect and the world had best take our orders. Joe said that he always thinks you have to be in the position of strength, which tragically misconstrues what real strength is.

It's not just might, or the willingness to waterboard, and this fatal error of the Bush Administration, which seems indeed the dominant hard right ideology, must be pointed out as much as possible.

Never forget.

Dick Death

How sick an individual is Former Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney?

Death squad sick, per Seymour Hersh:

"After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen

"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

"Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us."

How El Salvador 1980's. The man who would have been right at home as Grand Inquisitor in the Spanish Inquisition is a stain on American history. I have no doubt that this man, the most successful bureaucrat in the modern history of our nation, gets off on torture. As Andrew Sullivan connects per this portion of a CNN transcript:

UNIDENTIFIED DRUG CARTEL MEMBER: To -- not to get information. Just the pleasure of doing it. They make it pleasurable, pleasurable (INAUDIBLE) doing it.

COOPER: So, it doesn't -- it doesn't yield useful information; it's just doing it because they enjoy it?

UNIDENTIFIED DRUG CARTEL MEMBER: Yes. Information, they have information from the government, so they have all the information they can get. Most of the -- most of the -- most of the torture is for pleasure.

That's always the bottom line -- participatory porn for the most violently repressed. And the Grand Inquisitor's role is to recruit and license the most brutal in society to indulge their violent perversions, or to bend otherwise decent types to do the same.

The only solution: Indict.