Dick's Dare: " Indict me"

Lanny Davis has often said that he does not want to see prosecutions of Bush administration officials, whom we now have good reason to believe entered into a conspiracy to obtain, through methods of torture, a causus belli for the bombing, invasion and occupation of Iraq; a war of aggression, planned long before 9/11/01, for domestic political reasons as well as Neocon ideology as laid out in the PNAC document, which essentially looked to a re-ordering of the middle east for geo-political reasons and, perhapas, religious ones.

We are glad to see that Davis has come around to our way of thinking on this, no matter his reasons.

It is bad enough that there was a conspiracy in the highest levels of our government to develop a policy/program of torture, but for anyone to keep defending such a policy/program now is simply outrageous. Dick Cheney cannot possibly be a stupid man. He has made quite a success of his life, given his poor educational performance as a young man. (Not all smart people do well at University.)

So, what are Cheney's motives for this behavior? He cannot possibly believe that torture works to get the most reliable Intel., but we all know it works superbly to get bogus Intel. which one can use as a excuse to launch a war of aggression. Wasn't that one of the charges against Saddam Hussein? A war of aggression is the mother of all war crimes.

Some say that Cheney scares easily and we do know that fearful people often do stupid things. But there were people around him that could have stopped him but, rather, chose to be co-conspirators. Maybe Cheney is a coward. There are certainly signs of that in his 5 deferrments to avoid service in Vietnam, a war he supported. However, cowardice is not a defense for war criminals. Neither is stupidity or ignorance, especially when you hold high office.

In all of this, we must not forget that Cheney has now implicated Bush as well, by stating on a recent news program that he felt sure that Bush knew,,,uh, actually, he signed off on it. If Cheney is to be believed, there goes plausble deniability, right out the window, for Mr. Bush.

Meanwhile, we are busy keeping a record of everything being said by Cheney and others, as well as what is not said when a question is asked of anyone defending the horrendous practice of torture.

Had we not committed a war of aggression against Iraq, who had nothing to do with the attack on the U.S., an attack on us in the future would be less likely than it is today. The actions of the conspirators in the Bush administration have done more to harm our national security than anything OBL could have ever done. Al Qaeda were knocked back on their heels....way back, by their own actions on 9/11/01 and the attack on Afghanistan, but the Bush administration dropped the ball to conform with the Neocon's ideological desire to re-order the middle east by, first, defeating a nation already weakened by one war and years of sanctions. It was a war they thought would be easy. That was how many years ago?

If we are attacked again, Mr Cheney and Mr. Bush's policies will be largely to blame, not the fact that President Obama has ordered our people to obey the law of the land, as well as International law.

And where is Osama bin Forgotten and his insane side-kick, Zawahiri? Bush lost interest. So did Cheney. I wonder why.

By Lanny Davis

I have written many times in this space that I oppose any criminal prosecution of prior-administration officials on torture or other issues relating to the Iraq War and the war on terrorism, especially those CIA interrogators who relied in good faith on the instructions of policymakers and the legal opinions issued by Justice Department senior officials.

I have agreed with President Obama on the need to look forward, not backward.

But I have changed my mind about the need to indict former Vice President Dick Cheney for complicity in illegal torture.

His insistence on putting himself on multiple TV programs and conservative radio talk shows, not only defending torture but offering the defense that it worked, has changed my mind. Not only that -- he went on to attack Mr. Obama as weakening the United States in the war on terrorism because Mr. Obama immediately announced that torture would no longer be allowed.

Dem's fighting words. They are also, in my view, reckless and irresponsible.

They seem to be laying down a marker that in case, God forbid, there is a terrorist attack, Mr. Cheney can be the first to blame it on Mr. Obama's policies and say, "I told you so."

Even more, they seem to be an in-your-face dare by Mr. Cheney to the U.S. criminal justice system: "I am Dick Cheney, I approved violations of the law in the name of the war on terror, and what are you going to do about it?"

It reminds me of Gary Hart's reaction in the early days of his 1988 presidential campaign to the rumors of his womanizing. Mr. Hart denied the charge and then dared the media to catch him. Well, they took him up on his dare (specifically, the Miami Herald did). And they caught him at least in a compromising situation that led to his withdrawal from the campaign.

So as to Mr. Cheney: I think it is time to take him up on his implicit dare and indict him for violating the 1994 federal law against torture.

Not to do so, in light of Mr. Cheney's arrogant public challenges, may reinforce the notion that Mr. Cheney can get away with lawbreaking, and be proud of it, because he is a former vice president, and because he is the tough, intimidating Dick Cheney who everyone (at least many) in the Bush administration feared.

So I think it's important to take Mr. Cheney up on his challenge, despite all the disadvantages that had led me to oppose prosecutions of the former administration.

Here is what the indictment of Mr. Cheney would look like; it's not that complicated.

First, as to the law: The 1994 federal law making torture illegal defines torture as "any act that causes severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, intentionally inflicted on a person for such purpose as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession."

The two top officials at the Office of Legal Counsel -- Jay S. Bybee (who is now a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals) and John Yoo, now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley Law School -- tried in 2002 to "reinterpret" the term "severe pain" out of existence by requiring a torture victim to feel pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."

But their colleagues at Justice, not only at the OLC, but also the Criminal Division, repudiated their legal gymnastics and restated the definition of torture plainly set forth in the 1994 federal law and the Convention Against Torture. For this and other reasons, both Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee should at the very least be investigated for ethical violations and possible disbarment.

Second, as to the facts, here is what we know or have good reason to believe:

• We know that waterboarding was intentionally used against detainees to obtain information.
• We know that waterboarding causes "severe pain or suffering." It involves strapping a man to an inclined board with his head below his feet, wrapping a cloth across his face, and pouring water into his nostrils and mouth, which convinces the victim that he faces imminent death by drowning. It has been used as torture from the Inquisition to Nazi Germany, and was prosecuted as a war crime after World War II.
• Finally, there is strong circumstantial evidence that Mr. Cheney knew waterboarding was being used against detainees, that he expressly approved its use, or that he actually directed interrogators to use it. If any of these are true, then Mr. Cheney could be guilty under U.S. laws of being a co-conspirator or an accessory to a crime.

An indictment, of course, is only an accusation of criminal conduct. Mr. Cheney must be presumed innocent until a jury of his peers finds him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Many people still think, and I was among them until recently, that it would be better not to put the country through the divisive and backward-looking experience of seeing a former vice president on trial for crimes committed while in office. But given Mr. Cheney's decision to publicly attack the president on the subject, perhaps we have no choice but to take Mr. Cheney up on his challenge.

I am hoping that in the final analysis, the case of the People vs. Dick Cheney will provide all Americans with an opportunity to answer the vital question as to whether a democratic society based on moral values should defend the use of torture, even if at times it successfully obtains important information from a terrorist.

I am hoping our answer as a nation will be similar to the eloquent one provided by Israeli Supreme Court President Aharon Barak regarding the use of torture by the Israeli Security Services:

This is the destiny of democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it, and not all practices employed by its enemies are open before it. Although a democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand. Preserving the Rule of Law and recognition of an individual's liberty constitutes an important component in its understanding of security. At the end of the day, they strengthen its spirit and its strength and allow it to overcome its difficulties.

Lanny J. Davis, a Washington lawyer and former special counsel to President Clinton, served as a member of President George W. Bush's Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. He is the author of "Scandal: How 'Gotcha' Politics Is Destroying America."

This article appeared in Mr. Davis's weekly column, "Purple Nation," in the Washington Times on Monday, May 18, 2009.

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Let The Sun Shine In......

GOP Losses Span Nearly All Demographic Groups

Obviously, church-goers and followers of Christ aren't the same thing.

Only frequent churchgoers show no decline in support since 2001

by Jeffrey M. Jones

PRINCETON, NJ -- The decline in Republican Party affiliation among Americans in recent years is well documented, but a Gallup analysis now shows that this movement away from the GOP has occurred among nearly every major demographic subgroup. Since the first year of George W. Bush's presidency in 2001, the Republican Party has maintained its support only among frequent churchgoers, with conservatives and senior citizens showing minimal decline.

So far in 2009, aggregated Gallup Poll data show the divide on leaned party identification is 53% Democratic and 39% Republican -- a marked change from 2001, when the parties were evenly matched, according to an average of all of that year's Gallup Polls. That represents a loss of five points for the Republicans and a gain of eight points for the Democrats.

The parties were also evenly matched on basic party identification in 2001 (which does not take into account the partisan leanings of independents), with 32% identifying themselves as Republicans, 33% as Democrats, and 34% as independents. The 2009 data show the GOP losing five points since then, with identification increasing three points among both Democrats and independents.

As was shown earlier, the GOP's loss in leaned support over this time is evident among nearly every subgroup. The losses are substantial among college graduates, which have shown a decline in GOP support of 10 points. (The losses are even greater -- 13 points -- among the subset of college graduates with postgraduate educations.) This may reflect in part Barack Obama's strong appeal to educated voters, a major component of his winning coalitions in both the Democratic primaries and the general election.

Aside from education, for which the parties were basically at even strength in 2001, the Republicans' losses tend to be greater among groups that were not strong GOP supporters to begin with. These include self-identified liberals and moderates, church non-attenders, and lower-income and young adults. Thus, a big factor in the GOP's overall decline is the Democratic Party's consolidating its support among normally Democratically leaning groups.

In turn, the GOP has generally avoided significant losses among only its most loyal groups, including frequent churchgoers and self-identified conservatives. The Republican Party maintains majority support among these two groups.

Two exceptions to this general pattern are senior citizens, and racial and ethnic minorities. Republican support among blacks and the larger group of nonwhites has not changed much in the past eight years, but these groups have shown only very limited support for the Republican Party. And while Obama's candidacy seemed to attract young voters to the Democratic Party during the 2008 presidential campaign, it did not have the same effect on older voters. As a result, the share of older voters aligned with the Republican Party has generally held steady.

Implications
The Republican Party clearly has lost a lot of support since 2001, the first year of George W. Bush's administration. Most of the loss in support actually occurred beginning in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina and Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court -- both of which created major public relations problems for the administration -- and amid declining support for the Iraq war. By the end of 2008, the party had its worst positioning against the Democrats in nearly two decades.

The GOP may have stemmed those losses for now, as it does not appear to have lost any more support since Obama took office. But as the analysis presented here shows, the losses the GOP has suffered have come among nearly all demographic groups apart from some of the most ardent Republican subgroups.

Survey Methods

Results are based on telephone interviews with 7,139 national adults, aged 18 and older, in Gallup polls conducted January-April 2009. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±1 percentage point.
Margins of error for subgroups will be larger.

Interviews are conducted with respondents on land-line telephones (for respondents with a land-line telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell-phone only).

In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

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Let The Sun Shine In......

There's Very Few Things Worse For A President To Do Than Protect War Criminals!

Professor Turley says it better than we could.

more about "There's Very Few Things Worse For A P...", posted with vodpod

Does Rumsfeld Deserve To Be Called A War Criminal?

In a word, YES!

He should be charged, tried and imprisoned as well, along with Bush and Cheney, among others.

more about "Does Rumsfeld Deserve To Be Called A ...", posted with vodpod

Maddow: Rumsfeld's God of war

Just when one thinks one cannot be more horrified.....this literally makes me sick to my stomach.

more about "Maddow: Rumsfeld's God of war", posted with vodpod

Tortured Smoking Gun Witness Suicides in Lybian Prison.

How many witnesses to Bush administration crimes (both domestic and foreign) have died by "suicide" or suspicious plane crashes?

Do your own research. We can tell you, it is a highly suspicious number.

Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, the man who told of a phony connection between former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda while being tortured, has died in a Libyan prison, allegedly of suicide. Al-Libi was the unnamed source that former Secretary of State Colin Powell and other Bush administration officials relied upon prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to demonstrate that Saddam was helping the terrorist organization behind the September 11 attacks. Powell’s February 5, 2003, speech before the United Nations was largely based on al-Libi’s coerced testimony, even though intelligence officials in the U.S. government questioned it at the time. (allgov)

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Let The Sun Shine In......

Pelosi Forced Cheney to Order Torture!

So, the Rethugs want a full investigation, do they? we say give it to them. Of course, as independents, we don't give a hoot in hell who was involved and who knew what and when, when it comes to Dimbulbs and Rethugs. We simply want the truth, for once!


(Please do click on over to read the entire article)


The hoopla over Nancy Pelosi and CIA briefings is pretty ridiculous, a calculated distraction by Republicans and the CIA, happily abetted by journalists, most of whom don't want to do any real reporting on this subject (and aren't even covering it well as a dispute, let alone fact-checking it). Is it really news that the Bush administration consistently misled Congress, even in secret briefings, and the CIA has a long history of doing just that? Is it so hard to realize that John Boehner, Newt Gingrich and other Republicans are shameless hypocrites here? Isn't it funny how a relatively minor dispute, where the facts back Pelosi, is being sold as a condemnation of her? Isn't it funny how that dispute seems to have elicited more fury from Republicans and more coverage from reporters than any of the many revelations of wrongdoing by the Bush administration on the same front? Ya know, the Bush administration - the folks who actually did this stuff? The people who ordered torture, and who reportedly did so to justify their war of choice with Iraq? What about the CIA destroying torture tapes, and torturing in the first place?

Gingrich and other Republicans have to know this is bullshit, but they're raging like rabid dogs with little cause. In contrast, Pelosi took impeachment off the table. It's all a farce.

The GOP doesn't want a full investigation. Much of the press doesn't want a full investigation. Pelosi, for any of her other faults (personally, I'm not a big fan of Pelosi or Reid), supports an investigation. Given all this "contention," a full investigation is just what we need.

Emptywheel's done a superb job on fact-checking the Pelosi story, including in "Mark Mazzetti, the Gray Lady’s Grammar-Impaired Spook Stenographer":

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Let The Sun Shine In......

A Must Read: Great Research On Torture.

We provided enough for our usual readers, but if you're interested in more, and we hope you are, click on over and get some good links on the truth about torture. This blogger has done one helluva job.

Torture Versus Freedom

(WWII-era poster on torture.)
(There are times I feel like a broken record on torture and human rights abuses. This is something of a recap post borrowing somewhat from earlier pieces.)

Defending torture insistently means one's moral compass is pointing straight down to hell. I continue to believe it's essential to confront the dangerous and evil lie that torture "works" and that we're all going to die if we respect human rights, follow the law, or dare to investigate - let alone prosecute - the people responsible for these horribly shameful and criminal policies. However, as many have noted, that we are "debating" torture's usefulness at all means we've failed somehow as a society. As Scott Horton quipped in December 2008, "Perhaps for Christmas proper we’ll be treated to arguments for and against genocide, and on the fourth day of Christmas we’ll read the arguments for and against the practice of infanticide."

While specific false claims about torture and the Bush administration's conduct should be challenged, it's especially important to emphasize torture's immorality and its clear illegality. Torture is the very antithesis of freedom. The key dynamics are not truth, security or patriotism. They are power, dehumanization and sadism. As Rear Admiral John Hutson observed, "torture is the method of choice of the lazy, the stupid and the pseudo-tough." When someone is tortured, it means that someone else in a position of power over the victim has deliberately chosen to inflict significant pain and suffering on a fellow human being. Torture spreads and corrupts in a democracy. Not only do torturers often not recognize the truth even when it's told to them, sometimes the torturers get so carried away they don't "even bother to ask questions" and "torture becomes an end unto itself." As Soviet-era torture victim Vladimir Bukovsky put it, "Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling?" He also explains how, after several days of torture, "neither the doctor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again." (See also The Lucifer Effect.)

These abuses have often resulted in permanent or serious physical and psychological damage (although torturers often prefer methods that hide the abuse they've inflicted). Torture is assault of the most cruel variety, robbing the victim of the sanctity of his or her own body, but also his or her very mind and soul. These are not actions to weigh lightly, tactics to endorse or excuse cavalierly, nor damages to forgive quickly before we even know precisely what was done. It's hard to imagine a more clear moral line.

Torture is (1) immoral, (2) illegal, (3) endangers us (especially American troops in the Middle East), and (4) doesn't "work" – unless one wants to inflict pain, terrorize the populace, produce bogus intelligence or elicit false confessions. It's not that torture never produces a true statement, but at best, torture "works" much the same way amputation "cures" all hand ailments. (That's still probably far too generous.) Experienced interrogators know that torture is unreliable and counterproductive in addition to being cruel and illegal. For obtaining reliable information, more humane, rapport-building techniques are far more effective. Furthermore, as John Sifton has pointed out, intel from prisoners typically grows "stale" quickly, and "if you’re relying on interrogations for intelligence, you’re already on the back foot. You’ve already lost the war, so to speak." Regardless, skilled, experienced interrogator pursuing accurate information would not be approaching a prisoner asking, "How much pain can I legally inflict?" That is a self-defeating, dangerous path that leads all too easily to becoming "the enemies of all humankind."

Almost every excuse from Bush officials and their allies fits somewhere in the following pattern of descending denials: We did not torture; waterboarding is not torture; even if it is torture, it was legal; even if it was illegal, it was necessary; even if it was unnecessary, it was not our fault. Almost every new document and piece of information has exposed lies, deception and crippling inconsistencies in their self-ennobling but accountability-denying tale. The existing evidence does not support a "good faith" defense, but even if it did, an investigation would still be required by law. Anti-torture laws exist in large part to protect all of us from men and women so certain of their own righteousness or need that they torture others (normally until the tortured person says exactly what they want to hear - apparently, precisely what happened here.) The "debate" on torture and specific abusive techniques are stalling tactics by torture proponents and apologists, who consistently favor fantasy over reality in their arguments, and want to prevent a full investigation or trial. They will discuss Jack Bauer and hypothetical ticking time bombs endlessly, but not Maher Arar or Binyam Mohamed (among many others). They typically ignore altogether such damning, central evidence as the Red Cross report, which stated authoritatively and unequivocally that prisoners in U.S. custody were tortured. Their specific denials shift depending on their audience, but they almost always ignore that for years we have tortured, abused and imprisoned innocent people. It's much easier to abuse people or justify their abuse, of course, if they're all viewed as guilty, dangerous, alien or subhuman. These practices have often resulted in significant, lasting physical and psychological damage - and even death. (That's not to mention their central role in selling the war in Iraq and the consequences of that.) Ignoring or outright lying about this level of cruelty and abuse embodies the banality and audacity of evil.

The general public has been horribly served by the press on these matters. Some reporters, organizations and blogs have covered these issues superbly. But major outlets such as The New York Times have chosen to use euphemisms for torture and have played the gutless and dishonest false equivalency game of he said-she said. They've routinely withheld the crucial context that America has prosecuted the same abuses in the past. (Meanwhile, America's covert operations have committed and taught similar abuses in the past as well, hardly in line with our best moments or stated ideals.)

Opposition to torture should not be a partisan issue, and it isn't. Liberals, moderates and rule-of-law conservatives, including many military lawyers, have spoken out against torture, abuse and the stripping away of legal rights. (Some more partisan conservatives opposed prisoner abuses until they realized how far up the authorization went.) Yet as Glenn Greenwald has shown, most Beltway pundits (and sometimes all pundits on a given show) oppose prosecutions and often even a full investigation.

It's maddening, as is too much of the mainstream torture "debate," because as Will Bunch asserts, "Torture is not about "winning the afternoon"" – we are discussing clearly illegal war crimes with serious consequences. Yet torture apologists are routinely granted respectability and their false and misleading claims often go unchallenged. Somehow, on the Beltway circuit, it would be rude – and perhaps too much work - to fact-check and refute them. Somehow, it's a radical notion to point out that torture is illegal and that legal statutes require that credible allegations of torture be investigated. Somehow, revealing the truth, or – heaven forbid – prosecuting a member of their Beltway class would be horribly "divisive," yet refusing to do so and asserting that the law doesn't apply to some people somehow isn't divisive. Torture apologists typically avoid any mention of the key legal statutes and major reports and articles on torture, and far too many pundits feel similarly entitled to ignore key evidence in the public record (and sometimes ignore their own op-eds). Instead, we get the characteristic and grandiloquent ravings of Peggy Noonan, claiming that "Some things in life need to be mysterious… Sometimes you need to just keep walking." In Beltway morality, torturing someone is fine - or at least debatable among civilized folk - but it's terribly, horribly rude and offensive to call someone a torturer, or to accurately describe what was done as torture, or even to acknowledge that anything at all took place. War crimes are just too contentious, an understandable indiscretion by gentlemen, or a mystery that passeth all understanding.

Most prominent torture apologists are not arguing in good faith, and virtually every pro-torture argument has been debunked countless times, including the infamous ticking time bomb scenario. Specific pro-torture arguments come in and out of fashion, but the most popular two currently are the counterfactual claims that we didn't torture anyone (David Rivkin, Liz Cheney) and that torture (or "enhanced interrogation techniques") saved lives (Dick Cheney, John Boehner, many talk show hosts). A few, such as Lindsay Graham, are "trying to find a narrow ground from which [to] condemn torture, yet prevent anyone from being held accountable for torture." (Trying to spread partisan blame is also popular, although it may eventually backfire.) Liz Cheney has attempted a particularly brazen tact favored by some torture apologists (including her mother) - denying that torture is torture while waving the flag and trying to shame her challengers. Liz Cheney told Norah O'Donnell that it "does a fundamental disservice to those professionals who are conducting this very effective program and to those people who approved the program in order to keep this nation safe and prevent attacks through the program to call it torture."

This would surely come as news to the many professionals, past and present, who have spoken out against these abuses. It'd be an astounding revelation to those who suffered the consequences of those policies, from those prisoners who were tortured and killed, to the American troops attacked, injured and killed, to the families and friends of both groups. As decorated military interrogator Matthew Alexander puts it:

There are valid reasons why we haven’t had enough with “torture sanctimony,” as Christopher Buckley puts it in an article in The Daily Beast, and let me start with the most important—it’s going to cost us future American lives in addition to the ones we’ve already lost.

Our policy of torture and abuse of prisoners has been Al Qaida’s number one recruiting tool, a point that Buckley does not mention and is also conspicuously absent from former CIA Director General Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s argument in the Wall Street Journal. As the senior interrogator in Iraq for a task force charged with hunting down Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the former Al Qaida leader and mass murderer, I listened time and time again to captured foreign fighters cite the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as their main reason for coming to Iraq to fight. Consider that 90 percent of the suicide bombers in Iraq are these foreign fighters and you can easily conclude that we have lost hundreds, if not thousands, of American lives because of our policy of torture and abuse. But that’s only the past...

Former officials who say that we prevented terrorist attacks by waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Muhammad or Abu Zubaydah are possibly intentionally ignorant of the fact that their actions cost us American lives. And let’s not forget the glaring failure in these cases. Torture never convinced either of these men to sell out Osama Bin Laden.

These policies have been extremely harmful, and additionally, the various defenses for these abuses just don't hold up to scrutiny. As DDay noted on sleep deprivation, "a technique that takes 11 days to break a prisoner is most definitely NOT a technique used in reaction to an imminent plot, particularly not a ticking time bomb scenario." ("Break" in this context would almost certainly amount to the prisoner submitting to his captors' power, not necessarily providing accurate intel, even though the pro-torture crowd often mistakenly or intentionally conflates the two.) Emptywheel was the first to observe, "according to the May 30, 2005 Bradbury memo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002." As John Cole commented, "There better be a pretty damned long fuse on that ticking time bomb. And yes, this is nothing but pure sadism."

The more pieces we add to the torture narrative, the worse it looks. Each report, each new contradiction to the standard Bush administration version of events, further exposes the dishonesty of the torture apologists and the indefensibility of the actual perpetrators' actions. That trend looks to continue. Torture apologists want to muddy the waters to confuse the public, and frame the "debate" to prevent the most glaring questions from being asked: "What exactly was done, and who authorized it? What is the timeline? How can we best uncover the truth? Are members of the Bush administration guilty of war crimes? If so, how can they be brought to justice, and what should their punishment be?" More than anything, they want to avoid any questions about the role selling the Iraq War played in pushing torture. It's understandable why Liz Cheney would try to gloss over the starring part her father played in that diabolical plot, but it's hard not to share Dan Froomkin's amazement - why has the press been so silent on such explosive revelations?

Arguments that we shouldn't prosecute because of the public's own complicity are silly, misleading and self-serving, especially given the quality of the coverage, but even more importantly because of the law. Roughly half of the public supports investigations, although the numbers fluctuate, especially when polls use poor and misleading questions. As Dan Froomkin observes:

To me, these poll results demonstrate the genius of the Cheney strategy, which is to keep the argument limited to what happened at the black sites, which have an aura of "24" to them. The torture there was still inexcusable, but I guess forgiveable to many.

I doubt they would feel the same way if they were shown proof of a direct relationship between Bush policy and not just the torture of "high value" detainees, but also the vile abuse of garden-variety suspects at Guantanamo and Bagram, and of mostly innocent Iraqis at Abu Ghraib.

Has Dick Cheney told the truth or been accurate about anything of consequence at this point? Is there some reason to let him dictate the "debate" or take anything he says at face value, unverified, even when a mountain of evidence calls him out as delusional or a self-serving liar? (Or is basic journalism just too "impolite"?) These abuses were not isolated incidents, nor the result of a few bad apples. People were tortured and sometimes killed as a direct result of widespread, deliberate policies of abuse dictated from the very top. There is no serious dispute on this. The media haven't done a good job of making all this clear and pushing back against the liars who claim otherwise. And as Matthew Alexander puts it, "The American public has a right to know that they do not have to choose between torture and terror." The media as a whole have not helped spread the word about that, either.

We need a full investigation – and one without immunity handed out beforehand. We need as much disclosure as possible. For all the recent bluster from torture apologists urging the release of documents, the smarter among them only want cherry-picked releases and not the full picture. They want to prevent a trial at all costs. That's why it's essential to call Cheney's bluff on the document and investigation front. Surely, if these people are right, a full investigation and disclosure will exonerate them. Surely it's the only way they will be vindicated. That's the political gamesmanship, but the law itself is quite clear. The proper place for Bush officials to be offering their defenses is under oath, as part of a full and thorough investigation and/or on trial. An investigation is what's required by law given the clearly credible allegations of torture, and Bush officials could offer all their shifting defenses and "evidence" there. There is absolutely no good reason to believe the same or similar abuses won't happen again if we don't look at what happened. As retired Major General Antonio Taguba states, "There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

This is not a game. These torture "debates" should not be thought experiments divorced from objective reality, history, the known timeline and the very real and deadly consequences of these policies. It's one thing for members of the general public to be confused or not be up to date on the general timeline and key details, or be swayed by fantastical ticking time bomb scenarios. It's one thing for the bloodthirsty chickenhawks who assume every Muslim or Arab prisoner is a guilty terrorist to indulge in their ignorant, self-flattering Jack Bauer fantasies of living in the "real world" of tough decisions. It's inexcusable that so many members of the media still - still - know and/or report these matters so poorly. We deserve and need better. It's not hyperbole to say that people are dead because of these policies. Given what we already know, how can we turn away? This is not a game to those who were tortured, nor to the families and friends of those tortured, abused, maimed and killed. It is not a game to human rights activists trying to end abuses around the world. It's not a game to the JAGs and other lawyers trying to ensure fair trials and treatment for their clients, guilty and innocent alike. Contrary to the grotesque bullying tactics, shameless lies or colossal self-deception of the Cheney family and their kind, it's not a game to the American and coalition troops attacked, injured, maimed or killed as a result of arrogant, feckless leadership and reckless, unconscionable and evil policies.

We have failed as a nation in allowing torture. We will fail again if we don't learn the full story and prosecute where appropriate as many of the guilty as possible. The perpetrators and their allies say they've done nothing wrong, so why would they stop should they re-gain (or maintain) power? The specific abuses of power may change, but the pattern of abuse will not. There's a direct line from Watergate through Iran-Contra to the Bush administration's abuses. As the recently-released Senate report shows, there's also a direct connection from trying to sell an unnecessary war with Iraq to torturing prisoners to make them "confess" to a non-existent Iraq-al Qaeda/9-11 link. And it's not as if no one ever warned the Bush administration that they shouldn't be doing this. As Cheney aide David Addington said (in the context of warrantless wiretapping and executive power), "We're going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop." That larger force clearly will not be conscience. And David Broder and his lazy, gutless, dishonest and addled ilk will not speak out for human rights or democracy any more than they opposed a war of choice or admitted their own culpability in that. It's up to the citizenry. We need to push for a full investigation, as much disclosure as possible, and prosecutions where appropriate. Torture is immoral and illegal. The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but there's more than one road, and the price of doing nothing is just too damn high. It's a radical stance to be sure, but: Let the truth come out, and justice be done.


("Inferno Canto XXI (The Lawyers)" by Michael Mazur.)

Further Resources

Many other sites have produced superb pieces on these issues. I've tried to link a number of them above, and in previous posts. However, Emptywheel has a superb torture timeline with links, and a shorter piece rounding up the most recently-released documents, including the Red Cross and Senate reports on the torture and abuse of prisoners, and the Bush administration torture memos.

My most extensive posts to date on the subject are (the very lengthy) "Torture Watch 2/19/08" and "Rivkin's Protean Logic on Torture."

I would recommend (although I've linked some of these above):

The Dark Side (July 2008) by Jane Mayer. Dan Froomkin provides a good overview of it, and some of Mayer's related pieces can be read online: "The Memo," "The Hidden Power," "Whatever It Takes" and "The Black Sites."

Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values (May 2008) by Philippe Sands. "The Green Light" by Sands covers many of the highlights.

Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (September 2008) by Barton Gellman gives one of the best overall accounts of how the Bush administration worked. Excerpts are here and here.

The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 (June 2006) by Ron Suskind. (I have an older post covering the Abu Zubaydah material here.)

Torturing Democracy - the full documentary can be viewed online. (PBS chose not to air it before the end of the Bush administration, probably due to external pressure.)

Frontline - many good episodes relate to the Bush administration, but "The Dark Side," "Cheney's Law" and "Bush's War" are the most relevant, and can all be viewed online.

Taxi to the Dark Side is an Oscar-winning documentary about a Afghan cabdriver arrested, tortured and killed by American troops.

Mark Danner wrote two key pieces in the New York Review of Books in April 2009, "US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites" and "The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means." The first piece lead to the release of the Red Cross report.

"Torture's Long Shadow" (12/18/05) by Vladimir Bukovsky, a victim of torture during the Soviet era.

"It's Our Cage, Too" (5/17/07) by Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar, who write that "torture betrays us and breeds new enemies." ("Charles C. Krulak was commandant of the Marine Corps from 1995 to 1999. Joseph P. Hoar was commander in chief of U.S. Central Command from 1991 to 1994.")

"The General's Report" (June 2007) by Seymour Hersh on Army Major General Antonio Taguba and his attempts to report on the abuses at Abu Ghraib. (The sidebar links several other related Hersh stories.)

"Rorschach and Awe" (June 2007) by Katherine Eban, on torture psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. This April 2009 Democracy Now episode features Eban, and is a good overview of the subject.

"Waterboarding is Torture... Period" (10/31/07) by Malcolm Nance, a former SERE instructor.

"Why It Was Called 'Water Torture'" (2/10/08) by Richard E. Mezo.

"Tortured Reasoning" (December 2008) by David Rose for Vanity Fair, focusing on false claims of torture "working" on specific prisoners.

"I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq" (11/30/08) by Matthew Alexander (a pseudonym), an American interrogator. He is also the author of How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq. (I've linked several of his appearances above and in previous posts.)

"My Tortured Decision" (4/22/09) by Ali Soufan, an FBI interrogator who questioned Abu Zubaydah, and confirmed and fleshed out earlier accounts. Crucially, any actionable intelligence was obtained before Abu Zubaydah was tortured.

"Drop By Drop: Forgetting the History of Water Torture in U.S. Courts" (PDF, 2006) by Evan Wallach, a "federal judge and former judge advocate general" for The Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.

"Waterboarding is Illegal" (5/10/08) by Wilson R. Huhn, Washington University Law Review

The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo, on the Stanford prison experiment and related issues of power and abuse. Zimbardo's site links a number of his appearances, including this Fresh Air interview.

Torture and Democracy (November 2007) by Darius Rejali. One of the most comprehensive books on the subject. Here's Rejali with Scott Horton.

I could easily keep going, and feel free to pass on any recommendations in the comments. Other posts have and will continue to take on specific torture apologist arguments. In the future, I may try to put together a torture primer of some sort, covering most of the arguments we've seen. But the most important task now is to push for a full investigation.

(Edited for clarity, and a few sentences and links added to paragraph 5 of the piece proper. It was a late night.)

 

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Let The Sun Shine In......

Nancy Pelosi Did Not Order Torture!

Late Night: Elephants on Parade By: Gregg Levine Friday May 15, 2009 8:00 pm

You know, it was a big week. . . lots to talk about, lots of insanely insane Republicans to shamelessly shame. . . but what with all this “he said, she said,” with the “she” being Nancy Pelosi, isn’t it time we talked about, you know, the, um, elephant in the room?

That’s right, tonight, let’s talk about Dick.

There has been a great deal of excellent reporting on this site by the likes of Marcy, Jane, and Spencer, among others, showing that there is now pretty solid evidence that the CIA misled those in Congress tasked with oversight—that the Bush Administration waited until after it began torturing detainees to inform the likes of Representative Nancy Pelosi and Senator Bob Graham about these “enhanced” programs. . . and, even then, it is possible they withheld important facts. Yet, pretty much every news segment I catch is starting and ending the argument with whether Speaker Pelosi is hiding something, and whether it is over the line to accuse the CIA of lying.

I got news for ya’, it isn’t even close to over the line—but that’s not where I want to go tonight. . . .
Because before you get to Pelosi, or to Graham, or Jane Harman, or a host of other congressional leaders who in good time should be held accountable for their action or inaction during the Bush years—before you get to any of that—one thing had to happen. . . .

Someone had to order the torture. Someone had to sign off on the program in its design phase, someone had to render a group of detainees, hold them outside the reach of US law, and someone had to give the order to have them tortured.

I could, at this point, throw out the name George W. Bush—he was president at the time, after all—but we now have pretty good evidence that the real authority for waterboarding (to name but the most talked about of many illegally brutal “techniques”), the real orders to “do that,” and “do that again,” came from the vice president. The order to torture came from Dick Cheney.

(And Cheney says Bush signed off on "the program".)

Let me say that again: Dick Cheney ordered torture.

Not Nancy Pelosi; Dick Cheney.

Before there were any briefings of any Democrats, there was the torture—a violation in-and-of itself—and that torture was ordered by Republican Vice President Dick Cheney.

And to take it one step further, that torture wasn’t ordered up to save us from some imagined “ticking bomb” scenario (not that torture would even solve that particular problem, and not that, even if it did, it could be justified), it was ordered to make detainees produce a specific, desired piece of information (or disinformation). Dick Cheney wanted a connection between the attacks of September 11, 2001 and Iraqi leader Sadam Hussein, and so Cheney told interrogators contractors to torture detainees until they stated that there was a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq.

They signed off on a reverse-engineered program designed to help US troops survive “brain washing,” and then used that program to elicit false confessions.

All at the behest of tonight’s big fucking elephant, Dick Cheney.

I know all of that has been said before, but I felt like I needed to say it again. What do you need to say about this week’s execrable elephants?

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Let The Sun Shine In......

Official story of 9/11 "almost entirely untrue"

Sat May 16, 2009 at 01:09:42 AM PDT

Now, before you get your panties in a bunch, this is about a new book, titled "The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America's Defense on 9/11".

And before you get all outraged (The FAQ! The FAQ!), here is the author of the book, John Farmer:

John Farmer served as Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission, where his areas of responsibility included assessing the national response to the terrorist attacks and evaluating the current state of national preparedness for terrorist attacks and natural disasters, he also served as attorney general of New Jersey (1999-2002), as chief counsel to Governor Whitman, and as a federal prosecutor. He recently served as a subject matter/rule of law expert on security to the special envoy for Middle East regional security. He is currently a partner of a New Jersey law firm and an adjunct professor of national security law at Rutgers University Law School. His editorials and articles have appeared in "The New York Times" and elsewhere

I wrote a couple of nights ago, here -- '9/11 Commission Report -- Info Obtained Through Torture" -- as to how much of what was published in the 9/11 Commission report was obtained through torture, and is therefore completely without credibility.

Scandalous enough, right?

Well, it gets worse.

The above described James Farmer has just come out with his new book. It was released April 14. I have not read it (I just heard about it maybe ten minutes ago) and it is difficult to find any reviews of it by any mainstream book reviewers (gee, what a surprise!).

But according to the publisher, it's quite a bombshell:

Description:

As of the 9/11 Commission’s one of the primary authors report, John Farmer is proud of his and his colleagues’ work. Yet he came away from the experience convinced that there was a further story to be told, one he was uniquely qualified to write.

Now that story can be told. Tape recordings, transcripts, and contemporaneous records that had been classified have since been declassified, and the inspector general’s investigations of government conduct have been completed. Drawing on his knowledge of those sources, as well as his years as an attorney in public and private practice, Farmer reconstructs the truth of what happened on that fateful day and the disastrous circumstances that allowed it: the institutionalized disconnect between what those on the ground knew and what those in power did. He reveals — terrifyingly and illuminatingly — the key moments in the years, months, weeks, and days that preceded the attacks, then descends almost in real time through the attacks themselves, revealing them as they have never before been seen.

Ultimately Farmer builds the inescapably convincing case that the official version not only is almost entirely untrue but serves to create a false impression of order and security. The ground truth that Farmer captures tells a very different story — a story that is doomed to be repeated unless the systemic failures he reveals are confronted and remedied.

So let me just repeat that to let it sink in .... The official story is "almost entirely untrue." So what IS true? Hell if I know.

And check this out:

Farmer himself states that "at some level of the government, at some point in time ... there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened."

So let's let that sink in .... there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened.

This link also develops the story further:

In August 2006, the Washington Post reported, "Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate."

The report revealed how the 10-member commission deeply suspected deception to the point where they considered referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation.

"We to this day don’t know why NORAD told us what they told us," said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. "It was just so far from the truth. . . . It’s one of those loose ends that never got tied.

Wow. Let's go to that Washington Post story now, shall we?

It's 9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon, from August 1, 2006:

For more than two years after the attacks, officials with NORAD and the FAA provided inaccurate information about the response to the hijackings in testimony and media appearances. Authorities suggested that U.S. air defenses had reacted quickly, that jets had been scrambled in response to the last two hijackings and that fighters were prepared to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93 if it threatened Washington.

In fact, the commission reported a year later, audiotapes from NORAD's Northeast headquarters and other evidence showed clearly that the military never had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights and at one point chased a phantom aircraft -- American Airlines Flight 11 -- long after it had crashed into the World Trade Center.

Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold and Col. Alan Scott told the commission that NORAD had begun tracking United 93 at 9:16 a.m., but the commission determined that the airliner was not hijacked until 12 minutes later. The military was not aware of the flight until after it had crashed in Pennsylvania.

These and other discrepancies did not become clear until the commission, forced to use subpoenas, obtained audiotapes from the FAA and NORAD, officials said. The agencies' reluctance to release the tapes -- along with e-mails, erroneous public statements and other evidence -- led some of the panel's staff members and commissioners to believe that authorities sought to mislead the commission and the public about what happened on Sept. 11.

Farmer was quoted in this story as well. And according to the one review I did find:

Make no mistake, Farmer is not saying that 9/11 was an inside job ...

I'm sure I'll get flamed by a lot of people who don't even read that quote. But whatever.

Like I said, I haven't read the book myself, seeing as I just found out about it. But it sure looks interesting.

Sure would be nice to find out what really happened that day. And left wondering HOW such a monumentally huge fuck-up, at every level imaginable, both during the attacks, and after, and during the investigation that followed, could have possibly happened in this country. And why people were tortured to deliberately give false information that could be used in a report everybody knew was bogus anyway.

And why we are now involved in two wars, both unnecessary and without end ...

And why we're being lied to about it all, to this day.



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Let The Sun Shine In......