For over a month Dick Cheney has been justifying his support for the illegal use of torture
by claiming that CIA documents prove that torture was effective in
saving American lives. This was very convenient for Cheney since the
documents which supposedly show this are classified. Although Cheney’s claims contradict general statements
on the lack of efficacy from torture, we could not evaluate the actual
documents Cheney was referring to. Fortunately Senator Carl Levin has
reviewed the documents and has stated that Cheney is lying:
Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, says former Vice President Dick Cheney is lying when he
claims that classified CIA memos show that enhanced interrogation
techniques like waterboarding worked.
Levin, speaking at the Foreign Policy Association’s annual dinner in
Washington on Wednesday, said an investigation by his committee into
detainee abuse charges over the use of the techniques — now deemed
torture by the Obama administration — “gives the lie to Mr. Cheney’s
claims.”
The Michigan Democrat told the crowd that the two CIA documents that
Cheney wants released “say nothing about numbers of lives saved, nor do
the documents connect acquisition of valuable intelligence to the use
of abusive techniques.”
“I hope that the documents are declassified, so that people can
judge for themselves what is fact, and what is fiction,” he added.
A former FBI interrogator who successfully extracted secrets from
senior Al Qaeda members using psychological tricks has gone public with
his feelings on the ineffectiveness of torture. As he explained on CBC's As It Happens,
torture is especially bad when you've got a "ticking bomb" situation,
as a good psychological interrogator can establish rapport in hours,
while torturing Al Quaeda suspects required dozens of sessions with
waterboards and days of sleep deprivation to get any intelligence (and
what it got, no one trusts):
Ali Soufan, a former FBI interrogator, revealed in an
article being released in June that Osama Bin Laden's bodyguard opened
up about the 9/11 terror attacks only after being offered -- sugar free
cookies.
Bin Laden lieutenant Abu Jandal is a diabetic, Soufan said, and wouldn't eat sugar cookies he'd been offered.
"Soufan noticed that he didn't touch any of the cookies that had
been served with tea: 'He was a diabetic and couldn't eat anything with
sugar in it,' Time's Bobby Ghosh wrote. "At their next meeting, the
Americans brought him some sugar-free cookies, a gesture that took the
edge off Abu Jandal's angry demeanor.
"We had showed him respect, and we had done this nice thing for
him," Soufan told Ghosh. "So he started talking to us instead of giving
us lectures..."
"It took more questioning, and some interrogators' sleight of
hand, before the Yemeni gave up a wealth of information about al-Qaeda
-- including the identities of seven of the 9/11 bombers -- but the
cookies were the turning point," Ghosh writes.
"After that, he could no longer think of us as evil Americans," Soufan said. "Now he was thinking of us as human beings."
Along with Satanism, Scientology and the GOP's friends over at the Moonie newspaper. I've often said that the radical Mormon activists who we're forced to deal with - the ones who forcibly baptize dead Jewish Holocaust victims in an effort to steal their souls,
the ones who spend tens of millions in other states to force Christians
and others to live according to Mormon views of morality - bear a
striking resemblance to Scientologists. We have a Scientology mother
ship here in DC, and if you ever talk to any of its inhabitants it's
remarkably like talking to activist Mormons. Sweet as pie to a fault
until you question them on anything, then the long knives, and the
lawyers, come out.
Howard Fineman sees the modern-day GOP leaders are the same GOP leader with the same old bag of tricks:
Right now there are two RNCs here in Washington, side by side. The contrast is instructive.
One,
the Republican National Committee, is a clueless self-parody. The
other, the (R)ush-(N)ewt-(C)heney tag team, is providing the real
muscle as the Republican right begins to build traction in taking on
President Obama and the Democrats.
The official RNC just spent
the last two days wasting time and inviting ridicule—listening to a
listless, empty speech by its chairman, Michael Steele, and debating
the grand idea of calling the Democrats "socialists." Meanwhile, Rush
Limbaugh hammers away at the Democrats and the president on radio every
day; Newt Gingrich sarcastically attacks Nancy Pelosi on The Daily Show
(and gets laughs for doing so); and Dick Cheney continues his
high-profile, Iraq-star media tour.
Okay. How
idiotic are the people in the traditional media? Speaker Pelosi said
quite firmly that the CIA misled her about the Bush administration's
torture policy back in 2002. She was adamant. And, yes, it was torture.
Yet,
traditional media types can't grasp that concept. Surely, they're
breathlessly intimating, Pelosi must be wrong. Do they not remember
what really happened back in 2002-2003? I made the mistake of watching
the start of the TODAY Show this morning. Matt Lauer and the ever
painful Kelly O'Donnell seem shocked, shocked that Pelosi would say
someone in the Bush government would have lied back in 2002. For Christ
Sakes, George Bush, Dick Cheney and their entire administration were
flat out lying to the American people back then about terrorism and
Iraq. They misled us into a war -- abetted by the traditional media.
Do
these idiots in the media not remember that? The likes of Lauer,
O'Donnell and their colleague covering the White House, David Gregory,
were regurgitating the Bush team's lies -- and echoing the drumbeat for
war. It was appalling -- beyond appalling -- that no one challenged the
lies back then. Now, they can't grasp that someone in the government
was lying about these issues. Idiots.
Yes, because that whole "conservative" thing has been working so well
for the Republicans. The religious right won't give up without a fight,
and so far they're taking the GOP down with them. God speed.
In
an interview with the California newspaper The Visalia Times-Delta,
Huckabee said the GOP would only further decline in influence should it
alienate social conservatives — largely considered the most energetic
and loyal faction of the party.
"Throw the social conservatives
the pro-life, pro-family people overboard and the Republican party will
be as irrelevant as the Whigs," he said in reference to the American
political party that largely disbanded in the mid 1800s. "They'll
basically be a party of gray-haired old men sitting around the country
club puffing cigars, sipping brandy and wondering whatever happened to
the country. That will be the end of the party," he said in the
interview published Thursday.
I saw this yesterday, it's sick. The GOP continues to seek the lowest part of the lowest gutter they can find. No one who claims to be part of the GOP deserves any respect at all. There may be some reasonable Republicans in the US but if they claim to still support the GOP they are admitting to supporting liars, thugs and bullies and the most dishonest and sick people who seek to undermine and destroy America. The GOP is a MUCH larger threat to America than OBL or the looniest of terrorists. A suicide vest or a plane flown into a building is not even a drop in a bucket compared to what the GOP seeks to accomplish.
Who do they think this appeals to? They seem to think the more slimy sheep they can pull in the better. Are they going to elect Rush Limbaugh as their Grand Wizard next.
The Republicans are working with fervor and desperation to inculcate
the false notion that closing Guantanamo Bay means releasing terrorists
into small-town America. You have to see this incredibly dishonest
video put out by the Senate Republicans, complete with spooky music
building to a crescendo. Here's the video:
The editing and theme are extremely dishonest. They continually edit
in clips of news shows asking "where would the detainees go" without
ever showing the actual answer to the question: they'll go to maximum
security prisons, either civilian or military. Because they don't want
viewers to hear the real answer, they want them to see the lie at the
end of the video:
Terrorists: Coming Soon To a Neighborhood Near You
Rep. Pete Hoekstra, past chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and now candidate for governor of Michigan, said at a press conference
last week that Obama is going to take terrorists "away from Gitmo and
plunk them down in the middle of Michigan, in the middle of Kansas, in
the middle of Virginia or in the middle of New York."
They actually want people to believe that the Obama administration
is just going to drop off Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on the corner of Main
and Elm. Heck, they'll probably give him a gun and some C-4 too. All of
this is patently absurd. Why mince words? It's a baldfaced lie.
When the detainees from Gitmo are transferred out, they will be
housed in maximum security prisons. That might mean military prisons,
like the Navy brig that housed Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla in South
Carolina. Or it might mean a civilian prison like the Florence, Colorado Supermax prison where Padilla is currently being held after being found guilty.
The Colorado Supermax facility also houses Omar Abdel-Rahman, the
mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Zacarias Moussaoui,
Wadih el-Hage, Ramzi Yousef, Richard Reid (the "shoe bomber") and
Mahmud Abouhalima, as well as domestic terrorists like Terry Nichols,
Eric Robert Rudolph and the Unabomber. Most have been held there for
more than a decade without incident.
There were 425,000 POWs held in the United States during WW II,
eight of them right here in Michigan. They included Camp Allegan, Camp
Owosso and Fort Custer in Battle Creek. There are about 250 men left at
Gitmo. But be afraid....be very afraid....and don't forget to blame the
other party for your fear so you'll vote for us.
An army contractor received a $12,500 fine, five years' probation, and no jail time for killing a flex-cuffed Afghan who had doused his colleague with gasoline and set her one fire.
The immolation victim eventually died of her injuries, but she was still alive when the contractor shot the prisoner.
As horrific as the provocation was, the sentence seems awfully light
for first degree murder of a prisoner. Killing a handcuffed prisoner is
absolutely beyond the pale.
Update: The contractor was initially charged with murder
but the charge was later reduced to manslaughter, an offense which
carries up to eight years in prison. Based on the circumstances
outlined in the Danger Room post, I think the charge was way too light,
and the sentence was a joke relative to the charge.
The
contractor executed a prisoner in U.S. custody. I don't care how evil
the prisoner's conduct was. In wartime, soldiers will inevitably take
prisoners who have done terrible things to their comrades. The
contractor ostensibly got an unusually light sentence because the judge
agreed that he was suffering from diminished responsibility because of
the trauma of the attack. If we let the fog of war count as a defense
for killing prisoners, we're opening the door to summary executions on
the battlefield. The contractor is a former Army Ranger, so he has been
trained to control himself in battle.
Rush and Hannity do make themselves easy targets. And, Wanda Sykes let them have it.
You
know that both of these guys are going to be in a frenzy about this
over the next couple days...the hard core right-wingers are very
thin-skinned and have no sense of humor:
If
I had to guess, I'd bet Wanda Sykes really doesn't care what Rush and
Hannity say. It'll just give her more material and opportunities to
respond...
Recent Comments