Truth is Out on Torture

Milt Bearden, former career CIA, via The Washington Independent:

Throughout this ugly drama, U.S. leaders have assured the public that the extreme interrogation measures used on detainees have thwarted acts of terrorist and saved thousands of American lives. The trouble with such claims is that professionals who know something of interrogation or intelligence don’t believe them. This is not just because the old hands overwhelmingly believe that torture doesn’t work -- it doesn’t -- but also because they know that torture creates more terrorists and fosters more acts of terror than it could possibly neutralize.

The administration’s claims of having “saved thousands of Americans” can be dismissed out of hand because credible evidence has never been offered -- not even an authoritative leak of any major terrorist operation interdicted based on information gathered from these interrogations in the past seven years. All the public gets is repeated references to Jose Padilla, the Lakawanna Six, the Liberty Seven and the Library Tower operation in Los Angeles. If those slapstick episodes are the true character of the threat, then maybe we’ll be okay after all.

Torture

Heckuva Job

Via NYT:

After the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush committed the nation to a “war on terrorism” and made the destruction of Mr. bin Laden’s network the top priority of his presidency. But it is increasingly clear that the Bush administration will leave office with Al Qaeda having successfully relocated its base from Afghanistan to Pakistan’s tribal areas, where it has rebuilt much of its ability to attack from the region and broadcast its messages to militants across the world.

Al Qaeda

Lawyers Concocted Torture Schemes

via McClathcy:

WASHINGTON — The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn't the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers.

It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials.

Torture, Guantanamo

The McClellan [Over]Reaction

So many layers get uncovered with this story. Particularly striking, is the unsurprising reaction of the media to the claims that they were lapdogs in the lead up to the war. Most folks, I believe, figured the barn door was shut on this topic, but journalists, newsreaders and other hacks, just like the current administration and stand-up comedians, do not like to be criticized, no matter how cogent the knock. A standard response coming out the last few days is similar to the Hillary Clinton justification to vote for the Iraq War Resolution. It goes something like this:

How could we have known that the what the President and other administration officials said about the threat posed by Iraq was flawed and/or patently false? How could we have known that what we all figured would be a nice, short, tidy little war, with great patriotic visuals for the folks back home (for that is what the administration promised us), would turn into a sectarian bloodbath and 5 year plus counter-insurgency quagmire? We asked all the hard questions and the President, and even Colin Powell, gave their word that this unprovoked war was necessary. Heck, it was even desperately urgent to save us from a nuclear strike that would make 9/11 look like a walk in the park. How could we have known?!

As Salon's Glenn Greenwald points out, in reviewing McClellan's book, Tim Rutten, the LA Times media "critic," joins the choir of voices defending those journalists who couldn't be bothered with doing their jobs, i.e. acting as independent inquirers as opposed to White House stenographers. According to media "critic" Tim Rutten:

The news media, no less than the nation, endured a wrenching trauma on 9/11 and no less than any other institution in society felt the moral obligation to demonstrate solidarity with a country under deadly threat. In that situation, not giving the administration the benefit of the doubt, when it presented "facts" it said were based on the best and most sensitive intelligence available from the CIA and other spy agencies, would have been mindlessly adversarial. Moreover, since the media lacked the ability to do original reporting on the ground in Iraq, what basis would there have been for contradicting the administration's assessment of Saddam Hussein's aims?

Greenwald highlights the absurdity of these comments.

There's that standard media excuse: it was impossible for journalists to do anything except spout what the government was telling them. . . . Apparently now, in the U.S., when our Government wants to start a war by attacking another country that hasn't attacked us, it's the duty of the media to presume that they're telling the truth about everything, and it would be extremely irresponsible -- "mindlessly adversarial" -- for them to do otherwise. I just can't even add anything to that.

For his part, NBC White House correspondent David Gregory is willing to level criticism at anyone besides himself and other reporters. According to Gregory, the fault that the American people heard only one side of the story, that of the Bush/Neo-Con marchers onto war, was the fault of, well, the American people. After all, according to Gregory, its not the press's responsibility to question the President when he lies the country into war.

I think the questions were asked. I think we pushed. I think we prodded. I think we challenged the president. I think not only those of us in the White House press corps did that, but others in the rest of the landscape of the media did that.

If there wasn't a debate in this country, then maybe the American people should think about, why not? Where was Congress? Where was the House? Where was the Senate? Where was public opinion about the war? What did the former president believe about the pre-war intelligence? He agreed that—in fact, Bill Clinton agreed that Saddam had WMD.

The right questions were asked. I think there‘s a lot of critics—and I guess we can count Scott McClellan as one—who thinks that, if we did not debate the president, debate the policy in our role as journalists, if we did not stand up and say, this is bogus, and you‘re a liar, and why are you doing this, that we didn‘t do our job. And I respectfully disagree. It‘s not our role.

As Greenwald and others have noted, some reporters were doing more than reprinting the administration's dire warnings and fear mongering talking points. Take for example the McClatchy organization, whose excellent reporting before the war demonstrated the hollowness and outright falseness of the administrations justifications for war. I guess Rutten of the LA Times must find it hard to understand how they could have gotten the story right. I guess they were just acting "mindlessly adversarial."


Media

Romney: I'm Always Open To Hypocrisy and Duplicity If It Gets Me Elected

AP via USA Today:

BOSTON (AP) — A decorated Iraq war veteran, convicted as a boy for a pellet gun shooting, seemed like an ideal candidate for a pardon from then-Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

But Romney, now a U.S. Republican presidential candidate, said no — twice — despite the recommendation of the state's Board of Pardons.

At age 13, Anthony Circosta was convicted of assault for shooting another boy in the arm with a BB gun, a shot that did not break the skin. Circosta worked his way through college, joined the Army National Guard and led a platoon of 20 soldiers in Iraq's deadly Sunni triangle.

In 2005, as he was serving in Iraq, he sought a pardon to fulfill his dream of becoming a police officer.

"I've done everything I can to give back to my state and my community and my country, and to get brushed aside is very frustrating," said Circosta, 29.

In his presidential bid, Romney often proudly points out that he was the first governor in modern Massachusetts history to deny every request for a pardon or commutation during his four years in office. He says he refused pardons because he did not want to overturn a jury.

But critics argue that the blanket policy is an abdication of a key power given governors and the president — the ability to recognize how someone convicted of a past crime has turned their life around.

During the four years Romney was in office, 100 requests for commutations and 172 requests for pardons were filed in the state. All were denied.

"Governor Romney's view is that it would take a compelling set of circumstances to set aside the punishment and guilt resulting from a criminal trial," said Romney aide Eric Fehrnstrom, who added he was not familiar with Circosta's case. "The power to pardon should only be used in extraordinary circumstances."

While he refused all requests for pardons as governor, Romney has said that could change if he is elected president.

Asked in last week's debate if he would consider pardoning Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who was convicted of lying and obstructing the CIA leak investigation, Romney said: "It's worth looking at that. I will study it very closely if I'm lucky enough to be president. And I'd keep that option open."

REPUG 2008

Sadly, People Still Need Reminding That Torture Is Wrong, And Unhelpful

via WashPost op-ed:

As has happened with every other nation that has tried to engage in a little bit of torture -- only for the toughest cases, only when nothing else works -- the abuse spread like wildfire, and every captured prisoner became the key to defusing a potential ticking time bomb. Our soldiers in Iraq confront real "ticking time bomb" situations every day, in the form of improvised explosive devices, and any degree of "flexibility" about torture at the top drops down the chain of command like a stone -- the rare exception fast becoming the rule.

To understand the impact this has had on the ground, look at the military's mental health assessment report released earlier this month. The study shows a disturbing level of tolerance for abuse of prisoners in some situations. This underscores what we know as military professionals: Complex situational ethics cannot be applied during the stress of combat. The rules must be firm and absolute; if torture is broached as a possibility, it will become a reality.

This has had disastrous consequences. Revelations of abuse feed what the Army's new counterinsurgency manual, which was drafted under the command of Gen. David Petraeus, calls the "recuperative power" of the terrorist enemy.

Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld once wondered aloud whether we were creating more terrorists than we were killing. In counterinsurgency doctrine, that is precisely the right question. Victory in this kind of war comes when the enemy loses legitimacy in the society from which it seeks recruits and thus loses its "recuperative power."

The torture methods that Tenet defends have nurtured the recuperative power of the enemy. This war will be won or lost not on the battlefield but in the minds of potential supporters who have not yet thrown in their lot with the enemy. If we forfeit our values by signaling that they are negotiable in situations of grave or imminent danger, we drive those undecideds into the arms of the enemy. This way lies defeat, and we are well down the road to it.

Torture

Broder: Man of the People?!

Glenn Greenwald via Salon:

The disconnect between, on the one hand, what Beltway media stars think about and care about, and the lives of most Americans on the other, is so vast that it is difficult to describe. One could argue that the complete disconnect between our Beltway power centers and the lives of most Americans is the single greatest deficiency in our political culture. Yet the preening, insulated pundits of the royal court think the opposite.

They think that they are the real representatives of The People, and that their King, David Broder, is the Real Voice of the People. Mike Gravel apparently "chuckled" in Tom Edsall's face after Edsall bestowed Broder with that title, thinking that he had "made an absurdist joke."

But most national journalists would almost certainly walk away exactly the way Edsall did -- deeply confused and disoriented over the fact that someone did not perceive David Broder as the Man of the People. They live in a different universe and -- especially for the ones who have been there for so long, as well as for the ones who are most desperate to rise within it -- they cannot and do not recognize that any other exists.

More:

In sum, Broder has propped up one of the most unpopular and corrupt presidencies in history, all after he spent years waxing hysteric over a deeply popular President and a sex scandal that Americans by and large thought was petty and inconsequential. Time and again, David Broder is on the wrong side of every critical political issue. His judgment proves again and again to be worthless and misguided. And his opinions could not be any more detached from the "ordinary Americans" he thinks he represents.

Press

Authoritarianism On Parade

Via NYT editorial:

Suddenly, Mr. Bush is in a hurry. He has submitted a bill that would enact enormous, and enormously dangerous, changes to the 1978 law on eavesdropping. It would undermine the fundamental constitutional principle — over which there can be no negotiation or compromise — that the government must seek an individual warrant before spying on an American or someone living here legally.

To heighten the false urgency, the Bush administration will present this issue, as it has before, as a choice between catching terrorists before they act or blinding the intelligence agencies. But the administration has never offered evidence that the 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, hampered intelligence gathering after the 9/11 attacks. Mr. Bush simply said the law did not apply to him.
* * *
This is a dishonest measure, dishonestly presented, and Congress should reject it. Before making any new laws, Congress has to get to the truth about Mr. Bush’s spying program. (When asked at a Senate hearing yesterday if Mr. Bush still claims to have the power to ignore FISA when he thinks it is necessary, Mr. McConnell refused to answer.)

With clear answers — rather than fearmongering and stonewalling — there can finally be a real debate about amending FISA. It’s not clear whether that can happen under this president. Mr. Bush long ago lost all credibility in the area where this law lies: at the fulcrum of the balance between national security and civil liberties.

Spying, Civil Liberties,

The Wolf Has Got To Go

Ignatius via WashPost.com:

Wolfowitz has failed at the World Bank not because his underlings were out to get him (though many probably were) but because he treated the organization itself as an enemy. He saw its professional staff as an impediment to achieving his goals, rather than as a potential ally. Instead of heeding advice to work with the prickly international staff and win them over, he installed a palace guard of Americans who, like him, exuded the cocky "we know best" confidence of the Bush administration.

Wolfowitz, NeoCons

McCaffery on Iraq, "The population is in despair."

Gen. McCaffrey on the not-so-bright future for Iraq. Via WaPo:

[His] bottom line is that the U.S. military is in "strategic peril" -- a sharp contrast to his previous views. In 2005, he concluded in a similar report that "momentum is now clearly with the Iraqi government and coalition security forces." In a 2006 assessment, he wrote: "It was very encouraging for me to see the progress achieved in the past year."

The retired general, who on his latest visit also interviewed a U.S. intelligence official and some Iraqi officers, is especially critical of the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. It is "despised" by the Sunnis, he writes, is seen as "untrustworthy and incompetent" by the Kurds, and now enjoys "little credibility among the Shia populations from which it emerged."

The government lacks dominance in every province, he added. One result is that "no Iraqi government official, coalition soldier, diplomat, reporter, foreign NGO [nongovernmental organization], nor contractor can walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Basra, nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi, without heavily armed protection."
* * *
So, he concluded, it is still possible to develop a stable Iraq. But, he added, "We have very little time left." The dilemma facing the U.S. government, he said, is that U.S. forces probably will have to be reduced substantially within three years, but the insurgency will go on for many years more.

Iraq

The Broken Country

Veteran military correspondent Joe Galloway, via Military.com:

No doubt the contractors who are bloated like ticks on the billions they've sucked out of the public trough will write the checks to build George W. Bush a really fine presidential library on the campus of Southern Methodist University.

All of it will be a lie, just like the lies his administration told to beat the war drums five years ago.

How will the curators portray the broken military, the broken Constitution, the broken laws, the forever broken troops who came home missing limbs or eyes or pieces of their brains, the broken promises to cherish and care for the families of those who were killed and those very wounded veterans?

How will they portray the corruption, both real and spiritual, that this man and his accomplices have visited upon a nation and a people who once could be proud of their place in this world?

How and why did so many Americans, including so many in Congress and in the media, sit idly by while so much that was precious to us was bent and twisted and broken by men who had the power and the money to do the right things but chose to do the wrong things?

Iraq

George W. Bush is What Reagan Would Have Been Given The Opportunity

Or so says Prof. Krugman (via NYT):

Why is there such a strong family resemblance between the Reagan years and recent events? Mr. Reagan’s administration, like Mr. Bush’s, was run by movement conservatives — people who built their careers by serving the alliance of wealthy individuals, corporate interests and the religious right that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s. And both cronyism and abuse of power are part of the movement conservative package.

In part this is because people whose ideology says that government is always the problem, never the solution, see no point in governing well. So they use political power to reward their friends, rather than find people who will actually do their jobs.

If expertise is irrelevant, who gets the jobs? No problem: the interlocking, lavishly financed institutions of movement conservatism, which range from K Street to Fox News, create a vast class of apparatchiks who can be counted on to be “loyal Bushies.”

The movement’s apparatchik culture, in turn, explains much of its contempt for the rule of law. Someone who has risen through the ranks of a movement that prizes political loyalty above all isn’t likely to balk at, say, using bogus claims of voter fraud to disenfranchise Democrats, or suppressing potentially damaging investigations of Republicans. As Franklin Foer of The New Republic has pointed out, in College Republican elections, dirty tricks and double crosses are considered acceptable, even praiseworthy.

Bush, Reagan, Presidency

Our Warm(er) World

Scientists Gather to Finalize Climate Report via NYT:

``We basically have three choices - mitigation, adaptation, and suffering,” said John Holdren, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an energy and climate expert at Harvard University. ``We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.”

Global Warming

Wealth, askew

Herbert via NYT:

There are 93 million production and nonsupervisory workers (exclusive of farmworkers) in the U.S. Their combined real annual earnings from 2000 to 2006 rose by $15.4 billion, which is less than half of the combined bonuses awarded by the five Wall Street firms for just one year.

Wealth, Income,

“It takes Executive Branch authority beyond anything we’ve ever known.”

Again.

Bush signing statement undoes intended protections against spying on Americans through the mail, via Carpetbagger and the NY Daily News.

President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans’ mail without a judge’s warrant, the Daily News has learned.

The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a “signing statement” that declared his right to open people’s mail under emergency conditions.

That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it.

Bush’s move came during the winter congressional recess and a year after his secret domestic electronic eavesdropping program was first revealed. It caught Capitol Hill by surprise.

Bush, Spying, Law

Why I Am A Democratic

Pithy but strong quote from Digby:

I am a liberal because it is the political philosophy of freedom and equality. And I am a progressive because it is the political path to a better future. And I am a Democrat because it is the political party that believes in freedom, equality and progress.

Politics

UK Diplomat Lays Bare Lies Behind Iraq War

via The Independent:

A devastating attack on Mr Blair's justification for military action by Carne Ross, Britain's key negotiator at the UN, has been kept under wraps until now because he was threatened with being charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act.

In the testimony [to the Butler inquiry] revealed today Mr Ross, 40, who helped negotiate several UN security resolutions on Iraq, makes it clear that Mr Blair must have known Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction. He said that during his posting to the UN, "at no time did HMG [Her Majesty's Government] assess that Iraq's WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK or its interests."

Mr Ross revealed it was a commonly held view among British officials dealing with Iraq that any threat by Saddam Hussein had been "effectively contained".

He also reveals that British officials warned US diplomats that bringing down the Iraqi dictator would lead to the chaos the world has since witnessed. "I remember on several occasions the UK team stating this view in terms during our discussions with the US (who agreed)," he said.

"At the same time, we would frequently argue when the US raised the subject, that 'regime change' was inadvisable, primarily on the grounds that Iraq would collapse into chaos."

Iraq, WMD

Unfinished Business

via NYT:

Some recent images from George W. Bush’s war on terror:

¶Jose Padilla, the supposed dirty bomber, submitting while guards blindfolded him and covered his ears for a walk from his cell to a dentist’s chair.

¶Government lawyers arguing that a prisoner could not testify that he was tortured by American agents, because their brutality was a secret.

¶A judge dismissing another prisoner’s challenge to his detention, after a new law stripped basic rights from those Mr. Bush has designated “illegal enemy combatants.”

¶The White House scorning lawmakers’ attempts to rein in Mr. Bush’s illegal domestic spying.

This is the legacy of a Republican Congress that enabled the president’s imperial visions of his authority.

Bush, Dirty Bomber, Spying, Law

Mediocre on Mission Rock

Mission Bland

Another bland oversized complex in Mission Bay. What fun. At least it's just rentals. Why would anyone BUY something in Mission Bay when the apartment buildings look the same as the condo buildings, and are on the same block? I don't get it. This should have been rethought a bit to insist that some smaller projects were put into the mix.

San Francisco, Architecture

Secrets That Are In No Way Secrets

via Booman Tribune:

Only people trading clam shells for coconuts would have been unaware that any financial transaction moving through the international financial system--which includes SWIFT, FedWire, and CHIPS—was being scrutinized by the United States Government. As I noted earlier, Bush official, Juan Zarate, was telling Congress in February 2002 that Bin Laden and his crew were taking precautions because traditional banking money movements made them vulnerable to detection.

The furor over the “SWIFT” story has little to do with keeping America safe and a lot to do with keeping Republicans in power. If the leak was so devastating there would be a full court investigation of who in the Federal Government spoke to the reporters. But, as shown above, this information was not secret and was already in the public domain. It appears that Bush, with the advice of Karl Rove, sees demonizing the New York Times as a great way to energize a flagging political base. When it comes to hurting our nation's security and putting our citizens at risk, the fault lies with Bush, not the New York Times.

Terrorism, Secrets & Lies