The New York Times Gets It On Torture - Mostly

From an editorial two days ago:

Since the day President Obama took office, he has failed to bring to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects — an official government program conceived and carried out in the years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

And they describe a larger conspiracy to commit the war crimes:

As the report reveals, these claims fail for a simple reason: C.I.A. officials admitted at the time that what they intended to do was illegal.

In July 2002, C.I.A. lawyers told the Justice Department that the agency needed to use “more aggressive methods” of interrogation that would “otherwise be prohibited by the torture statute.” They asked the department to promise not to prosecute those who used these methods. When the department refused, they shopped around for the answer they wanted. They got it from the ideologically driven lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel, who wrote memos fabricating a legal foundation for the methods. Government officials now rely on the memos as proof that they sought and received legal clearance for their actions. But the report changes the game: We now know that this reliance was not made in good faith.

The Times gets most of it right.  Here's where they fail:

The American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch are to give Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. a letter Monday calling for appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate what appears increasingly to be “a vast criminal conspiracy, under color of law, to commit torture and other serious crimes.”

The question everyone will want answered, of course, is: Who should be held accountable? That will depend on what an investigation finds, and as hard as it is to imagine Mr. Obama having the political courage to order a new investigation, it is harder to imagine a criminal probe of the actions of a former president.

See that? Everyone gets probed except the one guy in charge - George W. Bush.

And here's the reason why the torture needs to be investigated and prosecuted:  To hold accountable those who committed the crimes and to stop them from happening again.  I know President Obama stopped the practice for now, during his administration, but what's to stop some future President from simply following Dick Cheney's lead?

While a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the interrogation program shocked many with its vivid descriptions of one unresponsive prisoner frothing at the mouth after waterboarding and others shackled from bars in stress positions for prolonged periods, Cheney was unrepentant.

He repeatedly dismissed the Senate inquiry as “partisan” but seemed entirely comfortable with a public discussion of the once-secret techniques. Indeed, Cheney seemed proud of his role in creating the interrogation program.

“I’d do it again in a minute,” he declared.

That's why the torture needs to be investigated and prosecuted.  Because it might happen again.

Prosecute The Torture.

Prosecute The Torture. Prosecute Bush, Cheney for The Torture

Ok, let's stick to the legal texts.

This is from the preamble to the UN Convention Against Torture:

Considering the obligation of States under the Charter, in particular Article 55, to promote universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms,

Having regard to article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both of which provide that no one may be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,

Having regard also to the Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Being Subjected to Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, adopted by the General Assembly on 9 December 1975 (resolution 3452 (XXX)),

Here's the article 5 text from the Universal Declaration:

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

It was adopted by a vote of 48 to nothing with 8 abstentions.   The United States was one of the 48.

Here's the article 7 text from the International Covenant:

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. In particular, no one shall be subjected without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation.

This was signed by President Carter in October, 1977 and ratified by the US Senate in June 1992.

And here's the Declaration - adopted by the United Nations in 1975 - and its definition of torture:

For the purpose of this Declaration, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted by or at the instigation of a public official on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or confession, punishing him for an act he has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating him or other persons.

And it includes this Article:

No State may permit or tolerate torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Exceptional circumstances such as a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency may not be invoked as a justification of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

And that's just to add some background information to the UN Convention Against Torture.

And here is some of what Ronald Reagan signed in 1988:

For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

And:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

And now let's look at what happened (From the Senate report via vox.com):

On August 5, 2002,...CIA Headquarters authorized the proposed interrogation plan for [Redha] al-Najjar, to include the use of loud music (at less than the level that would cause physical harm such as perman hearing loss), worse food (as long as it was nutritionally adequate for sustenance, sleep deprivation, and hooding.

More than a month later, on September 21, 2002, CIA interrogators described al-Najjar as "clearly a broken man" and "on the verge of a complete breakdown" as result of the isolation. The cable added that al-Najjar was willing to do whatever the CIA officer asked.

And:

Of the 119 known detainees, at least 26 were wrongfully held and did not meet the detention standard in the September 2001 Memorandum of Notification (MON). These included an "intellectually challenged" man whose CIA detention was used solely as leverage to get a family member to provide information...

And:

Sleep deprivation invlved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours, usually standing or in stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their heads. At least five detainees experience disturbing hallucinations during prolinged sleep deprivation and, in at least two of those cases, the CIA nonetheless continued the sleep deprivation.

And so on...

Regardless of any claim that the torture "produced useful intelligence that helped the United States thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives" these acts are clearly against BOTH international and US law.  Clearly, these acts are cruel, inhumane and antithetical to any moral value that can be truly considered American.

Simply following orders is not a defense when it comes to torture.  Saying there was a national emergency is no excuse for ordering such reprehensible acts.  No one who committed them should be considered patriotic for having done so.

These are serious crimes and history demands prosecution; Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest of them who instituted and or participated in the torture need to be brought to justice.  If this country lacks the political will to do so, then shame on any pragmatist who feels that looking forward is more important than looking backward. That national shame brought on by the torture will forever be on their hands if they don't prosecute.

We used to be the good guys.  Not any more.  Not while the torturers walk freely among us.

Prosecute the torture.

One last thing to contemplate: the Senate report more or less guarantees the torturers a permanent internal exile.  Consider article 7, paragraph 1 of the UN treaty:

The State Party in territory under whose jurisdiction a person alleged to have committed any offence referred to in article 4 is found, shall in the cases contemplated in article 5, if it does not extradite him, submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.

So if say, George Bush wants to go on vacation most anyplace else on the planet, there's a provision in the law for him to be arrested and tried for war crimes.

As it should be.  As it should be done here.

More Tribbing For A Tuesday Morning

Follow the money. That's what the man said.

Funny what you'll find when you follow the Scaife money around the pages of the Tribune-Review.

First something from this weekend:

Some FBI secrets are secrets no more -- thanks to Ronald Kessler, award-winning Newsmax.com chief Washington correspondent and best-selling author.

In "The Secrets of the FBI" (Crown), he discusses many FBI triumphs and tribulations, including J. Edgar Hoover's personal life; FBI involvement with Marilyn Monroe, Robert Kennedy, organized crime, major spy cases and the Ruby Ridge and Waco fiascoes; and its post-9/11 anti-terrorism orientation. Revelations give unprecedented insight, and Kessler says the book project enhanced his opinion of the bureau. Following are excerpts from the Trib's phone conversation with him.

How does it feel knowing you just read an advertisement that's only impersonating an interview? Why do I say this?

Look at where Kessler works: Newsmax.

Richard Mellon Scaife owns 40% of Newsmax.

Then there's this - where the Media Research Center covers for war criminal Dick Cheney. The author of the piece, Kyle Drennen, seems to be complaining about the "hostile" interview Matt Lauer conducted with Cheney. There's even a jab at a sign held in front of the camera at the end of the interview.


All of which is true, by the way. Waterboarding is toture and torture is a war crime and Dick Cheney should be prosecuted for it.

The Media Research Center obviously doesn't think so.

And the Richard Mellon Scaife controlled foundations (Carthage and Sarah Scaife) have given about $3.5 million to the MRC over the years.

Good to know where they stand on torture.

An Update On Dick Cheney, War Criminal

An astute reader emailed in this link from The Atlantic.

Ta-Nehisi Coates boils everything down into a bite sized paragraph :

It's amazing, though it shouldn't be, to see the former vice-president of the United States arguing that the government still should be torturing people, and that torture is one of the things he's proudest of. I think the worst thing about the Obama administration's "looking forward" doctrine is that it virtually guarantees that torture will happen again--perhaps even under the very next administration.

I could not agree more.

And on a recent edition of Democracy Now! Salon.com writer Glenn Greenwald and Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell discuss the real fallout of the Cheney book:

GLENN GREENWALD: One of the most significant aspects of the rollout of Dick Cheney’s book is that he’s basically being treated as though he’s just an elder statesman who has some controversial, partisan political views. And yet, the evidence is overwhelming, including most of what Colonel Wilkerson just said and has been saying for quite some time, and lots of other people, as well, including, for example, General Antonio Taguba, that Dick Cheney is not just a political figure with controversial views, but is an actual criminal, that he was centrally involved in a whole variety not just of war crimes in Iraq, but of domestic crimes, as well, including the authorization of warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens in violation of FISA, which says that you go to jail for five years for each offense, as well as the authorization and implementation of a worldwide torture regime that, according to General Barry McCaffrey, resulted in the murder—his word—of dozens of detainees, far beyond just the three or four cases of waterboarding that media figures typically ask Cheney about.

And yet, what we have is a government, a successor administration, the Obama administration, that announced that there will be no criminal investigations, no, let alone, prosecutions of any Bush officials for any of these multiple crimes. And that has taken these actions outside of the criminal realm and turned them into just garden-variety political disputes. And it’s normalized the behavior. And as a result, Dick Cheney goes around the country profiting off of this, you know, sleazy, sensationalistic, self-serving book, basically profiting from his crimes, and at the same time normalizing the idea that these kind of policies, though maybe in the view of some wrongheaded, are perfectly legitimate political choices to make. And I think that’s the really damaging legacy from all of this.

AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Wilkerson, do you think the Bush administration officials should be held accountable in the way that Glenn Greenwald is talking about?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I certainly do. And I’d be willing to testify, and I’d be willing to take any punishment I’m due. And I have to say, I agree with almost everything he just said. And I think that explains the aggressiveness, to a large extent, of the Cheney attack and of the words like "exploding heads all over Washington." This is a book written out of fear, fear that one day someone will "Pinochet" Dick Cheney.

There's more from Wilkerson here:

"[Cheney]'s developed an angst and almost a protective cover, and now he fears being tried as a war criminal so he uses such terminology as 'exploding heads all over Washington' because that's the way someone who's decided he's not going to be prosecuted acts: boldly, let's get out in front of everybody, let's act like we are not concerned and so forth when in fact they are covering up their own fear that somebody will Pinochet him," Wilkerson added.

Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested for war crimes.

As both Bush and Cheney should be.

Dan Simpson, in today's P-G, has a list of reasons why he won't buy or read Cheney's book:

1) He is a liar. Anyone who would take the United States to war based on two false reasons -- the claim of Iraq having nuclear weapons and of the Saddam Hussein regime having links to al-Qaida -- has no further right to be believed about anything. Mr. Cheney's approach to these deadly lies was to choose and interpret U.S. intelligence to reinforce his goal, as opposed to arriving at a truth upon which to base U.S. policy.

2) He is a killer. His deliberate actions, probably intended to get himself and President George W. Bush reelected in 2004, led to the deaths of more than 4,400 Americans and countless thousands of Iraqis. Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, fine; George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, no way.

I would have added stuff about the torture and the non-existent WMDs and the domestic surveillance. But that's just me.

Many thanks to the Obama Administration! By taking any prosecution of the war crimes off the table, it's at least partially legitimized the crimes Cheney is so so proud of.

Here's to hoping that some country somewhere has the courage to "Pinochet" Dick Cheney - war criminal.

Why Hasn't Cheney Been Arrested?

From Realclearpolitics:

[NBC's Jamie] Gangel: "A conservative hero the his fans, Darth Vader to his critics, Cheney 's book is an unapologetic defense to his Vice Presidency and the controversial programs he's championed after 9/11. In your view, we should still be using enhanced interrogation?"

Cheney: "Yes."

Gangel: "Should we still be waterboarding terror suspects?

Cheney: "I would strongly support using it again if we had a high-value detainee, that was the only way we could get him to talk."

Gangel: "People call it torture. you think it should still be a tool?"

Cheney: "Yes."

Ok, ok, ok. Let me stop the "unbiased" Gangel right there. People don't call waterboarding torture. The Law calls waterboarding torture. US and International Law:

• United States Code Title 18, §2340(2)
• The UN Conventions Against Torture
• The Geneva Convention Relative To The Treatment of Prisoners Of War

In fact what Cheney said goes directly against the UN Conventions:

For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions. [emphasis added.]

Ah, the joys of an "unbiased" interviewer! By putting it in "People call it..." rather than "The law says..." frame, she gets Cheney is off at least one rhetorical hook. Why couldn't she just say it was illegal (not to mention immoral and counterproductive)?

And that being the case, why isn't Dick Cheney in jail?

For that, I guess, we have our disappointing President to thank.

Doesn't change the fact that waterboarding is torture and torture is a war crime and George Bush and Dick Cheney are war criminals.

SOMEONE Has The Right Idea At CPAC!

Listen at about 1:27.

Some brave soul screams out "War Criminal!" at the former Vice-President.

Even in the alternative universe that is the American conservative movement, someone sees clearly enough to speak the truth.

TPM has more:

Rumsfeld is being given CPAC's "Defender Of The Constitution" award, a concept that apparently rankled Paul supporters in the crowd. Many of them got up and walked out en masse at the mention of Rumsfeld, though some stayed behind in the conference hall to heckle the architects of the invasion of Iraq.

And:

"Uh, Defender of the Constitution?" Justin Bradfield of Maryland scoffed when I caught up with him after he walked out of Rumsfeld's speech. "Let's see: he expanded the Defense Department more than pretty much any other defense secretary and he enforced the Patriot Act."

"[Speaking] as a libertarian, that's not really the type of person who should be getting Defender of the Constitution," he added.

Gotta love those libertarians!

Another Reason Why Torture Is A Bad Idea

Take a look at the Ghailani Verdict:

Fierce criticism erupted Thursday over the split verdict on terrorism charges against the first Guantánamo detainee to be tried in civilian court, casting new doubts on the Obama administration’s goal of trying cases against other prisoners in the civilian criminal justice system.

The defendant, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, was convicted Wednesday in federal court in Manhattan of conspiring in the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa, and he faces a sentence of 20 years to life in prison. But Republican critics roundly denounced the fact that a jury acquitted him on all but one of more than 280 charges — including every murder count — as a sign that such terrorism detainees should be prosecuted only before a military commission.

That portrayal of the verdict as a disaster was hotly contested by the administration and other supporters of civilian trials. They argued that the system had shown that a terrorist could be convicted and sentenced to a stiff prison term even after a judge excluded evidence tainted by coercive interrogations during the Bush administration.

See that? They euphemized "torture" to "coercive interrogations." When they do it it's torture; when we do it it's "coercive interrogations." Damned lib-rul media!

So what's the problem?

Many observers attributed any weakness in the prosecution’s case to the fact that the Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of United States District Court in Manhattan, who presided over the trial, refused to allow prosecutors to introduce testimony from an important witness, who was discovered after interrogators used coercive techniques on Mr. Ghailani.

So evidence based on torture was deemed inadmissible. That, of course enraged the law and order types on the right. Military tribunals wouldn't have this problem, they said.

Not so:

But proponents of civilian trials noted that in a footnote of his order rejecting the witness, Judge Kaplan pointed to restrictions against evidence obtained by torture in military trials and strongly suggested that a military judge would have excluded the testimony, too.

So, apart from the immorality of Bush's torture, apart from the illegality of Bush's torture, there's another reason why torture is bad. Bad, bad, bad.

From Andrew Sullivan:

The only thing to say about the remarkable acquittals on almost all counts for a tortured prisoner of war is that torture renders convictions all but impossible. By throwing aside all norms for prisoner treatment and setting up an apparatus of systemic torture, Bush and Cheney destroyed critical evidence that could have been used by the prosecution to convict. [emphases added.]

In their zeal to "git 'em!" Bush and Cheney made things much much more complicated. They could have just followed the law but they didn't. They broke it. And now the only alternative is detaining the accused terrorists indefinitely without trial. Another insult to our Constitutional system.

This is the Bush/Cheney legacy: torture followed by indefinite detention. So much for the rule of law.

Guess Who Said This?

C'mon guess!

They (Bush and Cheney) should have been indicted. They absolutely should have been indicted for torturing, for spying, for arresting without warrants. I'd like to say they should be indicted for lying but believe it or not, unless you're under oath, lying is not a crime. At least not an indictable crime. It's a moral crime.

It was probably some "blame-Amurika-first lib'rul", huh?

Guess again.

It was Judge Andrew Napolitano, he of Fox News.

He was interviewed by Ralph Nader on C-Span discussing his book, Lies The Government Told You, when the topic of habeas corpus came up, leading to the above quotation.

As for the evidence for such crimes, Napolitano says:

The evidence in this book and in others, our colleague the great Vincent Bugliosi has amassed an incredible amount of evidence. The purpose of this book was not to amass that evidence but I do discuss it, is overwhelming when you compare it to the level of evidence required for a normal indictment that George W. Bush as President and Dick Cheney as Vice President participated in criminal conspiracies to violate the federal law and the guaranteed civil liberties of hundreds, maybe thousands of human beings. [emphasis added]

Judge Andrew Napolitano, Fox Legal Analyst.

Cheney Hospitalized for Chest Pains; Doctors Find His Heart to be "Two Sizes Too Small"

From The New York Times:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney was admitted Monday to George Washington Hospital after experiencing chest pains. Mr. Cheney’s assistant, Peter Long, said in a statement that Mr. Cheney, 69, was resting comfortably and that his doctors were evaluating the situation and found his heart to be "two sizes too small."

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I Wish I'd Written This

In response to reading about the dozen or so people carrying at Obama events in Arizona, watertiger at Firedoglake had this to say:

Once again we see how irony deficiency maims the conservative's ability to reason: those most terrified of The Negro Socialist Non-Citizen Grandmother-Killing President taking away their assault weaponry [roll eyes here] are free who to openly carry them at Obama events without fear of reprisal.

Could you even begin to imagine that sort of apparently lackadaisical approach during Bush's Orwellian tenure? Contemplate what would have happened to audience members had they shown up at one of Bush's "socha scurty" town halls packing heat. People wearing even vaguely anti-Bush t-shirts were summarily ejected from his little Potemkin village affairs and those whose cars brandished "liberal" bumper stickers were no doubt assigned to some DHS anti-American no-fly list. Anyone with a firearm at a Bush event would have found himself wearing an orange jumpsuit and shackles faster than you could say "Dick Cheney's man-sized safe."

Damn, I wish I'd written that.

So What WAS Cheney's Secret Program?

It might not be al-Qaeda assassinations. Why not?

From TPMMuckraker:

Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, told TPMmuckraker that because we've been in a state of war against al Qaeda since just after September 11, there would have been no need for a secret CIA program that received special legal authorization.

Since the war on terror began, said Cannistraro, the CIA has routinely conducted operations targeting top Qaeda leaders. "The CIA runs drones and targets al Qaeda safe houses all the time," said Cannistraro, explaining that there's no important difference between those kinds of attacks and "assassinations" with a gun or a knife.

Makes sense. But then there is this from the Guardian in the UK:

Dick Cheney, the former vice president, ordered a highly classified CIA operation hidden from Congress because it pushed the limits of legality by planning to assassinate al-Qaida operatives in friendly countries without the knowledge of their governments, according to former intelligence officials.

Former counter-terrorism officials who retain close links to the intelligence community say that the hidden operation involved plans by the CIA and the military to launch operations, similar to those by Israel's Mossad intelligence service, to hunt down and kill al-Qaida activists abroad without informing the governments concerned, even though some were regarded as friendly if unreliable.

So it's not necessarily assassinations, but secret assassinations in friendly countries. As TPM quotes, this is something Seymore Hersh wrote about something like this a while ago:

Under Rumsfeld's new approach, I was told, U.S. military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists. This could potentially involve organizing and carrying out combat operations, or even terrorist activities. Some operations will likely take place in nations in which there is an American diplomatic mission, with an Ambassador and a C.I.A. station chief, the Pentagon consultant said. The Ambassador and the station chief would not necessarily have a need to know, under the Pentagon's current interpretation of its reporting requirement.

TPM goes on with this nasty bit:

But Cannistraro cautioned that that DOD program has nothing to do with the secret, unidentified CIA program which Cheney is said to have hid from Congress, and which CIA director Leon Panetta ended last month.

As for what the program did involve, Cannistraro suggested that it involved Americans as targets, and that it went beyond surveillance, but declined to elaborate. He added that, though Cheney may have directly ordered the CIA to keep Congress in the dark, the veep wasn't acting alone. "The approval was from the president," said Cannistraro.

This seems to be backed up by something Karen Tumulty reports in Time. She quotes her colleague Bobby Ghoush:

Speculation abounds about the nature of the secret program Dick Cheney asked the CIA to keep from the Congressional oversight committees. The most sensational reports suggest it was plan to find and kill top Al Qaeda leaders – like the covert Israeli campaign to take out the perpetrators of the Munich killings.

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

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

There's not enough information right now for this to be anything other than speculation but the fact that it made it this far says something.

Of course the wingnuts are still screaming about birth certificates.

This is so not news: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed says he lied under torture

REPORT: Key Terror Detainee Acknowledged ‘I Make Up Stories’ In Response To Torture

Don't get me wrong. I appreciate any attention paid to this subject. I'm just saying it's something that we've known for years.

Back in 2007 when the Pentagon released the transcript of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession it was widely acknowledged that KSM seemed to have confessed to anything and everything and that it simply defied belief. Everyone from The Onion to Time Magazine ridiculed the confession at the time.

We even made a joke on this very blog that there was a local connection in KSM's confession:

2 Political Junkies has just learned from several unnamed sources that after some additional waterboarding questioning, terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has just confessed to being responsible for putting all those City of Pittsburgh-owned images on the Ravenstahl Campaign website.

And, yes, torture and waterboarding were also mentioned in some of the reports at the time -- maybe because we knew as far back as 2006 that the Bush-Cheney Administration was torturing suspects.

I remind you that we knew this because Dick admitted to it way back then.

So, while this news is important it isn't really new.

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This post has been brought to you by the Department of Things We Already Know But Keep Forgetting.
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Play him off, keyboard cat (Cheney Edition)

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Fact-Checking Cheney's Speech

McClatchy does the honors and it's no surprise what they find:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney's defense Thursday of the Bush administration's policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements.

They're being way too diplomatic. Usually these are called lies.

Here's more:

In his address to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative policy organization in Washington, Cheney said that the techniques the Bush administration approved, including waterboarding — simulated drowning that's considered a form of torture — forced nakedness and sleep deprivation, were "legal" and produced information that "prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people."

He quoted the Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, as saying that the information gave U.S. officials a "deeper understanding of the al Qaida organization that was attacking this country."

In a statement April 21, however, Blair said the information "was valuable in some instances" but that "there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is that these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security."

A top-secret 2004 CIA inspector general's investigation found no conclusive proof that information gained from aggressive interrogations helped thwart any "specific imminent attacks," according to one of four top-secret Bush-era memos that the Justice Department released last month.

FBI Director Robert Mueller told Vanity Fair magazine in December that he didn't think that the techniques disrupted any attacks.

Another omission/exaggeration/misstatement/whatever by Cheney:

_ Cheney said that only "ruthless enemies of this country" were detained by U.S. operatives overseas and taken to secret U.S. prisons.

A 2008 McClatchy investigation, however, found that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees captured in 2001 and 2002 in Afghanistan and Pakistan were innocent citizens or low-level fighters of little intelligence value who were turned over to American officials for money or because of personal or political rivalries.

Yea, these guys know intelligence.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

From The Nation, May 20:

The Department of Defense paid former Halliburton subsidiary KBR more than $80 million in bonuses for contracts to install electrical wiring in Iraq. The award payments were for the very work that resulted in the electrocution deaths of US soldiers, according to Department of Defense documents revealed today in a Senate hearing. [emphasis added]

Halliburton, of course, was Dick Cheney's old employer.

More On Cheney's Iraq/al-Qaeda Claims

It was something I missed last Friday.

Cheney has been caught in another lie. McClatchy begins:

Then-Vice President Dick Cheney, defending the invasion of Iraq, asserted in 2004 that detainees interrogated at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp had revealed that Iraq had trained al Qaida operatives in chemical and biological warfare, an assertion that wasn't true.

Chew on that for a moment before going on to the next two paragraphs:

Cheney's 2004 comments to the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News were largely overlooked at the time. However, they appear to substantiate recent reports that interrogators at Guantanamo and other prison camps were ordered to find evidence of alleged cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein — despite CIA reports that there were only sporadic, insignificant contacts between the militant Islamic group and the secular Iraqi dictatorship.

The head of the Criminal Investigation Task Force at Guantanamo from 2002-2005 confirmed to McClatchy that in late 2002 and early 2003, intelligence officials were tasked to find, among other things, Iraq-al Qaida ties, which were a central pillar of the Bush administration's case for its March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Do I need to say that no one's been able to find any credible evidence of any operational link between Saddam's Iraq and al-Qaeda?

The details:

The Rocky Mountain News asked Cheney in a Jan. 9, 2004, interview if he stood by his claims that Saddam's regime had maintained a "relationship" with al Qaida, raising the danger that Iraq might give the group chemical, biological or nuclear weapons to attack the U.S.

"Absolutely. Absolutely," Cheney replied.

A Cheney spokeswoman said a response to an e-mail requesting clarification of the former vice president's remarks would be forthcoming next week.

"The (al Qaida-Iraq) links go back," he said. "We know for example from interrogating detainees in Guantanamo that al Qaida sent individuals to Baghdad to be trained in C.W. and B.W. technology, chemical and biological weapons technology. These are all matters that are there for anybody who wants to look at it."

Except it wasn't true.

They were waterboarding to establish the link anyway - to cover their collective asses. No "ticking time-bomb" scenario here. No thwarting another attack by "the terrrists, the evil-doers." Torture to make the political case for the illegal immoral invasion of Iraq.

Prosecute the torture.

More On Cheney's Use of Torture

It starts here.

After writer Lawrence Wilkerson, Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff, points out some obvious facts about the Bush Cheney administration, for example:

First, more Americans were killed by terrorists on Cheney's watch than on any other leader's watch in US history. So his constant claim that no Americans were killed in the "seven and a half years" after 9/11 of his vice presidency takes on a new texture when one considers that fact. And it is a fact.

he drops the big one on us:

Likewise, what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

Then there's this from McClatchy:

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

It leads us here. Robert Windrem at the Daily Beast reports:

Two U.S. intelligence officers confirm that Vice President Cheney’s office suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner, a former intelligence official for Saddam Hussein, who was suspected to have knowledge of a Saddam-al Qaeda connection.

The former chief of the Iraq Survey Group, Charles Duelfer, in charge of interrogations, tells The Daily Beast that he considered the request reprehensible.

Much of the information in the report of the 9/11 Commission was provided through more than 30 sessions of torture of detainees.

While that intelligence official wasn't waterboarded, he WAS an official POW. For Cheney to suggest waterboarding a real life honest to goodness POW is disgusting in itself.

Joe Conason over at Salon.com adds:

Yet evidence is mounting that under Cheney’s direction, "enhanced interrogation" was not used exclusively to prevent imminent acts of terror or collect actionable intelligence -- the aims that he constantly emphasizes -- but to invent evidence that would link al-Qaida with Saddam Hussein and connect the late Iraqi dictator to the 9/11 attacks.

In one report after another, from journalists, former administration officials and Senate investigators, the same theme continues to emerge: Whenever a prisoner believed to possess any knowledge of al-Qaida’s operations or Iraqi intelligence came into American custody, CIA interrogators felt intense pressure from the Bush White House to produce evidence of an Iraq-Qaida relationship (which contradicted everything that U.S. intelligence and other experts knew about the enmity between Saddam’s Baath Party and Osama bin Laden’s jihadists). Indeed, the futile quest for proof of that connection is the common thread running through the gruesome stories of torture from the Guantánamo detainee camp to Egyptian prisons to the CIA's black sites in Thailand and elsewhere.

And he ends with:

Whether Bush, Cheney and their associates were seeking real or fabricated intelligence, they knowingly employed methods that were certain to produce the latter -- as American officials well knew because those same techniques, especially water torture, had been used to elicit false confessions from captured Americans as long ago as World War II and the Korean conflict.

Cheney now claims that he preserved the country from terrorism and saved thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives. We need a serious investigation, with witnesses including the former vice-president under oath, to determine what he and his associates actually did with the brutal powers they arrogated to themselves -- because instead their actions cost thousands upon thousands of American and Iraqi lives, all in the service of a political lie.

Investigate the torture. Prosecute the torture.

The IG Report On The CIA's Torture

The Washington Post reported yesterday about an Inspecter General's classified report regarding the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques torture.:

According to excerpts included in those memos, the inspector general's report concluded that interrogators initially used harsh techniques against some detainees who were not withholding information. Officials familiar with its contents said it also concluded that some of the techniques appeared to violate the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, ratified by the United States in 1994.

I know the usual retort: But Admiral Blair said torture worked! Setting aside the obvious fact that whether it worked it's still illegal, the Post reported:

According to excerpts included in those memos, the inspector general's report concluded that interrogators initially used harsh techniques against some detainees who were not withholding information. Officials familiar with its contents said it also concluded that some of the techniques appeared to violate the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, ratified by the United States in 1994.

Although some useful information was produced, the report concluded that "it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks," according to the Justice Department's declassified summary of it. The threat of such an imminent attack was cited by the department as an element in its 2002 and later written authorization for using harsh techniques.

They tortured who were not withholding information? So either they got all the information they could from them and then tortured them further or there was no information to be had - but tortured them anyway. Nice.

Sam Stein at HuffingtonPost writes:

A CIA inspector general's report from May 2004 that is set to be declassified by the Obama White House will almost certainly disprove claims that waterboarding was only used in controlled circumstances with effective results.

And then:

But there is no need to wait for the report's declassification. Information from its pages was already made public in the footnotes of the Office of Legal Counsel memos written by Steven Bradbury in 2005 and released by the current administration less than one month ago.

And the footnote:

"The difference was in the manner in which the detainee's breathing was obstructed," read the footnote, citing the IG report. "At the SERE school and in the DoJ opinion, the subject's airflow is disrupted by the firm application of a damp cloth over the air passages; the interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth in a controlled manner. By contrast, the Agency interrogator... applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee's mouth and nose."

Medical personnel at the detention facility protested the use of the waterboard in that form, stressing that "there was no a priori reason to believe that applying the waterboard with the frequency and intensity with which it was used by the psychologist/interrogators was either efficacious or medically safe.'"

The interesting part of all this is something Talkingpointsmemo has published.

This goes way beyond strange bedfellows. But it looks like Dick Cheney has emerged as the single most forceful proponent of a full investigation of the Bush administration's torture policies.

In an interview on CBS's Face The Nation yesterday, the ex-veep claimed, as he has before, that the Obama administration's rejection of torture has made us less safe. But he also went further ever in repeatedly arguing -- contra congressional Republicans -- that we need to look back at the details of the torture program before moving forward.

And he wants memos released and:

Cheney even told Schieffer that he'd "talk to" congressional investigators about the program, adding: " I wouldn't be out here today if I didn't feel comfortable talking about what we're doing publicly."

Ok. Fine. Let's have the discussion at least. Or as TPM says:

Listen To Dick Cheney: Investigate Torture.

It has the added bonus of being the law.

Couldn't Happen To A Nicer War Criminal

From The Hill:

Congressional Republicans are telling Dick Cheney to go back to his undisclosed location and leave them alone to rebuild the Republican Party without his input.

Displeased with the former vice-president's recent media appearances, Republican lawmakers say he's hurting GOP efforts to reinvent itself after back-to-back electoral drubbings.

Awwww, poor guy.

Keith Olberman Tonight

Transcript (via crooksandliars) here.