Osama bin Laden is dead

Just waiting for President Bush OBAMA (bitchez!) to say so officially.

UPDATE: Just to make that perfectly clear: Obama did in two years what Bush could never do in eight.

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.

Senator McCain's Foreign Policy Expertise

Yesterday in Jordan. From the Washington Post:

Speaking to reporters in Amman, the Jordanian capital, McCain said he and two Senate colleagues traveling with him continue to be concerned about Iranian operatives “taking al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back.”

Pressed to elaborate, McCain said it was “common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that’s well known. And it’s unfortunate.” A few moments later, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, standing just behind McCain, stepped forward and whispered in the presidential candidate’s ear. McCain then said: “I’m sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda.”

The mistake threatened to undermine McCain's argument that his decades of foreign policy experience make him the natural choice to lead a country at war with terrorists. In recent days, McCain has repeatedly said his intimate knowledge of foreign policy make him the best equipped to answer a phone ringing in the White House late at night.

And the New York Times:

But all did not go according to plan on Tuesday in Amman, Jordan, when Mr. McCain, fresh from a visit to Iraq, misidentified some of the main players in the Iraq war.

Mr. McCain said several times in his visit to Jordan — in a news conference and in a radio interview — that he was concerned that Iran was training Al Qaeda in Iraq. The United States believes that Iran, a Shiite country, has been training and financing Shiite extremists in Iraq, but not Al Qaeda, which is a Sunni insurgent group.

His campaign, of course, did its best to cover it all up:

Brian Rogers, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, responded: “In a press conference today, John McCain misspoke and immediately corrected himself by stating that Iran is in fact supporting radical Islamic extremists in Iraq, not Al Qaeda — as is reflected in the transcript. The reality is that the American people have deep concerns about the Democratic candidates’ judgment and readiness on matters of national security, and that’s why the D.N.C. launched their attack today.”

Uh, not quite. You see my friends, Senator John McCain did not make that mistake only once - in Jordan.

He also made the same mistake on Hugh Hewitt's radio program:

HH: What’s the concern you have about Iran, and about, in particular, Ahmadinejad? Some people want to meet with him. He’s not on your agenda this trip.

JM: (laughing) The day I meet with the president of Iran will be the day after he announces his country no longer is dedicated to the extinction of the state of Israel, the day after they stop exporting these most lethal explosives into Iraq. Just yesterday, up in the Mosul area, they uncovered a cache of weapons, and a lot of it was these Iranian copper, high…most lethal explosives. As you know, there are al Qaeda operatives that are taken back into Iran, given training as leaders, and they’re moving back into Iraq.

This is the guy who wants us to know that he's the expert on foreign affairs in the presidential race.

Not good. Not good at all.

He's lucky that he made this embarrassing gaffe the day that Senator Obama gave his speech. Had it been otherwise we might be talking about McCain's flubbing another important issue.

Saddam/al Qaeda Link - Yet ANOTHER Look

This time from the Pentagon.

The verdict? Take a look. This comes to us from the McClatchy papers:

An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.

No evidence.

Of course we were told otherwise:

Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed in September 2002 that the United States had "bulletproof" evidence of cooperation between the radical Islamist terror group and Saddam's secular dictatorship.

I wonder if Stephen Hayes will be submitting any sort of mea culpa. I mean he's the guy who wrote:

OSAMA BIN LADEN and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda--perhaps even for Mohamed Atta--according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

That memo was written by Douglas Feith and now the Pentagon itself is saying what that is.

Just. Plain. Wrong.

UPDATE: Douglas Feith has a new book out. This is what Keith Olbermann said about it this evening:

The undersecretary of defense, most of who's nightmares made it into the planning of the Iraq war. He's got a new book in which he blames General Tommy Franks for not being interested in post-invasion planning, says Colin Powel tried to cut the Dove/Hawk issue both ways and claims Condi Rice screwed up the coordination of war policy.

Oh and he says that the President told the National Security Council "War is inevitable." On December 18, 2002. Meaning all of Mr Bush's subsequent hand-wringing and lamentations about the uncertainty of peace versus war were, well, lies.

When you get thrown under the bus by Douglas Feith, you're on your way to becoming a footnote in history.

And so on. Take a look. It starts at about a minute in:

Jack Kelly Sunday

Jack's got an interesting column this week.

First his rather startling admissions:

Al-Qaida had little presence in Iraq during the regime of Saddam Hussein. (2nd paragraph, 2nd sentence)

I wonder when J-Kel first thought this. His conversion must've been a recent. Take a look at this column from almost exactly 4 years ago about a memo leaked to Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard. Here's what Jack had to say back then:

The content of the memo, which was written by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith to the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee in response to their questions, is worth more attention than Pincus gave it. It describes a secret relationship between Saddam's regime and al-Qaida that began in 1990 and intensified after the first Gulf war.

The Iraqis provided al-Qaida terrorists with training (particularly in the manufacture and use of biological and chemical weapons), false documents, money and some weapons, and a place to hide out when the heat was on.

In exchange, Osama bin Laden agreed to lay off Saddam (some in al-Qaida regarded his secular regime as nearly as offensive to Allah as the Jews or the Americans); to assist Iraq in smuggling into the country materials prohibited by the United Nations, and to attack some targets of interest to Iraq.

Pretty clearly, Jack thought back then that there was a presence. Where did the training take place if not in Iraq? Where was al-Qaida supposed to "hide out" if not in Iraq? Was Iraqi intelligence (or whomever was doing the funding or training) so powerful that these operational links existed but only outside the borders of Iraq? There's no hint in the column that he thinks the Hayes article was incorrect.

Here's the article, by the way. The first paragraph:

OSAMA BIN LADEN and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda--perhaps even for Mohamed Atta--according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD. [emphasis added]

Does Jack Kelly now think the Feith memo/Hayes article is wrong? If so, he should tell us. By the way, the Department of Defense issued a statement about the memo saying the news reports about the memo (i.e. the Hayes article) are "inaccurate." Hayes disagreed.

And then there's this:

It may have been a mistake for the United States to go to war in Iraq. (8th paragraph, 4th sentence)

I'm glad I was sitting down when these words crossed my field of vision. That's a huge concession from Commando Kelly, doncha think?

But let's get back to the column. Jack seems to have had a change of mind regarding the so-called "flypaper" strategy. Take a look at the whole 8th paragraph:

Canadian columnist David Warren speculated some years ago that enticing al-Qaida to fight there was one of the reasons why President Bush decided to invade Iraq. The administration has made so many egregious mistakes that I doubt the "flypaper" strategy was deliberate. But it has worked out that way. It may have been a mistake for the United States to go to war in Iraq. But it's pretty clear now it was a blunder for al-Qaida to have done so.

Now take a look at what he wrote in late August of 2003:

To win the war on terror, we have to kill the hard-core terrorists. It is better to fight them in Iraq, where our soldiers can kill them without reading them their Miranda rights first, than it is to wait for them to strike in Chicago or New York.

We have a "flypaper" strategy. It's working.

Or this from early August, 2003:

The Canadian columnist David Warren has suggested that the United States has a "flypaper strategy" to entice terrorists from the region into Iraq so that they might be killed there. This is not the sort of policy one announces, but it could be true, and it would be shrewd if it were true.

4 years ago he said it would be "shrewd" if it were true. Now he doubts it was deliberate, considering the "many egregious mistakes" of the Bush Administration. When did he change his mind?

But all this is still beside the point a bit. The whole article is about how al-Qaida is losing in Iraq. As if al-Qaida is the only terrorist organization in Iraq. As if al-Qaida is the only problem facing US Troops in Iraq. The implication is that if al-Qaida is losing in Iraq, we must be winning - for al-Qaida is the enemy.

Now remember, Jack's already asserted that al-Qaida was NOT a presence in Iraq before the invasion, so it follows that al-Qaida must then be one of the non-Iraqi groups (i.e. foreign fighters), right?

Right. Now get a gander at this from the Congressional Research Service:

In testimony before Congress in January 2007, the then Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (John Negroponte) said that foreign fighters constitute less than 10% of the insurgents in Iraq.

Kinda puts Jack Kelly's whole argument in a whole new light, don't it?

Is there *ever* a time we can believe these guys???

When I first heard about Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff's "gut feeling" my immediate reaction was that someone needed to mash Chertoff's statement:


with this video:


However, the day after he made his remarks he said he hadn't meant to alarm anyone and Official White House Spinmeister Tony Snow responded as following in a presser:

Q: Does the White House and the President share that same gut feeling?
MR. SNOW: I don't want to try to get into gastrointestinal descriptions.

Fine.

So we were told: "Don't worry, be happy" only to discover later that night that:

"The al Qaida terrorist network has rebounded and is at its greatest strength since it was expelled from Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a new top-level U.S. intelligence assessment concludes..."

And, then there's this:

The White House has called an urgent multi-agency meeting for Thursday to discuss a potential new al Qaeda threat on U.S. soil, ABC News reported on Tuesday.

[snip]

The unnamed official told ABC the level of concern of a new attack in the United States was now higher than it had been in some time.

So which is it?!?

Do we believe the Bush Administration or the Bush Administration???

Maybe it's because the NeoCONs are so completely conflicted about a possible terrorist attack themselves, they can't keep their stories straight.

After all, they tell us we're in Iraq because "we have to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here" and that they are the only ones who can save us, but then they have to periodically scare us into submission with terrorist warnings every time Bush gets some bad PR.

So who's a poor girl supposed to believe?

Then to top it off we have this from Virginia's own (he never moved back to PA, did he?) batshit crazy Rick Santorum:

Santorum Suggest New Terror Attacks Will Change View Of War

[...]

Santorum went on to clearly imply that terror attacks will occur inside America which will alter the body politic and lead to a reversal of the anti-war sentiment now dominating the country.

"Between now and November, a lot of things are going to happen, and I believe that by this time next year, the American public's going to have a very different view of this war, and it will be because, I think, of some unfortunate events, that like we're seeing unfold in the UK. But I think the American public's going to have a very different view," said the former senator from Pennsylvania.

Yep, that's Lil Ricky getting all misty-eyed about how another big terror attack on US soil will bring the American public back around to the right way of thinking.

[sigh]

So, to review, according to the Bushies:

Run! Run! We're all going to die!

It's all cool! :-)

Run! Run! Only we can save your sorry asses!

We're creaming our jeans for a big BOOM from al Qaeda to put you bitches back into line -- our only hope for November '08.

Got it?

Good!

So, what's the only things that we do know?

1. According to our own government, the Iraq War has created more terrorists.
2. Al Qaeda is now as strong as ever.
3. Bin Laden has still not been captured "dead or alive."

Heck of a job, Bushy!

(h/t to Bram for emailing me the Santorum quote.)