1 Boring Old Man

Leon Panetta Kisses His Credibility Goodbye
By: emptywheel
June 8, 2009

Well, that didn’t take long, for a Director of Central Intelligence to totally lose his credibility in the servitude of the institution… I’ll have more to say about Panetta’s declaration in the ACLU FOIA case tomorrow.  But for now, a little unsolicited advice for the spook-in-chief. When you say,

I also want to emphasize that my determinations expressed above, and in my classified declaration, are in no way driven by a desire to prevent embarrassment for the U.S. Government or the CIA, or to suppress evidence of unlawful conduct,

Yet the entire world knows – and the CIA has itself acknowledged – that the materials in question do, in fact, show evidence of unlawful conduct, and when you sort of kind of pretend that no one else knows what they all know – that the materials show evidence of unlawful conduct. Then you look like a fool… And then when you go on to say,

As the Court knows, some of the operational documents currently at issue contain descriptions of EITs being applied during specific overseas interrogations. These descriptions, however, are EITs as applied in actual operations, and are of qualitatively different nature than the EIT descriptions in the abstract contained in the OLC memoranda.

… Let me say this plainly. According to the CIA – the CIA itself – there’s a reason why the interrogations don’t resemble the "EIT descriptions in the abstract contained in the OLC memoranda." That’s because some cowboy probably named James Mitchell who was getting rich off of torture thought things would be more poignant – yes, the fucker actually said "poignant" – if he drowned Abu Zubaydah in gallons of water rather than sprinkling him like a daisy. There’s a reason why the descriptions of torture as it was applied is such a problem – and yes, is evidence of unlawful conduct.  And that’s because we know – we all know! – that the torture began before the memos authorized it, and the torture exceeded what few guidelines John Yoo placed on it.

1000 Words
By: emptywheel
June 9, 2009

The CIA’s Cherry-Pick
By: emptywheel
June 9, 2009

CIA Urges Judge To Keep Bush-Era Documents Sealed
Al-Qaeda Could Use Contents, Agency Says
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post
June 9, 2009

… The "disclosure of explicit details of specific interrogations" would provide al-Qaeda "with propaganda it could use to recruit and raise funds," Panetta said, describing the information at issue as "ready-made ammunition." He also submitted a classified statement to the court that he said explains why detainees could use the contents to evade questions in the future, even though Obama has promised that the United States will not use the harsh interrogation techniques again.

Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU’s national security program, said yesterday evening that it is "grim" and "troubling" for the Obama administration to say that information about purported abuses should be withheld because it might fuel anti-American propaganda. He said that amounts to an assertion that "the greater the abuse, the more important it is that it should remain secret." Jaffer said the ACLU is convinced that the public should have "access to the complete record of what took place in the CIA’s prisons and on whose authority"…

• After al Qaeda attacked New York, the U.S. Government wanted to blame that attack on Iraq, or at least use the al Qaeda attack as a reason to invade Iraq.
• In pursuit of this goal, the C.I.A. secretly tortured al Qaeda prisoners in hopes of getting confirmation that Iraq was involved in the attack.
• The Bush Administration responded to the C.I.A.’s complaint that what they were doing was illegal by getting the Department of Justice to issue secret memos saying that torture wasn’t torture.
• The C.I.A. continued their torture policy until it became public.
• Since then, the Administration and C.I.A. have obstructed all attempts to get at the truth, including this one – claiming that their secrecy is for any reason under the sun except hiding the truth.

• We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

• That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness…

Tiller Suspect: More Violence Possible
CBS News
June 7, 2009

The man charged in the shooting death of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller warned Sunday that more violence is possible. Scott Roeder, being held on charges of first-degree murder and aggravated assault in Tiller’s killing one week ago, called The Associated Press from the Sedgwick County jail. Tiller, whose Wichita clinic was among only a few in the U.S. performing third-trimester abortions, was shot while serving as an usher at the Lutheran church he attended.

"I know there are many other similar events planned around the country as long as abortion remains legal," Roeder said. He would not elaborate…

He told the AP he refused to talk to investigators when he was arrested, and has made no statements to police since then. "I just told them I needed to talk to my lawyer," Roeder said…

In two separate calls to AP on Sunday morning, Roeder was far more talkative about his treatment at the Sedgwick County jail, complaining about "deplorable conditions in solitary" where he was kept during his first three days there. Roeder said it was freezing in his cell. "I started having a bad cough. I thought I was going to have pneumonia," he said. He said he called AP because he wanted to emphasize the conditions in the jail so that in the future, suspects would not have to endure the same conditions.

Roeder also said he wanted the public to know he has been denied phone privileges for the past two days, and needed his sleep apnea machine.

People like Scott Roeder help me understand why we tortured the prisoners at Gitmo and in our Rendition facilities. My reaction to him was to think, "You just murdered a man you never met in cold blood, and now you’re complaining that you didn’t get to see your free lawyer soon enough? Your cell is too cold? You don’t have a phone to call the AP to terrorize other abortion providers? You miss your [probably free] sleep apnea machine? Give us a break, asshole! You want to find out about apnea? We’ll show you some apnea – by waterboarding you until you tell us everything you know about those ‘similar events’ you’re bragging about!"

It’s kind of hard to work up a big case of empathy for Scott Roeder’s plight. His crime produces powerful feelings. [see, I’m assuming he’s guilty]. My reaction is why we have the Miranda Rights, the requirement to provide him with adequate counsel, habeas corpus, the right to due process and a fair trial, etc. When someone comes along like this, the temptation to depersonalize  him is overwhelming – to extract an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. It transcends everything else if you’re on the other side. After all, he depersonalized Dr. Tiller. Why shouldn’t we depersonalize him?

Palin: Socialism "is where we are headed"
Salon
by Joan Walsh
June 8, 2009

Matt Drudge is headlining an excerpt from Sarah Palin’s interview/lovefest with Sean Hannity, scheduled for tonight at 9 p.m. EDT. No real surprises: Palin still sounds a bit befuddled when she talks about big issues.

We’re borrowing more to spend more … it defies any sensible economic policy that any of us ever learned through college … We’re borrowing from China, and we consider that now we own 60 percent of General Motors – or the U.S. government does … But who is the U.S. government becoming more indebted to? It’s China. So that leads you to have to ask who is really going to own our car industry than in America.

… Hannity asks if she thinks the country is headed toward socialism, and she agrees.

Well, that is where we are headed. That is where we have to be blunt enough and candid enough and honest enough with Americans to let them know that if we keep going down these roads … nationalizing many of our services, our projects, our businesses, yes, that is where we would head. And that is why Americans have to be paying attention…

Vice: The Dispiriting Legacy of Dick Cheney
By Stephen Holmes
The Nation.
May 27, 2009
published in the June 15^th issue

Gellman lavishes most of his attention on the fabrications Cheney used to enable the executive branch to circumvent constitutional checks and balances. One of the boldest involved the Bush administration’s ongoing program for intercepting domestic communications without a judicial warrant, which Gellman describes as an "operation conceived and supervised by the office of the vice president." When briefing the Republican and Democratic heads of Congress’s Intelligence Committees about this program in early 2004, Cheney (with White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, National Security Agency director Michael Hayden and others) connived to hide the fact that high-ranking lawyers from the NSA and Justice Department had expressed grave doubts about the program’s legality. "Cheney, who chaired briefings for select members of Congress, said repeatedly that the NSA’s top law and ethics officers had approved what their agency was doing," Gellman explains. Cheney was not vague about the facts of the case but conveyed inaccurate information about the legal opinions of others. To thwart Congressional oversight and thus eliminate outside review and potential criticism of a favored White House program, Cheney knowingly misled key members of a constitutionally coequal branch. 

Cheney’s "major role in bringing war to Iraq" likewise required a strategic twisting of the truth. Gellman details a private briefing in late September 2002 that Cheney provided to Republican Congressman Dick Armey, then majority leader of the House. Armey opposed an invasion of Iraq on the reasonable grounds that the United States should not attack a country that had not attacked it. Usually hawkish, Armey presented an embarrassing hurdle to the war party in the administration. As Gellman says, "If Armey could oppose the war, he gave cover to every doubter in waiting," making him "the center of gravity of the political opposition." Something had to be done, and Cheney did it. According to Gellman, Cheney, brandishing top-secret satellite photos, made statements about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear arsenal and ties to Al Qaeda that he knew to be erroneous: "In the privacy of his office, for this one crucial vote, Cheney leveled claims he had not made before and did not make again." Some of these claims "crossed so far beyond the known universe of fact that they were simply without foundation." Gellman concludes that Cheney deliberately told Armey "things he knew to be untrue," bamboozling a Congressional leader of his own party just long enough to extract a go-ahead vote. Having been preapproved on false pretenses by a gullible or complicit Congress, the misbegotten invasion was launched six months later.

Dick Cheney lied to me on war, says GOP leader
LA TIMES
September 16, 2008

It is the central charge against the Bush White House, that the administration lied its way into a war in Iraq…

Now comes Dick Armey, once House Majority Leader, who described a classified one-on-one briefing in the vice president’s hideaway office in the U.S. Capitol where he says Vice President Dick Cheney went beyond that into outright deception.

According to a new book on Cheney called "Angler," by Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, Armey, a Texas Republican, had spoken out against the war. Cheney was trying to change his mind. So the vice president told him the threat from Iraq was actually "more imminent than we want to portray to the public at large." In Armey’s account, Cheney told him:

Iraq’s "ability to miniaturize weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear," had been "substantially refined since the first Gulf War," and would soon result in "packages that could be moved even by ground personnel….We now know they have the ability to develop these weapons in a very portable fashion, and they have a delivery system in their relationship with organizations such as Al Qaeda."

"Did Dick Cheney … purposely tell me things he knew to be untrue?" Armey said. "I seriously feel that may be the case…Had I known or believed then what I believe now, I would have publicly opposed [the war] resolution right to the bitter end, and I believe I might have stopped it from happening."

As the stories mount up, it’s a little hard to understand how he thought he could get away with all this deceit and rule bending without being called to task somewhere down the road – or if he even thought about it that possibility. I presume he still thinks that he’s "untouchable." For example, his recent comments about Richard Clarke were so far off the mark ["he obviously missed it"] to be ludicrous – or his saying the Colin Powell wasn’t a Republican. It is not possible that the Memos he wants released say what he claims they say. And these Comey emails make him look like a boldfaced liar. Yet he prattles on. Dick Armey, a hard core Conservative, is out there saying that Cheney lied to him – his actual term was "bull-shited."

Right-Wingers To Boycott GM?
TPM
By Eric Kleefeld

June 8, 2009

The Detroit Bureau reports that an idea seems to be picking up some cachet on the right-wing blogs and in talk radio: Fighting the "Government Motors" bailout by boycotting the company. Most of it so far is limited to relatively little-known writers, but two big names have picked up on it: Hugh Hewitt, who wants to save free enterprise — and Rush Limbaugh, who wants anything President Obama does to fail, and is urging his listeners to help push towards that goal.

"In the effort to reverse this lurch beyond the farthest left fringe of previous Democratic statist urges, individual Americans have a role to play. They have to say no to GM products and services until such time as the denationalization occurs," says Hugh Hewitt. He acknowledges that this is a serious step that could hurt people currently working for GM: "But there isn’t any alternative, every dollar spent with GM is a dollar spent against free enterprise. Every car or truck purchased from Government Motors is one not purchased from a private car company that competes fairly against all other car companies"…

Where Hewitt makes his point as a seemingly reluctant and composed agitator, Rush Limbaugh makes no bones about what he wants in his own praise of the idea. The most amazing thing here is that Limbaugh appears to be openly admitting that the purpose of this is economic and political sabotage – to prevent President Obama from succeeding at something.

Limbaugh reassures any GM workers who might be listening that the boycotters aren’t angry at them. "They don’t want to patronize Obama. They don’t want to do anything to make Obama’s policies work!" he explains. "This is an untold story, by the way. Of course, the government-controlled media is not gonna report anything like this but there are a lot of people who are not going to buy from Chrysler or General Motors as long as it is perceived Barack Obama is running it, because people do not want his policy to work here because this is antithetical to the American economic way of life."

I’m trying to stop obsessing about the NY Times article [U.S. Lawyers Agreed on Legality of Brutal Tactic] that read James Comey’s leaked emails as saying he approved of Torture [or, at least, didn’t disapprove of it]. I’m just going to set that point aside. If you read the seven pages, his feelings about this are quite clear, as was his advice. Getting us all hung up on refuting their frame changing spin is a standard technique, and I’ve fallen into that hole for a couple of days. emptywheel and Dan Froomkin have responded to that article’s allegations much more cogently than I could ever muster.

But there are a couple of lines in one email that nobody’s mentioned, or at least I don’t find mentioned. Comey has repeatedly tried to get AG Gonzales to balk in response to the White House pressure, to no avail. As he speaks to Gonzales before the AG heads to a meeting of the Principals [Comey repeatedly says "Principles"], he gives him something:

The first paragraph makes Comey’s stand very clear. He even mentions the C.I.A. Torture Video [later destroyed]. But then he talks about giving Gonzales "a card" with a listing of all [Torture?] techniques "including some things that never get mentioned because they are ‘preliminary.’" What is he talking about? It seems important. Comey was pleading with Gonzales to do the right thing, to talk some sense into the Principals. In his last act, he hands this card to AG Alberto Gonzales.

The NYT’s Continuing Slide On Torture
Atlantic
By Andrew Sullivan
07 Jun 2009

…The best summaries of the latest piece of Bush administration stenography are from Marcy Wheeler and Glenn Greenwald. Read them both in full.

The gist: if you actually read the leaked memos, and absorb the details of the NYT piece, you find the actual story: that the OLC lawyers were under enormous pressure to approve whatever Cheney wanted, were denied time to get the whole thing right, (Bradbury was even kept on probation until he spat out the "legal" approvals they wanted), were told that the president himself was pushing hard, and that a couple of them, Comey and Goldsmith, believed that the torture techniques, although technically "legal" in their judgment, were "simply awful" and would come back to haunt them. Among the political interference in the OLC process (eerily reminiscent of the pressure on the CIA with respect to Saddam’s WMDs), we learn the following:

This was the kind of political pressure applied to lawyers who were supposed to be interpreting the law, regardless of policy positions by their superiors, free of political pressure or duress. And this was long, long after the initial period of terror after 9/11 and in Bush’s second term. Moreover, the lawyers’ belief that combining all these torture techniques was extremely dangerous was completely ignored. Here’s Comey desperately trying to get them to realize the Rubicon they were crossing:

Notice how Rice was demonstrating the moral courage she recently showed in front of some amateur (i.e. not supine MSM) questioners on the question. She wanted to give the president anything he wanted while remaining in total denial – and deniability – on the torture question. In some ways, her position is more contemptible than Cheney’s. At least he knew what he wanted to do, and is now proud of his record of torture and abuse of prisoners. Rice simply facilitated everything, while closing her eyes to reality, and abandoning any moral responsibilty.

Glenn homes in on the critical revelation:

Comey described exactly what was happening with this process:  that the White House was demanding and pressuring the issuance of these memos, but that once the torture regime became public — as Comey warned that it would – White House officials would defend themselves by heaping the blame on Gonzales and other DOJ lawyers, deceitfully pretending that they were merely following in good faith DOJ advice about what was and was not legal.

This is their shell-game now. And it’s working! The lawyers were at the heart of the golden legal shield, and were willing to go through any legal hoops and shenanigans to call what is illegal "legal" because their political masters demanded it. (Notice that Comey even uses quotation marks around "legal" in a memo to Gonzales). He knows what’s going on, and while too cowed to actually call unlawful acts unlawful, he nonetheless tries to stop them – because he knew that if people actually knew what Cheney authorized, behind the euphemisms and legal shenanigans, then the Bush administration would go down in history as torturers and pariahs. As they should.

So they destroyed the evidence – the CIA tapes, the last interrogation tape of Padilla, the records at Camp Nama (overseen by McChrystal), and suppressed as many photographs from Abu Ghraib and elsewhere that they could. Without the Abu Ghraib photographs, they would have gotten away with all of it.

Actually, of course, they have gotten away with all of it, subjecting the reservists at the very bottom of the heap to take the fall, as they continue to spin and lie and dissemble and reinvent the past. All with the help, of course, of the New York Times. But Comey was right. This will all come out. And we must not flinch or falter in exposing every single aspect of it…

• … that the OLC lawyers were under enormous pressure to approve whatever Cheney wanted, were denied time to get the whole thing right, (Bradbury was even kept on probation until he spat out the "legal" approvals they wanted), were told that the president himself was pushing hard, and that a couple of them, Comey and Goldsmith, believed that the torture techniques, although technically "legal" in their judgment, were "simply awful" and would come back to haunt them.
• "… it was simply not acceptable for the Princip[als] to say that everything that may be ‘legal’ is also appropriate."
• … White House officials would defend themselves by heaping the blame on Gonzales and other DOJ lawyers, deceitfully pretending that they were merely following in good faith DOJ advice about what was and was not legal.

Comey Emails Illustrate Concerns Over Torture Policies
Monday 08 June 2009
by: Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t

…On August 15, 2005, in his farewell speech, Comey urged his colleagues to defend the integrity and honesty of the DOJ.

I expect that you will appreciate and protect an amazing gift you have received as an employee of the Department of Justice," Comey said. "It is a gift you may not notice until the first time you stand up and identify yourself as an employee of the Department of Justice and say something – whether in a courtroom, a conference room or a cocktail part – and find that total strangers believe what you say next.

That gift – the gift that makes possible so much of the good we accomplish – is a reservoir of trust and credibility, a reservoir built for us, and filled for us, by those who went before – most of whom we never knew. They were people who made sacrifices and kept promises to build that reservoir of trust.

Our obligation – as the recipients of that great gift – is to protect that reservoir, to pass it to those who follow, those who may never know us, as full as we got it. The problem with reservoirs is that it takes tremendous time and effort to fill them, but one hole in a dam can drain them.

The protection of that reservoir requires vigilance, an unerring commitment to truth, and a recognition that the actions of one may affect the priceless gift that benefits all. I have tried my absolute best – in matters big and small – to protect that reservoir and inspire others to protect it."

How Cheney Bent DOJ to His Will
Washington Post
06/08/2009
By Dan Froomkin

Three newly-disclosed Justice Department e-mails thoroughly vindicate the most cynical suspicions about how former vice president Dick Cheney bent ostensibly independent Justice Department lawyers to his will and forced them to manufacture legal cover for his torture policies…

[just read it all. it’s perfect…]

Israel isn’t a very big place. If it were a State, it would rank 48th in size [between NJ and CT] at a bit over eight thousand square miles. Space is a pretty big deal. Palestine occupies the Gaza Strip and the West Bank with a combined area of around two thousand two hundred square miles. The population figures are fuzzy because of settlements, but there are about twice as many people in Israel [on almost four times the amount of land], but the population density is high in both places by any standard. In other words, these disputes about land area are a huge deal. The red line on the inset map on the right is the Israeli-built "fence"…

The map on the left is colored dark pink in for the areas of the West Bank that are Israeli settlements, yellow for Palestinian areas. The white area in under Israeli Military control. The area in white controlled by the Israelis where many of the large settlements are located is geographically separated from the rest of the West Bank by mountains. The "settlements" are substantial. Obama said "no more settlements" and now the bickering begins. It’s easy to see why there is such a bitter contention between the Israelis and the Palestinians about these "settlements." So, now Obama and Hillary are in the fray between them. We are advocating two states, but even if they agree, there is a lot of argument over where those two states might be defined, and about these settlements.

Here’s another map of the settlements:

Clinton Rejects Israeli Claims of Accord on Settlements
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post
June 6, 2009

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton forcefully rejected yesterday Israeli claims that the Bush administration had secretly agreed to expanding Jewish settlements on the West Bank, deepening the impasse between the two countries.

"We have the negotiating record, that is the official record, that was turned over to the Obama administration by the outgoing Bush administration," Clinton told reporters after meeting with her Turkish counterpart in Washington. "There is no memorialization of any informal and oral agreements."

President Obama in recent weeks has pushed Israel to halt settlement growth, including expansion that results from population growth, on the grounds that it violates commitments made by Israel in the 2003 "road map" peace plan. Israeli officials have protested, saying that they had reached a series of understandings with Bush administration officials – some written, some spoken – under which growth was permitted under certain conditions.

The Washington Post documented some of those understandings last year, quoting Dov Weissglas, one of the Israeli negotiators; at the time, the Bush White House insisted that no such understanding existed. But last week former White House aide Elliott Abrams acknowledged that there had been unwritten understandings between Washington and Jerusalem.

Weissglas detailed this week in an opinion article for the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot some of the talks, though he noted that "the Americans completely denied the existence of such understandings." If such understandings were reached, "they did not become part of the official position of the United States government," Clinton said. "And there are contrary documents that suggest that they were not to be viewed as in any way contradicting the obligations that Israel undertook pursuant to the road map. And those obligations are very clear"…

Words have consequences. That thought seems completely lost on the Fox News network, which launches a daily rhetorical assault on Obama, starting with the "Fox and Friends" morning show. The anti-Obama beat goes on through the day, and reaches a fevered pitch at night with Sean Hannity. Witness excerpts from Wednesday night’s exchange between Hannity and radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh:

Limbaugh: I do not hide from it. I do want and I still want Obama to fail.
Hannity: But it’s interesting here. …A lot of things you are saying – [Obama] is apologizing for America’s arrogance. He has taken over car companies. They want to dictate CEO pay. All of these things have been unfolding. Socialism is the Obama vision for America.
Limbaugh: And fascism. We must not be afraid to use that word either. It is a combination of the two.

Limbaugh and Hannity know the standard definition of fascism:

"a regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition."

And they must know how their characterization of Obama goes over with those Americans who live in fear that all they hold dear is coming under attack by a fascist in the White House.

The Jewish youth lies in wait for hours on end… spying on the unsuspicious German girl he plans to seduce… He wants to contaminate her blood and remove her from the bosom of her own people. The Jew hates the white race and wants to lower its cultural level so that the Jews might dominate. Was there any form of filth or crime…without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such a sore, you find like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light — a Jew.

Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf

Domestic Terrorism is like that. Find something people are afraid of and throw some gasoline on the fire. But being frightened by these people is as bad as embracing their world view. Being frightened of them is as much a part of the thing as being frightened by the specters they create. Bin Laden is one down right now, so he may well try to frighten us again soon. Hannity, Limbaugh, and O’Reilly are ratchetting up their fear-mongering to a fever pitch to hold on to their devotees. The danger in both cases, al Qaeda and Fox News, is in either fearing them or ignoring them. They’re dangerous when they’re allowed to fester unobserved, and they’re dangerous when we’re afraid of them.