1 Boring Old Man

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I’m going to be careful here, Tim, because I – clearly it would be inappropriate for me to talk about operational matters, specific options or the kinds of activities we might undertake going forward. We do, indeed, though, have, obviously, the world’s finest military. They’ve got a broad range of capabilities. And they may well be given missions in connection with this overall task and strategy. We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

MR. RUSSERT: There have been restrictions placed on the United States intelligence gathering, reluctance to use unsavory characters, those who violated human rights, to assist in intelligence gathering. Will we lift some of those restrictions?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Oh, I think so. I think the – one of the by-products, if you will, of this tragic set of circumstances is that we’ll see a very thorough sort of reassessment of how we operate and the kinds of people we deal with. There’s – if you’re going to deal only with sort of officially approved, certified good guys, you’re not going to find out what the bad guys are doing. You need to be able to penetrate these organizations. You need to have on the payroll some very unsavory characters if, in fact, you’re going to be able to learn all that needs to be learned in order to forestall these kinds of activities. It is a mean, nasty, dangerous dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena. I’m convinced we can do it; we can do it successfully. But we need to make certain that we have not tied the hands, if you will, of our intelligence communities in terms of accomplishing their mission.

MR. RUSSERT: These terrorists play by a whole set of different rules. It’s going to force us, in your words, to get mean, dirty and nasty in order to take them on, right? And they should realize there will be more than simply a pinprick bombing…

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Yeah, the – I think it’s – the thing that I sense – and, of course, that’s only been a few days, but I have never seen such determination on the part of – well, my colleagues in government, on the part of the American people, on the part of our friends and allies overseas, and even on the part of some who are not ordinarily deemed friends of the United States, determined in this particular instance to shift and not be tolerant any longer of these kinds of actions or activities.

Cheney’s political career began in 1969, as an intern for Congressman William A. Steiger during the Richard Nixon Administration. He then joined the staff of Donald Rumsfeld, who was then Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity from 1969–70. He held several positions in the years that followed: White House Staff Assistant in 1971, Assistant Director of the Cost of Living Council from 1971–73, and Deputy Assistant to the president from 1974–1975. It was in this position that Cheney suggested in a memo to Rumsfeld that the Ford White House should use the Justice Department in a variety of legally questionable ways to exact retribution for an article published by The New York Times investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. Cheney was Assistant to the President under Gerald Ford. When Rumsfeld was named Secretary of Defense, Cheney became White House Chief of Staff, succeeding Rumsfeld. He later was campaign manager for Ford’s 1976 presidential campaign as well.

During the Clinton years, besides being C.E.O. of Halliburton, he and his wife Lynne were active characters at the American Enterprise Institute. Dick was one of the Founders of the Project for the New American Century. In their documents, one can read of their grand plans for increased military might, for unseating Saddam Hussein, and of their disdain for the State Department and the C.I.A. Cheney, the author of the Minority Report of the Iran-Contra committee, was a "hawk" from birth.

I doubt that this "dark side" business was yet specific by September 16th, 2001. It was just a reflection of his general disdain for our "rules." We needed to get tough, and strong, and kick some ass, and Dick Cheney saw in 9/11 the chance to bring back the Reagan Ideal of America’s superiority above all others – to use Wolfowitz’s old phrase, "strength without equal." And I am sure that by September 16th, 2001, Cheney saw 9/11 as his chance to unseat Saddam Hussein in Iraq. What we do know is that they got into high gear looking for reasons to go to war with Iraq. Here again are Rumsfeld’s notes immediately after the attack:

Best info fast

Judge whether good enough

Hit SH @ same time

– not only UBL

Tasks. Jim Haynes to talk with PW

for additional support -?-

connection with UBL

But that wasn’t all of it, maybe not even the center of it. They were looking for some way to tie bin Laden’s al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq together, so they tried to get a prisoner with Schizophrenia to do that for them to keep from being drowned. I now believe that to be true. It’s the only thing that makes this bizarre story make any sense. Everything else was full of holes. All the stuff Powell was going to say in his future U.N. speech was conjecture at best. The Niger Uranium Hoax was already debunked by the C.I.A. The aluminum tubes allegations were discredited by our own scientists at first glance. Douglas Feith’s bin Laden/Hussein connections [that le later leaked to the Weekly Standard] were also fabricated. Either Cheney was sure he was right that Hussein was behind the attack like paranoid people tend to be, or Cheney didn’t care about the truth and was just looking for something to corroborate what he wanted to. And is there any difference between the two when it’s all said and done?

So, the debate isn’t really about torture any more than the debate about Valerie Plame was about the legality of outing a C.I.A. Agent. The debate is about fabricating evidence in order to start a War with another soveriegn country.  That’s what they did.

^{Inquiry Into the Treatment Of Detainees In U.S. Custody, pp. 40-41}

Statement by Senator Arlen Specter:

I have been a Republican since 1966. I have been working extremely hard for the Party, for its candidates and for the ideals of a Republican Party whose tent is big enough to welcome diverse points of view. While I have been comfortable being a Republican, my Party has not defined who I am. I have taken each issue one at a time and have exercised independent judgment to do what I thought was best for Pennsylvania and the nation.

Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans.

When I supported the stimulus package, I knew that it would not be popular with the Republican Party. But, I saw the stimulus as necessary to lessen the risk of a far more serious recession than we are now experiencing.

Since then, I have traveled the State, talked to Republican leaders and office-holders and my supporters and I have carefully examined public opinion. It has become clear to me that the stimulus vote caused a schism which makes our differences irreconcilable. On this state of the record, I am unwilling to have my twenty-nine year Senate record judged by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate. I have not represented the Republican Party. I have represented the people of Pennsylvania.

I have decided to run for re-election in 2010 in the Democratic primary.

I am ready, willing and anxious to take on all comers and have my candidacy for re-election determined in a general election.

I deeply regret that I will be disappointing many friends and supporters. I can understand their disappointment. I am also disappointed that so many in the Party I have worked for for more than four decades do not want me to be their candidate. It is very painful on both sides. I thank specially Senators McConnell and Cornyn for their forbearance.

I am not making this decision because there are no important and interesting opportunities outside the Senate. I take on this complicated run for re-election because I am deeply concerned about the future of our country and I believe I have a significant contribution to make on many of the key issues of the day, especially medical research. NIH funding has saved or lengthened thousands of lives, including mine, and much more needs to be done. And my seniority is very important to continue to bring important projects vital to Pennsylvania’s economy.

I am taking this action now because there are fewer than thirteen months to the 2010 Pennsylvania Primary and there is much to be done in preparation for that election. Upon request, I will return campaign contributions contributed during this cycle.

While each member of the Senate caucuses with his Party, what each of us hopes to accomplish is distinct from his party affiliation. The American people do not care which Party solves the problems confronting our nation. And no Senator, no matter how loyal he is to his Party, should or would put party loyalty above his duty to the state and nation.

My change in party affiliation does not mean that I will be a party-line voter any more for the Democrats that I have been for the Republicans. Unlike Senator Jeffords’ switch which changed party control, I will not be an automatic 60th vote for cloture. For example, my position on Employees Free Choice (Card Check) will not change.

Whatever my party affiliation, I will continue to be guided by President Kennedy’s statement that sometimes Party asks too much. When it does, I will continue my independent voting and follow my conscience on what I think is best for Pennsylvania and America.

The Banality of Bush White House Evil
By FRANK RICH
April 25, 2009

… it’s not Bybee’s perverted lawyering and pornographic amorality that make his memo worthy of special attention. It merits a closer look because it actually does add something new — and, even after all we’ve heard, something shocking — to the five-year-old torture narrative. When placed in full context, it’s the kind of smoking gun that might free us from the myths and denial that prevent us from reckoning with this ugly chapter in our history.

Bybee’s memo was aimed at one particular detainee, Abu Zubaydah, who had been captured some four months earlier, in late March 2002. Zubaydah is portrayed in the memo as one of the top men in Al Qaeda. But by August this had been proven false. As Ron Suskind reported in his book “The One Percent Doctrine,” Zubaydah was identified soon after his capture as a logistics guy, who, in the words of the F.B.I.’s top-ranking Qaeda analyst at the time, Dan Coleman, served as the terrorist group’s flight booker and “greeter,” like “Joe Louis in the lobby of Caesar’s Palace.” Zubaydah “knew very little about real operations, or strategy.” He showed clinical symptoms of schizophrenia.

By the time Bybee wrote his memo, Zubaydah had been questioned by the F.B.I. and C.I.A. for months and had given what limited information he had. His most valuable contribution was to finger Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the 9/11 mastermind. But, as Jane Mayer wrote in her book “The Dark Side,” even that contribution may have been old news: according to the 9/11 commission, the C.I.A. had already learned about Mohammed during the summer of 2001. In any event, as one of Zubaydah’s own F.B.I. questioners, Ali Soufan, wrote in a Times Op-Ed article last Thursday, traditional interrogation methods had worked. Yet Bybee’s memo purported that an “increased pressure phase” was required to force Zubaydah to talk.

As soon as Bybee gave the green light, torture followed: Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002, according to another of the newly released memos. Unsurprisingly, it appears that no significant intelligence was gained by torturing this mentally ill Qaeda functionary. So why the overkill? Bybee’s memo invoked a ticking time bomb: “There is currently a level of ‘chatter’ equal to that which preceded the September 11 attacks.”

We don’t know if there was such unusual “chatter” then, but it’s unlikely Zubaydah could have added information if there were… Meanwhile, we do have evidence for an alternative explanation of what motivated Bybee to write his memo that August, thanks to the comprehensive Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees released last week.

The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

… Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality…

President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won’t vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don’t need another commission. We don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s commitment to the rule of law.

What’s that sound I hear in the background? The one that’s getting louder and louder? Why I think it’s the truth trying to make itself known. I almost wish I didn’t hear it. As much as I’ve personally ranted against the Bush Administration, I’d rather believe that they were inept than corrupt. But what Rich is saying out loud is what a lot of us are thinking. There’s a new hypothesis that’s moving from conjecture into the realm of fact. It’s all part of one story – the Downing Street Memo, the Valerie Plame Affair, the Torture Memos, the Bush Administration’s public campaign for War, the leaks to Judith Miller, the Project for the New American Century. Rich calls lying about Iraq the "original sin" – pretty well stated. We can lay aside for the moment "Why" they wanted to invade Iraq. What we can say with certainty is that all these pieces we’ve been obsessed with for so many years are coming together, and their claim that we just didn’t have good intelligence is out the window. They went after a reason to invade Iraq with a vengence. All they came up with was a forgery from Italy, a shipment of aluminum tubes for small rockets that they morphed into centrifuge tubes, and a fabrication that Hussein was in cahoots with al Qaeda based on Douglas Feith’s distorted conjectures. Their search for anything solid to justify their war turned up nothing – but they sure gave it a shot, like torturing a Schizophrenic man. They were trying to make Abu Zubaydah lie for them, to keep them from killing him. And as ludicrous as it sounds, that’s the truth that is trying to be heard.

^{A disturbing epidemic of amnesia seems to be plaguing my former colleagues on Capitol Hill. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of the committees charged with overseeing our nation’s intelligence services had no higher priority than stopping al-Qaeda. In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House intelligence committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA’s "High Value Terrorist Program," including the development of "enhanced interrogation techniques" and what those techniques were. This was not a one-time briefing but an ongoing subject with lots of back and forth between those members and the briefers. Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as "waterboarding" were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.}

^{The Bush administration did not inform Congress that it had waterboarded detainees in classified briefings, after the agency had already done so, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) charged Thursday. Pelosi told reporters that the administration officials only told her and those in a classified briefing in the fall of 2002 that they believed they had the legal authority to do so, based on Office of Legal Counsel memos which have recently been released by the Obama administration.}

^{"In that or any other briefing…we were not, and I repeat, were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation techniques were used," said Pelosi. "What they did tell us is that they had some legislative counsel…opinions that they could be used, but not that they would."}

^{Pelosi said that the officials promised to inform Congress if they ever did waterboard a detainee, but never did so. Her assertion contradicts a recently released Senate committee report that cited CIA records to claim that senior members of Congress in both parties were briefed on the waterboarding, which had already been done to detainee Abu Zubaydah. Pelosi, in the strongest terms should could conjure, said the report was untrue and that she never approved, tacitly or otherwise, the waterboarding of detainees.}

^{"Further to the point was that if and when they would be used, they would brief Congress at that time," said Pelosi. "I know that there’s some different interpretations coming out of that meeting. My colleague, the chairman of the [intelligence] committee, has said, well if they say that it’s legal you have to know they’re going to use it. Well, his experience is that he was a member of the CIA and later went on to head the CIA. Maybe his experience is that they’ll tell you one thing but may mean something else." Pelosi is referring to then-GOP Rep. Porter Goss. "My experience was they did not tell us they were using that, flat out. And any, any contention to the contrary is simply not true," she said.}

There are two obvious reasons for Oversight, checks and balances. One is to have a watchdog around to see that the Executive Branch doesn’t get out of hand. We’ve all talked about that a lot. The Bush Administration didn’t want anyone looking at what they were doing because what they were doing wasn’t kosher. But there’s another reason for Oversight. The people on these Oversight Committees are smart people who might have some really good ideas to add to the mix – sort of like consultants. In a tangle like we had in the years in question after 9/11, it seems like we could have used all the ideas we could get.

Shane Murphy, Freed Pirate Hostage, Slams "Disgusting" Rush Limbaugh
by Arthur Delaney
Huffington Post
04/24/09

Shane Murphy, second-in-command aboard the ship seized by Somali pirates this month, is happy to be home. But he’s not happy to be sharing turf with land-lubber Rush Limbaugh, who politicized the pirate affair by referring to the pirates as "black teenagers."

"It feels great to be home," said Murphy in an interview with WCBV in Boston. "It feels like everyone around here has my back, with the exception of Rush Limbaugh, who is trying to make this into a race issue…that’s disgusting."

Limbaugh made the remark to suggest why President obama might have appeared preoccupied at church on the day of the operation to rescue the ship’s captain, who was taken hostage by the pirates until Navy SEAL snipers shot them in a daring rescue effort.

"He was worried about the order he had given to wipe out three teenagers on the high seas," Limbaugh said. "Black Muslim teenagers."

"You gotta get with us or against us here, Rush," Murphy said. "The president did the right thing…It’s a war…. It’s about good versus evil. And what you said is evil. It’s hate speech. I won’t tolerate it"…

Limbaugh has always been disgusting, but I think he’s getting worse. In this vignette, Limbaugh implies that Obama is a champion of black Muslim teenaged pirates. His evidence? Obama seemed preoccuppied at church that day. A remarkable piece of psychoanalysis. I’ll give that kind of detective work a shot myself. Limbaugh’s comment is obnoxious, indicating to me that it’s because he’s a fat racist bully. How’d I do?

Progressives Lack a Limbaugh-Like Voice
Sunday 19 April 2009
by: George Lakoff

You turn the AM on and there’s Rush, or Savage, or another of the army of right-wing radio talk show hosts. You may not be listening hard, just working, driving, doing busywork or the laundry. Yet if you listen day after day, year after year, your brain will begin to change.

Words, even those heard casually and listened to incidentally, activate frames – structures of ideas that are physically realized in the brain. The more the words are heard, the more the frames are activated in the brain, and stronger their synapses get – until the frames are there permanently.

All this is normal. It is how words work. And the right-wing message machine has found a way to take advantage of it – activating, as it were, a conservative system of thought. The problem is, those thoughts on the radio are hate city. Savage rails against what he calls "the weakening of the military" by "affirmative action," "illegal immigrants," and "Marxist politicians." What proves it? The submarine accident in the Gulf of Hormuz.

Tune in to Rush. On the one hand he’s pitching "rugged individualism," "liberty," and the absolute free market against Obama’s call to unity and a sense of national responsibility.Then he’s hammering the AIG bailout and its bonuses, not mentioning that it was the conservative destruction of reasonable regulation that lay behind our economic disaster. One diatribe after another, the crucial facts left out or lied about, day after day, city after city. It has an effect.

Where are the progressives? Largely absent. Or talking issue by issue, not about general themes. We have some icons: Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert. But they only talk to us. They are not omnipresent. Can President Obama overcome all this? He is by far the best communicator in politics today. But what we get of him are sound bites, an occasional major address, and a five-minute talk Saturdays on You Tube. Meanwhile, the reporting in the media is about positions on issues, not about general principles that get repeated…

Cheney Requests Release of 2 CIA Reports on Interrogations
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post
April 25, 2009

^{Former vice president Richard B. Cheney is asking for the release of two CIA reports in his bid to marshal evidence that coercive interrogation tactics such as waterboarding helped thwart terrorist plots, according to documents released yesterday by the National Archives and Records Administration. Cheney’s request was submitted March 31, more than two weeks before President Obama decided to release four "top secret" memos in which Bush administration lawyers sanctioned harsh tactics for questioning prisoners.}

^{The release of the memos has renewed a fiery debate over whether former senior Bush officials should be the targets of criminal investigations into whether they violated U.S. and international laws prohibiting torture. Obama said this week that his administration has not ruled out prosecuting senior lawyers and others responsible for allowing the harsh tactics, but he said he opposes a special "truth commission" favored by some lawmakers.}

^{Cheney, who has emerged as an outspoken critic of Obama’s national security policies, said in an interview on Fox News this week that he had asked for the release of documents that "lay out what we learned through the interrogation process" and how it saved U.S. lives…}

^{Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU National Security Project, said Cheney is attempting to "cherry-pick" intelligence to support his argument in favor of coercive interrogation tactics. "If we really wanted to evaluate the effectiveness of the CIA’s interrogation program, we have to look at more than two small documents," he said.}

^{The Obama administration is wrestling with how much material to release related to harsh interrogations, in part because of ongoing lawsuits demanding disclosures. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told Congress he would not "play hide and seek" with documents and would strive to release as many records about interrogations as possible.}

Cheney Doesn’t Care What You Think
By Dan Froomkin
Washington Post
March 20, 2008

^{It’s never exactly been a secret that Vice President Cheney operates by his own rules and thinks he knows better than the American public. But yesterday, he made it official. Talking to ABC News’s Martha Raddatz, in the piano lounge of the Shangri-La resort and spa in Oman, Cheney said he isn’t the least bit concerned that the public overwhelmingly opposes the war in Iraq. In fact, it makes him identify with Abraham Lincoln…}

^{Raddatz: "Two-thirds of Americans say it’s not worth fighting, and they’re looking at the value gain versus the cost in American lives, certainly, and Iraqi lives."}
^{Cheney: "So?"}
^{Raddatz: "So – you don’t care what the American people think?"}
^{Cheney: "No, I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls. Think about what would have happened if Abraham Lincoln had paid attention to polls, if they had had polls during the Civil War. He never would have succeeded if he hadn’t had a clear objective, a vision for where he wanted to go, and he was willing to withstand the slings and arrows of the political wars in order to get there."…}

Unless I’m missing some really big point here, the public debate isn’t about whether we should continue to have a torture policy for prisoners of war. We’re not going to do that. With the exception of Dick Cheney, I don’t hear anyone arguing that we should. The arguments from the other side are that releasing the documents is a political ploy designed to embarrass the former occupants of the White House or that the torture policy seemed justified back in 2002 because we were so afraid of another attack. Neither of those arguments makes much sense. Any fool can see that Obama would love to have this issue evaporate. Likewise, history has relegated the "ends justify the means" argument to an uncivilized era in the development of organized society along with its partner, "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."

More at the center of things: Do we make group decisions en masse [consensus, laws, voting, debate], or do we leave such things to a few powerful individuals? It’s more of an open question than we regularly realize. Our form of government has compromised in a very specific way between the snails’ pace of consensus and the dangers of despotism, the perils of mob rule versus the restraint of a single level head – a compromise that insures constant conflict between expediency and caution, action and debate.

Dick Cheney has no patience for such a system. He "just knows" the right thing to do, so he’s perfectly suited to Machiavellian manipulation. For Cheney, Congressional debate, oversight, our legal system are not part of the careful ways we make decisions, they’re only roadblocks in the way of doing what he knows is right. But he is currently operating in the region of his Achilles heel. He did the same thing with the Valerie Plame incident. This absolutely secretive man is wanting to release classified documents to vindicate himself. His claim to Martha Radditz that he is impervious to public opinion is a classic instance of the paradox of Narcissism. On the one hand, he needs no other – an island of strength and conviction. On the other hand, he’s very reactive to criticism, easily hurt, and can’t keep his mouth shut. For what it’s worth, he’s also a male chauvinist bully of the first order. He picks on girls – Valerie Plame,  Martha Radditz, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton. Hillary struck back the other day, saying that Cheney was "not a reliable source of information," and the truth hurts people like Dick Cheney.

What Dick Cheney thinks is irrelevant. His opinions about the "unitary executive," foreign policy, torture, secrecy, energy, global warming, etc. have been rendered immaterial by their disastrous results. I expect that his supporters would love for him to ride off into the Wyoming sunset and get out of their way. He’s not going to do that. He’s going to keep self-justifying and trying to remain the "voice of truth" in Washington. As tired as I am of hearing him talk, I suppose the greater purpose is served by letting him rant, release documents, appear on the shows with Karl Rove and the O’Reilly/Hannity/Limbaugh set. It places him in the proper context.

What Dick Cheney did is not irrelevant. Cheney’s assault on our government [the parts that were specifically designed to deal with someone like him] has been a disaster. He made a mockery of our legal system, oversight, and our legislative branch. He spent 10 years in the House of Representatives and 8 years as President of the Senate, yet his only goal while in Congress seems to have been to destroy its effectiveness. He surrounded himself with lawyers [Libby, Addington, Bybee, Yoo, Gonzales], yet their main function was to evade and distort the law. He became the Vice President under our poorest presidential choice in modern history, and instead of helping the guy do a job he was ill-suited to do, Cheney took over and ran the country in his own image, unassisted by other opinions.

U.S. Soldier Killed Herself After Refusing To Torture
the left coaster
by Turkana

In a heartbreaking and infuriating article at Huffington Post, Greg Mitchell recounts what happened when a person of conscience was confronted with Bush Administration inhumanity:

With each new revelation on U.S. torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gitmo (and who, knows, probably elsewhere), I am reminded of the chilling story of Alyssa Peterson, who I have written about numerous times in the past three years but now with especially sad relevance. Appalled when ordered to take part in interrogations that, no doubt, involved what we would call torture, she refused, then killed herself a few days later, in September 2003.

Peterson should be hailed as a martyr and a national heroine. But the military, of course, engaged in a cover-up. The cause of her death was listed as a "non-hostile weapons discharge"- possibly accidental. An intrepid local reporter named Kevin Elston, from her home state of Arizona, decided to do what national reporters now so infrequently do: investigate and report.

Here’s what the Flagstaff public radio station, KNAU, where Elston now works, reported: "Peterson objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners. She refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed." The official probe of her death would later note that earlier she had been "reprimanded" for showing "empathy" for the prisoners.

Empathy being anathema to the Bush-Cheney war criminal cabal. The contents of her notebook were blacked out. The contents of her suicide note were never revealed, and it has since disappeared. Her parents, of course, were told nothing about any of this. Elston summarized the comments reported to the Army by Peterson’s colleagues:

"The reactions to the suicide were that she was having a difficult time separating her personal feelings from her professional duties. That was the consistent point in the testimonies, that she objected to the interrogation techniques, without describing what those techniques were."

Alyssa Peterson deserved better, and continues to deserve better. Bush Administration war crimes should be called for what they were, and those responsible should be held accountable according to the law. And Peterson should be remembered as a great American and a great human being. For showing humanity under extreme duress. For dying for it.

But there’s more to this story that just its obvious tragedy. Alyssa wasn’t in the C.I.A. or the F.B.I. She wasn’t a crusty contractor. She was just a soldier in the Army, trained to be an interpreter, assigned to a military intelligence unit. Neither Jay Bybee nor John Yoo had written Memos to cover her actions or direct her dealing with prisoners. She was operating under the auspices of the Army Field Manual – a document informed by the Geneva Conventions. Alyssa had been in the Army for three years and had become fluent in Arabic. It is highly unlikely that she was uninformed about what she was going to see, so it’s safe to say that she was reacting to something unexpected. She was deployed to Iraq in February 2003. We invaded Iraq on March 20th, 2003, so she was there from the start. She committed suicide on September 15th, 2003 – shortly after seeing whatever she objected to. After her death, her suicide was covered over, listed as a "noncombat weapons discharge." Her diary, suicide note, and all records of the sessions she witnessed were destroyed.

To me, that all means that a routine Army Intelligence Unit was torturing Iraqi prisoners some six months into the war. Abu Ghraib was not a fluke. We know that now. Torture was part of Gitmo and secret C.I.A. Prisons. That’s common knowledge. But I didn’t have in my mind that regular Army Units were torturing prisoners in a way that was intolerable to a trained army intelligence soldier – likely going beyond the limits proscribed in the Army Field Manual. I also doubt that whatever was being done represented "rogue soldiers."  Alyssa was reprimanded by a superior and then transferred out of her unit. She was being dealt with through the chain of command. So, whatever happened was part of some standard procedure, and the "cover up" behavior sounds  systemmatic as well. These events were around the same time as the Abu Ghraid abuses.

• Do Nothing: To me, this is the worst option. What they did then becomes precedent. That’s totally unacceptable.
• Put it behind us; Let it go; Move on; Look forward: The lesson of trauma in history and in psychology is that this never works. A way to say that is that if you put it behind you, you’re followed for all time. I once saw a man who had been in the German Army. Towards the end of the War, he’d been wounded so he was in a hospital in Berlin when the Russians marched into the city. He was taken to a village in the middle of Russia where he stayed as a permanent P.O.W. until the mid fifties. When he was finally released, he returned to Germany, but there was nothing there for him anymore. After a time in South America, he ended up selling Mercedes in Atlanta Georgia. In his early 70’s, he returned to Germany because an aunt was dying. As fate arranges things, she was in the same hospital that he’d been in in the War. So now, fifty years later, he was overwhelmed with all those things he had “put behind” him. He’s the one who gave me the line, “It followed me, all these years.” It never works and we shouldn’t even try it.
• Prosecute the Bushies with a vengence [the Ken Starr method]: If we went with how I feel about what they did, we’d burn them at the stake. They weren’t just incompetent or bumbling, they were vigalantes – rewriting our laws on the fly. Their methods were barbaric and paranoid; their motives were criminal; and their results were atrocious. Their recurrent claims that “It worked” are both immaterial and dead wrong [see what I mean about how I feel?].

What is the point [besides blocking their misbehavior from becoming precedent]? I think the foremost point is to re-establish the rule of law – Civil Law, Criminal Law, and Constitutional Law. For years we’ve been saying that they are not “above the Law.” We need to make that charge stick.

This port of NASA’s Climate Time Machine only “sort of worked. Go to their site for the real deal. Very interesting.

My Tortured Decision
By ALI SOUFAN
April 22, 2009

For seven years I have remained silent about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding. I have spoken only in closed government hearings, as these matters were classified. But the release last week of four Justice Department memos on interrogations allows me to shed light on the story, and on some of the lessons to be learned.

One of the most striking parts of the memos is the false premises on which they are based. The first, dated August 2002, grants authorization to use harsh interrogation techniques on a high-ranking terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, on the grounds that previous methods hadn’t been working. The next three memos cite the successes of those methods as a justification for their continued use.

It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence.

We discovered, for example, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber. This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives.

There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.

Defenders of these techniques have claimed that they got Abu Zubaydah to give up information leading to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a top aide to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Mr. Padilla. This is false. The information that led to Mr. Shibh’s capture came primarily from a different terrorist operative who was interviewed using traditional methods…

The debate after the release of these memos has centered on whether C.I.A. officials should be prosecuted for their role in harsh interrogation techniques. That would be a mistake. Almost all the agency officials I worked with on these issues were good people who felt as I did about the use of enhanced techniques: it is un-American, ineffective and harmful to our national security…

My reason for not thinking that the "torture worked" argument matters very much is that it’s an obvious evasion of our questions. When someone is saying that "it wasn’t torture" and that "the torture worked" at the same time, there’s something very wrong. Even more absurd, Cheney argues that there’s still a threat, so we should keep torturing enhancedly interrogating, as if that will protect us in the future. Ali Soufan says otherwise, and adds: "In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process." Backfired how? Classified? Why classified?

Dick Cheney is playing with fire. There are lots of Ali Soufans out there who have plenty to say about all of this, and Cheney staying in the public spotlight is going to bring them out into the open [where they belong]. Remember how we felt in that Hearing when James Comey told his story about the late night attempt to get the delirious John Ashcroft to sign off on extending their secret programs? Remember Harry Markopolos testifying about the S.E.C. in the Madoff Hearings? We believe those guys. If Ali Soufan gets on the stand, we’ll have a similar reaction. Right now, Cheney is blowing it like Joseph McCarthy blew it in the 50’s. He doesn’t know when to stop.