Anyone who thinks they have all the Answers before they've even heard the Question - is Dangerously Deluded! Real Truth Requires Vigilance, Perseverance and Courage, regardless of Party and who wields Power. Left, Right, Center, Corporations, Government, Unions, Criminals or the Indifferent.
So the CIA has received Fmr. Vice President Dick Cheny's request to release documents that "prove" once and for all the effectiveness of his torture (Yes, Torture) program.
There's just one problem with that argument, the CIA doesn't do the job of enforcing the law or catching terrorist, the armed forces and the FBI do that. So what, besides today's revelation that Abu Zubaydah gave up KSM without Torture does the FBI have to say?
FBI Director Mueller to Vanity Fair when asked if "Enhanced Interrogation" had foiled any plots?
I don’t believe that has been the case
Ruh Roh!
On the other hand regularly gumshoe police work by local law enforcement and the FBI DID succeed at protecting American citizens.
In an interview in London in April 2008, I remind F.B.I. director Robert Mueller of the attacks planned against targets on American soil since 9/11 that his agents have disrupted: for example, a plot to kill soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and another to wreak mayhem at army recruiting centers and synagogues in and around Torrance, California. These and other homegrown conspiracies were foiled by regular police work. The F.B.I. learned of the Fort Dix plot from a Circuit City store where a technician raised the alarm when asked to copy firearms-training videos, while the Torrance cell was rounded up when cops probed the backgrounds of two of its members after they allegedly robbed a local gas station.
No waterborading, no wide-net of electronic surveillance, just a reasonable TIP and good follow up.
Like the tip by one Pheonix FBI Agent in 2001 that I've got some guys where who want to fly planes, but don't much care about landing them.
Time and time again we hear "The Tactics were Necessary" or "There was no other way", but clearly there IS another way. A way that works.
Furthermore, what seems more and more apparent from the various sources which are now coming forward in conjuction with the Levin Senate Armed Services Report is that torture under the Bush Administration wasn't used to provide information to save Amercians, it was used to proved information to save Bush's Foreign Policy, and justify the Iraq War
Several of those I interviewed point out the dearth of specific claims the administration has proffered. “The proponents of torture say, ‘Look at the body of information that has been obtained by these methods.’ But if K.S.M. and Abu Zubaydah did give up stuff, we would have heard the details,” says Cloonan. “What we got was pabulum.” A former C.I.A. officer adds: “Why can’t they say what the good stuff from Abu Zubaydah or K.S.M. is? It’s not as if this is sensitive material from a secret, vulnerable source. You’re not blowing your source but validating your program. They say they can’t do this, even though five or six years have passed, because it’s a ‘continuing operation.’ But has it really taken so long to check it all out?”
Officials who analyzed Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation reports say that the reports were afforded the highest value within the Bush administration not because of the many American lives they were going to save but because they could be cited repeatedly against those who doubted the wisdom of ousting Saddam by force.
“We didn’t know he’d been waterboarded and tortured when we did that analysis, and the reports were marked as credible as they could be,” the former Pentagon analyst tells me. “The White House knew he’d been tortured. I didn’t, though I was supposed to be evaluating that intelligence.” To draw conclusions about the importance of what Abu Zubaydah said without knowing this crucial piece of the background nullified the value of his work. “It seems to me they were using torture to achieve a political objective. I cannot believe that the president and vice president did not know who was being waterboarded, and what was being given up.”
Oh, I think the did know. Particularly since Zubaydah and KSM weren't the only ones this technique was used against.
Ibn Shayk Al-Libi, an associate of Zubaydah who was captured and tortured in Egypt, was the primary source of information that Iraq had provided chemical weapons training to Al Qeada. Guess what, this information was false
Just like the information that Iraq possessed "Mobile Weapons Labs" come from a former Iraqi who had relocated to Germany named Rafid Alwan, aka Curveball. (See this Report from BBC Newsnight) who was also, like, al-Libi, Lying.
The information provided by Curveball and al-Libi together led us into unneccesary and tragic War with an Unarmed Nation. And many others were coercively mistreated and suffered in The Black Sites, Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram AFB in order to help bolster their false claims.
Tortured to provide Lies to justify other lies. We have to come to grips with the fact that the U.S. deliberately waged a Campaign of Terror across the middle-east all based on LIES!
What needs to be asked now is not just what information we received through "enhanced interrogation" but also - how much of that information was BULLSHIT and led us down rat-holes and on wild-goose chases like the "Liberty City Six".
It really doesn't matter if any of these claims were ever true, because if so it probably wasn't neccessary to go these lengths, most likely the reason they were "resistant" is because the questions being asked were bogus, and by using these methods all we've done is get more bad information. Bad information that cost far more lives than any of the "good" information (assuming there somehow is any that the FBI director doesn't know about) may have saved.
I don't know how... but somehow, someway, Olbermann has been reading my mail.
I know it sounds crazy, but then with all this NSA Spying stuff who knows what they're leaking out and who they're leaking it too. But after I posted on sunday about Alberto Gonzales thinking he's not gonna get prosecuted, and how Steve King said Khallid Sheikh Mohammed isn't on a "Path to Citizenship" and is more likely to wind up in the Florence SUPERMAX in Colorado - I just had to start wondering when I saw this last night...
Here's the really creepy part. Olbermann isn't the only one.
Look at this Shit from the Daily Show, again from just last night... I'm telling you It's Creepy!
So maybe it's not just me. (Although the entire Florence SUPERMAX Thing with Tim McVeigh, the Unibomber and Ramzi Yousef was my Idea. IT REALLY REALLY WAS) Ok. ok. enough - obvious the paranoid delusions of the right wing are starting to get to me....
Whew
Ok, Here's a test. One thing that was on Thinkprogress yesterday that I wanted to write about bit didn't were the following comments from one of Bush's former speechwriters justifying and praising U.S. Torturers as "Heroes".
Just Listen.
THIESSEN: The CIA developed these alternative interrogation techniques, and all of a sudden he started talking. Zubaydah’s information led us to Ramsey bin al Shibh, who was was one of the 9/11 hijackers. Together, they gave us the information that led the capture of KSM. Then, KSM gave us information about another al Qaeda operative, Majid Khan, who was in CIA custody. He told us that Majid Khan had been tasked to give $50,000 to an operative named Zubair, who was developing plots with a Southeast Asian group called JI.
THIESSEN: They’re not torturers. They’re heroes. ... And the thought that we’re sitting here discussing whether these people should be prosecuted or investigated is just outrageous. These people are American heroes who saved lives and stopped the next Sept. 11.
Ok, MY RESPONSE to this is to point out what both the CIA and the Pentagon said about the information we received from Zubaydah After he was tortured as reported by Ron Suskind in the Washington Post last year.
Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."
Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics -- travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States."
Somehow?
After Thiessen's comments, I think we know part of why Bush speech on Zubaydah had nothing to do with the reality about Zubaydah.
According to Kiriakou's account, which he said is based on detailed descriptions by fellow team members, Abu Zubaida broke after just 35 seconds of waterboarding, which involved stretching cellophane over his mouth and nose and pouring water on his face to create the sensation of drowning.
But other former and current officials disagreed that Abu Zubaida's cooperation came quickly under harsh interrogation or that it was the result of a single waterboarding session. Instead, these officials said, harsh tactics used on him at a secret detention facility in Thailand went on for weeks or, depending on the account, even months.
But here's the thing - the good information we got from Zubaydah was all BEFORE he was tortured.
During his first month of captivity, Abu Zubaida described an al-Qaeda associate whose physical description matched that of Padilla, leading to Padilla's arrest at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago in May 2002. A former CIA officer said in an interview that Abu Zubaida's "disclosure of Padilla was accidental." The officer added that Abu Zubaida "was talking about minor things and provided a small amount of information and a description of a person, just enough to identify him because he had just visited the U.S. Embassy" in Pakistan.
Other officials, including Bush, have said that during those early weeks -- before the interrogation turned harsh -- Abu Zubaida confirmed that Mohammed's role as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.
So he did confirm KSM's role for us, but it wasn't because of those "Heroes" who tortured him - it was the Other Heroes who didn't. Not only that, but the information he gave us after he was tortured just got worse and worse and worse....
But FBI officials, including agents who questioned him after his capture or reviewed documents seized from his home, have concluded that even though he knew some al-Qaeda players, he provided interrogators with increasingly dubious information as the CIA's harsh treatment intensified in late 2002.
In legal papers prepared for a military hearing, Abu Zubaida himself has asserted that he told his interrogators whatever they wanted to hear to make the treatment stop.
One of the bogus things that Zubaydah told us - most likely after "Theissen's Heroes" got ahold of him was that Saddam Hussein and Al Qeada had an "Operational Relationship". Zubaydah is apparently a source for the fabled "Meeting in Prague" between Iraq Intelligence and Mohommed Atta. It's just that - that shit didn't happen according to a former Pentagon Analyst.
“The intelligence community was lapping this up, and so was the administration, obviously. Abu Zubaydah was saying Iraq and al-Qaeda had an operational relationship. It was everything the administration hoped it would be.” [...]
“The White House knew he’d been tortured. I didn’t, though I was supposed to be evaluating that intelligence. ... It seems to me they were using torture to achieve a political objective.”
Ya think?
Because of what Zubaydah told us under torture falsely linking Saddam to 9-11 because That's what the White House Wanted to Hear, and what Curveball (who was also nuts) told us about "mobile weapons labs" which didn't exist - 4000 American soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are now DEAD!
Torture is why we wound up in the wrong war with the WRONG COUNTRY!
Admittedly I've been focusing on Zubaydah and Thiessen went much further than just him bringing up some links that I suspect have never been revealed before, but it's also clear that we didn't get any good intelligence from water-boarding Khallid Sheikh Mohammed either. From Vanity Fair via my favorite site - Thinkprogress.
But according to a former senior C.I.A. official, who read all the interrogation reports on K.S.M., “90 percent of it was total f*cking bullsh*t.” A former Pentagon analyst adds: “K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were.”
Not "us" - How stupid Bush and his cronies were. No, ARE!
Fortunately the mainline professionals in the CIA knew better.
Inside the C.I.A., says a retired senior officer who was privy to the agency’s internal debate, there was hardly any argument about the value of coercive methods: “Nobody in intelligence believes in the ticking bomb. It’s just a way of framing the debate for public consumption. That is not an intelligence reality.”
Nor Reality? Do tell? Jack Bauer is just a (badly written) character on TV? Really? In fact, somebody tell Theissen - he needs a reality refresher it seems.
And if any of this shows up on Countdown tonight - I'm moving to fracking CANADA!
(Not! - Please use my shit Stuff Keith!! Pretty Please!!! Just give a shout-out to Dkos or Thinkprogress and I'm good.)
There's a new show that premiered this week. It's a show were a bunch of big muscled womanizing lunk heads think they're in competition to become "Mr. Awesome." As it turns out, while they chase the scantily clad girls dangled in front of them, their actual girlfriends are watching every second. They're really on a show called "Tool Academy" and they are the Tools.
After yesterday's revelation that the torture used in Gitmo has ruined the case against the 20th 9-11 hijacker, the real "Tools" appear to be George Bush, Dick Cheney, the entire Right-wing Media and Jack Bauer.
Just watch as they completely spooge over the 24 Season premiere.
In the speech that Billy, Doocy and Rushy find so inspiring Bauer, while being challenged for his treatment of a suspect named Hadib, tightens his jaw and heroically growls the following.
BAUER: When I am activated, when I am brought into a situation, there is a reason and that reason is to complete the objectives of my mission at all costs. [...]
For a combat soldier the difference between success and failure is your ability to adapt to your enemy. The people that I deal with, they don’t care about your rules. ... In answer to your question, am I above the law? No, sir. I am more than willing to be judged by the people you claim to represent. I will let them decide what price I should pay. Now please do not sit there with that smug look on your face and expect me to regret the decisions that I have made because, sir, the truth is I don’t.
OOhh... how masterful.
Most of us who live in the real world know that Jack Bauer is just a character on a tv show - unfortunately some of our governmental leaders over the last 8 years don't seem to know that since they happen to be spouting the exact same ridiculous B.S. as Bauer.
This week Vice President Cheney said when asked about his interrogation program said that ...
"I feel very good about what we did. I think it was the right thing to do,"... it would have been unethical or immoral for us not to" torture detainees
Kinda Baeur-rific, isn't it?
And President Bush? In his final Press Conference he said.
"I'm in the Oval Office and I am told that we have captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the professionals believe he has information necessary to secure the country. So I ask what tools are available for us to find information from him and they gave me a list of tools...
{We }"got legal opinions before any decision was made." Bush insisted that torturing Mohammed produced "good information" that "helped save lives on American soil."
That's Baeur-tastic - except for one little detail - shit didn't happen that way.
The guys in the CIA say they didn't get jack crap from Mohammed after he was tortured.
As for K.S.M. himself, who (as Jane Mayer writes) was waterboarded, reportedly hung for hours on end from his wrists, beaten, and subjected to other agonies for weeks, Bush said he provided “many details of other plots to kill innocent Americans.” K.S.M. was certainly knowledgeable. It would be surprising if he gave up nothing of value. But according to a former senior C.I.A. official, who read all the interrogation reports on K.S.M., “90 percent of it was total fucking bullshit.” A former Pentagon analyst adds: “K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were.”
Mission Accomplished Khallid.
Ok, so the torture didn't really work with him.. KSM told us what we wanted to hear, just like Curveball who said that Saddam had "Mobile Labs for Chemical Weapons" (Guess what? He didn't) and Abu Zubaydah who supposedly led us to KSM, but uh - actually didn't.
Bush discussed Abu Zubaydah’s treatment in his 2006 announcement. “As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so the C.I.A. used an alternative set of procedures.... The procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.” Soon, Bush went on, Abu Zubaydah “began to provide information on key al-Qaeda operatives, including information that helped us find and capture more of those responsible for the attacks on September 11.” Among them, Bush said, were Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind, and his fellow conspirator Ramzi Binalshibh. In fact, Binalshibh was not arrested for another six months and K.S.M. not for another year. In K.S.M.’s case, the lead came from an informant motivated by a $25 million reward.
Then there as Ibn-Sheik Al-Libi who told us Saddam was supplying al-Qeada with Chemical weapons training. Guess why he said that?
According to the ABC News report, one other detainee who was waterboarded was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the director of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, who was captured in November 2001. His current whereabouts are unknown, although there are suspicions that he was finally delivered to the Libyan government. Having slipped off the radar, the government clearly does not want his case revived, not only because it may have to explain what has happened to him, but also because, as a result of the application of "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," al-Libi claimed that Saddam Hussein had offered to train two al-Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons.
Al-Libi's "confession" led to President Bush declaring, in October 2002, "Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases," and his claims were, notoriously, included in Colin Powell's speech to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. The claims were of course, groundless, and were recanted by al-Libi in January 2004, but it took Dan Cloonan, a veteran FBI interrogator, who was resolutely opposed to the use of torture, to explain why they should never have been believed in the first place.
For the last time: the pre-war intelligence that led us into a war with Iraq wasn't "Flawed" - the techniques Bush authorized were.
Just like Bauer - both Bush and Cheney claim that they only did what thy had to do to Save American Lives. One of our chief Special Forces Interrogators from Iraq (the guy who helped hunt down abu Masub al-Zarqawi without torturing anyone) says, That's a crock of Shit.
I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. ... It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.
Your determination would create a reasonable basis in law that (the War Crimes Act) does not apply which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution," Gonzales wrote.
If Geneva was off the table (although the SCOTUS later said in Hamdan v Rumsfeld -"The HELL it wasn't!") , then all bets were off right from the start. All tactics they used from that point on - were their choice. It was Bush's choice, and he made the wrong one when he authorized water torture, sleep deprivation, stress positions and hypothermia as interrogation tactics.
Just like the Khmer Rouge, Augusto Pinchet, and the Right-Wing's darling hero Bauer.
Despite his claim that he "has no regrets" Jack - in a very Bushian way - seems to selectively forget just what he's really done, and how much of it went straight to hell.
- In the 2-Hour re-season opener "24:Redemption" Bauer had been ON THE RUN OVERSEAS TO AVOID A CONGRESSIONAL SUBPEONA.
Y'know like a mixture between Mark Rich and Karl Rove.
- The only reason he came back to the U.S. is because some Weaslely State Dept. "Bastard" tricks and blackmails him into complying with the law, by putting a bunch a kids that Bauer is protecting at risk of being butchered by an African dictator. Jack "redeems" himself by angrily giving in to the subpoena only so that the kids can be saved, not because he's made any decision to "face the music".
- But Jack Baeur and CTU have tortured kids before, including the 17-year-old son of a sleeper-cell leader, who himself - as it turned out - was completely innocent and didn't know anything. Nevermind the fact he'd already been granted immunity and was perfectly willing to talk. While they were busy and distracted doing that the bad guys SHOT DOWN AIR FORCE ONE, killed the President and captured the nuclear football. CTU later used the kid and his mother as bait, both were murdered.
Nice work Jack.
- Bauer failed to stop a nuclear suitcase bomb (a device which doesn't exist) from going off ion the outskirts off L.A., near Valencia. Bye Bye Magic Mountain. He later shot and killed one of his best friends in cold blood to protect a terrorist source that might have led them to another suitcase-bomb. He didn't.
- Jack hijacked Marine One and kidnapped President Logan out from from under the Secret Service in order to get him to admit being involved in the plot to kill President Palmer. (Which didn't work, but Logan did admit hiding his knowledge of it on tape later)
- Jack tortured his girlfriends ex-husband, Paul, just because he suspected he might be involved in a terrorist plot - but the man was innocent and didn't know anything at all. Eventually he figured out that the bad guys were using his company without his knowledge, something they could have figured out by just asking. Or getting one of the legal thingee's - whachamacallit - oh yeah, a Warrant! Paul, being a really good sport, eventually took a bullet for Jack and ended up paralyzed.
- Jack broke onto the grounds of the Chinese Consolate - which is an act of War - in order to torture and interrogate the Chinese Ambassador. The Chinese retaliated by kidnapping Bauer (and torturing him, but of course he didn't break), his girlfriend - the same one, Audrey - followed him to China - was captured, tortured and LOST HER MIND. (What was that about "No Regrets" again?) Her Dad, The Secretary of Defense, was a little peaved.
- He tortured his own brother, and his brother managed to resist it and hide the fact that the real bad guy - was their father. (Yes, this show is a rather pathetic soap opera isn't it?) Dear 'ole Dad then killed the brother to shut him up just in case he couldn't resist a second time, and setup Jack to take the blame. Real Great Family values there.
Even on their own damn show Torture Doesn't work at least half the time, now in the current season Jack's tactics are negatively influencing an FBI agent who recruited his help. She's already committed one act of torture - disabling the respirator of a wounded suspect - and Jack wasn't even there.
I'm not saying Jack hasn't had some miraculous successes for your basic FANTASY SUPERHERO WET-DREAM, but Call me "fickle"- he's not exactly a "Hero" in my book. "Mr. Awesome" he is not. Neither is Bush.
"War Criminal" sounds about right, but Lord God King of the Tools will just have to do for now.
Vyan
P.S. Wanna hear a truly great speech about torture? How about Denzel Washington as Agent Hubbard in 1998's The Seige!
PPS: I looks like the real life Agent Hubbard - Is Attorney General Nominee Eric Holder!!
This is a follow-up to my original post and I would have included it if I could, but it was happening in real time as I was posting:
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) could not fathom that an Attorney General would reject a practice that both is unlawful and endangers Americans. He tried to get Holder to back off his anti-torture stance by presenting an absurd “ticking time bomb” hypothetical in which thousands of American lives are at stake. “You would still refuse to condone aggressive interrogation techniques?” Cornyn asked. When Holder replied that waterboarding is not the only interrogation method, Cornyn insisted, “Assume that it was”:
HOLDER: I think your hypothetical assumes a premise that I’m not willing to concede.
CORNYN: I know you don’t like my hypothetical.
HOLDER: No, the hypothetical’s fine; the premise that underlies it I’m not willing to accept, and that is that waterboarding is the only way that I could get that information from those people.
CORNYN: Assume that it was.
HOLDER: [Laughs] Given the knowledge that I have about other techniques and what I’ve heard from retired admirals and generals and FBI agents, there are other ways in a timely fashion that you can get information out of people that is accurate and will produce useable intelligence. And so it’s hard for me to accept or to answer your hypothetical without accepting your premise. And in fact, I don’t think I can do that.
A few minutes later, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) identified where Cornyn most likely thought up his torture-is-the-only-option scenario: “I understand Senator Cornyn’s questions. They are questions that anyone who watches Jack Bauer on ‘24" would ask.”
In a hearing with Canadian national Maher Arar who was mistakenly apprehended at JFK airport and rendered to Syria where he was tortured for months until it was finally discovered that he was an innocent man - Dana Rohrabacher attempts to justify what was done to Arar. To him arresting people and deporting them to countries besides their own which participate in barbaric practices is a "reasonable" response to the "slaughter" of 9-11. Y'see the only thing they did wrong was that Arar was innocent, not that kidnapping and torturing people is wrong. Always!
Rohrabacher attempts to make the arguement that what happened to Arar must have been simply "A mistake" similar to that a "Friendly Fire" incident, and then continues to justify the U.S. action by saying that such incidents may be unfortunate - but they are a natural result of committing out troops to military action, and that if we failed to do this others would suffer. He then states that "No innocent person" should have to suffer through what Arar describes, and then likens the state as "gruesome a the tyranny" of communist political prisoners.
Never does he consider the irony that he himself has just admitted that America has sunk to the level of communist tyranny. We have become the Iron Curtain and the Banana Republic where innocent people can literally be "Disappeared".
Yet, Arar is far from the only innocent person to have been caught in this "Terror Net", many of whom have confessed to anything they were told to say after weeks and months of torture - one of those people was Ibn Sheik al-Libi, another was Curveball, both of whom contributed to creating the false impression that Iraq was maintaining WMD's and WMD programs which has so far led to the death of far more Americans than were killed on 9-11.
Another irony that Rohrabacher never acknowledges.
Just like preverbial boogey man of Myth, Fox News sees Al Qeada under every rock. Al Qeada is responsible for the Sunni Insurgency in Iraq. Al Qeada is responsible for Shia Death Squads. Al Qeada in Iraq has been "defeated", except when they haven't. And now, Al Qeada has allegedly set the California Wildfires which have displaced nearly 1 Million people - at least that's what Fox "Newsman" Steve Doocy thinks.
This morning on Fox News, hosts of the show Fox and Friends blamed the wildfires in California on a new culprit: al Qaeda. They pointed to a 2003 FBI memo, which raised the possibility that al Qaeda may try to set wildfires around the western United States. They also noted that men in a "hovering helicopter" saw "a guy starting one of these fires."
And, oh yeah, in that reported memo - California wasn't even mentioned.
DOOCY: You’re looking live at pictures from San Diego — Santiago, CA, where the wildfires continue. We were talking earlier in today’s telecast with Adam Housley and apparently police officers in a hovering helicopter saw a guy starting one of these fires. And Allison Allison Camerota, an FBI memo from late in June of this year is popping up this morning and it is ominous.
CAMEROTA: This actually has happened for many years in the past as well. An FBI sent out to local law-enforcement said that an al Qaeda detainee had given them some information that the next wave of terrorism could be in the form of setting wild fires. Adam Housley said lots of people on his block were asking him about it. Obviously this is something the FBI has looked into. They will continue to investigate it.
Oh, a Detainee said so? Well, geez, we know we can certainly take that one to the bank. I mean, Curveball was just so SPOT. ON. with the mobile labs wasn't he?
CARLSON: If they have this person in custody it probably won’t take long to be able to develop a link if there is one.
KILMEADE: A June 25 memo from the FBI’s Denver offices reported three days ago, excuse me, five days ago, by the Arizona Republic, that is a newspaper, they have been carrying the story and they continue to expand upon it.
DOOCY: Brian, the plot they say, according to this detainee, and they don’t know if the detainee is telling the truth. The plot was to set three or four wildfires. But they don’t mention California. They mention Colorado, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming. We do know for a fact that a number of the fires in southern California are of a suspicious nature and they are investigating arson.
It's fair to argue that there has been some evidence of arson in the California Wildires. This has been a situation that has gone back for generations, year in and year out - since as a matter of fact - most of Southern Calfornia is a mild desert! But to state that their might be active al-Qeada cells and sympathizers in HelL-A is going a bit far.
Not that CNN'S Glen Beck hasn't already been circling that block with his claim that it's...
"unfortunate that a handful of people who hate America ... are losing their homes in a forest fire today".
Is it "unfortunate" that they lost their homes or "unfortunate" that the supposedly "Hate America" by becoming successful in the entertainment industry? Which one is it Glen?
Of course now he's claiming that this was just a joke and is now playing the well worn right-wing victim card. Y'see it's all those lefty liberal bloggers who are really the mean people.
BECK: Let me get to your phone calls here in a second. I want to have a -- I want to have a frank and open conversation with you here for a second. Apparently, I have upset a few liberal bloggers. Woe is me. And I need to be extraordinarily clear on one thing. Not with you. And I'll explain in a second.
These people -- they're amazing. They're incredible. They claim that I'm serious when I'm joking and try to cause trouble, and then they say I'm joking when I'm serious and try to cause trouble. There's no way -- if you disagree with any of these people -- there's no way that you can ever win. And here's the interesting thing: Even if you agree with these people, there's no way you can ever win.
If you've listened to me for years, you know wildfires are deeply personal to me. Wildfires make blood shoot out of my eyes. But for the bloggers, it doesn't matter what I really think. It doesn't -- they're not trying to convince you I'm a bad guy. You know. You know who I am. What they're trying to do is convince people who don't watch the TV show, who don't listen to the show. They're trying to convince them that I'm an evil supervillain.
Because those people can be convinced. So let me just -- let me tell you, so you know, so you can tell those who want to make me into an evil supervillain. Who do you have to be to think that it's a good thing that anybody's house burns down? Who do you have to be?
Who do you have to be Glenn? Maybe you have to be a guy That thinks it's FUNNY that people's homes have burned down when you disagree with (some of) them politically??
How could we ever think anyone on the right-wing would stoop so low as to make fun of people who've lost every possession in the worst firestorm in history, after they've been so kind in their responses to people like Graeme Frost, Bethany Wilkerson, The 82nd Air Borne, Capt Jon Soltz, Micheal J. Fox, John Edwards, Cindy Sheehan and the 9-11 Widows?
After they've attacked sick kids, why exactly would anyone think twice about Beck and his ilk attacking the victims of a massive fire?
But not to worry, it was just a joke - minus the funny part.
And who knew that the right-wing hated the rich people who live in expensive houses on the hill so much? Maybe they can get them some fresh juicy new tax cuts to help buy a new house somewhere else as long as it isn't already flooded with the other kinds of people - y'know the middle-class and the poor? And while they're at it how about a few man-made Islands or something for the looming construction boom of new Luxury Condos far away from anyone who can't afford them? That outta be Posh, like totally Paris and Nicole.
One big problem with Glenn's entire view is that so much of these fires have affected Orange County and San Diego, both of whom are giant Red Swaths in an otherwise Blue State. Orange County was so gracious that they've bought us both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan not to mention B-1 Bob Dornan, Dana Rorbacher (sic) and from San Diego we've have had Duke Cunningham, Jerry Lewis and Darrell Issa.
If you subscribe to the Fixed News view of things on the other hand, the ones who "Hate America" are apparently the enormous enclave of Islamo Fascists who've decided their best weapon against the Imperialism of the West is to Flick a Bic. In that case, trying to burn down John Wayne's house almost makes sense.
And all this time while Fox and Beck are keeping us distracted with their pathological nuttiness - the real issues raised by these fires goes ignored while the White House Censors the head of CDC on the issue of the human impacts of Climate Change.
Today, Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on the "Human Impacts of Global Warming." Gerberding told the committee that global warming "is anticipated to have a broad range of impacts on the health of Americans," but gave few specifics, instead focusing on CDC’s current preparation plans.
CDC officials are now revealing that the White House heavily edited Gerberding’s testimony, which originally was longer and had more "information on health risks":
"It was eviscerated," said a CDC official, familiar with both versions, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the review process.
The official said that while it is customary for testimony to be changed in a White House review, these changes were particularly "heavy-handed," with the document cut from its original 14 pages to four. It was six pages as presented to the Senate committee.
The White House’s deletions included "details on how many people might be adversely affected because of increased warming and the scientific basis for some of the CDC’s analysis on what kinds of diseases might be spread in a warmer climate and rising sea levels."
I'm thinking right now that one particular risk happens to be trying to breath in a smoke cloud so large you can See it from Space!
So while Fox is chasing phantom al Qeada in the hills of Malibu (just as they've been chasing phantom AQI through the streets of Najaf and Fallujah for four years now) the impacts of gradual and steady planetary warming, which can clearly contribute to the types of dry conditions that help facilitate the tragedy that hit Southern California, remain ignored and forgotten by an Administration that has a long history of denying fact and science.
New documents indicate that under Alberto Gonzales, new harsh interrogation techniques were secretly authorized, such as detainees being placed naked in freezing conditions, stress positions, water-boarding, starvation and beaten in simultaneous combination. The documents also indicate that this was done simultaneous to the effort in Congress passing new restriction on these very same techinques.
During the report they speak with one British citizen who had been held in Gitmo and eventually released who says that he was willing to "say anything to stop the torture." He claims that he was "beaten, shackeled, stripped naked and hog-tied", was never associated with al Qeada and only said so to end the torture.
Wolf Blitzer then talks to WH Homeland Security Advisor Fran Townsend who trots out each and every wingnut talking point on this issue. I swear, this woman is like Baghdad Bob with an 80's flip and pink pants suit.
First there's the obvious old saw...
These programs stop attacks.
This she says while also claiming.
The United States does not torture.
Oh really, then just what are people doing in these programs?
I can't discuss specific techniques
No kidding. And then she naturally goes on to justify the torture that we don't do.
The program is very limited. The interrogators are highly trained. We start with the least harsh measures first, it stops when the subject becomes cooperatives. This program was used on Abu Zubaydah and resulted in actionable intelligence that led to the capture of abu Ben-Alzied.
Frankly Wolf, if Americans are killed because we failed to the hard things, Americans have a right to ask us why?
One example out of many comes in Ron Suskind's gripping narrative of what the White House has celebrated as one of the war's major victories: the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002. Described as al-Qaeda's chief of operations even after U.S. and Pakistani forces kicked down his door in Faisalabad, the Saudi-born jihadist was the first al-Qaeda detainee to be shipped to a secret prison abroad. Suskind shatters the official story line here.
Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."
This is where we got "actionable intelligence"?
And the "Why" part isn't so hard - it's because it's against the law.
Townsend literally scoffs at the idea that our usage of these techniques might make Americans less safe (never mind what Colin Powell says, it's not like he knows anything about the soldiers after being Chairman of the Joint Chiefs) claiming that "these people don't wear uniforms, they're going to treat our soldiers the same way no matter what we do."
Or don't do, or do and claim we don't do, or something...
She naturally ignores that it doesn't just put American troops at risk, when America is an international leader begins trying to find wiggle room in the Geneva conventions and our own War Crimes Laws it's like a virus that starts to spread to all sorts of other nations like say - Myanmar.
What Ms. Townsend also ably dodges is the fact that these techniques were expressly prohibited under U.S. Law and the Uniform Military Code of Justice during the entire period of their use until the passage of the Military Commissions Act in 2006, which implemented the Bybee Standard. (Torture isn't Torture unless some is about to die or lose a vital organ)
It was only last month that it was revealed that CIA Director Michael Hayden officially removed Water-Boarding from the approved list of "alternative" interrogation techniques which were approved by the President in 2002 - long before passage of the MCA or the McCain Detainee Treatment Act.
It is beyond question that these techniques have often been ineffective and have produce inaccurate information (such as the claims from "Curveball" an Ibn Sheik al-Libi that there were WMD's IN IRAQ!), that they are illegal and immoral.
It's not about whether we do the "hard thing" to protect Americans, it's whether we do the right thing because so far nearly 4,000 Americans have already died in the Iraq War in part, because we used torture - because we did the wrong thing.
This is a question of both character and morality. The question isn't whether America is willing to do the "hard thing", it's whether we're willing and able to do the right thing even when it does risk American lives to do so. Townsend's version of the question speaks to our cowardice, when we should be speaking to our courage.
And in this area it's long past time we we showed some courage and started doing the right thing.
Yesterday on Countdown, Congresswoman Jane Harman boldly stated that the Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell lied to Congress by claiming that there was an imminent threat against the Capital in order to pass the new FISA Law last month. But just as we've seen so many times before, the truth was far from obvious. In fact it was (deliberately?) buried beneath layer after layer of security and only after digging through these layers did Harman find that "the informant wasn't considered credible" by the very analysts that McConnel had sited.
If the informant wasn't credible why was McConnell spreading an unsubstantiated rumor around the halls of Congress?
Congresswoman Harman made her charge at a forum on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, FISA, conducted in Washington by the Center For American Progress. She says that on August 2nd, hours before lawmakers were to leave for a month long recess, word of specific intelligence led to increased security around the Capitol. Republican Congressman Zach Wamp of Tennessee said at the time, quote, the leaders of the committees of jurisdiction have been briefed on threats to the Capitol."
And in urging Congress to give Mr. Bush the extra spying powers he wanted, Senator Trent Lott said on that date that, quote, "the disaster could be on our doorstep." Congresswoman Harman said the unreliability of the so-called intelligence about the attack on the Capitol before the 9/11 anniversary was only made clear the very day lawmakers approved the temporary expansion of Bush‘s spy powers. "That specific intelligence claim, it turned out, was bogus," said Representative Harman. "The intelligence agencies knew that."
She added that the administration was guilty of a "Rovian strategy of using terrorism as a wedge political issue." Talk about the nexus of politics and terror.
After Judge Ann Digg Taylor struck down the Administration circumvention of the FISA Law as being both unconstitutional and illegal, the Bushies managed to actually scare up a single FISA judge (whom many suspect may have been the ulta-neo-conservative John D. Bates) who was willing to authorize the program under FISA. Yet just a few months later the veritable rubber-stamp court had ruled twice against the Bush Administration program forcing them to seek a warrant for each and every wiretap.
To which of course the Administration cried and screamed "foul" at the top of their lungs like a NBA Coach in the Playoffs!
In May, a judge on the same court went further, telling the administration flatly that the law's wording required the government to get a warrant whenever a fixed wire is involved.
The rulings — which were not disclosed publicly until the congressional debate this month — represented an unusual rift between the court and the U.S. intelligence community. They led top intelligence officials to conclude, a senior official said, that "you can’t tell what this court is going to do" and helped provoke the White House to insist that Congress essentially strip the court of any jurisdiction over U.S. surveillance of communications between foreigners.
"All of a sudden, the world flipped upside down," said a senior administration official familiar with the rulings.
So naturally their solution is simply to remove the umpire and instead have the HOME TEAM make all the calls. Yeah, that's certain to ensure a fair and "just" result. And they did it by trying to scare the bejeezus out of Congress by claiming they were about be attacked at the Capital. Their own lives were supposedly "on the line."
"I think [Congress] made a mistake," Harman said of Congress’s passage of FISA changes shortly before the August recess. Highlighting the need to rein in the recent unchecked expansion of power, Harman issued a challenge to her colleagues in Congress:
Congress must act. Congress is on trial here. I think we did the wrong thing in August. We have to correct it this fall.
Watch it:
Harman urged the need to restore "the 4th Amendment to the Constitution, which prevents searches and seizures of Americans without probable cause."
We've seen this strategery so many times before. This is how the Iraq War was started in the first place, when Congress was given a National Intelligence whose classified section included a vigourous dissent on the veracity of the Niger Uranium and Aluminum Tube claims.
Who would've expected that you could trust what Colin Powell would say before the U.N.? Who could have predicted that each and every allegation would turn out to be bogus - and that long before his presentation there was ample information providing doubt (such the fact that al-Libi and Curveball couldn't be trust) which were known to analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency and field CIA people such as Tyler Drumheller but where either bullheadedly ignored or deliberally hidden by those at the head of the Administration.
Yet again with General Petreaus we've seen the exact same Powell strategy replayed, the facts that fit their view of the world are those they Administration lackeys like Petreaus - impervious to criticism (or common frickin sense) in his finest Military dress green - spout pseudo "fact" after "fact" to make the case for doing exactly what they're going to be doing anyway. It doesn't matter what the GAO, the most recent NIE and the Congressional Research Service says - just like it didn't matter what Tyler Drumheller tried to tell Deputy DCI McLaughlin about Curveball.
But it matters to Jane Harman, she's done here what she should have done. Dig hard until you find the facts.
Unfortunately Harman's efforts were too little and too late at the time, Congress did shift the ability to decided "fair and foul" from the independant court judicial referees to the Department of Justice's Home Team Lawyers - at least for the next six months.
Yet McConnell is already back before Congress with his hand out for more power, claiming that simply discussing FISA in public could Kill Americans (even after he was caught in yet another lie when he claimed that the new law helped stop the recent german terrorist plot), still playing the fear card like some magic ace of spades that can trump anything, even fact and reality.
It's high time that we stopped letting these cheap confidence artists get away with it and finally call "Bullshit" on that noise as Harman has done. Maybe we should let her know we appreciate her efforts?
Phone Numbers to Office of Jane Harman: Washington Phone: (202) 225 8220 Fax: (202) 226 7290
El Segundo 2321 E. Rosecrans Avenue, Suite 3270 El Segundo, CA 90245 Phone: (310) 643 3636 Fax: (310) 643 6445
(In full disclosure, I am not a constituant of Ms. Harman's but her El Segundo Offices are literally right down the street from my home just about 4 miles away)
In the last week Moveon.org has made the reich-wing of the Republican Party practically apoplectic with outrage that they would intimate "betrayal" on the part of General Patreaus.
In response to these attacks most Democratic leaders did what they seem to be best in response to the GOP and backed away from these comments so rapidly they practically left behind skid marks. Most that is, except for Hillary Clinton, who choose not to distance herself from Moveon, and instead dramatically said nothing. In turn this prompted a scathing attack from Rudy Giuliani which alleged that Hillary's non-Democratic non-Reaction was somehow an endorsement of attacking our troops.
Yesterday, Moveon decided it wasn't going to wait for any prominent Democrat to come their rescue (Snort). They punched back on their own - hard - with a new ad called "Betrayal of Trust".
The Giuiliani ad dares to point out that when Rudy had a chance to do something about Iraq and Al Qeada by being a part of the Iraq Survey Group he skipped out on the meetings to go make Millions at lucrative speaking engagements.
Hm - Patriotism and Service or Cold Hard Cash, which would a traitor choose?
Rudy's clear problem with this ad is the fact that it's absolutely true as opposed to repeated claims by Conservatives of Democratic and Liberal cowardice and betrayal - which aren't.
STEWART: No. They keep saying we don't understand the nature of this war. And critics keep saying, we understand the nature of it. You've been doing it wrong.
HAYES: Right, so why is that -- what's the, what's the quality of difference there?
STEWART: Well, no the, the difference there is, we're not calling them traitors.
With these new ads MoveOn.org seems to have now irrevocably changed that fact. NOW we're calling them "Traitors".
Amazingly Haynes denied that the administration and it's supports have regularly engaged in this type of character assassination against Democrats for years. At the time of his statement I myself compiled this list of examples.
Right-Wing Radio Pundit Buzz Patterson : "Democrat politicians, big media, academia, popular culture, and nongovernmental organizations" of forming "a Fifth Column" that is "facilitating defeat against Islamo-fascism" and that Most Liberals are Traitors.
Radio Host Mike Gallagher on Fox News: the U.S. government should "round up" actor Matt Damon, "The View" host Joy Behar, and MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann and "put them in a detention camp until this war is over because they’re a bunch of traitors."
Fox News Host : Wall Street Won’t Let A ‘Puny Little Traitor (who leaked the NSA Story)...Take Down Our Market’
Bill O'Reilly on Cindy Sheehan : I think Mrs. Sheehan bears some responsibility for this [publicity] and also for the responsibility for the other American families who lost sons and daughters in Iraq who feel this kind of behavior borders on treasonous.
South Carolina GOP chairman Katon Dawson : "Which one of the Democrat [sic] contenders are going to take [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid [D-NV] to task about giving aid and comfort to the enemies by claiming the global war on terror is lost?"
Dean Esmay on New York Times reporters: "Exposing such a secret program is not whistle-blowing -- it is high treason. When I say 'treason' I don't mean it in an insulting or hyperbolic way. I mean in a literal way: we need to find these 21st century Julius Rosenbergs, these modern day reincarnations of Alger Hiss, put them on trial before a jury of their peers, with defense counsel. When they are found guilty, we should then hang them by the neck until the [sic] are dead, dead, dead."
Michael Savage : former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright "should be tried for treason, and when she is found guilty, she should be hung."
Coulter on the Hamdan Decision : [Y]ou just expect Democrats to side with Al Qaeda." Coulter also stated that she couldn't "imagine that this country could have won World War II if this is the way one of the parties was behaving."
Rush Limbaugh : "Did (Joe) Wilson lie about Niger? Did Wilson commit treason?"
And then members of the Administration itself (who've been less direct but have still made the same point).
George Bush : "However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses."
Dick Cheney : "It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2nd, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again,"
George Bush : "I asked Congress to give me the flexibility necessary to be able to deal with the true threats of the 21st century by being able to move the right people to the right place at the right time so we can better assure America we're doing everything possible. The House responded, but the Senate is more interested in special interests in Washington and not interested in the security of the American people." [Bush remarks in Trenton, New Jersey, 9/23/02, emphasis added]
John Ashcroft : "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty; my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists - for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends." [Washington Post, 12/7/01;]
Karl Rove : "Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers." Conservatives, he said, "saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war."
This past Sunday on Meet the Press John McCain made the following accusation against Democrats.
McCain .I hope that we will have the patience and the understanding on the part of the American people that they’ve made great sacrifice and all of us are saddened by it. But I hope we can also point out the consequences of failure, which is what the Democrats are proposing now.
Fortunately John Kerry was sitting beside him and (having learned from bitter previous experience) refused to take that accusation lying down.
SEN. KERRY: Listen to that. You just said the Democrats are proposing failure. We’ve had...
SEN. McCAIN: Yeah. (Unintelligible)...failure.
SEN. KERRY: ...four and a half years of failure. The Republicans stood up and cheered for Rumsfeld, who had a policy of not enough troops. To his credit, John at least said he needs more troops. But the fact is they’ve supported every step of this president, misleading America about the course of this war. Last January the president stood up to Americans. You know what he said, Tim? He said, "We will hold them accountable to their benchmarks." They’re not holding them accountable. They have no means of holding them accountable because they’ve said we’re going to stay there with 130,000 troops into next summer. They have no leverage.
We are not proposing failure, as John loves to assert and Republicans loves to assert. We are proposing a way to strengthen America in the region. We’re proposing a way to, in fact, make Iraq successful to the degree that it can be by playing to the real undercurrents of their, of their cultural and historical divisions. Nothing in the surge addresses the question of Shia, Sunni divide. Nothing in the surge is going to resolve the fundamental reluctance of Iraqi politicians to make a decision, Tim.
Now, we’re not talking about abandoning the place. Why do the Republicans have a complete inability to envision a foreign policy, as we used to have, Republican and Democrat alike, which plays to our strengths and builds alliances with other countries? Bring the United Nations back in. Bring the neighbors into this. Have a standing summit in a standing conference where we resolve these differences as best as can be. The United States can’t do it alone. And we have to change the equation so we regain leverage and initiative. That’s not walking away, that’s walking forward and putting us in a stronger posture.
The Truth, which Kerry put so well, is that Democrats have been the ones standing up and pointing out Bush and the Republicans repeated failure, after failure after failure - and as a reward they've been repeatedly attacked as traitors, appeasers, cowards, cut-and-runners and surrender-monkeys.
Frankly hurting the troops delicate little feelings (with the truth, ugly though it may be), as if they were Tinkerbell in desperate need of applause - does not make anyone a "traitor".
The truth is that Bush and his supporters are the traitors, and it's well past time we began saying so regularly as MOveon.org has finally started to do.
Anyone who...
Willfully ignored warning after warning (from Richard Clarke, George Tenet to Condi, August 6th PDB, George Tenet in Crawford, 52 FAA hijack alerts) that the U.S. was under threat of imminent terrorist attack in 2001 - is a traitor.
Failed to respond to the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole once al Qeada was confirmed at the culprit - is a traitor.
Failed to ensure that our troops have adequate training and oversight (abu Grhaib), bullets, (not so hillbilly) armor, vehicles, helmets, clean water (KBR), health care (Walter reed) and treatment for PTSD, depression and suicide is a traitor.
Ignores a drowning American City for nearly a week and lets it SINK INTO OBLIVION then leaves it that way for two years (and counting) while letting the rest of our infrastructure slowly crumble into dust - is a traitor.
Failed to protect our national interests by engaging in diplomacy, even with our so-called enemies (as every previous administration has done) is a traitor
Failed to even try to kill or capture Bil Laden because we are an "ally" of Pakistan which has a non-aggression treaty with the Taliban and has merged with Al Qeada - is a traitor!
Tries to use the American Justice System to FIX ELECTIONS - is a traitor.
Violates National Security Rules and Guidelines by pretending to be in some mysterious Fourth Branch Of Government - is a Traitor.
Has Falsified and distorted current intelligence on the ground in Iraq, ignoring the GAO, the NIE, troops in the 82nd Airborne and 71% of the Iraq Public to proclaim that the "Surge is a Success" simply to keep our troops in harms way for political reasons - no matter how many ribbons are on his chest - IS A TRAITOR!
All of these people have betrayed their oath of office to uphold the Constitution and abide by the laws of this nation, all of these people have repeatedly abused and betrayed the trust of the American public time and time again.
But guess what? Most of those people Aren't Democrats!.
We've all been well aware of this for years now, it's well past time we weren't afraid to say so out loud.
I understand why prominent Democrats back away from such language, so do prominent Republicans (in public). They openly use Coulter-geist and Limp-baugh as the mouth pieces for their dirty work while trying to keep their own hands "clean". But it's also clear that they're working in concert - tag team style - Good GOPer/Bad GOPer.
It high time that we learned and began to employ that trick. We are the solders, the grunts, we make sure the dirty jobs get done. Sure Pelosi might not use the same fiery language we do - but that doesn't mean she isn't on the same team.
Fact is: A Spade is a spade and a Traitor is a Traitor. Say it Loud. Say it Proud.
Last night Keith-O's latest report on Iraq did a masterful job of breaking down exactly how the administration has been pulling a giant bait and switch confidence game since before the war when George Tenet originally told George Bush - there were no WMD's based on credible sources and was ignored.
It was "too late. This isn't about WMD anymore - it's about Regime Change" was the answer.
I think it's well past time we seriously considered some "Regime Change" of our own.
Since before the war the Administration has been playing us all for suckers. It's been a long standing elaborate confidence game. Bush grand strategy in Iraq is clear and simple and would fit on a postage stamp and still leave plenty of room - "Just Wait."
During a press conference today at the G8 summit in Russia, President Bush told President Vladimir Putin that Americans want Russia to develop a free press and free religion “like Iraq.” To laughter and applause, Putin responded: “We certainly would not want to have same kind of democracy as they have in Iraq, quite honestly.”
BUSH: I talked about my desire to promote institutional change in parts of the world, like Iraq, where there’s a free press and free religion. And I told him that a lot of people in our country would hope that Russia will do the same thing. I fully understand, however, that there will be a Russian-style democracy.
PUTIN: We certainly would not want to have same kind of democracy as they have in Iraq, quite honestly.
BUSH: Just wait.
"Just wait" - that's been the "strategery" all along. Also known as the "Sun will come out tomorrow" view. Bet your bottom dollar.
WILKERSON: Well, I think some neo-cons in the administration might have had that as a goal but I think the highest level of leadership in the administration‘s goal was quite clear and it was made clear by the fact that there was so little planning for post-invasion Iraq. The plan was to stay 90 to 120 days and then to substantially reduce the American presence. We would leave some hard stand for aircraft and so forth so that we could use Iraq as a lever in the Middle East in general, but we wouldn‘t have a substantial troop presence there after 90 to 120 days. That was the plan.
OLBERMANN: Year after year since that plan didn‘t happen, didn‘t turn out the way it was planned or not planned as the case may be, Democrats have gotten burned when the administration dangles this possibility of some kind of withdrawal. Why did the Democrats seem incapable of dealing with Mr. Bush on the terms we now know to be his as described in that biography and described again today in “USA Today” by Mr. Bolten that he wants a sustained presence there that outlasts his own term of office?
WILKERSON: Well, let me address that issue first. I think I‘m being proven correct here in my openings some months ago that the administration, particularly Vice President Cheney, had made a strategic decision that they could not fix the situation in Iraq, therefore they were going to do their best to simply pass it on to the next administration without too much damage to, they hope, the Republican party in their hopes to win the White House again in 2008. I think this is justification of the view. I believe they think they can‘t do anything really well in Iraq right now, so they‘re going to pass it on to the next administration.
That's it, in a nutshell. Everytime we fall tragically short of accomplishing any of our goals in the region, the Bushies reset the goal posts. That is exactly what has already happened with the deeply deceptive Patreaus President's report in Iraq. They've already been totally outed by the GAO while trying to cook the books on the surge escalation.
Ilan Goldenberg writes that one explanation for the contrary reports is because the military is not counting deaths from car bombs. The National Security Network notes that Petraeus has made a number of statements about the results of escalation that have been contradicted by Iraqi government data, independent media reports, and other U.S. agencies.
NSN writes, “The numbers have raised such alarm bells that a member of the Iraq Study Group, former ambassadors and leading academics have written to Congress asking them to look into the validity of U.S. government claims.”
This plain a sober analysis of simple facts has of course been attacked by the wingers who've said the General Accounting Office "isn't qualified" to - uh - account for events in Iraq. (Considered the fact that by the same standards the President, Vice President and most of their staff including SecDef Gates aren't qualified to run a war - the point is moot) They've now got their new neo-con attack poodle O'Hanlon repeating their discredit and dismiss strategy that Cheney used so effectively on Joe Wilson, now claiming that the GAO report is "flat-out sloppy" when his own data and reports - borrow from the GAO.
How stupid must he feel now?
Just like when Iraq Foreign Minister Sabri told Tenet that "Saddam destroyed his WMD's in 1991" and was blown off. They didn't listen to him or the Gen. Hussein Kamel who'd said the same thing back in 1996, the Energy Dept who said the aluminum tubes were harmless and the UN Inspector who said our WMD Intel was Garbage, instead they listened to liars like Curveball, Ibn Sheik al-Libi and the Niger Forgeries. Today we're seeing the exact same situation repeated over and over again. The truth is being blown off. The facts are being ignored and the lies promoted as valid. Bush is claiming a great victory in Al Anbar, a wonderful validation of the "surge" when the truth is that the Sunni Militia in Anbar province had decided to fight against al Qaeda before the surge even began.
``In Anbar you're seeing firsthand the dramatic differences that can come when the Iraqis are more secure,'' Bush told U.S. troops, a friendly sea of soldiers and Marines dressed in camouflage uniforms. ``You see Sunnis who once fought side by side with al-Qaida against coalition troops now fighting side by side with coalition troops against al-Qaida.''
In truth, the progress in Anbar was initiated by the Iraqis themselves, a point Gates himself made, saying the Sunni tribes decided to fight and retake control from al-Qaida many months before Bush decided to send an extra 4,000 Marines to Anbar as part of his troop buildup.
There it is in black and white. The Sunni's turned on al Qeada themselves after they had successfully manage to ethnically cleanse the area (either by killing or intimidation) of all oppossing Shia. They had effecively WON their local civil war and simply turned against al Qeada to completely lock down their control of the area.
Sunni and Shia are self-segregating because they're either dead or they've fled the area.
That's how the fighting will eventually be ended, not by the ineffective and corrupt Iraqi Police or Army, not by their joke of a government - but by gradual implementation of their own "final solution."
Peace through Genocide.
Meanwhile, we just stand by and wait... and wait.. and wait, until Bush can quietly sneak out the back door, and when the next President finally start to clean this fracking mess up with some actual diplomacy - Bush will take all the credit.
I know that this pack of rabid criminals running the White House and the Government have got you hopping mad with ignoring Richard Clark, ignoring the Cole, ignoring the PDB, ignoring the attempted invervention on Rice and the Crawford One-on-One with Tenet on Osama, Yellowcake, no al-Qaeda in Iraq, trumped up links between Saddam and 9-11, ignoring the insurgency, ignoring the Iraqi People, ignoring Afghanistan, Body Armor, Abu Ghraib, Tora Bora, Gitmo, revoking Habeaus Corpus, the Katrina aftermath, ignoring both Fact and Science on climate change and stem cells, the Voter Caging, Freedom Fries, the midnight ride to Terry Schiavo's hospice, the Domestic Spying, The NSL's, outing Valerie Plame-Wilson, Diebold, Abramov, Safavian, Guckert, the "fucking faith-based thing", the midnight ride to Ashcroft's bedside, the Partisan Purging of DOJ and Civic Rights Division, Walter Reed, the Cheney Branch of Government and most of all -- the endless lies and bullcrap about all the above.
But take deep breath say these words with me.
"It's not time to Impeach, not yet."
This diary is directly squarely at the Impeach First, Ask questions later crowd.
And I'm sure "Ok, smart-guy - why not?" is what many of you are saying right now.
Unfortunately the answer isn't simple, so bear with me - but the main problem is the fact that Bush hasn't been caught red-handed yet.
Just yesterday I posted a rec'd Dkos diary on the Contempt of Congress motion being brought forward by John Conyers judiciary committee. That news was met here, at the Impeachment Captial of the Web, with a great deal of skeptism and frustration. It was too weak, too timid. Yet I think that objectively Conyers is doing exactly what he needs to do and shouldn't jump the gun all the way to drawing up articles of Impeachment against Bush because of one simple fact.
There was even a Defense Argument by Major Danby posted against my many and various charges to which I submitted a Rebuttal and then rested my case.
Back then we didn't have majority control of congress. Impeachment was an abstraction. A wishful dream. Now Dems do have control and many of us are getting quite upset at the "lack of progress" so far - many of us are ready to throw up our hands in frustration at the inaction of the Congress Critters.
Congress's approval rating is even lower than the President's and that's saying something - but what it says isn't good.
I understand this frustration, really I do, but the fact is that things are going exactly as they should.
Back then I was speaking generally, and including the idea of Impeaching Rumsfeld (who was still in office) as well as Gonzales and Cheney, but now I'm just focusing on Bush himself and in my view it simply isn't his time yet.
Oh, we thought we had him with the Downing Street Minutes, but not quite because you see - "fixing the facts around the policy" were the words of various British ministers who were quoting (apparently) the words of Tenet and Rice, but not Bush.
We thought we had him with Downing Street II, when it was revealed that Bush had admitted to Blair that it didn't matter whether Saddam had WMD's or not, he was invading anyway.
Unfortunately, being an F-inking Liar to the press and the American people isn't a criminal offense and so far isn't Impeachable.
And I don't care what Arlen Specter says about there being a law against "False Official Statements" (something he's mentioned several times in relation to Alberto Gonzales) - there isn't one. That term refers to a set of Military Regs, and could lead to a court-martial for members of the military who lie on official documentation, but it doesn't exist in criminal law.
So yes, he lied about not planning to fire Rumsfeld - annoying - but not Impeachable.
Going Count by Count...
Intelligence Fraud : Much of the real mischief took place far downstream from Bush. It happened with Douglas Feith who stovepiped and cooked intelligence while the DIA kept vital info such as the real facts about al-Libby and Curveball hidden and Cheney kept pressing the Niger-Yellowcake story alive despite 14 different skeptical rebuttals. That's a hit on the "Rumsfeld and Cheney Cabal" as Lawrence Wilkerson has described it - but not Bush.
Domestic Espionage: This issue remains on appeal after Judge Anne Diggs-Taylor's viciously pointed ruling on the NSA wire-tapping programs. She did declare that It was a crime one which we know has been specifically authorized and implemented by Bush personally - but we don't yet know what the appeals courts will say and whether they Supremes will back Diggs-Taylor or not.
There is also the fact that a FISA Judge has since signed off on the program, which again makes the issue largely moot - for now.
Except for the Midnight Ride to Ashcroft's bed which is a new revelation and may open up direct links both to breaking the law, since that version of the NSA program was found to be illegal by the DOJ - and was temporarily implemented by the White House anyway over the objections and threats to resign by Ashcroft and Comey. Gonzo is looking at perjury for his false Congressional testimony - but, we still don't yet have any direct links to Bush other than his making the phone call to Ashcroft's wife indicating that Card and Gonzo were "heading over". Who exactly made the decision to override the DOJ has not yet been revealed.
War Crimes: This mostly leads back to Gonzales' advice and attempts to circumvent Geneva by trumping up this "Enemy Combatants" pseudo status nonesense - and to Rumsfeld for authorizing interrogation techniques outside the Army Field Manual guidelines. Bush has been an accessory after the fact, but it's largely their crime.
Criminal Negligence: Last year I argued for Impeachment in the wake of Katrina, the failure to respond to 9-11 warnings, the deteriorating situation in Iraq and Bush's abuse of Signing Statements. Unfortunately Bush was far from the only one who totally fucked-up in these situations. Ample blame can and will be thrown at Ray Nagin, Kathleen Blanco, Rumseld, Tommy Franks, Colin Powell, George Tenet and others. The legal basis for Bush's use of signing statements has not been challenged or verified either way. Again annoying, probably extra-constitutional - but not illegal, yet.
All the above is very different from what actually occured in either Nixon's case or Clinton's impeachment - they were both busted cold.
The Paula Jones Story and suit broke while Clinton was running for President in 1992, it didn't metastisize into a full-blown disaster until six years later in 1998 when Clinton was caught in carefully crafted perjury trap during his deposition and further pummelled during in his Grand Jury testimony. It was his own words under oath that got him into trouble, not the actions of anyone else.
Nixon's near impeachment was a different story, but it was still his own words that did the trick. It also took quite a long while find out what those words actually were.
The Watergate Break-In took place in June of 1972, all five burglars were tried and convicted by January of 1973 for breaking and entering. It was a minor little case, until one of the burglars wrote a letter to the presiding judge.
In March 1973, James McCord, one of the convicted burglars, wrote a letter to Sirica charging a massive coverup of the burglary. His letter transformed the affair into a political scandal of unprecedented magnitude.
With the help of Mark Felt (Deep Throat) Woodward and Bernstein at the WaPo as well as Senate investigators began to slowly unravel exactly what McCord's letter was really talking about.
All the witnesses rallied around the president, until in June of 1973 John Dean testified - and gasp - told the truth!
But that didn't break open the floodgates, it just made Nixon circle that wagons even tighter. Dean was written off as a kook.
The story was over.
A month later in July the existence of the White House taping system was revealed during congressional testimony by Alexander Butterfield. Congress subpoened the tapes which led to Nixon trying to fight those subpoenas with the Saturday Night Massacre on October 20, 1973 having Robert Bork fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox when Attorney General Elliot Richardson refused to drop the axe himself.
This move is what turned the Republicans against Nixon - before they or anyone else even knew what was really on the tapes. Eventually Nixon complied with the subpoena and after people heard the tapes and their transcripts in April of 1974 it was all over but the shouting.
But here's the kicker...
Impeachment proceedings against Nixon didn't begin until May 9th of 1974 almost one year after Dean's initial testimony and almost two years after the initial break-in.
We haven't yet had anyone stand up and truly spill the beans the way John Dean did in 1973 or Fawn Hall and Ollie North did in 1986. We haven't yet found the smoking gun tape, a piece of evidence which specifically points to crimes by Bush himself. We haven't had a Saturday Night Massacre - all because many people in the current administration were there during Watergate [as well as] Iran-Contra and they are specifically trying to avoid getting caught in the same way.
When it does happen, it probably going to be from something we haven't anticipated yet.
So with all this in mind, what I have to say to the IMPEACH NOW people is ... calm down and have a bit more patience.
We're going the right direction, and we're right on schedule - at this point we're looking at a constitutional showdown on the contempt of congress charges by late summer/early winter. Either Harriet Miers and Josh Bolton are going to court (and prison) or we're going to get the the truth in detail early next year - possibly both - just in time for fabulous mid 2008 Summer Impeachment and Removal Trial Extravoganza! .
Don't forget to bring the hot-dogs and the charcoal.
In the meantime, rather than obsessing over Bush - let's focus on Gonzo, 1) he's already in major criminal jeopardy and 2) he's the gatekeeper on access to yummy Special Counsel goodness.
Once we get a real dogged SC on the case, all bets are off the table.
