Just Don’t Call It Torture

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And we know for a fact that information wrung from 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others has helped prevent further attacks on U.S. soil.

The quote above is from an editorial in Opinion Journal defending torture. Like most rightie “facts,” this fact was born from faith rather than from evidence. Let’s look at what we actually do know.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured in March 2003. It is alleged that KSM is being held in a “ghost” prison, possibly in Jordan, so that CIA interrogators can use “interrogation methods that are banned by US law.”

Sounds like he might have been tortured, yes. On the other hand, our President says we do not torture. Is the Opinion Journal editorial writer assuming that Bush lies? (Snort)

So, we don’t know for a fact that KSM was tortured, but for argument’s sake let’s assume he was. Did torturing KSM really provide information that “helped prevent further attacks on U.S. soil?” According to the White House’s own reckoning, one terrorist plot has been foiled on U.S. soil since KSM was captured, which was “to attack targets on the East Coast of the United States using hijacked commercial airplanes.” We have no way to know if “interrogating” KSM provided any information about that one plot. And we have no way to know if that one plot really was a plot and not a figment of John Ashcroft’s overheated imagination.

To give credit where credit is due, according to this Washington Post article KSM was behind a thwarted attempt to bomb London’s Heathrow Airport in mid-2003. And below the White House list of ten “plots” is a list of five “casings and infiltrations,” one of which (#2, collecting information on U.S. gas stations) involved KSM, according to WaPo. But we have no way to know from information made public so far how these “plots” or “casings” were uncovered, and we have to take on faith these were serious plots (or “casings,” as the case may be).

But the White House’s claims of attacks prevented on U.S. soil are a tad sketchy, and even if we assume these were all real plots that really were prevented, we don’t know for a fact where the intelligence came from that helped stop them. It could just as easily have come from standard law-enforcement type practices (e.g., wiretaps etc.) as from “interrogations.” Continue reading →

Serious Matters

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IF it weren’t tragic it would be a New Yorker cartoon. The president of the United States, in the final stop of his forlorn Latin America tour last week, told the world, “We do not torture.” Even as he spoke, the administration’s flagrant embrace of torture was as hard to escape as publicity for Anderson Cooper.

The vice president, not satisfied that the C.I.A. had already been implicated in four detainee deaths, was busy lobbying Congress to give the agency a green light to commit torture in the future. Dana Priest of The Washington Post, having first uncovered secret C.I.A. prisons two years ago, was uncovering new “black sites” in Eastern Europe, where ghost detainees are subjected to unknown interrogation methods redolent of the region’s Stalinist past. Before heading south, Mr. Bush had been doing his own bit for torture by threatening to cast the first veto of his presidency if Congress didn’t scrap a spending bill amendment, written by John McCain and passed 90 to 9 by the Senate, banning the “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment of prisoners.

So when you watch the president stand there with a straight face and say, “We do not torture” – a full year and a half after the first photos from Abu Ghraib – you have to wonder how we arrived at this ludicrous moment. The answer is not complicated. When people in power get away with telling bigger and bigger lies, they naturally think they can keep getting away with it. And for a long time, Mr. Bush and his cronies did. Not anymore. — Frank Rich, New York Times, November 13, 2005

It’s a shame the way that Frank Rich minces words. He should just come out and say what he thinks.

He goes on to say that the American people are not buying GOP talking points that the Libby-Rove-Plame investigation is all just politics; polls show that “roughly 8 in 10 Americans regard the leak case as a serious matter.” Further, “57 percent of Americans believe that Mr. Bush deliberately misled the country into war.”

Frank Rich continues,

The Bush loyalists’ push to discredit the Libby indictment failed because Americans don’t see it as a stand-alone scandal but as the petri dish for a wider culture of lying that becomes more visible every day. The last-ditch argument rolled out by Mr. Bush on Veterans Day in his latest stay-the-course speech – that Democrats, too, endorsed dead-wrong W.M.D. intelligence – is more of the same. Sure, many Democrats (and others) did believe that Saddam had an arsenal before the war, but only the White House hyped selective evidence for nuclear weapons, the most ominous of all of Iraq’s supposed W.M.D.’s, to whip up public fears of an imminent doomsday.

And then there was, IMO, the Mother of All Lies —

There was also an entire other set of lies in the administration’s prewar propaganda blitzkrieg that had nothing to do with W.M.D.’s, African uranium or the Wilsons. To get the country to redirect its finite resources to wage war against Saddam Hussein rather than keep its focus on the war against radical Islamic terrorists, the White House had to cook up not only the fiction that Iraq was about to attack us, but also the fiction that Iraq had already attacked us, on 9/11. Thanks to the Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, who last weekend released a previously classified intelligence document, we now have conclusive evidence that the administration’s disinformation campaign implying a link connecting Saddam to Al Qaeda and 9/11 was even more duplicitous and manipulative than its relentless flogging of nuclear Armageddon.

But…but…but…the White House says they never claimed Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11! Or did they?

This report by David Shuster was on MSNBC yesterday:

…the White House started claiming that Iraq and the group responsible for 9/11 were one in the same.

“The war on terror, you can’t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror,” said Bush on September 25, 2002.

“We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases,” said Bush a few days later on October 7. “He’s a threat because he is dealing with Al-Qaeda.”

In pushing the Saddam-Iraq-9/11 connection, both the president and the vice president made two crucial claims. First, they alleged there had been a 1994 meeting in the Sudan between Osama bin Laden and an Iraqi intelligence official.

After the Iraq war began, however, the 9/11 Commission was formed and reported that while Osama bin Laden may have requested Iraqi help, “Iraq apparently never responded.”

The other crucial pre-war White House claim was that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in the Czech republic in April 2001.

Cheney stated, “It’s been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a Senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service.”

Confirmed or unconfirmed by Vice President Cheney the 9/11 Commission said, “We do not believe such a meeting occurred.” Why? Because cell phone records from the time show Atta in the United States.

None the less, the White House strategy worked. In March of 2003, one poll found 45 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11.

On the eve of the Iraq war, the White House sent a letter to Congress telling lawmakers that force was authorized against those who, “aided the 9/11 attacks.”

Yet the Bush administration continues to say it never claimed Iraq was linked to 9/11.

“I think I made it very clear that we have never made that claim,” White House Press Secretary McClellan repeated on Sept. 17, 2003.

The brutal irony is that while implications, innuendo, or false claims if you will about a 9/11 connection helped take us into Iraq. The Iraqi war itself has created a real al-Qaeda/Iraq link that may keep us from getting out.

Do you remember the pre-flightsuit, “military” (cough) phase of the Iraq war? Do you remember that a flag that had flown at the Pentagon on September 11 somehow ended up in the hands of a U.S. Marine, who by coincidence was one of the Marines who pulled down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad? The Marines couldn’t actually raise the flag–wouldn’t have looked right, you know–but they could, with much publicity, cover Saddam Hussein’s bronze head with the flag before they pulled the statue down. If Karl Rove wasn’t behind that …

Let’s go back to Frank Rich.

… in October 2002, as the White House was officially rolling out its new war and Congress was on the eve of authorizing it – Mr. Bush gave a major address in Cincinnati intermingling the usual mushroom clouds with information from that discredited, “intentionally misleading” Qaeda informant. “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases,” he said. It was the most important, if hardly the only, example of repeated semantic sleights of hand that the administration used to conflate 9/11 with Iraq. Dick Cheney was fond of brandishing a nonexistent April 2001 “meeting” between Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague long after Czech and American intelligence analysts had dismissed it.

The power of these lies was considerable. In a CBS News/New York Times poll released on Sept. 25, 2001, 60 percent of Americans thought Osama bin Laden had been the culprit in the attacks of two weeks earlier, either alone or in league with unnamed “others” or with the Taliban; only 6 percent thought bin Laden had collaborated with Saddam; and only 2 percent thought Saddam had been the sole instigator. By the time we invaded Iraq in 2003, however, CBS News found that 53 percent believed Saddam had been “personally involved” in 9/11; other polls showed that a similar percentage of Americans had even convinced themselves that the hijackers were Iraqis.

The full story of how the Bushies managed to sell this whopper to so many Americans has yet to be told. Of course, that’s not the only story we don’t know in full. Rich writes,

There is still much more to learn about our government’s duplicity in the run-up to the war, just as there is much more to learn about what has gone on since, whether with torture or billions of Iraq reconstruction dollars. That is why the White House and its allies, having failed to discredit the Fitzgerald investigation, are now so desperate to slow or block every other inquiry.

The White House has launched a counter-offensive against its critics. Bushies are wounded and cornered, so they are going to be vicious. Our job is to keep the pressure on, to answer the lies, and to call loudly for investigations. The next few months could be pivotal.

People of Faith

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Righties are nearly giddy with joy at yesterday’s combative Veterans Day address by George W. Bush. Dear Leader is finally fighting back, and now the sun will shine and birds will chirp and all the awful bad poll numbers will go away.

At the rightie blog PoliPundit, Lorie Byrd wrote,

I agree with Michelle [Malkin] that the outrageous allegations of “lying” and “misleading” into war should have been addressed sooner. At one time I thought maybe it was better that Bush not personally respond, but that others do it for him. And many did a good job. As time passed though, and those allegations got repeated enough, with the media never questioning their validity, but merely parroting them over and over again, they gained an air of credibility about them. That is all that the public has heard in the mainstream media for two years now. Many have accepted those allegations as truth. I am very impatient. I could not have waited as long as Bush has to come out swinging. Maybe, though, if the President and his people come out forcefully enough now, armed with unassailable facts, they might be able to make a stronger argument than they would have if they were playing defense. I have been begging for this for a while now and would have liked to have seen it sooner, but it will be interesting to see if the President’s timing and method of action are effective.

Michelle also described Norman Podhoretz’s essay which was linked here as “the clear catalyst for Bush’s speech.”

“Outrageous” allegations? One wonders if righties understand what truth is.

Let’s say you ask me, “Have you seen Jane lately? How is she?” and I respond truthfully that I saw her last week and she was fine, you would naturally assume that Jane is fine. But if I knew for a fact that last night Jane was run over by a train and is being refrigerated at the county morgue, and didn’t bother to pass along that little detail, then my response would not have been honest.

But this is essentially the rightie approach to “truth.” For example, in the essay linked above Podhoretz writes,

And even Hans Blix–who headed the UN team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the past–lent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion:

    The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. . . . They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.

Blix now claims that he was only being “cautious” here, but if, as he now also adds, the Bush administration “misled itself” in interpreting the evidence before it, he at the very least lent it a helping hand.

Blix may very well have said all those things. But Podhoretz leaves out the inconvenient little detail that at the eve of the invasion Blix was begging the White House to at least postpone the invasion and give the inspectors more time, because they were not finding WMDs and doubted, at the very least, they were there.

Podhoretz’s whole essay is like that; it’s all spin and talking points. It is literally factual and deeply dishonest at the same time.

Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus write in today’s Washington Post:

President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.

Neither assertion is wholly accurate.

The administration’s overarching point is true: Intelligence agencies overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and very few members of Congress from either party were skeptical about this belief before the war began in 2003. Indeed, top lawmakers in both parties were emphatic and certain in their public statements.

But Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though concluding that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the administration exaggerated or distorted those conclusions.

National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, briefing reporters Thursday, countered “the notion that somehow this administration manipulated the intelligence.” He said that “those people who have looked at that issue, some committees on the Hill in Congress, and also the Silberman-Robb Commission, have concluded it did not happen.”

But the only committee investigating the matter in Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether officials mischaracterized intelligence by omitting caveats and dissenting opinions. And Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of Bush’s commission on weapons of mass destruction, said in releasing his report on March 31, 2005: “Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry.”

President Bush’s speech yesterday was one miscarriage of truth after another.

Bush, in Pennsylvania yesterday, was more precise, but he still implied that it had been proved that the administration did not manipulate intelligence, saying that those who suggest the administration “manipulated the intelligence” are “fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments.”

In the same speech, Bush asserted that “more than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.” Giving a preview of Bush’s speech, Hadley had said that “we all looked at the same intelligence.”

But Bush does not share his most sensitive intelligence, such as the President’s Daily Brief, with lawmakers. Also, the National Intelligence Estimate summarizing the intelligence community’s views about the threat from Iraq was given to Congress just days before the vote to authorize the use of force in that country.

In addition, there were doubts within the intelligence community not included in the NIE. And even the doubts expressed in the NIE could not be used publicly by members of Congress because the classified information had not been cleared for release. For example, the NIE view that Hussein would not use weapons of mass destruction against the United States or turn them over to terrorists unless backed into a corner was cleared for public use only a day before the Senate vote.

As Chuck at Just a Bump in the Beltway said,

Anyone see a pattern here? Much like the Patriot Act and other controversial activities, the White House and its allies repeatedly waited util the last second to present confusing and sometimes incomplete information to Congress and rammed through a vote on it right away.

Milbank and Pincus continue,

Bush, in his speech Friday, said that “it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began.” But in trying to set the record straight, he asserted: “When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support.”

The October 2002 joint resolution authorized the use of force in Iraq, but it did not directly mention the removal of Hussein from power.

The resolution voiced support for diplomatic efforts to enforce “all relevant Security Council resolutions,” and for using the armed forces to enforce the resolutions and defend “against the continuing threat posed by Iraq.”

In other words, in “trying to set the record straight,” Bush lied about the record.

Hadley, in his remarks, went further. “Congress, in 1998, authorized, in fact, the use of force based on that intelligence,” he said. “And, as you know, the Clinton administration took some action.”

But the 1998 legislation gave the president authority “to support efforts to remove the regime of Saddam Hussein” by providing assistance to Iraqi opposition groups, including arms, humanitarian aid and broadcasting facilities.

President Bill Clinton ordered four days of bombing of Iraqi weapons facilities in 1998, under the 1991 resolution authorizing military force in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Describing that event in an interview with CBS News yesterday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said: “We went to war in 1998 because of concerns about his weapons of mass destruction.”

I believe Condi has equated Clinton’s bombing with “going to war” before. Never mind that the “Clinton did it too” defense sounds a tad juvenile — I wasn’t the only one who threw eggs at Mr. Johnson’s car! Billy did it, too! — it is ludicrous on its face to equate Clinton’s bombing with “going to war.”

But to righties, that does’t matter. The hard-core rightie faithful, which includes most rightie bloggers, will grasp at any verbiage that comes out of a White House officials’ mouth as “unassailable facts” that repudiate the lies of the trickster left. That’s because any challenge to the fantasy world they live in scares the piss out of them. It is absolutely futile to try to reason with most of them, because they’ll turn purple and start screaming before you can finish a sentence. But it is vital for all of us to keep setting the record straight, so that Americans who are capable of appreciating the truth get to hear the truth.

Fathers’ Rights

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I’m all for equal rights for fathers, but why don’t they have equal liability?

A 4-month-old girl died when her inebriated mother fell asleep on top of her while breast-feeding, prosecutors said. …

The 27-year-old — who was on probation for child neglect — had consumed six double-shot alcoholic beverages at a bowling alley, the complaint said. A toxicologist estimated her blood alcohol level ranged from .15 to .27 percent.

Her husband drove Hawkins and their 4-year-old daughter to the bowling alley and later brought them home, then went out drinking himself, according to the complaint. The baby was unresponsive when he returned an hour later, the complaint said.

Hawkins was on probation for neglect of the same child, and was prohibited from drinking alcohol and from having unsupervised contact with all four of her children at once, court documents show.

If there’s a negleced child, how come only the mother was on probation for neglect? And how come the father isn’t being charged with something regarding the child’s death?

Hypocrite in Chief

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Throughout history, tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that murder is justified to serve their grand vision. And they end up alienating decent people across the globe.

This is from President Bush’s Veteran’s Day address. And I bet he said it with a straight face.

Other howlers:

My administration remains firmly committed to serving America’s veterans.

(APPLAUSE)

Since I took office, my administration has increased spending for veterans by $24 billion, an increase of 53 percent.

In the first four years as president, we increased spending for veterans more than twice as much as the previous administration did in eight years. And I want to thank the members of the Congress and the Senate for joining me in the effort to support our veterans.

For some accounts of the many ways the Bush Administration has tried to screw both veterans and active-duty military, go here, here, and here. This very week, Republicans in Congress were pushing for $600 million in cuts to veteran’s benefits, which would deny health care to 100,000 veterans.

Is the President lying when he says he increased spending? Not necessarily. He has had to spend more because of the carnage created by his policies.

Then Bush wanders into the topic of radical Islamic terrorism. Catch this “transition”:

Islamic radicalism is more like a loose network with many branches than an army under a single command. Yet these operatives fighting on scattered battlefields share a similar ideology and vision for our world.

We know the vision of the radicals because they have openly stated it in videos and audio tapes and letters and declarations and on Web sites.

First, these extremists want to end American and Western influence in the broader Middle East, because we stand for democracy and peace and stand in the way of their ambitions.

Al Qaida’s leader, Osama bin Laden, has called on Muslims to dedicated, quote, “their resources, their sons and money to driving the infidels out of our lands.”

The tactics of Al Qaida and other Islamic extremists have been consistent for a quarter of a century.

They hit us and they expect us to run.

We didn’t run, exactly, but we did allow the people who “hit us” to get away while we invaded someone else.

Last month, the world learned of a letter written by Al Qaida’s number two man, a guy named Zawahiri. And he wrote this letter to his chief deputy in Iraq, the terrorist Zarqawi.

In it, Zawahiri points to the Vietnam War as a model for Al Qaida. This is what he said: “The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left their agents is noteworthy.”

See how slick he is? We go from the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 to Iraq, without a blink. He doesn’t come out and say “Iraq was involved in September 11,” but anyone listening to this speech who didn’t know better would infer that it did. This is, I’m sure, what the speechwriter intended.

The terrorists witnessed a similar response after the attacks on American troops in Beirut in 1983 and Mogadishu in 1993.

They believe that America can be made to run again, only this time on a larger scale, with greater consequences.

Secondly, the militant network wants to use the vacuum created by an American retreat to gain control of a country, a base from which to launch attacks and conduct their war against non-radical Islam governments.

I’m sure that is what they want, but never forget it was the Bush White House who made this possible. Removing Saddam Hussein from power played right into Osama bin Laden’s plans. See also testimony here on the fact that Saddam Hussein, bad guy though he certainly was, was at least not allowing al Qaeda to train in areas under his control.

But, thanks to Bush, they are training in some of those places now.

And let us not forget that the Bushies deliberately allowed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to escape on at least three occasions.

Bush continues,

In his recent letter, Zawahiri writes that Al Qaida views Iraq as, quote, “the place of the greatest battle.”

The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity. We must recognize Iraq as the central front in our war against the terrorists.

The “front” appears to be bleeding over into Jordan, but let’s go on … The “great battle” of Iraq is a living monument to the failure of the Bush Administration to respond correctly to September 11. We shouldn’t be fighting there at all. The organization responsible for September 11 primarily was in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and it operated only in those parts of Iraq that Saddam Hussein did not control. We held back in Afghanistan because the Bushies already were preparing to invade Iraq. We let Osama bin Laden get away, and then we fulfilled his dearest wish and invaded another Muslim country that was no danger to us. We might as well have sent Halliburton to Osama with orders to build his training camps.

Then Bush whines on for a bit about how Syria had better watch its butt — like they have reason to be afraid of us now — then he complains about

elements of the Arab news media that incite hatred and anti-Semitism, that feed conspiracy theories and speak of a so-called American war on Islam, with seldom a worry about American action to protect Muslims in Afghanistan and Bosnia and Somalia and Kosovo and Kuwait and Iraq, or seldom a word about our generous assistance to Muslims recovering from national disasters in places like Indonesia and Pakistan.

Our government denies that U.S. military used white phosphorous against Iraqi civilians, but the Army’s own arguments are contradictory. The military denied bombing a wedding last year, also. And read this recent Fareed Zakaria column, which begins, “Ask any American soldier in Iraq when the general population really turned against the United States and he will say, ‘Abu Ghraib.'”

Stuff like this happens in war, which is why it’s a bit irrational to invade people who were no threat to you and then expect them to love you for it. It’s your actions, not your good intentions, that people notice.

Stephen Zunes wrote for ZNet:

What Bush fails to note is that much of the suffering and frustration felt by the Iraqi people is a direct result of U.S. policy. Not only did the Iraqi people suffer under decades of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship (which was backed by the United States during the peak of his repression in the 1980s), the U.S. led one of most intense bombing campaigns in world history against Iraq in 1991, resulting in severe damage to the civilian infrastructure. This was followed by a dozen years of crippling U.S.-led economic sanctions that resulted in the deaths hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, mostly children, from malnutrition and preventable diseases. As a result of the U.S. invasion, at least 20,000 civilians have died violent deaths, the country is facing a low-level civil war and an unprecedented crime wave, basic utilities have yet to be restored on a regular basis, unemployment is at an all-time high, there are mounting ethnic tensions which threaten to tear the country apart, priceless national artifacts have been stolen or destroyed from museums and archeological sites, and infant mortality is way up.

Bush continues,

Some have also argued that extremists have been strengthened by our actions in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals.

I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001.

This is nearly word-for-word from a speech Bush made on October 6, of which Fred Kaplan wrote,

This is mere playing with words. Notice: First, he cites the claim that the U.S. occupation has “strengthened” the extremists; then he dismisses some straw man’s contention that our presence has “caused or triggered” the radicals’ rage. The fact that 9/11 preceded the invasion of Iraq is irrelevant to the point that he started to counter—that the occupation “strengthened” the insurgency. This point is incontestable. (On the most basic level, before the invasion, there was no insurgency and no al-Qaida presence in Iraq, except for a training camp run by Zarqawi—and that was in the Kurdish-controlled northern enclave, which Bush could have bombed, and was encouraged by the Joint Chiefs to bomb, at any time.) More important, to evade the point is to misunderstand this phase of the war—and, therefore, to misjudge how to win it.

[Update: This wasn’t the only section of today’s speech lifted from the October 6 speech; see Sadly, No.]

Bush continues,

No act of ours invited the rage of killers and no concession, bribe or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder.

On the contrary, they target nations whose behavior they believe they can change through violence.

Isn’t that the excuse we’re making for invading Iraq–that we could change them by force into becoming a pro-western democracy?

Come to think of it, that makes about as much sense as the sound of one hand clapping. A war koan!

Against such an enemy, there is only one effective response: We will never back down, we will never give in, we will never accept anything less than complete victory.

That sounds grand, but as Fred Kaplan points out Bush has yet to explain what he means by “victory” and how he plans to get there.

Then he goes on about awful things Islamic terrorists have done. And these are, indeed, awful things. Islamic terrorists are nasty and dangerous and up to no good. It would be really nice if we had some effective policies to counter them, instead of Bush’s policies, which empower Islamic terrorism and make it stronger.

Here’s the part of the speech getting headlines:

Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war.

These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments related to Iraq’s weapons programs.

That’s because the bipartisan Senate investigation didn’t look for evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments related to Iraq’s weapons programs. From Media Matters:

In fact, there has been no official investigation into whether the Bush administration “lied about intelligence [or] distorted intelligence … to produce assessments that would support a supposedly pre-baked decision to invade Iraq.”

The first phase of the Senate Intelligence report determined, by the unanimous 17-0 vote that Garrett referenced, that intelligence assessments were not tainted by “pressure” that analysts received from policymakers, but it did not investigate whether the Bush administration misused that intelligence. The committee postponed analysis of the latter, more volatile question until after the 2004 presidential election, pledging to include it in phase two of the report. The Robb-Silberman report similarly excluded examination of the use of intelligence, noting: “[W]e were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community.”

Can we say that righties by nature are congential liars? I think we can.

They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein.

Well, not about the aluminum tubes, or buying yellowcake in Africa, and in March 2003 the UN weapons inspectors were begging Bush for more time because they weren’t finding WMDs …

They know the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions, citing his development and possession of weapons of mass destruction.

The UN wasn’t keen on us invading, either.

Many of these critics supported my opponent during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: “When I vote to give the president of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat and a grave threat to our security.”

That’s why more than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.

The newest offensive in the War on Terra is on reality itself. Those 100 Democrats did not have access to the same intelligence; they had access to intelligence cherry-picked and massaged by the Bushies.

To his credit, Bush took the time to say that the enemy is not Islam, but extremists. And then finally, near the end, we get to the quote at the top of this post — “tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that murder is justified to serve their grand vision. And they end up alienating decent people across the globe.” In this case it’s the neocons’ grand vision, and the United States government trying to simultaneous claim that we don’t murder and torture innocent people but, by the way, we need to have a free hand to murder and torture people just in case.

And they’re ending up alienating decent people across the globe.

It Ain’t Over ‘Til Scooter Sings

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Murray Waas has a new article at National Review Journal explaining that Karl Rove is not free and clear.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald delayed a decision on whether to seek criminal charges against Karl Rove in large part because he wants to determine whether Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, can provide information on Rove’s role in the CIA leak case, according to attorneys involved in the investigation.

Even if Fitzgerald concludes in the near future that he does not have sufficient evidence to charge Rove, the special prosecutor would not rule out bringing charges at a later date and would not finish his inquiry on Rove until he hears whatever information Libby might provide — either incriminating or exculpatory — on Rove’s role, the sources said.

Karl could be under a cloud for many, many months. Heh.

Armistice Day

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It’s Armistice Day. Click here for a Wilfred Owen retrospective. More here.

Today the French are pleading for calm. The Brits observed two minutes of silence at the eleventh hour this morning.

In Maine, police had to intervene when a group of VFW members tried to remove 2,000 white flags placed at veterans’ cemetery in remembrance of U.S. soldiers who’ve died in Iraq.

I think Wilfred Owen would have appreciated the flags.

Think

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The Los Angeles Times is running duelling op-eds on torture today, one by a computer scientist and one by a former CIA operative. You can guess which one is for it.

The computer guy, David Gelernter, from what I’ve seen of his bio, has no experience with spying or war. He’s a computer guy. His knee-jerk argument is that those who support the McCain Amendment are knee-jerkers.

But of course you don’t have to be “pro-torture” to oppose the McCain amendment. That naive misunderstanding summarizes the threat posed by this good-hearted, wrong-headed legislation. Those who oppose the amendment don’t think the CIA should be permitted to use torture or other rough interrogation techniques. What they think is that sometimes the CIA should be required to squeeze the truth out of prisoners. Not because the CIA wants to torture people, but because it may be the only option we’ve got.

McCain’s amendment is a trap for the lazy minded. Whenever a position seems so obvious that you don’t even have to stop and think — stop and think.

But if you are ignorant of the subject at hand, even a smart guy can think all day long and still be wrong. People with experience (see the previous post) say that what you squeeze out of prisoners is unlikely to be truth. Gelernter doesn’t acknowledge even the possibility that tortured people will say anything to stop the torture. Nor does he address larger concerns about the residual effects of torture–that it creates new enemies and dehumanizes the torturer. Gelernter presents a mathematical equation–torture applied to bad guys equals useful information–without showing how he arrived at his “solution.”

Get this:

Those who defend McCain’s amendment and attack Cheney and Bush feel a nice warm glow, as if they’re basking in virtue, as in a hot tub, sipping Cabernet. But there is no virtue in joining a crowd, even if the crowd is right — and this one isn’t.

McCain is a bona fide hero. But there’s nothing courageous in standing firm with virtually the whole cultural leadership of this nation and the Western world, under any circumstances. It’s too easy. To take a principled stand that you know will make people loathe and vilify you — that’s what integrity, leadership and moral courage are all about. This time Cheney is the hero. McCain is taking the easy out.

That’s the weenie’s whole argument–people who oppose McCain’s Amendment do so because they are noble and courageous, never mind that it’s unlikely either Cheney or Gellenter will ever be required to dirty their hands with torture personally. People who favor the McCain Amendment are intellectually lazy and don’t understand the harsh realities of the world. This includes ex-POW John McCain who (Gelernter implies) is just too emotional on the subject of torture to understand it.

Gellenter hasn’t noticed that his own argument is entirely emotional. He offers no data or evidence to back up his assumptions. Instead, he puts himself on the pedestal of righteousness and smears the opposition. A true rightie.

On the other side, ex-CIA operative Larry Johnson offers information, not emotion.

If you inflict enough pain on someone, they will give you information, but what they tell you may not be true. You will have to corroborate it, which will take time. And, unless you kill every suspect you brutalize, you will make enemies of them, their families, maybe their entire villages. What real CIA field officers know firsthand is that it is better to build a relationship of trust — even with a terrorist, even if it’s time-consuming — than to extract quick confessions through tactics such as those used by the Nazis and the Soviets, who believed that national security always trumped human rights.

And that’s the point. We should never use our fear of being attacked as justification for dehumanizing ourselves or others….

… am not advocating that terrorists be given room service at the Four Seasons. Some sleep deprivation — of the sort mothers of newborns all endure — and spartan living conditions are appropriate. What we must not do is use physical pain or the threat of drowning, as in “waterboarding,” to gain information. Tough, relentless questioning is OK. Torture is not.

Thankfully, several Republican senators, including John McCain and Lindsey Graham, are defying Cheney’s campaign for a torture loophole. Cheney’s plea to permit CIA officers unrestricted interrogation methods would be the death of the CIA as a professional intelligence service and another stain on the reputation of the U.S.

This is from the Knight Ridder article discussed in the last post:

Advocates for flexibility argue that, in fighting terrorism, sometimes the stakes are so high that repugnant measures are justified.

One is the so-called “ticking time bomb” scenario, in which a captured terrorist has information on an imminent attack that could kill hundreds or thousands of civilians.

Two administration officials, who asked not to be identified because they aren’t authorized to speak to the press, said Cheney had described such a scenario several times, in which interrogators using generally approved methods can’t pry the particulars out of the prisoner in time to prevent an attack.

Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz has argued that in such cases, torture should be used as a last resort, openly, with approval by the president or a Supreme Court justice.

But intelligence officers and other U.S. officials said the scenario was more likely to be found in James Bond films than in the real war on terrorism.

Asked how he’d handle it, McCain replied: “It’s a one in a million issue, and if something was one in a million situation, I would support whatever needs to be done. But that’s a one in a million situation.”

“If you have exceptions, then there’s more exceptions and more exceptions and more exceptions,” he said.

It tells you something when those with real-world experience of an issue are lining up on one side, and those on the other learned all they think they know from watching movies.

See also: John Cole Tim F. at Balloon Juice.

Still Crazy After All These Years

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Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay of Knight Ridder report that many former and some current CIA operatives are opposing the Dick’s effort to exempt the CIA from a ban on mistreatment of detainees.

“We ought to declare we don’t do this. We ought to declare the intelligence isn’t worth it,” said Frank Anderson, a former chief of the CIA’s Near East and South Asia division in the agency’s Operations Directorate, the clandestine service.

There’s also the question of what brutality does to those who carry it out, Anderson said.

“I will rebel against anyone who wants my son to torture, because it won’t ever heal,” he said, speaking at a conference this week sponsored by the Middle East Institute.

Anderson’s views were echoed, with some variation, in interviews with a half-dozen current and former CIA and military officers with extensive field experience. Retired and active officers made similar arguments against abusing prisoners, but none of the current CIA or military officers would agree to speak on the record because they aren’t authorized to talk to the media.

Robert Baer, a former CIA covert officer who worked in Iraq and elsewhere, said he recently spent time in an Israeli prison, talking with detainees from the radical Palestinian groups Islamic Jihad and Hamas for a British documentary about suicide bombers.

The Israelis, Baer said, have learned that they can gain valuable information by establishing personal relationships with the inmates and gaining their trust.

“They found that torture, abusive tactics, made things overall worse for them politically,” Baer said. “The Israelis are friendly with their prisoners. They play cards with them and allow them to contact their families. They are getting in their minds to determine what makes up a suicide bomber.

However, Ron Hutcheson of Knight Ridder reports that the Dick isn’t backing down:

“There seems to be a kind of collective consciousness that he’s become weakened,” said Steven Clemons, a foreign policy specialist at the New America Foundation, a public-policy group that seeks to bridge partisan differences. “He’s going to continue to matter, but is he going to matter as much as he did before? Probably not.” …

… Most politicians in Cheney’s situation would scramble to change course, but he isn’t like most politicians. Days after Libby resigned, Cheney replaced him with David Addington, another longtime adviser, who helped draft a 2002 memo defending the use of torture in some circumstances.

The vice president courted more controversy by taking the lead role in trying to exempt the CIA from a ban on cruel and inhumane interrogation techniques.

“I just don’t think he cares,” said Rich Galen, a Republican consultant and a Cheney defender. “He believes that we are, in fact, at war. When you’re at war, you can’t be distracted by these kinds of things. He’s going to move ahead.”

And, of course, it never occurs to him that he might actually be wrong about anything.

When Bush first came to Washington, Cheney was widely viewed as the experienced, steady hand in an untested White House. Now he’s more likely to be pilloried as the hawk who helped push the president into a messy war that could drag on for years.

Longtime associates say Cheney has become obsessed with the threat of terrorism, especially the possibility of a biological, chemical or nuclear attack. By Bush’s own description, the vice president was “gung-ho” for war with Iraq well before the president committed to it.

Republicans who once bit their tongues or limited their criticism of Cheney to the cocktail circuit are starting to go public. Associates from Cheney’s days as defense secretary under President George H.W. Bush say they don’t understand him.

(singing)

…I’ll never worry
Why should I?
It’s all gonna fade

Now I sit by my window
And I watch the cars
I fear I’ll do some damage
One fine day
But I would not be convicted
By a jury of my peers
Still crazy after all these years
Oh, still crazy
Still crazy
Still crazy after all these years …

Update: Via Billmon—Laura Rozen at War and Piece says torture is a tactic for losers.

I was in a torture chamber once, in the basement of a police station in Kosovo days after it was abandoned by Serb forces defeated by Nato. It was hideous as you would imagine. The British soldiers who were with me were equally shocked. A lot of the instruments and interrogation drugs I saw there also suggest they were not designed to cause organ failure or death in their victims, just pain and terror, as Mr. Cheney and his office mates suggest is what they are going for in terms of legal wiggle room. And like Mr. Cheney and his office mates, Mr. Milosevic and his Serb troops didn’t seem to overly concern themselves with the Geneva conventions, until it was a bit late. Having laid my eyes on what such a scene looks like, I just associate such activities with the forces of not only the pathological and depraved, but those who are headed for defeat. If you’ve seen it, you realize in a way that’s hard to explain, it’s the tactics of the losers. If Cheney and his office mates haven’t had the experience, perhaps they should. And I really don’t think it’s inconceivable that the remote possibility of the Hague may lie in some of their futures. Things change fast when they do, as history shows, and they could find their current willing protectors eventually chucked from office, and a whole new climate at home and abroad.