AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

Do you really object to a basically humane, non lethal, non injurious, non painful method used to terrify him so that he will?

You have a guy who knows where the dirty bomb is and when it is set to go off. Your wife, children, parents, friends, neighbors, loved ones are all at risk and there may be no time to evacuate and where do you go? What area is safe.

What do you do? Given the risk, do you care WHAT is done to that guy to get him to talk? Do you really object to a basically humane, non lethal, non injurious, non painful method used to terrify him so that he will?

Do you really consider that torture?

And if you do, how does that not trivialize the very real torture that has been used by evil people on humanity over the millenia?

What I really want to see are the prosecution of the Bush gang who authorized torture of prisoners. That'll really make my day!

Quote:

. . . Mark down the date. Tuesday, April 21, 2009, is the moment that any chance of a new era of bipartisan respect in Washington ended. By inviting the prosecution of Bush officials for their antiterror legal advice, President Obama has injected a poison into our politics that he and the country will live to regret. . . .

Your opinion is noted OE. I don't expect to see the point being made, however.

CBS Evening News
Bush: 'We Don't Torture'
President Tells Katie Couric That Connecting Iraq To War On Terror Is Hardest Part Of His Job

NEW YORK, Sept. 6, 2006 | by Melissa McNamara

"Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- [1]a wiretap requires a court order," he said on April 20, 2004 in Buffalo, New York.

"Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, [2]we're talking about getting a court order before we do so," he added.

On April 19, 2004, Bush said the Patriot Act enabled law-enforcement officials to use "roving wiretaps," which are not fixed to a particular telephone, against terrorism, as they had been against organized crime.

"You see, what that meant is if you got a wiretap by court order -- and by the way, [3]everything you hear about requires court order, requires there to be permission from a FISA court, for example," he said in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

oe, Conservatives love to use "fear" as their justification for breaking laws.

You know, your family and friends are going to be bombed to smithereens any moment, because they can't get that one terrorist to tell us where he hid that ticking bomb. The way to get them to talk is to apply a little un-harmful torture.

DECEMBER 11, 2007
Waterboarding: Congress Knew

After three days of screaming headlines about the CIA destroying videotapes in 2005 of the "harsh" interrogation of two terrorists, it now comes to light that in 2002 key members of Congress were fully briefed by the CIA about those interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. One member of that Congressional delegation was the future House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi.

The Washington Post on Sunday reported these series of briefings. While it is not our habit to promote the competition, readers should visit the Post's Web site and absorb this astonishing detail for themselves as reported by Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen in "Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002: In meetings, spy panels' chiefs did not protest, officials say."

Porter Goss, the former chair of the House Intelligence Committee who later served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006 is explicit about what happened in these meetings: "Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing. And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement."

In all, the CIA provided Congress with some 30 briefings on waterboarding before it became a public issue.

Why would the CIA want to tell the most senior members of Congress about anything so sensitive? No doubt in part because senior officials at the CIA, not to mention the interrogators themselves, assuredly did not want to begin any such policy absent closing the political and legal loop on it.

The Congressional briefings touched the political base, and a Justice Department memo at that time deemed the interrogation methods legal. Most crucially, bear in mind that when pressed about all this at his confirmation hearings, Attorney General Michael Mukasey pointedly said he would not make a post-facto condemnation of the techniques, thereby putting the "freedom" of the interrogators at risk, "simply because I want to be congenial."

At the time, we wrote that this was a sign of Judge Mukasey's character. That word would not spring to mind in describing what the Post's account says about Congress.

One certainly may hold as abhorrent the idea of aggressively interrogating any terrorists ever, either for fear of what they might do to our people, as John McCain does, or because one thinks this violates our values. What one may not do -- at least not if one wants the system to function -- is assent to such a policy in 2002 and then, when the policy is made public, put up the pretense that one is "shocked" and appalled to learn of it.

This is bad faith. Worse, it risks setting in motion the ruin or eventual criminal prosecution of CIA employees who in 2002 did what the Bush Administration, Congress and indeed the nation wanted them to do to protect the American people from another September 11.

It has been widely reported by now that waterboarding was used on only three individuals -- Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who planned the airliner attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon; Abu Zebaydah, an Osama bin Laden confidante captured in Pakistan 2002 and described as a director of al-Qaeda operations; and a third unidentified person. If Speaker Pelosi and her colleagues want the handling of such terrorists conformed to what they call "our values," then she should define that and put it in an explicit piece of legislation. Then let the Members vote yea or nay, in public, on the record.

But don't sign off on such a sensitive policy at a moment when the nation's "values" support it, then later feign revulsion when you can't take the heat from the loudest in your political constituency. There was a time when politics at least assumed more backbone than that.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119734098837720381.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Blair: Congress Approved CIA Interrogations
Wednesday, April 22, 2009 12:07 PM
By: David A. Patten Article Font Size

Before members of Congress rail at the CIA’s coercive interrogation of terrorists, they might want to blame those who authorized the measures in the first place: themselves.

Yes, members of Congress approved the interrogation methods many of them now decry as torture.

That revelation comes from an article posted Wednesday on WeeklyStandard.com by senior writer Stephen F. Hayes, who reveals that Adm. Dennis Blair, President Obama’s national intelligence director, circulated a letter within the intelligence community last week that could prove embarrassing to both Democrats and the Obama administration.

Blair’s letter reportedly states that members of Congress repeatedly signed off on enhanced interrogation methods such as waterboarding.

“From 2002 through 2006 when the use of these techniques ended,” Blair wrote, “the leadership of the CIA repeatedly reported their activities both to Executive Branch policymakers and to members of Congress, and received permission to continue to use the techniques."
http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/dennis_blair_cia/2009/04/22/205963.html

The CIA's Questioning Worked
by Marc A. Thiessen
Tuesday, April 21, 2009

In releasing highly classified documents on the CIA interrogation program last week, President Obama declared that the techniques used to question captured terrorists "did not make us safer." This is patently false. The proof is in the memos Obama made public -- in sections that have gone virtually unreported in the media.

Consider the Justice Department memo of May 30, 2005. It notes that "the CIA believes 'the intelligence acquired from these interrogations has been a key reason why al Qaeda has failed to launch a spectacular attack in the West since 11 September 2001.' . . . In particular, the CIA believes that it would have been unable to obtain critical information from numerous detainees, including [Khalid Sheik Mohammed] and Abu Zubaydah, without these enhanced techniques." The memo continues: "Before the CIA used enhanced techniques . . . KSM resisted giving any answers to questions about future attacks, simply noting, 'Soon you will find out.' " Once the techniques were applied, "interrogations have led to specific, actionable intelligence, as well as a general increase in the amount of intelligence regarding al Qaeda and its affiliates."

Specifically, interrogation with enhanced techniques "led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the 'Second Wave,' 'to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into' a building in Los Angeles." KSM later acknowledged before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay that the target was the Library Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast. The memo explains that "information obtained from KSM also led to the capture of Riduan bin Isomuddin, better known as Hambali, and the discovery of the Guraba Cell, a 17-member Jemmah Islamiyah cell tasked with executing the 'Second Wave.' " In other words, without enhanced interrogations, there could be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York.

The memo notes that "nterrogations of [Abu] Zubaydah -- again, once enhanced techniques were employed -- furnished detailed information regarding al Qaeda's 'organizational structure, key operatives, and modus operandi' and identified KSM as the mastermind of the September 11 attacks." This information helped the intelligence community plan the operation that captured KSM. It went on: "Zubaydah and KSM also supplied important information about al-Zarqawi and his network" in Iraq, which helped our operations against al-Qaeda in that country.

All this confirms information that I and others have described publicly. But just as the memo begins to describe previously undisclosed details of what enhanced interrogations achieved, the page is almost entirely blacked out. The Obama administration released pages of unredacted classified information on the techniques used to question captured terrorist leaders but pulled out its black marker when it came to the details of what those interrogations achieved.

Yet there is more information confirming the program's effectiveness. The Office of Legal Counsel memo states "we discuss only a small fraction of the important intelligence CIA interrogators have obtained from KSM" and notes that "intelligence derived from CIA detainees has resulted in more than 6,000 intelligence reports and, in 2004, accounted for approximately half of the [Counterterrorism Center's] reporting on al Qaeda."

The memos refer to other classified documents -- including an "Effectiveness Memo" and an "IG Report," which explain how "the use of enhanced techniques in the interrogations of KSM, Zubaydah and others . . . has yielded critical information." Why didn't Obama officials release this information as well? Because they know that if the public could see the details of the techniques side by side with evidence that the program saved American lives, the vast majority would support continuing it.

Critics claim that enhanced techniques do not produce good intelligence because people will say anything to get the techniques to stop. But the memos note that, "as Abu Zubaydah himself explained with respect to enhanced techniques, 'brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship." In other words, the terrorists are called by their faith to resist as far as they can -- and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything they know. This is because of their belief that "Islam will ultimately dominate the world and that this victory is inevitable." The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely.

This is the secret to the program's success. And the Obama administration's decision to share this secret with the terrorists threatens our national security. Al-Qaeda will use this information and other details in the memos to train its operatives to resist questioning and withhold information on planned attacks. CIA Director Leon Panetta said during his confirmation hearings that even the Obama administration might use some of the enhanced techniques in a "ticking time bomb" scenario. What will the administration do now that it has shared the limits of our interrogation techniques with the enemy? President Obama's decision to release these documents is one of the most dangerous and irresponsible acts ever by an American president during a time of war -- and Americans may die as a result.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/20/AR2009042002818.html

The CIA's Questioning Worked
by Marc A. Thiessen
Tuesday, April 21, 2009

I knew when I posted the WSJ article, that the numbnuts would have no clue what the topic was even about and would not understand the point being made. I knew they would make no effort to discuss the topic but would launch hateful and insulting posts at me instead. They didn't disappoint me.

I think the point is important enough to put it out there though because I know some have not yet drunk the kool-ade, are still capable of critical thinking and will understand the very serious mistake that Obama is making here. It has nothing to do with torture. It does have a lot to do with breaking the trust of people assigned to very difficult jobs.

Water-BoredAl-Qaida's plot to bomb the Library Tower was not worth torturing anyone over.
By Timothy NoahPosted Tuesday, April 21, 2009, at 7:19 PM ET

The US Bank Tower in Downtown Los Angeles.The U.S. Bank Tower in downtown Los AngelesThe Library Tower? Is that the best that Bush's torture apologists can do?

On April 16, the Obama administration publicly released four Justice Department memos, now repudiated, in which President George W. Bush's administration defined the parameters of what it termed, euphemistically, "enhanced interrogation techniques." This has enlivened the debate about whether water-boarding, walling, Room 101-ing and whatever other torture methods the Bush-era CIA may have used against al-Qaida captives actually prevented acts of terror. Various journalists (Ron Suskind, the Washington Post's Peter Finn and Joby Warrick, the New York Times' Scott Shane) have looked into Bush administration claims that water-boarding Abu Zubaida, the first "high-value" captive, yielded vitally important information, and concluded it did not. We have since learned that Abu Zubaida was water-boarded 83 times. ABC News reported a couple of years ago that water-boarding 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was what prompted him to confess, "I decapitated with my blessed right hand the American Jew, Daniel Pearl." That same report claimed Sheikh Mohammed had been water-boarded only once, an estimate we now know was off by 182. The confession may have been shaky, too. Bernard-Henri Lévy, among others, doubts Sheikh Mohammed killed Pearl. In any event, confessing to past murder had no obvious bearing on future acts of violence.
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Now Mark A. Thiessen, a former Bush speechwriter, argues in a Washington Post op-ed ("The CIA's Questioning Worked") that justification for the Bush administration's techniques is there for all to see in a memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel dated May 30, 2005, one of the four made public.

Specifically, interrogation with enhanced techniques "led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the 'Second Wave,' 'to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into' a building in Los Angeles." KSM later acknowledged before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay that the target was the Library Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast. The memo explains that "information obtained from KSM also led to the capture of Riduan bin Isomuddin, better known as Hambali, and the discovery of the Guraba Cell, a 17-member Jemmah Islamiyah cell tasked with executing the 'Second Wave.' " In other words, without enhanced interrogations, there could be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York.

Ah, the Library Tower. The thwarting of al-Qaida's attack on it was a favorite talking point of President Bush (though he sometimes called it the "Liberty Tower"; for the past six years, its formal name has been the U.S. Bank Tower). Because the Library Tower is in Los Angeles, the al-Qaida plot to bring it down is sometimes confused with the Millennium Plot, a separate plan to attack Los Angeles International Airport on New Year's Day 2000—supported but not organized by al-Qaida—that came much closer to fruition. The Library Tower, designed by I.M. Pei's architectural firm, stands 73 stories high and is the tallest skyscraper west of the Mississippi.* Sheikh Mohammed initially planned to crash a jetliner into it on 9/11 as part of a scheme involving not four but 10 passenger planes on both coasts. Osama Bin Laden vetoed that as too ambitious and scaled back the plan to focus on New York and Washington. After 9/11, Sheikh Mohammed still hoped to execute the attack on the Library Tower and, working with a Southeast Asian al-Qaida affiliate (the aforementioned Hambali), recruited four terror cell members to carry it out.

I think the point is important enough to put it out there though because I know some have not yet drunk the kool-ade, are still capable of critical thinking and will understand the very serious mistake that Obama is making here. It has nothing to do with torture. It does have a lot to do with breaking the trust of people assigned to very difficult jobs.

Freedom from torture is an inalienable human right. The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment, ratified by the United States and more than 130 other countries since 1984, forbids governments from deliberately inflicting severe physical or mental pain or suffering on those within their custody or control. Yet torture continues to be practiced around the world by rogue regimes whose cruel methods match their determination to crush the human spirit. Beating, burning, rape, and electric shock are some of the grisly tools such regimes use to terrorize their own citizens. These despicable crimes cannot be tolerated by a world committed to justice....

The United States is committed to the world-wide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. I call on all nations to speak out against torture in all its forms and to make ending torture an essential part of their diplomacy. I further urge governments to join America and others in supporting torture victims' treatment centers, contributing to the UN Fund for the Victims of Torture, and supporting the efforts of non-governmental organizations to end torture and assist its victims.

A Timeline Problem With The 'Torture Memos' And The Library Tower Plot

Timothy Noah of Slate does a good job of catching an interesting detail and smiting his opponents, but his objections can be answered. Here we go, starting with an excerpt from Marc Thiessen's WaPo column, which itself drew heavily on the May 30 2005 OLC memo:
Specifically, interrogation with enhanced techniques "led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the 'Second Wave,' 'to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into' a building in Los Angeles." KSM later acknowledged before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay that the target was the Library Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast. The memo explains that "information obtained from KSM also led to the capture of Riduan bin Isomuddin, better known as Hambali, and the discovery of the Guraba Cell, a 17-member Jemmah Islamiyah cell tasked with executing the 'Second Wave.' " In other words, without enhanced interrogations, there could be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York.

And Mr. Noah plays his ace:
What clinches the falsity of Thiessen's claim, however (and that of the memo he cites, and that of an unnamed Central Intelligence Agency spokesman who today seconded Thessen's argument), is chronology. In a White House press briefing, Bush's counterterrorism chief, Frances Fragos Townsend, told reporters that the cell leader was arrested in February 2002, and "at that point, the other members of the cell" (later arrested) "believed that the West Coast plot has been canceled, was not going forward" [italics mine]. A subsequent fact sheet released by the Bush White House states, "In 2002, we broke up a plot by KSM to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast." These two statements make clear that however far the plot to attack the Library Tower ever got—an unnamed senior FBI official would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Bush's characterization of it as a "disrupted plot" was "ludicrous"—that plot was foiled in 2002. But Sheikh Mohammed wasn't captured until March 2003.

Well, I suppose it is possible that the underlying CIA memo is false - it is described in the May 30 memo as the being authored by [redacted] at DCI and is titled "Re: Effectiveness of the CIA Counterintelligence Interrogation Techniques", March 2, 2005. Maybe we are being subjected to a bit of bureaucratic chicanery in which the CIA lies to the DoJ in order to protect its own turf and its own people - a bit of the old CYA at the CIA, if you will.

But it seems like a rather bold and unnecessary lie - the author did point to other less ambiguous successes, such as intel from Khalid Sheik Mohammed that led to the arrest of Hambali of the Jemaah Islamiyah, the group responsible for the Bali bombings and others, and Admiral Blair is the latest to admit that the enhanced interrogation program scored some successes. Trying to sneak the old "We busted him in 2003, thereby disrupting a plot in 2002" time-travel scam past the DoJ might have been risky if the secret eventually got out, as it did a year later when Bush declassified some details of the incident.

So let's imagine for a moment that the CIA document is the truth. Do we have to stretch any other facts very far to accommodate that? Not really. What Ms. Townsend said (link provided by Mr. Noah) in briefing the incident was that
The cell leader was arrested in February of 2002, and as we begin -- at that point, the other members of the cell believed that the West Coast plot has been canceled, was not going forward.

Let's review basic operational security - if KSM had a back-up team, would these four know about it? Or, if KSM put together a new team after these four were busted, would they know it? Why would they?

And why would KSM give up on crashing a plane into Los Angeles? He was involved in the 1995 plan to blow up twelve airplanes over the Pacific; he wanted to attack the West Coast on 9/11; and he did help launch the scheme disrupted here. Why would he lose interest in attacking the West Coast after that setback in 2002?

The May 30 2005 memo, citing the 'Effectiveness' memo, says that Hambali led a 17 member "Garuba cell" (part of the Jemaah Islamiyah) tasked with implementing the Second Wave attacks. Seventeen is more than four, from which I infer that maybe Hambali went to a B-team after the arrests of the initial cell which began in 2002.

I don't know why that is so implausible. As to why Bush said nothing about yet another plot, perhaps he didn't want to tip our hand as to how much had been learned from KSM.

In any case I am sure Mr. Noah will join the calls for President Obama to end the politicization of the intelligence and release the memos which provide the other half of the debate. The OLC memos tell us what we did; what has not been released are the memos telling us why we did it. And if the CIA was lying to the DoJ, let's find out.

BONUS GUESS: If the 'Effectiveness' memo and its counterparts concluded that the enhanced interrogation techniques were valueless, I think Obama would have released them, said "I told you so", and lauded the CIA for honestly confronting its past mistakes. A win-win!

Yet the memos remain hidden away and all we get our snippets from Admiral Blair telling us that, although he thinks it was wrong, "“High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country.”

With that background it's going to be hard to make a convincing case that the program was valueless.

What clinches the falsity of Thiessen's claim, however (and that of the memo he cites, and that of an unnamed Central Intelligence Agency spokesman who today seconded Thessen's argument), is chronology. In a White House press briefing, Bush's counterterrorism chief, Frances Fragos Townsend, told reporters that the cell leader was arrested in February 2002, and "at that point, the other members of the cell" (later arrested) "believed that the West Coast plot has been canceled, was not going forward". A subsequent fact sheet released by the Bush White House states, "In 2002, we broke up a plot by KSM to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast." These two statements make clear that however far the plot to attack the Library Tower ever got—an unnamed senior FBI official would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Bush's characterization of it as a "disrupted plot" was "ludicrous"—that plot was foiled in 2002. But Sheikh Mohammed wasn't captured until March 2003.