If you don't know what the title of this post refers to, here you go:
During a recent stop of the Bold & Fresh Tour with fellow Fox News personality Glenn Beck, right-wing talker Bill O'Reilly couldn't help but to spin a hypothetical.
In his fantasy world where Obama hires him as a presidential adviser, O'Reilly explained the first thing he'd do is lavishly decorate his office. Thing two would be having the CIA director kidnap top Democrats and "waterboard" Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
He was, of course, "joking" during the Jan. 23 appearance. The audience roared with laughter, even as O'Reilly had cautioned, "Don't tell anyone I said this, please."
Yes, because advocating abduction and torture of a public official, especially a female one, is such a laff riot. Ladies and gentlemen, meet your teabaggers.
I'm not sure what O'Reilly would get out of this, other than the boner he clearly gets when images of violence against women dance in his sick little cranium, but if he thinks waterboarding would somehow get her to "confess" something, he's wrong about that too:
Well, it's official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn't know what he was talking about.
Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency's intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC's Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.
[snip]
Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up.
"What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts," he writes. "I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence."
But never mind, he says now.
"I wasn't there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I'd heard and read inside the agency at the time."
Kiriakou needn't worry about his so-called reputation being marred with the wingnuts, though. Because for them, even if there is a one percent possibility that something could be true, in an alternate universe, every sixteenth leap year on February 29th, in the snow, both ways, uphill, it means it is a certainty.
Ive been driving around for a week in a state of some sort of dejection about the idea that we are torturing people, and worse, but who knows for sure until all the horror stories come out from reliable sources. I fear that the information that is culled from these horrific acts is not reliable and so actually is dangerous in that our forces might waste time chasing down false leads while other real threats are growing...and then theres the ethical and moral dilemma that I am feeling in that as a citizen of this country I don't want any part of what this administration has done. I don't consider most of it to be anywhere near the American way,and I feel like alot of what is wrong with this picture wont be fixed in my lifetime. I've always been proud to be American. I've always questioned authority, and worked for candidates that were liberal, like my family is. I even went to protests and all that as a kid. I felt that I could bring change about by using my little voice, and that the balance of powers were an important part of how this thing works. Maybe thats something like hope....can't remember much about hope. After so many years of this Bush crap...after seeing people stand on 12 hour lines to vote and insane voting machines that tallied wrongly...after watching the diplomacy and aide that America represented, be it truthful or not, it was at least a facade, be crushed to death by these horrible neocons, I just don't know how much fight there is left in me. I feel incredible empathy for those who have been lied to and hurt. And I know that history will look upon people like Malcolm Nance as heroes, in that they stood up and told the truth. This is a truth that the Bush administration will not listen to, and information that flies in the face of all of the lies that have been propagated carefully for public consumption.
The subject is torture, and the expert is Malcolm Nance. There is no one better to tell us about what exactly is being done in our names than this guy. He is not a radical lefty, he has no stake in this besides his feeling that this information must get out there. He was charged with teaching soldiers who might find themselves in danger of torture what to expect. In that position of responsibility and in that the training of these soldiers sometimes requires that they experience the torture procedures, he has had personal experience with different forms, and in particular waterboarding. So please listen to and watch what he has to say...or not say...in that this guy knows when to step back and let the wingnuts dig their own hole. Click Hereto play Streaming Audio of Malcolm Nance and Rachel Maddow from November 20th, 2007.
Then, of course, here is the full Dan Abrams throw-down...which is just incredible in that Pat Buchanan is talking out of his ass, like so many of these pundits do, and he has no idea of the law and that what they are talking about is, in fact, illegal. This is all too common among these guys. They are not used to being questioned sharply by the usual suspects like Russert, Matthews, and...er, sorry Dan, but Abrams...so when someone as sharp as Rachel Maddow gets on the case, (and bless Abrams and Olbermann and the whole gang at MSNBC for having her on so often, even if she challenges them to actually THINK and tell the truth,) we are shown just how out of our depth we are on issues of law and what is being done illegally in our names. This is a huge problem, and if not for ethical and moral reasons, then for the protection of our own soldiers, we have to change who is making these decisions. All too many people still get their information solely from Faux News, and this is an example of the disinformation floating around that crowd. If the constituents of republicans don't have the information with which to make their decisions, then how can they make decisions or even tell their representatives what they want to see their government doing?
And here is a clip from the senate testimony of Nance and Interrogator/Air force Reserve Colonel, Steve Kleinman,before the House Judiciary Subcommittee about waterboarding and torture on November 8, 2007...This is fantastic, and there should be no American out there who doesn't see this and understand what is involved in getting information from suspects:
AND this is why its so reprehensible to have to hear the nominee for the Attorney General job act like he has been living on a desert island with his head in the sand, regarding this stuff. He is just being a lawyer, in that he doesn't want to admit to knowing OF something because then he might have to take on some culpability and/or point the finger at those who he is really being sworn to protect: i.e. Bush/Cheney and their minions. The fact that this guy is acting like a shifty lawyer is good in the sense that maybe he has tried a case or acted as a lawyer in his life, as opposed to Gonzo, who had very little real experience for the job. So, maybe we can hope that somewhere the root of the love of the law that these old shriveled farts once had, will still be active enough to make him balk at the insanity....that is, once he learns what waterboarding is and how its done. Its hard to believe that he has never heard of waterboarding, and I take it as an insult to my intelligence and the intelligence of everyone in that room, and of the American people that he thinks we're gonna buy that line. Ladies and gentlemen, meet your new Attorney General:
First, a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee from over a dozen intelligence, diplomatic, law enforcement, and military professionals, including Larry Johnson, James Marcinkowski, Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame Wilson, and Coleen Rowley:
MEMORANDUM FOR: Chairman and Ranking Member Senate Committee on the Judiciary
FROM: Former U.S. Intelligence Officers
SUBJECT: Nomination of Michael Mukasey for Attorney General
Dear Senators Leahy and Specter,
Values that are extremely important to us as former intelligence officers are at stake in your committee’s confirmation deliberations on Judge Michael Mukasey. With hundreds of years of service in sensitive national security activities behind us, we are deeply concerned that your committee may move his nomination to the full Senate without insisting that Mukasey declare himself on whether he believes the practice of waterboarding is legal.
We feel this more acutely than most others, for in our careers we have frequently had to navigate the delicate balance between morality and expediency, all the while doing our best to abide by the values the vast majority of Americans hold in common. We therefore believe we have a particular moral obligation to speak out. We can say it no better than four retired judge advocates general (two admirals and two generals) who wrote you over the weekend, saying: “Waterboarding is inhumane, it is torture, and it is illegal.”
Judge Mukasey’s refusal to comment on waterboarding, on grounds that it would be “irresponsible” to provide “an uninformed legal opinion based on hypothetical facts and circumstances,” raises serious questions. There is nothing hypothetical or secret about the fact that waterboarding was used by U.S. intelligence officers as an interrogation technique before the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004. But after Alberto Gonzales became attorney general in February 2005, Justice reportedly issued a secret memo authorizing harsh physical and psychological tactics, including waterboarding, which were approved for use in combination. A presidential executive order of July 20, 2007 authorized “enhanced interrogation techniques” that had been banned for use by the U.S. Army. Although the White House announced that the order provides “clear rules” to govern treatment of detainees, the rules are classified, so defense attorneys, judges, juries — and even nominee Mukasey — can be prevented from viewing them.
Those are some of the “facts and circumstances.” They are not hypothetical; and there are simple ways for Judge Mukasey to become informed, which we propose below.
Last Thursday, President George W. Bush told reporters it was unfair to ask Mukasey about interrogation techniques about which he had not been briefed.
“He doesn’t know whether we use that technique [waterboarding] or not,” the president said. Judge Mukasey wrote much the same in his October 30 letter, explaining that he was unable to give an opinion on the legality of waterboarding because he doesn’t know whether it is being used: “I have not been made aware of the details of any interrogation program to the extent that any such program may be classified and thus do not know what techniques may be involved in any such program.” Whether or not the practice is currently in use by U.S. intelligence, it should in fact be easy for him to respond. All he need do is find out what waterboarding is and then decide whether he considers it legal.
The conundrum created to justify the nominee’s silence on this key issue is a synthetic one. It is within your power to resolve it readily. If Mukasey continues to drag his feet, you need only to facilitate a classified briefing for him on waterboarding and the C.I.A. interrogation program. He will then be able to render an informed legal opinion. We strongly suggest that you sit in on any such briefing and that you invite the chairman and the ranking member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to take part as well. Receiving the same briefing at the same time (and, ideally, having it taped) should enhance the likelihood of candor and make it possible for all to be—and to stay—on the same page on this delicate issue.
If the White House refuses to allow such a briefing, your committee must, in our opinion, put a hold on Mukasey’s nomination. We are aware that the president warned last week that it will be either Mukasey as our attorney general or no one. So be it. It is time to stand up for what is right and require from the Executive the information necessary for the Senate to function responsibly and effectively. It would seem essential not to approve a nominee who has already made clear he is reluctant to ask questions of the White House. How can a person with that attitude even be proposed to be our chief law enforcement officer?
We strongly urge that you not send Mukasey’s nomination to the full Senate before he makes clear his view on waterboarding. Otherwise, there is considerable risk of continued use of the officially sanctioned torture techniques that have corrupted our intelligence services, knocked our military off the high moral ground, severely damaged our country’s standing in the world, and exposed U.S. military and intelligence people to similar treatment when captured or kidnapped. One would think that Judge Mukasey would want to be briefed on these secret interrogation techniques and to clarify where he stands.
The most likely explanation for Mukasey’s reticence is his concern that, should his conscience require him to condemn waterboarding, this could cause extreme embarrassment and even legal jeopardy for senior officials this time not just for the so-called “bad apples” at the bottom of the barrel. We believe it very important that the Senate not acquiesce in his silence—and certainly not if, as seems the case, he is more concerned about protecting senior officials than he is in enforcing the law and the Constitution.
It is important to get beyond shadowboxing on this key issue. In our view, condoning Mukasey’s evasiveness would mean ignoring fundamental American values and the Senate’s constitutional prerogative of advice and consent.
At stake in your committee and this nomination are questions of legality, morality, and our country’s values. And these are our primary concerns as well. As professional intelligence officers, however, we must point to a supreme irony—namely, that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation practices are ineffective tools for eliciting reliable information. Our own experience dovetails well with that of U.S. Army intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. John Kimmons, who told a Pentagon press conference on September 6, 2006: “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.”
Speaking out so precisely and unequivocally took uncommon courage, because Kimmons knew that just across the Potomac President Bush would be taking quite a different line at a press conference scheduled to begin as soon as Kimmons finished his. At the White House press conference focusing on interrogation techniques, the president touted the success that the C.I.A. was having in extracting information from detainees by using an “alternative set of procedures.” He said these procedures had to be “tough,” in order to deal with particularly recalcitrant detainees who “had received training on how to resist interrogation” and had “stopped talking.”
The Undersigned (Official duties refer to former government work.)
Brent Cavan Intelligence Analyst, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA
Ray Close Directorate of Operations, CIA for 26 years—22 of them overseas; former Chief of Station, Saudi Arabia
Ed Costello Counter-espionage, FBI
Michael Dennehy Supervisory Special Agent for 32 years, FBI; U.S. Marine Corps for three years
Rosemary Dew Supervisory Special Agent, Counterterrorism, FBI
Philip Giraldi Operations officer and counter-terrorist specialist, Directorate of Operations, CIA
Michael Grimaldi Intelligence Analyst, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA; Federal law enforcement officer
Mel Goodman Division Chief, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA; Professor, National Defense University; Senior Fellow, Center for International Policy
Larry Johnson Intelligence analysis and operations officer, CIA; Deputy Director, Office of Counter Terrorism, Department of State
Richard Kovar Executive Assistant to the Deputy Director for Intelligence, CIA: Editor, Studies In Intelligence
Charlotte Lang Supervisory Special Agent, FBI
W. Patrick Lang U.S. Army Colonel, Special Forces, Vietnam; Professor, U.S. Military Academy, West Point; Defense Intelligence Officer for Middle East, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA); founding director, Defense HUMINT Service
Lynne Larkin Operations Officer, Directorate of Operations, CIA; counterintelligence; coordination among intelligence and crime prevention agencies; CIA policy coordination staff ensuring adherence to law in operations
Steve Lee Intelligence Analyst for terrorism, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA
Jon S. Lipsky Supervisory Special Agent, FBI
David MacMichael Senior Estimates Officer, National Intelligence Council, CIA; History professor; Veteran, U.S. Marines (Korea)
Tom Maertens Foreign Service Officer and Intelligence Analyst, Department of State; Deputy Coordinator for Counter-terrorism, Department of State; National Security Council (NSC) Director for Non-Proliferation
James Marcinkowski Operations Officer, Directorate of Operations, CIA by way of U.S. Navy
Mary McCarthy National Intelligence Officer for Warning; Senior Director for Intelligence Programs, National Security Council
Ray McGovern Intelligence Analyst, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA; morning briefer, The President’s Daily Brief; chair of National Intelligence Estimates; Co-founder, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
Sam Provance U.S. Army Intelligence Analyst, Germany and Iraq (Abu Ghraib); Whistleblower
Coleen Rowley Special Agent and attorney, FBI; Whistleblower on the negligence that facilitated the attacks of 9/11.
Joseph Wilson Foreign Service Officer, U.S. Ambassador and Director of Africa, National Security Council.
Valerie Plame Wilson Operations Officer, Directorate of Operations
(h/t for use of this particular sound clip in this context: Sam Seder Show)
Now we're ready:
I AM voting today to support Michael B. Mukasey for attorney general for one critical reason: the Department of Justice — once the crown jewel among our government institutions — is a shambles and is in desperate need of a strong leader, committed to depoliticizing the agency’s operations.
The department has been devastated under the Bush administration. Outstanding United States attorneys have been dismissed without cause; career civil-rights lawyers have been driven out in droves; people appear to have been prosecuted for political reasons; young lawyers have been rejected because they were not conservative ideologues; and politics has been allowed to infect decision-making.
We are now on the brink of a reversal. There is virtually universal agreement, even from those who oppose Judge Mukasey, that he would do a good job in turning the department around. My colleagues who oppose his confirmation have gone out of their way to praise his character and qualifications. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, for one, commended Judge Mukasey as “a brilliant lawyer, a distinguished jurist and by all accounts a good man.”
Most important, Judge Mukasey has demonstrated his fidelity to the rule of law, saying that if he believed the president were violating the law he would resign.
Should we reject Judge Mukasey, President Bush has said he would install an acting, caretaker attorney general who could serve for the rest of his term without the advice and consent of the Senate. To accept such an unaccountable attorney general, I believe, would be to surrender the department to the extreme ideology of Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington. All the work we did to pressure Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign would be undone in a moment.
[snip]
Judge Mukasey’s refusal to state that waterboarding is illegal was unsatisfactory to me and many other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But Congress is now considering — and I hope we will soon pass — a law that would explicitly ban the use of waterboarding and other abusive interrogation techniques. And I am confident that Judge Mukasey would enforce that law.
On Friday, he personally made clear to me that if the law were in place, the president would have no legal authority to ignore it — not even under some theory of inherent authority granted by Article II of the Constitution, as Vice President Cheney might argue. Nor would the president be able to evade a clear pronouncement on the subject from the courts. Judge Mukasey also pledged to enforce such a law.
[snip]
Even without the proposed law in place, Judge Mukasey would be more likely than a caretaker attorney general to find on his own that waterboarding and other techniques are illegal. Indeed, his written answers to our questions have demonstrated more openness to ending the practices we abhor than either of this president’s previous attorney general nominees have had.
And that is how low the bar has been set? He's more open than Alberto Gonzales?
Now, whom do you think is operating in the the reality-based community? Chuck Schumer's World of Pure Imagination™, or the expertise and experience of over a dozen experts in the area of interrogation?
