A Blue View

A Peek Behind The Curtain At How Washington Really Works

Though the Wash Post thinks the big news in this Propublica report is the suggestion that GE lied to investors about the condition of its short term debt, I found the most interesting thing to be how freely and how often Immault, GE's CEO, picked up the phone and spoke directly to Paulson, Bush's Sec of the Treasury. It is this unfair access (how many businesses do you know that have a direct line to the Treasury?), and the resultant ability to influence decisions as this story implies, that is the root of corporate & special interest control of our government.

As the financial crisis worsened toward the end of 2008, chief executive Jeffrey Immelt and other leaders at General Electric repeatedly assured the public there was no need to worry about the company's ability to access credit markets and refinance its massive debts as they came due.

But in private conversations that alarmed then-Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., Immelt laid out a different picture of GE's credit situation, according to Paulson's new book about the crisis.

Instead, Paulson writes, Immelt on at least four occasions expressed worries about GE's short-term debt, known as commercial paper, and eventually lobbied for access to special government guarantees for such debt.

To take one example: On Sept. 15, 2008, the day Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, Paulson says he was "startled" when Immelt came to his office and told him GE was finding it "very difficult" to sell short-term debt "for any term longer than overnight." A day earlier, GE sent investors a letter saying its ability to sell commercial paper was "robust."...

A Double Agent? (cartoon)

 

Cheney Cartoons

Truly Rovian In His Hypocrisy

 

Hypocrite Cheney Does It Again; White House Hits Back

Wash Post:

The political war over the failed Christmas Day bombing of a U.S. airliner showed no signs of abating Wednesday as leaders of both parties escalated their attacks, employing fiery rhetoric in assessing blame for the Detroit incident.

Former vice president Richard B. Cheney led a GOP offensive to assail President Obama's leadership on national security, charging that the American people are less safe because, Cheney believes, Obama is "pretending" that the United States is not at war with terrorists.

"We are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren't, it makes us less safe," Cheney, one of Obama's strongest critics, said in a statement to Politico. "Why doesn't he want to admit we're at war? It doesn't fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn't fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency -- social transformation -- the restructuring of American society."

Top aides to Obama and Democratic leaders pushed back aggressively, accusing Cheney and other Republicans of politicizing the incident in ways they say Democrats did not during previous terrorist acts.

"Cheney was out there today saying that the president doesn't recognize that we have a war on terror," White House senior adviser David Axelrod said in an interview. "This is the president who has made a very tough decision to refocus our efforts in Afghanistan after seven years of drift."

Democrats said the Bush administration -- chiefly Cheney -- failed to keep its focus on the fight against al-Qaeda as it pursued war in Iraq.

"This president is not interested in bellicose rhetoric, he is focused on action," White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer wrote on a blog. "Seven years of bellicose rhetoric failed to reduce the threat from al Qaeda and succeeded in dividing this country. And it seems strangely off-key now, at a time when our country is under attack, for the architect of those policies to be attacking the president."

For days, a chorus of GOP leaders has sought to portray Obama as weak on national security because of his administration's response to the incident as well as the intelligence and security failures that allowed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board a Northwest Airlines flight carrying an explosive.

Republicans said Obama should have interrupted his Hawaiian vacation before Monday to address last Friday's attack. But Democrats called this a double standard, saying they did not attack then-President George W. Bush when he said nothing during his vacation in Crawford, Tex., for nearly a week after shoe bomber Richard C. Reid's failed attack in 2001.

"Republicans are simply hypocrites," Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse said. "There is nothing -- no bounds whatsoever -- to what they will politicize for their own political gain."

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) on Wednesday said the Detroit incident is evidence that Obama should reconsider his decision to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "It's time for the president to halt terrorist transfers to other countries, including Yemen."

The detainees who ended up in the al-Qaeda leadership in Yemen were released not by Obama but by Bush two years ago.

Obama's Dilemma (cartoons)

     

Bush: What's Been Found & What's Still Missing (cartoon)

 

Senate Report: Bin Laden Was 'within our grasp' At Tora Bora

Wash Post (read the report):

Osama bin Laden was unquestionably within reach of U.S. troops in the mountains of Tora Bora when American military leaders made the crucial and costly decision not to pursue the terrorist leader with massive force, a Senate report says.

The report asserts that the failure to kill or capture bin Laden at his most vulnerable in December 2001 has had lasting consequences beyond the fate of one man. Bin Laden's escape laid the foundation for today's reinvigorated Afghan insurgency and inflamed the internal strife now endangering Pakistan, it says.

Staff members for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Democratic majority prepared the report at the request of the chairman, Sen. John Kerry, as President Barack Obama prepares to boost U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

The Massachusetts senator and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate has long argued the Bush administration missed a chance to get the al-Qaida leader and top deputies when they were holed up in the forbidding mountainous area of eastern Afghanistan only three months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Although limited to a review of military operations eight years old, the report could also be read as a cautionary note for those resisting an increased troop presence there now.

More pointedly, it seeks to affix a measure of blame for the state of the war today on military leaders under former president George W. Bush, specifically Donald H. Rumsfeld as defense secretary and his top military commander, Tommy Franks.

"Removing the al-Qaida leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat," the report says. "But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide. The failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism."

The report states categorically that bin Laden was hiding in Tora Bora when the U.S. had the means to mount a rapid assault with several thousand troops at least. It says that a review of existing literature, unclassified government records and interviews with central participants "removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora."

Thanksgiving Cartoons

Colbert & Letterman Discuss The Cool Presidents

The Palin, Been There, Done That Cartoon

 

Dick Cheney Is A Lier

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Is Our Dick Going Soft?
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

(For background, see the AP story, "Cheney FBI interview: 72 times of can't recall")

Afghanistan Cartoons

The Typical American Family Loses A Decade Of Income. More Fall Into Poverty & Lose Health Insurance

From the NY Times:

In the recession, the nation’s poverty rate climbed to 13.2 percent last year, up from 12.5 percent in 2007, according to an annual report released Thursday by the Census Bureau. The report also documented a decline in employer-provided health insurance and in coverage for adults.

The rise in the poverty rate, to the highest level since 1997, portends even larger increases this year, which has registered far higher unemployment than in 2008, economists said.

The bureau said 39.8 million residents last year lived below the poverty line, defined as an income of $22,025 for a family of four.

In another sign of both the recession and the long-term stagnation of middle-class wages, median family incomes in 2008 fell to $50,300, compared with $52,200 the year before. This wiped out the income gains of the previous three years, the report said.

Adjusted for inflation, in fact, median family incomes were lower in 2008 than a decade earlier.

“This is the largest decline in the first year of a recession we’ve seen since the Census Bureau started collecting data after World War II,” said Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard University, referring to household incomes. “We’ve seen a lost decade for the typical American family.”

The share of American residents who said they lacked health insurance throughout the entire year remained steady, at 15.4 percent, or 46.3 million people. But the total masked some more worrisome trends that are helping to drive the debate over a national health care overhaul.

Continuing an eight-year trend, the number of people with private or employer-sponsored insurance declined, while the number of people relying on government insurance programs including Medicare, Medicaid, the children’s insurance program and military insurance rose.

The share of children who were uninsured declined, to 9.9 percent from 11 percent in 2007, apparently because of the federal government’s special efforts to insure low-income children. But at the same time, the share of adults aged 18 to 64 without health insurance rose, to 20.3 percent in 2008 from 19.6 percent in 2007.

In a speech Thursday to promote his health care overhaul, President Obama referred to the census survey and said that things had grown worse since September 2008. “Over the last 12 months, it’s estimated that the ranks of the uninsured have swelled by nearly six million people,” he said.

The accuracy of the census numbers, which are collected each spring for the previous year as part of the Current Population Survey, is subject to debate. Family incomes in the poverty area do not include the value of food stamps, money received through tax credits or unreported income. On the other side, the poverty threshold has not been adjusted over the years to reflect the rising relative costs of housing and medical care and does not take account of large regional differences in the cost of living.

Whatever the flaws, which remain similar every year, “we think the C.P.S. data present a very good measure of the trends over time,” David S. Johnson, chief of the housing and household economic statistics division of the Census Bureau, said Thursday in an audio news conference.

Because unemployment has climbed so much more sharply in 2009 — averaging 9 percent, compared with an average of 5.8 percent in 2008 — “the real spike in poverty is going to be in the ’09 numbers, which we get next year,” said Sheldon Danziger, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan.

The Financial Bailout: Where Bush & Obama Deserve Credit

From the Wash Post:

Obama has said he inherited the financial crisis from President George W. Bush. But he also received a powerful arsenal from his predecessor -- the $700 billion financial bailout package.

In fact, the inaugural program the Bush administration rolled out after it got that money from Congress may have done more to stabilize the financial system than any of the bailout initiatives announced so far by Obama officials. Last October, the Bush Treasury directly injected hundreds of billions of dollars into ailing banks, abandoning its plan to relieve these firms of toxic assets. The Troubled Assets Relief Program never lived up to its name.

Obama's plan to buy toxic bank assets, announced in February, still hasn't been launched and will be far smaller than initially envisioned. Yet his team deserves much of the credit for its handling of the crisis, some bank analysts say. One signature initiative -- stress tests of the nation's biggest banks -- proved to be important in restoring confidence in the markets.

Perhaps more important, analysts and officials say, the administration presented the reasons for the bailout more clearly, and it did a better job of getting the politics right.

In Shift From Prior Administrations, White House to Open Visitor List: Theirs & Bush's

From the Wash Post:

President Obama said Friday he will make public an ongoing list of visitors to the White House, reversing a policy embraced and defended by previous presidents of both parties.

Under the new policy, the names of visitors to the White House, from tourists to business leaders, will be made public for the first time.

Obama's decision opens a window on efforts by some of those visitors to shape policy at the very top of the federal government. But the new rule has notable exceptions, including people who come for "particularly sensitive" meetings such as interviews for top jobs; personal guests of the first family; and visitors whose known presence at the White House would pose a national security risk.

The White House characterized the move as evidence of Obama's commitment to foster "an open and transparent government."

"For the first time in history, records of White House visitors will be made available on an ongoing basis," Obama said in a statement. "We will achieve our goal of making this administration the most open and transparent administration in history, not only by opening the doors of the White House to more Americans, but by shining a light on the business conducted inside. Americans have a right to know whose voices are being heard in the policy-making process."

The policy will take effect Sept. 15, and as soon as December the Obama administration will begin posting online the names of White House visitors from the previous 90 to 120 days. Officials said 70,000 to 100,000 people visit the White House each month ...

Officials also released the names of visitors to the White House under President George W. Bush. Those names included prominent Christian conservative leaders such as James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; the Rev. Jerry Falwell, president of Liberty University; and the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition.

Stephen Payne, a lobbyist who was videotaped by the Times of London allegedly offering meetings with senior Bush administration officials in exchange for large contributions to Bush's presidential library foundation, visited the White House 53 times, according to a tally by CREW.

"The Obama administration has proven its pledge to usher in a new era of government transparency was more than just a campaign promise. The Bush administration fought tooth and nail to keep secret the identities of those who visited the White House," said Melanie Sloan, CREW's executive director.

More Dick Cheney Cartoons

Dick Cheney Cartoons & Letterman Top 10

The Prince Of Darkness Complains About Too Much Light

According to the Wash Post, Dick Cheney thinks Obama will cripple the super effective, whiz kids over at the CIA (watch John McCain's rebuttal to Cheney):

Former vice president Richard B. Cheney on Sunday condemned the Justice Department's decision to investigate suspected CIA prisoner abuses, reiterated his assertion that enhanced interrogation techniques worked in revealing terror plots, and indicated that he may not cooperate with the prosecutor assigned to the case.

Cheney accused President Obama of setting a "terrible precedent" by allowing an "intensely partisan, politicized look back at the prior administration." Asked whether he would talk to John Durham, the veteran prosecutor appointed by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to examine allegations that the CIA abused Sept. 11 terror suspects, Cheney said: "It will depend on the circumstances and what I think their activities are really involved in."...

"I just think it's an outrageous political act that will do great damage, long term, to our capacity to be able to have people take on difficult jobs, make difficult decisions, without having to worry about what the next administration is going to say," Cheney said in a taped Fox News interview that was aired Sunday.

The 2004 inspector general's report concluded that some CIA interrogators went beyond Bush administration rules permitting the use of techniques such as waterboarding, or simulated drowning. Terrorists disclosed more information after being subjected to the controversial methods, which included threatened executions and the use of a power drill to scare a detainee, the report concluded. However, John Helgerson, the former IG who commissioned the 2004 study, said Saturday that his office's work did not permit "definitive conclusions about the effectiveness of particular interrogation methods."...

Cheney called the techniques "good policy" and said he was comfortable in cases where interrogators went beyond what they were authorized to do. Holder's decision to examine about 10 cases of alleged detainee abuse runs contrary to Obama's repeated desire to look forward, and raises the question of whether the legal reassurances of one administration carry over to its successor. "Now you get a new administration and they say, 'Well, we didn't like those opinions, we're going to go investigate those lawyers and perhaps have them disbarred,' " Cheney said. "I just think it's an outrageous precedent to set."

On the Sunday talk shows, Democratic lawmakers tried to counter Cheney's criticism and defend the Justice Department's investigation. "Dick Cheney has shown through the years, frankly, a disrespect for the Constitution, for sharing of information with Congress, respect for the law, and I'm not surprised that he is upset about this,"  Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) said on ABC's "This Week"...

Cheney added that he was aware of a Bush administration order banning the CIA from advising Congress about a program to kill or capture terrorists. But he stopped short of saying he issued that order.

The House intelligence committee last month launched an investigation to determine whether the CIA broke the law by not informing Congress about the secret program.

John McCain Pushes Back Against Cheney: "Torturing harmed us ... Interrogations were in violation of the Geneva Conventions ... They helped Al Qaeda recruit"

John McCain forcefully & elegantly rebuts Dick Cheney's latest charge (The Prince Of Darkness Complains About Too Much Light).

Report Does Not Show Rogue Agents Acting On Their Own; Instead There Was Centralized, Nazi-Like Control

From the NY Times:

The first news reports this week about hundreds of pages of newly released documents on the C.I.A. program focused on aberrations in the field: threats of execution by handgun or assault by power drill; a prisoner lifted off the ground by his arms, which were tied behind his back; another detainee repeatedly knocked out with pressure applied to the carotid artery.

But the strong impression that emerges from the documents, many with long passages blacked out for secrecy, is by no means one of gung-ho operatives running wild. It is a portrait of overwhelming control exercised from C.I.A. headquarters and the Department of Justice — control Bush administration officials say was intended to ensure that the program was safe and legal.

Managers, doctors and lawyers not only set the program’s parameters but dictated every facet of a detainee’s daily routine, monitoring interrogations on an hour-by-hour basis. From their Washington offices, they obsessed over the smallest details: the number of calories a prisoner consumed daily (1,500); the number of hours he could be kept in a box (eight hours for the large box, two hours for the small one); the proper time when his enforced nudity should be ended and his clothes returned.

The detainee “finds himself in the complete control of Americans; the procedures he is subjected to are precise, quiet and almost clinical, ” noted one document.

The records suggest one quandary prosecutors face as they begin a review of the C.I.A. program, part of the larger inquiry into abuse cases ordered Monday by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. Any prosecution that focuses narrowly on low-level interrogators who on a few occasions broke the rules may appear unfair, since most of the brutal treatment was authorized from the White House on down.

“The documents underscore how closely supervised the program was by officials in Washington,” said Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union, whose Freedom of Information Act lawsuit forced disclosure of the records. “Any investigation that began and ended with the so-called rogue interrogators would be completely inadequate.”

When you read the rest of the story, tell me if you are not struck with the similarities between the the dry language used by the Bush administration to describe its immoral deeds with the Nazi's similar obsessive recording of the details of their Final Solution program.  Now I am not comparing the two or saying there is a moral equivalence but I was struck with how bureaucracies, whether American or German categorize, record and bound actions. It also highlights how this approach can make something abhorrent seem normal and routine and drain it of its emotion-provoking moral outrage.

A 2004 background paper the C.I.A. sent to the Justice Department gives the fullest account to date of the oversight of every step that followed the capture of a man suspected of being a top member of Al Qaeda — an HVD, in agency parlance, for high-value detainee.

Brought to the “black site” in diapers, the paper says, the prisoner’s head and face were shaved, he was stripped and photographed and sleep deprivation and a diet limited to Ensure Plus, a dietary drink, began.

“The interrogators’ objective,” the background paper says, “is to transition the HVD to a point where he is participating in a predictable, reliable and sustainable manner.” The policy was to use the “least coercive measure” to achieve the goal. The harsh treatment began with the “attention slap,” and for three prisoners of the nearly 100 who passed through the program, the endpoint was waterboarding.

Waterboarding might be an excruciating procedure with deep roots in the history of torture, but for the C.I.A.’s Office of Medical Services, recordkeeping for each session of near-drowning was critical. “In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented,” said medical guidelines prepared for the interrogators in December 2004.

The required records, the medical supervisors said, included “how long each application (and the entire procedure) lasted, how much water was used in the process (realizing that much splashes off), how exactly the water was applied, if a seal was achieved, if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled, how long was the break between applications, and how the subject looked between each treatment.”

When the doctors gauged what a drenching in a cold cell might do to a prisoner, they did their research, consulting a textbook entitled “Wilderness Medicine,” in particular Chapter 6 on “accidental hypothermia,” as well as a Canadian government pamphlet, “Survival in Cold Waters,” according to footnotes.

Lawyers at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, likewise, were immersed in the details of investigations.

Detainee Abuse Reveals A Tale Of Two Administrations

From the Wash Post:

When an internal CIA report concluded in May 2004 that "unauthorized, improvised, inhumane, and undocumented" interrogation methods had been used on suspected al-Qaeda members, the predominant reaction within the Bush administration was not revulsion but frustration that the agency's efforts inside a network of secret prisons had not been more effective, former senior intelligence and White House officials recall.

Top officials in the Obama administration on Monday made clear that they read the report differently. Despite CIA resistance, they released unflattering portions of it on the same day the attorney general authorized a prosecutor to decide whether CIA employees broke the law while undertaking or overseeing those interrogations.

They also wrested control of future interrogations of suspected senior al-Qaeda members away from the CIA and handed it to an interagency group that will be housed at the FBI -- whose agents had not only objected to the CIA's techniques but also refused to stay in the rooms where they were practiced.

In supporting harsh interrogation methods, officials in the Bush administration have said they were strongly influenced by pervasive fear and anxiety that another attack on the United States was imminent, and that virtually any measure the Justice Department approved was seen as justified.

Obama and his aides, in contrast, have concluded that the benefits of the harsh interrogation program were unproven or slight, and that the costs to America's standing in the world exceed any potential gains from allowing it to persist.

Many of the Obama administration's top national security appointees are addressing the issues for the first time: They were not part of the CIA, the Justice Department or the White House staff during that frenetic period of 2002 to 2004, when the CIA report said the interrogations were conducted with inadequate staffing or support and under incomplete guidelines that left "substantial room for misinterpretation."

Obama and his director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, have also emphasized the need to conduct counterterrorism initiatives more openly. They have embraced the CIA report's conclusion that harsh interrogation techniques were a historic aberration that might bring "long-term political and legal challenges."

The CIA's interrogation program "diverges sharply," the report stated, "from previous Agency policy and practice, rules that govern interrogations by U.S. military and law enforcement officers, statements of U.S. policy by the Department of State, and public statements by very senior U.S. officials, including the President, as well as the policies expressed by members of Congress, other Western governments, international organizations, and human rights groups."

The administration's announcement Monday that the new interrogation task force will shun use of such harsh techniques -- and stick with milder interrogation practices that already govern the U.S. military -- risks alienating some CIA officials. But it might cheer those inside the agency who expressed concern to the inspector general in 2002 and 2003 that the interrogation program involved potential "violations of human rights," as the report stated, or who counted themselves as supporters of those who blew that whistle.

New Justice Dept Report On Detainee Abuse Makes Appointment Of A Prosecutor "Hightly Likely"

From the NY Times:

The Justice Department’s ethics office has recommended reversing the Bush administration and reopening nearly a dozen prisoner-abuse cases, potentially exposing Central Intelligence Agency employees and contractors to prosecution for brutal treatment of terrorism suspects, according to a person officially briefed on the matter.

The recommendation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, presented to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in recent weeks, comes as the Justice Department is about to disclose on Monday voluminous details on prisoner abuse that were gathered in 2004 by the C.I.A.’s inspector general but have never been released.

When the C.I.A. first referred its inspector general’s findings to prosecutors, they decided that none of the cases merited prosecution. But Mr. Holder’s associates say that when he took office and saw the allegations, which included the deaths of people in custody and other cases of physical or mental torment, he began to reconsider.

With the release of the details on Monday and the formal advice that at least some cases be reopened, it now seems all but certain that the appointment of a prosecutor or other concrete steps will follow, posing significant new problems for the C.I.A. It is politically awkward, too, for Mr. Holder because President Obama has said that he would rather move forward than get bogged down in the issue at the expense of his own agenda.

The advice from the Office of Professional Responsibility strengthens Mr. Holder’s hand.

The recommendation to review the closed cases, in effect renewing the inquiries, centers mainly on allegations of detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Justice Department report is to be made public after classified information is deleted from it.

The cases represent about half of those that were initially investigated and referred to the Justice Department by the C.I.A.’s inspector general, but were later closed. It is not known which cases might be reopened.

Mr. Holder was said to have reacted with disgust earlier this year when he first read accounts of abusive treatment of detainees in a classified version of the inspector general’s report and other materials.

In examples that have just come to light, the C.I.A. report describes how C.I.A. officers carried out mock executions and threatened at least one prisoner with a gun and a power drill. It is a violation of the federal torture statute to threaten a prisoner with imminent death.

Mr. Holder, who questioned the thoroughness of previous inquiries by the Justice Department, is expected to announce within days his decision on whether to appoint a prosecutor to conduct a new investigation; in legal circles, it is believed to be highly likely that he will go forward with a fresh criminal inquiry.

Tom Ridge's "Bombshell"

Bush's Detention Practices--And Obama's Changes--Will Be In the Spotlight This Week

According to the NY Times, a couple of important detention related things will be happening this week:

The Central Intelligence Agency on Monday is to release a highly critical 2004 report on the agency’s interrogation program by the C.I.A. inspector general.

The long awaited report provides new details about abuses that took place inside the agency’s secret prisons, including C.I.A. officers carrying out mock executions and threatening at least one prisoner with a gun and a power drill.

Also, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is expected to decide in the next several days whether to appoint a criminal prosecutor to investigate the interrogations of suspects accused of being involved in terrorism after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

They also report in detail on another important change that has already occured:

In a reversal of Pentagon policy, the military for the first time is notifying the International Committee of the Red Cross of the identities of militants who were being held in secret at a camp in Iraq and another in Afghanistan run by United States Special Operations forces, according to three military officials.

The change begins to lift the veil from the American government’s most secretive remaining overseas prisons by allowing the Red Cross to track the custody of dozens of the most dangerous suspected terrorists and foreign fighters plucked off the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is a major advance for the organization in its long fight to gain more information about these detainees. The military had previously insisted that disclosing any details about detainees at the secretive camps could tip off other militants and jeopardize counterterrorism missions ...

The new Pentagon policy on detainees took effect this month with no public announcement from the military or the Red Cross. It represents another shift in detention policy by the Obama administration, which has already vowed to close the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, by next year and is conducting reviews of the government’s procedures for interrogating and detaining militants ...

Unlike the secret prisons run by the C.I.A. that President Obama ordered closed in January, the military continues to operate the Special Operations camps, which it calls temporary screening sites, in Balad, Iraq, and Bagram, Afghanistan.

As many as 30 to 40 foreign prisoners have been held at the camp in Iraq at any given time, military officials said; they did not provide an estimate for the Afghan camp but suggested that the number was smaller.

The Red Cross is allowed access to almost all American military prisons and battlefield detention sites in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the Special Operations camps have been excluded.

Cheney

Et Tu Dick?

Following up on Cheney Disappointed With Bush; Thinks "Bush had gone soft on him" there's this:

Cheney Disappointed With Bush; Thinks "Bush had gone soft on him"

From the Wash Post:

Cheney's disappointment with the former president surfaced recently in one of the informal conversations he is holding to discuss the book with authors, diplomats, policy experts and past colleagues. By habit, he listens more than he talks, but Cheney broke form when asked about his regrets.

"In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him," said a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney's reply. "He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney's advice. He'd showed an independence that Cheney didn't see coming. It was clear that Cheney's doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times -- never apologize, never explain -- and Bush moved toward the conciliatory."

The two men maintain respectful ties, speaking on the telephone now and then, though aides to both said they were never quite friends. But there is a sting in Cheney's critique, because he views concessions to public sentiment as moral weakness. After years of praising Bush as a man of resolve, Cheney now intimates that the former president turned out to be more like an ordinary politician in the end.

Cheney's post-White House career is as singular as his vice presidency, a position he transformed into the hub of power. Drained of direct authority and cast aside by much of the public, he is no less urgently focused, friends and family members said, on shaping events.

The former vice president remains convinced of mortal dangers that few other leaders, in his view, face squarely. That fixed belief does much to explain the conduct that so many critics find baffling. He gives no weight, close associates said, to his low approval ratings, to the tradition of statesmanlike White House exits or to the grumbling of Republicans about his effect on the party brand.

John P. Hannah, Cheney's second-term national security adviser, said the former vice president is driven, now as before, by the nightmare of a hostile state acquiring nuclear weapons and passing them to terrorists. Aaron Friedberg, another of Cheney's foreign policy advisers, said Cheney believes "that many people find it very difficult to hold that idea in their head, really, and conjure with it, and see what it implies."

What is new, Hannah said, is Cheney's readiness to acknowledge "doubts about the main channels of American policy during the last few years," a period encompassing most of Bush's second term. "These are not small issues," Hannah said. "They cut to the very core of who Cheney is," and "he really feels he has an obligation" to save the country from danger.

Cheney's imprint on law and policy, achieved during the first term at the peak of his influence, had faded considerably by the time he and Bush left office. Bush halted the waterboarding of accused terrorists, closed secret CIA prisons, sought congressional blessing for domestic surveillance, and reached out diplomatically to Iran and North Korea, which Cheney believed to be ripe for "regime change." ...

Let's Catch Up With John Yoo, The Author Of The Bush Detainee Memos

From the Wash Post:

Some public figures, if their judgment and ethics come under fire, retreat into solitude. Then there is John C. Yoo. The former Justice Department official, whose memos blessed the waterboarding of terrorism suspects and wiretapping of American citizens, has come out fighting, even as negative assessments of his government service pile up.

Last month, a federal judge in California refused to dismiss a lawsuit that accuses Yoo of violating a detainee's constitutional rights. This month, the Justice Department's inspector general described Yoo's legal analysis of the Bush surveillance program as "insufficient" and sometimes inaccurate. Also expected in coming weeks is a department ethics report that sources have said could renounce Yoo's approval of harsh CIA interrogation practices and recommend that he and Jay S. Bybee, a former colleague, be referred to their state bar associations for discipline.

While former colleagues have avoided attention in the face of such scrutiny, Yoo has been traveling across the country to give speeches and counter critics who dispute his bold view of the president's authority. Now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, he engages in polite but firm exchanges with legal scholars over conclusions in their academic work. This month, he wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal defending his actions and labeling critics' arguments as "absurd" and "foolhardy" responses to "the media-stoked politics of recrimination."...

In many ways, Yoo, who declined to comment for this article, has become the face of what critics see as the Bush era's legal overreaching -- all tied to memos written from 2001 to 2003 spelling out his expansive views of interrogation, electronic surveillance and the deployment of soldiers on U.S. soil ...

Six months into a new administration, Yoo is a man with little to lose. As a tenured law professor, he has held onto his job despite protesters who have picketed the Berkeley campus and petitioned school leaders for his ouster.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has rejected the idea of criminal investigations of Bush lawyers who developed counterterrorism policy. Probes announced by authorities in Spain and Germany could take years, and the five-year statute of limitations for allegations of attorney misconduct in Pennsylvania, where Yoo is licensed to practice law, has expired. That makes it unlikely the state bar will take up an ethics inquiry into his work at the Justice Department, which he left in 2003.

He departed after then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, angry over Yoo's back-door conversations with Vice President Richard B. Cheney's office on national security issues, refused to recommend him for the top job at the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel ...

This month, government lawyers who had been representing Yoo since his departure from the department told a federal judge in San Francisco that "private counsel will be assuming representation of Mr. Yoo" in a case filed by Jose Padilla, a onetime domestic terrorism suspect who was held without criminal charge for more than five years. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White allowed Padilla and his mother to pursue the case, which argued that Yoo had violated Padilla's civil rights by authorizing the government's terrorist-detention policies.

In a single sentence, the judge crystallized the ongoing public debate about Yoo, describing it as a struggle to balance the anti-terrorism effort with "using tactics of terror" to win.

Yoo, who argued that he enjoys immunity from lawsuits because he was acting as a government official, will appeal the decision and is being represented by prominent Supreme Court advocate Miguel Estrada. Estrada will work at the government rate of $200 per hour, reimbursed by taxpayers because Yoo is being sued in connection with his government service ...

Lawyers not involved in the case say the shift to private counsel spares new Justice Department leaders from having to defend Yoo's sweeping views of presidential power and his memos. It also liberates Yoo to assert that he was acting at the behest of Cheney, President George W. Bush, adviser David Addington and then-White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, an argument legal sources said he may make if the case progresses.

Inconvenient Truths

A Brilliant Summary Of The President's Position On Bush Era Intelligence

While I am interested as the next progressive in learning the truth (for how else can we prevent it from not happening again if we don't know what happened the first time?) I am also very sympathetic to the President's concern that all his critical initiatives will get lost in the partisan fighting an investigation will bring. 

What do you think A Blue View readers? I'd really like to know as a way to help resolve my own on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand dilemma. Click the 'comment' link at the bottom of this post and let us all know.

This cartoon brilliantly encapsulates the President's concerns:

Btw, there were lots of good political cartoons today. You might also want to see the ones on Dick Cheney, the Sotomayor hearings, Financial Consumer Protection and Ma budget blackmail.

Increasing Pressure To Investigate Bush's Security Programs

As predicted in yesterday's post, Cheney Ordered The CIA To Lie, here's the NY Times this morning:

President Obama is facing new pressure to reverse himself and to ramp up investigations into the Bush-era security programs, despite the political risks.

Leading Democrats on Sunday demanded investigations of how a highly classified counterterrorism program was kept secret from the Congressional leadership on the orders of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who is the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on Fox News Sunday called it a “big problem.” Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, on “This Week” on ABC, agreed that the secrecy “could be illegal” and demanded an inquiry.

Mr. Obama said this weekend that he had asked his staff members to review the mass killing of prisoners in Afghanistan by local forces allied with the United States as it toppled the Taliban regime there. The New York Times reported Saturday that the Bush administration had blocked investigations of the matter.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is also close to assigning a prosecutor to look into whether prisoners in the campaign against terrorism were tortured, officials disclosed on Saturday.

And after a report from five inspectors general about the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping said on Friday that there had been a number of undisclosed surveillance programs during the Bush years, Democrats sought more information.

That makes four fronts on which the intelligence apparatus is under siege. It is just the kind of distraction from Mr. Obama’s domestic priorities — repairing the economy, revamping the health care system, and addressing the long-term problems of energy and climate — that the White House wanted to avoid.

A series of investigations could exacerbate partisan divisions in Congress, just as the Obama administration is trying to push through the president’s ambitious domestic plans and needs all the support it can muster.

Cheney & GW Are "Reunited" By SNL

Sorry it's taken me so long to post this:

Obama Suspends Bush Policy Of Deporting Widows

From the Wall St Journal:

The Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday it is temporarily freezing a policy of deporting widows and widowers of U.S. citizens, a sign of the Obama administration's interest in new approaches to immigration.

Only a few hundred people were at risk of deportation under the policy, but critics viewed it as one of the most painful consequences of President George W. Bush's immigration crackdown.

Under the current interpretation of federal law, some immigrants whose American spouses had died faced possible deportation because their legal status was in limbo. The rule applied to immigrants who had been married for less than two years or whose green-card process hadn't been completed when their spouses died. The clause, known as the "widow penalty," had resulted in a spate of lawsuits.

On Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that her agency was freezing any action against such widows and widowers for two years. "Smart immigration policy balances strong enforcement practices with common-sense, practical solutions to complicated issues," Ms. Napolitano said.

A Department of Homeland Security statement said U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that oversees immigrant petitions, would give favorable consideration to requests for reinstatement of cases that previously had been revoked under the law.

Ms. Napolitano's directive offers relief, if only temporary, to some 200 widows and widowers. However, it suggests the Obama administration could be testing a softer approach to other contentious aspects of immigration policy.

President Obama's Agenda Responsible "for only a sliver of the deficit"

From the NY Times:

There are two basic truths about the enormous deficits that the federal government will run in the coming years.

The first is that President Obama’s agenda, ambitious as it may be, is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying. The second is that Mr. Obama does not have a realistic plan for eliminating the deficit, despite what his advisers have suggested.

The New York Times analyzed Congressional Budget Office reports going back almost a decade, with the aim of understanding how the federal government came to be far deeper in debt than it has been since the years just after World War II. This debt will constrain the country’s choices for years and could end up doing serious economic damage if foreign lenders become unwilling to finance it ...

The story of today’s deficits starts in January 2001, as President Bill Clinton was leaving office. The Congressional Budget Office estimated then that the government would run an average annual surplus of more than $800 billion a year from 2009 to 2012. Today, the government is expected to run a $1.2 trillion annual deficit in those years.

You can think of that roughly $2 trillion swing as coming from four broad categories: the business cycle, President George W. Bush’s policies, policies from the Bush years that are scheduled to expire but that Mr. Obama has chosen to extend, and new policies proposed by Mr. Obama.

The first category — the business cycle — accounts for 37 percent of the $2 trillion swing. It’s a reflection of the fact that both the 2001 recession and the current one reduced tax revenue, required more spending on safety-net programs and changed economists’ assumptions about how much in taxes the government would collect in future years.

About 33 percent of the swing stems from new legislation signed by Mr. Bush. That legislation, like his tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug benefit, not only continue to cost the government but have also increased interest payments on the national debt.

Jon Stewart On Dick Cheney

Jon brings us "the moment that epitomizes everything that is wrong with Dick Cheney, his arrogance, the media, their acquiescence, and the delightfully witty relationship between the two."

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
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President Bush Defending Waterboarding In 2006

Remember this?

Toobin On Cheney

Jeffrey Toobin gets to the heart of Cheney's speech (his review of Obama's is also worth reading):

At a minimum, Obama seemed alive to the moral and legal ambiguities implied by the issue. Not so the former Vice-President, who chose to speak in a chilling code, in which methods of torture such as waterboarding became “enhanced interrogation,” in the way that death might be called “enhanced sleep.”

Cheney delivered his indictment of the current Administration in the same tone of certainty that he once used to inform the nation of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; of the connections between the government of Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 hijackers; and of the prospects for quick victory in Iraq. In light of this, it’s hard to take seriously the claims that Cheney asked us to accept: to name just two, that the information obtained by torture saved lives; and that the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was solely the work of “a few sadistic prison guards,” and not the result of interrogation practices approved by Cheney himself.

Even worse than Cheney’s distortions was the political agenda behind them. The speech was, as politicians say, a marker—a warning to the new Administration. “Just remember: it is a serious step to begin unravelling some of the very policies that have kept our people safe since 9/11,” Cheney said. “Seven and a half years without a repeat is not a record to be rebuked and scorned, much less criminalized. It is a record to be continued until the danger has passed.”

Cheney’s all but explicit message was that the blame for any new attack against American people or interests would be laid not on the terrorists, or on the worldwide climate of anti-Americanism created by the Bush-Cheney Administration, but on Barack Obama. For many months after the 9/11 attacks, Democrats refrained from engaging in the blame game with the Bush Administration. Cheney’s speech makes it clear that, should terrorists strike again, Republicans may not respond in kind.

Cheney’s political acumen is not to be underestimated, notwithstanding his image problems. Last week’s lopsided Senate vote suggests that Republican mastery of the politics of national security (if not of national security itself) remains intact. During the campaign, the majority of voters came to support Obama’s contention that a tradeoff between our values and our security is a false choice. (And John McCain largely agreed.) But the quick flight of most congressional Democrats from their President suggests just how difficult a political assignment Obama has given himself. Cheney, in proclaiming that another attack will prove that his policies were correct, is trying to undermine confidence in the new team in the White House. The President gave a persuasive speech last week, but it proved only that he has a lot more persuading to do.

Powell Rebuts Cheney

Colin Powell appeared on Face The Nation May to rebut Dick Cheney yesterday. Part I (jump to his Cheney statement):

Part II:

The NY Times' report:

Colin L. Powell challenged Dick Cheney on the legacy of the Bush administration and the future of the Republican Party on Sunday, declaring that Republicans should not bow to “diktats that come from the right wing.”

The remarks by Mr. Powell, a former secretary of state, amounted to a public rebuttal of Mr. Cheney, the former vice president, and Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio commentator, who have questioned Mr. Powell’s Republican credentials and suggested that he should leave the party.

“Rush will not get his wish,” Mr. Powell said Sunday on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “And Mr. Cheney was misinformed. I am still a Republican.”

Mr. Powell’s appearance underlined an extraordinary public struggle among Republicans over the future of the party and the legacy of the Bush administration, particularly on national security. Mr. Powell broke with Mr. Cheney on the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, saying that he agreed with President Obama that it should be closed and that Mr. Cheney disagreed as much with his former boss as with Mr. Obama.

“Mr. Cheney is not only disagreeing with President Obama’s policy,” Mr. Powell said. “He’s disagreeing with President Bush’s policy. President Bush stated repeatedly to international audiences and to the country that he wanted to close Guantánamo. The problem he had was he couldn’t get all the pieces together.”

Mr. Powell said Guantánamo prisoners could be safely housed in United States prisons, undercutting the main theme Congressional Republicans have been wielding against the president.

Still, Mr. Powell faulted Mr. Obama for failing to produce a detailed plan to close the prison and for giving his opponents time to mobilize on the issue.

In another indication of Republican discord, Tom Ridge, who was a secretary of homeland security for Mr. Bush, said on CNN that he disagreed with Mr. Cheney that the nation was less safe because of Mr. Obama’s national security policies. He, too, supports the closing of Guantánamo. The comments from Mr. Powell and Mr. Ridge come as Republican Congressional leaders are pushing to capitalize on concerns about national security and housing terrorism detainees from Guantánamo in local prisons.

But Karl Rove, who was Mr. Bush’s senior political adviser, saluted Mr. Cheney for leading the fight in challenging Mr. Obama, saying he was doing what other Republicans were not. “The vice president feels very strongly that the administration has mischaracterized and distorted the Bush administration’s record,” he said in an interview.

“I applaud Cheney,” Rove said. “No one else was stepping forward.”

On Sunday, Mr. Powell ... made clear that he thought a major threat to the party were suggestions by Republicans like Mr. Cheney and Mr. Limbaugh that there was no room for Republicans like Mr. Powell. “What the concern about me is, ‘Well, is he too moderate?’ ” Mr. Powell said. “I have always felt that the Republican Party should be more inclusive than it generally has been over the years.”

The recent exchanges underscored the turmoil in the party as it tries to assess the losses last year and judge the extent to which it needs to disassociate itself with the policies of Mr. Bush. Mr. Powell’s call for expanding the party was embraced by Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and a leading conservative in the party, who said Republicans would be doomed to minority status if they adopted a small-tent view.

“I don’t think anybody has the authority to read anybody out of a free party,” Mr. Gingrich said in an interview. “Having started my career in Georgia when there were no Republicans and we were eager to show up, and having been in the House for 15 years as a member of the minority, I’ll tell you if we didn’t have moderates, we would never have become a majority party. You can’t be a national party without internal tension.”

Still, other Republicans said that while they agreed with Mr. Powell’s argument that the road to success was not in pushing people out of the party, there were clear signs of animosity toward him.

“There are a lot of Republicans and conservatives who are frustrated with Colin Powell because of his endorsement of President Obama,” said Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Republican of Minnesota.

Olbermann Withdraws Offer To Hannity, Donates $10k To Mancow's Charity

Olbermann & O'Donnell react to Conservative Talkshow Host Gets Waterboarded, Says It's "absolutely torture". They make an important point that 'waterboarding' is not the correct name for this techniguq, the more accurate name is 'drowning' since that is what they do: you are drowning, you experience impending death, you are being tortured:

Cheney Cartoons

Fear itself:

Cheney and his legacy

The Constitution has its uses:

Cheney won't go away:

I'm Becoming A Jesse Ventura Fan

Yesterday, the View, today Hannity. Watch him ably take the nut on:

Is A Truth And Reconciliation Commission Gaining Ground?

Glenn Thrush thinks this might be more likely now. Which as I've written (What To Do With Bush's Torture: Truth and Reconciliation Not Prosecution) is the best way out of this legal, moral and political mess:

Is the truth commission - dismissed by President Obama and seemingly DOA a few weeks ago -- gaining traction again?

Three different stories out today make it clear that the idea of a truth commission is far from dead in the minds of many Democrats. And Republicans may now want their whack at the truth if they believe it will implicate Speaker Nancy Pelosi in any way.

First off, Jeffrey Rosen in the May 20 New Republic makes an argument that an empowered commission is the only way to find out what really happened:

But the fact that an independent commission would be politically distracting isn't a good argument for resisting it. The Bush torture policies are the most serious violation of American values since the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans. A closed Senate intelligence committee investigation would be inconsistent with the transparency Obama demanded when he released the memos in the first place.

Second, as The Hillreports this morning, Republicans like Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) and Newt Gingrich now want Pelosi investigated: "If nothing else, Pelosi's hard-to-prove assertion that the CIA lied to her in a briefing has renewed interest among Republicans and Democrats in what the Bush administration was doing with detainees six years ago and what it told Congress and other officials," Mike Soraghan writes.

And finally, there's this quote from Pelosi herself to Daily Beast founder Tina Brown in the May 25 Newsweek column out this week:

"The president has been very clear. He wants to move forward. Me and the Congress want to be told the truth. The more things get released, the more we want a full commission. He wants to give immunity. I want to be more selective. He says go with immunity and maybe you will learn more. It's very hard."

Does all this add up to a full-blown "commission" with subpoena powers like the 9/11 commission? Hard to say at this point, but the idea seems to be back on the table.

Toles

The Bush Admin Tortured Until Detainee Said What They Wanted To Hear: Iraq & Al Qaeda Were Linked. Then They Trumpeted The Lies To The World

More evidence that Bush Tortured For Political, NOT Security Reasons: To Link Al Qaida & Iraq from CNN. And we now learn that they tortured a detainee until he said what they wanted to hear, then deluded themselves it was the truth and trumpeted the lies to the U.N. and Congress:

Finding a "smoking gun" linking Iraq and al Qaeda became the main purpose of the abusive interrogation program the Bush administration authorized in 2002, a former State Department official told CNN on Thursday.

 The allegation was included in an online broadside aimed at former Vice President Dick Cheney by Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff for then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. In it, Wilkerson wrote that the interrogation program began in April and May of 2002, and then-Vice President Cheney's office kept close tabs on the questioning.

"Its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at preempting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al Qaeda," Wilkerson wrote in The Washington Note, an online political journal.

Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, said his accusation is based on information from current and former officials. He said he has been "relentlessly digging" since 2004, when Powell asked him to look into the scandal surrounding the treatment of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. "I couldn't walk into a courtroom and prove this to anybody, but I'm pretty sure it's fairly accurate," he told CNN.

Most of Wilkerson's online essay criticizes Cheney's recent defense of the "alternative" interrogation techniques the Bush administration authorized for use against suspected terrorists. Cheney has argued the interrogation program was legal and effective in preventing further attacks on Americans. Critics say the tactics amounted to the illegal torture of prisoners in U.S. custody and have called for investigations of those who authorized them ...

Wilkerson wrote that in one case, the CIA told Cheney's office that a prisoner under its interrogation program was now "compliant," meaning agents recommended the use of "alternative" techniques should stop. At that point, "The VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods," Wilkerson wrote.

"The detainee had not revealed any al Qaeda-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, 'revealed' such contacts."

Al-Libi's claim that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's government had trained al Qaeda operatives in producing chemical and biological weapons appeared in the October 2002 speech then-President Bush gave when pushing Congress to authorize military action against Iraq. It also was part of Powell's February 2003 presentation to the United Nations on the case for war, a speech Powell has called a "blot" on his record.

Al-Libi later recanted the claim, saying it was made under torture by Egyptian intelligence agents, a claim Egypt denies. He died last week in a Libyan prison, reportedly a suicide, Human Rights Watch reported.

Stacy Sullivan, a counterterrorism adviser for the U.S.-based group, called al-Libi's allegation "pivotal" to the Bush administration's case for war, as it connected Baghdad to the terrorist organization behind the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

And an Army psychiatrist assigned to support questioning of suspected terrorists at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba told the service's inspector-general that interrogators there were trying to connect al Qaeda and Iraq.

"This is my opinion," Maj. Paul Burney told the inspector-general's office. "Even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

Burney's account was included in a Senate Armed Services Committee report released in April. Other interrogators reported pressure to produce intelligence "but did not recall pressure to identify links between Iraq and al Qaeda," the Senate report states.

"Hip" Abstinence-Only Educator

Keith Deltano is a "sex ed comedian" paid by abstinence-only groups receiving federal funding.

Richard Milhouse Rice: "By definition, if it was authorized by the President" it was not torture

Condi Rice channels Nixon's infamous, anything-Presidents-do-is-legal defense to justify her participation in torture:

We were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture. And so, by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Conventions Against Torture.

George W Bush: "War crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be punished and it will be no defense to say, 'I was just following orders'”

Dick, remember when your ex-boss said this right before the invasion of Iraq? So even he thinks "I was just following orders" is not a defense for torturers.

Rachel Maddow Connects The Dots ... And They Lead To Bush

If you havent seen this, it's worth watching:

And if you haven't read what Carl Levin thinks about this, or what I think (Bush & Cheney Are Cowards) you should.

Everything Is Justifiable In The Pursuit of Linking Al Qaida & Iraq

Conservatives justify torture with the mythical, Jack Baueresque scenario of an impending nuclear explosion, but the reasons why they tortured were not so noble and need to be known by more people. The media has to better publicize the fact that Bush Tortured For Political, NOT Security Reasons: To Link Al Qaida & Iraq (also see the video: The White House "drove the process" "looking for a link between Bin Laden & Hussein").