FRANK GAFFNEY AND OTHERS ON HUGE EGO HEWITT'S SHOW

Gaffney repeated the tired wingnut smears about Obama, such as claiming Obama blames America for all the world's ills. Gaffney also said that Newt Gingrich is one of the "serious persons" and Hewitt naturally agreed, thus confirming that both of them are living in a wingnut fantasy world.

Michael Gerson was on next and denounced the release of the torture memos and the talk of prosecutions for those who authorized torture. Hewitt agreed once again and thought that the investigation of the torture issue would turn into a witch hunt. Hewitt also used the old "we are at war" defense and claimed that all this does is weaken our national security.

Andy McCarthy then came on and said that waterboarding is legal. (Hewitt also said he worked at DOJ for one year, something I didn't know.) McCarthy went on to make another popular wingnut defense of torture by asserting that the President's primary responsibility is to protect Americans. This is a revisionist view of the Oath of Office, which states:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

WHAT OUR PROS THOUGHT OF USING TORTURE

The WaPo found a 2002 memo " by the military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency." The JPRA "ran the military program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE), which trains pilots and others to resist hostile questioning." The memo came out against using the SERE-derived techniques. Here's an image version of the relevant part of the PDF file:


This is the text version:

of life-has been forwarded as a compelling argument for the use of torture. Conceptually, proponents envision the application of torture as a means to expedite the exploitation process. In essence, physical and/or psychological duress are viewed as an alternative to the more time consuming conventional interrogation process. The error inherent in this line of thinking is the assumption that, through torture, the interrogator can extract reliable and accurate intelligence. History and a consideration of human behavior would appear to refute this assumption.
(NOTE: The application of physical and or psychological duress will likely result in physical compliance. Additionally, prisoners may answer and/or comply as a result of threats of torture. However, the reliability and accuracy information must be questioned.)

A WORTHY EFFORT

Someone took the time to set up a website to push "Baby Jesus" Hannity to go through with his offer to be waterboarded. (h/t Mike Calderone) Considering what happened to Christopher Hitchens, I think Hannity will try to get out of carrying through with his promise.

MORALITY VS. THE LIARS

I began to distrust Gen. Hayden when he was head of the NSA and unable to recall what the 4th Amendment stated. This happened when the criminal Bush regime was trying to reassure us that it was acting legally. Recently, Hayden and former AG Mukasey attempted to justify torture and others have come forward to cast serious doubt on their claims and especially on Hayden's claims.

FBI: Key Sept. 11 Leads Obtained Without Torture
by Dina Temple-Raston
All Things Considered, April 24, 2009

Former CIA director Michael Hayden said as much on Fox News last Sunday: "The critical information we got from Abu Zubaydah came after we began the EITs [enhanced interrogation techniques]."

Anchor Chris Wallace pressed him, "Not before?"

Hayden was emphatic. "No."

one of Zubaydah's FBI interrogators, Ali Soufan, remembers it differently. Soufan wrote in The New York Times that Zubaydah talked without being coerced.

Two high-ranking former FBI sources remember it that way, too. They say that intelligence breakthroughs came before Zubaydah was subjected to harsh techniques, not after. Another person close to the interrogation, Rohan Gunaratna, has similar recollections. He is an al-Qaida expert who has worked with U.S. government agencies on terrorism issues.

"Gen. Hayden is dead wrong" about harsh techniques getting information from Zubaydah, he says. "I have tremendous respect for Gen. Hayden, but he is wrong in this case."

MIKE GALLAGHER WAS ON...

He's not as good as Slots Bennett but he also moralizes. In this case, he corrected Paul Begala about waterboarding. Begala claimed that after WW II, we executed a Japanese soldier for waterboarding U.S. POWs. In reality, he wasn't executed, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

To a wingnut like Gallagher, this error on Begala's part is supposed to make waterboarding OK, I guess.

SLOTS BENNETT IS NOT ON... :-(

but Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum filled in for him. I was hoping to get Bennett's opinion about waterboarding because he fancies himself a moralist and all I got was a wacko former U.S. Senator.

Santorum was worried that the release of more interrogation/torture photos will hurt our national security and so were some of the callers.

FOX NEWS FALLING APART?

Not everyone at Faux News is defending torture. Shephard Smith was very blunt:

SMITH: WE ARE AMERICA! I DON'T GIVE A RAT'S ASS IF IT HELPS. WE ARE AMERICA! WE DO NOT FUCKING TORTURE! WE DON'T DO IT!

This reminded me of a caller to Levin's show in early 2008 and I don't think there is an effective moral reply.

Judge Napolitano is a little more polite but he is also clearly against this outrage:

This is not rocket science and it is not art. Everyone knows torture when they see it; and no amount of twisted logic can detract from its illegal horror, its moral antipathy, and its attack at core American values.

THE NOISE MACHINE ISN'T WORKING

As a Politico story observed, this ain't the 90s any more and the horrendous smears by the GOP''s Noise Machine, such as accusing Obama of being a Marxist, aren't having much of an effect. The most recent Pew poll found that "Obama’s job approval stands at 63%, while 26% disapprove of the way he is handling his job as president. " and the recent AP/GfK poll found that "64 percent of the public approves of Obama's job performance, down just slightly from 67 percent in February."

HERE'S THE REAL PROBLEM

In an analysis piece, Charlie Savage hits on a real problem that's been overlooked:

Any Indictment of Interrogation Policy Makers Would Face Several Hurdles
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
Published: April 22, 2009
NY Times

Some have accused the lawyers of deliberately writing down a false reading of the law to enable policy makers to violate it with impunity.

But there is little precedent for prosecuting government lawyers who provided arguably bad legal opinions. Moreover, Mr. Yoo, the memorandums’ principal author, had espoused idiosyncratic views about presidential power before joining the Justice Department, so it would be difficult to prove that he did not believe what he was writing.

The GOP picks people who are extremists, like John Bolton, and puts them in the government. The only way to prevent this is to prevent a Republican from becoming President.

HANNITY, BACK THEN AND NOW

On Hannity & Colmes of 9/20/2006, Sean had this to say:

HANNITY: Hey Bill, I just disagree with your assessment. The president doesn't support torture. He's never said he supports torture. He's said just the opposite.

MAHER: Oh...

HANNITY: Wait a minute. What he said is he supports strong, aggressive interrogation techniques. That would be sleep deprivation, loud music, to extract information from enemy combatants on a battlefield when they may have information that will kill Americans or kill American soldiers. Why wouldn't you support that?

MAHER: OK. There are thousands of people in detention centers that we have. Thousands of them in Iraq and Guantanamo, Bagram Bay, black sites we don't even know about in lots of countries. And just because he uses a euphemism doesn't mean it's not torture.

How about this? If this is not really torture, if this is something that you're OK with our enemy doing to our troops if they were captured, why don't you undergo it for a week? Water-boarding, where they put you underwater until you nearly drown?

HANNITY: Nobody supports waterboarding. The president specifically addressed that. That's not what they're talking about. But loud music, sleep deprivation, aggressive interrogation, you should support that, especially knowing that American lives would be at stake.

Today, Hannity has a much different view. From his interview of Charles Grodin on April 22nd:

GRODIN: Let's say they capture him. They can't because he won’t join. But what does that mean, enhanced interrogation?

HANNITY: It means waterboarding.

HANNITY: ...Don't you — you don't want to live through 9/11 again. Is it really so bad to dunk a terrorist's head in water and make him talk? Tell me what's wrong with that.

Just before the 3:00 mark on this clip, you can hear Hannity say "I don't believe waterboarding is torture." Grodin was also talking at the same time, so it appears in the FAUX News transcript as "(CROSSTALK)".

WHAT THE FBI DIRECTOR SAID ABOUT TORTURE

UPDATE: Here's the link to the Vanity Fair article, courtesy of Greg Sargent.

(via the NYT)

In an interview with Vanity Fair last year, the F.B.I. director since 2001, Robert S. Mueller III, was asked whether any attacks had been disrupted because of intelligence obtained through the coercive methods. “I don’t believe that has been the case,” Mr. Mueller said. (A spokesman for Mr. Mueller, John Miller, said on Tuesday, “The quote is accurate.”)

GOP == THE DONNER PARTY

I know emotions play a huge role in political judgments bu this kind of ignorance should negate some of that.

BILL O'REILLY:

COLMES: Well, first of all, this shows -- first of all, what do you, ignore the guy? When George W. Bush was at the UN and asked, "Will you ever -- will you talk to Ahmadinejad if you're in the same room?" "No, I won't talk to him" -- like a 5-year-old.

What do you, ignore somebody standing right next to you? Do we -- because he touched him, put his hand on his shoulder, shook his hand? Do these people have a problem with Mao and Nixon? And of course, you worked for Richard Nixon. I mean, Nixon goes to China, do you have a problem with --

O'REILLY: It was Zhou and Nixon. Mao was not involved.

REALITY:





NEWT GINGRICH:

"But we didn't rush over, smile, and greet Russian dictators. We understood who they were."

REALITY:

GOOD RADIO NEWS

Randi Rhodes will be back in the air in May. From San Francisco's KKGN,

PREMIERE RADIO NETWORKS SYNDICATES THE RANDI RHODES SHOW

Premiere Radio Networks is proud to announce that beginning May 11, The Randi Rhodes Show will join its lineup of nationally syndicated radio programs. Airing weekdays from 3 - 6 p.m. ET, Rhodes will enlighten and entertain listeners with her trademark candid, incisive opinions, as well as her biting sense of humor, as she discusses everything from news and current events, to politics and hot topics. The Randi Rhodes Show will broadcast live from Washington, D.C., and will be heard on affiliates across the nation, including KTLK-AM/Los Angeles, KKGN-AM/San Francisco and KPOJ-AM/Portland.

I think Randi has gotten a little shrill (not in a good way) over the last year or so but I'm still glad she's back on the air.

WINGNUT RADIO SCHEDULING CHANGE

KNST now 4 hours of economic programming M-F and KQTH has 3 hours. I guess this means that even wingers think it's important to know something about the state of the economy.

I SUSPECTED AS MUCH

Some time ago, I came to the conclusion that many of the people who seem to worship the military do so because being in the service was the high point of their lives. Here's a little anecdotal evidence from a commenter at Politico:

I loved the service..I would have stayed in longer but my leg got blowed off...If we had had the prosthetics we have today, perhaps they would have let me stay in...My service years were the highlight of my life. I liked college and all but I never had the same comaraderie I had then...teaching was fun, I taught for 21 years, but nothing comes close to the military...try it if you haven't, it'll turn your life around...

ANOTHER WINGNUT MEME IS BORN

CNS News falsely claimed that the waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammed prevented a large attack on Los Angeles and many other wingnut outlets made the same claim. This lie has been repeated in this Politico story discussion thread.

One problem: KSM was captured in 2003, the LA attack was thwarted in 2002.

RADIO WINGNUTS ON TORTURE

Huge Ego Hewitt tried to compare the concern about torture to a McCarthy-like witch hunt and reached a further into the past by also making a comparison to the Salem Witch trials. Mark "Foamer" Levin compared it to a "Soviet-style" inquisition and warned that when conservatives regain power, they will use the same approach to liberals.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE "ORIGINAL INTENT" ARGUMENT?

Conservatives love to justify their reactionary views by claiming the Founding Fathers originally held the same views. In the torture debate, we haven't yet heard this defense, probably because George Washington himself prohibited torture:

After crossing the Delaware and winning the Battle of Trenton on Christmas Day, 1776, George Washington famously ordered his troops to give refuge to hundreds of surrendering Hessian soldiers. "Treat them with humanity," Washington instructed his lieutenants, noting that accepting the German mercenaries as prisoners of war wasn't just the right thing to do, it might even sway them to abandon their British paymasters and join the American side in the War of Independence. "Let them have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of the British army."

In 1777, John Adams expanded on this concept, asserting that it should be considered one of the defining features of America:

John Adams argued that humane treatment of prisoners and deep concern for civilian populations not only reflected the American Revolution's highest ideals, they were a moral and strategic requirement. His thoughts on the subject, expressed in a 1777 letter to his wife, might make a profitable read for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld as we endeavor to win hearts and minds in Iraq. Adams wrote: "I know of no policy, God is my witness, but this — Piety, Humanity and Honesty are the best Policy. Blasphemy, Cruelty and Villainy have prevailed and may again. But they won't prevail against America, in this Contest, because I find the more of them are employed, the less they succeed."

A LITTLE HISTORY FOR MR. STEVENS

In a Politico article that puzzles over the fact that unlike Clinton, Obama isn't getting mired down by wingnut lies and smears, I found this:

“He has the benefit of nobody paying attention to anything but the economy,” said Stuart Stevens, a longtime GOP strategist and author. “You have the economic equivalent of the country being at war. Nobody on Sept. 20, 2001, was particularly focused on cultural issues, either.”

How quickly Stevens forgot: On Sept. 13, 2001, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blamed the 9-11 attacks in feminists, gays, the ACLU and other liberals. On Oct. 4, 2001, the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon said that no aid should go to the survivors of gay partnerships.

STUCK ON STUPID

The 2002 NIE concluded that there was no substantive connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda but that wasn't good enough for the criminal Bush regime.

Report: Abusive tactics were used to find Iraq-al Qaida link
By Jonathan S. Landay McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Tuesday, April 21, 2009

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.


A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that intelligence agencies and interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

"There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.

"Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."

Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said.

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

"While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

Excerpts from Burney's interview appeared in a full, declassified report on a two-year investigation into detainee abuse released on Tuesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

COKIE ROBERTS CHANNELS SEAN HANNITY

Instead of a serious comment about the torture issue, Roberts sounds just like a radio gasbag:

...the truth is we do wonderful work all around the world, this country, people in this country, organizations in this country, the US government get no credit for it...

I THINK CHENEY'S SCARED

I agree with Andrew Sullivan. Cheney realizes that he may be held accountable for his illegal actions and he's scared to death. He can count on wingnut bloggers, FAUX News and parts of the Noise Machine to support him by trying to turn this legal issue into a partisan question but I don't think it will work. All you need to do is think about the numbers 183 and 83.

NOT THE ISSUE

War criminal Cheney seems to think that if the torture he promoted can be shown to have provided some useful information, then all is forgiven. That's not the issue! The issue is whether or not the United States is a country of laws.

THE 9TH AND THE 2ND

The wingnuts love to accuse the 9th Circuit Court as composed of rabid judicial acitvists so let the word go forth: The 9th supports the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms.

"AREN'T WE SPECIAL"

I get sick of wingers trumpeting their claim to be more "REAL" American than the rest of us and have a unique insight into what is truly American. That means I don't like this idiot from Texas at all:

Culberson: ..the core point here is Texans have a special feeling in our hearts about what it means to be an American. And to be an American means the government should leave me alone and get off my back and get out of my way and get out of my wallet...(crosstalk)

Matthews: Who has that special feeling?

Culberson: More than anyone else I think Texans have a special feeling in their heart about what it means to be an American and the core values that made Americans...(crosstalk)

WHY THE MOTU ARE WHINING

There's a nice piece in New York Magazine that describes how the MOTU are upset that their world was rocked. It provides one of the rationales they rely on to justify their obscene income:

...belief shared on Wall Street but which few have dared to articulate until now: Those who select careers in finance play an exceptional role in our society. They distribute capital to where it’s most effective, and by some Ayn Rand–ian logic, the virtue of efficient markets distributing capital to where it is most needed justifies extreme salaries—these are the wages of the meritocracy. They see themselves as the fighter pilots of capitalism.

The real problem is they didn't allocate capital efficiently. In fact, many of them contributed to wasting as much as $4 Trillion while still collecting millions in income.

$100 MILLION???

In the comedy flick Austin Powers, Dr. Evil humorously asks an anachronistically small ransom and I got the same sense of inappropriateness when I heard that Pres. Obama wants to cut such a small amount from the budget.

HERE'S THE FOOTNOTE

This is from the May 30, 2005 Bradbury memo, page 37:



You can click on the above to get a larger image. Here's the plain text:

The CIA used the waterboard "at least 83 times during August 2002" in the interrogation of Zubaydah. IG Report at 90, and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM, see id. at 91.

OK, LET'S SEE THE RESULTS

War Criminal Cheney wants the results of torturing Al Qaeda prisoners de-classified so he can claim justification:

“One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn't put out the memos that showed the success of the effort. And there are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified.”

“I formally asked that they be declassified now. I haven't announced this up until now, I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country.”

WHY SO MANY TIMES?

According to the torture memos, Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. According to a former CIA officer, once seemed to be enough (from the NYT):

A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

The memos also reveal that Khalid Sheik Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times yet earlier reports indicated that he told all he knew after a mere 2 1/2 minutes¹:

Waterboarding: Subjecting a person to simulated drowning has been used to obtain information or a confession for hundreds of years. The person is made to believe that death is imminent. According to what sources have told Dennis Ross of ABC News, waterboarding can break a person's will in a matter of seconds. The person is strapped to a board so he cannot move. His head is lower than his feet, and a towel covers his face. Water is then poured over his face, setting off a gag reflex and the feeling of drowning. Supposedly, Khalid Sheik Muhammad held out for about 2 1/2 minutes.

¹Newhouse News Service
September 23, 2006 Saturday 7:56 PM EDT
Together, Bush and Senators Compose a Narrow Definition of Torture
BYLINE: By GEORGE LATANZIO.
George Latanzio is an editor at The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He can be contacted at glatanzio@starledger.com

RADIO TIDBITS

Last night, Billy Cunningham was in fine form. His defense of capitalism came down to three sentences: "Greed is good. Greed is great. Greed is good." This is more proof that Galbraith was correct:

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

Near the end of the show, Billy indulged in hyperbolic paranoia by claiming that ACORN pays people $50 and hour to show up at demonstrations.

ANOTHER WINGNUT MEME SELF-DESTRUCTS

You may call that psycho Glenn Beck has promoted a modern "Thomas Paine" and Chris Kelly of HuffPo provided a little real information on the original that shows the current incarnation is an ill-informed imbecile. I went to the Encyclopedia Britannica and found a little more information. Paine was enraged by the attacks on the French Revolution by the great conservative writer Edmund Burke and wrote two rebuttals, The Rights of Man and The Rights of Man, Part II.¹ In these works, Paine advocated was can only be called a defense of liberalism:

What began as a defense of the French Revolution evolved into an analysis of the basic reasons for discontent in European society and a remedy for the evils of arbitrary government, poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, and war. Paine spoke out effectively in favour of republicanism as against monarchy and went on to outline a plan for popular education, relief of the poor, pensions for aged people, and public works for the unemployed, all to be financed by the levying of a progressive income tax.

¹Paine, Thomas. (2009). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved April 19, 2009, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online: http://search.eb.com/eb/article-260408

EMPTYWHEEL COMES THROUGH AGAIN

Marcy Wheeler took the time to carefully read the torture memos and discovered that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was water-boarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah was given the same treatment 83 times in August 2002. The very large numbers suggest three things:

1) water-boarding doesn't work
2) water-boarding will never work if people like Cheney and Addington are convinced that the prisoners really do know more.
3) water-boarding won't help us in the ticking time bomb scenario.

STILL LIVING IN THE PAST

In the Washington Monthly, Charles Homan writes about Culture111, one of the recent attempts by conservatives to be "hip." Considering that Hewitt thinks Jonah Goldberg is hip, I wasn't too surprised to learn that the new web site was inspired by the early writings of Tom Wolfe, the one who wrote humorous takes on the Left, such as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The wingers think that Wolfe offered devastating criticisms of liberalism and that his work can serve as a model for the 21st century.

I really don't think Wolfe offered more than humorous criticism of the Left and his work was based on the actions of others, notably the Dirty Fucking Hippies, who are in short supply these days.