hi Christy…

Christy!

The tapes documented a program so closely guarded that President Bush himself had agreed with the advice of intelligence officials that he not be told the locations of the secret C.I.A. prisons….

Plausible deniability? I don’t think so. Not knowing the locations is vastly different from knowledge of the existence of these illegal sites. “Don’t tell me where they are” is not only childish, but irrelevant.

no can go there…see yall later

sadlyyes, are you leaving? I wanted to thank you for telling me in the last thread that Obama is Lieberman’s butt boy. I didn’t even realize that!

jayt — I didn’t say it was valid. Probably should have put quotes around the plausible deniability phrasing though. *g*

The tapes documented a program so closely guarded that President Bush himself had agreed with the advice of intelligence officials that he not be told the locations of the secret C.I.A. prisons…

…plausible deniability…

Heck, Deadeye tol’ me those were jest polecats howling fer their suppa in his bunker. Ah always believe everything Deadeye tells me.

“Don’t tell me where the secret CIA prisons are.”

“Don’t tell me what the new Iran WMD intelligence is.”

“Don’t tell me why you’re firing the USAttorneys.”

“Don’t tell me how you’ll discredit Joe Wilson.”

.

“Okay, you’ve told me, now you’ve covered your ass.”

This is unrelated to plausible deniability — this is willful ignorance in the face of clear warning, something else entirely. And probably impeachable, if the table setting hadn’t been Pelosi’d.

I’ve clarified above on the “plausible deniability” — that’s what i get for shorthanding my snideness and assuming you guys will pick it up. Should be clearer now.

But if you listen to the Shrubs comments you will probably always hear him parse those words to “I didn’t know where….” That’s the cute game they play. He knows all of the shit, but with a wink wink so he can parse his answers to the public.

The George Washington story that someone pointed out recently here at FDL contains a concise refutation of current Bushco American Torture policy. When Washington’s men wanted to torture or (simply mistreat) British POW’s, General Washington would have none of it. Why does the Shrub think that his way is better than George Washington’s?

oh, I wasn’t slamming you – just GWB’s apparent feeling that if he he sticks his fingers in his ears and says “Don’t tell me any more – I don’t want to know!!”, that it somehow insulates him from liability.

OTOH, it’s not exactly surprising to hear, is it? What a maroon.

That’s easy– 9/11 changed everything.

This stuff just drives me crazy. I mean I’ve never liked Bush — I penned a throughly vitriolic diatribe against him after the way he “won” in 2000. But not even in my wildest dreams/nightmares did I think he was this corrupt…

And why, oh why, does it not surprise me to see Addington’s name up there? If we can’t impeach Cheney/Bush, can we at least run Addington to the ground? Please?

Why does the Shrub think that his way is better than George Washington’s?

Remember Georgie bragging about all of the books about George Washington that he’d read?

Apparently he didn’t approve.

That story isn’t necessarily supported by Washington’s own writing, btw, which is why I don’t cite it. If you look at any compilation of Washington’s letters during his tenure as commander of the American forces in the Revolutionary War, you’ll find references to some British officers being treated quite inhumanely during the Valley Forge timeperiod (I believe, would have to pull our book on that to be absolutely certain). It is clear, though, that Washington was deeply, deeply troubled by this and that he worked very hard from that point forward to ensure that the conduct wasn’t repeated.

It’s not a pure stance on his part, though, and people should know that — and that he learned some very difficult, painful and powerful lessons from it that caused him to implement some clearer policies thereafter.

The George Washington story that someone pointed out recently here at FDL contains a concise refutation of current Bushco American Torture policy. When Washington’s men wanted to torture or (simply mistreat) British POW’s, General Washington would have none of it. Why does the Shrub think that his way is better than George Washington’s?

I don’t know who linked to it, or if this is where they linked but here’s a version of the story.
George Washington: No Torture on My Watch

I came across it on digg
so I’ll quick say digg this post

and see Christy @ 16

George Bush doesn’t want to be an accomplice to his own criminal activity? Huh.

This is all very good for Republicans, however.

It’s not a pure stance on his part, though, and people should know that — and that he learned some very difficult, painful and powerful lessons from it that caused him to implement some clearer policies thereafter.

Gosh, funny that. Sounds like ol’ George W flip flopped! The horror!

Oddly enough, I respect him all the more for hearing this version of it. Would have been easy to turn a blind eye to it. Would have been easy to deny things were going on. Harder to admit it was wrong and then work toward changing the conditions for real.

It’s something George B appears incapable of understanding.

Well, if the past is any indicator of the future, what will happen here is that Bushco wil attempt to run the clock and muck up the facts. Then, another scandal wil well-up and for the great unwashed public the matter goes down the ra bbit hole.

My guess is justice will be had only in November of 2008 and in the judgment of hisory.

The photos from Abu Ghraib may have been emotionally volitile but there has yet to be any comprehensive accountability/responsibility realized. Don, Dick, and George (not all inclusive) all need to be held criminally responsible. Had they chose not to invade Iraq, there would have been no Abu Ghraib. They knew at the time they made their decision that their information was bogus, even if they had to pay a felon to lie for them.

And then there are those that belittle ‘conspiracy theories’? I wouldn’t put anything past these thugs to do what they had, to accomplish their agenda. But that’s part of their tactic; dirty the water so bad that you can’t pick any one thing, because pretty much everything they do turns to s*** for the most of us! Let’s not forget that a reprehensible ‘party’ went along with alot of this crap with nary a harsh word of retribution. That doesn’t necessarily exclude members of the other party who also stamped their approval (many times) with this cabal.

The disheartening thing for me is that one topic leads into another and it’s not a positive path. Practically every system in place right now is, or bordering on becoming, corrupt. Just where do we start?

And yes, I do know this is an awfully dark and dismal topic…sorry to bring everyone’s Sunday down, but this needed some serious discussion.

“To a spectator it would look like torture,” he said. “And torture is wrong.”

I got up this morning and read the article. Those are its last lines. After that, I had to sit down and write.

And here’s some of what I wrote:

There is interesting research that shows how people become more self-conscious when they can see themselves in a mirror. Must be something similar when you’re being taped. You’re aware a “record” is being made. And, if you think about it, you wonder how a “spectator” might view that record. And even if you have no conscience, no empathy for the fellow human who is totally subject to your treatment, you begin to wonder – how your normal, average human would react, seeing those tapes. You begin to see how your average fundamentalist, seeing the prisoner stripped and mocked and spit upon and worse, might think of Jesus, who said “if you do this to the least of them, you do this to me.” And if they thought of Jesus, they might think of other words, “Forgive your enemies. Forgive them and do not hate them.” Well, goodness, we can’t have that, can we? We’d better stop taping. And stop thinking such thoughts.

I think we are like Dante, approaching the gates of hell:

In the midway of this our mortal life,
I found me in a gloomy wood, astray
Gone from the direct path
………..
How first I enter’d it I scarce can say,
Such sleepy dullness in that instant weigh’d
My senses down, when the true path I left

“Abandon hope all ye who enter here”

And like Dante we must descend into hell. We must go where we do not want to go. We must look without flinching at everything that has come to pass. And we must look as a spectator would look. We must see things for what they are. And we must call them what they are. Torture. Interrogation under torture. Imprisonment without Habeas Corpus. Cruel and Unusual Punishment without Trial. Torture applied to helpless prisoners without benefit of any human counsel. People treated as animals and worse. And this has happened on our watch, regardless of our non-consent.

That’s brilliant. If I read Dante will I be able to write like that?

Put your heart and soul into what really matters. You will think of other writers or other memories, events, dreams. Be yourself. And stand up for what is right.

jayt — I didn’t say it was valid. Probably should have put quotes around the plausible deniability phrasing though. *g*

Christy, you have to bring up all these facts. In fact there are far too many things to remember. You totally left out Kommander Guy’s faulty memory. Who disbanded the Iraq Army? When did he learn Iran stopped their Nuclear Weapons program? Which torture tape is his favorite?

Cheney is the source of the authoritarian, subversive, anti-constitutional (frankly, anti-American) rot in this administration. But then there’s Bush’s profound psychological unwillingness to recognize the legitimacy of anyone with authority to say to him, “No, you can’t do that.”

This is a seriously bad combination to have in the two highest executive offices in a constitutional democracy. It’s made even worse by a Congress that is not only unwilling to effectively excercise its constitutional responsibilities with regard to executive branch wrong-doing, but is even unwilling to protect its own constitutional prerogatives against executive branch usurpation.

The tapes documented a program so closely guarded that President Bush himself had agreed with the advice of intelligence officials that he not be told the locations of the secret C.I.A. prisons….

Good God!! It sounds like a scheme by a roomful of sophomores. Were they afraid that if the principal questioned him, he might let the cat out of the bag and then they’d all be in deep shit with their parents? There’s no way in hell that not knowing the location of those prisons would protect the president and/or the rest of them in court actions.

Bill Cohen and Sam Nunn on Wolfie–who insists on asking if they’d support Bloomberg as a third party candidate–talking about bringing forth issues over the next six months, a dialog so we can fix our broken government. Yabbut [we always told our kids yabbuts live with the rabbits….], says Wolfie, will you support Bloomberg as a third party candidate.

Cohen, Nunn–must have a gov’t that can govern once the campaigning’s over.

Yabbut, will you support Bloomie for Prez/ third party candidate persists Wolfie, totally deliberately ignoring the thrust of Cohen and Nunn’s message.

Names dropped in the conversation: Boston Globe op-ed by Nunn/Cohen today, Sens. Boren, Robb Danforth. Christy Whitman, Brock…Center for Strategic & International Studies, Gilman [sp?] Foundation

Wolfie now talking to Dodd pushing his agenda that Cohen/Nunn’s appearance means a third party candidate. Wolfie–totally ignoring factbased conversation to propel his own spin again….

yep

As I read these things this morning, I thought to myself how things would go if I had been supervising someone doing therapy. And if, instead of listening to the tapes and maintaining a close “supervision” of the proceedings, I had just turned a deaf ear or told the therapist in training to “just go ahead and do whatever you think is necessary and don’t tell me about it,” well I can assure you the Licensing Board and my fellow psychologists would not have cut me any slack – even under the best of circumstances!

It is simply unacceptable for those at the top to presume they could insulate themselves from responsibility and guilt.

I’ve clarified above on the “plausible deniability” — that’s what i get for shorthanding my snideness and assuming you guys will pick it up.

It’s worth pointing out that different people have different standards for what they consider “plausible”.

That’s brilliant. If I read Dante will I be able to write like that?

Read Alan Bennett’s ‘The Uncommon Reader’, pehaps.

I want to make an incredibly important point, one of the most important we can make when we or any democrat discusses these issues;

the interrogators have informed us they got “crap information” once they went to the methods these sicko’s insisted on using

THEY GOT MUCH BETTER INFORMATION BEFORE THE SICKOS GOT THEIR WAY!

and THAT’S how this subject MUST be discussed, things like;

“who knows how many more lives we would have saved if we continued to use the more effective methods to gather our information”

“because of the depraved minds insisting on using these methods, we will never know the lives that would have been saved”

“we have known for quite some time we loose information when we resort to the depraved practices forced on our intelligence community by people in this information WHO HAVE PROVEN TIME AND AGAIN HAVE NO MILITARY CLUE”

“HOW MANY TERRORISTS HAVE BEEN CREATED BECAUSE OF THE SICK MINDS IN THIS ADMINISTRATION THAT ACTUALLY BELIEVE TORTURING COMBATANTS IS A GOOD IDEA?”

do you see that?

turn it around, make it THEM who have lost information because they INSISTED on using practices that PUT OUR SOLDIERS ARE GREAT RISK AND LOOSE INFORMATION

we need our politicians to understand these things and we need them to HAMMER these points

To which, once again, one can only say, “See? That wasn’t so hard.” Totally begs the question why statements like this seem to be so beyond the cognitive abilities of so many Democratic politicians.

I’m beginning to think that the torture approval from on high comes more from a desire for revenge and an apparently invisible sadistic streak in CheneyCo than from a firm conviction in the results being helpful.

I’m reading Craig Unger’s new book, Fall of the House of Bush (next week’s Saturday Book Salon, BTW, and a fascinating read, highly recommend) and it is almost inconceivable to me that anyone can hold the notions and enforce the policies the neocons do and not be a gleefully sadistic bastard.

Because he speaks for God…

Christy, I agree. As uncomfortable (to say the least) and difficult a subject, I cannot look away because I have some sense that I cannot articulate, how important it is to bear witness or we cannot move forward? I believe we, our country, will need a truth and reconciliation commission like South Africa in the aftermath of apartheid.

That’s my view of it, too. We have terribly childish men in the White House, supported by terribly childish people. We all know some of these people and have experienced their tantrums. Guantanamo was never about getting information or protecting people; it was always about vengeance, supported by the fantasy that the threat of that vengeance would ’scare’ potential enemies. The mindset, if not the actual implementation, has been taken over from the Israeli West Bank policy.

It might be nice if the media actually cooperated to let the public know what’s going on. I get a weekend edition to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, a Knight-Ridder paper. I read what I thought was the NYT article in the paper this morning. I say thought because when I read Christy’s post and then clicked to the on line NYT article itself, it is clear that the PiPress offered a severely edited and, if I didn’t know the PiPress was a paragon of truth, justice and the American way, I would think they were trying to spin the article into right-wing propaganda charicature of itself. Here’s the last few paragraphs of Times article itself:

“According to several current and former officials, lawyers in the agency’s clandestine branch gave Mr. Rodriguez written guidance that he had the authority to destroy the tapes and that such a move would not be illegal.

“One day in November 2005, Mr. Rodriguez sent a cable ordering the destruction of the recordings. Soon afterward, he notified both Mr. Goss and Mr. Rizzo, taking full responsibility for the decision.

“Former intelligence officials said that Mr. Goss was unhappy about the news, in part because it was further evidence that as the C.I.A. director he was so weakened that his subordinates would directly reject his advice.

“Yet it appears that Mr. Rodriguez was never reprimanded. Nor is there evidence that Mr. Goss promptly notified Congress that the tapes were gone.

“The investigations over the tapes frustrate some C.I.A. veterans, who say they believe that the agency is being unfairly blamed for policies of coercive interrogation approved at the top of the Bush administration and by some Congressional leaders. Intelligence officers are divided over the use of such methods as waterboarding. Some say the methods helped get information that prevented terrorist attacks. Others, like John C. Gannon, a former C.I.A. deputy director, say it was a tragic mistake for the administration to approve such methods.

“Mr. Gannon said he thought the tapes became such an issue because they would have settled the legal debate over the harsh methods.

““To a spectator it would look like torture,” he said. “And torture is wrong.””

Here’s how the Knight-Ridder/Pioneer Press version concludes:

” According to several current and former officials, lawyers in the agency’s clandestine branch gave Rodriguez written guidance that he had the authority to destroy the tapes and that such a move would not be illegal.

” In November 2005, Rodriguez and his aides decided to use their own authority to destroy the tapes, officials said.”

That’s it. No where in the Knight-Ridder version do you get any sense that thjere might be some current issue of cover-up or scapegoating by higher ups. The comments by ex-CIA director Gannon are completely omitted. The way the article is edited and rewritten, you get the opposite sense: Rodriguez and the CIA undertook the torture on their own and they decided on their on to destroy the tapes. In other words, just a few bad apples and nothing here of interest, folks so just move on along.

Knight-Ridder also ran an apologia of sorts written by Mark Bowden (”Blackhawk Down”). Bowden agrees that waterboarding is illegal as torture and usually wrong but tries to argue that it is sometimes justifiable. Bowden’s defense boils down to another variation of the “ticking time bomb” baloney used on TV shows like “24″: if it saved lives being conducted by intelligence in wartime, it is worth it. Waterboarders should not be prosecuted or punished. Nothing about the enablers, Bush, Cheney, Addington or Yoo who brought this on.

The PiPress has become the print version of Fox News in the Twin Cities so this is not surprising. What is surprising to me is that they would stoop so low as to blatantly edit and rewrite an article from another newspaper to fit the paper’s right wing editorial slant. I guess you just don’t have to dig very deep anymore.

George Bush doesn’t want to be an accomplice to his own criminal activity? Huh.

All these scandals are so far out of the norm that there’s no way they would have been done without a directive from the highest level (and I don’t mean Cheney).

It doesn’t matter if he says he didn’t know anything. It’s implicit.

Everyone should take note that when you’re in charge and wild & crazy things happen, then either you’re gonna take the fall or there will have to be some other people who were clearly not under your control. For example, the Abu Ghraib crew were pretty crazy, but from a distance it appears they were receiving some kind of direction from above. Covering it up doesn’t change the facts or the public impression and, frankly, the international impression which harms America so much.

After the Bush mafia the “political center”, if such a thing really can exist, has moved to the left — back toward sanity. For the future (which arrives quickly) we have to wonder if the center will take up permanent residence in the territory where it lay in the 1970s or the 1960s or somewhere else.

If the center is truly moving left, then an entry from Bloomberg et al could be a good thing. It would simply push the Conservative Bush Right Republicans into a dark corner where we can mostly ignore it. I wonder if Bloomberg himself is far enough Right to truly establish a new Right. He’s been a Democrat and a Republican in New York City. Where does that place him on the national political scale?

A Unity government could possibly be a good thing in some times (war time for example), but for now I think we need to solve a lot of problems very aggressively and I don’t think Bloomberg is a Teddy Roosevelt.

Maybe in the future we can look forward to a New Right Republican party which is at least sane and truly cares about America.

At least for now, I think Edwards is our best choice.

John Edwards for President — Leadership for these times!