Senator Carl Levin, Chair of the Armed Services Committee was on Rachel Maddow Thursday night. Our own intrepid commentor, Sunshine, wrote up a transcript. Senator Levin had a few things to say that MAKE A LOT OF SENSE [sorry for shouting], and some others that give me a kernel of hope for the future.
Rachel: One of the things that I think has been so I guess challenging to the American debate about this is that President Bush and Vice President Cheney have essentially argued that they have legalized waterboarding, that they have legalized torture. They think the actions of their Justice Department made things like waterboarding not war crimes any more. Are they right?
Levin: You can’t just suddenly change some thing that’s illegal into something that is legal by having a lawyer writing an opinion saying that it’s legal. Things can’t work that way or else someone could get a lawyer and say a crime is not a crime and then that would be a defense. It is not a defense. And I was astounded frankly, when I heard the Vice President of the United States sort of just blandly and blindly saying that he thought that was appropriate thing and yes he was involved in discussions about it.
[emphasis added]
THANK YOU SENATOR LEVIN. In one salient sentence, Senator Levine has explained why all the twisted, convoluted, crappy Yoo memos in the world, no matter how high you pile them up, do NOT equal a "get out of jail free" card. Further, since almost nobody was allowed to actually see those memos, few people can advance any credible claim to have relied upon something they never read.
Even better, Senator Levin proposes outright an intention to turn over information which the Armed Services Committee apparently already has or believes it can get, to the Obama Justice Department for prosecution. You heard read it folks, referrals for prosecution. Woot!
What I think it is our role to do is to bring out the facts which we have, to state our conclusions which we have, which is where the origin of these techniques were began. And then to turn over to the Justice Dept. of the next administration cause clearly this Justice Dept is not willing to take an objective look and turn over to the next Justice Dept. all the facts that we can and we have put together and get our report, the rest of it, declassified.
But then it seems to me that it is appropriate for there to be an outside commission appointed to take this out of politics and it would have the clear subpoena authority to get to the parts of this which are not yet clear. And that is the role of the CIA. We looked at the roll of Dept. of Defense but the roll of the CIA has not yet been looked at. And let an outside commission reach the kind of conclusions which then may or may not lead to indictments or to civil action. But it is not our role it’s not appropriate for us to reach those kind of those kind of conclusions.
[emphasis added]
Nota bene, did you notice that Senator Levin wants an outside commission to perform, with respect to the CIA, the same sort of investigation that SAS did for the Armed Services? Is this a tacit acknowlegement that the Intelligence oversight committees (Gang of Eight?) may have a conflict of interest in conducting such an investigation?
Twenty-third in a series on torture and the law
[Editor's note: This photo by takomabibelot features a banner created and designed by Firedoglake reader BonnieT of Austin, Texas, where she operates OpposeTorture.org.]
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Loosehead!
Carl Levin — wins the ‘U-da-man’ award!!
I see a bunch of plane crashes coming.
Biden says that the new administration may investigate the Bushies- sayin that now appears to be a plea for Bush to pardon everyone.
Linky?
If he pardons people who have not been convicted of a crime doesn’t that say he had inside knowledge of the commission of a crime and is therefore an accessory if not more.
Stay with me on this one.
Back in the day, before I went to law school, I worked in construction. This is over 20 years ago. I worked on foundations and similar early stages of projects, so I had to coordinate with those phases which came after me. One day, we were building condos for a developer. This guy acted like he was wanting to be preceived as mobbed up, but really was just a hustler. Anyway, he had had the sense to hire a site superintendent who knew how to get things done. After paying off the union so they could hire and fire whom they wanted, placng a newspaper ad for carpenters and after we’d gotten 4 building foundations going-on ready for the carpenters, the super had 4 foremen he’d worked with previously and knew were effective come into the trailer. I’m drinking coffee, making like I’m reading the sports pages.
The super lays out four sets of plans, one for each foreman. He then goes to the one set on the drafting table and says: “this is what you gotta build” and describes the condos, mentioning some of the technical issues. “Go look at the plans. Tomorrow, the mopes will that read the ad will start showing up. You can pick your crews then. The wood arrives the next day.”
Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of C-notes. He peeled ten of them from the wad onto the table and said: “First crew with the building framed out, sheathed, ready for the plumbers and approved by the municipal inspector gets these. You’ll get to divvy these up among your crew however you see fit.”
The meeting over the foremen went out, studied their plans and started calling in their trusted workers.
That afternoon, they started layout. They picked crews from all the guys who responded to the ads the next morning, pretty much like you would pick baseball teams or basketball teams.
All four buildings (8 units of condos, two stories tall in each) were framed, sheathed and approved within two weeks. In the dead of winter. And that included the one that blew down overnight in a windstorm. You never saw construction guys work so fast.
That’s the model for how this investigation needs to be done. For the military, get four ambitious colonels in a room, hand out a “please give every assistance” letter signed by Obama to each one and throw a pair of generals’ stars on the table. Watch how much they dig up and how fast.
Finally a Dem talking point thats good:)
How do outside commissions get created? Doesn’t congress have to do that? And doesn’t that run into the roadblock that the congressional leaders were in on the torture and all the other illegalities of the Bush administration?
P.S. A couple of times “roll” should be “role”
LHP so do you think this news will cause the GOP to rethink opposing Holder as AG I mean if I were the GOP I would want an experienced Fixer as AG to make this go away.
Also the GOP has not said word one about Chiquita banana.
I wrote on this a few days ago. Levin seemed to be all over the place. OTOH he talked about turning material over to the DOJ but in the following paragraph he mentions a commission. Which is one? One, the other, or both. Glenn Greenwald also echoes in an update something I said at the time. Why not give this to an independent special proscutor to investigate? This was one of the problems with the Libby prosecution. Fitzgerald was a special counsel appointed from within the DOJ. As a result, we only learned what was made public as part of the Libby trial. A special prosecutor works for the Congress and in addition to making charges also is required to issue a report, and it is in such a report that we would really learn who did what when.
My issue is the “outside commission” ……. soon after the 911 commission made their determination I attended an ACLU luncheon where Senator Ben-Veniste spoke. First is is a very poor speaker from notes…… but when asked questions I have never seen so much dancing since Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers…… you could cut the “bi-partisan” with a spoon……a lot of us left very disgusted and after the speech he would NOT talk or greet the attendees……..
This will make Holder’s job to cover things up a lot harder especially if the report goes public.
I thought they got rid of the Special Prosecutor law?
Good point government tries to make these commission reports as bland as possible if they can.
One strong spine can wreck a cover up. Will Pelosi, Reid and Hoyer turn around? Someone has to be twisting arms to get the support.
lhp!
Even the ‘potential’ of official investigation in the matter of Torture should add great weight to the call for full document preservation in the name of Legal Compliance and Judicial Review – even if Bush and Cheney have deferred it for eight years.
There is no defensible legal argument that my non-lawyer mind can conceive of that would allow the Perpetrators of Torture to Carry Evidence of Their Crimes out of Public Review with the end of Bush’s term – not if We are really a Nation of Laws in which No Man is Above the Law.
Bush’s great fallacy was that he felt he was entitled to break the Law in order to protect it. But his logic for feeling that way – he kept hidden from Congress, and kept away from being tested in Court.
Now that there is No Doubt that Bush has Committed Crimes while Claiming Immunity from the Rule of Law – the Rest of US are kind of interested in seeing just how Bush came to his extraordinary beliefs about his Unlimited Power and Immunity from the Consequences of Crimes Committed under his hand, in Our Name?
Bush and his Henchpeople have Every Reason to want documents to disappear.
Wouldn’t a Court normally recognize an ‘evidence jeopardy’ situation and call for a lockdown, under trustworthy security, until the legal process can sort-out competing claims?
Good question how can we null a Bush Pardon on this subject.
looseheadprop, I sure hope this is true, in my heart of hearts I was hoping obama would keep his intentions close to his vest so as to not get too much negative press from right wing media till he did it
I sure hope he has high crimes on his mind when he takes office, it is really the only method of bringing this great country back from the brink these traitors have brought us
Any statute of limitations on warcrimes? Will the Dems charge the Bushies with that or limit themselves to charging the Bushies with crimes that are subject to the statue of limitations and then claim that their hands are tied.
In exchange for GOP favors to be named in the future.
james madison on bush/cheney long before they were even born;
How does the Dem leadership avoid or deal with this problem? Harry and Nancy could confess their role to everything that is unclassified and make the GOP look bad. But will they do it/s.
Is there another way?
the attack in september was not an act of war, acts of war are reserved for nations, it was a crime of mass muder.
however the administration could not amass power unless it had it’s war
the puppeteers backward engineered madisons’s precient writing and sought to undermine this country, her peace and prosperity
thus they pulled the strings of these treasonous marionettes to make believe we had a war
they declared war against a tactic, you cannot possibly win a war against a tactic and they did not want a war that could possibly end
meh…this could have been a diary entry
No other way that I know of, which is why I think nothing will ever be done.
Brilliant!
They did. I’m just saying this is what is needed in this case. Maybe that’s Levin’s point, that we have the DOJ for prosecutions and a commission for a report. But it would have been nice if he had said so. Still I have to agree with katymine. The 9/11 Commission despite the bipartisanship hype was an incredibly partisan, manipulated, and highly compromised affair. In item 33 of my scandals list, I go into some of the problems it had. I joked a couple of days ago that if there were such a commission it would likely be headed by John McCain and Lee Hamilton and wouldn’t be worth spit.
Give credit where credit is due – to a mob-friendly construction super who knew how to get things done. I just sat there and recorded it. And now I know why I was there to hear it: so I could pass it on today.
Details will leak from Iraq about what happened especially after we are gone. The BBC will report it, Obama can lead or he can be dragged there is no way he or the GOP wants the Hague to control the investigation.
Although the GOP has not yet accepted that this is the way things are going to be.
Two can keep a secret if one is dead and Karl only has so many airplanes.
I’d like to be more impressed by Levin’s interview, but I have a hard time not viewing it in an overall context of his actions on this front. Despite Taguba’s calls for the kind of investigation he carried on on MP actions in Iraq to be conducted for MI, Levin never really pushed for that. But more than that, it’s hard for me to get around his posture as co-sponsor on the Detainee Treatment Act. He was a co-proponent of the DTA’s granting of amnesty for war crimes, of disenfranchising any remedy for detainees for future war crimes committed against them, of avoiding the issue of the massive detentions in Iraq, and along with the grants of amnesty and destruction of any remedy for future war crimes and abdication of oversight — he also helped them tack on the correlative legislative destruction of habeas.
Granted, after it looked destined to die at the Sup Ct, Levin did come forward to say he only meant to deny habeas to anyone taken into custody AFTER the DTA, not to the pending cases. Levin is right – what makes anyone think a lawyer can make something “legal” by issuing an opinion!?!?! He KNOWS that the right approach is to make war crimes “consequence free” by legislatively granting amnesty.
I think he’s got a buttload of posturing going on, so when pardons are issued he can keep up a pretense that he did something other than co-sponsor amnesty for war crimes legislation. Nice that he’s saying something now I guess, but let’s say my trust quotient is pretty low.
I don’t see people like Levin as part of the solution after his prior embrace of war crimes and of making sure that the victims of those crimes have no remedy and no habeas. With all the info he and his committee had pouring in from whistleblowers – even from the PUBLIC whistleblowers like Provenance and Fishback etc., with the info on how many at GITMO and at Abu Ghraib and all the Iraqi detention centers were “mistakes’ – with all he had, his concern was to take away habes, remedies and insure amnesty for war crimes, it’s hard for me to give him a booyah now. Among the many things he betrayed when he co-sponsored the DTA where all the soldiers who did NOT commit war crimes – the ones who knew right from wrong and acted accordingly. He disenfranchised them with the DTA.
Still, good for Rachel for getting the conversation going publically and obviously the report is better than anything else he’s been involved with over the last 8 years. I know I’m supposed to be won over by that. I’m just too much of a bitch to smile and make nice though.
I agree a Special Prosecutor is the way to go, but politically the GOP will risk shutting down the government first.
Do we have any Dems with the spine to play chicken?
Credit given to you both:)
There is some pompous jerk on my TV who allegedly is a terrorism expert. He’s pulling a Condi Rice performance, i.e. taking an excess amount of time to say absolutely nothing. He doesn’t even seem to know that Iran’s Grand Ayatollah has issued a fatwa against the nuclear bomb as being against Islam.
sounds to me like a most perfectly workable way to proceed. interesting too that you got to have that experience to call on later in your life as a model.
So things will happen by happenstance? Does not sound like a plan to me.
There was speculation in some thread that Maliki is the new Saddam Hussein, back in the day when he was ours, in which case nothing useful for accountability will come out of Iraq.
Maybe Levin like Tweety has seen which way the wind is blowing and has decided to Bow to it?
GOPers study talking points not facts
While I would love to see the ICC at the Hague intervene and assrt jurisdiction, it won’t for the purely political reasons of member governments. Nor do I see any great desire for the Obama Administration to push this agenda. There is Cass Sunstein’s desire not to “criminalize policy differences.” There is Obama’s own post-partisanship. And finally you have the complicity of the Democratic leadership in it.
ThingsComeUndone – I don’t know on the SoL issues involved with Torture, however, my feeling is that Bush and his Inner Circle are likely to be Prosecuted for War Crimes – specifically having both a Policy of Torture, and Consciousness of Guilt (Defense Cover Brief Charges)- Internationally. But, that’s jmho…
I like the idea of a Commission to look at the issue from a Systemic Impact on the Function of Government perspective, too, as well as a ‘How did this hidden apparatus of State operate’ point of view? I don’t see the process as a ‘witch hunt’ – allthough undoubtedly there are some Monsters in there – so much as developing an Understanding of How Did This Happen? Who Let the Dogs Out, and How did They Do It?
Imvho, We, and everyone, can find Justice that will Heal Our System, while doing the Right thing by the Victims and the Perpetrators, at the end of a Commission process.
His government is unstable details will leak assuming that any plan or government put together by Bush will fail is not relying on happenstance.
Other players on the chess board will move according to their own interests irrespective of our desires and in cases like this our and their desires converge.
Bush and the DLC play the game by assuming they are they only players. I am counting on Arrogance being their downfall.
Congress is the most obvious way to create such a commiission, but you could also have a presidentially appointed commission, or possibly, eve a DOJ appointed comssion–but don’t quote me on that
And if I’m counting correctly that’s two in the past week:
– this one http://firedoglake.com/2008/12…..ing-heart/
– http://firedoglake.com/2008/12…..it-to-you/
As of 1:00 this morning, I posted this on the LLN thread:
It’s great to see the momentum picking up. But Obama won’t do shit about it, unless we make him.
maybe that’s why Holder was nominated? To decline prosecutions? I have no clue, just guesing wildly
why does Cheney and bush hate George Washington?
would someone, anyone, DARE say Bush knows more then our first president?
hehe…I would love to see them make their case against our founding father
Only what the prosecutors think they can get away with. They’re still prosecuting people for WW2 war crimes.
This is a great quote. It ought to be part of every civics class.
Bob in HI
I absolutely love the idea of a commission with subpoena power that could recommend indictments. The commission idea has traction with the Obama people, as earlier posts have indicated, and it’s a small step to one that can recommend prosecution.
Levin is talking about turning over evidence his committee has already unearthed, or expects to have in hand pretty soon.
The Commisssion would be to investigate the intelligence agencies which are outside the jurisdiction of Levin’s Armed Sefvices Committee. I specualted above that it sounded like he did not have much confidence that the Intelligence oversight committee could do its job.
The independant Counsel statute expired. They would have to pass a new one. That’s why Pat was appointed from within DOJ, there was no other mechanism available
I think this is levin either:
1) floating a trial balloon to see if it gets negative press;
2)pushing Obama to do the right thing;
or 3) saying what we want to hear before breaking our hearts again
Stay tuned to find out hte real answer
Yes, Levin’s actions usually seem confined to offering an amendment somewhere so he has CYA later, but not speaking out at the time or in any sustained way. Levin became Chair of Armed Services in January 2007. As you point out, a lot of the story of torture was already out there. So it really didn’t need nearly two years to get this report done. Yes, we have learned more details in the last two years but Hirsch back in 2004 laid out the basic structure of the Pentagon civilian leadership’s role in torture.
Pushing a prosecution gives the member governments leverage they can trade to get what they want from the GOP.
Like say GOP support for a real global warming treaty or whatever else they want and rest assured everyone wants something.
The GOP will balk at paying and the Hague will be forced to lay down some cards/charges. We know the GOP will balk again because we know they hate paying for anything including blackmail and the Hague will lay down more cards/charges publicly with details, names and pictures.
At some point either the GOP gets a brain and pays or the Hague looses control of the story and public opinion forces a prosecution.
This is all one giant game of Go.
So GOP opposition to Holder is just Bere Rabbit saying he wants to be thrown into the Briar Patch?
Come on… this notion of the Bush administration breaking “the law” was puboic knowledge the minute the AMUF was introduced and everything that followed with their lawyers Yoo and Addington writing legal BS to justify what they wanted to do was known BS by every lawyer in this country, every judge sitting on a bench.
Why no one has prosecuted this criminality is the question that is relevant and I wouldn’t hold your breath that the O administration will do something probably will die of asphyxiation. Obi is a move forward type guy and it also seems that he doesn’t want to offend the dumb and narcissistic criminal half od the country. Maybe he fears for his life? The Kennedy’s were offed for stepping on toes. We just never got to be told who really ordered the hit.
Hugh, the minute I saw that Jamie Gorelick’s name was on th e 9-11 Commission–and that SHE DID NOT RECUSE HERSELF, I knew it was going to be a travesty.
I was mazed that they managed to get as much good stuff in their as they did considering that her participation fatally tainted it
cut and paste Washington’s quote, it will be good to reference whenever you have cause for discussing torture
president bush is the only president ever to make the claim torture is a necessary tool
and people defer to his reasoning as if he has some kind of right to say things that fly in the face of those most would consider quite more intellectually capable (to be kind)
LHP,
I saw Maddow’s interview with Levin, too, and heard the same stuff, but it is valuable to me to have you underline the relevant parts. I hope that your take is correct, and that Mary is just being overly cynical. Furthermore, I hope that Pat Fitz winds up as Special Counsel (or a similar such position.) One thing that gives me hope here is that if he gets an indictment of Blago this week, as seems likely, that will serve as a kind of bipartisan balance for Libby, establishing his creds as an independent. He’s the right person to do the kind of investigation that is needed.
Bob in HI
temporarily in Southern CA
Diary Bud!
interesting factoid, (do not have the link here so research if you want to use)
the commission spent a few million dollars on their research, the whitewater commision I have read spent ten times the amount
THAT is interesting stuff right there
going to cali for a week or so, will not have too much time to write, I would love to see you do it though, please feel free
I am hoping that Obama will use this issue to clean the GOP’s benches of their best for a generation! This is a huge political opportunity but yeah I guess I know where you are coming from fortune favors the bold.
The DLC is anything but
Why did these slackers wait 7 years to worry about lawlessness of this administration? WHY????
Maybe:) we both could cover the subject if we get around to it:)
They lack the Stones!
ok, found a link but I haven’t researched further
Levin has been known to make promises he doesn’t keep. Many of them about funding the war in Iraq. Just today VPE Biden refused to commit to anything but “looking forward”. At the same time he referred back to a statement he made earlier this yr hinting at a Special Prosecutor. So much for transparency, so far anyway.
It’s one of my hopes that they are just waiting to pull the trigger on these issues until after a AG is approved by the Senate and Obama has been sworn in. As much as we would like answers now I think it is a bit premature for Obama to be laying all his cards on the table.
I really liked what Glenn Greenwald had to say on Bill Moyers show recently and hopefully enough others will agree enough to push this thru. Here is just a small part of what Glenn had to say.
You can watch the video over at http://crooksandliars.com/susi…..moyers-abo
Levin didn’t need two years ro get the report done??
Nooo, he spent two years slow walking it so that a Bush DOJ could not decline prosecution. It would be MUCH MUCH harder to get a later DOJ to reverse itself.
What Comey and Goldsmith did, reverse the Yoo memo? Almost unheard of. And Comey isn’t there any more.
It is the GOOD thing that Levin stalled the report. You gotta think ahead several moves, like chess
35 – could be I guess, but I’m not convinced
49 – yep
As much as I love Maddow’s program, it seems to me she should have included this kind of questioning after Levin patted himself on the back.
Sen Levin, you were a co-sponsor of the Detainee Treatment Act, legislation which granted amnesty for war crimes committed against detainees and which took away any remedy for those detainees and which took away habeas for prospective cases.
Since it’s passage, portions of the the DTA have not survived court review. Do you think your amnesty provisions will be upheld and if there is a possiblity that they won’t, do you favor President Bush granting pardons to soldiers who committed war crimes in their handling and interrogation of detainees? Was your decision to grant amnesty based on the fact that soldiers were following orders? Do you favor President Bush granting pardons to the top civilian command at the Pentagon for their association with war crimes and torture of detainees?
She softballed him to let him get the posturing out IMO. I guess that’s ok if you think getting the concept into the discussion is the major important item, but I was disappointed.
I have no idea what is motivating the GOP oppos to Holder other than with all his baggaage, it will be easy to make him embarassing for Obama, because the narrative is easy enough for the press to understand
Ain’t that the truth… so where are the lawyers and there are plenty in congress on this EXTREMELY obvious fact.
Watch Madoff make off like a bandit while the NYS prisons are loaded with pot smokers.
Blow jobs are more important than 9/11 ? That should be a front Pager Story!
Hey Bob temprarily in California *g*
Mary’s depth of knowledge (context) and distrust of the motives of public actors, keeps me from getting duped too often. I would be lost without her perspective.
I would like to comment on the picture, “torture is wrong”
that doesn’t tell nearly the entire story;
torture PREVENTS us from gathering information it does not facilitate it
torture BREEDS enemies it does not disabuse them
torture HARMS our soldiers it does not protect them
torture turns US into the bad guys
torture turns our allies into our enemies
torture turns our enemies into heroes
and the list goes on, “torture is wrong” is a little counter productive since it is simply claiming the moral highground and does not point out how much it harms our country and national defense, how it harms our ability to gather information, how it harms our ability to actually win
Perris, really do an Oxdown diary on the Wshington quote. So we can linky
You should write questions for Rachel! We do need to organize a rapid response to the GOP and make it available to the Dems.
Why? Do you remeber what was going on at DOJ? Who was going to prosecute?????
48 – I’d vote 3, except the Democrats can’t break my heart anymore. I’ve lost the love.
IMO, they are all pretty worried about the things that are likely to start coming out in foreign press and via foreign investigations and they want to be able to try to blink and look surprised and say with convincing “bumbling goodheart-edness” taht they just didn’t know and they tried to do something.
This report also gives Clinton a little cover in her SOS role. After all, she sat on that committee and accumlated rats asses to hand out freely whenever torture issues came up – now she’ll be able to burnish her halo a bit.
And their response would be that George Washington is just so pre-9/11. /s
Perris, if you can find me a graphic that does all that, I will switch graphics for the torture series. I would love a conprehesive graphic of that kind
I wonder how much media air time 9/11 got vs the Monica scandal:)
Even if she didn’t want to go for her guest’s jugular (and her biz is having guests I guess), it does seem that the real question to end on for Levin would have been something like:
If President Bush pardons Rumsfeld, Haynes and the top civilian actors at the Pentagon – how will that affect your approach and would Congress contest those pardons?
I do kind of wonder if Haynes is in a catch-22 with a pardon – he is off the hook for prosecutions (that might not take place anyway) but it gets him into pretty troubled waters on his law license front. I’ve never really understood what Pepsico and Chevron, as public companies, are doing with people who have so many torture ties in their in house counsel offices, but I guess there is no downside for them.
Wrong. Torture gets “us” (i.e., Cheney) the information he wanted.
Again, that’s just what Cheney wanted as an excuse to keep the war on terror going.
Cheney doesn’t care.
Fixed that one up for you.
Now do you understand why torture was absolutely required? How else could you get so much done?
911 the event, or 9-11 commission, the investigation.
The Whaitewater/Lewinsky investigation got tons more coverage than the 9-11 commssion investigationn did.
They used to wait outside Ken Starr’s house every day and film him walking to his car. You didn’t see that heppening to Lee HAmilton or Tom Kane
hey…I think I saw BT upstairs…
sounds like a job for twolf, I hope he stops by and can put something together
off to the gym, c all L8tr
I suppose that some clever lawyers outside the DOJ could have started some lawsuits on constitutional issues. You’re the lawyer, tell me that only the DOJ could have done something?
If that is true, then we have a fatally flawed system where the DOJ works for/at the pleasure of the executuve branch and so there is an inherent conflict of interest.
I find it hard to believe that we have to relie on the DOJ control the types of lawlessness we all knew was going down. Like no one’s hair was on fire in the legal “community”?
So a Holder led DOJ could decline prosecution in turn? This just assumes so much, that the Democrats were going to win the White House in 2008 and that a Democratic Administration would press for prosecutions. Levin could have issued more than one report. He could have waited until the end to turn the whole series over to the DOJ. I mean he had a lot of options besides slow walking.
911 was a trap – a thorough investigation would have revealed:
insiders involved or
complete incompetence or a criminal negligence nature
big heads would be rolling or the country would be torn apart – not a choice that critters will make so they do the safe – nothing.
Any or all of the above and if the statement
. is right then YES front page it please!
Dig is open Perris, Mary, EVERYONE add a comment on Dig so we can get more coverage this thread is HOT!
Anyway everyone in the beltway knew we needed a new threat to justify the MIC’s addiction to tax dollars and they needed a new “theater” to use their toys so they could go for the next round of R&D and new toys.
It worked out just fine and the they got to privatize too and move billions to slackers in the private sector like Erik Prince.
Why were private companies even DOING things like interrogation for the government?
Perris I’m putting you 63 on digg:)
They did. Crew, the ACLU, there are all kinds of lawsuits out there, which you ought to know as a regualr reader of this website–cause we report on many of them.
DOJ is needed for criminal prosecutions, unless you cna think of some state law crimes for which a state attorney general or local DA could prosecute.
No, it doesn’t assume any of those things. It merely correctly appraised what would happen if a criminal referral were made , say, to AGAG?
Once DOJ declined prosecution, what good would issuing a second report do?
LHP your 81 on Digg:)
Thanx.
I am more concerned with driving the post tiself up on digg because if Elvin’s statement on Maddow WAS a trial balloon we want to make sure that the American people see it and start clamoring for prosecutions.
As Prof. Turley said the other night on KO, the ONLY way that prosecutions will happen, is if voters loudly demand them.
Mary your 29 is on Digg:)
I thought Lokwoky said Comments drive up the Digg number or maybe they help attract readers?
Here’s what I think – they would block the appointment of anyone – I think they are trying to prevent the appointment of an AG because they are trying to prevent/postpone the inevitable investigations/charges for torture and whatever illegal activities they have perpetrated.
At first I thought it was just Holder and maybe he was a better choice by Obama than some people seem to believe – but I don’t think that’s it.
Perris your Great! 43 on Digg!
Agreed the GOP is trying to stop Obama any way they can this will get worse once Obama tries to get people confirmed maybe this will convince Obama to play Hardball.
Torture interrogations got the “Tipton Three” (of which Rasul, whose case is the one the S.Ct just sent back) to all admit to being the “previously unidentified” men in a picture with Bin Laden (we won’t talk about the inherent unliklihood that some of the very few survivors of the container killings – where evidence is being destroyed in Afghanistan as this thread is going on) Unfortunately, MI5 had to take about 5 or 6 hours and disprove those admissions that had been secured over the years.
Torture interrogations from al-Libi got the admissions of Iraqi training camps, used as propaganda for the war. Disproven.
Torture interrogaions got Arar to confess to his partipation in Al-Qaeda training camps. Disproven
More than the right and wrong on the information, though, is the fact that they knew people like Kurnaz et al had nothing to give up, so in huge big aspects much of this was about the human experimentation features. Psychologists and intel interrogators don’t have such large groups of humans for whom no rules apply and to whom they can do anything very often. It was a Psychomengalian Disneyland set up, with all the satellite centers too. Old men with walkers, young children under 15 – they had the gamut available to them to play with their minds by imposing any kind of mental or physical conditions that they chose. And they could also kidnap and utlize family members for additional torture leverage. All, again, with no constraints and not reprucussions.
But at least the man who handed out amnesty is ready to say tsk.
I just don’t buy that Levin was doing us any favors waiting until the end of 2008 to issue this report on torture. It is 5-6 years too late. I have long since stopped accepting these yarns that Democrats had some long term arcane strategy that would some day explain their complicity and inaction. If the Bush Administration failed to follow up, Levin could have called it a cover up and resubmitted his report under a new Administration. He could have made a show of sending his report to the Hague. He could have issued multiple reports and turned them over to the DOJ only now as a bloc. This idea that Levin did it this way to preserve the option of prosecutions flies in the face of his actions on the DTA that Mary noted.
Sorry Mary your 29 should be on digg now I hope.
Exactly so. I have a gut feeling that many of the higher ups were duped into complicity. They were “informed ” under sworn secrecy that torture and all sorts of nefarious things were happening. All of it would come out in a criminal investigation and at best they would look naive – at worst complicit.
They all belong to the sick party of neoliberals. Levin was posturing.