Nice catch, Attaturk!

The depravity of these folks knows no bounds.
This is another chapter in the book on “My mind is made up! Don’t confuse me with facts!”

Talk about shaping the facts to fit the theory. These guys were shameless.

OK, off to bed now (Hawaii)

Bob in HI

Wait! I’ve got the title for a book on these guys: The Relentless Pursuit of Preconceived Notions”.

Where do I sign up for my royalties?

Bob in HI

“The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely.” –Marc A. Thiessen

Only blackmail can give you this kind of confidence:

Lieberman: U.S. to accept any Israeli policy decision

The Obama Administration will put forth new peace initiatives only if Israel wants it to, said Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in his first comprehensive interview on foreign policy since taking office.

“Believe me, America accepts all our decisions,” Lieberman told the Russian daily Moskovskiy Komosolets.

The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods used on Americans during military training. How could that be torture?

NYT

Cheney & Chalabi
“HEROES IN ERROR”

Ahmad Chalabi and his London-based exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, for years provided a conduit for Iraqi defectors who were debriefed by US intelligence agents. But many American officials now blame Mr Chalabi for providing intelligence that turned out to be false or wild exaggerations about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Chalabi, by far the most effective anti-Saddam lobbyist in Washington, shrugged off charges that he had deliberately misled US intelligence. “We are heroes in error,” he told the Telegraph in Baghdad.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new…..wirq19.xml

CHENEY & CHALIBI:

Standing of Former Key U.S. Ally in Iraq Falls to New Low

By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 21, 2004; Page A20

A year ago, as U.S. troops swept toward Baghdad, Ahmed Chalabi and about 400 hastily assembled fighters were secretly airlifted into southern Iraq to rally other Iraqis and begin a march toward Baghdad to help topple Saddam Hussein, an operation that won the concurrence of U.S. officials all the way up to Vice President Cheney’s office. Chalabi had predicted that he would become Iraq’s Spartacus, cutting a wide swath through Iraq and mobilizing vast numbers behind him, according to U.S. officials.

“It was the moment of truth for Chalabi, and it was literally a moment. It was over almost the minute it happened,” said a senior U.S. official who worked with Chalabi and served in the U.S.-led coalition in Baghdad. “Compared to [Charles] de Gaulle’s march to Paris [to liberate France], Chalabi’s march to Baghdad was a stone that went into the water without a splash.”

“The reality is that he was among a wide variety of Iraqi figures who made the case to an array of American officials over a period of time for the liberation of the Iraqi people.”

Yet no Iraqi leader has had more to do with the U.S. intervention in Iraq than Chalabi, from charming Congress into authorizing almost $100 million to back his fledgling Iraqi National Congress in the late 1990s and convincing Washington about Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in 2002 to pressing for war last year, say both his supporters and critics.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..May20.html

Bush & Chalibi
“HEROES IN ERROR”

Interview of the President by TVP, Poland

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
May 29, 2003

Interview of the President by TVP, Poland
The Library

Q. But, still, those countries who didn’t support the Iraqi Freedom operation use the same argument, weapons of mass destruction haven’t been found. So what argument will you use now to justify this war?

THE PRESIDENT: We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They’re illegal. They’re against the United Nations resolutions, and we’ve so far discovered two. And we’ll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong, we found them. “

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 you have it

cheney and rumsfeld KNEW with NO doubt there was no connection, every single agency told them, they also knew the information was public that there was no connection

they had to manufacture a connection that did not exist

step in, torutre

great exerp raven

of course they thought we would be so stupid as to buy the notion that a training session designed to innoculate our soldiers from torture is therefore not torture

Wonder how many troopers who undergo that training are not volunteers?

So this is what treason looks like.
And Pat Tillman was assassinated for these creeps?

Good morning, pups. It’s MoDo and Friedman today. MoDo ponders “To Tweet or Not to Tweet,” and says in an interview with the inventors of Twitter she had a simple quest: to find out if they are as annoying as their invention. I don’t see how they could be… The Moustache of Wisdom (a moment of silence, please, for his wife’s investments…), in “Swimming Without a Suit,” says America needs to invest money and energy into schools with a sense of urgency that the economic and moral stakes demand.

Here they are.

The coffee, tea and hot chocolate are ready, and I’ve got Thomas’ English muffins that just popped out of the toaster. For some reason I’m having trouble waking up this morning. Must get more caffeine… Have a good day.

or *by* those creeps…

there is some right wing fodder today that’s going to give us a hard time from the new york times;

Banned Techniques Yielded ‘High Value Information,’ Memo Says — WASHINGTON – President Obama’s national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists.

they’re gonna run through us with that

So this is what treason looks like.
And Pat Tillman was assassinated for by these creeps?

fixed it for ya

of course the real answer is;

“how much information did we lose to get that bit of information we were able to use?”

but it won’t play as strong as it needs to play

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.

let me replace my bold with the following

Senior administration officials, however, “DIDN’T WANT TO HEAR IT, the pnac TOLD thme we HAD to attack IRAQ and BY GOD they WERE going to attack Iraq”, that the interrogators weren’t pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to CREATE that information,” he said.

now THAT is how that article needs to be written, mine is FAR more accurate

They tortured people in Iraq initially to locate Saddam, whom they believed would tell them what they needed (after some friendly persuasion). That was the beginning of the Abu Ghraib travesty. I remember reading how they started with people at the outer circle of potential connections to Saddam and worked their way in, torturing innocent relative (actually just about everyone was an innocent) to force out the information. All so very German.

There will eventually be war crimes indictments somewhere — Europe probably.

I can’t believe I didn’t notice that the KSM waterboardings were in this particular month. Tenet didn’t even *start* pushing for WH cover until *after* KSM and Zubayadah had already been tortured – not until *June* of 2003.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..03331.html

Now there *was* some Justice Dept protection from 2002 memos – but I’m beginning to think that Obama’s promise to not seek prosecution for those who operated “within the four corners” of ostensible legal justification could turn out to be a fairly small group….

Now there *was* some Justice Dept protection from 2002 memos – but I’m beginning to think that Obama’s promise to not seek prosecution for those who operated “within the four corners” of ostensible legal justification could turn out to be a fairly small group….

let’s hope so jayt, that statement is indeed a disclaimer of sorts, that there could be punishment after all

of all things we’ve ever pushed I believe this is the most important

Morning all. Guess the questions would be was the significant information also correct information; how much easier would it have been without engaging in torture and how much did the torture methods add to the number of terrorists.

Sorry after standing at last nights protest ,I was holding the color picture of the blood smears in Abu Grahb , I’m emotionally drained. I was a witness for those innocents.
I always knew , from the triple tap it was a hit. Just warming up for today’s screaming ENOUGH. Good day all.

Good, good.

I thought of The Solipsists, or to give it an obssessive twist, The Solipsistic Reflex.

These guys reverse engineered SERE training; yet as the memos point out, the field routines of the communist armies that used these techniques were geared to elicit a canned confession from an unwilling subject, not truthful information. I wouldn’t say that I’ve resisted the notion that the Bush crew had the same objective —really I hadn’t care much about their objective— but with the last week’s docs all of a sudden it couldn’t be plainer that this is essentially what their objective was: to make robots to plug into whatever part of their horrendous theater required some “authentic” input.

Citizen Raven:

The absolute souless, amoral, sociopathology of these people will rival that of the masters of the 3rd Reich by the time it’s all out in the open…and the masters of the universe in the corporate war rooms knew at every step what was goin’ on and they were bought off with visions of 1929 redoux.

I have been sayin that what we are experiencing is a full blown fascist takeover by our home grown professional terrorists…and it is a long way from over. The new coalition between the old slavocracy and the banking overseers is stronger than anything we have seen in the last 150 years…ANYWHERE!

No matter what information Cheney says came from torture, we all know Cheney has been planning & plotting a new attack on America, so he and his Oil Cartel can profit on the sidelines of the Obama Administration.

One of the things that occured during this period was that shrub determined that the people that were captured were not wearing uniforms so that they were not subject to Geneva convention rules.

I notice that The Times of London is pushing mmuch of the same bullshit that we’re hearing. MI5 and MI6 people are worried the y might be prosecuted; they received “valuable information” from CIA; blah, blah, blah.

At some level you start to wonder why they didn’t just take some poor fuck off the street, hold his hand to write a confession with what they needed, and then kill him to destroy the evidence (and kill the interrogators). It would have been so much easier, and it cuts out the middleman, so to speak. As it is, they got stuck with a bunch of innocent torturees that were too many to ‘disappear’ after they had outlived their usefulness. I think at some level, Cheney Rumfeld and Bush and Ms Rice simply enjoyed the notion of torturing other people for no particular reason other than it proved they could do it and get away with it.

Somehow the torture aspect reminds me of executive pay in the bailout.
In the case of the bailout the American people were whipped into a populist rage over 1/1000 of the entire amount.
Torture. Indefensible, yet 1/100,000th of the atrocity of the total horror of Operation Enduring Freedom.
In order of scale:
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives lost
Thousands of American lives lost
Millions of Iraqi injuries
Thens of thousands of American injuries
Iraq’s economy and infrastructure decimated and looted
US economy hobbled and looted
US infrastructure ignored as a lower priority

I still cannot believe that these asshats couldn’t manage to *plant* a handful of WMD.
There is nothing so dangerous as a True Believer.
And our nation allowed them to rule for 8 years.

an added benefit to putting cheney behind bars (after a fair trial, of course) is that is might make his warmongering a bit more difficult.

Fresh revelations about the CIA’s torture techniques have thrown the spotlight on British Intelligence, which gained valuable insight into terror networks from confessions extracted by American officers. They have raised further fears that British agents could be prosecuted for their indirect role in the abuse of detainees.

. . .

In the period between September 11 2001 and April 2003, there were a number of crucial intelligence tip-offs to the British authorities that may have come via US interrogation of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists.
They include the alert that led to the decision by Tony Blair in February 2003 to send 400 troops in light tanks to Heathrow after a warning of an imminent attack on airliners coming into the airport. Another led to the deployment of special forces to intercept a cargo vessel, the MV Nisha, off the Isle of Wight in December 2001 because of intelligence that a ship in the English Channel might be carrying biological weapon components.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t…..115286.ece

I don’t really remember the incidents referred to but some of the comments to this article did:

How exactly was this information “crucial”? Were any terrorists encountered at Heathrow by those 400 troops? Is the raw sugar which was the only cargo found aboard the MV Nisha now classed as a terror substance?
&
If Blair had really though Heathrow was going to be attacked, it would have been shut down within 15 minutes. The tank deployment was a classic government scare tactic against its own citizens.

As for the MV Nisha nothing illegal or even suspicious was found.

excellent point.

Glenn Beck sez we’re seing facism on tne rise in this country too. Somehow, i don’t think he’s talking about the same thing as you are, Norske.

Strangely enough, in the just released report, it stated that some Iraqi detainees were; members of al Qaeda and Taliban were not. I think that is why everyone is always called one or the other. Nobody is ever just an Iraqi citizen who wants the US out of their country.

one thing that does please me about the bush years – we didn’t attack iran too.

via MoA:

wapo: Israel Puts Iran Issue Ahead of Palestinians

The new Israeli government will not move ahead on the core issues of peace talks with the Palestinians until it sees progress in U.S. efforts to stop Iran’s suspected pursuit of a nuclear weapon and limit Tehran’s rising influence in the region…

haaretz: Lieberman: U.S. to accept any Israeli policy decision

The Obama Administration will put forth new peace initiatives only if Israel wants it to, said Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in his first comprehensive interview on foreign policy since taking office.

“Believe me, America accepts all our decisions,” Lieberman told the Russian daily Moskovskiy Komosolets.

Did some of this “significant information” lead to all of those red alerts we had during this period.

TORTURE,CORRUPTION
a it was all wort it for some

Exxon Bumps Wal-Mart to Become No. 1 on Fortune 500
By Antonio Perez
Epoch Times Staff Apr 21, 2009

(Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Exxon Mobil Corp., the world’s largest oil and gas company, beat out retailer Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to become the new number one atop Fortune magazine’s annual list of 500 largest publicly traded companies.

The prestigious Fortune 500 list measures company size by annual revenues, and the new list released on Sunday showed Exxon reporting a whopping $442.9 billion in 2008 revenues despite a decrease in global energy prices and slumping demand.

Wal-Mart, the U.S. discount retail chain, was the largest company in six of the past seven years. Last year Wal-Mart brought in $405 billion in revenues.

The biggest difference between Wal-Mart and Exxon is in profit. Exxon was also the most profitable public company in 2008, reporting more than $45 billion in net profit. Wal-Mart was ranked number five, with $13.4 billion in profit last year

womndering what the puips think about this guy Blair’s comment in a staff memo that “high value information” came from the use of torture.

Will you DFHs please STFU?
Village wise man [and truly terrible novelist] David Ignatius
has some important words of wisdom:

If Obama means what he says about protecting the CIA workforce and its operational edge, he must give up the idea that he can please everyone on this issue. He should recommend limits on any congressional inquiry and resist demands for a special prosecutor. Instead, he should push the White House’s preferred alternative — a commission that can review secret evidence behind closed doors, then report to the nation.

“pups”. not “puips”. Hope “puips” isn’t a dirty word in some other language.

a commission that can review secret evidence behind closed doors, then report to the nation.

this is an alternative to what?
report what?
like a 9/11 commission type thing?
Um……I have a problem with that.

Darth would approve,methinks

yes,big oil got its big wish

There’s more!
A judge ordered the disclosure of FBI memos that reveal muslim groups accused the fbi of spying:

yes,big oil got its big wish

I would still love to see the list of attendees at the Darth “Energy Conference”.

A o/t from The City Beuatiful…..

I know alot of you guys like Alan Grayson. The R’s think he’s very vulnerable and were lining up a local mayor to run against him. Feeling good about their chances. said local mayor is also the chairman of one of the highway authorities here. the tolls have been raised and a grand jury report found that there is a “culture of corruption” at the highway authority. This is good for Grayson. I hope he makes it.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com…..3844.story

gasoline was a little over a buck a gallon when Clinton left office,then ENTER THE 2 OILMEN to the Whitehouse

MAPS of IRAQI oil fields

http://www.judicialwatch.org/iraqi-oil-maps.shtml

Ah, nothing like a little dose of perspective. Thanks for that!

And I wonder if that whole bullshit warning about concocting bombs on airliners out of common household liquids was another torture-produced tip. When you think about the fear, the time, the inconvenience, the sheer amount of material thrown away over…nothing. And it continues.

The proposal was preposterous on its surface from a chemistry point of view, but that didn’t matter to the fear-susceptible public. (there was an article a while back explaining the chemistry that would be required to do what was described and the impossibility of doing it under the conditions on a commercial airliner. I’ll see if I can find it).

One day shortly after reading the article, I remember having a sinking feeling in my stomach when I realized that we may have put everyone through all this over something a torture victim may have blurted out to make the torture stop.

Well, at least he did a risk/benefit analysis…said that the info we allegedly obtained that way did not outweigh the damage done to our standing in the world. And he said the info may have been obtainable otherwise. I still question the “high value info” but at least he has injected some actual analytical thinking into the discussion.

Here’s the article describing the chemistry and process required: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2…..rror_labs/

Thanks for the link, Attaturk. These guys were truly depraved.

The most important thing was the date of Cheney’s documents.
**************
” The documents contain a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as 2 charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.” The documents are dated March 2001. “

http://www.judicialwatch.org/s…..oil-fields

Maybe some day..the case of the missing e-mails is not over yet.
**********
” Washington, DC, April 14, 2009 – The plaintiffs and defendants in the pending lawsuit seeking restoration of millions of missing White House e-mails and the installation of an effective e-mail archiving system have agreed to stay the case so that the parties can discuss whether the matter can be resolved outside of litigation.

“There are many questions that need to be answered by the White House before the case can be fully resolved, including whether e-mails are still missing and whether more e-mail are at risk of disappearance, what efforts have been made to restore the millions of missing records, and whether records are likely to go missing again,” explained the Archive’s General Counsel, Meredith Fuchs. “In the meantime, we appreciate that the Obama White House has expressed a willingness to try to answer some of these questions, and we are going to make a strong effort to do so while also ensuring that there are no gaps in the documentary history of the White House.” “

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/n…../index.htm

All of us on the left, protesting against that sort of thing, writing letters, going to capitals on lobbying congress day….all of us were dismissed as hippies, conspiracy theorists, kooks, loons, un-American (insert noun here), and so forth. I’m not going to say “I told you so”, gratifying as it may be but I will say that this isn’t coinicidental with newspapers failing and cable news struggling to find new audiences. They made their decisions long ago to base their formats on attacking the “loony left” or whatever they are calling us these days. One of the best lines from any book I have read, fact or fiction comes to us from JK Rowling: “It’s far easier to forgive others for being wrong than for being right”. True words indeed and an indication that even though we have been proven correct over and over, we shouldn’t hold our collective breath for any of them to admit that we were right and they were lying. You’ll asphixiate.

Controlling oil in the region was just the icing on the cake.

What they really wanted was perpetual war to serve the war for profit aka the corporations of mass destruction.

They use bigotry, hatred, racism and fear.