Whining All The Way

The very manly Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee, blessed with the manliest of manliness, have decided to take their toys and go home rather than participate in a probably-toothless study of the CIA torture program, because they're so personally hurt that anyone could be held responsible for lawbreaking.

Republicans on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said Friday that they will no longer participate in an investigation into the Bush administration's interrogation policies, arguing that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.'s decision to reexamine allegations of detainee abuse by the CIA would hobble any inquiry [...]

"Had Mr. Holder honored the pledge made by the President to look forward, not backwards, we would still be active participants in the Committee's review," the ranking Republican on the intelligence panel, Sen. Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, said in a statement. "What current or former CIA employee would be willing to gamble his freedom by answering the Committee's questions? Indeed, forcing these terror fighters to make this choice is neither fair nor just."

"Terror fighters." That premieres right after 24 on Fox this fall, right? (It's certainly not going to be on after Law And Order.)

I suppose another word you could use in place of "terror fighters" is "murderers," but that would be grossly uncouth and would cause a run on fainting couches in Washington, particularly in the Republican caucus.

I will say that the bravery on display by these Republicans, not seen since the times of Sir Robin, is truly inspiring. They know just how to treat allegations of wrongdoing - with the most studied indifference and, if necessary, outright ignorance. They make me proud to be an American.

The only problem with their strategy is that others will not forget so easily. There are multiple court challenges and civil suits and investigations and FOIA requests. I suppose the defense attorneys in these cases can take the example of the Senate GOP and walk out of the proceedings, but it's unlikely to have the same impact.

I think the next step for Kit Bond and his charges will be to write a minority report, refuting whatever comes from the committee investigation and pressing for expanded CIA powers to, I don't know, pull the fingernails out of suspects in the name of fighting terror. Watch for who leads that minority report authoring, it may be important later.

But there were dissenters. A number of House Republicans on the committee cheered Colonel North on. One who led the way was Dick Cheney of Wyoming, who praised Colonel North as “the most effective and impressive witness certainly this committee has heard.”

Mr. Cheney the congressman believed that Congress had usurped executive prerogatives. He saw the Iran-contra investigation not as an effort to get to the bottom of possible abuses of power but as a power play by Congressional Democrats to seize duties and responsibilities that constitutionally belonged to the president.

At the conclusion of the hearings, a dissenting minority report codified these views. The report’s chief author was a former resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Michael J. Malbin, who was chosen by Mr. Cheney as a member of the committee’s minority staff. Another member of the minority’s legal staff, David S. Addington, is now the vice president’s chief of staff [...]

The report made a point of invoking the framers. It cited snippets from the Federalist Papers — like Alexander Hamilton’s remarks endorsing “energy in the executive” — in order to argue that the president’s long-acknowledged prerogatives had only recently been usurped by a reckless Democratic Congress.

Above all, the report made the case for presidential primacy over foreign relations. It cited as precedent the Supreme Court’s 1936 ruling in United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation, which referred to the “exclusive power of the president as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations.”

History, the report claimed, “leaves little, if any doubt that the president was expected to have the primary role of conducting the foreign policy of the United States.” It went on: “Congressional actions to limit the president in this area therefore should be reviewed with a considerable degree of skepticism. If they interfere with the core presidential foreign policy functions, they should be struck down.”

Maybe they'll just dust off that old report and replace "Iran-Contra" with "torture" and be done with it.

They Lie For A Living

Nancy Pelosi came out and said it today. It was a bit much when these right wingers kept lauding torture as this awsom program keeping Americans safe, and at the same time pointing the finger and yelling "Nancy knew!" as if there was something wrong with it. Ultimately, it doesn't matter even a little bit who knew what and when. The action is illegal and ought to be prosecuted. But today Pelosi confirmed that the CIA and the Bush Administration lied repeatedly to Congress.

PELOSI: The CIA briefed me only once on enhanced interrogation techniques in September 2002, in my capacity as ranking member of the intelligence committee. I was informed then that the Department of Justice opinions had concluded that the use of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques were legal. The only mention of waterboarding at that briefing was that it was not being employed. [...]

We also now know that techniques including waterboarding had already been employed and that those briefing me had given me inaccurate and incomplete information. At the same time the Bush administration…was misleading the American people about the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq [...]

PELOSI: So on the subject of what’s happening in Iraq, when it’s talking about the techniques used by the intelligence community on those they’re interrogating, at every step of the way, the administration was misleading the Congress. And that is the issue. And that is why we need a truth commission to look into the issue.

REPORTER: So Madame Speaker, just to be clear, you’re accusing the CIA of lying to you in September of 2002?

PELOSI: Yes. Misleading the Congress of the United States.

It goes without saying that, at the time of this briefing, the CIA was ALREADY waterboarding prisoners.

And we know they've been lying about the rest of it. Bob Graham, then the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, received no information about waterboarding, and in fact received less info than the House Intelligence Committee leaders, probably because ranking member Richard Shelby was leaking like a sieve at that time. Jay Rockefeller, later the ranking member on Senate Intel, stated outright that the CIA document listing briefings and attendees is wrong, that he didn't attend a briefing which the document has him attending. We know that Rockefeller is probably telling the truth since the CIA won't vouch for anything in the document.

As I've said, the CIA's job description requires their agents to lie. Why anyone would trust anything put out by them is beyond me. The CIA basically is blame-shifting here and Nancy Pelosi threw it right back in their face today.

This is precisely why those of us seeking accountability and justice have called for a full investigation so we can learn from what happened as well as ensure it never happens again by actually prosecuting those responsible. Anything less practically ensures we have this conversation again and again down the road.

(And that secret DiFi Intelligence Committee panel does not fill the bill here. We need transparency.)

Let's Play "Bring Down The Government Of The Nuclear-Armed State"

Another Predator drone attack killed at least 20 in Pakistan, according to early reports. While the US government continues to claim that these strikes are successful, at the very least they anger local populations and provide fuel for extremist organizations like the Taliban, which are already established in much of Pakistan and willing to weaken an already struggling young democratic government.

Given the circumstances, why in God's name would Dianne Feinstein make a statement like this that could increase anger among the disaffected in the country?

A senior U.S. lawmaker said Thursday that unmanned CIA Predator aircraft operating in Pakistan are flown from an air base in that country, a revelation likely to embarrass the Pakistani government and complicate its counter-terrorism collaboration with the United States.

The disclosure by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, marked the first time a U.S. official had publicly commented on where the Predator aircraft patrolling Pakistan take off and land.

At a hearing, Feinstein expressed surprise over Pakistani opposition to the campaign of Predator-launched CIA missile strikes against Islamic extremist targets along Pakistan's northwestern border.

"As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base," she said.

The basing of the pilotless aircraft in Pakistan suggests a much deeper relationship with the United States on counter-terrorism matters than has been publicly acknowledged. Such an arrangement would be at odds with protests lodged by officials in Islamabad, the capital, and could inflame anti-American sentiment in the country.

The Pakistani government, a nuclear-armed state, is literally fighting for their lives against Taliban forces. They have 120,000 soldiers in the fight. There are extremists and terrorists all over Pakistan - the government is finally acknowledging that the Mumbai attacks were launched from their soil. What can bring down the government in Pakistan quickly is losing the faith and support of the people, who are not disposed to the United States even under President Obama. It's extremely delicate and for Feinstein to make a statement like this, which will be seized on by the Taliban and used to whip up anger against Zardari and his government, is absolutely irresponsible.

Turning American Media Into Pravda

The release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's Phase II report, describing in great detail the lies and deceptions made by the Bush White House in the run-up to the war - is perhaps most notable for what it DIDN'T cover, like the activities of the White House Iraq Group, assembled precisely to sell the war to the public, or the effort to bully intelligence agencies into offering misleading or incomplete data that sided with the White House's views. The report is useful but really a simple analysis that measures the Administration's public statements against known facts, which any blogger with "the Google" could have done.

The Administration has responded to these charges by saying that we're all just upset because it was so successful. But what's interesting is how the summary of White House lies has rankled those inside the media who bought whatever Bush and Cheney were selling in 2002 and 2003, and who don't want to be tarred with that same brush of propaganda, even though that's precisely what they deserve. And so you have idiots like Fred Hiatt compounding the lies by trying to claim that the Phase II report didn't say what it said.

Hiatt:

On Iraq’s nuclear weapons program? The president’s statements “were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates.”

The actual report (pg. 15):

(U) Conclusion 1: Statements by the President, Vice-President, Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor regarding a possible nuclear weapons program were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates, but did not convey the substantial disagreements that existed in the intelligence community.

Hiatt:

On weapons of mass destruction overall (a separate section of the intelligence committee report)? “Generally substantiated by intelligence information.”

The actual report (pg. 49):

(U) Conclusion 5: Statements by the President, Vice-President, Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense regarding Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction were generally substantiated by intelligence information, though many statements made regarding ongoing production prior to late 2002 reflected a higher level of certainty than the intelligence judgments themselves.

Hiatt:

Unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to deliver WMDs? “Generally substantiated by intelligence information.”

The report (pg. 57):

(U) Conclusion 8: Statements by the President, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State that Iraq was developing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that could be used to deviler chemical or biological weapons were generally substantiated by intelligence information, but did not convey the substantial disagreements that existed in the intelligence community.

And in another tactic, you have duped editorialists like Nick Kristof saying that the reason he didn't speak up against the war was because of the lack of meaningful Democratic Party opposition, which neatly ignores the majority of Democrats in the House and 21 Democrats in the Senate who voted against authorization, as well as those pesky 15 million protesters in February 2003 (present company included).

There's a lot of self-protection going on here, with media figures wanting to absolve themselves of any blame for the worst foreign policy disaster in US history. But on the margins, you're starting to see some journalists come to terms with the failure of their profession, like Ruth Rosen of the San Francisco Chronicle.

I worked as an editorial writer at The San Francisco Chronicle, where a liberal editorial board raised serious objections to the war. And yet, in the years following 9/11, I felt editorial restraints that never allowed us to tell the whole truth about the lies and deception that led to America's most catastrophic foreign policy disaster [...]

Let me give you some examples. I was raised in a Republican family, but schooled by the great iconoclastic journalist I.F. Stone, who taught me that you can find the truth without inside sources, if only you're willing to see beyond patriotic fervor and examine voices in the public domain that are marginalized, So, I would read national security experts who countered Donald Rumfeld's ridiculous predictions; I would read the British, Canadian, Italian and French press; I would read the writings of experts in resource wars and weapons of mass destruction.

No, I didn't know I was right. But I was sure that the administration was lying. And, I knew that at the very least that our editorials should be asking why Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al should be believed when I had found strong evidence that they were cherry picking intelligence, and setting up their own office in the Pentagon, and acting in complete secrecy [...]

To its credit, the editorial board raised some of the toughest questions in the mainstream media. And yet....I was the only one who didn't believe Colin Powell's shameful presentation at the United Nations. Why? Not because I had special insider knowledge, but like I.F. Stone, I had found credible people who could dissect his speech and found it unconvincing and unpersuasive [...]

This week, I sat with a former colleague from the editorial board in a café, rather than in the room where we used to make our editorial decisions. He admitted that I had been right, but even more, that even in a liberal paper, the editor and most of the board, had felt restrained, afraid of seeming unpatriotic, afraid of saying the emperor wore no clothes, afraid of not giving the President the benefit of the doubt, afraid of truth telling without access to inside sources.

Unfortunately for Rosen, being right is bad for her career, and remaining in the editorial consensus results in failing upwards, and never getting called on the equivalent of war crimes that people like Tom Friedman committed on the public. This raises a larger question about the corporate takeover of the media and how their agendas end up reflecting what gets covered and what doesn't. Conglomerates who profit from war are in no mood to resist it, and conglomerates who want to maintain their credibility would never toss out the bulk of their staffs who were entirely wrong. Fortunately there's a movement dedicated to restoring an independent media and returning the power of knowledge back to the people. Dan Rather spoke at it, and Bill Moyers had a great moment when he turned the tables on a Fox News flunky that tried to ambush him, which you just have to see.



It's called the National Conference for Media Reform, and it's our last best hope as a nation to get the press we deserve. As for the war criminals who led us down a path to destruction, there's always a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Talk About A Buried Lede

So the NYT, the WaPo and the LAT all wrote the same story about the closed-door meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday, probably because it was closed-door and there was a limited amount of information. They all quoted Michael Hayden's "I know nothink" shtick, where he claimed he wasn't there when the taping of interrogations was authorized and he wasn't there when they were destroyed (except he claimed that he supported their destruction in his initial message, might want to button that up, General). They all quoted Jay Rockefeller calling the hearing "useful but incomplete" and vowing to call other witnesses. They all covered Michael Mukasey's hem and haw session, where he struck down the idea of a special prosecutor by claiming the completely compromised Justice Department can do the job. But at the end of two of the reports came a remarkable little nugget. From the NYT:

Elsewhere in Washington, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued an interim order on Tuesday directing the government not to destroy any evidence of torture that lawyers for a Guantánamo Bay detainee say they believe exists.

The order came after lawyers for the detainee, Majid Khan, filed a request asserting that he had been tortured in secret C.I.A. prisons for more than three years before he was transferred to Guantánamo last year.

J. Wells Dixon, one of Mr. Khan’s lawyers, said Tuesday that he believed the judges would not have issued the order “if they did not think there was any risk” that the government might destroy evidence of torture.

The WaPo had pretty much the same item, also at the very end of the story.

Shouldn't that be its own story? You have a three-judge panel warning the government against destroying evidence that may came up at trial, evidence that would implicate them in war crimes and violations of international law. Why is that buried in the back of a completely different story?

We keep getting these little tidbits in these stories. Yesterday it was one former detainee asserting that he saw cameras filming interrogations well after the CIA claims it ended the practice. Today it's this motion from the DC Court of Appeals.

There is evidence out there. It's beyond clear. That's the cumulative effect of these nods and winks. And if it's out there, the government might as well put it out now, because there will be a release at some point.

Meanwhile, the legal adviser at Gitmo seems to think that evidence gathered by torture is admissible at trial (or whatever they call the kangaroo courts down there), and refused to answer if waterboarding would be illegal if used on an American soldier by the enemy. The previous chief prosecutor of military commissions, Morris Davis, had a categorically different view on the admissibility of torture-generated evidence. He quit, and was invited to the Senate testimony yesterday, but the Defense Department WOULDN'T LET HIM TESTIFY even though he no longer works under them.

We're so far down the rabbit hole we can see ourselves on the other side. It's almost time to stick a fork in this democracy.

UPDATE: You can view an excellent timeline of the torture tapes at TPM Muckraker.

Wiretapping Update: Hold, What Hold?

Chris Dodd's noble action yesterday doesn't squash the telecom immunity bill entirely, but it's supposed to slow it down and make it such a pain in the ass that nobody in their right mind would push it forward. Harry Reid is not in his right mind.

Tim Starks of Congressional Quarterly reports that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) plans to bring the Senate’s surveillance bill up for floor debate in mid-November. That’s despite the hold that Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) plans to place on the measure — something first reported by Election Central’s Greg Sargent.

I’m a bit confused here. This just doesn’t happen. So I chatted with someone I know with extensive Hill experience, who said:

“I can’t think of one time when Harry Reid went around his own. It’s just not normal for a leader to do that to his own side. Sometimes you’ll go around Republicans, sometimes they’ll use holds to be “spoilers,” but that happens to the other guy. You just don’t do it to one of your own.”

Indeed, the bill passed out of the Intelligence Committee, with only Ron Wyden and Russ Feingold opposed. Wyden did manage to place a poison pill in there:

An amendment by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who opposed the bill for its inclusion of telecom immunity, requires the government to obtain a warrant when targeting an American overseas for surveillance.

Last night, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said: "We have strong concerns about that amendment. We certainly could not accept it."

Bond called the provision "problematic" and said that if it is not modified, passage could be difficult.

Jeez, it's almost like that those on the side of the rule of law are in the minority again. Putting poison pills in our own bills to knock them down? Unbelievable.

I have to hand it to Dodd again. He's fighting the good fight here, and he's the perfect person to take this on. One reason, besides the bully pulpit of running for President, is that he has already announced that he will not seek a run for re-election to the Senate. So the prospects of retaliation mean less to him. Still, this takes a lot of guts, which Barack Obama, who put out a nice little press release but hasn't gone to the same lengths, doesn't have in the same way. Obama did put a hold on the nomination of Hans von Spakovsky, which was huge, but look at the countervailing interests here. Opposing a Bush appointee is different from opposing Bush, the Republicans, and powerful telecom companies all at once.

And I'm as puzzled as Atrios about the idea of immunizing any party from breaking laws, given that there's legislation preventing ex post facto laws from being enacted.

UPDATE: If you want to know why Democratic leaders would be pushing to give telecom companies a free hand to break American law, this is a handy blog post.

Top Verizon executives, including CEO Ivan Seidenberg and President Dennis Strigl, wrote personal checks to (Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Jay) Rockefeller totaling $23,500 in March, 2007. Prior to that apparently coordinated flurry of 29 donations, only one of those executives had ever donated to Rockefeller (at least while working for Verizon).

In fact, prior to 2007, contributions to Rockefeller from company executives at AT&T and Verizon were mostly non-existent.
But that changed around the same time that the companies began lobbying Congress to grant them retroactive immunity from lawsuits seeking billions for their alleged participation in secret, warrantless surveillance programs that targeted Americans.

The Spring '07 checks represent 86 percent of money donated to Rockefeller by Verizon employees since at least 2001.

There are times when I really hate how perverted our political system has become.

UPDATE II: Dodd now vows to filibuster the bill.

Are you willing to go to the mat to restore the Constitution?

Just last night, we heard there are plans to disregard Senator Dodd's intention to place a hold on a FISA bill that includes amnesty for telecommunications companies.

That would be a pretty extraordinary move, but Chris Dodd has pledged to stop this horrible bill any way he can.

So if the hold is not honored, he is prepared to go to the Senate floor and filibuster.

Rolling back the Bush Administration assault on the rule of law has been a major focus of Chris Dodd's work in the Senate -- and it's also a centerpiece in his campaign for President.