Posts tagged “torture”
Ha, Ha, Ha, Oops!
Me, last week: Everyone at al-Qaeda should get a huge laugh out of some of the lies we were fed by the high-value detainees who were key linchpins of al-Qaeda, lies that we swallowed wholesale. They may even get a few laughs out of who we regarded as key linchpins of al-Qaeda. The Washington Post, [...]
Keeping Shit Secret Is What’ll Keep Us Safe
Safety doesn’t lie in numbers, safety lies in keeping ugly secrets secret. Loose lips sink ships, and so does the Freedom of Information Act. (1) So now it’s a formal legal argument: such-and-such information (about past government misdeeds) must be kept secret forever, because to allow this information to become public would benefit al-Qaeda’s recruitment [...]
Novel Criminal Defense
Back in October 2007, Sen. Lindsey Graham drew on his personal expertise to declare: I am convinced, as an individual senator, as a military lawyer for 25 years, that waterboarding…does violate our war crimes statute and is clearly illegal under domestic and international law. … I don’t think you have to have a lot of [...]
Cheney’s Heavy But Invisible Hand
Three weeks ago, Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote: Third–and here comes the blistering fact–when Cheney claims that if President Obama stops “the Cheney method of interrogation and torture”, the nation will be in danger, he is perverting the facts once again. But in a very [...]
Not Particularly Sensational, No Sir!
Once upon a time, there was a President who was widely regarded throughout the land as open, transparent, forthright and honest (though very few people were actually willing to say on the record that he walked on water). This was regarded as a welcome change from the other guy who came before. And it came [...]
Giuliani’s Alternate Reality
It may be officially time to start referring to Rudee Giuliani as Rudee Screwloosiani. As far back as I can remember, he has always been shamefully dishonest, but now he seems to have totally divorced himself from both reality and logic. Monday morning, on MSNBC‘s “Morning Joe” (that’s the place you go to when you [...]
How Many War Crimes Will It Take Till He Acts?
More evidence is trickling out to suggest that preventing another terrorist attack may never have been the prime motivation behind the torture the Bush-Cheney regime practiced on high-value al Qaeda detainees. That the prime motivation may have been to produce (as opposed to, for example, discover) evidence to support one of their main justifications for [...]
Ticking Time Bomb Scenario, Version 2.0
It looks like the ticking time bomb scenario is in need of a little revision. One Monday, Liz Cheney claimed that this is “exactly the situation my daddy these folks were in”: So, if you knew that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had information about an imminent threat on the United States. Information that would result in [...]
CIA: Liars, Clowns or Both?
(1) Bob Graham was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2002. Today he weighed in on last week’s controversy over whether Nancy Pelosi was or wasn’t briefed in September 2002 about the use of waterboarding and other torture techniques on Abu Zubaydah. To recap, the CIA made some absurdly half-hearted assertions which essentially [...]
So Help Him God?
Yesterday, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Dick Cheney unambiguously declared his willingness to testify before Congress about Bush-era torture policies: SCHIEFFER: Would you go back and talk to the Congress? CHENEY: Certainly. I’ve made it very clear that I feel very strongly that what we did here was exactly the right thing to do. And [...]