Well those that were paying attention last week listened to the sworn testimony of a CIA interrogator that is in direct conflict with the repeated assertions of former Vice President Dick Cheney. IS the CIA lying? Or is Cheney Lying? IS the CIA officer unable to remember what he did and when he did it and what the result was? Or just flat out lying. How can you reconcile Dick Cheney's exact opposite assertions with the sworn testimony of the CIA employee? ALSO why were independent contractors brought in for water boarding? That is one of the most interesting questions to me? Was it to avoid whistle blower laws? Did we have no governmental employees who could apply the techniques considered torture prior to the Bush Appointee internal legal memos? So should the CIA employee be tried for perjury? If what Deck Cheney is saying is true then the CIA employee must be lying right? Cheney claims the torture worked and got the valuable information, the CIA employee claims the exact opposite? Can two completely opposite characterizations of the same situation BOTH be true?
Link? Seriously you are kidding aren't you? Or did you honestly not pay any attention to the only sworn testimony on this issue?
Summer79 - all very poignant questions. I hope and expect more will be revealed about how Cheney's torture program was perpetrated. One main point to consider is that the CIA is compartmentalized wrt intel and missions. It's a convenient maneuver to reference "the CIA" as supporting a program of torture when it may very well be the case that the program was planned and executed in relative secrecy by a handful in the CIA who were cooperating with Cheney/Rumsfeld. The use of inexperienced contractors doing the torture allows for it to be further hidden while permitting some claim of government sponsorship under "the CIA." I think what FBI agent Ali Soufan's testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week shows is that career FBI and CIA agents and their supervisors - all highly experienced and successful with traditional legal interrogation methods - were opposed to what the contractors showed up and did. It certainly appears there was a chain of command ordering torture of high level AQ detainees that was outside of the true interrogation branch of both the CIA and FBI. I'm guessing it was a direct line from Cheney and Rumsfeld with contractors doing their bidding at a time when they had no legal cover for torture whatsoever.
It would seem to me that if Ms Pelosi is correct when she says the CIA lied to her and does so frequently, then this would indeed be a case of a rogue organization that would be a tremendous threat to our freedom. And an allegation of lying by a personage of the high status of Speaker of the House must be taken seriously. The consequences of a rogue CIA are too awful to consider or allow to come to pass. Therefore to not investigate whether the CIA lied, especially to do so under the guise of claiming that some irrelevant, unemployed 3rd party may also be lying, is to presume, of course that either the CIA is above the law, or that perhaps Pelosi is the liar.
So 77horn - you think the CIA is lying and Cheney is telling the truth? Are you also affirming that Pelosi and Vice President Cheney both are victims of CIA misrepresentations? Only one person of the group has been put under oath, and only two people had anything directly to do with "inhanced interrogation" or "torture."
Actually....I'm for giving both Pelosi and Cheney a pass on this one. This subject diverts attention from the much greater scandal which is the Obama presidency's first 125 days.
Count me in the group that would like to actually see the contradiction he's referring to. Sometimes they turn out to be not contradictions at all, but reading comprehension issues. Not saying there isn't a contradiction to be found, I'd just like to see it as I have grown leery of people who say "did you see that thing that happened? You know, the thing! Everyone saw it! Oh come on, you must be ignorant, everyone saw the thing, and they all agree with me about it!"
Yeah Prodigal- Again it's interesting that so few people listened to any of the testimony of the CIA interrogator sworn in during the recent hearings.
I have no idea what went on in the USA last week, but I find it difficult to believe that anyone believes a word out of Dick's mouth. The guy is one of the greatest lying scumbags in the history of US politics and I don't even understand why the press continues to cover him. Either take him out or ignore him, but why they give him press coverage is mindboggling. He's kind of like Hugo Chavez.
(((blog alert))) Anyone following this stuff knows I keep an eye on what marcy wheeler is talking about. If you think it's worthless, don't read this post of hers. But look at this timeline she'd put togther incorporating publicly available information (i.e. FBI al qaeda interrogator Soufan's testimony to Senate Judiciary last week) that is closing in on the circuit of authority of how torture appears to have happened: private contractors for torture of Zubaydah were given authorization on a daily basis by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. The US Attorney General Ashcroft and DoJ out of the loop, NSA Condi Rice out of the loop. In the loop: individuals in CIA counter terrorism center (CTC), Cheney, Bush, Gonzales, David Addington. The OLC memos offering a fig leaf for torture (not actual law) appear to have been after the fact add-ons that were coached in what they needed to allow to cover what had already been done. This thread is focusing on evidence that can be used to make an informed guess about exactly when the non-CIA torture contractor got the nod to go full bore from the WH: Did Abu Zubaydah’s Torture Begin After May 28, 2002?
Well, I guess you don't want balance. Cheney called for the release of documents detailing the interrogation. The administration has stonewalled. This is after Obama has attacked the past presidential leadership for the last 9 months or more. Cheney kept quiet about it for a long time - right up to the point that the current regime wanted to prosecute Cheney and Bush for some type of crimes. I think a full investigation of what Pelosi knew and what information was garnered from the interrogations is appropriate. Screaming about Cheney probably won't quiet him. As Cheney has begun to speak out, his popularity has risen.
Remember, the argument between the CIA and Pelosi is an argument between the Dem Party Speaker of the House, and an agency governed by a Dem President, with a Dem chief (Panetta). Want the truth? Release the memos. That's all they have to do. I really wish they would, because if they don't triplehorn is going to have to start diagramming sentences and explaining the subjunctive case to protect his talking points.
Dick wants selective declassification to prove a political point. Gop'ers want selective investigation of whether or not Pelosi is telling the truth about what she didn't know about Dick's illegal torture. If there's going to be multiple investigations, might as well get it all out there. I'm in favor of it. While I'm not going to try to defend the path that Obama is taking for his part, it all might end up in the same place in due time. How this proceeds has as much to do with the DoJ/courts and Congress as it does with the POTUS. The biggest potential loser in all this is Cheney, imo. To the extent that Republicans in Congress and Pres hopefuls like Romney continue to hitch their wagon to Cheney's torture train, they stand to fall hard and far when the bridge blows.
Uninformed - It does seem to personalize it, doesn't it? It's fitting considering it's looks more and more like this was a one man show: a co-president calling the shots then, and the same co-president singlehandedly defending himself now. The same selective declassification was used by Cheney in outing the identity of a covert CIA agent for political purposes. The difference now is that, being out of office, he's fresh out of pixie dust to pick and choose what classified information gets shown to suit his personal needs. It won't surprise me in the least to find out that Bush was more out of the loop in promoting/authorizing the use of torture than imagined.
I think this partisanship by you is way over the top. Without giving it a medical term, let me say that someone that you disagree with politically is not necessarily evil: He simply has a different viewpoint. If you step back a bit, you might see it.
It isn't a personal attack. Not in the slightest. I just see a lot of drivel that is entirely slanted and biased. I want you to open your eyes and see it for what it is. These conspiracy stories that the web blogs concoct and you forward get old. In the end I would like to see some critical thinking in more of the posts here. I don't have any expectations, but considering you have a MD, I do have hope.
You call something a conspiracy theory but provide no rationale. Furthermore you offer no explanation accounting for the facts in the order in which they are known. What we have is a situation where torture was perpetrated by for-profit contractors prior to any legal cover being provided for acts that were illegal under existing law, and prior to any notification of Congress - again required by law. One consideration that should occur to anyone wondering about this stuff is how did it get paid for. If Congress holds the purse strings, how did it get slipped by without the appropriate Congressional Intelligence Committees knowing about it? Guess what? Marcy Wheeler has already been writing about it and draws in an awareness by Pelosi of how how Bush was sneaking it in without proper oversight. Per Pelosi:
triplehorn, you have read more on this than anybody, so tell me what you believe... 1. What interrogation techniques was Pelosi briefed on in 2002? 2. Did they say anything about waterboarding? 3. Was she told that anybody had been waterboarded? 4. Was she told anybody would be waterboarded? 5. 2 years later a staff member wrote a letter protesting the practice. Was Pelosi aware of that? If so, did she agree? 6. If Pelosi didn't like waterboarding, why didn't she do anything as House Minority leader? 7. If Pelosi didn't like waterboarding, why didn't she do anything as Speaker of the House from 2007 - 2008? After all, it was public record since June 2004... June 2004 article about waterboarding KSM 8. Finally, is the argument against waterboarding a moral one? If so, how do you feel about using drone airplanes to assassinate Taliban and Al Queda leaders, with the resulting collateral damage to non-combatants? Is that OK? I don't intend that as a strawman, but rather as an attempt to understand a continuum of ethics that allows one and not the other.
zzzz- John Kiriakou was a CIA agent involved in the initial capture of Abu Zubaydah. He wasn't involved in Abu Zubaydah's torture and as such his report of AZ being waterboarded was not a firsthand account. His knowledge of it came from field accounts he read. Kiriakou came forward in a media interview and said Zubaydah got waterboarded for "probably 30, 35 seconds" and he "broke" afterward. It was discovered Very recently that Zubaydah was in reality waterboarded 83 times. We're finding out that the CIA's record keeping of briefings and other torture related information has been erroneous. I think it's a fair question to wonder if this is as much a 'feature' of their record keeping as it is a 'bug'.
