Cheney’s Claims That Torture Worked? Huge News. Torture Docs Don’t Prove This? Not So Important.
Have the big news orgs really decided that Dick Cheney’s previous claims that CIA docs proved torture worked were more newsworthy than what the documents themselves actually do prove?
So far the answer is Yes. While Cheney’s original assertions that the docs would prove torture worked garnered reams of stand-alone print and TV coverage, the fact that the docs themselves don’t actually prove Cheney’s claims was either not covered at all, buried deep in stories, or described in highly hedged language.
To its credit, The New York Times stated this conclusion very clearly, saying that the docs, which were released yesterday, “do not refer to any specific interrogation methods and do not assess their effectiveness.” But this came in the 13th paragraph in an article not directly focused on Cheney’s claims.
The Washington Post buried its description of the documents and didn’t even take a stand on whether they backed up Cheney. The Associated Press ran one story featuring Cheney’s repetition of his claim yesterday, with no mention at all of the documents. Another AP story said it was “not clear” whether the docs show torture worked — in its 21st paragraph.
CNN’s story featured paragraph after paragraph of Cheney’s claims and only noted in the second to last graf that it was “unclear” whether the docs proved him right.
Precious few news orgs ran stand alone stories on this. ABC News did one. The Washington Independent did another.
To be fair, there was tons of news yesterday. Maybe the news orgs will get around to doing big takeouts on this. But come on, Cheney and his daughter Liz were granted tons of print space and air time to claim for weeks that these docs would prove torture worked. Seems fair to expect aggressive, stand alone stories about what they do — and don’t — prove in the real world.
*************************************
Update: Politico, which madly hyped Cheney’s original claims, has a story today that leads with Cheney’s latest assertions and puts the rebuttal in the mouth of an anonymous Democratic official, rather than stating outright that the docs don’t prove what Cheney said they would.
Update II: TPM’s Zachary Roth weighs in with a good stand alone piece on this. C’mon, big news orgs, you can do this, too!
Update III: Now that Cheney is claiming to defend the interrogators who will be probed, it’s worth recalling that CIA agents themselves worried that Cheney policies were putting them at legal risk.
Update IV: Now Cheney is totally playing CNN for chumps. Embarrassing.
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Greg
The Washington Independent link isn’t working and if its the Ackerman link its probably the most important of them all if you ask me.
fixed SG, thx
What will be big news is when Cheney or his daughter (not the gay one) calls the docs un-American and that releasing is making us less safe. That will be front page, money making news then.
“Maybe the news orgs will get around to doing big takeouts on this”
Nah, they’ll focus on how unpatriotic it is of this administration to go after CIA officials that were only trying to protect us from scary bad guys.
One of the lies that Liz Cheney told repeatedly was that waterboarding couldn’t be torture because “we do it to our troops in SERE school”. The CIA IG document directly refutes this and one of the actually interrogators admitted that what they were doing was different than SERE school because it was “for real”. I am sure she will be all over MSNBC for the rest of the week and I hope someone calls her on that bullshit
I don’t believe that either Cheney ever claimed that “torture worked?”
sbj, they claimed that torture saved thousands of lives. does that count as claiming torture worked?
@sbj
I haven’t talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country,” Cheney said. “I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was.”
Sure it counts as the same but he’ll parse the words and twist them so there is no resemblance because that’s what he does.
See, according to Cheney, they didn’t torture so….torture didn’t work because they never tortured!
Isn’t that right sbj?
@ sbj, claiming it saved lives isn’t proving torture worked? What’s the point of torturing then if it didn’t save lives?
Once again, what’s being missed and glossed over in this whole charade, is that torture was a state-sanctioned policy of the United States. We can’t ignore it any longer. It officially makes the Bush administration a regime.
Given Cheney’s record of lying on the record, it repulses me that these news orgs would repeat his assertion so uncritically.
At what point do these journalists deserve some responsibility for helping to legitimize war crimes as a policy debate?
@Greg: My point was that they did not use the word “torture.” And what they claimed was that the program gathered valuable intelligence and saved lives. The reports prove that to be true.
Here’s what Greg wrote at the time:
“You can look at Cheney’s request form right here. They open the window a bit on the scope and direction of his request, which he has claimed will prove that Bush’s torture program yielded worthwhile intelligence.”
Greg also wrote:
“The big news orgs keep reporting with no skepticism that Cheney has asked the CIA to declassify documents that will show torture successfully yielded valuable intelligence.”
Greg also wrote:
“Boehner elaborated in a statement on his Web site: “I asked the President today to release information about what these interrogation methods yielded…” As you know, Cheney has also asked the CIA to declassify memos that detail the same thing.”
And:
“Cheney claims will demonstrate that the Bush torture program collected a whole bunch of useful intelligence, though it may take awhile.”
I believe the two docs do, in fact, prove that Cheney’s claim that the “torture” program yielded worthwhile intelligence.
Not only that, but the report does claim that attacks were prevented:
“One of the gains to detaining the additional terrorists has been the thwarting of a number of al-Qa’ida operations in the United States and overseas…Walid Bin ‘Atash (a.k.a. Khallad) was captured on the verge of mounting attacks against the US consulate in Karachi, Westerners at the Karachi airport, and Western housing areas.”
SBJ,
Do you support water boarding prisoners, of any kind?
Forget about if it works or not, because the decision to water board, and then to start doing it, preceded any results. It is ridiculous to take the position that the end justified the means, when the means were set in place, before there was an end available, to justify what was being started.
News orgs were cowards to go after the previous admin while they were in office. This appears to have carried on now. I suspect they fear what Cheney was capable of. They must assume he still has moles throughout the Govn’t and can track any one person down and make their lives difficult.
It’s still torture sbj, it’s still torture. It was a state-sanctioned policy of the United States. It’s torture and you know it. I’m amazed at the levels an “independent Libertarian” like yourself will go to defend the most unpopular presidential administration in history, an administration you have nothing to do with. What’s it matter to you? You didn’t vote for him as evidenced by your registration as a Libertarian. Right?
I told you so sbj would claim Cheney never used the word torture as defense of his claim.
Typical Bush apologist.
Hey sbj, since you are still in denial that waterboarding is torture, go read this wiki entry on waterboarding. It explains how waterboarding was indeed torture.
Give it up. Bush/Cheney were a pro-torture regime and anyone defending them are pro-torture apologists who stand for nothing that is American.
Cheney managed to turn this country into another Khmer-Rouge type regime.
My beliefs here are fairly simple to understand. The admin wanted to push interrogation to its legal limits. They did what they thought they had to do and could do within legal limits. I believe the architects thought that waterboarding was legal. I believe that the lawyers who justified it did so in good faith. I believe that the interrogators thought they were performing legal acts. I believe that enhanced interrogation yielded valuable results – that’s what these reports show.
If this administration deems Fox News dangerous to this country and puts all their news casters and opinionators in prison indefinitely, because they believe Fox is purposely inciting people to become highly aggressive by misleading them regarding the administrations goals, would that be O.K. for you sbj?
I mean, if they did it out of sincerity, and believed they weren’t breaking the law, it would be O.K. according to your libertarian views right?
SBJ is Liz.
I swear to god that if we could ever find out what in the world Cheney has on the media, we could find the origin point for 90% of our problems.
How did he do it? He cowed the entire media, starting 2 weeks after 9/11 and continuing on until this moment.
sbj, where do the reports reveal what cheney repeatedly said they would — that enhanced interrogation thwarted attacks and saved thousands of lives?
@ sbj, great answer for a Republican. A true Libertarian stance would be state-sanctioned torture is an abuse by the government.
You walk the Bushie line every time. Now go run and hide like you always do.
“I don’t believe that either Cheney ever claimed that “torture worked?””
Holy cow! Did you really make this claim, sbj? That’s just nuts – Cheney specifically made that claim more than once. Liz supported her father’s assertion that torture worked.
All over the place more than once; Uncle Dick has been saying it since the story broke.
Mr. Sargent:
“C’mon, big news orgs, you can do this, too!”
They could, but they won’t.
They are quite content to let this story die because the LAST thing they want is for the American people to read those redacted documents.
You’re free to howl in disagreement, but outside of the Far Left “hothouse”, wide dissemination of the facts that were revealed would prove disastrous to the Obama Administration, and especially the Democrats on the Hill who are pushing for this politically inspired judicial witch-hunt.
The Big Media Boys are trying to protect The One and his fellow-travelers from his own True Believer allies…that’s you…and the True Believers aren’t lucid enough to realize the fact.
This is the exact same treatment that the MSM gave to the release of the Venona Intercept transcripts that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Alger Hiss was a paid stooge of the Soviets. Very embarrasing for a generation of Leftists who for decades hollered his innocence from the rooftops.
I would counsel you that one day the portions of those douments that were redacted, and you must admit that a fair amount of the drafts were, will one day see the light of day.
What WAS released was bad enough. I shudder to think of what information lies under those black spaces.
You should too, albeit for slightly separate reasons.
Complete BS. You are shuddering at content that you have not seen. What a maroon!
Tena careful now. I called him an idiot one time, which couldn’t be a more accurate term, and he said doing that made him believe that I never wrote legislation for Obama. Of course I did for almost two years. Nonetheless, in bj’s world referring to someone as smart and Serious as him, means I’m a “child” and a phony.
@Greg: I believe we must be speaking right past one another. Here’s one snip from the report:
“One of the gains to detaining the additional terrorists has been the thwarting of a number of al-Qa’ida operations in the United States and overseas…Walid Bin ‘Atash (a.k.a. Khallad) was captured on the verge of mounting attacks against the US consulate in Karachi, Westerners at the Karachi airport, and Western housing areas.”
I think you are trying to make Levin’s point? That the docs don’t show a direct line from the use of waterboarding to stopping a specific attack? The docs show that interrogation lead to arrests and those who were arrested were arrested on the verge of mounting attacks.
Cheney said:
“I’m convinced, absolutely convinced that we saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives.”
“Because they disrupted the leadership of al-Qaida,” Schmitt said, Cheney can reasonably argue that “they were able in some larger sense to preclude a (weapons of mass destruction) attack in the years ahead.”
Cheney said:
“The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work, proud of the results,” Cheney said in his Thursday speech, “because they prevented the violent deaths of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people.”
I am having difficulty finding the Cheney quote where he purported said that waterboarding stopped an imminent attack.
Here’s what Bush said:
“The first thing you do is ask what’s legal?” President Bush said. “What do the lawyers say is possible? I made the decision, within the law, to get information so I can say to myself, ‘I’ve done what it takes to do my duty to protect the American people.’ I can tell you that the information we got saved lives.”
I fail to see the controversy.
Bilgeman and sbj don’t mind if America breaks the Geneva Convention. They’re all for laws being broken. They don’t believe that one of the reasons for our countries greatness is its ability to rise above the savagery of other nations.
What about John Ashcroft having recently told Congress that water boarding was only used about three times.
These new documents state that he was informed that one prisoner had been water boarded more than a hundred times. Shouldn’t Ashcroft be investigated for lying to Congress?
What is it with those super religious guys, remember Ashcroft would hold daily prayer sessions in his office, and he covered up the statute of justice, because of her marble breasts being on camera with him. (I guess he he just wanted to be the one colossal boob in the pictures.) But holy John has no problems condoning torture, and lying to congress about how much of it had taken place.
@sbj
Are you asserting that “torture works” doesn’t imply “enhanced interrogations saved lives”? Have you ever had a critical thought?
Did the program as whole produce intelligence? Yeah, of course it did, but no evidence is shown that “enhanced interrogation” led to actionable intelligence. In fact, all the docs seem to show that what the CIA had used for years and years before the Bush Admin obtained important and actionable intelligence.
So we’ve scrapped the power drilling bs and kept the traditional interrogations, thus have the same capablity of aquiring intel without all the baggage of war crimes. Pretty snappy!
CNN reports Cheney’s claims uncritically:
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/08/25/terror.interrogations/
They’ll keep using this tactic until they can’t get away with it.
The controversy is that waterboarding is torture, is specifically illegal, as evidenced by the fact that we hung Japanese for it in the 40s and just arrested and convicted a Sherif in Texas for using it in the 80s, and you and people like you defend it. That’s disgusting, and if you seriously see nothing wrong with it, then so are you.
““The first thing you do is ask what’s legal?” President Bush said. “What do the lawyers say is possible? I made the decision, within the law, to get information so I can say to myself, ‘I’ve done what it takes to do my duty to protect the American people.’ I can tell you that the information we got saved lives.”
I fail to see the controversy.”
That’s one of the most breathtaking comments I’ve ever seen posted.
And sickening. You fail to see the controversy over waterboarding? SBJ – executed Japanese for waterboarding after WWII and you fail to see the controversy?
You have absolutely no moral compass at all. Which makes you a sociopath – sociopaths have no conscience and anyone who can say about waterboarding after we executed people for doing it and turned around and did it ourselves, has no conscience.
WE executed…
At the Nuremberg Trials, we ruled that “we were just following orders” was not an acceptable defense, and we hung people who used that justification for their deeds.
We have to have a consistent legal and moral stance, on the world stage. We can not go around the world, lecturing all other nations about rule of law, and human rights, while exempting ourselves from those same standards.
Lets see if Howie will touch this on Reliable Sources on Sunday!
While I certainly agree that it’s disgraceful that more media isn’t reporting fact checks, or rebuttals of this claim, I still have to wonder how many people will actually believe anything Cheney says. Those who believe Fox News has a direct line to their version of “the truth,” perhaps– the same sorts who think that Obama is a secret Kenyan Muslim traitor or that he really wants to kill your grandmother if she sneezes.
I found it interesting that when Tom Ridge stated that he’d been pressured to raise the “terror threat level” right before the 2004 election, most comments that I saw on line had no trouble accepting it. (Neither did my husband or myself– in fact, we predicted it in early October 2004.)
Ergo, I conclude that Cheney’s claims will have little or no impact. I expect continued claims from him in the future.
“I still have to wonder how many people will actually believe anything Cheney says. T”
cheney is still less popular than syphilis and I don’t think average Americans believe him. I just want to know what the deal is with the media. It’s really significant to me because Cheney is the one who got the press to quit asking relevant questions after 9/11. For about 2 weeks, the media was acting normal and then suddenly the entire American press turned around and became all about the flag and the Motherland and dropped all the questions. WHY? How did Cheney do it?
The controversy is that they legal opinion in order to redefine what is legal. As others have pointed out the US considered water boarding torture as recently as WWII and the Geneva Convention is an existing treaty to which we are legally bound that they went beyond. So, whether or not Cheney calls what he authorized torture it was illegal by any number of standards (just not in the eyes of the MSM or the Bush legal council).
I think Cheney’s an extremely powerful man– always has been. I don’t believe that’s changed since January 20, it’s just shifted to less public visibility. He still is an incredibly powerful influence on policies affecting oil and gas, government contracting (especially in Iraq), etc. I think his influence will begin to wane, particularly as we begin to shift to alternate forms of energy and Obama has more time to root out the remnants of the Bushies, but it will take a lot of time. In the meantime Cheney still has a strong following and a tremendous amount of power among the True Believers.
mike from Arlington:
“Bilgeman and sbj don’t mind if America breaks the Geneva Convention. They’re all for laws being broken. They don’t believe that one of the reasons for our countries greatness is its ability to rise above the savagery of other nations”
You really should see a therapist about your egotistical delusions of greatness, pal. It’s fine for you to walk around in a cloud of your own self-esteem, but like cigarette smoke, when it hits MY nostrils, we’re going to have a problem.
I’m fine with obeying the Geneva Convention, as long as the enemy ALSO obeys it.
They haven’t, so why should we?
Oh, that’s right…for the sake of some wretched goober in an Arlington condo who thinks we should suffer and die needlessly for HIS subjecive definition of “national greatness”.
“The constitutional Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact.”-Justice Robert Jackson,(dissenting, 1949, Terminiello v. Chicago)
Neither is the Geneva Convention…
Tena:
“You have absolutely no moral compass at all. Which makes you a sociopath – sociopaths have no conscience…”
And that makes you…a licensed psychiatrist?
I would offer that the above would tend to make sbj a pragmatist.
Surely a Leftist/Liberal/Progressive,(of all people), would be able to appreciate the “nuance” of the grey areas of the world we must live in?
Bilgeman. Well named indeed!
Bilgeman logic; murderers do not obey the laws against murder, so why should we.
Bilgeman wants to let the worse scum of the earth determine what standards we shall hold ourselves too.
“Paul W. | August 25th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
The controversy is that they legal opinion in order to redefine what is legal.”
Exactly. And they began rather brilliantly by redefining the people they captured as something that doesn’t fit any legal category – that’s how they tried to skirt the Geneva Conventions. Our prisoners weren’t POWs, they were “enemy combatants” which is a made-up category not addressed directly by any laws, national or internation.
As as lawyer, I got it when they first did that, at the start of the war. I knew then they were doing everything extra-legally, in the sense of being outside the law. They really did set up their own legal justification based on a legal structure they built out of thin air and circular logic.
tena:
“And they began rather brilliantly by redefining the people they captured as something that doesn’t fit any legal category – that’s how they tried to skirt the Geneva Conventions. Our prisoners weren’t POWs, they were “enemy combatants” which is a made-up category not addressed directly by any laws, national or internation.”
Oh really? Ever heard of this?
Ex parte Quirin et al, US Supreme Court 1942:
“ …the law of war draws a distinction between the armed forces and the peaceful populations of belligerent nations and also between those who are lawful and unlawful combatants. Lawful combatants are subject to capture and detention as prisoners of war by opposing military forces. Unlawful combatants are likewise subject to capture and detention, but in addition they are subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals for acts which render their belligerency unlawful. The spy who secretly and without uniform passes the military lines of a belligerent in time of war, seeking to gather military information and communicate it to the enemy, or an enemy combatant who without uniform comes secretly through the lines for the purpose of waging war by destruction of life or property, are familiar examples of belligerents who are generally deemed not to be entitled to the status of prisoners of war, but to be offenders against the law of war subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals. ”
This was the Supreme Court’s finding in the case of the eight Nazi (would-be) saboteurs of “Operation Pastorius” captured on US soil in World War Two.
WE HANGED them for it.
“As as lawyer, I got it when they first did that, at the start of the war. I knew then they were doing everything extra-legally, in the sense of being outside the law. They really did set up their own legal justification based on a legal structure they built out of thin air and circular logic.”
Really? And with one cite, YOUR whole fantastic legal structure comes crashing down in flames.
You are no more qualified to be a lawyer than you are qualified to give psychiatric diagnoses.
Liam:
“Bilgeman logic; murderers do not obey the laws against murder, so why should we.”
Very close, sir, you are to be congratulated on your near-keen grasp of the obvious.
Let me sharpen it for you:
“Killing the guy(s) who are trying to kill you is not “murder’, but justifiable self-defense.”
The fact, friend, is that “murder” is a term that is applied AFTER the fact, and as such, is a matter of judgment.
The flaw in your thinking seems to be procedural…the verdict usually is applied AFTER the trial, and not BEFORE.
This is one of those nuances that the Left seems unable or unwilling to come to grips with.
Traditional media hates being shamed by influential folks with access to the information (or to ratings), look at the way that Chuck Todd got schooled on Maher and his reported response of saying “you made me look bad” while swiping away issues like whether the criticism was valid or not. These people seem to be there only to feel important about themselves instead of as vessels for getting valid information out to the public.
@Bilgeman
You need to install a working bilge pump.
Since you and Dick Cheney are letting the terrorists establish how you will treat our enemies, why are you not following those terrorist examples all the way.
They behead people that they disagree with, why are you and your beloved draft dodging chicken hawk, Dick Cheney, not doing the same.
“You are no more qualified to be a lawyer than you are qualified to give psychiatric diagnoses.”
O, I bleed, I swoon! Ya got me.
Except you more or less made the case. The facts in your cited case don’t fit the facts in the present situation in any way – but the justice department seized on that category and stretched it to fit a completely different situation and when it was announced that the administration was re-classifying the prisoners, there was discussion in every legal journal I know of at the time, as well as the WSJ and elsewhere about what this meant and it meant just what I said.
Obviously – since that’s how the justice department used it.
“The fact, friend, is that “murder” is a term that is applied AFTER the fact”
So is “torture.”
You have no standing here. You are WRONG. So sayeth piles of legal precident. Deal with it. At least admit that you’re just a sick f*ck who gets off on torturing people, whether they are guilty or not. At least that would be intellectually honest.
Chenney is just covering his behind. Because if they start talking they will implicate him and Bush.
“What might have been is an abstraction
remaining a perpetual possibility
only in a world of speculation.”
It’s like jobs that are “saved or created”. And in any event, I thought we elected Obama to be President and Commander in Chief. It sure seems like he thinks he is now Khalid Sheik Mohammad’s lawyer. I know you people don’t want to hear it, but my Spidey Sense is tingling again (just like it did about the Obamacare debacle). It is telling me that this isn’t the winner that Moveon and “the left of the left” must be suggesting it is.
smidget:
“So is “torture.”
You have no standing here. You are WRONG. So sayeth piles of legal precident. Deal with it”
You may be forgiven your ignorance, but I freely concede that waterboarding is torture.
Never tried to claim otherwise. The Bush Administration’s legal games were not engaged in to satiate me, but to try to convince you to get on board, or at least not be an active impediment, to the effort to save YOUR miserable life.
“At least admit that you’re just a sick f*ck who gets off on torturing people, whether they are guilty or not. At least that would be intellectually honest.”
Okay, I’d dearly love a few hours alone with bin-Laden and a bucket of aged pig manure….now do me the favor of reciprocating with the intellectual honesty that you don’t give a sh^t about Guantanamo detainess OR your fellow Americans.
“Getting” Bush and Cheney is worth any number of innocent American lives.
That’s all YOU really care about. Being proven “right” in some game where you and those who agree with you are the players and the referees.
Who’s the greater “sick f*ck”?
The news orgs would have to read the documents and assess them critically for themselves. They’re inclined to do neither…not just these docs, but any and all documents longer than, say, two paragraphs regularly receive this kind of treatment from journalists.
Just the other day I pointed out at unbossed.com that WaPo’s Anne Kornblut stated falsely that the new Army Field Manual does not permit sleep deprivation of prisoners. Clearly she didn’t read the document’s interrogation guidelines before parroting that talking point.
Cheney knows full well that reporters don’t read and don’t like to think too hard.
Tena:
“Except you more or less made the case.”
Oh no, “counselor”, I won’t let you move the goal-posts. Here is what you asserted:
“Our prisoners weren’t POWs, they were “enemy combatants” which is a made-up category not addressed directly by any laws, national or internation.”
This was an unequivocal assertion on your part…an absolute claim of fact with no wiggle-room.
I then shoved “Quirin et al” right down your throat, a US Supreme Court case that speaks directly to the idea of an unlawful enemy combatant.Settled law.
You have been refuted.
There was much made of Quirin back when Gitmo first opened, so much so that even I, a layman, had to read up on it.
So you are not nearly as well read on this subject as you’d like to think, or you are truly one crappy lawyer.
Back to the ranks of the “Ham n’ Eggers” at the PD’s office with you, chap!
Oh, and fwiw nobody needs to let Cheney’s “torture worked” argument drive the news. Torture is illegal so it doesn’t matter whether or not it “worked”.
As for whether sleep deprivation, hypothermia, prolonged isolation, battering, threats, waterboarding, etc. constitute torture or cruel treatment – there’s a simple test: Would you do these things to a dog? If not, then it’s because they’re cruel.
smintheis: Oh, and fwiw nobody needs to let Cheney’s “torture worked” argument drive the news. Torture is illegal so it doesn’t matter whether or not it “worked”.
We have a winner. Thank you.
Dick Cheney is scum and the only good news relating to him wil be that he is being tried at the Hague for war crimes or died of a heart attack and was seen on his way to hell.
would he mind if they were done to him or his family?
Better than sending him to prison, give it back for all the murders he helped happen.
sbj waterboarding has been illegal for nearly 70 years. The people in charge were not so stupid as to think it was okay. They just manipulated the situation to do what they wanted. And it did not save lives. Because these same people used that same ability of power and manipulation to start an illegal war in Iraq which also cost hundreds of thousands of innocent people their lives. So in reality even if it did save some American lives those deaths were translated into the deaths of innocent Iraqi’s during a war based on lies to the American poeple.
steve:
“They just manipulated the situation to do what they wanted. And it did not save lives. Because these same people used that same ability of power and manipulation to start an illegal war in Iraq which also cost hundreds of thousands of innocent people their lives.”
Boy,are YOU confused! The EIT program was concerned with learning as much about terrorist organizations that were targeting Americans and our allies.
That is what this is about…not your whack-tastic notions of an “illegal” war. What planet do you live on?
The war in Iraq was done under a Congressional AUMF, which is about as close as Congress comes nowadays to actually performing that portion of it’s Constitutional duty and power.
Could you be any more stoopid? Didn’t you spend enough time in college?
If the Bush Admin was so manipulative, it could very easily have suggested to the interrogators that they get KSM and Zubaydah to spew out the details of how Saddam gave them secret decoder rings and a jug of weaponized anthrax, along with a high-five, a soul kiss, and a power salute, y’know.
This obviously wasn’t done.
“So in reality even if it did save some American lives those deaths were translated into the deaths of innocent Iraqi’s during a war based on lies to the American poeple.”
“If”? Lord man, the reports are right there for you to read, can’t you give ANYBODY ANY credit at all?
American lives WERE saved.
And while Iraq had apparently no part in the EIT’s of these goobers, the harsh reality of the nation-state system is that we kill tens and hundreds of thousands of other nation’s citizens before suffering one of our own to suffer and die.
That’s part of the social contract between a citizen and his government in almost every land on the face of the Earth.
Which is why I wonder what planet you have beamed in from.
Time to put down that bong, stop watching the Woodstock retrospectives, and grow up, kid. The world is a harsh place to live…it’s a lot harsher if you’re not a team player and don’t think you have to display any loyalty to the people who you expect to watch your back.
This seems to be willful denial on the part of those who are against EIT’s. You can certainly be against them, and I understand some get a bit queasy about waterboarding. Reasonable people can disagree.
However to say this report does not provide evidence that the EIT’s did in fact provide actionable intelligence is again, willful denial. I understand it is better for your argument to claim that “not only is waterboarding bad and mean, but it doesnt work!”. However that doesnt allow you to make up the facts as you go or deny evidence.
When one belongs to a cult of indiscriminateness, as Greg Sargent does, any position other than his own must have employed discrimination, and is thus a hate crime.
Dick Cheney discriminated against the terrorists of 9/11.
Sorry guys, but Water Boarding is not torture. Get over it already.
Mr Sargent,
By intentionally misrepresenting what the reports actually say by cutting out portions of the actual report you have abrogated any small claim you might have had to not being a purely partisan hack.
The really sad thing is that you work for a newspaper. If you are indicative of the caliber of people at that organization the “news” is apparently not what you people are in the business of spreading