torture – Page 2

Welcome to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, Gawker.

Oh, stop squirming. Having the chip put in doesn’t hurt *that* much.

I’m sorry to have to tell you folks at The Gawker this, but it’s over. You’ve been tagged by the guy from the cow college as Outside the Pale, and you’re not coming back from that.

It’s like this: you were fine with this post, for a given value of fine: you took precisely the line that was expected of you with the Mancow narrative. Right-wing shock-jock gets waterboarded, now thinks it’s torture, yadda yadda and the Online Left cheers while it reaches for the tis… well, I’ll be polite. If you had left it there, nothing further would have gone on. But then you made the mistake of actually deciding that the evidence that this was a publicity stunt was actually worth publicizing. So you got yelled at for it, a little; but you just kept pushing. So now you got yelled at, for real – and it doesn’t matter in the slightest that it’s by a rampaging buffoon who believes that Cheney had secret death squads. Or that you actually agree with him that waterboarding really is torture. Or anything else, at this point. Continue reading Welcome to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, Gawker.

Current Speaker of the House declines Sunday show circuit.

Come out to play.

Pelosi turns down Sunday show invitations

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) turned down invitations to be on several Sunday morning talk shows and is instead spending the weekend with her family.

The Speaker was invited to appear on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” ABC’s “This Week,” “Fox News Sunday” and CNN’s “State of the Union,” according to sources at the networks.

The Warriors, because I like AofSHQ.

Crossposted to RedState.

You can almost smell the relief coming from this Salon Prevarigate piece…

[UPDATE]: And welcome, Protein Wisdom readers. You may be amused by Morgan Freeman doing a Barenaked Ladies cover.

…because now they have an acceptable devil figure to blame it all on. Via @vermontaigne (and Protein Wisdom):

Cheney’s torture trap for Democrats

[Note: Salon defines ‘waterboarding’ as ‘torture’ throughout this article. Please calibrate your semantic filters accordingly. – ML]

You might have thought getting torture back in the news would be a bad move for any Republican; after all, it was the Bush administration that authorized the torturing. But the last few days have shown Dick Cheney knew exactly what he was doing when he went on TV last week and started talking about “enhanced interrogation”: It was a masterstroke of bureaucratic warfare.

[snip multiple paragraphs that dance around the fact that Pelosi Knew All Along.]

Cheney, safely ensconced in his McLean, Va., mansion, must be chortling all the way to his cave every night. After three decades in the top levels of U.S. government, he knows better than most how to set his opponents against themselves.

You have to understand that this sort of thing is the product of a certain kind of mindset. Let’s say that you’re a person who has adopted a particular set of beliefs – for whatever reason – that you have come to depend on as being an integral part of why you consider yourself to be a good person. And let’s say that these beliefs have been reinforced and validated by certain outside individuals, through a series of deliberately provocative statements and actions. And let’s finally say that it becomes clear that those people have been lying to you with those statements and actions – and without them, the set of beliefs that you’re relying on now come into serious question. You have two options at this point. The first is to critically examine your beliefs, and be prepared to change them; the second is to find something else that would validate them.
Continue reading You can almost *smell* the relief coming from this Salon Prevarigate piece…

Pelosi. Knew. [Bumped.]

Hi, Activist Left.

[Further UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers. Umm. I dunno. Zombie MMORPG, maybe?

[UPDATE] You’d think that they thought that none of this would ever come out.

—–

Pelosi knew about the waterboarding.

She knew all along.

According to the memo the very first briefing listed is 9/4/02 with then Rep. Porter Goss & Pelosi. The summary of the briefing says:

“Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of the particular EITs that had been employed.”

This directly contradicts Pelosi’s story, that “we were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used.“

And here’s the important thing: we knew this already, and so did you. You’ve been lying to the American people about this for six or so years solely because that way you could maybe stop the screaming that was going on in your own head. It didn’t work, but then, it never was going to: you really shouldn’t have tried it in the first place. Continue reading Pelosi. Knew. [Bumped.]

Condi Rice versus Random Antiwar Guy #555443.

The best part? When she took pity, and gave him the answer.

And objectively speaking, the refs should have stopped the fight about halfway through. Not that either I or Brutally Honest would have thanked them for that: this was just too choice for words.

If you’re wondering who won this exchange, either you haven’t watched it yet or you’re not willing to admit the answer. When the room shuts up to listen to one person over another; when that person demonstrates on two separate occasions that she’s infinitely more knowledgeable on the subject than the person she’s ‘debating;’ and when that person brushes off her aide in order to rip a few more strips of flesh… well. Don’t go up against the varsity team if you’re not ready to play.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Obama caught between rock and a hard place on ‘torture.’

Or, why the Romans did that “Remember, thou art mortal” thing*.

Rep Peter Hoekstra of Michigan would like to remind people in general – and the White House in particular – that the events of the last eight years didn’t actually occur in a vacuum:

Congress Knew About the Interrogations

Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair got it right last week when he noted how easy it is to condemn the enhanced interrogation program “on a bright sunny day in April 2009.” Reactions to this former CIA program, which was used against senior al Qaeda suspects in 2002 and 2003, are demonstrating how little President Barack Obama and some Democratic members of Congress understand the dire threats to our nation.

[snip]

It was not necessary to release details of the enhanced interrogation techniques, because members of Congress from both parties have been fully aware of them since the program began in 2002. We believed it was something that had to be done in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to keep our nation safe. After many long and contentious debates, Congress repeatedly approved and funded this program on a bipartisan basis in both Republican and Democratic Congresses.

Rep Hoesktra goes on with this shot across the administration’s bow: “I have asked Mr. Blair to provide me with a list of the dates, locations and names of all members of Congress who attended briefings on enhanced interrogation techniques.” That being, of course, the thing that the White House probably doesn’t want publicized. It also doesn’t want it publicized that it doesn’t want it publicized, but that’s normal for administrations in the middle of an embarrassment.

Continue reading Obama caught between rock and a hard place on ‘torture.’

Cheney Doubles Down on ‘torture’ memos.

Release them all.

(Via Andrew Malcolm) Former Vice President Dick Cheney has indicated that last week’s disclosure / distraction involving four CIA ‘torture’ memos is critically incomplete, as it fails to give results. He wants the full story released:

“One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure,” Cheney tells Hannity, “is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn’t put out the memos that showed the success of the effort. And there are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified.”

“I formally asked that they be declassified now. I haven’t announced this up until now, 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.”

“And 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, as well as to see this debate over the legal opinions.”

Continue reading Cheney Doubles Down on ‘torture’ memos.

Spainmas Interruptus.

Keep hope alive!

Via Hot Air (and I love the name Ed came up with for this one), the AP does everything it can to keep the dream from dying, but they’re up against some tough objective reality, here:

Spanish AG says no torture probe of US officials

MADRID – Spanish prosecutors will recommend against opening an investigation into whether six Bush administration officials sanctioned torture against terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, the country’s attorney-general said Thursday.

Candido Conde-Pumpido said the case against the high-ranking U.S. officials — including former U.S. Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales — was without merit because the men were not present when the alleged torture took place.

“If one is dealing with a crime of mistreatment of prisoners of war, the complaint should go against those who physically carried it out,” Conde-Pumpido said in a breakfast meeting with journalists. He said a trial of the men would have turned Spain’s National Court “into a plaything” to be used for political ends.

Prosecutors at Spain’s National Court have not formally announced their decision in the case, but Conde-Pumpido is the country’s top law-enforcement official and has the ultimate say.

Continue reading Spainmas Interruptus.

Glenn Greenwald still pro-torture.

Free hint, Greenwald: until you write the magic sentence “I regret supporting Barack Obama in the last election,” you aren’t getting out of that designation. It’s not enough to disapprove: you have to admit that you were wrong.

Link via Protein Wisdom, because I try not to link to pro-torture Obama supporters if I can help it.

Crossposted to RedState.

Reason TV: ‘Barack W. Bush.’

If only.

While the foreign affairs part of this video is largely true, I have to disagree with it on two key points:

First off, the Obama administration has not “stopped torture.” They’ve started it back up again, only they’re going to be handing the job over to countries, in an essentially deniable fashion. And go read up on counter-terror operations conducted by, say, the French if you think that restricting rendition to Western European nations will prevent that from happening. Hint to the naive: the rest of the world is significantly nastier than we are. That’s why many of your ancestors moved here in the first place. And why almost none of them moved back.

Second, Obama doesn’t really have to try too hard to placate his antiwar base: they’re actually fairly indifferent to this issue, given the way that they’re barely exercised about Obama doing much the same thing as his predecessor. He does have to work a little to make his policies look sufficiently different enough from Bush’s, though – which provides a reasonably similar result, which is why I guess that Reason came to that conclusion.

Moe Lane

PS: I’ll believe that Gitmo’s getting closed down when I see it actually happening.

Crossposted to RedState.