Pelosi: Did I Say CIA?

As I said a day or two ago when it was being suggested the Dems had no exit strategy, despite Pelosi's bumbling, this was the plan all along - to focus attacks and any hearings on Bush. Her blunder was putting Bush and the CIA in the same box.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has backed down slightly in her fight with the CIA, saying that she really meant only to criticize the Bush administration rather than career officials.

"My criticism of the manner in which the Bush Administration did not appropriately inform Congress is separate from my respect for those in the intelligence community who work to keep our country safe," Pelosi said in a statement.

Some probably think she's now trapped. And she should be. But that depends on Obama and the Dem leadership. I certainly don't have faith in the media to hold her feet to the fire over the long-term.

Obama doesn't want a witch hunt. So, the price for her keeping the Speakership will be to let the torture issue go away. She and Obama are going to have to corral other liberals like Leahy if that's going to happen.

Stay tuned.

Sadly, by all rights, she should be out as Speaker. But that remains up in the air.

Comments

[mark l.]

"So, the price for her keeping the Speakership will be to let the torture issue go away."

I think the 'truth' commission is a goner, anyways. This is the equivalent of Cotton Mather flying into the witch trials on a broom.

I would love to see the libs proceed in a truth finding expedition, with one of the biggest proven liars in office leading the charge, but the speakership is gone. The implication of the title, itself, is that she is the highest representative of this new most ethical and wonderful congress.

I saw the presser. Everyone who has a dog in the fight saw the presser. She was twitching faster than michael j fox in a stem cell commercial. Wonder if she will take one last spin on her military transport. No word if they have gone into the motor poll to fix up a garbage truck to haul her around in.

[mark l.]

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2009/05/pelosi_up_a_tree.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

david ignatius politely slams pelosi.

the liberal squirming in the comments is a sight to behold. I wasn't a big trent lott fan, but I do remember a certain sense of accomplishment that was projected by the left over his inability to hold the senate majority leadership post.

what goes around, comes around. you lefties need to type harder.

[PA]

"Obama doesn't want a witch hunt."

Maybe, maybe not. If Pelosi is removed as speaker, then he has someone to blame all the Spendulus failures on since it was essentially outsourced to her, and he knows darn well its got a lot of problems. Its already cost 600 USW steel workers in PA their jobs due its hyper provincial trade protectionist provisions.

[Old Trooper]

Any "Truth Commission" that is made up of Members of Congress is a bust.
Lets have a special prosecutor, sworn testimony and penalties for perjury,
making false official statements, the works for All Concerned. If Anyone gave a briefing
or was briefed they are cleared for Classified info. Judges and prosecutors as well.
Lets get this business done and not have it adjudicated in the Media or by hacks of either
Party.

[Philip McDaniel]

"I think the 'truth' commission is a goner, anyways. This is the equivalent of Cotton Mather flying into the witch trials on a broom."

LOL!!!
What a great line...wish I had thought of it. ;-)

[lala]

That steel business is a strange story. I understand there are more to come and the Canadians are pretty irate. I guess big O wasn't kidding when he made that remark about NAFTA.

[Bob]

It says alot about conservatives that you care more about some ketchup on Nancy Pelosi's lapel than the hundred or so detainees that were reportedly killed during their interrogations. Probably none of these detainees were ever charged, and their actual guilt or innocence may never be known. Even the knowledge of what we did is apparently so dangerous that we can't even release any more pictures of it.

Conservatism has become such a petty, vindictive and morally bankrupt movement. Even Pelosi looks like a saint next to the lot of Bush administration liars who you still don't have the guts to even criticize. Your sanctimony means so much when for the previous eight years you excused the violation of every principle that your movement claimed to stand for.

[lala]

"reportedly killed during their interrogations"

[Steven Den Beste]

The Dems as a whole are in a trap on this one, too. They can't get rid of Pelosi unless they replace her with another woman. If they kick Pelosi out and replace her with an old white man, they are in deep trouble with their base.

And I'm not sure there's another Dem woman representative with enough seniority and charisma to take her place.

[lala]

It's like a soap opera, twists and turns, and unexplored alleys and swamps. And "nuances."

"Then there is Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, who declared that "waterboarding will almost certainly be deemed illegal if put under judicial scrutiny," depending on which "of several possibly applicable legal standards" apply. Does he know the Senate rejected a bill in 2006 to make waterboarding illegal? That fact alone negates criminalization of the act. So quick to condemn, Mr. Robinson later replied to a TV interview question that he did not know how long sleep deprivation could go before it was "immoral." It is "a nuance," he said."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124243020964825531.html

[gus]

Maybe you could post the transcript of her actual Thursday weekly press briefing. Y'know the one with the Obama-esque podium ego enhancing device...
OFFICE OF THE SPEAKER ...placard.
She said quite clearly that the CIA misleads "all of the time".
Because she stepped into a heap of her own dung, she is now backtracking.
Pelosi said what she said. She is a not-so-bright, egotistical, angry, liberal bitch. I hope she goes down VERY VERY HARD.

[North Dallas Thirty]

"It says alot about conservatives that you care more about some ketchup on Nancy Pelosi's lapel than the hundred or so detainees that were reportedly killed during their interrogations."

It says a lot about liberals that you care more about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed getting his face wet than you do about the three thousand Americans whose deaths he caused by burning, suffocation, and buildings collapsing on them -- and avoiding even more suffering the same fate.

Don't play moral outrage here, Bob. Your party thinks of Americans as nothing more than "little Eichmanns" who deserve to die, and who clap and cheer as their preachers scream "God damn America" from the pulpit. It's a pity that you care more about lying, murdering thugs than you do the millions of Americans that they want dead.

The moral principle at stake here, Bob, is that the government exists to protect American lives. In your strange liberal world, American lives are free for the sacrifice in order to make your leftist allies and al-Qaeda like you.

[Old Trooper]

"It says alot about conservatives that you care more about some ketchup on Nancy Pelosi's lapel than the hundred or so detainees that were reportedly killed during their interrogations."

OK Bob,put up or shut up. "Reportedly killed during their interrogations" when, where?

You need a little proof before you post crap like this, Nimrod.
Are you closely related to Pelosi?

[mark l.]

"And I'm not sure there's another Dem woman representative with enough seniority and charisma to take her place."

jane harman. still a dem, but a very moderate one.

hoyer will get the post.

[Bob]

The 100 detainee deaths comes from an estimate by someone who worked with Human Rights Watch. The article is here:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-05-05/how-many-were-tortured-to-death/full/

Since most of the information is classified, it had to be put together piece by piece. The information is obviously incomplete, but it looks to be a good-faith effort. Information on some specific cases has been made public, such as the following story from 2006:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/01/22/ING9UGQ2701.DTL

---------------------------------------------
(01-22) 04:00 PDT Fort Carson, Colo. -- Every American should be forced to see the autopsy pictures of Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush on display at the trial of Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer Jr.

Welshofer is charged with killing the Iraqi general during a November 2003 interrogation. But what's playing out in a Fort Carson courtroom is a nation's shame, not just an individual's.

The autopsy photos of Mowhoush make the now-infamous images from Abu Ghraib prison look like a costume party. Bruises and welts cover Mowhoush's dead body.

Doctors ruled that Mowhoush was smothered. Officials charge that Welshofer stuffed him inside a sleeping bag, bound him with an electric cord, sat on his chest and covered his mouth. Still, there is no question that Mowhoush was also savagely beaten.

[. . .]
----------------------------

At this stage of the game, one would have to conclude that anyone who pleaded ignorance of this stuff must be WILLFULLY ignorant. But the point is, you guys literally care more about some temporary political kerfuffle over Nancy Pelosi than about the actual abuse itself. You dismiss people being beaten and in some cases killed as, "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed getting his face wet." Like every other principle the conservative movement has betrayed, the one about "moral relativism" seems particularly relevant here.

Not only is detainee abuse morally wrong in and of itself, but the international laws behind it might ultimately protect our own soldiers and those of our allies. Put in its proper context, Nancy Pelosi's case is a trivial sideshow. But it's an example of how the Bush administration was so corrupt and immoral that anyone who even so much as cooperated with them was contaminated.

[PA]

The Iraqi general case is well known and should be addressed.

HRW is not a particularly credible source when it comes to tallys.

[Bob]

Human Rights Watch based their claims on investigative work. To responsibly dismiss them as "not a particularly credible source" would then have to involve some other investigation that was done that disproved their claims. What is this alternate investigative source? Or is it just the usual hand-waving?

Here's another source, General Barry McCaffrey, who said, "We should never, as a policy, maltreat people under our control, detainees. We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A." So is McCaffrey also "not a particularly credible source?" Is it a case of "moral relativism" to act as though it really matters if the numbers were 100, more than 100, or ONLY dozens?

Again, it seems to be a matter of convenience for torture apologists to keep denying the information that's already out there. And considering that much of the evidence is being kept classified, you'd have to assume that the known cases are just the tip of the iceberg, right?

[LOL]

What makes Human Rights Watch not a credible source? Can you present any evidence of past shortcomings by them?

[Neo]

So is McCaffrey also "not a particularly credible source?"

Tell me ...

According to an article written by Seymour Hersh published in 2000 The New Yorker, General McCaffrey committed war crimes during the Gulf War by having troops under his command kill retreating Iraqis after a ceasefire had been declared.

[North Dallas Thirty]

"At this stage of the game, one would have to conclude that anyone who pleaded ignorance of this stuff must be WILLFULLY ignorant."

Of course, that doesn't apply to Pelosi, does it, partisan hack?

And what makes this really funny is that Mowhoush, back in Iraq, was an integral part of a regime that did things to literally hundreds of thousands of people that make waterboarding look like a trip to Chuck E. Cheese's -- and Barack Obama, the Obama Party, Pelosi, and Bob whined and screamed that stopping them was a "violation of sovereignty" and whatnot.

Again, why do leftists like Bob care more about criminals and thugs than they do the thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqis and Americans who the thugs and criminals they protect are terrorizing?

[Bob]

"Credible" means that the person is in a position to likely know what they're talking about, and that they have no reason not to be truthful. Regardless of any charges made against McCaffrey for unrelated actions committed years ago, is there any reason that McCaffrey should be doubted for statements he makes about recent abuse of detainees? He has no conflict of interest in these cases. It seems that anyone who questions him has the onus of providing a specific reason that his statement should be doubted. Again, it seems like a matter of convenience for torture proponents to raise specious questions with evidence they prefer not to address.

And North Dallas, I'm gonna have to ask you again to please stop trying to hump my leg. Maybe one of your friends, like perhaps SacTownMan or OldTrooper, would pretend to be a liberal poster so you could hump THEIR leg. I'm sorry, but I'm just not into your kinky scene.

[North Dallas Thirty]

It's no surprise that Bob is desperately trying to liken me to a dog; that's the latest meme from his Obama Party, as Dan called out in the next post. It's merely a sign of how the Obama Party is getting perpetually cornered by its lies and its obvious support for murdering thugs over innocent Iraqi and American citizens.

It also shows how Bob is nothing more than an Axelrod puppet who is merely repeating talking points.

[katablog.com]

Not that the death of any detainee is right, but it appears that the report of 2 detainees' death has been catapulted into "dozens". http://freedetainees.org/5336

The interesting thing is no one on the left wants to talk about who these detainees were, how they came into US custody, what they did before being taken into custody and how many American lives were saved.

[North Dallas Thirty]

Of course not. Anything that would paint them as less than saints is counterproductive to the Obama Party meme. People might not support the fact that Bob and the Obama Party want to release people who not only openly applaud, but actually train on effective tactics for blowing up Christians, sawing the heads off Jews, and destroying American infrastructure.

[Bob]

"The interesting thing is no one on the left wants to talk about who these detainees were, how they came into US custody, what they did before being taken into custody and how many American lives were saved."

I thought that we, as Americans, claimed to care about things like freedom, justice and human rights. Our own justice system doesn't demand to know "who somebody is" or "what they were doing" ahead of time when it decides to grant due process and a fair trial, does it? We don't provide justice as some kind of favor only to nice people, we give it to everybody specifically so it will be unprejudiced and fair. It's not so much a matter of who THEY are, but rather who WE claim to be, isn't it?

How would you feel if it were American soldiers being tortured into false confessions by some foreign government? Isn't that what happened to John McCain, the guy that everybody reveres as a hero for what the Vietnamese did to him? Why the double standard?

It just amazes me that Americans could be dismissing the idea that probably more than hundreds of detainees were tortured in one way or another, and that likely at least dozens of them were killed during these interrogations. And all some of you can say about it is like, wait a minute, doesn't the fact that they were detained at all mean it's no big deal if they got killed? Jeez, gimme a break. Is that what this nation has become?

[LOL]

It's funny how wanting to respect the Constitution and written law is somehow twisted into wanting America to lose and coddling our enemies.

[LOL]

"It's merely a sign of how the Obama Party is getting perpetually cornered by its lies"

Funny how being cornered means a 60% approval rating and a continuing and successful effort to advance his agenda.

[PA]

"Human Rights Watch based their claims on investigative work."

So do the Loose Change guys, Alex Jones, and the wildly inaccurate Lancet. HRW's claims are always exaggerated so their press releases will get media splash.

[xerocky]

"Funny how being cornered means a 60% approval rating and a continuing and successful effort to advance his agenda."

Yawn. The moment gas prices go above 3$ a gal. it's over for the one. Once the Hyper inflation takes hold, they're going to ride him out of town on a rail.

[lala]

"Our own justice system doesn't demand to know "who somebody is" or "what they were doing" ahead of time when it decides to grant due process and a fair trial, does it?" by Bob

Nonsense.

[North Dallas Thirty]

"I thought that we, as Americans, claimed to care about things like freedom, justice and human rights."

We do, Bob, which is why we are capturing, imprisoning, and interrogating these people who are acting in a way that is completely antithetical to all three, who have, in fact, drastically infringed on all three for our own citizenry, and who we have a vested interest in stopping from doing more infringement on all three.

When your leftist Obama Party manages to get the terrorists you are desperately trying to protect to sign and follow the Geneva Conventions and acknowledge the US Constitution, then we can have this discussion again. But those who deliberately have put themselves outside both deserve and get none of the protections of either.

The problem here, Bob, is that you and your fellow Obama Party partisans, given your "little Eichmanns" worldview, see the lives of innocent citizens as bargaining chips that can be traded away for credibility with the leftists you worship. What do you care if Saddam systematically tortured millions of innocent people? He was paying your fellow leftists billions of dollars in oil bribes, so how bad could he be? The same applies to al-Qaeda; when you have a worldview, as clapped and cheered for in church by Barack Obama, of "God damn America", it's easy to come up with all sorts of equivocations for why your friends in al-Qaeda, the beloved "freedom fighters" of the left, as your own Obama Party has called them, were only killing the American citizens who deserved it.

[North Dallas Thirty]

"How would you feel if it were American soldiers being tortured into false confessions by some foreign government?"

American soldiers are in uniform, in full compliance with the Geneva conventions, and are specifically prosecuted by our OWN side for causing excess civilian casualties.

The fact that the leftist Bob draws a moral equivalence between our soldiers and the al-Qaeda terrorists shows you exactly the worldview of the Obama Party. I wonder how effective our forces could be if they, like al-Qaeda, didn't wear uniforms, deliberately used civilians as human shields, videotaped themselves sawing off the heads of people, and lied their way into countries with the express intent of causing massive destruction and devastation to innocent citizens using poisons and illegal weaponry with absolutely no warning.

[SacTownMan]

Dallas the bitch slapping you have been dealing Bob-O is priceless!

He spits out his talking points and you come back with counterpoints and then you get the "yea, well you're a hack" treatment.

Time for some new talking points there Bob.

Now for the ACTUAL post from Dan I can only say from San Fran Nan's point of view,

"Well I didn't mean all of the lying CIA bastards I meant the one's that worked for Bush, you know those lying CIA bastards!!

Keep digging there Nan!!

Two heartbeats from the presidency, right after Joey hairplugs!

You know the "hey there's this great secret place for the Vice-President to hide under when we're attacked thats under the naval observatory.... oops never mind, I didn't mean that secret hiding place,, hey I was just kidding ha, ha, ha! It's just me joking there guys!!

Reminds me of Senator Boxer spilling the beans on the Preditor drones being flown out of "Pak-E-Stan" bases.

Tell a troll a secret and it's no longer a secret!!

Kind of like the controlled demolition of Tower 7 right trolls?

[Anon]

There is no evidence that any American lives were saved by torture, there is no evidence that any quality information was gained by torture...Dick Cheney's word on it isn't enough, since he has come to closely resemble the boy who cried wolf.

The Bush Administration released HUNDREDS of Gitmo detainees without any charges, which would seem to pretty clearly indicate that they were not the 'worst of the worst' or even terrorists of any stripe...it then logically follows that in all probability we tortured not only the guilty but the factually innocent.

[Bob]

So far the responses I'm seeing fit the usual pattern of intellectual laziness that one always seems to see when conservative ideologues are asked to back up their claims. Some examples:

"HRW's claims are always exaggerated so their press releases will get media splash." (How about some proof for YOUR claim that's based on factual evidence rather than fact-free hand-waving)

A statement from Lala that, if I understand correctly says, "Nonsense" to my statement that our justice system is based on due process and is impartial.

"The problem here, Bob, is that you and your fellow Obama Party partisans, given your "little Eichmanns" worldview, see the lives of innocent citizens . . . blah blah blah" (whatever, but please don't drag your ass across the carpeting like that, you're leaving a skid mark)

"Well I didn't mean all of the lying CIA bastards . . ." (hey, if you're a wing nut and want to score a point against the opposition, just make something up and say that they said it)

So then, does anybody have any substantive points to make, or should we just conclude that you really have nothing to say that has an ounce of integrity or credibility? We'll just have to conclude from these slip-shod efforts of yours that you figure that such human rights concerns aren't really your problem.

[JustOneMan]

Bob do have any substantive points to make, or should we just conclude that you really have nothing to say?

[North Dallas Thirty]

"There is no evidence that any American lives were saved by torture, there is no evidence that any quality information was gained by torture"

Mhm.

"The documents also offer justification for using the tough tactics.

A memo dated May 30, 2005, says that before the harsher methods were used on top al-Qaida detainee Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he refused to answer questions about pending plots against the United States.

"Soon, you will know," he told them, according to the memo.

It says the interrogations later extracted details of a plot called the "second wave" to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into a building in Los Angeles.

Terror plots that were disrupted, the memos say, include the alleged effort by Jose Padilla to detonate a "dirty bomb" spreading radioactive materials by means of conventional explosives."

Because, after all, none of those would have killed any Americans or anything, right?

[North Dallas Thirty]

Link for the above:

http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/national/2009/04/17/memos-describe-cias-harsh-interrogation-program.html

[lala]

Our government does not "decide to grant" due process to its citizens, Bob.

[Bob]

JustOneMan, if you provide evidence that says that no one was actually tortured and killed during their interrogation while in U.S. custody, you can find fault with the point I'm making. Otherwise you're just talking out of your hat like everyone else seems to be. It's un-American to dismiss human rights violations committed by our side without a good-faith effort at due diligence. Just dismissing the evidence out of hand and implying that it doesn't really matter is morally shoddy, which you would think any American should recognize.

[North Dallas Thirty]

Meanwhile, Bob's attempt to claim that Nancy Pelosi never accused the CIA of lying or said that they lie to Congress all the time and that all of this is "made up" can be easily handled in this fashion:

"Not many people get away with calling the Central Intelligence Agency a bald-faced liar, at least not when they're speaking to a room packed with dozens of national media outlets. And yet that is exactly what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did on Thursday. "Madam Speaker, just to be clear," stuttered a reporter at a Capitol Hill press conference, "you're accusing the CIA of lying to you in September of 2002?" "Yes," Pelosi declared definitively, "misleading the Congress of the United States. I am."

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1898706,00.html

And for more:

"Pelosi was unusually harsh in describing the CIA.

"They mislead us all the time," she said. Asked whether the agency had lied, Pelosi said yes."

http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/us_world/Pelosi-on-CIA-They-Mislead-us-All-the-Time-.html

Remember, everyone, Bob says that Nancy Pelosi never said anything of the sort and that anyone who says so is lying.

[North Dallas Thirty]

"JustOneMan, if you provide evidence that says that no one was actually tortured and killed during their interrogation while in U.S. custody, you can find fault with the point I'm making.....It's un-American to dismiss human rights violations committed by our side without a good-faith effort at due diligence."

In other words, moonbat Bob can make whatever accusation he wants and WE have to prove that it's false.

That's far more "un-American" than dealing harshly with people whose express goal is to kill our citizens for the purpose of stopping them from doing so, and who have deliberately violated every rule of civilized warfare in the process.

[anon]

So the 'evidence' is a memo that says a terror plot was foiled. I guess the FBI was then, what? lying? misinformed? has been infiltrated by a bunch of soft on crime liberals? when they said that nothing useful was obtained from the sheik via waterboarding

Hmm, was anybody affiliated with 'second wave' apprehended? Don't think so. Jose Padilla had a dirty bomb? Do tell, because that isn't anything he has been charged with either.

Sounds like more of the same neocon hallucinations.

Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, except he didn't.
Saddam Hussein had restarted his nukes program, except he hadn't.
Everyone at Gitmo was a worst of the worst terrorist, except they weren't.
O'Hare Airport is international terrority, except it isn't.
Hundreds of terrorist plots were foiled using the Patriot Act, except they weren't.

So, after all of the 'ahem' mistakes, I should believe now these fools when they claim that American lives were saved by use of torture?

BS. If a memo existed that vindicated our use of torture you can bet your a** that Dick Cheney would have found a way to release it and wouldn't be asking Barry to do it for him.

Torturing prisoners was a mistake. It was wrong, it was stupid, it was counterproductive and I do not believe it saved any American lives or that it foiled any terrorist plots. Not one.

[Windmill]

Bob:

Your claim that a hundred internees were killed during their interrogations, is a lie. I backtracked the web site you referred us to, backtracked the site he cited (I love homonyms, don't you), and backtracked the congressional report, which that site claimed to state that internees were killed. It doesn't say that anyone was killed, much less a hundred people. (Yes, actually checking this does indicate that I've got too much time on my hands. Regulars on the site probably know to ignore Bob, but I don't know it that well. )

The report did repeatedly lie, in order to make the Bush administration look bad, but it never went that far. It did, however, repeatedly claim that the Bush administration changed the law. Its actual findings indicate the exact opposite, that the administration relied on the proper experts to try to determine what the (rather vague) law, actually allowed and disallowed. The administration acted properly in relying on the Office of Legal Council to try to figure out what was allowed, and then rigidly adhered to the law, as best as it could find out what the law was.

The report also claimed that President Bush removed the terrorists from the protection of the Geneva Protocols. Actually, it’s the Geneva Protocols which removed them from the protection of the Geneva Protocols. The Geneva Convention is quite clear on who it protects. People who operate out of uniform, and deliberately hide among the civilian population, aren’t covered. It was universally accepted (except among the lunatic left) that illegal combatants are outside the protection of the conventions, until the Supreme Court went rogue, and ruled that the conditions stipulated by the Geneva Convention, don’t apply to the Geneva Convention.

Now that Bob has been informed that he’s been spreading lies, I expectthat he will apologize, and adopt a grown-up tone for his future comment. (I also believe in unicorns.)

[Bob]

"It doesn't say that anyone was killed, much less a hundred people."

Reading for comprehension, Windmill. The article doesn't claim that the report itself (I presume you're referring to the Senate Armed Services report) discusses all of the alleged homicide cases. Here, read it again:

"Yet an important report by the Senate Armed Services Committee, declassified in April 2009, explains in clear terms how Bush-era interrogation techniques, including torture, once authorized for CIA high-value detainees, were promulgated to Guantánamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, where (as reporter Jason Leopold recently noted at The Public Record) the policies have led to homicides."

Want me to diagram that sentence for you? It says that the report explains how interrogation techniques were promulgated to Guantanamo, etc. Then, it says . . . where [a reporter says] the techniques have led to homicides. The report itself is mostly about policies and how they evolved and were promulgated to detention centers. Was that so hard?

The report does actually contain a little information about some actual homicide cases, however, which you must have overlooked in your haste to proclaim that "the report did repeatedly lie." Here's what the Senate report said:

"In December 2002, two detainees were killed while detained by CITF-180 at Bagram. Though the techniques do not appear to have been included in any written interrogation policy at Bagram, Army investigators concluded that the use of stress positions and sleep deprivation combined with other mistreatment at the hands ofBagram personnel, caused or were direct contributing factors in the two homicides."

To read of other homicide cases, you have to read the details in at least a couple of publications by the main author, John Sifton. He details quite a few cases, which, for you to question their credibility would require you to reference some other source that specifically proves his examples wrong. We have to insist that careful logic is the best way to address these factual matters. Hand waving counts for nothing.

And what, did you expect the government to hand over all of the details on a silver platter? They're keeping this information secret, just like the Vietnam-era military brass tried to keep the My Lai massacre secret, and Nixon tried to keep the details of the Watergate break-in secret and Bill Clinton tried to keep the details of his sexual dalliances secret. That's what reporters are for, isn't it? We only found out about Abu Ghraib because reporters investigated and wrote stories and Salon.com published previously secret pictures. So we have to assume that the cases the government acknowledged in official publications are just the tip of the iceberg.

Unlike you, Windmill, I won't call you a liar. Maybe you think you're acting in good faith, but your reading comprehension seems to be impaired by a pre-existing prejudice. Read Sifton's article and try to prove it with facts when you say he made it all up because he hates George Bush, or whatever your pre-emptive excuse will be.

[Mikey NTH]

"How would you feel if it were American soldiers being tortured into false confessions by some foreign government?"

We weren't waterboarding Khlid Sheikh Mohammed for a confession - he bragged about 9/11 and murdering Daniel Pearl. Why the devil would we need a confession from him? It would be like giving Bonnie and Clyde the third degree to get them to confess to a bank robbery.

We didn't want a confession, we wanted information on future operations - things we could investigate and verify. For God's sake, before you argue get it right about what we were doing and why we were doing it, and it certainly wasn't for jollies.

[Windmill]

Read for comprehension, bob. The sentence you quoted says that the senate report ". . . explains in clear terms how Bush-era interrogation techniques, including torture, once authorized for CIA high-value detainees, were promulgated to Guantánamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, where (as reporter Jason Leopold recently noted at The Public Record) the policies have led to homicides." This sentence says that the Senate report explains that the Bush administration policies led to homicices. The parenthetical remark about the reporter mentioning this, does not alter the subject of the surrounding sentence. Of course, the author may not have been any better at English than you are; maybe he didn't mean what he said. But what he said was false.

The note on the two detainees being killed specifically says that what was done to them was not in the approved procedure, and that their deaths spurred the unit to tighten up, and formalize its procedures. That argues for the need for formal controls on interrogations; it does not argue that the formalized controls were harmful.

Since you don't understand English, I should probably point out that I didn't say you were a liar--I said that the story you were telling was a lie--as it was. The fact that the claim you were making was based on a falsehood doesn't even establish that the claim was wrong--only that the argument presented for it was wrong. If anyone can come up with some actual evidence, it could fairly be re-introduced. But unless you can come up with some actual evidence (better than "just read everything that the guy who spread the last false story has written"), you should apologize to those you maligned, and your audience.

[Bob]

What a lot of quibbling, Windmill. YOU'RE the one who can't seem to keep straight whether you're complaining about what the ARTICLE says the REPORT says, versus what the SENTENCE says. I guess you thought nobody would catch that sleight of hand. That's a bad sign of disingenuity. As if it matters anyway, since they ALL say that people were killed. What, the deaths don't count if all of them aren't mentioned in the Senate report? Oh, and they weren't following proper torture procedures? What sorry-ass quibbling, indeed.

Why don't you find fault with this report from the article:

***
To the best of my knowledge, the first death of a U.S. detainee in custody occurred in August 2002—an Afghan detainee named Mohammad Sayari killed by four U.S. military personnel. I first learned about the Sayari case in 2005, reading through a Department of Defense document obtained via a Freedom of Information Act case by the American Civil Liberties Union. The document contained a short description of the incident: A captain and three sergeants “murdered Mr. [Sayari] after detaining him for following their movements in Afghanistan.” The section of the document detailing the result of the investigation was redacted.

More than three years after the murder, human-rights groups and I pressed the military for an explanation. The Army revealed that commanders had declined to prosecute any of the four men implicated in the case, although one of the four soldiers received an “administrative reprimand.” In 2006, additional documents obtained by the ACLU disclosed that the Army investigation had found probable cause to recommend charges of murder and conspiracy against the four Special Forces soldiers. According the investigation, the four soldiers had captured the detainee, a civilian noncombatant, and shot him, presumably after interrogating him. (Investigators also recommended dereliction-of-duty charges against three of the men and a charge of obstruction of justice against the highest-ranking, a captain, who admitted to destroying evidence of the crime.) Inexplicably, without a court martial, the case was closed. The captain received a letter of reprimand for “destroying evidence.”
***

Yes, he's undoubtedly making this up because he wants America to fail. We could go on and on like this, and you'd have no factual evidence to rebut dozens of these cases. Sifton did his homework, and you did none. That leaves you with nothing but hand-waving to dismiss these cases. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but once again, you've provided us with another example of shoddy moral reasoning and sloppy due diligence. Maybe that qualifies you for a fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute. Congratulations!

[North Dallas Thirty]

Yes, he is making this up.

Exact quote: "presumably after interrogating him".

Sifton doesn't even know that this person was interrogated, much less whether or not this person was "tortured". He simply claims that, because the person was killed by US troops, that it was a result of "torture". He acts as judge, jury, and executioner on those troops, and the accused are guilty until proven innocent -- an absolute perversion of the American justice system, but a completely-normal belief among hate-filled leftists and Obama Party partisans like Bob.

That's because Sifton has an agenda, and yes, he does want the United States to fail. To hatemongering leftists like him, we are the enemy, and as they show, they are more than willing to ally themselves with and protect people who saw the heads off folks like Daniel Pearl and broadcast it for the world to see to accomplish our destruction.

[North Dallas Thirty]

"So the 'evidence' is a memo that says a terror plot was foiled."

Actually, no; the evidence is several different memos that say multiple terror plots were foiled, as was clearly outlined in the link provided you.

"The documents also offer justification for using the tough tactics.

A memo dated May 30, 2005, says that before the harsher methods were used on top al-Qaida detainee Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he refused to answer questions about pending plots against the United States.

"Soon, you will know," he told them, according to the memo.

It says the interrogations later extracted details of a plot called the "second wave" to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into a building in Los Angeles.

Terror plots that were disrupted, the memos say, include the alleged effort by Jose Padilla to detonate a "dirty bomb" spreading radioactive materials by means of conventional explosives."

http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/national/2009/04/17/memos-describe-cias-harsh-interrogation-program.html

You no doubt saw that, but of course you lied and tried to pretend there was only one memo, mainly so that you could shift the argument to the vaunted "the FBI said there wasn't anything" excuse of the hatemongering Obama Party left.

Problem with that, though, is simple; as outlined in the 9/11 Report, the FBI and CIA did not share information. The FBI, simply put, has no way of knowing what exactly was gotten from interrogations because the CIA does not share every bit of information from them; therefore, they are not capable of determining whether or not interrogations were effective.

In a similar fashion, you continue your lies.

Hmm, was anybody affiliated with 'second wave' apprehended? Don't think so.

Why? You claim that you don't know why all Gitmo inmates were arrested; why do you lie and claim that none of them had to do with the "second wave"?

"Jose Padilla had a dirty bomb? Do tell, because that isn't anything he has been charged with either."

No one ever said he HAD a dirty bomb; he was arrested and charged with conspiracy to build and detonate one, among other terrorist activities.

And how did we get that information? Oh yeah, right; from interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

And meanwhile, as for your ranting about "neocon hallucinations", why don't you denounce the source of these statements stating unequivocally that Saddam had WMDs?

http://whosaiditiraq.blogspot.com/2005/11/al-gore.html