Rudy Giuliani Swings and Misses

Former Mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani went on Fox and CNN this morning to blast President Obama for not saying "Islamic terrorist" in his State of the Union Address and for not addressing the failed Christmas Day bombing. Interesting since Obama did mention the words "terrorist", "terrorism", and "Al Qaeda" as well as specifically mention the Christmas Day bombing.

Giuliani went on to say that Obama not paying more attention to national security is like FDR "not mentioning Nazism and not mentioning the war" during World War Two. Watch:



This isn't the first time Rudy has just made stuff up and something tells me that it won't be the last. The real question is, when will these media outlets start calling Giuliani out over this madness?

Obama Retains Authority to Assassinate U.S. Citizens

From Dana Priest's piece in the Washington Post today (emphasis mine):

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for instance, has to pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests," said one former intelligence official.

The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, "it doesn't really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them," a senior administration official said. "They are then part of the enemy."

Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called "High Value Targets" and "High Value Individuals," whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi's name has now been added.

This quote was toward the end of a larger article that discusses the growing military involvement of the United States in Yemen and is quite alarming.

The article claims that the Obama Administration has adopted the same view as the Bush Administration in their authority to target and kill U.S. citizens that they suspect of being terrorists. No formal charges, no trial, just authority to strike and kill those U.S. Citizens who the Government unilaterally labels as terrorists.

As Priest mentions, there is apparently a short-list with American names on it, that allows for zero evidence to be presented in order to verify the claims of the Government. Similar to why it is troubling to imprison detainees indefinitely without charge, it is just as troubling to learn that the President has determined that he has the authority kill U.S. citizens without any process of proving guilt.

From where does the Presidential authority for this kind of legal discretion derive? All those who had a problem with the Bush Administration for these kinds of abuses of power should have equal qualms with the Obama Administration for continuing these same actions.

Around the Horn: Reaction to President Obama's Escalation Speech

Here are some reactions from around the blogosphere to last night's Presidential address where President Obama announced that he would be escalating the war in Afghanistan:

Richard at Hyscience:

"Stupid, immoral, worthless, self-absorbed non-strategy for his own political gratification." Yep, that about sums it all up perfectly.

And to think that America actually elected this Marxist and a Congress just like him. Is this the "change we had waited for"?

Jarrett Rush of the Dallas Morning News blog:

...he will be sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan on an accelerated timetable he will be doing it from West Point with, no doubt, troops as the backdrop. Does that bother anyone else, because it doesn't sit right with me.

The idea has felt weird since I heard about it, but I didn't want to knee-jerk and criticize the president just because he and I don't see eye to eye on much. But after considering it more, a policy decision like this needs to be announced from the White House with just the president. He's sending thousands of troops into harms way and using them as props on a stage is bad form.

Matt Armstrong at MountainRunner:

A successful strategy must empower the Afghan people against their oppressors. This means providing assistance directed “against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos” in order to “permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist” without which “there can be no political stability and no assured peace.” Success pivoted on whether the locals felt self-empowered and secure. Its value lay “not so much in its direct economic effects, which are difficult to calculate with any degree of accuracy, as in its psychological political by-products.” These statements, originally from 1947 by George C. Marshall and George Kennan, are timeless and just as applicable today to Afghanistan.

desmoinsdem at Bleeding Heartland:

Raise your hand if you believe that a surge in Afghanistan is going to stabilize that country and allow us to bring our troops home sooner. I doubt escalating our involvement will solve any problems in the region or make us safer. In particular, it won't address various security issues related to Pakistan.

After seeing how Obama kept a bunch of Republicans on at the Pentagon and then heeded their advice on Afghanistan, I have become more convinced that he would not have voted against the original resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq if he had been in the Senate at that time. He has not bucked the beltway conventional wisdom on any security issue.

Kevin Beck at Transmillennial:

War begets war. Always. Every time. No exceptions.

Escalating the war in hope of ending the war seems like a rational policy only if you believe violence can result in peace. Perhaps a greater presence can bring some stability, but when generating the habit energy of warfare only increases the possibility of more violence.

The Current Discussion About Afghanistan

As President Obama continues to deliberate on which path he wishes to take in regard to Afghanistan, it is becoming increasingly clear that ending the war or significantly reducing the number of troops committed to the conflict are options that are not even on the table:

Mr Obama did not indicate to the bipartisan group whether he was leaning towards or against a significant troop escalation.

Instead, he suggested he was looking at the middle range of the spectrum, somewhere between a major increase in forces and a large drawdown.

''The President reiterated that we need this debate to be honest and dispense with the straw-man argument that this is about either doubling down or leaving Afghanistan,'' one senior Administration official said after the meeting.

Mr Obama also said ''his decision won't make everybody in the room or the nation happy''.

Obama even met with a bipartisan group of lawmakers yesterday to discuss various options surrounding the conflict:

Although lawmakers sought after the meeting to express bipartisan support for Obama as he makes the most far-reaching foreign policy decision of his tenure, Democrats questioned whether the Afghan government remains a viable political partner after the flawed Aug. 20 presidential election, and Republicans challenged the administration's determination to defeat the Taliban.

In recent weeks, Obama has made clear that defeating al-Qaeda is the goal of his policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the group's leadership is believed to be operating in the largely ungoverned tribal areas. His national security team will assemble Wednesday at the White House for a meeting focused on Pakistan, whose nuclear-armed government has shown more willingness recently to take on the Taliban within its borders.

So the war will apparently slog on as members of Congress continue to blindly support vague efforts in a country with which the United States has been engaged in for the last eight years. This is a familiar exercise that we have watched happen with President Bush with the only exception being that Obama is actually consulting with Congress. The end result will be the same. More troops, more money poured into a seemingly bottomless pit, more lives lost, more "accidental" bombings, and on it goes.

In the middle of all of this, the media is portraying President Obama as trying to find the "middle ground" on this issue. This has been defined by the Los Angeles Times as "somewhere between a major increase in forces and a large drawdown". As Peter Hart at FAIR points out, this is quite a large range and really isn't helpful to the discussion. Hart makes a suggestion:

If you look at polls of the public, there is very little support for sending more troops--and much more support for either keeping troop levels where they are, or decreasing the size of U.S. forces in the country. So the "middle" ground isn't so hard to locate--it's somewhere between decreasing U.S. forces or keeping them at current levels. The fact that the debate in Washington doesn't seem to reflect that is, of course, telling; perhaps a more open media debate would change that.

What would a more open media debate look like? Take a look at the line-up that was put together by the folks at Democracy Now! this morning. There coverage included:

- An interview with Rep. Barbara Lee, the only lawmaker who initially voted against going to war in Afghanistan. She has now introduced a bill to block any surge in troops.
- An interview with a woman identified as Zoya, who is a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan.
- A discussion with independent journalist Rick Rowly on this recent reporting on the return of the warlords to Afghanistan.

This is the type of reporting and news gathering that should be happening in the so-called "mainstream" media. We should not simply be hearing what is coming out of policy-makers in Washington and then be told that this is how the debate is going to be framed. We need a more in depth look into how these decisions will impact the people of Afghanistan, the financial status of the United States, and examine why other voices are not being included in this debate. It is the kind of reporting like you see on Democracy Now! or the type of filmmaking like you see in ReThink Afghanistan, the latest from Brave New Films.

Glenn Greenwald makes an interesting point that would be interesting to explore through a more open media debate:

The great fallacy at the heart of discussions of Afghanistan is this: if one can plausibly argue that a war was originally justified, then that proves that the war should continue even eight years later (there's no need for us to leave because the Taliban let Al Qaeda use that country to attack us in 2001 and therefore it's self-defense). Often, the discussion, for many war supporters, rarely progresses beyond that point. But whether a war is "justified" is a completely separate question from whether it's "wise." Just as was true for Iraq, the supposed "costs" of leaving Afghanistan are endlessly highlighted (the Taliban will return, Al Qaeda will come back, it'll be a brutal and lawless state), while the costs to the U.S. from staying -- and from continuing to be a nation in a state of perpetual war and occupation -- are virtually ignored.

and dday asks an interesting question that should be addressed as well:

So the Taliban has been in control of at least half the country for at least two years, more than enough time for Al Qaeda to pack up from the border region and reinstall themselves into these safe havens. Skelton stated specifically that if the Taliban regains hold in "all or part of Afghanistan," Al Qaeda would return to plot attack. Well, the Taliban control lots of the country. But Al Qaeda aren't there. They don't need to be.

This persistent lie about Al Qaeda's aims in the region underpins the entire case for escalation, just the way the domino theory underpinned consistent troop buildup in Vietnam. And yet nobody in the media, up to and including Chris Matthews today, has bothered to challenge this basic falsehood. Nobody has asked the question, "If Al Qaeda is so desperate to find a safe haven, why haven't they returned to Afghanistan now, when the Taliban controls large swaths of the country?" It's not like they aren't under as much threat from drone attacks in Pakistan as they would be in Afghanistan.

[...]

Will anyone present these basic facts to the "serious foreign policy" dittoheads when they go on and on with a demonstrably false argument about safe havens and how we must send as many troops as possible into danger or we'll all be killed in our beds?

With a lot of political "reporters" like NBC's Chuck Todd running around Washington, I am not holding my breath that we are going to get these questions asked.


This piece is crossposted here.

John Yoo Defends His Position on Warrantless Wiretaps

Former Justice Department Official and infamous author of the "torture memos", John Yoo, has written an editorial in today's Wall Street Journal in defense of his endorsement of warrantless wiretaps.

Yoo's piece defiantly speaks out against critics (including the Inspector General's report) who fault Yoo for providing legal advice that was not in good faith and worked to achieve the political goals of the Bush Administration.

Yoo sights the attacks of 9/11 as the catalyst for the warrantless wiretapping program and justifies it on the grounds of the need to protect America from another attack:

Suppose an al Qaeda cell in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles was planning a second attack using small arms, conventional explosives or even biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. Our intelligence and law enforcement agencies faced a near impossible task locating them. Now suppose the National Security Agency (NSA), which collects signals intelligence, threw up a virtual net to intercept all electronic communications leaving and entering Osama bin Laden's Afghanistan headquarters. What better way of detecting follow-up attacks? And what president -- of either political party -- wouldn't immediately order the NSA to start, so as to find and stop the attackers?

Similar to the justification for the torture of detainees in U.S. custody, Yoo sights the supposed unprecedented timeframe immediately following 9/11 and the need to adopt means that were unconventional (or in Yoo's eyes, very conventional) due to this "new" and threatening enemy. Yoo continues:

It is absurd to think that a law like FISA should restrict live military operations against potential attacks on the United States. Congress enacted FISA during the waning days of the Cold War. As the 9/11 Commission found, FISA's wall between domestic law enforcement and foreign intelligence proved dysfunctional and contributed to our government's failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks.

[...]

In FISA, President Bush and his advisers faced an obsolete law not written with live war with an international terrorist organization in mind. It was to meet such emergency circumstances that the Founders designed the presidency. As John Locke first observed, foreign threats "are much less capable to be directed by antecedent, standing, positive laws." Legislatures are too slow and their members too numerous to respond effectively to unforeseen situations. Only the executive can act to protect the "security and interest of the public."

Here we have the crux of Yoo's defense. He claims that the FISA law was not created during wartime and was an obsolete law that was not up-to-date for the threats that we are currently facing in the so-called "War on Terror". He also claims that the process of changing the law is too slow, so it makes sense that the executive branch is the only branch that can make these decisions to "protect the 'security and interest of the public.'"

To address the claim that FISA is in fact an "obsolete law" that was "not written with live emergency circumstances" in mind, I find it helpful to review an analysis from May 21, 2007 written by Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald has written extensively on the issue of warrantless wiretapping over the last few years and in this entry he addressed the claims made by Mike McConnell in an op-ed that the FISA bill was, in fact, obsolete.

From that entry:

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration demanded a whole slew of changes to FISA which expanded the President's eavesdropping powers and which the administration claimed were necessary in order to bring FISA into the 21st Century by allowing surveillance of modern communication methods. Congress, needless to say, complied in full, and in October of 2001 -- contrary to McConnell's misleading Op-Ed -- it enacted, and the President signed, sweeping "modernizing" changes to FISA.

and what did President Bush say at the signing ceremony in October, 2001?:

The changes, effective today, will help counter a threat like no other our Nation has ever faced. . . .

We're dealing with terrorists who operate by highly sophisticated methods and technologies, some of which were not even available when our existing laws were written. The bill before me takes account of the new realities and dangers posed by modern terrorists. It will help law enforcement to identify, to dismantle, to disrupt, and to punish terrorists before they strike. . . .

Surveillance of communications is another essential tool to pursue and stop terrorists. The existing law was written in the era of rotary telephones. This new law I sign today will allow surveillance of all communications used by terrorists, including e-mails, the Internet, and cell phones. As of today, we'll be able to better meet the technological challenges posed by this proliferation of communications technology. . .

Yoo's claim, that the FISA legislation was "obsolete" and not "written with an international terrorist organization in mind", is simply not accurate. As shown above, the FISA legislation was amended shortly after 9/11 in order to give President Bush the tools to (in Bush's words) "meet the technological challenges posed by this proliferation of communications technology". Yoo is simply advancing the false claim that the FISA legislation had not been amended since 1978.

Also important to point out is that Congress explicitly proposed amendments to the FISA legislation in order to expand its scope and make in easier for warrants to be obtained, in 2002. The Bush Administration rejected them. Greenwald again:

...it is also critical to recall that the administration had multiple opportunities since those post-9/11 changes to expand the scope of FISA, and it was the administration which refused those changes on the ground that they were unnecessary. In 2002, multiple Senators sought to make it easier to obtain FISA warrants, and the Bush administration opposed those changes, insisting that it already had sufficient eavesdropping powers. And all throughout last year, Senators such as Diane Feinstein and Arlen Specter proposed endless FISA amendments to expand the scope of government eavesdropping (in response to claims that FISA was too narrow), and the Bush administration was completely uninterested in all of them.

It is clear that the Administration was not simply trying to protect the public from these "new" and never before seen threats, but their goal was to expand executive power and authority no matter what the law stated. Not only were they undertaking these actions, but they were doing it in secret and lying about it. To take one example, in April, 2004 Bush stated:

Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires — a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so. It’s important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.

The above can be interpreted in no other way, except that it is a lie.

In his piece, Yoo goes on to cite FDR eavesdropping on domestic and foreign communications (before Pearl Harbor and with a lack of Congressional authority) to justify the actions of President Bush. Interesting how Yoo does not address that the FISA legislation was passed over thirty years after this took place and was passed in order to protect people from being spied upon without just cause. Yoo's underlying point in citing the FDR example, as well as other examples that he references, is to make the point that during wartime the Presidential responsibility to protect the population Constitutionally supersedes all else. In his concluding paragraph Yoo states:

Our Constitution created a presidency whose function is to protect the nation from attack. Gathering intelligence -- including intercepting enemy communications -- has long been a key aspect of war. Our military and intelligence agencies cannot attack or defend the nation unless they know where to aim. As we confront terrorists who remain intent on attacking the U.S., using weapons we cannot anticipate, we should be skeptical of those who insist that we radically change the way this country has always made war.

Yoo's argument essentially boils down to that during wartime, Presidential authority is supreme and the decisions that the President makes to protect the population, are protected even if his actions would break the law during times of peace...after all, FDR did it. Yoo's response does not clear things up or provide any kind of more rational explanation on this issue. Yoo's continued defense of unchecked executive power (especially during wartime) only continues to enforce the criticisms that he gave opinions to meet political goals and that relied on a warped sense of the law. I will be interested to see how his Wall Street Journal piece is perceived around the media and blogosphere.



This piece is crossposted here.

Hunting Down the Terrorists

So to recap, the Obama Administration is concerned that the release of photographs depicting detainee abuse will act as a tool for Al Qaeda recruitment all while escalating a war that continues to maim, displace, and kill a poor civilian population. Any questions?

Former Military Interrogator: "Torture has cost us American lives"

Matthew Alexander is a former senior military interrogator that conducted over 300 interrogations in Iraq and supervised over 1,000. He was lead interrogator for the military task force whose responsibility it was to track down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. He recently sat down for an exclusive interview with Brave New Films during which he rebuked statements made by former Vice President Cheney and asserted that "Torture has cost us American Lives".

Here is the video:

Colin Powell's Former Chief of Staff: Torture Was Used to Link Al Qaeda to Saddam

Former Chief of Staff to then Secretary of State Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson, was recently on "The Rachel Maddow Show" discussing the various comments made in the media by Former Vice President Dick Cheney:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Wilkerson then posted an entry on the website of the Washington Note in which he stated:

Likewise, what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just "committed suicide" in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan government to allow them to interview al-Libi....)

The seriousness of what went on over the last eight years under the leadership of the Bush Administration cannot be stressed enough. Claims that torture was being applied to detainees to elicit false information on a non-existant link between Al Qaeda and Iraq remind me of the words of another former Administration official.

Take a journey with me back to 2004 when President Bush's top adviser on terrorism, Richard Clarke, made the following claims on 60 Minutes (emphasis mine):

Clarke says that as early as the day after the attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was pushing for retaliatory strikes on Iraq, even though al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan.

Clarke suggests the idea took him so aback, he initally thought Rumsfeld was joking.

[...]


After the president returned to the White House on Sept. 11, he and his top advisers, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate. As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq.

"Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said to Stahl. "And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.
"Initially, I thought when he said, 'There aren't enough targets in-- in Afghanistan,' I thought he was joking.

"I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying we've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection."

Clarke says he and CIA Director George Tenet told that to Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Clarke then tells Stahl of being pressured by Mr. Bush.

"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.

"I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.'

"He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report."

Clarke continued, "It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again.'

"I have no idea, to this day, if the president saw it, because after we did it again, it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, I don't think the people around the president show him memos like that. I don't think he sees memos that he doesn't-- wouldn't like the answer."

Clarke's statements were made five years ago. Seems like some of the puzzles pieces are beginning to fit together to bring things full circle.

Selling Torture

Roy Eidelson has an interesting piece posted on CommonDreams today that discusses the American public's perception of torture. I am in agreement that when we discuss this issue, we also must take a look at how torture has been sold to the public by its proponents. Just as marketing has had an effect on selling the public everything from the latest soft drink to the latest war in the Middle East, it is essential to look at the message that has been, and continues to be, emphasized.

Eidelson does a good job in boiling this message down to five main points that the Bush Administration and other torture supporters have used:

1. Instilling fear into the minds of Americans by perpetuating the post-9/11 fears that this country is in imminent danger.

2. Torture is necessary in keeping Americans safe.

This second point is interesting because when the interrogation policies of the Bush Administration were still under lock and key, we didn't really see this strategy being used publicly. Only now, after more details continue to emerge, do we see the likes of Dick Cheney and other torture apologists coming out and saying that these polices were instrumental in keeping Americans safe. I would amend this point slightly to say that pre-emptive war policy (torture is included in this) was sold to Americans as necessary in keeping American's safe.

3. Those who are being tortured are monsters and do not adhere to the normal conduct of war.

4. The United States does not want to use torture, but only uses it for the greater good and to save American lives.

5. Critics of interrogation policies (including human rights groups, leaders, and activists) can not and should not be trusted.

I would also say that this fifth point was coupled with labeling the opposition to these policies as being stuck in a "pre 9/11 mindset". That somehow on 9/11 everything, including the lengths that we were willing to go to as a moral country, were forced upon us by an unconventional enemy.

I think that these points are important and necessary to understand in looking at the ongoing debate over the interrogation policies of the Bush Administration. These points continue to be used, most notably, by former Vice President Cheney in defending the Administration's role in approving these policies. Cheney continues to claim that President Obama is making the country less safe by discontinuing torture...an argument that he deduces directly from his flawed premised outlined in point number two above.

Also, today we have learned of the suicide of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. Al-Libi ran an Al-Qaeda training camp and after his capture in 2002 by the United States, was tortured. During his interrogation he stated that Saddam Hussein was working with Al-Qaeda and these claims were echoed by President Bush in a speech in Cincinnati and Colin Powell in his infamous speech to the United Nations to make the case for an invasion of Iraq. This information, was obviously wrong and according to the Senate Intelligence Committee's September 8, 2006 report (emphasis mine):

Postwar findings support the DIA February 2002 assessment that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was likely intentionally misleading his debriefers when he said that Iraq provided two al-Qa'ida associates with chemical and biological weapons (CBW) training in 2000… Postwar findings do not support the CIA's assessment that his reporting was credible… No postwar information has been found that indicates CBW training occurred and the detainee who provided the key prewar reporting about this training recanted his claims after the war… CIA's January 2003 version of Iraqi Support for Terrorism described al-Libi's reporting for CBW training "credible", but noted that the individuals who traveled to Iraq for CBW training had not returned, so al-Libi was not in position to know if the training had taken place… In January 2004, al-Libi recanted his allegations about CBW training and many of his other claims about Iraq's links to al Qa'ida. He told debriefers that, to the best of his knowledge, al-Qa'ida never sent any individuals into Iraq for any kind of support in chemical or biological weapons. Al-libi told debriefers that he fabricated information while in U.S. custody to receive better treatment and in response to threats of being transferred to a foreign intelligence service which he believed would torture him… He said that later, while he was being debriefed by a (REDACTED) foreign intelligence service, he fabricated more information in response to physical abuse and threats of torture.

Torture is necessary to keep Americans safe, or manipulate their opinion to get them to support invading a country that the Bush Administration already had their sights set upon attacking.

Same thing.

Condoleeza Rice's Heated Exchange With Stanford Students

There was a very interesting and rather heated exchange between former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and a student at Stanford University on Monday.

During this conversation Rice makes the statements that:

1. Al Qaeda is a bigger threat to the United States than the Nazi's were because Al Qaeda has attacked our homeland.

2. That the Supreme Court blocked detainees from standing trial under the Military Commissions that the Bush Administration had set up.

3. That because President Bush told his Administration that nothing they were doing violated the Convention Against Toture, this inherently means that it was legal.

I wonder if Rice was channeling Nixon when she gave her own "if the President authorized it, it means it was legal" defense. Watch:



Notice how condescending and defensive Rice was during this exchange. She not only tells this student that he can't begin to understand the pressure decision makers were under after 9/11, but denies responsibility for authorizing anything after dismissing the student with the "do your homework" line.

Out of the three points I listed above, the first needs no explanation and the third has been shown to be a narrow and warped Nixonesque view of excutive power, but for the second Ali Frick weighs in:

"Of course, the Supreme Court "stayed" the Bush administration's military commissions because they were woefully inadequate. The Court -- three separate times -- required the administration to come up with meaningful judicial review of suspects' detentions. Indeed, last June the court held that military commissions "are not an adequate and effective substitute for habeas corpus" and thus "operates as an unconstitutional suspension of the writ."">Of course, the Supreme Court "stayed" the Bush administration's military commissions because they were woefully inadequate. The Court -- three separate times -- required the administration to come up with meaningful judicial review of suspects' detentions. Indeed, last June the court held that military commissions "are not an adequate and effective substitute for habeas corpus" and thus "operates as an unconstitutional suspension of the writ."

The defenses for torture are flying fast and furious out of this Administration and as Spain proceeds with criminal investigations the pressure is mounting for investigations within the United States. In last night's Presidential Press Conference, President Obama voiced his direct opposition to the position put forth by Rice and other Bush Administration officials:

What I've said — and I will repeat — is that waterboarding violates our ideals and our values. I do believe that it is torture. I don't think that's just my opinion; that's the opinion of many who've examined the topic. And that's why I put an end to these practices.

So...if torture is against the law and if waterboarding is torture and if we know that the Bush Administration authorized waterboarding...then is there any reason why investigations should not move forward if we are a nation where no one is above the law?

Brian Kilmeade Falsely Claims President Bush Never Said There Was a Link Between Iraq and Al Qaeda

On the August 6th edition of "Fox and Friends", host Brian Kilmeade claimed that the President never said that there was a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda:





This statement, is 100% false. On June 17, 2004, President Bush stated before reporters:

"The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda, because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda."

Now it is up to Brian Kilmeade and Fox News to issue a correction. You can tell Fox to issue a correction:

Fox News Channel: 1-888-369-4762
comments@foxnews.com