Both former Florida Senator Bob Graham, and current Senator Jay “Spine of Jello” Rockefeller have categorically stated that they were not briefed on waterboarding at the time that the CIA docs implied that they were brief on the procedure.
Graham is significant, because of his obsessive record keeping. This guy has been diarying his meals for something like 20 years, so he is not the sort to “forget” what happened at a specific date and time.
Pat Roberts’ (R-KS) silence on this is deafening.
He is now seeking to block the release of photos of abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It’s the exact opposite of what he promised, and to do this he has to overrule the decision made last month by the Pentagon to turn over the photos to the ACLU.
It’s only a promise, after all.
Jesse “The Body” Ventura, on Larry King, of all places.
VENTURA: No, I live in Mexico now, Larry. So I do a lot of reading. I don’t watch much TV. This year’s reading, I covered Bush’s life. I covered Guantanamo and a few other subjects. And I’m very disturbed about it.
I’m bothered over Guantanamo because it seems we have created our own Hanoi Hilton. We can live with that? I have a problem. I will criticize President Obama on this level; it’s a good thing I’m not president because I would prosecute every person that was involved in that torture. I would prosecute the people that did it. I would prosecute the people that ordered it. Because torture is against the law.
KING: You were a Navy SEAL.
VENTURA: That’s right. I was water boarded, so I know — at SERE School, Survival Escape Resistance Evasion. It was a required school you had to go to prior to going into the combat zone, which in my era was Vietnam. All of us had to go there. We were all, in essence — every one of us was water boarded. It is torture.
KING: What was it like?
VENTURA: It’s drowning. It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning. It is no good, because you — I’ll put it to you this way, you give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.
KING: Even though you know it’s not going to happen — even though before it, you know you’re not going to drown.
VENTURA: You don’t know it. If it’s — if it’s done wrong, you certainly could drown. You could swallow your tongue. You could do a whole bunch of stuff. If it’s it done wrong or — it’s torture, Larry. It’s torture.
Sorry Jesse, but our nation has a big deficit.
When Cheney is up for waterboarding, we are taking bids, starting at $1 million.
Zachary Roth at TPMMuckraker uncovered this little gem from Newsweek in 2004:
Until a few weeks ago, Patrick Murray was just another ambitious Capitol Hill staffer. As a top aide to Rep. Porter Goss, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, Murray had a reputation as a sharp-tongued partisan lawyer. When Democrats on the committee asked the CIA for information, Murray would cut them off, reminding the agency that only requests backed by the Republican majority should be honored. “He was just impossible,” says one staffer who dealt with him. “He was sarcastic, snide and had this uncanny ability to push people’s buttons.” One former CIA official told NEWSWEEK that Murray leaned on him more than once to declassify information so he could use it to “embarrass the Democrats.” Murray was irritated when the agency declined. He regarded much of the CIA as a nest of obstructionist bureaucrats, time-servers who had schemed to undermine the administration’s policies–especially in Iraq.
(Emphasis mine)
It is best to remember that Bush and His Evil Minions™ had 8 years to politicize the state security apparatus, driving out all but hardcore loyalists who would use the levers of the state in pursuit of their own political, partisan, and personal gain.
They have done their level best to poison the bureaucracy.
As such it is best to wait until a report is fully vetted and final before taking it at face value.
So then, what do we make of the reports that she was briefed in 2002 on the use of torture enhanced interrogation techniques in 2002 (here and here)
After Pelosi’s non-performance regarding even considering impeachment investigations after the Dems took Congress in 2006 (see pic), I’m not generally inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt, but in this case, with a document that Leon Panetta felt compelled to include a cover letter noting that this is very preliminary.
Additionally, as Emptywheel (link above) notes, this “report” almost instantly hit both the mainstream and wingnut press (HumanEvents dot com).
Additionally, Greg Sargent notices that while there might have been a discussion of torture techniques, it is not clear in the document as to whether the Congress critters were told that the techniques were being used.
I do rather believe that Pelosi knew what was going on, and I would guess that it is at least even money that she was specifically briefed about it being done in an ongoing manner: It would explain her recalcitrance on impeachment, because the scandal could pull her down too.
I would also note that involving members of Congress in torture in this manner, so that they would be inclined to oppose any investigation or punitive action, sounds like SOP for Bush/Cheney.
Barack Obama promised that the people who engaged in torture at the CIA would not be subject to prosecution, but it appears that this guarantee will not apply to people who actively destroyed evidence of torture:
When president Obama decided to release the Bush-era Justice Department’s interrogation memos last month, he tried to calm an anxious CIA by publicly declaring that operatives who “reasonably” relied on them would not face criminal prosecution. But agency officials still have plenty to worry about. Despite Obama’s assurances, a Justice Department special counsel is quietly ratcheting up his probe into a closely related subject: the CIA’s destruction of hundreds of hours of videotape showing the waterboarding of two high-value Qaeda suspects. At the same time, a Senate panel is planning the first public hearing dealing with CIA interrogations, including testimony from a star witness: Ali Soufan, the former FBI agent who vigorously protested the questioning of one of the detainees, terror suspect Abu Zubaydah.
….
You can see my old post on this here.
Interestingly, these tapes were destroyed when both Congressional investigators, and a Federal Court Judge were demanding information of this sort.
While no one may go to jail for the torture, it is likely that some people, Michael Hayden, Porter Goss, and Jose Rodriguez who was the director of the CIA’s operations directorate.
In a way, this might be better, because their defense against torture is protected by the OLC memos, as flawed (garbage really) as they are, but they did not receive an OLC memo to obstruct justice and destroy evidence.
It looks like the Justice Department’s ethics report on the torture memo authors will not recommend a criminal investigation, but it will recommend disciplinary action by the local bar associations, and this has Bybee, Yoo, and Bradbury are doing the level best to use whatever connections they have to make the report milder.
I do hope that this will bet both of them disbarred, but I think that a criminal investigation is really in order, but these folks are merely the sociopaths (Yoo) and careerists (Bybee and Bradbury) who could be reliably counted on to ignore the law in drafting the memos.
We need to work this up the chain, which will doubtless expose obstruction of justice by higher-ups.
For the good of the country, Cheney and Rumsfeld need to spend the rest of their natural lives in jail, so that people inside the DC Beltway stop thinking that rules do not apply to them.
Because, as Obama noted in his presser, Churchill opposed torture
Obama responded by pointing to the example from the Blitz: ‘I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British, during world war two, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said ‘we don’t torture’, when all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat. And the reason was that Churchill understood you start taking shortcuts, and over time, that corrodes what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.’
Hoocoodanode?
*Dirty f%$#ing hippie.
Now Jay Bybee is actively defending the torture memos that he wrote, as opposed what was said by “friends” to the Washington Post, which is that he basically took the OLC job because he had to in order become a Federal Judge.
I think that the money quote is, “In that context, we gave our best, honest advice, based on our good-faith analysis of the law.”
It’s an attempt to say that it’s reprehensible, but not criminal, and hence does not fall under the the bailiwick of, “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” though that might be small comfort, since the first impeachment and conviction was really because the subject was probably clinically insane, the charges were “drunkenness and unlawful rulings,” and the latter sounds a like Bybee.
He isn’t rude, that is, at least after the first paragraph, where he compares Republicans to fattie amputee midget S&M fetishists who draw a line when someone sends them links to child porn:
Some conservatives have actually gotten queasy with the release of the torture memos and the Senate Armed Services Committee report on the same. Maggie Gallagher, who has lived for years now off the lucre she makes from her hatred of gay marriage, once praised the illegal data mining that Bush’s NSA did: “When exposed to information about efforts like this by President Bush, I am not outraged. I’m deeply grateful. And worried now about who might die now that The New York Times has published this information.” Now, in the National Review Online (motto: “Is anyone still reading this sh$# beyond bloggers who need something to argue with?”), Gallagher writes, “I personally believe torture is wrong. We shouldn’t do it. Even if it means me, my husband, and my two sons get blown up. Seriously, if I had to choose I’d say: Death is common to us all; torture is a choice.” It’s as impassioned an anti-torture statement as anyone on the Left has made.
($#@ of swear words mine, as is the emphasis)
He’s right. Maggie Gallagher gets it.
Go read the rest.
So, it looks like the Spanish judges are ignoring the recommendation of the Spanish Attorney General, and proceeding with an investigation.
The best outcome of this investigation, IMNSHO, is that this forces the US government to pursue the perpetrators of these crimes, though the fact that this will tend to prevent Bush and His Evil Minions&trade from traveling freely around the world because of concerns regarding torture is an added plus in any case.
So, the latest New York Times OP/ED page 
conservative affirmative action case has his debut editorial for the paper, and what is his trenchant analysis?
It’s that the Republicans should have nominated Richard Milhaus Cheney as their presidential nominee in 2008.
I guess that’s because Cheney is such a photogenic and friendly dude, whether talking about his penis (top picture), or simply snarling at the American public (bottom).
Of course this is not really what the author believes. He wanted Cheney to run because he would have been beaten like a baby seal while showing how the right wing orthodoxy needs to be repackaged: It’s simply link bait, as Froomkin notes.
He wants people to read him, so Douthat says something outrageous, and finishes with, “And when he went down to a landslide loss, the conservative movement might – might! – have been jolted into the kind of rethinking that’s necessary if it hopes to regain power.”
No. Simply put, he is being a tool to get buzz, and it increasingly appears that the Republican Neocons are simply some sort of truly subversive performance art group.
I miss William Safire, who while right wing, had a brain, and could actually string together words in an attractive way.
Between Tierney, Kristol, and now Douthat, it appears that the sure sign that you are really, really, stupid is getting a regular Times OP/ED slot.
Yes, I know, I am really describing him being an asshole, not stupid, but his argument boils down to, “We should have nominated Dick Cheney, and we would have lost much better.”
That’s Doug “The Stupidest Motherf^%$er on the Planet” Feith stupid, and the New York Times already has a surfeit of stupid among their regular columnists, with Maureen Dowd, who covers politics like she is a junior high schooler dissing a classmates choice in shoes.
Still it appears that but it appears that Andrew Rosenthal, the Editorial Page Editor, feels that they need some more stupid.
This is a good thing, though there are still a number of road blocks, most likely bureaucratic resistance, because it’s a black eye for the military’s determination to hold them in the first place, and ‘Phant grandstanding.
They were held at Guantanamo Bay for years despite the fact that they were not terrorists, and they were tortured at the request of the Chinese government, and they have no where else to go.
Friends of one of the torture memo authors have been waging a campaign to rehabilitate him by explaining his motives, which is, unfortunately, at the end of the article:
“The whole idea that the Constitution is based on a kind of wariness of mankind’s tendency to grab power, that is an idea I got from Jay,” McAffee said. “So the whole idea of uninhibited executive power, from him, does seem passing strange.”
Bybee’s friends said he never sought the job at the Office of Legal Counsel. The reason he went back to Washington, Guynn said, was to interview with then-White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales for a slot that would be opening on the 9th Circuit when a judge retired. The opening was not yet there, however, so Gonzales asked, “Would you be willing to take a position at the OLC first?” Guynn said.
Being unable to answer for what followed is “very frustrating,” said Guynn, who spoke to Bybee before agreeing to be interviewed.
Gee, he was a movement conservative who thought he deserved a Federal judgeship, so he authorized torture, even though he knew that it was wrong.
That does not make his circumstances better, it makes them even more indefensible.
He did it because he was a career Apparatchik, not out of any conviction or perceived need.
Bonus video:
John Podesta calls for Bybee’s impeachment.
What the hell is wrong with everyone in Washington?
Meeting with the Democratic leadership on Wednesday night, Mr. Obama said a special inquiry would steal time and energy from his policy agenda, and could mushroom into a wider distraction looking back at the Bush years, people briefed on the discussion said. Mr. Obama, they said, repeated much the same message on Thursday at a bipartisan meeting with Congressional leaders.
The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, and other top Senate Democrats endorsed Mr. Obama’s view on Thursday, telling reporters at a news conference at the Capitol that they preferred to wait for the results of an investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee expected late this year.
It should be noted that senior Senators on the Intel Committee have already been described as having signed off on torture, and as such Rockefeller, Feinstein*, Roberts, etc. have a vested interest in burying this.
The fact is that the American public wants this, the Republicans are going to fight you every step of the way on your agenda anyway, but still, you are determined to kick the can down the road long enough that people will forget.
This is not partisan politics, it is, as Krugman says, a battle for America’s soul, and it appears that the folks inside the Beltway just don’t give a damn
And the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.
What about the argument that investigating the Bush administration’s abuses will impede efforts to deal with the crises of today? Even if that were true — even if truth and justice came at a high price — that would arguably be a price we must pay: laws aren’t supposed to be enforced only when convenient. But is there any real reason to believe that the nation would pay a high price for accountability?
Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to rescue the economy. Peter Orszag, the budget director, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to reform health care. Steven Chu, the energy secretary, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to limit climate change. Even the president needn’t, and indeed shouldn’t, be involved. All he would have to do is let the Justice Department do its job — which he’s supposed to do in any case — and not get in the way of any Congressional investigations.
Why this scramble not to investigate. It makes no sense.
*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers, though we have never met, either in person or electronically.
She links torture to political needs, as opposed to security needs. (13:23)
This may explain why Karl Rove is flipping out on Fox News about a possible criminal investigation: If this was done for political reasons, then he had to be actively involved in pursuing the policy.
Politics and electioneering went through his office.
Seriously, Shepard Smith of Fox News pounding the table and saying, “We don’t f&^$ing torture?”
Interestingly enough, the big issue here is not Shepard Smith showing common decency, but the fact that we are all using the word “torture”.
It changes the dialogue to use that word, and makes it clear just how repulsive the whole concept is.
He is saying that he will not allow bipartisanship to be used as an excuse to delay an investigation into torture:
Sen. Patrick Leahy pledged today that if he cannot get the votes to create a bipartisan commission to investigate U.S. torture policy under former President George W. Bush — and regardless of calls by President Obama that any inquiry be bipartisan — he’ll conduct his own partisan inquiry in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Leahy’s comments after a press conference on Capitol Hill today exposed a growing rift between Democrats in Congress and the White House on how to seek accountability from Bush-era Justice officials for condoning torture in the aftermath of 9/11.
Leahy is right, and Obama is wrong, morally, legally, and politically.
When you do not prosecute, these people keep coming back, which is why you had so many Watergate and Iran-Contra alums in Bush’s staff and cabinet.
Well, the Senate report on torture is out, and it appears that Rumsfeld and His Evil Minions™ were authorizing torture before the infamous memos justifying such behavior had been drafted, despite the fact that numerous experts on interrogation said that it torture does not work.
Notably, it was based on the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training which was used to allow captured Americans to resist torture designed to elicit false confessions.
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice et all did not care. They just wanted to torture out of a combination of sadism and machismo.
That being said, I do like the last line of the article, “If torture occurred before the memo was written, it’s not worth the paper it’s written on, and the writing of the memo is potentially criminal.”
In a related note, we now know the answer to the question, “Why waterboard someone 183 times in one month?”
They did it for propaganda purposes, specifically, in order to extract false statements linking al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein”
The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.
Seriously, these people need to spend the rest of their lives in a SUPERMAX facility.
It appears that Rahm Emanuel’s and Robert Gibbs statements about not prosecuting people, incensed senior career lawyers at the Department of Justice, who saw this as political meddling in a law enforcement decision.
Interestingly enough, as Scott Horton notes, the net result of this fallout may be to force AG Holder to appoint a special prosecutor in order to defuse those charges, which to my mind is a good thing.
Sounds like a joke, but the punchline is that the Three Stooges of the Senate have penned a letter to President Obama asking for a get out of jail free card for the torture memo writers, because, of course, accountability is only for blow jobs in Washington, DC.