The President's Weekly Address: The Fight Against Al Qaeda

From the White House Blog:

The President discusses the recent attempted act of terrorism on the Christmas day flight to Detroit, and his broader strategy to fight Al Qaeda.

We have to stand up and help the President in this. We need to be loud and long in our support of him against the attacks made as he tries to fix this problem.

The attacks on him are coming because he didn't wear a tie, he waited until he had all the facts before he spoke.. a whole 3 days, and because he was in "exotic Hawaii" which you know is barely even a state, and he should have come back to Washington immediately.

Never mind that all of those things pertain to Bush after Richard Reid, the so called Shoe Bomber tried to blow up an airplane. Well except Hawaii, and Bush, not only did not come back to Washington, he left Washington and went to Texas, after it happened. He also didn't speak for 6 days after the attack.. yes, that's right SIX days.. not 3, not 72 hours.. but 6, count them SIX days after the attack.

Sam Stein has a great write up of the entire set of events surrounding the Bush Shoe Bombing Debacle in the Huffington Post. He lays out the time line and talks about the lack of criticism from people then. And all of this was less than 4 months after September 11th.

But, I guess it is like the acronym we have all seen.. IOKIYAR, I think we all know what that means.. and if you don't.. just ask.. I will tell you..

So with Cheney coming out from his hiding place, and speaking out again, different Senators and Congress people trying to raise money off this, we have to stand firm and speak out against this.

Let people know they are wrong to criticize this President for his strong stand against the extremists who are trying to harm us all. This doesn't have anything to do with the war, this is against the people who are still determined to blow up airplanes, or do something else to harm Americans, right here on our soil. They are there, and we have to support our President as he does all he can to protect us.

Pres. Obama's Nobel Acceptance Speech

This morning, before most of us were out of bed, our President accepted his Nobel Peace Prize. Controversial, yes it has been. Some have even gone so far as to say he should not have accepted it.

The money he donated to charity, the Peace award, he humbly accepted. I don't have the video, but I think in this instance the words need to be read and let soak in to get their true meaning.

There are still going to be people who won't understand and will still say he shouldn't have accepted it, but I think he was deserving and I think he accepted it gracefully and humbly. We have a President who deserves much more respect than this country gives him. People on the left and people on the right need to step back and look at this man and realize what he is dealing with and what he is striving to do. Don't criticize everything he is doing. Yes, he makes missteps, he is human.. but he is trying to clean up a horrible mess, protect us from harm and give us health care for all.

Clean up the environment, and save us from ourselves in a way, because we sure aren't helping him in many ways. If we aren't willing to change our ways, to start to help our environment heal and to become better stewards of the world we live in.

But enough of my words.. here is the President and his speech this morning.

THE PRESIDENT: Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, distinguished members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, citizens of America, and citizens of the world:

I receive this honor with deep gratitude and great humility. It is an award that speaks to our highest aspirations -- that for all the cruelty and hardship of our world, we are not mere prisoners of fate. Our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice.

And yet I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated. (Laughter.) In part, this is because I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage. Compared to some of the giants of history who've received this prize -- Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela -- my accomplishments are slight. And then there are the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice; those who toil in humanitarian organizations to relieve suffering; the unrecognized millions whose quiet acts of courage and compassion inspire even the most hardened cynics. I cannot argue with those who find these men and women -- some known, some obscure to all but those they help -- to be far more deserving of this honor than I.

But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars. One of these wars is winding down. The other is a conflict that America did not seek; one in which we are joined by 42 other countries -- including Norway -- in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.

Still, we are at war, and I'm responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill, and some will be killed. And so I come here with an acute sense of the costs of armed conflict -- filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other.

Now these questions are not new. War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease -- the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences.

And over time, as codes of law sought to control violence within groups, so did philosophers and clerics and statesmen seek to regulate the destructive power of war. The concept of a "just war" emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when certain conditions were met: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.

Of course, we know that for most of history, this concept of "just war" was rarely observed. The capacity of human beings to think up new ways to kill one another proved inexhaustible, as did our capacity to exempt from mercy those who look different or pray to a different God. Wars between armies gave way to wars between nations -- total wars in which the distinction between combatant and civilian became blurred. In the span of 30 years, such carnage would twice engulf this continent. And while it's hard to conceive of a cause more just than the defeat of the Third Reich and the Axis powers, World War II was a conflict in which the total number of civilians who died exceeded the number of soldiers who perished.

In the wake of such destruction, and with the advent of the nuclear age, it became clear to victor and vanquished alike that the world needed institutions to prevent another world war. And so, a quarter century after the United States Senate rejected the League of Nations -- an idea for which Woodrow Wilson received this prize -- America led the world in constructing an architecture to keep the peace: a Marshall Plan and a United Nations, mechanisms to govern the waging of war, treaties to protect human rights, prevent genocide, restrict the most dangerous weapons.

In many ways, these efforts succeeded. Yes, terrible wars have been fought, and atrocities committed. But there has been no Third World War. The Cold War ended with jubilant crowds dismantling a wall. Commerce has stitched much of the world together. Billions have been lifted from poverty. The ideals of liberty and self-determination, equality and the rule of law have haltingly advanced. We are the heirs of the fortitude and foresight of generations past, and it is a legacy for which my own country is rightfully proud.

And yet, a decade into a new century, this old architecture is buckling under the weight of new threats. The world may no longer shudder at the prospect of war between two nuclear superpowers, but proliferation may increase the risk of catastrophe. Terrorism has long been a tactic, but modern technology allows a few small men with outsized rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale.

Moreover, wars between nations have increasingly given way to wars within nations. The resurgence of ethnic or sectarian conflicts; the growth of secessionist movements, insurgencies, and failed states -- all these things have increasingly trapped civilians in unending chaos. In today's wars, many more civilians are killed than soldiers; the seeds of future conflict are sown, economies are wrecked, civil societies torn asunder, refugees amassed, children scarred.

I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war. What I do know is that meeting these challenges will require the same vision, hard work, and persistence of those men and women who acted so boldly decades ago. And it will require us to think in new ways about the notions of just war and the imperatives of a just peace.

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones." As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naïve -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

I raise this point, I begin with this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter what the cause. And at times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world's sole military superpower.

But the world must remember that it was not simply international institutions -- not just treaties and declarations -- that brought stability to a post-World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest -- because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.

So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another -- that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy. The soldier's courage and sacrifice is full of glory, expressing devotion to country, to cause, to comrades in arms. But war itself is never glorious, and we must never trumpet it as such.

So part of our challenge is reconciling these two seemingly inreconcilable truths -- that war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly. Concretely, we must direct our effort to the task that President Kennedy called for long ago. "Let us focus," he said, "on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions." A gradual evolution of human institutions.

What might this evolution look like? What might these practical steps be?

To begin with, I believe that all nations -- strong and weak alike -- must adhere to standards that govern the use of force. I -- like any head of state -- reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation. Nevertheless, I am convinced that adhering to standards, international standards, strengthens those who do, and isolates and weakens those who don't.

The world rallied around America after the 9/11 attacks, and continues to support our efforts in Afghanistan, because of the horror of those senseless attacks and the recognized principle of self-defense. Likewise, the world recognized the need to confront Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait -- a consensus that sent a clear message to all about the cost of aggression.

Furthermore, America -- in fact, no nation -- can insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves. For when we don't, our actions appear arbitrary and undercut the legitimacy of future interventions, no matter how justified.

And this becomes particularly important when the purpose of military action extends beyond self-defense or the defense of one nation against an aggressor. More and more, we all confront difficult questions about how to prevent the slaughter of civilians by their own government, or to stop a civil war whose violence and suffering can engulf an entire region.

I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, as it was in the Balkans, or in other places that have been scarred by war. Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later. That's why all responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace.

America's commitment to global security will never waver. But in a world in which threats are more diffuse, and missions more complex, America cannot act alone. America alone cannot secure the peace. This is true in Afghanistan. This is true in failed states like Somalia, where terrorism and piracy is joined by famine and human suffering. And sadly, it will continue to be true in unstable regions for years to come.

The leaders and soldiers of NATO countries, and other friends and allies, demonstrate this truth through the capacity and courage they've shown in Afghanistan. But in many countries, there is a disconnect between the efforts of those who serve and the ambivalence of the broader public. I understand why war is not popular, but I also know this: The belief that peace is desirable is rarely enough to achieve it. Peace requires responsibility. Peace entails sacrifice. That's why NATO continues to be indispensable. That's why we must strengthen U.N. and regional peacekeeping, and not leave the task to a few countries. That's why we honor those who return home from peacekeeping and training abroad to Oslo and Rome; to Ottawa and Sydney; to Dhaka and Kigali -- we honor them not as makers of war, but of wagers -- but as wagers of peace.

Let me make one final point about the use of force. Even as we make difficult decisions about going to war, we must also think clearly about how we fight it. The Nobel Committee recognized this truth in awarding its first prize for peace to Henry Dunant -- the founder of the Red Cross, and a driving force behind the Geneva Conventions.

Where force is necessary, we have a moral and strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct. And even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules, I believe the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war. That is what makes us different from those whom we fight. That is a source of our strength. That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America's commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions. We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. (Applause.) And we honor -- we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it's easy, but when it is hard.

I have spoken at some length to the question that must weigh on our minds and our hearts as we choose to wage war. But let me now turn to our effort to avoid such tragic choices, and speak of three ways that we can build a just and lasting peace.

First, in dealing with those nations that break rules and laws, I believe that we must develop alternatives to violence that are tough enough to actually change behavior -- for if we want a lasting peace, then the words of the international community must mean something. Those regimes that break the rules must be held accountable. Sanctions must exact a real price. Intransigence must be met with increased pressure -- and such pressure exists only when the world stands together as one.

One urgent example is the effort to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, and to seek a world without them. In the middle of the last century, nations agreed to be bound by a treaty whose bargain is clear: All will have access to peaceful nuclear power; those without nuclear weapons will forsake them; and those with nuclear weapons will work towards disarmament. I am committed to upholding this treaty. It is a centerpiece of my foreign policy. And I'm working with President Medvedev to reduce America and Russia's nuclear stockpiles.

But it is also incumbent upon all of us to insist that nations like Iran and North Korea do not game the system. Those who claim to respect international law cannot avert their eyes when those laws are flouted. Those who care for their own security cannot ignore the danger of an arms race in the Middle East or East Asia. Those who seek peace cannot stand idly by as nations arm themselves for nuclear war.

The same principle applies to those who violate international laws by brutalizing their own people. When there is genocide in Darfur, systematic rape in Congo, repression in Burma -- there must be consequences. Yes, there will be engagement; yes, there will be diplomacy -- but there must be consequences when those things fail. And the closer we stand together, the less likely we will be faced with the choice between armed intervention and complicity in oppression.

This brings me to a second point -- the nature of the peace that we seek. For peace is not merely the absence of visible conflict. Only a just peace based on the inherent rights and dignity of every individual can truly be lasting.

It was this insight that drove drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after the Second World War. In the wake of devastation, they recognized that if human rights are not protected, peace is a hollow promise.

And yet too often, these words are ignored. For some countries, the failure to uphold human rights is excused by the false suggestion that these are somehow Western principles, foreign to local cultures or stages of a nation's development. And within America, there has long been a tension between those who describe themselves as realists or idealists -- a tension that suggests a stark choice between the narrow pursuit of interests or an endless campaign to impose our values around the world.

I reject these choices. I believe that peace is unstable where citizens are denied the right to speak freely or worship as they please; choose their own leaders or assemble without fear. Pent-up grievances fester, and the suppression of tribal and religious identity can lead to violence. We also know that the opposite is true. Only when Europe became free did it finally find peace. America has never fought a war against a democracy, and our closest friends are governments that protect the rights of their citizens. No matter how callously defined, neither America's interests -- nor the world's -- are served by the denial of human aspirations.

So even as we respect the unique culture and traditions of different countries, America will always be a voice for those aspirations that are universal. We will bear witness to the quiet dignity of reformers like Aung Sang Suu Kyi; to the bravery of Zimbabweans who cast their ballots in the face of beatings; to the hundreds of thousands who have marched silently through the streets of Iran. It is telling that the leaders of these governments fear the aspirations of their own people more than the power of any other nation. And it is the responsibility of all free people and free nations to make clear that these movements -- these movements of hope and history -- they have us on their side.

Let me also say this: The promotion of human rights cannot be about exhortation alone. At times, it must be coupled with painstaking diplomacy. I know that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation. But I also know that sanctions without outreach -- condemnation without discussion -- can carry forward only a crippling status quo. No repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door.

In light of the Cultural Revolution's horrors, Nixon's meeting with Mao appeared inexcusable -- and yet it surely helped set China on a path where millions of its citizens have been lifted from poverty and connected to open societies. Pope John Paul's engagement with Poland created space not just for the Catholic Church, but for labor leaders like Lech Walesa. Ronald Reagan's efforts on arms control and embrace of perestroika not only improved relations with the Soviet Union, but empowered dissidents throughout Eastern Europe. There's no simple formula here. But we must try as best we can to balance isolation and engagement, pressure and incentives, so that human rights and dignity are advanced over time.

Third, a just peace includes not only civil and political rights -- it must encompass economic security and opportunity. For true peace is not just freedom from fear, but freedom from want.

It is undoubtedly true that development rarely takes root without security; it is also true that security does not exist where human beings do not have access to enough food, or clean water, or the medicine and shelter they need to survive. It does not exist where children can't aspire to a decent education or a job that supports a family. The absence of hope can rot a society from within.

And that's why helping farmers feed their own people -- or nations educate their children and care for the sick -- is not mere charity. It's also why the world must come together to confront climate change. There is little scientific dispute that if we do nothing, we will face more drought, more famine, more mass displacement -- all of which will fuel more conflict for decades. For this reason, it is not merely scientists and environmental activists who call for swift and forceful action -- it's military leaders in my own country and others who understand our common security hangs in the balance.

Agreements among nations. Strong institutions. Support for human rights. Investments in development. All these are vital ingredients in bringing about the evolution that President Kennedy spoke about. And yet, I do not believe that we will have the will, the determination, the staying power, to complete this work without something more -- and that's the continued expansion of our moral imagination; an insistence that there's something irreducible that we all share.

As the world grows smaller, you might think it would be easier for human beings to recognize how similar we are; to understand that we're all basically seeking the same things; that we all hope for the chance to live out our lives with some measure of happiness and fulfillment for ourselves and our families.

And yet somehow, given the dizzying pace of globalization, the cultural leveling of modernity, it perhaps comes as no surprise that people fear the loss of what they cherish in their particular identities -- their race, their tribe, and perhaps most powerfully their religion. In some places, this fear has led to conflict. At times, it even feels like we're moving backwards. We see it in the Middle East, as the conflict between Arabs and Jews seems to harden. We see it in nations that are torn asunder by tribal lines.

And most dangerously, we see it in the way that religion is used to justify the murder of innocents by those who have distorted and defiled the great religion of Islam, and who attacked my country from Afghanistan. These extremists are not the first to kill in the name of God; the cruelties of the Crusades are amply recorded. But they remind us that no Holy War can ever be a just war. For if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will, then there is no need for restraint -- no need to spare the pregnant mother, or the medic, or the Red Cross worker, or even a person of one's own faith. Such a warped view of religion is not just incompatible with the concept of peace, but I believe it's incompatible with the very purpose of faith -- for the one rule that lies at the heart of every major religion is that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

Adhering to this law of love has always been the core struggle of human nature. For we are fallible. We make mistakes, and fall victim to the temptations of pride, and power, and sometimes evil. Even those of us with the best of intentions will at times fail to right the wrongs before us.

But we do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place. The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached -- their fundamental faith in human progress -- that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.

For if we lose that faith -- if we dismiss it as silly or naïve; if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace -- then we lose what's best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass.

Like generations have before us, we must reject that future. As Dr. King said at this occasion so many years ago, "I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the 'isness' of man's present condition makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal 'oughtness' that forever confronts him."

Let us reach for the world that ought to be -- that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls. (Applause.)

Somewhere today, in the here and now, in the world as it is, a soldier sees he's outgunned, but stands firm to keep the peace. Somewhere today, in this world, a young protestor awaits the brutality of her government, but has the courage to march on. Somewhere today, a mother facing punishing poverty still takes the time to teach her child, scrapes together what few coins she has to send that child to school -- because she believes that a cruel world still has a place for that child's dreams.

Let us live by their example. We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice. We can admit the intractability of depravation, and still strive for dignity. Clear-eyed, we can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace. We can do that -- for that is the story of human progress; that's the hope of all the world; and at this moment of challenge, that must be our work here on Earth.

Thank you very much. (Applause.)

The emphasis here is mine. I felt those passages were some that needed to be really looked at and read by all.. Please take the few minutes and read this.. He really says what he believes and feels in this speech.. We have to remember above all else, he is the Commander in Chief... He has the responsibility of the entire nation in his hands.. he has more information at his grasp than we will ever have. We have to trust him when he says there is a threat. That's the info he has.. we don't have that.. If it is false.. then I am sure heads will roll.. But just a little while ago.. 5 people, all US citizens were arrested in Pakistan for trying to join
al-Qaeda. There is still a threat.. In Iraq there was a bombing that al-Qaeda in Iraq claimed credit for.

These are things we were warned about long ago.. that when the troops starting leaving Iraq the attacks would gear up..

We just have to trust.. I know it is hard.. after 8 years of being lied to.. it is very hard.. but we have to learn to trust this man we all worked to get into the White House. Give him a chance.. So far I think he has done very well.

In 2004 Seymour Hersh Told a Story, But No One Listened

Now, everyone is clambering about it and blaming Pres. Obama for not releasing the pictures. They seem to think he is wrong, but do not want to take the blame for covering up the story they refused to cover 5 years ago.

I tried to ask Jake Tapper today about it on Twitter, but he refused to even answer me. Mark Knoller same thing. They were too busy yelling at Robert Gibbs for telling them not to believe everything they read in the British tabloid papers.

However the story is out there about some of the pictures that are purported to show the rape of children and women being among the ones that Pres. Obama decided not to release.

These were referenced in an interview that Seymour Hersh did on July 15, 2004 while speaking with the ACLU. Some of what he said was recorded but the recordings are not linkable now.

This is a partial transcript from BoingBoing as follows:

" Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."

Then there was this from Geraldine Sealey @ Salon who wrote this:

After Donald Rumsfeld testified on the Hill about Abu Ghraib in May, there was talk of more photos and video in the Pentagon's custody more horrific than anything made public so far. "If these are released to the public, obviously it's going to make matters worse," Rumsfeld said. Since then, the Washington Post has disclosed some new details and images of abuse at the prison. But if Seymour Hersh is right, it all gets much worse. (...)
Notes from a similar speech Hersh gave in Chicago in June were posted on Brad DeLong's blog. Rick Pearlstein, who watched the speech, wrote: "[Hersh] said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, 'You haven't begun to see evil...' then trailed off. He said, 'horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.' He looked frightened."

There are several questions here: Has Hersh actually seen the video he described to the ACLU, and why hasn't he written about it yet? Will he be forced to elaborate in more public venues now that these two speeches are getting so much attention, at least in the blogosphere? And who else has seen the video, if it exists -- will journalists see and report on it? did senators see these images when they had their closed-door sessions with the Abu Ghraib evidence? -- and what is being done about it?

One of the things referenced was the Taguba Report. Also that is the name of the retired officer who is quoted in the Telegraph article that Gibbs is dissing today. Here are some of the things they are quoting, still from 2004.

This makes me think there is something to the story, which I stated right at the time I thought may be the reason Pres. Obama decided NOT to release the pictures. At the time he stated he was going to, he was being told that there was nothing in those pictures, then he saw them, and he found out what was really there.

After seeing them, he realized he couldn't let them out as long as there are military in harms way, as long as he is still trying to heal what BushCo has screwed up so royally. Yeah, I know all the arguments. Get them out so everyone can see them, but I am sorry, why inflame tensions any more than needed?

Here is what they point out about this report, "What most of us have seen of the report are excerpts from the 50-page summary. In fact, there are well over 6,000 pages in the report itself, including statements by and interviews with witnesses. Among them, testimony from an Iraqi prisoner that would appear to substantiate Seymour Hersh's claims that boys were sodomized at Abu Ghraib. Maj. Gen. Taguba evidently found these statements credible -- they supported statements from interviews with soldiers and other witnesses."

Yes, 6,000 pages in the reports and the summary that people have seen is condensed version of 50 pages. Here is where it gets nasty in backing up what Hersh claimed.

At the end of this post are links to digital copies of two documents from the Taguba report, hosted on the Washington Post website. Is it possible that they document the exact incidents to which Hersh referred? Excerpt from statement provided by Kasim Mehaddi Hilas, Detainee #151108, on January 18 2004:

I saw [name deleted] fucking a kid, his age would be about 15 - 18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard the screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn't covered and I saw [name deleted] who was wearing the military uniform putting his dick in the little kid's ass. I couldn't see the face of the kid because his face wasn't in front of the door. And the female soldier was taking pictures. [name deleted], I think he is [deleted] because of his accent, and he was not skinny or short, and he acted like a homosexual (gay). And that was in cell #23 as best as I remember.
Another testimony alleging abuse of minors from a statement provided by Thaar Salman Dawod, Detainee #150427, on January 17, 2004:
I saw lots of people getting naked for a few days getting punished in the first days of Ramadan. They came with two boys naked and they were cuffed together face to face and Grainer was beating them and a group of guards were watching and taking pictures from top and bottom and there was three female soldiers laughing at the prisoners. The prisoners, two of them, were young. I don't know their names.

That's exactly what Seymour Hersh stated in his story to the ACLU, so why didn't this get picked up? Why was there not more coverage of this and why were the so called media not all over it during the summer of 2004?


And there's this snip from a CBS interview with "leash girl" Pfc. Lynndie England, the guard seen grinning and pointing at Iraqi prisoners in the infamous photos:
When England was asked if there were other things that happened at Abu Ghraib, things that were not photographed, she said, "Yes." When asked if there were worse things that happened, she said "Yes," but would not elaborate.
Link to first PDF, Link to second PDF. (Thank you, Mark)

Yet, they say this isn't torture. This is acceptable because of what al-Qaeda has done to us. Excuse me, they just kill us for the most part that I have ever seen. One of the things everyone likes to point out is how they seem to prefer, if that's the word you would use, the decapitation of our people. Well, I think I would rather have that, at least it would be quick and done, rather than to be beaten, raped, waterboarded, starved, slapped, hung by my arms, kept in a small box, or had bugs put on me as we have done to the Iraqis and others we tortured.

Here is a link to the story from CNN world, where they reported the story. Why they put it in the world section instead of the front page is beyond me. It should have been front page news. Come on people. This is stupid. We covered up the rape of children and the murder of detainees.

There are more places where the story of these abuses are out there, but it is mostly blogs where they are posted. There was very little coverage if any in the main stream news media.

Today there is another piece in Salon which is linking some of the cables which were sent from Iraq to CIA headquarters in 2002 and may show the story of waterboarding and torture of Abu Zubaydah, the al-Qaida operative who was, according to government reports, subjected to the near-drowning, if that's what you want to call it, at least 83 times in August 2002.

There are more and more pieces to this puzzle coming out every day. Will we ever have the entire story? Who knows. Will we ever see trials and convictions? Again, who knows. I certainly hope so.

Pres. Obama said in his speech that he thought we had the framework in place to do it. Do we have the will in this country? That's another question.

Matt Taibbi Says What Needs to be Said

If you have never or even if you have read Matt's blog, The Smirking Chimp, today's is especially good.

So many times I have heard the same thing he is saying. You are against Americans, you are for the terrorists. How can you say we tortured them, whatever we did was legal because they weren't actual armies, and weren't fighting for a real country.

Even Cheney and his daughter were saying the same things yesterday all over the TeeVee Machine and have been for the last 3 months.

I have had arguments with my own daughter over this very thing, more than once. She says they had no rights, because they attacked us without provocation. They flew planes into buildings.

I tried to explain to her, it was the same as what the Japanese did in Hawaii at Pearl Harbor, but she didn't see it that way.

For some reason, people don't recognize al Qaeda as human, they only see them as less than animals I suppose. They must because even animals would be treated better than what some of these people were treated.

Here is what Matt had to say in part:

The thing is, we’ve been listening to this stuff for so long that when we hear it, we don’t recoil in confused disbelief anymore — we’re so familiar with these arguments we’ve forgotten that they don’t make any sense. It’s similar to that other Bush-era standard: “We fight them over there, so we don’t have to fight them here.”

I never understood what the hell that was all about. The best I could figure is that the people who were saying this think of the world like a big Stratego game, and they think that if we commit a big force to some place like Iraq, the “other side” will have to leave all his forces over there or something to keep us from moving through Eurasia. This might make sense in a real war, in a war-between-nations war, but it’s completely absurd in a conflict where the “other side” is actually hundreds if not thousands of different/unrelated actors and can successfully attack a country like the U.S. using just a few people at a time. Sending 160,000 troops to Iraq does absolutely nothing to prevent a terrorist group like al-Qaeda from sending over a couple of “exchange students” to dump botulinum toxin into the Akron reservoir.

Okay check that — it does nothing positive. Because it might prevent such attacks in the sense of giving foreign terrorists an array of more enticing targets to shoot at who are closer to home. But in real terms the idea “we fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here” is just magical thinking, the kind of notion that feels like it makes sense because your brain is running amok in the unconscious making unsupervised connections between unrelated things, sort of like an OCD patient who believes that if he steps on every third sidewalk crack he won’t get into a car accident. What’s amazing about this sort of propaganda is that once it gets hammered into your head enough, the logic of it begins to feel self-evident, above the need for explanation. Over and over again on the campaign trail last year I had people explain this concept to me by simply repeating themselves. I once asked a guy in South Carolina who had laid that line on me if he thought our forces in Iraq were, simultaneous to their occupation mission, physically blocking the airports in Saudi Arabia and Yemen to keep potential terrorists from coming to the U.S.– if that was why fighting them over there kept “them” from committing terrorist acts here.

“You’re not listening to me,” he said. “The point is that if we weren’t over there, we’d be fighting them here. Now that we’re over there, they fight us there.”

“But why can’t they attack us here anyway?” I asked.

He stared at me for something like thirty seconds. I remember having enough time to check to make sure I had tape left on my recorder. “Because we’re over there,” he said finally.

This is the circular logic of the people on the wrong side of this so called argument. They say we are not fighting an enemy bound by a country, yet we are fighting them "over there so they won't fight us over here". That makes such little sense.

If we could keep them contained in a small area, we could defeat them and be done with it. That would have worked well... the "GWOT" that Shrub wanted to fight could have been done in a few days and we could have brought all our military home and we wouldn't have lost over 5,000 lives and spent ourselves into 1 Trillion dollars of debt.

Matt goes on to say,

It’s the same thing with this torture business. There are a lot of people in this country who genuinely believe that torture opponents are “not upset” about things like 9/11 or the beheading of American hostages. The idea that “no one complains when Americans are murdered” is crazy — of course we “complained,” and of course we’d all like to round up those machete-wielding monsters and shoot them into space — but these people really believe this, they really believe that torture opponents are secretly unimpressed/untroubled by Islamic terrorism, at least as compared to American “enhanced interrogation.” For them to believe that, they must really believe that such people are traitors, nursing a secret agenda (an agenda perhaps unknown even to themselves, their America-hatred being ingrained so deep) against their own country. Which is really an amazing thing for large numbers of Americans to believe about another large group of Americans, when you think about it.

The reason it’s possible is that it’s been drilled into their heads to instinctively perceive opposition to their point of view as support for their enemies. They’ve lost the ability to distinguish between real, honest-to-God enemies (al Qaeda, Kim Jong-Il) and people they simply disagree with or dislike (Boston liberals, the French, gays, the ACLU, etc).

-snip-

They don’t understand that this is not a question of taking different sides in a war; this is two groups of Americans having a disagreement about how best to deal with a foreign enemy both of these groups of Americans despise, fear and revile equally. My group, the anti-torture group, believes that what should make us superior to terrorists is respect for law and due process and civilization, and that when we give in and use these tactics, we forfeit that superiority and actually confer a kind of victory to the al Qaedas of the world, people who should never be allowed any kind of victory in any arena. We furthermore think that the war on terror doesn’t get won with force alone, that it’s a conflict that ultimately has to be won politically, by winning a propaganda battle against these assholes, and we can’t win that battle so easily if people in the Middle East see us openly embrace these tactics.

Whether or not you agree with that is up to you — we could be wrong, after all — but when you respond to these arguments by asserting that people like me didn’t “complain” when Americans were tortured and murdered, what you’re really doing is calling me a traitor. And while it may be more interesting and exciting for you to think like that, in reality it’s just nuts. Seriously. Trust us on this one. So think it over and ask yourself again if it really makes sense to say that torture opponents like me didn’t “complain” when Americans get their heads chopped off. Ask yourself if you really mean that, before you say it. And then get back to me.

He sites several things others have said and argued such as Charles Krauthammer who thinks torture is okay in certain instances... and then lists them. Well, sorry there Charles. I disagree. Torture is WRONG. Always has been, Always will be.

Besides, it is illegal. You know, I am and have been amazed by the Republicans who always LOVE to spout Reagan as their HERO... yet in this they seem to have covered his eyes and turned their back on him and forgotten he even existed.

Reagan signed a treaty, specifically outlawing torture. However, to get around this, Bush just told the OLC and the DOJ to write him some memos making torture look legal. He then preceeded to torture at will. According to Cheney Sunday, Bush knew what was going on, he signed off on it at the least. If he didn't know what was going on then he was at least complicit by signing off on it.

We, have to keep pushing this until something is done. Right now there is testimony in the Senate. I am watching it and hoping we can get something done.

The pictures will be out soon. Children were raped, children were killed and tortured. This has to be punished. We have to make sure people know and get outraged by this and finally maybe they will want something done.

A Perspective From Outside, The View from a Non Citizen

One of the blogs I read regularly is Talking to Tango. He has a very unique perspective on things and yet sees them with an "outsiders eye". He is a Canadian and so looks at things with a different viewpoint than we do.

However, so many of the things that effect us also effects Canada, and things that our government does effects them. And of course vice versa.

We all know the last 8 years was disastrous to us all, and was just as much so to our neighbors to the North.

Today, Tango's Daddy has a great post up about the way he sees President Obama and the outreach he is making to the World. It is really a good read. It just kinda puts thing in perspective and helps me see things in a different light.

I often wonder if I see things through rose colored glasses because I do like and respect Pres. Obama. I know he has feet of clay, I see the things he has done wrong, don't misunderstand me. But, I am defensive of him, and so when he is being what I consider attacked by the "right" constantly for the infamous handshake, the gift of a book, the "bow", all of that, I can't help but wonder if I am just over defensive sometimes.

So, when someone from outside looking in so to speak writes something like this:

The Obama administration has done more in 100 days than GWB was able to destroy in eight years. George tried hard but failed.
I believe Hugo Chavez said the stench has left this room, would you care to read this book which speaks to my concerns? And your leader said thank you Sir I would be delighted. Today I saw Fidel Castro with some female American politician and Fidel was wearing an American lapel pin. THIS IS PROGRESS.
Cowboy bullshit politics are over for good, the real deal is in play and it is working. The American people made a good choice when it overwhelmingly elected President Obama. Nothing less than the world depended on it. Now I would like to see that hand extended in another direction, Al Qaeda. Time Out. Let’s talk. Would that make sense?
The president of the United States of America can talk to whoever he wants and it is not wrong.

Wow, I felt good reading that. Maybe we are headed in the right direction finally. Let's hope so for sure. Hopefully, those last two lines can come true soon too. That would be wonderful.

If we can see more progress as we saw this week with Pakistan finally stepping up and starting to fight the war in their own backyard maybe we will be able to step down some and start some real diplomatic talks in that area and get Al Qaeda to set down and talk.

What progress that would be. If we could do that, have peace in that area and bring all our troops home wow, what a joy we would have. Pres. Obama would be the best President ever, as I truly had hopes for him to become.

Oh I know, that's pie in the sky dreams.. but a girl can dream can't she...lol

Go check out Talking to Tango.. He is great.

Vanity Fair article says Torture does't work, by David Rose

Tortured Reasoning
Part 1

George W. Bush defended harsh interrogations by pointing to intelligence breakthroughs, but a surprising number of counterterrorist officials say that, apart from being wrong, torture just doesn’t work. Delving into two high-profile cases, the author exposes the tactical costs of prisoner abuse.

by David Rose WEB EXCLUSIVE December 16, 2008

This is from the online article that was published by Vanity Fair. You can read it in it's entirety by clicking the title above. It is very detailed and very well done at debunking the entire story Darth has been spinning this week about all the intell we supposedly got from the torture he ordered.

By the last days of March 2002, more than six months after 9/11, President George W. Bush’s promise “to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act” was starting to sound a little hollow. True, Afghanistan had been invaded and the Taliban toppled from power. But Osama bin Laden had vanished from the caves of Tora Bora, and none of his key al-Qaeda lieutenants were in U.S. captivity. Intelligence about what the terrorists might be planning next was almost nonexistent. “The panic in the executive branch was palpable,” recalls Mike Scheuer, the former C.I.A. official who set up and ran the agency’s Alec Station, the unit devoted to tracking bin Laden.

Early in the morning of March 28, in the moonlit police-barracks yard in Faisalabad, Pakistan, hopes were high that this worrisome intelligence deficit was about to be corrected. Some 300 armed personnel waited in silence: 10 three-man teams of Americans, drawn equally from the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., together with much greater numbers from Pakistan’s police force and Inter-services Intelligence (ISI). In order to maximize their chances of surprise, they planned to hit 10 addresses simultaneously. One of them, they believed, was a safe house containing a man whose name had been familiar to U.S. analysts for years: Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Hussein, a 30-year-old Saudi Arabian better known as Abu Zubaydah. “I’d followed him for a decade,” Scheuer says. “If there was one guy you could call a ‘hub,’ he was it.”

The plan called for the police to go in first, followed by the Americans and ISI men, whose job would be to gather laptops, documents, and other physical evidence. A few moments before three a.m., the crackle of gunfire erupted. Abu Zubaydah had been shot and wounded, but was alive and in custody. As those who had planned it had hoped, his capture was to prove an epochal event—but in ways they had not envisaged.

Four months after Abu Zubaydah’s capture, two lawyers from the Department of Justice, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, delivered their notorious memo on torture, which stated that coercive treatment that fell short of causing suffering equivalent to the pain of organ failure or death was not legally torture, an analysis that—as far as the U.S. government was concerned—sanctioned the abusive treatment of detainees at the C.I.A.’s secret prisons and at Guantánamo Bay. But, as Jane Mayer writes in her recent book, The Dark Side (Doubleday), Abu Zubaydah had been subjected to coercive interrogation techniques well before that, becoming the first U.S. prisoner in the Global War on Terror to undergo waterboarding.

Here is where we start the first questions being asked. They had him in custody, long before the memos were ever written. So did the torture start then? Now we know it didn't really, we have it from the FBI interrogator who interviewed him, that all the information that was received was from normal interrogation practices not their so called enhanced interrogation or torture.

David Rose goes on to say:

Really? In researching this article, I spoke to numerous counterterrorist officials from agencies on both sides of the Atlantic. Their conclusion is unanimous: not only have coercive methods failed to generate significant and actionable intelligence, they have also caused the squandering of resources on a massive scale through false leads, chimerical plots, and unnecessary safety alerts—with Abu Zubaydah’s case one of the most glaring examples.

-snip-

far from exposing a deadly plot, all torture did was lead to more torture of his supposed accomplices while also providing some misleading “information” that boosted the administration’s argument for invading Iraq.

-snip-

“a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden.” Instead, Scheuer says, he was “the main cog in the way they organized,” a point of contact for Islamists from many parts of the globe seeking combat training in the Afghan camps. However, only a tiny percentage would ever be tapped for recruitment by al-Qaeda.

According to Scheuer, Abu Zubaydah “never swore bayat [al-Qaeda’s oath of allegiance] to bin Laden,” and the enemy he focused on was Israel, not the U.S. After Abu Zubaydah’s capture, Dan Coleman, an F.B.I. counterterrorist veteran, had the job of combing through Abu Zubaydah’s journals and other documents seized from his Faisalabad safe house. He confirms Scheuer’s assessment. “Abu Zubaydah was like a receptionist, like the guy at the front desk here,” says Coleman, gesturing toward the desk clerk in the lobby of the Virginia hotel where we have met. “He takes their papers, he sends them out. It’s an important position, but he’s not recruiting or planning.” It was also significant that he was not well versed in al-Qaeda’s tight internal-security methods: “That was why his name had been cropping up for years.”

Declassified reports of legal interviews with Abu Zubaydah at his current residence, Guantánamo Bay, suggest that he lacked the capacity to do much more. In the early 1990s, fighting in the Afghan civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal, he was injured so badly that he could not speak for almost two years. “I tried to become al-Qaeda,” Abu Zubaydah told his lawyer, Brent Mickum, “but they said, ‘No, you are illiterate and can’t even remember how to shoot.’” Coleman found Abu Zubaydah’s diary to be startlingly useless. “There’s nothing in there that refers to anything outside his head, not even when he saw something on the news, not about any al-Qaeda attack, not even 9/11,” he says. “All it does is reveal someone in torment. Based on what I saw of his personality, he could not be what they say he was.”

Really bad character wasn't he...we caught a good one there.. sounds like a really dangerous guy.. with brain damage and all. This next part reiterates exactly what the FBI agent stated in the NY Times and I referenced above about the information gathered from Abu Zubaydah. They say it was "within a few days", I think that may be debatable.

In May 2008, a report by Glenn Fine, the Department of Justice inspector general, stated that, as he recovered in the hospital from the bullet wounds sustained when he was captured, Abu Zubaydah began to cooperate with two F.B.I. agents. It was a promising start, but “within a few days,” wrote Fine, he was handed over to the C.I.A., whose agents soon reported that he was providing only “throw-away information” and that, according to Fine, they “needed to diminish his capacity to resist.” His new interrogators continued to question him by very different means at so-called black-site prisons in Thailand and Eastern Europe. They were determined to prove he was much more important than the innkeeper of a safe house.

Bush discussed Abu Zubaydah’s treatment in his 2006 announcement. “As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so the C.I.A. used an alternative set of procedures…. The procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.” Soon, Bush went on, Abu Zubaydah “began to provide information on key al-Qaeda operatives, including information that helped us find and capture more of those responsible for the attacks on September 11.” Among them, Bush said, were Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind, and his fellow conspirator Ramzi Binalshibh. In fact, Binalshibh was not arrested for another six months and K.S.M. not for another year. In K.S.M.’s case, the lead came from an informant motivated by a $25 million reward.

Now, we know they waterboarded him 83 times to help "soften him up" so to speak. This is a man who they have already stated was brain damaged and now they waterboarded him 83 times. His brain must be nearly mush by now. I am not sure how the man is even alive or breathing. No wonder he says he pees himself.

Then we get into the famous or infamous Khalid Sheik Mahommed or KSM and his story. David Rose really got into this. This story was written and researched so throughly that I had to make it in two parts so it wouldn't be so long. If you want to read the entire article you will have to click the link.

As for K.S.M. himself, who (as Jane Mayer writes) was waterboarded, reportedly hung for hours on end from his wrists, beaten, and subjected to other agonies for weeks, Bush said he provided “many details of other plots to kill innocent Americans.” K.S.M. was certainly knowledgeable. It would be surprising if he gave up nothing of value. But according to a former senior C.I.A. official, who read all the interrogation reports on K.S.M., “90 percent of it was total f**king bulls**t.” A former Pentagon analyst adds: “K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were.”

It is, perhaps, a little late, more than six years after detainees began to be interrogated at Guantánamo Bay and at the C.I.A.’s black-site prisons, to be asking whether torture works. Yet according to numerous C.I.A. and F.B.I. officials interviewed for this article, at the time this question really mattered, in the months after 9/11, no one seriously addressed it. Those who advocated a policy that would lead America to deploy methods it had always previously abhorred simply assumed they would be worthwhile. Non-governmental advocates of torture, such as the Harvard legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, have emphasized the “ticking bomb” scenario: the hypothetical circumstance when only torture will make the captured terrorist reveal where he—or his colleagues—has planted the timed nuclear device. Inside the C.I.A., says a retired senior officer who was privy to the agency’s internal debate, there was hardly any argument about the value of coercive methods: “Nobody in intelligence believes in the ticking bomb. It’s just a way of framing the debate for public consumption. That is not an intelligence reality.”

There is, alas, no shortage of evidence from earlier times that torture produces bad intelligence. “It is incredible what people say under the compulsion of torture,” wrote the German Jesuit Friedrich von Spee in 1631, “and how many lies they will tell about themselves and about others; in the end, whatever the torturers want to be true, is true.”

Right there states they knew they would be getting bad intelligence from KSM and others with torture, but they went right on, because Bush & Cheney ordered it. However I think again it is worth noting that it has since been discovered that MOST of the regular CIA agents would not go along with this and they had to bring in contractors to do the bidding.

The unreliability of intelligence acquired by torture was taken as a given in the early years of the C.I.A., whose 1963 kubark interrogation manual stated: “Intense pain is quite likely to produce false confessions, concocted as a means of escaping from distress. A time-consuming delay results, while investigation is conducted and the admissions are proven untrue. During this respite the interrogatee can pull himself together. He may even use the time to think up new, more complex ‘admissions’ that take still longer to disprove.”

A 1957 study by Albert Biderman, an Air Force sociologist, described how brainwashing had been achieved by depriving prisoners of sleep, exposing them to cold, and forcing them into agonizing “stress positions” for long periods. In July 2008, The New York Times reported that Biderman’s work formed the basis of a 2002 interrogators’ training class at Guantánamo Bay. That the methods it described had once been used to generate Communist propaganda had apparently been forgotten.

Experience derived from 1990s terrorism cases also casts doubt on torture’s value. For example, in March 1993, F.B.I. agents flew to Cairo to take charge of an Egyptian named Mahmud Abouhalima, who would be convicted for having bombed the World Trade Center a month earlier. Abouhalima had already been tortured by Egyptian intelligence agents for 10 days, and had the wounds to prove it. As U.S. investigators should have swiftly realized, his statements in Egypt were worthless, among them claims that the bombing was sponsored by Iranian businessmen, although, apparently, their sworn enemy, Iraq, had also played a part.

-snip-

A computer seized in Murad’s apartment held details of the flights he planned to attack, detonator-timer settings, and photos of some of his co-conspirators, together with their aliases, so enabling their subsequent arrest. It was this, Mike Scheuer says, not Murad’s interrogation, that provided more useful intelligence.
Equally significant was what Murad didn’t give up under torture. Bojinka was partly the brainchild of none other than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, later alleged to be the chief planner of 9/11. He had been living in the Philippines, but apparently Murad said nothing that might have helped his interrogators find him: he was not captured until 2003.
On April 10, 2002, 13 days after Abu Zubaydah’s capture, in Faisalabad, a 23-year-old Ethiopian named Binyam Mohamed was detained at the airport in Karachi, Pakistan, attempting to board a flight to London, where he had been living for seven years. Information about the case drawn up by the British security service M.I.5, and obtained by Vanity Fair, suggests that if Mohamed was a terrorist his tradecraft was unimpressive: he was stopped because he was using a passport that obviously belonged to someone else, his friend Fouad Zouaoui—the second time that Mohamed had tried to leave Pakistan on Zouaoui’s papers. He also had a heroin problem.
In any event, there is no dispute that he fled across the border into Pakistan as soon as he could after 9/11.
The first 10 days of Mohamed’s detention, at Landi prison, near Karachi, were not, on his account, comfortable, but he was not tortured or abused. But after he was moved to a Pakistani security jail, around April 20, he began to be abused. A few days later, when he was questioned for the first time by U.S. agents, his treatment worsened dramatically.
“They seemed to think I was some kind of top al-Qaeda person,” Mohamed said. “How? It was less than six months since I converted to Islam, and before that I was using drugs!” After the Americans’ visit, Mohamed said, he was hung by his wrists for hours on end, so that his feet barely touched the ground. Suspended thus, he said, he was beaten regularly by Pakistani guards. He said he was also threatened with a gun.
U.S. interest in Mohamed appears to have been triggered by an unlucky coincidence. It so happened that in the period in early April before Abu Zubaydah’s torture began, when he was starting to cooperate with the F.B.I., he gave up the name of one of those who had passed through his safe house en route to an Afghan camp—that of Jose Padilla, a former Chicago gang member. “He probably remembered Padilla because he was a U.S. citizen, and that was rare,” says the former F.B.I. al-Qaeda specialist Dan Coleman.
Mohamed has maintained that if he had ever met Padilla it would have been a fleeting, chance encounter, perhaps when they both fled Afghanistan, and he has no memory of it. But the first time Mohamed tried to fly to London via Zurich, around April 4, Padilla was booked on the same flight. Their ultimate destinations were different: Padilla planned to spend time in Egypt before returning to Chicago. But the fact they were starting their journeys together, says an F.B.I. agent who attended official briefings about the case, convinced American agencies that they shared some joint purpose. “It was simply that—flight coincidence,” he says. “I never saw any evidence that Padilla and Mohamed met.”
By late April, Abu Zubaydah was being tortured and giving up details of a plot that sounded truly terrifying: a plan for Padilla to build and detonate a radioactive dirty bomb in America. But even at the outset, some who worked in U.S. counterterrorism were skeptical. “If there is a dirty bomb, you’d better take it seriously, because as bad as 9/11 was, a dirty bomb would be a hundred times worse,” says the former F.B.I. agent who attended the case briefings. “It was clear that Padilla had some form of training, that he was a sympathizer. But to claim he really had a plan to do a dirty bomb? That’s tough. You show me he knew how to go and get it. That he knew how to make it. They never had that.”
Convinced that the dirty-bomb plot was real, those interrogating Binyam Mohamed assumed that he must be part of it, and if he could not fill in missing details, he must have been covering up. Agents such as the F.B.I.’s Jack Cloonan, who spent years fighting al-Qaeda before his retirement in 2002, had learned that it had an impressive “quality-control system,” which meant “they looked for people with the right makeup, they did their own due diligence, and they would not pick weak guys”—not, typically, heroin addicts. But no one was listening to these agents.

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Vanity Fair article says Torture does't work, by David Rose

Tortured Reasoning

Part 2

As you can see reading this second part of this, there were concerns about the information they were getting, but it was full steam ahead. Even other agencies had concerns.

M.I.5 seems to have shared the C.I.A.’s groupthink. Sources in London say that its agents also assumed that anything Mohamed said to try to defend himself must be a lie. One admission he did make was that he had seen a Web site with instructions on how to make a hydrogen bomb, but he was apparently claiming it was a joke. The intelligence agencies believed this was a smoking gun, notwithstanding Mohamed’s bizarre statement that the instructions included mixing bleach with uranium-238 in a bucket and rotating it around one’s head for 45 minutes. Neither the British nor the Americans thought Mohamed’s claim that the Web site was a joke was credible: his “confession” to reading instructions about building nuclear weapons on the Internet was cited in Mohamed’s Guantánamo charge sheet. Yet it was a joke: such a Web site, with instructions about how to refine bomb-grade uranium with bleach and a bucket, has been doing the rounds on the World Wide Web since at least 1994. In 2005, the conservative columnist Michelle Malkin cited it in her blog as evidence of al-Qaeda’s deadly intentions. She was swiftly disabused by readers, who, unlike the C.I.A. and M.I.5, immediately recognized it as satire.
But even M.I.5 couldn’t help but notice “glaring inconsistencies” among the different accounts of the plot being given by those getting interrogated. And instead of asking whether the plot was real, the investigators seem to have assumed that the different accounts of those being interrogated were merely an attempt to protect al-Qaeda operations.

Clive Stafford Smith believes that the weakness of the dirty-bomb charge against Padilla may well explain what happened to Binyam Mohamed: “Maybe what they were trying to do was turn him into a prosecution witness.” After all, he had already confessed in Pakistan, under torture that had been, in comparison with what was to come, relatively mild. But on July 21, 2002, as the plane’s flight log later confirmed, he was flown aboard a Gulfstream V jet chartered by the C.I.A. to Rabat, in Morocco. There he was to spend the next 18 months.

With the help of Stafford Smith, he later assembled a diary describing his treatment there. Amid numerous beatings in Rabat, Mohamed wrote, “They’d ask me a question. I’d say one thing. They’d say it was a lie. I’d say another. They’d say it was a lie. I could not work out what they wanted to hear.” He also said the Moroccans repeatedly cut his chest and genitals with a razor. Finally he was subjected to further harsh treatment in the “Dark Prison” near Kabul, Afghanistan, after being spirited away on another C.I.A. flight in January 2004.

After another nine months, he was brought to Guantánamo, where he remains. He filed a habeas corpus lawsuit in federal court in the District of Columbia, a claim that there was no credible reason for his continued detention, and in its attempt to defend this, the administration in October 2008 dropped all mention of the dirty-bomb plot. In Guantánamo’s parallel quasi-legal world of military commissions, where the rules make it much harder to exclude evidence derived from torture, the Pentagon in May 2008 issued a charge sheet against Mohamed. It said that having trained in various al-Qaeda camps and taken instruction from bin Laden, Mohamed “reviewed technical information concerning the construction of an improvised radioactive bomb” with K.S.M. and decided with Padilla to detonate one in America.

In October, the charges were withdrawn, after the prosecutor, Lieutenant Colonel Darrel Vandeveld, resigned. Later he told the BBC he had concerns at the repeated suppression of evidence that could prove prisoners’ innocence. Meanwhile, as of December 2008, Mohamed’s lawyers were fighting separate court cases to force the U.S. government in Washington and the British government in London to disclose all the information they have about Mohamed’s treatment. (Coincidentally, my sister, Dinah Rose, Q.C., is representing Mohamed in the London case.) Stafford Smith is bound by Draconian restrictions that prevent him from offering any but the blandest comments about the evidence in his client’s case. He says, “I know of no evidence against him other than his own confessions, all of which are the bitter fruit of his abuse.”

This is one of the cases the ACLU has been fighting I believe. This is a sad case. It needs to just go away. This poor man was just made a target for nothing it sounds like. All because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Note the first line I put in bold in this next section.

“There was no dirty-bomb plot. I’m sure it was just Abu Zubaydah trying to get them excited,” says the F.B.I.’s Dan Coleman. “There’s never been any corroboration except the confessions of Binyam Mohamed under torture. No one was willing to take their time.” But, in the words of the former C.I.A. official Mike Scheuer, “That dirty-bomb business put the fear of God into these people in the administration.” As a result, he says, “they may well have sent Binyam Mohamed somewhere where the authorities would do things we wouldn’t—or couldn’t.”

That is my bold...note the date.. that is before the dates of the memo which authorizes torture. June 10, 2002.

On June 10, 2002, then attorney general John Ashcroft interrupted a visit to Moscow to speak to reporters: “I am pleased to announce today a significant step forward in the war on terrorism. We have captured a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or ‘dirty bomb,’ in the United States.” He meant Jose Padilla, who had been arrested as he flew into Chicago on May 8. The president, Ashcroft said, had designated Padilla an “enemy combatant,” and he had been removed from civilian custody to a navy brig. In due course, Ashcroft said, he would be tried by a military commission.
“Let me be clear: we know from multiple independent and corroborating sources that Abdullah Al Mujahir [Padilla’s nom de guerre] was closely associated with al-Qaeda and that … he was involved in planning future terrorist attacks on innocent American civilians in the United States,” Ashcroft said. Had his dirty bomb gone off, it could have caused “mass death and injury.”
The shakiness of Ashcroft’s “multiple independent and corroborating sources” claim was demonstrated by an affidavit from an F.B.I. agent, Joe Ennis, in support of Padilla’s detention. Referring to Binyam Mohamed as “Subject-1,” it said that his “wife” had told law-enforcement authorities that he “would often become emotional and cry when he discussed his willingness to die for his God.” Strangely enough, Mohamed was and remains unmarried.
Mohamed, the affidavit said, “has not been completely candid about his association with Al Qaeda, and his own terrorist activities,” and was trying to “mislead or confuse U.S. law enforcement.” But it was clear that after weeks of abuse he had started to crack. According to Ennis, he had already told his interrogators that he and Padilla had “researched the construction of a uranium-enhanced explosive device”; that Padilla had been to meetings with al-Qaeda officials; and that he believed Padilla had been ordered to return to America.

Well why would Padilla be any different than anyone else. Just because he was an American citizen living in Chicago.

In the brig, Padilla’s attorneys claimed, he too was tortured. He was deprived of all contact with the outside world for two and a half years, and, according to one court filing, “He would be shackled and manacled, with a belly chain, for hours in his cell. Noxious fumes would be introduced to his room causing his eyes and nose to run. The temperature of his cell would be manipulated, making the cell extremely cold for long stretches of time.” Chained in agonizing “stress positions” repeatedly, he was also allegedly “threatened with imminent execution.… Often he had to endure multiple interrogators who would scream, shake, and otherwise assault [him].”
The government did not deny these assertions, only the claim that they amounted to torture. Donna Newman, Padilla’s attorney before he was taken to the brig, says that afterward “he was not the same person. Beforehand, he was engaged in his case; he asked pertinent questions. When I saw him again, he hardly said a word. He had no interest in what was happening, even though his case was nearing the Supreme Court.”
Under this pressure, Padilla produced ever more elaborate confessions. Former deputy attorney general James Comey said in June 2004 that Padilla spoke of discussing the dirty bomb with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, of an instruction from K.S.M. to blow up apartments by filling them with gas and igniting it, and of a dinner party with Binyam Mohamed, K.S.M., and al-Qaeda bigwigs the night before he left Pakistan.
Very senior officials had a lot invested in Padilla. But in November 2005, three days before the Justice Department was to file a brief before the Supreme Court in response to his lawyers’ claim that his treatment was unconstitutional, the administration returned him to civilian custody. With all mention of the dirty-bomb plot deleted, he stood trial in Florida on far less serious charges of conspiracy to murder, maim, and kidnap, and providing material support to terrorist organizations, and in January 2008 he was sentenced to 17 years and four months in prison. “The dirty-bomb plot was simply not credible,” Jack Cloonan says. “The government would never have given up that case if there was any hint of credibility to it. Padilla didn’t stand trial for it, because there was no evidence to support it.”

Here is a statement from Zubaydah himself. Even with the broken English it really makes little sense. You can really tell he is suffering from some kind of brain damage. You cannot convince me he isn't.

On March 27, 2007,at a “Combatant Status-Review Tribunal” at Guantánamo—a military hearing convened to determine whether he should continue to be detained. Everything he said about the details of his treatment was redacted from the unclassified record. But a few relevant remarks remain: “I was nearly before half die plus [because] what they do [to] torture me. There I was not afraid from die because I do believe I will be shahid [martyr], but as God make me as a human and I weak, so they say yes, I say okay, I do I do, but leave me. They say no, we don’t want to. You to admit you do this, we want you to give us more information … they want what’s after more information about more operations, so I can’t. They keep torturing me.”

The tribunal president, a colonel whose name is redacted, asked him: “So I understand that during this treatment, you said things to make them stop and then those statements were actually untrue, is that correct?” Abu Zubaydah replied: “Yes.”
Some of those statements, say two senior intelligence analysts who worked on them at the time, concerned the issue that in the spring of 2002 interested the Bush administration more than almost any other—the supposed operational relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq. Given his true position in the jihadist hierarchy, Abu Zubaydah “would not have known that if it was true,” says Coleman. “But you can lead people down a course and make them say anything.”
Some of what he did say was leaked by the administration: for example, the claim that bin Laden and his ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi were working directly with Saddam Hussein to destabilize the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. There was much more, says the analyst who worked at the Pentagon: “I first saw the reports soon after Abu Zubaydah’s capture. There was a lot of stuff about the nuts and bolts of al-Qaeda’s supposed relationship with the Iraqi Intelligence Service. The intelligence community was lapping this up, and so was the administration, obviously. Abu Zubaydah was saying Iraq and al-Qaeda had an operational relationship. It was everything the administration hoped it would be.”
Within the administration, Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation was “an important chapter,” the second analyst says: overall, his interrogation “product” was deemed to be more significant than the claims made by Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, another al-Qaeda captive, who in early 2002 was tortured in Egypt at the C.I.A.’s behest. After all, Abu Zubaydah was being interviewed by Americans. Like the former Pentagon official, this official had no idea that Abu Zubaydah had been tortured.

This is when the fallout started. People began to realize what had happened and were starting to cover their butts.

One result of Abu Zubaydah’s torture was that the F.B.I.’s assistant director for counterterrorism, Pasquale D’Amuro, persuaded Director Robert Mueller that the bureau should play no part in future C.I.A. interrogations that used extreme techniques forbidden by the F.B.I. The Justice Department’s Glenn Fine indicated in a statement before the U.S. Senate that the main reason was that the agency’s techniques would “not be effective in obtaining accurate information.”

If torture doesn’t work, what does? The evidence suggests that when the Bush administration decided to ignore many of America’s most experienced counterterrorist agents and go for torture in 2001 and 2002, it shut down rich sources of intelligence. In the biggest terrorist case of the 1990s, the bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that killed more than 220 people, the F.B.I.’s Cloonan and his colleagues were able to persuade three of the main conspirators not only to talk to them but also to give prosecution testimony in court. Here Morocco, the U.S. ally where Binyam Mohamed was sent to be tortured in 2002, provided assistance of a very different order. Eighteen months after the attacks, Cloonan traced L’Houssaine Kherchtou, also known as Joe the Moroccan, an al-Qaeda operative who had played a key role, to his hiding place, in Sudan. The Moroccans concocted a story to lure him home, and when he arrived in Rabat he was arrested.

After reports of Abu Zubaydah’s torture, F.B.I. director Robert Mueller agreed that the bureau should play no part in future C.I.A. interrogations that use extreme techniques. Cloonan says, “We all went to a beautiful safe house outside of town, with gazelles bouncing around in the grounds and three solid meals fit for a king each day. We all sat on sofas in a big room—me, Ali Soufan [an F.B.I. colleague], Pat Fitzgerald [the U.S. attorney then in charge of a special counterterrorist section in New York], a C.I.A. guy, and two Moroccan colonels. The Moroccans said he’d never talk. He never shut up for 10 days.” Cloonan had done his homework: “His wife needed money for medical treatment in Khartoum, and al-Qaeda had failed to provide it.” That gave Cloonan his “in.”
The intelligence Kherchtou provided, at a time when U.S. knowledge about al-Qaeda was still perfunctory, was invaluable. “He told us about a lot of things,” says Cloonan. “We learned how they recruited people, their front organizations, how they used NGOs, false passports, what they thought about kidnapping, how they developed targets, did their surveillance, a day in the life of Osama bin Laden, what weapons they used, what vehicles they drove, who was the principal liaison with the Sudanese government, that there was a relationship between al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, how they did their training exercises, their finances, and their membership.”
Finally Fitzgerald offered Kherchtou a deal: if he came to New York, pleaded guilty, and testified against the bombers, Fitzgerald would ask the judge to treat him leniently. At first, it looked as if he was going to turn it down. Then, Cloonan says, “I said, ‘Joe, you understand English, so I’d like you to go out and pray on this with your two Moroccan brothers.’ I thought Fitzy was going to give birth. Joe went out and prayed and came back and said yes.” Kherchtou is now in the federal witness-protection program. Thanks in part to his testimony, four of his onetime associates are serving life.

This next section, David Rose makes a statement which is being now proven wrong, I believe. We are now in the beginnings of the final calculus.

To reach a final calculus of the Bush administration’s use of torture will take years. It will require access to a large body of material that for now remains classified, and the weighing not just of information gained against false or missed leads but of the wider consequences: of the damage done to America’s influence with its friends, and of the encouragement provided to its enemies. Even harder to quantify is the damage done to institutions and their morale, especially the C.I.A.
“We were done a tremendous disservice by the administration,” one official says. “We had no background in this; it’s not something we do. They stuck us with a totally unwelcome job and left us hanging out to dry. I’m worried that the next administration is going to prosecute the guys who got involved, and there won’t be any presidential pardons at the end of it. It would be O.K. if it were John Ashcroft or Alberto Gonzales. But it won’t be. It’ll be some poor G.S.-13 who was just trying to do his job.”

Here the FBI really bemoans the work they had to do running down the false leads the torture produced. While they were doing that, instead of being safer, we were probably less safe. Because their eyes were really off the ball so to speak. Maybe that's why the Anthrax got through, and all the other things, like the D.C. Sniper.. of course, Bush doesn't consider that when he says he kept us safe all those years.

At the F.B.I., says a seasoned counterterrorist agent, following false leads generated through torture has caused waste and exhaustion. “At least 30 percent of the F.B.I.’s time, maybe 50 percent, in counterterrorism has been spent chasing leads that were bullshit. There are ‘lead squads’ in every office trying to filter them. But that’s ineffective, because there’s always that ‘What if?’ syndrome. I remember a claim that there was a plot to poison candy bought in bulk from Costco. You follow it because someone wants to cover himself. It has a chilling effect. You get burned out, you get jaded. And you think, Why am I chasing all this stuff that isn’t true? That leads to a greater problem—that you’ll miss the one that is true. The job is 24-7 anyway. It’s not like a bank job. But torture has made it harder.”

Several of those I interviewed point out the dearth of specific claims the administration has proffered. “The proponents of torture say, ‘Look at the body of information that has been obtained by these methods.’ But if K.S.M. and Abu Zubaydah did give up stuff, we would have heard the details,” says Cloonan. “What we got was pabulum.” A former C.I.A. officer adds: “Why can’t they say what the good stuff from Abu Zubaydah or K.S.M. is? It’s not as if this is sensitive material from a secret, vulnerable source. You’re not blowing your source but validating your program. They say they can’t do this, even though five or six years have passed, because it’s a ‘continuing operation.’ But has it really taken so long to check it all out?”

Officials who analyzed Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation reports say that the reports were afforded the highest value within the Bush administration not because of the many American lives they were going to save but because they could be cited repeatedly against those who doubted the wisdom of ousting Saddam by force.

“We didn’t know he’d been waterboarded and tortured when we did that analysis, and the reports were marked as credible as they could be,” the former Pentagon analyst tells me. “The White House knew he’d been tortured. I didn’t, though I was supposed to be evaluating that intelligence.” To draw conclusions about the importance of what Abu Zubaydah said without knowing this crucial piece of the background nullified the value of his work. “It seems to me they were using torture to achieve a political objective. I cannot believe that the president and vice president did not know who was being waterboarded, and what was being given up.”

One of the most specific claims Bush made in 2006 was that secret black-site C.I.A. interrogations “helped foil a plot to hijack passenger planes and fly them into Heathrow [airport] and London’s Canary Wharf.” Could that be true?

One man who knows is Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard’s Anti-terrorist Branch from the spring of 2002 until May 2008, and as such the U.K.’s chief counterterrorist official, who succeeded in stopping several jihadist attacks that were in advanced stages of planning. Clarke, who has not publicly discussed this issue before, says it is possible that al-Qaeda had considered some project along the lines suggested by Bush, but if so it was nowhere near fruition. “It wasn’t at an advanced stage in the sense that there were people here in the U.K. doing it. If they had been, I’d have arrested them.”

Perhaps the most dangerous of the plots disrupted on Clarke’s watch was through Operation Crevice, the 2004 bust of a gang of seven who had 1.3 tons of homemade explosive material, with which they had intended to blow up targets including a nightclub and a shopping mall. But the lead that led to Crevice came not from torture, Clarke says, but an electronic intercept. He says he can think of only one arrest made by his team that could be said to have been partly the result of C.I.A. interrogations—that of Dhiren Barot, sentenced to life, in 2006, for conspiracy to murder stemming from his plan to attack a range of British targets. But even here, the original lead, reportedly given up by K.S.M., was vague. “All we had was a nom de guerre, Esa al-Hindi, and the claim that he was a serious player and a Brit,” Clarke says. “We had no idea who he was. It took weeks and months of painstaking work to identify and find him.”

In an interview in London in April 2008, I remind F.B.I. director Robert Mueller of the attacks planned against targets on American soil since 9/11 that his agents have disrupted: for example, a plot to kill soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and another to wreak mayhem at army recruiting centers and synagogues in and around Torrance, California. These and other homegrown conspiracies were foiled by regular police work. The F.B.I. learned of the Fort Dix plot from an informant at a local mosque, while the Torrance cell was rounded up when cops probed the backgrounds of two of its members after they allegedly robbed a local gas station.

I ask Mueller: So far as he is aware, have any attacks on America been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through what the administration still calls “enhanced techniques”?

“I’m really reluctant to answer that,” Mueller says. He pauses, looks at an aide, and then says quietly, declining to elaborate: “I don’t believe that has been the case.”

So there you have it.. Finally Robert Mueller says, Even he does't believe there were any threats disrupted. But then we knew that didn't we?

Amazing Mash-up Video from a Right Wingers MySpace..lol

This was on a supposedly Right Wingers MySpace Page..Warning it is a live page, why they haven't taken it down I don't know.. but the link is still working. There are some different things on there... lol To say the least. I didn't see anything really offensive.

I found it funny, he was arrested just before TeaBaggers Day in Oklahoma City, for planning to kill himself and several others.

It was pointed out at Crooks & Liars on their "blog round up" they linked to Wired.com and they were talking about how he had all this hate Obama stuff on his page. I really didn't see that much against Pres. Obama, it was more against Bush. So, I was scrolling down through the vids and I found this one...lol The title is "How to create an angry American". I would say that's correct...lol



It really shows how we were lied to, pandered to, and manipulated over the years of the Bush fiasco. Why did Congress allow this to just keep going on. Why were the Republicans so stupid they couldn't stand up to him as some of the Democratic Party does now to Pres. Obama?

But they didn't. They blindly followed along with everything Bush did and wanted to do all along and for the 8 years, no matter what it was. Now, Pres. Obama comes along and has to fight them because still they are lock step, but against everything he wants to do to fix our country, and our own Democratic Party is fighting and questioning him too.

But that is ok, that is why we have separation of powers, that's why we have Congress and a President. They are supposed to question each other. But for the Republicans to vote against everything just to say NO to Pres. Obama just because they think that's the way to win back Congress and eventually the White House, I think they are fooling themselves.

So, what do you think? Let me hear from you.