The Torture Question

Frontline ran a very detailed story of how secretary of defense Rumsfeld and his jack-booted Gestapo lackey General Geoffrey MillerGitmoized” the interrogations of detainees in Iraq. Their website has great backround, such as “Examining the Paper Trail“, video of Camp Delta, lawyers defending torture with make-believe TV timebomb senarios and many interviews including the groundbreaking story of US Army interrogator Spc. Tony Lagouranis (Ret.) who admits he tortured the hell out of Iraqis and tells us:

“Well hypothermia was a widespread technique. I haven’t heard a lot of people talking about that, and I never saw anything in writing prohibiting it or making it illegal. But almost everyone was using it when they had a chance, when the weather permitted. Or some people, the Navy SEALs, for instance, were using just ice water to lower the body temperature of the prisoner. They would take his rectal temperature to make sure he didn’t die; they would keep him hovering on hypothermia. That was a pretty common technique.

A lot of other, you know, not as common techniques, and certainly not sanctioned, was just beating people or burning them. Not within the prisons, usually. But when the units would go out into people’s homes and do these raids, they would just stay in the house and torture them. Because after the scandal, they couldn’t trust that, you know, the interrogators were going to do “as good a job,” in their words, as they wanted to.”

A couple of bad apples, huh? Oh, well, go ahead and freeze ’em solid, as long as their organs don’t explode.

The entire show is to replay on the Frontline website Wednesday at 12 noon EST.

Oh, yeah, and don’t forget as you read and watch that the DoD eventually admitted to the Red Cross that “70-90 percent” of the Abu Ghraib prisoners were entirely innocent.

Roger L. Simon: Utilitarian Collectivist

In a post called “Collateral Damage,” Roger L. Simon writes

“When you read reports like this, you gasp, even though you know they may be exaggerated or even pure propaganda. But then when you read this, your mind focuses again on the greater reality.”

Yes, the fact that 2.5 years after Bush’s Mayday “Mission Accomplished” speech, Iraq is in such chaos that the USAF is still bombing from the air, and killing 39 civilians – including 18 children, is shocking at first, until one realizes that it’s all for the greater good – er – reality.

We have to keep in mind that the unalienable right to life doesn’t exist for you if you live across water from here, and that yes, somehow, sinking to Saddam’s level makes it all worth while.

Indict Ledeen

Roger L. Simon has a problem with my call for Fitzgerald to indict Michael “P-2” Ledeen as a conspirator in the forging of the Niger uranium documents. He complains in a post called, “Reactionaries on Parade (Left Wing Dvision [sic])”:

“Without any evidence other than a posting on Wikipedia (wow… there’s an unimpeachable source), someone named Scott Horton of the soi-disant Anti-War Blog is calling for the indictment of Michael Ledeen for the Niger yellowcake forgeries. If I were Michael, I’d take this nitwit to court. Were this the UK, I’d bet my house Mr. Horton would be paying for Ledeen’s next vacation in Tahiti. But perhaps the looser US libel laws shield infants like Horton from this kind of action.”

Here is the deal Mr. Simon:

First of all, I am not a leftist. Secondly, the sources for the quotes of former CIA and DIA agent Philip Giraldi were my interviews of him, as indicated in the correctly transcribed entry on the Wikipedia page, and which I provided the mp3 link for. Fourth, I am happy that the US is no longer part of the British Empire.

As far as Ledeen and the Niger uranium forgeries, Giraldi explained in the interviews that the “couple of CIA agents” were paid in foreign accounts and that Fitzgerald had “already found the money trail.” Ledeen’s connections to the Office of Special Plans and Sismi are well documented, he attended a number of meetings in Italy with Harold Rhode, who “practically lived out of (Iranian spy) Ahmad Chalabi’s office,” Manucher Ghorbanifar and guilty Israeli spy Larry Franklin, around the time the Italians began passing on the (already debunked) story back to the US.

As Josh Marshall put it in The Hill:

“[T]he intelligence reports that came in to Washington in late 2001 were from Italian military intelligence, SISMI. The other detail, according to intelligence sources I’ve spoken to, is that those reports turned out to be text transcriptions of Niger forgeries that didn’t surface in Rome until almost a year later…

From the very beginning, American suspicions about a Niger-Iraq trade in uranium were based on what turned out to be the forged documents. And the text transcriptions of those documents came in from Italian intelligence…

Burba, the Italian journalist who eventually brought the forgeries to the U.S. Embassy in Rome, got them from an unnamed Italian “security consultant.” His name turns out to be Rocco Martino, a retired SISMI operative. And as I mentioned last week, last summer, my colleagues and I conducted a series of in-person interviews with him.

It has sometimes been suggested in the Italian press that Martino himself is the forger. But he told us a different story — one that was corroborated by another participant in the handling of the documents. Martino told us that the documents came from a still-serving SISMI colonel, whom he named.”

But where did they originate? Giraldi’s partner, Vincent Cannistraro, Director for Intelligence Programs at the National Security Council under Reagan, has maintained that they were produced in the US and has said, “You’d be very close,” in answer to the question of whether Ledeen forged them.

Combined with what Giraldi had to say, it sure seems like enough to take to a grand jury to me.

Or is it not a crime to lie a country into war?

Another Scripted PR Stunt

The Bush crew has done it again (remember the plastic turkey on Thanksgiving?): (via Think Progress)

Earlier today, President Bush held an “impromptu” public teleconference with a group of U.S. soldiers based in Tikrit, Iraq.

Pentagon communications aide Allison Barber “insisted the questions were not rehearsed. The military had been told ahead of time only about topics the president might want to talk about, not specific questions. ‘We just knew broad themes,’ Barber said.”

Yet reporters could clearly hear White House handlers, including Barber herself, prepping the troops for President Bush’s photo-op:

WH Pooler Geoff Earle of the New York Post writes of the teleconference: “The soldiers, nine U.S. men and one U.S. woman, plus an Iraqi, had been tipped off in advance about the questions in the highly scripted event. Allison Barber, deputy assistant to the Secretary of Defense for internal communication, could be heard asking one soldier before the start of the event, “Who are we going to give that [question] to?”

Read the rest here. Some of the audio in question here.
Update: It turns out the Turkey was real, just not for sharing with the soldiers. And the PR stunt was still pathetic.
Thanks to some jerk for the correction.

So, who’s left on the right?

Boy, the liberventionists sure picked a great time to become conservatives. Howard Fineman at MSNBC says the “conservative coalition” has had it. Wouldn’t that be great? The oddball grouping of fundamentalist crazies, the warfare mercantilists, fiscal conservatives and libertarians was in jeopardy after the fall of Communism when quite a few on the right who had believed William F. Buckley, when he said that the “totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores” was strictly a temporary measure found themselves disappointed.

The imperial rule of Bill “burn and machine gun and call it suicide” Clinton helped keep the structure of the right intact temporarily, but the damage had already been done. George W. Bush and his neoconservative cronies’ “strategic disaster” of a war in Iraq, as former Reagan-era NSA director William Odom has called it, has finished the job.

The neocons, having created the war in Iraq, have now turned on Bush for having it waged, and officially abandoned him:

“Their neo-Wilsonian theory is correct, they insist, but the execution was botched by a Bush team that has turned out to be incompetent, crony-filled, corrupt, unimaginative and weak over a wide range of issues.

The flight of the neocons – just read a recent Weekly Standard to see what I am talking about – is one of only many indications that the long-predicted “conservative crackup” is at hand.”

Fineman is adding the neocons to the religious crazies who are mad about Harriet Myers’ nomination to the Supreme Court, businessmen (presumably from companies other than Halliburton) who are embarrassed by the disastrous handling of Hurricane Katrina, fiscal conservatives worried about funny money, and those he calls “isolationists” (the old smear term against those who advocate political “independence“).

Traditional establishment chessboard types like Zbigniew Brzezinski haven’t liked him since he went to Iraq instead of taking over all of Central Asia.

So who are the 40% of people left supporting George W. Bush and the stupidest foreign policy since McKinley waged aggressive war in the Philippines to Christianize the Catholics?

This seems like a pretty good sample: American government school graduates who think Iran is a continent in the South Pacific.