Republican implosion over torture gulags

An interesting torture story developing today. From publius:

According to Drudge (always a shaky way to start), Frist and Hastert are going to announce an investigation not into our mini-gulag in Eastern Europe, but into the leak of the black sites to the Post.

This is EXACTLY why the Espionage Act should be read in the way that I read it. By roping Libby within its scope, you give the government a perfect weapon to punish all unfavorable reporting on national security issues. Inevitably, people will abuse the power – because that’s what people tend to do. An expansive reading of the Espionage Act will remove a check to corrupt and illegal practices – which is precisely what Frist and Hastert (surely at the direction of others) are trying to do.

Then, here’s digby:
Whole Lotta Love

Wow. CNN is reporting that Trent Lott just said that the Washington Post leak was probably perpetrated by a Republican Senator! Apparently, the gulag was discussed at the Republican-Senator-only meeting last week in which Cheney begged them to back-off the anti-torture policy.

Lott said, “we have met the enemy and he is us.” Man a majority leader scorned is fearsome creature, ain’t he?

I do find it fascinating that Cheney was discussing this Gulag opernly in front of the GOP caucus after they had just recently voted 90-0 for the anti-torture amendment. Seems old Dick is a little slow on the uptake. He didn’t learn a thing from his earlier leaking campaign, did he?

Think Progress has the video.

Related: Fox News: “Why All The Fuss About Torturing People?”

Ledeen Smears Himself

Michael Ledeen is whining about reports that supposedly accuse him of forging the fake Niger documents. There’s just one problem, though: no one that I have read on the subject is making any such accusation. The La Repubblica series by Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d’Avanzo says that Ledeen was the conduit for the forgeries, “stovepiping” them — or their content — from Rome to Washington via the Office of Special Plans — the Pentagon’s parallel intelligence-gathering operation that did an end-run around the CIA.

As for my own contribution to the story, it explicitly states Ledeen was a “conduit” for the report, and that the forging was done by others.

Ledeen, the master of obfuscation, is confusing the issue: but then that’s not too surprising. He’s eager to deny his own reported role in this shameful affair, but it seems distinctly odd that he’s doing so by overstating it — basically accusing himself of crimes no one has fingered him for. He ought to give himself a break — and give us one, too. No one is fooled by this strenuous smoke-blowing. But I can’t help thinking that where there’s so much smoke, there has to be a certain amount of fire …

UPDATE: Several readers have pointed to this bit of “dialogue” between Ledeen and “James Jesus Angleton,” whose shade Ledeen communes with (via ouija board) to set us mortals straight, to correct my contention that Ledeen is “whining” about being tagged as a forger:

“JJA: The ones that say you forged them? I didn’t know your French was
good enough…

“ML: No, no, not those. Anyway hardly anybody said that, mostly they
accused me of schlepping them, not forging them.”

If we remember that Angleton is, after all, quite dead, and that Ledeen’s by-now-tiresome literary device is just that — a device — we are confronted with the curious conundrum of Ledeen smearing himself out of one side of his mouth, and correcting himself out of the other.

Link Roundup

Wonder what the heck is going on in Paris, with all the rioting? Skip the bigots and read lenin.

Micah Holmquist sends us linkage for the NYT bogus intelligence story: “You can read the actual document provided to the New York Times via Carl Levin’s webpage.”

Micah on on WMD, torture and Iraq.
Thanks, Micah!

Oh, and here are the Republican Talking Points on the NYT al-Libi story.

Laura Rozen on how the Republicans plan to spin the outrageous demand for the Phase II intelligence report to be produced, already.

Burning_blair_smallBurning Tony Blair in effigy for Guy Fawkes – Blair_guy_2_1

The Medium Lobster says: “Torture shouldn’t just be the tool of the CIA or even the armed forces. It should be the legal right – no, the duty – of every American citizen.”

Torture Dick.

Roderick Long: Antifascist Before It Was Cool

George and Condi in Argentina

Saddest Riverbend post ever.

The Rad Geek on FBI spying on Americans: “….the Washington Post is shocked! shocked! to discover that the FBI may have abused its undisclosed and unchecked powers.”

Dermot O’Connor on a heretofore untapped source of extra troops for the Iraq occupation.

al-Libi and the Cheney/Bush Torture Regime

Douglas Jehl’s revelations in the New York Times today:

A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.

The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, “was intentionally misleading the debriefers’’ in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons.

The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi’s credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi’s information as “credible’’ evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

And how was this garbage “intelligence” obtained? Well, we already know that al-Libi is practically a poster boy for the Cheney/Bush Torture Regime:
Torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere – Pakistan turns Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a Libyan national, over to US authorities. Libi is believed to have run the Khaldan paramilitary camp in Afghanistan for al-Qaeda. Interrogations start and a debate soon erupts with regard to which methods can be employed. The CIA advocates threatening him with his life and that of his family. [Washington Post, 6/27/2004] The CIA’s actions are, according to Newsweek, facilitated by a February 2002 secret presidential order “authorizing the CIA to establish secret detention facilities outside the US and to use extra harsh interrogation methods” (see After February 7, 2002). [Newsweek, 5/24/2004] Some time after his handover to the US, Al-Libi is rendered to Egypt. According to an ex-FBI official, the CIA “duct-taped his mouth, cinched him up and sent him to Cairo. At the airport the CIA case officer goes up to him and says, ‘You’re going to Cairo, you know. Before you get there I’m going to find your mother and I’m going to f*** her.’ ” [Newsweek, 6/21/2004] Al-Libi is said to provide the US with valuable intelligence including information about an alleged plot to blow up the US Embassy in Yemen with a truck bomb and the location of Abu Zubaida, who will be captured in March 2002 (see March 28, 2002). The FBI has thus far taken the lead in interrogations of terrorist suspects, because its agents are the ones with most experience. The CIA’s success with Al-Libi contributes to the shift of interrogations from the bureau to the CIA. [Washington Post, 6/27/2004] Such methods as making death threats, advocated by the CIA, are opposed by the FBI, which is used to limiting its questioning techniques so the results from interrogations can be used in court. [Washington Post, 6/27/2004] “We don’t believe in coercion,” a senior FBI official says. [The Guardian, 9/13/2004]

Mar del Plata

The argument over whether the various nations of North and South America should be forced together under the auspices of global capitalism or global socialism came to an ugly head today at the Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, Argentina as anti-capitalist provocateurs, of the professional and amateur varieties, decided to do their best to destroy the effective use of peaceful protests against state power.

Originally, there was a peaceful march of tens of thousands in opposition to the terribly misnamed Free Trade Area of the Americas, and the Iraq war. Then, according to the CNN, after Hugo Chavez gave his soccer stadium speech denouncing Bush and the FTAA, the “anarchists” showed up and started smashing windows and setting fires. There was massive rioting throughout the city, and some of the violence even spread to neighboring Uruguay.

How to fight injustice and poverty? Break anything that looks like someone was able to save up for it. Smart.

Here comes another round of letters equating us with them…

It should be to the everlasting shame of all Americans that a Communist demagogue like Chavez has even the slightest bit of credibility in contrast to George W. Bush. It takes a real loser in the role of “leader of the free world” who not only can’t convince people of the benefits of open markets, but instead provokes massive destruction simply by showing up.

Update: Okay, okay, Chavez is a “socialist” not a “communist.” Government is government. Geez.

Update II: “I have been a Maoist since I entered military school.” From the speech “Capitalism is Savagery” by Hugo Chavez.

Update III: Attention Leftists! Before you write me some inchoherent speil about how I am the world’s biggest supporter of American Empire and all its interventions in South America, scroll up and copy to your clipboard the part where I even came near implying any such thing. Even better, read this. Thank you for your careful attention.