http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=79953§ionid=3510302
Nasrallah: The Gaza solution lies in Egypt
Tue, 30 Dec 2008 17:24:00 GMT
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[Source: WAR ON YOU FORUMS
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Neocons, NYT Demand More War, Torture
The neoconservatives are drifting back into the Democratic Party fold from whence they came, attempting to limit the terms of the discourse on foreign and security policy so there will be no surprises from the new administration. Media neocons like Bill Kristol and David Brooks are jumping on the Hillary bandwagon, convinced that she will, if anything, prove to be more hawkish than her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice.
The mainstream media is also doing its bit. The New York Times leads the way in stifling any real debate, recently featuring on its opinion pages a "Transitions" series that incorporates the views of designated "experts." The choice of contributors, including Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, and Peter Bergen, has guaranteed a consensus that America's use of its military might in the international arena is a force for good. One piece, titled "Let Russia Stop Iran," was written by three Israelis who are members of the Institute for International Security Studies, a think-tank in Tel Aviv dedicated to Israeli security.
Notable among the contributors are two leading neocons, Danielle Pletka and Reuel Marc Gerecht, both of whom support torture and war with Iran. Pletka is vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and Gerecht is currently a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a think-tank that focuses heavily on Israeli security. Gerecht was also at AEI but recently lost his sinecure in a purge that reportedly was initiated by Pletka. Michael Ledeen also was removed and wound up with Gerecht at FDD, and Joshua Muravchik is also reported to be leaving AEI.
Pletka is Australian born and is reported to be a close associate of Martin Indyk, also an Australian by birth, who became U.S. ambassador to Israel under Bill Clinton. She was educated in the United States, worked in Israel and the U.S. as a journalist, and eventually found a niche on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where she served as a staffer. AEI regards her as an expert on the Middle East, though there is no evidence in her official bio that she speaks either Farsi or Arabic.
Pletka's "The Syrian Strategy" might be described as predictable in that it dismisses diplomatic attempts to improve relations with Syria, which would, inter alia, divide it from Iran and potentially remake the status quo in the Middle East. Per Pletka, Syria has been "funneling killers into Iraq to oppose coalition forces, assassinating its opponents in Lebanon, arming Hezbollah to attack Israel, and starting a nuclear weapons program with help from North Korea," all of which are assertions that intentionally narrow the terms of the discourse but are debatable or even manifestly false.
Pletka reasons that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad "can maintain his grip on power only as long as he is seen as a vital instrument of Israel's defeat," and she rejects those who believe that Syria actually wants to become a "normal" state, asserting that it wishes to remain a pariah. For Pletka, it's all about Israel, but not surprisingly she provides no evidence to support her claims about Damascus. Nor does she appear to have an answer to the challenge posed by Syria apart from unrelenting hostility, a simplistic solution to a complex problem that is completely divorced from reality. Her viewpoint would appear to be undermined by the Israelis themselves, who are talking to the Syrians in Turkey.
Gerecht is a more interesting character altogether. A student of Bernard Lewis, he believes that the only thing that Muslims truly understand is the mailed fist. He has said that Iranians have "terrorism in their DNA," and he advocates negotiating with Iran only as a prelude to bombing. He currently resides in Prague, where his wife, Diane Zeleny, is director of communications for Radio Free Europe, a position she was given after being on the receiving end of a grievance filed by the American Foreign Service Association in 2006 when she broke every rule in State Department assignments to obtain a godfathered appointment to head a media response center in Brussels. Zeleny was allegedly a favorite of the redoubtable Karen Hughes, the self-styled soccer mom turned public diplomacy czarina whose gaffe-filled "listening tours" to the Muslim world were amusingly described in the world media. Gerecht has been involved in trying to establish a neocon beachhead in Europe based in Prague, an effort that has produced several security conferences featuring celebrities such as Richard Perle.
Pletka approves of the torture of terrorist suspects, but Gerecht, as a former intelligence officer, has made a study of the practice and is heavily into its benefits. Like many neocons, he is fond of the therapeutic effects of institutionalized violence but has never served in the military, preferring to leave the dirty work to others. Unlike many of his neocon colleagues, Gerecht does speak Farsi and has some actual understanding of what is going on in the Middle East, though with the usual Likudist lean in terms of how he interprets developments.
It is astonishing that the New York Times would even print a piece advocating torture, but the article is just one more indication of the access that the neocons have to the nation's editorial pages. Gerecht's "Out of Sight" argues that Barack Obama will undoubtedly recognize the utility of rendition, in which terrorism suspects are sent to their home countries to be interrogated, i.e., tortured. He sets his stage carefully, raising the specter of "the slaughter of civilians by Islamic holy warriors" and then posing a choice "between non-deniable aggressive questioning conducted by Americans and deniable torturous interrogations by foreigners acting on behalf of the United States." He dismisses the third option of non-coercive questioning of suspects, citing the imaginary, Jack Bauer-esque "ticking time bomb" scenario in which a terrorist has information that can stop an attack and "save thousands of civilians." Gerecht concludes by rejecting calls to close Guantanamo, because it would release an apparent horde of "enemy combatants" prepared to wreak havoc worldwide.
Curiously enough, in 2005 Gerecht was opposed to rendition. He claimed in the Weekly Standard that torture is a useful interrogation tool, similar to his current position, and he also cited the ticking-bomb fantasy, but he insisted that the abuse be carried out by American interrogators rather than foreigners. His preference was partly derived from his view that foreigners are intrinsically unreliable, but it was also shaped by his belief that the CIA should not be relinquishing control over potential sources of intelligence, or as Gerecht puts it, "willfully diminishing the flow of reliable information."
The principal flaw in Gerecht's argument, if one might dignify it by calling it an argument, is that rendition and torture both are fallible processes that lack any mechanism to protect the innocent. Fear of arbitrary action by government is why America's founders created a constitution that enshrined individual rights and liberties and why most Americans demand a rule of law with inbuilt safeguards, even for suspected terrorists. That Bush and Cheney have managed to pervert the system and get away with it, a development that both Gerecht and Pletka applaud, does not change the fundamental moral and legal issues.
Nor is there any actual evidence that torture has ever saved anyone's life, much less "thousands of innocents." And it has not made the United States any safer. Washington's torture of Muslims has created more enemies than friends around the world. "Enhanced interrogation" can also lead to other abuses, including the mistreatment of American soldiers who are captured by militants who themselves have been tortured. Selective use of torture lowers the bar for everyone. Torture is disgraceful for the government and country that order it, and it dehumanizes the CIA officers called upon to do it.
Professional interrogators know that most people subjected to torture will say anything to stop the pain, meaning that the information obtained under duress just might not be reliable. The process whereby one arrives in the torture chamber is also questionable. It is not known how many of the hundreds of people rendered to other countries for torture were actually terrorists. There are several well-documented cases of errors being made, and it has been suggested that very few renditions were justified, even if one accepts the perverted logic that established the rendition and torture programs in the first place. One might also question Gerecht's presumption of the guilt of the prisoners at Guantanamo. He assumes they are terrorists to justify keeping the offshore prison, but there is considerable evidence that many of the inmates were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Ethically and legally there is also a long tradition of rejecting torture, which Gerecht and Pletka ignore in spite of the oft-repeated neocon insistence that policy be guided by "moral clarity." German and Japanese officers were executed after the Second World War for torturing prisoners, and the principle was firmly established that torture, including waterboarding, is a war crime. The U.S. is signatory to the UN's anti-torture convention. But then again, Nuremberg also determined a war of aggression to be the ultimate war crime, and since both Gerecht and Pletka embraced the invasion of Iraq and welcome yet another preemptive war against Iran, one presumes that they consider themselves to be above any conventional moral or legal restraint.
Gerecht and Pletka, both of whom are inordinately fond of Israel, should also note that the Israeli Supreme Court has banned torture, and the Shin Bet security service has discovered that interrogating prisoners without coercion actually produces more and better intelligence. Many American interrogation experts would agree based on their own experience. The most pathetic thing about neocons like Pletka and Gerecht is that they frame imposing arguments to sustain a worldview in which suffering inflicted on innocent people becomes an abstraction, like a model in a political science class, completely respectable and devoid of consequences. One suspects that they can embrace torture because they know it won't happen to them or to their friends hunkering down at their desks at AEI and FDD. Only some hapless Arab or Afghan will get the chop, and what does it matter if he's innocent?
The mainstream media is also doing its bit. The New York Times leads the way in stifling any real debate, recently featuring on its opinion pages a "Transitions" series that incorporates the views of designated "experts." The choice of contributors, including Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, and Peter Bergen, has guaranteed a consensus that America's use of its military might in the international arena is a force for good. One piece, titled "Let Russia Stop Iran," was written by three Israelis who are members of the Institute for International Security Studies, a think-tank in Tel Aviv dedicated to Israeli security.
Notable among the contributors are two leading neocons, Danielle Pletka and Reuel Marc Gerecht, both of whom support torture and war with Iran. Pletka is vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and Gerecht is currently a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a think-tank that focuses heavily on Israeli security. Gerecht was also at AEI but recently lost his sinecure in a purge that reportedly was initiated by Pletka. Michael Ledeen also was removed and wound up with Gerecht at FDD, and Joshua Muravchik is also reported to be leaving AEI.
Pletka is Australian born and is reported to be a close associate of Martin Indyk, also an Australian by birth, who became U.S. ambassador to Israel under Bill Clinton. She was educated in the United States, worked in Israel and the U.S. as a journalist, and eventually found a niche on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where she served as a staffer. AEI regards her as an expert on the Middle East, though there is no evidence in her official bio that she speaks either Farsi or Arabic.
Pletka's "The Syrian Strategy" might be described as predictable in that it dismisses diplomatic attempts to improve relations with Syria, which would, inter alia, divide it from Iran and potentially remake the status quo in the Middle East. Per Pletka, Syria has been "funneling killers into Iraq to oppose coalition forces, assassinating its opponents in Lebanon, arming Hezbollah to attack Israel, and starting a nuclear weapons program with help from North Korea," all of which are assertions that intentionally narrow the terms of the discourse but are debatable or even manifestly false.
Pletka reasons that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad "can maintain his grip on power only as long as he is seen as a vital instrument of Israel's defeat," and she rejects those who believe that Syria actually wants to become a "normal" state, asserting that it wishes to remain a pariah. For Pletka, it's all about Israel, but not surprisingly she provides no evidence to support her claims about Damascus. Nor does she appear to have an answer to the challenge posed by Syria apart from unrelenting hostility, a simplistic solution to a complex problem that is completely divorced from reality. Her viewpoint would appear to be undermined by the Israelis themselves, who are talking to the Syrians in Turkey.
Gerecht is a more interesting character altogether. A student of Bernard Lewis, he believes that the only thing that Muslims truly understand is the mailed fist. He has said that Iranians have "terrorism in their DNA," and he advocates negotiating with Iran only as a prelude to bombing. He currently resides in Prague, where his wife, Diane Zeleny, is director of communications for Radio Free Europe, a position she was given after being on the receiving end of a grievance filed by the American Foreign Service Association in 2006 when she broke every rule in State Department assignments to obtain a godfathered appointment to head a media response center in Brussels. Zeleny was allegedly a favorite of the redoubtable Karen Hughes, the self-styled soccer mom turned public diplomacy czarina whose gaffe-filled "listening tours" to the Muslim world were amusingly described in the world media. Gerecht has been involved in trying to establish a neocon beachhead in Europe based in Prague, an effort that has produced several security conferences featuring celebrities such as Richard Perle.
Pletka approves of the torture of terrorist suspects, but Gerecht, as a former intelligence officer, has made a study of the practice and is heavily into its benefits. Like many neocons, he is fond of the therapeutic effects of institutionalized violence but has never served in the military, preferring to leave the dirty work to others. Unlike many of his neocon colleagues, Gerecht does speak Farsi and has some actual understanding of what is going on in the Middle East, though with the usual Likudist lean in terms of how he interprets developments.
It is astonishing that the New York Times would even print a piece advocating torture, but the article is just one more indication of the access that the neocons have to the nation's editorial pages. Gerecht's "Out of Sight" argues that Barack Obama will undoubtedly recognize the utility of rendition, in which terrorism suspects are sent to their home countries to be interrogated, i.e., tortured. He sets his stage carefully, raising the specter of "the slaughter of civilians by Islamic holy warriors" and then posing a choice "between non-deniable aggressive questioning conducted by Americans and deniable torturous interrogations by foreigners acting on behalf of the United States." He dismisses the third option of non-coercive questioning of suspects, citing the imaginary, Jack Bauer-esque "ticking time bomb" scenario in which a terrorist has information that can stop an attack and "save thousands of civilians." Gerecht concludes by rejecting calls to close Guantanamo, because it would release an apparent horde of "enemy combatants" prepared to wreak havoc worldwide.
Curiously enough, in 2005 Gerecht was opposed to rendition. He claimed in the Weekly Standard that torture is a useful interrogation tool, similar to his current position, and he also cited the ticking-bomb fantasy, but he insisted that the abuse be carried out by American interrogators rather than foreigners. His preference was partly derived from his view that foreigners are intrinsically unreliable, but it was also shaped by his belief that the CIA should not be relinquishing control over potential sources of intelligence, or as Gerecht puts it, "willfully diminishing the flow of reliable information."
The principal flaw in Gerecht's argument, if one might dignify it by calling it an argument, is that rendition and torture both are fallible processes that lack any mechanism to protect the innocent. Fear of arbitrary action by government is why America's founders created a constitution that enshrined individual rights and liberties and why most Americans demand a rule of law with inbuilt safeguards, even for suspected terrorists. That Bush and Cheney have managed to pervert the system and get away with it, a development that both Gerecht and Pletka applaud, does not change the fundamental moral and legal issues.
Nor is there any actual evidence that torture has ever saved anyone's life, much less "thousands of innocents." And it has not made the United States any safer. Washington's torture of Muslims has created more enemies than friends around the world. "Enhanced interrogation" can also lead to other abuses, including the mistreatment of American soldiers who are captured by militants who themselves have been tortured. Selective use of torture lowers the bar for everyone. Torture is disgraceful for the government and country that order it, and it dehumanizes the CIA officers called upon to do it.
Professional interrogators know that most people subjected to torture will say anything to stop the pain, meaning that the information obtained under duress just might not be reliable. The process whereby one arrives in the torture chamber is also questionable. It is not known how many of the hundreds of people rendered to other countries for torture were actually terrorists. There are several well-documented cases of errors being made, and it has been suggested that very few renditions were justified, even if one accepts the perverted logic that established the rendition and torture programs in the first place. One might also question Gerecht's presumption of the guilt of the prisoners at Guantanamo. He assumes they are terrorists to justify keeping the offshore prison, but there is considerable evidence that many of the inmates were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Ethically and legally there is also a long tradition of rejecting torture, which Gerecht and Pletka ignore in spite of the oft-repeated neocon insistence that policy be guided by "moral clarity." German and Japanese officers were executed after the Second World War for torturing prisoners, and the principle was firmly established that torture, including waterboarding, is a war crime. The U.S. is signatory to the UN's anti-torture convention. But then again, Nuremberg also determined a war of aggression to be the ultimate war crime, and since both Gerecht and Pletka embraced the invasion of Iraq and welcome yet another preemptive war against Iran, one presumes that they consider themselves to be above any conventional moral or legal restraint.
Gerecht and Pletka, both of whom are inordinately fond of Israel, should also note that the Israeli Supreme Court has banned torture, and the Shin Bet security service has discovered that interrogating prisoners without coercion actually produces more and better intelligence. Many American interrogation experts would agree based on their own experience. The most pathetic thing about neocons like Pletka and Gerecht is that they frame imposing arguments to sustain a worldview in which suffering inflicted on innocent people becomes an abstraction, like a model in a political science class, completely respectable and devoid of consequences. One suspects that they can embrace torture because they know it won't happen to them or to their friends hunkering down at their desks at AEI and FDD. Only some hapless Arab or Afghan will get the chop, and what does it matter if he's innocent?
Somalia: The Forgotten Front of the War on Terror
Excerpt: The Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG), which was never applicable to most Somalis, is close to losing the few blocks in Mogadishu that it still controls, and the radical Islamists who go by the name al-Shabaab are on the verge of taking control of the parts of Somalia that haven't already seceded.
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[Source: AntiWar.com
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[Source: AntiWar.com
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Waterboarding Master Cheney
Author's note: The statements Cheney made this week during an interview with the Washington Times about his role in approving the waterboarding of three Guantanamo detainees and the so-called "enhanced interrogation" of 33 prisoners was, disturbingly, not covered at all by the mainstream media.
Also published at my web magazine, The Public Record.
Vice President Dick Cheney, in another stunning admission during his campaign to burnish the Bush administration’s legacy, said he personally authorized the “enhanced interrogations” of 33 suspected terrorist detainees and approved the waterboarding of three so-called “high-value” prisoners.
“I signed off on it; others did, as well, too,” Cheney said about the waterboarding, a practice of simulated drowning done by strapping a person to a board, covering the face with a cloth and then pouring water over it, a torture technique dating back at least to the Spanish Inquisition. The victim feels as if he is drowning.
Cheney identified the three waterboarded detainees as al-Qaeda figures Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheik Mohammed and al Nashiri. “That's it, those three guys,” Cheney said in an interview with the right-wing Washington Times.
Other detainees at secret CIA prisons and at Guantanamo Bay were subjected to harsh treatment, including being stripped naked, forced into painful stress positions, placed in extremes of heat or cold and prevented from sleeping – actions that international human rights organizations, and previously the U.S. government, have denounced as torture and illegal abuse.
“I thought that it was absolutely the right thing to do,” Cheney said of what he called the “enhanced interrogation” of the detainees. “I thought the [administration’s] legal opinions that were rendered [endorsing the harsh treatment] were sound. I think the techniques were reasonable in terms of what they [the CIA interrogators] were asking to be able to do. And I think it produced the desired result.”
Cheney also took issue with the notion that waterboarding was torture.
“Was it torture? I don't believe it was torture,” Cheney said. “The CIA handled itself, I think, very appropriately. They came to us in the administration, talked to me, talked to others in the administration, about what they felt they needed to do in order to obtain the intelligence that we believe these people were in possession of.”
Other experts, including some military and intelligence interrogators, have disputed Cheney’s claims of success in extracting reliable information through waterboarding and other harsh techniques. Much of the confessed information turned out to be dubious or incorrect.
The First Case
Zubaydah was the first “war on terror” detainee to be subjected to the Bush administration’s waterboarding, according to Pentagon and Justice Department documents, news reports and several books written about the Bush administration’s interrogation methods.
However, according to author Ron Suskind who interviewed CIA and other insiders, Abu Zubaydah was not the "high-value detainee" that the Bush administration had claimed. Rather, Zubaydah was a minor player in the al-Qaeda organization, handling travel for associates and their families, Suskind wrote in his book The One Percent Doctrine.
Nevertheless, Suskind said President George W. Bush became obsessed with Zubaydah and the information he might have about pending terrorist plots against the United States.
"Bush was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind wrote. Bush questioned one CIA briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?"
Abu Zubaydah's captors soon discovered that their prisoner was mentally ill and knew nothing about terrorist operations or impending plots. That realization was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind wrote.
But Bush did not want to "lose face" because he had stated Zubaydah’s importance publicly, according to Suskind.
WARONYOU
Also published at my web magazine, The Public Record.
Vice President Dick Cheney, in another stunning admission during his campaign to burnish the Bush administration’s legacy, said he personally authorized the “enhanced interrogations” of 33 suspected terrorist detainees and approved the waterboarding of three so-called “high-value” prisoners.
“I signed off on it; others did, as well, too,” Cheney said about the waterboarding, a practice of simulated drowning done by strapping a person to a board, covering the face with a cloth and then pouring water over it, a torture technique dating back at least to the Spanish Inquisition. The victim feels as if he is drowning.
Cheney identified the three waterboarded detainees as al-Qaeda figures Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheik Mohammed and al Nashiri. “That's it, those three guys,” Cheney said in an interview with the right-wing Washington Times.
Other detainees at secret CIA prisons and at Guantanamo Bay were subjected to harsh treatment, including being stripped naked, forced into painful stress positions, placed in extremes of heat or cold and prevented from sleeping – actions that international human rights organizations, and previously the U.S. government, have denounced as torture and illegal abuse.
“I thought that it was absolutely the right thing to do,” Cheney said of what he called the “enhanced interrogation” of the detainees. “I thought the [administration’s] legal opinions that were rendered [endorsing the harsh treatment] were sound. I think the techniques were reasonable in terms of what they [the CIA interrogators] were asking to be able to do. And I think it produced the desired result.”
Cheney also took issue with the notion that waterboarding was torture.
“Was it torture? I don't believe it was torture,” Cheney said. “The CIA handled itself, I think, very appropriately. They came to us in the administration, talked to me, talked to others in the administration, about what they felt they needed to do in order to obtain the intelligence that we believe these people were in possession of.”
Other experts, including some military and intelligence interrogators, have disputed Cheney’s claims of success in extracting reliable information through waterboarding and other harsh techniques. Much of the confessed information turned out to be dubious or incorrect.
The First Case
Zubaydah was the first “war on terror” detainee to be subjected to the Bush administration’s waterboarding, according to Pentagon and Justice Department documents, news reports and several books written about the Bush administration’s interrogation methods.
However, according to author Ron Suskind who interviewed CIA and other insiders, Abu Zubaydah was not the "high-value detainee" that the Bush administration had claimed. Rather, Zubaydah was a minor player in the al-Qaeda organization, handling travel for associates and their families, Suskind wrote in his book The One Percent Doctrine.
Nevertheless, Suskind said President George W. Bush became obsessed with Zubaydah and the information he might have about pending terrorist plots against the United States.
"Bush was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind wrote. Bush questioned one CIA briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?"
Abu Zubaydah's captors soon discovered that their prisoner was mentally ill and knew nothing about terrorist operations or impending plots. That realization was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind wrote.
But Bush did not want to "lose face" because he had stated Zubaydah’s importance publicly, according to Suskind.
WARONYOU
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
The Darkness And The Power
Jim Kirwan12-20-8The Dictator announced his relief-package for the Big Three yesterday: The media is calling it “a Christmas-gift.” This is a LOAN-agreement: Gift’s do not come wrapped in razor wire. This too-little-too-late proposal is meant to bring an end to the problem of having to pay anyone, for whatever they do on-the-job in the United [...]
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[Source: War On You
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[Source: War On You
Friday, December 19, 2008
Israelis Continue to Abuse Palestinian Prisoners
Excerpt: RAMALLAH -- Israel released over 200 Palestinians from Israeli jails in a "goodwill gesture" Monday. This followed the Muslim feast of Eid Al-Adha and was an attempt to boost the waning popularity of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
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[Source: AntiWar.com
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[Source: AntiWar.com
The Wholesale Sedation of Americas Youth
In 1950, approximately 7,500 children in the United States were diagnosed with mental disorders. That number is at least eight million today, and most receive some form of medication.Is this progress or child abuse?ANDREW M. WEISSAndrew Weiss holds a PhD in school-clinical psychology from Hofstra University. He served on the faculty of Iona College and [...]
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[Source: War On You
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[Source: War On You
Obama's War
Excerpt: Just two months after the twin towers fell, the armies of the Northern Alliance marched into Kabul. The Taliban fled.The triumph was total in the "splendid little war" that had cost one U.S. casualty. Or so it seemed. Yet, last month, the war against the Taliban entered its eighth year, the second longest war in our history, and America and NATO have never been nearer to strategic defeat.
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[Source: AntiWar.com
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[Source: AntiWar.com
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
GM Files: Horrifying New Disease Contains Identical Material to GM Food
Just in case you thought it was fine to eat Genetically Modified foods (better identified as FrankenFoods), along comes a study which makes it clear that you are eating this make believe non-food at your own peril and, worse yet, you are feeding it ...
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[Source: Ron Paul forum
Monday, December 15, 2008
Dollar Staggers as U.S. Unleashes Cash Flood, Deficit
The biggest foreign-exchange strategists and investors say the best may be over for the dollar after a four-month, 24 percent rally.
The currency weakened 5.9 percent measured by the trade- weighted Dollar Index after strengthening between July and November as investors bought the greenback to flee riskier assets and repay dollar-denominated loans from lenders reining in credit. Ever since peaking on Nov. 21, the dollar fell against all 16 of the most-widely traded currencies, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
U.S. policy makers are flooding the world with an extra $8.5 trillion through 23 different plans designed to bail out the financial system and pump up the economy. The decline shows that the increased supply of money may be overwhelming investors just as the government steps up debt sales, the trade and budget deficits grow and de-leveraging by investors slows.
“The dollar will go to new lows as the U.S. attacks its currency,” said John Taylor, chairman of New York-based FX Concepts Inc., which manages about $14.5 billion of currencies.
Citigroup Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., BNP Paribas SA and Bank of America Corp. predict further weakness. Last week was the first time in almost a month that consensus estimates for the dollar against the euro through 2009 fell, according to the median forecast of 47 strategists surveyed by Bloomberg.
Taylor, whose firm manages the biggest hedge fund focusing on foreign exchange, said while the dollar may strengthen next year, it will fall to a record low against the euro in 2010 and to a 13-year low of 80 per yen as soon as 2009.
The dollar fell to 90.68 yen as of 2:11 p.m. in New York from 91.21 on Dec. 12. It declined to $1.3678 per euro and traded at $1.3703, its weakest in two months, from $1.3369. ...
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[Source: WAR ON YOU FORUMS
The currency weakened 5.9 percent measured by the trade- weighted Dollar Index after strengthening between July and November as investors bought the greenback to flee riskier assets and repay dollar-denominated loans from lenders reining in credit. Ever since peaking on Nov. 21, the dollar fell against all 16 of the most-widely traded currencies, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
U.S. policy makers are flooding the world with an extra $8.5 trillion through 23 different plans designed to bail out the financial system and pump up the economy. The decline shows that the increased supply of money may be overwhelming investors just as the government steps up debt sales, the trade and budget deficits grow and de-leveraging by investors slows.
“The dollar will go to new lows as the U.S. attacks its currency,” said John Taylor, chairman of New York-based FX Concepts Inc., which manages about $14.5 billion of currencies.
Citigroup Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., BNP Paribas SA and Bank of America Corp. predict further weakness. Last week was the first time in almost a month that consensus estimates for the dollar against the euro through 2009 fell, according to the median forecast of 47 strategists surveyed by Bloomberg.
Taylor, whose firm manages the biggest hedge fund focusing on foreign exchange, said while the dollar may strengthen next year, it will fall to a record low against the euro in 2010 and to a 13-year low of 80 per yen as soon as 2009.
The dollar fell to 90.68 yen as of 2:11 p.m. in New York from 91.21 on Dec. 12. It declined to $1.3678 per euro and traded at $1.3703, its weakest in two months, from $1.3369. ...
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[Source: WAR ON YOU FORUMS
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Thursday: 58 Iraqis Killed, 120 Wounded
Excerpt: Updated at 10:32 p.m. EST, Dec. 11, 2008Near Kirkuk, at least 58 Iraqis were killed and another 120 were wounded in the last hours of Eid observances. Although reporters have been observing the Eid, this blast was too significant to ignore. No other deaths Iraqi and otherwise were reported. Meanwhile, Ali al-Dabbagh, spokesman for the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, said that Iraq could require the presence of U.S. troops for another 10 years. Also, a U.S. general noted that the use of EFPs are down and suggested that that a shift in strategy among Iranian leaders is behind it.
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[Source: AntiWar.com
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[Source: AntiWar.com
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Pro-Govt Fighters, Under Attack by Taliban, 'Betrayed' by Kabul
Excerpt: PESHAWAR -- The past two months has seen an upsurge in violence unleashed by Pakistani Taliban in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the adjacent tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.
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Will Obama Buy Torture-Lite?
You've got to hand it to them. Torture aficionados at the White House and CIA have conned key congressional leaders into insisting not only that torture-lite would be a swell idea, but advocating that the overseers of torture be kept on.
From change-you-can-believe-in, we seem to be slipping back to fear-you-can-trade-on.
Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has publicly warned those in charge of the administration transition that "continuity is going to be pivotal in keeping us safe and secure."
Thus, he argues, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and CIA Director Michael Hayden should stay in their posts.
If that were not enough, Reyes told Congress Daily's Chris Strohm that he [Reyes] had advised the Obama team that some parts of what Strohm referred to as "CIA's controversial alternative interrogation program" should be allowed to continue.
Using some of the same euphemisms and circumlocutions employed by the ersatz-lawyers hired by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, Reyes fired this shot across the bow of Barack Obama's transition ship:
"It gets back to a world that is very dangerous. … There are some options that need to be available. … We don't want to be known for torturing people. At the same time, we don't want to limit our ability to get information that's vital and critical to our national security. That's where the new administration is going to have to decide what those parameters are, what those limitations are."
Background
Someone needs to tell Reyes what those parameters – what those limitations – should be. They are set by the Geneva Accords and the US War Crimes Act of 1996. Those are the laws that President Bush's overly clever lawyers told him he could safely – well, pretty safely – disregard, because of the "new paradigm" post 9/11.
Pretty safely? Even those Mafia-type lawyers felt it necessary to warn their clients that Section 2441 of the US War Crimes Act, passed by a Republican-led Congress in 1996, could conceivably come back to haunt the president and others who approved of or took part in torture. This is the best they could do by way of offering reassurance:
"It is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441. Your determination [that Geneva does not apply to al-Qaeda and Taliban] would create a reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution."
If that sounds like the kind of advice one would expect to get from lawyers for the Mob, that's because it is.
The casuistry virtually drips from a Jan. 25, 2002, memorandum for the President drafted by then-counsel to the Vice President, David Addington, and signed by then-counsel to the President, Alberto Gonzales. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell objected for a day or so but then saluted sharply, as is his wont.
As will be seen below, the lawyers' advice did come back to haunt the President, putting him in a real sweat until he got Congress to grant him retroactive immunity.
To say President Bush was dumb to take their dubious advice is not the half of it. Really dumb was his decision to put it in writing, since the goons uncovered by CIA Director George Tenet and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were not about to torture without a signed authorization from the President.
Bush decided to go ahead on the basis of the Addington/Gonzales opinion and signed a presidential memorandum on Feb. 7, 2002, incorporating the advice. The opinion is written verbatim, twice, into that short executive memorandum.
Over the President's large black felt-tip signature appears convoluted text depicting, despite itself, a circle that refuses to be squared. Bush orders that detainees be treated "humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva."
That was the official start of post-9/11 torture authorized from the top, although an American, John Walker Lindh, was the first to be actually tortured after being captured on Nov. 25, 2001, during the US invasion of Afghanistan – when senior Justice Department officials deliberately chose not to prevent it.
In the wake of the smoking-gun presidential memorandum of Feb. 7, 2002, subsequent memos by the administration's Mob lawyers were mostly ex post facto attempts at CYA.
Shame
What incalculable shame this has brought on the US Army and the Central Intelligence Agency, in both of which I was privileged to serve. I am hardly the first to use a Mafia analogy.
Consider the case of Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who was the first to investigate the Abu Ghraib prison abuse – the most glaring result of the President's memo and Rumsfeld's implementing instructions.
"Make sure this happens!" in Rumsfeld's handwriting appeared on a memo over Rumsfeld's signature that was prominently posted at Abu Ghraib.
Taguba issued a tough report, which was then leaked to the press – and thus was largely responsible for preventing the scandal from being swept entirely under the rug. Rather than thank Taguba for upholding the honor of the US military, the Bush administration singled him out for ridicule, retribution and forced retirement.
Taguba told Seymour Hersh of a chilling conversation he had with Gen. John Abizaid, then head of Central Command, a few weeks after Taguba's report became public in 2004. Sitting in the back of Abizaid's Mercedes sedan in Kuwait, Abizaid quietly told Taguba, "You and your report will be investigated."
"I'd been in the Army 32 years by then," Taguba told Hersh, "and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia."
Getting Squared Away
The Army, to its credit, was able to push brownnosers like Abizaid off to the margins and, more important, to keep Mob lawyers out of the process of updating the Army Field Manual for interrogation.
Such was not the case at CIA, where Mob lawyers continued to prosper – including the one who offered interrogators the following basic guidance: "If the victim dies, you're doing it wrong."
I like to think that our nation's decisions are not totally bereft of moral considerations, and that a majority of Americans would agree that torture – like rape or slavery – is intrinsically evil.
But torture is also intrinsically dumb. And an Army general with guts said precisely that on the very day President Bush was extolling the merits of "alternative sets of procedures" for interrogation.
Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, a career intelligence officer and expert in interrogations, minced no words in describing the new Army Field Manual (FM 2-22.3, Human Intelligence Collection Operations).
He stressed that it is "consistent with the requirements of law, the Detainee Treatment Act, and the Geneva Conventions, and that it was endorsed by the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Director of National Intelligence. The DNI, Kimmons said, "coordinated laterally with the CIA."
Doesn't take a crackerjack intelligence analyst to figure out why the CIA would not "endorse" it.
As a former Army intelligence officer, who had to commit the previous interrogation field manual virtually to memory, I was particularly proud that Kimmons had the guts to seize the bull by the horns:
Conceding past "transgressions and mistakes," Kimmons insisted: "No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.
"Moreover, any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress through the use of abusive techniques would be of questionable credibility. And additionally, it would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used. And we can't go there.
"Some of our most significant successes on the battlefield have been – in fact, I would say all of them, almost categorically all of them have accrued from expert interrogators using mixtures of authorized, humane interrogation practices in clever ways that you would hope Americans would use them, to push the envelope within the bookends of the legal, moral, and ethical – now as further defined by this field manual. So we don't need abusive practices in there. Nothing good will come from them."
No Torture Commandments
Kimmons emphasized that the new manual is written in "straightforward language for use by soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines; it is not written for lawyers." He explained that the field manual explicitly prohibits torture or cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment or punishment.
Among the specific prohibitions were:
-Interrogators may not force a detainee to be naked, perform sexual acts or pose in a sexual manner;
-They cannot use hoods or place sacks over a detainee's head or use duct tape over his eyes;
-They cannot beat or electrically shock or burn them or inflict other forms of physical pain – any form of physical pain;
-They may not use water boarding, hypothermia, or treatment which will lead to heat injury;
-They will not perform mock executions;
-They may not deprive detainees of the necessary food, water, and medical care; and
-They may not use dogs in any aspect of interrogation.
Meanwhile, just across the Potomac at the White House an hour later that same day (Sept. 6, 2006), President Bush devoted half of a long speech to cops-and-robbers examples, none of them confirmed or persuasive, showing how "tough" interrogation techniques – he called them "an alternative set of procedures" – had yielded information preventing all manner of catastrophe.
He made clear that his government had "changed its policies," giving intelligence personnel "the tools they need" to fight terrorists, and that he wanted the "CIA program" to continue.
Bush appealed for and, just before Congress changed hands in November 2006, got legislation granting retroactive immunity to him and other practitioners of "alternative" procedures.
Several months earlier, on June 29, 2006, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the US Supreme Court had ruled that Geneva DOES apply to al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees, and rejected the artifice of "unitary executive power" used by the Bush administration to "justify" practices like torture.
One senior Bush official is reported to have gone quite pale when Justice Anthony M. Kennedy raised the ante, warning that "violations of Common Article 3 [of Geneva] are considered ‘war crimes.'"
That threw a scare into a whole bunch of what one might call "unitary executives," prompting the President on Sept. 6, 2006, to ask Congress to give "top priority" to new legislation holding them harmless for violation of Geneva, which they got a couple of months later.
Back to the Future
You may have been told, Chairman Reyes, that when Rep. Charlie Wilson took the reins of a House intelligence oversight panel, he immediately wrote to the operations people at CIA, saying, "Well, gentlemen, the fox is in the hen house. Do whatever you like."
Your predecessor as House Intelligence Committee chair, Pete Hoekstra, R-Michigan, also gave the CIA free rein as long as then-Director George Tenet did the White House's bidding – whatever that bidding happened to be.
Is that how you see your role, Mr. Congressman? Why have you been running interference for the Bush/Cheney administration?
Specifically, why did you stiff-arm those of your colleagues who wanted to put language into the FY09 Intelligence Authorization Bill ordering CIA interrogators to adhere to the Army Field Manual for interrogation?
Have a look at the above list of practices expressly forbidden by the manual. Have the folks in the hen house told you that some are absolutely necessary?
You served in Vietnam. Did you see "alternative techniques" in use there? Could you visualize them being used on you – or your grandsons?
Do you think former Air Force General and now CIA Director Michael Hayden or former Navy Admiral Mike McConnell know more about effective interrogation techniques than the head of Army intelligence?
Getting Snowed
Are you not aware that many of those on the operations side of CIA ply their trade as con men? Such activities are supposed to be directed abroad. But all too often they are applied with consummate, smirking skill to the Hill.
Don't believe the stories they tell you about alleged "successes" of torture techniques. They are normally told by folks with zero experience or folks simply snowing you.
Take former Deputy Director John McLaughlin, for example. I have known John for 40 years; he would not recognize an interrogation if he tripped over one.
And he and his boss Tenet were so duplicitous that the former head of State Department intelligence permitted himself the undiplomatic comment that the two should have been shot for their role in deliberately falsifying intelligence – like that concerning those nonexistent "mobile biological weapons laboratories" in Iraq.
Not long ago, McLaughlin made the mistake of purveying the myth about how effective harsh interrogation techniques have been, with the usual "If you saw the intelligence I have seen…"
Trouble was, the senior intelligence officer he was talking to had seen it all, and more, and answered, "I have seen all of it John. Either you are naïve, incredibly credulous, or you are lying."
How McLaughlin and John Brennan, both eager accomplices of George Tenet, got picked for the intelligence transition team boggles the minds of those of us who are familiar with their role in the saddest and most unconscionable chapters of US intelligence – both analysis and operations.
But there they are, whispering into the credulous ears of people like Silvestre Reyes.
Chairman Reyes, go talk to Gen. Kimmons.
Read More...
From change-you-can-believe-in, we seem to be slipping back to fear-you-can-trade-on.
Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has publicly warned those in charge of the administration transition that "continuity is going to be pivotal in keeping us safe and secure."
Thus, he argues, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and CIA Director Michael Hayden should stay in their posts.
If that were not enough, Reyes told Congress Daily's Chris Strohm that he [Reyes] had advised the Obama team that some parts of what Strohm referred to as "CIA's controversial alternative interrogation program" should be allowed to continue.
Using some of the same euphemisms and circumlocutions employed by the ersatz-lawyers hired by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, Reyes fired this shot across the bow of Barack Obama's transition ship:
"It gets back to a world that is very dangerous. … There are some options that need to be available. … We don't want to be known for torturing people. At the same time, we don't want to limit our ability to get information that's vital and critical to our national security. That's where the new administration is going to have to decide what those parameters are, what those limitations are."
Background
Someone needs to tell Reyes what those parameters – what those limitations – should be. They are set by the Geneva Accords and the US War Crimes Act of 1996. Those are the laws that President Bush's overly clever lawyers told him he could safely – well, pretty safely – disregard, because of the "new paradigm" post 9/11.
Pretty safely? Even those Mafia-type lawyers felt it necessary to warn their clients that Section 2441 of the US War Crimes Act, passed by a Republican-led Congress in 1996, could conceivably come back to haunt the president and others who approved of or took part in torture. This is the best they could do by way of offering reassurance:
"It is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441. Your determination [that Geneva does not apply to al-Qaeda and Taliban] would create a reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution."
If that sounds like the kind of advice one would expect to get from lawyers for the Mob, that's because it is.
The casuistry virtually drips from a Jan. 25, 2002, memorandum for the President drafted by then-counsel to the Vice President, David Addington, and signed by then-counsel to the President, Alberto Gonzales. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell objected for a day or so but then saluted sharply, as is his wont.
As will be seen below, the lawyers' advice did come back to haunt the President, putting him in a real sweat until he got Congress to grant him retroactive immunity.
To say President Bush was dumb to take their dubious advice is not the half of it. Really dumb was his decision to put it in writing, since the goons uncovered by CIA Director George Tenet and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were not about to torture without a signed authorization from the President.
Bush decided to go ahead on the basis of the Addington/Gonzales opinion and signed a presidential memorandum on Feb. 7, 2002, incorporating the advice. The opinion is written verbatim, twice, into that short executive memorandum.
Over the President's large black felt-tip signature appears convoluted text depicting, despite itself, a circle that refuses to be squared. Bush orders that detainees be treated "humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva."
That was the official start of post-9/11 torture authorized from the top, although an American, John Walker Lindh, was the first to be actually tortured after being captured on Nov. 25, 2001, during the US invasion of Afghanistan – when senior Justice Department officials deliberately chose not to prevent it.
In the wake of the smoking-gun presidential memorandum of Feb. 7, 2002, subsequent memos by the administration's Mob lawyers were mostly ex post facto attempts at CYA.
Shame
What incalculable shame this has brought on the US Army and the Central Intelligence Agency, in both of which I was privileged to serve. I am hardly the first to use a Mafia analogy.
Consider the case of Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who was the first to investigate the Abu Ghraib prison abuse – the most glaring result of the President's memo and Rumsfeld's implementing instructions.
"Make sure this happens!" in Rumsfeld's handwriting appeared on a memo over Rumsfeld's signature that was prominently posted at Abu Ghraib.
Taguba issued a tough report, which was then leaked to the press – and thus was largely responsible for preventing the scandal from being swept entirely under the rug. Rather than thank Taguba for upholding the honor of the US military, the Bush administration singled him out for ridicule, retribution and forced retirement.
Taguba told Seymour Hersh of a chilling conversation he had with Gen. John Abizaid, then head of Central Command, a few weeks after Taguba's report became public in 2004. Sitting in the back of Abizaid's Mercedes sedan in Kuwait, Abizaid quietly told Taguba, "You and your report will be investigated."
"I'd been in the Army 32 years by then," Taguba told Hersh, "and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia."
Getting Squared Away
The Army, to its credit, was able to push brownnosers like Abizaid off to the margins and, more important, to keep Mob lawyers out of the process of updating the Army Field Manual for interrogation.
Such was not the case at CIA, where Mob lawyers continued to prosper – including the one who offered interrogators the following basic guidance: "If the victim dies, you're doing it wrong."
I like to think that our nation's decisions are not totally bereft of moral considerations, and that a majority of Americans would agree that torture – like rape or slavery – is intrinsically evil.
But torture is also intrinsically dumb. And an Army general with guts said precisely that on the very day President Bush was extolling the merits of "alternative sets of procedures" for interrogation.
Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, a career intelligence officer and expert in interrogations, minced no words in describing the new Army Field Manual (FM 2-22.3, Human Intelligence Collection Operations).
He stressed that it is "consistent with the requirements of law, the Detainee Treatment Act, and the Geneva Conventions, and that it was endorsed by the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Director of National Intelligence. The DNI, Kimmons said, "coordinated laterally with the CIA."
Doesn't take a crackerjack intelligence analyst to figure out why the CIA would not "endorse" it.
As a former Army intelligence officer, who had to commit the previous interrogation field manual virtually to memory, I was particularly proud that Kimmons had the guts to seize the bull by the horns:
Conceding past "transgressions and mistakes," Kimmons insisted: "No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.
"Moreover, any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress through the use of abusive techniques would be of questionable credibility. And additionally, it would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used. And we can't go there.
"Some of our most significant successes on the battlefield have been – in fact, I would say all of them, almost categorically all of them have accrued from expert interrogators using mixtures of authorized, humane interrogation practices in clever ways that you would hope Americans would use them, to push the envelope within the bookends of the legal, moral, and ethical – now as further defined by this field manual. So we don't need abusive practices in there. Nothing good will come from them."
No Torture Commandments
Kimmons emphasized that the new manual is written in "straightforward language for use by soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines; it is not written for lawyers." He explained that the field manual explicitly prohibits torture or cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment or punishment.
Among the specific prohibitions were:
-Interrogators may not force a detainee to be naked, perform sexual acts or pose in a sexual manner;
-They cannot use hoods or place sacks over a detainee's head or use duct tape over his eyes;
-They cannot beat or electrically shock or burn them or inflict other forms of physical pain – any form of physical pain;
-They may not use water boarding, hypothermia, or treatment which will lead to heat injury;
-They will not perform mock executions;
-They may not deprive detainees of the necessary food, water, and medical care; and
-They may not use dogs in any aspect of interrogation.
Meanwhile, just across the Potomac at the White House an hour later that same day (Sept. 6, 2006), President Bush devoted half of a long speech to cops-and-robbers examples, none of them confirmed or persuasive, showing how "tough" interrogation techniques – he called them "an alternative set of procedures" – had yielded information preventing all manner of catastrophe.
He made clear that his government had "changed its policies," giving intelligence personnel "the tools they need" to fight terrorists, and that he wanted the "CIA program" to continue.
Bush appealed for and, just before Congress changed hands in November 2006, got legislation granting retroactive immunity to him and other practitioners of "alternative" procedures.
Several months earlier, on June 29, 2006, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the US Supreme Court had ruled that Geneva DOES apply to al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees, and rejected the artifice of "unitary executive power" used by the Bush administration to "justify" practices like torture.
One senior Bush official is reported to have gone quite pale when Justice Anthony M. Kennedy raised the ante, warning that "violations of Common Article 3 [of Geneva] are considered ‘war crimes.'"
That threw a scare into a whole bunch of what one might call "unitary executives," prompting the President on Sept. 6, 2006, to ask Congress to give "top priority" to new legislation holding them harmless for violation of Geneva, which they got a couple of months later.
Back to the Future
You may have been told, Chairman Reyes, that when Rep. Charlie Wilson took the reins of a House intelligence oversight panel, he immediately wrote to the operations people at CIA, saying, "Well, gentlemen, the fox is in the hen house. Do whatever you like."
Your predecessor as House Intelligence Committee chair, Pete Hoekstra, R-Michigan, also gave the CIA free rein as long as then-Director George Tenet did the White House's bidding – whatever that bidding happened to be.
Is that how you see your role, Mr. Congressman? Why have you been running interference for the Bush/Cheney administration?
Specifically, why did you stiff-arm those of your colleagues who wanted to put language into the FY09 Intelligence Authorization Bill ordering CIA interrogators to adhere to the Army Field Manual for interrogation?
Have a look at the above list of practices expressly forbidden by the manual. Have the folks in the hen house told you that some are absolutely necessary?
You served in Vietnam. Did you see "alternative techniques" in use there? Could you visualize them being used on you – or your grandsons?
Do you think former Air Force General and now CIA Director Michael Hayden or former Navy Admiral Mike McConnell know more about effective interrogation techniques than the head of Army intelligence?
Getting Snowed
Are you not aware that many of those on the operations side of CIA ply their trade as con men? Such activities are supposed to be directed abroad. But all too often they are applied with consummate, smirking skill to the Hill.
Don't believe the stories they tell you about alleged "successes" of torture techniques. They are normally told by folks with zero experience or folks simply snowing you.
Take former Deputy Director John McLaughlin, for example. I have known John for 40 years; he would not recognize an interrogation if he tripped over one.
And he and his boss Tenet were so duplicitous that the former head of State Department intelligence permitted himself the undiplomatic comment that the two should have been shot for their role in deliberately falsifying intelligence – like that concerning those nonexistent "mobile biological weapons laboratories" in Iraq.
Not long ago, McLaughlin made the mistake of purveying the myth about how effective harsh interrogation techniques have been, with the usual "If you saw the intelligence I have seen…"
Trouble was, the senior intelligence officer he was talking to had seen it all, and more, and answered, "I have seen all of it John. Either you are naïve, incredibly credulous, or you are lying."
How McLaughlin and John Brennan, both eager accomplices of George Tenet, got picked for the intelligence transition team boggles the minds of those of us who are familiar with their role in the saddest and most unconscionable chapters of US intelligence – both analysis and operations.
But there they are, whispering into the credulous ears of people like Silvestre Reyes.
Chairman Reyes, go talk to Gen. Kimmons.
Read More...
Obama, Iraq, and the Cyprus Solution
Excerpt: How, one wonders, could President-elect Barack Obama possibly hope to implement his announced foreign policy goals when he's entrusted his enemies -- the Clntonites, and the Republicans -- to implement them? I've wondered that myself, but now the mystery is cleared up by Robert Gates, the GOP defense secretary who says we'll be in Iraq "for decades." In an interview with George Will, Gates let the cat out of the bag:
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