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<a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennthrush/0409/Pelosi_I_didnt_know_about_waterboarding.html" target=_top>http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennthrush/0409/Pel osi_I_didnt_know_about_waterboarding.html</a> <BR> <BR>Pelosi: I didn't know about use of waterboarding <BR> <BR><a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennthrush/0409/Pelosi_briefed_on_waterboarding_in_02_.html" target=_top>http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennthrush/0409/Pel osi_briefed_on_waterboarding_in_02_.html</a> <BR> <BR>Pelosi briefed on waterboarding in '02 [UPDATED] <BR> <BR>UH OH, Is Nancy going to get her .... caught in the ringer over this?????
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I'm convinced she did know. <BR> <BR>She is a disgrace to this country and to women in general. Women that attain positions of power should go the extra mile to make certain they show their gender capable of holding every single position that men think they are entitled to under the ancient patriarchal stupidity. People like her and Carly, formerly CEO at HP, make it harder for women to be accepted as equals in politics and business, IMO. <BR> <BR>BTW, since when did you start believing the words of politicians?
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Did I ever say no politician spoke the truth. That must be an echo in that room with 8 computer monitors.
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<font color="0000ff">Did I ever say no politician spoke the truth.</font> <BR> <BR>Did I ever claim you did? <BR> <BR>You put up the Pelosi piece like its a shock. The shock would be if she had told the truth. <BR> <BR>Bob's Internet Ethics: Anything you say will be misquoted and then used against you.
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TTTHTFAL
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April 26, 2009 <BR>Op-Ed Columnist <BR><b><font size="+2">The Banality of Bush White House Evil </font></b> <BR> <BR>By FRANK RICH <BR> <BR>WE don’t like our evil to be banal. Ten years after Columbine, it only now may be sinking in that the psychopathic killers were not jock-hating dorks from a “Trench Coat Mafia,” or, as ABC News maintained at the time, “part of a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement.” In the new best seller “Columbine,” the journalist Dave Cullen reaffirms that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were instead ordinary American teenagers who worked at the local pizza joint, loved their parents and were popular among their classmates. <BR> <BR>On Tuesday, it will be five years since Americans first confronted the photographs from Abu Ghraib on “60 Minutes II.” Here, too, we want to cling to myths that quarantine the evil. If our country committed torture, surely it did so to prevent Armageddon, in a patriotic ticking-time-bomb scenario out of “24.” If anyone deserves blame, it was only those identified by President Bush as “a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values”: promiscuous, sinister-looking lowlifes like Lynddie England, Charles Graner and the other grunts who were held accountable while the top command got a pass. <BR> <BR>We’ve learned much, much more about America and torture in the past five years. But as Mark Danner recently wrote in The New York Review of Books, for all the revelations, one essential fact remains unchanged: “By no later than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it.” When the Obama administration said it declassified four new torture memos 10 days ago in part because their contents were already largely public, it was right. <BR> <BR>Yet we still shrink from the hardest truths and the bigger picture: that torture was a premeditated policy approved at our government’s highest levels; that it was carried out in scenarios that had no resemblance to “24”; that psychologists and physicians were enlisted as collaborators in inflicting pain; and that, in the assessment of reliable sources like the F.B.I. director Robert Mueller, it did not help disrupt any terrorist attacks. <BR> <BR>The newly released Justice Department memos, like those before them, were not written by barely schooled misfits like England and Graner. John Yoo, Steven Bradbury and Jay Bybee graduated from the likes of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Michigan and Brigham Young. They have passed through white-shoe law firms like Covington & Burling, and Sidley Austin. <BR> <BR>Judge Bybee’s résumé tells us that he has four children and is both a Cubmaster for the Boy Scouts and a youth baseball and basketball coach. He currently occupies a tenured seat on the United States Court of Appeals. As an assistant attorney general, he was the author of the Aug. 1, 2002, memo endorsing in lengthy, prurient detail interrogation “techniques” like “facial slap (insult slap)” and “insects placed in a confinement box.” <BR> <BR>He proposed using 10 such techniques “in some sort of escalating fashion, culminating with the waterboard, though not necessarily ending with this technique.” Waterboarding, the near-drowning favored by Pol Pot and the Spanish Inquisition, was prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II. But Bybee concluded that it “does not, in our view, inflict ‘severe pain or suffering.’ ” <BR> <BR>Still, it’s not Bybee’s perverted lawyering and pornographic amorality that make his memo worthy of special attention. It merits a closer look because it actually does add something new — and, even after all we’ve heard, something shocking — to the five-year-old torture narrative. When placed in full context, it’s the kind of smoking gun that might free us from the myths and denial that prevent us from reckoning with this ugly chapter in our history. <BR> <BR>Bybee’s memo was aimed at one particular detainee, Abu Zubaydah, who had been captured some four months earlier, in late March 2002. Zubaydah is portrayed in the memo (as he was publicly by Bush after his capture) as one of the top men in Al Qaeda. But by August this had been proven false. As Ron Suskind reported in his book “The One Percent Doctrine,” Zubaydah was identified soon after his capture as a logistics guy, who, in the words of the F.B.I.’s top-ranking Qaeda analyst at the time, Dan Coleman, served as the terrorist group’s flight booker and “greeter,” like “Joe Louis in the lobby of Caesar’s Palace.” Zubaydah “knew very little about real operations, or strategy.” He showed clinical symptoms of schizophrenia. <BR> <BR>By the time Bybee wrote his memo, Zubaydah had been questioned by the F.B.I. and C.I.A. for months and had given what limited information he had. His most valuable contribution was to finger Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the 9/11 mastermind. But, as Jane Mayer wrote in her book “The Dark Side,” even that contribution may have been old news: according to the 9/11 commission, the C.I.A. had already learned about Mohammed during the summer of 2001. In any event, as one of Zubaydah’s own F.B.I. questioners, Ali Soufan, wrote in a Times Op-Ed article last Thursday, traditional interrogation methods had worked. Yet Bybee’s memo purported that an “increased pressure phase” was required to force Zubaydah to talk. <BR> <BR>As soon as Bybee gave the green light, torture followed: Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002, according to another of the newly released memos. Unsurprisingly, it appears that no significant intelligence was gained by torturing this mentally ill Qaeda functionary. So why the overkill? Bybee’s memo invoked a ticking time bomb: “There is currently a level of ‘chatter’ equal to that which preceded the September 11 attacks.” <BR> <BR>We don’t know if there was such unusual “chatter” then, but it’s unlikely Zubaydah could have added information if there were. Perhaps some new facts may yet emerge if Dick Cheney succeeds in his unexpected and welcome crusade to declassify documents that he says will exonerate administration interrogation policies. Meanwhile, we do have evidence for an alternative explanation of what motivated Bybee to write his memo that August, thanks to the comprehensive Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees released last week. <BR>The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence. <BR> <BR>In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk. <BR>But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding. <BR>Last week Bush-Cheney defenders, true to form, dismissed the Senate Armed Services Committee report as “partisan.” But as the committee chairman, Carl Levin, told me, the report received unanimous support from its members — John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman included. <BR> <BR>Levin also emphasized the report’s accounts of military lawyers who dissented from White House doctrine — only to be disregarded. The Bush administration was “driven,” Levin said. By what? “They’d say it was to get more information. But they were desperate to find a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.” <BR> <BR>Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” <b><font size="+1">torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality. </font></b> <BR> <BR>Levin suggests — and I agree — that as additional fact-finding plays out, it’s time for the Justice Department to enlist a panel of two or three apolitical outsiders, perhaps retired federal judges, “to review the mass of material” we already have. The fundamental truth is there, as it long has been. The panel can recommend a legal path that will insure accountability for this wholesale betrayal of American values. <BR> <BR>President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won’t vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don’t need another commission. We don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s commitment to the rule of law.
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TTTHTFAL, OMG, Elaine, you pull out the issues of the past pretty quickly. Why not discuss the current crisis and what we can do so our dollar doesn't slip to nothing. I live in Canada as you know, growing up, OUr Dollar was always about 60 cents to a full US Dollar, I think it may be the other way around right now. Not as attractive to vacation in my homeland anymore.
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Additionally Elaine, if we went in based on the massacre of the Kurds by nerve gas, and not WMD, I believe the Americans were and are justified in taking down that regime. You are welcome, along with your believe that Jesus doesn't save, to believe what you sish, hperlink sources would help as I usually provide.
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Frank Rich usually writes for the Huffington Post or the New York Times. Will unbiased sources in our current environment. Good job Elaine. Fair and Balanced, NYT policy, They report, they decide, Instead of Fox News, We Report you decide,eh???
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Elaine, question, if your family had a public emergency where EMT and other emergency services were brought to your house, would you release a public statement on your porch the next morning clarifying the neighborhood disruption with publicly funded resources???
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heres the list of tortures she probably knew about (and just as probably agreed to) <BR> <BR>apparently these methods of "enhanced <BR>in<b>terror</b>gation" produced evidence that a 2nd 9/11 was planned for the Left Coast.... <BR> <BR>so one should weigh all the potential lives saved against the discomfort of a very few terrorists.... who would just as soon cut our heads off given the chance. <BR> <BR>The 10 techniques described below, as detailed in that memo, were "to be used in some sort of escalating fashion." <BR> <BR> <BR>1. ATTENTION GRASP <BR>"Consists of grasping the individual with both hands, one hand on each side of the collar opening, in a controlled and quick motion. In the same motion as the grasp, the individual is drawn towards the interrogator." <BR> <BR>2. WALLING <BR>The individual is placed with heels next to a specially built fake wall. The interrogator then slams the person's shoulder blades to the wall. "In part, the idea is to create a sound that will make the impact seem far worse than it is, and that will be far worse than any injury that might result from the action." 3. FACIAL HOLD <BR>The goal is to immobilize the head, with one open palm "placed on either side of the individual's face." <BR> <BR>4. FACIAL, OR INSULT SLAP <BR>The point of this slap is to "invade" personal space. "The goal of the facial slap is not to inflict physical pain that is severe or lasting. Instead, the purpose of the facial slap is to induce shock, surprise and/or humiliation." <BR> <BR>5. CRAMPED CONFINEMENT <BR>A cramped space-usually dark. The larger version is big enough to stand or sit up to 18 hours; the smaller box allows only sitting for no more than two hours. <BR> <BR>6. WALL STANDING <BR>Standing a few feet from a wall, with feet spread and fingers resting on a wall. "Used to induce muscle fatigue." <BR> <BR>7. STRESS POSITIONS <BR>Used "to produce the physical discomfort associated with muscle fatigue." There are several variations, including for Zubaydah, sitting on the floor "with his arms raised above his head." <BR> <BR>8. SLEEP DEPRIVATION <BR>The goal is to "motivate" cooperation. In the case of Zubaydah, sleep deprivation would be for no more "than eleven days at a time." <BR> <BR>9. INSECTS <BR>Used in combination with a cramped confinement box. Informed that Zubaydah "appears to have a fear of insects," he would be told that a stinging insect would be placed in the box with him. "You would, however, place a harmless insect in the box." <BR> <BR>10. WATERBOARDING <BR>The most severe and controversial method, waterboarding simulates drowning. A person is bound to an inclined bench and gagged while water is poured over the face for 20 to 40 seconds. The gag is lifted for "three or four" full breaths then the process is repeated. For Zubaydah, each session was to last no longer than 20 minutes. <BR> <BR>"This procedure triggers an automatic physiological sensation of drowning that the individual cannot control even though he may be aware that he is, in fact, not drowning."
If electricity comes from electrons, does morality come from morons?
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John, thanks for the info, extremely helpful infomation for us to see what the discussion is about. <BR> <BR>Bob
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<blockquote><hr size=0><!-quote-!><font size=1><b>quote:</b></font><p><b><font size="+1">Reagan's DOJ Prosecuted Texas Sheriff For Waterboarding Prisoners</font></b> <BR> <BR><i>Written by Jason Leopold <BR>Tuesday, 21 April 2009 21:47 <BR> <BR>By Jason Leopold</i> <BR> <BR>George W. Bush’s Justice Department said subjecting a person to the near-drowning of waterboarding was not a crime and didn’t even cause pain, but Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department thought otherwise, prosecuting a Texas sheriff and three deputies for using the practice to get confessions. <BR> <BR>Federal prosecutors secured a 10-year sentence against the sheriff and four years in prison for the deputies. But that 1983 case – which would seem to be directly on point for a legal analysis on waterboarding two decades later – was never mentioned in the four Bush administration opinions released last week. <BR> <BR>--snip--<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote><a href="http://www.pubrecord.org/torture/854-doj-prosecuted-texas-sheriff-in-1983-for-waterboarding-prisoners.html" target=_top>http://www.pubrecord.org/torture/854-doj-prosecute d-texas-sheriff-in-1983-for-waterboarding-prisoner s.html</a>
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Neal, and you know why!!! The detainees are not even identified by uniform to a land based State. They are non-State terrorists, therefore, in my opinion and others, the Geneva conventions and laws of this type would not apply to the detainees, UNLESS, our great president Hussein Obama allows them that privilege, eh???
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They belong to the State of Religious NUTHOOD, like you. <BR> <BR>The USA doesn't torture. <BR> <BR>Period. <BR> <BR>We hung Japanese soldiers for waterboarding US servicemen during WWII. Now, its ok for us to waterboard. <BR> <BR>If you want to defend W's use of torture in his Holy War go ahead as long as you don't mind me ripping u a new bung hole. <BR> <BR>Or, would it have been ok to have water-boarded your philosophical mate Timothy McVeigh? <BR> <BR>Most of al quaeda are allegedly from Saudi Arabia. Maybe the Saudi's told us we could torture their citizens seeing how that's what the governments in those camel riding countries over their do as part of their normal day-to-day operations. <BR> <BR>Gotta go... <BR> <BR>Later
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Look our own soldiers had waterboarding as part of their training, now you want to put George W, Rove and others in the slammer because of this issue, if I read your point, properly!! <BR> <BR>Read this piece: <BR> <BR>This Is Torture? Hardly <BR> <BR><a href="http://open.salon.com/blog/djohn/2009/04/18/this_is_torture_hardly" target=_top>http://open.salon.com/blog/djohn/2009/04/18/this_i s_torture_hardly</a> <BR> <BR><blockquote><hr size=0><!-quote-!><font size=1><b>quote:</b></font><p>... <BR> <BR>The following techniques were employed: attention grasp, walling, facial hold, facial slap (insult slap), cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation, insects placed in a confinement box and the waterboard. <BR> <BR>So there you have it. This is how we "tortured" these terrorists in order to get information from them. Like I said earlier I don't see the torture. Frankly, many of today's military recruits go through some ar [sic] all of these while in Basic Training! <BR> <BR>...<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>
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<font color="0000ff">Look our own soldiers had waterboarding as part of their training....</font> <BR> <BR>OUR own soldiers? <BR> <BR>I googled for Canadian Basic Training and could not find where YOUR soldiers are given the training that OUR American soldiers are given. <BR> <BR><img src="http://www.atomorrow.net/discus/clipart/biggrin.gif" border=0>
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Cute, TTTHTFAL.
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The Speaker misspeaks <BR> <BR><a href="http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/may/15/curl-speaker-misspeaks/" target=_top>http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/may/15/curl-s peaker-misspeaks/</a> <BR> <BR><blockquote><hr size=0><!-quote-!><font size=1><b>quote:</b></font><p>House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, her eyes wide, her hands gesticulating wildly, on Thursday laid out a third version of what she knew and when she knew it about the Bush administration's interrogation policies, edging ever closer to debating what the meaning of the word "is" is. <BR> <BR>With even her own second-in-command now demanding more answers, the California Democrat, her voice barely audible at times, read a rambling statement at her weekly press briefing about her prior knowledge of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" (EITs) employed under President Bush, insisting that she was not told in a September 2002 briefing that the U.S. government used waterboarding. <BR> <BR>Minutes later, though, she acknowledged for the first time that her top security adviser had learned details of a February 2003 briefing in which lawmakers were told that American interrogators were in fact waterboarding suspected terrorists. <BR> <BR>"My statement is clear, and let me read it again. Let me read it again I'm sorry I have to find the page," said a flustered Mrs. Pelosi, shuffling through papers, her hands quivering a bit, as she sought to stick to her prepared text. <BR> <BR><font color="ff0000"><b>"When when when my staff person I'm sorry, the page is out of order five months later, my staff person told me that there had been a briefing informing that there had been a briefing and that a letter had been sent. I was not briefed on what was in that briefing; I was just informed that the briefing had taken place," she said. <BR> <BR>The speaker's weekly press conference drew a standing-room-only crowd of reporters tracking the steady drip, drip, drip of revelations that have come out over the past several weeks. Dressed in a key-lime green pantsuit and smiling broadly, Mr. Pelosi charged that the CIA lied to Congress and that House Republicans are using her as "a diversionary tactic" to deflect criticism from Mr. Bush. <BR> <BR>Aside from not being briefed on what was in that briefing, she said she was very busy at the time "I was fighting the war in Iraq at that point, too, you know" and battling a Bush administration that was "misleading the American people about the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." <BR> <BR>Repeatedly clearing her throat, she explained that she was briefed by the CIA in 2002, while on the House intelligence committee. Agency records indicate the Sept. 4 briefing included "a description of the particular EITs that had been employed" on al Qaeda detainee Abu Zubaydah, then the only suspected terrorist in U.S. custody. The previous month, he had been waterboarded a form of simulated drowning President Obama has declared is torture 82 times. <BR></b></font><!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote> <BR> <BR> <BR>OOOOOPSY!!!! Flustered is an understatement, eh???
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