The Impeachment Newsfeed

Breaking: Mark Sanford facing impeachment

gsadamb — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:04:18 -0800

This is news that's developing about Republican governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford, as just reported by the AP.

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) -- South Carolina lawmakers plan to formally consider impeaching Gov. Mark Sanford for the first time next week, the chairman of the committee beginning that work said Friday.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Harrison told The Associated Press he is appointing an ad-hoc committee of four Republicans and three Democrats who will begin meeting Tuesday. He said he expects to have a resolution to impeach ready before Christmas for the full Judiciary Committee to consider.

It seems like Governor Sanford thought he could just quietly ride out the political firestorm he created. Five months later, however, it appears as if consequences are catching up to him.

South Carolina discussing impeachment for Sanford

Chris in Paris — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:44:00 -0800

Couldn't happen to a nicer person. AP:

South Carolina lawmakers plan to formally consider impeaching Gov. Mark Sanford for the first time next week, the chairman of the committee beginning that work said Friday.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Harrison told The Associated Press he is appointing an ad-hoc committee of four Republicans and three Democrats who will begin meeting Tuesday. He said he expects to have a resolution to impeach ready before Christmas for the full Judiciary Committee to consider.

Obama Must Toss the Bums Out of Treasury, End the Wars and Start Leading

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:13:46 -0800

By Dave Lindorff

If you are sitting in class taking a test, and you’ve chosen to sit
amongst your bone-headed, slacker friends, don’t turn to them for help
when you can’t figure out of any of the answers. They may all tell you
the same thing, but they’ll all be wrong.

That’s the situation President Obama finds himself in today in the
White House. Having surrounded himself with the very Wall Street con
men who set up the crooked game that led to the current financial
crisis and economic collapse, and finding that the lousy advice they
have been giving him since last January has left the country still
mired in deepening economic decline, with the banks still not lending
and unemployment still mounting, and with growing signs that instead of
bottoming out and starting to recover, the economy is threatening to
fall a second time, to new lows and higher unemployment, Obama has
turned to the same rotten advisors for answers.

A few days ago, in an interview with Fox-TV while he was in China
off all places (a country that has made a stupendous stimulus
investment to create domestic jobs!) Obama warned, for the first time,
that America faces the possibility of a “double-dip” recession. That’s
fine as far as it goes. I agree. But what did he say the risk was? Not
that the government has been failing to put significant numbers of
people back to work, but that the government keeps piling up deficits.

This has to be the lamest economic thinking since Herbert Hoover
started tightening the screws on government spending at the onset of
the Great Depression in 1930.

Clearly the American government needs to do just the opposite of
worrying about deficits. The only growth the US economy has seen to
date has been the result of government funding—the cash-for-clunkers
program gave a brief restoration of pulse to the auto industry, and the
$8000 tax credit for buying a first home kicked up home sales briefly.
We know this because when the clunkers program ended, auto sales
crashed, and when the deadline approached for the end to the new home
tax credit, home building plunged almost 11%. The hundreds of billions
of dollars poured into so-called “shovel-ready” state and local
projects like roads, schools, etc., may have added or saved as much as
a million jobs, but the economy lost many times that many jobs over the
same period.

The problem with these stimulus programs is that they are
inefficient ways to create jobs or preserve jobs. If roughly one
million jobs were created through the stimulus spending of say $200
billion (assuming that the February $800-billion stimulus program, to
mollify Republicans, consisted of one-half tax cuts and only one-half
actual federal spending, and that this federal spending was spread
evenly over a two-year period, that’s $200,000 per job!

If, instead, Obama had chucked the dunces at Treasury and in his
Council of Economic Advisors, and instead asked your Labor Secretary to
initiate a wide-ranging $200-billion-per-year jobs program, hiring the
unemployed at perhaps $20-25,000 per person to do everything from teach
in overcrowded urban schools to laying high-speed rail trackbeds, from
cleaning up parks to putting insulation in homes, he could have given
jobs to close 8 million people—people who would have then spent their
money on goods and services and helped rally the economy from the
bottom up.

Deficits? Who gives a damn about deficits at this point! The
country is up to the gills in debt without creating any jobs. (It’s
kind of like my mortgage. Why would I worry about using my credit card
to buy food for the week if I was low on cash, when my mortgage has me
deep in the red for the next ten years? Obama’s financial advisors, on
the evidence, would tell me I should let my family go hungry, because I
need to worry about my total debt load.) If you’re worried about
deficits, Mr. Obama, end the god-damned wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is costing one million dollars a year to send one lousy grunt to
Afghanistan or Iraq. And you want to have at least 100,000 guys over
there. That’s $100 billion a year right there—enough to hire four
million unemployed Americans back here at home!

This president is well on the way to rescuing President Hoover from
history’s crap heap by one-upping him in the realm of economic
mismanagement. We already have Obamavilles springing up around the
country. We haven’t started calling them that, but Naming Day isn’t far
off.

At least Hoover didn’t mire the country in another war while the economy was collapsing around him.

President Obama is on a short leash at this point. His fans, and I
was one of those who was willing to give him a shot last November, are
mostly giving up on him. Activists are already turning on him. My union
friends are disgusted. My African-American friends just shake their
heads in dismay. Liberal friends act embarrassed. A leftist friend,
retired, who devoted a month to campaigning for Obama full time in
Pennsylvania last fall now writes angry letters almost weekly to
Obama’s former campaign manager David Plouffe and others, blasting
Obama’s handling of the bank crisis and his Afghan War plans. Clearly
Obama cannot continue to appease Republicans and cater to Blue Dogs in
Congress and expect to be re-elected in 2012.

Indeed, if he doesn’t toss the crooks and charlatans in the Fed,
the Treasury and his Council of Economic Advisers out, and doesn’t stop
listening to the self-serving crazies in the military, he won’t even
have a Democratic majority in Congress by the end of next year.

President Obama, aren’t you tired of being an embarrassment to your
friends and family? Aren’t you tired of being mocked by your foes?

Come on. We’re sick of your speeches! Suck it up, be a
leader.finally and kick some butt. Do something unconventional and
daring. End the wars, bring the troops home, announce a huge jobs
program, issue an executive order expanding the Medicare program, raise
taxes on the wealthy to back where they were in the 1960s, and let’s
get the country moving forward again.
__________________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

President Obama: Don't Lecture China on Censorship

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:22:53 -0800

By Dave Lindorff

President Obama, in his visit to China, held a “town meeting” with
Chinese students in which he praised openness and lectured them on the
value of freedom of information, saying that he is a “supporter of
non-censorship” and that open access to information was a “source of
strength.”

And yet America is hardly free of censorship. Heck, the president
himself has gone to court to prevent the release of photographs of US
troops torturing captives in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo. Talk
about censorship! But it goes way beyond just such crude, totalitarian
style control over information.

Let’s just take the issue of depleted uranium weapons, over 1000
tons of which have been expended in the US invasion of Iraq, most of it
in populated areas where millions remain exposed to the radioactive
dust of the burned material. There is almost no reporting on this topic
in the US media. The Pentagon has for years lied about and hidden the
effects of this deadly substance, used in shells, bombs and bullets
because of its unique ability to penetrate hard steel armor and
concrete bunker walls. It has refused to disclose where the weapons
were fired, and has denied US troops the tests that would show if they
have been contaminated. It has even resorted to having paid Pentagon
hacks surreptitiously libel, slander and otherwise undermine those
military sources and journalists who have tried to expose this scourge
(this reporter has been the target of such disinformation attacks).

But censorship in the US goes beyond these crude efforts at
government-directed control of information. In America, some of the
most potent censorship is done by the privately owned media—supposedly
a bastion of freedom of expression.

There is no reason why the US media cannot report on depleted
uranium and its deadly legacy in places where it has been used, such as
Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Kosovo, or on and around American
military bases from Maryland to Hawaii. And yet it does not. Just
recently, stories have appeared both on Britain’s SkyTV and in the Guardian newspaper,
reporting on an alarming rise in unusual birth defects and infant
cancers in Fallujah as well as in other Iraqi cities like Basra, Najaf,
Baghdad and Samara—all urban areas where there were major assaults by
US forces both in the initial invasion, when most of the DU weapons
were used, and later during fights against holed-up insurgent groups.

In Fallujah, the Guardian reports that birth defects are up by a
staggering 15 times normal—an increase of 1400%! While the article
doesn’t mention depleted uranium specifically, and says that doctors in
Fallujah have been "reluctant to attribute" the astonishing number of
birth defects to the massive assault on that city by US forces in late
2004, they do say those doctors cite “radiation and chemicals” which
were dumped on the city.

There is no such report about this in the US media.

Is that censorship? Of course it is.

The American government doesn’t tell CBS News or CNN not to report
this story, which amounts to a US war crime. It does not (at least
generally), contact the editors at the New York Times or the Washington
Post and say, “Don’t report on the infant mortality crisis in Iraq, or
on the possible connection to US weaponry” (Though the government did
ask and successfully get the Times to hold a story about the National
Security Agency's massive electronic spying program for a year, and
managed to pressure the Times' editors to kill a Times reporter's story
about President Bush's likely use of a hidden cueing device during the
2004 presidential debates). The editors of those news organizations
themselves most of the time simply decide that either the story is of
no importance to readers or they worry that they may be criticized
either by the government or by other media organizations for being
unpatriotic, or biased.

The end result of such a process of self-censorship, however, is
that the American public is as ignorant about certain things as someone
in China.

More ignorant in fact.

One thing I learned from living and working as a journalist and
journalism teacher in China back in the 1990s is that the Chinese
people, with their long experience of living in a totalitarian
dictatorship in which all media are owned and tightly controlled by the
state and the ruling Communist Party, are acutely aware that they are
being lied to and that the truth is being hidden from them.
Accordingly, they have learned to read between the lines, to pick up
subtle hints in news articles which honest journalists have learned how
to slip into their carefully controlled reports. They have also
developed a sophisticated private system of person-to-person reporting
called xiaodao xiaoxi or, literally, “back-alley news.” This
system used to be word-of-mouth between neighbors and friends. As
telephones became ubiquitous, it was done by phone, allowing
transmission over long distances quickly. Now there is the internet,
which, while it is systematically controlled via what has become known
as China’s “Great Firewall”—effectively all of China is like a vast
corporate “intranet” which blocks access to outside websites—still
allows the flow of email. This is nearly impossible to monitor,
particularly when the messages are not bulk mailed to large numbers of
addressees.

So in China, reports of corruption, of local rebellions or strikes,
of internal struggles within the government or party, or of important
news about the outside world that the government wants to keep at bay,
manage to circulate widely inside China despite a huge state censorship
apparatus.

This alternative highly-personal news network works because the
Chinese people know they are being lied to and kept in the dark, and
they want to break through that official shroud of secrecy and control.

In the US, in contrast, we have a public that for the most part is
blissfully unaware of the extent to which our news is being censored,
filtered and controlled. Like the President (who knows better), we
boast of our “free press,” and our open society, and indeed, as a
journalist, I am free to write what I want to write.

But given that most people get their news either from corporately
owned newspapers or from corporate radio and TV stations, it doesn’t
really matter what I or other journalists critical of the Establishment
write because it won’t appear in the corporate media. Since most
Americans, unlike most Chinese people, assume that they live in a
society with a free press and no censorship or control of information,
they don’t even bother to look beyond the information that is spoon-fed
to them by corporate media sources.

The result is that in my experience I have found peasants in rural
Jiangsu or Anhwei Province to in many cases be better informed about
their own country and the world than are typical American suburbanites.
Certainly if an American wants to be informed, all the information she
or he could want is available, but one has to be first of all aware
that one isn't getting certain information via the obvious sources, and
then one has to want to get it, and make the effort to find it. For
most Americans, all three of these elements are missing.

The list of censored stories and issues in the US, about which the
American public knows almost nothing is staggering, going well beyond
just the use of nasty weapons.

Do Americans know, for instance, that all the other modern western
Democracies in the world have some form of national health care—either
a state-run system like that in the UK or a single-payer model like
that in Canada, or some hybrid like they have in France or
Switzerland—and that in all those countries, the systems are so popular
that they have survived decades of conservative governments? No. Our
corporate media instead report on the crank critics of those systems
and allow us to believe they are hated by their citizens.

Do Americans know that the US no longer boasts the best standard of
living in the world—or even close? No. Because the American media
continue to portray the US as “number one.”

Do Americans know that Al Qaeda was actually a creation of the CIA?
No. This important bit of information doesn’t get mentioned in the US
media, which always starts the organization’s history at 1988, when it
got its name, when actually, its early origins date to the arming of
the mujahadeen by the CIA and the CIA-linked Pakistani intelligence
service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, in the late 1970s and
early 1980s, when the US wanted to create and support resistance to the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

And of course, we rarely get to see the slaughter of women and
children that our beloved soldier “heroes” are conducting in Iraq and
Afghanistan in our name.

No censorship in America?

Mr. President, please. You may fool us, but at least don’t insult the intelligence of your Chinese audience.
____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He spent seven
years in China and Hong Kong and Taiwan as a Fulbright journalism
professor and a correspondent for Businessweek magazine. He is author,
most recently, of "The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin's Press, 2006)
and is the winner of a Project Censored award. His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

Fiat Blog!: Block the Bush pardons

Fiat Blog! — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 16:00:00 -0800

Great men never change their minds and never admit... Rep. Schiff on national security and impeachment · â–º November (5). The Matthew Shepherd Act lands in Purgatory · DiFi, D'ohFi · Madam Speaker, listen up! H.Res. 333 ·

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On the NY Times' Editorial About Cheney

Dennis Loo — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 05:37:00 -0800

In today's NYT:

December 23, 2008
EDITORIAL

The World According to Cheney

Vice President Dick Cheney has a parting message for Americans: They should quit whining about all the things he and President Bush did to undermine the rule of law, erode the balance of powers between the White House and Congress, abuse prisoners and spy illegally on Americans. After all, he said, Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln did worse than that.

So Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush managed to stop short of repeating two of the most outrageous abuses of power in American history — Roosevelt’s decision to force Japanese-Americans into camps and Lincoln’s declaration of martial law to silence his critics? That’s not exactly a lofty standard of behavior.

Then again, it must be exhausting to rewrite history as much as Mr. Cheney has done in a series of exit interviews where he has made those comments. It seems as if everything went just great in the Bush years.

The invasion of Iraq was exactly the right thing to do, not an unnecessary war that required misleading Americans. The postinvasion period was not bungled to the point where Americans got shot up by an insurgency that the Bush team failed to see building.

The horrors at Abu Ghraib were not the result of the Pentagon’s decision to authorize abusive and illegal interrogation techniques, which Mr. Cheney endorsed. And only three men were subjected to waterboarding. (Future truth commissions take note.)

In Mr. Cheney’s reality, the crippling budget deficit was caused mainly by fighting two wars and by essential programs like “enhancing the security of our shipping container business.”

Well, no. The Bush team’s program to scan cargo for nuclear materials at air, land and sea ports has been mired in delays, cost overruns and questions about effectiveness. As for the deficit, the Congressional Budget Office has said the Bush-Cheney tax cuts for the wealthy were the biggest reason that the budget went into the red.

Some of Mr. Cheney’s comments were self-serving spin (as when The Washington Times helpfully prodded him to reveal that even though the world might have seen Mr. Bush as insensitive to the casualties of war, Mr. Cheney himself made a “secret” mission to comfort the families of the dead.)

Mr. Cheney was simply dishonest about Mr. Bush’s decision to authorize spying on Americans’ international calls without a warrant. He claimed the White House kept the Democratic and Republican Congressional leadership fully briefed on the program starting in late 2001. He said he personally ran a meeting at which “they were unanimous, Republican and Democrat alike” that the program was essential and did not require further Congressional involvement.

But in a July 17, 2003, letter to Mr. Cheney, Senator John Rockefeller IV, then vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he wanted to “reiterate” the concerns he expressed in “the meeting today.” He said “the activities we discussed raise profound oversight issues” and created “concern regarding the direction the Administration is moving with regard to security, technology and surveillance.”

Mr. Cheney mocked Vice President-elect Joseph Biden for saying that he does not intend to have his own “shadow government” in the White House. Mr. Cheney said it was up to Mr. Biden to decide if he wants “to diminish the office of vice president.”

Based on Mr. Cheney’s record and his standards for measuring these things, we’re certain a little diminishing of that office would be good for the country.

* * *

If you go to the comments on the editorial you will find many letters stating that Bush and Cheney ought to be in prison and, as one writer put it, the New York Times has closed the barn door after the animals have already left.

Another person who is a former Legislative Director for a Congressperson points out in letter #342 that the Jay Rockefeller letter that the NYT puts so much stock in is a "cover your ass" letter that Congresspeople write all the time. The NYT, as this person notes, is not so naive as to truly think it is anything else.

What's in play here is the NYT's inability and unwillingness to step outside the safety of caviling at the margins and act in a way appropriate to the gravity of the situation.

It underscores the necessity for the American people to step beyond what our mass media and major parties will do.

This was my comment at their website on their editorial:

Unfortunately, Cheney isn't misrepresenting the essential facts with respect to the White House briefing the Democratic Congressional leadership on their felonious program of massive spying on the American people. While some of the Democratic leadership might have expressed some reservations such as Jay Rockefeller, the fact remains that none of them went public on this in a manner appropriate to the egregious and outrageous violations of the 1978 FISA law that prohibited surveillance without cause. Moreover, none of them did what WOULD have been meaningful if they really objected - moved to impeach. Letters such as Rockefeller's expressing misgivings and concerns mean exactly how much to someone like Bush and Cheney? It's like saying "No, no, no" to a spoiled and rotten kid demanding his way, while GIVING the damn kid what he wants.

Not only did Bush and Cheney involve and get the approval of the Democratic leadership for their ubiquitous spying, but also for the program of TORTURE, not "abuse" as you continue to describe it. Pelosi, among others, was briefed on their use of waterboarding at least as early as 2002.

What is more disturbing than what Bush and Cheney have done is that they have been allowed to get away with it by the Democrats and by the mass media. If they are not held to account and their precedents are allowed to stand, then anything that they have done and more can be and will eventually be done by future presidents. Even if Obama doesn't do it, in other words, some other president can and will. What happens, therefore, to the rule of law?

The New York Times to its credit exposed the warrantless spying, although it delayed revealing it for a full year, having known about it before the 2004 election, by acceding to the White House's entreaties to not reveal "national security secrets" to who? Why to the American people themselves who were being spied upon!

The Times, to its discredit, still refuses to call for impeachment and still refuses to call torture torture.

Fiat Blog!: For 5000 years, every culture, every religion...

Fiat Blog! — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:00:00 -0800

Colorado Confidential:: DeGette to Introduce Bill for 1.65 Million ...

Colorado Confidential - Front Page — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:00:00 -0800

Would rather see her be a Co-Sponsor on H Res 333, Impeach Cheney Bill by Kucinich, he who won the ABC Debate Poll. I'd much rather see her become a co-sponsor on Rep. Kucinich's Bill to Impeach Cheney ( H Res 333). ...

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Former CIA Officer Predicts Obama Will Employ Rendition

Dennis Loo — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 07:03:00 -0800

Yesterday the New York Times published the following OpEd by Reuel Marc Gerecht, ex-CIA officer and a member of Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a neocon think tank that includes Steve Forbes, Bill Kristol, Jack Kemp, Louis J. Freeh, Joseph Lieberman, Newt Gingrich, Max Kampelman, Robert Macfarlane, and James Woolsey. FDD's Board of Advisors are Gary Bauer, Rep. Eric Cantor, Frank Gaffney, Gene Gately, Charles Jacobs, General P.X. Kelley, Charles Krauthammer, Hon. Richard D. Lamm, Kathleen Troia "KT" McFarland, Sen. Zell Miller, Richard Perle, Steven Pomerantz, Oliver "Buck" Revell, Hon. Francis J. "Bing" West (This list courtesy of Wikipedia).

In his OpEd Gerecht postulates a "ticking time bomb" scenario:

"[I]f we’d gotten our hands on a senior member of Al Qaeda before 9/11, and knew that an attack likely to kill thousands of Americans was imminent, wouldn’t waterboarding, or taking advantage of the skills of our Jordanian friends, have been the sensible, moral thing to do with a holy warrior who didn’t fear death but might have feared pain?"

Interestingly, the US government did have information about a pending attack on the US, with the World Trade Center Twin Towers specifically mentioned by more than one source. What did the Bush White House do about this?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Not only did they have information, they had a great deal of information, from diverse and multiple sources, without engaging in rendition and without employing torture.

In my book, Impeach the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney, you will find this abbreviated list, in Chapter 14 by Peter Phillips, Bridget Thornton, Lew Brown and Andrew Sloan, of what the White House knew before 9/11:

"A significant portion of the GDG [Global Dominance Group] had every opportunity to know in advance that the 9/11 attacks were imminent. Afghanistan, Argentina, Britain, the Cayman Islands, Egypt, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Morocco, Russia, and from within the U.S. the intelligence community all warned the U.S. of imminent terrorist attacks. Some of the 9/11 prewarnings include:

"1996–2001: Federal authorities knew that suspected terrorists with ties to bin Laden received flight training at schools in the U.S. and abroad. An Oklahoma City FBI agent sent a memo warning that 'large numbers of Middle Eastern males' were getting flight training and could have been planning terrorist attacks. (CBS, May 30, 2002.) One convicted terrorist confessed that his planned role in a terror attack was to crash a plane into CIA headquarters. (Washington Post, September 23, 2001.)

"JUNE of 2001: German intelligence warned the CIA, Britain’s intelligence agency, and Israel’s Mossad that Middle Eastern terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft and use them as weapons to attack 'American and Israeli symbols which stand out.' (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 11, 2001; Washington Post, September 14, 2001; Fox News, May 17, 2002.)

"JUNE 28, 2001: George Tenet wrote an intelligence summary to Condoleezza Rice stating, 'It is highly likely that a significant al-Qaeda attack is in the near future, within several weeks.' (Washington Post, February 17, 2002.)

"JUNE–JULY 2001: President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and national security aides were given briefs with headlines such as 'Bin Laden Threats Are Real' and 'Bin Laden Planning High Profile Attacks.' The exact contents of these briefings remain classified, but according to the 9/11 Commission, they consistently predicted upcoming attacks that would occur 'on a catastrophic level, indicating that they would cause the world to be in turmoil, consisting of possible multiple—but not necessarily simultaneous—attacks.' (9/11 Commission Report, April 13, 2004.)

"JULY 26, 2001: Attorney General Ashcroft stopped flying commercial airlines because of a threat assessment. (CBS, July 26, 2001.) The report of this warning was omitted from the 9/11 Commission Report. (Griffin, May 22, 2005.)

"AUGUST 6, 2001: President Bush received a classified intelligence briefing at his Crawford, Texas, ranch, warning that bin Laden might be planning to hijack commercial airliners; this briefing was entitled 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the United States.' The entire memo focused on the possibility of terrorist attacks inside the U.S. and specifically mentioned the World Trade Center. (Newsweek, May 27, 2002; New York Times, May 15, 2002; Washington Post, April 11, 2004; White House, April 11, 2004; Intelligence Briefing, August 6, 2001.)

"AUGUST, 2001: Russian President Vladimir Putin warned the U.S. that suicide pilots were training for attacks on U.S. targets. (Fox News, May 17, 2002.) The head of Russian intelligence also later stated, 'We had clearly warned them' on several occasions, but they 'did not pay the necessary attention.' (Agence France-Presse, September 16, 2001.)

"SEPTEMBER 10, 2001: a group of top Pentagon officials received an urgent warning that prompted them to cancel their flight plans for the following morning. (Newsweek, September 17, 2001.) The 9/11 Commission Report omitted this report. (Griffin, May 22, 2005.)"

***

The "ticking time bomb" scenario allegedly necessitating the use of torture is a false premise for multiple reasons. I will elaborate on this question as I am able, time permitting. For now, remember that any scoundrel could cite an alleged "ticking time bomb" as a justification at any time. Is this the kind of world that we want to live in where anyone has license, as long as he or she cites the suspicion that there's a bomb about to go off, to torture someone? Torture is, as international law makes crystal clear, at all times and under all circumstances unjust, immoral, illegal and barbaric. Those who want to claim, as does Gerecht, that "we're the good guys" and "they're the bad guys" and "when we torture people we do it morally" are either trying to fool others or are engaging in self-deception as well as duplicity.

See the Op-Ed in question below:

December 13, 2008

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR | TRANSITIONS

Out of Sight

By REUEL MARC GERECHT
Prague

FEW post-9/11 issues have produced more anxiety and revulsion than the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of “aggressive interrogation” and the extrajudicial rendition of terrorist suspects to countries that practice torture. President-elect Barack Obama has promised to ban waterboarding and other pain-inflicting soliciting techniques, as well as rendition. He has also promised to close the Guantánamo Bay prison.

More broadly, liberal Democrats in Congress intend to deploy a more moral counterterrorism, where the ends — stopping the slaughter of civilians by Islamic holy warriors — no longer justifies reprehensible means. Winning the hearts and minds of foreigners by remaining true to our nobler virtues is now seen as the way to defeat our enemies while preserving our essential goodness.

Sounds uplifting. Don’t bet on it happening.

Mr. Obama will soon face the same awful choices that confronted George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and he could well be forced to accept a central feature of their anti-terrorist methods: extraordinary rendition. If the choice is between non-deniable aggressive questioning conducted by Americans and deniable torturous interrogations by foreigners acting on behalf of the United States, it is almost certain that as president Mr. Obama will choose the latter.

Of course, he and his senior officials seem to believe now that they don’t have to make this choice. For them there is a better way to combat terrorism, by using physically non-coercive questioning of suspects and civilian courts or military courts-martial to try and punish jihadists.

But this third way, which is essentially where America was before the Clinton administration embraced rendition, is plausible only if Mr. Obama is lucky. He might be. If there is no “ticking time bomb” situation — say, where waterboarding a future Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (the 9/11 mastermind) could save thousands of civilians — then there is neither need for the C.I.A.’s exceptional methods, nor the harsh services of Jordan’s General Intelligence Department.

And there are signs that Mr. Obama won’t have to confront such a situation. Through American and allied efforts, Al Qaeda has sustained enormous damage since 9/11. Osama bin Laden’s decisive battle in Iraq, where Al Qaeda intended to re-energize its holy war against the Americans among the Arabs, has turned into a military and moral disaster. Arab Muslim fundamentalists have finally started the great debate as to whether it is, in fact, unacceptable to kill believers and nonbelievers in jihad.

And the internal-security services of our allies in Europe are, on the whole, vastly better today than they were in 2001. Thanks to intrusive surveillance methods (many of which are outlawed in the United States), they are much more efficient in pre-empting the plots of holy warriors traversing their borders.

However, troubles in Pakistan may well reverse Mr. Obama’s luck. He has said he intends to be hawkish about fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Central Asia. So, let us suppose that he increases the number of Special Forces raids into Pakistan, and those soldiers capture members of Al Qaeda and their computers, and learn that the group has advanced plans for striking American and European targets, but we don’t know specifically where or when.

What would Mr. Obama do? After all, if we’d gotten our hands on a senior member of Al Qaeda before 9/11, and knew that an attack likely to kill thousands of Americans was imminent, wouldn’t waterboarding, or taking advantage of the skills of our Jordanian friends, have been the sensible, moral thing to do with a holy warrior who didn’t fear death but might have feared pain?

Mr. Obama will probably not have the option of ordering the C.I.A. to aggressively interrogate another member of Al Qaeda — not after running a campaign that highlighted the moral failings of President Bush. To get the C.I.A. back in the interrogation business would probably require a liberal Democratic Congress to pass laws guaranteeing case officers’ immunity from criminal and civil prosecution. This seems unlikely — unless, of course, the United States is again devastated by a terrorist strike.

And because of Mr. Obama’s plan to close Guantánamo, the Justice Department is already going to have to figure out how to move, try, punish and release its detainees. Thus the last thing in the world the Obama administration will want is to bring in more “enemy combatants” from the Central Asian battlefield.

Which brings us back to rendition, which, properly understood, is what Americans do when they realize that active counterterrorism against jihadists prepared to use mass-casualty weapons is an ethical, juridical and operational tar pit. It isn’t an ideal solution — American intelligence officers have no control of the questioning, and Washington can become beholden to foreign security services — but it’s a satisfactory compromise. Just ask Samuel R. Berger, the national-security adviser for President Bill Clinton, who no doubt worked through all the pitfalls when he first approved extrajudicial rendition.

In addition, the C.I.A. is able to guard the secrecy of foreign-liaison operations more effectively, especially from Congressional prying, than it can its own activities. It has also certainly paid close attention to how the press tracked some of its clandestine international flights carrying terrorism suspects after 9/11, and will in the future undoubtedly make it much harder to sleuth out who is going where.

A dense bipartisan moral fog surrounds rendition. Former senior Clinton officials can still deny that they sent anyone away in order that he be tortured. Few are as honest and frank as Walt Slocombe, a Clinton undersecretary of defense who once remarked that the difference between Democratic and Republican rendition was that Democrats “drilled air holes in the boxes.”

If Mr. Obama’s Democrats get blown back into the ugly world that we live in, and resume rendition (and, of course, fib about it), then President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who have been vilified for besmirching America’s honor, may at least take some consolation in knowing that hypocrisy is always the homage vice pays to virtue.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, is a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Fiat Blog!: A well-regulated militia in Yosemite

Fiat Blog! — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:00:00 -0800