These ten things were specifically considered legal by Bybbe and the OLC:


Sure it's not everything that McCain went through, but there are enough similarities that it should give you pause in questioning whether we torture. I don't even think McCain would argue that we used similar techniques to what was used by the N. Vietnamese.

I don't think knowing is as severe as instigating, but if Congressional leaders knew and didn't voice objections they're complicit. I'm fine with prosecuting the lot of them regardless of party. Can you say the same?

I feel the same way. If that is true, I have no problem with prosecuting them and throwing them out of office. They can go live in Syria where that shit flies.

Anything that clears out congress is fine with me.

What am I missing here? I already said that he should hold all of his former Congressional peers accountable. I already said in my post what you said in your response, yet you ask if think they should be held accountable.

You could have just saved the time and said you agree with my assessment rather than pretending to say something profound that I hadn't already said.

Agreed. I kind of like this whole 'show all the information' stuff that's going on. For the most part, it's making all these yahoos look like a bunch of hypocritical asses. Both sides think they're playing the right cards, but all they're doing is damaging their re-election changes en masse.

But you have no interest in holding the Bush admin accountable. That's where we differ. You're hopeful this will hurt Obama/Dems politically, I'm hopeful this will punish those responsible for instituting a torture regime.

That's not true at all. That's a much different discussion. I think that people should be held accountable if something illegal was done. What I've seen thus far does appear to be stretching things a bit and giving a hing of impropriety, but I don't think it's a prosecutable offense.

In addition, as many strategists on both sides of the aisle have noted, Obama has put himself into a real pickle with his flip-flop on whether these people should face prosecution.

That's why it should be taken out of his hands and given to a special prosecutor to investigate. IMO there's no way any AG can make a determination as to whether laws were broken without being burdened by political considerations.

If it were my choice I'd get Fitzgerald and tell him to go wherever the facts lead him. I seriously doubt, however, that Congressional Republicans, and likely a few Dems, would go for this.

Well, these guys in the statosphere of politics aren't in the weeds and seeds of the tactical level. So a high level politician says, "Find out what he knows". He doesn't "instigate" anything. What happens is the agents at the tactical level say, "You know, I bet waterboarding these assholes will get the information we want" and then all these chuckleheads at the top discuss the legal aspects. Bush, Cheney, and woah, Democrats like Nancy Pelosi were involved in the discussion? Really? I never knew that, based on what the Dems have been tellling us. Cheney will say all day long that they thought long and hard about it and discussed it at length with legal and they feel it was the right thing to do.

NANCY PELOSI said it was the wrong thing...but she knew about it all along and didn't say so??? And you will defend that?

I agree with the special prosecutor idea. Put it in someone like Fitzgerald's hands who has been fair and if he finds something illegally, he prosecutes. This shouldn't be the President's call.

Where have I defended Pelosi? I do think there's a difference between ordering certain tactics and knowing, just as I think there's a difference between ordering a robbery and knowing about it. However, I'm fine with an investigation that lays everything out and if it's shown that Congressional leaders violated the law they can go down too, regardless of party.

Unlike some, I'm not interested in which party comes out on top, I'd just like to see those that turned my country into a torture regime face some consequences.

This.

It's getting a little rediculous that waterboarding the mastermind of 9/11 in 2002 in an attempt to save lives has come to this conclusion for liberals. And when I say liberals, I am not meaning to single you out JPhillips, so please don't take it personally.

Why do you have to be a liberal to be against torturing people?

I personally don't think this is as big a deal as other things. We are going crazy over the torturing of a few people. I'm against torture and think it's something that is for shithole 3rd world countries. But we killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Iraq for no reason as well as thousands of our own servicemen. That seems like a bigger crime in my book.

183 times in an attempt to save lives? D o you really believe there was more to learn after 100 times? But waterboarding KSM wasn't at all the only thing that was approved by the administration

They authorized hitting and slamming detainees into walls. And gave the okay for stress positions akin to what the Chinese Communists used in Korea. And agreed to locking people in coffin-like containment boxes. And waterboarded a guy 83 times who turned out to be a minor figure at best. And crafted a policies to "take the gloves off" at Abu Ghraib. And kept detainees location secret from the ICRC. And destroyed dozens of videos of interrogations. And copied techniques from SERE training to use at Gitmo. And authorized sleep and sensory deprivation techniques. And authorized forced nudity. And did nothing while at least 108 detainees died in custody.

Read this from Admin official and torture opponent Philip Zelikow:


And this from OLC lawyer John Yoo


Waterboarding by itself would be reprehensible, but the evidence clearly shows that "enhanced interrogation techniques" were authorized at many lacations around the globe. At the behest of our most senior government officials we beat, contorted, waterboarded, sometimes drove insane, and sometimes killed hundreds of detainees.

I'm glad you aren't comfortable saying the previous administration instituted a torture regime, but wishing it weren't so doesn't make it the truth. What else should we call a systematic program of mental and physical abuse?

if the info the congresspeople got was classified info than how could they raise hell in a handbasket without it being "Deepthroat" like or treasonous....Im sincerely asking. When it was going on, no one would talk about it, the admin was saying it wasnt happening, and the documents were classified so whats a shmoe to do outside of the closed doors? Im not sure what options they would have at that moment in time.

that being said I see nothing wrong with a special prosecutor going after all the people who signed off on things that the Geneva Conventions define as torture. A violation is a violation of that.

It would have been nice for just one person to see how depraved these techniques were and force a legal confrontation. At the end of the day the people who knew what was going on, opposed it, but said nothing were cowards. There may be a reason for being a coward, but then again isn't there always a reason?

treason? I mean could it have been construed as such and then pursued by the admin?

I think the fear was far more about electoral chances than treason. I don't think there's a credible scenario for putting Harry Reid in front of a firing squad.

I'm getting really tired of this parsing of words and the pseudo-debate. You know what, screw 'em. Anyone who knew about it should be held to some sort of responsibility. I don't mean "got a memo that no one reads" but had actual briefings about what went on.

We're the US. We're better than that and we should be embarrassed for having an environment over the last 7 or 8 years that enabled this to even be a debate rather than an open-and-shut case. We don't torture, we shouldn't torture, and anyone who didn't take that moral high ground should be held accountable according to their standing. Yoo and Bibey should be effing brought up on war crimes and Gonzalez should probably be right there with them.

SI

You're right. It was a big crime. Saddam Hussein was convicted and hung for that reason.

Agreed. Classified or not, there is protection for whistleblowers in this case. If it truly was a case of legal negligence, those people should have called it out as such. There's no treason charges against someone if you're calling out what the law considers negligent (though I'm not completely sure that's what we have in this case).

As someone else said and I pointed out earlier this week, the handwringing is mostly nothing more than partisan politics. These politicians on both side throwing the mud are looking to get ahead. They don't care all that much whether it was legal or not.

I have to say, this isn't how I'm reading Obama's statements. I read his statements as he doesn't intend to allow "people who were just following orders" to be prosecuted, but he's open to investigations into how those orders came about.


Doesn't the current evidence seem to indicate the opposite sequence of events?


Are you, Dutch, seriously suggesting that a member of Congress should have publicized top secret information? That doesn't seem like you.


:+1:

Was Obama a "peer" in 2002 when Pelosi and all were briefed on this? I'm not sure why this is bad for the administration, it wasn't as if Obama himself was briefed about it 7 years ago and did nothing. Pelosi =/ Obama just in case you weren't clear by looking at them. I sure hope he goes after Pelosi, as I find her pretty foul, but I'm not sure why you are trying to assign blame to the current president for the fact that people in his party knew about this 7 years ago.

Other than you find every way you can to spin things against the administration.

Uh, Obama wasn't in the Senate 7 years ago, so he obviously wasn't involved in any of that. With that said, the events of the past week and previous weeks have shown Obama to be a very reactionary leader who will quickly chance his stance if his initial stance hurts him from a PR perspective. He doesn't get direct blame, but he needs to handle this gently. As I mentioned before, this isn't even a partisan issue at this point, though it was initially. In the process of trying to politicize this issue, there could be significant unintended casulties on both sides. Obama will likely look back on this as a can of worms that he never should have opened.

Can you elucidate for me what this "flip-flop" was, preferably with links to sources?

Oh, so you're a stand-up philosopher.

Some things in life should remain a mystery.

Bush killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens as well as thousands of American military. All for a war of choice that wasn't necessary and had no effect on our safety.

Yeah, we'll just agree to disagree. Sadaam had many choices that he could have made to avoid all of that, but it's obviously easier to scapegoat than hold him accountable for his actions.

I'd also note that this is no excuse to divert from some of the mistakes that President Bush made. But placing sole blame for hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and our war dead is pretty misplaced.

Here's a summary of the most recent one. With the disclaimer that it's a conservative blog, there are links to the articles within the blog entry where you can read some of the articles from places like the NY Times.

Obama Reverses Stance On Enhanced Interrogation "Truth" Commission (Wizbang)

So you felt it was worth sacrificing that many American lives? Not counting the hundreds of thousands Iraqis who died and the hundreds of thousands of Americans who were hurt and were away from their families for years.

I think it's safe to say that not even you believe it was worth it.

My main beef was not with going into Iraq, but rather that the administration felt the need to work the WMD angle. There was all kinds of suffering, killing and intimidation going on in that regime. There was enough justification from a humanitarian standpoint to take out Sadaam to save thousands of lives. We did all that in the end. The only problem was that they argued for the war with reasoning that was iffy at best.

No one likes to see a single soldier die, but they certainly didn't die for an unneeded reason as you'd like to portray it.

I'm not going to take this thing any further off target. There's plenty of current difficulties in the current administration that warrant discussion in an Obama thread over rehashing the past.

Lets be honest, if there was enough justification in your mind to fight this war, you would be over there fighting it. The fact you are not shows that it's more about supporting your political party and not about the cause.

Don't be a jackass. I applied for the military and was denied due to medical reasons that I was unaware of when I initially applied. Granted, that was in the mid-90s, but I tried to do so. Your accusatory state in this post has no place in this discussion anyway. We're all American and each one of us has the ability to state exactly what we believe because other people fought for me and others even when people like me physically weren't able to help them out.

All I'm saying is that it's easy to talk tough about wars, torture and whatever else when it's someone else's kid taking the punishment.

Careful, US Soldiers are not children.

As for talking tough, yes it's easier. The same could be said about ignoring foreign enemies. All have their consequences.

For instance, it is my belief that rediculously harsh "tactics" at Abu Graib cost some soldiers their life as it energized the terror insurgency base for a while and chipped away at the Iraqi's belief/trust in American (and British/Australian/Polish) forces. Because it is my belief that these reservists at Abu Graib were simply doing this for sadistic reasons.

On the flip-side, it is also my belief that interogations, including tough interogation tactics of top terror-insurgents, saved American lives. Further, it is not my belief that any of these harsh interogation methods were done for sadistic reasons.

Two things:

The Senate report makes it very clear that Abu Ghraib was the result of decisions made by senior admin officials.

Do good intentions excuse all behavior?

It's an all-volunteer force. If they don't like it, get out when they fulfill their commitment to the nation. That being said, I don't think that this war was necessarily a just war...but it's not necessarily an unjust war either.

Can you please link me to more info on that?

edit: Got it.

http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-s...aineeabuse.pdf

Alright, I read that over. Good information. To me, this is a trickle-down affect that empowered both the right intentions (Gitmo) and the wrong intensions (Abu Graib). The reason it's hard for me to condemn President Bush's role in this (stating that Geneva Conventions do not apply to these terror-insurgents) is because POW's cannot be interogated. Was the true rationale just to be sadistic? I don't buy it.

I think when you do volunteer, you are doing so under the belief that you will only be used when necessary to protect our country. One of the saddest elements to this war is how it has decimated our military and forced them to dramatically lower standards to make recruiting goals.

It all depends upon your point of view as to whether or not they were protecting their country. I would contend that they were. It might not have been a direct attack, we defend situation, but this was a radical step in the way to fight terror. No, I am not saying that there was a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, but we could fight terror by exporting democracy from a liberated Iraq to the rest of the region.

Lowering standards has been a common item throughout the history of the nation when it has gone to war. You can look at the testing of recruits during WWII and how they quality of recruit changed over the course of the war.

Right, the lower standards only means it may take a bit more effort of NCO's to bring the best out of new recruits. I hope nobody is sad because they think the American NCO's and new recruits have let them down.

You don't think having lower IQs and felons in the military is a negative?

I'm saying lowering the recruitment standards isn't even close to being as important as you want us to believe. Would you care to cite examples of how our military men and women don't live up to your expectations now compared to 2001?

I don't think we'd know how it effects our military. I guess it's just crazy to think being stupid and a criminal would be a negative when being given a job with a ton of responsibility.

No offense meant to our current Armed Forces guys/gals, but criminals and the stupid have a long history as the backbone of the world's armies.

I believe they preferred to be called "infantry" and not "meat shield"

SI

French Foreign Legion? Nothing like the winged dagger ... flights of fancy of my youth.