REVIEW & OUTLOOK DECEMBER 19, 2008
The left gears up to prosecute Bush officials for protecting the country.The release of Carl Levin's report on the Bush Administration's alleged "torture" policies was a formality: The Senator's conclusions were politically predetermined long ago. Still, the credulity and acclaim that has greeted this agitprop is embarrassing, even by Washington standards.
According to the familiar "torture narrative" that Mr. Levin sanctifies, President Bush and senior officials sanctioned detainee abuse, first by refusing to accord al Qaeda members Geneva Convention rights, and second by conspiring to rewrite the legal definition of torture. The new practices were then imposed on military leaders and spread through the chain of command. Therefore, Mr. Bush, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and their deputies are morally -- and legally -- responsible for all prisoner abuse since 9/11, not least Abu Ghraib.
Nearly every element of this narrative is dishonest. As officials testified during Mr. Levin's hearings and according to documents in his possession, senior officials were responding to requests from the CIA and other commanders in the field. The flow was bottom up, not top down. Those commanders were seeking guidance on what kind of interrogation was permissible as they tried to elicit information from enemies who want to murder civilians. At the time, no less than Barack Obama's Attorney General nominee, Eric Holder, was saying that terrorists didn't qualify for Geneva protections.
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As for Mr. Levin, his real purpose is to lay the groundwork for war-crimes prosecutions of Bush officials like John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Jim Haynes who acted in good faith to keep the country safe within the confines of the law.
Messrs. Obama and Holder would be foolish to spend their political capital on revenge, but Mr. Levin is demanding an "independent" commission to further politicize the issue and smear decent public servants.more(emphasis added)
Wait, "smear decent public servants" who torture? OMG!
U.S. Senator proposing an investigation of Bush administration officials? NYT calls for prosecutor to "consider criminal charges against top officials at the Pentagon"Update:
Last night on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) ardently defended the Bush administration’s torture policy, echoing Vice President Cheney’s claim that
torture yielded life-saving results. He pointed to waterboarding Abu Zubayda and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was remarkably successful. “After this procedure,” Duncan said, “we got enormously valuable information that saved American lives.” Watch it:
(
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/12/19/hunter-torture-works/">Hunter: Torture provided 'enormously valuable information that saved American lives')
Despite Hunter’s claims, the torture of Abu Zubayda and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed provided
next to zero useful intelligence, as a recent Vanity Fair article revealed:
But according to a former senior C.I.A. official, who read all the interrogation reports on K.S.M., “90 percent of it was total f*cking bullsh*t.” A former Pentagon analyst adds: “K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were.”
In fact, the article explained that the “intelligence” gleaned from Zubayda was false information about non-existent links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein — information the Bush administration seized on as
a major part of its argument for the Iraq war, as a former Pentagon analyst explained:
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Rather than “saving American lives,” torturing Zubayda provided false intelligence that led to a catastrophic war that killed more than 4,000 Americans. What’s more, as former interrogators and military officials have said, torture has directly led to the deaths of thousands of American soldiers through its use as an effective recruiting tool for al Qaeda and insurgents.
UPDATE David Rose, the author of the Vanity Fair article, told Rachel Maddow last night that the counterrorism experts he interviewed "are
unanimous in saying they got much better information from regular, legal, constitutional methods, rapport building, developing a relationship with the source. That way, they got really good information."
It's spin time to cover for war criminals, and the Repubs are out in force admitting to torture.
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