cheney Posts

Reports are in that link up the US torture program and the hunt for the non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Jonathan S Landay in McClatchy News quotes a "former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue":

"The main [reason for the torture] is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

"There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.

All this is not really a surprise; I covered it in real time over on Nonviolence.org. There were numerous reports that the Vice President and Secretary of Defense were pushing the intelligence agencies to come up with evidence that would back their flawed theories.

The United States is supposed to be the champion of freedom but we resorted to the most brutal of communist-era torture techniques because our highest officials were more interested in their cartoon view of the world than the complex reality (and not so complex: anyone who's taken an "Intro to Islam" class would know that an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden would be have been very unlikely). When facts and ideological theories don't match up, it's time to dig for more facts and revisit the ideologies. 

Part of the playbook for American torture in Iraq and Guantánamo comes from Chinese interrogation methods used against captured Americans during the Cold War.

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners. The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

It sounds like something out of the 1962 thriller film The Manchurian Candidate. And in a way it is: the idea that Chinese Communists had used inhuman ruthlessness to unlock the secrets of the brain to create the perfect truth technique would be a charming artifact of 1950s American culture, something to show alongside the hula hoop and the Jetson-like hover cars we're all supposed to be driving in the year 2000. Instead it's yet another exhibit in Pentagon amnesia.

Doesn't anyone do any fact checking at the Pentagon? "Officials who drew on the SERE program [in 2002 to design American intelligence adaptation] appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners." And yet... it's clear that Presidents Bush and Cheney wanted false information in 2002 to launch the war against Iraq. Whatever "confessions" can be wrung from the Baghdad taxi drivers who got caught up in the arrest sweeps can certainly be used to bully the growing number who oppose the war.

But what do we want, justifications or the truth? Peace in the region or protection from sins of the past? Forget that torture is inhuman: it's also just an unreliable way of getting accurate information. It's hard to imagine a realistic scenario where the horrible events of 9/11 could have been stopped by acts of torture by U.S. intelligence or military personnel but it's could have been stopped if thoughtful analysts had been allowed to share information across agency lines and been focused on true knowledge and understanding.

I thought it might be fun to dip into the blog archives every month or so to pull up some old chestnuts:

• A year ago: Blushing over Chris M's QuakerQuaker carnival and a Quaker post Who Am I to Decide Anything about leaderless dynamics and theological creep among liberal Friends;
• Six Years Ago: Dick Cheney's Rambo Complex ("Bush and Cheney are snoring in the bleacher seats when it comes to the world's most pressing and intractable conflict. They're dreaming of cinematic glory.");
• Ten(ish) Years Ago: Stop the Zipper War Before it Starts, an editorial against Bill Clinton's Iraq sabre-rattling in the midst of the Monica Lewinski scandal.

From the New York Times : "I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted today of lying to F.B.I. agents and grand jurors investigating the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative amid a burning dispute over the war in Iraq."

The Washington Post notes that Libby is the highest-ranking White House official to be indicted on criminal charges in modern times.

This has been a long time coming. This is the first conviction arising from the Bush Administration's deliberate campaign to mislead Congress and the American people into the war in Iraq. Libby was Vice President Cheney's right hand man and orchestrated a nasty smear campaign against the family of Joseph Wilson, a state department diplomat who researched, questioned and publicly doubted one of the major pieces of "evidence" of an Iraqi weapons of mass destruction program cited by the President George W Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address.

Libby was found guilty of perjury and making false statements to investigators. In the course of the trial, it became clear that his boss, the Vice President, was actively involved in the smear. From the Post again: "Testimony and evidence revealed that the vice president dictated precise talking points he wanted Libby and other aides to use to rebut Wilson's accusations against the White House, helped select which journalists would be contacted and worked with Bush to declassify secret intelligence reports on Iraqi weapons that he believed would contradict Wilson's claims."

Unfortunately deliberately misleading Congress and the American people and holding up the most obvious forgery as a cause of war is still not considered a treasonable offense. Pity.

Some good questions asked over at Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo: about Vice President Cheney's complicity in and essential authorship of one of the central lies at the core of the Bush administration's case for war

The truth, though, is that we are not really examining the cover-up in this case so much as we are still living within it. Most of the key facts of this episode either remain entirely concealed or buried under a mass of government produced misinformation.

Shortly after the Bush Administration took office, Vice President Dick Cheney held a series of secret meetings in the White House that have guided America's energy policy over the last four years. The White House has refused repeated requests for a list of participants at the "task force" meetings. All we've known for sure is who wasn't invited: enironmentalists and anyone else who might bring a perspective critical of America's dependence on fossil fuels.

We've long suspected that Cheney's special guests were top oil company executives and that these consultants largely wrote the energy guidelines that came out of the meeting. The policy strong favor the economic interests of "Big Oil" over environmental or national security concerns. The oil companies have repeatedly denied being at the meetings: Just last week, oil industry officials from Exxon Mobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips testified at a joint hearing of the Senate Energy and Commerce committees that their employees had been part of Cheney's energy task force.

Liar liar, pants on fire.

The Washington Post has obtained a White House document that executives from Big Oil did indeed meet with the energy task force in 2001. Investigations are in order. Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey said "The White House went to great lengths to keep these meetings secret, and now oil executives may be lying to Congress about their role in the Cheney task force." This issue is important not only to Washington Beltway insiders but to all of us. Disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing quagmire in iraq are fueled by American energy needs. As long as we have Big Oil dictating our energy policy we will continue to have these wars and climate tragedies. People will die, lives will be ruined and we will all be taxed for our oil misadventures.

Apparently the U.S. is pressuring Qatar to sell the Al Jazeera TV network The best line in the New York Times article:

Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other Bush administration officials have complained heatedly to Qatari leaders that Al Jazeera's broadcasts have been inflammatory, misleading and occasionally false, especially on iraq.

So I suppose Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell have never given out misleading or occasionally false information about iraq?

Al Jazeera is watched by 30 million to 50 million viewers. It's coverage has been inflammatory and I'm not going to defend that, but it's the most important media source in the Middle East and should not be shut down by American pressure. Qatar is only considering selling it, but potential buyers for the financially-strapped network are few. And the Cheney team wouldn't be involved if they weren't interested in making it's content more U.S. friendly.