Over the last two days, so many different revelations have exposed aspects of the role torture played in attempts to tie Iraq to al Qaeda, thus justifying the Iraq War, that there is no longer any reasonable doubt about the intention involved. This is why we tortured. Not the only reason, to be sure, but a very important one--and one not even covered by the farcical "torture memos". Rachel Maddow provided a very compelling summary of the evidence last night, before discussing the latest developments with Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side:
In light of these latest developments, Obama's attempt to continue covering up Bush Era crimes is no longer tenable. His promises of "openness and transparency" cannot be squared with covering up what clearly are high crimes and misdemeanors. Torture is against the law, it's against international law, so is making war on another country. So we have two grave crimes linked to one another. Failing to investigate and prosecute torture is itself a violation of our treaty obligations--another violation of international law, and hence a violation of our own Constitution, which declares such treaties to be the "law of the land."
There is no doubt about it. America is a rouge state. Bush made it so, and under Obama's failure to take corrective action, it remains so. We have only barely begun the struggle to reclaim our democracy, and our republican form of government. We have no more than a toehold, a foothold at best. The promise of "change we can believe in" has become the single greatest obstacle to actually delivering change we can believe in. We cannot move forward without understanding our past, and how we have gotten where we are today. A democratic republic cannot be built on silences and lies.
We have been told repeatedly that concern for the truth will get in the way of Obama's important agenda. But everything Obama wants to do is already a compromise, and its being compromised further and further every day. The idea that surrendering in advance on the most basic responsibilities of upholding the rule of law will somehow make Obama politically stronger and more able to solve other important problems that confront the nation is palpably false. Bill Clinton tried a similar trade-off when he took office, and it ended up empowering the GOP as it had not been empowered since the 1920s. Retreat from responsibility is not the way forward. It is not now. It cannot ever be.
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are those who want crops without plowing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." -- Frederick Douglass
Desperately trying to distract attention from the rapidly-breaking, multiple-angle story that BushCo tortured detainees to concoct a phony excuse for the Iraq War, the GOP has decided that the best defense is a good offense, and if that's not available, then just giving offense will have to do.
And so they're going after Nancy Pelosi for sticking by her guns that the CIA never briefed her that it had already used torture. The CIA said they did brief her, Pelosi says not so much. And since the CIA also said they had briefed former Senator Bob Graham four times (including twice shortly after Pelosi) and now they've been forced to back down from that, things aren't really looking so good for the Slam Dunk-era CIA guys, and their current-day ass-coverers.
But you go to war with the lies you've got, as a great liar once said, not the lies you wish you had. Leading the crowd, of course, is the most hyperboliplectic GOP leader/liar of the past 20 years, serial adulterer Newt Gingrich.
In an interview with ABC News Radio's Marcus Wilson, Gingrich, R-Ga., said Pelosi, D-Calif., "has lied to the House" in claiming that she was never briefed by the CIA about the Bush administration's use of waterboarding and other harsh tactics.
"I think she has lied to the House, and I think that the House has an absolute obligation to open an inquiry, and I hope there will be a resolution to investigate her. And I think this is a big deal. I don't think the Speaker of the House can lie to the country on national security matters," Gingrich said.
He's right, of course. That's the President's job!
Back On April 26, in my diary "Torture In NeoContext", I picked up on Keith Olbermann's brief introductory summation of how torture had been used to try to produce bogus intelligence tying Iraq to 9/11, and wrote:
Torture wasn't supposed to save us from a ticking time-bomb. Heck "24" was barely starting its first season. Torture was supposed to get al Qaeda operatives to fess up to a non-existent link with Iraq, so we could have the war the neo-cons had been itching for for years, instead of this unwanted distraction by bin Laden and friends.
I went on to tie this scheme back to the well-established (albeit totally ignored) neocon plan for world domination (PNAC's September 2000 "Rebuilding America's Defenses"), in which terrorists play no part whatsoever, but taking over Iraq is an important regional geopolitical move for which Saddam Hussein himself is nothing more than a convenient excuse (p. 14):
Indeed, the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.
After lying fallow for a few weeks, this story has now exploded with a new angle--information reported at the Daily Beast, and supported by Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff Lt. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson--that torture had been used after the invasion of Iraq in an attempt to produce false confessions tying Iraq to al Qaeda. This use of torture clearly would not fall under the purview of the OLC memos, and thus opens a whole new grounds for criminal investigations, which Senator Sheldon Whitehouse today confirmed on both CNN and MSNBC:
The story was further picked up on Countdown this afternoon. Video on flip.
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