Vice President Joe Biden hit the nail on the head when he said Dick Cheney cannot change history and that his recent rhetoric is misinforming Americans. The former Vice President's hypocrisy was clear last weekend when he criticized of the Obama Administration's handling of alleged Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. It's time to set the record straight.
The evidence for the necessity to hold Bush administration officials accountable for the use of torture continues to grow. Light is being shed, not only on the acts of torture, but also on the indiscriminate and wantonly careless manner in which detainees were designated as such "high value" that they should be considered appropriate subjects for torture interrogation techniques.
On Tuesday, June 16th, the Washington Post reported (CIA Mistaken on 'High-Value' Detainee, Document Shows) that CIA documents confirm the Bush administration was mistaken about Guantanamo detainee Abu Zubaydah being a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda.
The Post report confirmed what Brent Mickum, one of Abu Zubaydah's lawyers, told a torture accountability forum on May 30th, that "Abu Zubaydah was never even a member of al-Qaeda much less a high-level member." Nevertheless, Zubaydah, a Palestinian, was held at a secret CIA facility after his capture in Pakistan in March 2002 and was subjected 83 times to waterboarding.
Mickum on his client Abu Zubaydah at torture accountability forum May 30th:
Mickum wrote about these mistakes by the Bush administration in a March 30th article "The Truth About Abu Zubaydah" published in the British newspaper Guardian.
The facts surrounding the handling and treatment of Abu Zubaydah that have so far come to light raise enormous doubts about Dick Cheney's assertions that the techniques he authorized were used sparingly, only on "high-value" suspects and yielded positive results. Closer to the truth is that the use of these torture techniques was reckless, in most cases based on implausible and mistaken information, and may involve a cover-up by the OLC.
Senior Bush administration officials - like former Vice President Dick Cheney - continue to insist that the use of abusive interrogation techniques like waterboarding has saved American lives.
There is an ongoing debate over the closing of America's most notorious detainment/torture center at Guantanamo and the legality and efficacy of using torture to extract "information" from detainees in that and other facilities.
In a piece in this morning's Washington Post titled Torture? Prosecute Us, Too Richard Cohen leads with this:
"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." So goes an aphorism that needs to be applied to the current debate over whether those who authorized and used torture should be prosecuted. In the very different country called Sept. 11, 2001, the answer would be a resounding no.
Contrary to what has become the accepted noise, "the world" did not "change" on 9/11. Our laws, our treaties and international agreements as well as our values remained. We did not become a "very different country" on September 12, 2001 despite Mr. Cohen's (and others) claim.
No, literally, he is going to lead directly to our deaths. George W. Bush's speechwriter, now writing at "The Corner":
He has removed the tool that is singularly responsible for stopping al-Qaeda from flying planes into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, Heathrow Airport, and London’s Canary Warf, and blowing up apartment buildings in Chicago, among other plots. It’s not even the end of inauguration week, and Obama is already proving to be the most dangerous man ever to occupy the Oval Office.
While I know it's not very post-partisan, there are still moments when I think "fear" is the main unifying theme of Republicanism. It's not just that they want citizens to be afraid, it's that they themselves are perpetually frightened. A few examples (in somewhat chronological order):
Fear of communism
Fear of black people voting
Fear of women in the workplace
Fear of hippies
Fear of people having sex
Fear of gay people
Fear of immigrants
Fear of people not speaking English
Fear of baggy pants
Fear of gays in the military
Fear of big government
Fear of their handguns being taken
Fear of terrorism
Fear of the thought of gay people having sex
Fear of gay people getting married
And now, fear of the "most dangerous man ever to occupy the Whitehouse."
No wonder so many conservatives love huge fenced-in ranches. All the better to keep out the gay, brown, terrorist-loving, sex-having, baggy-pants wearing, communist, socialist hippies.
STATE BLOGS
There is an ongoing debate over the closing of America's most notorious detainment/torture center at Guantanamo and the legality and efficacy of using torture to extract "information" from detainees in that and other facilities.