JUSTICE Myths Of The Torture Apologists Last week, President Obama made headlines after suggesting that he would support a "bipartisan" commission to investigate President Bush's torture crimes, days after he released four Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel memos that detailed torture tactics used by CIA interrogators. These practices include slamming detainees against the wall, cramped confinement, sleep deprivation, the use of insects, and "the waterboard." Asked whether Obama should "investigate whether any laws were broken in the way terrorism suspects were treated under the Bush administration," 51 percent of the public said they would favor such an investigation. Meanwhile, advocates of torture -- led by Vice President Cheney -- are doing all they can to fill the public debate with misinformation in an attempt to push back against an investigation of Bush national security policies. After years of promoting secrecy in national security, for example, Cheney recently submitted a formal request for documents that he claims prove his point that torture prevented terrorist attacks. Cheney has also made multiple media appearances defending his and his boss's approval of torture. Today's Progress Report examines some of the myths about torture being promulgated by several Bush administration officials and other conservatives in recent weeks.
MYTH #1: WE DIDN'T TORTURE: One of the most stale lines from the Bush administration was the robotic response to any discussion about torture. "We did not torture," administration officials repeated over and over. The recently-disclosed OLC memos, however, lay that debate to rest, particularly with their authorization of waterboarding.Yet some on the right are continuing to provide political cover for the administration's law-breaking. Former State Department official Liz Cheney, a daughter of Dick Cheney, claimed last week that waterboarding is not torture because similar tactics were used on U.S. troops in SERE training. "Everything that was done in this program, as has been laid out and described before, are tactics that our own people go through in SERE training," she said. But CIA interrogators "used much larger volumes of water" while waterboarding the detainees, leading the CIA Inspector General to conclude that such waterboarding was "neither efficacious or medically safe." Furthermore, U.S. soldiers undergoing SERE training presumably understood there were limits to their experiences undergoing water torture, whereas CIA interrogators waterboarded detainees hundreds of times in one month. In fact, as early as 2002, the military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency warned that the Bush administration's interrogation program was "torture" and that it would produce "unreliable information." MYTH #2: HARSH INTERROGATION WORKED: The right wing has been trying to frame the debate over torture as a simple question of whether torture "worked" to prevent terrorist attacks. Several, including Bush and Cheney, have claimed that torturing 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) helped them foil a plan to blow up the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles. But "an unnamed senior FBI official would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Bush's characterization of it as a 'disrupted plot' was 'ludicrous' -- that plot was foiled in 2002. But KSM wasn't captured until March 2003," Slate's Tim Noah noted. The torture debate has also focused on Abu Zubaydah, a detainee who allegedly disclosed "the fact that KSM was the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks" to the CIA only after he was tortured, according to former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen. But Ali Soufan, an FBI interrogator who worked closely with Zubaydah, said the FBI "extracted crucial intelligence -- including the identity of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the architect of 9/11 and the dirty-bomb plot of Jose Padilla -- before CIA contractors even began their aggressive tactics." Zubaydah also "had a schizophrenic personality"; his diaries were written in the voices of three distinct personalities. "How, then, did the C.I.A. conclude that Zubaydah was mentally fit enough to withstand the Agency's coercive techniques?" the New Yorker's Justin Vogt asked. MYTH #3: NO NEED FOR ACCOUNTABILITY: Several conservatives have also protested the idea of a commission or prosecutions of Bush officials who gave legal cover for torture. Former White House press secretary Dana Perino referred to an investigation as a "political witch hunt." "[M]aybe there's an element of setting old political scores here," Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said yesterday. But as journalist Mark Danner observed, "The mystique of torture will only disappear once a cold hard light has been shone on it by trustworthy people who can examine all the evidence and speak to the country with authority." Indeed, what transpired under Bush violates both U.S. statute and international treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory, and an investigation is needed to prevent future abuses of the law. As a first step to achieving accountability, Center for American Progress Action Fund President and CEO John Podesta called for the impeachment of 9th Circuit Court Judge Jay Bybee yesterday. When he was a former top Bush administration lawyer, Bybee signed off on the notorious torture tactics seen in recently-disclosed OLC memos. "Bybee has neither the legal nor moral authority to sit in judgment of others," Podesta wrote in a letter to House Judiciary Commitee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI). 
ENVIRONMENT -- OBAMA ADMINISTRATION VOWS COMMITMENT TO INTERNATIONAL CLIMATE TREATY: Today, diplomats from the world's major greenhouse gas polluters -- including the U.S., India, and China -- begin two-day talks at the State Department to discuss a possible U.N. agreement to curb global warming. The Obama administration hopes to use the opportunity to emphasize its break from the previous administration, which largely ignored the issue. "They were not fundamentally looking for an international agreement," U.S. special envoy for climate change Todd Stern said of the Bush administration. "We are looking for an international agreement, and we're looking for cooperation at a significant, we hope, transformative level." Yet even as the White House tries to take meaningful action on the climate crisis, conservatives in Congress are stepping up their attacks on a cap-and-trade plan to curb global warming emissions. "According to a GOP leadership aide, the Democrats' American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 that minority party members refer to as 'cap and tax' offers them a 'huge opportunity, and we will use it to hammer that tax message in a communications offensive over the next four weeks -- that this bill amounts to a national energy tax that will destroy jobs and increase costs for every single American,'" The Hill reports. However, as the Wonk Room's Brad Johnson points out, "It is our nation's dependence on polluting fuels that acts as a tax on society -- 'a great big one.' As corporations pollute for free, everyone else pays for the disease, asthma, heat waves, droughts, floods, storms, sea level rise, and economic and national insecurity that results."
HEALTH CARE -- DURING STIMULUS DEBATE, LAWMAKERS RIDICULED FLU PANDEMIC PREPAREDNESS, STRIPPED IT FROM THE BILL: The United States yesterday declared a "public health emergency" amid growing concern over the potential outbreak of a newly emerged flu strain known as "swine flu." While suspected cases are being reported around the world, there have been 20 confirmed cases of swine flu in the United States. The U.S. is taking measures to prepare for a pandemic, steps that include "civilian and military stockpiles of antiviral drugs...being readied for rapid distribution" and "greater vigilance at border crossings and in airports for travelers who are coughing or appear ill." "This is standard operating procedure and allows us to free up federal, state and local agencies and their resources," said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. As the nation prepares for a possible outbreak, The Nation's John Nichols points out that during the debate over President Obama's economic recovery plan, conservatives attacked House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey's (D-WI) inclusion of $900 million for pandemic flu prevention as wasteful spending. Writing in the Wall Street Journal in February, former Bush adviser Karl Rove cited the flu preparation spending as an example of the "disturbing" "new spending programs" included in the legislation. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) fumed about the flu spending, asking, "Does it belong in this bill? Should we have $870 million in this bill? No, we should not." Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told the New York Post that "all those little porky things that the House put in, the money for the [National] Mall or the sexually transmitted diseases or the flu pandemic, they're all out."
RADICAL RIGHT -- SECOND-IN-COMMAND OF HIJACKED SHIP BLASTS RUSH LIMBAUGH'S 'DISGUSTING' COMMENTS: Earlier this month, hate radio host Rush Limbaugh brought attention to the fact that the hijackers of the Maersk Alabama ship were "black Muslim teenagers." "Now, just imagine the hue and cry had a Republican president ordered the shooting of black teenagers on the high seas," said Limbaugh, later joking, "If only President Obama had known that the three Somali community organizers are actually young black Muslim teenagers, I'm sure he wouldn't have given the order to shoot." On Friday, Shane Murphy, the second-in-command of the Maersk, returned home and sharply criticized Limbaugh's remarks. "It feels great to be home. With the exception of Rush Limbaugh who is trying to make this into a race issue. It's disgusting," Murphy said. He added, "The president did the right thing. It's a war. It's about good versus evil. And what you (Limbaugh) said is evil, that is hate speech. I won't tolerate it," Murphy said. | 
A new Star Tribune Minnesota poll found that "[n]early two-thirds of Minnesotans surveyed think Norm Coleman should concede the U.S. Senate race to Al Franken." Sixty-four percent said Coleman "should accept the recount trial court's April 13 verdict that Democrat Franken won the race by 312 votes. Only 28 percent consider last week's appeal by Coleman to the Minnesota Supreme Court 'appropriate.'" Today, the U.S. and Iraq will begin negotiating "possible exceptions to the June 30 deadline for withdrawing American combat troops from Iraqi cities, focusing on the troubled northern city of Mosul" and parts of Baghdad. In the rest of Iraq's cities and towns, the withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops "is on schedule to finish by the June 30 deadline." "[T]he White House and Congress must not give up on trying to reinstate a ban on assault weapons, even if it may be politically difficult," former president Jimmy Carter writes in a New York Times op-ed today. "We can't let the N.R.A.'s political blackmail prevent the banning of assault weapons -- designed only to kill police officers and the people they defend." Republicans are accusing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) of "amnesia" for demanding investigations in 2009 "after failing to raise objections seven years ago when she first learned of the legal basis for the [torture] program." House Democrats are countering that the "criticism of Pelosi is nothing compared with the long-term damage done to Republicans by the disclosure of Bush administration interrogation abuses." Fifty of the nation's largest electric utilities "amped up spending on lobbyists by 30% late last year to influence the debate in Congress just underway on one of the biggest issues facing lawmakers: climate change." The companies "spent a total $51 million in the last six months of 2008, $12 million more than the same period in 2007."
Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert says that in the fall of 2006 a "whistleblower" alerted him to the fact that Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) had been recorded on a NSA wiretap of an Israeli agent. Hastert's efforts to learn more were "rebuffed" by the Bush administration despite a long-standing agreement that congressional leaders be notified when "their members became ensnared in a national security investigation." Today, Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced that "the Justice Ministry was amending a controversial law which contains harsh provisions on women that critics have called a step back toward Taliban-era controls." Yesterday, he also told a group of women activists that although he signed the law in March, "he did not fully [understand] it at the time." "In the weeks since the Pentagon ended an 18-year ban on media coverage of fallen soldiers returning to the U.S., most families given the option have allowed reporters and photographers to witness the solemn ceremonies that mark the arrival of flag-draped transfer cases," the AP reports. Though critics warned that lifting the ban would be problematic, "so far the coverage has not caused problems." And finally: President Bush is getting used to receiving standing ovations when they dine out in Dallas. That's what happened on Friday night, when he and Laura Bush went to the Mercury Grill. When the couple walked in, "the dinner crowd rose to its feet and applauded. This was much to the consternation of my non-Bushie friend watching the NBA playoffs at the bar. 'I'm trying to watch LeBron James,' he muttered." |
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OHIO: Veterans give local VA clinic low marks.
MISSOURI: Last month, public transportation authorities "laid off more than 500 workers and slashed bus and light rail service."
ECONOMY: Through 2010 state budgets "are in the red by more than $200 billion." 
THINK PROGRESS: CAPAF President and CEO John Podesta calls for Jay Bybee's impeachment on CNN, delivers petition to Congress.
WONK ROOM: The Weekly Standard's Noemie Emery: Ignore 9/11, except as a defense of torture.
YGLESIAS: The circumstances of city shrinkage imply very different policy prescriptions.
POLITICAL ANIMAL: The Washington Post's David Broder dismisses torture investigations as just "an unworthy desire for vengeance." 
"[Republican Jim] Tedisco's victory will be a credible repudiation of the spending spree that Obama and Congress have been on since January."
-- RNC Chair Michael Steele, 4/01/09, one day after New York's 20th congressional district special election
VERSUS
"Almost a month after a special election in a heavily Republican congressional district, the Democratic candidate claimed victory Friday when his GOP opponent [Tedisco] conceded in a race that focused attention on President Barack Obama's stimulus plan."
-- AP, 4/24/09 | |
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