The Stupid Continues to Burn

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Un frickin’ believable!

Copies of ‘torture’ report hand delivered to terror suspects, blocked from CIA officials:

Full disclosure took a back seat to the CIA’s green movement last week when agency big shots blocked officials from printing out hard copies of the Senate Democratic report on terrorist interrogations, fearing it was “killing too many trees.”

Meanwhile, paper copies of the report from Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein were hand-delivered to terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay — though not the rebuttals from the CIA or Republicans on her committee.

I decided to collect these into one post instead of clutter the Most Wanted section. So bear with me.

Oh, the Hillarity:

NEW YORK (AP) — Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday she’s proud to have been part of an administration that “banned illegal renditions and brutal interrogations” and said the U.S. should never be involved in torture anywhere in the world.

First, renditions began under Bill Clinton; and last I read, they still go on under the current PotUS.

As for “banning” brutal interrogations, a number of the techniques for which the CIA has been criticized- sleep deprivation, isolation, and more- are still on the menu in the Army Field Manual. Just ask Amnesty International.

Furthermore, the last HVT to receive CIA swimming lessons was KSM in 2003. The CIA program itself was pretty much dead by November-December of 2007. Yes, ended on Bush’s watch. Obama’s 2009 EO “banning” torture was redundant. It essentially echoes much of the same that Bush said I. His 2007 EO.

Maybe congress should legislate a ban on torture (define it in non-vague terms) and waterboarding specifically if they hate it so much? (They didn’t ban it when Congress passed the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act; and they didn’t ban waterboarding in 2006 with the Military Commissions Act. As Marc Thiessen points out in his book, Congress “explicitly rejected an amendment by Senator Ted Kennedy to ban waterboarding by a vote of 53 to 46.”).

Marc Thiessen’s Courting Disaster, pg 214-215:

President Bush did not shy away from making hard choices. One of the criticisms he faced during his time in office is that he made too many of these hard decisions alone, without involving Congress. This “go-it-alone” approach, critics argue, undermined the administration’s policies; it invited the judiciary to overturn them. As Jack Goldsmith and Benjamin Wittes put it in the Washington Post, “Bush’s approach avoided congressional meddling but paradoxically sloughed off counterterrorism policy on the courts. Over time, the judiciary grew impatient with ad hoc detention procedures that lacked clear and specific legislative authorization, and judges began imposing novel and increasingly demanding rules on the cammander in chief’s traditionally broad powers to detain enemy soldiers during war.”

There are several problems with this argument: First, the judicial branch has overturned Bush’s counterterrorism policies without regard to congressional approval. In June 2006, the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan that the administration’s military commissions were unconstitutional, and instructed the administration to work with Congress on a compromise. The president did just that. A few months later, he secured passage of the Military Commissions Act in which Congress and the Executive Branch together established a new system of military commissions and declared that captured terrorists did not have the right to challenge their detention in federal courts.

What was the result? The Supreme Court overturned this compromise two years later in the Boumediene decision and gave terrorists at Guantanamo Bay an unprecedented Constitutional right to habeas corpus, allowing them to contest their detention in federal courts. It did not matter whether the president acted unilaterally or in concert with Congress- the judicial result was effectively the same.

The reason the president did not involve Congress in many of the early decisions is because Congress did not want to be involved in those decisions. Several senior Bush administration officials recounted for me how, when top Congressional leaders were first briefed on enhanced interrogation techniques, they were asked whether such briefings should be conducted more widely on Capitol Hill. They replied, “No, why are you even telling us?”

Meanwhile, KSM refuses to be escorted by female guards, prolonging his pre-trial hearings for 3 years now:

KSM’s treatment at Guantanamo Bay, his lawyer said, has been “cruel, inhuman, and degrading.” Much of the time spent over the past three years in pre-trial proceedings has been on perceived mistreatment. Time has been spent on whether KSM should be given a pillow to sit on while riding from the detention center to court, whether attorney communications have been kept private, and now, his extraction from his cell by female guards.

“My client hasn’t been waterboarded since 2003, but there are many more subtle forms of coercion,” Nevin said.

Despite having been held by the U.S. government since his capture in 2003, KSM hasn’t lost his vanity. He uses a combination of cafeteria ingredients to dye his beard—fruit juices and berries, as well as cumin and turmeric to alter his facial hair to a bright color.

And Janet Hamlin, an AP sketch artist who has drawn KSM in the past, once told NPR that the accused terrorist once complained that she drew his nose all wrong. According to NPR, he apparently told her, “Touch it up.”

He doesn’t care about prolonging his detainment without charge or trial. It’s on taxpayer’s dime, afterall:

The cancellation of this week’s proceedings also had a taxpayer cost. To facilitate the proceedings the government paid between $150,000 to $170,000 for a chartered flight between Andrews Air Force Base to Guantanamo Bay, a Pentagon spokesman said. Add to that the per diems paid for the 105 military commission personnel who attend the proceedings, which cost more than $16,000. This does not include the cost of housing press, NGOs and staff at Camp Justice, a number of expeditionary tents set up near the courtroom; nor the time and effort spent organizing the proceedings.

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Wordy
Today it is reported that Seymour Hersh who broke the story of the Mai Lai massacre has reported that the Pentagon has had in its possession a video tape made by an American at Abu Gharib of “our Iraqi allies ” raping young boys in front if their mothers so that the wanted fathers would surrender them selves to the Coalition
No don’t thus was done to “save lives”
Do you believe that there should be limits placed on what may be done to potentially save lives ?

Gen Taguba who headed the investigation on thst prison has also verified this and also said that Americans were actively engaged in such abuse

The secret arrests and detentions came to light Dec. 21 when the suspects made a brief appearance in a Brooklyn courtroom.

If there had been secret arrests and detentions under the former administration’s protocol, I don’t think we would have been reading an article about it in the Washington Post two months later. The suspects certainly wouldn’t have been making an appearance in a Brooklyn courtroom. Basically, it sounds as if they’ve been taken into custody and charged with crimes in accordance with the rules of our nation’s legal system. It isn’t unlawful that the court records are under seal. Two of the suspect’s names are known. Apparently they all have legal representation. I’m not clear what indication there is of a problem.

Seymour Hersh lied on the Mai Lai massacre. He is totally a fraud as a journalist. If you have all forgotten, the Mai Lai event occurred as a planned incident for the exit of the US from Vietnam. The post like the slime(nyt’s)is so journalistic corrupt, that an accurate story is impossible. Just look a the sandy hook coverup. The educational board came up with $50 million dollars to tear the school down while facing a $1.1 billion fiscal deficit. Only one parent was allowed to identify his son, the rest were not allowed to claim their children. Only one paper was allowed to cover the story-the slime.

@Greg:

Basically, it sounds as if they’ve been taken into custody and charged with crimes in accordance with the rules of our nation’s legal system.

it’s not clear that we’re talking Americans here, that’s the only ones entitled to the American justice system.

@John:

Originally you posted:

Today the media is reporting that Hersh who broke the Mai Lai massacre is now reporting that the Pentagon has had in its possession video shot by an American of Iraqi guards ( our guys) raping young boys in front if their mothers. This apparently was done to force their fathers to surrender themselves
Hersh said the soundtrack was horrifying
Apparently some on the radical right think things like that should be forgotten/forgiven as necessary to “saving lives “

Now you post:

Today it is reported that Seymour Hersh who broke the story of the Mai Lai massacre has reported that the Pentagon has had in its possession a video tape made by an American at Abu Gharib of “our Iraqi allies ” raping young boys in front if their mothers so that the wanted fathers would surrender them selves to the Coalition
No don’t thus was done to “save lives”
Do you believe that there should be limits placed on what may be done to potentially save lives ?

Did you change

Iraqi guards

to

“our Iraqi allies”

on your own for greater effect, or did you misquote the original article in the first place?

You also took this part of your original post:

This apparently was done to force their fathers to surrender themselves

and embellished it to read:

so that the wanted fathers would surrender them selves to the Coalition

Not withstanding the fact that Seymour Hersh is a far left radical and opposes war for any purpose, I would suggest that he produce the product of his claim. I can make the claim that Hersh is a drug addict that frequents nudie gay bars but if I do, it is up to me to prove it.

Hersh used to write for The Village, and the older he got the more left wing radical he got. He is of the same mindset as William Ayers, so why should we believe anything he says.

Also, I noticed you didn’t mention when these rapes were supposed to have taken place. Perhaps he didn’t want to come clean that if, and that is a big IF, these events did take place, was it after we handed security for Abu Gharib over to the Iraqis themselves, when was when the Iraqis release the current head of ISIS.

Seymour Hersh was prepped and given the story in Vietnam as a a means to exit the US. The man was trash then and is now septic tank float . Want to check the wipe house visitor’s log for the last few months and you may just find his name there twice. Like Vietnam, this idiot did not break a story, he was given a story.
How quickly America forget its history?

#6:
“I can make the claim that Hersh is a drug addict that frequents nudie gay bars…”

This compels a rational person to question yet again exactly why it is that you are so utterly obsessed with images of naked homosexuals. Do you ever wonder why you go to sleep dreaming of nude gays glistening with the sweat of intimate embrace?

Like your friend Redteam’s obsession with men wearing ‘ass-less chaps,’ your fixation calls into question the root cause. Like Redteam, were you, as an adolescent, traumatized by a same-sex proposition? Did you marry someone who was not what they ‘appeared’ to be? Surely you have some reasonable explanation for why your obsessive-compulsive disorder manifests in an irresistible urge to dwell on the activities of naked gays.

A healthy mind would not perpetually reflect upon sexual subject matter regardless of orientation. Your obsession with sexuality – especially that oriented differently than your own – raises a number of red flags and calls into question the validity of any argument you make with it.

Your slip is showing. Please adjust yourself discretely.

Ronald Reagan signed the Anti Torture Treaty
He promised the world the USA would never torture human beings and that we would prosecute anyone who did
Every government that tortures used the same excuses it saved lives, national security, or no we really didn’t do that it wasn’t torture
Or we didn’t do it another government did it for us
As for the army manual of what is allowed I am sure it does not allow what was done in Abu Gharib according to the report done by Maj Gen Taguba things like raping boys while their mothers watched in order to make their fathers surrender
No major religion believes torture is acceptable

Nice piece, Word

@George+Wells:

Like Redteam, were you, as an adolescent, traumatized by a same-sex proposition?

I never said I was traumatized, only propositioned. I only said no. It’s the gays that are obsessed with ass less chaps. I don’t own a pair and I’ll bet only gays do.

@George+Wells:

A healthy mind would not perpetually reflect upon sexual subject matter regardless of orientation. Your obsession with sexuality – especially that oriented differently than your own – raises a number of red flags

I would say that sentence fits you much more so than Retire05. You spent enough time dwelling on it to change your orientation.