Don't Criticize France When Bush and Cheney Ignored 9-11 Warnings

The death toll in Paris is not even final, yet many on the far right in America's chattering class and GOP politicians are already insanely laying blame on Barack Obama, french gun control laws, and any number of irrelevant things - liberals, college students, the list is nothing short of crazy.   Yet through all of this is a total failure to admit that the more serious failure to stop Islamic terrorism occurred on the watch of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who remain darlings of the far right.  Making all of this far worse is new information that makes it painfully clear that Bush and Cheney were warned and did nothing. A piece in Salon looks at the shocking failure of Bush/Cheney and they failure to hold them accountable (and let's not forget the war crimes they committed).  Here are column highlights:

Documentarian Chris Whipple has some new bombshell revelations about how the Bush administration ignored the advance warnings of 9/11 in story for Politico, “‘The Attacks Will Be Spectacular,’” a spin-off of his documentary, “The Spymasters,” set to air this month on Showtime, in which he interviews all 12 living former CIA directors.

Whipple’s most stunning revelations revolve around a July 10 meeting that’s been mentioned by others in books before—Bob Woodward, George Tenet, Condi Rice—but always in a manner that drastically underplays the urgency of CIA’s warnings, and how much they had to go on, according to Whipple’s new information:

By May of 2001, says Cofer Black, then chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, “it was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.” “There were real plots being manifested,” Cofer’s former boss, George Tenet, told me in his first interview in eight years. “The world felt like it was on the edge of eruption. In this time period of June and July, the threat continues to rise. Terrorists were disappearing [as if in hiding, in preparation for an attack]. Camps were closing. Threat reportings on the rise.”

Finally, things boiled over:

That morning of July 10, the head of the agency’s Al Qaeda unit, Richard Blee, burst into Black’s office. “And he says, ‘Chief, this is it. Roof’s fallen in,’” recounts Black. “The information that we had compiled was absolutely compelling. It was multiple-sourced. And it was sort of the last straw.”

Tenet called Rice for an immediate meeting with her and her team—Bush was out of town:

“Rich [Blee] started by saying, ‘There will be significant terrorist attacks against the United States in the coming weeks or months. The attacks will be spectacular. They may be multiple. Al Qaeda’s intention is the destruction of the United States.’” [Condi said:] ‘What do you think we need to do?’ Black responded by slamming his fist on the table, and saying, ‘We need to go on a wartime footing now!’”

But nothing happened. “To me it remains incomprehensible still,” Black told Whipple. “I mean, how is it that you could warn senior people so many times and nothing actually happened? It’s kind of like The Twilight Zone.”

It was not just a failure to respond to warnings, however. There was a broader refusal to even consider thinking proactively. Along these lines, Whipple writes more broadly about Tenet and Black’s plan to “end the al Qaeda threat” with a combined military/CIA campaign “getting into the Afghan sanctuary, launching a paramilitary operation, creating a bridge with Uzbekistan.” They pitched the plan in spring of 2001, according to Whipple, “‘And the word back,’ says Tenet, ‘was “we’re not quite ready to consider this. We don’t want the clock to start ticking.”’ (Translation: they did not want a paper trail to show that they’d been warned.)”

Black chalks this up to the Bush team being stuck in the past, thinking of terrorists as “Euro-lefties,” but there was a deeper story, with more to the state of denial than Whipple discusses, since the Bush team was also actively fending off dealing with the recommendations of bipartisan Hart-Rudman Commission (officially the “U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century”). It had warned that “Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.”

Not only did Hart-Rudman see terrorist attacks as a possibility, it highlighted five key areas for reform, the first of which was “ensuring the security of the American homeland.” It regarded a 9/11-style attack as so likely that defending against it should be a top priority in rethinking our entire approach to national security.

" . . . EIGHT Benghazi investigations yet Bush WH sat on its hands while bin Laden got ready to kill 3K Americans,” Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert tweeted. “if this story were abt Benghazi, GOP would introduce Obama impeachment proceedings today,” he followed up. Boehlert’s point is obviously valid, but even more troubling is how the lack of accountability has made things so much worse, actually crippling our ability to win the war on terror.

The failure to hold anyone accountable for 9/11 is inextricably intertwined with the broader failure to go back and rethink fundamental questions on all aspects of national security—something that was obviously needed at the time, and that remains imperative still.

Trump Is Right to Blame George W. Bush for 9/11

It is really frightening when I find myself agreeing with Donald Trump on anything.  I find man to be a loud mouthed egomaniac who is having a tempestuous love affair with himself.  Yet, on starting a narrative that Jebbie Bush's feckless brother George W. Bush - a/k/a the Chimperator on this blog - bears responsibility for the disastrous 9/11 attacks  - Trump is on the mark.  It's a conversation that needs to be had, especially with yet another doltish Bush seeking the White House.  A piece in The Atlantic makes the case that the Chimperator and his puppeteer Dick Cheney could have perhaps stopped the attacks had they paid attention to information in their possession.  Here are article excerpts:

His [Trump's] latest ugly truth came during a Bloomberg TV interview last Friday, when he said George W. Bush deserves responsibility for the fact that “the World Trade Center came down during his time.” Politicians and journalists erupted in indignation. Jeb Bush called Trump’s comments “pathetic.” Ben Carson dubbed them “ridiculous.”

Former Bush flack Ari Fleischer called Trump a 9/11 “truther.” Even Stephanie Ruhle, the Bloomberg anchor who asked the question, cried, “Hold on, you can’t blame George Bush for that.”

Oh yes, you can. There’s no way of knowing for sure if Bush could have stopped the September 11 attacks. But that’s not the right question. The right question is: Did Bush do everything he could reasonably have to stop them, given what he knew at the time? And he didn’t. It’s not even close.

When the Bush administration took office in January 2001, CIA Director George Tenet and National Security Council counterterrorism “czar” Richard Clarke both warned its incoming officials that al-Qaeda represented a grave threat. During a transition briefing early that month at Blair House, according to Bob Woodward’s Bush at War, Tenet and his deputy James Pavitt listed Osama bin Laden as one of America’s three most serious national-security challenges. That same month, Clarke presented National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice with a plan he had been working on since al-Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole the previous October. It called for freezing the network’s assets, closing affiliated charities, funneling money to the governments of Uzbekistan, the Philippines and Yemen to fight al-Qaeda cells in their country, initiating air strikes and covert operations against al-Qaeda sites in Afghanistan, and dramatically increasing aid to the Northern Alliance, which was battling al-Qaeda and the Taliban there.

But both Clarke and Tenet grew deeply frustrated by the way top Bush officials responded. Clarke recounts that when he briefed Rice about al-Qaeda, “her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before.” On January 25, Clarke sent Rice a memo declaring that, “we urgently need…a Principals [Cabinet] level review on the al Qida [sic] network.”

By early summer, Clarke was so despondent that he asked to be reassigned. “This administration,” he later testified, “didn’t either believe me that there was an urgent problem or was unprepared to act as though there were an urgent problem. And I thought, if the administration doesn’t believe its national coordinator for counterterrorism when he says there’s an urgent problem and if it’s unprepared to act as though there’s an urgent problem, then probably I should get another job.”  

During that same time period, the CIA was raising alarms too. According to Kurt Eichenwald, a former New York Times reporter given access to the Daily Briefs prepared by the intelligence agencies for President Bush in the spring and summer of 2001, the CIA told the White House by May 1 that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist attack. On June 22, the Daily Brief warned that al-Qaeda strikes might be “imminent.”

But the same Defense Department officials who discounted Clarke’s warnings pushed back against the CIA’s. According to Eichenwald’s sources, “the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled . . . 

The following day [July 30], the CIA included in its Daily Brief an article entitled “Bin Laden Threats Are Real.” On July 1, the Brief predicted that an attack “will occur soon.”Then, on July 10, Tenet and CIA counterterrorism head Cofer Black held an emergency meeting with Rice to push for action against Bin Laden. But according to Woodward’s State of Denial, “both felt they were not getting through to Rice.” 

The warnings continued. On July 11, the CIA sent word to the White House that a Chechen with links to al-Qaeda had warned that something big was coming. On July 24, the Daily Brief said the expected al-Qaeda attack had been postponed but was still being planned. Finally, on August 6, the CIA titled its Daily Brief: “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike the US.” The briefing didn’t mention a specific date or target, but it did mention the possibility of attack in New York and mentioned that the terrorists might hijack airplanes.

[I]t was the 36th time the CIA had raised al-Qaeda with President Bush since he took office.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Clarke’s anti-al-Qaeda plan was sitting on Bush’s desk, awaiting his signature. It was the ninth National Security Presidential Directive of his presidency.

Would the Bush administration have stopped the 9/11 attacks had it taken the threat more seriously? Possibly.

On August 16, FBI and INS agents in Minnesota arrested another potential hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, after being tipped off by his flight instructor. But despite numerous requests, they were denied permission to search his apartment or laptop. These incidents “might have exposed the” 9/11 plot, writes Eichenwald, “had the government been on high alert.”

Four Americans died in Benghazi.  Far more than 3,000 died on 9/11.  If the House Republicans want to hold hearings on terror attacks, they need to reopen an investigation of how Bush/Cheney failed to keep America safe - not to mention launched a war based on deliberate lies that took thousands of more American lives.

 

Obama’s Secret Weapon: GOP Extremists

One of the ironies about the far right is that it is in many ways hastening its own destruction through its extremism and intransigence to change.   The Christofascists, while demanding special rights and displaying the ugly hatred at the core of their theology, are speeding the exodus of the younger generations from religion entirely (and more older folks are following suit as well).  And on foreign policy where the GOP and the Christofascists and Tea Party lunatics seem to want endless war - they always ignore the squandered American lives and squandered billions of dollars - they helping drive moderates and sane individuals to the Democrats.  Killing Muslims may take the Christofascists and their GOP political whores to near orgasm, but decent people are increasingly repulsed.  A piece in Slate looks at how the GOP helped insure the approval of the Iran nuclear power deal.  Here are excerpts:

This was a great week for the White House.

A month ago Democrats were working to stop a GOP-penned resolution of disapproval against President Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran. . . .  it would restrict his ability to lift sanctions on Iran, and potentially threaten the deal itself, as allies questioned U.S. commitment to the agreement.

On Thursday, however, that changed. When the resolution came for a vote, 42 senators voted to filibuster and keep it from the Senate floor. Democrats didn’t just save the deal; they blocked the GOP altogether. It was a huge win, and the administration wasn’t shy about its success. “This vote is a victory for diplomacy, for American national security, and for the safety and security of the world,” said Obama. 

[W]e shouldn’t ignore the extent to which it [the White House] had a huge ally in persuading Democrats to stand with the deal. Namely, the Republican Party.

Republicans could have capitalized on the division, running against the deal while offering an alternative and showing—in word and deed—that this was about the policy, not the president. . . . . considered opposition could have peeled away enough Democrats from the administration to win the legislative battle and jeopardize the deal. Instead, Republicans jumped to hyperbole.

The apex of this criticism came Tuesday, when former Vice President Cheney slammed the agreement in the fiercest words possible. “I know of no nation in history that has agreed to guarantee that the means of its own destruction will be in the hands of another nation, particularly one that is hostile,” he said.

None of this scared Democrats into voting against the deal. Instead, it was evidence that this fight was irreducibly partisan, with no chance of a compromise or détente. Cautious Democrats—like Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon or Cory Booker of New Jersey—had two options: They could sign on with Cheney and the GOP, or they could bolster the president. They chose the latter, and handed Obama a victory that wasn’t guaranteed.

Again and again, the GOP’s great obstacle—and Democrats’ great ally—is itself. Its intransigence might win elections—Obamacare helped the GOP win the 2010 midterms, and Republicans hope that Iran will do the same for 2016—but it comes at a cost: policy that’s more liberal than the alternative. And while there’s still time to turn the tide, it’s running out. If Democrats win another four years in the White House, they can turn Obama’s changes into a new and durable status quo.

"Wrong Then, Wrong Now" - White House Video Rips Cheney

There are few American politicians who reach the threshold of being truly evil.  Most simply put self-advancement over the interests of their constituents and others.  However, Dick Cheney, in my opinion, meets the criteria to be deemed truly evil.  He advocated lying to the American public to take the nation to war in Iraq, he convinced his idiot superior, George W. Bush, to authorize the use of torture in violation of the Geneva Conventions, and now he wants to take America to war against Iran.  The man is both evil and delusional.  Thousands of wasted American lives in Iraq and trillions of wasted dollars wasn't enough for Cheney.  Thankfully, in advance of Cheney's lying and disinformation speech against the Iran nuclear agreement, the White House has gone on the offensive against one of the foulest individuals in American history.  Talking Points Memo looks at the White House attack.  Here are highlights:

Timed to a speech given by former Vice President Dick Cheney slamming President Obama's Iran deal, the White House released a video highlighting Cheney's continual defense of the Iraq war.

The two-and-a-half-minute video titled "Former Vice President Dick Cheney: Wrong Then, Wrong Now" -- which was featured prominently on the White House homepage Tuesday -- spares no punches.

It begins with a Fox News host asking Cheney last week why anyone who believes Cheney was wrong on Iraq should listen to him about the Iran deal.

"Because I was right about Iraq," Cheney said.

It then segues into the abundant news clips from the run-up to Iraq War in which Cheney offers scores of claims first urging then defending military action -- from touting the presence of weapons of mass destruction to predicting that Iraqis would great American troops "as liberators."

No one benefited from the Iraq War except perhaps Halliburton.  Oh, and did I mention that Cheney has lots of Halliburton stock?  I guess he wants to make another fortune off the squandered lives of our military personnel and wasted taxpayer dollars.  The man is a war criminal and needs to be tried as such.  Would the death penalty be too much?  Not in my opinion.

Jebbie Bush's Idea of a "Good Deal"

Perhaps I am biased since I have a son-in-law who was seriously wounded in Afghanistan.  But in retrospect, he was one of the lucky ones - he had a miraculous recovery.  He had friends who lost their lives and others who lost multiple limbs.  All for nothing in the grand scheme of things.  Yet Jeb "Jebbie" Bush believes that the Iraq War and the fool's errand launched by his idiot brother and Emperor Palpatine Cheney was overall a good Deal.  The question is, for who - Halliburton and its shareholders like Cheney?  

A reader sent me the above image from a Facebook post that lays out what assholes like Jebbie conveniently forget.   Read it carefully.  It is an indictment against Jebbie and other Republicans who are all too eager to throw away more American lives and to squander billions, if not trillions of dollars, by sending American troops back into the Middle East.

The last think America needs is another idiot Bush in the White House.  Let's hope Jebbie's poll numbers keep falling.

CIA Briefer Admits Bush and Cheney Lied to American Public on WMD Intelligence

Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell is sworn in as he testifes before the House Intelligence Committee. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

With Jeb "Jebbie" Bush already suffering severe political turbulence over the failed policies of his idiot brother, now George W. Bush's CIA briefer has admitted on national television that Bush and Dick Cheney knowingly lied to the American public about weapons of mass destruction  in Iraq.  And Jebbie is already on record that he sees his lying brother as his "go to adviser" on Middle East policy.  A piece in Mother Jones looks at the CIA briefer's admissions.  Here are excerpts:

For a dozen years, the Bush-Cheney crowd have been trying to escape—or cover up—an essential fact of the W. years: President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their lieutenants misled the American public about the WMD threat supposedly posed by Saddam Hussein in order to grease the way to the invasion of Iraq. For Bush, Cheney, and the rest, this endeavor is fundamental; it is necessary to protect the legitimacy of the Bush II presidency. Naturally, Karl Rove and other Bushies have quickly tried to douse the Bush-lied-us-into-war fire whenever such flames have appeared.

[N]ow there's a new witness who will make the Bush apologists' mission even more impossible: Michael Morell, a longtime CIA official who eventually became the agency's deputy director and acting director. During the preinvasion period, he served as Bush's intelligence briefer.

Appearing on MSNBC's Hardball on Tuesday night, Morell made it clear: The Bush-Cheney administration publicly misrepresented the intelligence related to Iraq's supposed WMD program and Saddam's alleged links to Al Qaeda.

Host Chris Matthews asked Morell about a statement Cheney made in 2003: "We know he [Saddam Hussein] has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." Here's the conversation that followed:

MATTHEWS: Was that true?

MORELL: We were saying—

MATTHEWS: Can you answer that question? Was that true?

MORELL: That's not true.

MATTHEWS: Well, why'd you let them get away with it?

MORELL: Look, my job Chris—

MATTHEWS: You're the briefer for the president on intelligence, you're the top person to go in and tell him what's going on. You see Cheney make this charge he's got a nuclear bomb and then they make subsequent charges he knew how to deliver it…and nobody raised their hand and said, "No that's not what we told him."

There's the indictment, issued by the intelligence officer who briefed Bush and Cheney: The Bush White House made a "false presentation" on "some aspects" of the case for war. "That's a big deal," Matthews exclaimed. Morell replied, "It's a big deal."

And there's more. Referring to the claims made by Bush, Cheney, and other administration officials that Saddam was in league with Al Qaeda, Morell noted, "What they were saying about the link between Iraq and Al Qaeda publicly was not what the intelligence community" had concluded.

Maureen Dowd: The Need Remember the Iraq War Was Launched based on Lies

As Jeb "Jebbie" Bush tries to extricate himself form the fiasco he created by stating that he would have invaded Iraq as his idiot brother did, other Republican candidates are striving to couch the issue in "what we knew then and what we know now."  In short, they want the public to forget that the war was justified and launched based on deliberate lies and fabrications.  Stated another way, the war was the result of failed GOP policies and the sinister actions of GOP elected officials and their advisers.  Maureen Dowd has a column in the New York Times that reminds us that we must not be duped into believing the GOP revisionist history.  Here are excerpts:

IT isn’t about what we know now.  It’s about what we knew then.

It is simply not true, as Republican presidential aspirant Scott Walker said on Friday, that “any president would have likely taken the same action Bush did with the information he had.”

That’s not giving enough credit to W. and his frothing band of Reservoir Dogs.

It took a Herculean effort of imagination, manipulation and deception to concoct “the information” that propelled the invasion, occupation and destruction of a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.

Aside from the Blair poodle and the Coalition of the Willing-to-Overlook-Counterfeit-Claims, our allies tried to warn us. You know you’re in trouble when the Germans tell you that you’re too militaristic.

The Saudis thought Saddam was a monster, but, according to a Saudi official, they sent top emissaries to urge W. against war. Prince Saud, the foreign minister, and Prince Bandar, the ambassador in Washington, told the president that Saddam had assured them that he would allow the inspectors in. The Saudis explained what should have been obvious to the foreign affairs neophyte in the Oval Office: Saddam, who was writing romance novels, listening to Frank Sinatra and reading Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” was simply blustering like any Arab despot would, trying to deter Iran with a big imaginary cache of W.M.D.

Everyone paying attention after 9/11 knew that the Bush crew had crudely and cynically switched villains, diverting America’s fury and fear from Osama, whose address was unknown, to Saddam, a reliable Bush family punching bag. They used patriotism like brass knuckles.

Karl Rove, who once thought the war would help build a Republican empire at home, still defends it.

But, as Senator Rand Paul bluntly argued last weekend while visiting a San Francisco tech company, America was better off with Saddam in power.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Colin Powell, told the Concord Monitor that it was a “fair assessment” to say Iraq was better off under Saddam.

Jeb had barely finished insisting that he was his own man before he voluntarily shackled himself to W., putting several members of his brother’s war-torture-and-Katrina tarnished brain trust on his advisory list and telling a group of financiers in New York that W. was his top adviser on the Middle East!! :(

The 62-year-old was schooled on W.’s deadly Middle East legacy by a 19-year-old University of Nevada student, Ivy Ziedrich, who explained to the would-be leader of the free world that ISIS — which is gobbling up more and more pieces of Iraq — was not the virulent spawn of President Obama’s policies, but of his brother’s.

And consider this: Jeb hasn’t even been asked any questions yet about W.’s dark contributions on waterboarding, the deficit and the near-total collapse of the American economy.

New York Times: Prosecute Dick Cheney and Torturers

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney find themselves unable to travel outside of the United States for fear of arrest and prosecution for war crimes, yet sadly they have been given de facto amnesty in this country for conduct that violated the Geneva Conventions and other treaties which in former years led to prosecutions and even death penalties.  The New York Times argued that prosecutions are need to safeguard against future horrors.  I agree 100% and the editorial deserves another reading, especially in light of GOP sabre rattling over Iran and the fact that Jeb Bush is surrounding himself with the same failed adviser his brother used.  Until America prosecutes its own war criminals, we can expect to have no moral standing in the world. Here are editorial highlights:

Since the day President Obama took office, he has failed to bring to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects — an official government program conceived and carried out in the years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

He did allow his Justice Department to investigate the C.I.A.'s destruction of videotapes of torture sessions and those who may have gone beyond the torture techniques authorized by President George W. Bush. But the investigation did not lead to any charges being filed, or even any accounting of why they were not filed.

Mr. Obama has said multiple times that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” as though the two were incompatible. They are not. The nation cannot move forward in any meaningful way without coming to terms, legally and morally, with the abhorrent acts that were authorized, given a false patina of legality, and committed by American men and women from the highest levels of government on down.

[T]he 524-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report erases any lingering doubt about their depravity and illegality: In addition to new revelations of sadistic tactics like “rectal feeding,” scores of detainees were waterboarded, hung by their wrists, confined in coffins, sleep-deprived, threatened with death or brutally beaten. In November 2002, one detainee who was chained to a concrete floor died of “suspected hypothermia.”

These are, simply, crimes. They are prohibited by federal law, which defines torture as the intentional infliction of “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” They are also banned by the Convention Against Torture, the international treaty that the United States ratified in 1994 and that requires prosecution of any acts of torture.

No amount of legal pretzel logic can justify the behavior detailed in the report. Indeed, it is impossible to read it and conclude that no one can be held accountable. At the very least, Mr. Obama needs to authorize a full and independent criminal investigation.

[A]ny credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; the former C.I.A. director George Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who drafted what became known as the torture memos. There are many more names that could be considered, including Jose Rodriguez Jr., the C.I.A. official who ordered the destruction of the videotapes; the psychologists who devised the torture regimen; and the C.I.A. employees who carried out that regimen.

One would expect Republicans who have gone hoarse braying about Mr. Obama’s executive overreach to be the first to demand accountability, but with one notable exception, Senator John McCain, they have either fallen silent or actively defended the indefensible.

Starting a criminal investigation is not about payback; it is about ensuring that this never happens again and regaining the moral credibility to rebuke torture by other governments. Because of the Senate’s report, we now know the distance officials in the executive branch went to rationalize, and conceal, the crimes they wanted to commit. The question is whether the nation will stand by and allow the perpetrators of torture to have perpetual immunity for their actions.

Are Claims of American Exceptionalism a Sick Joke?

Among the racists, homophobes, and anti-women elements of the Republican Party and certainly among the Tea Party loons, the myth of "American exceptionalism" is almost as sacred as the Bible which they use to justify their hatred toward everyone else.   The myth is a continuation of the Old Testament myth that sought to give the Israelites a sense of being special and gave Israel claims to a great history that, as modern archaeology is confirming, in fact did not exist.  A piece in Salon looks at this myth of the far right and the ways in which America is exceptional, but not in a good way.  Here are some excerpts:

Washington, more than any other power, created the modern international community of laws and treaties, yet it now reserves the right to defy those same laws with impunity. A sovereign ruler should, said Schmitt, discard laws in times of national emergency. So the United States, as the planet’s last superpower or, in Schmitt’s terms, its global sovereign, has in these years repeatedly ignored international law, following instead its own unwritten rules of the road for the exercise of world power.

Just as Schmitt’s sovereign preferred to rule in a state of endless exception without a constitution for his Reich, so Washington is now well into the second decade of an endless War on Terror that seems the sum of its exceptions to international law: endless incarceration, extrajudicial killing, pervasive surveillance, drone strikes in defiance of national boundaries, torture on demand, and immunity for all of the above on the grounds of state secrecy. Yet these many American exceptions are just surface manifestations of the ever-expanding clandestine dimension of the American state.

All of the exceptions that really matter spring from America’s decision to join what former spy John Le Carré called that “squalid procession of vain fools, traitors… sadists, and drunkards,” and embrace espionage in a big way after World War II. Until the creation of the CIA in 1947, the United States had been an innocent abroad in the world of intelligence.

Yet by fits and starts, the covert domain inside the U.S. government has grown stealthily from the early twentieth century to this moment. It began with the formation of the FBI in 1908 and Military Intelligence in 1917. The Central Intelligence Agency followed after World War II along with most of the alphabet agencies that make up the present U.S. Intelligence Community, including the National Security Agency (NSA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and last but hardly least, in 2004, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Make no mistake: there is a clear correlation between state secrecy and the rule of law — as one grows, the other surely shrinks.

The White House’s “exceptions” also produced a deeply contradictory U.S. attitude toward torture from the early years of the Cold War onward. Publicly, Washington’s opposition to torture was manifest in its advocacy of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the Geneva Conventions in 1949. Simultaneously and secretly, however, the CIA began developing ingenious new torture techniques in contravention of those same international conventions. 

Much of the torture that became synonymous with the era of authoritarian rule in Asia and Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s seems to have originated in U.S. training programs that provided sophisticated techniques, up-to-date equipment, and moral legitimacy for the practice. From 1962 to 1974, the CIA worked through the Office of Public Safety (OPS), a division of the U.S. Agency for International Development that sent American police advisers to developing nations.

Concealed within this larger OPS effort, CIA interrogation training became synonymous with serious human rights abuses, particularly in Iran, the Philippines, South Vietnam, Brazil, and Uruguay. Amnesty International documented widespread torture, usually by local police, in 24 of the 49 nations that had hosted OPS police-training teams. 

[T]he terror attacks of September 2001 sparked an unprecedented expansion in the scale of the intelligence community and a corresponding resurgence in executive exceptions.  The War on Terror’s voracious appetite for information produced, in its first decade, what the Washington Post branded a veritable “fourth branch” of the U.S. federal government with 854,000 vetted security officials, 263 security organizations, over 3,000 private and public intelligence agencies, and 33 new security complexes . . .

As this secret state swelled, the world’s sovereign decided that some extraordinary exceptions to civil liberties at home and sovereignty abroad were in order. The most glaring came with the CIA’s now-notorious renewed use of torture on suspected terrorists and its setting up of its own global network of private prisons, or “black sites,” beyond the reach of any court or legal authority. Along with piracy and slavery, the abolition of torture had long been a signature issue when it came to the international rule of law.

Even after the Senate’s 2014 Torture Report documented the Agency’s abusive tortures in painstaking detail, there was no move for either criminal or civil sanctions against those who had ordered torture or those who had carried it out. In a strong editorial on December 21, 2014, the New York Times asked “whether the nation will stand by and allow the perpetrators of torture to have perpetual immunity.” The answer, of course, was yes. Immunity for hirelings is one of the sovereign’s most important exceptions.

Can there be any question that, in the decades to come, Washington will continue to violate national sovereignty through old-style covert as well as open interventions, even as it insists on rejecting any international conventions that restrain its use of aerospace or cyberspace for unchecked force projection, anywhere, anytime? Extant laws or conventions that in any way check this power will be violated when the sovereign so decides. These are now the unwritten rules of the road for our planet.  They represent the real American exceptionalism.

Read the entire piece.  It will NOT leave you feeling warm and fuzzy - or safe from your own government.

American Sniper: Revisionist History and Hypermasculinity

With the Oscars on Sunday, there continues to be nauseating talk of "American Sniper" winning the Best Picture award.  Should that happen, it will underscore the fact that America - especially red state America - learned absolutely nothing from the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan by the evil duo of George "I'm a cretin" Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney.  Thankfully, a number of veterans have condemned the movie and even its false hero, Chris Kyle, but for the most part average Americans, notably those in a heavy military area like Hampton Roads, continue to drink the Kool-Aid and close their eyes to fact that America should never have invade Iraq.  Indeed, much of the disaster unfolding with ISIS stems directly from the mess unleashed by Bush/Cheney's fools errand.  A piece in Salon is yet another that looks at the falsehoods put forth by this foul movie.  Here are highlights:

In a recent interview with Terry Gross, Bradley Cooper described how he and screenwriter Jason Hall initially envisioned “American Sniper” as a revisionist western. “The idea was to have a construct of a western, but play with it a bit in the way that ‘Unforgiven’ did, you know?…I like that idea of playing with these archetypes.” 

Like so many westerns, “American Sniper” revolves around the tensions between a hypermasculine hero, who only feels at home on the frontier of “civilization and savagery,” and a heroine who embodies domesticity.  Like so many westerns, it has been defended and attacked on the basis of the authenticity (or lack thereof) of its representations of a distant “frontier.”

From Taya Kyle’s repeated testimony at the film’s promotional events proclaiming that the film is like “seeing Chris again,” to former SEALs criticizing the film’s failure to represent Kyle using a rifle scope cover, there is a remarkable consensus around the idea that what the film should be is a documentary account.

The aspects of “American Sniper” that conform to western archetypes are easily recognizable. As a young man, Kyle is portrayed as adrift, an ersatz cowboy whose exploits on the rodeo circuit fail to secure the fidelity of a girlfriend who cheats on him while he is on the road. Having failed to realize his dreams of frontier masculinity as a rodeo cowboy, Kyle turns to the military. He is trained and deployed to “the new wild West in the old Middle East,” where he is able to realize his true calling as a latter-day western lawman, serving as the lone wolf representative of the civilization whose sovereign violence he embodies. 

Kyle’s frontier masculinity is threatened not only by the violence of the “savage,” but also by the feminine domesticity of his wife, whom he marries on the same day that he gets his orders to deploy. In his trips home between tours, Taya, who needs Kyle at home to raise their children, pleads for his return.  Kyle defies his wife and returns to Iraq for a fourth tour, during which he kills Mustafa in a long-range, “High-Noon”-style shootout. It is only then that, by his own choice, he returns home to begin the process of reintegrating himself into the “civilized” life he had been working to protect.

If “American Sniper” was a film with “no nuance, no context and no subtlety,” as Sophia McClennen described it recently in Salon, that would be the end of the story. But Hall’s script, Eastwood’s direction and Cooper’s masterful performance give us a film that accomplishes much more than the failed biopic so many critics have described.

Cooper’s visceral physical performance portrays Kyle as wracked by the emotional responses that those of us who have never been on the front lines can identify with, even as he delivers lines so racist that we recoil against them. In its deliberate collision of liberal humanism with frontier violence, “American Sniper” is reminiscent of one of the most brilliant revisionist westerns ever made – John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

In the climactic shootout in Ford’s film, lawyer Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart), the film’s representative of liberalism, reluctantly, and only after legal avenues had failed, kills the vaguely ethnic outlaw “Liberty Valance” (Lee Marvin).

In the film’s famous conclusion, Stoddard (at this point in the film’s chronology, a U.S. senator and Hallie’s husband) confesses the truth in a report to the Shinbone paper. The paper editor refuses to publish the story, declaring as he is tearing up his notes that “this is the West sir. When the legend becomes fact, you print the legend.”

In metaphorically refusing to “print the legend,” “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” forces us to grapple with the secret complicity between American liberalism and the racist violence of the frontiersman. In a representation of “The Legend” Chris Kyle that draws liberal viewers closer to his worldview than they feel comfortable being, “American Sniper” does the same thing.

The tragedies perpetrated and experienced by men like Kyle are not a conservative problem; they are an American problem. In one of the more insightful criticisms of “American Sniper,” Lakota/Dakota scholar James Fenelon argues that Kyle’s invocation savagery to describe his enemies cannot be understood as an invention of neoconservatism. The imagination of a category of human beyond the limits of reason, “the unreconstructed Other that needs to be obliterated,” enabled the violence that facilitated the settlement of the territorial United States long before it enabled American militarism abroad.

In condemning westerns like “American Sniper” rather than the ongoing political realities that drive their appeal, critics mistake a symptom for a cause.

Why Is Congress Hiding the Truth About Saudi Arabia's Involvement in 9-11?

Chimperator George Bush with Saudi buddies

I usually do not buy into conspiracy theories and leave such lunacy to members of the GOP base.  But the continued refusal to declassify 28 pages of the investigation of congressional intelligence committees into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks makes one wonder what is being hidden.  This question is fanned by the reality that in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the Bush/Cheney regime allowed  only one flight to take off from America's airports and it was loaded with Saudis fleeing America.   The New York Times looks at the continued controversy over denying the American public all of the information compiled by the congressional committees.  If there's nothing to hide, then why act like there is some damning information.  Here are article highlights:

A still-classified section of the investigation by congressional intelligence committees into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has taken on an almost mythic quality over the past 13 years — 28 pages that examine crucial support given the hijackers and that by all accounts implicate prominent Saudis in financing terrorism.

Now new claims by Zacarias Moussaoui, a convicted former member of Al Qaeda, that he had high-level contact with officials of the Saudi Arabian government in the prelude to Sept. 11 have brought renewed attention to the inquiry’s withheld findings, which lawmakers and relatives of those killed in the attacks have tried unsuccessfully to declassify.

“I think it is the right thing to do,” said Representative Stephen F. Lynch, Democrat of Massachusetts and an author of a bipartisan resolution encouraging President Obama to declassify the section. “Let’s put it out there.”

Mr. Lynch and his allies have been joined by former Senator Bob Graham of Florida, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee was a leader of the inquiry. He has called for the release of the report’s Part 4, which dealt with Saudi Arabia, since President George W. Bush ordered it classified when the rest of the report was released in December 2002.

Mr. Graham has repeatedly said it shows that Saudi Arabia was complicit in the Sept. 11 attacks. “The 28 pages primarily relate to who financed 9/11, and they point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier,” Mr. Graham said last month as he pressed for the pages to be made public.

Proponents of releasing Part 4, titled “Finding, Discussion and Narrative Regarding Certain National Security Matters,” have suggested that the Bush and Obama administrations have held it back for fear of alienating an influential military and economic partner rather than for any national security consideration.

But there seemed to be little appetite for declassification among the Republican leaders of the intelligence panels. Senator Richard M. Burr, the North Carolina Republican who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he was skeptical of the value of releasing the pages, calling them more of a historical document in a fight against terrorism that has shifted substantially since 2002.

A side piece to the article notes as follows:

Three of the Saudi princes accused by the Qaeda member Zacarias Moussaoui have strong diplomatic and business ties to the United States. 

Prince Bandar bin Sultan was known as “the toast of Washington” who had an “aura of charming roguishness” when he served as Saudi ambassador to the United States from 1983 to 2005. He is a nephew of King Salman and King Abdullah, who died last month. Prince Bandar, 65, had been close to President George Bush and his son, President George W. Bush . . . 

Prince Turki al-Faisal, 69, is another of the king’s nephews. He replaced Prince Bandar as the Saudi ambassador in Washington in 2005 and served in that post for two years. He was the head of Saudi intelligence from 1977 until Aug. 31, 2001. . . 

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, at 59 is a grandson of Saudi Arabia's founder, King Abdulaziz, and is chairman of the Kingdom Holding Company and the wealthiest member of the royal family. . . .  He owns Rotana, the Arab world's largest entertainment company, and holds significant investments in Citigroup, TimeWarner, Twitter and Apple, among other companies.

Obviously, if the Bush/Cheney regime acted to protect those who financed the attacks, it makes perfect sense why Congressional Republicans don't want the classified section of the report made public. It would not help the GOP cause in 2016.

Saudi Arabia and the Missing Pages of the 9/11 Report

As noted recently, the USA continues to treat Saudi Arabia as a key ally even though that nation continues to violate international law on human rights abuses and to foster Islamic extremism.  Now, in the wake of events in Paris last week, some want the pages redacted from the 9/11 report to be released.  What will they show?  Mainly that the USA's supposed ally provided most of the funding for the 9/11 attackers. It's past time that America stop giving a pass to and supporting regimes that in so many ways work against America's - and western modernity - interests.  Here are excerpts from a piece in The Daily Beast:

A story that might otherwise have slipped away in a morass of conspiracy theories gained new life Wednesday when former Sen. Bob Graham headlined a press conference on Capitol Hill to press for the release of 28 pages redacted from a Senate report on the 9/11 attacks. And according to Graham, the lead author of the report, the pages “point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as the principal financier” of the 9/11 hijackers.

“This may seem stale to some but it’s as current as the headlines we see today,” Graham said, referring to the terrorist attack on a satirical newspaper in Paris. The pages are being kept under wraps out of concern their disclosure would hurt U.S. national security. But as chairman of the Senate Select Committee that issued the report in 2002, Graham argues the opposite is true, and that the real “threat to national security is non-disclosure.”

Graham said the redacted pages characterize the support network that allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur, and if that network goes unchallenged, it will only flourish. He said that keeping the pages classified is part of “a general pattern of coverup” that for 12 years has kept the American people in the dark. It is “highly improbable” the 19 hijackers acted alone, he said, yet the U.S. government’s position is “to protect the government most responsible for that network of support.” 

The Saudis know what they did, Graham continued, and the U.S. knows what they did, and when the U.S. government takes a position of passivity, or actively shuts down inquiry, that sends a message to the Saudis. “They have continued, maybe accelerated their support for the most extreme form of Islam,” he said, arguing that both al Qaeda and ISIS are “a creation of Saudi Arabia.”

Standing with Graham were Republican Rep. Walter Jones and Democratic Rep. Stephen Lynch, co-sponsors of House Resolution 428, which says declassification of the 28 pages is necessary to provide the American public with the full truth surrounding the 9/11 attacks. The two lawmakers echoed Graham’s assertion that national security would not be harmed . . . . 

The relatively few who have read the pages come away with varying levels of shock and surprise. Lynch said he was so blown away that the information was being kept from the public that he told the two room monitors he would be filing legislation. HR 428 had 27 co-sponsors in the last Congress.

Quinn told The Daily Beast, “It’s rather bizarre that we would go to these great lengths to air this heretofore confidential information about how we reacted to 9/11, and at the same time we keep secret information about protecting those who helped launch the attack.”  But now the wheels of justice are finally moving. The Senate passed by voice vote in the last Congress JASTA (Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act). Co-sponsored by Democratic New York Sen. Chuck Schumer and Republican Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the bill would strip diplomatic immunity from nation states in cases of terrorism, and open the door to financial compensation for the 9/11 families from the Saudi government.

It all signals that the decades-long bipartisan policy of always keeping the Saudis happy, and never rocking the boat, may be coming to an end. In Sarasota, Florida, a federal judge is reviewing 80,000 pages of documents that relate to a prominent Saudi family and its extensive contacts with three of the hijackers when they attended flight school in Sarasota.

The family abruptly left the U.S. for Saudi Arabia a few days before the attacks, leaving dinner on the table and a brand new car in the driveway “as though they’d been tipped something was going to happen, and they’d better not be in the country,” said Graham. One member of the family is described as a high-level adviser to the Saudi royal family.

All but three Senate Democrats, joined by one Republican and one independent, signed a letter calling on President Bush to declassify the 28-page section detailing the role of foreign governments in bankrolling the 9/11 attackers.

Oh, and let's not forget how Bush and Cheney allowed a plane full of Saudis to leave the country even as all other flights were grounded. 

The Case for Trying Bush, Cheney and More for War Crimes

America has a very nasty history of what has been done to those deemed enemies - it started with the genocide against the Native Americans - but on occasion it has stood up for punishing those who committed atrocities.  The war crimes trials after World War II are a case in point.  Now, America seems to be shifted back to its old ways of talking about lofty ideals while allowing horrific deeds to go unpunished.  A piece in Salon makes the case of why George W. Bush and Dick Cheney among others need to be prosecuted for war crimes.  Here are select excerpts:

We’ve seen it in Ferguson, Missouri, with Darren Wilson getting off scot-free for killing Michael Brown. And we’ve seen it again in Staten Island, with Daniel Pantaleo getting off scot-free for killing Eric Garner. So why shouldn’t scores of CIA agents, contractors, higher-ups and other government officials—including former President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney—get off scot-free for torturing hundreds of detainees, including some complete innocents?  That, apparently, is the reigning logic following the release of the Senate torture report.

But just as genuine legal experts have been appalled by the perversion of normal and normative legal process in the grand jury proceedings in St. Louis County and Staten Island, there’s been a sharp line drawn by human rights lawyers and advocates in response to the Senate torture report, calling for prosecutions to match the crimes. 

“The report talks a lot about how the CIA lied and covered up, but it doesn’t change the fact that the basic practices were authorized, you know, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, things like that.” But also, “George Bush approved waterboarding by his own admission, he approved the CIA renditions program,”  while Cheney  “was the driving force behind many of the illegal detention and interrogation policies to begin with.”

As for the legal obligations involved, “The torture convention requires that acts of torture be referred to the competent authority for the purpose of prosecution,” Roth said. “The United States has an obligation to prosecute torture.” Ben Emmerson, the U.N. special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, agreed. “The individuals responsible for the criminal conspiracy revealed in today’s report must be brought to justice, and must face criminal penalties commensurate with the gravity of their crimes,” he said.

The need for such action is only made more urgent by the fact a new Pew poll shows 56 percent of Americans believe the lie that torture provided intelligence that helped prevent terrorist attacks, and relatedly that 51 percent think that “the CIA’s interrogation methods … were justified.”

As the Intercept’s Dan Froomkin tweeted, “If 56 percent of Americans think ‘CIA interrogation’ was effective, all that tells us is that they’ve been misled,” adding, “Just like 70 percent of Americans once though Saddam was behind 9/11, now 56 percent think torture worked. This is a massive indictment of the U.S. media.” But it’s not just the media. America’s entire elite infrastructure is indicted in this state of affairs, which is why America so desperately needs to have broad-based, high-profile torture trials on the model of the Nuremberg Trials following World War II . . . 

Al-Qaida’s whole aim with the 9/11 attacks was to draw the U.S. into a self-destructive conflict in the Middle East, and to expose and exploit our contradictions. And thanks primarily to the Bush/Cheney delusional response (and Obama’s limited willingness to alter direction), that’s exactly what has happened.

[E]verything the U.S. has done since 9/11 has been seriously misguided at best, and Obama’s policy changes have merely trimmed around the edges of what Bush and Cheney started, because he has been obsessed with trying to quickly unify the country, papering over  profound differences, rather than facing up to the genuine deep difficulties of overcoming them.

Obama invoked the shameful, discredited Nazi Nuremberg Defense (“I was only following orders”), when he said:

In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.

Not only is this an insult to the real heroes, who spoke out against the barbarism they were tasked with, the Nuremberg Principles, which came out of the Nuremberg Trials, explicitly rejected this defense:

Principle IV
The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

They also rejected the notion that those who give the orders are exempt:

Principle III
The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.

These two principles aren’t that hard to grasp, for anyone familiar with TV crime dramas. Both the hit man and the man who orders the hit are guilty of murder.  Street crimes, suite crimes, international war crimes—the same logic applies equally to all of them.

Bush and Cheney’s unhinged panic drove the entire process off the rails. Yet, even today they and their defenders continue to pretend that they were the tough guys, the realists, the ones who protected us. They need to stand trial in part simply so that this lie can be publicly put to rest. 

Did Bush/Cheney Authorize Nazi-Like Experimentation on Humans?

Various aspects of what the Senate torture report revealed in therms of the torture and war crimes authorized the the evil duo of Chimperator George Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney.  Less discussed is a related aspect of what the CIA did under the authorization from the White House: experimentation on humans to find ways to break them.  It's something right out of the annals of what the Nazi regime and Gestapo did in Germany in the 1930's and early 1940's.  Any decent American ought to be horrified by this revelation.  Frighteningly, many are not and it speaks volumes about America's further moral descent under those who claim to be the champions of "Christian values."  The Nation looks at some of these less reported horrors:

Human experimentation, in contrast, has not been politically refashioned into a legitimate or justifiable enterprise. Therefore, it would behoove us to appreciate the fact that the architects and implementers of black-site torments were authorized at the highest levels of the White House and CIA to experiment on human beings. Reading the report through this lens casts a different light on questions of accountability and impunity.

The “war on terror” is not the CIA’s first venture into human experimentation. At the dawn of the Cold War, German scientists and doctors with Nazi records of human experimentation were given new identities and brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip. During the Korean War, alarmed by the shocking rapidity of American POWs’ breakdowns and indoctrination by their communist captors, the CIA began investing in mind-control research. In 1953, the CIA established the MK-ULTRA program, whose earliest phase involved hypnosis, electroshock and hallucinogenic drugs. The program evolved into experiments in psychological torture that adapted elements of Soviet and Chinese models, including longtime standing, protracted isolation, sleep deprivation and humiliation. Those lessons soon became an applied “science” in the Cold War.

During the Vietnam War, the CIA developed the Phoenix program, which combined psychological torture with brutal interrogations, human experimentation and extrajudicial executions. In 1963, the CIA produced a manual titled “Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation” to guide agents in the art of extracting information from “resistant” sources by combining techniques to produce “debility, disorientation and dread.” Like the communists, the CIA largely eschewed tactics that violently target the body in favor of those that target the mind by systematically attacking all human senses in order to produce the desired state of compliance. The Phoenix program model was incorporated into the curriculum of the School of the Americas, and an updated version of the Kubark guide, produced in 1983 and titled “Human Resource Exploitation Manual,” was disseminated to the intelligence services of right-wing regimes in Latin America and Southeast Asia during the global “war on communism.”

In the mid-1980s, CIA practices became the subject of congressional investigations into US-supported atrocities in Central America. Both manuals became public in 1997 as a result of Freedom of Information Act litigation by The Baltimore Sun. That would have seemed like a “never again” moment.

But here we are again. This brings us back to Mitchell and Jessen. Because of their experience as trainers in the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program, after 9/11 they were contacted by high-ranking Pentagon officials and, later, by lawyers who wanted to know whether some of those SERE techniques could be reverse-engineered to get terrorism suspects to talk.

[U]ntil the program was dry-docked in 2008, at least thirty-eight people were subjected to psychological and physical torments, and the results were methodically documented and analyzed. That is the textbook definition of human experimentation.

My point is not to minimize the illegality of torture or the legal imperatives to pursue accountability for perpetrators. Rather, because the concept of torture has been so muddled and disputed, I suggest that accountability would be more publicly palatable if we reframed the CIA’s program as one of human experimentation. If we did so, it would be more difficult to laud or excuse perpetrators as “patriots” who “acted in good faith.” Although torture has become a Rorschach test among political elites playing to public opinion on the Sunday morning talk shows, human experimentation has no such community of advocates and apologists.

Not all at the CIA and within the military bought into torture and experiments on human beings.  A piece here looks at these unsung heroes who supported decency. 

Cheney - Bush Knew About CIA Torture

Apparently wanting to make sure that, like himself, Chimperator George Bush can never again leave American territory, Emperor Palpatine Cheney is working hard to dispel the storyline of those who are trying to depict Bush as too clueless to have known about the CIA torture program and other war crime abuses being committed in the name of the American people.  MSN News reports on Cheney's effort to fully implicate George W. Bush.  Here are excerpts:

President George W Bush was fully aware and an "integral part" of the CIA's torture of terror suspects, his vice-president Dick Cheney said Wednesday. 

The long-awaited US Senate report released Tuesday on the program of harsh treatment and torture of detainees said Bush only learned details of it in 2006, four years after it started in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

Speaking to Fox News, Cheney denied Bush was kept out of the loop. He said the then-president "was in fact an integral part of the program and he had to approve it."


Asked if Bush knew specific details of how specific interrogations were being conducted, Cheney was more vague, saying: "We did discuss the techniques. There was no effort on our part to keep him from that."

Bush has yet to speak out publicly on the Senate report, which has drawn scathing criticism worldwide of what the CIA has called "enhanced interrogation techniques", amid calls for those involved to face trial.


"Such a gross violation of our liberal, democratic values must not happen again," German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said, reflecting the embarrassment of Washington's European allies.
America's great power rival China -- often on the end of US censure for its rights record -- was equally unimpressed.

"We believe the US side should reflect upon itself, correct its ways and earnestly respect and abide by the rules of international conventions," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei said.

The United Nations said the program violated international law and basic human rights, and British-based advocacy group CAGE demanded criminal proceedings.

Around the world, human rights bodies demanded that current US President Barack Obama -- who halted the torture but has not gone after the perpetrators -- take legal action.

Bush and Cheney et al have done immense damage to America's ability to chide others on human rights abuses.  True, America has a very ugly history, if one knows accurate history, but the use of torture and war crimes makes it clear that nothing has really changed and America is plagued with hypocrisy.  People around the world are tired of being told by America to "do as we say and not as we do."

Are International Legal Cases Against Torture Participants Coming?

As noted in one of the last posts uploaded yesterday, under the UN Convention on Torture, if the United States fails to prosecute American torture participants, then other countries can launch prosecutions and the United States will have to either allow the defendants to be extradited or find itself further outside the bounds of international law.  Think Progress has a piece that looks at the question of whether international prosecutions are in the offing.  It's probably safe to say that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney won't be traveling outside the USA any time soon.  Here are article highlights:

New evidence might bring new legal cases against American officials involved in the Central Intelligence Agency’s “enhanced interrogation” program after the release of previously classified information on Tuesday. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s 525-page report report which details the “brutal” interrogations of 39 detainees has spurred calls for prosecution from the U.N., as well as human rights’ and civil liberties organizations. 

“We made mistakes,” C.I.A. director John Brennan said in a statement, but he maintained that his agency’s policies were legal. 

But Ben Emmerson, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on counter terrorism and human rights doesn’t think official authorization from agencies within the U.S. frees those who carried out torture from facing justice. 

“The fact that the policies revealed in this report were authorized at a high level within the U.S. government provides no excuse whatsoever,” Emmerson said in a statement. “Indeed, it reinforces the need for criminal accountability.” 

He added that as a signatory to the U.N. Convention Against Torture, the U.S. is legally obligated to prosecute acts of torture and enforced disappearance if there is sufficient evidence to to bring about a case.

International law does not permit individuals who carried out torture to dismiss liability because they were acting on orders. And, Emmerson said, “States are not free to maintain or permit impunity for these grave crimes.”

“Other countries have all the information they need should they wish to exercise universal jurisdiction and prosecute these officials should they appear in their borders,” Andrea Prasow of Human Rights Watch said.

Universal jurisdiction is a legal doctrine that allows the courts of any country to try certain crimes against humanity including torture regardless of where those crimes took place or who is alleged to have committed them. It stems from a 1998 case brought by a Spanish court against the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for the murder and torture of opposition figures. 

Some organizations that have already invoked this principle and are planning to use this new release of information to build their case against American officials.

In a fact sheet, the ACLU notes that there are a number of U.S. laws that could be invoked to hold those accused of torture responsible including the federal torture statute that criminalizes the infliction of severe physical or mental suffering with intent outside of the U.S. 

The group points out that while some of the alleged crimes occurred more than a decade ago, “There is no statute of limitations under the torture statute when the abuse risked or resulted in serious physical injury or death.”

Here Come the War Crime Apologists

It's no surprise that many on the far right are falling all over themselves to defend the criminal use of torture revealed by the Senate torture report released yesterday.  I'm sure many of them, had they been in Nazi Germany in the period 1938 - 1945 would have found justification for the countless horrors the Nazi regime inflicted on millions.  The numbers of victims involved in the Bush/Cheney torture program may be smaller by far than what Hitler oversaw, but torturing smaller numbers doesn't somehow make it acceptable or any less criminal under international law.  As noted previously, it is no wonder Republicans did not want this report to see the light of day because through Bush and Cheney they own it.  A column in the New York Times looks at the efforts of the war crimes apologists.  Here are excerpts:

The publication today [yesterday] of a censored summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the use of torture at C.I.A. prisons has brought war-crime apologists out from under their rocks.

Chief among them is former Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the all-time great prisoner abuse enthusiasts. Even before the report was issued, Mr. Cheney was telling The New York Times on Monday that torturing prisoners was absolutely the right thing to do and that everything the C.I.A. did was authorized.

“What I keep hearing out there is they portray this as a rogue operation, and the agency was way out of bounds and then they lied about it,” Mr. Cheney said in a telephone interview. “I think that’s all a bunch of hooey. The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice Department before they undertook the program.”

Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, said releasing the report was a “terrible idea,” because it would put Americans in danger. “Our own intelligence community has assessed that this will cause violence and deaths,” he said, conveniently ignoring that it’s in the intelligence community’s interest to make such a prediction.

Mr. Rogers is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, which has done absolutely nothing to shed light on this dismal chapter in American history. It’s specious to argue that transparency about torture, rather than torture itself, is to blame for any future retaliation.

Let’s be clear, the acts committed against the C.I.A.’s prisoners — no matter how murderous and awful some of those prisoners were — were disgusting and inexcusable. They violated all kinds of American and international laws against torture.

“The truth is sometimes a hard pill to swallow,” he [John McCain] said. “The American people are entitled to it nonetheless. They must be able to make judgments about whether these policies and personnel who supported them were justified in compromising our values.”