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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsPre-Spin on CIA Torture report - W's team to stand with CIA *AND* say W was lied to
Bush and C.I.A. Ex-Officials Rebut Torture Report
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/12/08/us/politics/bush-and-cia-ex-officials-rebut-torture-report.html
WASHINGTON A long-awaited Senate report condemning torture by the Central Intelligence Agency has not even been made public yet, but former President George W. Bushs team has decided to link arms with former intelligence officials and challenge its conclusions.
The report is said to assert that the C.I.A. misled Mr. Bush and his White House about the nature, extent and results of brutal techniques like waterboarding, and some of his former administration officials privately suggested seizing on that to distance themselves from the controversial program, according to people involved in the discussion. But Mr. Bush and his closest advisers decided that were going to want to stand behind these guys, as one former official put it.
Former intelligence officials, seeking allies against the potentially damaging report, have privately reassured the Bush team in recent days that they did not deceive them and have lobbied the former presidents advisers to speak out publicly on their behalf. The defense of the program has been organized by former C.I.A. leaders like George J. Tenet and Gen. Michael V. Hayden, two former directors, and John E. McLaughlin, a former deputy C.I.A. director who also served as acting director.
General Hayden added that the former C.I.A. team objected to the Senates characterization of their efforts. Were not here to defend torture, he said by email on Sunday. Were here to defend history.
malaise
(269,005 posts)I'm lovin' it.
They violated international law - they are war criminals and nothing they say will change that.
underpants
(182,814 posts)#1 sounds really familiar
DetlefK
(16,423 posts)louis-t
(23,295 posts)They said it's like a fraternity prank. Called it "enhanced interrogation" to make it sound like it was just 'tough love'. Cheney kept saying torture saved lives. It didn't. They ought to be scared to death.
sabrina 1
(62,325 posts)There is no way they can claim ANYONE lied to them, THEY were the arbiters of the entire program and that is why there needs to a TRIAL where they are under oath. I would prefer an International Court. There was one but the US Government pressured the court to stop the prosecution of the Bush Six (torturers) as we saw in the Wikileaks cables.
The US cannot police itself, that is clear. Some other entity is going to have to do so.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Here's to defending history: People and organizations -- including Congress -- are afraid of the BFEE.
underpants
(182,814 posts)The only reasonable explanation I ever came up with was that they had dirt on everyone via the illegal spying operations.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Frank Church was a patriot, a hero and a statesman, truly a great American. Guy stood up to CIA/NSA domestic operations during the 70s, so the CIA/NSA was turned on him.
The guy also led the last real investigation of CIA, NSA and FBI. When it came to NSA Tech circa 1975, he definitely knew what he was talking about:
I dont want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.
-- Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) FDR New Deal, Liberal, Progressive, World War II combat veteran. A brave man, the NSA was turned on him. Coincidentally, he narrowly lost re-election a few years later.
And what happened to Church, for his trouble to preserve Democracy:
SOURCE: http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=frank_church_1
From GWU's National Security Archives:
"Disreputable if Not Outright Illegal": The National Security Agency versus Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Art Buchwald, Frank Church, et al.
Newly Declassified History Divulges Names of Prominent Americans Targeted by NSA during Vietnam Era
Declassification Decision by Interagency Panel Releases New Information on the Berlin Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Panama Canal Negotiations
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 441
Posted September 25, 2013
Originally Posted - November 14, 2008
Edited by Matthew M. Aid and William Burr
Washington, D.C., September 25, 2013 During the height of the Vietnam War protest movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the National Security Agency tapped the overseas communications of selected prominent Americans, most of whom were critics of the war, according to a recently declassified NSA history. For years those names on the NSA's watch list were secret, but thanks to the decision of an interagency panel, in response to an appeal by the National Security Archive, the NSA has released them for the first time. The names of the NSA's targets are eye-popping. Civil rights leaders Dr. Martin Luther King and Whitney Young were on the watch list, as were the boxer Muhammad Ali, New York Times journalist Tom Wicker, and veteran Washington Post humor columnist Art Buchwald. Also startling is that the NSA was tasked with monitoring the overseas telephone calls and cable traffic of two prominent members of Congress, Senators Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Howard Baker (R-Tennessee).
SNIP...
Another NSA target was Senator Frank Church, who started out as a moderate Vietnam War critic. A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee even before the Tonkin Gulf incident, Church worried about U.S. intervention in a "political war" that was militarily unwinnable. While Church voted for the Tonkin Gulf resolution, he later saw his vote as a grave error. In 1965, as Lyndon Johnson made decisions to escalate the war, Church argued that the United States was doing "too much," criticisms that one White House official said were "irresponsible." Church had been one of Johnson's Senate allies but the President was angry with Church and other Senate critics and later suggested that they were under Moscow's influence because of their meetings with Soviet diplomats. In the fall of 1967, Johnson declared that "the major threat we have is from the doves" and ordered FBI security checks on "individuals who wrote letters and telegrams critical of a speech he had recently delivered." In that political climate, it is not surprising that some government officials eventually nominated Church for the watch list.[10]
SOURCE: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB441/
I wonder if Sen. Richard Schweiker (R-CT) also got the treatment from NSA?
I think that the report, to those who have studied it closely, has collapsed like a house of cards, and I think the people who read it in the long run future will see that. I frankly believe that we have shown that the [investigation of the] John F. Kennedy assassination was snuffed out before it even began, and that the fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was not to use its own investigators, but instead to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence officials who directed the cover-up. Senator Richard Schweiker on Face the Nation in 1976.
Lost to History NOT
spanone
(135,838 posts)criminals.
fuck hayden.
fuck 'em all.
where are the world courts?????
ChisolmTrailDem
(9,463 posts)9/11 to the end of the bush era.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Every one who had a part in this shit. They hijacked and disgraced my country with their infantile, incompetent violence and deceit. Not to mention the waste, and the trashing of a long list of foreign places, and the hundreds of thousands of the dead and injured, for nothing, for less than nothing..
nilesobek
(1,423 posts)that indeed there is a criminal conspiracy to commit torture. The prime motivations being greed and revenge. After all, the Iraq war enriched the torturers and their boss's wallets. I hope that when the prosecutions happen, that there will be a complete and total seizure and forfeiture of the criminal's assets, their businesses and corporations included. It would be totally legal because all the ill gotten gains are evidence.
PearliePoo2
(7,768 posts)Frog-marched, water-boarded, then led off to prison to rot.
Start it off with "Darth" himself.
sabrina 1
(62,325 posts)KingCharlemagne
(7,908 posts)looking forward rather than backward? After all, these patriots were under a lot of stress, don'cha know?
sabrina 1
(62,325 posts)I just haven't been able to conjure up any sympathy at all for 'patriotic torturers who were under stress'!
KingCharlemagne
(7,908 posts)for war crimes during the Bush-Cheney Junta and the utter lack of accountability as of today. I will simply borrow a line from Malcolm X that, if and when any Americans are tortured from here on out, it's simply 'chickens come home to roost.'
I have major reservations about VP Biden but on one count I will give him major props. I'm paraphrasing but, when Abu Ghraib first broke, I saw a clip of Biden exasperatedly saying words to the effect that "the reason we don't torture those we capture is that we don't want our forces to be tortured if they are captured by our enemies." Biden must have missed Rove's disquisition to Suskind (in The 1% Doctrine) about how the U.S. is an empire and constructs its own reality now.
GeorgeGist
(25,321 posts)KingCharlemagne
(7,908 posts)Special Counsel to investigate and prosecute any and all accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Bush-Cheney Junta. Let the chips fall where they may.
heaven05
(18,124 posts)OMG, how could this have happened?!!!!???? More like we were lied to.
kentuck
(111,098 posts)The George H.W. Bush Intelligence Agency?
It is not a trivial point.
underpants
(182,814 posts)Best link I could find
Dick himself
http://wonkette.com/363302/cheneys-new-house-is-cia-adjacent
hifiguy
(33,688 posts)Every last one of these evil shitheels should be clapped in irons at the Hague, convicted, and those who approved it hanged for crimes against humanity and war crimes. Cheney and the Chimp can drop first.
cstanleytech
(26,291 posts)still support the CIA.
I mean hell I have said before on this forum (as well as on another one I used to visit 10 years ago before it shutdown) that they would probably fall back with the claim that they were lied to as its difficult to prove otherwise and they will also stand with the CIA because it probably has the evidence that proves Bush was not lied at all so they are all going to stand together in this.
Response to underpants (Original post)
trusty elf This message was self-deleted by its author.
Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)Keep sending them through over and over until one of them cracks.
I know which one it will be too.
We all do.
Cheney.
The reason will be because after the first three times through Dubya will start to sing along.
Thinkingabout
(30,058 posts)Instead of his hearings on Benghazi starting over with a special committee to investigate again, jump on this. The least they should admit is they knew water boarding was a part of a torture treaty we are a part. Even John McCain said this was wrong. I have mixed emotions about releasing lots of information for fear we just may be endangering American lives and these guys has a very difficult time staying alive without more problems.