Thanx Spencer and keep workin’, we out here in the boondocks are relying on you and those like you to keep us informed.

damn Spencer, that’s one big fish you got there. thanks!

Interesting. Good work, and I look forward to hearing whatever answer(s) you get.

you guys are great.

can someone help out this ignoramous…
what memos is Cheney talking about that he wants released?

The ones that show that torture works.

Yeah, stuff like 6 times a day for a month doesn’t show how well it works.

As I typed on an earlier thread, it’s a perpetual tactic for Cheney. He can always claim that such memos exist, but are not being released, and those who wish to counter are put in the familiar position (vis-a-vis Cheney) of having to prove a negative.

“The agency repeatedly sought and repeatedly received written assurances from the Department of Justice that its interrogation practices were lawful.”

Everyone is implicated in this. C.I.A. DOJ. The White House. Everyone went along with the idea that torture can be justified if it produces results.

And because so many agencies failed us, a full investigation is absolutely essential. This was massive government failure, across the board, top to bottom. Doing nothing at this point, a la Obama, is sheer recklessness.

As Mary said, if torture works so well, why is bin Laden still on the loose?

so there are no such memos? not even bullshit memos?

Ah, but they would say: imagine how bad it would have been if we hadn’t tortured!

Spencer

you are being front paged at TPM right now – re: Zelikow
linkitude

I don’t know, but I presume that if there were such memos, they would have been the first ones to be released. Dya think?

yep.

and then you have delay and gingrich sent out quoting bad numbers on purpose and the debate turns to their fatted-up numbers and away from the missing ‘meat’ that isn’t missing in the first place. cuz it was never there in the first place.

yep, you got it ecahn.

msnbc just said that obama leaving the door open for bush-era prosecutions.msnbc got it from ‘the media that cannot be named or quoted without charge’.

The CIA was right to ask for repeated explanations from the OLC on what the law allowed. They knew what they were doing was wrong or questionable. They knew the administration was constantly shifting its rationales for it, and changing staff at OLC as fast as a newborn needs new diapers.

OLC opinions are official interpretations of federal laws, binding on executive branch officials. We should see them. We are not a country of secret laws. The very concept is an oxymoron for rule by whim. It’s so typical of Bush, who wanted what he wanted when he wanted it, and Cheney, who wanted everything. What does Obama want beyond a second term?

There simply have to be memos that say “all this enhanced interrogation — it works!” It’s harder to believe that there wouldn’t be such memos. What we’ll need to see is how those memos established the basic proposition that the torture worked; or that alternative techniques wouldn’t have, etc.

Agree entirely.

You know, in response to Ratner’s question about who they were wanting to keep torturing in 2007, something came to mind and it is conveniently mentioned in another story – one about Roxanna Saberi and whatshisname trying to propagandize on the fair trial she will be getting that does also tuck in this reference:

Iranian leaders have repeatedly asked for the release of three Iranian diplomats, who are accused of spying but have been held without trial by U.S. forces in Iraq since 2007. The Iranian foreign ministry recently called for the “speedy and unconditional freedom of its consulate officials.”

that occurred to me too. i was wondering if there aren’t some self-serving pices of garbage out there. also, others have pointed out that Cheny probably has copies of alot of the memos that were floating around.

agree on all counts. they keep spouting the lines that ‘it worked” it “saved lives” etc. there’s got to be something on paper. probably wouldn’t withstand analysis by a few bloggers in pajamas in their basements or whatever Palin’s terminolgy was.

16 – they also knew that each memo, while going further and further, still carved out exceptions that put them outside of the memos scope. Nowhere do any of the memos talk about adding disappearing someone and holding them in isolation to the listings – then there are the el-Masris, “mistakes” who it is hard to fit under the “high ranking al-Qaeda operative” carve outs, and the way the toruture was applied and the lack of cut off after 30 days (or 5 years for that matter) and the other uses of hypothermia, and the death of Jamadi from non-listed techniques (he wasn’t just slapped) and the use of proxy torturers and the threats to family and the actual kidnap of family and …

Yeah – they kept going back and they got more and more each time, but they never really got what they needed, even so, and they know it. But it’s ok – Obama is happy to give them what no one else would.

17 et prev – the CIA put together some docs that are referenced in the Bradbury memo. While those docs are not released, the “good parts” Bradbury lifts from them into his memos are and that is a pretty sorry assortment. Marcy touches on it some in a post she had about the quantity of intel reports they got out of the torture -266 waterboardings plus head slamming and nudity and sleep deprivation = 3000 intel reports and half of all we know about al-Qaeda. Which, apparently, is why we can’t seem to find Bin Laden – our intel reports placed in him Zubaydah’s waking dreams. Apparently the CIA is still looking for the right “technique” to get them there too.

In any event, Bradbury lists a whole lot of things referencing those docs and most of them sound ridiculous or have been pretty clearly sourced elsewhere. It sounds to me that Bradbury tries at one point to make KSM the source for routing the Singapore follow up bombings, but that has been pretty well and thoroughly sourced elsewhere. And apparently in the end KSM tied himself to pretty much everything we could have ever listed – a completely unsuspicious circumstance.

Remember Cheney and Libby’s spiels with Judy Miller. After they cherrypicked info for surreptitious release to her without attribution (in violation, imo, of the nat sec act’s prohibition on executive planted, unattributed domestic propaganda) Libby also gave her a spiel about that being a taste, if she could only see the real stuff it would be so much worse (of course, they had cherrypicked the “best of the worst” and what was actually left was stuff contradicting what they planted with her). So that’s an old time game he plays.

He also knows that what CIA can do is lie and produce fake docs – just like they can destroy original videos. So the hint is there, not so much because he cares about the CIA operative he made into torturers, but bc he has CIA in a position where, to cover for their own, they have to protect him too and he’s getting a kick out of that.

The OPR report on the is going to be the next shoe to drop. Sen. Whitehouse said on Maddow:

…the report’s release “can’t be more than a few weeks away,” and that he has “every reason to believe it will be a devastating opinion.”

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpoi…..hp?ref=fp1

Just as Bradbury’s Memos actually compile more information about WHAT actually occurred than the “justification memoranda” this 2007 Memo is likely to go into vast detail about “errors” and “abuses” that occurred. It will cite these and say “that was overreaching or failed to provide accurate intel”. This could be the Holy Grail since it will review what was achieved.

BTW Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s two sons (7 and 9 years old) were captured in Pakistan in September 2002, less than a month after the “caterpillar or other insect” memo was issued.

Acciording to a statement by the father of internee Majid “The Pakistani guards told my son that the boys were kept in a separate area upstairs, and were denied food and water by other guards. They were also mentally tortured by having ants or other creatures put on their legs to scare them and get them to say where their father was hiding.”

Note the use of insects! Another suspect was tortured in restraint and pain positions for eight hours or more, then placed in a box that was “too small to sit or stand in and infested with mosquitos”. It’s unlikely that the room where interrogators were working would be filled with mosquitos. But the box was. Clearly, this is again another case of the application of insects to torment the internees.

Another report says that the boys were brought to the United States in March 2003 for further interrogation after their father was captured. The CIA reported that child psychologists were involved in these interrogations, which were intended to get their father to “talk”.

Exactly how it can be justified that such interrogations were in the “best interests” of the children is beyond me. How can child psychologists justify such activity? They should have been advocates for the release of the children to relatives. Instead they were participating in State-Sponsored kidnapping….that was occurring within the borders of the United States.

One can be assured that there were videotapes of these interrogations….perhaps shown to KSM…who knew his kids were held (although he thought they had only been held 3 months) and tortured.

Taking hostages in this manner violates the Geneva Conventions. And this isn’t the only case in which we did it.