Graham was a ball of contradictions today. It was almost like they told him he had to defend the GOP position but he really wasn’t all that into it. Hell he even snapped back at that wingnut Addicot. Speaking of which who the hell invited THAT guy. Talk about being out of touch. His views was different from even the people whose side theoretically he was on. Back to Graham he brought every weaksauce Redstate/freeper/NRO excuse for torture imaginable. But even he admitted that he didn’t approve of waterboarding and that he wanted GITMO to close. Watching him it seemed like he was damn near schizo today. How do you bring that debunked story up after the guy who actually interrogated him stated unequivically that he got important info before Zubaydah was waterboarded and that Zubaydah had clammed up when the torture was introduced.

Graham was also a major asshole to Ludan and that really pissed me off.

well lindsay, why don’t we just bring back crucifixion?

How could Graham sincerely believe he’s helping the GOP in any way, shape, or form by defending this stuff? Protracted group suicide by the R’s.

Graham: “One of the reason these interrogation techniques have survived fore 500 years is because they work.”

No, the reason these interrogation techniques have survived for 500 years is that this poor world has no shortage of sadists.

I was just thinking that he’s bragging about something that was done 500 years ago and we’re still doing it.
Guess we haven’t learned or evolved much in that time.

Depends on what you mean by “work”. It’s always been an excellent means for the powerful to put false words into the mouths of their enemies. Whereas it’s never had any value at all in uncovering the truth. If we can just make that clear, then we’ll have the Lindsey Grahams of this world on the run.

Guess we haven’t learned or evolved much in that time.

The Thugs don’t believe in learning. Or evolution.

The purpose of torture is torture. Always.

Lindsey Graham?

Good grief, Miss manners.
I could literally make him soil his pants with a pair of pliers in my hand.

Who the hell is afraid of this guy?

Yet another apologist from the GOP trying to catapult the propaganda that torture is A-OK .

Hint;
it’s not and all the BS propaganda from the right is not going to change that.

Keep stroking it Lindsey.

Rachel just covered the interchange.

Moron on Rachel refers to sleep depravation as “softening” technique. Instead it is a technique to drive someone crazy.

Graham believes that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. After all, torture has been working great for the last 500 years!

If it’s been going on for 500 years already, it’s ripe for inclusion in the GOP platform!

Obama pulls another flaming asshole move by refusing to release the rest of the torture picks.

Graham: “One of the reason these interrogation techniques have survived fore 500 years is because they work.”

Soufan: “There are a lot of people who find it easier and aren’t smart enough” to interrogate someone without torture.”

That pretty much nails it. Republics are too stupid to breathe.

You’d think America’s image would be damaged mainly by the fact that something happened that somebody could take a picture of. Actually seeing the pictures is a little beside the point.

Graham was such an asshole today I was ashamed. At another point Graham challeged: ”I’ve been to interrogations in Spain and Turkey” so I know better than you. Nah-nah-na-na-na. Graham is an intentional liar: he kept repeating lies that were refuted during this hearing. He has no clue what he is talking about and is not interested in correcting his ignorance. I was ashamed and he should be.

Soufan is a great American: he holds his oath to protect America sacred.

The room was electric.

I agree but the McCain, Graham, Warner position on torture has always been schizophrenic. They say they are against torture but when confronted with the facts of Bush Administration torture, they choose partisanship over principle and say whatever Bush and Cheney did wasn’t torture, the US does not torture and even if it did it was the work of a few bad apples a la Abu Ghraib and it’s already been taken care of.

But if you actually look where these guys were on specific legislation like the Detainee Treatment Act or the Military Commissions Act, they did everything they could to prevent detainees not only from challenging their detentions but their treatment while detained, established the President as the arbiter of what was torture, and immunized torturers retroactively to 1997.

I said it last night to an acquaintance who still wants to defend this insanity. after all it’s easier than actually considering what it really says about us as a nation.

Not that it would make it right, but if torture worked, Osama, dead or alive, would have surfaced a long long time ago.

It’s that simple.

That reminds me, last night while looking up the word ‘palmipsest’ in a dictionary I discovered that in Greek the word ‘Palin’ means ‘again’. “Will it go ’round in circles?” Also too.

Why are there SO many pictures? What is that about? Trophies?

And I keep saying: some one should have thought about the downside to all of this years ago. It’s too fucking late now to say our troops are endangered by the pictures. Our troops have been endangered by these POLICIES.

…in Greek the word ‘Palin’ means ‘again’.

How can there be an ‘again’ when they won’t go the fuck away the first time?

The point is to keep the pics from the U.S. voter. The people of other countries know a lot more than we do.

Oh, I think they’re going away now all right. With the notable two-headed exception of The Dickster and its evil hellspawn The Littlest Cheney.

Perhaps we should get John Demanjuk to come to congress and testify how effective his acts of genocide were?

-G

Not following ya — Why would PBO want to keep the pix away from US voters?

The photos are really beside the point. Knowing what they’ve already done because of what has been released should be way more than enough.

These craven bastards just don’t give a damn what the consequences of US policy are. It’s not like they or their evil spawn will ever be in the military

The first fatality of war is the truth. The govt always tries to keep the truth away from their citizens, esp under war circumstances, but also in general. After all, if we had fully disclosed evidence of what our govt was doing in our name, do you suppose we’d support it? And since Obama is spreading the wars to Pakistan, and making them endless, he certainly does not want us to know what war is really about.

Rachel points out that what the additional pics would give lie to is that it is “only a few rotten apples.” I take her point.

Ah. I was looking at it from the electoral POV, as in “that was the result of the other team’s policy, which I repudiate and have taken big huge un-missable public steps to stop and distance myself from.”

Further such pix taken starting now, I can see how those would be unhelpful to a PBO re-election.

Anyone who still believes that it was just “a few rotten apples” should go ahead and purchase that ocean front property in Arizona. Not only was it authorized, Bushco was demanding this crap be done to people.

No question the photos would inflame people in the countries where the abuses occurred… and the rest of the world. The knowledge that the abuses occurred doesn’t have the same emotional impact as the visual evidence.

The best way to defuse the international outrage the photos would inspire is by entering them into the public record as evidence in the trials of the officials responsible.

It seems that Graham was confessing to his own involvement in torture today….he seemed damned frenetic? What was he doing observing “interrogations” like this in “Spain and Turkey”? And he asserts these were worse than what Abu Zubaydah and KSM faced?

Either Lindsey is concealing involvement with a clandestine torture team while he was supposedly doing legal work in the military…or he’s just shooting statements out of his a**ho**.

And to say that torture and waterboarding has worked for 500 years? What sort of insanity is that. I know that Lindsey is a devout Christian, but does he really believe that all those coerced confessions of witchcraft and Stanic possession by those tortured during the inquistion and Salem Witch Trials actually obtained TRUE CONFESSIONS??? Does he really believe that those British Merchants who confessed during waterboarding in the Amboyna Massacre were actually guilty? Does he believe that all the confessions extracted by the N. Koreans, Gestapo, N. Vietnamese, Chinese, Pinochet, the Argentine junta, Idi Amin, Bokassa, and any number of other tyrants were not simply for propaganda purposes?

Add those examples to his litany of “everybody does it…especially to their own citizens”!

If torture produces such accurate information, and is harmless in the long term, perhaps Graham thinks there should be no prohibition against these methods in the US…for things like suspected car theft, teenage drinking, getting your kid to own up to smoking pot or having sex? Maybe they should ahve a waterboard set up in divorce courts?

BTW The British have now realized the egregious human costs of “false confessions” extracted by torture. There are now 150 asserted IRA former prisoners who are tryting to have their convictions voided because their confessions, or evidence takenm from others, were produced under torture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Six

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guildford_Four

well lindsay, why don’t we just bring back crucifixion?

unfortunately – outside the optimal 500 year window…

You betcha.

What Obama is doing is exactly the opposite to what would make the situation better. Keeping evidence secret and protecting the perps.

Hypocrisy is is not unique to democracy, it is just heavily concentrated there.

We haven’t gotten bin Laden, nor Mullah Omar, nor Dr. Zawahiri.

And all of the Orange Alerts we went to…the imminent attacks that were supposedly the product of “confessions” from prominent al Qaida members? All turned out to be hoaxes, and very costly “false alarms”. In fact, they were likely “confessions” extracted after hours of torture…made after prompting, or simply fantasies created to stop further abuse.

Obama now owns the wars. He will not discipline his generals into saying that the Iraq SOFA is settled, and he is vastly expanding the war in Afghanistan into Pakistan. So he wants to make it all seem pretty pretty.

What did Mullah Omar ever do to us? Why should we “get him?”

“Deja Vu, Palin All Over Again! “~ Yogi Berra

Pretty certain that is Obama’s true motivation for keeping the photos under wraps. He’s already drawing fire for ruling out prosecutions. The photos would just increase pressure on him and Holder to do the right thing.

Shorter Graham:

Just because Cheney and Kiriakou and Krauthammer and myself all lied about how effective torture was against Zubaydah doesn’t mean that it wasn’t effective as hell in the other cases we’re lying about.

The war expanded from Afghanistan into Pakistan quite without any input from Obama.

I wonder whether the “new arguments” against releasing the pictures that Obama ordered the lawyers to raise to the court will be made public, vs. in secret / in camera.

i love your blog, man.
and your comments always totally MATCH!

sorry for the ot and shameless fanism………….

The SERE school instructor was calling it a “softening-up” process because that is the state of fatigue they train the SERE school trainee’s to achieve, because the next stages in the torture process, (waterboarding) and questioning is where the trainee begins to answer pure gibberish…like confessing to being a witch or making love to satan, or being in control of the weather, as in the Inquisition.

…in addition:

Jesse Ventura (a grad of the SERE school) on Larry King’s program, told Larry that with an hour and a waterboard, he could get Dickless Cheney to confess to the Sharon Tate murder.