Sen. Angus King Challenges Cheney to Try Waterboarding

19 Comments

1. 

   seabe on April 6, 2014 at 2:10 pm

   Reminder:

2. 

   Marie2 on April 6, 2014 at 3:33 pm

   Cheney would “not fare well” in a waterboarding situation.  That’s the test for the application of punishment to the elites for their wrongdoing; they are delicate flowers that can’t take more than a mild slap on wrist.  

   Waterboarding could quite possibly kill Cheney, but it would still be wrong because it’s torture.  I’d prefer to see him locked up and fined enough that he loses all his ill-gotten gains.  

   • 

     Geov Parrish on April 6, 2014 at 4:20 pm

     Waterboarding – and other tortures – were certainly applied to plenty of other people without regard to their health histories (or anything else about them, such as, for example, whether or not they could possibly have any intelligence of value). I don’t see where Cheney’s health history gets him off.

     If he dies, given how many other people were murdered using techniques he authorized, well, he must have been guilty of something, right? Isn’t that how the witch trials worked?

     • 

       Marie2 on April 6, 2014 at 4:29 pm

       Considerations for elites that have engaged in wrongdoing do not apply to “other people.”  Hence, Chelsea Manning is locked up for decades and as prison would have placed an undue burden on Scooter Libby, his term was commuted so that he can continue to live his life of privilege and wealth.

       • 

         Geov Parrish on April 6, 2014 at 5:06 pm

         Funny thing. I would think war criminals would get less consideration for their tender fee-fees, given all the lives they destroy. But then, I’m an idealist that way.

         • 

           Marie2 on April 6, 2014 at 5:25 pm

           Why do you think war criminals expend so much effort denigrating and dismissing those they defined as idealists, aka bleeding heart liberals?  Makes it so much easier to lock up those that report the crimes of war criminals and give the torturers and liars permanent seats on the Sunday talkies, space to spout their self-serving nonsense in NYT and WAPO op-eds, and big fee-fees to deliver speeches to their masters and the deluded rubes.  

3. 

   MNPundit on April 6, 2014 at 4:28 pm

   Hey hey, remember we can’t be hostile to the intelligence community! It’s a symptom of being unwilling to take charge!

4. 

   donnah on April 6, 2014 at 4:30 pm

   The sad fact is that Cheney will never pay for his crimes. We can fuss and fume about it for as long as we want to, but he’s going to live out the rest of his shameful existance in affluence, surrounded by family, friends, and supporters. I’d be willing to bet he sleeps like a baby every night, too, without as second thought about the lives he ended.

   He will never admit he’s a criminal. He will continue to spout hate as long as there’s a microphone stuck in his face or someone standing by with a keyboard.

   Bush gets his shitty paintings in his shitty library, Cheney gets to go on talk shows and criticize a president who is ten times the man he is and chuckle all the way to the bank.

   War criminals, living long lives with blood on their hands, oblivious to it.

   • 

     Marie2 on April 6, 2014 at 4:44 pm

     Other sorry excuses for humans:

     According to Gen. (Retired) Michael Hayden, “Jose [Rodriguez] built a reputation for leadership in the field and here at headquarters, and he guided some of the agency’s greatest counterterror victories.” “He has done much to protect our country by strengthening its Clandestine Service,” Hayden added. Other colleagues cite him as “one of the best” field operatives in his time at the CIA.

     Yeah, an operative exceptionally good at torture and destroying evidence of it.

5. 

   Quaker in a Basement on April 6, 2014 at 5:46 pm

   Do we have to wait for Cheney to accept the challenge?

   • 

     Snarki child of Loki on April 6, 2014 at 7:24 pm

     Perhaps Cheney will push forward “Daddy’s little Deferment” to take the waterboarding in his place.

     Unfortanately, now that the ‘torture’ demon is out of the pentacle, the only way to put a stop to it is to put a real, concrete fear in the elites and the conservatives that THEY will be subjected to it.

     Torturing ‘violent terrorists’ is okay? Well, how about waterboarding Terry Nichols (OK city bombing)? Convicted of a terrorist crime, in federal prison, likely to have co-conspirators that are still at large.

     And if some of those co-conspirators are high ranking conservative Republicans?  Well, that’s too fucking bad for them. Squeeze their nuts until they squeal.

6. 

   TarheelDem on April 6, 2014 at 7:20 pm

   Good for Angus King.

   OT.  Sy Hersh has a stunning report at the London Review of Books.  The Red Line and the Rat Line: Seymour M. Hersh on Obama, Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels.

   Read the section about the White House dinner with Erdoğan.  “We know.” is about to become for foreign affairs what “Please proceed, governor.” was for a political campaign.  It is stunning.  And once again makes one wonder where the bad advice is coming from and how quickly someone will leak the full Senate Intelligence Committee torture report so that John Brennan can be replaced, and John Rizzo can be indicted.

   • 

     BooMan on April 6, 2014 at 8:54 pm

     Sy Hersh has gone funny in the head.  Some of his most loyal editors are refusing to publish his stuff lately.  Remember how many times he reported that war with Iran was imminent?  

     I haven’t even read his latest, but I will have a shaker of salt when I do.  

     • 

       TarheelDem on April 6, 2014 at 9:18 pm

       Seems like his sources were telling him that a war with Iran was imminent.  Editors in the US are getting a little squeamish with all the legal consequences of publishing essentially leaked material.  The James Risen case has them walking on tiptoe.

       It is interesting for what it did not say about the divisions in the national security community and even the White House.

       The analysis jibes with most bits and pieces that have come out outside of the Wall Street media.  Take your salt shaker; you need it for everything these days; the fundamental who, where, what, when, and how are no longer reliable even with reliable reporters.  There are major disinformation wars going on between all sorts of actors and they do not stop at national borders.  Hersh tries to vet them, but it is becoming more difficult IMO.

       • 

         BooMan on April 6, 2014 at 11:26 pm

         All I know is that I was privately screaming at the WH during John Kerry’s congressional performance and there were divisions that even I picked up on.  That Obama promptly called it off was to his credit, and that he found a quality and useful escape hatch was almost magical.  His team can do what it wants and call for all the strikes it wants, but the president has the final say, and I’m okay with what he decided.  

     • 

       Marie2 on April 6, 2014 at 11:08 pm

       Guess those that pushed back on Cheney’s non-existent plans to attack Iran had “gone funny in the head” as well:

       The option of attacking nuclear sites [in Iraq] had been raised by Bush with the Joint Chiefs at a meeting in “the tank” at the Pentagon on December 13, 2006, and had been opposed by the Joint Chiefs, according to a report by Time magazine’s Joe Klein last June.

       After he become head of the Central Command (Centcom) in March 2007, Admiral William Fallon also made his opposition to such a massive attack on Iran known to the White House, according Middle East specialist Hillary Mann, who had developed close working relationships with Pentagon officials when she worked on the National Security Council staff.

       It appeared in early 2007, therefore, that a strike at Iran’s nuclear program and military power had been blocked by opposition from the Pentagon. Cheney’s proposal for an attack on IRGC bases in June 2007, tied to the alleged Iranian role in providing both weapons – especially the highly lethal explosively formed projectiles (EFPs) – and training to Shi’ite militias appears to have been a strategy for getting around the firm resistance of military leaders to such an unprovoked attack.

     • 

       Arthur Gilroy on April 6, 2014 at 11:23 pm

       A shaker of salt? Sorry, Booman. I have used up all the salt on this website trying to fathom how you can stand being a loyal Democrat. Seymour Hersh deserves more respect from you.

       AG

       • 

         BooMan on April 7, 2014 at 12:16 am

         no, he doesn’t.

         • 

           Arthur Gilroy on April 7, 2014 at 11:02 am

           How soon they forget.

           My Lai Massacre
           On November 12, 1969, Hersh reported the story of the My Lai Massacre, in which hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians were murdered by US soldiers in March 1968.[10] The report prompted widespread condemnation around the world and reduced public support for the Vietnam War in the United States. The explosive news of the massacre fueled the outrage of the US peace movement, which demanded the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam. Hersh wrote about the massacre and its cover-up in My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath and Cover-up: The Army’s Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai 4. A movie was produced, based on this book, by Italian director Paolo Bertola in 2009.[11]

           —snip—

           Mordechai Vanunu and Robert Maxwell
           In his 1991 book The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, Hersh wrote that Nicholas Davies, the foreign editor of The Daily Mirror, had tipped off the Israeli embassy in London about Israeli traitor (to the supporters of Israel’s government) or whistle-blower (to its critics) Mordechai Vanunu. Vanunu had given information about Israel’s nuclear weapons program first to The Sunday Times and later to the Sunday Mirror. At the time, the Sunday Mirror and its sibling newspaper, the Daily Mirror were owned by media magnate Robert Maxwell who was alleged to have had contacts with Israel’s intelligence services. According to Hersh, Davies had also worked for the Mossad. Vanunu was later lured by Mossad from London to Rome, kidnapped, returned to Israel, and sentenced to 18 years in jail. Davies and Maxwell published an anti-Vanunu story that was claimed by critics to be part of a disinformation campaign on behalf of the Israeli government.[14]

           Hersh repeated the allegations during a press conference held in London to publicize his book. No British newspaper would publish the allegations because of Maxwell’s famed litigiousness. However, two British MPs raised the matter in the House of Commons, which meant that British newspapers were able to report what had been said without fear of being sued for libel. Maxwell called the claims “ludicrous, a total invention”. He fired Nick Davies shortly thereafter.[15]

           —snip—

           Iraq
           Hersh has written a series of articles for The New Yorker magazine detailing military and security matters surrounding the US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. In March 2002 he described the planning process for a new invasion of Iraq that he alleged had been on-going since the end of the First Gulf War, under the leadership of Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Fried and other neo-conservatives. In a 2004 article, he alleged that Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld circumvented the normal intelligence analysis function of the CIA in their quest to make the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Another article, Lunch with the Chairman, led Richard Perle, a subject of the article, to call Hersh the “closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist.”[17]

           A March 7, 2007 article entitled, “The Redirection” described a recent shift in the George W. Bush administration’s Iraq policy, the goal of which Hersh said was to “contain” Iran. Hersh asserted that “a by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.”[18]

           In May 2004, Hersh published a series of articles which described the treatment of detainees by US military police at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, Iraq.[19] The articles included allegations that private military contractors contributed to prisoner mistreatment and that intelligence agencies such as the CIA ordered torture in order to break prisoners for interrogations. They also alleged that torture was a usual practice in other US-run prisons as well, e.g., in Bagram Theater Internment Facility and Guantanamo. In subsequent articles, Hersh claimed that the abuses were part of a secret interrogation program, known as “Copper Green”. According to Hersh’s sources, the program was expanded to Iraq with the direct approval of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, both in an attempt to deal with the growing insurgency there and as part of “Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.”[20] Much of his material for these articles was based on the Army’s own internal investigations.[21]

           Scott Ritter, a disaffected former arms inspector, asserted in his October 19, 2005 interview with Seymour Hersh that the US policy to remove Iraqi president Saddam Hussein from power started with US president George H. W. Bush in August 1990. Ritter concluded from public remarks by President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker that the Iraq sanctions would only be lifted when Hussein was removed from power. The justification for sanctions was disarmament. The CIA offered the opinion that containing Hussein for six months would result in the collapse of his regime. According to Hersh, this policy resulted in the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

           MR. HERSH: One of the things about your book that’s amazing is that it’s not only about the Bush Administration, and if there are any villains in this book, they include Sandy Berger, who was Clinton’s national security advisor, and Madeleine Albright.

           Another thing that’s breathtaking about this book is the amount of new stories and new information. Scott describes in detail and with named sources, basically, a two or three-year run of the American government undercutting the inspection process. In your view, during those years, ’91 to’98, particularly the last three years, was the United States interested in disarming Iraq?

           MR. RITTER: Well, the fact of the matter is the United States was never interested in disarming Iraq. The whole Security Council resolution that created the UN weapons inspections and called upon Iraq to disarm was focused on one thing and one thing only, and that is a vehicle for the maintenance of economic sanctions that were imposed in August 1990 linked to the liberation of Kuwait. We liberated Kuwait, I participated in that conflict. And one would think, therefore, the sanctions should be lifted.

           The United States needed to find a vehicle to continue to contain Saddam because the CIA said all we have to do is wait six months and Saddam is going to collapse on his own volition. That vehicle is sanctions. They needed a justification; the justification was disarmament. They drafted a Chapter 7 resolution of the United Nations Security Council calling for the disarmament of Iraq and saying in Paragraph 14 that if Iraq complies, sanctions will be lifted. Within months of this resolution being passed–and the United States drafted and voted in favor of this resolution–within months, the President, George Herbert Walker Bush, and his Secretary of State, James Baker, are saying publicly, not privately, publicly that even if Iraq complies with its obligation to disarm, economic sanctions will be maintained until which time Saddam Hussein is removed from power.

           That is proof positive that disarmament was only useful insofar as it contained through the maintenance of sanctions and facilitated regime change. It was never about disarmament, it was never about getting rid of weapons of mass destruction. It started with George Herbert Walker Bush, and it was a policy continued through eight years of the Clinton presidency, and then brought us to this current disastrous course of action under the current Bush Administration.[22]

           —snip—

           Iran
           In January 2005, Hersh alleged that the US was conducting covert operations in Iran to identify targets for possible strikes. Hersh also claimed that Pakistan and the United States have struck a “Khan-for-Iran” deal in which Washington will look the other way at Pakistan’s nuclear transgressions and not demand handing over of its infamous nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan, in return for Islamabad’s cooperation in neutralizing Iran’s nuclear plans. This was also denied by officials of the governments of the US and Pakistan.

           In the April 17, 2006 issue of The New Yorker,[23] Hersh reported on the Bush administration’s purported plans for an air strike on Iran. Of particular note in his article is that a US nuclear first strike (possibly using the B61-11 bunker-buster nuclear weapon) is under consideration to eliminate underground Iranian uranium enrichment facilities. In response, President Bush cited Hersh’s reportage as “wild speculation.” [24]

           When, in October 2007, asked on presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s hawkish views on Iran, Hersh claimed that Jewish donations were the main reason for these:

           ”    Money. A lot of the Jewish money from New York. Come on, let’s not kid about it. A significant percentage of Jewish money, and many leading American Jews support the Israeli position that Iran is an existential threat. And I think it’s as simple as that. When you’re from New York and from New York City, you take the view of – right now, when you’re running a campaign, you follow that line. And there’s no other explanation for it, because she’s smart enough to know the downside.[25]    “
           During one journalism conference, Hersh claimed that after the Strait of Hormuz incident, members of the Bush administration met in vice president Dick Cheney’s office to consider methods of initiating a war with Iran. One idea considered was staging a false flag operation involving the use of Navy SEALs dressed as Iranian PT boaters who would engage in a firefight with US ships. This idea was shot down. This claim has not been verified.[26]

           —snip—

           The man has been on the right side of so many anti-PermaGov stories over the past 45+ years, from My Lai right on through Abu Ghraib and beyond. He tells the truth as well as can ascertain it, at the risk of his own mortal ass. And you disrespect him???

           Deep.

           This is “progressivism?”

           I think not.

           It’s just flat-out partisanship.

           Sad.

           AG