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She may be out of the military and out of prison, but West Virginia's Lynndie England gets to continue to serve as America's scapegoat:
More than two years since leaving her prison cell, the woman who became the grinning face of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal spends most of her days confined to the four walls of her home.
Former Army reservist Lynndie England hasn't landed a job in numerous tries: When one restaurant manager considered hiring her, other employees threatened to quit.
She doesn't like to travel: Strangers point and whisper, "That's her!"
In fact, she doesn't leave the house much at all, limiting her outings mostly to grocery runs.
"I don't have a social life," she says. " ... I sit at home all day."
Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice makes a point the AP doesn't have the balls to make:
We may never be allowed to call Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, William Kristol, or any of their prosperous fellows to account for their crimes during the ginning up and prosecution of our latest War Against the Iraqis. But, by the Christianists' God, we can at least ensure that the face of America's nightmare behavior there will be ostracized from Appalachia's fast-food emporiums and public housing
A federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush joins the jump up and down club for torture accountability:
In 2002, Justice Department lawyer John Yoo wrote a memo recommending that Jose Padilla, arrested in Chicago in the wake of 9/11 and held on suspicion of plotting a dirty-bomb attack, be classified as an enemy combatant. Yoo also wrote memos arguing that American law does not prevent the president from ordering such enemy combatants tortured. This January, after enduring years of abuse in prison, Padilla sued Yoo for violating his constitutional rights.
And a week ago, Judge Jeffrey White ruled that Padilla's allegations were plausible enough to justify denying Yoo's motion to dismiss the lawsuit. White was appointed by George W. Bush the year Yoo was writing his memos.
White's decision is the first of its kind: Until now, although other lawsuits have been brought, no government official has faced personal liability for his role in the torture or deaths of detainees. But it probably won't be the last. These cases are just beginning to address the fraught questions of justice that have emerged in the aftermath of the Bush era-what atrocities were committed in the name of national security, who bears responsibility, and how should they be punished? Although neither the Obama administration nor most members of Congress want to deal with these questions directly, they're even more opposed to letting judges (and juries) take a crack at them. Padilla v. Yoo is an example of a surprising development: a conservative judge putting pressure on the Democrats in Washington to create some system of accountability for the Bush administration. It could help spawn more such rulings.
That was the short email to family, both here and abroad. Dan Froomkin is gone. Must have been more White House Watching than Mr. Hiatt could stand. And Dan was not letting go of some topics from the past.
I'm also deputy editor of NiemanWatchdog.org, a Web site devoted to encouraging watchdog and accountability journalism from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
The SCOTUS employee brother-in-law was the one who suggested we make Dan a regular read online. With former Washington Post paper boys in the extended family, we were loyal, even as the price of getting the print edition out here in the Eastern Panhandle kept going up and up. The media market is fractured for West Virginia as we here know.
Michael Gerson. Charles Krauthammer. George Will. Robert Kagan. Robert Samuelson. Jim Hoagland. Richard Cohen. David Broder. Howie Kurtz. Ramesh Ponnuru. Sally Quinn. Kathleen Parker. And now they employ William Kristol. I guess Washington was just not big enough to keep a critic of Obama from the left.Katie, bar the door.
Retired colonel and former chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell in 2006:
Documents and memos that have already made their way into the public domain make it clear that the Office of the Vice President bears responsibility for creating an environment conducive to the acts of torture and murder committed by U.S. forces in the war on terror.
There is, in my view, insufficient evidence to walk into an American courtroom and win a legal case (though an international courtroom for war crimes might feel differently). But there is enough evidence for a soldier of long service -- someone like me with 31 years in the Army -- to know that what started with John Yoo, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, William Haynes at the Pentagon, and several others, all under the watchful and willing eye of the Vice President, went down through the Secretary of Defense to the commanders in the field, and created two separate pressures that resulted in the violation of longstanding practice and law.
These two pressures were, on the one hand, the understandable pressure to produce intelligence as rapidly as possible, and on the other hand, the creation of an environment best described as "the gloves coming off" -- or better, the gloves ARE off.
At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.
Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.
Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.
Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.
snip
Maj Gen Taguba's internal inquiry into the abuse at Abu Ghraib, included sworn statements by 13 detainees, which, he said in the report, he found "credible based on the clarity of their statements and supporting evidence provided by other witnesses."
Among the graphic statements, which were later released under US freedom of information laws, is that of Kasim Mehaddi Hilas in which he says: "I saw [name of a translator] ******* a kid, his age would be about 15 to 18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn't covered and I saw [name] who was wearing the military uniform, putting his **** in the little kid's ***.... and the female soldier was taking pictures."
Do the ends justify the means as at least one person here claimed? The reason Dick Cheney is every where trying to justify torture is he's trying to pre-empt the criminal investigations here and internationally.
As this analysis shows, Cheney's defensive efforts are crumbling.
From day 1, the Bush cabal has relied upon the defense of legal advice of counsel to avoid prosecution. Step 1 was to obtain a legal opinion from OLC to "authorize" torture because its ops carry the force of law within the executive branch. Bush officials then maintained that torture was "authorized". Step 2 was enacting a law that advice of legal counsel was a defense to torture charges. But, what happens if the OLC memos do not constitute legal advice of counsel because Bush Team and the torture lawyers rigged the OLC process to render fraudulent opinions? Then the main defense from torture prosecutions is bye bye.
snip
[ Cheney ] may be a little panicked because Obama plans to release the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report this summer, maybe even next month. If the cumulative findings of misconduct in this report show that the torture lawyers acted as advocates rather than advisers, then the memos did not constitute appropriate OLC legal advice.
Thus, the Lizzie/Dickie campaign may be their preemptive strike to make their case before the OPR report is publicly released. The stakes are high for Dickie because if the legal advice defense is eliminated, then he will have the impossible burden of proving that the prisoners were not tortured unless he has a Plan B defense.
We have already seen hints of Plan B: Bush was the Unilateral Decider and I just followed orders in my subordinate role! Cheney and Rice have already shifted gears, pointing fingers at Bush and the "administration", respectively, as having authorized the torture rather than relying on the torture memos as "authority" provided by advice of counsel.
The release of the photos, blocked by President Barack Obama, will occur eventually. The best way to protect the troops is to show that those behind the policies that encouraged such illegal actions are accountable to our nation's laws.
It is impossible to defend the indefensible, however.
I have opposed the creation of such a Commission because I believe that our existing democratic institutions are strong enough to deliver accountability. The Congress can review abuses of our values, and there are ongoing inquiries by the Congress into matters like enhanced interrogation techniques. The Department of Justice and our courts can work through and punish any violations of our laws.
The gears of Justice often grind slow, but they do grind on. Once the report is out that I suspect will show the OLC attorneys twisted the law and acted outside of their professional responsibilities, then any pretense of a defense is gone from Cheney - and George W. Bush - for their share of responsibility for these horrendous crimes.
Cheney and Bush were quick to throw the soldiers like West Virginia's own Lynndie England out to serve as the scape goats for their part of the crimes.
But when Cheney said the "gloves are coming off" he forgot that also meant he left his fingerprints at the crime scene.
In an appearance on Radio Free Europe Sunday, the man hailed by conservatives as the preeminent military figure of his generation left little room for doubt about where he stands on some of Obama's most contentious policies.
"I think, on balance, that those moves help [us]," said the chief of U.S. Central Command. "In fact, I have long been on record as having testified and also in helping write doctrine for interrogation techniques that are completely in line with the Geneva Convention. And as a division commander in Iraq in the early days, we put out guidance very early on to make sure that our soldiers, in fact, knew that we needed to stay within those guidelines.
"With respect to Guantanamo," Petraeus added, "I think that the closure in a responsible manner, obviously one that is certainly being worked out now by the Department of Justice -- I talked to the Attorney General the other day [and] they have a very intensive effort ongoing to determine, indeed, what to do with the detainees who are left, how to deal with them in a legal way, and if continued incarceration is necessary -- again, how to take that forward. But doing that in a responsible manner, I think, sends an important message to the world, as does the commitment of the United States to observe the Geneva Convention when it comes to the treatment of detainees."
But torture and waterboarding - but I repeat myself - are important to national security. Dick Cheney and his spawn were on my TV telling me so.
I thought it was only the far left bloggers opposed to torture and for closing Gitmo. Do you know what this must mean? Petraeus must be one of those far left bloggers!
Update
Andrew Sullivan highlights this section of Dick Cheney's torture speech last week and compares it to the Senate Armed Services Committee report:
Perhaps the most remarkable passage in (Cheney's) speech to AEI last week was the following:
In public discussion of these matters, there has been a strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib prison with the top secret program of enhanced interrogations. At Abu Ghraib, a few sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulations, and simple decency. For the harm they did, to Iraqi prisoners and to America's cause, they deserved and received Army justice. And it takes a deeply unfair cast of mind to equate the disgraces of Abu Ghraib with the lawful, skillful, and entirely honorable work of CIA personnel trained to deal with a few malevolent men.
There are two options in trying to understand this passage: a) It reveals a profound and disturbing level of denial about his own record; or b) It is one of the Biggest of Big Lies ever told by a vice-president of the United States. Perhaps the easiest way to show this is to cite the final and definitive "Conclusion 19" of the Senate Armed Services Committee Report:
The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely.
There is no factual dispute as to the real origin of what Cheney calls the "disgraces" of Abu Ghraib: Dick Cheney via Don Rumsfeld.
Cheney wants to scape goat the low ranking soldiers like Lynddie England to take the fall for his actions.
Feature article on torture and accountability from Executive Director, Frank Crabtree
Profile of ACLU of WV member and otherwise tireless advocate Julie Archer of Citizen Action Group
We take a great deal of pride in producing our newsletters, and it comes out in the final product. Feel free to print as many copies as you like.
Have a great Memorial Day weekend, and please take a moment to honor those individuals who have fallen in the name of defending our Country and Constitution.
As a Justice Department attorney,* I would like to comment on Obama's speech with regard to the issue of prosecutions over torture and the establishment of a Truth Commission, issues that have been the subject of much debate and discussion here. I know that there has been a fair amount of consternation based on the premise that the President has all but ruled out investigations or examinations into possible violations of the law concerning torture. Jesselyn Radack has presented one skeptical view, and others have agreed. Such skepticism is fueled, I think, by the President's few statements about this issue.
This was an opportunity for the President to address the issue of torture prosecutions and truth commissions more clearly. Indeed, I suspect that the expressed dissatisfaction from some progressives and discussions on sites like DailyKos raised the issue to a level where it had to be addressed today.
snip
But here's the point: although Obama's speech was powerful enough that he could have declared that there will be no further investigation or examination of the legality or illegality of the use of torture, and even though he did declare set positions on several key issues, I did not hear such foreclosure with regard to possible prosecutions.
Key passage:
I know that these debates lead directly to a call for a fuller accounting, perhaps through an Independent Commission.
I have opposed the creation of such a Commission because I believe that our existing democratic institutions are strong enough to deliver accountability. The Congress can review abuses of our values, and there are ongoing inquiries by the Congress into matters like enhanced interrogation techniques. The Department of Justice and our courts can work through and punish any violations of our laws.
That passage packs a significant amount of punch. A significant amount.
That statement, that language quoted above, was reviewed and approved by more than Obama and Rahm and Jon Favreau. You can rest assured that the language of that speech was vetted within the White House and by the Attorney General, by State and DOD, CIA and NSA. Presidents do not give a speech of such importance without serious review of what will be said. Okay, maybe the last one didn't. But I assure you this one does.
Emphasis and italics in the original.
Closing Gitmo and letting the Justice Department do its job is what those of us in the Jump Up and Down Hysterically Club have wanted.
Update
For a man who is supposed to be on vacation, Andrew Sullivan is on fire:
A simple note having now read the former vice-president's despicable and disgraceful speech. It confirms the very worst of him, and reveals just how callow, just how arrogant, and just how reckless and unrepentant this man is and has long been. There was not a whisper of regret or reflection; there was a series of lies and distortions, a reckless attack on a graceful successor, inheriting a world of intractable problems, and a reminder that while serious men and women will indeed move on, Cheney never will. He remains a threat to this country's constitution as he remains a stain on its honor and moral standing. I never believed I would hear a vice-president of the United States not simply defend torture but insist on pride in it, insist on its honor. But that is what he said, with that sly grin insisting that fear always beats reason, that violence always beats dialogue, and that torture is always an American value.
Update 2
Jesselyn Radack, a former attorney with DoJ and one of the skeptics mentioned above, agrees with the assessment about what Obama's speech today means to those who want investigations of torture.
I agree with his analysis of President Obama's speech (and appreciate him crediting me and other Kossacks with forcing the issue of torture prosecutions).
Radack, who was fired after being a whistleblower, does disagree with Lars about the DoJ's Office of Professional Responsibility, but that's a separate issue.
Following up on my earlier post, here's a reminder of what Leon Panetta said:
Let me be clear: It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values. As the Agency indicated previously in response to Congressional inquiries, our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing "the enhanced techniques that had been employed." Ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened.
1. The contemporaneous records (that is, the CIA briefer's own notes on the briefing) show that the briefers "briefed truthfully ... describing 'the enhanced techniques that had been employed'" on Zubaydah.
2. It is up to Congress to evaluate this evidence and "reach its own conclusions about what happened."
Now, first of all, Panetta is not saying (nor has anyone said, not even Porter Goss) that the briefers briefed Congress that these techniques had been used. I know this sounds weasely, but until someone says, in plain language, that the CIA told Congress those techniques had already been used on Abu Zubaydah, we should assume that's not what the notes reflect, because if they did, you can be sure both the briefing list and the public statements would say so. But no one is saying that. And against that background, Panetta is reiterating the statement that Congress should determine what happened--a reiteration of the admission that CIA's own briefing records are not the totality of the story.
The CIA briefing list records that the following people participated in the briefing: Nancy Pelosi, her staffer Michael Sheehy, Porter Goss, his staffer Tim Sample, briefers from the CounterTerrorism Center (CTC), and the Office of Congressional Affairs (OCA; elsewhere, we've been told four people, total, from CIA attended).
While CIA doesn't say it, the chances are very good that the head of CTC was among the four CIA officials who attended that briefing--he probably led the briefing. On September 4, 2002, the head of CTC was Jose Rodriguez.
Jose Rodriguez, you'll recall, is one of the key suspects in the torture tape destruction.
digby has an interesting view of Panetta's parsing:
I will take the simple route here and just point out that if Panetta's statement "ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened" isn't weaselly, CYA language then nothing is. He doesn't know what happened in those briefings and he knows very well that those notes aren't reliable. After all, the most anal retentive politician in Senate history has already disputed these briefing memos by going back to his own infamously detailed notes.
My rule of thumb on this stuff is when politicians use awkward tenses and odd phrases instead of a simple declarative answer in response to a simple question, they are playing lawyer games.
Keep in mind too the CIA briefer's notes came at the same time that then Vice President Dick Cheney was putting undue pressure on the CIA. From the Washington Post on June 4, 2003:
Vice President Cheney and his most senior aide made multiple trips to the CIA over the past year to question analysts studying Iraq's weapons programs and alleged links to al Qaeda, creating an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments fit with the Bush administration's policy objectives, according to senior intelligence officials.
With Cheney taking the lead in the administration last August in advocating military action against Iraq by claiming it had weapons of mass destruction, the visits by the vice president and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, "sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here," one senior agency official said yesterday.
Considering Cheney was pressuring the CIA to fix the intelligence around the agenda and the Bush administration ordered the torture of detainees to get false confessions to justify the Iraq invasion, there is little reason to trust the CIA's account of intelligence briefings to members of Congress.
As Sen. Jay Rockefeller said on April 16 in regards to the Obama administration releasing of the four torture memos:
"The Senate Intelligence Committee has been pressing for years for greater openness regarding interrogation, particularly as it became clear over time that the Congress had not been fully informed. In the wake of 9-11 we all wanted to leave no stone unturned in pursuing terrorists and preventing future attacks, but some serious mistakes were made with lasting implications and very senior Bush Administration officials made a concerted effort to distort and hide the truth, at the time and in the years that followed.
Defending torture insistently means one's moral compass is pointing straight down to hell. I continue to believe it's essential to confront the dangerous and evil lie that torture "works" and that we're all going to die if we respect human rights, follow the law, or dare to investigate - let alone prosecute - the people responsible for these horribly shameful and criminal policies. However, as many have noted, that we are "debating" torture's usefulness at all means we've failed somehow as a society.
snip
Torture is the very antithesis of freedom. The key dynamics are not truth, security or patriotism. They are power, dehumanization and sadism. As Rear Admiral John Hutson observed, "torture is the method of choice of the lazy, the stupid and the pseudo-tough."
Entire post, with numerous links, is well worth reading.
Like a good boss, Leon Panetta is wanting to cover for his people, but - via TalkingPointsMemo - Greg Sargent notes that Leon Panetta's statement is less than an unequivocal denial:
But Panetta is also amplifying and repeating the agency's refusal to promise that the recently-released documents offer a reliable version of how and when members of Congress were briefed on the use of torture techniques.
Panetta sent a note today to CIA employees, which you can read right here. Here's the key part:
Let me be clear: It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values. As the Agency indicated previously in response to Congressional inquiries, our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing "the enhanced techniques that had been employed." Ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened.
That's pushback against Pelosi, to be sure. But that's not all it is. The agency also restated the agency's earlier unwillingness to vouch for the overall reliability of what the docs say about what happened. He's saying, in effect, that only Congress can determine the truth about what members of Congress were told.
That's not a call for a Congressional probe. But it does seem like a suggestion that such a probe is the only way the truth can be established. If nothing else, the CIA is redoubling its efforts to distance itself from the political charges some are making - on the basis of CIA info - about who knew what and when about torture.
But as Sargent notes in his earlier link, the Panetta's reiterated that the accuracy of the CIA's records has to be verified. Considering how many visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA to successfully fix the intelligence that he wanted in the runup to the Iraq war, the accuracy of the CIA's contemperaneous records is questionable, particularly when Sen. Jay Rockefeller and Sen. Bob Graham have called the accuracy into question as well as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
This is yet another reason for a full investigation into the torture and coverup by the Bush administration. If Democrats also were complicit, so be it. I've stated before this is an issue that rises above mere politics. But at this point, the efforts by the rightwingers are nothing more than an attempt to play politics, hoping that attempts to link Democrats to the scandal will create a poison pill. So far, and this is highly indicative that the rightwinger's effort is failing, Pelosi, Rockefeller and Graham welcome that investigation.
Attorney General Eric Holder should appoint a special prosecutor immediately. I recommend due to his experience and expertise it should be U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald who has shown in the past he pursues a case regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats were involved.
Update: Think Progress has an excellent piece on how the rightwingers have miscalculated, thinking they could shut down investigations by trying to drag Pelosi and other Democrats into the debate:
For weeks, conservatives have been launching hypocritical and disingenuous attacks on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) regarding her level of knowledge of the Bush administration's torture program.
Fox News conservatives are revealing one of the underlying motives for these attacks - to diminish calls for a truth commission on torture.
snip
Pelosi has been clear that recent questions about her level of knowledge about Bush's torture program only add more - not less - need for an investigation to take place. "Until a truth commission comes into being, I encourage the appropriate committees of the House to conduct vigorous oversight of these issues," Pelosi said.
If conservatives were being honest about their criticisms, they'd be taking up Pelosi's desire for a full investigation, an inquiry that would not only examine what members of Congress knew but also the prominent role Cheney played in authorizing illegal acts.
The rightwingers are terrified about what will come out which is why they are desperate to stop it by dragging in Democrats. Pelosi and Rockefeller are for full investigations and if they did something wrong, they'd have the most to lose by such inquiries. Yet they're for them. Why other Democrats are fearful of the truth coming out is a mystery.
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