Israeli genocide hits its Watergate point: What does the president know and when did he know it?

What else can you call it, per my currently pinned Tweet about this Washington Post story from last Monday? The nutgraf is right at the top:

On Oct. 27, three weeks into Israel’s punishing counterattack in Gaza, top Biden officials privately told a small group assembled at the White House what they would not say in public: Israel was regularly bombing buildings without solid intelligence that they were legitimate military targets.

Followed by this:

The previously unreported meeting shows that discrepancies were emerging far earlier than publicly known between the Biden team’s internal doubts about Israel’s conduct and its ironclad external support.

So, I think we're at the point of that Watergate question:

"What did the president know and when did he know it?"

That not enough for you? There's this from Twitter last Friday:

Per Ken, it's clear that Biden's "pier to Gaza" is
A. Like Sarah Palin's bridge to nowhere
B. Purely symbolic
C. Purely shambolic https://t.co/3UevEYH7jy

— TheRealSocraticGadfly 🥝☢️🌻🌲 (@real_gadfly) March 23, 2024

Per others who responded to the Ken Klippenstein Tweet  that I quote-tweeted, I have zero doubt that people fairly high up in the Biden White House knew from the start, from the moment Biden mentioned building this pier, that actually offloading stuff would need a lot more work than that. We're going to have a Pier Massacre about a month after the Flour Massacre with this level of brilliance.

That not enough? Let's wonder how much Genocide Joe already knows — and already knew before the issue became public — about Israel's reported cold-blooded executions at al Shifa hospital. Or torture inside Israeli prisons?

==

It trickles down to executive department spox, like Ms. Singh for the DoD. Biden himself is complicit in these lies.

Move over, #BernieSanders, as #Hillary gets 2nd challenge from left

Lincoln Chafee

It admittedly sounds weird to talk about a former Republican running to the left of Hillary Clinton, but, if one looks at Lincoln Chafee's presidential campaign announcement, he's doing exactly that. (And please participate in the poll at right about actual and rumored 2016 Democratic presidential candidates.)

First, yes, it's something he throws out there all the time, but he WAS the only GOP senator voting against the Iraq War. Clinton, as a senator herself then, of course voted for it, and has been totally down with the War on Terra since, as senator, presidential candidate and Secretary of State.

Second, along with Sanders, he wants Edward Snowden to come home. He's less clear than Sanders on whether that should be without any criminal consequences, but the "allowed" certainly indicates he's closer to Sanders than to Clinton. Dan Froomkin, writing at Glenn Greenwald's outpost, seems to agree.

Third, he wants to end drone strikes, primarily in the Muslim world, of course.

Fourth, he at least wants to do something to get big money out of politics by banning political donors from becoming US ambassadors.

Fifth, he explicitly used the word torture for what the Bush Administration did, and the Obama Administration did nothing about, and says that we must stop doing.

These are all positions to the left of Hillary Clinton, per her documented political stances.

"We have to have a way to wage peace," as he said in his announcement, alone illustrates that. That's Dennis Kucinich land!

Does he have any more chance than Sanders? I don't know.

Will this split the left-of-Clinton Democratic vote? Maybe. Maybe it will get more of it to turn out in primaries.

Will he get as much media dissing as Sanders? Possibly.

Per my header, is it true? I say yes, overall.

Yes, Chafee once supported, and maybe still supports, privatizing Social Security. That said, Clinton has opposed hiking the portion of income subject to FICA, claiming it would be a "middle class" tax hike, when it would actually affect 6 percent of Americans or less. This, in turn, plays to her middle class pandering.

Yes, Chafee voted for the Patriot Act. So did Clinton. Yes, he supports free trade. So does Clinton.

The point is not that Chafee is THAT liberal.

The point is that Clinton is not even THAT liberal.

I would in no way vote for a Democratic nominee named Lincoln Chafee over a Green candidate. But, if Bernie Sanders were out of the race, I'd vote for Lincoln Chafee over Hillary Clinton.

More on Chafee here.

We tortured people, not "folks" — a foreign yin to domestic yang

And, for nothing valuable on intelligence, because just about anybody will say anything to captors to end torture.

Anthony Romero, ACLU
Ex Dir/Wikipedia photo

But, the head of the nation's "premier" organization on "civil liberties" (sorry, scare quotes is the only way I can write) thinks we should pardon the torturers. See below for details on a new low from the ACLU.

The ACLU, the same folks who said last month that Citizens United is good, now think we should pardon the torturers.

And torturers they are.

And, if not torturers, orderers of torture, which, by law, means they were torturers too.

Period.

And, that's not all from an executive summary of the Senate report on the CIA's torture.

We killed one person (that we know of) from hypothermia. Waterboarding, aka simulated drowning, almost did the real thing to at least one person.

For all, that, though, most of the details, such as abu-Zubaydah's death and Gul Rahman's near drowning, have been known for years.

They were known to the general public and to President Obama before he made his pseudo-jocular "we tortured some folks" comment.



And, yet, the Dick Cheneys of the world continue to lie about what this achieved, even as the George Bushes of the world talk about "a few bad apples" and the Barack Obamas of the world refuse to prosecute either one.

Arguably, and connected with it due to salvage sale of surplus hardware, this is the flip side of domestic police violence.

While we're not all bad apples, either in foreign intelligence gathering or domestic policing, we're more than "a few."

And, here, as in a lot of places, power corrupts.

==

Back to the ACLU and Romero's very-pun-intented tortured reasoning.

Folks, if you want to donate to a civil liberties charity, there's one clear choice.

And, it's NOT the American Civil Liberties Union. It's the Center for Constitutional Rights.

A month after the group, in a press release, said Citizens United was good, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero has said we ought to pardon all the torturers for the torture they ordered to be committed.

This is the same Romero who, in conjunction with then-board president Nadine Strossen, engaged in a purge of "dissident" board members several years ago. I've got more on the purge, with links to extended pieces by Wendy Kaminer, on this blog. (Click the "ACLU" tag.)

Do NOT support the ACLU Nationwide. Period.

And, for a lawyer, Romero's reasoning to justify the pardons is incredibly stupid:

I have come to think that President Obama should issue pardons, after all — because it may be the only way to establish, once and for all, that torture is illegal.

So, we should pardon people we believe to have committed manslaughter or robbery, both of which, like torture, are on the books as defined crimes, because somebody else won’t prosecute?

More stupidity follows:

What is the difference between this — essentially granting tacit pardons for torture — and formally pardoning those who authorized torture? In both cases, those who tortured avoid accountability. 

 But with the tacit pardons, the president leaves open the very real possibility that officials will resurrect the torture policies in the future.

Really? And, they wouldn’t do the same with actual instead of tacit pardons?

A liar, a thug and an idiot, all three.

Besides, per Ben Emmerson of the United Nations, torture as a crime against humanity falls under international law, not just US law.

===

More UGH:

The two psychologists behind reversing the military's SERE training made $80 million for their pains. Let's also not forget that the American Psychological Association has never formally renounced or denounced psychologists participating in torture sessions. (The American Psychiatric Association, on the other hand, has been against it from the start.

That said, this too is nothing new; basic information about this, like most of the rest of the stuff in the Senate's executive summary, came out in 2009. Read this NYT piece.

And, as far as Folks Torturer? He named one of those unapologetic psychologists — the head one at Gitmo — to head up a task force on the health of military families.

==

Finally, let's not forget that I don't recall the racist, ultra-Zionist New Republic, now thankfully half-dead, ever criticizing this.

UN grills US on torture, becomes kangaroo court, Team Obama tap-dances

So much to unpack from one short news story!

First and bottom line?

We tortured people in various spots in Iraq and Afghanistan (not to mention outsourcing even more torture to the likes of Egypt under the euphemism of "extraordinary rendition"). Period, end of story.

And now the UN, which admittedly has a number of members with even looser support for civil rights than America, wants to hear more about this.

Team Obama says this all happened under the previous guy and it's all OK now. We're cool. We're down with it:

The Obama administration officials said that whatever transgressions occurred had been under the previous administration of George W. Bush, but Obama that had quickly tried to turn things around. 

"As President Obama has acknowledged, we crossed the line and we take responsibility for that," McLeod said. "The United States has taken important steps to ensure adherence to its legal obligations." 

Tom Malinowski, an assistant U.S. secretary of state, told the committee the government believes torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment "are forbidden in all places, at all times, with no exceptions." 

In Washington, the White House said the administration also now considers the ban against torture to apply to prisoners held by the U.S. overseas, including Guantanamo Bay. Under the Bush administration, the U.S. interpreted the U.N. Convention Against Torture to apply only within U.S. borders.

Let's unpack that.

Quickly? Until his "we tortured some folks," Dear Leader didn't even use the "T-word."

"We crossed the line." Was that like a chicken-torturer, to get to the other side of the torture road? No, we crossed the line while claiming not to cross the line. That's half the problem right there. Oh, and what would the "important steps" be, given the last graf, with my emphasis.

So, we "now" consider a ban on torture to apply abroad? What is the date of the now? Was it Jan. 20, 2009,or some time later.

At the same time, per my cracking wise about the UN, er, while the death penalty may be wrong, cruel and unusual, it's not torture. And, while Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson may have acted wrongly (or may not have acted wrongly) in fatally shooting Michael Brown, that's not torture, either.

Why do I have the feeling this is going to go beyond a rightful legal grilling into a kangaroo court? Only thing missing, even though he's not on death row with a commuted sentence, are lawyers for Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Or Tom Cruise, speaking on behalf of Scientology and claiming that psychiatry is torture.

#Krugman guzzles #Obamiac Kool-Aid, the full party jug, gets an F for #fail

Paul Krugman is "doowwwn" with his Obama bromance!

Paul Krugman, possibly the best of the New York Times' op-ed columnists (of course, that could be seen as similar to the best bagel in Bismarck, North Dakota, and besides, overall, Gail Collins is better), once an Obama critic for the president having the Teddy Roosevelt-quipped "backbone of a chocolate eclair," now calls him "one of the most consequential, and yes, successful, presidents in American history."

Man, Krugman could't do much better, or rather, worse, if he were paid White House PR flak. And, if he were paid, it would be by the soft bigotry of low expectations count, because that's what ultimately drives twaddle like this.

Here's Krugman's tout list:

His health reform is imperfect but still a huge step forward – and it's working better than anyone expected. Financial reform fell far short of what should have happened, but it's much more effective than you'd think. Economic management has been half-crippled by Republican obstruction, but has nonetheless been much better than in other advanced countries. And environmental policy is starting to look like it could be a major legacy.

I'll go through that in detail in a minute.

First, Krugman dismisses the likes of Cornel West, who call him a fake progressive. Actually, I'd dismiss West by calling him a fake whiner; the reality of Obama's neoliberalism on fiscal issues, sellout on civil liberties issues, and other things, were all visible before the 2008 general election — a general election in which West avidly supported Dear Leader.

On health care, Krugman ignores that Obamacare was:
1. Written by AHIP and Mod Max Baucus;
3. Dilatory to the nth degree in its passage — whatever Dear Leader wanted should have been passed long, long before Scott Brown was elected to the Senate from Massachusetts
3. Based on Dear Leader lying all along about his stance on single-payer.

But, that's all pre-passage stuff.

Let's look at post-passage stuff.
1. More and more information that the most neoliberal parts of Obamacare, like electronic patient records, are nowhere near what they were cracked up to be
2. A horrible rollout (hey, Krugman, per Mike Dukakis, the fish rots at the top, especially on a "signature achievement")
3. Relatively modest proof so far of restraint of medical inflation rates.

Specific to that link on EPRs? From that story:

Frustrated medical professionals across the country told The Dallas Morning News that the expensive systems — the technology used by Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, part of a $200 million investment by its parent company — are often unwieldy and problematic.
 (Experts) have documented cases where patient histories and other information have seemingly vanished from software or ended up in the wrong place.
 And researchers have found that emergency room doctors are more frenzied in keeping up with data demands because of the complicated systems, even hiring personal scribes to input information for them on the fly.

That said, per the story, EPRs were actually fobbed off on the American public by Shrub Bush. But Obama gleefully embraced them.

Krugman touts a drop of about 10 million people without health insurance. Nice, but far short of the 25-30 million mentioned not too many years ago.

Krugman then claims single-payer wasn't politically feasible. I'd argue it was before Scott Brown was elected, at least. But, because it was never in the playbook of a man who, during the 2008 primaries, didn't "get" the need for the individual mandate, or else was lying on that issue too, what else can you say?

Financial reform? Here's Krugman:

You often hear Dodd- Frank, the financial-reform bill that Obama signed into law in 2010, dismissed as toothless and meaningless. It isn't. It may not prevent the next financial crisis, but there's a good chance that it will at least make future crises less severe and easier to deal with.

Well, if that ain't praising with faint damns, what is? I'll skip past the rest of this section, because it's that bad. It's ugly. It's doubly bad in that Krugman doesn't even mention Tim Geithner's hiring by name. It's triply bad because Krugman brings out the "soft bigotry of low expectations" card by comparing US recovery from the Great Recession to that of the European Union.

(Of course, Obama's whole presidency, when discussed by Kool-Aid drinkers, whether regular ones or Johnny-come-latelys, benefits from the "soft bigotry of low expectations" compared to Shrub.)

Krugman then dismisses with a light shrug Obama's approach to war crimes, etc., not even mentioning Dear Leaders "we tortured some folks" phrase.

And, the violations of civil liberties that got EXPANDED by Dear Leader?

Krugman mentions them not at all.

Hell, David Frum could have written something just like this from the other side of the aisle about Shrub.

Seriously, while Obama may not be in the bottom 10 of US presidents so far, he's closer to that than to the top 10.

 And,  two other asides.

First, I guess Krugman is OK with surrendering his civil liberties.

Second, we have two-plus years of encomia like this? Oy.

Sen. Betty Crocker — wrong on torture, wrong on American history

Dianne Feinstein, aka Sen. Betty Crocker thinks torture is an "error" to be admitted. That's why any huff she has with the CIA will eventually be solved only to help Congress and not We the People:

Senate Intelligence Committee chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., maintained that the eventual release of the summary and findings will show “that this nation admits its errors, as painful as they may be, and seeks to learn from them.”

She called the findings shocking, adding: “The report exposes brutality that stands in stark contrast to our values as a nation. It chronicles a stain on our history that must never again be allowed to happen. This is not what Americans do.”

The report “certainly depicts the program as much, much worse than generally thought,” said Alberto Mora, a former Navy general counsel and an early critic of the Bush administration program. “Oh my gosh, it’s a devastating critique.”

The finding that 26 detainees were held without legal authorization and the confirmation that the CIA in some cases went beyond the techniques approved by the Justice Department might fuel legal challenges.

Uhh, first, as the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates would tell you, it's what white Americans did to black Americans for some 200 years, under guise of some legality, until Emancipation, then continued to do a century after that.

And, we did it to other white people elsewhere, too. Perhaps not as much as other countries, but we shot surrendered prisoners of war, in WWII, in Germany and Italy.

And, later than that, we committed a laundry list of atrocities in Vietnam.

And various things to American Indians — though, with one partial exception, the smallpoxed blankets is a myth, and the Indians, even if on the defensive, had no problems inflicting torture themselves.

And, I'm just hitting the high points of the low points.

Second, I doubt the legal challenges. Hamdam and Hamdi, the Supreme Court gave a bare nod to rights of detainees. But, I'm sure a Bush v. Gore type majority will flatly cut off any such suits against the US government or its agents.

No, not every Euro-American in US history is rotten to the core. But, American history has been about more than bad apples. It's been about bad appleseed, too.

And, until the likes of American exceptionalists, including most politicians of both major parties, admit that, we'll still be proving Santayana true, though not Marx.

We'll continue to repeat our unremembered history. Unfortunately, it will be always as tragedy in matters like this and never as farce.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/04/03/4037714/mcclatchy-senate-panel-finds-cia.html#storylink=cpy

'Days of Fire'? Peter Baker's book is barely kindling

Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House by Peter Baker

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Why do I say what I do? Veteran New York Times reporter Peter Baker has too much "mainstreamitis," too much "have-a-beer-itis," in this over-length tome.

Per the first, this book reads exactly like it was written by who it was: not "Peter Baker," but a decade-plus White House correspondent for a major mainstream paper. Take torture, for example. In the index, it links to pages that don't actually use the word, but, euphemisms or softenings.

Per the second? Baker seems to have that stereotypical "guy I'd have a beer with," as it was called in 2000 and again in 2004, man-crush on W.

As a result, other than looking at some details of how Bush wasn't totally Cheney's puppet, and even more details about how, after office, every Bush Administration official, including the Head Cheese and Darth Cheney, who has written a book, or been interviewed for a partisan one, has told at least one lie about one major interaction with other Bushies, there's not much here. On length, it could have been cut 150 pages without much loss.

I was on the 2/3 star border, but, this book is getting too much unworthy praise, so I went down rather than up.



View all my reviews

Hail to the new Torturer in Chief Obama?

Hmm. Seems like Preznit Look Forward, Not Backward, may have yet more of Bush's War on Terra continuity on his hands.

U.S. troops surrendering captured Afghans to sites where it's known people are tortured?

"There is compelling evidence that at least some U.S. forces or personnel continue to transfer individuals to NDS Kandahar despite not only a widely acknowledged risk of torture but also evidence that detainees transferred to NDS Kandahar by U.S. forces have been subjected to torture," according to the report.

Don't tell me this isn't known higher up the food chain. Exactly how high, on civilian as well as military sides, is the question.

And, let's see how Preznit Look Forward spins this one, with his constitutional law skills. Let's also see how he spins it on the foreign policy side with Our Man in Kabul, Hamid (Don't Say I'm Off My Meds) Karzai.

Ask me again why I'm voting Green again.

Bin Laden death and torture

Update, May 3: Unfortunately, any "debate" over Osama bin Laden's death and the value of torture has been clusterfucked by reporting by the AP and other MSM that give the appearance Khalid Sheikh Mohammed revealed the name of Osama bin Laden's courier under torture.

Rather, as Andrew Sullivan and Marcy Wheeler report, that's totally false.

Whether the reportorial problem lies more with the AP et al, or with confusing/bad early info from Team Obama, I'm not sure. But, we have this "meme" now out there which is ultimately irrelevant. — End update

So, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was a lead, if not the only one, to the lead that led to the Osama bin Laden assault that lead to his death. (And, per the NYT, which just says "Guantanamo detainees," there may have been several leads.)

The McClatchy story is right — this will reignite the debate over torture. (That said, when did McClatchy go "soft" and stop using that word?)

First, KSM could have given out inaccurate blather here just like he did with other things.

Second, at the time he named this courier, that person may not have been so close to bin Laden as he became in later years.

Third, the "right" result doesn't make a wrong action right anyway.

The larger civil liberties fallout of the hunt for bin Laden? Here is a good laundry list.

Gitmo to go on trial

Spanish judge Balthasar Garzon may have been suspended from investigating allegations that the U.S. has tortured people at Guantanamo, but another magistrate there will hear a similar claim by a Moroccan.

Center for Constitutional Rights has more.

Too bad we can't send the Three Stooges, aka George W. Shrub Bush, Rummy Rumsfeld and Darth Cheney, over to Spain to stand in the docket as Obama continues to look forward.

Guess Spain didn't get that memo from Preznit Executive Order Kumbaya.

Who kidnapped Andrew Napolitano's brain?

Faux News' legal expert says Bush and Cheney should be indicted for torture.

Torture-loving, refuted

And thoroughly. Jane Mayer takes torture-loving BushCo speechwriter Mark Thiessen to the woodshed for a book that probably could have been written in crayon.

Dick Cheney: I am a war criminal

On ABC's This Week yesterday, Uncle Fester confessed to being a big supporter of waterboarding.

As Andrew Sullivan notes, it's not only a war crime, but one with no statute of limitations. And, either the death penalty or life in prison as a sentence.

Of course, Obama has the balls of a two-week-old mouse, so nothing will happen here.

That said, Glenn Greenwald notes that Cheney is performing a bitch-slap of Obama, to put it bluntly.

But, the precedent of Pinochet in mind, or that of Henry Kissinger, if I were Dick Cheney, I wouldn't travel abroad. That said, if I knew he'd get arrested elsewhere, I'd pack his bags for him.

The NYT gives Obama a 'war on terror' smackdown

This is a simple yet strong editorial about Binyam Mohammad, Mahar Arar and the Obama Administration's utter hypocrisy on civil liberties and torture.

Waterboarding your OWN KID?

Today's sick news leads to my observation, as a sort of rift on Lord Acton's thoughts on absolute power's corruptions, that barbarism, even in the alleged defense of noble ideas, can corrupt pretty absolutely, too.

Update: Over at Salon, Joe Conason agrees with my take. And even goes beyond it, to look at the domestic roots of torture in the first place.

Torture and murder at Gitmo

Let's not pretend we're not doing it, because we are. Period. End of story. (Except for Obama's broken promise to close the place.)

Andrew Sullivan hits the highlights of Horton's story. Glenn Greenwald gives it some context, including how widespread this was. (And maybe still is? Bagram, anybody?)

CIA: Guilty in Italy

An Italian court has convicted 23 CIA agents and others over an illegal rendition kidnapping. The CIA response? Straight from the pages of Uncle Fester, Dick Cheney. From one of those convicted:

(Former Milan CIA station chief Robert) Lady has since retired and whose whereabouts are unknown. In the interview, he said of Abu Omar’s abduction, “Of course it was an illegal operation. But that’s our job. We’re at war against terrorism.”

I repeat, to people who make this facile claim, read, “A Man for All Seasons.” When you eliminate the rule of law for others, what protects you?

Stop the cover-up, Mr. President

The New York Times tells President Obama to come clean on “enhanced interrogation,” and not just what the Bush Administration did, but what it may be doing, or trying to do, too.

More on why torture doesn't work

The stress causes memory loss, specifically shown in waterboarding.

NO PROOF torture got KSM to ‘fess up’ to truths

Conservatives are already spinning this “new” story about Khalid Sheik Muhammed coughing up all sorts of information under waterboarding torture. But, it ain’t necessarily so.

Here’s the contradicting details.

John L. Helgerson, the former CIA inspector general who investigated the agency's detention and interrogation program, said his work did not put him in "a position to reach definitive conclusions about the effectiveness of particular interrogation methods."

"Certain of the techniques seemed to have little effect, whereas waterboarding and sleep deprivation were the two most powerful techniques and elicited a lot of information," he said in an interview. "But we didn't have the time or resources to do a careful, systematic analysis of the use of particular techniques with particular individuals and independently confirm the quality of the information that came out."

Beyond that, we already know KSM claimed oversight responsibility for particular al-Qaeda actions that he, in fact, did NOT run.

And, in fact, I think this is why top WaPost reporter Walter Pincus only has an end-of-story “tagline” rather than a byline. I think somebody higher up was pushing an angle on this and he demurred at more detailed involvement.
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