Asleep at the switch

Bushists and neocons might have given their best efforts and still not prevented 9/11. But they didn't even try, despite many warnings:

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous.

Unconscionable.

Waziri leaks

In all the hue and cry over Wikileaks, I haven't seen much to get too bent out of shape over. Most of it was, duh, obvious. A lot of it had already been reported.

While governments need to be able to keep their conversations confidential, even some that are merely embarrassingly frank, the main damage has been the need to blush a little.

Still, imagine this: You're a foreign service officer talking with your opposite number in another country's diplomatic corps. You know how certain you would be that he will keep your confidences, small and large! C'mon, no one is that naive.

Instead of laughing off the embarrassment, governments have pursued Julian Assange, arrested him, and locked him up on unrelated charges that look trumped up (h/t Digby). These governments have certainly responded with much greater focus than they would have had he been, say, Brett Favre or Kobe Bryant.

The biggest take-away from the whole affair so far has been how thoroughly inculcated the media is in the culture of secrecy that they are supposed to expose to light. Sure, they've reported on the leaks, but I'm starting to wonder how thoroughly.

When I heard that the Pentagon was directing its service people and contractors that they were not allowed to read classified documents even after they were published on the Internet, I thought they were typically, bureaucratically overreaching. Just like the world's most command-oriented bureaucracy to pretend that the genie right there in the room was still safely in the bottle. Even a genie not nearly as revealing as Barbara Eden.

Then, today, the New York Times carried the story of the U.S. CIA station chief in Islamabad had fled Pakistan after his name got out into the open in local media. What is his name? The Times pointedly wouldn't say:

The legal complaint that named the station chief, who was working undercover and whose name is classified, was filed on Monday over attacks that killed at least two Pakistanis. The complaint sought police help in keeping the station chief in the country until a lawsuit could be filed.
The agent’s name had already been revealed in a news conference last month by Mirza Shahzad Akbar, the lawyer who filed the complaint this week, and the name had been reported in local media.

The rest of the world can know, but Americans can't! The big media is in on the suppression of information.

Of course, Google is still up, so it's easy to find out. No, not the character actor by the same name.

I'm showing fear here, too, by not simply typing the name. I don't want to be charged with espionage for "revealing" something that's widely known the world just because there's a Top Secret stamp marking a piece of paper locked in a vault that I've never seen. Think about what that fear means to an open society, without which democracy is a sham.

The name I'm omitting is probably itself a cover identity. Really, would the CIA send someone to Pakistan for covert action under his own name? Of course not. Yet the Times and I won't simply type the name, and it's itself a fiction. Am I still allowed to name Winston Smith?

Funny, I don't recall the American big media being so solicitous of the classification status of non-official cover identity when the exposed agent was Valerie Plame.

The question: How long before the U.S., like China, decides it needs to block sites that expose its own citizens to this slightly uncomfortable sort of truth?

Update (1/7/2011): Related comment on Salon.

Third degree

Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.

Light summer reading

Hey, is that a thriller?

Click image for full Rob Rogers/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cartoon.

See figure 1

Click image to see figure 1 rendered in a Pat Bagley/Salt Lake Tribune cartoon.

CIA/media follies

This Time report is what is technically known as wild-ass guessing. The program Darth Cheney reportedly protected was either assassination or it was domestic surveillance. Or it was unworkable and cancelled in 2008, I mean 2004, no biggie, move along, nothing to see.

Anyone can guess: How about enough resolution in satellite imagery to do facial recognition? (Why look straight down? Enemy of the State showed the problems with that.)

C'mon, give it a try! It's fun and easy, and there's no accountability for being wrong.

Enough bullshit! What we need from the media is not to print every goddamned unverified superficial rumor they hear. What we need is research, reporting, sourcing, and truth.

A bit of memory wouldn't hurt either. Could this "new" story relate to the unpursued Bob Woodward rhetorical bombshell of September 2008? Yes, at the time, I leaned to technology, too, since Woodward likened it to the Manhattan Project.

In any case, we still don't know.

No excuse

Click image for full Dan Wasserman/Boston Globe cartoon.

Source Vizzini

Inconceivable!

A former senior intelligence official said Thursday it is "inconceivable" that the CIA briefers would not have talked about interrogation methods that had already been used.

"I can't prove it," the official said, but added, "The whole point [of the briefings] was to make sure they [lawmakers] understood what we were doing." The official asked to comment anonymously so he could speak more candidly.

Some anonymous sources seem credible despite their anonymity. They are clearly in vulnerable positions, so their anonymity seems necessary.

This is not one of those sources. This "former senior intelligence official" seems like a Bushist spinner of bullshit.

The reporter, also anonymous, helpfully dittoed the former official's fig leaf that he needed to be anonymous to speak candidly. This is also bullshit. There's no candor in what he says, only self-interested speculation.

The use of these quotes is journalistic malpractice, in other words standard operating procedure for the insider Beltway press.

Doubletalk

In a story about their destruction of evidence of torture, the CIA claims:

CIA officials rejected the assertion that the agency had sought to hide evidence from investigators and said they had cooperated fully with the Justice Department investigation.

"If anyone thinks it's agency policy to impede the enforcement of American law, they simply don't know the facts," spokesman George Little said.

They won't lie either.

Crawling out of the slime

The Senate is finally pretending to do its oversight duty by taking a look into torture by the CIA, done with the urging and fig-leaf bullshit of the pro-torture Bushists. This should have started in 2007, but the Democrats didn't have strong enough, uh, principles to penetrate the stonewalling that the Bushists no doubt would have done.

Can't keep it all in our silly little heads

Incredibly, CNN retypes the Pentagon press release about five prisoners at Guantánamo who say they want to confess. Our media can't seem to find its brain today, or they would notice that the hard cases among the Guantánamo population - not to mention those isolated into mental illness - are looking forward to martyrdom, where they expect virgins instead of the panties of menstrual female interrogators.

Oh, hell, underwear, no matter its state of laundry, is not torture. But some of these guys may be ready to martyr themselves because they have truly been tortured or at least threatened with torture:

The White House has consistently denied that the United States practices torture, but CIA officials have admitted to using "waterboarding." The technique, which is said to simulate drowning, has been considered a war crime in the past.

Again, CNN can't come right out with the obvious and incontrovertible truth: Waterboarding has always been torture when someone else did it to us. Here's the truth:

The White House has persistently bullshitted the media and the people about the Bushist Republicans' consciously pro-torture policy, but CIA officials have admitted use of "waterboarding", which is well-known to be a war crime.

Does all of the media have to go broke before they understand that their job is to penetrate the bullshit, not simply to repeat whatever comes out of the flatulent anuses of official sources?

Stockholm Syndrome

The North Vietnamese tortured John McCain. Now he acquiesces to the continuation of Duhbya's CIA torture policy.

In 2000, Duhbya and the Bushists engaged in some of the vilest political character assassination against McCain. Now McCain makes common cause with one of the men who viciously abused him.

It appears that there is no depth to which John McCain will not stoop in pursuit of his overweening ambition. It's sad, really.

Becomes what he forswore

The Republicans lie even when they're lying. No one should any longer expect them to be fair to their opponents, but if their first tales are not juicy enough, they pump them up without limitation by silly things like facts.

John McCain had this done to him by the Bushists in 2000 in South Carolina. Now, he is trying vainly to do the same to Obama.

He has flushed his conscience down the toilet in the name of ambition. He has become a Bushist in every way.

Of course, compared to acquiescing to continued torture by the CIA, he had already much more visibly lost his bearings. It would be sad, a tragic flaw, except that it's so infuriating.

Despite all this, McCain will not be Thane of Cawdor. He will have to live with the damned spot for the rest of his days. He could have been a man and still lost. He chose to dishonor himself.

Choose your poison

For all those bleating sheep who pulled the wool over their own eyes and refused to believe the obvious fact that torture was (and, thanks to the likes of John McCain, still is) the policy of the Bushists, there are two choices:

1. Admit that fact, or
2. Deny it until you've been waterboarded, and then admit it.

I recommend option 1.

For this, George Tenet and Donald Rumsfeld received the Medal of Freedom. An all-expenses-paid trip to the Hague in a barely heated cargo hold would have been more appropriate.

Venngeance

Slate paints a few of the scofflaw scandals of the Bushists:


Getting them all onto one page might send us looking for Hume's missing shade of blue.

Click thumbnail image for interactive graphic.

(h/t LGM)

Igzecative privalige

Nothing new in the Bushist claim that executive privilege protects Duhbya and Darth from ever having to explain anything, so I changed the spelling to Duhb's illiterate version.

Transcribing the bullshit

Is there any reason for any journalist to believe the CIA or any other agency of the Bush-Cheney administration?

The C.I.A. emptied its secret prisons in the fall of 2006

Lying is part of the CIA mission, and the New York Times thinks it knows that the CIA isn't lying about clearing all of its black detention sites.

Especially when this is well known:

Ms. Gutierrez said that she could not reveal what Mr. Khan had said about his treatment because the government declared prisoners’ statements to be classified.

Lie there and take it

The Bushists lie. Ho hum, that's not news.

When they hide evidence and then destroy it, they claim the problem is that the court didn't ask specifically enough for tapes the court didn't know existed.

But even that is a lie. One court was still asking for evidence specific to the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah as the decision to destroy the videotapes was being made. The government was still submitting summaries that conveniently neglected to mention that the tapes ever existed.

The Bushists protect lies with a bodyguard of lies. There's no truth at the middle of this onion.

CIA cooperation

CIA: You didn't ask for the tapes.

Commission: We asked for everything. You didn't tell us the tapes existed.

CIA: We were very cooperative with your requests. We preserved the tapes in case you guessed they existed.

Commission: John McLaughlin said you gave us everything responsive. You don't think a videotape is a document?

CIA: A videotape might be documentation, but only something on paper is a document. Or maybe email. At least for now.

Commission: So no one in the agency ever wrote a memo on the existence of the tapes?

CIA: See, that's one of those times when when the tapeness of a memo turns it from a document into something tapey, and since you didn't ask specifically for documentation related to videotapes, there's no way you could expect us to hand it over. But we were very cooperative. You couldn't have written your narrative without our information.

Commission: Which is why we needed all of it.

CIA: We gave you everything you asked for.

Commission: Is there anything else you have that we supposedly didn't ask for?

CIA: We always cooperate with commissions while they are active.

Lessons of Watergate

Can anyone still believe that the White House was not involved in destruction of recordings of torture? No one who isn't in the middle of a do-it-yourself colonscopy.

Basically, this story describes Bandini, Lambert, & Locke negotiating with the CIA. Addington, Gonzales, and Miers were all involved. You know which direction the orders were travelling, even if they might have been in the form of nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Update: Really from the New York Times, which finally lays out the prisoners' legal rationale for including these non-Guantánamo interrogation tapes in the order about Gitmo prisoners: al Zubaydah may have implicated them during torture.