Bodenner: Tracing Propaganda
NYT reporter Elizabeth Bumiller is backpedaling on her A1 story yesterday that blared "1 in 7 Detainees Rejoined Jihad," which was subsequently changed in the Web version to reflect a vaguer possibility: "Later Terror Link Cited for 1 in 7 Freed Detainees." TPM's Elliott asks:
Did Bumiller and her editors consider the possibility that a six-year stay Gitmo could actually create terrorists? That an innocent Afghan man embittered after being scooped up by the United States and unjustly imprisoned for years might actually become a terrorist?
Ackermann tracked the story yesterday, highlighting a Human Rights Watch report saying at least one of the detainees had been tortured into admitting recividism. CAP's Ken Gude rips into Bumiller's shoddy journalism:
Reaching back into an old bag of tricks, Bush administration holdovers in the Pentagon have used the paper of record to spread false propaganda at a critical juncture in a key national security debate, this time about released Guantanamo detainees supposedly returning to terrorism. This article has just one purpose: to mislead readers about the true nature of the threat posed by released Guantanamo detainees. ... What kind of journalism allows a reporter to write a story so clearly slanted in one direction without even a minimal effort to verify the information that forms its basis?
Shayana Kadidal piles on.
Attaturk: Including every mumbled “and” & “the”
Well, here's something everyone could have anticipated, but as usual, other than bloggers it seems only Warren Strobel and John Landay of McClatchy reported:
Former Vice President Dick Cheney's defense Thursday of the Bush administration's policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements.
Well, this column is apparently going to be as long as a Leon Uris novel, but here is a selection that seems remarkably DFH bloggeresque:
_ Cheney said that the Bush administration "moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks."
The former vice president didn't point out that Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenant, Ayman al Zawahri, remain at large nearly eight years after 9-11 and that the Bush administration began diverting U.S. forces, intelligence assets, time and money to planning an invasion of Iraq before it finished the war in Afghanistan against al Qaida and the Taliban...
Oh, you damn dirty hippies -- being all right and not serious like Dick Cheney. Because David Broder and his ilk know serious, and only serious can be appreciated. Especially in the form of needlessly dead soldiers and civilians in a third-world country (no pictures though).
- Sully: McCain On Cheney
Jeffrey Goldberg gets a scoop (as he often does):
"When you have a majority of Americans, seventy-something percent, saying we shouldn't torture, then I'm not sure it helps for the Vice President to go out and continue to espouse that position," he said. "But look, he's free to talk. He's a former Vice President of the United States. I just don't see where it helps."
And then he got acerbic: Cheney, he says, "believes that waterboarding doesn't fall under the Geneva Conventions and that it's not a form of torture. But you know, it goes back to the Spanish Inquisition." - Joe Sudbay (DC) adds:
As predicted, the traditional media was agog over the Cheney speech yesterday. Just felt like many of them fell right back into their circa 2002 reporting. Dick Cheney said we must be afraid. Dick Cheney said terrorists were going to get us.
If Dick Cheney put as much time into thinking about protecting the nation at this time eight years ago, he and his hapless president might have prevented the worst terrorist attack in our history. But, many in the media forget that Bush and Cheney failed to protect us. And, a lot of them forget Bush and Cheney lied to them about so many issues. Lied right to their faces.
But, Cheney is back. He's the GOP's future. And, while most Americans are long past the politics of fear, the D.C. press and pundits fall for it every time.
- DemFromCT Daily Kos:
The Opinionator (NY Times) collects reaction to the Obama and Cheney speeches. You wonder, sometimes, about how unintelligent and unreal the right's reactions are, speaking as if the GOP's isn't the unpopular minority position. Bill Kristol is a great example:
Obama’s is the speech of a young senator who was once a part-time law professor–platitudinous and preachy, vague and pseudo-thoughtful in an abstract kind of way. . . . Cheney’s is the speech of a grownup, of a chief executive, of a statesman.
You know, the kind of grown-up statesman that GOP insiders want to just go away.
- Atrios has a Deep Thought: I love GOP Daddy Dick Cheney.
-
Do I wish he had been more gracious with and honest about the Bush administration officials whose policies he is benefiting from? Yes. But the bottom line is that Obama has taken a series of moderate and time-tested policy compromises. He has preserved and reformed them intelligently. He has fit them into a persuasive framework. By doing that, he has not made us less safe. He has made us more secure.
- NYTs Editorial: The Real Path to Security
We listened to President Obama’s speech on terrorism and detention policy with relief and optimism.
For seven years, President George W. Bush tried to frighten the American public — and successfully cowed Congress — with bullying and disinformation. On Thursday, President Obama told the truth. It was a moment of political courage that will make this country safer.
Mr. Obama was exactly right when he said Americans do not have to choose between security and their democratic values. By denying those values, the Bush team fed the furies of anti-Americanism, strengthened our enemies and made the nation more vulnerable.
Such clarity of thought is unlikely to end the partisan posturing. It certainly didn’t quiet former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was fear-mongering in full force on Thursday. But we hope that lawmakers who voted this week against closing the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — starting with the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid — were listening closely.
We do not agree with every aspect of Mr. Obama’s solutions, especially his opposition to the court-ordered release of photographs of prisoner abuse and the positions he has taken on state secrets. But the course he outlined was generally based on due process and democratic governance. ... ... - The Onion: Guantánamo Detainee Ruled Not Mentally Fit To Testify About Psychological Torture
WASHINGTON—In its first major hearing on the use of abusive interrogation tactics at Guantánamo Bay, a blue-ribbon panel found detainee Omar Khadr mentally unfit to testify about his years of psychological torture. "Because of Mr. Khadr's fragile state due to unknown hours spent under the most brutal, mentally straining conditions, he cannot be trusted to speak competently on his own behalf," said Rep. Kit Bond (R-MO), the panel's chairman. "It is unfortunate that someone with such intimate knowledge of the horrors of waterboarding, stress positions, and induced hypothermia is so emotionally unstable. He bursts into tears at even the mention of mock torture." Bond added that Khadr's confession of planning 9/11, the London train bombings, and the Iranian hostage crisis would be kept on the record.
- Appel: Not Gonna Happen
Reihan Salam, a few days ago, saw method in Cheney's madness:
Could it be that Cheney, who has sound-enough political instincts to realize that the GOP is in dangerously weak shape, is finally gunning for the top job? If not, would he consider "guiding" another young pup from the office of the vice president? Right now this sounds like a surreal nightmare, one that would lead the five boroughs of New York and large swaths of Southern California to saw themselves off from the American mainland and try their luck as minor outlying islands. But stranger things have happened.Name one.
- Think Progress: Romney: Obama’s speech was ‘more tortured’ than Bush’s interrogation tactics.
Blogging at The Corner today, Mitt Romney panned President Obama’s speech on national security, saying that Vice President Cheney’s “response” to Obama was “direct, well-reasoned, and convincing.” Romney mocked Obama’s speech condemning torture as being worse than Bush’s torture tactics:
He struggles to explain how he is keeping faith with the liberal advocates who promoted his campaign but in doing so, he breaks faith with the interests of the American people. When it comes to protecting the nation, we have a conflicted president. And his address today was more tortured than the enhanced interrogation techniques he decries.
Obama “said that the last thing he thinks about when he goes to sleep at night is keeping America safe. That’s a big difference with Vice President Cheney — when it came to protecting Americans, he never went to sleep,” Romney concluded. This would be news to Cheney. In October 2007, Cheney dozed off during a briefing on the California wildfires and also during his boss’s farewell address in January 2009. Watch it:
C
I liked most of Obama's speech. If it weren't for that one little bit about preventive detention, I'd be as happy as a clam. But there it was:
"But even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States. Examples of that threat include people who've received extensive explosives training at al Qaeda training camps, or commanded Taliban troops in battle, or expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden, or otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans. These are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States.
Let me repeat: I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people. Al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States, and those that we capture -- like other prisoners of war -- must be prevented from attacking us again. Having said that, we must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded. They can't be based simply on what I or the executive branch decide alone. That's why my administration has begun to reshape the standards that apply to ensure that they are in line with the rule of law. We must have clear, defensible, and lawful standards for those who fall into this category. We must have fair procedures so that we don't make mistakes. We must have a thorough process of periodic review, so that any prolonged detention is carefully evaluated and justified.
I know that creating such a system poses unique challenges. And other countries have grappled with this question; now, so must we. But I want to be very clear that our goal is to construct a legitimate legal framework for the remaining Guantanamo detainees that cannot be transferred. Our goal is not to avoid a legitimate legal framework. In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man. If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight. And so, going forward, my administration will work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime so that our efforts are consistent with our values and our Constitution."
Let's start with the good part. If we have to have preventive detention, it ought to be subject to the kind of oversight Obama is talking about. There should be rules. There should be checks and balances. I like that part.
But that's like saying: if we have to have censorship or prohibitions on particular religions, they ought to be subject to judicial oversight. Yay for judicial oversight. Hurrah for explicit legal frameworks. Whoopee. That said:
Preventive detention????????
No. Wrong answer.
If we don't have enough evidence to charge someone with a crime, we don't have enough evidence to hold them. Period.
The power to detain people without filing criminal charges against them is a dictatorial power. It is inherently arbitrary. What is it that they are supposed to have done? If it is not a crime, why on earth not make it one? If it is a crime, and we have evidence that this person committed it, but that evidence was extracted under torture, then perhaps we need to remind ourselves of the fact that torture is unreliable. If we just don't have enough evidence, that's a problem, but it's also a problem with detaining them in the first place.
What puzzles me even more is this, from a New York Times story about this:
"The two participants (...) said Mr. Obama told them he was thinking about "the long game" -- how to establish a legal system that would endure for future presidents."
The long game? If we have a need for preventive detention, which I do not accept, it's a short-term need produced by Messrs. Bush and Cheney. The long game is the preservation of our republic. It is not a game that we can win by forfeiting our freedom.
People seem to be operating under the assumption that there is something we can do that will bring us perfect safety. There is no such thing. We can try our best, and do all the things the previous administration failed to do -- secure Russian loose nukes, harden our critical infrastructure, not invade irrelevant countries, etc. -- but we will never be completely safe. Not even if we give up the freedom that is our most precious inheritance as Americans.
Freedom is not always easy, and it is not always safe. Neither is doing the right thing. Nonetheless, we ought to be willing to try. I wish I saw the slightest reason to believe that we are.
'Prolonged detention' May 21: President Obama introduced some new approaches to detaining prisoners, and one of them seems to be controversial. What does prolonged detention mean? Rachel Maddow is joined by Vincent Warren, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
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Dick on defense May 21: President Obama wasn't the only one with a major speech today. Former Vice President Dick Cheney defend the Bush administration's use of torture in an address on national security. Cheney also defended the Iraq war, but his claims were more vague than in the past. Rachel Maddow talks about Cheney's remarks with The Nation's Chris Hayes.
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