Your government's secrecy at risk

[KaskadskyjKozak]

I will take it a step further......9/11 was an inside job. All just to invade Iraq. Why? Money.

 

So, 9/11 was planned by the U.S. government, not by bin laden? Weird! We should just stop looking for him, then. Terrorists are not a threat afterall!

 

Phew. I don't know about you, but that's a huge load off.

 

 

No shit! And the proof of this theory is all those piles of money we got out of this deal!

 

[kevbone]

We should just stop looking for him, then.

 

Rob.....we stopped looking for him a couple of years ago.....I would not be suprised if we ever looked for him.....hence Iraq.

[rob]

So when Bin Laden admitted responsibility for 9/11, was he lying? Or does he work for the U.S. government? Just wondering.

[kevbone]

I never said Bin Laden was responsible. I am only implying that the US government knew about it. Inside job......perfect excuse to go invade an unarmed country and occupy them.

 

I dont have the answer Rob.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

I dont have the answer Rob.

 

You also don't have a single functioning neural synapse.

 

Now go eat a bag of dicks and STFU.

[rob]

If the U.S. government didn't actually plan and execute the 9/11 attacks, then how can you call it an inside job?

[kevbone]

Sorry Rob. I dont have an answer for you. I dont know who planned it and dont know who knew about it. You dont either. Dont believe all that you see and hear.

 

Wag the dog.

[rob]

I dont have an answer for you. I dont know who planned it and dont know who knew about it.

 

That doesn't stop you from thinking it was an inside job, though?

 

sure is smokey in here

[kevbone]

Shhhh.....cant say too much more. They are listening.

[STP]

STP, if you go read any number of the policy letters like this or this at the neocon's website 'Project for the New American Century' (note that's a 'the' and not an 'a' in the title) and check the various signatories, you'll see that is explicitly not the case. 9/11 just gave them the pretext and cover they needed to initiate an attack Iraq they already had in mind. And prior to 9/11 the Bush administration was having numerous internal debates on how the could just attack Iraq. Also, the DoD was actively planning for an invasion of Iraq well before 9/11.

 

Ya, I agree with you to a point. I've read some of that stuff before. I just don't believe the ideology is confined to the Republicans. It follows the power shift. Do you get what I'm saying?

[JayB]

Also, with regard to torture - Rumsfeld and Cheney explicitly shopped for, designed, and built the capability and policy up from, North Korean torture techniques as persisted in our military in the form of SERE training. This was not in any way some innate, lingering capability we used all the time - this was a deliberate and far-ranging policy, methods, and infrastructure play - extrodinary rendition, jet leases, 'interrogation' subcontractors (including Syria and Egypt), gitmo, Abu Ghraib, CIA and DoD policy and protocols, and reasoned treaty abrogations. All part of the plan. The only part they skipped in their planning (what's new) was producing a 'legal' basis for their actions, glibly decrying none was necessary as it all fell under Executive perogative and priviledge.

 

You can tie this behavior directly back to the Nixonian belief that "if the President does it, it isn't illegal" - a belief held far more widely than just by Nixon himself. Post 9/11, Gore, like Obama is now, would have built a vetted legal and Constitutional basis for the use of any extrordinary methods which in turn would need to be authorized on a case-by-case basis by him personally. The entire fabric of any such protocols should have been, and will be, reviewed and vetted by the Congress and SCOTUS and not simply cloaked behind a veil of Executive priviledge.

 

I am pretty sure that the "extraordinary methods" that you are referring to here would be classified as torture if the standards applied to the Bush administration are applied to the Obama administration with the same rigor.

 

So, if we have a formal set of rules vetted in open daylight that state when, exactly, the president can order that a known terrorist can be tortured in order to extract the necessary information - we're still engaging in torture, no? Finding a way to make it legal suddenly makes it moral?

 

The folks who were cringing and gnashing their teeth over a Koran in the toilet are now suddenly cool with torture as long as there's "a vetted legal and Constitutional basis for the use of any extraordinary methods which in turn would need to be authorized on a case-by-case basis by him personally"? Can't recall anyone saying, "Gee - I'd be totally cool with torture as long as there's a legal framework in place and it's personally approved by the president" when Bush was in office.

 

I'm saying all of this as someone who thinks that Obama has made the right rhetorical, political, and legal moves by closing Guantanamo, etc.

[JayB]

STP, if you go read any number of the policy letters like this or this at the neocon's website 'Project for the New American Century' (note that's a 'the' and not an 'a' in the title) and check the various signatories, you'll see that is explicitly not the case. 9/11 just gave them the pretext and cover they needed to initiate an attack Iraq they already had in mind. And prior to 9/11 the Bush administration was having numerous internal debates on how the could just attack Iraq. Also, the DoD was actively planning for an invasion of Iraq well before 9/11.

 

Ya, I agree with you to a point. I've read some of that stuff before. I just don't believe the ideology is confined to the Republicans. It follows the power shift. Do you get what I'm saying?

 

You've done an admirable job of calling people on this one, but don't expect much in the way of public concessions of your points, since doing so would require making - at the very least - a tacit admission of the extent to which their previous statements on these matters where driven by political opportunism masquerading as principled opposition.

 

 

[STP]

While the CIA publicly balks, one wonders if they are that unhappy with the AFM's Appendix M, which codifies the old CIA interrogation doctrine of regression of the prisoner's personality through use of solitary confinement (isolation), sleep deprivation (debility), sensory deprivation, and a harsh form of "Fear Up" (dread)? In any case, Appendix M violates the very international documents Obama claims to uphold. That contradiction cannot hold, and other human rights groups, like Physicians for Human Rights and Center for Constitutional Rights, have publicly called for the elimination of Appendix M prior to acceptance of the AFM as any kind of interrogation template.

 

There's a reference to Appendix M in the Army Field Manual here:

 

More Confusion on Renditions: The Role of Ostensibly Liberal Bloggers

[JayB]

While the CIA publicly balks, one wonders if they are that unhappy with the AFM's Appendix M, which codifies the old CIA interrogation doctrine of regression of the prisoner's personality through use of solitary confinement (isolation), sleep deprivation (debility), sensory deprivation, and a harsh form of "Fear Up" (dread)? In any case, Appendix M violates the very international documents Obama claims to uphold. That contradiction cannot hold, and other human rights groups, like Physicians for Human Rights and Center for Constitutional Rights, have publicly called for the elimination of Appendix M prior to acceptance of the AFM as any kind of interrogation template.

 

There's a reference to Appendix M in the Army Field Manual here:

 

More Confusion on Renditions: The Role of Ostensibly Liberal Bloggers

 

Great link. I'd probably disagree with the guy on many things, but it's refreshing to see someone who hasn't changed his tune simply because he likes the new director better than the old one.

 

I suspect that he will incur no small amount of wrath from his erstwhile fellow-travelers for calling them on this one.

[j_b]

He is far from being the only one not to have changed his tune so it's useless to pretend most everyone did. Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, for example, was asking those very same questions. Anyway, rendition, as in kidnapping people who have committed serious crimes to bring them to justice when extradition isn't possible, merrits serious consideration, but that is completely different than just shipping people to places where human rights don't exists. Despite the long standing history of these terrible practices, there isn't a way yet to tell which way the Obama administration will aply them.

[billcoe]

Wow! Nice to see 3 of the more intellectually honest powerhouses seriously raising the bar on discourse (STP, Joseph and Jayb). I'll read it all, but feel that weighing in right now would be akin to stepping into the ring with 3- 26 year old dudes for a Ultimate fighting championship match with all 3 champions at once: heavyweight division of course.

 

Great to watch, but why step in and get all ripped up! My mama didn't raise no fools...

 

ps, very deep and thoughtful points raised on that link STP. Thanks!

Edited February 7, 2009 by billcoe

[JayB]

He is far from being the only one not to have changed his tune so it's useless to pretend most everyone did. Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, for example, was asking those very same questions. Anyway, rendition, as in kidnapping people who have committed serious crimes to bring them to justice when extradition isn't possible, merrits serious consideration, but that is completely different than just shipping people to places where human rights don't exists. Despite the long standing history of these terrible practices, there isn't a way yet to tell which way the Obama administration will aply them.

 

It still warrants serious consideration (for you) in light of the fact that in the very states that are either unwilling or unable to hand over the guys that the US wants are quite unlikely to have much formal recognition or consideration for their human rights en route to the airplane? We're not likely to have the luxury of knocking on doors with a "thoroughly vetted" warrant in one hand an a badge in the other in the tribal areas, or anywhere else that terrorists tend to congregate these days. That's in the event that it's us that do the knocking, and not some bought-off local drug-lord's thugs who'll "secure" the guy in exchange for cash and/or weaponry, etc.

 

 

 

[Gary_Yngve]

FISA courts can operate 24/7; FISA warrants can be issued in a matter of hours.

 

Furthermore, FISA warrants can be retroactively issued for taps up started up to 72 hours earlier.

[JosephH]

Ya, I agree with you to a point. I've read some of that stuff before. I just don't believe the ideology is confined to the Republicans. It follows the power shift. Do you get what I'm saying?

 

I beg to differ with the idea this is a generic issue and the Bush administration's distinction was only about scope and scale; quite the contrary. While there are certainly 'generic' aspects to numerous [institutional] baseline 'anti-terror' protocols, context is everything. Context, and the tone or tenor it conveys, are what define the boundaries, scope, and scale of the infrastructure and implementation, regardless of the appropriateness of the methods.

 

It's not really a fine line either - but rather the distinction between a deliberate professionalism and effective scope on one hand, and ground forces operating under 'terrorist' capture performance measures, a CIA run amok, 'interrogation' contractors, Abu Ghraib, gitmo, and the corrosion of the the Constitution on the other. And when you get the circularly resonating and self-reinforcing themes of 'evil', democracy, privatization, executive power, nation-building, 'reconstruction', and 'terror' all cranked up in the blender known as the Mideast along with a half trillion in cash you just knew it was going to be a train wreck of magnificent proportions.

 

Where I see 'ideology' coming into play is precisely in that divide - do we define and employ such measures effectively, say in the same manner of a sniper rifle, or do we wield them more like cluster munitions from 40,000 feet with little control over the results or collateral damage. The former would dictate a degree of legal transparency, international cooperation, professionalism, and restraint - the latter delivers a horrorfest which always reveal itself in its excess, incompetence, and blame. Carried to extreme, your conjecture for me is a lot like saying the holocaust was (institutionally) inevitable whether Hitler came to power or not.

 

I think the end-to-end pipeline, protocols, and infrastructure around in-country 'capture' and extrordinary rendition of 'terrorists' had little to do with effective intelligence, domestic security, or military objectives and everything to do with an absurd theatre designed to deliver a demonstrable product and justification for the expansion of Executive power and war. The gitmo military commission show trials were designed to be the media events at the end of that pipeline, and guilt, innocence, and [mil/intel] value had little to do with feeding grist to the mill.

 

P.S. That John Yoo and others are free to write articles rather then inprisoned for treason is a mistake that will come back and bite us on the ass some time in the future.

[STP]

I could be totally wrong.

 

I held similar beliefs as you about the Bush administration and the ‘neoconservative’ influence on his cabinet. But, I’m trying to look at things differently, revising my mental model of what’s going on to achieve the semblance of objectivity or intellectual honesty (inasmuch as that can exist). For instance, there are certain things implied when using words like ‘neoconservative’ and ‘clean break’. So, cultural biases that are difficult to admit consciously can exist among other things that influence your thinking. I reserve the right to change my mind and break from the partisan straitjacket or the constraints of historical forces or whatever else you want to call it.

 

It’s like that 1930’s Mystery Wall example (Climbers’ Board). There are a certain set of facts known. Then there are some other facts that can be deducted such as angle of face determined by shadows. You could make an educated guess on the location but sometimes if the model you have in your mind is incorrect then the final answer is wrong (either inductive reasoning or deductive reasoning erroneously applied). Perhaps a crucial piece was missing or not enough information was known. It might not neccesarily be forcing the information or shoehorning the facts to fit the model. If that happens however, that’s ok because hopefully someone will come along to add another piece and then everything changes.

 

Someone could make a wild guess on a location for the alpine crag with the joint set, the set of features that lends itself to be the most prominent evidence. That person could say, “Hmm, where have I seen something similar.” and vaguely recall some place like Sloan (although the rock is probably all wrong or it doesn't actually have joint sets) where there’s some unusual jointing or partings. Short of having a photograph it’s difficult to go by memory alone. Also, as someone mentioned if the negatives were reversed then the orientation of the joints and the background silhouette would be misleading. The best guess, I suppose, remains the Alpine Lakes area but that shouldn’t preclude further input because sometimes the unlikeliest ideas yield a radical departure from the norm that opens the way for resolution. Fear of criticism shouldn't be the sole criterion for rejection.

 

My argument (and we won’t know short of having a parallel universe) is things wouldn’t have been vastly different under a Democratic administration in the aftermath of 911 and with the trajectory of terrorism and our responses to it that occurred prior to 911. This is not to say things are predetermined or inevitable but given the pattern of the past, predictions of the future can be based on what we’ve already seen as well as explanations of the present. My disagreement is that I don’t believe the Bush administration was a singular exception. The anomaly could be said to be 911 rather than the ‘predetermined’ policy position of the Bush administration.

 

As far as the Shoah, given the history of Europe or rather the history of the Jews it’s not very difficult to see that event occurring in the absence of a particular man if the cultural structure exists for the event to be likely and a confluence of events occurs (as opposed to the ‘great’ man theory as the paradigm of history ).

 

Is all this twisted or what?

 

[mattp]

You may be right that a Democratic president would have done a lot of the same things, STP, but I haven’t heard anyone suggest that Gore would have invaded Iraq without U.N. support or that he would have been anywhere near such a loud-mouthed cowboy and, when it comes down to it, brazen criminal. And, also, without the parallel universe it is hard to know what might have happened but we’ve all read about how the Bushies ignored and poo pooed the Clinton teams warnings about terrorism in the nine months leading up to 911.

 

True, 911 was completely unlike anything that had ever happened before and Jack Goldsmith, in his book about the Bush anti-terrorism program, points out that Presidents Lincoln and Roosevelt similarly exercised expanded war and presidential powers that were not necessarily Constitutional in times of crisis. He also pointed out that more recently we might be said to have been on the path toward Iraq and Gitmo and Abu Ghraib when Bill Clinton ordered the Tomahawk missile attack on Khadafi and had the Office of Legal Counsel determine, in 1998, that we were in an armed conflict and not just a law enforcement effort against Al Queda. He points out, too, that under Clinton we detained Haitian boat people at Guantanimo for many of the same reasons we sent the captives from Afghanistan and elsewhere there under Bush: that they feared these captives’ use of the American legal system if they were detained on American soil and also, in the case of the new war on terror, it was thought that homeland military bases would be softer targets for terrorists wanting to score a coup by blowing up an American facility holding their brothers than would Guantanimo. excerpt from book

 

Goldsmith makes some compelling arguments that the Bush administration practices were not as much of an historical aberration as they are often presented but, still, it is hard to imagine that Gore and his cabinet would have gone to anywhere near the same lengths to proclaim Europe irrelevant, or to publicly proclaim that the terrorists should “bring it on,” or that we were “taking the gloves off,” you think? As with the argument over Obama’s rendition policy, above, tone and tenor can be quite significant. When you had an administration wioth high ranking people who had previously announced that they were against the U.S. being bound by International law, is it any surprise that they actually operated in such a manner?

 

[Fairweather]

Compare the post of an open mind...

I could be totally wrong.

I held similar beliefs as you about the Bush administration and the ‘neoconservative’ influence on his cabinet. But, I’m trying to look at things differently, revising my mental model of what’s going on to achieve the semblance of objectivity or intellectual honesty (inasmuch as that can exist). For instance, there are certain things implied when using words like ‘neoconservative’ and ‘clean break’. So, cultural biases that are difficult to admit consciously can exist among other things that influence your thinking. I reserve the right to change my mind and break from the partisan straitjacket or the constraints of historical forces or whatever else you want to call it.

 

...with that of one that is closed:

You may be right that a Democratic president would have done a lot of the same things, STP, but I haven’t heard anyone suggest that Gore would have invaded Iraq without U.N. support or that he would have been anywhere near such a loud-mouthed cowboy and, when it comes down to it, brazen criminal.

[j_b]

It still warrants serious consideration (for you) in light of the fact that in the very states that are either unwilling or unable to hand over the guys that the US wants are quite unlikely to have much formal recognition or consideration for their human rights en route to the airplane?

 

When extradition of a major criminal is impossible, rendition should probably be considered.

 

We're not likely to have the luxury of knocking on doors with a "thoroughly vetted" warrant in one hand an a badge in the other in the tribal areas, or anywhere else that terrorists tend to congregate these days. That's in the event that it's us that do the knocking, and not some bought-off local drug-lord's thugs who'll "secure" the guy in exchange for cash and/or weaponry, etc.

 

In other words, giving more power to another bad guy because he'll do our bidding? You people will never learn. If nabbing the bad guy is likely to create significant blowback, it isn't worth it, at least not to joe average and the nation.

[JosephH]

I might agree with your attempts to homogenize responses across party lines if an overwhelming body of evidence and facts weren't publicly available in fine detail that the neocons / Bush administration worked backwards from a set of desired outcomes they viewed as pre-ordained if the U.S. were to restore it's pre-eminence. The neocon ( Cheney / Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz) agenda pre-existed well before 9/11. Their specific responses to 9/11 were all entirely aligned and consistent with that agenda.

 

Again, the entire prisoner pipeline from points of origination, through intermediate prisons, and on to gitmo - along with the intel protocols, legal cover, and military commissions - were at every turn designed to be offshore, out-of-sight, and out-of-mind of the American public until final pronouncements of assigned guilt were made on short TV announcements.

 

What would have been fundamentally different under any democratic Presidency is the entire rubric will not have been constructed, deployed, and cloaked behind Executive power, the enhancement of which was itself was a principle objective of the same team. The Constitution wouldn't have been trampled and subjugated to a political agenda. And none of this is supposition or guessing, but simply read from the trail of their own proud and detailed documentation at every undeniable step of the way.

[mattp]

Fairweather:

Why would you suggest maintaining an "open mind" about the Bush Administration at THIS point? They are no longer in power and we don't need to fall in line or risk aiding the terrorists any more and, as Joseph points out: we have more than sufficient facts to bring judgment on at least some aspects of their conduct.

 

As one who frequently trumpets their interest in history, what do you think of any possible parallels between Bush and Lincoln or Roosevelt? Or, to focus on more recent history, was Bill Clinton taking steps that ultimately led to Gitmo and Abu Ghraib?