For democracy there was Abu Ghraib

“No Prob - You don't seem to be getting it at all. I want to see Al Qeda defeated. I don't want to see America defeated - its a whole different scale and to be comparing the behavior of the two is nonsensical and a distraction at best.

You sound like my friends son when he was caught with pot in the house. "Dad, there are kids in High School who steal things to buy crack, why are you punishing me for buying pot with money I earned and not doing anything about the real criminals." The answer was that you expect far better from family than from the people you are paying taxes for the police to protect you from.

To be honest, I'm not making such a big deal out of Abu Graib. It's the kind of f--- up thats likely when you are occupying another country and training to crush an embedded opposition. However the combination of things like Abu Graib and chaning policies and double talk on torture have hurt our country and our cause and helped the enemy. It sure as heck helped terrorist recruitment for the enemy.”

“Yah, yah, yah! The difference is, we're the gang with hats that look alike and that came from halfway around the world. Should I put a hard back on it?
last edited: 5/28/07 8:47:50 AM”

“Good Dennis Miller line Crash!”

“LOL...the guy who decides if the fight was fair is the guy who walks away.”

“Remember what the grunts used to say about 'old Blood & Guts' Patton..... "His guts and our blood".

Funny how History repeats. Too bad the Drunken Frat Boy in the White House didn't pay attention in class.”

“LOL...maybe if his predecessor had been more interested in fulfulling his OATH than dropping his trou to rape women we wouldn't have been having this discussion.”

“Maybe more concern for what's current rather than what's back in the 'contract on america days' may be prudent.”

“Yeah, XL, Clinton was in the past and is no longer relevent. Quit bringing it up.”

“Clinton's relevant. But here's a comparison: Clinton was warned about terrorist attacks on the US for the start of the new millenia, he took it seriously and attacks were stopped. Bush got memos and presentations about Bin Laden's determination to attack the US and did diddly.

Clinton had mega flaws as president, but Bush doesn't look good next to him if you do an honest comparison.”

“ped, thought we weren't suppose to talk about Clinton cause that's all in the past.

BTW, since you brought it up, Clinton doesn't look good compared to ANY president with the possible exception of Carter.”

“I can see you people live your lives in four year segments trying to justify the fool your voted for. Don't worry, none of you'll brake that habit soon.”

“LOL....the funny part is that the Republicans you have named were disowned from the party...the liberals we have named are still considered "HEROES" of the liberal democrat party.

And while the fact that Alqaeda and Osama rated DOODLY in the Foriegn Service Briefing from Slick to Bush...makes it open to debate about RESPONSIBILITY for 9/11 lets look at someone who was IN OFFICE for at least one term when we were attacked....

DECEMBER 7, 1941.
last edited: 5/29/07 3:36:55 PM”

“who was in office september 11, 2001?”

“Bush was at an elementary school reading to kids, you cannot blame him.

Clinton weakened the armed forces and never followed up on the leads presented to him on Ossama.

He was also responsible for the deaths of some 3 milion American troops, well according to the website XL posted.”

“actually, he was on his way to the school when the first plane hit

and you actually think a website posted by xtroll will actually be objective?”

“BTW, since you brought it up, Clinton doesn't look good compared to ANY president with the possible exception of Carter.”
NoProb
2:14:54 PM
5/29/07

Except for the facts, he sure looks bad. Peace, prosperity, shrinking government, budget surplus, real welfare reform, responds to terror alert and terror attacks prevented. Sure it goes against your theories, but the results were pretty good. Yes he messed up big time in the Lewinski - gave the Republican lynch mob lots of ammo. He definitely f--d up trying to finesse Somalia.


Sure we could blame him for 9/11. If not for his sleazy BJ's from a White House intern, Gore might have been president in 2001 and he might have listened when people tried to warn him about new attacks from Al Qeda.”

“No Prob - sometime Clinton is relevant. Its just that some folks seem to use Clinton references as a mantra to avoid the perils of thought and confrontation with evidence.”

“Oh, I see. If it's something "good" the he's relevant. But when it's something "bad" it should just be forgotten. Ok, I didn't know the rules. That seems fair. Anything else I should know so I don't get in your way when you busy are re-inventing history?”

“ped has numerous times commented on the negatives of clinton, and kerry, and others you love to hate, no p.”

“The previous Bush did do a lovely job of presenting Clinton with Somalia as a housewarming gift.

You must admit --- Clinton didn't start the civil war that killed (what are we up to now?) approaching a million Iraqis?  Way To Go, George. And Mega Dittoes to all of your supporters who made it all possible.

I'm sorry; is that inflammatory?  

Tough #&%!$.”

“No Prob - its not a question of whether its good or bad for Clinton. XL brought up Clinton and how he dealt with Al-Qeda, I took up the challenge and pointed out that I thought he'd done better than Bush.

As for Somalia, yes Bush I started the involvement - but I think Clinton's team f-ed up the Black Hawk down incident.”

“In legal theory, the one who lit the fuse is ultimately responsible.  But who took the fall for that one... Les Aspin?


This exercise is so pointless.  Bush's policies are so indefensible that his cheerleaders don't even try anymore.  Impeachment now would be akin to euthanasia.  The Clinton references are such mindbendingly pathetic attempts at diversion.  I think the well of talking points ran dry in 2005.

As the saying goes, the only thing holding this administration together is the termites holding hands.”

“

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/05/verschfte_verne.html”

“The thing you are all missing is that in the 42nd administration SLICK and company got rid of "humint" or Human intelligence by making them only associate with "good elements"...LOL I think it is hilarious hypocrisy of the Libbies to demand that when we see the sick demented crap they were doing in their own administraiton. The result was we could not associate with the very people we needed to contact to find this stuff out.

Trust me here....even a blithering idiot will tell you it will take more than 9 months to rebuild the bridges Jamie Gorelick and company destroyed.”

“
The General's Report
by Seymour M. Hersh

The New Yorker
June 17, 2007

How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties.

On the afternoon of May 6, 2004, Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba was summoned to meet, for the first time, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in his Pentagon conference room. Rumsfeld and his senior staff were to testify the next day, in televised hearings before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees, about abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq. The previous week, revelations about Abu Ghraib, including photographs showing prisoners stripped, abused, and sexually humiliated, had appeared on CBS and in The New Yorker. In response, Administration officials had insisted that only a few low-ranking soldiers were involved and that America did not torture prisoners. They emphasized that the Army itself had uncovered the scandal.

If there was a redeeming aspect to the affair, it was in the thoroughness and the passion of the Army's initial investigation. The inquiry had begun in January, and was led by General Taguba, who was stationed in Kuwait at the time. Taguba filed his report in March. In it he found:

Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees ... systemic and illegal abuse.

Taguba was met at the door of the conference room by an old friend, Lieutenant General Bantz J. Craddock, who was Rumsfeld's senior military assistant. Craddock's daughter had been a babysitter for Taguba's two children when the officers served together years earlier at Fort Stewart, Georgia. But that afternoon, Taguba recalled, "Craddock just said, very coldly, 'Wait here.' " In a series of interviews early this year, the first he has given, Taguba told me that he understood when he began the inquiry that it could damage his career; early on, a senior general in Iraq had pointed out to him that the abused detainees were "only Iraqis." Even so, he was not prepared for the greeting he received when he was finally ushered in.

"Here ... comes ... that famous General Taguba - of the Taguba report!" Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice.The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment nearly three years later, said, sadly, "I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting."

In the meeting, the officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. "Could you tell us what happened?" Wolfowitz asked. Someone else asked, "Is it abuse or torture?" At that point, Taguba recalled, "I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, 'That's not abuse. That's torture.' There was quiet."

Rumsfeld was particularly concerned about how the classified report had become public. "General," he asked, "who do you think leaked the report?" Taguba responded that perhaps a senior military leader who knew about the investigation had done so. "It was just my speculation," he recalled. "Rumsfeld didn't say anything." (I did not meet Taguba until mid-2006 and obtained his report elsewhere.) Rumsfeld also complained about not being given the information he needed. "Here I am," Taguba recalled Rumsfeld saying, "just a Secretary of Defense, and we have not seen a copy of your report. I have not seen the photographs, and I have to testify to Congress tomorrow and talk about this." As Rumsfeld spoke, Taguba said, "He's looking at me. It was a statement."

At best, Taguba said, "Rumsfeld was in denial." Taguba had submitted more than a dozen copies of his report through several channels at the Pentagon and to the Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, which ran the war in Iraq. By the time he walked into Rumsfeld's conference room, he had spent weeks briefing senior military leaders on the report, but he received no indication that any of them, with the exception of General Schoomaker, had actually read it. (Schoomaker later sent Taguba a note praising his honesty and leadership.) When Taguba urged one lieutenant general to look at the photographs, he rebuffed him, saying, "I don't want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with that information, once you know what they show?"

(more)

”

“Taguba, watching the hearings, was appalled. He believed that Rumsfeld's testimony was simply not true. "The photographs were available to him - if he wanted to see them," Taguba said. Rumsfeld's lack of knowledge was hard to credit. Taguba later wondered if perhaps Cambone had the photographs and kept them from Rumsfeld because he was reluctant to give his notoriously difficult boss bad news. But Taguba also recalled thinking, "Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap. There's no way he's suffering from C.R.S. - Can't Remember #&%!$. He's trying to acquit himself, and a lot of people are lying to protect themselves." It distressed Taguba that Rumsfeld was accompanied in his Senate and House appearances by senior military officers who concurred with his denials.

"The whole idea that Rumsfeld projects - 'We're here to protect the nation from terrorism' - is an oxymoron," Taguba said. "He and his aides have abused their offices and have no idea of the values and high standards that are expected of them. And they've dragged a lot of officers with them."”

“The Army also protected General Miller. Since 2002, F.B.I. agents at Guantánamo had been telling their superiors that their military counterparts were abusing detainees. The F.B.I. complaints were ignored until after Abu Ghraib. When an investigation was opened, in December, 2004, General Craddock, Rumsfeld's former military aide, was in charge of the Army's Southern Command, with jurisdiction over Guantánamo - he had been promoted a few months after Taguba's visit to Rumsfeld's office. Craddock appointed Air Force Lieutenant General Randall M. Schmidt, a straight-talking fighter pilot, to investigate the charges, which included alleged abuses during Miller's tenure.

"I followed the bread-crumb trail," Schmidt, who retired last year, told me. "I found some things that didn't seem right. For lack of a camera, you could have seen in Guantánamo what was seen at Abu Ghraib."”

“Tilt is talking to himself again. ;-)”

“Nice work, Tilt.”

“LOL...yeah...good work..Allah Akbar right?”

“An aggressive congressional inquiry into Abu Ghraib could have provoked unwanted questions about what the Pentagon was doing, in Iraq and elsewhere, and under what authority. By law, the President must make a formal finding authorizing a C.I.A. covert operation, and inform the senior leadership of the House and the Senate Intelligence Committees. However, the Bush Administration unilaterally determined after 9/11 that intelligence operations conducted by the military - including the Pentagon's covert task forces - for the purposes of "preparing the battlefield" could be authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief, without telling Congress.”

“LOL...It isn't amazing the very people condeming our soldiers for not completing the mission are the ones demanding they do it with one arm tied behind their back.”

“"They always shoot the messenger," Taguba told me. "To be accused of being overzealous and disloyal - that cuts deep into me. I was being ostracized for doing what I was asked to do."



Taguba went on, "There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff" - the explicit images - "was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this." He said that Rumsfeld, his senior aides, and the high-ranking generals and admirals who stood with him as he misrepresented what he knew about Abu Ghraib had failed the nation.



"From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service," Taguba said. "And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable."”

“Tilt , you are really upsetting the 'Silly Libby Twins'.”

“Damn. It's a stain on all of us. Mother#&%!$ers.”

“Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.

Worth the read: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/opinion/14rich2.html?_r=1&ex=1350100800&en=db0293f96432022f&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin”

“
"America’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques have a grotesque provenance: “Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’ It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.”

          [ .... ]

Last week Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq war combat veteran who directs Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, sketched for me the apocalypse to come. Should Baghdad implode, our contractors, not having to answer to the military chain of command, can simply “drop their guns and go home.” Vulnerable American troops could be deserted by those “who deliver their bullets and beans.”


          good grief.

”