Tag: ek Politics

Democrats Bow Down to Wall Street

Bill Moyers & John R. MacArthur, president and publisher of Harper’s Magazine, Moyers & Company

December 12, 2014

You say if he wins the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he’ll be giving away big chunks of our remaining manufacturing base to Japan and Vietnam and other Pacific Rim countries. Why does he want to do that?

Because he’s the fundraiser in chief. And again, this goes back to Bill Clinton. Because Obama’s really just imitating Bill Clinton. Clinton made an alliance with the Daley machine in Chicago, which Obama, he’s inherited that alliance with the two Daley brothers. The people who were thriving are the people in power. Rahm Emanuel is now mayor of Chicago. Bill Daley and Rahm Emanuel were the chief lobbyists for passing NAFTA under Clinton. They’re the ones who rounded up the votes. They’re the ones who made the deals with the recalcitrant Democrats and Republicans who didn’t want to vote for it. These people are in the saddle.

Full Transcript

The good news is that even Politico is beginning to realize that Alberta Tar Sands are not economically sound and will cost more to extract than they are worth.

Also 2 interviews from Democracy Now at COP 20 in Lima.

Former VP Al Gore Urges Obama to Reject Keystone XL as Kerry, Top U.S. Negotiator Stay Mum

Pipe Dreams? Labor Researchers Say Keystone XL Project May Kill More Jobs Than It Creates

Will cheap oil kill Keystone?

By Elana Schor, Politico

12/15/14 5:35 AM EST

The same collapse in oil prices that is pumping dollars into motorists’ wallets also risks undermining the case for building the 1,179-mile pipeline in two crucial ways: It’s squeezing the western Canadian oil industry that has looked to Keystone as its most promising route to the Gulf Coast. And anti-pipeline activists hope that falling prices will make it politically safer for Obama to reject the project, despite the new Republican Congress’ pledges to put Keystone at the top of its 2015 energy agenda.

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U.S. oil prices have plunged by nearly half since late June, tumbling to around $58 a barrel on Friday, thanks to the refusal of OPEC to cut production amid a glut of global supplies. Gasoline prices have fallen to a five-year low at the same time, reaching a national average of $2.60 a gallon Friday morning.

The oil price is crucial to the Keystone debate because the latest State Department environmental study on the project says prices in the $65-to-$75 range are a potential danger zone for oil production in western Canada – the point where transportation costs driven higher by failing to build the pipeline could “have a substantial impact on” the industry’s growth.

Cheaper oil also makes it easier to blame Keystone for the greenhouse gases that the Canadian oil fields send into the atmosphere. The State Department study said Keystone would be blameless for all that carbon because Canada is likely to keep pumping more oil even without the pipeline, sending the crude to the U.S. by truck or train if necessary. But the rail and truck options are more expensive – so if cheap oil makes them no longer cost-effective, greens argue, the pipeline would be the thing that keeps the pollution coming.

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“It is now impossible to credibly argue that Keystone XL won’t enable significant expansion of the tar sands and associated climate emissions,” Natural Resources Defense Council international program attorney Anthony Swift said by email. “Plummeting global oil prices have highlighted the fact that tar sands only work in a world of expensive crude – and without cheap pipeline infrastructure, many carbon-intensive tar sands projects simply will not be built.”

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Canada’s heavy-fuel producers are facing a cash crunch as cheap crude chokes profits for some of the industry’s most expensive new projects, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared last week that trying to regulate oil emissions during the current price crash would be “crazy economic policy.”

Everywhere you look in the region, companies are cutting back: The company Canadian Oil Sands sliced its 2015 budget nearly in half compared with this year’s spending. Baytex slashed its dividends to stockholders by more than half, announcing a focus on U.S. oil assets. Cenovus described its 15-percent budget cut for 2015 as “capital restraint in the year ahead in the face of weaker oil prices.”

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(P)olitical jostling over the murky nuances of oil markets often glosses over some of the escape hatches in the State Department’s price scenario: For the death of the pipeline to slow Canadian oil sands growth – and the resulting greenhouse gas emissions – other major export projects for the Canadian fuel would also have to run into problems, the study said.

That “pipeline-constrained” scenario was taking shape even before this fall’s oil crash, thanks to an obstruction campaign by climate activists and indigenous peoples on both sides of the border. Three other massive pipeline projects that would funnel crude from Canada’s oil-rich Alberta province to its coastlines have met fierce resistance from greens.

The eurozone crisis – history is repeating itself … again

Larry Elliott, The Guardian

Sunday 14 December 2014 06.09 EST

Let’s start with Greece, which was where the eurozone crisis began all those years ago. The French statesman Talleyrand once said of the Bourbons that they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The same applies to the bunch of incompetents in Brussels, Berlin and Frankfurt responsible for pushing Greece towards economic and political meltdown.

Greece’s recent economic performance has been pretty good. The economy is growing, unemployment is on the decline and the debt to GDP ratio has come down a bit. Time, you might think, to cut Athens a bit of slack. Not if you are the German government, the European commission or the European Central Bank. No, they are insisting on even more austerity and continued surveillance by the International Monetary Fund.

But the Greeks have had a bellyful of austerity. They have had enough of being pushed around. Predictably, support for the anti-austerity Syriza party is strong and the mood is angry. In an attempt to regain the initiative, the government in Athens brought forward the dates for the votes in parliament to elect a new president. If by the time of the third vote at the end of the December, the centre right’s candidate Stavros Dimas, a former EU commissioner, has not secured 180 votes out of 300 – unlikely as things stand – there will be an election that Syriza could win.

The chances of it doing so will certainly be enhanced unless the Bourbon-in-chief, Jean-Claude Juncker, learns when to keep his mouth shut. By saying he wanted “known faces” rather than “extremist forces” in charge in Greece, the European commission president was the perfect recruiting sergeant for Syriza.

The gamble seems to be that Syriza, assuming that there is an election in which it emerges victorious, will either do a U-turn on austerity voluntarily or be forced to do a U-turn due to hostile market reaction. The collapse of a Syriza government will herald the return of a centre-right government who will do what Juncker and Angela Merkel tell them to do.

But this has not been properly thought through. A crisis in Greece will take months to unfold. Bond yields will rise in every eurozone country seen as vulnerable: Portugal, Spain, Italy and, perhaps, Belgium. Business and consumer confidence will be hit. Concerns about the non-performing loans held by Europe’s shaky banks will be reignited.

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A fresh Greek crisis will have spillover effects. It will lead to a fresh recession and deepen deflation. Weak growth and falling prices are a toxic combination for highly indebted countries, because they raise the real value of debts while cutting national output.

Beppe Grillo of Italy’s Five Star Movement has said. “Eventually will come a time when a politician will hold up a copy of the EMU [European Monetary Union] treaty, declare it null and void, and the debt null and void right along with it. That politician will be elected.”

And the moment that politician will be elected may not be all that far away. The only conceivable way to solve some – if not all – of the design flaws in the euro is for a strategy that involves debt forgiveness, expansionary policies in the countries – such as Germany – that can afford it, a large-scale quantitative easing programme from the European Central Bank and much more aggressive attempts to rid the banks of their toxic assets.

Unfortunately, this is not on the table. Eventually, once the crisis is raging, the ECB may well overcome Germany’s misgivings about buying sovereign bonds and dip its toe in the water with a limited QE programme. It will be too little too late, and in any case contingent on further so-called structural reforms, shorthand for wage cuts and the dilution of labour rights.

Mad as Hellas

Paul Krugman, The New York Times

DEC. 11, 2014

The Greek fiscal crisis erupted five years ago, and its side effects continue to inflict immense damage on Europe and the world. But I’m not talking about the side effects you may have in mind – spillovers from Greece’s Great Depression-level slump, or financial contagion to other debtors. No, the truly disastrous effect of the Greek crisis was the way it distorted economic policy, as supposedly serious people around the world rushed to learn the wrong lessons.

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What happened last time, you may recall, was the exploitation of Greece’s woes to change the economic subject. Suddenly, we were supposed to obsess over budget deficits, even if borrowing costs were at historic lows, and slash government spending, even in the face of mass unemployment. Because if we didn’t, you see, we could turn into Greece any day now. “Greece stands as a warning of what happens to countries that lose their credibility,” intoned David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister, as he announced austerity policies in 2010. “We are on the same path as Greece,” declared Representative Paul Ryan, who was soon to become the chairman of the House Budget Committee, that same year.

In reality, Britain and the United States, which borrow in their own currencies, were and are nothing like Greece. If you thought otherwise in 2010, by now year after year of incredibly low interest rates and low inflation should have convinced you.

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(T)he devastation in Greece is awesome to behold. Some press reports I’ve seen seem to suggest that the country has been a malingerer, balking at the harsh measures its situation demands. In reality, it has made huge adjustments – slashing public employment and compensation, cutting back social programs, raising taxes. If you want a sense of the scale of austerity, it would be as if the United States had introduced spending cuts and tax increases amounting to more than $1 trillion a year. Meanwhile, wages in the private sector have plunged. Yet a quarter of the Greek labor force, and half its young, remain unemployed.

Meanwhile, the debt situation has if anything gotten worse, with the ratio of public debt to G.D.P. at a record high – mainly because of falling G.D.P., not rising debt – and with the emergence of a big private debt problem, thanks to deflation and depression. There are some positives; the economy is growing a bit, finally, largely thanks to a revival of tourism. But, over all, it has been many years of suffering for very little reward.

The remarkable thing, given all that, has been the willingness of the Greek public to take it, to accept the claims of the political establishment that the pain is necessary and will eventually lead to recovery. And the news that has roiled Europe these past few days is that the Greeks may have reached their limit. The details are complex, but basically the current government is trying a fairly desperate political maneuver to put off a general election. And, if it fails, the likely winner in that election is Syriza, a party of the left that has demanded a renegotiation of the austerity program, which could lead to a confrontation with Germany and exit from the euro.

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This is what happens when an elite claims the right to rule based on its supposed expertise, its understanding of what must be done – then demonstrates both that it does not, in fact, know what it is doing, and that it is too ideologically rigid to learn from its mistakes.

Repeat after me- Neoliberal Economics Does.  Not.  Work.

James Elmer Mitchell (aka Grayson Swigert) and John Bruce Jessen (aka Hammond Dunbar) are the names of the chief designers of the United States program of torture run by the CIA.

While not responsible for the decision by the United States government to violate its Constitutional and International Treaty obligations (that came directly from the White House, specifically Richard Bruce Cheney aka “Dick” Cheney), they were admittedly responsible for selecting the tortures to be used, oversaw the implementation of those tortures, and actively tortured themselves.

For this they received $81 Million of a $180 Million contract from the United States Government.

These facts are undisputed.

What you may not know that is that James Mitchell was already employed by the CIA’s Office of Technical Services in 2002, from which he was selected to develop the United States Torture Program.  As masters of CIA triva like Valtin remember, this was the same division of the CIA responsible for the MKULTRA program.

MKULTRA was the code name given to an illegal and clandestine program of experiments on human beings, made by the CIA – the Intelligence Service of the United States of America. Experiments on humans were intended to identify and develop drugs and procedures to be used in interrogations and torture, in order to weaken the individual to force confessions through mind control. Organized through the Scientific Intelligence Division of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the project coordinated with the Special Operations Division of the U.S. Army’s Chemical Corps. The program began in the early 1950s, was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967 and officially halted in 1973. The program engaged in many illegal activities; In particular it used unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens as its test subjects, which led to controversy regarding its legitimacy. MKUltra used numerous methodologies to manipulate people’s mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.

SSCI Report Reveals CIA Torture Program Originated in Same Department as MKULTRA

By: Jeff Kaye, Firedog Lake

Thursday December 11, 2014 12:47 am

The sheer brutality of the program’s use of torture is overwhelming, from the use of forced enemas on detainees – the CIA called it “rectal hydration” and “rectal feeding” – to intense use of solitary confinement, threats to kill prisoners’ families, homicide, and more. Revelations from this report will continue to be reported and absorbed into the world’s understanding of the criminal extent of the U.S. torture program for months or years to come.

But one revelation has gone notably unreported. The man associated with implementing the most brutal part of the interrogation program was drawn out of the same division of the CIA that some decades ago had been responsible for the notorious MKULTRA program. As a CIA history of OTS (.PDF) explains, MKULTRA “involved Agency funding for the testing and use of chemical and biological agents and other means of controlling or modifying human behavior” (p. 19)

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On April 1, 2002, a cable was sent from OTS at the request of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and ALEC Station, which was the group within CIA supposedly hunting down Osama bin Ladin, discussing the possible use of “novel interrogation methods” on Abu Zubaydah.

The new proposed interrogation strategy proposed “several environmental modifications to create an atmosphere that enhances the strategic interrogation process.” The cable continued, “[t]he deliberate manipulation of the environment is intended to cause psychological disorientation, and reduced psychological wherewithal for the interrogation,” as well as “the deliberate establishment of psychological dependence upon the interrogator,” and “an increased sense of learned helplessness.”

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(I)t seems more likely, for reasons that will be further explored below, that the program was initiated by OTS itself, and constituted at least in part an experimental program. What exactly the experiment consisted is not totally clear. But it may have involved the use of wireless or other medical devices to measure biological markers of “uncontrollable stress,” in an effort to establish a scientific calibration of torture and overall behavioral or mental control of prisoners. That such a “mind control” effort would originate or be carried out by the same institution that spent millions of dollars on the MKULTRA program is not difficult to believe.

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OTS has been part of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology (DS&T) since the early 1970s. It was transferred from the Directorate of Plans (clandestine operations, renamed around that time, the Directorate of Operations). OTS had earlier gone under other names itself, including Technical Service Staff and Technical Services Division. OTS and its predecessors had been involved in arranging the technical aspect of covert operations, including audio surveillance, forgery, secret writing, spy paraphenalia, sophisticated electronics, and assassination devices.

Then, there was the massive MKULTRA project, which had other names as well, and was coordinated in various ways with similar military programs. MKULTRA had well over a hundred “subprojects,” and contracted with many of the U.S.’s top universities and medical and psychological researchers. (For listing of subprojects see here and here.)

MKULTRA research is probably best known for its use of hallucinogens, like LSD, which were sometimes used on unsuspecting civilians, and resulted in damaged lives and even deaths. Sometimes derided as subject matter for conspiracy theorists, MKULTRA and assorted programs was all-too-real. While the vast majority of its documentation was destroyed by CIA leaders with the program was exposed in the early 1970s, what we do know it terrifying.

UN Official: Prosecute “Systematic Crimes and Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law”

By Jim White, emptywheel

Published December 10, 2014

Ben Emmerson is the UN’s Special Rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights. His statement released yesterday in response to the SSCI torture report points out the clear responsibilities that the US has under the Convention Against Torture and other international human rights laws to prosecute not only those who carried out torture, but those who designed the torture program and gave orders for its implementation.

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So we know that crimes have been committed. Further, the committee also knows who is responsible for those crimes. What to do about it?

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Emmerson doesn’t say that those responsible for the crimes should be brought to justice. He says outright that they MUST be brought to justice. Emmerson further points out that being authorized at a high level in the government gives no protection. Further, he notes a “conspiracy” to carry out the crimes.

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Obama, Holder and Durham simply cannot grant immunity for these crimes. International law forbids it. More specifically, the Convention Against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, prohibits it. Similarly, the Convention on Enforced Disappearances also comes into play in the crimes committed by the US and also prevents the granting of immunity that Obama has tried to orchestrate.

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Emmerson specifically calls out those who planned and authorized the torture as deserving the “heaviest penalties”.

And they need to be careful. Even though they are facing no punishment in the US for their crimes, these criminals can face prosecution should they travel abroad because torture is a crime subject to universal jurisdiction. Under universal jurisdiction, other countries would normally defer to the US for prosecution of crimes carried out by citizens of the US. However, once it is clear that no such prosecutions will take place, other countries are free to act.

Although I’d like to see them inside cells of much smaller dimensions, it appears that for now those who designed the CIA torture program and ordered its implementation are now imprisoned within the borders of the US because they are at risk of real prosecution while traveling outside the borders.

Overseas, Torture Report Prompts Calls for Prosecution

By RICK GLADSTONE and ROBERT MACKEY, The New York Times

DEC. 9, 2014

“The individuals responsible for the criminal conspiracy revealed in today’s report must be brought to justice, and must face criminal penalties commensurate with the gravity of their crimes,” Mr. Emmerson said in a statement posted on the website of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“The fact that the policies revealed in this report were authorized at a high level within the U.S. government provides no excuse whatsoever,” he said. “Indeed, it reinforces the need for criminal accountability.”

Other international law experts and rights advocates who have long supported an accounting for the C.I.A.’s behavior concurred with that assessment.

Jordan J. Paust, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center, said the report “adds another layer of proof of serial international criminality that was manifestly authorized” during President George W. Bush’s two terms in office.

In a commentary on Jurist.org, Professor Paust said both the Convention Against Torture and the 1949 Geneva Conventions require the United States to prosecute or extradite any person “reasonably accused of having criminal responsibility” for the documented instances of torture.

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Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said in a statement on the organization’s website that the Senate report “should forever put to rest C.I.A. denials that it engaged in torture, which is criminal and can never be justified.”

He added, “Unless this important truth-telling process leads to prosecution of officials, torture will remain a ‘policy option’ for future presidents.”

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“The Gestapo called it ‘Verscharfte Vernehmung,'” wrote one blogger, Ian Geldard. “Exactly the same term ‘enhanced interrogation’ used by the C.I.A.”

Did CIA interrogation methods break the law?

by Amel Ahmed, Al Jazeera

December 9, 2014 11:56AM ET

Despite Obama’s repeated assurances that CIA officials who applied harsh interrogation methods under the Bush administration will not be prosecuted, experts say U.S. law does not necessarily foreclose such claims.  

“We don’t have to go through international courts to obtain justice. Federal courts have U.S. jurisdiction over its own citizens, even if the conduct in question occurred abroad,” said Elizabeth Holtzman, a former congresswoman and a co-author of “Cheating Justice: How Bush and Cheney Attacked the Rule of Law, Plotted to Avoid Prosecution – and What We Can Do about It.”

The same criminal laws used to prosecute individuals on U.S. soil for committing offenses such as murder, assault, and battery can be applied to torture cases that occurred overseas, say experts.

Such criminal offenses are outlined in Title 18 of the U.S. Code, the criminal code for federal crimes.

Defenders of the program and the memos that authorized them argue that U.S. criminal laws do not apply outside of U.S. territory – and the CIA interrogations in question occurred at secret black sites overseas. But the 4th Circuit Court in 2006 rejected the extraterritoriality argument in United States v. Pessaro, the first and only case in which a person connected with the CIA was convicted in connection to the “war on terrorism” that began after the Sept. 11 attacks.

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In his defense, Pessaro relied on some of the authorizations in the torture memos, which included the argument that U.S. nationals can’t be tried for conduct committed on foreign soil. But the court found that two laws expanded the territorial jurisdiction of U.S. federal courts, thus allowing for criminal prosecution of torture acts committed abroad.

The Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000 (MEJA) asserts federal district court jurisdiction over civilians accompanying the armed forces overseas, including military contractors. MEJA’S broad territorial definition was made possible through a 2001 amendment to the Patriot Act.

Title 18 of the Patriot Act expanded the court’s territorial jurisdiction to cover certain U.S. government installations located abroad. It also removed the statute of limitations on prosecution for any terrorist offense that led to the death or serious bodily injury of any person.

“Despite what Obama and Bush have said, the fact is that anyone who created a risk of death or serious bodily injury can face potential prosecution for the rest of their lives,” Holtzman said.

This jurisdictional amendment was tested for the first time in Passaro. The 4th Circuit Court held that the premises of Asadabad, Afghanistan, where the offense occurred, constituted a U.S. military mission, rendering it within the criminal jurisdiction of a district court.

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The 2009 Federal anti-torture statute offers further pathways for legal action in response to harsh interrogation methods used by the CIA, in part because it permits claims for mental suffering inflicted on detainees.

The law was enacted as part of U.S. efforts to comply with the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT). The CAT, ratified by the U.S. in 1994, mandates all parties to the treaty to “take effective legislative, administrative, judicial, or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.”

The statute can be applied to anyone, U.S. citizen or otherwise, who commits an act of torture outside the U.S, said Holtzman. And its definition of torture includes any act committed by a person acting under the color of law that is intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain upon another person within his custody.

This includes threats of imminent death and the intentional or threatened infliction of severe physical pain, according to Holtzman.

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Violation of the anti-torture statute is punishable by up to 20 years in prison, or execution, if the torture resulted in a victim’s death. And as a result of Title 18 of the Patriot Act, there is no statute of limitations for any act that resulted in the death or serious bodily injury of any person.

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The War Crimes Act (WCA) is a federal statute that makes it a felony for any U.S. national to violate the Geneva Convention by engaging in murder, torture, or inhuman treatment, according to Holtzman.

The statute applies to those who carried out, authorized or who were aware of but failed to stop such acts, Holtzman said.

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Under a theory of law known as universal jurisdication, if a country is unwilling or unable to prosecute certain egregious offenses such as torture, war crimes, or genocide, then foreign jurisdictions may step in and prosecute those cases, according to Dixon of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

The principle of universal jurisdiction has been used to pursue war crimes allegations against senior Bush administration officials in a number of European countries, Dixon said.

In one of the more prominent cases invoking universal jurisdiction, Italy in 2009 convicted 26 CIA agents in absentia for their role in the 2003 abduction in Milan of Egyptian cleric Abu Omar. The case marked the first court decision ever to challenge the U.S. practice of “extraordinary rendition,” under which suspects were abducted and sent to countries whose security services were less restrained in their use of techniques amounting to torture.

The Italian court’s ruling means those 26 CIA operatives remain subject to arrest should they travel to Europe, Dixon said.

The principle of universal jurisdiction forms the basis of two international legal frameworks that provide for the prosecution of individuals accused of authorizing or committing acts of torture.

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The Geneva Conventions, enacted shortly after World War II and ratified by nearly every country in the world, are a set of legal protections that safeguard civilians, soldiers, and prisoners during wartime.

The provision known as Common Article 3 prohibits torture, cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of prisoners of war (POWS). In addition, article 17 bars physical or mental torture that is inflicted to secure information or a confession from prisoners. Countries that violate the Geneva Conventions can be prosecuted for war crimes, according to Pitter.

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The U.N. Convention Against Torture is an international human rights treaty meant to prevent torture and cruel, inhuman degrading treatment. The treaty, which the U.S. helped to draft, requires countries to pass legislation to prevent torture within their borders, said Pitter. It also prohibits countries from transporting people to any country where there is reason to believe they will be tortured.

The big lie is that CIA torture provided any information at all, because the truth proves that they were sadists (up to and including Cheney) AND utterly and completely incompetent.

For CIA, Truth about Torture Was an Existential Threat

By Dan Froomkin, The Intercept

12/10/14 at 11:31 AM

For the CIA officials involved in torture, one thing was clear from the very beginning: The only way they would be forgiven for what they did was if they could show it had saved lives.

It was the heart of their rationale. It was vital to public acceptance. It was how they would avoid prosecution.

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And so, when the tragically predictable sequence of events began to unfold – and torture, as it always has, produced false confessions and little to no intelligence of value – admitting that it had failed was not even an option.

Instead, those involved made up stories of success.

They insisted that Abu Zubaydah was a top al Qaeda figure who, only after being waterboarded, provided information that foiled a major attack on the U.S. – even though Zubaydah wasn’t in al Qaeda, the plot was a farce, and the only related information he provided came before he was tortured.

They cast Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s false confessions as deadly threats, then announced they had been thwarted.

They viciously brutalized people, some of them entirely innocent, and described what they were doing as an art and a science.

Senate investigators, who had access to millions of pages of original CIA cables and other source material, used most of the 499 pages in Tuesday’s release documenting example after example of CIA officials doing gruesome things, then telling convenient falsehoods to each other, to their bosses, to the White House, to anyone who questioned them, and to Congress – all to prove to everyone that torture worked.

By mid-2003, the CIA’s constant mantra was that “enhanced interrogation tactics” had “saved lives,” “thwarted plots,” and “captured terrorists.” Saying otherwise was like blasphemy.

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The people who actually knew the facts certainly lied, obliging the requests from their superiors for examples of effective torture.

Maybe some of the people who heard the lies, and passed them on, let themselves believe they were true. For the CIA, that would be even worse, because a susceptibility to lies is a fatal flaw for an agency charged with providing fact-based intelligence to keep the nation safe.

What the Senate’s summary tells us is that the modern CIA is actuated by fantasy and faith. It’s a familiar charge; we saw the same pattern in the CIA when its political masters wanted a case for war in Iraq.

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There are no indications the CIA is ready to turn things around, of course. CIA Director John Brennan went to extraordinary lengths to stymie and discredit the investigation. And now, he is rebuffing its conclusions.

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And while they remain offstage by design, nothing in this report in any way exonerates the people who were running the show from the White House.

Other reports and works of journalism have clearly identified Vice President Dick Cheney as the prime mover in creating a torture regime that extended not just to the black sites, but to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and elsewhere. Cheney was no victim of misinformation; he was its architect.

And George W. Bush might have remained unfamiliar with the details until as late as 2006 – “According to CIA records, when briefed in April 2006, the president expressed discomfort with the ‘image of a detainee, chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper, and forced to go to the bathroom on himself’.” But he must have had some idea what Cheney and others were up to in the basement.

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The report identifies 26 detainees, out of the CIA’s 119 in total, who the agency itself determined should never have been held at all. That unfortunate group includes “Abu Hudhaifa, who was subjected to ice water baths and 66 hours of standing sleep deprivation before being released because the CIA discovered he was likely not the person he was believed to be,” and “Nazir Ali, an ‘intellectually challenged’ individual whose taped crying was used as leverage against his family member.”

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The authors don’t just document these new atrocities, they cite them to illustrate how baldly CIA officials deceived others about what was really going on.

A particular sore point is the inaccurate information the CIA fed to Congress. First CIA officials disavowed torture, and promised that the Senate Intelligence Committee would be notified about every individual detained by the CIA. Then came the misinformation and the outright subterfuge.

A 2005 proposal from Senator Carl Levin to establish an independent commission to investigate detainee abuse, for instance, “resulted in concern at the CIA that such a commission would lead to the discovery of videotapes documenting CIA interrogations.” As a result, the CIA destroyed them.

The summary devotes a 37-page appendix on “Inaccurate CIA Testimony” by former CIA Director Michael Hayden in one Senate Intelligence Committee hearing alone.

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Although most of the misinformation documented in the report dates back to the Bush years, Senate investigators also debunked the narrative – spread by Obama-era CIA officials – that torture was responsible for the capture of bin Laden.

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The report documents the ample information the CIA had from other sources about the courier who ultimately led them to bin Laden.

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In fact, the information in the report supports the argument that torture may have slowed the hunt for bin Laden.

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Attorney General Eric Holder has frequently stipulated “that the Department of Justice will not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the legal guidance given by the Office of Legal Counsel regarding the interrogation of detainees.”

The Senate report makes clear that the DOJ memos giving legal cover to CIA officers were based on crucial misrepresentations by the CIA of its needs and its conduct. The DOJ memos “relied on the CIA’s claim that the techniques were necessary to save lives,” the investigators wrote.

And that continues to be the Big Lie about the government in D.C.  In order to not believe they are as evil as any of the great tyrants in history (Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin) you must believe that they are as breathtakingly stupid as turkeys who will stare at the sky mouths agape when it rains until they drown.

“These Are Crimes”: New Calls to Prosecute Bush Admin as Senate Report Reveals Brutal CIA Torture

Democracy Now

12/10/14

The report concludes that the intelligence agency failed to disrupt a single plot despite torturing al-Qaeda and other captives in secret prisons worldwide between 2002 and 2006, and details a list of torture methods used on prisoners, including waterboarding, sexual threats with broomsticks, and medically unnecessary “rectal feeding.” The report also confirms the CIA ran black sites in Afghanistan, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Thailand, and a secret site on the Guantánamo Naval Base known as Strawberry Fields. So far no one involved in the CIA interrogation program has been charged with a crime except the whistleblower John Kiriakou. In 2007, he became the first person with direct knowledge of the program to publicly reveal its existence. He is now serving a 30-month sentence. We speak with Reed Brody, counsel and spokesperson for Human Rights Watch, who has written several reports on prisoner mistreatment in the war on terror, including a 2011 report which called for a criminal investigation of senior Bush administration officials.

CIA Torture Report Incomplete as Key Documents Remain Withheld

The Real News

12/10/14

Marcy Wheeler is the author of Anatomy of Deceit , a short primer on the pre-war intelligence and the CIA Leak. She blogs under the name “emptywheel” at The Next Hurrah and live-blogged the Scooter Libby trial. She has a PhD from University of Michigan relating to politics and journalism. Marcy lives in Michigan, where she works as a business consultant.

Obama Would Not – Cannot – Deem Any Activities Authorized by Gloves Come Off Finding Illegal

By emptywheel

Published December 9, 2014

Romero’s proposal (if it is intended as anything beyond a modest proposal meant to call Obama’s bluff) fundamentally misunderstands the situation – a situation the ACLU has been at the forefront in exposing.

Obama would not – categorically cannot – admit that what Tenet and Bush and Cheney did on torture is illegal. That’s because he has authorized war crimes using the very same Presidential Finding as the Bush Administration used to authorized torture.

As I have laid out at length, the torture program started as a covert op authorized by the September 17, 2001 Gloves Come Off Memorandum of Notification. And along with torture, that Finding also authorized drone strikes. The drone strikes that Obama escalated.

Just 3 days after he assumed the Presidency, a drone strike Obama authorized killed as many as 11 civilians, including one child, and gravely injured a 14 year old boy, Farim Qureshi.  And several years into his Administration, Obama ordered the CIA to kill American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki with no due process. As far as we know, both of those things were done using that very same Finding, the Finding that Romero would like Obama to declare authorized war crimes.

When the 2nd Circuit ruled the President – President Obama, not President Bush – could keep a short phrase hidden making it clear torture had been authorized by that Finding in ACLU’s very own torture FOIA, it did so because the Finding still authorized intelligence activities. The Finding authorizing torture was still active – President Obama was still relying on it – at least as recently as 2012.

For Obama to pardon Bush, Cheney, and Tenet, he would have to admit that the same Finding that he used to authorize drone strikes that have killed hundreds of civilians authorized war crimes. There is absolutely zero chance Obama is going to do that.

They’re not even going to fire anybody.

Stop believing the lies: America tortured more than ‘some folks’ – and covered it up

Trevor Timm, The Guardian

Tuesday 9 December 2014 13.43 EST

But beyond all the the depravity, perhaps the most shocking part of this exposed history is the action of US officials who knew these horrors were unfolding – and covered them up.

For years, as the 480-page executive summary of the report documents in meticulous detail, these officials lied to the Senate, the Justice Department, the White House, to the American public and to the world. They prevented CIA officers involved from being disciplined. They investigated and marginalized those who were investigating them. They happily leaked classified information to journalists – much of it false – without worry of consequence.

For the past few days, we have seen many of the same resentful politicians and former CIA leaders in charge of the torture-denial regime being handed virtual royalty status by the American media to respond to pre-emptively respond to the report without much of any pushback. Dick Cheney basically got to write his own interview in the New York Times, while Michael Hayden, the former NSA and CIA director in charge of lying to the Senate for years, was handed softball after softball by Bob Schieffer of CBS News to make his case. It is borderline propaganda.

As Schieffer innocently asked Hayden a few days ago: “Do you know of anybody from the CIA, in your view, who lied to Congress about what was going on there?” Hayden’s name appears in the torture report more than 200 times, and most of the references document the various times he knowingly misled one government body or another. As media organizations continue turning to Hayden for comment time and again, they should understand the Senate report indicates that basically every time he’s opened his mouth about “enhanced interrogation” over the past decade, he’s has been lying.

Senate report on CIA torture claims spy agency lied about ‘ineffective’ program

Spencer Ackerman and Dominic Rushe, The Guardian

Tuesday 9 December 2014 15.17 EST

The methods of torture carried out by the CIA were even more extreme than what it portrayed to the George W Bush administration and went beyond techniques already made public through a decade of leaks and lawsuits, which had revealed that agency interrogators subjected detainees to the quasi-drowning known as waterboarding, staged mock executions and revved power drills near their heads.

…

After examining 20 case studies, the investigators found that torture “regularly resulted in fabricated information”, said committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, in a statement summarizing the findings. She called the torture program “a stain on our values and on our history”.

…

At least 17 detainees were tortured without the approval from CIA headquarters that ex-director George Tenet assured the DOJ would occur. And at least 26 of the CIA’s estimated 119 detainees, the committee found, were “wrongfully held.”

Contractor psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen played a critical role in establishing the torture program in 2002. A company they formed to contract their services to the CIA was worth more than $180m, and by the time of the contract’s 2009 cancellation, they had received $81m in payouts.

…

International condemnation was swift. Ben Emmerson, the United Nations rapporteur for counterterrorism, commended the White House for resisting pressure not to publish the report but said action must now be taken.

“The individuals responsible for the criminal conspiracy revealed in today’s report must be brought to justice, and must face criminal penalties commensurate with the gravity of their crimes. The fact that the policies revealed in this report were authorised at a high level within the US government provides no excuse whatsoever. Indeed, it reinforces the need for criminal accountability,” he said.

Senate Torture Report Shows C.I.A. Infighting Over Interrogation Program

By SCOTT SHANE, The New York Times

DEC. 9, 2014

In January 2003, 10 months into the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret prison program, the agency’s chief of interrogations sent an email to colleagues saying that the relentlessly brutal treatment of prisoners was a train wreck “waiting to happen and I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens.” He said he had told his bosses he had “serious reservations” about the program and no longer wanted to be associated with it “in any way.”

The bitter infighting in the C.I.A. interrogation program was only one symptom of the dysfunction, disorganization, incompetence, greed and deception described in a summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report. In more than 500 pages, the summary, released on Tuesday, paints a devastating picture of an agency that was ill equipped to take on the task of questioning Al Qaeda suspects, bungled the job and then misrepresented the results.

…

The outburst from the chief of interrogations came amid weeks of torture of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a leading suspect in the bombing of two American embassies and a Navy ship. C.I.A. personnel working on the secret program had split into two camps. On one side were the chief of interrogations and nearly all of the on-the-ground personnel who had been questioning Mr. Nashiri. After two months of harsh questioning, the chief wrote, they believed that the prisoner had “been mainly truthful and is not withholding significant information.”

On the other side were James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, two former military psychologists who had advised the agency to use waterboarding and other coercive methods. With the support of C.I.A. headquarters, they repeatedly insisted that Mr. Nashiri and other prisoners were still withholding crucial information, and that the application of sufficient pain and disorientation would eventually force them to disclose it. They thought the other faction was “running a ‘sissified’ interrogation program,” the report says.

…

The report spends little time condemning torture on moral or legal grounds. Instead, it addresses mainly a practical question: Did torture accomplish anything of value? Looking at case after case, the report answers with an unqualified no.

In fact, it says, “C.I.A. officers regularly called into question whether the C.I.A.’s enhanced interrogation techniques were effective, assessing that the use of the techniques failed to elicit detainee cooperation or produce accurate intelligence.” Nonetheless, higher-ups ordered that the methods be continued and told Congress, the White House and journalists that they were having great success.

Just as striking as that central finding is the detailed account of C.I.A. mismanagement. Both factions in the fight over interrogations, for instance, were led by people with histories that might have been expected to disqualify them.

The chief of interrogations, who is not named in the report, was given the job in the fall of 2002 even though the agency’s inspector general had recommended that he be “orally admonished for inappropriate use of interrogation techniques” in a training program in Latin America in the 1980s.

And Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, identified by pseudonyms in the report, had not conducted a single real interrogation. They had helped run a Cold War-era training program for the Air Force in which personnel were given a taste of the harsh treatment they might face if captured by Communist enemies. The program – called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape – had never been intended for use in American interrogations, and involved methods that had produced false confessions when used on American airmen held by the Chinese in the Korean War.

Yet the program allowed the psychologists to assess their own work – they gave it excellent grades – and to charge a daily rate of $1,800 each, four times the pay of other interrogators, to waterboard detainees. Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen later started a company that took over and ran the C.I.A. program from 2005 until it was closed in 2009. The C.I.A. paid it $81 million, plus $1 million to protect the company and its employees from legal liability.

Early in the program, the report says, “a junior officer on his first overseas assignment,” who had no experience with prisons or interrogations, was placed in charge of a C.I.A. detention site in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit. Other C.I.A. officers had previously proposed that he be stripped of access to classified information because of a “lack of honesty, judgment and maturity.”

At the Salt Pit, the junior officer ordered a prisoner named Gul Rahman shackled to the wall of his cell and stripped of most of his clothing. Mr. Rahman was found dead of hypothermia the next morning, lying on the bare concrete floor. Four months later, however, the junior officer was recommended for a cash award of $2,500 for his “consistently superior work.”

…

The agency even had trouble keeping track of the people it was holding. In a December 2003 cable to C.I.A. headquarters from one of the countries with a secret prison, the C.I.A. station chief wrote, “We have made the unsettling discovery that we are holding a number of detainees about whom we know very little.” Most of the prisoners had not been questioned for months and seemed to have little intelligence value, the cable said.

But little of this kind of disarray came to the attention of the C.I.A.’s congressional oversight agencies, the White House or the public, which were repeatedly assured by a succession of C.I.A. directors that the program was highly professional and very successful.

During the program’s later years, after a damning report in 2004 by the C.I.A.’s inspector general, much of the agency’s effort appears to have gone into public relations to counter a rising tide of dismal news coverage. In 2007, for instance, Michael V. Hayden, then the C.I.A. director, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that “all of those involved in the questioning of detainees are carefully chosen and screened for demonstrated professional judgment and maturity.”

In fact, the Senate report concludes, no such vetting took place. The interrogation teams included people with “notable derogatory information” in their records, including one with “workplace anger management issues” and another who “had reportedly admitted to sexual assault.”

Senate Report Disputes C.I.A. Claims on Hunt for Osama bin Laden

By CHARLIE SAVAGE and JAMES RISEN, The New York Times

DEC. 9, 2014

Months before the operation that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, the Central Intelligence Agency secretly prepared a public relations plan that would stress that information gathered from its disputed interrogation program had played a critical role in the hunt. Starting the day after the raid, agency officials in classified briefings made the same point to Congress.

But in page after page of previously classified evidence, the Senate Intelligence Committee report on C.I.A. torture, released on Tuesday, rejects the notion that the agency would not have found Bin Laden if it had not tortured detainees.

“The vast majority of the intelligence” about the Qaeda courier who led the agency to Bin Laden “was originally acquired from sources unrelated to the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program, and the most accurate information acquired from a C.I.A. detainee was provided prior to the C.I.A. subjecting the detainee to the C.I.A.’s enhanced interrogation techniques,” the Senate report said.

It added that most of “the documents, statements and testimony” from the C.I.A. regarding a connection between the torture of detainees and the Bin Laden hunt were “inaccurate and incongruent with C.I.A. records.”

…

It was in 2004 that the C.I.A. came to realize that it should focus on finding Mr. Kuwaiti as part of the hunt for Bin Laden, after it interrogated a Qaeda operative, Hassan Ghul, who had been captured in Iraqi Kurdistan. The report concludes that Mr. Ghul provided “the most accurate” intelligence that the agency produced about Mr. Kuwaiti’s role and ties to Bin Laden.

But the report emphasizes that Mr. Ghul provided all the important information about the courier before he was subjected to any torture techniques and spoke freely to his interrogators. During that two-day period in January 2004, it said, the C.I.A. produced 21 intelligence reports from Mr. Ghul, who one officer said “sang like a Tweety Bird.”

“He opened up right away and was cooperative from the outset,” the officer added.

In those initial interrogations, Mr. Ghul portrayed Mr. Kuwaiti as Bin Laden’s “closest assistant” and said he was always with him, identifying him as a likely courier who ran messages between Bin Laden and other leaders of Al Qaeda. He listed him as one of three people most likely to be with Bin Laden, who he speculated was living in a house in Pakistan, with Mr. Kuwaiti handling his needs.

Nevertheless, the C.I.A. then decided to torture Mr. Ghul to see if he would say more. He was transferred to a “black site” prison, where he was shaved, placed in a “hanging” stress position, and subjected to 59 hours of sleep deprivation, after which he began hallucinating; his back and abdomen began spasming; his arms, legs and feet began experiencing “mild paralysis”; and he began having “premature” heart beats. During and after that treatment, he provided “no actionable threat information” that resulted in the capture of any leaders of Al Qaeda, the report said.

When they talk about the “statute of limitations” they are flat out lying to you.

There is no “statute of limitations” on torture, murder, and war crimes.

There is only “accessory after the fact.”

Make no mistake about it, Parties are machines to win elections.  When there is no electoral victory, there is no reason for their continued existence except sentiment and inertia.

Wall Street’s Democrats

Robert Reich

Monday, December 8, 2014

In Washington’s coming budget battles, sacred cows like the tax deductions for home mortgage interest and charitable donations are likely to be on the table along with potential cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

But no one on Capitol Hill believes Wall Street’s beloved carried-interest tax loophole will be touched.

Don’t blame the newly elected Republican Congress.

Democrats didn’t repeal the loophole when they ran both houses of Congress from January 2009 to January 2011. And the reason they didn’t has a direct bearing on the future of the party.

…

Carried interest allows hedge-fund and private-equity managers, as well as many venture capitalists and partners in real estate investment trusts, to treat their take of the profits as capital gains – taxed at maximum rate of 23.8 percent instead of the 39.6 percent maximum applied to ordinary income.

It’s a pure scam. They get the tax break even though they invest other peoples’ money rather than risk their own.

The loophole has no economic justification. As one private-equity manager told me recently, “I can’t defend it. No one can.”

It’s worth about $11 billion a year – more than enough to extend unemployment benefits to every one of America’s nearly 3 million long-term unemployed.

The hedge-fund, private-equity, and other fund managers who receive this $11 billion are some of the richest people in America. Forbes lists 46 billionaires who have derived most of their wealth from managing hedge funds. Mitt Romney used the carried-interest loophole to help limit his effective tax rate in 2011 to 13.9 percent.

So why didn’t Democrats close it when they ran Congress?

…

The Democrats’ unwillingness to close the carried-interest loophole when they could also goes some way to explaining why, almost six years after Wall Street’s near meltdown, the Obama administration has done so little to rein in the Street.

Wall Street’s biggest banks are far bigger now than they were then, yet they still have no a credible plan for winding down their operations if they get into trouble.

The Dodd-Frank Act, designed to prevent another Wall Street failure, has been watered down so much it’s slush. There’s been no move to resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act separating investment banking from commercial banking.

Not a not a single Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for his involvement in the frauds that caused the mess.

Wall Street was the fourth-largest contributor to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008, and is already gearing up for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run.

…

This must stop. America can’t tackle widening inequality without confronting the power and privilege lying behind it.

If the Democratic party doesn’t lead the charge, who will?

Addition by Subtraction

by Gaius Publius, Hullabaloo

12/08/2014 10:00:00 AM

Democratic voters again showed they don’t want corporate Democrats in office, which hands wins to Republicans. More and more it seems entirely likely – it’s at least worth considering – that to defeat Republicans, we have to take control of the party first and remove bought “leaders” who are electorally weaker than we are. Because more and more, electoral losses are on them and not on us.

…

Klein compares Lieu’s electoral results to Waxman’s in the same district. Then he compares Lieu’s results to California Assemblyman Muratsuchi’s, whose Assembly district lies within Lieu’s congressional district.

…

Klein offers other examples as well, including the fact that a corporatist will set up the party’s “Post Mortem” committee. (That committee will include the ultimate corporatist, Google’s Eric Schmidt.) The lesson of these examples is clear. In today’s electoral climate, progressives mainly win and corporate Democrats mainly lose. (Muratsuchi’s loss just cost the Democrats their super-majority in the CA Assembly.) Yet as seems more and more obvious, corporate Democrats in leadership positions would rather keep Money happy than keep voters happy, and it’s costing the party at the booth.

If they’re the reason the party is losing, not us, shouldn’t they be taken out first? After all, as the Piketty world grows darker and more stark, it’s our solutions that voters are looking for. Should we let “party loyalty” prevent us from giving the country and its voters what they both want and need?

In that sense, perhaps the 2014 election was a win after all. Addition by subtraction. Also, a useful signal that 2016 may not be Ms. Clinton’s Dem-corporate cakewalk and needs a rethink. Time to start challenging those “leaders” for party control? I would say Yes, and firmly.

I have a life you know.

Anyway I was part of this conference at the U.N. before they cleaned all the smoke off the walls and after the thrill of sitting in actual Ambassador chairs (Zimbabwe!) it was time for our box lunch (that’s what they call a stale ham and cheese sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a rather decrepit looking apple when they stuff it in a box).

Fortunately the soda was fresh and they had some club which was good enough for me before I went all low sodium (remember to order seltzer) because I don’t much like the sweet stuff.

Nobody had favored it before, so I got the chance to crack the cap.

Ah, you guessed it, soda geyser.  Well, a little Club Soda will clean that right…

Oh, wait.

So I did and all the people at my table had a nice laugh and we were poking in our boxes to find anything that was edible (sadly, no) when our guest of honor, Jane Curtin, strode in and, in an incredible action of solidarity which I give her great credit for, picked up one of the boxes and headed for the soda table.

Well, I must have broken the ice (as it were), and the Club was empty but a fresh refill was at hand and I actually felt remarkably justified when Jane made it her beverage of choice.

For about ten seconds when… ah, you guessed again.  Soda geyser.

Jane, I couldn’t help myself.  I about busted a gut when I noticed that no one was laughing except me.

But it all worked out in the end.  I had an incredible tour of 5th Avenue capped by a toast in the Rainbow Room as the sun set and a public private concert at the piano in the lobby of the Waldorf with my Nurse Girlfriend who lived in a trailer park and raised Siamese Cats on the side and her Consigliere who broke us up within the month because he was jealous.  Yet that worked out also because he advanced me to Capo di Tutti where I broke the system.

Still, that’s another story.

Is Obama Stalling Until Republicans Can Bury the CIA Torture Report?

By Dan Froomkin, The Intercept

10/23/2014

Continued White House foot-dragging on the declassification of a much-anticipated Senate torture report is raising concerns that the administration is holding out until Republicans take over the chamber and kill the report themselves.

Senator Dianne Feinstein’s intelligence committee sent a 480-page executive summary of its extensive report on the CIA’s abuse of detainees to the White House for declassification more than six months ago.

In August, the White House, working closely with the CIA, sent back redactions that Feinstein and other Senate Democrats said rendered the summary unintelligible and unsupported.

Since then, the wrangling has continued behind closed doors, with projected release dates repeatedly falling by the wayside.  The Huffington Post reported this week that White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, a close ally of CIA Director John Brennan, is personally leading the negotiations, suggesting keen interest in their progress – or lack thereof – on the part of  Brennan and President Obama.

Human-rights lawyer Scott Horton, who interviewed a wide range of intelligence and administration officials for his upcoming book,  “Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Foreign Policy,” told The Intercept that the White House and the CIA are hoping a Republican Senate will, in their words, “put an end to this nonsense.”

Stalling for time until after the midterm elections and the start of a Republican-majority session is the “battle plan,” Horton said. “I can tell you that Brennan has told people in the CIA that that’s his prescription for doing it.”

…

Victoria Bassetti, a former Senate Judiciary Committee staffer, wrote this week that the administration is playing “stall ball” and that Senate staffers expect Republicans would “spike release of the report” should they take over the chamber.

So today-

White House Getting Cold Feet Over Exposing CIA’s Torture Secrets

By Dan Froomkin, The Intercept

12/05/14

After seven months of promising to release a report exposing CIA torture of terror suspects, the Obama administration Friday reportedly sent Secretary of State John Kerry to ask Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein to consider holding off “because a lot is going on in the world.”

…

Adhering to the time-honored Washington tradition of releasing news with unpleasant PR repercussions on a Friday afternoon, “an administration official” leaked word of the call to Josh Rogin of Bloomberg View.

…

Friday’s news was reminiscent of a previous Obama reversal, in the early days of his presidency. Back in April 2009, Obama had said he would not block the court-ordered release of photographs depicting the abuse of detainees held by U.S. authorities abroad. Then he changed his mind.

“[T]he most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in danger,” Obama announced a few weeks later.

I wrote at the time that Obama had at that point officially joined the Bush-Cheney cover-up of torture.

By blocking the release of those photos, Obama managed to keep the public from the visceral realization that the kind of vile, sadistic treatment of detainees illustrated in the infamous photos from Abu Ghraib in Iraq was not limited to one prison or one country.

Ah, my first banning.

Now of course I’m banned for calling out Denise Oliver Velez as a “rapist apologist” for supporting ZhenRen in his drunken attacks against triv33.

Who are the “Good Germans” now?

(h/t digby)

Chris Rock–

For all the current conversation about income inequality, class is still sort of the elephant in the room.

Oh, people don’t even know. If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets. If the average person could see the Virgin Airlines first-class lounge1, they’d go, “What? What? This is food, and it’s free, and they … what? Massage? Are you kidding me?”

…

Obama’s been faulted for not showing anger in public, and for not speaking in simple, declarative Bushisms. Of course, the moment he does do that, he’s accused of being an angry black man.

There’s an advantage that Bush had that Obama doesn’t have. People thinking you’re dumb is an advantage. Obama started as a genius. It’s like, What? I’ve got to keep doing that? That’s hard to do! So it’s not that Obama’s disappointing. It’s just his best album might have been his first album.

What has Obama done wrong?

When Obama first got elected, he should have let it all just drop.

Let what drop?

Just let the country flatline. Let the auto industry die. Don’t bail anybody out. In sports, that’s what any new GM does. They make sure that the catastrophe is on the old management and then they clean up. They don’t try to save old management’s mistakes.

That’s clever. You let it all go to hell.

Let it all go to hell knowing good and well this is on them. That way you can implement. You hire your own coach. You get your own players. He could have got way more done. You know, we’ve all been on planes that had tremendous turbulence, but we forget all about it. Now, if you live through a plane crash, you’ll never forget that. Maybe Obama should have let the plane crash. You get credit for bringing somebody back from the dead. You don’t really get credit for helping a sick person by administering antibiotics.

…

What would you do in Ferguson that a standard reporter wouldn’t?

I’d do a special on race, but I’d have no black people.

Well, that would be much more revealing.

Yes, that would be an event. Here’s the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.

Right. It’s ridiculous.

So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.” It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

Gaius Publius–

Five hundred billionaires, 15,000 people all averaging $2,800,000 per year, and every group below them averages a tenth or less in earnings. Look at that list above, and notice the bottom bullet. Everyone from the top 2% through the top 10% averages less than $200,000 per year – 1/120th of our lucky 15,000.

Why point this out? Because people have no idea what life for the 15,000 is actually like, much less life for someone in the David Koch class. When we think of the wealthy, we imagine MacMansions blown big; we conjure pictures we’ve seen from wealthier neighborhoods, and we just … scale up a bit. We see monster Cadillac SUVs and say, “Ah, the very rich.” People who live like us, but with more stuff.

…

Our image of the very very rich – MacMansions, only scaled up; nice cars, only pricier; like us, but with more toys – is very very wrong. It’s also one reason we haven’t had a class revolt since the New Deal era.

…

Except even he (Chris Rock) doesn’t scale up enough. These people never ride first class because they never fly commercial. He rides first class; they own airplanes. They don’t own homes, they own estates – so many of them in fact that not one is “home” in the normal sense. Now extend that – for most of these people, not one country is home either.

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