Media Villagers and Beltway Bloviators Miss The Biggest Story of Our Lifetime

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Hey, media villagers and Beltway bloviators — yeah, I'm talking to you. I realize that it has been years since any of you have done any serious investigative journalism, perhaps decades for some of you. Your investigative journalism skills have atrophied and died long ago. You couldn't find your own ass with both hands behind your back.

Others of you have sold out and become stenographers who simply repeat the conservative talking points you receive each day without a thought in your pretty little heads. Just smile and read the teleprompter. You are content to be part of the Mighty Wurlitzer conservative noise machine. It's a paycheck, I get that. But please, don't call yourselves journalists. You are not.

It is no surprise then that the media villagers and Beltway bloviators are missing the biggest story of our lifetime; others are purposefully misleading and obsfuscating to cover up this story.

Here's a clue for you: The story is not Nancy Pelosi. Not even close.

You are being played by members of the Mighty Wurlitzer conservative noise machine. Nancy Pelosi is irrelevant to this story.

Here's what we do know to date from the Senate Armed Services Committee Report and other congressional testimony and recent revelations:

The Bush torture program began sometime in February 2002. Prisoners were subjected to torture during the Spring and Summer of 2002. The conspiracy to commit and the commission of the crime of torture were completed crimes with each instance of torture.

Prisoners were subjected to torture months before the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) was asked to prepare a CYA "torture memo" purporting to give legal cover post hoc for the illegal torture that had already been committed. Note to media villagers: a lawyer's opinion is just that – an opinion. It has no legal effect. Moreover, there is no "safe harbor" provision in the anti-torture laws or covenants against torture for a good faith reliance on legal advice. Torture is not like your tax evasion. Any acts of torture which were completed acts prior to the issuance of the CYA "torture memo" would fall outside any purported protection from prosecution afforded by the CYA "torture memo."

Members of Congress were not advised of the Bush torture program until months after the program began sometime in February 2002 and months after prisoners had already been subjected to torture, and after the issuance of the first CYA "torture memo" from the OLC. You got that? Crimes of torture had already been committed and completed by the time any member of Congress had been advised about the Bush torture program. The failure of the Bush administration to "fully and currently inform" Congress about the Bush torture program was itself a violation of US CODE: Title 50 Sec. 413.

It was recently revealed that torture was used primarily to coerce a confession from prisoners to establish a link between al Qaida (and 9/11) and Saddam Hussein to justify the war with Iraq. KSM Questioned About al Qaeda-Iraq Ties During Waterboarding:

[A] line buried on page 353 of the July 2004 Select Committee on Intelligence report on pre-Iraq war intelligence strongly suggests that the interrogation was just as centered on a possible Iraq-al-Qaeda link as terrorist activity.

"CTC [Counter Terrorist Center] noted that the questions regarding al-Qaida's ties to the Iraqi regime were among the first presented to senior al-Qaida operational planner Khalid Shaikh Muhammad following his capture."

A real investigative journalist, Jonathan Landay from McClatchy, continues his excellent reporting:

The head of the Criminal Investigation Task Force at Guantanamo from 2002-2005 confirmed to McClatchy that in late 2002 and early 2003, intelligence officials were tasked to find, among other things, Iraq-al Qaida ties, which were a central pillar of the Bush administration's case for its March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"I'm aware of the fact that in late 2002, early 2003, that (the alleged al Qaida-Iraq link) was an interest on the intelligence side," said retired Army Lt. Col. Brittain Mallow, a former military criminal investigator. "That was something they were tasked to look at."

He said he was unaware of the origins of the directive, but a former senior U.S. intelligence official has told McClatchy that Cheney's and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's offices were demanding that information in 2002 and 2003. The official, who wasn't authorized to speak publicly on the matter, requested anonymity.

During the same period, two alleged senior al Qaida operatives in CIA custody were waterboarded repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times and Khalid Sheik Mohammed at least 183 times.

A 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee report said that the two were questioned about the relationship between al Qaida and Iraq, and that both denied knowing of one.

A U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Paul Burney, told the Army Inspector General's office in 2006 that during the same period, interrogators at Guantanamo were under pressure to produce evidence of al Qaida-Iraq ties, but were unable to do so.

"The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results," Burney said, according excerpts of an interview published in a declassified Senate Armed Services Committee report released on April 22.

Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff Larry Wilkerson recently revealed at The Washington Note:

Likewise, what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002–well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion–its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just "committed suicide" in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan government to allow them to interview al-Libi….)

The question of "what did members of Congress know and when did they know it?" is on the far periphery of this story. The media villagers and Beltway Bloviators are not even in the ballpark – hell, they're not even in the parking lot. They just don't get it.

Who does get it? The New York Times nasty girl gossip columnist, Maureen Dowd – Maureen Dowd for chrissakes! – you media villagers and Beltway bloviators should all be sufficiently embarrassed that you feel compelled to fall on your swords to end your public humiliation. What, too Samurai? At least turn in your press credentials and submit your letters of resignation. You've been shown up by Maureen Dowd!

Dowd writes in her column today Cheney, Master of Pain:

[A] lot of the hoo-ha around Pelosi makes it sound as if she knew stuff that no one else had any inkling of, when in fact the entire world had a pretty good idea of what was happening. The Bushies plied their dark arts in broad daylight.

Besides, the question of what Pelosi knew or didn’t, or when she did or didn’t know, is irrelevant to how W. and Cheney broke the law and authorized torture.

* * *

The more telling news last week was yet another suggestion about Cheney’s reverse-engineering the Iraq war. Robert Windrem, a former NBC News investigative producer, reported on The Daily Beast that in April 2003, after the invasion of Baghdad, the U.S. arrested a top officer in Saddam’s security force. Even though this man was an old-fashioned P.O.W., someone in Vice’s orbit reportedly suggested that the interrogations were too gentle and that waterboarding might elicit information about the fantasized connection between Osama and Saddam.

In The Washington Note, a political and foreign policy blog, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff at State, wrote that the “harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 … was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and Al Qaeda.”

More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

This is the central question that the media villagers and Beltway bloviators should be discussing, but so far they are not. The right's tortured shell game It is long past time for the media to focus on the real issues of crime and punishment.