As long as you focused exclusively on weather, yesterday brought all the change you could want here, over and over again. We awoke to fluttering huge flakelets drifting past our windows, some seemingly the size of small pancakes. It was wondrous to linger in bed, alternating between reading, dozing, and flake-ogling. Bliss indeed.
Later it was driving sleet and then rain. Later still it was bright sun, followed by showers then driving rain, then still and dry. My new stepladder blew over twice, despite ~40-lb weight. Consequently, I was a bit cautious and refrained from finishing off the top of the pear and Asian pear which otherwise are now "almost" ready for Spring. Which I gather is only a week or so away. I noticed in my forays in the yard that one of the major trunks of one of our lilacs had fallen across neighbor's rhody. This is not the sort of community activism I want to be a part of; with help of hand-saw, a come-along, and several lengths of sisal we brought the prodigal stem back into the fold. Hopefully Mary and Steve's rhody will bounce back with minimal damage. Later I noticed significant somewhat-inexplicable breaks in one large branch at least of Eucalpyt and Asian pear as well, possibly lingering damage from prior combination of snow load and wind.
But how about some less-ephemeral and bucolic stuff? A little tart with the sweet always seems like a good program.
Froomkin among others picked up on the Intel Red Cross report Mark Danner got his hands on and reported on in detail in NY Books and more briefly in NYT Op-Ed I hear Sunday. Dan designates long one as required reading. I'm not sure how much more harrowing detail I need and am waiting for the right time:
Here's another good reason to have some sort of authoritative public reckoning of the Bush administration's dark legacy: Until we deal with it once and for all, it will come back to haunt us time and time again. The latest reminder of horror is now upon us, from the mouths of brutalized detainees and in the form of a conclusion by the International Red Cross -- the world's authority on the subject -- that their treatment undeniably amounted to torture.Mark Danner, one of the great chroniclers of the Bush administration, somehow obtained a copy of the international organization's confidential report based on its interviews with the 14 "high value detainees" who were held in the CIA's network of secret prisons for periods ranging from 16 months to almost four and a half years.His article in the New York Review of Books is harrowing, deeply disturbing -- and an absolutely essential read. He also published a shorter version as a New York Times op-ed yesterday.
The report, which made the rounds of the CIA and the White House two years ago, offers a damning portrait of cruelty. From the statements of individual detainees who had never been allowed to speak to each other, a clear method emerges based on forced nudity, isolation, bombardment with noise and light, deprivation of sleep and food, forced standing, repeated beatings and countless applications of cold water including, of course, waterboarding.The ICRC's conclusion is inescapable: "The allegations of ill treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill treatment to which they were subjected while held in the C.I.A. program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment."As Danner tells NPR: "Its determination that these activities were torture is absolutely definitive, absolutely authoritative. These activities were torture. The International Committee of the Red Cross says so, and they use the definitions in treaties the United States has signed on to."-clip-And don't think these actions and many others can't be traced directly back to the White House. They can.In December 2007, FBI agent John Kiriakou, who participated in Zubaydah's capture and early questioning, told ABC News that every decision leading to the torture of CIA detainees was documented and approved in cables to and from Washington. And last April, ABC News reported that top Bush aides, including former vice president Cheney, micromanaged interrogation tactics from the White House basement."The high-level discussions about these 'enhanced interrogation techniques' were so detailed," ABC's sources said, "some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic." Those discussions started right after Zubaydah's capture in the spring of 2002. According to ABC, the CIA briefed the White House group on its plans to use aggressive techniques against Zubaydah and received explicit approval.
Techniques that created damage short of "the level of death, organ failure, or the permanent impairment of a significant body function" were later authorized in an August 2002 Justice Department memo, known as the Torture Memo.For his part, Danner traces it all back to the administration's message after 9/11 that the gloves were to come off. "It is no accident that two of the administration's most powerful officials, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, served as young men in very senior positions in the Nixon and Ford administrations. They had witnessed firsthand the gloves going on and, in the weeks after the September 11 attacks, they argued powerfully that it was those limitations — and, it was implied, not a failure to heed warnings — that had helped lead, however indirectly, to the country's vulnerability to attack.-clip-Another major theme of Danner's piece is that, despite the repeated assertions of the Bush administration, there's no evidence that, at long last, any of this torture did us any good at all. That's another point I couldn't agree with more. -clip-"'These reports are from an impeccable source,' said Geneve Mantri, a counterterrorism specialist at Amnesty International. 'It's clear that senior officials were warned from the very beginning that the treatment that detainees were subjected to amounted to torture. This story goes even further and deeper than many us of suspected. The more details we find out, the more shocking this becomes.'"I'm quite gratified that spokesperson Gibbs stood up and tweaked the dick-head's little (no doubt flaccid) head today. You can't get much more prickly and ass-holic than Dick Cheney without prison garb. And of course he deserves that far more than hundreds of thousands of folks in stripes right now in our beloved Kingdom of Incarceration. If we can't find a way to get this little toad behind some truly nasty razor-wire, what is the point of our prison system?
And if there was ever a candidate for torture, were this the Dark Ages, instead of just at times seeming like it!
Talking Points Memo, as you know, one of my solid sources, has some details:
During this afternoon's White House press conference, Robert Gibbs positively lambasted Dick Cheney -- both for the attacks that Cheney lodged against President Obama in yesterday's CNN interview, and for Cheney's own record in office:Gibbs was asked about Cheney's line that the Obama Administration is making the country less safe. "Well, I guess Rush Limbaugh was busy," Gibbs said, prompting of the reporters to laugh out loud. "So they trotted out their next-most popular member of the Republican cabal."
Gibbs then elaborated on Obama's responsibilities as president to fight terrorist -- and the failures that came before him:"I think the President saw over the seven-plus years the delay in bringing the very people to justice that committed terrorist acts on this soil and on foreign soil. That delay in seeking swift and certain justice was what he decided to change through his executive order. In changing the legal architecture by which these terrorists would finally be brought to justice. I think the American people will in this administration see those actors brought to the swift and certain justice that was not brought to them in the previous administration."
As for Cheney's criticism of Obama on the economy: "I think not taking economic advice from Dick Cheney would be maybe the best possible outcome of yesterday's interview."And later on, Gibbs stated again his response to Cheney's national-security criticism: "For seven-plus years, the very perpetrators that the Vice President said he's concerned about weren't brought to justice."Thank you, sir.
It's not as if we have seen many journalists with the guts to actually even interview Cheney - they do tea parties for him,
a la Tim Russert, the favorite propaganda outlet of the bush administration. For the love of god, what makes these folks pretend to pursue a trade that should involve actual cerebral activity and ideally some spunk!
Well, don't look to Chip Reid of CBS for anything resembling a smidgeon of journalistic skills, backchecking of "leaks," critical followup, insight, or anything but total sycophancy to that dreamy time when he doubtless had his head up every
cheney/rumsfeld/bush butt he could find. Eric Kleefeld of TPM does the take-down:
Here's yet another sign that Washington media is still wired to a great extent for a playing field of GOP dominance. During today's White House press conference, CBS correspondent Chip Reid asked Robert Gibbs if it was appropriate for him to attack Dick Cheney:
Reid: Can I ask you, when you referred to the former Vice President, that was a really hard-hitting, kind of sarcastic response you had. This is a former Vice President of the United States. Is that the attitude -- is that the sanctioned tone toward the former Vice President of the United States from this White House
now?
Gibbs: Sometimes I ask forgiveness rather than for permission, Chip. But no, I hope my sarcasm didn't mask the seriousness of the answer with which I addressed Ed -- that for seven-plus years, the very perpetrators that the Vice President says he's concerned about weren't brought to justice.
Now let's consider the full context here. Dick Cheney did an interview with CNN in which he went out of his way to repeatedly attack the new White House, saying they were putting the country at risk of a new terror attack. But the question here is whether it's appropriate for the Obama Administration to fire back in response -- that it's Obama's people who are accused of showing insufficient respect to the office?
