Still no mention of Scott Horton's Gitmo scoop on any right-leaning blog. But Marc Thiessen, and others on the right, are crowing about the above video on Gitmo recidivism:
Show this to anyone you know who is not convinced that the detainees at Guantanamo are terrorists — or that closing Guantanamo and bringing them to America is a mistake.
The only way to tell if all the suspects at Gitmo were terrorists is to examine the evidence of their alleged Jihadism before they were seized. This has been done. A huge majority were not captured by US forces, were handed over by bounty hunters and were innocent. That's why these Jihadists were released by the Bush administration. But, of course, if you weren't a Jihadist before you arrived in Gitmo, you sure as hell would be by the time they let you out. I would be. Listening to the screams of the tortured is a pretty good motivator to hate the US. And again, there is a non-sequitur here. There is nothing in this video that suggests or proves that a federal super-max jail would be less secure than Gitmo. Nothing.
But Thiessen does help explain how a man like Steven Hadley could find a way to rationalize torturing so many to death:
In an interview for my book, former national-security adviser Steve Hadley explained to me, “The interrogation techniques were not to elicit information. So the whole argument that people tell you lies under torture misses the point.” Hadley said the purpose of the techniques was to “bring them to the point where they are willing to cooperate, and once they are willing to cooperate, then the techniques stop and you do all the things the FBI agents say you ought to do to build trust and all the rest.”
From later in the article:
They took great care to stay within the confines of the law and to ensure the safety of those in their custody. For their efforts, they have been vilified as torturers by critics who know next to nothing about what went on at the “black sites” where they worked.
This is a double-lie. The law was twisted by mediocre hacks to enable Cheney to do anything he wanted to prisoners, which is why so many died under the ordeal. There was no attempt to obey the law; there was a very elaborate attempt to bypass it entirely and to stretch the meaning of plain English in ways reminiscent of totalitarian states.
This is why I believe the current American right is proto-fascist. Because they can do this outside the law and then brag about it.
The Dish 