In the 19th century, American slavery relied on torture. At the turn of the 20th, when America began assembling its empire overseas, the U.S. army waterboarded Filipinos during the Spanish-American War. As part of the Phoenix Program, an effort to gain intelligence during the Vietnam War, CIA-trained interrogators delivered electric shocks to the genitals of some Vietnamese communists, and raped, starved, and beat others.
He argues that “when you claim that the United States is intrinsically moral, and torture therefore represents an aberration, you undermine the fight against such practices”:
Being a successful American politician today requires declaring that America is different, blessed, exceptional. Thus, when other countries torture, it reflects their basic character. When we torture, it violates ours. But the wisest American thinkers have found a way to reconcile this need to feel special with the recognition that, as human beings, Americans are just as fallen as everyone else. In the mid-20th century, men like Schlesinger and Reinhold Niebuhr argued that, paradoxically, the more Americans recognized their sinfulness, and restrained it within systems of law, the more America would prove its superiority over those totalitarian systems that refused such restraints.
(Caption from The New Yorker: “A picture of a “water detail,” reportedly taken in May, 1901, in Sual, the Philippines. “It is a terrible torture,” one soldier wrote. Credit attributed to Corporal George J. Vennage/Ohio State University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library)
There are no permanent majorities in politics. An unpopular Republican president would move the needle. A Democratic fundraising base that chose not to go nuclear on a Democratic candidate who opposed Obamacare or the stimulus would have done it. A more culturally “red” Democratic nominee would help.
The voters who elected Phil Bredesen governor of Tennessee by 40 points are largely still around, as are the people who elected Mike Beebe governor of Arkansas by 30 points in 2010 and 14 points in 2006. The same goes for the folks who sent Landrieu and Hagan back to the Senate in 2008, or Blanche Lincoln in 2004. The people who elected a swath of moderate-to-conservative Democrats in 2006 and 2008 are still there.
The party just has to try to appeal to them, or at least give more latitude to its candidates to appeal to them, as Rahm Emanuel did in 2006.
The bad news for Southern Democrats is that Democrats aren’t likely to do this anytime soon, and if they did, they’d pay a price. Politics, again, is about tradeoffs, and by appealing to a more downscale coalition, Democrats would sacrifice enthusiasm gains among their new coalition. As I’ve said before, if Hillary Clinton had been the nominee in 2008, Mitch McConnell might not have been a senator in 2009, but Gordon Smith might have survived in Oregon. National Democrats don’t seem inclined to make this tradeoff anytime soon (plus, the wipeouts have left Democrats without much of a bench in these states), and the zeitgeist seems to be against it.
The South isn’t a lost cause for Democrats if they don’t want it to be one. Their problem is that the national party doesn’t seem to care right now if it is one, and there are clear electoral benefits from focusing elsewhere.
[T]he way the Democratic Party can best help the poor people of Mississippi is to control Congress and the White House. So the point is to win those. With respect to the White House, no one can guarantee anything of course, but at least the Democrats do have these days a built-in Electoral College advantage.
As for congressional majorities, I say it’s far more likely they’ll win them in the North and on the West coast, and to some extent in the Midwest and Rocky Mountain states, than via the South. And if they ever get that majority, they will (one hopes) pass progressive laws, and those laws will benefit the people who live in the South.
So I’m not for abandoning the people of the South. I’m just saying the best way to help them is by building a congressional majority in the quickest and easiest way possible, and that, alas, is not through the South.
Naturally, in light of what I know to be true about Southern people, Tomasky’s article struck me as peevish and small-minded. Yet beyond the offense to honor he intended with his unfair description of Dixie, Tomasky seemed to be advising Democrats to abandon all strategic electoral sense along with the South. Far be it from me to offer aid and succor to my ideological opposites, but this idea just seems too ill-conceived to be allowed to live. The following may be a reductive assertion, and I invite any professional political operatives to correct my ignorance, but:
1. If you allow your opponent to march unopposed to victory in one area,
2. Then he is free to commit the resources he might have spent there to other areas, where he has a real fight on his hands,
3. Therefore, it is unwise to simply abandon the field.
Yes, the realignment of southern rural and small-town whites is now virtually complete. The possibility of a “replacement” Democratic coalition depends on how many retirees, secular suburbanites, transplants, knowledge workers, and of course minority voters are in any one place, and sometimes it also depends on real-life events such as GOP misgovernment. That’s another reason I see no need for Democrats to “Dump Dixie,” though they’d be foolish to consider most of it anything other than missionary territory at the moment.
Update from a reader:
Tomasky is right. The South is a lost cause for Democrats for the foreseeable future. Whether or not Johnson actually made his famous quote after signing the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the prediction of a mass migration in the South from D to R was uncannily accurate. In fact, it was probably an understatement.
Having lived in the South for much of my life, I’ve witnessed the transformation, which I attribute to the entire civil rights movement from Brown v Board of Education to Engel and Abington to the Civil Rights Act to school busing to Roe v Wade (yes, I think that fits within civil rights) to more recent developments like gay marriage. Sure, it took a couple of generations, but that has more to do with the habits of the American voter than anything else. All those older voters who voted down party lines for Democrats and would never dream of voting Republican (like my grandmother) had to die off while the generations that followed began Republican and will probably be so for life. It took 100 years or so after the Civil War for the South to start moving towards the Republicans, and I expect the current party affiliation of the South will outlive all of us. Bill Clinton blurred the lines a little bit in the ’90s, but Obama has successfully righted the narrative just by his existence.
So, why did civil rights prompt such a transformation? Well, racism. But that’s a little too easy. More broadly, fear. Economic insecurity. Fear of “The Other.” Fear of change. Fear of losing what they see as their God given prominence. That’s why the typical Southern voter, now a Republican, embraces the following sentiments:
1. Public education is bad. It’s poor quality, it’s dangerous for my children to attend, and it is a front for Godless liberal indoctrination. How dare they call the extermination of Native Americans genocide. Why are they talking about slavery so much, it was like 200 years ago? Why are they talking about natural selection and not creation? I want charter schools and school choice.
2. Christianity is the foundation of America and should be more heavily codified in schools and government, but liberals and activist judges have undermined Christianity’s rightful place as the national religion.
3. Science is its own religion. Evolution and global warming are hoaxes.
4. Gay marriage threatens civil society and is only talked about because the gay agenda is so good at propaganda and is supported by the liberals who control the federal government.
5. The Feds want to take away guns in order to exert further control over the population.
6. Obama hates America and white people, so it’s okay to hate him without being able to name a single thing Obama has done to justify that hatred.
7. I’m not racist. I have a black friend or two. I just think black people are lazy and entitled, and they’re just not generally as smart as other races, but the government gives them advantages over me out of guilt and to buy their votes. Black people and self loathing white guilt liberals are the real racists.
8. I’m fine with disparities in capital punishment, race based disenfranchisement, and police shootings of unarmed civilians. Those only happen to “The Other” anyway, and they probably deserve it. People should stop whining about the little things.
9. Obamacare is a government takeover of healthcare and a giveaway to minorities.
10. The Democrats are responsible for all of the above.
Sounds silly, right? Overstated? It isn’t. They’re deadly serious. I know many otherwise reasonable people who believe the above. Fear does that to people, even if that fear is unfounded. That’s why Tomasky is right, at least until demographics overwhelm the South later this century.
His interview last night is worth revisiting again. He says what he has previously said – adding nothing to the factual record, and addressing none of the specifics in the report. But he is also clearly rattled. He is used to proclaiming categorical truths about things he knows will never be made public. He is used to invoking what he says he knows from secret intelligence without any possibility of being contradicted. This interview is the first time he has made statements about torture that can be fact-checked by the record. And, he is proven to be a liar, as shown below.
When someone presents a public official with a large tranche of the CIA’s own documents and operational cables and internal memos, and that paper-trail contradicts previous statements by the public official, he has a couple of options. The first is to point out where any particular allegation is factually wrong, to show a flaw in the data, to defend himself factually from the claims presented. The second is to flail around, dodge any specifics and double-down on various talking points that evade the central facts at hand.
Cheney picked the second path. That tells you a huge amount, it seems to me. He doesn’t address the mountain of evidence. He is simply ruling it out of bounds – after admitting he hasn’t even read it! If you had a two-bit tax evader who is presented by the IRS with a tranche of his own tax records proving he was delinquent, and he simply insisted that he hadn’t read them and still emphatically denies the charge, he’s self-evidently guilty. Why is this not self-evidently the case with Cheney?
His response to the facts as documented is simply: I know otherwise. He gives no specifics. He merely invokes other CIA official denials as an authority – when they too are charged with war crimes. That’s like a gangster claiming he is innocent on the basis of his gang-members’ testimony. He blusters on. In a court of law, his performance would be, quite simply, risible as an act of self-defense. It becomes some primal scream version of “Because I said it worked!”
Now look at what else he said. He describes this as a classic example of politicians throwing the “professionals” under the bus. One is forced to ask: what professionals? All the professionals in interrogation in the military and the FBI were kept out of the torture program, which was assigned to two contractors, who assessed themselves, who had never interrogated anyone in their lives, and who had no linguistic or interrogation backgrounds. What this report does is throw the amateurs under the bus, and among those rank amateurs is Dick Cheney.
When Cheney is asked about a prisoner chained to the ceiling in a cell and forced to defecate on himself in a diaper, he says “I’ve never heard of such a thing.” As if that is relevant. If he hadn’t heard of such a thing, he should have. And if he hadn’t until this week, he could have read about it in the report. And then, revealingly, he immediately gets angry. He expresses no regret and no remorse about another human being’s unimaginable suffering. He cites the alternative to torture – legal powerful, effective interrogation that the report proves gave us great intelligence – as “kiss him on both cheeks and tell us, please, please tell us what you know”. Again, this is risible as an argument.
In fact, it is prima facie evidence that torture was used as a first resort, and it was a first resort because Cheney already knew it was the only way to get intelligence. How he knew we don’t know. No one in professional interrogation believed or believes it. So you have clear evidence that the decision to torture was taken early on – and nothing was allowed to stand in its way. This was an ideological decision – not a policy judgment based on evidence.
Here’s the truly revealing part. Cheney is told about a prisoner, Gul Rahman, who died after unimaginable brutality – beaten, kept awake for 48 hours, kept in total darkness for days, thrown into the Gestapo-pioneered cold bath treatment, and then chained to a wall and left to die of hypothermia. The factors in his death included “dehydration, lack of food, and immobility due to ‘short chaining.” This is Cheney’s response:
3,000 Americans died on 9/11 because of what these guys did, and I have no sympathy for them. I don’t know the specific details … I haven’t read the report … I keep coming back to the basic, fundamental proposition: how nice do you want to be to the murderers of 3000 Americans?
But Gul Rahman had nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 plot.
He had engaged in no plots to kill Americans. He was a guard to the Afghan warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, part of an organization that began by fighting the Soviets in occupied Afghanistan. It had alliances with al Qaeda at the time, but subsequently engaged in peace negotiations with the Karzai government. His brother claims Rahman was even involved in rescuing Hamid Kharzai in 1994. To equate him with individuals who committed mass murder of Americans or who were actively plotting against Americans is preposterous. He was emphatically not a threat to the US. Yet we tortured him to death. And the man running the torture camp was promoted thereafter.
To put it more bluntly, Cheney’s response is unhinged. It is suffused with indiscriminate rage which is indifferent to such standards as whether the prisoner is innocent or guilty, or even if he should be in a prison at all. He is acting out a revenge fantasy, no doubt fueled in part by the understanding that 3,000 Americans lost their lives because he failed to prevent it – when the facts were lying there in the existing surveillance and intelligence system and somehow never got put together.
What we have here is a staggering thing: the second highest official in a democracy, proud and unrepentant of war crimes targeted at hundreds of prisoners, equating every single one of the prisoners – including those who were victims of mistaken identity, including American citizens reading satirical websites, including countless who had nothing to do with any attacks on the US at all – with the nineteen plotters of one terror attack. We have a man who, upon being presented with a meticulous set of documents and facts, brags of not reading them and who continues to say things that are definitively disproved in the report by CIA documents themselves.
This is a man who not only broke the law and the basic norms of Western civilization, but who celebrates that. If this man is not brought to justice, the whole idea of justice in this country is a joke.
(Photos: scenes from Abu Ghraib prison, showing the results of torture techniques pioneered by Dick Cheney.)
Meteor Blades of Daily Kospicks up on the CIA director’s favorite term for torture :
Come the next crisis, nothing—certainly not John Brennan—stands in the way of CIA “mistakes” being made again. We also learned that the euphemizing of torture just hadn’t gone far enough. So, instead of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which sounds like the title of a panel at a management seminar, Brennan introduced us to EITs, which sound like stock market derivatives.
One day, I promise you, they will either look back on this acronym as a stain on this generation and an embarrassment to the world. Or it will not be a world worth living in.
I watched the CIA Director’s speech today, in which he actually described the CIA as an agency “speaking truth to power.” He got that the wrong way round. There is no organization in the US government that exercises the kind of power the CIA does – over the presidency, and the Congress, and the media. It is unimaginable that any other agency in government could commit war crimes, torture innocents, murder people, wreck this country’s moral standing … and yet escape any consequences for their actions. There is no other government agency that launches elaborate public relations campaigns to discredit and undermine its Senate oversight committee. There is no other organization whose head can tell blatant lies about spying on its overseers and receive the president’s wholehearted support. There is no other agency where you can murder someone already in your captivity and get away with it. That is incredible power – and there is no greater power than the power to torture.
As for the truth part, Brennan has to concede what the CIA has already conceded: that they lied to the president and to the Congress many, many times on the efficacy of torture. But Brennan describes these lies, as the CIA did in its formal response to the report, as “imprecision”. It was therefore merely “imprecise” that, to take one of many examples, the “Second Wave” attack was discovered thanks to torture. But either something was procured through torture, or it wasn’t. That’s not imprecise; it’s an either/or. And it was presented by the CIA as a categorical product of torture – which played a part in devising the legal memos that gave these crimes a patina of temporary formal legality. That is not imprecision; it is misrepresentation.
Here’s the most we’ll ever get from our dark side overlord:
CIA officers’ actions that did comport with the law and policy should neither be criticized nor conflated with the actions of the few who did not follow the guidance issued. At the same time, none of these lapses should be excused, downplayed or denied. In some instances, we simply failed to live up to the standards that we set for ourselves, that the American people expect of us.
Translation: the bulk of the torture was perfectly acceptable; a small part of it wasn’t. Have there been any consequences for those who committed the war crimes outside those allowed for by the spurious legal memos? Nope. Has anyone been fired? Not that we know. Are most of the people involved in these war crimes still walking the halls at Langley? You bet they are. And Brennan admitted today that he knew full well what was going on as the torture program was constructed.
Now this weird circumlocution on a central question:
I have already stated that our reviews indicate that the detention and interrogation program produced useful intelligence that helped the United States thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives. But let me be clear: We have not concluded that it was the use of EITs within that program that allowed us to obtain useful information from detainees subjected to them. The cause and effect relationship between the use of EITs and useful information subsequently provided by the detainee is, in my view, unknowable.
So we are now in Rumsfeld’s post-modern universe. What Brennan has repeatedly said was that we got intelligence from those in the program, but now he is saying that the intelligence was not provably a result of the torture. What he is trying to insinuate is that long after being tortured, some suspects may have given intelligence under legal and humane interrogation that helped. All I can say is that the report meticulously demonstrates that this is not the case. Or let me allow Dianne Feinstein to put it succinctly:
CIA says “unknowable” if we could have gotten the intel other ways. Study shows it IS knowable: CIA had info before torture. #ReadTheReport
This is a simple matter: before or after? In the coming days, the Dish is going to go through critical cases in the report to show that Brennan is still lying about this, seeking refuge in bullshit notions of “unknowability” because what we do know from the CIA’s own documents absolutely refutes his case.
And notice the only reason Brennan objects to torture:
I believe effective, non-coercive methods are available to elicit such information; methods that do not have a counterproductive impact on our national security and on our international standing.
Brennan goes on to lie again that torture helped us find Osama bin Laden. This is disproved – not challenged or questioned, but disproved – in the report. And continuing to suggest – against the evidence – that torture may have helped get that monster is an invitation for such an evil to be imported back into the the US in the future. And, indeed, Brennan concedes that it is perfectly possible that torture will return:
I defer to the policymakers in future times when there is going to be the need to be able to ensure that this country stays safe if we face a similar type of crisis.
We have a CIA whose head believes in the efficacy of torture, and that the only reason to refrain from it is that it hurts our national security and international standing. We have a CIA head who will not rule out the use of torture in the future. We have a CIA head who believes that much of the torture conducted in the Bush-Cheney years was legal. And we have a CIA head prepared to argue in public that the facts and documented evidence in a summary of the CIA’s own documents are untrue. Because he says so.
And he wants us to end this debate and move. He has to be kidding.
(Photo: Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John Brennan talks with the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper before US President Barack Obama spoke about the National Security Agency and intelligence agencies surveillance techniques at the US Department of Justice on January 17, 2014. By Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images.)
“Warning that it would be reckless to release the full findings to the general public, critics in Washington condemned the Senate’s 480-page report detailing the CIA’s interrogation tactics Tuesday, saying it puts the country at considerable risk of transparency,” – The Onion, on Tuesday.
“I think there’s more than enough transparency that has happened over the last couple days,” – CIA Director John Brennan, today.
I’ve been a registered Republican since ’84, the year I became eligible to vote. Although since the GW Bush era I’ve voted and thought much more like an independent, I had never gotten around to re-registering as an independent for a variety of reasons, mostly inertia.
Until today.
I am so repulsed by many Republicans’ support for torture and their general reaction to this torture report, that I am unable to align myself with them any more. On a chat board today, I read a description of McCain as a “RINO and a scumbag” for his having denounced torture, and the poster was unaware of how damning this was of the GOP. You reminded me of how conservative stalwarts like Starr, Buckley and Will unequivocally rejected torture just a few short years ago, and compared it to McConnell’s and Butters’ reflexively cynical response to the report. Oh how fast and far we have fallen!
I just went on-line and re-registered as an independent. I’ll be writing Reince Preibus to let him know why. I feel a bit cleaner now.
Send one to the White House as well. Another reader:
There’s something I haven’t ever seen you address but that I now see all the more clearly with the publication of this report: why we really did it. It was NOT for the value of the information gained. That much is clear. So, what then? This was not a Foucauldian effort to scare the potential terrorists. It happened because we feel that these people deserve some form of punishment deeper than prison. Until we really call that out and confront it, I don’t think there is much point in the discussion at all. We tortured because it felt good.
Another would agree:
Go back and watch the Jose Rodriguez 60 Minutes interview. When asked explicitly whether waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammad 183 times was justified (or, rather, being subjected to 183 “pours” in a half dozen sessions), he replies:
Can I say something about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? He’s the one that was responsible for the death of Danny Pearl, the Wall Street reporter. He slit his throat in front of a camera. I don’t know what type of man it takes to cut the throat of someone in front of you like that, but I can tell you that this is an individual who probably didn’t give a rat’s ass about having water poured on his face.
It wasn’t about collecting intelligence. It was about punishment and revenge.
Moreover, another turns to popular culture:
Reading through your live-blog post of the torture report was surreal. Really, that’s the only word I can use. You commented at one point that if we were watching this in a movie, the perpetrators would be Nazis. Sadly, I think that’s wrong in today’s America.
Think of the network TV that we have been fed since 9/11. Jack Bauer’s 24, Criminal Minds, Stalker – a plethora of violence that is somehow “ok” because it’s gotten past network censors, because the censors are far more concerned with a kid seeing a naked body part or hearing a person say “shit” than letting the kid watch a serial killer kidnap someone and, yes, torture them for a solid hour of TV.
Beyond what this report says about America and our indescribably stupid paranoia and fear post 9/11, it is a reflection of what we’re seeing in popular culture every day. We are celebrating people who torture people, whether it’s the government calling them patriots because they were willing (and some probably enjoyed) seeing a man repeatedly almost drowned, or it’s the media-consuming public who make Criminal Minds (a torture porn show if I’ve ever seen one) or 24 top-rated television shows.
We’ve simply become immune to abject violence. Combine that with the idea that was pounded into our heads for the last 13 years that EVERYONE is out to get us and we must do ANYTHING to stop them and I can sadly understand how this happened, how this was justified, and how everyone who should’ve known better turned a blind eye to what we as a people were becoming.
Another sees abject violence carried out by our current administration:
I am usually a bleeding heart, but as horrific as the details in the report are, I feel mostly ambivalent and I’m tying to figure out why. I think there are a few reasons. After Bush, the Pentagon, CIA, and White House have switched from black sites and EIT to signature strikes and a disposition matrix. The fact that innocent people were caught up in the black sites and tortured is the worst part of the program, but thousands have been incinerated or torn to pieces by hunks of metal because they were standing too close to a person the White House wanted permanently disposed of.
Another turns back to the previous administration:
Why won’t Bush or Rubio call Lynndie England a patriot? She seems to fit the bill now right? Her and 10 others were court-marshaled for doing their job according to Bush and Cheney.
Another has a bit of dark humor:
Oh, how I would have loved to have heard Hitch respond to a Vanity Fair editor asking him to try rectal-feeding after waterboarding.
Another is just dark:
I can’t say that I disagree with why you’re feeling such anguish. I certainly feel it, and I don’t know how anyone with any heart at all couldn’t feel it after reading about what happened in those dank torture chambers and rape rooms. Who’d have ever thought we’d be talking about American rape rooms?
But I think your (and your reader’s) immigrant love of America is a bit too forgiving of this country. We are a country founded on slavery; we believed in Manifest Destiny and destroyed the indigenous population (because we could); we acquiesced to Jim Crow after a bloody Civil War; we dropped nuclear weapons on civilians; our own CIA had already perpetrated illegal acts on humans in the name of interrogating and torturing them; we had assassination units, and it wasn’t the first time. When you express shock about the CIA treating the human body as an experimental subject, I think of how they’ve done that on American civilians. When you are surprised about a PR campaign for torture by the CIA, I can’t help but think how it makes sense, because they have such practice at media manipulation. The list goes on and on.
To only see the United States as a shining city on a hill is a mirage. It has never been that. We are a gray capital, compromised and stitched together as a kludge. This is not “America hating” or self loathing. We simply are what we are. This isn’t an excuse for torture; it’s context for our national capacity for depravity.
We’re a great country. And we’re criminal fuck ups. That our tax dollars paid the CIA to torture innocents is not “the end of America as much of the world has known it.” It’s just America. It’s the United States removed from its ludicrous bumper-sticker sentimentality and empty words. It’s our truth. I hate that, but it’s our truth.
Another reader, however, looks at the glass half full:
Like most, I’m horrified by what the torture report reveals. I also worry how the report will influence how Americans are treated in other countries and by other regimes – whether they will use the report to justify their treatment of our soldiers. Of course that’s exactly how we should determine whether we think something is torture – if we would deem it so if it was how captured Americans were treated. (There, I think there’s little question.) I’m also angered by the response by many on the right.
BUT, I think the one bright spot in all of this is the very fact of the report and that it’s being publicly released (albeit in redacted form). As much as other countries may justifiably complain about what this says about our own human rights and asking what right do we now have to question theirs, can anyone imagine that countries like China, North Korea, Russia, Syria, etc. would ever release such a report. Hopefully, this report is what will push us to correct our behavior. Without such reports, what would provoke other countries to ever correct theirs.
Another also tries to stay positive:
Patience, patience. I do believe that prosecutions are better handled internationally and those prosecutions will take time. Will all the bad actors be prosecuted no, but just as Nazis are still hunted and tracked US War Criminals will be hunted down and some will be brought to justice. Look at the length of time it has taken dictators in other countries to be brought to justice, often it takes decades. Personally, I am unhappy that this is the political reality, but I do know that these kinds of crimes are likely to be punished, probably within my lifetime.
However, often the punishment is not what brings healing and stability. It is telling the truth and honoring the victims that brings healing. The Senate Committe did what it had to do: oversee the CIA, and the world has not crumbled overnight. I am willing to bet that the world will not crumble and that as others see that the truth can be told, more and more secrets will come to light in the future. Eventually we will be able to move away from the paranoid world-view these torturers let loose.
I was shocked by something James Mitchell (one of the supposed architects of the torture program) said in his VICE interview: torture wasn’t supposed to yield actionable intelligence and he’d be “stunned” if it did. Why? Because we tortured people just to play good cop/bad cop and to loosen them up to other questioning! Seriously.
I’m in disbelief, and I just wanted to make sure you all saw it. Thanks for all your hard work on this incredibly important story.
Let’s spread #ReadTheReport far and wide (and blow #IHateCartmanBrah out of the water). Read all of DiFi’s tweets thus far, in chronological order, below:
“That there are elements of the American government still arguing against this cold blast of truth, offering up the craven fear that the rest of the world might see us as we actually are, or that our enemies will perhaps use the evidence of our sadism to justify violent retribution or political maneuver — this further cowardice only adds to the national humiliation.
This is not one of the world’s great powers behaving as such, and it is certainly no force for good in the world. This might as well be the Spanish national amnesia following the death of Franco, or a post-war West Germany without the stomach for the necessary self-reflection. Shit, even the fragile, post-apartheid democracy of South Africa managed to openly conduct hearings and attempt some measure of apology and reconciliation in the wake of the previous regime’s brutalities. Not us. Not the United States. We’re too weak to endure any such moral reflection without the attempt itself descending into moronic partisan banter. That’s right. Here, in America, we are — today — actually torturing other human beings with exacting cruelty in secret and then arguing about whether we can dare discuss it in public” – David Simon.
the mountain of evidence. He is simply ruling it out of bounds – after admitting he hasn’t even read it! If you had a two-bit tax evader who is presented by the IRS with a tranche of his own tax records proving he was delinquent, and he simply insisted that he hadn’t read them and still emphatically denies the charge, he’s self-evidently guilty. Why is this not self-evidently the case with Cheney?
to the ceiling in a cell and forced to defecate on himself in a diaper, he says “I’ve never heard of such a thing.” As if that is relevant. If he hadn’t heard of such a thing, he should have. And if he hadn’t until this week, he could have read about it in the report. And then, revealingly, he immediately gets angry. He expresses no regret and no remorse about another human being’s unimaginable suffering. He cites the alternative to torture – legal powerful, effective interrogation that the report proves gave us great intelligence – as “kiss him on both cheeks and tell us, please, please tell us what you know”. Again, this is risible as an argument.
The Dish 