The lying swine Cheney - ought to have been hung by now.
"If you are in favor of the torture, fine. But I am begging you, spare me any sermons about the law ever, ever again." - Chris Hayes, last night on MSNBC
After the aborted Bay of Pigs operation in 1961, John F. Kennedy loudly proclaimed that he wanted to "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the four winds." If he had expeditiously gone through with that intent, we'd likely not now be having to digest a revolting summary report of CIA tortures - debasing our nation, our claimed aspirations, our claim to being a "nation of laws" and exceptional in the world. Kennedy's mistake was in trying to rope in the CIA incrementally, using 17 proposed oversight rules and creating an alter-agency - the DIA or Defense Intelligence Agency. The spooks got onto him and well, the rest is history.
Most of the day yesterday, the CIA - as per its wont, and as they did 40 years earlier with "Operation Mockingbird" - trotted out their lying PR flunkies to try to tell the American people that what was done in our name wasn't torture. But they were exposed for the fucking liars and tools they are, as on Rachel Maddow's show last night - using historical documents as well as the actual report.
This was good because as numerous moral philosophers have observed, all that is often needed to commit mass moral outrage is to alter the language. This tends to alter thought so the weak -minded will succumb as the amoral employ euphemisms to try to justify what is a moral outrage. And so the Nazi scum referred to "cleansing" when they herded Jews into the gas chambers, just as now these miscreant apologists are adopting the euphemism "enhanced interrogation" to try to make us believe what they did was A-ok. No it wasn't. And anyone who buys into this crap- including into former CIA Director George Tenet's denial of euphemism- is guilty of normalizing the torture that these rats seek to justify retrospectively. They then arguably aren't any better than the perpetrators. Such is the case with that screeching harpy and former BushCo operative, Nicolle Wallace - who almost climaxed- yapping about why we "need" CIA torture the other day. Maybe she's into torture porn too! Who knows?
Not so with Norah O'Donnell who surely got it this morning on CBS Early Show when scumbag and tool Mike Morell was being interviewed. While the weasel and liar Morell tried to claim that what his men did "wasn't torture", Norah, to her credit- wasn't having any of it. She said:
"I don't understand how waterboarding someone one hundred eighty three times isn't torture. I don't understand how giving forced enemas isn't torture."
The monkey Morell actually replied with a straight face that on "pouring over' the program he was even more convinced that it "was effective in getting information that stopped plots that would have killed Americans". Which is arrant horse pockey.
Gail King then asked Morell to respond to the issue of morality- never mind the dubious authorizations from the Bush Justice Dept. which we now know were fabricated out of whole cloth - as Maddow showed - and I will get to. Morell responded it is "the central question" but then added this is what we "should be debating as a society - was this right or was this wrong?". Uh no! We don't need any debate because it was patently wrong! Morally evil! Never mind the claimed ends - a first moral principle is that the ends NEVER justifies the means. I don't care if 10,000 might have been killed you don't use these abhorrent methods to obtain suspect info. (Which is never reliable given the extreme methods used when the tortured will cop to anything under duress - as records show occurred!)
Even the CIA's 1989 Report to the then Senate Intelligence Committee flatly observed:
"Inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will result in false answers."
So Morell asking if this was really wrong is like asking if herding Jews into gas chambers was wrong. Yes it emphatically was! I mean, good God, the Senate report even documented CIA officers choking and vomiting as well as crying and some having to leave the scene of some of the tortures. This only occurs, my friends, when one's moral conscience so recoils at actions that a sense of revulsion overtakes the person. Most humans possess this moral sense, but clearly most of the CIA's torturing fiends didn't. Many howled with laughter when the "rectal feedings" they delivered caused the person to crap all over themselves as they hung upside down!
These rat vermin were even afraid to broach what they were doing to Colin Powell because they thought he'd "blow his top". Well, yes he would because though he's a military man he's also a moral man and would recognize evil if he saw or heard of it!
I ask, when considering what these CIA monsters did, to think of your own loved ones in those torture scenes - which I will examine shortly.
Rachel Maddow merits many kudos for her segment on the history of CIA torture including the creation of its first torture manual in July, 1963. Most savvy researchers of the JFK era and the conspiracy to kill him agree Kennedy was unaware of the manual, and would have really "smashed the CIA" if he knew of it but was already overwhelmed with fighting off their attempts to undermine him -including his implementing curbs on their covert actions. (Kennedy was also likely unaware of the ZR/Rifle assassination program, and especially the Staff D CIA connections which would be used later to turn it against him).
Maddow's piece showed how the CIA manual was used to torture former KGB man Yuri Nosenko who defected to the U.S. in late 1963. During his debriefing he evidently gave the spooks cause to subject him to assorted "enhanced measures" - but officially called torture at the time, including: sleep deprivation, being forced to stay nude for long periods at a time, pummeling and punching -including his kidneys, sleeping on stone floors and being fed a ghastly gruel.
The spooks didn't believe his debrief that Lee Harvey Oswald was of zero or minor import to the KGB. (Sadly, Maddow again muddied her otherwise impeccable reporting by recirculating the canard that "the other thing that happened right before he (Nosenko) got there was the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The man who killed President Kennedy was Lee Harvey Oswald". Uh no he wasn't, Rachel, and you need to clean up your act to confer more gravitas on your historical reporting).
Maddow went on to claim: "Lee Harvey Oswald had spent time in the Soviet Union before killing President Kennedy" which is again, only partly true, part lie. He spent time in the Soviet Union - most likely as a CIA contract agent, according to his CIA CI/SIG files- before returning to the U.S. in 1962 when - interestingly - he was removed from the FBI's Watch List.
Nosenko was one of the KGB agents who interviewed Oswald, and claimed Oswald was unfit for any kind of spy work. Of course, as later released records showed, this story didn't jibe with what the CIA wanted at the time - which was to paint Oswald as a Soviet agent out to kill Kennedy- which could then be used to justify aggression- against Russia as well as Cuba. (Peter Dale Scott has uncovered most of this and interested readers can find more details in my two October, 2013 posts on the pre-assassination framing of Oswald.)
Anyway, what Maddow did get right is that Nosenko was locked up in 1964, at Camp Peary, given no sensory stimulus whatsoever - except for a light kept on in his room 24/7. He was given nothing to read, and given purposefully revolting food. When he did have human contact it was to abuse him - described by one author (Tim Weiner, 'Legacy of Ashes') as "the same treatment his fellow Russians received in the Gulag."
In 1967, he was released to some unknown location in the south when the spooks realized he really was a defector. And only when he was 81 years old, in 2008, did another lying CIA worm -Michael Hayden - come to apologize to him - likely because he knew the shit would hit the fan with the next election: either a former Constitutional lawyer elected, or a former prisoner of war who himself underwent torture.
As Maddow points out, the CIA in the wake of the wrongful torture of Nosenko realized that they couldn't afford to make such costly mistakes again. There followed, in 1978, a formal study of what went wrong with the conclusion that "the agency's handling of the Nosenko case was an abomination"
The CIA then got rid of the interrogation manual and as Maddow put it:
"Not because it's not tempting to use fear, and degradation and solitary confinement to try to get information out of people- when you're sure they're lying to you, and you're sure its a very dangerous situation and the country is very upset.and stressed out about it's safety. Not that it isn't tempting, it's tempting, But it doesn't work. It's a bad idea. We tried it and it's a bad idea."
Maddow further notes that despite the initial rejection there remained those CIA personnel who still wanted to be able to use torture from time to time, including one who "dug up the old manual" in 1983. The manual was then used in the 1980s (during the Reagan era) in Latin America. In Honduras as well as Guatemala hundreds of thousands were tortured by the methods in the manual. The methods came to also be associated with those from "death squads" in those countries, as well as in Nicaragua.
At last in 1988 a new CIA report declared again: "Physical abuse or other degrading treatment was rejected not only because it was wrong but it has historically been proven to be ineffective."
Maddow then put up on the screen a portion of a memo released in November, 2001 right after the 9/11 attacks. It reads:
" A policy decision must be made with regard to U.S. use of torture."
Note the word used: torture - NOT "enhanced interrogation".
The sentence was written by CIA lawyers in the office of the CIA General Counsel. So much then for the horse shit that what was presented in the Senate report wasn't torture!
Maddow notes the CIA didn't have prisoners in custody at the time, but was only thinking prospectively - e.g. "ahead" - to what the agency could do if and when prisoners came into their hands. They then batted it around how they could justify it, including:
"CIA could argue torture was necessary"
This was the CIA now, early 2001 - likely under pressure from the criminal Bushies- cooking up a new policy to justify torture though they rejected it earlier. Again, this was no accusation that others made about them it was what THEY called it themselves - TORTURE! And to this end, the need for psyops as part of the operations, two psychologists were recruited: Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell. (Which showed the spooks firmly believed psychology wasn't entirely useless!). This pair developed the manual to help captured U.S. troops survive torture from enemies, then extracted the tortures those troops might face to use on U.S. "enemies".
And what kind of tortures are we talking about when these fiends finally got their hands on prisoners (up to 26% of whom they (CIA) didn't even know why they were being held, or what they had done)? Chris Hayes elaborated some of it on his own 'ALL IN' show:
- Threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee and also to cut her throat
- Abu Zubaydah lost his left eye while in CIA custody - from being gouged out slowly.
-Two detainees were shackled in stress positions after their bones were broken (this was also often used by the Inquisition on apostates)
- One CIA officer played Russian roulette with a detainee
- Another held a gun and power drill to the detainee's head threatening to let his brains leak out
- Five detainees were subjected to rectal rehydration - a method also used by the Gestapo to try to wrest information, as my friend Kurt Braun told me. In this method of torture massive amounts of fluid -water are pumped into the colon until the victim feels as if his innards will burst open. The pain is agonizing - and most people would be vaguely aware of what that is like if they allowed themselves to be fully awake during a colonoscopy (the difference being that gas is pumped into the colon in the latter case)
- Rectal feeding - wherein a blenderized mix of humus, pasta and pureed raisins are forced into the rectum causing an exploding sensation in the bowels. Anyone who's ever had a barium enema - and the agony produced for even five minutes holding it - would be aware of this one.
Another asshole, who forced a detainee to sit naked on a bare floor in a freezing room for 24 hours and who later died of hypothermia, was given a $2,500 award for his "superior work". In another case, the top torture director was an immature goofus, lacking solid experience, putting the lie to Michael Hayden's malarkey the interrogators were all "well trained". No they were not!
The program was also subject to incompetence, including one case where two victims were subject to sleep deprivation and dietary manipulation and later found out to be CIA assets!
Can we say delirious assholes here? Yes we can! And yet these pieces of refuse want to try to justify what they did as preserving freedom or preventing another 9/11. Sadly, a majority of dopey, dumbass Americans agree (in recent polls) which confirms my suspicions too many are zombies who are unable to put themselves in the position of others.. Next time these yahoos get a colonoscopy I want them to do it with no sedation - then imagine something ten times worse being done to them - and tell me they are pro torture! Damned fools and hypocrites!
Don't believe it! These are filth and maggots acting under their own arrogant, inhuman banner and have no connection to the rest of us who are sane and moral. Their own people performing these atrocities were often brought to the point of such revulsion they cried, choked and vomited. So don't ever tell me these vermin were doing the "right thing".
If true justice reigned all would be hung by the neck, as well as the Bushie assholes who contrived to let them get away with it by fiddle-fucking with the laws and interpretations thereof. Hell, if it were up to me I'd let Colin Powell be the presiding judge. Line 'em all up, including the 3 former directors spewing justifications in yesterday's WSJ piece, and hang 'em en masse or one at a time. I don't give a shit which.
But we can't let this sorry episode ever be normalized or come back to haunt us again. Strangely, or maybe not, the only person on the Right that seems to get it is John McCain. But maybe that's because he once experienced torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese. He said on the Senate floor yesterday:
"I know from personal experience, that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence. I know that the use of torture compromises that which most distinguished us from our enemies. Our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights which are protected by international conventions- the United States not only joined but for the most part authored. "
Well said. Let us also bear in mind above all, that declaring torture of any kind off limits means when our own personnel are captured they will be less likely to be exposed to it. It therefore redounds to our benefit to take the higher moral ground rather than take the lower ground of rats and vermin - including defending it after the fact.
See also more proof we are not a nation of laws:
http://www.salon.com/2014/12/10/torture_reports_big_bombshell_how_a_glaring_double_standard_was_exposed/
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