The Stupid Continues to Burn

Flopping Aces ^ | 12-17-14 | Wordsmith

[Starman417]

Un frickin’ believable!

Copies of ‘torture’ report hand delivered to terror suspects, blocked from CIA officials:

Full disclosure took a back seat to the CIA’s green movement last week when agency big shots blocked officials from printing out hard copies of the Senate Democratic report on terrorist interrogations, fearing it was “killing too many trees.”

Meanwhile, paper copies of the report from Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein were hand-delivered to terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay — though not the rebuttals from the CIA or Republicans on her committee.

Oh, the Hillarity:

NEW YORK (AP) — Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday she’s proud to have been part of an administration that “banned illegal renditions and brutal interrogations” and said the U.S. should never be involved in torture anywhere in the world.

First, renditions began under Bill Clinton; and last I read, they still go on under the current PotUS.

As for “banning” brutal interrogations, a number of the techniques for which the CIA has been criticized- sleep deprivation, isolation, and more- are still on the menu in the Army Field Manual. Just ask Amnesty International.

Furthermore, the last HVT to receive CIA swimming lessons was KSM in 2003. The CIA program itself was pretty much dead by November-December of 2007. Yes, ended on Bush’s watch. Obama’s 2009 EO “banning” torture was redundant. It essentially echoes much of the same that Bush said I. His 2007 EO.

Maybe congress should legislate a ban on torture (define it in non-vague terms) and waterboarding specifically if they hate it so much? (They didn’t ban it when Congress passed the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act; and they didn’t ban waterboarding in 2006 with the Military Commissions Act. As Marc Thiessen points out in his book, Congress “explicitly rejected an amendment by Senator Ted Kennedy to ban waterboarding by a vote of 53 to 46.”).

Marc Thiessen’s Courting Disaster, pg 214-215:

President Bush did not shy away from making hard choices. One of the criticisms he faced during his time in office is that he made too many of these hard decisions alone, without involving Congress. This “go-it-alone” approach, critics argue, undermined the administration’s policies; it invited the judiciary to overturn them. As Jack Goldsmith and Benjamin Wittes put it in the Washington Post, “Bush’s approach avoided congressional meddling but paradoxically sloughed off counterterrorism policy on the courts. Over time, the judiciary grew impatient with ad hoc detention procedures that lacked clear and specific legislative authorization, and judges began imposing novel and increasingly demanding rules on the cammander in chief’s traditionally broad powers to detain enemy soldiers during war.”

There are several problems with this argument: First, the judicial branch has overturned Bush’s counterterrorism policies without regard to congressional approval. In June 2006, the Supreme Court ruled inHamdan that the administration’s military commissions were unconstitutional, and instructed the administration to work with Congress on a compromise. The president did just that. A few months later, he secured passage of the Military Commissions Act in which Congress and the Executive Branch together established a new system of military commissions and declared that captured terrorists did not have the right to challenge their detention in federal courts.

[sauropod]

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[LegendHasIt]

Thanks for the posting.
Wow.