Posted on 01/08/2005 2:56:17 PM PST by wagglebee
How many of you stuck with -- and I doubt that many of you had a chance to, but how many of you stuck with the Gonzales hearings yesterday when he was finished with his testimony? The real story of what happened... Well, that's maybe going a bit far, but clearly one of the big moments of yesterday's hearings, looking into the fitness of Alberto Gonzales to be the attorney general -- and by the way, can I ask you a question? I noticed that yesterday during the hearings, all the Democrats paid homage to his "poor background," came from poverty, came from nowhere, came from the dirt, came from the soil, and rose all the way up to Harvard law and in the newspapers today, the Washington Post and the New York Times both say that's about best thing about Gonzales is that he came from dirt, nothing, and went Harvard. But after that he blew it because he got associated with Bush. Would somebody explain to me just why it makes him any better?
What does it say about somebody's qualifications that they have to come from an impoverished background? Why does that automatically give them even more qualifications than, say, somebody comes from a standard middle class family? (interruption) So they didn't have it all handed to them. You know how few people do have it all handed to them? Most of the people who have it all handed to them are sitting in judgment on this guy on the other side of the committee. You want to talk about people who have had it handed to them, you want to start with Boston and go on across the country? There's Ted Kennedy. You know, the combined wealth would outdo the amount of aid that we have sent to the tsunami victims. The six Democrat senators alone combined wealth is more than the aid we're sending to the tsunami victims. I'm not against it, don't misunderstand. I'm just saying it's something that's always bothered me. I'm perfectly willing to celebrate and applaud people who rise up from the dirt, from the soil, and from the muck and from the mud, even if they've wandered out of the ocean as protozoa and they end up becoming human beings and going to Harvard. (applauds) My hat's off to them.
But it doesn't say. (Interruption) No, they didn't use his non-humble background. They (interruption). Oh, that's true. See, that's my point. Estrada... Estrada, Miguel Estrada, who (the White House) wanted to put on the D.C. Court of Appeals, the first Hispanic there, (Democrats) used his wealthy background, his middle class background against him. He didn't understand the trials and tribulations of the people who might come before him, before the Circuit Court of Appeals because his parents were bankers! So what? There's this notion that you only can relate to all Americans if you walk ashore, you know, you started out as an amoeba you survived the sharks and everybody else in the ocean; you somehow found yourself a beach; you walked ashore and you made something of yourself. I just think it's just typical liberalism, but in this case, it did make it difficult for them to condemn this guy yesterday, Gonzales. But anyway -- sorry for getting sidetracked there, you people (laughing) -- the point is, these three guys that were brought in as witnesses when Gonzales finished. Did you watch this, Mr. Snerdley? Did you watch it or (interruption). Yeah, he was (interruption). Snerdley was on his way home. What, did you stop off at Wal-Mart or something on the way home? (laughs)
Let me tell you who these three guys were. One of them was on Matthews' show on Wednesday night. His name was John Hutson, Rear Admiral John Hutson, former Clinton administration judge advocate general, who is now president and Dean of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire. Some guy named Douglas Johnson, the executive director of the Center for Victims of Torture -- Now, this guy did not come out yesterday in the hearings, but this guy, Douglas Johnson, is on record as equating our acts of war with the same atrocities committed by those in Iraq who are beheading innocent civilians. This guy, if you so much as shout at somebody, you are torturing them -- and so they brought this guy up there and then they had Dean Harold Koh from Yale Law Skrool. He's another former Clinton administration official who is now the Dean of the Yale Law Skrool, and of course all three of these guys: "There's no reason for torture and Gonzales stands for torture, and we're not here to tell you we're not here to oppose him. We don't recommend that you confirm or not, but this guy stinks! This guy stands for torture. This guy's horrible. This guy's misreading the law. This guy's skirting the law."
This was during their statements. After they all finished their statements, Arlen Specter showed these guys for exactly who they are. Arlen Specter says, "I want to bring up a delicate subject with you, something that hasn't come up today, but I want to bring this up because it's crucially important in the discussions we're having having today about how we're going to behave in the future. From what I understand from you gentlemen, torture is something to be avoided at all costs. May I present to you the ticking time-bomb analogy. Now, many people have discussed this. I am not sure where I come down on this, but I want to ask you experts where you come down on the ticking time-bomb analogy." Do you know what that is, ladies and gentlemen? The ticking time bomb analogy is: You have captured a terrorist. This terrorist has a bomb that's ticking somewhere on an airplane, in a building, could be attached to a nuke. It's going to blow up in an hour. It's going to blow up in two hours. You don't know where the bomb is. The bomb is placed in such a place that tens or hundreds of thousands of people could die.
These guys and all the Democrat senators have spent all day saying, "Torture is horrible. Torture is rotten. Torture is not American. Torture is against the law." The president cannot override U.S. statute and authorize torture. The president can't even authorize torture and then grant clemency to the person who commits it. He can't even do that. "What, gentlemen, would you say about using torture during the ticking time bomb scenario?" And Admiral Hutson, the former JAG in the Clinton administration -- none of these guys would answer the question. None of them would answer the question. They came in there so damn sure, so damn sure, "We don't ever use torture! It's un-American! It's not who we are," but they would not say you wouldn't use it. They didn't even want to answer the question. I heard more legalese gobbledygook. I heard more elitist professorial gibberish than I have heard in 30 minutes in my life at one time. In fact, there was one slip-up. Admiral Hutson said, "Well, if you have to, but it shouldn't become who you are and it shouldn't set a precedent," and I said, "Well, your whole argument is out the window, then, admiral, because if you're going to authorize torture in the ticking bomb scenario, you're authorizing torture."
You are saying that there is a circumstance in which it is justified. That is, to save hundreds of thousands of innocent people. But he wouldn't admit it that way, but he as much as said it. Dean Koh, he skirted around this, this Doug Johnson, none of them wanted to answer the question. They didn't answer the question. I'm telling you, folks, it was the most telling part of the hearings yesterday, and also, when they were there, there were only two or three senators there. The chairman, Specter, John Cornyn from Texas who never left the room yesterday other than to vote on this silly -- oh, I can't wait to play for you some of the audio.(Laughing) We have even more audio of this Ohio protest yesterday. Oh-ho-ho-ho, folks! They're up their thanking Michael Moore. I was so right on yesterday. This is nothing but a bunch of pandering to the base. Cornyn was there. Pat Leahy hung around even though he couldn't talk toward the end of it, and Senator Kennedy stayed until the end of Gonzales because he demanded three and four rounds of questioning even when some senators hadn't had their second round.
He was acting petulant like a little baby saying, "I remember when we conducted 22 days of, of, of hearings into attorney general," and I'll tell you, Arlen Specter kept this in check yesterday, kept it in control. They're through with Gonzales, and the Democrats have lost this. They have already lost it. It's a fait accompli. He's going to be confirmed. Their efforts to mount any serious opposition went down the tubes yesterday. Chucka Schumer, for all practical purposes, the junior senator from New York, rather than senior, had the audacity -- and I don't have the exact quote in front of me but I can get it. He had the audacity to say to Gonzales, Alberto Gonzales, "Hey, look, we're kind of giving you a pass here. This attorney general, lower standard, much, much lower standard. If they send you back up here for the Supreme Court, you're not going to get away with this kind of softball questioning." So I guess, senator, what you're essentially saying is that you had "the soft bigotry of low expectations" on display yesterday for this Hispanic gentleman from the dirt and from the soil who rose to attend Harvard.
The former judge advocate general, John Hutson, Admiral John Hutson, who teaches law someplace hard to find on a road map in New Hampshire, he came in there. He was with Dean Koh and he was with this Douglas Johnson guy from Minnesota and they're going on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on talking about torture is no good ever. Then Specter hits him with the ticking bomb scenario, and here it came. I mean, Admiral Hutson said, "Weeeell, you know, you might resort to torture because you have to, to coerce the information." Well, doesn't that just sort of render this whole day yesterday obsolete and meaningless? Then he said he would prefer not to be drawn into so hypothetical and academic a subject late in the day, but the fact of the matter is, folks, that's all this was yesterday especially with these three guys in their statements and their questions, other than Specter's. It was nothing more than an academic exercise.
It was nothing more than what intellectuals call a feast, where they get to sit around and talk about hypotheticals. But when hard questions are asked and their rubber has to meet the road and the reality has to be dealt with, that's when they take a pass. That's when they make a U-turn and head back to the ivy halls, and the towers of academe where they can pretend that they're insulated from the real world, while telling themselves they are the real world. But you present them with a real-life, hard question: "We got a ticking bomb; we got a terrorist going to blow up a hundred thousand people. What do we do to find out where that bomb is? We've got one hour." (Sniveling liberal stammering) Not one of them said the Geneva Conventions. Not one of them said the Geneva Conventions. They didn't even want to go there. They didn't even want to answer the question yesterday, folks. We will. I'm going to try to get the audio for it. I'm going to try to get the audio of each of their three answers. We don't need all of the answer, Cookie, just some of it. It will show you: "B-deh, b-deh, b-deh, buh, buh..." Elmer Fudds. They became Elmer Fudds. It almost sounded like Bruce Babbitt. (sigh) It was just hilarious.
I've got four sound bites from the Gonzales hearings yesterday after he concluded. We had three guests, Harold Koh, former assistant secretary of state. He is currently the Dean of the law school at Yale. The admiral, John Hutson, former Navy judge advocate general Clinton administration, and Doug Johnson, the director of the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis. This guy, particularly, equates U.S. military action with the atrocities committed by terrorists, so opposed to torture is he. All three of these guys say Gonzales is dangerous. Have no reason for torture in this country. It's not who we are. Geneva Conventions should be extended to terrorists, blah, blah, blah. That's what they said in their opening statements. So Arlen Specter after their opening statements asked them a question.
SPECTER: And now with three individuals who are more, perhaps, academicians or at least in part academicians, we could explore a subject which we have not taken up, a delicate subject, and that is the issue of the so-called ticking bomb case on torture. There are some prominent authorities -- and I do not subscribe to this view but only set it forth for purposes of discussion -- that if it was known, probable cause, that an individual had a ticking bomb and was about to blow up hundreds of thousands of people in a major American city, that consideration might be given to torture.
RUSH: So that's how he set it up. Then he started the questioning and it began this way with Dean Koh.
SPECTER: Dean Koh, start with you. Are considerations for those tactics ever justifiable, even in the face of a ticking-bomb threat?
KOH: Well, senator, you're a former prosecutor, and I think that my approach would be to keep the flat ban, and if someone -- the president of time of the United States -- had to make a decision like that, someone would have to decide whether to prosecute him or not. But I don't think that the answer is to create an exception in the law, because an exception becomes a loophole, and a loophole starts to water down the prohibition. I think what we saw at Abu Ghraib is the reality of torture.
RUSH: Didn't want to answer the question. The question gets hard and the academic exercise ceases to exist. You know, these guys live in their ivory towers, divorced from the real world, and that's why they're able to think and say the things they do and look very lofty and idealistic and smarter and more elite than all the rest of us. But when they have to face real-world circumstances, "Weeeell, the president would have to do this but then we'd have to prosecute and I don't know. We don't even want to go there. We don't want to set the precedent and let's..." Abu Ghraib? There's nothing about Abu Ghraib that is relevant to specter's question whatsoever. No desire to answer this question whatsoever. The next question was asked of Admiral Hutson, the judge advocate general during the Clinton administration.
SPECTER: Dean Hutson, what do you think? Ever an occasion to even consider that?
HUTSON: I agree with, uh, with Dean Koh that it is always illegal. Now, you may decide that you are going to take the illegal action, ummm, because you have to.
RUSH: Huh? "I agree with Dean Koh. It's always illegal." Torture is always illegal, but you may have to take the action "if you have to." Okay. So what these guys are saying is, "We don't ever favor torture. It's always illegal. (whispering) You might have to in this circumstance. (loud) But we're going to nail whoever did it! No matter how many lives they saved, no matter. We're going to nail them because this isn't allowed in the United States, (whispering) even though you might have." This is the great thinking on the left, ladies and gentlemen, that sought to appear yesterday, did appear yesterday, in opposition to Judge Alberto Gonzales and up next, this is Douglas Johnson, who is the director of the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis.
JOHNSON: On the specifics of the -- of the ticking time bomb, I think that it's very overblown in our imaginations, and -- and it's very ripe with what I would...could only call fantasy and mythology.
RUSH: Okay. So he doesn't even want to answer the question because it will never happen. It's nothing but somebody's fantasy. It's nothing but something theoretical, as far as he's concerned so he's not going to deign to even answer the question. Well, what about planning? What about preparation? That's all Gonzales was doing: Seeking legal advice from a number of sources to present to the president, planning for certain characteristic circumstances or what have you as the war on terror was fought. But according to this guy, that's not even possible. That's just fantasy. Why, it's mythology. We don't even want to worry about it -- and these are the people that were brought up to tell us why Alberto Gonzales is not qualified to be the attorney general when they all three essentially ducked the question when it got hard. When it was just an academic exercise and they could all engage in their little intellectual feast (claps). Why, look at how smart we are! In the real world, when it came time to hammer the nails and screw the screws and clean the dishes and wash the windshield, "Uhhhh..." They're lost.
Even the most well known civil libertarian, Alan Dershowitz, would conone toruture to stave off a WMD attack.
While it may serve the administration in giving them some sort of public cover, this investigation does need to be done. It does appear that there was methods used that were exceptional rather than standard. That may have been necessary, but to prejudge each of the situations as a ticking time bomb as Rush was inferring was simply wrong.
Jefferson said:"State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules."
In the case of Kennedy vs. Gonzalez, one might paraphrase Jefferson thusly: "State a moral case to a person who grew up in poverty and to one who grew up in plenty. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by an artificial and inflated sense of himself and his own importance."
Torture.... There are those like me who would do it for revenge and smile at every scream. Torture my family and my revenge would be a long drawn out affair. Heck, I might even let you heal up a time or two just so I could make it last longer.
Once and for all, Abu Ghraib was not an example of torture. Ask POWs of Japanese WWII camps, or our soldiers in Vietnam.
I have a problem in equating humilation and degradement with torture. Putting panties on someone's head and making fun of their masculinity is not torture.
I'm sure they prayed day and night (the one who lived wrote the same in his recount of the time) for what you are calling torture.
I spit on your definition.
Quite the irony in that.
I actually would have found it ironic if I did't already know what a damned hypocrite Tubby is. He was probably so drunk at the hearing that he didn't remember that he was actually the only person in the room who was guilty of drowning someone.
Not to marginalize those who were tortured before or will be tortured in the future. My heart and prayers go to those who sufferred. But what was done was done. Barbarism is barbarism without a reason. Simply because "they" do it to us doesn't mean we stoop to their tactics unless absolutely necessary, ergo the ticking time bomb.
So if you must spit, spit.
What of the alleged abuses beyond Abu Ghraib?
That is great! lmao. "The Swimmer"
I don't think you LISTENED too well then.
A distinction was made, at one point, between Abu Grahab and Gitmo for instance.
From: http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB110497519167818391-IBjg4Njlah4m5uuaoCGbquBm5,00.html
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Too Nice for Our Own Good By HEATHER MAC DONALD January 6, 2005; Page A16 Senate Democrats plan to turn the confirmation hearings of Alberto Gonzales into a referendum on the war on terror -- specifically, on the Bush administration's decision that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to al Qaeda terrorists. They will argue that the denial of prisoner-of-war status to al Qaeda fighters resulted in the torture of prisoners in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. This "torture narrative" is gospel truth among elite opinion-makers, yet it is false in every detail. It relies on ignorance of the actual interrogation techniques promulgated after 9/11. However spurious, the narrative has had a devastating effect on interrogators' ability to get intelligence from detainees. Soon after the Afghanistan fighting began, Army interrogators realized that their part in the war on terror was not going according to script. Pentagon doctrine, honed in the Cold War, held that 95% of prisoners would break upon straightforward questioning. But virtually no al Qaeda and Taliban detainee was giving up information -- not in response to direct questioning, and not in response to army-approved psychological gambits for prisoners of war. Some al Qaeda fighters had received resistance training, which taught that Americans were strictly limited in how they could question prisoners. Failure to cooperate, they had learned, carried no penalties and certainly no risk of torture -- a sign, al Qaeda said, of American weakness. Even if a prisoner had not previously studied U.S. detention policies, he soon figured them out. "It became very clear very early on to the detainees that the Americans were just going to have them sit there," explains an Afghanistan interrogator. "They realized: 'The Americans will give us our Holy Book, they'll draw lines on the floor showing us where to pray, we'll get three meals a day with fresh fruit . . . we can wait them out.'" Traditional appeals to a prisoner's emotions, such as playing on his love of family or life, had little effect. "The jihadists would tell you, 'I've divorced this life, I don't care about my family,'" recalls an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Frustrated interrogators across the globe concluded that their best hope for getting information was to recreate the "shock of capture" -- that vulnerable mental state when a prisoner is most uncertain and most likely to respond to questioning. Many argued for a calibrated use of "stress techniques" -- prolonged questioning that would cut into a detainee's sleep schedule, for example, or making a prisoner kneel or stand. A crack interrogator from Afghanistan explains the psychological effect of stress: "Let's say a detainee comes into the interrogation booth and he's had resistance training. He knows that I'm completely handcuffed and that I can't do anything to him. If I throw a temper tantrum, lift him onto his knees, and walk out, you can feel his uncertainty level rise dramatically. He's been told: 'They won't physically touch you,' and now you have. The point is not to beat him up but to introduce the reality into his mind that he doesn't know where your limit is." Grabbing someone by the top of the collar has had a more profound effect on the outcome of questioning than any actual torture could have, this Army reservist maintains. "The guy knows: You just broke your own rules, and that's scary." Such treatment, though far short of torture, probably violates the Geneva Convention's norms for lawful prisoners of war, who must be protected from "any form of coercion." But terrorists fail every test for coverage under the Geneva Conventions: They seek to massacre civilians, they conceal their status as warriors, and they treat their own prisoners to such niceties as beheadings. President Bush properly found that terrorists do not qualify as Geneva-protected prisoners of war. In April 2003, the Pentagon finalized the rules for questioning unlawful combatants in Cuba, following a fierce six-month debate. The approved techniques were in many respects more restrictive than the Geneva conventions themselves. Providing a detainee an incentive for cooperation -- a McDonald's Filet-O-Fish sandwich or a Twinkie, say -- was forbidden unless specifically cleared by the secretary of defense, because not every prisoner would receive the goodie. Other longstanding army psychological techniques, such as attacking a detainee's pride or the classic good cop/bad cop routine, also required a specific finding of military necessity and notice to Donald Rumsfeld. The only nonconventional "stress" techniques on the final Guantanamo list are such innocuous interventions as adjusting the temperature or introducing an unpleasant smell into the interrogation room (but only if the interrogator is present at all times), reversing a detainee's sleep cycles from night to day, and convincing a detainee that his interrogator is not from the U.S. And those mild techniques could only be used with extensive bureaucratic oversight and medical monitoring to ensure "humane," "safe," and "lawful" application. The decision to exclude terrorists from Geneva coverage and the interrogation methods approved for unlawful combatants in Cuba had nothing to do with the Abu Ghraib anarchy. Military commanders in Iraq emphasized repeatedly that the conflict there would be governed by the Geneva Conventions. The interrogation rules developed for Iraq explicitly stated that they were promulgated under Geneva authority. Except for the presence of dogs, none of the behavior in the photos was included in interrogation rules. Mandated masturbation, dog leashes, assault, and stacking naked prisoners in pyramids -- none of these was approved (or even contemplated) interrogation practice in any theater of conflict. The Abu Ghraib abuse resulted rather from the Pentagon's failure to respond adequately to the Iraq insurgency and its inability to maintain military discipline in the understaffed facility. As the avalanche of prisoners taken in the street fighting overwhelmed the minimal contingent of soldiers at Abu Ghraib, order within the ranks broke down as thoroughly as order in the operation of the prison itself. The guards' sadistic and sexualized treatment of prisoners was just an extension of the chaos they were already wallowing in with no restraint from above. Almost all the behavior shown in the photographs occurred in the dead of night among military police, wholly separate from interrogations. Most abuse victims were not even scheduled to be interrogated. * * * Equally irrelevant to the prisoner abuse scandal is the infamous torture memo written by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee in August 2002. The CIA had asked him for guidance in interrogating al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah. Mr. Bybee responded that a U.S. law against torture forbade only physical pain equivalent to that "accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death" and that anti-torture conventions may not even bind the president during war. The Bybee opinion had no effect on interrogation practices among Pentagon interrogators in Afghanistan, Cuba or Iraq. Army interrogators were perfectly ignorant of executive-branch deliberations on the outer boundaries of pain and executive power, which were prepared for and seen only by the CIA. In the wake of the Abu Ghraib disaster and the ensuing media storm, the Pentagon has shut down every stress technique but one -- isolation -- and that can be used only after extensive review. An interrogator who so much as requests permission to question a detainee into the night could be putting his career in jeopardy. Interrogation plans have to be triple-checked all the way up through the Pentagon by bureaucrats who have never conducted an interrogation in their lives. To succeed in the war on terror, interrogators must be allowed to use carefully controlled stress techniques against unlawful combatants. Stress works, say interrogators. The techniques that the military has used to date come nowhere near torture; the advocates can only be posturing in calling them such. These self-professed guardians of humanitarianism need to come back to earth. Our terrorist enemies have declared themselves enemies of the civilized order. In fighting them, we must hold ourselves to our own high moral standards -- without succumbing to the utopian illusion that we can prevail while immaculately observing every precept of the Sermon on the Mount.
Wagglebee I like your style, excellent post. Thank you for sharing.
TT
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