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Bipartisanship And Truth
Open Left - Front Page —
Glenn repeats his citation of this passage from a NYT story:
The opposition to Mr. Brennan had been largely confined to liberal blogs, and there was not an expectation he would face a particularly difficult confirmation process. Still, the episode shows that the C.I.A.'s secret detention program remains a particularly incendiary issue for the Democratic base, making it difficult for Mr. Obama to select someone for a top intelligence post who has played any role in the agency's campaign against Al Qaeda since the Sept. 11 ...
The Media's Complicity In Torture And Law-Breaking
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan —
It begins with an inability to tell the truth in plain English and gets worse from there. Greenwald explains.
Dark Secret
N/A —
... interrogation, secret surveillance and the detention and trial of enemy combatants. Nine months later, in June 2004, Goldsmith resigned. Although he refused to discuss his resignation at the time, he had led a small group of administration lawyers in a behind-the-scenes revolt against what he considered the constitutional excesses of the legal policies embraced by his White House superiors in the war on terror.
But that was then. And this is now. Now Goldsmith bands together with that band of misguided zealots he fought against. ...
Torture Double-Think in the Media
Daily Kos —
... Today, as he occasionally does, he exchanged his needle for a chainsaw and put it to the pathetic coverage of John Brennan's opting out as a candidate for the job of CIA director. Greenwald writes long, and an excerpt scarcely does him justice, so I recommend that you click through and read the whole piece. Here are some bits to whet your appetite: ...
Moral clarity
The Sideshow —
Glenn Greenwald on How the media talks about torture and the rule of law: All of this underscores a crucial fact: a major reason why the Bush administration was able to break numerous laws in general, and subject detainees to illegal torture specifically, is because the media immediately mimicked the Orwellian methods adopted by the administration to speak about and obfuscate these matters. Objective propositions that were never in dispute and cannot be reasonably disputed were denied by the Bush administration, and -- for that reason alone (one side says it's ...
Jack Goldsmith: Rule of Law Is a Threat to National Security
Comments from Left Field —
Hard to believe that the same man who resigned from the Office of Legal Counsel after nine months of battling the Bush administration over atrociously reasoned legal justifications for torture and limitless presidential power is now arguing that the incoming president should abandon any plans to prosecute Bush, Cheney, Addington, et al. for war crimes and other gross violations of domestic and international law.
Goldsmith’s reasoning? Congress is investigating the Bush White House’s illegal activities, and for “political” reasons Obama has to let those investigations continue (can’t look ...
End of the year national security wrap-up --
The Reaction —
... ." Rose reveals that "Intelligence experts who analyzed Al-Qaeda detainee's statements about 'links' with Saddam Hussein were never told that he had been tortured." And in another example, like Glen Greenwald at Salon.com, we lament the manner in which breaches of the law are reported by the mainstream media. And I also found it ironic that the Director of National Intelligence felt it necessary to reveal that a ...
Danner: Revealing The Truth About Torture Is ‘Debilitated…By The Practices Of The American Press’
Think Progress —
On Sunday, journalist Mark Danner revealed a previously secret International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report, which concluded that “the Bush administration’s treatment of al-Qaeda captives ‘constituted torture,’ a finding that strongly implied that CIA interrogation methods violated international law.”
As The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan noted yesterday, when the Washington Post wrote up the report, they “put the word torture in quotation marks.” Appearing on CSPAN’s Washington Journal this morning, Danner took the press to task for engaging in a “semantic ...
