The Tortured Party
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| Fri, 12-12-2008 - 11:15pm |
Now that he's got nothing to lose by dropping the pandering, McCain issued a joint report just that found that Rumsfeld was right in the middle of authorizing the torture:
"Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld Approves Aggressive Techniques (U)
(U) With respect to GTMO’s October 11, 2002 request to use aggressive interrogation
techniques, Mr. Haynes said that “there was a sense by the DoD Leadership that this decision
was taking too long” and that Secretary Rumsfeld told his senior advisors “I need a
recommendation.” On November 27, 2002, the Secretary got one. Notwithstanding the serious
legal concerns raised by the military services, Mr. Haynes sent a one page memo to the
Secretary, recommending that he approve all but three of the eighteen techniques in the GTMO
request. Techniques such as stress positions, removal of clothing, use of phobias (such as fear of
dogs), and deprivation of light and auditory stimuli were all recommended for approval.
(U) Mr. Haynes’s memo indicated that he had discussed the issue with Deputy Secretary
of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, and General
Myers and that he believed they concurred in his recommendation. When asked what he relied
on to make his recommendation that the aggressive techniques be approved, the only written
legal opinion Mr. Haynes cited was Lieutenant Colonel Beaver’s legal analysis, which senior
military lawyers had considered “legally insufficient” and “woefully inadequate,” and which
LTC Beaver herself had expected would be supplemented with a review by persons with greater
experience than her own.
(U) On December 2, 2002, Secretary Rumsfeld signed Mr. Haynes’s recommendation,
adding a handwritten note that referred to limits proposed in the memo on the use of stress
positions: “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”
(U) SERE school techniques are designed to simulate abusive tactics used by our
enemies. There are fundamental differences between a SERE school exercise and a real world
interrogation. At SERE school, students are subject to an extensive medical and psychological
pre-screening prior to being subjected to physical and psychological pressures. The schools
impose strict limits on the frequency, duration, and/or intensity of certain techniques.
Psychologists are present throughout SERE training to intervene should the need arise and to
help students cope with associated stress. And SERE school is voluntary; students are even
given a special phrase they can use to immediately stop the techniques from being used against
them.
(U) Neither those differences, nor the serious legal concerns that had been registered,
stopped the Secretary of Defense from approving the use of the aggressive techniques against
detainees. Moreover, Secretary Rumsfeld authorized the techniques without apparently
providing any written guidance as to how they should be administered. "
http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/supporting/2008/Detainees.121108.pdf
What a surprise! There will be a lot more on this. If we don't hold those who broke the law accountable, the rampant rate of lawbreaking in the Republican Party will not slow down in the slightest. It will also be a good message to Democrats not to make the same mistakes.

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Remember those reports Businessweek did in China?
< Of course it was an ideologue's war. What better reason to fight than to protect your ideals and way of life? Communism threatened that...and so we fought to stop it's spread. A noble cause, but the people didn't have the heart to see it through...or to fight to win.
>>> The wars we have gotten involved with because of the ideologues' thinking are Korea, Vietnam and per the latest "democracy" ideologue reasoning, Iraq. How did Korea and Vietnam turn out?
Don't forget the cold war...or the War of Independence...both of which turned out pretty well for us. I suspect there is a fair amount of ideology in the decision to go into any war...which is good.
>>> Well, we and our allies backed South Korea, and the Russians and most importantly the Chinese backed North Korea. That was all about the two Koreas coming together and being one, but one was communist and one was not. That war went on for three or four years, I can't remember now, and after much death and destruction, they are right where they were before the war began over 50 years ago, except with electric fences and machine guns along the border. How familiar does Vietnam sound to Korea? Why they are almost exactly the same, with a couple of exceptions. We were there like 10 years, much death and destruction, but this time, it's all communist.
Ya win some, ya lose some...but it certainly doesn't mean you don't try.
>>> Those kind of wars don't seem to work out so well for us, and you give the liberals far too much credit if you think they were the monkey wrench in those war machines. Those wars should have been a lesson in not waging wars for ideologue reasons, but apparently they were not.
The problems with those wars wasn't our ideology. It was a fear of commitment...which is also a problem we faced in Iraq.
>>> Then we have the majors, WWI and WWII. In WWI, I don't think we got into that soon enough, and the same for WWII. Our allies were getting the heck kicked out of them while we sat around being isolationists. I've forgotten why we finally entered WWI, but surely remember why we got into WWII. They were just and necessary wars hundreds of thousands of "liberals" like my father volunteered to fight in when he didn't have to having a child, my brother, and an elderly mother who was dependent upon him.
So you say we were "too hawkish" on one hand, and "not hawkish enough" on the other? How do you reconcile the two? And in both cases, it was the anti-war crowd...i.e. the liberals...who prevented the US from taking action sooner, rather than later.
>>> Ideologues who want to wage war for "their" ideals are the most dangerous people this country will ever know, democrat, republican or independent.
Ideals are one of the things that make this country great.
Britain is a "friend"...China is more like the distasteful guy you do business with but always keep a keen eye on.
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