CIA interrogators used a handgun and an electric drill to try to frighten a captured al-Qaeda commander into giving up information, according to a long-concealed agency report due to be made public next week, former and current U.S. officials who have read the document said Friday.
The tactics — which one official described Friday as a threatened execution — were used on Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, according to the CIA’s inspector general’s report on the agency’s interrogation program. Nashiri, who was captured in November 2002 and held for four years in one of the CIA’s “black site” prisons, ultimately became one of three al-Qaeda chieftains subjected to a form of simulated drowning known as waterboarding.
The report also says that a mock execution was staged in a room next to one terrorism suspect, according to Newsweek magazine, citing two sources for its information. The magazine was the first to publish details from the report, which it did on its Web site late Friday.
A federal judge in New York has ordered a redacted version of the classified IG report to be publicly released Monday, in response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union. Since June, lawyers for the Justice Department and the CIA have been scrutinizing the document to determine how much of it can be made public. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has been weighing the report’s findings as part of a broader probe into the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation methods.
The IG’s report, written in 2004, offers new details about Nashiri’s interrogation, including the incidents in which the detainee reportedly was threatened with death or grave injury if he refused to cooperate, one current and one former U.S. official told The Post. Both officials have seen classified versions of the report. ad_icon
In one instance, an interrogator showed Nashiri a gun and sought to frighten the detainee into thinking he would be shot, the sources said. In a separate encounter, a power drill was held near Nashiri’s body and repeatedly turned on and off, said the officials, who spoke about the report on the condition of anonymity because it remains classified.
The article goes on to say that Jay Bybee ok’d these tactics so long as they weren’t intended to cause lasting mental harm, so Holder’s (potential) inquiry will necessarily skip looking at these events. If someone is going to be prosecuted for torture, it has to be for something other than threatening to use an electric drill on someone or partially drowning them. That would only be considered torture if some faceless bureaucrat hadn’t written a memo authorizing them. Oh well.
Last year at the Democratic convention, I was on a panel with Jonathan Alter in which he oddly asserted that people don’t pay attention to what’s said in the media. I asked him where he thought they got their information and he said “from each other.” I found that somewhat interesting coming from a journalist, needless to say.
There’s a weird propensity among villagers to think that they don’t affect public opinion, that it just exists out there in a vacuum and can be gauged separate and apart from what’s being reported. Ruth Marcus was on MSNBC earlier and she said this:
I think any time a politician is complaining about the media it means they have a bigger problem. [smirking] And certainly when Barack Obama starts complaining about his media coverage, you might have a little question about that, since he’s actually gotten fairly good media coverage throughout his rather meteoric career.
Look, I would not look at the media coverage and I would also not look at the town hall meetings as a gauge of the public mood, but I would look at the polls …
Now, I happen to think looking at the polls is probably a good thing in this case (see below) because they are actually showing that there is a decline in base support, which is important to acknowledge (although I won’t hold my breath for Marcus to do so.) But that is likely happening because by all appearances, Obama looks to be willing to cave to the teabaggers — and the media are kvelling about the good news.
The idea that the media and the teabaggers have nothing to do with the poll results is just cracked. Are people making their judgments based on some dream they had? Some conversation with a stranger? They are getting their information somewhere, and call me nuts, but I would guess it’s mostly from newspapers and television (and to a small extent blogs.)
The teabaggers have been dramatically in the news for the past few weeks and Obama’s poll numbers have taken a hit. I certainly don’t believe that it’s because everyone agrees with the teabaggers, but it’s insane to think that the news coverage of it, and the health care debate in the media, hasn’t had an effect.
I guess this is the MSM’s way of avoiding responsibility, but what it really shows is that they don’t take their jobs seriously and, therefore, they shouldn’t be surprised to be losing market share to those who do. They certainly shouldn’t be angry when they are declared to be irrelevant, since they themselves are the ones who say it the most.
Update:Here’s Jamison Foser with the facts on this. read ’em and weep.
I have started working with Brave New Films on their Sick For Profit campaign, which exposes the giant salaries, stock options, and general high-livin’ of our nation’s insurance company executives, all of whom profit from denying care rather than offering anything of value to the system. My latest post shows that everyone understands the failure of the current for-profit system, even a certain excitable lad who goes by the name “Glenn Beck.” Have a look.
… we have a few leaders who are the powerful advocates behind closed doors, moving the process along, steeling the backbones of the tepid and nervous, when they need steeling, and providing the intellectual firepower when people lose their way from time to time. No one– two simple words that I chose with care– has been a better advocate for working families inside progressive circles than Maryland Congresswoman Donna Edwards.
Blue America was the original online home-away-from-home for Donna Edwards when she first ran for Congress in 2006 against corrupt and reactionary Democratic hack (now a K Street lobbyist), Al Wynn. Our PAC raised more money and more love for her than for anyone else running for the House. And since becoming a member she’s had the best– meaning most progressive– voting record of any member of the House. She has been more than an ally; she has been an advocate, not because someone pressures her or bullies her but because she is a leader and has been for many, many years. Her beliefs are the beliefs many of us share, beliefs that are the glue that holds us together. If no one is perfect, there is no one as close to that as Donna Edwards.
No doubt you’ve noticed that Blue America is hosting a netroots-wide campaign, Standing Up For The Public Option which has raised around $350,000 from more than 5,500 donors so far for the 65 Congressmembers who are vowing to stick with the public option even after the House of Lords tries to sell American families out to the insurance business at the inevitable conference committee meeting this fall. Donna has among the top dozen number of donors and was one of the first members to cross the $5,000 mark in contributions. Last night I asked her how this battle is looking from her perspective inside the halls of Congress. She was happy to craft something for me to share:
“The stakes for comprehensive health care reform are high. It’s time for our rhetoric to match our policy. That means that we must be clear about what constitutes comprehensive reform.
Over the past several weeks, I have held numerous interviews, (print, radio, television, internet), town hall meetings and other public fora discussing health care reform. I am excited that real people actually want bold, comprehensive reform and they want to understand the details. This response has invigorated me as never before.
I just want to be absolutely clear–comprehensive reform must include a robust public health insurance option. Otherwise, we’re just tinkering around the edges and run the risk of giving even more power to the already too powerful insurance and pharmaceutical industries and their overpaid CEO’s. I am unequivocal, unwavering, and unapologetic about my support of a robust public option — in and outside of the Congress. Indeed I appeared on the CBS Evening News just this week urging Democrats to move forward on healthcare reform, including a robust public option, with or without Republican support since they seem more interested in the politics of taking down Presidnt Obama than healthcare for millions of Americans.
It is important that we stay focused on getting a robust public option included in the House version of the bill — nothing watered down. As a progressive member of the House of Representatives, I can’t spend time guessing or speculating about what the Senate will do. I do know that if we don’t do our work to get a strong bill out of the House, we won’t be able to beg, borrow or steal a robust public option from the Senate. And, the naysayers and opponents of reform know this — they know what’s at stake. That’s why they’ve tried to use August to kill reform. With your help, it hasn’t worked and it won’t work.
To accomplish our goal, we must be vigorous advocates for a public option that uses the Medicare provider network, starts immediately without triggers, and has a payment system that encourages quality patient care. We’re almost there, and that’s why it will take your voices outside of Congress and those of us inside to encourage our colleagues and our President to be courageous to the end. I hope you will continue to join me in this fight for comprehensive health care reform.
No more tinkering.
No more dictates by the big insurers and pharmaceutical companies.
No more deceptions and distractions.
Let’s fight for a robust public option to ensure quality, affordable healthcare and lower costs for everyone and provide transparency and accountability. I know we can do this. I will keep fighting, but I need you to keep fighting with me.
Thank you.
Rep. Donna F. Edwards (MD-4)
One of the most important, and underappreciated, dynamics in this whole sausage making process is that the Senate is allowing the Gang Of Six to pretend that they have the last word in this process. And it’s mighty irritating to those in People’s House who somehow got the idea that they have an equal say in legislation. (Maybe they read it in The Constitution.) Even Blue Dogs like Steny get their backs up when the House of Lords decides to turn up its blue noses at the other House and pretend they are irrelevant. Institutional pride plays a part in all congressional negotiations and should be taken into account as we analyze what’s going on here.
Edwards and others who are standing up for the public option are not just standing up for the progressive caucus agenda, they are putting the spine back into the House of Representatives. It’s called leadership and they continue to deserve our thanks for doing it.
You can still contribute here, if you haven’t done so. At the time of this writing, we are at a staggering $337,000.
The conventional wisdom, however, has been that the Democrats are suffering from some sort of political Icarus syndrome. They are flying too high and too soon, and the public disapproval will send them crashing back to earth. The problem with that rationale, at least in our numbers this week, is that it doesn’t match with the data. Across the board, the drops among Obama and the Democratic Party have come not from the loyal opposition, nor have they come from dismayed Independents. They have come from Democrats…Anyone who thinks the protracted arguments over health care aren’t frustrating the Democratic base need look no further. A ten-point dip in net favorability, in a single week, is a pretty solid statement. A quick look at the generic Congressional ballot confirms that the Democrats have shed a great deal of soft supporters over the last few weeks. The margin between the Democrats and Republicans now rests at six points (35-29), the closest we have seen on that question since the item was inserted into the poll a couple of months back. Interestingly, the Republicans have gained virtually nothing over that time. The steady stream of voters no longer willing to commit to the Democrats on the ballot test have almost uniformly gone into the ranks of the undecided.
One of the most common errors in mainstream reporting is the default assumption that when a politician suffers in the polls it’s because they are going “too far,” whatever that means. They never consider whether it might be because he isn’t going far enough.
There are other stupid assumptions as well, such as the silly contention that George W. Bush won the 2004 election on the basis of “moral values,” — meaning conservative moral values. (Had I been exit polled, I would have told the pollster that I voted on the basis of moral values too — those values telling me that the immoral illegal war in Iraq meant that George W. Bush should be tried as a war criminal.) The biases of the village narrative drive the interpretation of polls in such a way that they actually end up changing public opinion.
This poll shows that Obama is losing altitude alarmingly fast and he’s losing it mostly among his own followers. Why? Well, nobody who reads this blog needs to ask that question. (And if you do, just read Paul Krugman and Glenn Greenwald this morning.) There have been a series of issues, one on top of the other and each one more distressing, in which the fundamental principles on which Obama ran have been either betrayed or compromised. It’s been too much, too many, in too short a time, from civil liberties to secrecy to cozying up with industry behind closed doors. These aren’t minor issues — they go directly to values and principles.
He’s losing trust among the base because he appears to believe that those constituents have no serious claim on his agenda. Even the appointment of Sotomayor did not reflect a liberal commitment beyond the breaking of ethnic barriers, which is wonderful, but cannot be seen as a substitute for progressive principle. Bargaining away the one substantial progressive demand in health care reform is seen as simple bad faith.
I’m not one to trust politicians, but I recognize that most people do, even ardent partisans. They are busy, they don’t want to have to follow every detail of the political sturm and drang or try to read between the lines of the NY Times every day to try to figure out what’s going on. They more or less inform themselves before an election about what their representatives say they believe in, they assess their sincerity and commitment to certain broad principles and values, and then they leave the governing in their hands, trusting them to do what they said they would do to the best of their ability. Obama promised a lot. A whole lot. And he garnered the trust of many millions of liberal minded folks. When that kind of trust is betrayed, it’s very hard to get it back.
I certainly hope they are not fighting the last war. Bill Clinton did not suffer a backlash in his base because he was operating in an environment of conservative dominance and a very weak left flank. The base was desperate and demoralized. But it’s not 1996 anymore and that strategy just won’t work this time. The conservatives are a clownish group of know-nothings whose approval ratings are in the single digits. They should not, in a democratic society, have the power to shape strategy to the extent they are and the president should not be empowering them. Big business and finance is even more discredited and has no trust among the poeple whatsoever. Openly catering to them in this environment is nothing short of defiant (and politically suicidal.)
Nobody expects that the left will get everything it wants. But they do expect to be treated with respect as a vital constituency in the Democratic Party that has to answer to its voters just as the Blue Dogs do. And those voters are making some demands that must be taken as seriously as those minority conservatives who believe that they are in charge no matter who winselectkions in this country.
Obviously, Obama has to reach out to more than his base as all presidents do, but he also has to recognize that he can’t treat them like a bargaining chip. These polls prove that to some extent this is a zero sum game and therefore, he can’t be all things to all people. His political capital is dwindling significantly from all directions and he’s going to have make some choices.
Sometimes I wonder if the administration decided to do health care this year just to keep us from focusing on this stuff:
The delinquency rate for mortgage loans on one-to-four-unit residential properties rose to a seasonally adjusted rate of 9.24 percent of all loans outstanding as of the end of the second quarter of 2009, up 12 basis points from the first quarter of 2009, and up 283 basis points from one year ago, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) National Delinquency Survey. … The delinquency rate breaks the record set last quarter. The records are based on MBA data dating back to 1972.
The delinquency rate includes loans that are at least one payment past due but does not include loans somewhere in the process of foreclosure. The percentage of loans in the foreclosure process at the end of the second quarter was 4.30 percent, an increase of 45 basis points from the first quarter of 2009 and 155 basis points from one year ago. The combined percentage of loans in foreclosure and at least one payment past due was 13.16 percent on a non-seasonally adjusted basis, the highest ever recorded in the MBA delinquency survey. … “While the rate of new foreclosures started was essentially unchanged from last quarter’s record high, there was a major drop in foreclosures on subprime ARM loans. The drop, however, was offset by increases in the foreclosure rates on the other types of loans, with prime fixed-rate loans having the biggest increase. As a sign that mortgage performance is once again being driven by unemployment, prime fixed-rate loans now account for one in three foreclosure starts. A year ago they accounted for one in five….” said Jay Brinkmann, MBA’s Chief Economist.
How in the hell is this economy going to rebound if the housing crisis just keeps on keeping on? It’s a vicious circle: the housing crisis creates unemployment which creates more housing crisis and on and on.
I’m totally engaged in the health care debate, and think it’s vitally important for the citizens of this country and the Democratic party as an institution. But really, none of that is going to matter if the economy doesn’t adequately turn around and financial reforms aren’t put in place to keep this from happening again, more often and with even more dire consequences. On some level we’re being played and I think most of us know it and don’t want to admit it.
But hey, at least Robert Rubin feels really terrible about everything, so that’s something.
Now back to our regularly scheduled program of chasing our tails.
This economy is just terrible on so many people. The stories are just heart breaking, with people losing their life savings, their homes, their jobs, their health insurance, everything.
Thank the Good Lord for the NY Times or we wouldn’t hear about the absolute worst of the news. This one hurts so much:
Rise of the Super-Rich Hits a Sobering Wall
[E]conomists say — and data is beginning to show — that a significant change may in fact be under way. The rich, as a group, are no longer getting richer. Over the last two years, they have become poorer. And many may not return to their old levels of wealth and income anytime soon.
For every investment banker whose pay has recovered to its prerecession levels, there are several who have lost their jobs — as well as many wealthy investors who have lost millions. As a result, economists and other analysts say, a 30-year period in which the super-rich became both wealthier and more numerous may now be ending.
The individual stories will make you cry:
In one stark example, John McAfee, an entrepreneur who founded the antivirus software company that bears his name, is now worth about $4 million, from a peak of more than $100 million. Mr. McAfee will soon auction off his last big property because he needs cash to pay his bills after having been caught off guard by the simultaneous crash in real estate and stocks.
Auction his last big property? Down to his last four million? Dear God, where will it stop?
Can’t we do something to help these people? Oh, right. Well, something more, then?
Jon Stewart went easy on Betsy McCaughey. He eventually got around to the meat of the issue after letting her hang for a while (I particularly liked the part where he got her to admit that patients could request to be kept alive by any means necessary, too), but you can see how she gets away with this. She walks in with a big binder to try and connote authority, but it’s a prop… by the end she’s just flipping through it when asked for evidence, as if she’s never read it before. Stewart says “you should put Yellow Post-Its in there to mark your place,” which would never occur to McCaughey because people are just supposed to expect her to have possession of the facts. She cashes checks off nobody ever challenging her. And when Stewart finally does, it’s delicious to watch.
The tsunami of lies is too big, and a substantial part of the country on McCaughey’s side of the tribe would believe her over Stewart even after this embarrassing performance. But the antidote to most of this comes in two words – “Prove it.” And they never can.
Here’s an interesting article by Johann Hari on the cultlike qualities of the right wing. He perceptively highlights the continuum between what we all saw during the Bush years and today, something which I wish more media would do because it’s very clarifying:
This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy-world isn’t new; it’s only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear Saddam Hussein had no Weapons of Mass Destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed, as one Republican congressman put it, that it was “the greatest hoax in human history”, and all the world’s climatologists were “liars”. The American media then presents itself as an umpire between “the rival sides”, as if they both had evidence behind them. It’s a shame, because there are some areas in which a conservative philosophy — reminding us of the limits of grand human schemes, and advising caution — could be a useful corrective. But that’s not these what so-called “conservatives” are providing: instead, they are pumping up a hysterical fantasy, that is only a thin skin covering raw economic interests and base prejudices. […] Indeed, if you spend any time with American right-wingers — as I have, reporting undercover on events like the National Review cruise and the Christian Coalition Solidarity Tour of Israel — you soon find that your arguments don’t center on philosophy. You have to concentrate on correcting basic factual errors about the real world. They insist Europe has fallen to Islam, since Muslims immigrants are becoming a majority and are imposing sharia law. In reality, Muslims make up 3 percent of the population of Europe, and most of them oppose sharia law. They insist Franklin Roosevelt caused the Great Depression, and should have cut government spending. In reality, whenever he did cut spending — as he tried periodically throughout the 1930s — the economy began to tank. But explain this patiently — with a thousand sources — and they simply shriek that you are lying, and they know “in their heart” what is true. They insist gay marriage would cause the institution of the family to collapse. In reality, where it has already been introduced in Europe, heterosexual families continue just as before. On the list goes: evolution is a lie, a blastocyst is akin to a baby, torture produces actionable intelligence…
This fantasy/delusion is not a bug, it’s a feature, as Perlstein pointed out in his article this week-end. And those who think that it is something that can be appeased or dealt with in good faith are badly mistaken. After all, we have the primary Senate negotiator saying publicly that the health care reforms include euthanasia. If that has become something that’s “just part of the debate” even on theelite level.then we have gone even further into the looking glass than before.Hari continues:
Up to now, Obama has not responded well to this onslaught of unreason. He has tried to conciliate the elite economic interests, and joke about the fanatical fringe they are stirring up. He has shamefully assured the pharmaceutical companies that an expanded healthcare system will not use the power of government as a purchaser to bargain down drug prices, while wryly saying that he “doesn’t want to kill Grandma.” Rather than challenging these hard interests and bizarre fantasies aggressively, he has tried to flatter and soothe them. His healthcare plan is weaker and harder to explain as a result. But this kind of mania can’t be co-opted: it can only by over-ruled. Sometimes in politics you will have enemies, and they must be democratically defeated. The political system cannot be gummed up by a need to reach out to the maddest people with the maddest fears. There is no way to expand healthcare without angering Big Pharma and the Republicaloons. So be it. As Arianna Huffington put it, “It is as though, at the height of the civil rights movement, you thought you had to bring together Martin Luther King and George Wallace and make them agree. It’s not how change happens.”
But you can’t ignore then either. They share this society with us, are relatives and neighbors and there’s no getting away from them even if we wanted to. This problem has to be dealt with.
If you wonder why people are so unbelievably misinformed in this country here’s one good place to look:
LIMBAUGH: I love it when the global warmers — and I think they’re — you know, you people run around and you talk about the birthers and how irresponsible and off their rockers they are. The global warming believers are just as wacko as the birthers if you want to look at them as wacko. I mean, if there is a leftist equivalent of the birthers out there, it is the global warmers. And this story, they’re blaming the ocean for falling global temperatures. The sun warms the oceans, so any fluxuation comes from the sun! There is no other heat source for the ocean. At any rate, who in their right minds trusts Gore or Obama on this? The reason that we’re in a cooling period is sunspot activity — anybody knows this. The sun’s cooled a little bit and only a fool would be surprised that Earth’s temperatures have fallen as a result. I mean, for crying out loud, folks, the sun is in a solar minimum phase right now. And we’ve studied these, and we know when they’re in minimum phases, and they’re in one now. And it’s — it just makes common sense if you’re in a solar minimum phase that the temperatures are going to be lower here on Earth. I — have you ever just been as amazed as I am that the global warmers just discount the sun? It’s not a factor, as far as they’re concerned. And it’s the only factor! Without it, we wouldn’t be.
People listen to this kind of drivel all day long on talk radio and Fox News. Why should anyone be surprised that they think the government is going to be sending Death Agents to nursing homes to kill old people? Why are we startled to hear people claim that Obama isn’t an American citizen or that medicare isn’t a government program? They are being indoctrinated in idiocy by radical demagogues and for some reason everybody persists in thinking there is no harm in it.
These fatuous gasbags empower the teabaggers and swift boaters and I think we can see the result — ill-informed, know nothings holding the country hostage with total irrationality.