Back in 1998 Newt Gingrich made a fatal decision to allow the Lewinsky scandal to be used in the midterm elections despite the fact that the public supported Clinton and the press was already acting like slavering beasts day in and day out on the subject. He had expected that they Republicans would gain seats in the election and instead they almost lost their majority. He lost his Speakership.
What he learned was that when the press and outside groups are already doing the job for you, take the high road.
That’s why he’s saying right now that the Republicans should not be so crude as to put out critical Balogojevich-Obama Youtubes under the name of the RNC. It’s not because he’s suddenly discovered ethics or that he thinks that Obama is special. It’s that he sees that the press and the gasbags are running with this anyway and he wants to position the party as acting in good faith. They aren’t, of course, as we saw with the auto bridge loan debacle. But Newtie understands that it’s important to pretend that when they “oppose” it’s for principled reasons rather than obstruction for political gain. Which is, of course, exactly what they are doing.
Never take Newtie at face value. He’s a slime, just as his name suggests. Always has been, always will be.
Where Lincoln is concerned, no such schism exists. He is “considered by both historians and ordinary Americans to have been the greatest American president,” says the taxpayer-supported website of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. Oh, really? Tell that to Bragdon Bowling, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. He won’t be lighting any candles for Abraham Lincoln on Feb. 12.”Lincoln is responsible for the devastation of the founding principles of our country, and you can lay 600,000 bodies at his feet, the casualties of a totally unnecessary war,” Bowling told me. As for the bicentennial, “It’s just a continuation of the Lincoln myth-making paid for with public dollars.”Bowling sounds like an outlier crank, but south of the Mason-Dixon line his views aren’t particularly radical. His anti-Lincoln line springs partly from popular culture, and partly from academic scholarship. In the marketplace of ideas the Lincoln-o-phobes lack the throw weight of, say, David Herbert Donald (of Lincoln, Mass.) or Doris Kearns Goodwin. But they are there, for those who want to hear them.What’s their beef? They view Lincoln as a cynical, self-serving politician with no particular aversion to slavery, who precipitated the Civil War, sorry – the War Against Southern Independence – to keep his Republican party in the White House. “It was all about power,” Bowling observed at an anti-Lincoln rally in Richmond in 2003. “All so Lincoln and his friends could consolidate their power to tell other people how to live their lives.”Former University of South Carolina historian Clyde Wilson particularly objects to the beatification of the 16th president as a genial, all-knowing Christ figure trapped in a bloody hecatomb not of his own making. Writing on the website of the Abbeville Institute, a think tank for revisionist Southern scholarship, Wilson calls Lincoln “the tender-hearted leader who authorized ruthless terrorism against women and children, refused generous offers of prisoner exchange while declaring medicine a contraband of war, accepted Grant’s costly policy of losing three men for every one Confederate killed, was not above keeping his own son out of harm’s way, and invited his own fate by clandestinely organizing the attempted assassination of Jefferson Davis.”Wilson sent me a copy of a forthcoming anti-Lincoln article, timed to coincide with the bicentennial. Inter alia, it reserves particular scorn for Boston, whose citizens, Wilson believes, fanned the flames of war to ensure the economic hegemony of the industrial North over the agrarian South. Yankee hypocrisy is a favorite target: “New England shippers got rich in the illegal African slave trade to Cuba and Brazil right up to The War and Bostonians owned slave sugar plantations in Cuba even after The War,” he writes.Wilson even assails Ms. Julia Ward Howe of Mt. Vernon Street, for the “bigotry and blasphemy” of her composition, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” “She subsumes Christ to her secular vengeance and conquest,” he explained to me. That’s a little rich, I’d say.
I always find it fascinating that the people who want to reach into your bedrooms, hospital rooms and wombs, are always upset about some phantom liberal who supposedly wants to tell them how to live. But it seems to be based upon this odd idea that goes all the way back to the civil war that if a fellow American is not in 100% agreement that they are trying to inflict their “values” on others.
Gay marriage is a good example. Nobody says that people must be gay and must marry others of the same sex. But these people simply can’t live and let live. The mere fact that others don’t believe as they do is seen as a threat and they seek to stop it. And they always do it while excoriating the other side for “seeking power.”
(And the irony of excoriating Lincoln for spilling the blood of hundreds of thousands for immoral reasons in an unnecessary war for the benefit of rich hypocrites who made money arming the enemy is just too rich…)
I don’t know that there are very many of these anti-Lincoln cranks out there. But the underlying philosophy is quite pervasive among conservatives, even if they don’t trace it to Lincoln and the civil war. I recall another conservative from a few years back who also seemed to believe that the Democrats were only interested in power for its own sake:
By “the left” I’m including almost the entire Democratic Party, you can count the exceptions on your fingers, you can name them, Zell Miller, Joe Lieberman…The whole mainstream of the party is engaged in an effort that is a betrayal of America, what they care about is not winning the war on terror…I don’t think they care about the danger to us as Americans or the danger to people in other countries. They care about power.
That’s right. Everyone in the Democratic party was engaged in an effort to betray America because they only care about power. Just like Lincoln and the northerners. I suspect that projection is the foundation of this ongoing sense of conservative victimization. They have to quiet the voices in their own heads by shutting up those who disagree with them.
And all I could think when I was reading this story was how extraordinarily fucked up it is that, if you want to be a parent, you’re better off being a gay male penguin in China than a gay male human in Arkansas.
Do click over for the sweet story behind that quote.
The Federal Reserve cut their key interest rate as low as they can go – virtually to zero, although the bank rate is more like .5%. The investors loved it! Well, today they did, anyway. But this is the final tool in the shed for the Fed, and a zero interest rate policy (or ZIRP!) hasn’t shown much success elsewhere in the world:
There’s a bit of room left to go, since the rate isn’t actually zero, but essentially, the Fed has run out of ability to use standard monetary policy. It’s broken and it doesn’t work anymore. Deflationary expectations have set in, and folks figure that a dollar a year from now will be worth more than dollar now, so even borrowing at zero or .5% doesn’t seem like that good a deal.
As Bloomberg pointed out, the Bank of Japan kept rates at zero for five years, and it did squat. So the Fed has announced that it will use non-standard measures like buying up government backed housing bonds, and is considering buying long term treasuries, whose rates simply aren’t dropping, even as people accept negative returns to buy short term securities. (They are doing so because the Fed was paying 1% interest on reserves, and treasuries can be used as reserves, which is why the Fed dropped the amount they pay on reserves to .25%.) […]
Deflation can always be fixed, in the worst case scenario, the government could just send everyone a gift card for $50,000 which expires in 3 months and tell them to use it or lose it. But it can’t be fixed by giving money to banks who won’t lend it to the real economy, and even pushing down long bond rates really isn’t going to matter as long as there are deflationary expectations.
So, expect the Fed to spend a LOT of money and get very little in return until someone uses some of the money to buy a clue. In the meantime, remember, you’re probably going to have to pay this money back, no matter how little it does, unless the government manages to make itself go bankrupt. In theory the US need never go bankrupt, but a lot more of this, and it may turn out to be the lesser evil.
Paul Krugman calls it the liquidity trap – the Federal Reserve can’t implement a rate change to facilitate lending at all, and the banks aren’t being forced to lend, and the quantity of money is meaningless because bonds are worth essentially just as much. The Fed is also planning quantitative easing, basically increasing the money supply. But when money is the same as bonds, what’s the difference? As Ian says, we’re exploding the deficit and getting little in return.
The other worry is deflation; consumer prices fell at a record rate last month, which means that retailers can’t sell enough to make a profit, which means they cut jobs, which means less people have money, and prices have to drop to sell anything, etc. Nasty business. While Kevin Drum notes that the drop in prices is entirely due to cheaper oil, taking that out of the equation there was virtually no change in inflation, which is unsustainable.
The textbook tells us to engage massive fiscal spending, as nobody is equipped to spend at all right now except for government. But Robert Reich is absolutely correct, IMO, that spending won’t be enough.
Keynesianism is based on two highly-questionable assumptions in today’s world. The first is that American consumers will eventually regain the purchasing power needed to keep the economy going full tilt. That seems doubtful. Median incomes dropped during the last recovery, adjusted for inflation, and even at the start weren’t much higher than they were in the 1970s. Consumers kept spending by borrowing against their homes. But that’s over. The second assumption seems even more doubtful: that, even if middle-class Americans had the money to continue the old pattern of spending, they could do so forever. Yet the social and environmental costs would soon overwhelm us. Even if climate change were not an imminent threat to the planet, the rest of the world will not allow American consumers to continue to use up a quarter of the planet’s natural resources and generate an even larger share of its toxic wastes and pollutants.
The current deep recession is a nightmare for people who have lost their jobs, homes, and savings; and it’s part of a continuing nightmare for the very poor. That’s why we have to do all we can to get the economy back on track. But many other Americans are discovering they can exist surprisingly well buying fewer of the things they never really needed to begin with. What we most lack, or are in danger of losing, are the things we use in common — clean air, clean water, public parks, good schools, and public transportation, as well as social safety nets to catch those of us who fall.
That’s why it’s not enough to spend, spend, spend, until the housing market comes back or everyone gets excited about the latest iGadget again. Indeed we need to create a new economy that is not based so heavily on unsustainable consumer spending. President-elect Obama has the right idea in talking about a green economy – not only would the money spent go into something of value, like the commons, but the emphasis on green technologies could spur innovation and perhaps generate something we can export for a change. Right now America is the number one exporter of raw materials in the world – we make precious little, give away our material wealth and do nothing but consume. When you strip away the CDOs and the CDSes and the subprime lenders, THAT’s the problem. We’re a bubble-based economy out of necessity. Without re-industrializing America, without making products the rest of the world wants, that will never change.
James Boyce has more, and believe me, I gave you the GOOD news.
Senate Republicans have requested information about Attorney General nominee Eric Holder’s role in the Elian Gonzales controversy as part of a broad probe into his tenure with the Clinton administration and potential ties to presidential scandals during that era. Eight of nine GOP members on the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote Clinton Presidential Library Director Terry Garner on Thursday to ask for 10 categories of material, and that includes any information on Holder’s involvement with the Cuban boy seized by U.S. agents in April 2000. Holder was deputy attorney general at the time. While the senators have publicly stated concerns about Holder’s role in the 2001 pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich, the move to focus attention on the highly controversial Gonzales case indicates the confirmation of President-elect Obama’s top law enforcement official will be anything but smooth. Seeking information about Gonzales suggests Republicans are seeking issues that will resonate outside the Beltway, unlike the Rich pardon.An aide to Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) says Republicans never showed the Clinton Library letter to Leahy but simply began referring to it in comments on the Senate floor on Thursday. The aide also said Republicans are being hypocritical by asking for a voluminous amount of information about an attorney general candidate.
Keep in mind that they are just doing this to generate enough heat that Obama will find it in his best interest to withdraw Holder’s nomination so that these hearings don’t turn the first days of his administration into a circus. They want a scalp. It proves their relevance, it is yet another shot at Clinton (which guarantees the media will eat it with a spoon) and it puts Obama on notice that they can still gin up a hissy fit at a moment’s notice if they feel they need to. The press is already showing they will move right along with them without missing a beat, so it’s a logical strategy.
Let’s hope he doesn’t give it to them. Once you start meeting their lunatic demands, there is no end to it.
Earlier today on MSNBC, Tamron Hall played the tape of Obama refusing to answer questions about Blagojevich today, chatted a bit about that and then asked a question:
Tamron Hall: He talked about transparency. We’re seeing him in a tight situation with this Blagojevich thing. Are we seeing a different Barack Obama emerge?
Mark Murray, NBC news director deputy political director: We’re seeing a Barack Obama that’s actually trying to take control of the agenda. And that question was in reference to the Blagojevich scandal and Barack Obama said “I’ve already spoken about this. We’re going to release all of our contacts the week of December 22nd,” so for a reporter like me, obviously, that week will be big and if there isn’t any news coming from them then the Obama folks really do have a problem.
However it really isn’t a secret that Barack Obama really hasn’t had a fantastic relationship with the press corps that’s been following him over the last two years. There have been some testy moments. It’s not surprising that Obama would be annoyed by a substantive and relevant question like we heard this morning.
Tamron Hall: Mark Whittaker said this morning — the bureau chief for NBC — that he’s got to get used to answering these questions and maybe the press corps that’s been following is really going to have to start pushing his so that they’re not accused of what some were accused of when Bush was president of not asking the tough questions.
Mark Murray: No doubt about it Tamron, as we’ve seen in this press conference and in previous ones reporters were only allowed three questions. It came out of the pool reports today after that event that Barack Obama took more questions from students he was with rather than the reporters. So I think we’re going to see reporters roll up their sleeves a little bit but no doubt when Obama becomes president in the white house he’s going to get a LOT more questions than just three at media availabilities.
They’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore.
The interesting things about this is that NBC bureau chief Mark Whittaker is throwing down the gauntlet to Obama and saying that the press feels it has something to prove after being accused of being Bush lapdogs. And his minion Murray is dutifully carrying the boss’s water.
Eight years of relentless harassment and character assassination, during which time the village media felt that Clinton and then Gore were “getting away with too much” because none of the endless GOP generated scandals ever came to anything, and so they had to take him down. Then, in order to “prove” they weren’t just childish scandal mongers after destroying Al Gore, they went the other way and laid on their backs and let Bush walk all over them as he oversaw the destruction of the country. Now, in order to once again “prove” they aren’t lapdogs, they are going to pick up right where they left off eight years ago, asking endless questions about inconsequential nonsense and breathlessly speculating about what the inconsequential nonsense might mean until a whole lot of people think there must be something to it or these people wouldn’t be talking about it so much.
It’s a coincidence, I’m sure, that they only feel the need to make sure that politicians don’t “get away with” anything when the politician is a Democrat and they only need to prove they aren’t reflexively hostile when it’s a Republican. I’m also sure that ill-informed bloggers speculating as to whether or not that might actually be a reflection of the political values of the political establishment would be wrong, so I’ll refrain from doing it.
Dday has a compelling post up today at the Great Orange Satan about the need for Bush to publicly forgive the shoe thrower or risk having things hurtle out of control. I had thought it was a good idea to help repair America’s image, but dday points out that it is probably necessary to prevent further violence as well.
Well, Bush’s spokesperson said today that he doesn’t hold any grudges, and that’s probably as good as it’s going to get. But he failed to publicly appeal to the Maliki government to pardon the guy or at least make sure he is protected, so it’s pretty meaningless. He reiterated that it’s all up to Iraq, which has by all accounts already beaten the guy severely.
dday appeals directly to Bush:
Do not listen to know-nothings calling this man an “ingrate” for not appreciating American sacrifice. That’s nonsense. We have invaded this country under false pretenses, killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions, allowed 70% to live without access to water or electricity, and brought a once-great society to rubble. It is perfectly human to feel frustration and rage. And if you refuse to open your mind enough to think of that, think about Baghdad on fire for the last month of your Presidency. Think about security gains lost. I’d ask you to think about the dead, but you won’t, so think about your legacy. I don’t usually think calling the White House is worth a hill of beans, but give it a shot in this case. 202-456-1111 is the White House switchboars, and the Iraqi Embassy is at 202-742-1600. These things have the tendency to quickly spiral out of control. The safety of perhaps tens of thousands of people is at stake. Please, Mr. President, you have the power to fix this.
Hey, even the Wall Street Journalagrees with us on this. (Sort of.)
T. Christian Miller wrote a definitive work a couple years ago called Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq. Late last week, Miller, who used to work for the LA Times and now writes for the online investigative unit Pro Publica got his eye on an unpublished document detailing the history of the failed reconstruction project in Iraq, and the only thing surprising about it is that the Pentagon allowed the Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Stuart Bowen, to write it up at all. The blinding incompetence and ignorance, the sustained money funnel into the hands of contractors, and the ideological warfare that led to over $100 billion in waste and fraud, all to simply replicate what we spent even more billions destroying without improving the basic lives of Iraqis, is just astounding. You can pull out anecdote after anecdote that will absolutely floor you.
It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.
In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.'” […]
When the Office of Management and Budget balked at the American occupation authority’s abrupt request for about $20 billion in new reconstruction money in August 2003, a veteran Republican lobbyist working for the authority made a bluntly partisan appeal to Joshua B. Bolten, then the O.M.B. director and now the White House chief of staff. “To delay getting our funds would be a political disaster for the President,” wrote the lobbyist, Tom C. Korologos. “His election will hang for a large part on show of progress in Iraq and without the funding this year, progress will grind to a halt.” With administration backing, Congress allocated the money later that year.
In an illustration of the hasty and haphazard planning, a civilian official at the United States Agency for International Development was at one point given four hours to determine how many miles of Iraqi roads would need to be reopened and repaired. The official searched through the agency’s reference library, and his estimate went directly into a master plan. Whatever the quality of the agency’s plan, it eventually began running what amounted to a parallel reconstruction effort in the provinces that had little relation with the rest of the American effort.
Money for many of the local construction projects still under way is divided up by a spoils system controlled by neighborhood politicians and tribal chiefs. “Our district council chairman has become the Tony Soprano of Rasheed, in terms of controlling resources,” said an American Embassy official working in a dangerous Baghdad neighborhood. ” ‘You will use my contractor or the work will not get done.'”
The New York Times, who published this article in conjunction with Pro Publica, has actually put the entire report on its website, with keyword searchable functions. It’s a major achievement that will ensure this history will not be buried, as important as the Pentagon Papers in many respects. The stories contained within tell a sad chapter in American history, where people with no interest and in fact total contempt for government were given the task of remaking a country, to predictable results. It’s not just that they didn’t know what they were doing – they didn’t want to know. Domestic politics trumped competence, appearance trumped reality, and ideology trumped knowledge.
Some of this history has been told elsewhere, but this is a coherent, comprehensive narrative that will keep you awake at night. Hilzoy uncovered maybe the most notorious example:
“Ambassador George Ward, head of ORHA’s humanitarian pillar, asked, “How am I going to protect humanitarian convoys, humanitarian staging areas, humanitarian distribution points?” A flag officer who had flown in from CENTCOM said, “Hire war lords.” “Wait a minute,” Ward thought, “folks don’t understand this. There are warlords in Afghanistan, not in Iraq. There were no warlords to rent.” “At that point,” Ward says, “I thought this was going to fail because no one is paying serious attention to civilian security.””
It was more important to put “the adults” in charge, who simply knew that we would be greeted as liberators and that the oil money would pay for the reconstruction and that Sunnis and Shiites have no history of ethnic strife, than to find anyone with the slightest understanding of the country we were blowing to bits. It’s absolutely astounding. And let me take a moment, in the midst of all this cheerleading that we “won the war” in Iraq, to second Matt Yglesias:
The harsh reality is that this was not a noble undertaking done for good reasons. It was a criminal enterprise launched by madmen cheered on by a chorus of fools and cowards. And it’s seen as such by virtually everyone all around the world — including but by no means limited to the Arab world. But it’s impolitic to point this out in the United States, and it’s clear that even a president-elect who had the wisdom not to be suckered in by the War Fever of 2002 has no intention of really acting to marginalize the bad actors. Which, I think, makes sense for his political objectives. But if Americans want to play a constructive role in world affairs, it’s vitally important for us to get in touch with the reality of what the past eight years of US foreign policy have been and how they’re seen and understood by people who aren’t stirred by the shibboleths of American patriotism.
This report might go a long way to such an understanding. But it just makes me sick.
In ABC’s exit interview, Dick Cheney makes it pretty clear that he doesn’t think he needs to fear war crimes trials. He proudly admits to them.
The vice president was unapologetic in his defense of the Bush administration’s anti-terror policies, including the use of waterboarding, and said the prison at Guantanamo Bay should remain open as long as there’s a war on terror.
Cheney said waterboarding was an appropriate means of getting information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
He was also asked whether he authorized the tactics used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. “I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn’t do,” Cheney said. “And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it.
“There was a period of time there, three or four years ago, when about half of everything we knew about al Qaeda came from that one source,” he added, referring to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. “So, it’s been a remarkably successful effort. I think the results speak for themselves.”
Cheney said the prison at Guantanamo Bay could be responsibly shut down only when the war on terror has ended. Asked when that might be, he added, “Well, nobody knows. Nobody can specify that.”
Cheney warned that prisoners released from Guantanamo could prove dangerous to the United States, adding that the problem of what to do with released prisoners had not yet been solved.
“If you’re going to close Guantanamo, what are you going to do with those prisoners?” he asked. “One suggestion is, well, we bring them to the United States. Well, I don’t know very many congressmen, for example, who are eager to have 200 al Qaeda terrorists deposited in their district.”
Meantime, Cheney said the Guantanamo detainees have been “well treated.” “I don’t know any other nation in the world that would do what we’ve done in terms of taking care of people who are avowed enemies, and many of whom still swear up and down that their only objective is to kill more Americans,” he said.
You’ve probably also read that he believes we would have invaded Iraq no matter what, ostensibly because Saddam could have decided to build the bomb someday and we just couldn’t take the chance. (Of course, he’s still lying — he didn’t care about Saddam at all.)
And the landmine about al Qaeda terrorists shopping at the neighborhood WalMart is very clever. They obviously hope to tie this mess around Barack Obama’s neck and destroy any hope he has of forging a clean break with Cheney’s psycho foreign policy.
He clearly believes he is in no danger of prosecutions for his crimes here in the US, but I wouldn’t leave the country any time soon if I were him. War criminals find themselves in unusual situations these days when foreign nations decide they have to take justice into their own hands when the home country refuses to do it. And it’s not like the US could exactly complain about it.
Cheney is a sick piece of work. But we knew that.
Update: Vanity Fair is reporting that the analysts who prepared the intel weren’t told that the sources had been tortured:
Two Bush administration intelligence analysts who wrote reports on the C.I.A.’s interrogation of a “high value” al-Qaeda detainee were never told he had been subject to waterboarding and other coercive methods, Vanity Fair contributing editor David Rose reports.
The analysts’ reports on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in Pakistan in March 2002, were used to make the case within the administration for invading Iraq, Rose reports, and selectively leaked to journalists.
Yet the reports’ authors had no idea that Abu Zubaydah had been questioned using methods that the International Committee of the Red Cross has categorized as torture.
Jane Mayer’s recent book The Dark Side (Doubleday) cites a Red Cross investigation report as evidence that Abu Zubaydah was locked into a box the size of a “tiny coffin,” beaten, and waterboarded. Because this was torture, the Red Cross said, it exposed those responsible to possible prosecution.
Some of what Abu Zubaydah said after this treatment was leaked to the media by the administration before the Iraq invasion: for example, the claim that Osama bin Laden and his ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi were working directly with Saddam Hussein in order to destabilize the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.
There was much more, says the first analyst, who worked at the Pentagon: “There was a lot of stuff about the nuts and bolts of al-Qaeda’s supposed relationship with the Iraqi Intelligence Service. The intelligence community was lapping this up, and so was the administration, obviously. Abu Zubaydah was saying Iraq and al-Qaeda had an operational relationship. It was everything the administration hoped it would be.”
Within the administration, Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation was “an important chapter,” the second analyst says. Neither analyst had any idea that he had been tortured.
The claim that there was an operational relationship between al-Qaeda and Saddam has since been authoritatively dismissed, in reports by bodies including the 9/11 commission and the Senate intelligence committee. Rose quotes the former F.B.I. counterterrorism expert Dan Coleman, who worked on the Abu Zubaydah case, and says that his true position in the terrorist hierarchy means that he would not have known whether such a relationship existed or not. But under torture, Coleman says, “you can lead people down a course and make them say anything.”
“As soon as I learned that the reports had come from torture, once my anger had subsided I understood the damage it had done,” a Pentagon analyst says. “I was so angry, knowing that the higher-ups in the administration knew he was tortured, and that the information he was giving up was tainted by the torture, and that it became one reason to attack Iraq.
“We didn’t know he’d been waterboarded and tortured when we did that analysis, and the reports were marked as credible as they could be.” However, approval for Abu Zubaydah’s treatment had been given at the highest level.
“The White House knew he’d been tortured. I didn’t, though I was supposed to be evaluating that intelligence,” the analyst says. “It seems to me they were using torture to achieve a political objective. I cannot believe that the president and vice president did not know who was being waterboarded and what was being given up.”
Rose’s article includes an interview with Peter Clarke, the head of Scotland Yard’s Anti-Terrorist Branch from the spring of 2002 until May 2008. As the U.K.’s chief counterterrorist official, he succeeded in stopping several jihadist attacks that were far advanced.
Asked to comment on claims made by President Bush in 2006 that waterboarding and other “enhanced” techniques had “thwarted a plot to hijack passenger planes and fly them into Heathrow [airport] or the Canary Wharf in London,” Clarke, who has not discussed this issue in public before, says that if al-Qaeda had really discussed a plot of this kind it was nowhere near fruition. “It wasn’t at an advanced stage in the sense that there were people here in the U.K. doing it. If they had been, I’d have arrested them.”
Rose also interviewed F.B.I. director Robert Mueller. The article states that Rose reminded him of some of the attacks planned against targets on American soil since 9/11 that his agents were said to have disrupted—for example, a plot to kill soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and another to wreak mayhem at army recruiting centers in Torrance, California.
Rose asks Mueller whether, so far as he is aware, any attacks on America have been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through what the administration still calls “enhanced techniques.”
“I’m really reluctant to answer that,” Mueller says. He pauses, looks at an aide, and then says quietly, declining to elaborate, “I don’t believe that has been the case.”