Here's what we got....

And just so we're clear on exactly what we were able to "get" for all of our torture porn, the Senate Armed Services Committee report issued yesterday makes it pretty clear. Jane Hamsher spells it out:

Serial sadists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, the psychologists who were the first to rationalize and implement torture, were not members of the CIA and are not covered under Obama's immunity blanket. They violated their ethics as health professionals, and should lose their licenses and face criminal prosecution.

• Jessen and Mitchell modeled their torture program on methods used by the North Koreans to extract false confessions.

• Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney "demanded that intelligence agencies and interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration," despite the fact that the CIA told them repeatedly that no such collaboration existed. So, extracting false confessions was the goal.

• The Bybee Memo justified the use of waterboarding on enemy combatants because it had been deemed safe for use by US military in a program (SERE) to train soldiers at high risk of capture about what they might expect to encounter. It's sort of like saying it's okay to throw someone out of a plane because you pushed them off the porch and they were fine.

• The doctor whose memo Yoo/Bybee relied upon for assurances that waterboarding was safe, Dr. Jerald Ogrisseg, said that "he was surprised when he found out later that Lt Col Baumgartner had forwarded his memo to the General Counsel’s office." Dr. Ogrisseg testified that when Lt Col Baungartner asked about waterboarding in the real world, he told him that "aside from being illegal, it was a completely different arena that we in the Survival School didn’t know anything about." (h/t Valtin)

• So, Yoo/Bybee based their legal justification for waterboarding on assurances of safety they got from a memo that was talking about something else entirely, and which the author of the memo had expressly said did not apply in the situation.

Rumsfeld and Cheney worked backwards from a survival guide that the army used to prepare their men for torture techniques used by the Chinese and North Koreans. That torture was specifically designed to elicit false testimony. Either the two of them were psychopaths or morons, and probably a health dose of both. Bybee and Yoo gave them all of the legal cover that they requested and required to proceed. The ultimate goal was certainly to force the confession of a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam.

Cheney continues to belch bile....

Couple of things about Cheney's whine this weekend concerning the release of the torture memos, in which he said:

"I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country," Cheney said. "I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was."

First, at this point, Dick Cheney has no more authority to ask the CIA to do anything than I do. It's getting a bit embarrassing, actually. He's probably ordering his neighbors around, and screaming at his secret service agent to bring him some fresh pudding.

Secondly, my guess is that if we had to waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in one month, the information we got from him wasn't so super at all. I'd admit to being Ethel Merman after the first dunk, and by number 183, I can't imagine what I'd cop to.

Happy Teabagging Day!

Tomorrow is the big day for the rightwingers, the spontaneous and entirely grass roots "teabagging" movement will take to the streets. Enjoy!

Glen Beck, Historian

It's funny, I remember clearly learning the difference between fascism and communism, within the broad definition of totalitarianism in eighth grade in Mrs. Griffith's history class. We studied the continuum of political beliefs and systems (oligarchy, aristocracy, monarchy, democracy, etc) and discussed how no pure system would really work, including a pure democracy, which would dissolve into mob rule or anarchy.

And when Jonah Goldberg published "Liberal Fascism" last year, it was easy to shrug it off as the meanderings of a third rate conservative slob, because any sentient eighth grader would immediately recognize that liberalism and fascism were and are in diametric opposition.

Interesting to note, then, that one of the highest rated cable news shows, Glen Beck's, continues to promote the notion that the Obama administration is somehow leading us down the road to fascism, and that the policies that we are pursuing to pull ourselves out of the mire that eight years of the Bush administration left us in are somehow akin to those of the Nazi party in Germany. Of course, when I was in Mrs. Griffith's history class, we'd also have recognized Beck as nothing more than a madman screaming at people on the street corner, so perhaps this is all part of a general rise in the stupidity level of Americans.

Anyway, Beck's particular thesis, if it can be dignified with that term, is shredded to pieces by Orcinus, here.

It makes for great reading.