DOUBLE STANDARD? When John Cusack bombards his girlfriend's home with music, it's cute. When the CIA uses a boombox, it's torture.

So, a pretentious group of musicians is upset that their music is being used to torment America’s most dangerous enemies?

And now they want the U.S. government to release an official song list?

I can’t imagine that such a document actually exists. Are we supposed to believe that CIA and Pentagon interrogators around the world were issued official playlists by some audio-torture DJ?

It’s a safe bet that the music choices used to keep terrorists awake 24/7 were straight from a gazillion different iPods.

However, there WAS an official songlist when the U.S. Army flushed Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega out of hiding in 1989. The psychological warfare guys surrounding the Vatican Embassy during “Operation Just Cause” called in their requests to Army Radio.

How retro.

Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" made this dictator's skin crawl!

THE OFFICIAL 1989 MUSIC TORTURE SONG LIST FOR NORIEGA

Straight from U.S. Army records, here is a portion of the radio playlist used to annoy Manuel Noriega.

1. (You’ve Got) Another Thing Coming — Judas Priest
2. All I Want is You — U2
3. Big Shot — Billy Joel
4. Born to Run — Bruce Springsteen
5. Bring Down the Hammer — Georgia Satellites
6. Don’t Look Back — Boston
7. Don’t Fear the Reaper — Blue Oyster Cult
8. Eat My Shorts — Rick Dees
9. Feel a Whole Lot Better (When You’re Gone) — Tom Petty
10. Give It Up — KC and the Sunshine Band
11. Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down — Paul Young
12. Guilty — Bonham
13. Hang ‘Em High — Van Halen
14. Hanging Tough — New Kids on the Block
15. I Fought The Law and the Law Won — Bobby Fuller
16. Judgment Day — Whitesnake
17. Never Gonna Give You Up — Rick Astley
18. No More Mister Nice Guy — Alice Cooper
19. Panama — Van Halen
20. Paranoid — Black Sabbath
21. Stay Hungry — Twisted Sister
22. The Party’s Over — Journey
23. The Star Spangled Banner — Jimi Hendrix
24. They’re Coming to Take Me Away — Henry VIII
25. Time is on My Side — Rolling Stones
26. Wanted Dead or Alive — Bon Jovi
27. We Didn’t Start the Fire — Billy Joel
28. We Gotta Get Out of This Place — The Animals
29. Who Will You Run To? — Heart

Who knew that Billy Joel and New Kids on the Block would ever serve their country so effectively?

Wanna see the full list of Noriega torture tunes?  CLICK HERE.

” I think the interrogations were in violation of the Geneva Convention against torture that we ratified under President Reagan. I think that these interrogations, once publicized, helped al Qaeda recruit. I got that from an al Qaeda operative in a prison camp in Iraq who told me that. I think that the ability of us to work with our allies was harmed. And so — and I believe that information according to the FBI and others could have been gained through other methods.”
- John McCain on Face The Nation today

Yes folks, torture became a recruitment tool. And it’s apparently yet another reason we got bogged down in Iraq. Again, from McCain…

“Senator Lindsey Graham and I were in Camp Bucca, where there’s the 20,000-prisoner camp. We met with a former high- ranking member of al Qaeda. I said, how did you succeed so well in Iraq after the initial invasions? He said two things. One, the chaos that existed after the initial invasion, there was no order of any kind. Two, he said Abu Ghraib pictures allowed me and helped me to recruit thousands of young men to our cause. Now that’s al Qaeda.”

Does this surprise anybody?

The question now…will we learn?

Everybody’s abuzz about the new Wash Post story today that starts off with the idea that Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) was turned into some type of “terrorist professor” because he was waterboarded.

And away we go…

The debate over the effectiveness of subjecting detainees to psychological and physical pressure is in some ways irresolvable, because it is impossible to know whether less coercive methods would have achieved the same result. But for defenders of waterboarding, the evidence is clear: Mohammed cooperated, and to an extraordinary extent, only when his spirit was broken in the month after his capture March 1, 2003, as the inspector general’s report and other documents released this week indicate.

Over a few weeks, he was subjected to an escalating series of coercive methods, culminating in 7 1/2 days of sleep deprivation, while diapered and shackled, and 183 instances of waterboarding. After the month-long torment, he was never waterboarded again.

“What do you think changed KSM’s mind?” one former senior intelligence official said this week after being asked about the effect of waterboarding. “Of course it began with that.”

Yes, of course it began with that. Why? BECAUSE IT BEGAN WITH THAT.

Also, KSM didn’t start giving these terrorism lectures until a full 2 YEARS LATER. The waterboarding lasted one month. Think maybe building rapport and trust with him over the next couple years did more than making him feel like he was drowning?

Not only that, during this early period KSM gave us a bunch of false information…

Mohammed, in statements to the International Committee of the Red Cross, said some of the information he provided was untrue.

“During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop. I later told interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive. I’m sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time,” he said.

When will people begin to understand that there is an inherent paradox in the idea of torture: you don’t know what you don’t know. So somebody can make up ANYTHING to get you stop torturing them and you’ll waste your time.

Of course the vast majority of interrogators will tell you this time and time and time again, but the opposition finds a few people who were able to beat some actionable intelligence out of somebody and that makes it alright for us to do

And that gets me to the real point of this post. Torture works? Again, no. Because it completely undermines the values that we’re fighting to defend. America is not a TV show. Fighting terrorism doesn’t work like that. And if you don’t understand that having policies that allow us to kidnap and torture anybody we want makes us look like the big bullies they accuse of being, makes it easier for more people to hate us and therefore makes us less safe, well, please think on this some more.

Seriously, really dig into the cause and effect of what we’re doing. Because “blowback” is real, and I fear that if we don’t stop what we’re doing we’re in for yet another round of it.

But they promise that detainees won’t be abused. More on why I think that’s nonsense later on in the post.

But first, more from NY Times:

The announcement, by President Obama’s Interrogation and Transfer Policy Task Force, seemed intended in part to offset the impact of the release on Monday of a long-withheld report by the C.I.A. inspector general, written in 2004, that offered new details about the brutal tactics used by the C.I.A. in interrogating terrorism detainees.

Though the Obama administration previously signaled that it would continue the use of renditions, some civil liberties groups were disappointed because, as a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama had strongly suggested he might end the practice. In an article in Foreign Affairs in the summer of 2007, Mr. Obama wrote, “To build a better, freer world, we must first behave in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people.”

Mr. Obama continued, “This means ending the practices of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, of detaining thousands without charge or trial, of maintaining a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law.” In January, the president ordered secret prisons run by the C.I.A. to be shut down.

And here are the changes proposed so people aren’t tortured…

The administration officials, who discussed the changes on condition that they not be identified, said that unlike the Bush administration, they would operate more openly and give the State Department a larger role in assuring that transferred detainees would not be abused.

“The emphasis will be on ensuring that individuals will not face torture if they are sent overseas,” said one administration official, adding that no detainees would be sent to countries known to conduct abusive interrogations.

While these are at least movements in the right direction, we’ve seen how people have been kidnapped from their homes, detained for years and then released because they shouldn’t have been picked up in the first place.

Here’s the thing…stealing people from their lives still constitutes abuse in my book. Perhaps not the classic definition of torture, but think of the mental torment those folks went through. So if it happens again, well, shame on the Obama administration.

Truly disappointing…

npr link to music torture…

By the way, most of you know I don’t make it a habit to embed clips from Olbermann’s show on the site, but this is a notable exception because that’s the venue Muller chose to disclose the information. And I think he comes off rather well in comparison to Olbermann’s sullen partisan soldier routine.

Eric “Mancow” Muller is a fairly popular conservative/libertarian morning talk show host, and he didn’t think waterboarding was torture.

It took 6 seconds for him to change his mind:

Witnesses said Muller thrashed on the table, and even instantly threw the toy cow he was holding as his emergency tool to signify when he wanted the experiment to stop. He only lasted 6 or 7 seconds.

“It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that’s no joke,”Mancow said, likening it to a time when he nearly drowned as a child. “It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back…It was instantaneous…and I don’t want to say this: absolutely torture.”

“I wanted to prove it wasn’t torture,” Mancow said. “They cut off our heads, we put water on their face…I got voted to do this but I really thought ‘I’m going to laugh this off.’ “

This is another thing I don’t get about arguments from the right…cutting off somebody’s head is MURDER. Torture is meant to make somebody suffer physical or emotional trauma. True, it could eventually lead to murder, but it’s not the same as killing somebody.

Next up, Sean Hannity? Actually, even though he said he’d do it, I doubt he will. Because he has to know by now that he wouldn’t last very long and would literally have to lie about how he felt. Nobody can beat this technique, and especially not rich, right wing talk show hosts.

By the way, if you want to watch the video of this, go here.

This is Mike Fritz and David Murdock from ANP.

Senator Lindsey Graham was a passionate critic of the Bush Justice attorneys during this past summer’s Armed Services Committee hearings on interrogation.

Lately, however, Graham seems to have had second thoughts on the matter. At a recent Judiciary subcommittee hearing investigating the torture memos, Graham mounted a feisty defense of Jay Bybee, John Yoo and the lawyers who provided legal cover for detainee abuse.

This performance sent producer Mike Fritz back to the ANP archives to confirm that this was indeed the same Lindsey Graham we remembered from the summer, and sure enough, it was. As this video reveals, same guy – different message.

Click to view the whole story at Huffington Post.

By the way, I don’t agree with Hasselbeck being called a “right wing idiot” on the title of this video, but I can’t take it off and I think the point is valid enough to post.

When it comes to waterboarding, the question now surrounding House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is what did she know and when did she know it. Today, Pelosi claimed what she knew, at least at first, was a lie.

[T]he House’s top Democrat, speaking at a news conference in the Capitol, was unequivocal about a CIA briefing she received in the fall of 2002.

“We were told that waterboarding was not being used,” the speaker said. “That’s the only mention, that they were not using it. And we now know that earlier they were.” She suggested the CIA release the briefing material.

The CIA denies the agency ever deceived lawmakers.

So we now have a “he said/she said” situation and most of the official records are classified. What the CIA has released is a chart listing discussions with congressional members:

The chart specifically notes a discussion of waterboarding in 13 briefings between February 2003 and March 2009, most attended by Democrats as well as Republicans. Two Democrats, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and former Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, have challenged the accuracy of some of the CIA’s chart.

However, the whole “what she knew and when she knew it” question really misses the point. The right question is: could Pelosi and the Democrats have done more the stop the technique many consider torture? Or was winning control of Congress and the Presidency the only way to effectively halt the use of waterboarding?

Just because Pelosi knew about harsh integration techniques doesn’t mean she approved. Then again, if waterboarding is as morally unacceptable as Pelosi has claimed it is, shouldn’t she have been a lot more vocal a lot earlier?

A surprising reversal and one I obviously disagree with. This also seriously undermines Obama’s message of transparency and openness…at least in the eyes of Dems.

From Wash Post:

President Obama has decided to oppose the release of several dozen photos depicting abuse of detainees held in U.S. military custody abroad, reversing his previous position on the grounds that the pictures could inflame anti-American sentiment and endanger U.S. troops.

In a brief statement to reporters before flying to Arizona for a speech late this afternoon, Obama said he believes “that the publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals. In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.”

He also suggested that the publication could lead “a chilling effect on future investigations of detainee abuse.”

Is it just me or does this reasoning make no sense?

Because having these photos be undefined means people fill in the blanks with even more horrific stuff than what’s possibly contained in them. And that means al Qaeda can say whatever they want about them to their recruits and we’re powerless to stop them. And that’s what puts Americans in greater danger.

Also, the idea that this would have a chilling effect on future investigations? How exactly? Actually, by making these public it would put a chilling effect on the behavior, not the investigations.

The only thing I can think of is he’s finally seen the photos and some of them contain pictures of CIA personnel he promised to protect. So if these pictures get out, he’d be obligated to prosecute them the way the other personnel were or face a massive backlash by the military brass and the American public.

Still, I’m confused by this move and I’m sure many other Americans are too. So the administration owes us more explanation…and soon.

We all knew this had to happen sooner or later, and it looks like the White House wants to put this issue to bed once and for all.

From Wash Post:

Government officials familiar with the CIA’s early interrogations say the most powerful evidence of apparent excesses is contained in the “top secret” May 7, 2004, inspector general report, based on more than 100 interviews, a review of the videotapes and 38,000 pages of documents.

The full report remains closely held, although White House officials have told political allies that they intend to declassify it for public release when the debate quiets over last month’s release of the Justice Department’s interrogation memos…

Although some useful information was produced, the report concluded that “it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks,” according to the Justice Department’s declassified summary of it.

And let’s note the date when this was finished: May 7, 2004.

That means that Bush and company had a report in their hands that was THE most extensive look at their torture program and they completely ignored it.

Why?

Because admitting it at that time would have meant certain defeat for Bush in the 2004 election. And admitting it after the election would have completely discredited the administration.

So then, to all of you who continue to think that the Bush continued to sanction the torture techniques because it made this country safer, please, wake up already.

Click here to Listen

Some of the posts/pieces we mentioned are linked here:

James’ unique take on torture at pomocon here and here, which acts as a jumping off point for the best parts of the conversation.

James and Daniel Larison’s conversation about empire linked here.

Most of my writing on the subject can be found here at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen. The most relevant of those posts is this one.

The Bacevich Globe piece is here.

And Tyler Cowen’s post opposing prosecution that James mentions can be found here.

There’s a section in the middle of the audio where we discuss the relevance of American interventionism and I turn into a blithering idiot for a few minutes. But Scott and James’ discussion on that issue is well worth the dead air I cause.

Cross-posted.

Just for future reference, what you’re seeing above is considered a “pour.” You’ll need that information to weave your way through the mine field presented here by Fox News.

Let the apologizing begin…

A U.S. official with knowledge of the interrogation program told FOX News that the much-cited figure represents the number of times water was poured onto Mohammed’s face — not the number of times the CIA applied the simulated-drowning technique on the terror suspect. According to a 2007 Red Cross report, he was subjected a total of “five sessions of ill-treatment.”

“The water was poured 183 times — there were 183 pours,” the official explained, adding that “each pour was a matter of seconds.”

The Times and dozens of other outlets wrote that the CIA also waterboarded senior Al Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah 83 times, but Zubayda himself, a close associate of Usama bin Laden, told the Red Cross he was waterboarded no more than 10 times.

The confusion stems from language in the Justice Department legal memos that President Obama released on April 16. They contain the numbers, but they fail to explain exactly what they represent.

So Fox doesn’t believe that a pour is considered being waterboarded.

Does it really matter?

We tried to induce the feeling of drowning in somebody 183 times. Whether or not it was 1 attempt during 183 separate sessions or 10 attempts during 18 sessions is irrelevant.

Torture is torture is torture.

Still, these last two sentences of the story tell you pretty much all you need to know about where Fox is coming at this from…

And the precise number of waterboarding sessions is still not known. What is known is that Mohammed was not waterboarded 183 times.

Ugh.

Moving on…

When I read the following I have to ask, “Who’s lying here?”

Because haven’t we heard from some pretty high profile folks that these techniques worked, most notably former VP Cheney?

I guess maybe Hillary was right.

First, from NY Times, what traditional interrogation tactics gave us:

Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned [Abu Zubaydah] from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence.

We discovered, for example, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber. This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives.

And now, what torture brought us…

There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.

Defenders of these techniques have claimed that they got Abu Zubaydah to give up information leading to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a top aide to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Mr. Padilla. This is false. The information that led to Mr. Shibh’s capture came primarily from a different terrorist operative who was interviewed using traditional methods. As for Mr. Padilla, the dates just don’t add up: the harsh techniques were approved in the memo of August 2002, Mr. Padilla had been arrested that May.

I have a feeling we’ll never know the whole truth, but I still contend that the loss of credibility around the world isn’t worth finding out about a few operational ties with tactics that we simply didn’t need to use.

That said, the posts (and subsequent responsive comment) with which E.D. and Mr. Schwenkler take issue is emblematic of something that has been particularly frustrating to me over the last several days or so. Specifically, I’m frustrated at the certainty with which proponents of waterboarding and various other procedures outlined in the OLC memos proclaim that those procedures were clearly “not torture.”

The fact is, whatever one thinks of the legal acumen demonstrated (or, more accurately, not demonstrated) in the OLC memos, and especially the Bybee memo, they do not provide a basis for concluding that waterboarding, et al – especially when combined in one continuous program – are “clearly” not torture. The Bybee memo itself states quite explicitly that waterboarding in particular is pretty damn close to being torture, going so far as to say that it is a “predicate act” for a finding of torture. So if you’re going to rely on the Bybee memo as an accurate depiction of the law (which it isn’t – seriously, I’ve seen associates fired for less shoddy memos), then at the very least you have to acknowledge that these actions come pretty damn close to being torture, and that there is hardly anything outrageous or unhinged about calling these acts torture.

In other words, if you’re going to rely upon a piece of legal analysis as proof that something is clearly “not torture,” then you probably shouldn’t rely upon a piece of legal analysis that (shoddy as it may be) concludes that said something is pretty damned close to being torture.

Cross-posted at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen.

Today he was asked again. Wishy washy it is.

I take this as, more or less, reassuring.

It reaffirms my belief that Obama is, at worst, opportunistic, a fair weather civil liberties advocate. That sounds like damning with faint praise, and it is, but it’s also a heckuva lot better than the previous administration, for whom opposition to civil liberties was not a matter of convenience shimmying but of hardened ideology, and who took accountability as beginning and ending with an election every four years.

What Obama is indicating, and has indicated, is that he’s not particularly eager to have this matter be center stage, but nor is he particularly eager to get on the wrong side of it, and at the end of the day, he is willing to be persuaded/pushed.

For the record, that position does make clear that we should not expect Obama to take a principled, courageous stand on civil liberties. For those of us who voted for him on the hope that he would stand tall and do the right thing, because it was the right thing to do…eh, not so much. We civil libertarians have been waiting with bated breath to see what kind of a President Obama was going to be in these respects. His campaign rhetoric indicated he might have greatness in him. Some of his actions in office (continuing the Bushian line on habeas corpus, for instance) have caused us to fear that he might be a wolf in sheep’s (or a sheep in wolf’s clothing, I suppose). The reality that is starting to settle in is he’s just another politician.

However, I take his statement today more or less at face value. He is not, personally, particularly inclined towards prosecution, but he’s also more or less not willing to exert overt political pressure to close the door on it. He won’t grease the wheels, but he won’t throw up impediments either. I would certainly vastly prefer it if he were inclined towards positive action on the principle of it, but if the worst we’re going to get out of him is a blank slate waiting for the writing on the wall, I’ll take it.

Obama is clearly not going to be a messianic figure on this matter; he is not going to lead us to the promised land. But nor is he going to stand in the road with his hand to us yelling “stop”. We clearly can’t expect Obama to do the right thing. But I think we can also not expect him to do the wrong one. In that sense, this is not a “good news” sort of situation; it is an absence of bad news. And maybe that shouldn’t strike a positive chord with me, but my bar has been so lowered on civil liberties that I’m positively thrilled at the absence of bad news. At this point, I’ll take it, and it’s also worth noting that where action does hit the President’s desk, so far, his rhetoric has been mealy-mouthed but his actions have tended towards the right. That’s worth something too.

If at the end of the day all we get is immediately stopping the practice and the executive branch not standing in the way of further inquiry/action, that’s not ideal, but it’ll do pig, it’ll do.

—–

So where that leaves things is, ultimately, with the onus on us, the American public. So, let me suggest three courses of action.

The first: FireDogLake has a petition making the rounds, to be delivered to the Attorney General on Thursday. It says simply:

Given the seriousness of these crimes, we the undersigned call for Attorney General Eric Holder to immediately appoint a special prosecutor to determine if criminal proceedings are warranted for Justice Department lawyers who legalized these crimes, and the high level executive branch officials who ordered them.

I suggest you sign it.

Second, the only reason the OLC memos were released at all is the dogged pursuit of them by, more or less, a single organization, which has been in the trenches fighting the good fight for many years. I’m talking about the American Civil Liberties Union. Obama’s skittishness on this matter is a good reminder why the work they do is crucial no matter which party is in power or which way the winds are blowing. Instead of making a donation to a candidate this cycle, consider sending some help their way

And third, get candidates on record. Obama has made it pretty clear that he considers this whole thing to be a headache he’d just assume not to deal with. But he’s wrong in one critical respect: we can’t move forward until we faced our past (and hell, our present). If Congress doesn’t want to deal with it, fine, but make them put their names to that. One interesting path to that: start pushing for impeachment proceedings against John Bybee. It won’t pass, but make those f’ers vote on it.

Obama is not The One. He’s not Scott Bacula, jumping into the Presidency to right the wrongs of the guy whose shoes he’s stepping into. If we want action on this, we have to take it.

That means he was made to feel as if he were drowning an average of 6 times and day for 30 straight days.

Kind of puts that whole ticking clock scenario to rest.

From Emptywheel:

I’ve put this detail in a series of posts, but it really deserves a full post. According to the May 30, 2005 Bradbury memo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002.
On page 37 of the OLC memo, in a passage discussing the differences between SERE techniques and the torture used with detainees, the memo explains:

The CIA used the waterboard “at least 83 times during August 2002” in the interrogation of Zubaydah. IG Report at 90, and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM, see id. at 91.

Note, the information comes from the CIA IG report which, in the case of Abu Zubaydah, is based on having viewed the torture tapes as well as other materials. So this is presumably a number that was once backed up by video evidence.

Again, the point isn’t whether or not Mohammed is a bad man. There’s no doubt he is. The point is that we can’t allow ourselves to act just as despicable as him. I mean, Bush said they hate our freedoms, right? Well what happens when we compromise our values to mirror theirs? Doesn’t that make us less free?

Michael Reynolds had this thought over at a previous post…

There’s a price to be paid for living in a civilization as opposed to living in the jungle. We minimize many risks, but we assume some others. We may have to swallow hard at times, but it’s the only way to have a civilization. Civilization, like freedom itself, isn’t free.

Well said.

[...] imagine if an American operative out of uniform were captured by the Iranians tomorrow. Imagine he were put into a coffin for hours with no light and barely enough air to breathe, imagine if he were then removed and smashed against a plywood wall by a towel tied around his neck thirty times, imagine if he were then kept awake for eleven days in a row, then kept in a cell frozen to hypothermia levels, and then waterboarded multiple times, after which he confessed to being a spy trying to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program. Would you believe that intelligence?
- Andrew Sullivan comparing what we did…with what could possibly be

And that’s the question…would this be acceptable for you?

Yes, I know we’re right and they’re wrong, but stop for a moment, take off the partisan shades and consider the question. Because when we legally condone clearly despicable actions, what do you think the fallout will be?

The predicament then becomes a question of whether or not we do what we think is right given the situation. But can’t anything be justified given certain circumstances?

To put it another way, this isn’t a TV show, we’re not facing a ticking clock and to all those who say that Obama’s decision to release the torture memos made us weaker…I say that torturing detainees puts us in a precarious position because we’re adopting the cowardly tactics of our enemies. And since that leads to less freedoms, our credibility suffers as a result.

Does that seem like an intelligent decision to you?

Discuss.

“The United States is a nation of laws. My Administration will always act in accordance with those laws, and with an unshakeable commitment to our ideals. That is why we have released these memos, and that is why we have taken steps to ensure that the actions described within them never take place again.”
- President Obama in a statement about the torture memos released today

As I said earlier, these memos reveal that everybody in the administration new what they were doing would be considered torture. So the fact that Obama released these memos were important.

And, again, I disagree that anybody who carried out these orders should be prosecuted.

But if you want to go after the folks who okayed these techniques?

Well, that I’m a bit more flexible on.