Philip Giraldi from American Conservative reports that the CIA program kerfuffle involving VP Cheney seems to have been more an effort to hide incompetence than guarding an effective tool  of the CIA.

They would enter the target countries as businessmen on false passports, some of which would be non-American, obtain weapons sent ahead through the diplomatic pouch to the US Embassy, kill the target, turn the weapons back over to an embassy contact, and leave the country.  The program used delta soldiers initially because CIA SOG was fully engaged in Afghanistan.  The first hit attempt was in Kenya, was botched, and the deltas had to be bailed out by the Ambassador who had not been briefed on what was going on under his nose.  The program was suspended after that but never quite terminated.

Undoubtedly this isn’t something the CIA would like the world to know…

h/t Balloon Juice

Feinstein thinks that oversight laws have been broken. The real question is will Lord Darth Cheney be held accountable for intentionally flouting the law? He seems very adept at avoiding accountability, ignoring Congress and being protected by GOP caucus on the Hill.

via U.S. officials slam Dick Cheney’s claim that waterboarding 9/11 mastermind 183 times was a ‘success’.

“Cheney is full of crap,” one intelligence source with decades of experience said Tuesday.

Another retired counterterrorism official who read reports when they arrived in Washington detailing the confessions of Mohammed, known as “KSM,” said most of the information he coughed up during the waterboarding sessions involved things he thought his CIA-contract interrogators already knew, or were just his ideas for mayhem.

“Most of the (cables) were reports of actions that KSM was only remotely thinking of undertaking – they didn’t even reach the planning stage,” the retired counterterrorism official said. “So it’s a bit of a stretch for Bush administration officials to say these were attacks they had disrupted.”

Andrea Mitchell notes that the CIA denies that they have received any such request for the former VP. And why would it matter if he did? He should have no more influence than any other private citizen over the CIA’s decisions on de-classification of documents.

In any case, it doesn’t matter one way or the other. It’s wrong, it’s illegal and goes against everything we’ve ever stood for. Because an old man wet his diaper in fear after 9-11 doesn’t mean that torture is right. If it worked or not is irrelevant. The ends do not justify the means. Either we live by a moral code or we are as bad as any of our foes.

Most interrogation experts seem to think that it’s not a useful tactic, that it leads the torture victim to say whatever they believe the torturer wants to hear. I wonder how many false leads were followed and resources diverted because of false information? How many jihadis were recruited based on our torture program? How can we possibly claim any moral authority when we refuse to follow our own laws? Sully noted that there was a Kafkaesque and deliberate effort to create a public face of freedom on the march, while privately trying prevent the same for detainess:

Looked at from a distance, the Bush administration wanted to do two things at once: to declare to the world that freedom is on the march, and human rights are coming to the world with American help, while simultaneously declaring to captives that the US has no interest in the law, human rights, accountability, transparency or humanity. They wanted to give hope to all the oppressed of the planet, while surgically banishing all hope from the prisoners they captured and tortured. And the only way they could pull this off is by the total secrecy they constructed and defended. So we had a public government respectful of the rule of law, and a secret government whose main goal was persuading terror suspects that there was no rule of law at all. It is hard to convey just how dangerous this was and is.

If a hear an Obama spokesman say “we should be looking forward, not backwards” again, I’m going to scream. Does that imply that if a robbed a bank during Bush administration I shouldn’t be arrested, tried and jailed becuase that would be looking backwards? Hardly. Seems like the bankers already did that anyway.

Why I Believe Bush Must Go – washingtonpost.com
Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly “high crimes and misdemeanors,” to use the constitutional standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team’s assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged — perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion — by far the highest in our national history.

Sadly he is correct in saying that we lack the statesmen with the stones to do what is clearly right.

Giuliani muses on vice president, cabinet – Boston.com
Later, Giuliani pivoted from a question about potential picks for secretary of state to this: “Let me answer with the question of what you would look for in a vice president first — again without any presumption that I’m going to be the nominee.”In an answer that mentioned Cheney more than once, Giuliani said, “A vice president has to be a partner in the administration. The vice president has to know everything that’s going on, just in case the vice president has to step in at a moment’s notice,” he said. He added that during a conversation with Cheney on Sept. 11, 2001, he felt the vice president “had a sense that he knew what he was doing.”

Rudy has a knack for making me nauseous. You must be fucking kidding me, Cheney as some kind of positive roll model? And does he have to mention 9-11 every time he opens his mouth? Oh right, it is all he has.

One former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said there had been “vigorous sentiment” among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes. The former official did not specify which White House officials took this position, but he said that some believed in 2005 that any disclosure of the tapes could have been particularly damaging after revelations a year earlier of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

h/t The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Sully says that:

This time, there could not even be a farcical attempt to blame elaborate text-book torture and abuse techniques on free-lance reservists who were easily framed. All this torture – hundreds and hundreds of hours of Gestapo-style hypothermia, stress positions, waterboarding, sleep deprivation – was meticulously approved from the very top. They knew they were risking illegality and obstruction of justice in this act of institutional vandalism. But if they didn’t destroy the tapes, they were risking direct evidence of war crimes. Not a hard call, is it? And you would have to have had blinders and ear-muffs on for the past six years to believe Bush didn’t know about it.

I agree, the White House and Chenney’s fingerprints are all over this. War crimes and obstruction of justice. The Democratic leadership really should put impeachment (starting with Chenney) back on the table immediately.

Exactly why is there so much paper they never want anyone to see? “The Wonkette says You better get crackin’, Dick — that evidence won’t destroy itself!”

A salivating ultra-hawk admits that the recent Iran NIE makes the chances of a strike against Iran extremely unlikely. Thank God.

Cheney: Iraq to be self-governing by 2009 – Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei and John F. Harris – Politico.com
Vice President Cheney today predicted Iraq will be a self-governing democracy by the time he leaves office, calling the current U.S. surge strategy “a remarkable success story” that will be studied for years to come.

A miracle in Iraq in just over two Freidman untis, hooray!!! Grampa Gravitas is either a serial liar or completely delusional. Somebody nail his friggin’ coffin shut already.

The only thing notable about this is that Sweaty Scott blames his masters for feeding him lies. I wonder, does he blame his parents for his excessive credulity  and gullibility?

Iran wants Western “apology” after IAEA report – Yahoo! News
Iran called on its Western foes on Friday to apologize to the Islamic Republic after the release of a U.N. nuclear agency report which Tehran said showed it had been telling the truth about its atomic plans, according to state media.

I think the past shows that the Bush administration does care if they really have WMD’s or not. Apology? Not likely.

Did $1.5 trillion get us more secure? Buy an awe-inspiring display of American military might? Cheaper oil? A sound dollar? Exactly what did we purchase for so high a price? A generation of hatred? Worldwide disdain? A near total loss of moral authority on the world stage? Did we show Islamic extremists the limits of American military power? When will Congress shut off the near unlimited flow of money? Is it possible for them to finally show some backbone?

The presidency of George W. Bush is a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.

Levin was fired for daring to not toe the line and be a good Bushy.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will, unless something drastically changes, approve Judge Mukasey for Attorney General without him uttering the words “water boarding is illegal”. This is not to protect military personnel, it is to protect policy makers, up to and including the president. The interrogators are immunized by law. It is the senior civilian leadership that’s at risk.

When will someone in a position of power actually do something about it? There is no ambiguityabout torture. It’s wrong, it’s illegal and it’s actionable. As Wategate veteran John Dean suggests, can’t we at least get a special prosecutor to investigate war crimes?

Crooks and Liars has the whole thing here.

OK, we all oppose torture, Dubya and Chenney included. The rub is exactly how does the AG nominee define torture? Does he have an expansive view that encompassing the same methods used by the Nazi’s during WWII and the KGB during the Cold War?

Take a look. Ezra argues that as long as we antagonize Iran and use bellicosity instead of reasonable diplomacy, Iran has no incentive to help in Iraq. Once Iraq is secure, guess which country is next on the Bush-Chenney hit list?

Crooks and Liars » Nuns call for impeachment of Bush/Cheney
“The National Coalition of American Nuns is impelled by conscience to call you to act promptly to impeach President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for … high crimes and misdemeanors,” the group wrote in a letter written on behalf of its board members.

George and Dick, the Mother Superior has a ruler with your name on it.

Someone has to explain to me,  what existential threat justified descending into what can only be called barbarism? 9-11? If that’s the case in what way has debasing our legal system made us safer? Are we less likely to suffer mass casualty attacks because we torture people that may not even deserve to be imprisoned?

1. We didn’t abolish all the instruments of the Imperial Japanese government. The kept their Emperor, police and government bureaucracy which insured stability.
2. There was no significant popular uprising against American occupation, no bloody counterinsurgency.
3. Without that opposition rebuilding post-war Japan into a modern industrial society was relatively painless and quite successful.

Japan became a steadfast ally in the Pacific as a result of a successful occupation and rebuilding. The President has repeatedly proven himself incapable of understanding the problem in Iraq and incompetent to manage the no-bid patronage bonanza reconstruction.

He moved on to point to Korea as another example. We didn’t win in Korea, it was a draw. There was no popular counterinsurgency bedeviling American forces. Thus we were able to nurture the growth and development of local institutions and representative democracy.

The only sort of (but not entirely) appropriate example was Vietnam. It’s hard to believe he even wants to link George’s Excellent Iraq Adventure to the perennial symbol of American defeat. We lost there, plain and simple. Not because we were beaten militarily, but because we lacked the national will to bleed indefinitely in midst of a local civil war. The situation was entirely different. We were facing a single, albeit often faceless enemy; proxies of the communist regime of North Vietnam. Is the President suggesting that we fight for 18 years in Iraq, watch thousands more young Americans bleed and die only to lose the political battle that truly defines the outcome in counterinsurgencies?

We thankfully lack the collective willingness to engage in the kind of brutality required to prevail in Iraq. The sooner we face that Iraqis, not Americans, will have to determine what kind of nation they want to fight and die for, the better off all parties will be. If we had only heeded the Dick Cheney of 1994.

I find it amazing that anyone, even the die-hard Bush loyalists, would find his combination of historical confusion and current hard-headed stupidity least bit compelling. How many days left until we are rid of this dangerous fool? The only upside to all of this is that it’s clearly shown the American public what the GOP stands for. They’ll spend a generation recovering from the Bush legacy.

Update:

TPM on the Korea Analogy.

Update II:

Scarecrow at Firedog Lake has more