The mainstream media often refers to the Tea Party spectacle as a “movement.” It isn’t.

A CBS News poll shows that Tea Party “members” are actually pretty dumb. Tea Party people believe that President Obama has already raised taxes – he hasn’t. One-third of Tea Party people think Obama favors the poor – that’s code for blacks and other minorities – and there’s no basis for that belief in anything Obama has done or said. If anything, Obama favors Wall Street bankers and corporate fat-cats more than he does poor people.

Who’s to blame for the federal deficit? Only 7 percent of Americans say it’s Obama’s fault, but 19 percent of Tea Partiers blame him. Forty-one percent of Americans put the problem squarely on Bush’s while only 16 percent of Tea Party people do.

These so-called patriots hate the government. Ninety-one percent of Tea Party identifiers are dissatisfied or angry at the United States government.

Not surprisingly, most Tea Partiers live in the South.

“Tea Party identifiers are overwhelmingly white – 95 percent are white, compared to 77 percent of Americans,” the poll said.

If it’s a “movement,” not many people have no knowledge of it. Fifty-five percent of Americans have not even heard of the Tea Party. Only 19 percent of Americans claim to know a lot about the Tea Party.

And among those who’ve heard of the Tea Party, 42 percent said it doesn’t reflect most Americans’ values with 21 percent are unsure.

The Obama administration is no different than other administrations in that they dump news on Friday hoping that no one is paying attention. Fortunately, I’m a dork and I love seeing what they try and sneak past us each week.

Today the Office of Professional Responsibility released their report on whether Bush administration lawyers broke the law when they decided torturing fellow human beings was cool.

According to the report the OPR found misconduct, but DoJ career attorney David Margolis didn’t have a problem with Jay Bybee and John Yoo’s legal justification for torture.

Here’s what Margolis wrote:

In keeping with usual Department practice, I invited Bybee and Yoo to submit responses to OPR’s final report. They submitted those responses on October 9, 2009, and the matter is no ripe for discussion. My task is a narrow one. The OPR report addresses a number of topics without reaching misconduct fundings against any Department attorney. I did not review OPR’s analysis of those topics. For example, during the course of its investigation, OPR reviewed prosecutive declinations regarding interrogations of certain detainees, but I have not examined its analysis of those issues. In addition, OPR reviewed and analyzed several memoranda authored by former OLC attorney Steve Bradbury. Because that review did not result in a finding of misconduct or poor judgement, I have not reviewed that analysis. Rather, my review was strictly limited to the findings of misconduct against Yoo and Bybee.

For the reasons state below, I do not adopt OPR’s finding of misconduct. This decision should not be viewed as an endorsement of the legal work that underlies those memoranda. However, OPR’s own analytical framework defines “professional misconduct” such that a finding of misconduct depends on application of a known, unambiguous obligation or standard to the attorney’s conduct. I am unpersuaded that OPR has identified such a standard. For this reason and based on the additional analysis set forth below, I cannot adopt OPR’s findings of misconduct, and I will not authorize OPR to refer its findings to the state bar disciplinary authorities in the jurisdictions where Yoo and Bybee are licensed.

Here are the newly released documents from OPR and DoJ.
Career DoJ attorney David Margolis Admonishes Torture Lawyers
John Yoo Response to DoJ Torture Investigation
Office of Professional Responsibility Second Report on Torture
Office of Professional Responsibility First Report on Torture
Bybee Response to OPR’s Draft Report
John Yoo Response to OPR Draft Report on Torture

Here’s my archive of torture memos and reports
Jay Bybee torture memo August 1, 2002
Steven Bradbury torture memo May 10, 2005
Steven Bradbury to John Rizzo about torture program May 10, 2005
Steven Bradbury to Rizzo torture memo
De-classified CIA report on Bush torture program

The only question remaining now is whether former Vice President Dick Cheney personally participated in waterboarding people. When it comes to torture, hell yes, Cheney was totally on board.

On Sunday, Cheney unequivocally stated the Bush administration tortured prisoners. On ABC’s “This Week” Cheney said, “I was a big supporter of waterboarding.”

I guess one could argue that waterboarding isn’t torture, or illegal. But if you remember Vietnam, you might recall the story about the US soldier who was court-martialled for waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. The Washington Post ran a photo of the torture.

That was back when the US had a news media willing and able to challenge the government. Now we just have media without the news.

“Water boarding was designated as illegal by US generals in Vietnam 40 years ago,” ABC News reported in 2005 in their story “History of an Interrogation Technique: Water Boarding.”

Sen. John McCain(R-Ariz), who was tortured as a POW in Vietnam, said the water-board technique is a “very exquisite torture” that should be outlawed, according to the ABC News report.

Waterboarding has been outlawed. We signed the Geneva Convention that prohibits torture. And here’s what the US Justice Department’s Criminal Manual says about torture.

Section 2340A of Title 18, United States Code, prohibits torture committed by public officials under color of law against persons within the public official’s custody or control. Torture is defined to include acts specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering. (It does not include such pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions.) The statute applies only to acts of torture committed outside the United States. There is Federal extraterritorial jurisdiction over such acts whenever the perpetrator is a national of the United States or the alleged offender is found within the United States, irrespective of the nationality of the victim or the alleged offender.

So where’s the Justice Department investigation Attorney General Eric Holder was yammering about last year?

The story is that Holder is waiting on the Office of Professional Responsibility to complete its report on the Bush torture program. Well, it’s been a year now, and it looks a lot more like a cover-up than an investigation.

The sad truth is that this is NOT a nation of laws but rather men, and this case proves that. These men can break any law they want and get away with it.

Maybe an international war crimes tribunal is a more appropriate venue anyway?

–

Here are links to stories last year about the pending Bush torture investigation.
Criminal investigation into CIA treatment of detainees expected LA Times
Top prosecutor orders probe into interrogations; Obama shifts onus CNN
Holder Probe Would Be Big Break From Bush Torture Policy Washington Independent
Justice Dept. Report Advises Pursuing C.I.A. Abuse Cases New York Times

On Sunday, Former Vice President Dick Cheney accused the Obama administration of making the country less safe by mirandizing terror suspects, trying them in civilian court and abandoning torture.

“It’s the mind-set that concerns me,” Cheney said. On “This Week” he explained, “I was a big supporter of waterboarding. I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Read this article on Examiner.

While data and statistics don’t tell the whole story about our flailing economy and unemployment, but this chart created on Feb. 5, 2010 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is pretty cool. Jobs are being created, even if slower than we’d like.

Lobbying violations were way up in 2009 because new regulations and a bad reputation is pushing lobbyists to drop the title thus triggering more than 1,400 lobbyists to de-register with the feds to avoid the stigma and additional paperwork.

According to a Huffington Post story, usually only a couple of hundred lobbyists leave the game each quarter. But Congress passed the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act in 2007 and doubled the amount a financial reporting each lobbying firm is required to submit each year.

Bush signed the bill into law, but when Obama was campaigning he called this transparency.

The downside is that in 2009 about 4,400 potential paperwork violations were filed. According to the Huffington Post, since 1996 the Secretary of the Senate referred just over 8,200 violations.

The law (referred to as “Helloga” by lobbying wonks) requires firms to file reports on expenses and contacts four times instead of twice a year, and it introduced a new requirement that firms and individual lobbyists file semiannual reports on political contributions. So, there’s a lot more paperwork to screw up.

It’s not just the paperwork, some of the lobbyists are trying to drop the title for something that sounds less evil – like “researcher.”

The Huffington Post reported that “two lobbyists named Larry Mitchell and Brien Bonneville de-registered at the end of 2009 and founded a new ‘non-lobbying entity’ called K Street Research. They figure they can do the same work as before without the ‘Scarlet L.’”

One can’t help but think about the “spirit of the law” regulating lobbyists. Just because someone doesn’t want to file the paperwork, but “can do the same work as before” and call themselves a researcher …

Read the Huffington Post story “Potential Lobbying Disclosure Violations Surged In 2009.”

Evidently during President George W. Bush’s White House career millions of e-mail messages were lost. Two advocacy groups sued to have the messages recovered and restored to Bush’s presidential legacy, but it appears some of those e-mail messages are gone for good.

The Obama White House and the advocacy groups reached a deal on Monday over the 22 million lost messages. The National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics sued the Executive in 2007 because from March 2003 – the beginning of the war in Iraq – and October 2005 e-mail messages were not being archived as is required by law.

The Bush administration initially denied that any messages were missing, but one day after leaving office, court documents show that the Bush administration admitted that 22 million e-mail messages were “mislabeled,” according to a report by the Washington Post.

Earlier this year, technicians were able to retrieve 61 days of the missing messages from tape backup. And now under the agreement between the two advocacy groups and the Obama administration, another 33 days of e-mail correspondence will be restored.

So of the 20 months of messages “accidentally” removed from the historical record, the Obama administration will restore three.

Source: Deal announced on missing e-mails by Dan Eggen

Dick Cheney is amazing. It’s like he’s really living in another universe. Here’s what he said on Fox this morning about torturing prisoners.

“I’m very proud of what we did in terms of defending the nation for the last eight years successfully,” Cheney said.

Here’s an excerpt from a review by the CIA inspector general of the torture program.

In June 2003, the U.S. military sought an Afghan citizen who had been implicated in rocket attacks on a joint U.S. Army and CIA position in Asadabad located in Northeast Afghanistan. On 18 June 2003, this individual appeared at Asadabad Base at the urging of the local Governor. The individual was held in a detention facility guarded by U.S. soldiers from the Base. During the four days the individual was detained, an Agency independent contractor, who was a paramilitary officer, is alleged to have severely beaten the detainee with a large metal flashlight and kicked him during interrogation sessions. The detainee died in custody on 21 June; his body was turned over to a local cleric and returned to his family on the following date without an autopsy being performed.

Now that’s just one incident in which one man was murdered after he turned himself in. I wonder what his family and neighbors felt when they were returned a corpse?

But back to Cheney’s assertion about keeping us safe for eight years. There was that little event we call 9/11. I know I won’t forget that nearly 3,000 of us were killed on a sunny Fall morning while Cheney and Bush were “protecting” us. Now I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking that they weren’t torturing people before 9/11, and we were attacked, ergo when Cheney started waterboarding people and beating them to death with flashlights, that’s when we were safe. One can find a correlation between torture and a lack of terrorist attacks here in the US, but correlation does not equal causation. In fact, in the documents Cheney cites as evidence that torture saved lives, the author clearly states that there is no evidence that torture provided any actionable intelligence that saved our nation from attack.

And in terms of who’s to blame for 9/11, I know Cheney tried to pin that on President Clinton, but it never stuck. So if 9/11 happened on Cheney’s watch, why does he feel he gets a pass? If 9/11 had happened under Clinton, do you think Cheney would just chalk it up to “stuff happens”?

Also, it’s common knowledge that President Bush and Vice President Cheney did not consider terrorism a serious threat before 9/11. If they did, they certainly didn’t act like it. Just read the 9/11 commission report. The authors of the report tried very hard to give Bush and Cheney a get of jail free card for 9/11, but there’s no doubt that the Bush administration had a laissez-faire attitude to towards terrorism.

What happened after 9/11 could never have happened without it. What we know of so far is that there was torture, eavesdropping, prisons full of suspected “terrorists,” two wars, a bloated privately owned military industrial complex, a shattered economy and a radicalization of a pretty sizable segment of the population here and around the globe.

Dare I say, the reason Cheney doesn’t show remorse for 9/11 is because he knows it was the best thing to have happen during his tenure in the White House – it’s almost like he planned it himself.

Without 9/11, Bush could very well have become a one-term president. There certainly would not have been the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan and the level of fear, paranoia and overt patriotism could never have reached post-9/11 heights.

No, Cheney needed 9/11, and so he sees no reason to show remorse or take responsibility for this failure, because to him it wasn’t a failure.

To learn more about the policy discussion in neo-conservative circles just prior to 9/11, read the Project for a New American Century policy report “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century.”

Here’s a story in the Washington Post about Cheney’s latest case for torture.
CIA Special Review of Torture program May 7, 2004

In an effort to maintain a valid public record, here’s another batch of Bush administration torture memos. All of them were written by Steven G. Bradbury except one by Jay Bybee.

Here’s some of the text I transcribed from Steven G. Bradbury’s memo on torture from July 20, 2007. This is not a complete transcript of the 79-page memo. I’ll add more to this post if I transcribe more of the document.

Steven G. Bradbury memo on torture

Re: Application of the War Crimes Act, the Detainee Treatment Act, and Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions to Certain Techniques that May Be Used by the CIA in the Interrogation of High Value al Qaeda Detainees

You have asked whether the Central Intelligence Agency may lawfully employee six “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the interrogation of high value detainees who are member of al Qaeda and associated groups Addressing this question requires us to determine whether the proposed techniques are consistent with (1) the War Crimes Act, as amended by the Military Commissions Act of 2006; (2) the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005; and (3) the requirements of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

As the President announced on September 6, 2006, the CIA has operated a detention and interrogation program since the months after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The CIA has detained in this program several dozen high value terrorists who were believed to possess critical information that could assist in preventing future terrorist attacks, including by leading to the capture of other senior al Qaeda operatives. In interrogating a small number of these terrorists, the CIA applied what the President described as an “alternative set of procedures” – and what the Executive Branch internally has referred to as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” These techniques were developed by professionals in the CIA, were approved by the Director of the CIA, and were employed under strict conditions, including careful supervision and monitoring, in a manner that was determined to be safe, effective, and lawful. The President has stated stat the use of such techniques has saved American lives by revealing information about planned terrorist plots. They have been recommended for approval by the Principals Committee of the National Security Council and briefed to the full membership of the congressional intelligence committees.
…
1. Conditioning techniques

Dietary manipulation would involve substituting a bland, commercial liquid meal for a detainee’s normal diet. As a guideline, the CIA would use a formula for calorie intake that debpends on a detainee’s body weight and expected level of activity. This formula would ensure that calorie intake will always be at least 1,000 kcal/day, and that it usually would be significantly higher. By comparison, commercial weight-loss programs used within the United States commonly limit intake to 1,000 kcal/day regardless of body weight. CIA medical officers ensure that the detainee is provided and accepts adequate fluid and nutrition, and frequent monitoring by medical personnel takes place while any detainee is undergoing dietary manipulation. Detainees would be monitored at all times to ensure that they do not lose more than ten percent of their starting body weight, and if such weight loss were to occur, application of the technique would be discontinued. The CIA also would ensure that detainees, at a minimum, drink 35 ml/kg/day of fluid, but a detainee undergoing dietary manipulation may drink as much water as he reasonably pleases.

Read the complete Bradbury memo

It’s not light reading and it kind of makes me want to puke, but the “opinion” written by Steven G. Bradbury in 2007 regarding the CIA’s torture program is so disgusting that I’m going to have to read it in chunks.

I didn’t get too far today, I stopped at page eight. This is the part where Bradbury describes the “conditioning technique” called “dietary manipulation.”

“Dietary manipulation would involve substituting a bland, commercial liquid meal for a detainee’s normal diet. As a guidline, the CIA would use a formula for calorie intake that depends on a detainee’s body weight and expected level of activity. This formula would ensure that calorie intake will always be at least 1,000 kcal/day, and that it usually would be significantly higher. By comparison, commercial weight-loss programs used within the United States commonly limit intake to 1,000 kcal/day regardless of body weight. CIA medical officers ensure that the detainee is provided and accepts adequate fluid and nutrition, and frequent monitoring by medical personnel takes place while any detainee is undergoing dietary manipulation. Detainees would be monitored at all times to ensure that they do not lose more than ten percent of their starting body weight, and if such weight loss were to occur, application of the technique would be discontinued. The CIA also would ensure that detainees, at a minimum, drink 35 ml/kg/day of fluid, but a detainee undergoing dietary manipulation may drink as much water as he reasonably pleases.” — Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven G. Bradbury wrote in his July 20, 2007 memo.

Just to be clear, Bradbury actually cited the US weight-loss industry as a source of information in defending the humanity of “dietary manipulation.” The difference, I assumed was obvious, is that Americans who go on a weight-loss program are doing so voluntarily. And the number of people who are functioning on 1,000 kcal a day are a rare breed indeed.

It doesn’t matter though.

What does matter is that Bradbury is trying to make the case that there are six torture techniques that are lawful: dietary manipulation, extended sleep deprivation, facial holding, attention grasping, abdominal slapping and facial slapping (also known as the bitch slap). I know, that’s a lot of slapping and holding, and there’s more than a hint of homo-erotic imagery here, but let’s stay focused. I wonder if they had a safe word. Pineapple!

Can we have a minute for the doctors, I assume they’re doctors, monitoring these torture sessions? Isn’t there some sort of Hippocratic Oath preventing them from harming a patient? And having doctors monitoring prisoners while they’re being tortured doesn’t provide a legal basis for torturing people – it just sounds even creepier.

The good news is that Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder issued a press release on March 2, 2009 proclaiming that the opinions of certain Bush lawyers, such as Bradbury, “no longer reflect the views of OLC and ‘should not be treated as authoritative for any purpose.’”

The question today is whether President Obama has the right to not investigate this torture program. Can he, having taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, just simply ignore what are apparently flagrant abuses of power? Or does Obama want the option of torturing people too? Obama continues to pursue the Bush policy of sending prisoners to other countries, presumably because torture is allowed (e.g. Obama’s High-value detainee Interrogation Group, known as HIG, Holder said it “would be gathering intelligence to prevent terrorist attacks and otherwise to protect national security”).

Last week Holder announced that there will be an investigation into the Bush administration’s torture program, but it would be very limited in scope.

–
Steven G. Bradbury July 20, 2007 memo on legality of torture techniques
Steven G. Bradbury Wiki
Hippocratic Oath

Here’s another collection of documents relating to the CIA’s torture program. If you like reading formerly Top Secret documents, this is for you.

Letter to Rizzo from OLC Aug. 31, 2006
Letter from OLC to CIA Nov. 6, 2007
Memorandum to Rizzo Aug. 31, 2006
Letter from OLC to CIA Aug. 23, 2007
David Barron Memo for the AG July 11, 2009
Letter from OLC to CIA Nov. 7, 2007
OLC opinion on interrogation techniques 2007

Here are some of the highlights from the CIA’s Inspector General report on US torture program. And ellipse represents text that has been blacked out of the declassified document. I’ll provide more information as I make my way through the 269 pages of the report, but for now this stuff is pretty interesting.

“Senior Agency officials believed Abu Zubaydah was withholding information that could not be obtained through then-authrorized interrogation techniques. Agency officials believed that a more robust approach was necessary to elicit threat information from Abu Zubaydah and possibly other senior Al-Qaida high value detainees.” Page 9

“Working with DoJ’s Office of Legal Counsel(OLC), OGC determined that in most instances relevant to the counterterrorism detention and interrogation activities the criminal prohibition against torture, 18 U.S.C. 2340-2340B, is the controlling legal constraint on interrogations of detainees outside the United States. In August, 2002, DoJ provided to the Agency a legal opinion in which it determined that 10 specific ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’ (EITs) would not violate the torture prohibition. This work provided the foundation for the policy and administrative decisions that guide the CTC Program.” Page 10

“By November 2002, the Agency had Abu Zubaydah and another high value detainee, ‘Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, in custody … and the Office of Medical Services (OMS) provided medical care to the detainees.” Page 10

“There were few instances of deviations from approved procedures … with one notable exception described in this Review. With respect to two detainees at those sites, the use and frequency of one EIT, the waterboard, went beyond the projected use of the technique as originally described by DoJ. The Agency, on 29 July 2003, secured oral DoJ concurrence that certain deviations are not significant for purposes of DoJ’s legal opinions.” Page 11

“there were instances of improvisation and other undocumented interrogation techniques.” Page 12

“Agency efforts to provide systematic clear and timely guidance to those involved in the CTC Detention and Interrogation Program was inadequate at first but have improved considerably during the life of the Program as problems have been identified and addressed. CTC implemented training programs for interrogators and debriefers.” Page 12

Here the footnote regarding “interrogators and debriefers” pointing to the torture training program. “Before 11 September (9/11) 2001, Agency personnel sometimes used the terms interrogation/interrogator and debriefing/debriefer interchangeably. The use of these terms has since evolved and, today, CTC more clearly distinguishes their meanings. A debriefer engages a detainee solely through question and answer. An interrogator is a person who complete a two-week interrogations training program, which is designed to train, qualify, and certify a person to administer EITs. An interrogator can administer EITs during an interrogation of a detainee only after the field, in coordination with Headquarters, assesses the detainee as withholding information. An interrogator transitions the detainee from a non-cooperative to a cooperative phase in order that a debriefer can elicit actionable intelligence through non-aggressive techniques during debriefing sessions. An interrogator may debrief a detainee during an interrogation; however, a debreifer may not interrogate a detainee.” Page 12

–
View complete CIA torture program report

It’s not news, but despite President Bush’s unambiguous statement back in 2005 that “We do not torture,” we do, or at least did, in fact torture.

Newly declassified CIA documents have been released highlighting the torture techniques utilized by intelligence agency employees between September 2001 to October 2003.

The report by the CIA Inspector General is titled “Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities.” It was previously declassified in 2007, but so much of the information was redacted that it was essentially meaningless, but the new report is much more informative, and it’s release is reportedly the reason Attorney General Eric Holder announced on Monday that he will be investigating the matter.

According to the report, prisoners were interrogated using techniques such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation, something called “the hard takedown,” threats to murder the prisoner’s family, and I’m still combing through the documents.

Now of course one can argue, as former Vice President Dick Cheney has been doing, that torture worked and these documents prove it, but no one can deny that the United States of America tortured human beings and that is a direct violation of international law. These are laws that Congress has said we as a nation will abide by. And according to the report, there was concern by some people in the CIA involved in torture that what they were doing could land them in a world court facing charges of war crimes.

But in terms of justifying breaking international law regarding torture – and I haven’t had a chance to review all 269 pages of this report – but I’ve yet to see proof that a) torturing people worked or b) that there was no other way to get the information, besides using torture.

It’s worth noting that even if torture “worked,” it doesn’t mean it was the correct and moral choice.

Here’s the full document for you to review (269 pages – 17MB).
“Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (September 2001 – October 2003)” by the CIA Inspector General released August 2009.

Further reporting can be found here:
Cheney says documents show interrogations prevented attacks CNN
Report Shows Tight C.I.A. Control on Interrogations NY Times
CIA Report Details Interrogation Techniques NPR