Spin-Spinnery

I'm watching this breathless speech from the President, which was kicked off by this total whitewash about the capture and interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, who was supposed to be a high-value target. Zubaydah was not only mentally ill, but Bush personally got involved in his interrogation after the CIA knew it was pointless.

Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. "I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

This is complete, total bullshit he's peddling right now.

...And now there's clapping? For doing something that ought to have been done 3 years ago? Sending the 9/11 planners like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to Gitmo and prepping them for trials could have been done AT ANY POINT in the last 3 years.

I literally am rubbing my eyes.

...Wow, the bottom line is that Bush is scared that US personnel, including HIM, will be indicted for war crimes. He just said so. His lawyers must have looked at the Hamdan decision and told him there was vulnerability there. This CIA program, which Bush said will CONTINUE, is clearly in flagrant violation of Common Article 3, and now the White House is backpedaling fast, because they're liable.

So they had to spell out an extremely detailed prescription of techniques that will NOW be outlawed (proving they weren't in the past). Lt. Gen. John Kimmons at the Pentagon said today that "no good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices." That didn't stop the White House from doing it. The only thing that stopped Bush is the realization that his ass could be prosecuted. This is big.