This Is How It's Done

Yes, it's only CNN.com, and the media would probably not dare have such an effective liberal spokesman on the broadcast airwaves. But David Waldman (nee Kagro X) really destroys his fellow combatants talking about torture here, and all of these "Democratic strategists" are welcome to pick up his point of view as a model:



These simply are facts. The United States tortured detainees to extract false confessions about an Iraq/Al Qaeda link. The Washington Post tries to obscure those facts by allowing anonymous intelligence officials, probably holdovers from the Bush Administration, offer their one-sided view of things without rebuttal, acknowledging that Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were questioned about Iraq's ties to Al Qaeda but claiming that waterboarding did not accompany that questioning. There's no way to disprove their statements but plenty of people who contradict them. And so instead of giving room for only anonymous sources repeating Bush-era spin, we need a full investigation of every facet of United States detention and torture policy from 2001 to the present to determine if we subjected prisoners to illegal tactics to make a case or justify a case for war. We're no longer talking about those idiotic ticking time bomb scenarios.

Jane Hamsher created a Facebook page for Kagro. You can join it. This entire Nancy Pelosi/CIA brouhaha is designed to intimidate Democrats into stopping any investigation into what the Cheney regime really did. Since Pelosi has gone on record supporting a Truth Commission, that threat ought not to work. But the media is certainly giving it the college try. We must have investigations and prosecutions where necessary, especially given the latest revelations connecting torture to Iraq and the lies that led to war.

Postscript: Batocchio has something you should see.