Comments on: U.S. Drones Have al Qaeda On the Run

Strikes by CIA Drones to al Qaeda Sanctuaries in Pakistan Are Working

[rednomo]

cont.

Very few voters are aware of Mr. Addington?s existence, much less what he stands for. But he was the legal linchpin of the administration?s Marquis de Sade approach to battling terrorism. In the view of Mr. Addington and his acolytes, anything and everything that the president authorized in the fight against terror ? regardless of what the Constitution or Congress or the Geneva Conventions might say ? was all right. That included torture, rendition, warrantless wiretapping, the suspension of habeas corpus, you name it.

This is the mind-set that gave us Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and the C.I.A.?s secret prisons, known as ?black sites.?

Ms. Mayer wrote: ?The legal doctrine that Addington espoused ? that the president, as commander in chief, had the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries if national security demanded it ? rested on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars shared.?

When the constraints of the law are unlocked by the men and women in suits at the pinnacle of power, terrible things happen in the real world. You end up with detainees being physically and psychologically tormented day after day, month after month, until they beg to be allowed to commit suicide. You have prisoners beaten until they are on the verge of death, or hooked to overhead manacles like something out of the Inquisition, or forced to defecate on themselves, or sexually humiliated, or driven crazy by days on end of sleep deprivation and blinding lights and blaring noises, or water-boarded.

To get a sense of the heights of madness scaled in this anything-goes atmosphere, consider a brainstorming meeting held by military officials at Guantánamo. Ms. Mayer said the meeting was called to come up with ways to crack through the resistance of detainees.

?One source of ideas,? she wrote, ?was the popular television show ?24.? On that show as Ms. Mayer noted, ?torture always worked. It saved America on a weekly basis.?

I felt as if I was in Never-Never Land as I read: ?In conversation with British human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, the top military lawyer in Guantánamo, Diane Beaver, said quite earnestly that Jack Bauer ?gave people lots of ideas? as they sought for interrogation models.?

Donald Rumsfeld described the detainees at Guantánamo as ?the worst of the worst.? A more sober assessment has since been reached by many respected observers. Ms. Mayer mentioned a study conducted by attorneys and law students at the Seton Hall University Law School.

?After reviewing 517 of the Guantánamo detainees? cases in depth,? she said, ?they concluded that only 8 percent were alleged to have associated with Al Qaeda. Fifty-five percent were not alleged to have engaged in any hostile act against the United States at all, and the remainder were charged with dubious wrongdoing, including having tried to flee U.S. bombs. The overwhelming majority ? all but 5 percent ? had been captured by non-U.S. players, many of whom were bounty hunters.?

(cont)


The U.S. shamed itself on George W. Bush?s and Dick Cheney?s watch, and David Addington and others like him were willing to manipulate the law like Silly Putty to give them the legal cover they desired. Ms. Mayer noted that Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the late historian, believed that ?the Bush administration?s extralegal counterterrorism program presented the most dramatic, sustained and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history.?

After reflecting on major breakdowns of law that occurred in prior administrations, including the Watergate disaster, Mr. Schlesinger told Ms. Mayer: ?No position taken has done more damage to the American reputation in the world ? ever.?

Americans still have not come to grips with this disastrous stain on the nation?s soul. It?s important that the whole truth eventually come out, and as many of the wrongs as possible be rectified.

Ms. Mayer, as much as anyone, is doing her part to pull back the curtain on the awful reality. ?The Dark Side? is essential reading for those who think they can stand the truth.

[Joe_NY_15]

It might have been the case, if we elected the bomber pilot, but instead you irresponsibly elected a totally unqualified community organizer to the position of President, so there will be no wiping of anything.....just empty talks, diplomacy-only, appeasement, negotiations, sanctions, and other weak liberal ideas of how enemies are dealt with.

[geneonlbk]

Let nobody go unkilled. After all they are only rag-heads. Have you noticed that we are alone in our crazed logic?

[hungry1968-16]

by rbstrcklnd July 11, 2009 1:21 AM PDT
How differently CBS reports the war when Obama is President. What a joke. I guess more than Brian Williams is sharing a bed with him.






Translation: "Bush micromanaged the wars and led them into complete failure, and the news reported all of his failures and missteps accurately. Now Obama is president and he's letting the generals on the ground run the wars the way that they're supposed to, and the press is reporting on the success that those generals are accomplishing. That's not fair."



Brilliant post.

[ToolMangler1]

Hungry' "Obama is president and he's letting the generals on the ground run the wars the way that they're supposed " very true!! the problem is that the repugs are saying that Obama has not won anything (because he isn't running the war like the shrub did.) It is slanted journalism from one end to the other. Then you couple 15 or so Obama haters with the commentary forums and it looks like Obama is unpopular. The repugs don't want Obama to succeed anywhere. They would rather the country fail than to help him do anything. Can you recognize "Jim Crow" when you see it? Or are you old enough to have lived through that era? I am!!

[nextgenman09]

I'm sure Al Qaeda says the same thing about the 9/11 victims. Hey, sometimes the gum has to bleed when you pull a rotten tooth.

[darthcheney345]

That was unforgivable.

[darthcheney345]

Once again, we didn't invent armed drones.

The Nazi V-1 Buzz Bomb was an armed drone.

And comparing a drone to a fanatical suicide bomber makes no sense.

The Japanese used Kamikazi pilots because they couldn't make drones.

The whole point of a drone is so that a human pilot DOESN'T have to get killed.

So a drone is more like the OPPOSITE of a suicide bomber.

[darthcheney345]

by CB_Brooklyn July 10, 2009 6:49 PM PDT
Dr Wood's analysis shows, very clearly, that directed energy weapons (DEW) were a causal factor in the destruction of the World Trade Center.
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So, like, are you on drugs, or what?

The only "truth" I believe about 9/11 is what I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. BEFORE 9/11/2001.

But when I tell people, they all LOL and ROTFL me and call me a liar. Because they don't want to believe me. It interferes with their political agenda. And to them, their own lies matter more than the truth that I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears.

I know what I saw and what I heard. You can stop others from believing me, but you can't stop me from believing me.

I know what I saw and what I heard.

And I know d@*n well what happened.

And I'm not going to waste my time getting LOL and ROTFL'ed for telling anybody else except my close friends.

And for those who would attack me, hear this:

1) The government WAS warned. Repeatedly. The government chose to ignore the warnings.

2) I only saw one piece of the puzzle. I had no idea what it meant until 9/11 happened. When it happened, THEN I knew exactly what it meant. Hey, putting the puzzle pieces together is what the government is supposed to do. Instead, they threw away the puzzle pieces as soon as they got them.

3)NO I WILL NOT NAME NAMES of the others who saw and heard what I did. I don't want any dead bodies turning up beside dirt roads on my account. Especially because they would be my close friends. Or me.


Don't try to lie to me about 9/11. I saw it before it happened. You can fool everybody else, but you can't lie to me.

[curiously1]

When you pull a rotten tooth, the gum around it gets lacerated too. Ben Laden is a rotten tooth that needs to be removed. My heart bleeds for very innocent man, woman and child who suffer in this war but what has to be done, has to be done. The world is ridding itself of the evil fanatic thugs and we are all either a part of this struggle, or a witness to this cleansing.

[nextgenman09]

I'm sure Al Qaeda says the same thing about the 9/11 victims. Hey, sometimes the gum has to bleed when you pull a rotten tooth.

[darthcheney345]

by andacar July 10, 2009 9:49 PM PDT
Just curious Darthcheney, can you define what a "liberal" is?
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Well for starters, tmittelstaed just gave an excellent example of an liberal gushing over Obama's "genius" for basically doing nothing. In this case, he says Obama is a genius for copying what Bush did. And as we all know, Einstein was called a genius for the way he cleverly copied the Theory of Relativity from somebody else - NOT!!!!

But more rigorously, you asked an excellent question. What is a liberal? It turns out, no liberal can explain it. Part of the problem is, most liberals deny being liberals. I think that has to do with what a total failure Obama is, and being a liberal now carries a stigma.

But when somebody does admit to being a liberal, they can't define what it is in any coherent way. They will say a liberal is somebody who is right about everything, then they have some kind of mental siezure and foam at the mouth while they go back to bashing Bush.

Which doesn't really answer the question.

So I have no choice but to conclude that a person is liberal if he/she gushes over Obama in spite of what an utter failure he is. But that in no way fully defines what a liberal is, I just take it as ONE symptom of the disease.

Now I'm sure you will just LOL and ROTFL me, and accuse me of being insulting.

Because that's another thing liberals do, and you sound liberal to me.