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Rachel runs down the list of intelligence leaks by Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the man who the Republicans feel is the best choice to be the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. This was a follow up from last night where Maddow focused on the leaking of Maj. Nidal M. Hasan's email conversations with cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi.
As Think Progress noted, Marcy Wheeler also reminded us today of some of Hoekstra's finer moments.
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It's one thing for the Bernie Sanderses and Russ Feingolds to openly question the mission in Afghanistan. It's quite another for Dianne Feinstein to do so.
KING: Well Senator Feinstein, you're the chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence. To the question of where this ends, it is eight years after 9/11. We've paused and reflected on that just the other day. You see the things that we can't see, the intelligence. Are we winning in Afghanistan? Are we any closer to finding Osama bin Laden, and does the president have a clear strategy, in your view?
FEINSTEIN: Well, I can tell you this. A lot of the leadership has been taken out of al Qaeda. I can say and I think you would agree that Afghanistan and the Pakistani border are still the major safe haven, the major safe haven for terrorists in the world. And these are people who will, if they can, come after us, not necessarily the Taliban, but certainly al Qaeda and other affiliated groups.
So we have to consider that. We have about 60,000 troops there, another 8,000 are moving in with our allies, it about equals the force that is in Iraq. To the best of my knowledge, the president has had no request for additional troops up to this time. My view is that the mission has to be very clear. I don't believe --
KING: Has to be means it is not now?
FEINSTEIN: I believe it is not now. I do not believe we can build a democratic state in Afghanistan. I believe it will remain a tribal entity.
I do believe that clearing out Al Qaida, clearing out the Taliban is a bona fide part one of the mission. I do agree that training Afghan troops, Afghan -- Afghan police is an important piece of the mission.
I believe the mission should be time limited, that there should be no, well, we'll let you know in a year and a half, depending on how we do. I think the Congress is entitled to know, after Iraq, exactly how long are we going to be in Afghanistan.
Feinstein is actually more charitable about the presence of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan than the commanding general on the ground, Stanley McChrystal, who said this week that there are no signs of major Al Qaeda anywhere in the country.
But as far as the wariness of the viability of Constitutional democracy in Afghanistan, you need only look to their recent election, into which the opposition leader is now seeking a criminal investigation. He has accused Hamid Karzai of treason and "state-engineered fraud". Despite this, Karzai will probably win election on the first ballot, and a vote that has been horribly compromised will be made official. We saw in Iran how this can lead to violence and chaos, and Afghanistan is not nearly as stable. Without a viable partner in the government, as Feinstein says we cannot expect an endless commitment. Yet because Karzai is Pashtun the US will likely back him in this fight, alienating the other ethnic groups in the region. Kalashnikovs are flying off the shelves in the Tajik areas. Civil war is not an unlikely scenario at this point.
This further limits the mission, away from state-building and toward dealing with the elements in the country willing to deal. Otherwise we set ourselves up for a decade-long slog that will only end with more dead and more treasure squandered, to little effect. And yes, as Sen. Feinstein says, that process should have an end date.
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Rachel Maddow doesn't back down an inch in what was really a pretty amazing interview with Tom Ridge. Amazing in that we haven't seen enough of them and how sad it was these kind of questions weren't asked of the Bush administration by anyone in the press before we invaded that country. At the end of what was a three part interview, Rachel calls Ridge out for his attempt at revisionist history.
Rachel asks him if he still believes that Iraq had WMD and Ridge says he does not. She asks him if he really doesn't believe that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld "had any role in skewing the intelligence to a foregone conclusion" and "an intelligence community error and not a politicized decision". Ridge of course says that no one in the Bush administration would have done something like that and that he believed that they just wanted to keep the country safe.
Maddow: I think that is an eloquent argument and I have to tell you….I think you making, I think you making that argument right now is why Republicans after the Bush and Cheney administration are not going to get back the country’s trust on national security. To look back at that decision and say we got it wrong but it was in good faith and not acknowledge the foregone conclusion that we were going to invade Iraq that pervaded every decision that was made about intelligence, looking back at that decision making process, it sounds like you’re making the argument you would have made the same decision again.
Americans need to believe that our government would not make that wrong a decision, would not make such a foregone, take such a foregone conclusion to such an important issue that the counter, the intelligence that proved the opposite point was all discounted, that the intelligence was combed through for any bit that would support the foregone conclusion of the policy makers. The system was broken and if you don’t see that the system was broken and you think that it was just that the Intel was wrong, I think that you’re one of the most trusted voices on national security for the Republican Party, and I think that’s the elephant in the room.
I don’t think you guys get back your credibility on national security until you realize, that was a wrong decision made by policy makers, it wasn’t the spies fault.
Ridge: Well, I think you’re suggesting that it was only being driven by quite obviously, the people who made the decision knew more about the threat than you and I do, and again I think it’s a, it’s a pretty radical conclusion to suggest the men and women entrusted with the safety of this country would predicate a decision upon any other basis than to keep America safe. Late on it may have proven that some of the information was inaccurate, but there were plenty of reasons to go into Iraq at the time, the foremost were the weapons of mass destruction. That obviously had proven to be faulty. But the fact of the matter is at that time, given what they knew, they knew more than you and I did, it seemed to be the right thing to do and the decision was made in what they considered to be the best interest of our country.
We’ve been litigating it now for about five or six years. I guess we’re going to continue to litigate it and historians and the final history hasn’t been written because of Iraq. If some form of self government, some form of democracy ultimately is achieved in Iraq and it’s not going to look exactly like ours, but you know, the Muslim world does admire freedom of speech. The Muslim world does admire democracy. As difficult as it is over there, the notion that we went in improperly will be obviously reversed and the history is yet to be written. Democracy in Iraq…
Maddow: Reversed?
Ridge: Well, yeah. Democracy in Iraq will make a huge difference not just for the men and women and the people and the families in Iraq, but for the entire region for a lot of reasons.
Maddow: If you can go back in time and sell the American people on the idea that 4000 Americans ought to lose their lives and we ought to lose those trillions of dollars for democracy in Iraq, you have a wilder imagination than I do. We were sold that war because of 9-11. We were sold that war because of the threat of weapons of mass destruction and this guy didn’t have them and our government should have known it and frankly, a lot of people believe that our government did know it and that it was a cynical decision and maybe everybody wasn’t in on it and maybe that is a radical thing to conclude...
Ridge: Well, I don’t share that point of view. I know you do. I’m not going to convince you and you’re not going to convince me, but I really appreciate the civil way we’ve had this discussion. In frankly I think it would advance our interest as a country a lot further and a lot faster if we could have the discussion such as this.
In The Know panelists discuss the closing of the controversial detainee labyrinth and debate whether the Minotaur's sternum-stomping-by-hooves interrogation technique yielded valuable intelligence.
The Washington Post does the most insidious form of "journalism" today: they do an "on the other hand" story about torture. "Some say" it's wrong, but "others say" it works, so the implied conclusion is, how can it be wrong?
And therein lies the problem. Why does it matter? After eight years or so of deceptive leadership and an inbred corporate media corps eager to lend its imprimatur, we have gotten to the point where we're actually arguing that torture is okay if it works.
Life is full of challenges and dilemmas, but morally aware people don't take to the low road when they have to deal with them. For instance, I'm worried about paying for my COBRA coverage. If I could rob a bank and get away with it, would that be okay? Of course not.
And can I point out again that the most useful intelligence we got from detainees was because their interrogators were kind to them?
These scenes provide previously unpublicized details about the transformation of the man known to U.S. officials as KSM from an avowed and truculent enemy of the United States into what the CIA called its "preeminent source" on al-Qaeda. This reversal occurred after Mohammed was subjected to simulated drowning and prolonged sleep deprivation, among other harsh interrogation techniques.
"KSM, an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate or incomplete," according to newly unclassified portions of a 2004 report by the CIA's then-inspector general released Monday by the Justice Department.
The debate over the effectiveness of subjecting detainees to psychological and physical pressure is in some ways irresolvable, because it is impossible to know whether less coercive methods would have achieved the same result. But for defenders of waterboarding, the evidence is clear: Mohammed cooperated, and to an extraordinary extent, only when his spirit was broken in the month after his capture March 1, 2003, as the inspector general's report and other documents released this week indicate.
Over a few weeks, he was subjected to an escalating series of coercive methods, culminating in 7 1/2 days of sleep deprivation, while diapered and shackled, and 183 instances of waterboarding. After the month-long torment, he was never waterboarded again.
"What do you think changed KSM's mind?" one former senior intelligence official said this week after being asked about the effect of waterboarding. "Of course it began with that."
Mohammed, in statements to the International Committee of the Red Cross, said some of the information he provided was untrue.
"During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop. I later told interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive. I'm sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time," he said.
Critics say waterboarding and other harsh methods are unacceptable regardless of their results, and those with detailed knowledge of the CIA's program say the existing assessments offer no scientific basis to draw conclusions about effectiveness.
"Democratic societies don't use torture under any circumstances. It is illegal and immoral," said Tom Parker, policy director for counterterrorism and human rights at Amnesty International. "This is a fool's argument in any event. There is no way to prove or disprove the counterfactual."
According to WRAL News, sources expect former U.S. Sen. John Edwards to admit that he is the father of his former mistress' 18-month-old daughter.
Edwards confessed last August to an affair with Rielle Hunter, who worked for the Edwards presidential campaign in 2008. Edwards has denied father her daughter, saying the relationship with Hunter ended before the child was conceived.
I will reiterate again that it is my belief that the extramarital activities of any one is not of interest. However, I do think it's instructive to note the character of someone who would break so callously the promises made to those closest to him.
However, let me also say (and I do this as a former HUGE John Edwards supporter), WHEW!!!! I'm so glad his campaign blew up when it did. It's bad enough that he took his marriage vows so casually, but to be dumb enough to do so without taking precautions against this kind of eventuality does not speak well for Edwards' intelligence at all.
The Pump Handle: The Climate Bill is less than ideal, but the best we're gonna get right now
The Big Picture: The back story to "Bailout Nation" (h/t swimgirl)
TPMMuckraker: A sketchy DOD report does not attempt to establish the original status of the detainees it claims "reengaged" in terrorism, and does not consider the possibility that some of the 540 men released from Gitmo just might have been radicalized during their imprisonment.
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MSNBC's Joe Scarborough thinks it's a mistake to abandon President Bush's harsh interrogation techniques like waterboarding that many consider to be torture. Scarborough points to a Washington Post poll that says about half of Americans support the use of torture in some cases.
Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski notes that Obama administration officials say that intelligence can be gathered without using torture. "What Robert Gibbs is saying on 'Meet the Press' yesterday, was that they don't know whether other means may be able to get the same information," she said.
"I'm not. Go ahead. Take that chance," scoffed Scarborough. "Sometimes you have a reason to be fearful," he said. "There is irrational fear and then rational fear. If you live in a neighborhood where people's homes get broken into and people get shot and killed at night and their items get stolen, and you're fearful that may happen to you, that's not irrational. That is fear and you will support a stronger police presence in your home. If this country got attacked the way it did on September 11th, 2001, it is not irrational for Americans to fear it might happen again when you have al Qaeda wanting to do nothing but kill all of us, destroy our cities."
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Isn't it wonderful that Dick Cheney has now taken over as the leader of the Republican Party? They've been running around headless and look who comes to save them. I'm sure many conservatives are just delighted that he's going out in public, front and center and taking care of things for them.
In his Fox News interview with Sean Hannity -- the second half of which ran last night -- he trotted out an attack narrative against President Obama, essentially agreeing with Hannity that he's installing "socialism," and calling Obama's stimulus plan "devastating" for the economy.
Evidently, he's hoping that going on the attack will make the public forget about the current economic situation, which we would only politely call "devastating."
We always knew Cheney was a con artist -- how else did he get to be vice president, after all? -- but the Hannity interviews have been a disgusting performance.
“I formally asked that they be declassified now. I haven't announced this up till now, I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country.”
Obviously, Cheney's say-so is not exactly credible (after all, this is the guy who told the public "there's no doubt" Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction). But that really isn't the point. Torture is illegal, period.
I get his game, though. He's running a con on the media and the public. He's betting on the idea that certain intelligence will never be declassified for a wide variety of reasons, so he knows that by shooting his mouth off with these demands he's probably safe. They will never come to light. Very shrewd, but he's the VICE.
