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Mark Danner on AC360 calls out the Cheney father-daughter tag team for their use of fear mongering and Karl Rove style "ruthless politics of national security". As he notes it isn't good for the country or for the Republican party, not that the Cheney's seem so care.

Mark also points out the very slippery slope that President Obama is talking about taking us down with this idea of prolonged detention which is essentially preventive detention and is not something anyone should be supportive of.

COOPER: Mark, you have written extensively about the detainee issue, about these interrogation techniques. What did you think of what Vice President Cheney said today, about what Liz Cheney said tonight?

DANNER: Well, I think this is an extension of what President Obama has referred to as the politics of fear.

Both Cheneys made very serious charges about President Obama, basically saying, explicitly, that he was endangering the country, that he endangered the country, as -- as Liz Cheney said, by putting out these memos, which is a complete canard.

These techniques have been public not simply since the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, as -- as you pointed out, Anderson, but since 2005, when ABC News did an extensive report that specifically described all these techniques.

So, the idea that this was a great secret and now terrorists can train to them is completely and manifestly untrue. And, as a charge, it is a kind of ruthless politics of national security, of the sort that we have seen Republicans seize on since about four months after 9/11, when Karl Rove basically told the Republican National Committee, look, this is an issue we can win on.

This was January 2002. And you see a kind of reclaiming of this ground, or an attempt to reclaim this ground, from the two Cheneys. And I think the Republican Party in general doesn't want to go in this direction, but they're being, in effect, dragged along, kicking and screaming, by the ubiquitous voice of the former vice president.

I don't think it's good for the country. But I agree with David Gergen that it's at least interesting to see a public debate and to see President Obama come up and, in a prepared speech -- and I thought a very elegant speech -- try to take on these matters and build a consensus for a sustainable policy. And I emphasize sustainable. He wants something that we won't fight about, that can be submitted to the rule of law, that the Supreme Court will not throw out, that can last over the length of the so-called war on terror.

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Bill Moyer talks to Mark Danner and Bruce Fein on last night's Journal:

The President had a press conference on Wednesday night in which he was asked two questions about torture. If you'd been there, Mark, what would you have asked him?

[...] BRUCE FEIN: I would have asked him, since he's agreed that what was done was torture, and that the United States criminal code makes torture a crime. And there's no national security exception, no exception if you get useful information. And because we had impeached, in the House Judiciary Committee, a former President, called Richard Nixon, for failing faithfully to execute the laws. How he can justify not moving forward with an investigation when we have a former President and Vice President openly acknowledging they authorized water boarding, what he has described as torture, is a crime.

Or in the alternative, if he thinks that there are mitigating circumstances, and there's body language suggests that, then he should pardon them like Ford did Richard Nixon. And the reason why the difference between a pardon and non-prosecution is important, is because a pardon requires the recipient to acknowledge guilt. That there was wrongdoing. There was a crime. Just forgetting and sweeping it under the rug suggests this wasn't illegal.

BILL MOYERS: But he is clearly trying to move, as he says, beyond the past. He's closing Guantanamo. He doesn't countenance torture. He says it won't happen on his watch. I mean, shouldn't that settle the issue?

MARK DANNER: This is an issue that, as he has put it, divides the country. But because it divides the country, in my opinion, is one reason we have to confront it. The idea that this is about the past is simply wrong. It's not about the past. It's about our present politics.

Fein is exactly right. As long as we act as if a crime wasn't committed, we undermine the rule of law.

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Rachel Maddow follows up on her reporting with Mark Danner who obtained a Red Cross report on the torture that occurred at GITMO and made it public at The New York Review of Books. Rachel asks Danner whether he's concerned about the report being made public and if it will affect the Red Cross having access to prisoners in the future. Mr. Danner felt that the public's right to know about what happened outweighed that concern. From the article:

When it comes to torture, it is not what we did but what we are doing. It is not what happened but what is happening and what will happen. In our politics, torture is not about whether or not our polity can "let the past be past"—whether or not we can "get beyond it and look forward." Torture, for Dick Cheney and for President Bush and a significant portion of the American people, is more than a repugnant series of "procedures" applied to a few hundred prisoners in American custody during the last half-dozen or so years—procedures that are described with chilling and patient particularity in this authoritative report by the International Committee of the Red Cross.[2] Torture is more than the specific techniques—the forced nudity, sleep deprivation, long-term standing, and suffocation by water," among others—that were applied to those fourteen "high-value detainees" and likely many more at the "black site" prisons secretly maintained by the CIA on three continents.

Torture, as the former vice-president's words suggest, is a critical issue in the present of our politics—and not only because of ongoing investigations by Senate committees, or because of calls for an independent inquiry by congressional leaders, or for a "truth commission" by a leading Senate Democrat, or because of demands for a criminal investigation by the ACLU and other human rights organizations, and now undertaken in Spain, the United Kingdom, and Poland.[3] For many in the United States, torture still stands as a marker of political commitment—of a willingness to "do anything to protect the American people," a manly readiness to know when to abstain from "coddling terrorists" and do what needs to be done. Torture's powerful symbolic role, like many ugly, shameful facts, is left unacknowledged and undiscussed. But that doesn't make it any less real. On the contrary.

Torture is at the heart of the deadly politics of national security. The former vice-president, as able and ruthless a politician as the country has yet produced, appears convinced of this. For if torture really was a necessary evil in what Mr. Cheney calls the "tough, mean, dirty, nasty business" of "keeping the country safe," then it follows that its abolition at the hands of the Obama administration will put the country once more at risk. It was Barack Obama, after all, who on his first full day as president issued a series of historic executive orders that closed the "black site" secret prisons and halted the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" that had been practiced there, and that provided that the offshore prison at Guantánamo would be closed within a year.

The rest of his article as linked above can be read here.

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Rachel Maddow talks to Mark Danner who recently published an article in The New York Review of Books US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites.

Maddow: One of the remarkable things about the similarities between the different prisoner's descriptions is not just that it implies that they couldn't have all come up with the same story. It also implies that this was a very organized situation. This is not rogue CIA officers taking the gloves off and deciding what to do in the moment. What do you know? What do you believe we know about the level of coordination between officials at these black sites and officials in Washington who might have pursued this as a matter of policy?

Danner: Well we know first of all that the interrogators were in constant touch with their superiors at CIA headquarters in Langley, VA. In fact there is one of the interrogators of Abu Zubaydah Mr. John Kiriakou gave an interview to ABC News that is, you can find on the Internet in which he detailed this rather extensively. I quote from this report in which Mr. Kiriakou essentially says every time we had to use a new procedure, if we had to him him, slap him, whatever you would have to cable headquarters and get approval from the Deputy Director of Operations which is a very high position in the CIA.

Meanwhile the Director of Central Intelligence at the time, this was the spring and summer of 2002 in the case of Abu Zubaydah, was George Tenet who was traveling across the river every day to principles meetings at the White House. The principles committee includes the National Security Adviser, then Condoleeza Rice, the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of State Colin Powell, the then Attorney General John Ashcroft, the highest law enforcement official in the United States of course. All of whom were briefed on this day by day. Not least because George Tenet apparently was worried that he would get stuck with this.