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Anyone want to take bets on what the collective IQ of this pair is? Sean Hannity brings in The View's Elisabeth Hasselbeck to do a bit of concern trolling for Sarah-Barracuda and that mean old "librul" media that just "hates" conservative women and the conversation turns to a bit of fear mongering over the trial of Khalid Sheikh Muhammed being moved to New York.

Hannity: How do you feel about Barack Obama? Do you think he’s a Socialist? Do you think he’s a radical?

Hasselbeck: You know I think he ran as from the middle of the road, right? But what we’re seeing are some what I think to be near extremist non…lack of decisions I should say. You know, take for instance Khalid Sheikh Muhammed getting a civilian trial here in New York City.

Hannity: Umm hmm.

Hasselbeck: The irony that we now are having this rock star KSM on the biggest Broadway stage of the world to what?—reenact and draw up all that happened on 9-11. Wow! What a chance for al Quada to come in…I mean they should start selling tickets now. This is going to be a circus—an absolute circus and no illegal combatant deserves a civilian trial and I cannot believe that this decision has been made.

Hannity: And that and they still have the investigation into Fort Hood which I can’t believe, but you’re right about Khalid Sheikh Muhammed. Think about this. We will pass on intelligence information…

Hasselbeck: Umm hmm…

Hannity: …to him and his defense team…

Hasselbeck: Of course.

Hannity: When he already admitted guilt and was willing to get the death penalty.

Hasselbeck: Speaking of defense Sean, who’s going to be the defendant here? Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, he’s going to then be “oh, poor guy. What did they chuck some water on him”. And then we have the Bush administration going to be the real defendant and let’s not kid ourselves here…

Hannity: You’ll get in as much trouble as me about chucking water…

Hasselbeck: I will. I’m sure. I’m sure I will.

Hannity: I’m glad we waterboarded him. It kept people safe.

Broadway stage? Really? I want to know when someone’s going to “chuck some water” in one of these two’s faces. Hannity never did respond to Keith’s challenge for him to be waterboarded himself. I await Sean making his Worst Person’s segment after this one.

You gotta' love Hannity's lead in here as well. Barack Obama...Elisabeth is he really a Marxist, Socialist, terrorist or is he just a radical that wants to destroy America? Give me your insightful analysis on this, would you? Because I know there's no one more qualified than a former Survivor contestant turned daytime talk show co-host to weigh in on that.

Look, we know most of the alleged Al Qaeda detainees are innocent, with far too many of them victims of horrifying tactics like the ones reported in this Raw Story article. Will there ever be justice for them, or will President Obama continue to turn a blind eye to the Bush torture policies? Because with recent reports of a known rendition plane in Birmingham, England, I have to wonder if those policies are still in place:

The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.

Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK's ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.

"I'm talking of people being raped with broken bottles," he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. "I'm talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I'm talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on."

Human rights groups have long been raising the alarm about the legal system in Uzbekistan. In 2007, Human Rights Watch declared that torture is "endemic" to the country's justice system.

Murray said he only realized after his stint as ambassador that the CIA was sending people to be tortured in Uzbekistan, a country he describes as a "totalitarian" state that has never moved on from its communist era, when it was a part of the Soviet Union.

Suspects in Uzbekistan's gulags "were being told to confess to membership in Al Qaeda. They were told to confess they'd been in training camps in Afghanistan. They were told to confess they had met Osama bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes."

"I was absolutely stunned -- it changed my whole world view in an instant -- to be told that London knew [the intelligence] coming from torture, that it was not illegal because our legal advisers had decided that under the United Nations convention against torture, it is not illegal to obtain or use intelligence gained from torture as long as we didn't do the torture ourselves," Murray said.

OurFuture: "Anything Goes" capitalism destroys companies and workers' lives

Capital Eye: Aides, lobbyists and contributors among those left in the wake of John Ensign's ethics scandal

Lean Left: Don't know much about history, biology, science books, the French I took...or art. But I do know that I'm a right wing moron.

Where’s the Outrage?: Dr. Errington Thompson says..."Keith, thanks for letting America see the world I work in every day."

TAPPED: Congress' torture coverup

Welcome Back to Pottersville: Assclowns of the Week: Nattering nabobs of negativism edition

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From Saturday Night Live Oct. 3, 2009.

Jon Stewart takes the GOP hypocrites to task for wanting ACORN investigated while defending the likes of Karl Rove and refusing to investigate torture, and for freaking out over a video of school children praising President Obama.

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An investigation into abuse of terrorism detainees won't be halted following a letter sent to President Barack Obama by seven former CIA directors. "I don't want to start getting into the business of squelching, you know, investigations that are being conducted," Obama told CNN's John King Sunday.

"I appreciate the former CIA directors wanting to look after an institution that they helped to build," Obama told CBS' Bob Schieffer in a separate interview.

Politico:

The White House’s comments on the sensitive issue have been closely watched by supporters and opponents of further investigation into interrogations some have described as torture.

In August,
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y) urged Obama and his aides not to send signals about what Holder should do in terms of investigating the interrogations.

“I have nothing to say to the president on this, except let Mr. Holder alone. As far as I know, they are," Nadler said at a convention of liberal bloggers and activists. “It would be….improper for the president to decide that there ought to be or ought not to be a special counsel, prosecutions or whatever.”

It is remarkable that there's nary a mention of George Bush, the chosen one and savior of our country by the conservative movement.

Given how things were from 2001 until the presidential campaign heated up, it's really quite stunning how George W. Bush is utterly missing from our discourse. The conservative movement was for that period all about elevating Dear Leader, and now he's just gone.

Some of it is because Dick Cheney has been so outspoken about his love of torture, but it's also the fact that Cheney had almost as much power as Bush himself. That was, until things started blowing up in GW's face.

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Howard Kurtz is still playing water carrier for the Bush administration and their WMD lies used to justify invading Iraq and when called out for it by Daniel Ellsberg who says he'll name names as to who in the Bush administration knew better what does he do? Why try to change the subject of course!

Ellsberg is the subject of a new documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers which debuts this week in New York, Los Angeles and at the Toronto Film Festival.

KURTZ: Do you think that the Obama administration is getting as much pressure from the press as it should, particularly compared to previous administrations, say the Bush administration?

ELLSBERG: None. No administration has gotten the pressure that it should from the press on this point. We got into Iraq with as much deceptions as occurred in Vietnam, a generation earlier. A performance by the press no better than we saw of pressing behind the lies of the administration than we got during the Johnson administration when I was in; nor did we get a single person within the administration, the Bush administration now, who saw that the adventure into Iraq was going to hurt our counter-terrorism efforts, hurt our security, and was violating the Constitution in terms of treaties. Another example would be treaties on torture and our domestic laws on torture. People who saw that clearly, not one of them leaked to Congress, or to the press.

(CROSS TALK)

KURTZ: Obviously, there were conflicting opinions and conflicting evidence, for example on WMDs. But let me come back to this.

ELLSBERG: No, pardon me.

KURTZ: Go ahead.

ELLSBERG: When it came to lying -- when it came to lying about the nature of the evidence that the evidence was unequivocal, that was as much of a lie as saying that evidence of the attack on August 4th, on our destroyers, was unequivocal. Yes, there was --

KURTZ: You're comparing the Bush's building of the case to go to war in Iraq, with Lyndon Johnson's Tonkin Gulf war incident, just to be clear.

ELLSBERG: I am, indeed. It's exactly the same in the performance not only by the president, but by all of the people who knew that it was a disaster. And I could name names there, if you want.

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Apparently Chris Matthews thinks this is funny.

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September 02, 2009 MSNBC Keith Olbermann

OLBERMANN: In the 48 hours since Dick Cheney called investigating torture an outrageous political act to former prosecutors, one from each party say they disagree.

In our fourth story on the COUNTDOWN: The torture probe is now getting support not only from former prosecutor Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic U.S. senator who joins us in a moment, but also from the nation‘s former top prosecutor, Republican Alberto Gonzales.

First, the senator, the former U.S. attorney in the “National Law Journal,” laying out the legal foundations that justify that require investigation. First, the corpus delicti, the body of evidence establishing the possible existence of a crime. In this case, the Bush administration‘s admission of waterboarding, an act defined as criminal by international treaty and by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the fifth circuit in 1984.

Mr. Whitehouse writing, quote, “For there to be investigation now is unexceptional. The only exceptional is the parties involved: the former vice president of the United States, his counsel, David Addington, Office of Legal Counsel lawyer John Yoo.”

Congressman Jerry Nadler making the same case on FOX News where, of course, the emcee was contractually obligated to interrupt as soon as Nadler mentioned Cheney.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NADLER: The law says very clearly that it is the obligation of the attorney general to investigate, to see whether crimes were committed any time there was torture under American jurisdiction. He must do that, if he didn‘t do that, he‘d be breaking the law. My criticism of the attorney general is that he should not limit the investigation to people in the field who may have committed the torture, to people who may have ordered, such as the vice president.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: But it was Fredo, poor Fredo who grabbed the headlines by going against the family. He broke their hearts.

Quote, “Let me just say that I have a great deal of respect for General Holder. I think that the attorney general would have made this on his own and I think as the chief prosecutor of the United States, he should make the decision on his own. Eric Holder is looking at conduct that goes beyond the instructions given by the Department of Justice. And if people go beyond that, I think it is legitimate to question, to examine that conduct to ensure that people are held accountable for the actions they take even if it‘s the actions in prosecuting the war on terror.”

With us now, as promised, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

Great thanks for your time tonight, Senator.

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE (D), RHODE ISLAND: Good to be with you.

OLBERMANN: First, your thoughts on Mr. Gonzales endorsing this investigation. Do you think his approval is sincere here? Or is it a function of relief that the aim is no higher than the operatives at the interrogative level?

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September 01, 2009 News Corp

HANNITY: Now former vice president, Dick Cheney, has made no secret of his disappointment with the current administration. He aired his frustrations with President Obama in perhaps the most explicit terms yet on FOX News this past Sunday. Asked his opinion of the president, he said the following.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DICK CHENEY, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Well, I wasn't a fan of his when he got elected, and my views haven't changed any. I have serious doubts about his policies, serious doubts especially about the extent to which he understands and is prepared to do what needs to be done to defend the nation.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HANNITY: All right, the White House is not taking that sitting down. National security advisor, Jim Jones, hit back yesterday, telling ABC News that the country is actually safer under President Obama than it was under President Bush. OK. Take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEN. JAMES JONES (RET.), NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR: We're seeing results that indicate more captures, more deaths of radical leaders, and a kind of a global coming together of the fact that this is -- this is a threat to not only the United States, but to the world at large.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HANNITY: And joining me now to discuss all of this is former deputy assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs, somebody who knows the former vice president very well. Liz Cheney is back to us.

Liz, thanks for being here.

LIZ CHENEY, FORMER DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE, NEAR EASTERN AFFAIRS: Thank you for having me, Sean. Great to be with you.

HANNITY: You know, I find it interesting, because we can't even say it's a war on terror. I mean, Robert Gibbs slipped up the other day. Wasn't -- isn't it supposed to be now an overseas contingency operation? It's no longer a war on terror?

L. CHENEY: Yes, I mean, it is really a very concerning state of affairs, because you have a situation where, through a whole series of policies, you know, bringing terrorists from Guantanamo on to U.S. soil, threatening to prosecute the individual at the CIA who kept us safe since 9/11, not understanding exactly where the responsibility for future interrogations will lie, a whole set of circumstances which have us now moving back to pre-9/11 kinds of policies, dealing with terrorism as a law enforcement matter.

But it's worse than that, because we now know what happened when we dealt with terrorism that way. We've now been through 9/11. We've seen the attacks. So for the administration and President Obama, the attorney general, to now be returning to those days with the knowledge that we have of the consequences is really inexcusable.

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September 01, 2009 MSNBC HARDBALL

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Jeremy Scahill weighs in on Dick Cheney's softball interview on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace and why there needs to be prosecutions of everyone from top to bottom. And that means anyone who broke the law and ordered the torture of prisoners, from the top Bush administration officials to those that carried it out. Scahill also takes the media to task for their coverage of this issue and not making sure Americans are actually aware of what's been done in their name.

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On Sunday's ABC Roundtable, Liz Cheney and Sam Donaldson got into it on the torture investigations.

The only reason she's on is to defend her father once again. This is old and tired. Why does Dick only appear on FOX News to defend his position? We know the answer to that one. Chris Wallace makes with the Love Boat eyes and crawls on his tummy to try and get Dick all excited. They are like two cats in heat. Sam Donaldson wouldn't take Liz's ridiculous arguments. I mean, she actually says that there already were investigations...cough...cough...by the Bush administration and they passed with flying colors. She then continues to lie about the 2004 report and says that nobody was raped...Sure, Liz...

Liz: You do, you say it has already been looked at..

Sam: By who?

Liz: By career prosecutors...

Sam: In the Bush administration justice department.

But Sam, they were less political than Eric Holder, who is a political appointee...

When Sam brought up drilling people in the head and rape, Liz Cheney was outraged. Not at the act, but at the accusation...

Liz: That is totally, that is inexcusable..

Sam: It's in the report...

Liz: Nobody raped anybody...

George: The law said the threats were illegal, It's against the law.

Liz: Wait a second, that's not clear.

{}

Sam: Everyone except one person that I know has commented ....says torture is waterboarding is wrong.

Liz: Waterboarding isn't torture. We can go that path...the lack of seriousness here is important...

When a conservative is losing an argument, one of their weapons is to say that you're not serious. It's a one stop shop argument fixer. Kristol uses the word "serious" a lot to make himself sound intelligent, but nobody buys it except FOX.

Oh and Liz is still trying to sell her best product of all: Waterboarding isn't torture. How many times has she denied it already?

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Looks like Mr. Glazed-Chicken Duncan Hunter is at it again with defending our torture of prisoners. I don't know what else Chris Matthews thought he was going to get from the likes of Hunter given his past appearance on his show where he called detainee abuse "left wing rubbish". Now he's claiming that waterboarding isn't torture, and it makes our Marines tough! I think Jesse Ventura would disagree with him.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz did a pretty good job later in the segment when she was allowed to get a word in edge-wise and took Hunter to task for his claim that the government got any information from KSM after he was waterboarded.

Media Matters has a good run down of where that latest talking point came from and debunks it here-- Following Wash. Post article, conservative media advance falsehood that CIA documents prove interrogation techniques worked. Unfortunately since so much of the segment turned into a pissing contest between Hunter and Matthews over whether waterboarding is torture or not, those points were barely discussed.

Of course the fact that they have to make things up to justify the use of torture is no surprise since it doesn't work. It's meant to extract confessions and to get the prisoner to tell the torturer what they want to hear, not to get at the truth. But that's not going to stop the likes of Dick Cheney and Duncan Hunter from lying about it or the media from giving them a format to do it.