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Former Gov. George Pataki apparently thinks that if you repeat yourself enough times and keep regurgitating the same lies over and over again, eventually that makes you right. Pataki along with a lot of others on the right apparently aren't too happy about the outcome of the trial of now convicted terrorist Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani.

Palin Adviser Wanted Execution Without Trial For Convicted Terrorist Ahmed Ghailani :

A Federal District Court in Manhattan convicted Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani yesterday on one count of of conspiracy for the 1998 terror bombings of U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. While Ghailani — the first former Guantanamo detainee to be tried in civilian court — was acquitted of more than 280 other charges, he faces 20 years to life in prison.

On cue, conservatives are outraged at the result of the trial (even though he’ll spend time in a maximum security prison for least 20 years), claiming he should have been tried in a military tribunal. Liz Cheney’s group Keep America Safe claimed that “bad ideas have dangerous consequences. … We urge the president: End this reckless experiment. Reverse course. Use the military commissions at Guantanamo that Congress has authorized.” (The Center for American Progress’ Ken Gude notes on the Wonk Room that military commissions “deliver shorter sentences than civilian courts” and “the minimum sentence that Ghailani can receive is longer than the combined sentences” of three of the four detainees who have been convicted in military commissions.)

The extremely patient Jonathan Turley wrote about the case at his blog as well and Rep. Peter King's similar reaction to Pataki's here to the verdict.

Ghailani Acquitted On Major Terrorism Charges — Rep. King Responds With Call To Change Legal System:

In a truly disturbing response to the verdict, Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) denounced the jury verdict as “a total miscarriage of justice” and insisted “this tragic verdict demonstrates the absolute insanity of the Obama administration’s decision to try Al Qaeda terrorists in civilian courts.” Of course, no one would accuse New Yorkers as being ambivalent on terrorism.

Nevertheless, Rep. King’s solution to a jury of citizens acquitting an accused person is to rig the system to avoid such juries in the future. It is the most raw demonstration that the interest in the tribunal system is the view that it is outcome determinative and pre-set for convictions. Rep. King appears to be joining the Queen of Hearts that we must have a system that guarantees “sentence first, verdict afterwards.”

Matthews sub Michael Smerconish completely lost control of this interview and allowed George Pataki to control it and talk over everyone. I think Pataki's been going to the same media training school as Ron Christie where they teach you to talk over everyone else, never come up for air, filibuster, feign outrage and hope you run the clock out so the other guests never get a chance to get a word in. This was just a shameless display by Pataki defending torture.

UPDATE: Transcript via Lexis Nexis below the fold.

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If you need any proof that no bad deed goes unrewarded by our corporate media, you need look no further than this attention whore. Here's how you're rewarded for violent rhetoric and promoting torture on twitter these days.

New York lawmaker: I would torture an American citizen:

New York state Sen. Greg Ball (R) on Monday night reiterated his belief that Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be tortured even though he is a U.S. citizen.

During a tense interview, CNN’s Piers Morgan repeatedly asked Ball whether he was OK with torturing American citizens. While he refused to condone torture as a government policy, he said he was not opposed to personally torturing American citizens such as Tsarnaev.

“I’m telling you as Greg Ball, if personally put in a room with anybody from the most current scumbags to Osama bin Laden I’m telling you what I would do. As far as policy of the United States, you’ve got to take it up with your man Obama,” Ball explained. [...]

The New York Republican has repeatedly defended his support of torture since tweeting about it over the weekend.

In a separate interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday night, Ball remarked he was speaking “from my heart” and acknowledged his comments might not help his reelection.

Morgan's follow up with Alan Dershowitz, who defended torture in some instances wasn't a whole lot better than his interview with Ball, who walked off of the set after this segment even though he said he'd come back. Note to Piers Morgan if you're going to have someone like this clown on your show again:

Torture does not work and provides unreliable information.

Torture is not consistent with our laws or with our Constitution and it's a war crime.

Torture does not save lives.

Torture does not serve our national interests.

And maybe you could ask this guy if he ever comes on again why we don't allow the police to beat confessions out of citizens on a daily basis and why our courts won't accept confessions obtained under those conditions as evidence. This interview wasn't quite as pitiful as the ones he did on Faux "News," but that's a pretty low bar to hurdle.

You can let him know what you think of his remarks on twitter here.

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The man who convinced President George W. Bush to reinterpret the Geneva Convention's prohibitions on torture on Sunday declared that "we can never be safe in a society like ours" and terrorists will always want to attack America because they are "unhappy about U.S. foreign policy."

On Sunday, CNN's Candy Crowley invited former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to explain what might have radicalized the men who carried out last week's bombings at the Boston Marathon.

"The next attack is likely to come from someone who looks like you and I -- American citizens, someone who speaks perfect English, someone who can travel freely in this country," Gonzales remarked. "The truth of the matter is, there are some people in this country -- around the world who are very unhappy about U.S. foreign policy, and as a result of that, hostility rises, rage rises. And people want to reach out against the United States."

Crowley wondered if it was even possible to "keep America America and keep America safe."

"I think we can keep America America," Gonzales insisted. "But clearly we can accommodate both our security and we can accommodate our liberties. But let's face it, let's be realistic. In a society like ours where we enjoy so many freedoms, you know, to expect that we can be 100 percent safe, I think, is unrealistic. We are clearly safer today than we were on 9/11, we've done a lot to make America safer today."

"But we will never be safe in a society like ours."

In a 2002 memo to then-Presiden George W. Bush, Gonzales argued that the so-called War On Terror meant that the United States was not bound by "quaint" rules in the Geneva Convention that prohibit torture.

"This new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions requiring that captured enemy be afforded such things as commissary privileges," Gonzales wrote.

Bush eventually agreed and within weeks, military interrogators were being trained on the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, which a nonpartisan group recently determined were "clearly torture."

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Who would ever think we'd see this scenario happen again -- Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham appearing on a Sunday show talking about their fake Benghazi scandal. What are the odds? I was waiting for Bob Schieffer to give both of them a big wet kiss, he was so thrilled at the very beginning of this interview to have both of them on there together with him.

There are plenty of legitimate reasons to have concerns over the appointment of John Brennan to CIA, the torture issue which was mentioned in passing here being one of them, but their fake Benghazi outrage and Susan Rice's press releases are not among them.

Demanding Benghazi documents, McCain, Graham will delay Brennan nomination:

Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. will not move forward President Obama's nominee to head the CIA until they receive additional documents detailing the White House's handling of the Sept. 11 attack on a U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, the pair said today on "Face the Nation."

"John and I are hell-bent on making sure the American people understand this debacle called Benghazi," Graham said, vowing to "stop" John Brennan's confirmation until further information is released about the attack that left four Americans dead. A Tuesday vote is currently scheduled in the Senate Intelligence Committee. [...]

"Her story has completely collapsed under scrutiny," Graham said. "I said this to the president: I want FBI interviews of the survivors. They were turned over to the intelligence committee and everything was blacked out. ...The e-mail about who changed the talking points - there's a big gap. I want to know who the survivors are so we can interview them.

"The transmissions from Benghazi to Washington, in real time, on the night of the attack," he continued. "What were people asking for? What were they saying?"

Using a Cabinet nomination as leverage is a classic "give-and-take," a "time-honored tradition" among lawmakers, Graham said. "And I'm going to insist on that," he continued. "I'm not going to vote on a new CIA director until I find out what the CIA did in Benghazi."

McCain said he hates to say he's threatening to hold Brennan's nomination because "the story tomorrow will be, 'McCain and Graham threaten to...'

Sorry Johnny, but if the shoe fits....

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I'm not sure why PBS and CBS News feel that the public needs to be treated to yet another fawning interview with former Vice President Dick Cheney, but maybe they're hoping to pick up some of that Fox viewership, because Charlie Rose's hour long disgrace propping this guy up is what we're usually treated to on that network.

Apparently Cheney doesn't mind the drone program and called it a "good program" -- but what bothers him about it is not what should disturb most of us, like whether it's legal, the lack of oversight, overreach by the executive branch and the fact that dropping bombs on civilians' heads is just going to create more enemies and potential blowback when people rightfully get sick of watching their friends and their family members killed.

No, Cheney doesn't care about any of that. What bothers him is that we're killing these supposed terrorists instead of torturing them as we were doing under the Bush administration.

Cheney: Obama wants to weaken U.S. role in world:

Cheney insists that Obama's worldview and foreign policy is making the U.S. "vulnerable to the future."

And while Cheney voiced support for Obama's use of drones -- calling it a "good program" -- he said the president's national security nominees reflect "choices ... based on people who won't argue with him" and in the case of Hagel, "I think he wants a Republican to be the foil ... for what he wants to do to the Defense Department, which I think is to do serious, serious damage to our military capabilities."

Turning to a controversial policy of the George W. Bush administration, Cheney defended the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, saying that officials engaged in a "very long, difficult and elaborate process" with the Justice Department to determine "where the red line is."

"And we got approval for the programs that did go, that they were quote 'not torture,'" he said, but added that ultimately the administration stopped the use of waterboarding "because there was so much flak over it."

Rose did actually ask Cheney why he won't call the program torture during the interview, but there was zero follow up to this response. You can add this interview to the mile long list of evidence that proves that anyone who claims that PBS is some "liberal" network deserves to be mocked roundly for such a ridiculous assertion.

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Joe Scarborough is back at it again, apologizing for torture and telling lies about whether it works. Every time I think this show can't get much worse, I turn it on like I did this morning and realize I'm wrong. This had to be one of the more disgusting segments I've watched in a while, and that's saying a lot for this show. Scarborough and his panel members, David Ignatius and Jon Meacham, did their best to help revise history and help Scarborough play torture apologist while discussing the new film coming out this month, Zero Dark Thirty.

Glenn Greenwald has more on the problems with the premise of this movie: Zero Dark Thirty: new torture-glorifying film wins raves:

Earlier this year, the film "Zero Dark Thirty", which purports to dramatize the hunt for and killing of Osama bin Laden, generated substantial political controversy. It was discovered that CIA and White House officials had met with its filmmakers and passed non-public information to them - at exactly the same time that DOJ officials were in federal court resisting transparency requests from media outlets and activist groups on the ground that it was all classified.

With its release imminent, the film is now garnering a pile of top awards and virtually uniform rave reviews. What makes this so remarkable is that, by most accounts, the film glorifies torture by claiming - falsely - that waterboarding and other forms of coercive interrogation tactics were crucial, even indispensable in finding bin Laden.In the New York Times on Sunday, Frank Bruni wrote: "I'm betting that Dick Cheney will love the new movie 'Zero Dark Thirty.'" That's because "'enhanced interrogation techniques' like waterboarding are presented as crucial" to finding America's most hated terrorist. [...]

The claim that waterboarding and other torture techniques were necessary in finding bin Laden was first made earlier this year by Jose Rodriguez, the CIA agent who illegally destroyed the agency's torture tapes, got protected from prosecution by the DOJ, and then profited off this behavior by writing a book. He made the same claim as "Zero Dark Thirty" regarding the role played by torture in finding bin Laden.

That caused two Senators who are steadfast loyalists of the CIA - Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein and Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin - to issue statements definitively debunking this assertion. Even the CIA's then-Director, Leon Panetta, made clear that those techniques played no role in finding bin Laden. An FBI agent central to the bin Laden hunt said the same.

What this film does, then, is uncritically presents as fact the highly self-serving, and factually false, claims by the CIA that its torture techniques were crucial in finding bin Laden. Put another way, it propagandizes the public to favorably view clear war crimes by the US government, based on pure falsehoods.

And Mediaite's Tommy Christopher did a nice job of breaking down just how dishonest this Morning Joe segment was: Joe Scarborough Claims Zero Dark Thirty Torture Scene True, Screenwriter And Facts Disagree:

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As if the interview with former CIA torture architect Jose Rodriguez on 60 Minutes wasn't bad enough, Sean Hannity followed up the next day with an even more infuriating interview of Rodriguez as well. If you were disgusted by Leslie Stahl lobbing friendly softballs to this war criminal, it's probably not going to do your blood pressure any good to watch the Hannity job he received the next evening on Fox.

Hannity brought on Pat Buchanan this Wednesday evening and was continuing to parrot Rodriguez's talking points that without torture, President Obama would not have had the intelligence needed to send in the SEAL team after bin Laden.

As Media Matters has been documenting, carrying water for Bush and Cheney's torture program is nothing new for Fox or the right-wing media. You can read more about that from last year here: Right-Wing Media Still Hyping EITs, Ignoring Experts' Dispute, and here: Right-Wing Media Tout Bin Laden Death As Victory For Torture, Ignore Dispute.

And here is their latest report debunking Hannity's talking points in the clip above: One Book Defending Waterboarding Doesn't Change The Fact That Torture Doesn't Work:

In a book published Monday, Jose Rodriguez, the former head of the CIA's Clandestine Service during the Bush administration, defends the use of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) such as waterboarding, a technique that groups such as Amnesty International have called "torture." Rodriguez claimed that EITs "led to the capture and killing of Usama bin Ladin." However, multiple experts, including a CIA interrogator, an FBI counterintelligence expert, a former CIA inspector general, and the chairs of the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committees, have said that these techniques were not effective or did not lead to the strike against bin Laden. [...]

One can hear the same argument Rodriguez is making on Fox News and other conservative media outlets, which have touted bin Laden's death as a victory for EITs and President Bush. But it's an argument rebutted by many experts, who dispute whether the use of EITs yielded critical intelligence that led to bin Laden.

And you can read those rebuttals in the rest of their post. I'm still waiting for Hannity to take up that offer Keith Olbermann made for him to be waterboarded back in 2009 if he still doesn't think it's torture. Transcript of Hannity and Buchanan below the fold.

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The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur takes apart the 60 Minutes interview with former CIA torture architect Jose Rodriguez which we posted on earlier here – Whitewashing Torture, Redux.

I'm quite sure that Rodriguez would never come on the air with someone like Cenk, who unlike Leslie Stahl during her softball interview with this man, who was openly admitting to torture and war crimes on the air, actually articulated the amount of disgust that Rodriguez deserves.

And Cenk's exactly right. This is what happens when you don't prosecute people for their crimes. They end up on television giving interviews trying to sell books instead of landing in a jail cell where they belong. And allowing this to go unpunished means that it will happen again. Sadly, our history in recent decades has proven him right about that already.

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As Rachel Maddow reported this Wednesday, despite the Bush administration's best efforts to destroy every copy of internal memo from former State Department counselor Philip Zelikow, one copy survived and has been obtained by Wired Magazine and the national security archive at George Washington University, three years after filing a FIOA request.

Rachel delved into the politics on this, noting the hard move to the right by the Republican Party even since their nomination of John McCain who spoke out against torture during the last presidential election.

MADDOW: And, if the Republican Party were still the party of John McCain, this would open up a whole new can of political worms, because the Obama administration, remember, looked into Bush administration ordered torture and they decided not to prosecute any of it. They decided effectively that the Bush administration was operating on good faith when they ordered torture? They thought it was legal? Probably not. Actually, it turns out they had good reason to know it was not legal, so that means it was a crime. It was probably a war crime, not to put too fine a point on it.

And that is something that we are legally obligated to prosecute in this country. This reopens the whole question of the legal liability for torture that was administered by the previous administration. The Democratic Party will be split by this because the White House politically doesn't want to deal with it, even if it's wrong and even if they know it's wrong.

And the Republican Party still has to figure out who it is. Is the Republican Party still the party of John McCain, which has now the opportunity to out flank the President on a matter of principle here, where the White House knows what the right thing to do is, but they don't want to do it. Or, are the Republicans still the party of George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, who think torture is okay? Gut check time.

Given the fact that it appears they're well on their way to nominating Mitt Romney and hell will be warming over before we see anyone in the GOP pushing for prosecutions of the Bush administration, I think we've already got our answer. And given the fact that the Obama administration and the DOJ have not already pushed for prosecutions on this matter, I'm not holding my breath for them to do the right thing either.

Here's Spenser Ackerman's article over at Wired on the newly released memo -- CIA Committed ‘War Crimes,’ Bush Official Says:

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Apparently I wasn't the only one completely disgusted by CNN allowing a host of Bush neocon war mongers to ask questions at their "national security" Republican debate, including torture advocate, Cheney's Cheney, David Addington.

HAYES: Alright, don't call it a comeback. The neocons have been here for years... and they were out in full force at this week's presidential debate. Paul Wolfowitz, the architect, one of the architects of the war in Iraq asked a question. There was Fred Kagan, one of many Kagans who were constantly advocating war in some place or other. And then there was David Addington, who helped craft the Bush administration's war on terror policy.

Mr. Addington got some applause from the crowd there. Can I just say something about David Addington? David Addington was one of... was probably the foremost legal mind, in the Bush administration […] who was masterminding the most maximalist, extremist positions on what the government could do, and he guided John Yoo through crafting the infamous torture memo, which essentially said anything short of pain, equal, up to and including what would be the same as organ failure... short of organ failure would be legal under U.S. law.

He was the mastermind behind pushing through the entire sort of regime of detention without, in the beginning, until the Supreme Court overruled, denied habeas, denied the most basic rights to contest imprisonment for those in prison, and I think there's a very good... a good case to be made that he is guilty of violating U.S. law and should be held to account.

And here he is, at this debate, along with a whole bunch of other people who were responsible for this travesty of Iraq, being treated like like any other eminent (inaudible) or think tanker to ask questions and I found it appalling. I found it absolutely appalling.

As Hayes noted, no one associated with the Bush administration that lied us into war has had to pay any kind of social cost for their actions while serving in the Bush administration and Hayes found it a “remarkable moment” to watch them being allowed to ask questions during that debate.

His guest, Eli Lake, from The Daily Beast claimed that they paid the ultimate cost by being out of power and the fact that they were “roundly criticized in almost all corners of the press, with the exception of the conservative media” and he noted that the justification for holding prisoners without a right to a trial has only been scaled back somewhat and is still being used today by the Obama administration when it comes to not releasing some of these terrorist suspects.

As Hayes replied, that just makes what Addington did “even more egregious” and that the ultimate cost would have been some of these Bush neocons being prosecuted and landing in jail and not just being shunned socially or in the media.

Lake continued to make excuses for the Bush administration excesses and Hayes followed up with this.

HAYES: People do think all the time... that break the law and then later look extreme and they still have to face... they still have to stand trial. They still have to answer for their actions and accountability.

What's really disgusting as well is that MSNBC has relegated Hayes' show to the crack of dawn on the weekends where they're hoping no one will watch it. It's too bad this type of conversation isn't what I'm waking up to on a daily basis when heading to work during the week on the satellite radio instead of the hackery on Morning Joe Monday through Friday.