This is a convenient excuse. How can we forget about Bush altogether, when his minions keep on bringing up crap such as this to toss at Obama?
These guys don’t deserve a free pass because there’s too much “Bush Bashing” any more than people should avoid calling them on their shit because John Mace might err and take it personally.
Sure, a high-minded discussion of the the proper guiding principles for TWAT might provide a refreshing change of pace, but we also know that that’s not what the Republicans are attempting to engage in here.
Oh for crying out loud. For the sake of answering that one question posted above (#73), let’s forget about the Bush administration since we can use evidence from the Obama administration.
Whether or not Cheney lied about how we got the intelligence info is irrelevant wrt whether we got the intel. I was addressing the question, in post #73, as to whether or not we have ever gotten intel from captured terrorists.
Here, I’ll quote it again so you don’t have scroll all the way up to that post. That might hard to be do with your knee jerking so violently at the mere mention of Cheney’s name:
That article doesn’t demonstrate that “Cheney lied.” It only says that the released reports (a subset of all the reports) are not specific enough to determine whether the information was obtained after the enhanced interrogation techniques were applied (however, that conclusion is “implicit” in the released reports).
I’m not even sure what you’re railing against. There’s pretty much no way that we’ve *never *gotten valid information from a captured terrorist, whether it was Cheney torturing his children in front of him or me making mean faces at him. What does the answer prove?
No, you are now lying. The article says more than that, and does more than just demonstrate that Cheney lied: it uses his own words and shows how they contradict factual information.
Not specific enough?
So Cheney’s characterization was a lie.
So his description of the program itself was a lie.
It seems that we have one liar here, on the board, and another who used to be our vice-president.
But things 2, 3 and 4 weren’t number one for a reason. Kill enough of them and you’ll wind up with leaders as stupid and Bush and Rummy, and then we’ll be in good shape.
Bo, I was responding only to Dio’s claim that that article demonstrates that Cheney lied about whether enhanced interrogation techniques yielded useful intel. Therefore, whether Cheney lied on other issues has nothing to do with it.
Dude, why are you jumping in the middle of their debate just to move the goalposts? John was only countering a poster’s assertion that capturing a terrorist has never yielded useful intel. That’s it.
We’ve never obtained any useful information through waterboarding. All the useful information we’ve gotten has been through means other than torture.
But those we’ve gotten information from have also not been captured by high risk, low percentage missions into remote, Afghan/Pakistani mountain regions.
Equip the predator drones with harpoons. Not antiship weapons, actual harpoons. We can harpoon the bad guys (like, through a leg or abdomen), reel them in, bring them in for prompt medical treatment and maybe talk to half of them.
Solves the intel problems with eliminating sources and makes Marwan think twice about becoming a terrorist.
I’m curious as to the sourcing of Thiessen’s facts.
This one’ll do for starters:
How does he know that Obama “eliminated the CIA’s capability to capture senior terrorist leaders alive”?
Is Thiessen just talking out of his hat, or does he have special access to classified information on the CIA’s overseas operations?
•If the former, he should just stop it. It’s not in any way helpful to those who might actually know what the facts on the ground are and actually have to formulate policy based on those facts. It’s just noise, and partisan noise at that.
•If the later, is it legal access, or are former Bush admin officials running partisan moles at the CIA?
Ideally, we’re still capturing and questioning these people, we’re just no longer stupid enough to transport them back to American soil or rendition them through friendly European nations.
Ideally too, we’re not torturing them for information, as it is fairly counter-productive.