So the Vice President kinda sorta admitted that the United States has waterboarded terrorism suspects:

“Again, this debate seems a little silly given the threat we face, would you agree?” Hennen said.

“I do agree,” Cheney replied, according to a transcript of the interview released Wednesday. “And I think the terrorist threat, for example, with respect to our ability to interrogate high-value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that’s been a very important tool that we’ve had to be able to secure the nation.”

[…]

“Would you agree that a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?” asked Hennen.

“It’s a no-brainer for me, but for a while there, I was criticized as being the vice president `for torture.’ We don’t torture. That’s not what we’re involved in,” Cheney replied.

While McClatchy is playing a game of gotcha here, I’m interested in something completely unrelated. You see, in Cheney’s quote, he uses the phrase “with respect to”, something I’ve always felt he’s said an awful lot these past six years. Along with, “from the standpoint of”, this is probably the one phrase that I associate with the man. So how often does he use these phrases?

From a single source, the White House website, I found 82 cases where Cheney used the phrase “from the standpoint of”. His most famous use of this phrase is probably this one;

“If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again — that we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States.”

And what about the other phrase? Cheney used the words “with respect to” 357 different times, according the White House website. He used it 12 times during the 2004 vice presidential debate with former Senator John Edwards. 12 times! Edwards used it once. I’ve added some of my favorites below:

Most Outlandish:
“It’s clearly established in terms of training, provision of bomb-making experts, training of people with respect to chemical and biological warfare capabilities, that al-Qaeda sent personnel to Iraq for training and so forth*” (Cheney, CNBC’s “Kudlow & Kramer,”

Strangest:
“And we’ll take a look to see if we can’t have similar impact with respect to sugar.”

Most Compound usage:
“Most recently, of course, the focus has been on California, the problems that California has been suffering through, partly as a result of a flawed regulatory scheme with respect to electric power, partly as a result of combined economic growth and lack of any additional supplies with respect to electric generating capacity over the last 10 years.”

Most Incoherent:
He’s made it clear he has a different perception of how to defend the nation with respect to the current kind of threat we’re faced with than does the President — would have been fundamental differences, for example, over the situation with respect to Iraq.

Most Rapid-Fire:
He’s not someone you can enter into an agreement with, with respect to a permanent arrangement for peace. No one is going to trust him with respect to being the presiding authority, if you will, with respect to a Palestinian homeland.

Oh hell, he said “if you will” too. That’s another favorite of his, but I’ll save it for another post.

Torture, death and mayhem got you down?  Check out the SumoSays from an old friend of mine.  It’s worth a look.

Today is Eid-ul-Fitr. The day when a billion Muslims celebrate the end of the month of Ramadan. The woman in the picture above didn’t make it to the party. It’s not clear whether she was killed for being Sunni, Shite, Christian, or Jew. Maybe she was out too late. Maybe she wasn’t “properly” dressed. Maybe she was killed for her brand new Air-Sadr sneakers. Who the fuck knows?

What we do know, from eye-witnesses, is how she died (via Healing Iraq):

My brother, Nabil, witnesses another terrible murder, this time of a hairdresser. She was dragged out of her taxi by 4 gunmen, a sack was put on her head and then they opened fire. Her corpse was left on the street for over 3 hours because no one dared to go near it. The worst was when Iraqi troops arrived at night to pick up the corpse. They had to shoot it several times to ensure it wasn’t booby-trapped with explosives, something that is becoming more and more common in our area of Baghdad.

Something wicked has been unleashed on the streets of Iraq. And no amount of mendacity on the part of the Occupation forces can account for the monstrous atrocities being committed in the name of nationalism and Islam. For too long, we Muslims have looked the other way while our brothers have committed the most brutal and despicable acts imaginable.

Not anymore. Now is the time to speak up.

This is just a PSA to let my six readers know that my favorite Iraqi girl blogger this side of the Tigris is posting again after being silent since early August.  Welcome her back.

The President did his little touchdown dance on the Constitution today. And while most of the Lefty Blogosphere has directed its anger towards him, I can’t seem to find it within myself to be all that angry with the guy. That’s not to say that I’m not angry. I’m furious. I’ve even taken to naming the wrinkles and swollen veins that have characterized my face in the Bush Era. I have a laugh line called “the Decider”, a throbbing vein called “Gitmo”, and a Spider Angioma called “Iraq”, just to name a few.

But today, I’m not angry with the President. I’ll let Jonathan Turley tell you why (via Crooks and Liars).

“And people have no idea how significant this is –What really a time of shame this is for the American system. What the Congress did and what the President signed today, essentially revokes over 200 years of American principles and values. It couldn’t be more significant. And the strange thing is that we’ve become sort of Constitutional couch potatoes. I mean, the Congress just gave the President despotic powers. And you could hear the yawn across the country as people turned to you know, Dancing with the Stars. It’s otherworldly.”

Yes, the President put the baby in the microwave. Yes, the President frantically typed in the numbers with his pudgy little fingers, hoping not to get caught. But through the drug-induced haze, his self-medicated parents saw it all,

And took another hit.

[Update*] Not to be confused with Stoned (1980) (TV), or The Boy Who Drank Too Much (1980) (TV). Who knew Scott Baio would turn out to be such a prophet?

Think Progress: 

President Bush signs the “Military Commissions Act of 2006″ today in the Rose Garden, a bill that will not grant detainees legal counsel. “Also, it specifically bars detainees from filing habeas corpus petitions challenging their detentions in federal courts.” The new law sets the stage for what many analysts believe will be yet another historic showdown between the courts, the president, and Congress.

This could be a bombshell. If true, it should mean the end of Gitmo. I believe that the F.B.I., erroneously or with malice, pawned off a 2000 Abu Dhabi TV interview with two Taliban prisoners as an Al-Qaeda Martyrdom tape. Following up on this post from Digby, I did a little digging on a Guantanamo Bay prisoner named Abd Al Rahim Abdul Rassak Janko (referred to as Abdul Rahim Al Ginco in this Oct, 2006 NY Times story.)

From the Times story:

Mr. Ginco, a college student living in the United Arab Emirates, had gone to Afghanistan in 2000 after running away from his strict Muslim father. He was soon imprisoned by the Taliban, and tortured by operatives of Al Qaeda until, he said, he falsely confessed to being a spy for Israel and the United States.

But rather than help Mr. Ginco return home, American soldiers detained him again. Nearly five years later, he remains in the United States military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — in part, it appears, on the strength of a propaganda videotape made by his torturers.

[snip]

The Taliban announced in May 2000 that Mr. Ginco had been arrested as a spy. Another videotape was then broadcast on an Arab television network, in which he looks pale, uneasy and underweight and confesses at length to having been a spy for the United States and Israel.

In an effort to determine whether or not Mr. Janko’s story (AKA Ginco) was credible, I went looking for the original 2000 Taliban claim that Janko was an American spy. Here is the 2000 AP story.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) - An Arab arrested in Afghanistan says the United States recruited him to try to find alleged terrorist Osama bin Laden, and his Taliban captors say he and another prisoner “were spying for America and Israel.” A television reporter interviewed the two prisoners at a secret location in southern Afghanistan. The Associated Press viewed the taped interview Wednesday in Islamabad..”

[ snip ]

The reporter and his cameraman, interviewed by the AP upon their return to Islamabad this week, work for United Arab Emirates Television, Abu Dhabi Channel, in the UAE’s capital. They interviewed the Taliban’s two acknowledged prisoners the night of April 25. The Syrian, Abdul Rahim Janko, 22, fidgeted in his chair as he answered questions. “During my interrogation, I told them how I was recruited, what they wanted me to do and who I was to contact with my information,” he said. Janko said he’d been lured to a party in Abu Dhabi where he was filmed drinking and having sex. He said two men who claimed to work at the U.S. Embassy in Abu Dhabi threatened to show the film to Janko’s deeply conservative father if Janko refused to go to Afghanistan. “I committed every sin,” Janko told the reporter, Jamal Ismail, who is Palestinian.

On camera, his voice broke, tears welled in his eyes and his face turned crimson as he pleaded for his life: “I deserve to die, I know that. I have committed sins for all of my 22 years, but if the Taliban let me live, I want to spend the next 22 years fighting for jihad (holy war) to make up for my sins.”

Missing from the Times story, the original AP story mentions another Taliban prisoner — this one an Iraqi named Arkan:

Ismail said he and the cameraman were driven by turbaned Taliban to a secret location in Kandahar on April 25, but the darkness and the vehicle’s tinted windows limited their ability to see their surroundings. Once there, the Taliban refused to allow the TV crew to see the American or to speak at length with Arkan, saying they were being questioned. Arkan appeared sullen and unkempt on camera. He had shoulder-length hair and wore a beige shalwar kameez, the traditional Afghan pajama-like outfit of baggy pants and long shirt. “Do you want my real name or my jihad name?” Ismail said the Iraqi asked him. “My real name is Arkan and my jihad name is Islam.” Arkan said he had come to Afghanistan 18 months ago; Janko said he arrived in December.

Which Brings us back to the Times story:

On Jan. 17 [2002], however, John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, held a news conference to announce that five videotapes had been recovered from the ruins of Mr. Atef’s home showing several men who “may be trained and prepared to commit future suicide terrorist acts.” The first man shown in an excerpt from one of those tapes was Mr. Ginco, whom Mr. Ashcroft identified as Abd Al-Rahim.

Lawyers for Mr. Ginco, who was born to a Kurdish family in Syria, still have not viewed the complete tape from which Mr. Ashcroft showed a brief excerpt or heard its audio. But they said they believed it showed part of one of the propaganda videos made by the torturers who extracted Mr. Ginco’s confession.

I believe this is at least a portion of the same video. It is two minutes long and was released by the F.B.I without audio.

From screenshots, we can see Janko, who is pictured at the top of this post. We also see a man who appears sullen, with shoulder-length hair, wearing beige or green shalwar kameez. He was identified by Ashcroft as Khalid Ibn Muhammad Al-Juhani at the Jan. 17 news conference. I believe he is the man referred to as Arkan in the 2000 AP story.

That means that the secret evidence used to hold a man at Guantanamo for more than four years was not originally from a martyrdom tape, but from an Abu Dhabi TV interview arranged by the Taliban in 2000 under the auspices that these two men were American spies.

At the time of the Ashcroft press conference, the men on these videos were touted as fugitives from the justice. When asked about whether the tapes would be released with audio, he responded:

“We will pursue and make a judgment on that based in the national interest and the interest of this investigation. And so we need to complete the analysis of the tape and to complete all the specific and detailed translation of the tape.

I know that the portions we released today we felt were safe for release, and we didn’t believe they contained any surreptitious messages or coded signals that would be designed to alert parts of the terrorist network.”

To this date, I am unaware of any effort by the U.S. government to get a hold of the full Janko interview tape or to clear up the fact that at least two of the men on the tape had been in American custody since December of 2001. What is clear though, is that one portion of the tape is being used to hold Janko as an enemy combatant, while the portion where he admits, probably falsely, to being an American spy, remains a secret from him and from the public.

Some enterprising reporter should talk to Jamal Ismail of Abu Dhabi Television or AP Writer Kathy Gannon what they know.

[Bonus*] You know Janko’s strange confession about being an American spy? According to him, it was extracted by Al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives,”by applying electric shocks to his ears and toes, nearly drowning him in a filthy water tank, depriving him of sleep and beating him on the soles of his feet”.

Why am I not surprised?

Following up on an earlier post, I wanted to see what Fareed Zakaria was saying about a potential war with Iraq during the period between his secret meeting with Paul Wolfowitz on November 29, 2001 and the beginning of hostilities in March of 2003.

Surprisingly, less than two weeks after brainstorming how best to sell a showdown with Saddam, he wrote this:

The debate over Iraq is taking place far more furiously outside government than it is inside. The formal meetings of the president’s top national-security advisers–the “principals committee”–has barely discussed Iraq. (It was mentioned briefly in last week’s sessions.)

From Bob Woodward’s recounting of the Wolfowitz meeting, which included Robert D. Kaplan from The Atlantic Monthly and throng of neoconservative policy thinkers, the general takeaway:

‘…was that Egypt and Saudi Arabia … were the key, but the problems there are intractable. Iran is more important…’ But Iran was similarly difficult to envision dealing with… But Saddam Hussein was different, weaker, more vulnerable… ‘We concluded that a confrontation with Saddam was inevitable. … We agreed that Saddam would have to leave the scene before the problem would be addressed.’

In fairness to Zakaria, he does, over the course of more than a year, make the above argument in his columns. But a couple other things happened, and didn’t happen as well. First, he makes little or no attempt to reconcile the administration’s public argument (WMD, Nuclear Weapons, terrorism, Prague, Al-Qaeda ties, mushroom clouds) with it’s private argument, that Saddam Hussein was weak and his toppling would serve as an example to America’s real enemies. Second, as the war draws closer, his argument for “Iraq, the nuclear powerhouse” inches its way up the bullet list, obscuring his earlier arguments that an Iraq war “would change the Middle-East and be totally awesome and sweet.“

On a couple occasions he even suggests that the United States should attempt, by using a form of Diplomatic Jujitsu, to trick Saddam Hussein into forcing war upon himself. No, this is not intended to be another “Fareed Zakaria is dumb” post, although he clearly is, considering he went from this,

“Let me make a prediction. If the administration stays on its current path, there will be no conflict with Iraq.”

to this,

“The United States will soon be at war with Iraq.”

in less than a Friedman.

No, this is not one of those posts. This is a “Fareed Zakaria sold you out to get his pet war and kept his job so STFU you macaca sucka motha-fucka” kind of posts. Below are some excerpts from his Newsweek columns on Iraq during the period in question. Read ‘em and weep.

(more…)

The United States cannot torture American Citizens. The United States can torture Macacas. All Macacas are brown. Some Macacas are American Citizens. The United States can torture Macacas when:

A) When they are not American citizens.

B) When they are American citizens, but also very brown.

C) When George Bush really, really wants to.

D) Bend over Macaca, this is America!!!

From Jose Padilla’s Lawyer, via Glenn Greenwald:

Mr. Padilla was often put in stress positions for hours at a time. He would be shackled and manacled, with a belly chain, for hours in his cell. Noxious fumes would be introduced to his room causing his eyes and nose to run. The temperature of his cell would be manipulated, making his cell extremely cold for long stretches of time. Mr. Padilla was denied even the smallest, and most personal shreds of human dignity by being deprived of showering for weeks at a time, yet having to endure forced grooming at the whim of his captors.

He was threatened with being cut with a knife and having alcohol poured on the wounds. He was also threatened with imminent execution. He was hooded and forced to stand in stress positions for long durations of time. He was forced to endure exceedingly long interrogation sessions, without adequate sleep, wherein he would be confronted with false information, scenarios, and documents to further disorient him. Often he had to endure multiple interrogators who would scream, shake, and otherwise assault Mr. Padilla.

Additionally, Mr. Padilla was given drugs against his will, believed to be some form of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or phencyclidine (PCP), to act as a sort of truth serum during his interrogations.

My advice? Stop being a Macaca. Via Sully:

The 22 chemical components recovered by police are believed to be the largest haul ever found at a house in this country. Cottage is an ex-BNP member who stood as a candidate in the Pendle Council elections in May. Mrs Christiana Buchanan, who appeared for the prosecution in Jackson’s case, alleged the pair had ’some kind of masterplan’. She said a search of Jackson’s home had uncovered rocket launchers, chemicals, BNP literature and a nuclear biological suit.

See, this particular terrorist plot was planned British far-rightists, so it doesn’t count. Macaca, welcome to America, and the real world.