I hope this is another sign of a coordinated effort by Democrats ( a cabal, if you will) to keep this issue on the front burner. Even the liberal hawks should be able to get behind it — â€I was lied to†is their best approach to Iraq at this point, and they should use it. I’m rather amazed and dismayed, however, that it took 60% disapproval ratings before the corporate media and Dems embraced this obvious story about Iraq.

Dem,
I think that’s Linda Douglas. Actually, I would label Fareed, Will and Newt all as conservatives.

This story got no play on C-Span and Meet the Press as far as I can tell. Did anybody else cover it?

Actually, I would label Fareed, Will and Newt all as conservatives.

I left the sarcasm tag off. In that crowd, Zakarias is the leftist. Linda Douglas in the above context wass useless and contributed nothing. Non-entity.

Dem recantations may not be a sin, but we’ve sunk pretty damn low when the best way our leaders can find to crawl out of a hole they dug through their own cowardice is to to say â€we were stupid.â€

Elections are won by those whose leadership seems, even marginally, more plausible than the alternative. A low standard, but true. Democrats need to have enough guts to propose a way out of the hole — so far, aside from Feingold, they seem more concerned with preserving their illusory positions of relative standing.

As for the winner writing the narrative — that is precisely what we are seeing unravel. Let’s hope we can offer an alternative one. Glad to see any signs of life there, and we do see a few like Reid’s intervention — but notably NOT from those who hope to be President.

Susan, tell him to write down everthing Chuck Hagel says.

I share the andger of janinsanfran and Susan S but we should also keep in mind that these recantations are coming out just as the Libby trial is beginning. The trial will generate headlines from time to time that will remind people of the deceit without which the WH cannot operate. If enough Dems can combine their â€I was wrong†statement with explicit references to WH deceptions, Dems as a whole could make the case that Bush & co. (and better still the current GOP as a whole) cannot be trusted on national security. After all, it wasn’t just the White House that engaged in an unprecedented level of deception. They had plenty of enablers in Congress and the Senate.

If handled right, the recantations could become a useful too, but I suppose that’s a lot to ask of the current generation of Dems in Washington.

This is just one more reason why we can’t abide by torture. Torture becomes a tool the government uses to create lies to tell the American people.
Hear, hear!

landreau, â€I was misledâ€. Covers mistakes as well as lies. As I noted in a previous post, all R talking points are built around â€don’t blame us’, though some are specifically â€Don’t blame Bushâ€.

But this WH and the GOP (who, after all, are responsible for the appalling lack of oversight need to be helpd accountable, and will be by the voting public).

Good job tying the threads together, ’wheel. The Dems need to couple the torture problem with the faulty intel problem, IMHO, for several reasons. What we essentially have is (1) preconceptions and bias toward going to war, for disparate reasons; (2) an attempt to get intelligence to support any plausible rationale for war, but particularly WMD and tying Saddam to al Qaeda and (3) an attempt to coverup the connection between the two when the intel proves faulty, at least long enough to secure Bush’s reelection.

Of course from our perspective this proves that intel should be about getting good information, because if you go blind into a situation like Iraq, there is almost an infinitesimal chance of success, because the whole plan, such as it was, is based on false info.

From their perspective, it was a success because they got their war and Bush got reelected. And because they really, at bottom, do believe their own hype, they think it will all turn out ok if we just stay there long enough.

As for whether the information did or didn’t get to people like Cheney (whether it was stopped by people who knew what the boss did and didn’t want to hear or whether it did but was ignored), I’m inclined to think it is a combination of the two. Cheney is pathologically incapable of understanding that he is or can be wrong, even in the face of overwhelming evidence–or he just doesn’t think reality matters, which is even more frightening. The overwhelming evidence is that he is bent on a particular course of action regardless of the consequences and regardless of how reality-based it is, and no one seems to be able dislodge him. Indict Libby and he elevates Addington. Wilkerson described Rummy as mad, but I think Cheney is even more pathological, and even with his 19% favorable ratings, more powerful. And more dangerous. Both know that this is their last chance–neither can run for Pres. Torture is Cheney’s Achilles heel, I think, which is why making it part of the narrative weakens him, at least in the Senate.

The R’s in Congress do have a responsibility here, since he is one of theirs. But the Dems need to start taking him on in a focused, if not direct, way. They do seem to be laying the groundwork, and it is about time.

Hmmm…sorry about that. Here it is without any frills:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyo…..113438/846

Hi emptywheel … a lurking fan here.

I very much liked this analysis and the important conclusions you drew. You succinctly manage to point up the important *role* torture plays for this Admin.

I’ve just come across a very perceptive commentary that explores much the same point at some greater length. From the comments section of Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, here is Michael Pollak (please forgive the lengthy cite):

http://www.juancole.com/2005/1…..l#comments

â€There is a lot to be said for the idea that fighting evil can make us evil. But when it comes to torture, recent events suggest a more direct mechanism: torture is the indispensable basis of fake intelligence. It is how you create irrefutable evidence for what your ideology says should exist, which allows you to override all contrary evidence.

Recently you discussed crucially false intelligence given to us by the al-Qaeda leader
http://www.juancole.com/2005/1…..by-us.html

It now turns out that there seems to be a very simple explanation for why Libi told the interrogators what they wanted to hear: he was tortured.

Now, since Libi ranked high in al-Qaeda, the fact that we tortured him isn’t a surprise in itself. But what makes it an interesting subject for reflection is that he seems to have been the subject of a battle. His was the first case where torture won out. And the surprise is that this was all prominent news more than 3 years ago in
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5197853/site/newsweek/
in the wake of Abu Ghraib.

This might well be part of why the DIA suspected he was lying. Although â€lying†doesn’t seem to exactly capture the speech act of â€telling torturers what they want to hear.
http://atrios.blogspot.com/200…..68%3083680
Atrios seems to have been the first to make this suggestion.

This seems like another fine exhibit of how torture can be counted on to produce the worst kind of intelligence — the kind that makes us positive that our fantasies are reality by â€confirming†them.

And it’s by no means the first. I would argue that it is often the essence of a countrywide torture operation such as we used to run in Latin America. You capture people, torture them, and they tell you want you want to hear as well as the names of people. You torture the people they named, and these â€confirm†the original confessions for the same reason: they are also telling you what you want to hear in order to get the torture to stop. The end result is to create a cascade of confirming â€facts†— and with them an ultimate truth that seems to stand on them irrefutably: that these people you are torturing are evil and deserve it. And this is of paramount importance: torture, by creating evidence, justifies torture: it becomes literally the only means to obtain the crucially confirming information — because that crucial information is made up. And by this means it hid under the cloak of a search for truth the real means by which systemic torture â€worked†in fighting guerrilla war in Latin America and other countries: it made clear to everyone in the population that any opposition could get you tortured by getting you caught up in these concentric circles of being named. The â€truths†created by torture rationalized a system of rule by terrorization. It was exactly the mechanism by which Saddam ruled Iraq. But the crucial difference was we believed the truth that our system created. And that made it seem like something other than the incarnation of evil. Without that belief, there would be nothing to cover that reality.

So for such a system, the â€truths†that torture creates are indispensable. But even when torture is not being used as a means of countrywide oppression it still always produces the truths we want to hear. Or so it seems based on the little evidence that escapes its secrecy (which is the second reason its truths are irrefutable: its evidence is by nature unexaminable except by those who believe).

The great example in Iraq is the infamous journal posted on the internet by the contract interrogator Joe Ryan. (Remember the great contract interrogator scandal? It seems so long ago.) There we learned that his interrogatees confirmed every ignorant thing he thought about Iraq — and above all the dominant line that the Iraqi insurgency had been gotten up and run by foreigners:

http://www.juancole.com/2004/0…..s-via.html

http://www.juancole.com/2004/0…..rture.html

So there is a kind of perfect fit when we now learn that the ultimate force pushing for torture by the US — the one party willing to defend it even in the light of day, even against the opposition of 90% of the Senate — is the office of Richard Cheney, who the Washington Post, in an October 26 editorial, recently and famously called
http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..0/25/AR200 5102501388.html

It’s no accident that Cheney’s office is also the ground zero for the faked intelligence that led to the war (which has recently been churned up by the Fitzgerald investigation and the indictment of the other Libby). People like Richard Cheney need torture because they need distorted intelligence. They need irrefutable objective proof that their distorted ideas are true. And they need to torture reality to do it. Their ideas and their policy can’t survive without it.

The lies of torture contributed to the last war. And if unchecked, it will lead to the next.â€

In fact, I think this analysis applies far more broadly than to just torture. Pollak’s emphasis on the irrefutability (public unfalsifiability) of allegations seems to capture something quite essential of the M.O. of this Admin, one plainly (and quite effectively) at work in the massive campaign of deception deployed in making the case for war in Iraq. It also underscores the strategic importance and instrumentality of â€intelligence†(both with and without the scare quotes) to the Bush Admin and its propaganda machine.