Cheney on the world being against us.
Cheney: “We fail to recognize the fact that we’re alone out there in terms of trying to achieve the objective of forcing the Iranians to give up their nuclear weapons. Everybody’s in a giant conspiracy to achieve a different objective than the one we want to achieve.”
Countywide’s Mozilo likely facing SEC charges for insider trading.
I’ve been talking to a few people today who have some professional insight into the whole torture saga, just what happened, what this or that secret memo might say. And I’m getting the sense that waterboarding to force people to tell us the ‘truth’ about Saddam’s alliance with al Qaida might turn out to be a pretty big part of this. Especially when we look closely at Cheney’s role.
Late Update: Hmmm … Seems like a lot of people are talking. Just out from the Robert Windrem, reporting for the Daily Beast …
Two U.S. intelligence officers confirm that Vice President Cheney’s office suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner, a former intelligence official for Saddam Hussein, who was suspected to have knowledge of a Saddam-al Qaeda connection.
*The former chief of the Iraq Survey Group, Charles Duelfer, in charge of interrogations, tells The Daily Beast that he considered the request reprehensible.
From TPM Reader RW …
This torture thing looks like it has real legs. And it may ironically turn on the reverse of the famous Watergate question of “What did the President know and when did he know it?” Because if it turns out the President didn’t get the full story from Cheney and the torture memos were after-the fact justifications, not explorations of policy options, we are looking at something far, far greater than we realized a week ago.
I’m not sure this is really going to turn on the president’s being out of the loop. Since, after all, being in the loop is usually a relative thing. And if the unlooped person won’t say they were out of the loop, there’s not much to go on. But I do think that the mix of drip, drip, drip declassifications and Cheney’s inability to stop talking are opening up a number of new dimensions to this story.
If we need to keep evidence of torture, like photographs, secret, to protect our troops, doesn’t that suggest that torture isn’t a great way to keep them or us safe?
Republicans unhappy with Dick Cheney as the party’s top spokesperson — but too afraid to say so on the record. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
Yet more evidence that a big part of the drive to use torture was to ‘get evidence’ for Saddam’s phony alliance with al Qaida. This time from Powell’s former Chief of Staff.
We now have two big developments on the torture front that may allow the whole torture issue to take on a life of its own and frustrate President Obama’s attempts to close the door on the issue. First, as you’ve seen, is Nancy Pelosi’s claim this morning that the CIA is lying about what it told members of the Democratic opposition in the early part of this decade. It’s still not completely clear to me if she’s just talking about the narrow point of what she was told in mid-late 2002 versus what she was told in 2003. (ed.note: Just talked to Zack Roth, our reporter on this story. And he confirms that Pelosi does seem to be talking about what she knew from the late 2002 briefing. There doesn’t appear to be any dispute about the 2003 one. However, while it’s a relatively narrow point if your issue is Pelosi, I’m starting to wonder whether the unseen mover behind these changed briefings may not be uses of torture as part of the effort to find intel to justify the Iraq invasion. We’ll keep you posted.)
But this is the Speaker of the House, second in line to the presidency, accusing the country’s chief intelligence agency of lying to the country and to members of Congress. And the political pressure to get to the bottom of that — whether they’re lying, whether she’s lying etc. — will likely be irresistible.
Next you have a flurry of claims that a key motive behind the push to torture was to elicit ‘confessions’ about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida, which was of course the key predicate for the invasion of Iraq. That again has to create much more pressure to clarify what happened. The basis of most of the anti-torture push has been the assumption that torture was used for the purpose of eliciting information about future terrorist attacks. Whether it was illegal, wrong-headed, misguided, immoral — whatever — most have been willing to at least give the benefit of the doubt that that was the goal. If the driving force was to gin up new bogus intel about the fabled Iraq-al Qaida link, politically it will put the whole story in a very different light. And rightly so.