Cheney: Stay radical, Republicans, stay radical. That and that day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
There’s a lively debate today about which if any Democrats knew about various torture practices on a relatively contemporaneous basis. And we’re going to have reporting today from TPMmuckraker about what certain documents do or don’t mean. Speaking for myself though I’d be very surprised if the key Democrats at the time weren’t briefed on a lot of this stuff. And to the extent that they didn’t know the details, that it might have been not wanting to know rather than having been kept in the dark.
If it turns out that the Democrats in leadership were really kept wholly in the dark about this stuff, that’d be nice to know, I guess. I’d like to think they’re not compromised. But expecting or hoping for that strikes me as a recipe for disappointment and eventual special pleading in their defense.
To me, though, this is precisely why we need some version of a Truth Commission, probably one that at least on first blush is not about assigning blame or recommending punishment but simply finding out, in as disinterested a manner as possible, just what happened and who knew and okayed it.
I just think we’re fooling ourselves if we don’t see that many, many people — even a lot of the “good guys” were and are compromised by what happened.
Is a breach between the Obama and Netanyahu governments on the horizon? I asked this question to a senior Israeli government official recently and was told — not that convincingly, I thought — that it wasn’t in the cards because the two governments don’t fundamentally disagree on the big questions. But MJ Rosenberg comes at the question from a different angle — pointing out that the US government virtually always gets what it wants when a popular US president puts down his foot. This is an important read — and really shows that it comes down to what Obama wants and what he’ll demand.
Last night Rachel Maddow interviewed one of the military Arabic language translators who was booted out of Army after publicly saying he’s gay.
Over at TPMmuckraker we’ve been digging into these public pension investment scandals in which an overlapping group of players have been scamming (or perhaps better to say, skimming) money out of public pension plans in several states. So we got curious why something very similar seemed to be going on in Illinois but with a very distinct group of villains. The upshot seems to be that Chicago and Illinois had enough native grown corruption just not to need any help from outside — or to let outsiders take their cut.
Nancy Pelosi reaffirms that she only received one briefing, in 2002, on “enhanced interrogation techniques” — and asserts that the CIA itself isn’t standing behind the accuracy of its own documents that on their face seem to contradict her.
Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) on the latest developments (or lack thereof) in the effort to repeal the military’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy.
Are AIGers giving generous terms to counter-party banks in exchange for cushy jobs to come?