The 'ticking time bomb' scenario never made sense, did it ? The interrogations were started after weeks of flying prisoners around in chartered jets. Urgency was not the priority.

But it makes sense that people were tortured to help Cheney's political position. McCain was tormented for the same sort of reason : his tormentors wanted him to make a false confession. The false confession would help the political position of the politicians running the torture.

In both cases the political career of the captor was to be enhanced by the false confession.

In 'The Grand Inquisitor' chapter of 'The Brothers Karamazov' the same sort of story is told. The political career of the captor has to be preserved by the demise of the prisoner.

And so we hear the Al-Libi has 'committed suicide' in a jail somewhere ...

I think we may be seeing what Cheney fears most about the torture issue; it might start the onion to be peeled causing things worse than torture to become known about what that horrible Bush/Cheney gang were doing for 8 years.

McCain was tormented for the same sort of reason : his tormentors wanted him to make a false confession

You know, I think that the situation is interestingly different. I have to read all this as implying that Cheney and his ilk wanted a real confession. That is, they believed that they would find something real to substantiate their position. Otherwise, the cat comes out of the bag eventually.

At least the extractor of a false confession understands the nature of the transaction. If you torture to corroborate your genuine beliefs, you create a self-contained system of delusions and lies that can go on more or less indefinitely (broken, at least, by term limitations).

One day they are bragging about the links their torture program revealed and the next their saying no such avenues were even explored.

Like pork neck bones to the Pelosi Sunday Gravy

Torture is not the way to facilitate cooperation with other countries. The U.S. should focus more on soft power and increase the strategic foreign aid.
The Borgen Project has good info on the estimated cost of ending global poverty:

$30 billion: Annual shortfall to end world hunger.

$550 billion: U.S. Defense budget.

Why this isn't the biggest story since Natale Holloway speaks volumes about the corporate news.

Corporate news will go the same way as the car companies, newpapers and banks. They're run by bean counters with spreadsheets who had no morals and are only looking at the next profit announcement, not down the road.

What with print news dying and all, we have to find some way to keep McClatchy and Knight Ridder going. They are the only two "newspapers" who are and have been doing real investigative reporting on the Good War of George W. Bush. (For a bit of snark. When I'm mean I call it the Holy War of George W. Bush.)

The "newspapers of record" - the NYT and WaPo -- have been mysteriously timid and have certainly given a lot of people anonymity.

I almost chocked when Tim Russert said the he ASSUMED certain conversations were off the record unless it was specified otherwise. WTF!! And this TV anchor was eulogized as a great reporter?

He may have been a great guy, a good boss, a terrific executive, but if he didn't quote every single person about what they said before the interviewEE said stuff was off the record ... well, I can only say they would have FAILED Journalism 101.

Thank you McClatchy.

Thank you Knight Ridder.

Thank you New Yorker.

Thank you GC ... who woulda thunk it. But then Vanity Fair, thank you too.

OK, I can subscribe to the magazines to support them, but what can we do to support McClatchy and Knight Ridder??

Yes Cheney and the rest certainly pushed the link between the two, however I think it raises a larger issue as to how Iraq seemed to fit so appropriately into his tenure.

Almost as if a perpetual conflict and of course WAR PROFITEERING were preplanned. It certainly appears to be so by the way this conflict dragged on and on with no clear plan or end in sight.

There's no escaping this issue. It's all positive for Obama. The documents he has released in addition to AG Holder's investigation into this issue won't fade any time soon.

In certain ways, this sort of implies that Cheney's plan was a bit less convoluted than I thought. It seems his notion was simple; a tortured person will say pretty much anything you want them to.
What a guy!

The notion that Cheney or anyone in the Bush administration wanted a real confession is patently absurd.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice were planning the ivasion of Iraq as early as the first National Security Council meeting on January 30, 2001. Former Secretary of the Treasury, John Snow has stated such.

When the CIA finally got an audience with Bush in August of that year, they just ignored the warning. My guess is that they thought it would be a minor bombing with few, if any, casualties. That would provide them with an excuse to invade,making the Iraq - Al Qaeda link seem plausible and justified. Torture was used, not to discover a link, but to create one.

Cheney's claim that harsh interrogation techniques kept America safe for 7 1/2 years is bullshit. What kept America safe was that we dried up Al Qaeda's financial resources, something that the Clinton Administration had been working on, and the fact that we invaded Afghanistan and took their safe haven away. The only thing accomplished by the Iraq war was that it cut down on travel time for terrorists who wanted to kill Americans.

Waterboarding was torture when the Catholic Church used it to find heretics during The Inquisition. It was torture when the Khmer Rouge used it to find political disidents in Cambodia. It is torture when operatives and contractors, on behalf of the U.S. Government use it on detainees in our custody regardless of the rationale.

The notion that torture is at all effective at extracting information, even including the most far-fetched ticking time bomb scenario, is completely untrue on the face of it. You can make people talk, but you can't make them tell the truth. However, as dictators around the world have shown, from the Moscow Trials to the Chinese "investigations" into germ warfare in Korea, the primary use of torture has been to extract false confessions. The techniques of sleep deprivation, stress positions, continual interrogation and the threat of death was the way to deliver docile and unmarked witnesses to a propaganda event. Imagine, for instance, that a "witness" had been manufactured to appear before Congress.

There was enough of the constitution left that the ultimate nightmare, the Cheney Moscow Trials, never happened. That's why a full investigation and prosecution is so necessary.

To think that Cheney
(a) was a "true believer" who really, really only wanted the world to know the truth about Saddam Hussein's deadly attack on America on 9/11/01
(b) thought that torture was the way to achieve said goal

...is belied by everything we know about the man.

COme on. He knows as much about government as any man alive, and surely knows as a result of his decades of highest-level contacts in the intelligence services, US federal law enforcement, and DoJ that effective interrogation is not torture, and vice versa.

He was part of the PNAC plot to attack Iraq. He, like Rumsfeld, is hostile and dismissive toward anyone opposing him. He is cynical and manipulative, and both his public statements and private machinations should be seen as merely the means to the end of enacting the agendas of the PNAC of his financial backers.

He knows very well what torture is and why to use it, and thus he did. He has a black hole where, in a human, idealism would live.

How much evidence is enough? We already have plenty, despite Dick s' cover-up/expose attempt to reinvent history & facts. Let him keep burying himself & the crew.
You know in republican speech that saying Nancy Pelosi has stepped in deep really means that cheney is up to his neck & beginning to drown. Karl Rove's imprint is on everything the right-wingers do. Place all your fault & guilt on your opponent. Been there, done that!

Chisholm,

My take is that Obama wants to get a lot of legislation going through Congress while he is popular. Looking into the Bush administration misbehavior will divide and polarize, especially if Obama pushes for it. Then after a few years he can take up the issue.

The problem is that the whole issue may just go away, the Spanish court inquiry not withstanding. Why not appoint a special prosecutor to work on it low key for 18 months. It could get at both problems Obama faces.

I've been on travel and out of touch for a week. Colin Powell's chief of staff claims Cheney used torture primarily to get evidence to support the Iraq war. He said all torture officially stopped after 2004. And this didn't make it into the mainline news this last week??? Unbelievable. I sent email to NPR to make sure they got a tip. Nothing happened? I'm thinking we need to get out into the streets.

Cheney wanted war with Iraq for oil. Don't FOIA released documents from Cheney's Energy Commission held before 9/11 show how the western oil companies were going to split Iraqi oil fields? Why would they do that? Then we had 9/11 with no intercepts of hijacked planes in 1 and 1/2 hours. And no one gets busted for this complete collapse of defense. Add to that the third building to fall into its footprint, WTC7 on 9/11. This one puzzles everyone, except for the official steel melting answer. Hopefully, if something can get started, maybe a lot can be investigated.

I'm thinking it's time to get into the streets.