narus.info PRISM/US-984XN

The lovely story behind the guy carrying an AR-15 in Arizona to the Obama event.

Read this so you can remember when there used to be both a Boston Globe and a Ted Kennedy. Here’s what his longtime colleague Vice President Joe Biden said.

Here is the eulogy that Ted Kennedy gave for his brother Bobby Kennedy after his assassination in 1968, which I think is appropriate now as well.

So call my office, he says. Gee Tom, too bad for you that there’s not enough air time for you to talk to every Oklahoman in a similar situation. I’m sure that you’d like to “personally help out” each of the over 600,000 Oklahomans without health insurance, which is one out of five of your constituents, instead of just giving lip service to the one who slipped through the cordon of crazed wingnuts in order to ask you a question. Why didn’t you just explain to her that the cult group you live with in Washington, DC, literally does not believe in charity?

Various ex-Bush administration sources have been “leaking” to the mainstream media all weekend that the 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report on torture, suppressed for 5 years, is somehow not that bad. It is officially scheduled to be released today. When it comes out and we read the highlights tonight, ask yourself, had it been released in 2004 would George W. Bush have still been the President from 2005 – 2008?

UPDATE: The special prosecutor has been named.

Emptywheel, whose knowledge of who’s who in the DOJ I defer to, is not impressed. It appears to me that this prosecutor will simply work to “clean up” the obvious unprosecuted felonies that are about to be “hung out” in the release of the report. I predict that the report will show multiple felonies that were actively covered up prior to now, and Durham will do the dead minimum, which is to clear up the discrepancy highlighted by the report’s release.

UPDATE 2: The report is out, after 5 years of coverups by the Bush administration, and the first headline-worthy item noticed in quick reading so far is this: the Department of Justice illegally authorized, in a secret, verbal-only way, extreme waterboarding techniques and intentionally left no paper trail. This means they went out beyond the already illegal “authorization” for torture that was contained in secret memos, and used the telephone, completely unaccountably, to approve no-holds barred methods of torture. Now we know why they eventually needed a tracheotomy kid in the waterboarding torture room.

92. REDACTED The debriefer assessed Al-Nashiri as withholding information, at which point REDACTED reinstated REDACTED hooding, and handcuffing. Sometime between 28 December 2002 and 1 January 2003, the debriefer used an unloaded semi-automatic handgun as a prop to frighten Al-Nashiri into disclosing information. After discussing this plan with REDACTED the debriefer entered the cell where Al-Nashiri sat shackled and racked the handgun once or twice close to Al-Nashiri’s head. On what was probably the same day, the debriefer used a power drill to frighten Al-Nashiri. With REDACTED consent, the debriefer entered the detainee’s cell and revved the drill while the detainee stood naked and hooded. The debriefer did not touch Al-Nashiri with the power drill

93. The REDACTED and debriefer did not request authorization or report the use of these unauthorized techniques to Headquarters. However, in January 2003, newly arrived TDY officers REDACTED who had learned of these incidents reported them to Headquarters. OIG investigated and referred its findings to the Criminal Division of DoJ. On 11 September 2003, DoJ declined to prosecute and turned these matters over to CIA for disposition. These incidents are the subject of a separate OIG Report of Investigation.

Threats

94. REDACTED During another incident REDACTED the same Headquarters debriefer, according to a REDACTED who was present, threatened Al-Nashiri by saying that if he did not talk, “We could get your mother in here,” and, “We can bring your family in here.” The REDACTED debriefer reportedly wanted Al-Nashiri to infer, for psychological reasons, that the debriefer might be REDACTED intelligence officer based on his Arabic dialect, and that Al-Nashiri was in REDACTED custody because it was widely believed in Middle East circles that REDACTED interrogation technique involves sexually abusing female relatives in front of the detainee. The debriefer denied threatening Al-Nashiri through his family. The debriefer also said he did not explain who he was or where he was from when talking with Al-Nashiri. The debriefer said he never said he was REDACTED intelligence officer but let Al-Nashiri draw his own conclusions.

95. REDACTED An experienced Agency interrogator reported that the REDACTED interrogators threatened Khalid Shaykh Muhammad REDACTED. According to this interrogator, the REDACTED interrogators said to Khalid Shaykh Muhammad that if anything else happens in the United States, “We’re going to kill your children.” According to the interrogator, one of the REDACTED interrogators said REDACTED. With respect to the report provided to him of the threats REDACTED that report did not indicate that the law had been violated.

This was done to Al-Nashiri, one of the 3 men supposedly subjected to drowning torture. It helps explain why the videotapes were destroyed of this torture. The implication of this new leak from the forthcoming release of the 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report, is that after waterboarding was ruled out al-Nashiri (because he probably nearly died during the torture), they then progressed to using an electric drill on him and mock executions using guns. Al-Nashiri says he told his torturers that Osama Bin Laden had a nuclear weapon. Obviously absolutely no one, including Bush and Cheney, believed it was credible in any way, or we would have been treated with hysterical claims by the administration that Al Qaeda was going to nuke the United States.