Originally posted by Capitalizt
shepard smith gets bout it bout it at :28..
LOL, bang on.
Capitalizt
I like his little "oops" at :42 too ;)
culorut
quote:
Originally posted by Capitalizt
I like his little "oops" at :42 too ;)
LOL again, I just watched it over. Missed it the first time around.
Halcyon+On+On
quote:
Originally posted by Clovis
Yeah, even better, you single handedly labeled each of us, and anyone else who might enter the thread who doesn't agree with your point of view in one fell swoop.
He's got all the subtlety of his party, wouldn't you say?
The17sss
quote:
Originally posted by Halcyon+On+On
He's got all the subtlety of his party, wouldn't you say?
pshhh! Subtle like Barney Frank, baby!
Clovis
quote:
Originally posted by Halcyon+On+On
He's got all the subtlety of his party, wouldn't you say?
And even then he's still classier than Rush.
yukii
the "oops" just made my day. :tongue2
then he's looking around-- this is better than when he said "blowjob" :stongue:
MisterOpus1
quote:
Originally posted by The17sss
To get back on subject here, I want to reiterate the timeline thing.... and how it DOES work out because the 2nd wave was still in the works by that 2nd cell, which was what KSM gave up after getting waterboarded. Can those of you who claimed it was impossible, needed a time machine, or accused the CIA and/or Bush administration of making up lies please admit now that those claims were a rush to judgement?
Here is more backup to the timeline, that Q5echo re-posted, and which I re-re-posted at the bottom of page 16 in this thread.
First, the May 30th, 2005 memo from the Dept. of Justice stating this (on page 10 of the memo):
To say it was completely disrupted in 2002, therefore the timeline doesn't work out is lazy and it's patently false. The 2nd wave was still in the works by that other cell after KSM's capture, and KSM gave up the goods via waterboarding. The L.A. Times (ironically trying to bury this now) put out an article in October 2005 discussing how the 2nd wave was disrupted! Look:
How far along its progression was is a separate debate, but by KSM's own ominous admission before getting waterboarded, "Soon you will know". Do brush it aside simply because it may have been "in the planning stages" is foolish. As Phillip Klein says: http://spectator.org/blog/2009/04/2...os-angeles-plot
You have to admit that there is a substantial, very real possibility that if KSM hadn't been waterboarded, another 9/11 type attack would have happened in L.A.
Well I have to admit there seemed to be a bit of plausibility to Thiesen's ideas, but the burning question I had was where he obtained this information from? Well it looks like Noah helped answer a few things in a rebuttal to Thiessen's rebuttal. From the looks of it, seems like Thiessen was confusing things (or as is often the case when reading Bush apologist blogs, deliberately obfuscating things), and may also be filling in holes with nothing less than his own speculation:
quote:
More Library Tower Nonsense
Former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen defends his California-flavored torture defense.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Monday, April 27, 2009, at 7:28 PM ET
On April 21 I posted a Chatterbox column arguing that if the Central Intelligence Agency and former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen hoped to convince the world that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" described here (and since repudiated by President Obama) prevented terror attacks against the United States, they would have to come up with a better example than the Library Tower plot. The CIA and Thiessen had argued that torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, allowed the U.S. government to thwart the Library Tower attack, wherein al-Qaida planned to hijack a jetliner and fly it into the tallest building in Los Angeles (formally known these days as the U.S. Bank Tower). The trouble with this argument was that the chronology didn't work. Sheikh Mohammed was captured in March 2003, and on more than one occasion (for instance, here, here, and here), the Bush administration stated that the Library Tower plot was broken up in 2002. How could torturing Sheikh Mohammed in 2003 have prevented an attack that had already been foiled a year earlier?
After my column appeared, the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America noted (here, here, and here) that the following people continued to repeat the Library Tower canard without acknowledging its logical inconsistency: Karl Rove, Dana Rohrabacher, Clifford May, and Fox News' Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Neil Cavuto, Steve Doocy, Catherine Herridge, and Brian Kilmeade. How annoying! Thiessen did, too, but on April 25, he finally answered with a posting on the National Review's blog, "The Corner," under the headline: "The West Coast Plot: An 'Inconvenient Truth.' "
quote:
Noah cites the fact that Fran Townsend, the Bush administration's homeland-security adviser, told reporters in a February 2006 press briefing that a key cell leader in the West Coast plot was arrested February of 2002. This, Noah points out, is before KSM came into CIA custody and underwent enhanced interrogation. He also notes Townsend said that after the cell leader's capture other cell members "believed" that the plot was not going forward.
I hate to break it to Noah, but this does not refute the fact that KSM's interrogation disrupted the West Coast plot.
It doesn't?
Let's review. The cell leader, Masran (not "Marsan," as Thiessen calls him) bin Arshad, was captured 13 months before Sheikh Mohammed. Not good enough, Thiessen says, because bin Arshad "did not lead us to the [other three] members of the cell tasked with carrying out the West Coast plot." Maybe so, but a second member of the cell, Zaini Zakaria ("Mussa"), surrendered to authorities in December 2002. That was three months before Sheikh Mohammed was captured. That left Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep ("Lillie") and Mohamad Farik Bin Amin ("Zubair"), neither of whom knew how to fly a plane.
(Two others with at least some pilot experience may have been involved in the Library Tower plot earlier, but they go unmentioned by Thiessen. These were Zacharias Moussaoui and Abderrauf Jdey. But Moussaoui was arrested before 9/11, and Jdey, who apparently dropped out before 9/11, remains at large—if you happen to see him please notify the Federal Bureau of Investigation—so neither is relevant to this discussion.)
Lillie and Zubair weren't captured until 2003, and apparently they remained involved in terror plots, most notably the August 2003 suicide bombing of a J.W. Marriott in Jakarta, Indonesia, which killed 12 people and injured 144. But they did not continue to pursue the Library Tower plot. We know this because, as Townsend told reporters in February 2006, they believed the Library Tower plan had ended with bin Arshad's capture. That jibes with an October 2003 Time magazine account of Lillie's confession, which states that "as far as Lillie knew, the operation was called off." Lillie was in a position to know pretty far, because he and his co-conspirator Zubair (an old school chum) were both working as top lieutenants to Riduan Isamuddin ("Hambali")—leader of a Southeast Asian al-Qaida affiliate called Jemaah Islamiyah and the man Sheikh Mohammed had directed to organize the Library Tower attack.
Thiessen does his level best to confuse this straightforward narrative by relating a complex tale involving Majid Khan (captured around the same time as Sheikh Mohammed) and Hambali's little brother Rusman Gunawan ("Gun Gun"). The gist is that al-Qaida gave $50,000 to Khan, who gave it to Zubair. Thiessen seems to imply that the money was for the Library Tower plot, but a March 2007 transcript of Zubair's tribunal hearing says it was actually "used to fund a safe house and to purchase materials for the J.W. Marriott attack in Jakarta." Thiessen asserts that Khan was "another key operative in the West Coast plot," but I can find no evidence of this in the public record, which by now is pretty extensive; it went unmentioned, for instance, at Khan's April 2007 tribunal hearing. (The rap against Khan, who resided in Baltimore but was arrested in Karachi, Pakistan, is that Sheikh Mohammed chose him for some sort of attack in the United States, possibly involving the detonation of gas stations or the poisoning of reservoirs—the details are very unclear—or, alternatively, to assassinate Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, in a suicide attack.) After 9/11, Khan did introduce Sheikh Mohammed to an American named Iyman Faris, with whom Sheikh Mohammed discussed the Library Tower plot, but Faris ended up getting involved in an entirely different plot (which Faris quickly judged impractical) to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge by cutting its cables.
Thiessen goes on to assert that Gun Gun (arrested in Pakistan six months after Sheikh Mohammed's capture and later jailed in Indonesia for his role in the J.W. Marriott bombing) was "the leader of [a second] cell that was to carry out the West Coast plot." Again, I can find no evidence of this in the public record.
In both instances, I strongly suspect that Thiessen runs afoul of the distinction between the Library Tower plot and what Sheikh Mohammed referred to as the post-9/11 "Second Wave" of attacks. They are not the same thing. Yet the two terms are used interchangeably in the May 30 Justice Department memo on which Thiessen bases his argument and perhaps (it's hard to tell) in a CIA "effectiveness memo" cited in that same Justice Department memo. "You have informed us," writes Stephen G. Bradbury, principal deputy assistant attorney general, "that the interrogation of KSM—once enhanced techniques were employed—led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the 'Second Wave,' 'to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into' a building in Los Angeles." In fact, though, Second Wave, a term apparently used by Sheikh Mohammed himself, could refer to any one of a variety of possible post-9/11 attacks in the United States—none of them very far along in the planning—of which the Library Tower plot was only one. Sheikh Mohammed's use of the term was sufficiently imprecise that it drove his CIA interrogators a little batty. Second Wave, they complained, "has meant different things over the course of Sheikh Mohammed's debriefings." Asked finally to clarify, Sheikh Mohammed said Second Wave referred (here I quote the CIA's paraphrase) "to efforts begun in parallel with the 9/11 plot to identify and train pilots and muscle for additional 9/11-style strikes in the United States." In a final statement (read by his lawyer) at his March 2007 tribunal hearing, Sheikh Mohammed said:
I was responsible for planning, training, surveying, and financing the New (or Second) Wave attacks [italics mine] against the following skycrapers after 9/11:
a.) Library Tower, California
b.) Sears Tower, Chicago
c.) Plaza Bank, Washington State
d.) The Empire State Building, New York City
Sheikh Mohammed then went on to further cite plots to bomb suspension bridges in New York City, to destroy the New York Stock Exchange, and to assassinate former President Jimmy Carter. Given Sheikh Mohammed's expansive definition, Khan's seemingly inchoate desire to wreak havoc back home in the United States might easily be classified, too, as Second Wave, even though it bore no apparent connection to the Library Tower plot.
And Gun Gun? Thiessen links him to the Library Tower plot via a cell of plotters—not the four Library Tower plotters we've already discussed but a second cell consisting of 17 Indonesians and Malaysians who were arrested in September 2003. Members of Jemaah Islamiyah, the Southeast Asian affiliate led by Gun Gun's brother Hambali, these 17 souls constituted the "Guraba cell." According to Thiessen, they were going to carry out the Library Tower attack, too.
I'm at a disadvantage here because I'm pretty much in the dark about who the Guraba cell members were. Practically the only public reference I can find to them is in that May 30 Justice Department memo, and a quick check with several very reliable terrorism sources yielded nothing. But I have a strong hunch that Thiessen doesn't know who they are, either, outside of the May 30 memo—which mentions them once in reference to Sheikh Mohammed's catchall phrase "Second Wave" and once in reference to the "planned Second Wave attacks against Los Angeles." My best guess is that this second reference arises from a mistaken belief by the memo's Justice Department author, Bradbury, that Second Wave and Library Tower attack meant the same thing. Bradbury was a lawyer, not an intelligence official, and therefore unlikely to make much independent effort to find out where in the United States the Guruba cell planned its mischief. Surely someone inside the Bush administration knew, though. And if the Bush White House knew the Library Tower plot wasn't truly foiled until the Guraba cell bust in the fall of 2003, what possible reason would it have had to broadcast, repeatedly, years later, that the Library Tower plot was foiled in 2002?
[Update, April 28: A reader kindly informs me that among the "Second Wave" buildings Sheikh Mohammed "admitted" he'd plotted to destroy after the CIA waterboarded him 183 times, the Plaza Bank in Washington State seems especially farfetched. That's because the only bank bearing that name in the Evergreen State wasn't even founded until three years after Sheikh Mohammed was taken into custody. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer puzzled over this riddle at the time of Sheikh Mohammed's tribunal hearing.]
Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
And so it goes. This is what happens when you take the bait of a Bush speechwriter/spin-doctor, 17.
MisterOpus1
Oh yeah, almost forgot:
....also awaits apologies......
Shakka
quote:
Originally posted by MisterOpus1
Oh yeah, almost forgot:
....also awaits apologies......
Age before beauty, right?;)
Anyhoo, Thomas Friedman had this piece out today that I thought was pretty good.
quote:
April 29, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
A Torturous Compromise
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Weighing everything, President Obama got it about as right as one could when he decided to ban the use of torture, to release the Bush torture memos for public scrutiny and to not prosecute the lawyers and interrogators who implemented the policy. But there is nothing for us to be happy about in any of this.
After all, we’re not just talking about “enhanced interrogations.” Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has testified to Congress that more than 100 detainees died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, with up to 27 of those declared homicides by the military. They were allegedly kicked to death, shot, suffocated or drowned. Look, our people killed detainees, and only a handful of those deaths have resulted in any punishment of U.S. officials.
The president’s decision to expose but not prosecute those responsible for this policy is surely unsatisfying; some of this abuse involved sheer brutality that had nothing to do with clear and present dangers. Then why justify the Obama compromise? Two reasons: the first is that because justice taken to its logical end here would likely require bringing George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials to trial, which would rip our country apart; and the other is that Al Qaeda truly was a unique enemy, and the post-9/11 era a deeply confounding war in a variety of ways.
First, Al Qaeda was undeterred by normal means. Al Qaeda’s weapon of choice was suicide. Al Qaeda operatives were ready to kill themselves — as they did on 9/11, and before that against U.S. targets in Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Tanzania and Yemen — long before we could ever threaten to kill them. We could deter the Russians because they loved their children more than they hated us; they did not want to die. The Al Qaeda operatives hated us more than they loved their own children. They glorified martyrdom and left families behind.
Second, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda aspired to deliver a devastating blow to America. They “were involved in an extraordinarily sophisticated and professional effort to acquire weapons of mass destruction. In this case, nuclear material,” Michael Scheuer, the former C.I.A. bin Laden expert, told “60 Minutes” in 2004. “By the end of 1996, it was clear that this was an organization unlike any other one we had ever seen.”
Third, Al Qaeda comes out of a stream in radical Islam that believes that it has religious sanction for killing absolutely anyone, including fellow Muslims. Al Qaeda in Iraq has blown up Muslims in mosques, shrines and funerals. It respects no redlines or religious constraints. One of its leaders personally severed Daniel Pearl’s head with a butcher knife — on film.
Finally, Al Qaeda’s tactics are designed to be used against, and to undermine, exactly what we are: an open society. By turning human beings into walking missiles and instruments from our daily lives — cars, airplanes, shoes, cellphones, backpacks — into bombs, Al Qaeda attacks the very feature that keeps our open society open: trust. If you have to fear that the person next to you on a plane or in a theater might blow up, there can be no open society.
And therefore, the post-9/11 environment remains perilous. One more 9/11 would close our open society another notch. One more 9/11 and you’ll be taking off more than your shoes at the airport. We have the luxury of having this torture debate now because there was no second 9/11, and it was not for want of trying. Had there been, a vast majority of Americans would have told the government (and still will): “Do whatever it takes.”
So President Obama’s compromise is the best we can forge right now: We have to enjoin those who confront Al Qaeda types every day on the frontlines to act in ways that respect who we are, but also to never forget who they are. They are not white-collar criminals. They do not care whether we torture or not — bin Laden declared war on us when Bill Clinton was president.
I believe that the most important reason there has not been another 9/11, besides the improved security and intelligence, is that Al Qaeda is primarily focused on defeating America in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world — particularly in Iraq. Al Qaeda knows that if it can destroy the U.S. effort (still a long shot) to build a decent, modernizing society in Iraq, it will undermine every U.S. ally in the region.
Conversely, if we, with Iraqis, defeat them by building any kind of decent, pluralistic society in the heart of their world, it will be a devastating blow. Odd as it may seem, the most dangerous moment for us is if Al Qaeda is beaten in Iraq. Because that is when Al Qaeda’s remnants will try to throw a Hail Mary pass — that is, try to set off a bomb in a U.S. city — to obscure its defeat by moderate Arabs and Muslims in the heart of its world.
So, yes, people among us who went over the line may go unpunished, because we still have enemies who respect no lines at all. In such an ugly war, you do your best. That’s what President Obama did.
Clovis
Friedman is hot or miss with me but that was a good piece. Thanks for posting it.
Q5echo
quote:
Originally posted by Clovis
Friedman is hot or miss with me
he's always hot to me!!!! WHO WANTS A MUSTACHE RIDE?
