The number in my head was three. That's the number of bad guys that were waterboarded. Today it's 266. That's the number times that two of the bad guys were waterboarded according to the news all over the news. The most detailed of the details are evidently still in the hands of bloggers. Emptywheel is the source of analysis that losers of the sort the New Yorker hires are unable to effect.
Dick Cheney has stared Obama down with a challenge to answer the question that his inquiry provokes, "Is it worth it?", by releasing the rest of the documents at CIA. Basically Obama has only addressed the politically provocative side, which is over the question of legality. It is clear that the number of waterboarding exceed the guidelines for the practice according to Emptywheel; it begs the question "why?" Of course the answer to the question is obvious, depending on what side you're on. If you showed symptoms of BDS the answer is neatly summed up by Andrew Sullivan.
The point is to exert total absolute control over another human being - and to break that human being into as many pieces - physical, psychological, spiritual - as possible. This breaking of another human being is what Cheney wanted; it is what gave him a sense of control after he had presided over the worst attack in American history. Even though the victim had nothing more to tell, the torture had to go on and on - in part to generate data to justify the torture. Can you imagine what it felt like to put Zubaydah on the waterboard the seventieth time, knowing he had nothing more to say, knowing he was the wrong guy?
Yes of course we have to imagine, because the results of the interrogation remain classified. Cheney on the other hand says to Obama show the results side of the equation you sanctimonious wimp. By the way 'sanctimonius wimp' is one of the best insults I've heard thrown against Obama. Nails him. Hat tip to Jules Crittenden who quotes Cheney:
“One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn’t put out the memos that showed the success of the effort. And there are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified.” “I formally asked that they be declassified now. I haven’t announced this up until now, I haven’t talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country.” “And I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was, as well as to see this debate over the legal opinions.”
So either Obama has to end his puffery allowing his drones a couple days to run to listen to Sullivan and the New Yorker and Jon Stewart or some patriots at the CIA are going to be sorely tempted to start leaking. This is, finally, the entire cat out of the bag. Now that Obama has played this much of the hand he must be about full transparency and go along with Cheney or be about political gamesmanship in which he gets to show that Bush broke the rules, leave why open to crude speculation, and cover up the results in the interests of national security. Then say, hey we're not going to prosecute anybody formally, we're just using this evidence to flay our predecessors in public - to let 'the world' know.
So as I've been saying for years, the Monster was on a short leash. This is the extent of it. See here from 2004:
But we're all capable of savagery. In that regard, there is no difference between 'us' and 'them'. We all retain the essence of our humanity which allows us to kill at all. No one suggests that we not kill the enemy. The difference lies in what our systems are constructed to do and how they perform when called into duty. The difference lies in the quality of the cage in which our monsters reside during the off season. The difference lies in the willingness to look, to see, to judge and to act when monstrous subjects are at hand. These are not differences made real by the existence of a Geneva Convention, but differences made real by the structure and behavior of the US military and its civilian oversight.
Obama wants to pretend that these are not his tools and that the world that hates America was right for 8 years. Disclose or be delusional.
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