4-Star General Calls for Probe of Bush White House

[Galen Sevinne]

Nora O’Donnell: General McCaffrey, let me start with you. The President’s speech was largely a pep rally. How do you think it went?

General Barry McCaffrey: Good. It was the right thing to do. It's hard for me to overstate the degree of respect I have for the agency. I worked with them closely for years. They're disciplined. They're courageous. They're effective. We ought to be grateful they're there.

Having said that, it's almost an out of body experience to me to listen to this debate going on [whether these techniques were torture].

We should never as a policy maltreat people under our control, detainees.

We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during a course of that, both by the armed forces and CIA. [Releasing the memos] was the right thing to do.

We have to move forward.

[snip]

There is prosecutorial discretion. We shouldn't in my view go after the CIA officers involved in this. There is a good argument in my view for reviewing the White House justice council and the Attorney General's office who okayed this.

I think as a policy matter we better find out how thing went so wrong.

Nora O’Donnell: Wow!


Here we go...should be interesting. Obama has balls.

[Galen Sevinne]

I think this is going to be a tipping point in this country in how these torture memos are handled. How this plays out will dwarf socialist/fascist rethoric from the Right. Once you start prosecuting officials for authorizing the use of tortue, how high can you go? There is plenty of speculation at this point about Condi and Cheney being on on daily briefings about the use of torture.

The Right has already pushed the talking point that the country was in danger and these techniques were necessary in protecting the u.s. citizens.

There is contrary evidence that the use of torture does not produce significant information and drawing the line of evidence that torture saved us from additional attacks is nearly impossible.

But transcending that debate is the idea that America does not torture. It doesn't. It is what separates us from what we refer to as "brutal dictorships"....from true despots and fascists. There is no justification for torture. Trying to say that it saved lives is a red hering.

BUT on top of all that is the newly released information that Bush and Co. were using torture to falsey extract a connection from Al Qaeda to Sadamm and thus justification for going to Iraq.

So, in essence, Bush was using illegal torture to justify his unethical if not illegal war. This is what America became under this guy and watch the Right continue to try to justify these actions.

According to The Senate Report based in part on the testimony of Senior intelligence officials:

There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

Ron Suskind explains:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSw-B...layer_embedded