Good little torture advocate Joe Scarborough seems to think that anything the United States does is justified, if it works. I'd like to know just what Joe Scarborough and the rest of his guests would ever find objectionable enough that it finally goes over the line for any of them? Scar starts out feigning indignation for the poor demoralized CIA that got their feelings hurt by that mean old Amnesty International and the ACLU for letting the public know they tortured prisoners. He's completely unfazed by her report and at the end of course questions whether it's even true.
Mitchell: Well when they looked at the details and when they looked at some of the more gruesome aspects of this program, they say, they believed they had to uphold...
Scarborough: Now when you say gruesome, what are you talking about gruesome. Uhhhmm....
Mitchell: Well we don't know frankly. Pete Williams and I went through all this and we're told that we don't even know some of the worst cases that were still censored. So....
Scarborough: Well the cases we do know is somebody turned on a drill and made a detainee think that they were going to get drilled...
Mitchell: Well...
Scarborough: And then somebody fired a gun in an adjoining room. Have we heard of anything worse than that right now?
Mitchell: Yes we have.
Scarborough: What have we heard?
Mitchell: We've heard of threats to, we will bring your mother in here and we'll bring your children here and we'll kill your children when the children were in custody of the U.S. Military. So we will rape your mother in front of you. These are things that, this is not, you know, me talking. This is the Geneva Conventions. You've got a lot of...
Scarborough: We will rape your mother in front of you. Who is suggesting that was said by an interrogator?
Mitchell: Yes, exactly.
Scarborough: Okay. And when are we going to get that information released?
Mitchell: Well, we're not sure that we're going to ever get that information released. There are a lot of lawsuits out there and some of the plantiffs are still complaining, Amnesty, ACLU said what was released yesterday still has too many blacked out sections.
Scarborough: Okay. Andrea...ah...it is, this is absolutely fascinating.
Mitchell: It's a mess. There's no question it's a mess. And it's really damaging morale at the agency. There's no questions about that.
Scarborough: Listen, I personally believe it's a nightmare moving forward. I know David Ignatius has said as much. We're going to have him on and talk to him for about thirty minutes.
Scarborough and Richard Haas then go on to more or less say that the CIA cannot do it's job if they're not allowed to torture people, and carry water for that "torture saved us from terrorist attacks" canard.
Scarborough: Richard, my god, I cannot, I, can, not, imagine, a series of events that could have been more calculated, calculated. If you wanted to damage the CIA's morale, if you wanted to gut our intelligence gathering operation, I just can't imagine a series of events that could be more calculated to do that.
Haas: This seems to go in cycles. If you'll recall the United States got heavily involved in Central America. Certain people then got called up in front of Congress and the legal machinery. It's happening now. It's not the first time, but each time we pay a price, which is either people don't join, people leave the operational side, or it inhibits those who are already there from doing what they want to do. My prediction is this will be simply another way. These people will be very careful for while. God forbid there will be future terrorism against the United States and then once again we will become more expansive because people are going to want to know why we didn't do more to prevent it. At the risk of repeating myself, I really think putting this in legal channels as opposed to just the policy channels is something, just like the politics, we as a society, will regret. We need to look at all of our tools. We may reject some of these things. Let's say on balance they're not worth it. But other things we may say to do it given who we're up against.
That's going to be the conversation. That's a grown up conversation.
Scarborough: But this is not a grown up conversation because it's so politically charged on both sides, that if we had grown ups actually in charge of this operation, they would ask the question that Richard Haas, President of the CFR asked last hour. A very simple question and a question that's not about political retribution but a question that's about protecting this country. The question is this. What works? What works? That's what other countries do. Okay, this is what we've done in the past seven, eight years. What works? Not who, who can we throw in jail. What works?
Scarborough goes on to fear monger over how terrible this is going to be politically for the Democrats and warns of the dire consequences if we look back. Look forward dammit!!! Look forward!! And of course while he's at it he has to get a shot in at the "base" on the left.
