Sometimes Andrea Mitchell can be a tool, but sometimes she acts like a journalist. Kit Bond was on a wanker role today on MSNBC and actually had Andrea Mitchell almost jumping out of her seat with his distortions of so many facts. Bond said that the Senate Armed Services Report was a partisan report and it was wrong. When he tried to say that Abu Ghraib was just a few rogue soldiers that's when Andrea got into it with him.
Senate armed services committee released an exhaustive report detailing direct links between the harsh interrogation programme of the CIA and abuses of prisoners at the US prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, in Afghanistan and at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.
When Andrea brought this fact up to Kit, he called the SASC report lies...( rough transcript. Fill in the thread)
Mitchell: Do you really feel that the CIA/terror fighters are being stabbed in the back by the President's actions?
Bond: Yes, very clearly. by released these classified has put all the CIA under the gun.There could be prosecutions for following orders and there could be prosecutions in other countries.
Mitchell: ...the Bush administration lawyers, one a sitting federal judge, on the federal appeals court on the 9th circuit in San Francisco, so those legal opinions themselves are being questioned, the practice is being questioned, the chain of how these decisions led eventually to Abu Ghraib according to the Armed Services Committee report yesterday and your own committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee has released a time line that shows that Condi Rice and others as early as July, 2002 approved these techniques, your colleagues have done on the hill.
Bond: There are about five different questions in there. No 1, Abu Ghraib had nothing to do with intelligence, that was a bunch of rogue reservists from West Virginia
Mitchell: That's not what what the Armed Services Committee report says sir.
Bond: It's absolutely wrong. It is a DOD report, they did not have access to the classified information on Intelligence community and we will be doing a review of the intelligence committee. It did not , it did not have access to what the CIA was doing. To say that Abu Ghraib had anything to do with intelligence is flat wrong.
Mitchell: So you're saying the Armed Services Committee report was in error yesterday?
Bond: Sen Rockefeller's report, we will do a bipartisan report.
Sen Rockefeller's report conveniently ignores the fact that the leadership of congress, Republican and Democrat in both houses and on the intelligence committee had access...(Democrats are are fault here too)
Mitchell: We've reported on that, my question Carl Levin was on yesterday and drew a connection between the original; authorizations and the practices that were first used at Guantanamo and then were followed through because the military personnel from Guantanamo, a General Miller I believe then went to Baghdad and initiated some of these same practices which they draw the connection, I'm not drawing that connection, I'm just reporting on it.
Bond: I think, I think Carl Levin is wrong on that, but it was military activities and Abu Ghraib had nothing to do with intelligence.
He goes on to warn President Obama that investigations is the wrong way to go because Republicans can do the same thing, after all they didn't investigate President Clinton's administration after Bush took office.
Bond: We don't criminally prosecute people we disagree with when we change office. There are lots of questions that could have been asked about the Clinton administration, failing to recognize the war on terror. They did not., The Bush administration went forward...
The Bushies were too busy waterboarding people to worry about anything else. We prosecute those that break the law, Mr. "not James" Bond. No, they investigated Clinton like maniacs when he was in office starting with White Water. And a special prosecutor named Ken Starr was just fine by the Republicans. Let's remind Bond that it was Bush that opposed the 9/11 commission because he knew that he failed to take terrorism seriously.
Mitchell" I just want to make sure before I let you go, that you mean to be comparing the Obama administration with a "Banana Republic?"
Oh, just meant we shouldn't act like one.
The report says: "The abuse of detainees in US custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of "a few bad apples" acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorised their use against detainees."
It's clear from the report that techniques used in Guantanamo Bay were then jettisoned to Iraq and implemented in Abu Ghraib to gather "intelligence," especially to see if al-Qaeda had ties to Iraq even when it was found that there were none, but also just out of cruelty. Power corrupts.
