I can’t contribute if I’m laughing. Stop making me laugh.

Where do you work?

Still, you are right in that there is little if any comment or pushback against the torture thugs from the intelligence communities managers. That’s the scary part–they seem to have bought into and buried the machanisation of skeletons.

There’s also the obvious buttons being pushed which set people off, and instead of simply ignoring the buttons and focusing on content, they’ve been getting tripped.

I recommend that we implement a cease-fire and get back on topic of this thread, which is the July 2002 Torture Training Session. What do we have to post here in comments which is new in content or analysis, or elaborates on the investigative work Marcy has done?

Personally, I’m still quite curious about the classification redaction and the entity name also redacted. And I’m still wondering about earlier advice mentioned by Jason at (76).

EPU’d and not that important I guess – but Skimpy, bmaz has been saying for a long time much of what you are saying now.

There’s this fantastical world that YOU live in where bad people end up confessing to their crimes and owning up to them.

This is so far from what the lawyer here have said that I have to wonder where you get it from – everytime the msm theme of these “few brave laywers fighting to protect us” gets trotted out, it’s mostly the lawyers here who challenge it and bmaz in particular.

I think your insights are interesting, but also I think you are doing more to fan false hopes than bmaz and you seem to be all over the board.

You have gone from talking about how there were going to be all kinds of whistleblowers coming out for a list of reasons, ranging from them not liking what was being done to self preservation etc. (which I didn’t find super believable – esp your scenario that there would be such a strong fire raining down that any of these guys would feel the need for self preservation or find a benefit from it when revelations would probably just cause more personal exposure as well) to other times talking about how codes of honor and big future payoffs would prevent anyone from ever saying anything (something I find a lot more believable and something bmaz has talked about many times as well) to saying now that people will disappear bc that’s what they’ve been trained to do. I don’t doubt there are some elements of truth in all those posits, but each one comes out as kind of absolutist when it does come out, and esp when you were talking about whistleblowers it was fanning a lot of hopes.

And even in your posts in this thread, you go from talking about how lawyers got us into this (something, again, that bmaz has talked about for a long long time – so you guys are pretty much on the same page on most things so far) to also saying at the same time that the other fault of lawyers, in addition to *getting us into* this mess, was “lawyers that thought they could stop it by trying arcane legal maneuvers on people who don’t care about the law.” Now, to me that seems to be saying that you are acknowledging there were people who didn’t care about the law calling a lot of the shots, to where the lawyers were pretty much immaterial (legal maneuvering was not going to stop them).

It’s a downside of the internet that a lot of things in a passing comment can’t be expanded upon at the time, or that a comment often presupposes some familiarity with the history of comments (bc there isn’t time to reinevent the wheel with each post) But it’s pretty confusing when you pick out bmaz for so much anger when he’s pretty much said what you are saying and made some of the same complaints.

As for:

Where the fuck were you when my bosses where violating every American principle I swore to uphold? Where were you and all your blustering lawyer kinfolk in Brooks Brothers turncoats when they – successfully – legalized torture?

You know, for a long time what was being done was being done in secret. The intel community sat on it, covered it up, and allowed it to progress to something that would be very difficult to ever do anything about when it was exposed. Sure, the lawyers (and that’s my community, so it’s my blame as well) were huge offenders (the worst imo) and so were, as Jeff Kaye has been exposing, the doctors and pscyhologists.

Something to note, though, is that while there are lots of nonDOJ lawyers now, who with information are trying to do something (and who fought originally to get access to GITMO personnel while the intelligence community sided with the DOJ lawyers and claimed even releasing names would harm intelligence gathering opportunities) and while a lot of psychologists are out in the open now, that facts are coming out, fighting againt what happened in their community; and while JAG corps lawyers have fought from the start and even uniformed Generals are coming out – the community that hasn’t come forward by and large is the intelligence community.

So while I also believe that, “There are supposed to be principles and ideals that people adhere to because they believe in what American really stands for. America does not stand for torture.” I hear that from people like bmaz (and Scott Horton, et al); I hear it from Swifts and Kueblers; I hear it from the Jeff Kayes; but the intel community has been pretty silent, and on two fronts. On the one front, it was silent while the laws were being broken and principles demolished – so it is convenient to pop up after years of enhancing the veil of secrecy behind which such things were being done and saying “well, how come you guys who didn’t know what we knew didn’t do something” when your community was the one sitting on the secrets and not saying a word while lies were being claimed to the American people and the courts. The second front is the dearth of objection from your community, the intelligence community, once things have come out.

So you don’t have to twist arms here to get an agreement on both the individual lawyers and the legal community and culpability – but the main difference between bmaz (and Jeff for that matter) and you so far has been the ability to confess to the faults of their community. You still are painting yours as a community of “the good guys” but they are the ones who covered up the secrets and did their best to prevent people like bmaz and Jeff from getting the information they would have needed to be effective. To say that NOW they are going to come out of the woodwork is, imo, creating false hopes and running counter to what has happened during the better part of a decade. If it happens, good, very good, great. So far, it has been an unabashed community that points to everyone else and says “why didn’t YOU” and never says, “why DID we”

Looking back over the older press reports (from 2005), I suspect someone was intentionally confusing al-Libi with AZ when speaking to the press. The full explanation is complicated and a bit of guesswork.

But, they said he was not the only one who gave the CIA legal advice in this area.

Anyway, just FYI and I suppose we will find out whether that is indeed the case when the report is released whenever that is.