What Did Dick Give Judy to Go Pro-Torture?
Judy Miller must think she’s smarter than Susan Crawford. Crawford, after all, while still convening authority for military commissions in Gitmo, admitted that Mohammed al-Qahtani had been tortured. And by that, she was referring to the treatment that started in November 2002, nine months after Gitmo opened; she was talking about conduct that was ultimately approved in large part by Rummy.
Susan Crawford ought to know, and she says we tortured Qahtani.
But Judy Miller now says we didn’t torture at Gitmo–and any abuse occurred in the first four months after Gitmo was opened–in May 2002 and earlier. (h/t fatster)
“Even though this hasn’t been true for many, many years now,” she explained. “No one was ever waterboarded at Guantanamo, according to Guantanamo officials,” Miller continued. “Torture as ordinary people would call it took place only during four months when it first opened…like sleep deprivation, being doused with ice cold water…things that don’t meet current standards.”
What’s particularly interesting about this opinion from someone whose opinion no one much heeds anymore is that she had a different take on Gitmo back in May.
Joel, I’m sorry, but I was actually in a jail with — one floor away — from Zacarias Moussaoui. … We know how to do this. Believe me, we can do it. The issue is, is it politically acceptable to the American people? That we’re not sure about.
Back in May (just a month after Judy admitted she had a hard time reading the torture memos her buddy Dick had conjured up), she said we know how to close Gitmo. But back in September, Judy said we had to have Gitmo or a place like it.
While the administration ponders the detainees’ legal fate, it seems pointless to spend more money and energy moving them to “Gitmo North” — maximum-security prisons in the United States where they may be far more harshly treated.
It’s time for the Obama administration to acknowledge that Gitmo, or another center like it, will be needed as long as the war on terrorism — no matter what our commander in chief calls it — endures.
Now, I never really expected intellectual consistency from Judy Miller. But I do find it interesting that she’s hitting the airwaves at the moment making claims that are transparently untrue.
Sort of makes you wonder who’s behind her new opinions about Gitmo, doesn’t it?
One doesn’t have to “wonder” very far. I am with you in being interested in the method of travel however. How did she get from point A to point B?
I doubt Dick gave her anything. It’s more likely to me that she got a phone call offering to assist her in making sure certain other communications of hers didn’t become public.
Boxturtle (Datamining can be such a USEFUL tool in the hands of a neocon)
Beware of journos who wake up in a new world every day.
“Transparently Untrue” should be Judy Judy Judy’s Registered Trademark.
This country is populated at the top by craven and mendacious whores to power and slaves to money.
Miller is one of them.
-G
It’s a symptom of a nation in decline, morally, spiritually and ethically. Historical inevitability.
Hasn’t Miller always been pro-torture?
Maybe the Darth pay with taxpayer bucks private prison business is promising Judy a prison of her very own.
Putting up with Miller’s crap is also torture.
Oh good. We have Judy Miller to kick around again.
Judy is so important. Really. How many of us can say we were in jail with Zacarias Moussaoui?
All Dick had to do was blow in her ear and she would follow him everywhere.
How are the aspens in Colorado this year Judy babbby!
Did we ever find out definitively what was up with that metaphorical communique?
Why would anyone trust Judy Miller for the time of day?
She’s now precisely where she belongs — on FOX.
As Mark Twain once said: “Never lie and then you don’t have to remember anything.” It does get more and more difficult to remember what you said when you continually lie.
Perhaps Judith Miller is hoping to go on the Condoleezza speaking circuit to cash in on the big bucks. Did you know a synagogue in Minnesota is charging up to $12,500 per table to come bathe in Ms. Rice’s presence on November 8th?
But you can get your whole office or club in to hear GWB for $19.00.
What are they expecting from Condy? She really doesn’t seem to have much to offer.
She waves good and has a fabulous shoe collection.
unbelievable
Hopefully for that price she’s going to throw in professional shopper services – for that, at least, she’s qualified.
Judy Miller is just another media clown. Her job is not to convey news but disseminate propaganda. In this she is no different from David Broder, David Brooks, David Gregory, Wolf Blitzer, Charlie Gibson, Katie Couric, Fred Hiatt, Bill Keller, and essentially all the others who make up our “news” media.
Well it’s true, Hugh, the media is now 98% propaganda with a few real journalism sprinkled in.
Media has been taken over by capital then use it for their purpose. It’s that simple and there are more than enough people who sell out or delude themselves into believing they are journalists because of who signs their paycheck.
Miller is a shill par excellence.
Women’s Rights and Equality:
Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore Show) = one baby step forward.
Judy Miller (Shill for the WH) = three giant steps backward.
Now, here you are, EW, just continuing to circulate these things on the web. (If you’re masochistic enough to watch the video at Raw Story, you’ll hear Judy say that right at the end.) Tsk tsk.
Must drive her crazy. She had to cope with a managing editor who seems to have been getting fed up with her stale routines. How dare all these DFHs just sit there, typing away, publishing themselves?
Jan 2003 – US Solider mistaken for a detainee beaten into permanent disability, life flighted out of GITMO, tape destroyed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Baker
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/jun/18/nation/na-gitmo18
June 2006 – three suicides (aka assymetric warfare) steming from the “non-torture” detentions. Leading to an op ed piece
June 14, 2006 in the Guardian, where Clive Stafford Smith discusses, among other things a forced cell entry (FCE) similar to the “training exercise” that left Baker disabled, involving his then client, Ahmed Errachidi (confined in isolation for years (not the first four months of GITMO, but YEARS, denied treatment for his mental illness, etc.) that had just taken place (June, 2006 not being during the first four months of GITMO) forcibly stripped by 5 men.
Instead of that, the US tried to sneak Errachidi into Morocco for them to give him the Binyam Mohamed treatment, but once British press (not to be confused with FOX news) discovered where he was, Morocco declined to continue Errachidi’s US torture program.
Rather than go on and on about the things that disprove Miller, I think the more interesting thing is why the LA Times is printing Miller as someone who would know what is going on at GITMO. I know that she was Fitzgerald’s go-to gal on the Saleh torture case, to “prove” that Saleh wasn’t being tortured in Israel, but how is it that people just assume that she is all-knowledgeable about what is going on at the world’s torture facilities? How does she know what was going on during the first 4 months (and if she is now admitting that those were torture and that she knows all about them, why wasn’t she reporting on them as torture at the time?) and how does she know what is going on now? Where are her interviews with guards, ex-guards, JAG prosecutores and defense counsel, civilian defense counsel, released detainees, etc.?
Oh, wait, here ya go – she says that peole who would be guilty of war crimes if they fessed up to continued torture have said that torture stopped.
emph added
So LA Times gives her an op piece for her to type up that unidentified “officers say” they don’t beat their wife anymore.
Good to know that Miller thinks the Taliban were humane and nifty guys in their kidnap/detention of David Rhode, but the big question is how she is a recognized mouthpiece for “GITMO Happenings” at all. She is in the know and in the loop – how?
Did Judy go ask Bahtiyar Mahnut how he and his brother, Arkin Mahmud, are enjoying those “art classes” that she sneeringly touts as being a US taxpayer offering to terrorists? After all, she took the “official tour” in deciding that everything is loverly at GITMO.
Apparently, despite the fact that Obama has ordered the closing of GITMO, Miller says that the official tours of GITMO are being given specifically to undermine that order –
. emph added
Pretty mind boggling – Miller says the military at GITMO is organizing media tours to prove that their CIC gave them an order that was an empty political gesture. And btw, could she go get an op piece in the LATimes to pass that message on for them?
And somehow in that nifty official tour, they managed to miss the high profile Uigher brothers in the “art class” (In March, the task force added art classes to the thrice-weekly instruction it offers in Arabic, Pashtu and English, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer.) Brothers who were not brought to GITMO until 2002, well after the Miller Specified Torture Time at GITMO.
How kewl that we could torture a guy into insanity AFTER Miller assures us that GITMO has cleaned up its act.
And then there’s Miller’s description of how hunger strikes are “allowed’ (unbelievably – that is her actual word choice) at GITMO. This is her version of “allowing” hunger strikes:
I’m having a very hard time reading that and not playing amateur psychologist, bc anyone who thinks that force feeding through a nose tube while tied down is another way of describing “allowed” hunger strikes, is frickin nuts. And she describes them “lining up” like they are waiting for the ice cream truck, but basically leaves hanging whether she’s talking about being there and describing what she witnessed first hand or just passing on the “butter pecan” info that she was handed off. Either way – what kind of thing types up that shackling someone for force feeding via a nose tube is “allowing” hunger strikes?
She types up (without a trace of irony)
and then apparently asks the doctor (without a trace of irony) about detainee gratitude
I’m waiting, without a trace of irony, for Miller’s description of how al Hanashi’s ungrateful suicide in June 2009 (was the bed where he died on the ‘official tour’ Judy?) indicates the ultimate solution to GITMO. After all, just as hunger strikes are allowed, leaving GITMO is apparenly also allowed (typed without a trace of irony). It just needs to be accompanied with a voluntary loss of life.
It’s hard to digest something so wicked on a beautiful Sunday morning in a country that has earned so much better.
Thanks for that. I can’t believe they’re still going with the transparent Punch ‘n Judy Show, as if we can’t see them behind the scenes. Keep busting these attempts to jack our shared narrative.
Mary, thanks for the reminders. The criminality needs to be continuously reviewed until there are actual soldiers and politicians, spies and contractors held accountable for the criminality and thuggery.
Thanks from me too, Mary. Keep doing this so that each of us can get at least some of that store of facts fixed in our minds too. We’re obviously going to need them. Beautiful piece of writing.
Oh, this is indeed a keeper, Mary. Many thnx.
A link to a Worthington piece, primarily about Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling in the al-Rabia case, but also detailing abuse from 2002-2004, and the use of interrogators involved in the prior abuse at later “clean” interviews, using the terror invoked by their presence to make sure the interviews went in the right direction.
http://pubrecord.org/torture/5645/judges-ruling-confirms-innocent-gitmo/
that’s brilliant on her part, she gets to say “those things aren’t torture anymore” even though they clearly are
of COURSE they “meet courrent standards of torture”, but the administration makes believe torture isn’t torture and then marionettes go out and print crap like that and bing, they create an atmosphere of innocence
a criminal doesn’t get to change the definition of the crime and make believe he didn’t commit said crime but that’s exaclty what’s going on here
or if a muderer would claim;
“since I want to redefine murder as “if I do it it’s not murder” I obvously didn’t murder anyone now did I
But the definition of a crime does change: in very recent memory, making it ok to have telecoms spy on us–and making it ok retroactively.
Sorry to go off on a mini-rant, perris, for your comment didn’t warrant it, but this stuff is just stuck in my craw.
“Torture as ordinary people call it.” If being extraordinary enough to be a Villager means forgetting about the daily lives of Americans, if it means ignoring cruelty and the law in exchange for lucre and the imagery of safety, if it means ignoring facts and printing officialdom pleasing falsehoods, I’ll stay ordinary, thank you.
Ms. Judy treats facts as if they were the partner she used to be with; she treats the powers that be as if they were the partner she’s about to snare.
We will always need Gitmo. We will always need Judy Miller. Nearly the same claim, isn’t it? One tortures mostly innocent lives in a far away place, removed from prying eyes. The other tortures facts, as meaningless to Ms. Miller as the pain she encourages her government to inflict on anyone it desires.
One thing is sure: if the predicate for being tortured is that the victim, however innocent, might know something useful, even if they don’t know it, Ms. Miller will never have to worry about enduring it.
Judith Miller lies to the readers of your newspaper, Los Angeles Times editors. Which means, if those lies are left uncorrected, so do you.
Military Judge Army Colonel Stephen Henley, September 24, 2008:
Congress isn’t overseeing that prison, and, quite evidently and predictably, given the absence of oversight, neither is the military chain of command in any meaningful way. How many other purported orders to “discontinue” abuse and mistreatment have been flagrantly violated since 2004, unbeknown to the outside world, and free of all consequence to the perpetrators? Only the perps, and their victims, know at Guantanamo.
And there’s this, from Senator Dick Durbin, speaking 10/20/09:
[Notice how even Dick Durbin – an attorney and officer of the court – betrays here that he implicitly accepts that if our military merely accuses – or detains, in lieu of formal accusation – a non-citizen, the accused non-citizen is self-evidently guilty, before, after, or without charge, and regardless of the presence or absence of trial or GC Article 5 competent tribunal adjudication. The non-citizen suspect is immediately transformed into “a terrorist”, as Durbin asserted here, simply by virtue of their forced detention in a DOD prison, no other proof necessary for this powerful Senator and American attorney. And that’s the thoughtless opinion of a high-ranking member of the “liberal, left-wing” side of the “debate” in our Congress… An unAmerican and grossly-uninformed opinion that has been disseminated throughout the land by the sort of lies the Los Angeles Times, even at this late date, has allowed into print via the transparently-false Miller op-ed.]
holy crap!!!
you get that on every democrats lips, you get the blogs to lead with that and you watch even the wing nuts have trouble with quantanimo
Addendum (I was reacting mostly to what I now see is a Raw Story excerpt, not an LA Times excerpt):
“Fox News pundit” Judith Miller lied in an interview with PJTV’s Bill Whittle on Friday, and thus to his listeners; if those lies go uncorrected, so did Whittle and PJTV.
[Miller may also have lied, as well as propagandized, in her earlier September op-ed in the LA Times, also linked and excerpted by EW, but I won’t be going over to read the rest of Miller’s swill to find out.]
isn’t this the broad who whored herself for scotter and cheney for Iraq
Yes.
Durbin needs to factor in the DOJ habeas proceedings costs and figure out what it costs to hold an innocent torture victim at GITMO. Or maybe that’s just not an important number to our Congress and our country?
Durbin is still suffering from whipped pup syndrome over the targeting he took when he made his old GITMO statements.
All the torture aside (as if you can put it aside), I’m still struck by the fact that Miller says in print that the military has arranged her GITMO tour specifically to undermine the President, call him out as a fibber, and attempt to override his orders on closure. IMO, this sets up a mind blowing vignette:
Obama is calling GITMO a stain, but the miltiary is inviting Judy along to show her that he is fibbing. Courts are issuing opinions revealing that GITMO has been riddled with torture and abuse and devoted to the exploitation of, and human experimentation on, innocent people, but Miller is getting a tour to show her that “relocating” (as opposed to the court ordered RELEASES) the “inmates” – an action ordered by the tour givers CIC, is an “empty political gesture”
When did the military conduct tours for
propagandistsjournalists with the stated purpose of showing that Bush was fibbing and that his orders were empty political gestures?Really interesting. Obama chose who he was going to jump into bed with – hope he’s happy with them now.
Oh Mary, I have Burge related stuff for you!
“No one could have predicted” that Judy Miller would be a lying propagandist.
BTW, as someone who following throat surgery had to spend 9 months getting a liquid diet through a tube, I can say that regular doses of butter pecan Ensure is pretty close to torture all by itself.
To a certain extent, paying attention to authorization dates is not much use.
After Alberto Mora’s threat to spell it all out in writing, they had the system rolling again just about overnight.
Blanket authorizations, individual authorizations, or done anyways all have the same actual effect.
Nonetheless: What happened, about techniques at Gitmo, in May 2002?
Change in command and the appointment of Dunlavey to be in charge of intelligence.
Dunlavey was there from February 2002 on, and took charge after Lennert’s departure in March 2002.
May 2002 seems to have been chosen at random by Miller; it’s the kind of freedom available a person who just makes up shvt as convenient.
Karen Greenberg‘s book provides the most detail on the first six months of the prison.
Judy “I was fucking right” Miller is really smart. As well as Feith, Wolfowitz, Cheney etc all of the warmongers who started a war based on a “pack of lies” These thugs are still walking free when they should be having to testify under oath for their war crimes
Don’t you mean Judy “I was fucking my source” Miller?
Bmaz is it worth it to rip Cheney’s treasonous speech again? They are playing it again on C-Span and I don’t know why I am in shock by some of the things I am hearing him say. He acutally asked why the Obama administration is not consulting the intelligence community about what the techniques the Bush administration used or some such bullshit. Then Cheney went on to say that there have not been any more attacks. He really does not get it that the most serious attack on the U.S. happened right under his lying nose
All of this bullshit came out of the mouth of a man who was part of the team that completely ignored Richard Clarke. They really do not have any shame. Madmen…absolute madmen.
Is it appropriate for Gaffney to refer to Cheney as the “Vice President” I thought it was appropriate to put “former” in front of that title?
Gaffney gave Feith, John Hannah awards also. Gaffney just mentioned that they will be giving David Addington his award at a later date
my question would be, not what did dick do for judy, but what does dick have on judy?
and just a thought: would it be about time for us to perhaps do some sort of timeline that charts these dick and co. push events? i know this is far-fetched, but is there any chance they precede some legal move that they may get wind of and be trying to head off at the pass.
a bit tinfoil hat, sure; but would not put a damn thing past the big dick.
judy, you’re torturing ME!
i’d ship her off to gitmo, along with a few hundred other neo-cons and bushivites
From a largely empty mind and soul.
The same military which allows female American members of its organization to be raped and beaten, tortures rather than refusing to obey illegal orders, and increasingly plunders the national budget. Yeah, I’d take their word for anything, too.
Aspens.
To Mary @26, re Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling in the al-Rabia case. It should be noted that all of Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s references to the Army Field Manual were to the older version of it (FM 34-52). The later and current version (FM 2-22.3) has changes that, as pertains to the al-Rabia case, would allow much of what was done to al-Rabia. For instance, the earlier version of the manual did not allow for sleep deprivation. The later version allows four hours of sleep per night for 30 days or more, with no limitations on shifts in circadian timing. Nor does it prohibit “frequent flyer” programs. The current field manual practice of sleep deprivation can be evinced in the interrogation log of al-Qahtani.
The same goes for threats. I looked carefully at both manuals. FM 2-22 does indeed disallow use of threats (such as to be rendered to another country). But it does so in a more limited or conditional fashion than FM 34-52.
From FM 2-22 (bold emphasis added):
Threats to turn an individual over to hostile forces, e.g. to submit them to rendition, is prohibited by Article 31 of the Geneva Conventions protecting “civilian persons in time of war”. Such civilians, the protocols make clear, can include spies (see Article 5), i.e., this is a category above and beyond prisoners of war, who have all the same protections, by the way, and then some.
FM 34-52 prints the relevant sections from Geneva and makes the points about threats, etc., in its text. What the Stephen Cambone-generated Army Field Manual of 2006 does is eviscerate the earlier protections, primarily by carving out a special category of prisoners that are not considered Prisoners of War, and not allowed other Geneva protected status.
In her muddled headed way, Judy registers the kinds of briefings she has most likely attended, in order to get her talking points. She “knows” or has been told that “standards” have changed. What she most likely doesn’t understand, and what hasn’t been emphasized enough or understood by most who have looked at the Kollar-Kotelly ruling, is that what was forbidden or curtailed by the Army Field Manual at the time of al-Rabia’s torture is now allowed under the auspices of the current Army Field Manual. Of course, the current AFM was not applicable during the period that al-Rabia was being abused, so an argument based upon it is not relevant.
But for those who can read between the lines, Kollar-Kotelly’s plea that the prohibited techniques in the pre-2006 AFM “[are] not necessary to gain the cooperation of intelligence sources,” and in fact lead quite often to the production of false confessions (as in the case of al-Rabia), is a direct slam against the use of such techniques as must currently go on at Guantanamo, Bagram, or other U.S. prisons in the “war on terror.”
I have long argued that the switch in army interrogation manuals late in the Bush term was meant to preserve the essence of the torture program, in particular the aspects related to isolation, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, and the use of fear — the four horsemen of modern torture, if you will. Today, the Obama administration embraces the current version of the Army Field Manual as the humane alternative to the Bush policies. But the AFM was written by Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld acolytes, and while it gets its share of criticism from right-wing military troglodytes and slippery military reformers (who complain it’s not “scientific” enough, but have no problems with the techniques I’ve enumerated above), it is the primary policy around which the current practitioners of torture in the U.S. government have solidified their position.
You are so kind with such words. She is a manipulator. Period.
She is a war criminal along with all of those who knowingly stuffed false intelligence down the American public’s throats.
Cheney, Feith, Addington, Miller etc etc should all be tried at the Hague. Hope there is a hell bacause they are sure to be going