Afganistan has minerals

Ooh shinies!

Ambers says the news is not new.

Foreign Policy is also skeptical.

Why Palin won't win the nomination

Ambers is somewhat encouraging.

Scott Brown's victory speech

Via Ambers, some excerpts:

This special election came about because we lost someone very dear to Massachusetts, and to America. Senator Ted Kennedy was a tireless and big-hearted public servant, and for most of my lifetime was a force like no other in this state. His name will always command the affection and respect by the people of Massachusetts, and the same goes for his wife Vicki. There's no replacing a man like that, but tonight I honor his memory, and I pledge my very best to be a worthy successor.

I said at the very beginning, when I sat down at the dinner table with my family, that win or lose we would run a race which would make us all proud. I kept my word and we ran a clean, issues oriented, upbeat campaign - and I wouldn't trade that for anything.

[..] This little campaign of ours was destined for greater things than any of us knew, and the message went far beyond the name on the sign.

It all started with me, my truck, and a few dedicated volunteers. It ended with Air Force One making an emergency run to Logan. I didn't mind when President Obama came here and criticized me - that happens in campaigns. But when he criticized my truck, that's where I draw the line.

We had the machine scared and scrambling, and for them it is just the beginning of an election year filled with surprises. They will be challenged again and again across this country. When there's trouble in Massachusetts, there's trouble everywhere - and now they know it.

In every corner of our state, I met with people, looked them in the eye, shook their hand, and asked them for their vote. I didn't worry about their party affiliation, and they didn't worry about mine. It was simply shared conviction that brought us all together.

[..] In health care, we need to start fresh, work together, and do the job right. Once again, we can do better.

I will work in the Senate to put government back on the side of people who create jobs, and the millions of people who need jobs - and as President John F. Kennedy taught us, that starts with an across the board tax cut for individuals and businesses that will create jobs and stimulate the economy. It's that simple!

I will work in the Senate to defend our nation's interests and to keep our military second to none. As a lieutenant colonel and 30-year member of the Army National Guard, I will keep faith with all who serve, and get our veterans all the benefits they deserve.

And let me say this, with respect to those who wish to harm us, I believe that our Constitution and laws exist to protect this nation - they do not grant rights and privileges to enemies in wartime. In dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them.

Raising taxes, taking over our health care, and giving new rights to terrorists is the wrong agenda for our country. What I've heard again and again on the campaign trail, is that our political leaders have grown aloof from the people, impatient with dissent, and comfortable in the back room making deals. And we can do better.

They thought you were on board with all of their ambitions. They thought they owned your vote. They thought they couldn't lose. But tonight, you and you and you have set them straight.

Needless to say I disagree with the notion that captured terrorists don't have the right to a fair trial when taken outside a theater of war. We tried the Nazis at Nuremberg, and we can certainly try other despicable enemies of humanity like Al Qaeda's leaders and operatives.

Tax dollars paying for lawyers is a tiny drop in a very large bucket, and for Scott Brown to politicize such due process is unbefitting of a JAG lawyer. He ought to be ashamed of himself.

Four funky GOP primaries

Ambers reviews. The one I'm watching:

KY SEN, Ron Paul's son, Dr. Rand Paul (yes, named after Ayn) is now leading...or slightly leading... in the Republican primary (incumbent Sen. Jim Bunning is retiring). The GOP establishment chose Secretary of State Trey Grayson, but Paul has pushed hard on his party's dissatisfaction with GOP leaders. (There's a bit of Mitch McConnell fatigue in his home state.)  Paul is ostensibly a libertarian, but he's getting support from all the conservative establishment interest groups, including the taxpayers union he once headed.  For TV producers, the Paul pa-son angle is irresistible. And the "audit the Fed" message resonates beyond the confines of the ReLOVEution. Also funky: one of those campaign-aides-posts-something-racist-and-has-to-resign angles. Grayson, again, is running a conventional NRSC campaign against Washington (jobs, Democrats, D.C.); Paul is running against Grayson as an embodiment of Washington. The primary is May 18.

"Offensive Cyber War Turned The Insurgency In 2007"

Ambers summarizes:

Now it can be fully revealed: In May of 2007, the National Security Agency launched a massive cyber offensive against insurgent cell and computer networks in Iraq, which officials believe was responsible for breaking the back of the insurgency.  Shane Harris at National Journal takes you inside the Oval Office as the decision was made:

Former officials with knowledge of the computer network attack, all of whom requested anonymity when discussing intelligence techniques, said that the operation helped turn the tide of the war. Even more than the thousands of additional ground troops that Bush ordered to Iraq as part of the 2007 "surge," they credit the cyberattacks with allowing military planners to track and kill some of the most influential insurgents. The cyber-intelligence augmented information coming in from unmanned aerial drones as well as an expanding network of human spies.

When Bob Woodward wrote about unspecified techniques used to turn the tide of the war, this is what he meant.

Obama on the debt

Ambers notes:

There will be talk of real, across-the-board limits to discretionary spending. There will probably be a bipartisan deficit-reduction panel set up, along with, perhaps, another Social Security reform commission.

Andrew sniffs:

Talk is cheap. And commissions are often ways of avoiding, not expediting real cuts in entitlements and defense. For this independent supporter of Obama, the key issue in the next year will be seriousness about reducing long term debt. If he cannot do it, or fails to make it a priority, he will lose me and many others. I understand why circumstances and inheritance have propelled the debt up right now. But circumstances cannot explain away the long-term crunch. A real leader tackles that. A phony leader ducks it.

I'm with Andrew. I want to see real progress before 2012.

Allowing Bush's tax cuts to expire won't be nearly enough.

At what cost, cutting off a leg?

Ambers passes on this amusing press release:

The American College of Surgeons is deeply disturbed over the uninformed public comments President Obama continues to make about the high-quality care provided by surgeons in the United States. When the President makes statements that are incorrect or not based in fact, we think he does a disservice to the American people at a time when they want clear, understandable facts about health care reform. We want to set the record straight.

• Yesterday during a town hall meeting, President Obama got his facts completely wrong. He stated that a surgeon gets paid $50,000 for a leg amputation when, in fact, Medicare pays a surgeon between $740 and $1,140 for a leg amputation. This payment also includes the evaluation of the patient on the day of the operation plus patient follow-up care that is provided for 90 days after the operation. Private insurers pay some variation of the Medicare reimbursement for this service.
  
  
• Three weeks ago, the President suggested that a surgeon's decision to remove a child's tonsils is based on the desire to make a lot of money. That remark was ill-informed and dangerous, and we were dismayed by this characterization of the work surgeons do. Surgeons make decisions about recommending operations based on what's right for the patient.

We agree with the President that the best thing for patients with diabetes is to manage the disease proactively to avoid the bad consequences that can occur, including blindness, stroke, and amputation. But as is the case for a person who has been treated for cancer and still needs to have a tumor removed, or a person who is in a terrible car crash and needs access to a trauma surgeon, there are times when even a perfectly managed diabetic patient needs a surgeon. The President's remarks are truly alarming and run the risk of damaging the all-important trust between surgeons and their patients.

We assume that the President made these mistakes unintentionally, but we would urge him to have his facts correct before making another inflammatory and incorrect statement about surgeons and surgical care.

What did the CIA hide from Congress?

Ambers opens:

Because the executive branch retains a stranglehold on regulations about the disclosure of classified information, there are very few ways for member of Congress who learn about objectionable, classified programs to reveal their discomfort. They can write a classified letter. They can risk prosecution by revealing the information publicly. Or they can do what a gaggle of House Democrats did yesterday: band together, suggest that the CIA misled them about a specific program, and wait for journalists to uncover the details.

He then goes off on a speculation spree. So basically, stay tuned...

Iran election tracker

Super-filtered #IranElection info for the easily overwhelmed (ht Ambers)

Quote of the day

Marc Ambinder:

the White House understands that [David] Brooks's voice, even when not embraced by conservatives, influences how centrists and many intellectually honest liberal Democrats look at the world.

You mean there's another kind?

The Cairo speech is majestic

Transcript - foreign leader reactions, other reactions abroad

We cannot know how effective a mere speech will be--much depends on the execution and willingness of the parties involved. But I'm sure it will be positive, at least at the margins (i.e. help to dampen extremism)

Think back for a moment to over a year ago, before the financial crisis. This was the principal reason for Obama's candidacy, especially during the primary. No one is in a better position to promote peace.

Link blag

Ambers: How about a gay justice? It's already aired out bigot Sen. Thune (R-SD)

Megan details why the auto bailouts are all about the unions.

Ordinary Will looks at teaching reform.

Conor says power to the principals.

Thinner people spend more time eating.

America's first face transplant offers some improvement over being shot in the face with a shotgun. I'd still consider a veil, though.

The nation is ready to be lied to about the economy again

Malpractice, crime, partisanship, and honor

Ambers:

Ostensibly, Yoo, an attorney for the Office of Legal Counsel and Bybee, that section's chief, were tasked by Attorney General John Ashcroft with determining whether so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" violated U.S. law and treaty obligations. But a draft report, prepared by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Review, suggests that, at the direction of the White House, the OLC worked to justify a policy that had already been determined and did not begin their inquiry from a neutral position.

Andrew thinks it may lead to the motherload, and I agree justice demands it.

However, the public perception that Democrats would be seeking political retribution stands in the way. Perhaps that is the motive of some on the left, but certainly not independents like myself or Andrew's. In reality, it is the partisan self-interest of Republicans like John McCain that pushes the notion torture investigations are political retribution.

This Republican self-interest is understandable, but nonetheless wrong. Though it can be a wrenchingly difficult thing to do, honorable citizens place justice before party—just as they would place it before family.

Quote of the day II

"Somewhat weirdly, as I waited [in the West Wing lobby], I listened to a Marine guard and the uniformed Secret Service agent on duty quietly argue about the torture memos." —Marc Ambinder

Parties, countries, popularity

Ambers wrote:

My Republican friends keep asking me when I’ll take the GOP seriously again and why I’ve stopped writing about ticky-tak political gamesmanship and GOP consultant tricks. When they’re a serious party with serious ideas, then we can talk

Mark Hemingway protests:

To support his decision to ignore Republican politics, Ambinder cited poll numbers straight from a liberal blog that supposedly demonstrate that Venezuela — not specifically the country’s socialist government, but the country as a whole — has a higher approval rating than the Republican party. Of course, the same meaningless CNN polling data also show that Americans have a higher opinion of Turkey than of the Democratic party. Maybe Ambinder can explain what that means — perhaps Armenians and Kurds are underrepresented in the polling sample?

Ambers on Obama's popularity

3. Independents remain firmly rooted in the Democratic garden. They're skittish about deficits, but they love Obama. They trust him, alone, of all the institutions of and figures in -- government.

I'm more than skittish about deficits, but I'm sure it describes many independents. And we don't love Obama, we just like him--in a Kennedyesque way. See the rest of Marc's points...

Quote of the day

"My Republican friends keep asking me when I'll take the GOP seriously again and why I've stopped writing about ticky-tak political gamesmanship and GOP consultant tricks. When they're a serious party with serious ideas, then we can talk." &mdashMarc Ambinder

Torture reax IV

Andrew does a third round...

Kristol disagrees wih Krauthammer:

Leave aside how dark and painful the chapter really was. The question is, Is it over? Is the chapter in which we had to focus on preventing further attacks really through? Isn't there still a war against the jihadists on? Of course Blair and other senior Obama officials have elsewhere suggested that the terror threat remains real, and even urgent. Why else the maintenance of the Bush era surveillance program? Why else the decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, and to deploy more Predator strikes into Pakistan? But can we then afford Obama's "dark and painful chapter" attitude, exemplified by his foregoing certain interrogation techniques in the present and future, and his exposing and deploring what was done in the past? Can we afford an intelligence director who tries to excuse his boss by telling us we are now safe?

K-Lo calls it torture:

The president yesterday said that "withholding these memos would only serve to deny facts that have been in the public domain for some time." If the facts are already out there, why the need for yesterday? Unless you're looking to drum up support for prosecutions?

Torture at the hands of Americans should never be swept under a rug. But some adult in this administration ought to be taking the headlines they are making deadly seriously.

John Hinderaker echos Abe Greenwald:

...you will see that DOJ's lawyers grappled carefully and fairly with issues that are, by their nature, both difficult and distasteful. I find much to agree with in the memos and little, if anything, with which I disagree from a legal standpoint. Several things about the memos are striking: the concern that is shown for the health and well-being of the detainees; the very limited circumstances under harsh interrogation techniques were used (only when the CIA had reason to believe that the detainee had knowledge about pending terrorist attacks, among other limitations), and confirmation of the fact that thousands of American servicemen have been waterboarded and subjected to the other techniques in question, as part of their training--a practice that continued at least up to the dates of the memos.

Ace Of Spades HQ:

The number of terrorist attacks (that's a "man-made disaster" for any monitors from DHS who might keeping an eye on us extremists) on US soil that killed approximately 3,000 people and caused billions of dollars in economic dislocation before use of these techniques...1.

The number of attacks on US soil that killed approximately 3,000 people and caused billions of dollars in economic dislocation after use of these techniques began...0.

Amy Davidson:

Reasonable people can disagree. Indeed, they can disagree about what is reasonable, as anyone who has sat through a judge’s instructions on reasonable doubt knows. Serving on a jury gives one, if nothing else, an ear for the nonsense of lawyers, but you don’t need much discernment to pick up the utter sophistry in the Justice Department memos released yesterday (thanks to an A.C.L.U. FOIA suit) and their rambling—rationalizing isn’t even the right word—on the putative reasonableness of all involved, especially the person being tortured. “A reasonable person,” a memo signed by Attorney General Jay Bybee says, would not “reasonably anticipate,” based on having his head slammed into a wall (up to “twenty or thirty times consecutively,” according to another memo) that something worse was to come; “a reasonable person in the subject’s position”—position meaning, in this case, stuffed into a dark box—“would not infer from this technique that severe physical pain is the next step.” Say that the next step was putting an insect in the dark box with him—this was proposed for Abu Zubaydah—and the interrogators, whatever they hinted, didn’t “affirmatively” say that it was poisonous...

Dreher:

One thing that nobody should ever be permitted to say again, after reading these memos: "The United States didn't torture." When President Bush said it, he was a liar. The only question is whether or not he was lying to himself, so that he could sleep at night, or consciously lying to the public for reasons of political expediency.

Gerard Magliocca:

The third Bradbury memo observed that the State Department calls many of the techniques that we were using torture when practiced in other nations. But then the memo, in part, dismisses the force of that point by saying that other nations use these methods for relatively trivial purposes, while we were using them to protect America. The end, in a sense, justifies the means. One difficulty with the memo's analysis is that many regimes that inflicted torture probably thought they were doing it for a good reason. The Inquisition was trying to defend the Faith, the Nazis were trying to defend racial purity, the Khmer Rouge was trying to defend the workers' paradise, etc. That's why the whole point of banning torture was to prohibit certain types of conduct without regard to motive. The rack or the thumbscrew can't be used even it works really well at getting information and is done for an excellent reason. Treating torture as a relative harm rather than as a categorial ban is contrary to that understanding, and that departure is not really explained in the memos.

Anonymous Liberal:

...from a legal perspective, I do not believe there is any chance in hell of securing a criminal conviction against anyone who acted in accordance with specific OLC legal advice. The opinions of the OLC essentially carry the weight of law within the executive branch. You'd have about as much chance of convicting someone who acted in accordance with a specific Supreme Court opinion.

Marc:

I'd like to point you to this article by the American Prospect's Adam Serwer, who compared the strictures placed on interrogations in the OLC memos with the practices described by the detainees in the International Committee of the Red Cross report. I am sympathetic -- or, at least, I am cognizant of the view that the detainees who described their conditions and experiences to the Red Cross might not be the most honest, most reliable witnesses. But the scope of the ICRC report, the cross-correlated evidence, the similarities of accounts between prisoners -- I believe that these will convince historians that the ICRC report fairly accurately describes the milieu of American torture, circa 2002-2009.

Dahlia Lithwick:

President Obama makes forgiving and forgetting sound awfully appealing. The country is in deep economic trouble. The days and weeks after 9/11 were really, really scary. We need our intelligence officials to be able to keep us safe without having to look over their shoulders. Good people shouldn't be punished for the bad legal advice they received. Bygones. But is the short-term comfort of saying we're over it worth the long-term cost of having become torturers and then cavalierly gotten over it? Because the real risk of getting over it is the possibility that it happens all over again.

Mollie Wilson O'Reilly:

When Cheney goes on television to insist darkly, “If it hadn’t been for what we did….then we would have been attacked again,” he can simultaneously insist that we take his word for it, because backing up his claims would require releasing information crucial to America’s safety. As Danner notes, “Cheney’s story is made not of facts but of the myths that replace them when facts remain secret: myths that are fueled by allusions to a dark world of secrets that cannot be revealed.”

That’s why Obama’s decision to release the “torture memos” is an important step, in the country’s best interests. And that’s why suggestions that he’s somehow hurting America by airing the facts are naked political ploys — even if you find them on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

Torture reax

Via Ordinary E.D. Kain:

Sullivan has some initial thoughts up here:

I do not believe that any American president has ever orchestrated, constructed or so closely monitored the torture of other human beings the way George W. Bush did. It is clear that it is pre-meditated; and it is clear that the parsing of torture techniques that you read in the report is a simply disgusting and repellent piece of dishonesty and bad faith. When you place it alongside the Red Cross’ debriefing of the torture victims, the fit is almost perfect.

Michael Scherer:

The legal memorandum for the CIA, prepared by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, reviewed 10 enhanced techniques for interrogating Zubaydah, and determined that none of them constituted torture under U.S. criminal law. The techniques were: attention grasp, walling (hitting a detainee against a flexible wall), facial hold, facial slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation, insects placed in a confinement box, and waterboarding.

Alex Koppelmann:

The Obama administration has made today a good news-bad news day for civil libertarians. On the one hand, the administration has decided to release four controversial memos prepared by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush administration…

…However, in the same statement, Obama says one thing that will not warm the hearts of torture opponents: CIA agents and officials responsible for waterboarding will not be prosecuted.

I wonder, what is the statute of limitations on war crimes? Torture? Defaming the American Constitution? How Obama can grant immunity on this is simply beyond me.

President Obama:

In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution. The men and women of our intelligence community serve courageously on the front lines of a dangerous world. Their accomplishments are unsung and their names unknown, but because of their sacrifices, every single American is safer. We must protect their identities as vigilantly as they protect our security, and we must provide them with the confidence that they can do their jobs.

Glenn Greenwald:

The more one reads of this, the harder it is to credit Obama’s statement today that “this is a time for reflection, not retribution.” At least when it comes to the orders of our highest government leaders and the DOJ lawyers who authorized them, these are pure war crimes, justified in the most disgustingly clinical language and with clear intent of wrongdoing. FDL has a petition urging Eric Holder to immediately appoint a Special Prosecutor to determine if criminal proceedings should commence.

Obama did the right thing by releasing these memos, providing all the information and impetus the citizenry should need to demand investigations and prosecutions. But it is up to citizens to demand that the rule of law be applied.

My U.S. Senator, Russ Feingold:

"The president has stated that it is not his administration's intention to prosecute those who acted reasonably and relied in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice. As I understand it, his decision does not mean that anyone who engaged in activities that the Department had not approved, those who gave improper legal advice or those who authorized the program could not be prosecuted. The details made public in these memos paint a horrifying picture and reveal how the Bush administration's lawyers and top officials were complicit in torture. The so-called enhanced interrogation program was a violation of our core principles as a nation and those responsible should be held accountable."

Update: More via Kain...

Marc Ambinder:

Here’s what Attorney General Holder said today in his statement: “Holder also stressed that intelligence community officials who acted reasonably and relied in good faith on authoritative legal advice from the Justice Department that their conduct was lawful, and conformed their conduct to that advice, would not face federal prosecutions for that conduct.”

…So — doesn’t that mean that if there were IC officials who did NOT act reasonably, did NOT act in good faith, and IGNORED the OLC’s advice — that if evidence were to come out that some folks did this — that they could be subject to prosecution?

Hilzoy:

On this one, the right side won.

Thoreau:

A quick skim suggests that very little of significance was redacted. I am quite pleased with the Obama administration’s actions here. While some are upset that the guys who were “just following orders” will get off, I’m pleased to see some evidence come to light regarding the people who actually gave orders. Now, wouldn’t it be absolutely delightful if we could use this evidence to punish those who gave the orders? One can hope…

It seems like mostly good news to me - perhaps my initial worry over the immunity was overblown….

Andrew asks:

Did the decision by the Spanish to relent on their war crimes prosecution have anything to do with the decision by the White House to release the OLC torture memos in full - with merely proper names redacted?

If so, that makes almost no sense to me at all. If anything, releasing these memos should give the Spanish courts a stronger case. The only way I can see that making any sense is if American courts had some plan to take up the cases instead, and I am going to once again play the cynic and suggest that such is not to be…at least not any time soon.

Yglesias:

The OLC memos released today make for chilling reading. They also make it clear that we’re talking about interrogation methods that were whipped up by a group of people who were incredibly eager to torture some of their fellow human beings. They reflect the mindset of a group that regards the legal prohibition on torture as really sad, and thus something they need to find a way to get around. They achieved this by first concocting this weird definition of torture and then deviously coming up with all kinds of ways of torturing people that don’t fit the definition.

But all that this business about trapping someone in a confined box with insects shows is that the definition is wrong. The bug box, the slap, the stress positions, the waterboarding, etc. have all the hallmarks of torture. If they were done to your dad, you would call it torture. But some folks who are both creative and demented managed to come up with a bunch of ways of torturing people that didn’t fit the weird definition of torture they dreamed up.

Greenwald (again):

Finally, it should be emphasized — yet again — that it was not our Congress, nor our media, nor our courts that compelled disclosure of these memos. Instead, it was the ACLU’s tenacious efforts over several years which single-handedly pryed these memos from the clutched hands of the government. Along with a couple of other civil liberties organizations, the ACLU (with which I consult) has expended extraordinary efforts to ensure at least minimal amounts of openness and transparency in this country, something that was necessary given the profound failures of these other institutions to do so.

Update IV:

Not really an update. Still deafening silence from the Right. Only Charles Johnson who writes on the CIA immunity:

This breaking news is going to drive the left completely crazy. (A short drive.)

I guess everyone is so busy Tea Partying like it was 1981 that real news - real revelations about American war crimes - are just falling by the wayside. When they do finally emerge from their cave, what apology for the Bush administration do you suppose they’ll offer?

Anonymous Liberal:

As I’ve said many times here before, the most culpable parties in this whole disgusting affair are the lawyers. Their job was to stand up for the rule of law, to tell the Dick Cheneys of the world that what they wanted to do was clearly illegal. They didn’t do that. Indeed, they went to elaborate lengths to give their legal blessing to conduct they had to have known was illegal.

I know many of you disagree with me on this, but I think Obama did the right thing by promising not to prosecute CIA officers who acted in accordance with the OLC’s prior advice. Given the kind of things these folks are asked to do and the important missions entrusted to them, they have to be able to rely on the legal advice they’re given by the government. If we start prosecuting people for conduct they were specifically advised was legal by the OLC, it will severely hamper our ability to conduct future intelligence work. No one will trust the advice they are given, they’ll worry that the rug will be pulled out from under them at some point down the road. That’s an untenable situation.

The people who should be punished are the people who gave the advice. The lawyers. The Jay Bybees, John Yoos, and David Addingtons of the world. Obama did the right thing by releasing these memos today. It is now up to us to make sure they generate the degree of outrage that they should.

Oh, and I found a Redstate reaction from Jeff Emmanuel:

Co-opting the word “torture” to include methods far less offensive than the majority of interrogation techniques I underwent in military SERE training isn’t a victory for moralists and humanitarians in any form; rather, it’s an Orwellian perversion of a word that once had meaning by those who have spent the last eight years on constant lookout for some greviance to hold against a president whose mere existence they resented.

The sad fact is, by co-opting the word “torture” and using it to describe activities going on at Gitmo, Bagram, and elsewhere, these faux-humanitarians have left us with no word to use to describe those activities which used to be classified as torture, like beheading captives on video, hanging people from meat hooks, drilling out eyeballs, using electric current to cause severe pain and physical damage, and cutting off limbs.

Damn co-opters! First you co-opt the word “marriage” and now the word “torture!” By the way, is “beheading captives on video” really considered torture? I thought that was murder…

It’s interesting that Jeff thinks the only forms of torture that ought to be called that are the sort that essentially just almost instantly kill the victims. Been watching too many Saw movies there Jeff?

Ambinder again:

Senior administration officials have made it clear to me: neither President Obama’s statement nor Attorney General Holder’s words were meant to foreclose the possibility of prosecuting CIA officers who did NOT act in good faith, or who did not act according to the guidelines spelled out by the OLC.

Spencer Ackerman:

The point is that the depths of this story are still unexplored, and only a congressional investigation, with appropriate subpoena power, can get at the truth. That’s what the American Civil Liberties Union is calling for; that’s what Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) is calling for. It’s not a question of a witch hunt, nor is it a backdoor way into prosecutions. It’s about closing this ugly chapter in American history. Leaving questions unresolved ensures that can never happen. If it’s the case that CIA officials are culpable for the torture, they should be held appropriately accountable; the same goes for Bush administration officials. The only blanket statement that’s appropriate in the wake of these memos is that torture is unacceptable, illegal and un-American.

What the CIA did

Ambers:

There are many revelations and details buried in the banal, technical language of lawyers:

Among the revelations:

** Through 2005, the CIA used "enhanced interrogation techniques" on 28 of 94 so-called "high value detainees."

** Waterboarding was theoretically allowed only in cases where the information solicited from the prisoner could thwart an imminent terrorist attack; the Justice Department permitted only "six applications of water lasting more than ten seconds" for every two-hour period during which a detainee was strapped to the board. Only 12 minutes of water torture was allowed per 24-hour period. Also: the CIA put potential waterboardees on a fluid diet before the torture in order to prevent them from choking to death on food that might be stuck in the GI tract.

** The OLC concluded that the CIA's careful application of the program didn't "shock the conscience" of a reasonable person and thus would not trigger a statute that would leave interrogators vulnerable to prosecution

** The name of at least one High Value Detainee who was subject to "enhanced techniques" has been redacted. Later (.pdf), however, the same memo mentions a "Gul" who was subjected to enhanced techniques. This appears to be an inadvertent omission.

** Through 2005, the CIA said that only 3 detainees were subject to 96-hour sleep deprivation

** See page 7 of this document (.pdf) for an example of a "typical" interrogation: abdominal slaps, facial holds, "walling," wall-standing.

** The 2002 memo (.pdf) contended it was legal to place an insect in a cramped confined space with a prisoner, provided that the insect was not poisonous. The CIA wanted to use this technique on Abu Zubaydah, who was afraid of poisonous insects. Nowhere is Zubaydah's degraded mental state mentioned.

** It sanctioned techniques which caused less pain than then type of pain one would experience with a major injury

** It allowed a previously disclosed technique called "walling," involving the slamming of a detainee's head back against a fake wall.

** It presumed that the CIA interrogators did not want to cause Zubaydah "severe" mental or physical pain;

** The CIA justified its techniques by referring to the SERE program, which teachers soldiers how to avoid capture and interrogation.

** A May 10, 2005 memo calls torture "abhorrent"

Without any doubt, these techniques are torture. Not the most barbaric form imaginable, but still torture.

I'll let lawyers sort out whether any of this was illegal and whether any of the lawyers involved should be at least disbarred, etc. I only know that I think the answer should be yes, and if we need to pass better laws to make this crystal clear for the future then we should do so.

My feelings now are mixed. The details are nauseating, and I'm ashamed a president I supported was responsible for authorizing these techniques. But I'm also relieved and not a little proud that we've got it in the open.

I'm reminded of a quote by Churchill: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried."

Democracy is dysfunctional with insufficient transparency and accountability.  Today the system worked a little better than usual.

To give you a taste of how mad some on the Right remain, here's UNRR:

Not only should there be no prosecution of those who were doing the difficult and dirty job of trying to extract intelligence from terrorists, but the administration should have refused to release the documents on grounds of national security. What's the point of classifying documents in the first place if they are just going to be made public a few years later? The idiotic efforts to expose secret CIA operations, combined with shortsighted attempts to impose crippling legal restrictions will invariably damage intelligence-gathering. Actually, they probably already have. Almost everyone agrees that intelligence is the first line of defense against terrorism. Terrorists are difficult or impossible to deter. They have to be apprehended, eliminated, or disrupted before they strike. Many of the operations designed to serve these functions require secrecy in order to be effective. Efforts aimed at breaking down the secrecy of the CIA and revealing operational details strike at the heart of our anti-terrorist defenses. We need the executive branch to stand firm against such attacks, even if they come from other branches of the government.

It seems he was thinking 4-8 years ahead and hoping the next president would re-authorize torture. Because Obama has made clear that it would not be done under his administration, so there's absolutely no downside to national security in making these memos public during his tenure. Only were a president to re-authorize torture could there possibly be a downside to these techniques being known.

I remain convinced that countenancing torture incites anti-American sentiment, which simultaneously makes the country less safe and harms relations to a degree that far outweighs any security benefit that could possibly be gained by torture. UNRR, of course, disagrees.