Perino: ‘I absolutely feel comfortable’ lying about the Bush administration’s torture record.
Perino: ‘I absolutely feel comfortable’ lying about the Bush administration’s torture record.
Last week, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said unequivocally, “We did not torture.” This is a lie. In a wide-ranging interview with the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, Perino refused to retract her claim:
When a reporter asked last week about reports that Obama’s team plans to review techniques for interrogating terror suspects, Perino said that the methods were used “to protect the country from possible imminent terrorist attack. We did not torture.” Administration officials have acknowledged waterboarding suspects, and critics, including John McCain, have said that is torture.
“I absolutely feel comfortable with what I said,” Perino says now.
Perino’s comment is the latest evidence that — despite widespread expert opinion to the contrary — the Bush administration continues to insist that waterboarding is not torture.
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“I absolutely feel comfortable with what I said,” Perino says now.
That’s because sociopaths have no conscience.
November 24th, 2008 at 10:04 amcaption:
“We did not torture.
November 24th, 2008 at 10:06 amWe let Dick and Condi take care of that.”
Could someone please explain to me how getting Khalid Sheikh Muhammed to tell investigators what he thought they wanted to hear “protected the country from possible imminent attack?”
November 24th, 2008 at 10:07 amI think it would be most appropriate on January 20, as part of the transition of power that the members of the Bush Administration be water boarded as they leave office. I am sure they would enjoy the treat.
November 24th, 2008 at 10:08 amPerino’s comment is the latest evidence that — despite widespread expert opinion to the contrary — the Bush administration continues to insist that waterboarding is not torture.
I say we let the entire Bush cabal experience it first hand and see if they still claim that water boarding is not torture.
Christopher Hitchens tried it, and then wrote an article on his experience for Vanity Fair magazine. It is most definitely torture.
November 24th, 2008 at 10:08 amThat lying wench !
Tell me , would it be compelling to watch her get a nice 1 hour waterboarding, and interesting to ask her how it felt ?
Yes!
November 24th, 2008 at 10:10 amHoward Kurtz will be fielding questions on-line today, beginning at noon. The questions can be submitted earlier.
November 24th, 2008 at 10:10 amI’d find the torture/not torture topic most interesting.
(www.washingtonpost.com)
inside job
November 24th, 2008 at 10:11 amas part of the transition of power . . . members of the Bush Administration be water boarded as they leave office
Well, I see that they are building a huge gallows and gallery there by Congress right now. Maybe they have something even bigger in mind!
November 24th, 2008 at 10:13 amPerino: ‘I absolutely feel comfortable’ lying about the Bush administration’s torture record.»
– - Shame on you TP and Ali. Putting quotation marks around your carefully picked words does not create an accurate quote by your intended target. That’s really sleazy journalism.
November 24th, 2008 at 10:20 am“to protect the country from possible imminent terrorist attack. We did not torture”
Uh, the two aren’t mutually exclusive.
And what about the effects ? As alluded to above, the info gained is wrong. The cases against the persons held in Gitmo are compromised. We have lost the good will of the world.
God Bless America !
November 24th, 2008 at 10:21 amThey pretty much have to hire someone who has this ability (to believe whatever you’re supposed to regardless of evidence to the contrary) or you end up with a Bulworth-style situation. Republicans are masters of cognitive dissonance.
November 24th, 2008 at 10:24 amI have been saying for some time now that there is no difference between Dana Perino and Bagdad Bob. Like Bagdad Bob, Perino is perfectly happy spouting lies because this is the information she is provided. And like Bagdad Bob and his, “there are no Americans in Bagdad” we all know Perino is lying to a point that it is comical.
November 24th, 2008 at 10:27 amI agree, Badmoodman. TP does itself and its readers a disservice when it plays games like this with headlines.
Now, that having been said, it should be noted that “I absolutely feel comfortable with what I said,” is not the same thing as “I did not lie”.
One can be perfectly comfortable with a lie. In fact that seems like a job requirement for Bush Administration officials.
Remember: You can’t spell “BULLSHIT” with “B-U-S-H”!
November 24th, 2008 at 10:29 amRumor has it that Perino will be moving to the tobacco companies after this. She wants to work with children there. Either that or PR for the Somalia warlords…or maybe the pirates of the Sea of Aden. So many despots, so little Perino.
November 24th, 2008 at 10:29 amDAMN! That should have been,
“You can’t spell “BULLSHIT” without “B-U-S-H”!
November 24th, 2008 at 10:31 amI cannot tell a lie…Perino is lying.
Torture and illegal invasions have become America’s legacy, thanks to Bush and the likes of Perino covering his stupid ass.
Bush, if you’re going to have your Press Sec lie, at least get a good liar; like Tony Snow.
November 24th, 2008 at 10:33 am
The Stephanie Miller show had it right by referring to Ms. Perino as that “Lying Sack of Cute.”
November 24th, 2008 at 10:35 amPerino also said, “I stopped reading blogs about me and told my mom to stop, because it was so vitriolic.”
Dana’s upcoming biopic: “The Wrath of Mom”
November 24th, 2008 at 10:39 amI’m sure every victim of your boss’ “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” is deeply saddened by your discomfort, Dana.
I really believe that.
I really do.
Really.
Weeping at your pain, Dana.
All of them…
November 24th, 2008 at 10:40 amWill it stop?
(from antiwar.com/ Justin Raimondo)
November 14, 2008
Torture – Yes We Can?
Obama and the national security question: the sellout accelerates
by Justin Raimondo
Most politicians wait at least until they’ve been sworn in before they start breaking their campaign promises. In this sense, as in so many others, Barack Obama represents an entirely new phenomenon: the politician who preemptively reneges.
A recent Wall Street Journal piece describing the transition process as it relates to intelligence-gathering reveals we aren’t going to see much change in this vitally important realm, the one in which the Bush administration truly made its blackest mark. This will “create tension within the Democratic party,” we are told, apparently because even the worst party hacks will have a hard time going along with the revised Obama Doctrine on the issue of torture.
According to the Journal, Obama’s advisors on intelligence matters are “centrists” in the Clinton mold and outright Republicans, who favor torture “with oversight.” These, we are told, are the “pragmatists,” likely candidates for positions in Obama’s national security bureaucracy. “He’s going to take a very centrist approach to these issues,” avers Roger Cressey, who served as a counter-terrorism official under Clinton as well as Bush II.
It’s a grotesque commentary on the moral health of the nation when advocacy of torture is considered “centrist.” One shudders to imagine what it means to be right-of-center.
A big problem for the pro-torture faction of Team Obama, however, is their Leader’s pronouncements on this subject during the campaign, when he came out unequivocally against “‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ like simulated drowning that qualify as torture through any careful measure of the law or appeal to human decency.”
Human decency and government, however, are opposites in a dichotomy. Now that the Obama-ites have the power, all the pious rhetoric and self-righteousness of the Bush-hating Obama-loving “progressives” falls by the wayside, like so much confetti, to be swept up and trashed the morning after the election. It’s an old story, but true – and yet with a rather grotesque twist that is all too indicative of the age we live in.
After all, we are talking about torture, here, the apotheosis of barbarism – and the signature issue of the sort of limousine liberals who just adore the Dear Leader, and wouldn’t think of criticizing him in public, especially this early on. This betrayal is a real slap in the face to these people, and one wonders if it will sting enough to provoke a reaction.
So how will Obama’s cheerleaders square this circle, and reconcile his campaign pronouncements with the emerging reality? The Journal avers that, just as he said he was against providing immunity to telecom companies that permitted illegal spying on thousands of Americans, yet voted for it, so he could finesse the torture issue in an all too familiar fashion:
“The new president could take a similar approach to revising the rules for CIA interrogations, said one current government official familiar with the transition. Upon review, Mr. Obama may decide he wants to keep the road open in certain cases for the CIA to use techniques not approved by the military, but with much greater oversight.”
The elastic Obama doll is stretching to the breaking point – but, then again, everybody has their own breaking point. Mine came well before this, it’s true, but surely such a slimy attempt to slink around the black-and-white issue of torture has got to shock Obama’s supporters, many of whom, I realize, are big fans of this web site.
In the mainstream media and its blogospheric extensions, Obama’s loyal partisans have so far confined themselves to ordinary apologetics: touting Rahm Emanuel’s “toughness” while ignoring his pro-war pro-DLC bias as head of the party’s national congressional campaign committee, and mumbling “Brent Scowcroft” under their breath in explaining away the likelihood of Robert Gates staying on at Defense. How will they spin the persistence of Jack Bauer in Obama-World?
Oh well, that’s their problem. Ours’ is finding out who’s behind all this, and figuring out how to stop it. In this regard, the Journal informs us:
“The intelligence-transition team is led by former National Counterterrorism Center chief John Brennan and former CIA intelligence-analysis director Jami Miscik, say officials close to the matter. Mr. Brennan is viewed as a potential candidate for a top intelligence post. Ms. Miscik left amid a slew of departures from the CIA under then-Director Porter Goss.”
Who are these people? Well, go here if you want to see a dress rehearsal for Obama’s climb-down on torture, given by Brennan in an interview last year, in which he agrees that waterboarding, for example, is torture, and “should be prohibited,” but then comes back and says:
“There has been a lot of information that has come out from these interrogation procedures that the agency has, in fact, used against the real hardcore terrorists. It has saved lives. And let’s not forget, these are hardened terrorists who have been responsible for 9/11, who have shown no remorse at all for the death of 3,000 innocents.”
So which is it – to torture or not to torture?
Brennan, by the way, is the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, a former deputy executive director of the CIA, and is being talked about as a leading candidate for CIA chief. He is also CEO of the Analysis Corporation, a company that employs many former intelligence officials: it was an employee of Analysis, you’ll remember, who was caught prying into the passport records of prominent persons – including Obama and John McCain.
November 24th, 2008 at 10:41 amMore of the family values as defined by the right. Lying your ass off.
November 24th, 2008 at 10:45 amBadmoodman Says:
- – Shame on you TP and Ali. Putting quotation marks around your carefully picked words does not create an accurate quote by your intended target. That’s really sleazy journalism.
November 24th, 2008 at 10:20 am
________
What’s inaccurate about this?
Dana Perino is on record saying “I absolutely feel comfortable with what I said,” what she said being “We did not torture.”
It has been proven, based on documentation in Jane Meyers’ The Dark Side and other works, that this is categorically untrue, and that the CIA used interrogation techniques such as sleep deprivation, stress positions, and waterboarding – all well-defined in international law as torture – on detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere.
Therefore, the headline is logically and factually correct.
November 24th, 2008 at 10:50 amFrom the linked article:
Yeah, they were so undamaged before blogs……
November 24th, 2008 at 10:51 amStupid…? Evil…?
*sigh* I can’t decide.
November 24th, 2008 at 11:00 amFascist Barbie is now irrelevant. Boo hoo.
November 24th, 2008 at 11:01 amThese people get out of bed lying. It’s just what they do. It is the very essence of their being. If you are not a liar, you must either learn to lie, in order to work in the Bush administration, or you won’t work for Bush very long. For instance, Paul O’Neill and Richard Clarke refused to lie and they were forced to resign. Colin Powell, on the other hand, decided to lie for Bush, but then his conscience got to him, and he quit.
Conservative pundit, Tucker Carlson, said it all in this quote about former Bush communications director, Karen Hughes.
Then I heard that [on the campaign bus, Bush communications director] Karen Hughes accused me of lying. And so I called Karen and asked her why she was saying this, and she had this almost Orwellian rap that she laid on me about how things she’d heard — that I watched her hear — she in fact had never heard, and she’d never heard Bush use profanity ever. It was insane.
I’ve obviously been lied to a lot by campaign operatives, but the striking thing about the way she lied was she knew I knew she was lying, and she did it anyway. There is no word in English that captures that. It almost crosses over from bravado into mental illness.
November 24th, 2008 at 11:01 amNo matter what anybody says, the USer military will NOT stop using torture.
It’s one of those ‘out of the bottle’ phenomena: once it’s out, it ain’t gonna go back in. It’s part of the discourse. There will always come an occasion when somebody, with the ‘best intentions,’ says “well, we JUST GOTTA have that information…”
and it won’t matter that the information they get is ALWAYS suspect… It won’t matter that it violates some distant code or law. “Hey, they did it after Nine-Eleven. We got just the same kind of crisis. Break out the elecrtrodes….”
You’re delusional if you think it’s just gonna go away. If nothing else, they’ll perfect a way to ‘out-source’ it, like they did in Egypt, Morocco and ALbania…
November 24th, 2008 at 11:02 amPerino also said, “I stopped reading blogs about me and told my mom to stop, because it was so vitriolic.”
Why is Dana Perino’s mom writing vitriolic things about her on blogs? Is Dana Perino’s mom a member of the Reality-Based Community™?
November 24th, 2008 at 11:06 ambullshit……you imply that we are no better than bush……we are better
November 24th, 2008 at 11:08 amCaption: When I grow up, I want something cute & blond like you…
November 24th, 2008 at 11:09 amIn my view, HTH, the headline is inaccurate and unfair because it creates the impression that Dana Perino said or meant that she was comfortable with lying. She did not. She issued a fairly standard “non-denial denial” but never acknowledged her statements as a lie.
It’s fine to make the point in the article that since Perino’s statement is a demonstrable lie, she can in fact be seen as saying that she’s comfortable lying for the administration , but the headline is misleading and sensationalistic, and TP should be better than that.
November 24th, 2008 at 11:10 amPossible : being within the limits of ability, capacity, or realization.
Imminent : ready to take place.
BS
November 24th, 2008 at 11:14 amralph the wonder llama Says:
In my view, HTH, the headline is inaccurate and unfair because it creates the impression that Dana Perino said or meant that she was comfortable with lying. She did not. She issued a fairly standard “non-denial denial” but never acknowledged her statements as a lie.
I’m with badmoodman and Ralph. The post is fine, but the headline is really over the top.
November 24th, 2008 at 11:15 amIt is not the press secretary’s job to lie. The press secretary serves at the pleasure of the President, meaning he can fire her, but it is her duty to provide accurate information to the American people. When you get a spineless press secretary like Dana Perino in the office she does a grave disservice to the American people. The sign of a good press secretary is how much they stood up to the President, not how much they spun the press.
November 24th, 2008 at 11:24 am“I stopped reading blogs about me, and told my mother to stop because it was so vitriolic.”
______________________________________________________________
S’matter, you bleached-blonde bimbo, the truth hurts?
November 24th, 2008 at 11:42 amIn that picture, it looks like she is about the pleasure the President.
November 24th, 2008 at 11:46 amI remembeer Scotty openly lying for the President. Dana has join the ranks of those who openly lie and don’t care. When Gitmo is closed what Americans will see is the horror done by the Bush Administration at Dana says didn’t happen. Like Hitler never felt he was doing anything wrong, we will see simular pictures of human suffering and the number of those killed by the Bush Administration. If Dana ask for God’s forgiveness she might realize she was following the Devil and his workers.
November 24th, 2008 at 11:53 amWhy would a sociopathic liar like perinon care about vitriol?
November 24th, 2008 at 11:55 amHow’s that bed you made, Dana?
The only thing more assinine than her pyschobabble is the moron that calls her his wife.
November 24th, 2008 at 12:15 pmWow! who would go home to this nut job?
The Pentagon has said that 90% of those rounded up in sweeps in Iraq and put into prison were innocent and later released. The Pentagon has said 110 died in custody.
We prosecuted Japanese who near the end of WWII waterboarded American prisoners. Apparently, being in imminent threat of nuclear attack was not sufficient reason.
November 24th, 2008 at 12:44 pmPerino also said, “I stopped reading blogs about me and told my mom to stop, because it was so vitriolic.”
What?!?!? Even her mother was bad-mouthing her on the blogs? You’d think that Dana would get a clue … but you’d think wrong; it’s physiologically impossible.
Cheers,
November 24th, 2008 at 12:59 pmralph the wonder llama Says:
It’s fine to make the point in the article that since Perino’s statement is a demonstrable lie, she can in fact be seen as saying that she’s comfortable lying for the administration , but the headline is misleading and sensationalistic, and TP should be better than that.
November 24th, 2008 at 11:10 am
_________
I don’t see it that way. Sensationalistic, perhaps, but the headline isn’t misleading. When someone continues to speak in defense of a demonstrable lie, that is in itself lying. In libel terms, it’s known as “reckless disregard for the truth.” I see nothing wrong with TP calling her out on this. We’ve tiptoed around the term “lie” for too long with these people. When they lie, we need to call them on it.
November 24th, 2008 at 1:17 pmI think it may be a mistake for we opponents of torture to allow the debate to be focused so much on water-boarding. True, it is something that people can recognize as torture, but the Bushies simply admit it and say they only used it on a handful of known terrorists. The other techniques, including the mental tortures, may be over-looked when torture is identified with water-boarding, and the other techniques have been very widely used and are devastating to victims. I do think it’s useful to continue pressuring the press to stop describing water-boarding as a “simulation”, stop using various euphemisms for all the techniques, use the T word, and do their job with government officials like Perino. We can also contribute to Center for Constitutional Rights, ACLU, and Amnesty International. That’s how I spent some of my economic stimulus check. Just trying to help out the economy here.
November 24th, 2008 at 1:26 pmLooking at the picture of chimpy hugging & kissing Perino, she better watch out or she will incur the wrath of chimp’s kissing fool, Michelle Bachmann.
November 24th, 2008 at 1:38 pmHTH, I have no problem calling out Dana Perino on her lies, or calling her a liar.
I have a problem with TP implying that she herself acknowledged that she lies.
November 24th, 2008 at 1:50 pmThe USA has used TORTURE for decades now. Is currently using it and will continue to do so… Just check the curriculum of the ‘School of the Americas’ in Meryland… Check if they have changed anything!
November 24th, 2008 at 1:55 pm‘iminet attack’… what a myth! Just like WMD and ‘mushroom clouds’.
9/11 was an inside job!
This really isnt news. She is a spokesperson for the right. Being comfortable lying is a prerequisite
November 24th, 2008 at 2:59 pm