It’s nice to see McCain lying about FISA at his CPAC speech.
There are a lot of reasons you can come up with for why John McCain may not be a strong general election candidate. But this is the flipside. Since he has a reputation for straight-talk, he’s been granted by the press an unrestricted licenses to lie. It’s hard to beat someone with one of those.
After acknowledging for the first time publicly that the CIA waterboarded three prisoners, CIA Director Michael Hayden “left open the option of reinstating” the interrogation tactic in the future.
The FBI and Department and Defense, however, are standing by their position that waterboarding is unnecessary. The Pentagon has banned employees from using the tactic, and the FBI said “its investigators do not use coercive tactics when interviewing terror suspects.”
In a hearing today, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) asked FBI Director Robert Mueller and Lt. Gen. Michael Maples of the Defense Intelligence Agency why their agencies don’t use coercive interrogations: “Do you never interrogate people who have critical information?” The agency heads responded:
MUELLER: Our protocol is not to use coercive techniques. That is our protocol. We have lived by it. And it is sufficient and appropriate for our mission here in the United States. … We believe in the appropriateness of our techniques to our mission here in the United States.
MAPLES: The Army Field Manual guides our efforts and the efforts of the Armed Forces. … We believe that the approaches that are in the Army Field Manual give us the tools that are necessary for the purpose under which we are conducting interrogations.
Watch it:
The FBI has long warned against such interrogations. In 2004, agents “repeatedly warned” interrogators at Guantanamo Bay that their tactics “were legally risky and also likely to be ineffective.”
The Defense Intelligence Agency, like the CIA, runs intelligence operations around the world. In fact, some “missions have expanded into areas traditionally under the purview of the Central Intelligence Agency.”
In December, the House passed an amendment that extends the current prohibitions in the Army Field Manual against torture to U.S. intelligence agencies and personnel. Later in the hearing, Hayden “guaranteed” that if legislation is passed prohibiting coercive techniques, the CIA will abide by it.
I’ve seen lots of posts on Mittens’ wingnutty farewell speech that focus on the “surrender to terror” bit, but what about this?
Did you see that today, government workers make more money than people who work in the private sector. Can you imagine what happens to an economy where the best opportunities are for bureaucrats?
This seems bizarre. A lot of the people working for the government have specialized skills. They’re lawyers, scientists, accountants, etc. and, in good market fashion, they earn more money than do unskilled workers. Teachers, to name a very large category of public sector worker, are, for obvious reasons, better-educated than the average person. Police officers and firefighters have demanding, often dangerous jobs. It’s not as if the people handing out forms at the DMV earn more money than hedge fund managers. I’m retroactively reconsidering my support for this clown.
Via Mark Kleiman, Rodger Payne rounds up the several respects in which Barack Obama has outlined a more sensible Cuba policy than has Hillary Clinton. He’s not been willing to move toward full sensibleness, but Clinton has indicated that she’ll take a full-on “whatever CANF wants” approach to the issue. Somewhat similarly, while Obama’s hardly been a saint on Israel-Palestine issues, he’s at least managed to make AIPAC somewhat uncomfortable with his approach.
This is how it goes down the line on foreign policy issues — there are no yawning gaps between Clinton and Obama, but across a broad range of subjects Obama has positioned himself substantively better, while Clinton has been very cautious about challenge any aspects of entrenched conventional wisdom. To me, ultimately, that’s what my preference for Obama is about. I find the cult a little creepy, too.
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