Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-TX), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told Congress Daily that President-elect Obama should keep Mike McConnell on as Director of National Intelligence and Michael Hayden as head of the CIA. He said Obama should keep “continuity” in the intelligence sector because we live in “a world that is very dangerous.”

Reyes dismissed concerns over Hayden and McConnell’s records as apologists for torture. He insisted that “there are some options that need to be available” to interrogators — presumably beyond the Army Field Manuel — to get the best information:

Regarding the CIA’s alternative interrogation program, Reyes indicated that his recommendations concerned finding a balance so the agency does not use torture but can get valuable information from suspected terrorists or other detainees.

“There are those that believe that this particular issue has to be dealt with very carefully because there are beliefs that there are some options that need to be available,” Reyes said.

“We don’t want to be known for torturing people. At the same time we don’t want to limit our ability to get information that’s vital and critical to our national security,” he added. “That’s where the new administration is going to have to decide what those parameters are, what those limitations are.”

As the Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman notes, Reyes “framed the debate as between effective torture and ineffective compliance with the law.” In fact, torturing does not provide reliable intelligence, as former interrogator (and author) Matthew Alexander told Jon Stewart Monday night:

STEWART: Did you ever see coercive methods pay off?

ALEXANDER: No. … When I was in Iraq, the few times that I saw people use harsh methods, it was always counterproductive. Because the person hunkered down, they were expecting us to do that, and they just shut up. And then I’d have to send somebody in and build back up rapport, reverse that process, and it’d take us longer to get that information.

McConnell and Hayden share Reyes’ approval of torture. McConnell has explained his refusal to move the CIA to the Army Field Manuel rules by denigrating Army servicemen, saying the Field Manuel was “designed for young and inexperienced” soldiers. He apparently does not consider waterboarding to be torture. Similarly, Hayden has dismissed torture as a mere “legal term,” saying we use the term “in a far too casual way.” Hayden apparently retaliated against the CIA’s inspector general for being an outspoken critic of waterboarding, and he may have destroyed interrogation videotapes to cover up the CIA’s use of torture.

Numerous media outlets are reporting Dr. Steven Chu will be President-elect Obama’s choice to head the Department of Energy. Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, is the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California where he has been addressing the climate crisis by pushing breakthrough research in energy efficiency, solar energy, and biofuels technology.

Colleagues who know Chu best say “he’s not a manager, he’s a leader.” In an interview with the Wonk Room, David Roland-Holst, an economist at the Center for Energy, Resources and Economic Sustainability at UC Berkeley, described Chu as a “very distinguished researcher” and “an extremely effective manager of cutting edge technology initiatives.”

This past summer, Dr. Chu spoke at the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas, convened by the Center for American Progress, UNLV, and Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV). In one of the lighter moments during his remarks, Chu claimed that efficiency gains and lowered costs have been shown to be possible when the jobs were assigned to engineers, not lobbyists. Chu also laid out in stark terms the climate crisis that we now face:

Consider this. There’s about a 50 percent chance, the climate experts tell us, that in this century we will go up in temperature by three degrees Centigrade. Now, three degrees Centigrade doesn’t seem a lot to you, that’s 11° F. Chicago changes by 30° F in half a day. But 5° C means that … it’s the difference between where we are today and where we were in the last ice age. What did that mean? Canada, the United States down to Ohio and Pennsylvania, was covered in ice year round.

Five degrees Centigrade.

So think about what 5° C will mean going the other way. A very different world. So if you’d want that for your kids and grandkids, we can continue what we’re doing. Climate change of that scale will cause enormous resource wars, over water, arable land, and massive population displacements. We’re not talking about ten thousand people. We’re not talking about ten million people, we’re talking about hundreds of millions to billions of people being flooded out, permanently.

Joe Romm cautions that the 3°C figure is just a mid-range warming even if we’re able to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Watch Chu’s remarks:

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In the wake of the passage of the status of forces agreement “Agreement on Complete U.S. Withdrawal from Iraq,” our neoconservative friends are again revealing themselves as deeply confused about Iran’s actual relationship with various actors in the new Iraq.

Charles Krauthammer:

A self-sustaining, democratic and pro-American Iraq is within our reach.

[This] would constitute a major defeat for Tehran, the putative winner of the Iraq war, according to the smart set. Iran’s client, Moqtada al-Sadr, still hiding in Iran, was visibly marginalized in parliament — after being militarily humiliated in Basra and Baghdad by the new Iraqi security forces. Moreover, the major religious Shiite parties were the ones that negotiated, promoted and assured passage of the strategic alliance with the United States, against the most determined Iranian opposition.

Eli Lake:

What the [status of forces agreement] does…is establish the political legitimacy of American troops in Iraq for the next three years and provides a framework beyond that. It is perhaps for this reason that the remnants of Moqtada Al Sadr’s organization have protested the agreement, as have more and more of the hard-line clerics in Iran.

Bill Roggio:

How quickly the narrative on Sadr has changed. Today, the Washington Post describes a weakened Sadr, with a near-toothless political movement, struggling to find its path after suffering a stinging defeat after the passage of the Status of Forces agreement between the United States and Iraq.

While it’s clearly true Sadr’s movement has been weakened, Roggio’s presents this as primarily the result of cunning U.S. military strategy. There’s no acknowledgment of Iran’s role — apart from mentioning “Sadr’s Iranian-backed Mahdi Army” — in brokering the cease-fires between Maliki and Sadr, nor of the extent to which Sadr’s marginalization is the result of Maliki’s co-opting Sadr’s demand for a hard date for U.S. withdrawal.

There’s really very little excuse any more for the “U.S. and Iraqi forces versus Iranian-backed militias” frame. Iran’s close relationship with all the leading Iraqi Shia political trends is well known. An October report from West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) offers a pretty comprehensive analysis of Iran’s strategy in Iraq (pdf): Read more

Today in an interview with NPR, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continued her Bush Legacy tour, sticking up for the administration’s national security policies. In particular, she downplayed the fact that President Bush hasn’t lived up to his stated desire to close Guantanamo Bay, saying that it’s “not easy” to do.

When reporter Michele Kelemen then asked Rice about another issue that has “tarnished the U.S. image” — the torture of detainees — Rice objected, insisting that it wasn’t a problem because the United States has never tortured:

Q: And Guantanamo wasn’t sort of the only issue that tarnished the U.S. image. There is also the treatment of terror suspects, waterboarding, other methods of torture or –

RICE: Well, you know that I’m going to have to object, because the United States has always kept to its international obligations, which include international obligations on the Convention on Torture. The United States, the President, was determined after September 11th to do everything that was legal and within those obligations, international and domestic laws, to make sure that we prevented a follow-on attack.

Many top Bush administration officials have long been trying to insist that the United States has never engaged in torture. However, even setting aside the infamous Abu Ghraib incidents, Bush’s own CIA director Michael Hayden has confirmed that his agency had subjected at least three detainees to waterboarding. In 2004, the Red Cross documented “cruel, inhumane and degrading” treatment of detainees while inspecting Guantanamo Bay.

In other attempts at hagiography in recent weeks, Rice has claimed that removing Saddam Hussein was a “great strategic achievement” and the United States is still “very well-regarded” around the world.

Transcript and audio below: Read more