Matt Lauer Questions Bush on Prisons, Torture / Bush: 'People Wanna Murder Your Family, Matt!!'

NBC's Matt Lauer actually conducted a pretty in-depth interview with the President earlier this week, in particular a discussion of secret prisons and torture. Lauer asked some excellent questions (ie. what exact methods were used, if the interrogation methods used were 'legal' and humane- as Bush insisted- then why were they done in secret prisons whose very existence was denied up until last week). President Bush did not answer these questions. Instead, when not stammering and getting huffy like a little child, he resorted to raising his voice and telling Lauer that evil people want to murder his family and similar emotional appeals. You have to see this one to believe it. Video posted below.



Notice how he sneered at the idea that the rest of the world can question us post-9/11?

You'll also notice a typical Bush contradictory response... insisting that we do not torture, while basically stating that our torture is saving lives. And while they will continue to play the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed card, the fact of the matter is that the majority of people held at prisons like those in Europe or in Abu Ghraib were mostly guilty of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. KSM is the exception, not the rule. Lauer also did a good job always referring to "suspected terrorists", whereas the White House wants to play judge, jury, and executioner by themselves.

As for the President's statement that those in the secret prisons or those in Guantanamo were taken "off the battlefield", that is nonsense. However, since in the neoconservative view of the war on terror the entire world is a 'battlefield', it is a statement of truth in his eyes. We know now as fact that numerous innocent people were held in these prisons, some having been released without explanation, and that they were pulled off the streets of their towns or kidnapped. Andrew Sullivan did a great writeup on this subject last week. Countless innocent people were tortured, some fatally so.

And I have no doubt that 98% of the information we received from brutalizing these miscellaneous Muslims was jibberish and led to dead ends. We already know a lot of the intelligence used to sell the Iraq war was based on the rantings of men who would tell their captors anything they wanted to stop the pain (ie. the case of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi). Again, Sullivan did a great writeup on this last week.

The President also briefly, in passing, mentioned the warrantless wiretapping scandal when he stated "we're listening to al Qaeda if they're calling in this country, and some people wanna get rid of that program". Unfortunately, Lauer did not question the President on this statement. As I have lamented on numerous occasions, the media and the Democrats allowed the White House to falsely frame the debate on this scandal as being about wiretapping v. not wiretapping. It has never been about that. It is the Fourth Amendment, the '78 FISA law, checks and balances, and whether we live in a society where the President can override/violate the laws of our land without oversight solely on his say-so. No one opposes wiretapping al Qaeda communications and if they do, the President has yet to name a single person who does. We have a system to allow the President to do that, but he abandoned it to (surprise) go it alone. And he must be held accountable for that.

Finally, Salon's Mark Benjamin takes a detailed look the legislation that the President is urging the Congress to pass for him before the elections (his 'Get Out of Jail card')-

...Some observers, however, say that the bill does much more than establish tribunals [at Guantanamo Bay], and that its true impact is not fully appreciated. Among other things, the White House is seeking to ensure that the Geneva Conventions are no longer an enforceable standard for the United States in the conduct of war. "This is huge," said Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First. "It will be viewed as a rejection of the baseline standards for treatment under the Geneva Conventions."

Now a group of retired military officers is readying a letter to the president that articulates serious objections to Bush's proposal. In an exclusive interview with Salon, the former military attorneys, or judge advocates general, claimed that the legislation would condone abusive interrogations of the sort that were prohibited by the Supreme Court's recent Hamdan decision, and largely gut the War Crimes Act of 1996, a law that gives U.S. courts the authority to convict Americans for Geneva Conventions violations. The bill, the attorneys claim, would endanger U.S. troops who are held prisoner and further erode the stature of the United States in the international community...

Had enough?

[Related: John Yoo summarizes the last 5 years in two short sentences (Glenn Greenwald)]