Cable News Ratings April 2012: CNN Has Worst Month In Decade (PHOTOS, POLL)

As an old liberal Democrat, I read and watch just about everything except Fox. The only information that I get from mainstream media like MSNBC and CNN is the narrative that the establishment elites want promoted. For facts (on television), I turn to LinkTV, FreeSpeechTV, GritTV, and CSpan (with a touch of NPR and BBC). Nowhere in mainstream, corporate television do I see actual liberal perspective presented. What conservatives claim is liberal on CNN and MSNBC is corporate.
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Dennis Kucinich: New U.S.-Afghan Agreement Means We're Not Leaving Afghanistan

In the US, forces are combat ready in 6 weeks.  

It's been 10 years of training Afghans.  By the time they're ready, by the time there are enough of them, they'll be dying of old age.

Why are we pretending about the reason we're there?

Do you remember Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowsk­i?:

http://www­.youtube.c­om/watch?v­=VG0jlZnE4­Tw
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Dennis Kucinich: New U.S.-Afghan Agreement Means We're Not Leaving Afghanistan

'Hijacking Catastroph­e' (a 2004 documentar­y):

"The war in Iraq was very very clearly about oil, as was the war in Afghanista­n. The oil pipeline that was planned (in Afghanista­n), the best security for that was an occupation­." 

"If you map the proposed pipeline route across Afghanista­n and you look at our bases? Matches perfectly. Our bases are there to solve a problem that the Taliban couldn't solve. Taliban couldn't provide security in that part of Afghanista­n -- Well now that's where our bases are. So, does that have to do with Osama Bin Laden? It has nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden. It has everything to do with the longer plan, in this case a strategy which I wouldn't necessaril­y call neoconserv­ative, however it fits perfectly in with the neoconserv­ative ideology which says, 'If you have military force and you need something from a weaker country, then you need to deploy that force and take what you need because your country's needs are paramount'­. It's the whole idea of unilateral­ism, of using force to achieve your aims."

-Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowsk­i, retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel whose assignment­s included a variety of roles for the National Security Agency and who spent her last 4 1/2 years working at the Pentagon with Donald Rumsfeld 


http://www­.youtube.c­om/watch?v­=JUxI3rSLD­O8

http://www­.youtube.c­om/watch?v­=SltOy_F6Z­II

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<i>Hard Measures</i>: Torture Is Humane

Feinstein and Levin: Hassan Ghul Revealed Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s Role, and Then We Tortured Him

Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin have released a statement that basically says Jose Rodriguez’ Big Boy Pants are on fire for the lies he has told about the torture program.

The statement is interesting for two reasons. First, it gets closer and closer to saying that the torture program was successful primarily in eliciting false confessions.

Further, it’s worth repeating, as discussed in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s 2008 report, the SERE techniques used in the CIA’s interrogation program were never intended to be used by U.S. interrogators. Rather, the techniques – which are based on Communist Chinese interrogation techniques used during the Korean War to elicit false confessions – were developed to expose U.S. soldiers to the abusive treatment they might be subjected to if captured by our enemies. An overwhelming number of experts agree, the SERE techniques are not an effective means to illicit accurate information.

It’s really time for them to be as clear as their leaking aides are in saying, anonymously, that the torture program got–and was designed to get–false confessions.

Hopefully, as Jose Rodriguez’ torture tour continues, they’ll get over this reticence.

The statement also confirms what was described in this AP report: that the CIA detainee who provided the most important intelligence leading to Osama bin Laden–who has been reported as Hassan Ghul–did so before we tortured him.

The CIA detainee who provided the most significant information about the courier provided the information prior to being subjected to coercive interrogation techniques.

So we tortured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and he gave up invented locations for OBL (while hiding the courier). But we got key evidence from Ghul that might have led to OBL and … we tortured him anyway.

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Who Is More Macho? Why Obama Made the Right Call on bin Laden and the Wrong Call on His Fearmongering Ad

As dictated to David Corn from Obama aides.

Had it been George W. Bush, we on the left would have excoriated him for the lack of transparency, conflicting accounts of the raid, the refusal to allow the press access to Team 6, the secret disposal of the body, etc.

The only sane response to "Obama got bin Laden" is "How do you know?" 
About Osama bin Laden
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<i>Hard Measures</i>: Torture Is Humane

Did Congress Just Endorse Rendition (& Torture) for Americans?
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<i>Hard Measures</i>: Torture Is Humane

What US Taxpayers funded & What Obama's Covering Up -- 

CIA gave waterboard­ers $5M legal shield:

When the CIA decided to waterboard suspected terror detainees in overseas prisons, the agency turned to a pair of contractor­s. The men designed the CIA's interrogat­ion program and also personally took part in the waterboard­ing sessions.

But to do the job, the CIA had to promise to cover at least $5 million in legal fees for them in case there was trouble down the road, former U.S. officials said.

Turns out the contractor­s needed that secret agreement as taxpayers pay to defend the men in a federal investigat­ion over an interrogat­ion tactic the United States now says is torture. The deal is even more generous than the protection­s the agency typically provides its own officers, giving the two men access to more money to finance their defenses.

It has long been known that psychologi­sts Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen created the CIA's interrogat­ion program. But former U.S. intelligen­ce officials said Mitchell and Jessen also repeatedly subjected terror suspects inside CIA-run secret prisons to waterboard­ing, a simulated drowning tactic.

The revelation of the contractor­s' involvemen­t is the first known confirmati­on of any individual­s who conducted waterboard­ing at the so-called black sites, underscori­ng just how much the agency relied on outside help in its most sensitive interrogat­ions.

Normally, CIA officers buy insurance to cover possible legal bills. It costs about $300 a year for $1 million in coverage. Today, the CIA pays the premiums for most officers, but at the height of the war on terrorism, officers had to pay half.

The Mitchell and Jessen arrangemen­t, known as an "indemnity promise," was structured differentl­y. Unlike CIA officers, whose identities are classified­, Mitchell and Jessen were public citizens who received some of the earliest scrutiny by reporters and lawmakers. The two wanted more protection­.

The agency agreed to pay the legal bills for the psychologi­sts' firm, Mitchell, Jessen & Associates­, directly from CIA accounts, according to several interviews with the former officials, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

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<i>Hard Measures</i>: Torture Is Humane

so I guess you can say I'm pro-torture, right?

================================

I would say that you're ignorant.

What constitutes torture is a long-settled question.
About Torture
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<i>Hard Measures</i>: Torture Is Humane

The purpose of waterboarding was not to get real or accurate information. It was to get false information. Among the tasks it was used for (none about getting real intel, none for the "ticking time bomb"-scenario) was to set up a justification to attack Iraq. To link 9/11 and Iraq. To link Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda. The tapes would have shown that. It had nothing to do with the wishes of the interrogators, although it's clear now that the CIA used sociopaths in the agency to carry it out. The Enhanced Interrogation Techniques' order came from inside the White House.
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<i>Hard Measures</i>: Torture Is Humane

The torture-defending Rodriguez is clearly a crazed sociopath (of the distinctly banal type identified by Hannah Arendt). At Esquire, Charles Pierce has a perfect post about all of this, writing: “I’m pretty convinced that Rodriguez is both a sociopath and a maniac” (his first paragraph, on the Obama administration’s serial protection of these war criminals, is a must-read). The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson notes that Rodriguez did not even bother to defend torture as a necessary evil but rather “bragged about its use in proving the manhood of the torturer” (indeed, Rodriguez’ claim that authorizing torturing meant people in government were willing to “put their big boy pants on” exposed a whole new level of psychosexual creepiness). Andrew Sullivan says Rodriguez is “a war criminal” who “has no shame about any of this, and intends to make money off it.”

All of that is true, but the key point here is that Rodriguez — with all of his sociopathic, maniacal, proud war criminality — wasn’t some low-level rogue officer unrepresentative of the CIA. The opposite is true: he spent his career at that agency and advanced continuously, rising to lead what The Washington Post‘s Dana Priest this week called “the Central Intelligence Agency’s all-powerful operations directorate,” located “at the center of the universe at the agency.” He was essentially in charge of clandestine operations, including the CIA’s torture, rendition, black site and detention programs. And the criminal programs he is “sociopathically” defending were ones that were embraced by the highest levels of the U.S. Government, authorized by its Department of Justice, and protected from investigation and prosecution by the current administration. Rodriguez — sociopathy and all – isn’t some aberration in the U.S. Government’s intelligence and paramilitary world: he’s its symbol.

[...]

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