"By holding no one accountable for past abuse, and by convening no commission on what did and didn’t protect the country, President Obama has left the telling of this dark chapter in American history to those who most want to whitewash it."

Says it all.

Jon Stewart did a great interview of Marc Thiessen, it was great to see Stewart ask him what life was like in the fantasy world he lives in.
Thiessen should join the likes of Paul Bremer who every year celebrate their successful ways while running the CPA.

unprincipled provocateurs free to move about unchallenged in the continued generation of soul corrupting toxins among us. Such moles will eat at our ethical foundation until only a society that sits upon the thinnest of pillars or a rogue's ruse exists.

There can never be too many defenders of war crimes and proponents of torture in the Washington Post. As long as they support Likud, that is. Hey, they pay Charles Krauthammer who works for Jerusalem Post also, a newspaper whose online (moderated) commentsection has become the biggest racist anti-muslim sewer in the english-speaking world of newspapers. Its not a newspaper anymore, but a open propaganda machine.

I can come up with for the Washington Post's editorial board corral of crazies is corporate envy of Fox News. Murdoch has built Americas most lucrative cable channel around a certifiable loon Glen Beck. I wonder though how much overlap their really is between people who read news in real newspapers and those that watch newstainment on cable tv.

...it really does appear at the moment that the only Republicans are Bush Republicans.

Everyone else is a Republican in Name Only, or RINO. Republicans who recognized how badly the last Republican President let the country down do exist, but you won't find them in Congress or among GOP state governors. The party's permanent campaign apparatus -- the vast network of pollsters, consultants and "strategists" that dominates the party, for whom Bush's intense focus on the mechanics of campaign politics produced eight very fat years -- doesn't have any anti-Bush Republicans in it, either.

Actually, the closest thing there is right now to anti-Bush Republicans are those, particularly int he South, who were infuriated when the former President briefly endorsed reforming the country's 40 year old immigration laws. Then there is Dick Cheney, who enjoyed less influence in the second Bush term than in the first and now regularly denounces President Obama for continuing some of the practices toward things like detainee interrogation that began under Bush. Cheney never directly criticizes Bush, though, and Republicans who disagree with Cheney are mostly still terrified of him. So he doesn't really count.

That leaves people like me, who have been Republicans forever and have worked for Republican public officials, but who regarded George Bush as a small man unworthy of the Presidency and thought even less of his son. That's a laugh line, really: America could have done better than the first President Bush, but the second did serious damage to the country at home and abroad. The Republican Party can't base its future on his record in office, or on that of his supporters in Congress, and expect either to prosper politically or to deserve power. But the reality is that it is attempting to do just that, and the Washington Post is just reflecting that reality.

A SPEECH-WRITER? Does Mr. Ricks, in all seriousness, mean to say that a speech-writer is suddenly considered a credible source of information about the usefulness of torture and how much intelligence it might have provided? Forget college, forget being a productive member of society. I'm just going to write books about things I have no understanding of for the rest of my life. I'm an angry young man, I have all the credentials I need.

Headquarters hero talk...... Thiessen's delusions should be exposed for the cow manure they are.... Good on Mayer, Ricks, and others like them....

I love when a suit wearing guy like Marc Thiessen, tries to discuss the effectiveness of something he wouldn't have the guts of doing to another person himself, nor could he bare hearing the screams....

They claim it worked because for them it did... they did it for the "confessions," not for the intelligence value...

It puzzles me that my old newspaper, The Washington Post, would hire Theissen to write for its op-ed page.

If they are not publishing in the WaPo paper, they seem to be here posting in the Shadow Govt. blog. And let's not forget that this very FP site gave Thiessen a forum for his nonsense (I can barely bring myself to link to it).
Dead Terrorists Tell No Tales
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/02/08/dead_terrorists_tell_no_tales

I have always valued the diversity of opinion to be found in FP even when I have to put up with the occasional silliness from some crank. I still remember Newt Gingrich decrying in July 2003 that "anti-American sentiment is rising unabated around the globe because the U.S. State Department has abdicated values and principles in favor of accommodation and passivity." That's a real gem, that one.

But I have been increasingly concerned with this creeping make-work program for former Bush hacks ever since FP was bought by the Washington Post. As long as this stuff is largely confined to the op-ed page or centralized in the Shadow Govt. blog where it is conveniently ignored, I still very much enjoy my printed FP.

But I certainly hope that owners & editors of this enterprise are aware that I am nervously tracking these developments as I sit here staring at my "Advanced Renewal" slip during these straitened economic times.

Still keep coming back for you though, Tom. Cheers!

Jane Meyer is the best, and her reporting on torture and intelligence has been among the very best since 9/11. I started reading her four years ago, and I try to read everything she writes. I'll be tweeting this post.

I've made this point before with you and will make it again: America can survive looking unjust, cruel, overly aggressive - indeed, these things can prove serviceable in wartime, certainly Lincoln seemed to think so, and FDR - our commitment to the rights of individuals and to freedom pulls us back from any abyss we find ourselves tempted by. What is much more injurious and worrisome for a great power is to appear weak - we cannot afford to look weak, the consequences of that will prove much more dire than Cheney's brief flirtation with putative torture. This liberal obsession with Bush era excesses does nothing but make us look weak, besotted by a whining angst and whimpers of conscience. I mean, I assume Mr Ricks, given your field of interest, you're a student of history - show me the great power that has prospered governed by such a cloying and sentimental display of sympathetic weakness. They don't exist, and for a very good reason.

Bush made a mistake - big surprise. Get over it.

Although Mayer's article thoroughly and utterly dismantles the evidence for productive intelligence gathered from enhanced interrogation as it is presented in Thiessen's book, her attack is misguided in its premise. She undertakes a systematic debunking of Thiessen's claims of success rather than disregarding the moral value of these claims altogether. One cannot rationally hope to debunk every possible claim that torture produces worthy results- firstly because they are infinite and secondly because one truly worthy report damages the argument. Imagine an airtight case that the torture of a terrorist yielded actionable intelligence in a timely manner that certainly saved lives. Does this damage the moral argument against torture? No. Does it damage Mayer's method of repudiating torture's "benefits" as they are claimed by fanatics like Thiessen? Certainly. Rather than point out each fallacy as it arises, we should reject altogether the claim that torture is morally acceptable and congruent with liberty. To judge each case's merits based on the outcome is to accept any means given lofty ends. Torture must remain categorically off the table.

To much time is spent on everything but the simple facts. We should just keep it off the table as a policy and I truly think that if we had just gone with the Geneva Conventions in regard to how we treat prioners in the first place we would not have half the problems we have had or currently have.

The first thing which to my mind is a question that How and Why American people accepted torturing cells in their Govt's custody ? Was that simply because those cells were not for American people, they were for the rest of the world. If yes then second question comes to me that Do American people have no simpathy to the people of the world ? I have a suggetion for American people if you look at 3rd world nations with love you will see how much respect they will give you. And its not the Govt, people of America will have to express their message in a way that it reaches out to the other nations. Love humans they will love you back.