Sheila Cochran managed to throw a nice op-ed page tomato, marking the occasion of his private address to WMC. It was in today's Journal-Sentinel:
http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/45438752.html.......On another plus note, it was kind of entertaining to see Pat McIlheran's head exploding in another op-ed column, this morning:
http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/45438762.htmlAccording to Pat, it's "obvious" Nancy Pelosi's been spinning some big whoppers about what she was told or wasn't told about torture, years ago.
"She is now lying, and to maintain the lie, spins ever-greater calumnies about agencies now run by her party's president, Barack Obama." Never mind that Barack had no responsibility for anything those agencies did under the previous watch.
It's like watching Humphrey Bogart in that one movie, where he can't stop talking about strawberries, while he's rolling those ball bearings in his hand.
McIlheran refers to Sen. Feingold as
"his party's righteous pill," tells us that
"Pelosi's crisis comes because of the release of the so-called "torture" memos. These reveal the Bush administration was applying lawyers to the CIA to make certain it stayed within U.S. anti-torture law." {No matter how many legal contortions, evasions, and fabrications it took, before or after the fact?}
His conclusion is that Pelosi had the chance to act like "an adult in contrast to Feingold's adolescent posturing." Because
"we now know the interrogations foiled plots to down a Los Angeles skyscraper and helped roll up much of al-Qaida's leadership..."Only on Planet McIlheran. The only 'great calumnies' in his piece are against the facts in evidence:
http://www.slate.com/id/2216601/A subsequent fact sheet released by the Bush White House states, "In 2002, we broke up a plot by KSM to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast." These two statements make clear that however far the plot to attack the Library Tower ever got—an unnamed senior FBI official would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Bush's characterization of it as a "disrupted plot" was "ludicrous" -— that plot was foiled in 2002. But Sheikh Mohammed wasn't captured until March 2003.
Which isn't to say that K.Sheikh Mohammed may not have been tortured for the Library Tower plot (Dubya kept referring to it as the "Liberty Tower"), but it could only have been inflicted on him after he was captured, when the 'plot' had already been foiled.