After 9/11, it was, like, ‘anything goes’ in the name of terrorism. (Harpers)

[kpete]

Six Questions for Jane Mayer, Author of The Dark Side
By Scott Horton

Most significantly, we learn the details on the torture techniques and the drama behind the fierce and lingering struggle within the administration over torture, and we learn that many within the administration recognized the potential criminal accountability they faced over these torture tactics and moved frantically to protect themselves from possible future prosecution. I put six questions to Jane Mayer on the subject of her book, The Dark Side.

.............

Meanwhile, although President Bush has argued that “enhanced” interrogation had led to numerous breakthroughs he has never publicly acknowledged the false and fabricated intelligence it has yielded, too. One former top CIA official told me, “Ninety percent of what we got was crap.”

..............

To her amazement, the FBI agent went ahead and did so anyway, and then the prosecutors in the Justice Department proceeded to use Lindh’s statements against him in their criminal prosecution. She told me, “It was like ethics were out the window. After 9/11, it was, like, ‘anything goes’ in the name of terrorism. It felt like they’d made up their minds to get him, regardless of the process.” Radack believed that the role of the ethics office was to “rein in the cowboys” whose zeal to stop criminals sometimes led them to overstep legal boundaries. “But after 9/11 we were bending ethics to fit our needs,” she said. “Something wrong was going on. It wasn’t just fishy—it stank.”

What happened next was truly scary. She tried to ensure that a judge overseeing the case, who asked for all information regarding the Department’s handling of Lindh, was given the full record, including her own contrary advice. But instead, she said she found that her superiors at Justice sent the judge only selective portions of the record, excluding her contrary opinion. Her case files, she said, were tampered with, and documents missing. Among the senior Justice Department officials who were sent her files, she said was Alice Fisher, a deputy to Michael Chertoff who followed him as head of the Department’s Criminal Division.

...........

Helgerson’s 2004 report had been described to me as very disturbing, the size of two Manhattan phone books, and full of terrible descriptions of mistreatment. The confirmation that Helgerson was called in to talk with Cheney about it proves that–as early as then–the Vice President’s office was fully aware that there were allegations of serious wrongdoing in The Program.

more at:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/07/hbc-90003234

[Solly Mack]

1. Oh yeah..."911"...America's "crazy period"

just a bunch of bullshit to excuse their crimes

[gratuitous]

2. I have an old book

Written in the mid-1950s, when Red-Baiting was still going pretty strongly, William A. Reuben came out with a book called "The Atom Spy Hoax," which put the lie to a lot of the then-current hysteria going on. He called the summer of 1950 the time when America Went Mad. The Soviets had just announced their first successful detonation of a nuclear weapon the previous year, and Mao Zedong had consolidated his communist regime and launched his invasion of Korea. And the repressive times rolled!

The Bush administration saw a similar "opportunity" in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, and boy did they take it. Some of the story has leaked out in the intervening seven years, but a full accounting of this administration's corruption and fear-mongering may never come out.

[CJCRANE]

3. Bush-Cheney knew

exactly what happened on 9/11.

If there is an opposite of the word "investigation" - then that's what they did, an attempt to muddy the waters as much as possible.

[Beam Me Up]

4. The word is "cover-up" and, yes, that is exactly what they've done. n/t