Back to the Future…
Remember the fun we had with that blog, “A Liberal Dose?” I still occasionally visit his site, and this time in reading his post, I felt I had to point out yet again what happens when one checks the sources used in his journalistic misadventure.
In his posting today, November 16th, he writes:
Looks like the feline’s slipped the confines. Now we find out orders for the Abu Ghraib lightstick anal rapes and secret overseas prisons came from none other than…
yup, chimpboy hisself.
Okay–anyone else suspicious? Well, as usual I was, so went and read the story cited from the Washington Post. In that story we find that there are two documents that authorized interrogation. One was signed by the President and the other issued from the Justice Department.
To quote from the article:
The ACLU describes the first as a “directive” signed by Bush governing CIA interrogation methods or allowing the agency to set up detention facilities outside the United States. McPherson describes it as a “memorandum.” In September, Bush confirmed the existence of secret CIA prisons and transferred 14 remaining terrorism suspects from them to Guantanamo Bay.
The second document is an August 2002 legal memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to the CIA general counsel. The ACLU describes it as “specifying interrogation methods that the CIA may use against top al-Qaeda members.” (This document is separate from another widely publicized Justice memo, also issued in August 2002, that narrowed the definition of torture. The Justice Department has since rescinded the latter.)
So I ask you–do you see anything in there that confirms that the President authorized specifically those forms of torture listed in the posting at “A Liberal Dose?” (Remember, he wrote “lightstick anal rapes“) I read through the article quite carefully, and the article makes it quite clear that the only thing confirmed is the existence of the memos. Not the contents. So while we can conclude that perhaps these alleged abuses occured (but even that is yet to be conclusively shown) there remains no evidence that these actions were part of the methods approved by the President.
Alas, these sorts of conclusion jumping activities are going to be more commonplace with Mr Conyers now on the warpath. Perhaps one could argue those on the right have jumped to conclusions without sufficient facts, but it seems to me that emulating that against which you have railed is far from responsible.
Journalists, I thought, were supposed to report facts. Alas, the gentleman at A Liberal Dose doesn’t seem to agree.