{"id":13928,"date":"2008-12-17T07:17:18","date_gmt":"2008-12-17T13:17:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/?p=13928"},"modified":"2008-12-17T07:17:18","modified_gmt":"2008-12-17T13:17:18","slug":"levining-the-narrative-dan-collins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/?p=13928","title":{"rendered":"Levining the Narrative [Dan Collins]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Read the whole thing, at NRO<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In September 2002, senior leaders on the Senate and House intelligence committees \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Democrats and Republicans \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u20ac\u009d began receiving briefings on the CIA\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u201e\u00a2s \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00c5\u201cenhanced interrogation program,\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00c2\u009d including the use of waterboarding on top al-Qaeda operatives. Among the leaders briefed was Nancy Pelosi, now speaker of the House.<\/p>\n

The lawmakers raised no objections. According to Porter Goss, a congressman at that time and later head of the CIA, their chief concern was whether \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00c5\u201cthe methods were tough enough.\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00c2\u009d But Carl Levin, the Democrat who runs the Senate Armed Services Committee, managed to suppress any mention of Speaker Pelosi and her congressional colleagues last week when his committee released its misleading and relentlessly partisan report, titled \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00c5\u201cInquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody.\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00c2\u009d <\/p>\n

This document is the latest chapter in the Democrats\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u201e\u00a2 torture narrative \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a warped tale that trivializes true torture by confounding it with less extreme forms of interrogation. The committee thoroughly misrepresents the legal standards that govern detainee treatment and ignores non-partisan investigations that have found no evidence of a systematic program of abuse. Perhaps most significant, the Democrats ignore the fact that those rare episodes of abuse that have been uncovered have resulted in prosecutions. <\/p>\n

According to the Levin report, the Bush administration reacted to 9\/11 by \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00c5\u201credefining\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00c2\u009d the law to permit aggressive interrogation tactics. Thus, the fable goes, in early 2002 the president determined that neither al-Qaeda nor Taliban fighters were entitled to prisoner-of-war treatment, in effect blocking application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and the \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00c5\u201cwell established military doctrine\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00c2\u009d of \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00c5\u201clegal compliance with the Geneva Conventions.\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00c2\u009d The administration then covertly set about having its Justice Department alter the legal definition of torture, the story goes, while its interrogators were schooled in illegal tactics by experts at the Defense Department. These techniques were employed by the CIA on important captives and became elements of a new warfare culture that spread to military interrogators at Gitmo and led, eventually, to the Abu Ghraib scandal. <\/p>\n

That narrative is flawed in its fundamental assumptions and fictional in its sweeping conclusions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Read the whole thing, at NRO: In September 2002, senior leaders on the Senate and House intelligence committees \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Democrats and Republicans \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u20ac\u009d began receiving briefings on the CIA\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u201e\u00a2s \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00c5\u201cenhanced interrogation program,\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00c2\u009d including the use of waterboarding on top al-Qaeda operatives. Among the leaders briefed was Nancy Pelosi, now speaker of the House. The lawmakers raised no objections. According to Porter Goss, a congressman at that time and later head<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":587,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/587"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13928\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}