Sunday, May 16, 2004
So, who wants to bet on how long the administration will allow the New Yorker to keep publishing?
And let's hope Seymour Hersh (the ugly story, back) doesn't go up in any small planes, have a heart condition that suddenly worsens, or agree to meet a source in a parking garage after a phone call from a mysterious stranger. Or open an envelope with white powder in it, from one of those guys we just don't seem able to catch...
I mean, Hersh just ripped the lid of the story beneath the story:
Not just the torture at Abu Ghraib, but the existence of a Special Access Program (SAP) at the Pentagon whose ground rules were Grab whom you must. Do what you want.’”.
Sure, mixing the "unconventional," covert SAP with regular army in interrogations at Abu Ghraib, as Carbone>Rumsfeld>Bush did, was a blunder fit to be measured on the Richter scale.
But what about the SAP itself? Sounds like a targetted assassination program, to me. Readers, any thoughts on this?
http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGA3OO8JBUD.html
UPDATE AP gets it wrong:
The real story is not the Bush trashing the Geneva convention—though that's a good story—but Hersh's story (back) on the Special Access Program, which is starting to look like a program of targetted assassination of AQ suspects. Compared to that story, the legality story pales.
I mean, Hersh just ripped the lid of the story beneath the story:
Not just the torture at Abu Ghraib, but the existence of a Special Access Program (SAP) at the Pentagon whose ground rules were Grab whom you must. Do what you want.’”.
Sure, mixing the "unconventional," covert SAP with regular army in interrogations at Abu Ghraib, as Carbone>Rumsfeld>Bush did, was a blunder fit to be measured on the Richter scale.
But what about the SAP itself? Sounds like a targetted assassination program, to me. Readers, any thoughts on this?
http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGA3OO8JBUD.html
UPDATE AP gets it wrong:
The Iraq prisoner abuse scandal shifted on Sunday to the question of whether the Bush administration set up a legal foundation that opened the door for the mistreatment.
The roots of the scandal lay in a decision approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to expand a classified operation for aggressive interrogations to Iraqi prisoners, a program that had been focused on the hunt for al-Qaida, The New Yorker magazine reported.
The real story is not the Bush trashing the Geneva convention—though that's a good story—but Hersh's story (back) on the Special Access Program, which is starting to look like a program of targetted assassination of AQ suspects. Compared to that story, the legality story pales.
