Blogging’s been sporadic. Well, no, there’s plenty of blogging (passive voice, get thee behind me) . . . I’ve been blogging sporadically.
I went on a 20-mile bike ride this morning with Darrell, Linda, and Lane, who are Trail Trash buddies. Donna, Mary Anne, and Kris got roped into manning a welcome booth at our destination, and didn’t get to ride at all. We’ll make up for it next weekend with an 18-mile Trail Trash ride down Old Spanish Trail to the Rincon Store and back.
After today’s ride Donna and I bought shelving for our garage. That’ll be next Sunday’s project. Take everything out of the garage, dump it in the driveway, build the shelving, put everything back. In a more organized manner.
And now a quick jump to the dark side:
It turns out, after all this time (and all those denials), that in 2002 and 2003, Dick Cheney, Condolezza Rice, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, and John Ashcroft regularly met in the White House to direct the “enhanced interrogation” of individual terrorism suspects. And not in any general way, but in specific ways:
Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.
The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.
The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.
At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
And of course George W. Bush knew all about it, and approved it.
I believe he did more than merely approve; that he was hands-on, very much in charge of what they’re calling the Principles Committee. Why?
Anyone with military experience can cite example after example of strange, wondrous, embarrassingly petty, and just-plain-wrong orders coming down from above. I certainly can, and can also state that every time it happened apologists up and down the chain of command would insist that underlings had misinterpreted or overreacted to something the general said. Nevertheless, the orders never got altered.
Later in my career, when I worked with three- and four-star generals, I learned that such orders invariably came, word for word, from those three- and four-star generals. Yes, they meant it, and no, underlings weren’t overreacting or misinterpreting. Government, I believe, is much the same.
I also recall learning how Lyndon B. Johnston would, with Bob McNamara, override military leadership to personally direct American air strikes on targets in North Vietnam, right down to selecting ingress and egress routes, the types of ordnance to be used, which targets were off-limits, even the size of fighter and bomber packages. The big boys always want to play with the toys, and isn’t torture quite the toy?
Even though ABC News broke the story, major media outlets simply aren’t touching it. Why is that, I wonder? Are flag pins really that much more important?
Update (1 1/2 hours later): I complain about members of the press not doing their job, then stumble upon this excellent report in the New York Times. Okay, they do their job some of the time. Now if we could just get them to do their job all of the time!