Right-Wing Media Ignore, Dismiss Bush Precedents To Attack Obama Over Africa Trip

ZACHARY PLEAT/Media Matters For America:

Right-wing media are attacking President Obama over the cost of his upcoming diplomatic trip to Africa, ignoring or dismissing the fact that the security measures that have driven the trip's budget are in line with those used by previous presidents on similar trips.

On June 13, The Washington Post reported on an internal document that detailed some of the security precautions being taken during President Obama's scheduled trip to Africa later this month, which will include the first lady, and will seek to forge stronger economic ties with African nations and address global health problems. According to the document, hundreds of Secret Service agents will be dispatched where the president and his family will be, a naval ship will be standing by for medical emergencies, and fighter aircraft will fly in 24-hours security shifts. The document "does not specify costs" for the trip, but thePost cited speculation from a source familiar with the trip that it "could cost the federal government $60 million to $100 million based on the costs of similar African trips in recent years."

The Post also stated that "the preparations appear to be in line with similar travels in the past" and quoted Ben Rhodes, an Obama adviser on national security, who said that the security requirements "are Secret Service-driven." The story also mentioned that a safari was being considered during the trip but was canceled, and that previous presidents had made similar trips, with President Bush bringing his daughters along on one that included a safari:

Former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush also made trips to multiple African nations involving similarly laborious preparations. Bush went in 2003 and 2008, bringing his wife on both occasions. Bush's two daughters went along on the first trip, which included a safari at a game preserve on the Botswana-South Africa border.

But in their eagerness to criticize President Obama over the cost of the trip, right-wing media ignored or dismissed these facts. The Drudge Report only highlighted the speculation that the trip could cost $100 million and that the safari was canceled. A blog post from The Weekly Standard drew attention to the canceled safari without mentioning the African safari that Bush and his family went on.

Mark Levin, on the other hand, decided that these precedents were irrelevant when he attacked Obama on his radio show. Levin said that he'd "never seen a presidential family take so many trips" and that Obama "doesn't deny himself or his family a damn thing." Levin stated that Obama is "on welfare, presidential welfare" and that "Obama believes that this is his time to live like a king" and that "his wife is the imperial first lady." He concluded by dismissing the fact that previous presidents have made similar trips by claiming "this president's propaganda is different from other presidents, this president's Marxist class warfare is different than other presidents." 

Fox Nation highlighted Levin's attack on Obama with the headline, "Levin slams Obama's $100 million Africa trip: He lives like a billionaire off you and me!"

The Bush Years And What A "Lapdog" Press Really Looked Like

ERIC BOEHLERT/Media Matters For America:

Perpetually fuming about President Obama, Sean Hannity widened his rant Wednesday night on Fox News and condemned the "lapdog, kiss ass media" that allegedly lets Obama have his way. Echoing the same attack, Karl Rove wrote in the Wall Street Journal this week that "Mr. Obama is a once-in-a-generation demagogue with a compliant press corps," while the anti-Obama Daily Caller pushed the headline,  "Lapdog Media Seeking Lap To Lie In."

Complaining about the "liberal media," has been a running, four-decade story for conservative activists. But what we're hearing more of lately is the specific allegation that the press has purposefully laid down for the Democratic president, and that it's all part of a master media plan to help Democrats foil Republicans.

The rolling accusation caught my attention since I wrote a book called Lapdogs, which documented the Beltway media's chronic timidity during the previous Republican administration, and particularly with regards to the Iraq War. I found it curious that Hannity and friends are now trying to turn the rhetorical tables with a Democrat in the White House, and I was interested in what proof they had to lodge that accusation against today's press.

It turns out the evidence is quite thin. For instance, onenever-ending partisan cry has been the press has "ignored" the terrorist attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi last year; that they're protecting Obama. Yet theNew York Times and Washington Post have published nearly 800 articles and columns mentioning Benghazi since last September, according to Nexis.  

What the lapdog allegation really seems to revolve around is the fact that conservatives are angry that Obamaremains popular with the public. Rather than acknowledge that reality, partisans increasingly blame the press and insist if only reporters and pundits would tell 'the truth' about Obama, then voters would truly understand how he's out to destroy liberty and freedom and capitalism.

Sorry, but that's not what constitutes a lapdog press corps. And to confuse chronic partisan whining with authentic media criticism is a mistake. The Hannity-led claim also isn't accurate. Studies have shown that during long stretches of his first term, Obama was  hammered with "unrelentingly negative" press coverage.

By contrast, the lapdog era of the Bush years represented nothing short of an institutional collapse of the American newsroom. And it was one that, given the media's integral role in helping to sell the Iraq War, did grave damage to our democracy.

Looking back at his tenure as Washington Post ombudsman, Michael Getler wrote in 2005 that the mainstream media's performance in 2002 and 2003 likely represented the industry's worst failing in nearly half a century. "How did a country on the leading edge of the information age get this so wrong and express so little skepticism and challenge?" Getler asked.

Let's recall some concrete examples of what helped the Bush era press rightfully earn its title of lapdogs so we can understand why today's conservative claims ring so hollow.  

A defining trait of Bush's obsequious press corps was its collective refusal to take seriously anti-war voices prior to the preemptive invasion of Iraq, even voices such as Democratic party stalwart Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA). In September 2002, Kennedy made a passionate, provocative, and newsworthy speech raising all sorts of doubts about the war, doubts that would later prove well-founded. The event garnered exactly one sentence -- thirty-six words total -- of coverage from the Post.

The daily was hardly alone in turning away from Kennedy's prescient  speech. The night of his address,  Nightly News devoted just 32 words to it. On ABC's World News Tonight, it received 31 words, and on the CBS Evening News, 40 words.

Kennedy gave that speech on a Friday. Two days later the Sunday talk shows discussed Iraq in detail, but Kennedy's name never came up. For the network pundits, the anti-war speech from one of the nation's political giants basically did not exist. It was irrelevant to the around-the-clock media chatter about a looming war.

Given that tentativeness, it's not surprising that a survey conducted by the liberal media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found that during the first two weeks of February 2003, when the debate about the war should have been raging on the public airwaves, just 17 percent of the 393 people interviewed on-camera for network news reports expressed "skeptical or critical positions" on Iraq.

Additionally, Media Matters found that while 23 percent of U.S. senators voted to oppose the war in the fall of 2002, only 11 percent of the senators invited to appear on the Sunday morning talk shows prior to the invasion were antiwar.

According to figures from media analyst Andrew Tyndall, of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC, and CBS from September 2002 until February 2003, all but 34 -- eight percent of the total -- could be traced back to sources from the White House, the Pentagon, or the State Department. Only 34 stories, or 8 percent or the reports, were of independent origin.

Meanwhile, given its current primetime lineup, sometimes it's hard to recall that in 2003 MSNBC was so nervous about employing a liberal host who opposed Bush's ordered invasion that it fired Phil Donahue preemptively, just weeks before war began. An internal memo warned that Donahue presented "a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war." (He was MSNBC's highest rated host at the time of his firing.)

Months worth of chronic timidity and newsroom bowing-down to the White House's war culture clearly helped pave the way to war.  

Laying out the reasons for an unprecedented invasion during his final, pre-war invasion press conference on March 6, 2003, Bush mentioned al-Qaida and the terrorist attacks of September 11 thirteen times in less than an hour. Not a single journalist that night challenged the presumed connection Bush was making between al-Qaida and Iraq, despite the fact that intelligence sources had publicly questioned any such association.

The egregious, look-the-other-way coverage continued long after the invasion. The U.S. media's collective disinterest in Britain's Downing Street Memo represented a perfect example of dogged lapdog behavior.

Consisting of minutes from a July 23, 2002, meeting attended by then-Prime Minister Tony Blair and his closest advisers, the memo revealed their impression that the Bush administration, eight months before the start of the Iraq war in 2003, had already decided to invade and that American officials seemed more concerned with justifying a war than preventing one.  

The blockbuster memo was leaked to the Times of London, which printed it on May 1, 2005. How did the American press respond?

It yawned.

Between May 1 and June 6, the story received approximately 20 mentions on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS combined, According to TVEyes. By contrast, during the same five-week period, the same outlets found time to mention more than 260 times the tabloid controversy that erupted when a photograph showing Saddam Hussein in his underwear was leaked to the British press.

In the five weeks following the memo being published in the Times of London, White House spokesman Scott McClellan held 19 daily briefings, at which he has fielded more than 900 questions from reporters, according to the White House's online archives. Exactly two of those 900 questions were about the Downing Street memo and the White House's reported effort to fix prewar intelligence.

That, unfortunately, is what a lapdog press corps looks like. Let's not diminish the significance of that historic failure by pretending today's Beltway press is repeating that catastrophic and unprecedented abdication under Obama. Just because Obama's most strident critics have failed to turn voters against the president doesn't mean the press isn't doing its job.

Jennifer Rubin: Obama's Terrorism Record Worse Than Bush's (9-11 Doesn't Count)

SIMON MALOY/Media Matters for America

Washington Post political blogger and de facto Mitt Romney surrogate Jennifer Rubin has posed some questions that she thinks should be asked of President Obama during the upcoming debates. Harnessing illogic and leaning on right-wing mythology, she wants the president to admit that his record on preventing terrorist attacks is worse than George W. Bush's, because there were no terrorist attacks on the U.S. under Bush after September 11, 2001.

No seriously. Here's the question she wants Obama to answer:

After Sept. 11, 2001, there were no terrorist attacks on the United States, but during your administration there have been the jihad-inspired Fort Hood massacre and the killing of four Americans in Libya, so isn't your anti-terror record worse than Bush's?

So Obama has to answer for Ft. Hood and the Benghazi attacks, but Bush gets a pass on the worst terrorist attack in American history. And when you neatly excise that horrific failure of intelligence and preparedness from the Bush terrorism ledger, Bush finds himself with a spotless record (the anthrax attacks, LAX shooting, DC sniper shootings, and attacks on various diplomatic personnel during the Bush years apparently don't count either).

The question refutes itself and evinces the sort of kneejerk partisanship and lack of seriousness that one would expect to find on a right-wing message board, and not under a Washington Post byline.

Why Obama Is Winning: 57% of Registered Voters Blame Bush and GOP for Economy

By: Jason Easley/politicususa

A new CNN poll explains why President Obama is leading in the polls. By margin of 57%-35%, registered voters blame George W. Bush and the Republican Party for the poor condition of the economy.

The CNN/ORC poll began with what should have been some good news for Romney. By a margin of 68%-32%, registered voters rated economic conditions in the country as poor. This moment of temporary Romney optimism was crushed by the fact that 67% of registered voters expect their economic condition to be good next year. Forty four percent of voters consider themselves worse off than they were four years ago, compared to 37% who say that they are better off.

The back breaker for Romney came when registered voters were asked which policies were more to blame for the country’s current economic problems, George W. Bush and the Republicans or Barack Obama and the Democrats. Fifty seven percent of registered voters said that Bush and the Republicans are responsible, compared to 35% who blamed Obama and the Democrats.

A deeper look inside the who is responsible numbers reveals that by a margin of 53%-37%, Independents think Bush and the GOP are responsible for the current state of the economy. Fifty six percent of men and fifty eight percent of women still hold Bush and the GOP responsible. White people narrowly hold Bush and Republicans more responsible, 48%-42% Americans under age 50 hold Bush and the Republican Party more responsible by a more than 2 to 1 margin, 62%-30%. The only groups polled that hold Obama and the Democrats responsible are Republicans (72%) and conservatives (52%).

The reason why Obama is winning is because voters are agreeing with his message that the economy is getting and will continue to get better. The likely and registered voters in this poll expect it to be better by next year. Voters aren’t believing Mitt Romney when he claims that if Obama gets reelected the economy will get worse.

More importantly, Republicans nominated a self styled economic Mr. Fix It whose solutions voters are viewing as the cause of the problem. The registered voters in this poll are still holding George W. Bush and his party responsible for the economy. This means that Romney’s economic plan, which is to do what Bush did, is signalling to voters that he may very well make things worse if elected.

In short, Romney is failing to convince voters that the economy is Obama’s fault. The voters in this poll have not forgotten who was in office during the economic collapse, and Mitt Romney has not been able to convince them that he would do anything to make it better.

Pundits and pollsters have expressed confusion over why Obama has been able to lead Romney while hauling around such a sluggish economy. The answer is simply that voters aren’t blaming the president for the economy. They still view the economic mess as something that he inherited from George W. Bush. Romney’s attacks on Obama over the economy are falling flat because a majority of voters are rejecting his basic premise that Obama is to blame for the economy.

Voters see the economy going in the right direction, they agree with President Obama that it will get even better, and they are still holding George W. Bush and the Republican Party responsible for the economic collapse.These three reasons are why Barack Obama is so far defying the odds, and is positioned to win reelection in the midst of a stubborn and difficult economy.

FLASHBACK: Fox News On Gas Prices In 2008

by Shauna Theel/Media Matters

Following GOP strategy, Fox News is again blaming the Obama administration for rising gasoline prices -- a claim that has been repeatedly debunked by energy analysts. But back in the summer of 2008, when the average U.S. gasoline price hit a record high of $4.11, Fox said that "no President has the power to increase or to lower gas prices."

In 2008, Fox's coverage occasionally even mirrored the facts: expanding domestic oil drilling will notsignificantly lower prices, and the only way to reduce our vulnerability to gas price spikes is to use less oil. Perhaps there was more room for reality-based coverage at Fox when there wasn't an incumbent president to defeat?

In case you missed it, here's how Fox is covering gas prices now:

Big Lie #18 Obama and Bush

RNC attack on Obama’s bus tour ignores Bush’s political travel costs

By Kase Wickman/Raw story: MCL note I'm not including the RNC video if you want to see it click on the link

The Republican National Committee released a tailored, satirical attack ad Monday as President Barack Obama began a three-day bus tour of the Midwest, focusing on jobs and the economy.

The 11-page pdf masquerades as a press guide for what the RNC has dubbed "A Totally Non-Political, Taxpayer-Funded Administration Event That Just Happens to Criss-Cross Several Battleground States Critical to the President's Reelection" — or, for short: the Debt-End Bus Tour (DEBT).

The "release" is labeled as being from the "Office of the Teleprompter" and gives "guidance" to reporters, sampled below:

During this totally non-political, taxpayer-funded excursion, the President will not be offering any specific details or anything resembling a plan to tackle the looming debt crisis facing America. If that was what you were expecting, feel free to nod off during the President’s open press events. You won’t hear anything that you haven’t heard before.

The president's trip is earmarked as a non-political tour — i.e. taxpayer-funded and not for campaign purposes. Conservatives have targeted the trip, which precedes a vacation in Martha's Vineyard, with criticism. GOP 2012 presidential contender and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has released his own attack video, dubbing it the "Magical Misery Tour."

It's not unusual for the line between official and campaign travel to blur somewhat leading up to an election, Center for Responsive Politics spokesman Michael Beckel told Raw Story in an email. In fact, it may be impossible to draw a line, as the president is judged not only on his campaign events, as other candidates are, but also by his actions as the sitting Commander-in-Chief.

"President Obama is hardly alone among presidents who have taken their official business to places where the political benefits are maximized," Beckel said. "And opponents of a sitting president, be that president a Democrat or a Republican, have long criticized the president for mixing re-election business with the business of governing."

"On trips when official business is mixed with campaign business, it can be harder to discern how to best apply [the FEC's] policy," Beckel said.

The White House, however, insisted that the trip isn't a campaign outing.

"The president views it as one of the chief responsibilities in office to spend some time outside Washington, D.C., talking to people all across the country about the economy and about how they’re impacted by the policy decisions that he’s making here in Washington, D.C.," deputy White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Friday. "That isn’t just an appropriate thing for a president to do, it’s something that a president should do."

Presidential trips in swing states in the year preceding an election are an established norm. A 2004 Brookings Institute paper compared the pre-reelection travel of presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and found that they both upped their travel, focusing on swing states, leading up to the election. If anything, an analytical look at Obama's predecessors shows that Bush is more guilty of "targeted" travel in his office leading up to election.

Between January 1 and May 31, 2004, Bush took 75 trips to 29 states, 56 percent of which were swing states. In the same time period in 1996, Clinton visited 25 states on 58 visits, 47 percent to swing states.

In June 2004, the Associated Press published a report saying that Bush had used his Air Force One privileges for campaign travel more often than any president in history. Federal Election Commission rules stipulate that for campaign trips using the presidential plane, the campaign must reimburse the government the equivalent of a first-class commercial fare for each person on board.

Compared to the $56,800 estimated to operate Air Force One per hour, the first-class fare is a bargain.

Only 1 percent of the $203 million Bush raised for his reelection campaign went toward reimbursing the government for travel costs, according to the AP's report.

Indeed, the trend of Bush, Clinton and now Obama's travel habits suggest a "permanent campaign trail,"presidential scholars claim, with an unending focus on swing states.

"I try to balance my job with my desire to win four more years," Bush said in August 2004.

Beginning today and until Wednesday, Obama will travel through Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota via bus.

Watch the RNC's accompanying video attack ad about Obama's bus tour, in which a narrator intones "the road ahead darkens." Embedded below via YouTube.

Former Colin Powell Chief of Staff: Bush didn’t want to get bin Laden

By David Edwards

Former Colin Powell Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson told MSNBC’s Ed Schultz Wednesday that President George W. Bush wasn’t interested in bringing Osama bin Laden to justice.

“I don’t think they really wanted to get bin Laden,” Wilkerson said.

“You could be very cynical and say he didn’t want to get him because once they got him the war was over and that left all the political advantage gone,” he added. “Or you could say that they knew that it was almost an impossibility to get him given what they had done to the intelligence and other aspects of the government that you needed to get him. They just about ruined it.”

Watch this video from MSNBC’s The Ed Show, broadcast May 11, 2011.

Right-Wing Media Still Hyping EITs, Ignoring Experts' Dispute

From Media Matters:

Since Osama bin Laden was killed in a successful U.S. raid last week, right-wing media have been hyping the Bush administration's use of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) and claim that key info about bin Laden was found by using EITs on detainees. In fact, many experts have questioned this claim, arguing that valuable intelligence has been and could have been gained more easily using other methods; additionally, there is considerable dispute as to whether the use of EITs yielded critical intelligence which led to bin Laden. 

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Right-Wing Media Hype Bush Admin. Officials' Claims About EITs

Wallace: "Enhanced Interrogation" Was "Such A Key Part Of This Raid." On the May 8 edition of Fox News' Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace asked National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, "Why is shooting an unarmed man in the face legal and proper, while enhanced interrogation, including waterboarding, of a detainee under very strict controls and limits, why is that over the line?" He later said that this "interrogation" was "such a key part of this raid [that killed Osama bin Laden]." From the broadcast:

WALLACE: We'll stipulate - I think, we'll all stipulate that bin Laden was a monster. But why is shooting an unarmed man in the face legal and proper, while enhanced interrogation, including waterboarding, of a detainee under very strict controls and limits, why is that over the line?

DONILON: Well, let's get -- let me talk first about the first half of the statement you made. Again, the president met with the operators yesterday in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and here are the facts. We are at war with al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden is the emir, or commander -- indeed, the only leader of al-Qaeda in its 22-year history. This was his residence and operational compound. Our forces entered that compound and were fired upon, in the pitch black. It's an organization that uses IEDs and suicide vests and booby traps and all manner of other kinds of destructive capabilities. Let me just finish what I'm saying here --

WALLACE: -- But let me just make my point. I'm not asking you why it was okay to shoot Osama bin Laden. I fully understand the threat. And I'm not second-guessing the SEALs.

DONILON: Right.

WALLACE: What I am second-guessing is, if that's okay, why can't you do waterboarding? Why can't you do enhanced interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was just as bad an operator as Osama bin Laden?

DONILON: Yeah, because, well our judgment is that it's not consistent with our values, not consistent and not necessary, in terms of getting the kind of intelligence we need.

WALLACE: But shooting bin Laden in the head is consistent with our values?

DONILON: It -- we are at war with Osama bin Laden.

WALLACE: We're at war with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

DONILON: It was a military operation, right? It was absolutely appropriate for the SEALs to take the action, and for the forces to take the action that they took in this military operation against a military target --

WALLACE: But why is it inappropriate to get information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?

DONILON: I didn't say it was inappropriate to get information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

WALLACE: You said it was against our values.

DONILON: I think that the techniques are something that there's been a policy debate about, and our administration has made our views known on that. 

WALLACE: Let me ask you about one other aspect of this and we'll move on. The Obama Justice Department reopened an investigation of half dozen CIA agents who were involved in interrogation after 9/11, raising the question -- and this had been closed. This has been a closed investigation. It was reopened by your justice department on the issue of whether or not they were using undue force. We talked earlier with Vice President Cheney who says that investigation is an outrage. Question: with interrogation, and you certainly have agreed, however it came -- with interrogation such a key part of this raid, why not end that investigation?  [Fox News, Fox News Sunday, 5/8/11]

Fox & Friends Hosts A Parade Of Former Bush Administration Officials To Claim EITs Were "Key" In Finding Bin Laden. On the May 9 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, the co-hosts interviewed three former Bush administration officials to claim that EITs produced valuable information that led to Osama bin Laden.

• Perino: "I Trust ... [Those Who Say] Enhanced Techniques Save Lives." During the show, the co-hosts interviewed former White House Press Secretary and Fox News Contributor Dana Perino. Co-host Gretchen Carlson said that many people credit "President Bush's enhanced interrogation techniques ... with killing Osama bin Laden." Perino later said that she believes Bush officials who told her that "enhanced techniques save lives." From the broadcast:

GRETCHEN CARLSON: The only disappointing thing for me, Dana, on [President Obama's May 8 60 Minutes] interview, maybe Steve Kroft asked these questions and they were edited out, but they didn't seem to move the story forward, as far as what do we do about on the war on terror now moving forward. Was that deliberate so that the president wouldn't be in a jam to have to talk about the fact that he's gotten rid of President Bush's enhanced interrogation techniques that many people credit with killing Osama bin Laden?

PERINO: You know, possibly, though I have to say, having watched 60 Minutes this past year, President Obama is almost a permanent fixture on the program. So maybe next week --

STEVE DOOCY (co-host): Co-host.

PERINO: -- he'll do another interview, and he'll be able to talk about that. It was actually the Sunday show hosts, and I would say including Chris Wallace, who pressed the National Security Advisor Tom Donilon on that very point. What are we going to be willing to do? And it's interesting to watch the left tie themselves up in knots and to rationalize that killing somebody is OK, because we're in a war with them, but enhanced interrogation techniques, which were legal, were not allowed because they're not consistent with our values. It doesn't make sense to us but I'm sure they rationalized it internally. 

[...]

DOOCY: And Dana, well, John Yoo was part of your administration. You've got Leon Panetta, who last Tuesday told Brian Williams that the enhanced interrogation techniques did lead to, you know, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed spilling the beans.

PERINO: Right, so it's a mosaic of information and it all comes together, and it takes very astute intelligence community officials looking at all of that intel, piecing it together and pulling those threads and making sure that they follow them through. My bottom line is, I trust General Hayden and Attorney General Mukasey. They say that enhanced techniques save lives, and we forget the most dangerous position in the world to hold over the last 10 years has been Osama bin Laden's number two. OK? We had that intelligence. We were able to get them. We finally got to him, and that is so symbolic. But we were able to prevent many attacks because of this intelligence, and I remember President Bush telling me, it didn't matter how unpopular he got, as long as the next president had what he needed to protect the country. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 5/9/11]

• Hayden: "[EITs] Allowed Us To Gain Information [And] Intelligence That Would Not Have Been Available To Us In Any Other Way." Later during the program, the co-hosts interviewed former CIA and NSA director General Michael Hayden (ret.). Hayden agreed with Carlson that EITs were "key," saying, "They allowed us to gain information, to gain intelligence that would not have been available to us in any other way. I mean, that's just a simple fact." [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 5/9/11]
• Mukasey: "At The Time [EITs] Were Used, They Were Enormously Valuable." Later during the show, co-host Brian Kilmeade interviewed former Attorney General Michael Mukasey. From the broadcast:

KILMEADE: From what you know, and what I won't be able to know, because I didn't have your type of clearance, how valuable were the enhanced interrogation practices to the success of the war on terror and getting bin Laden?

MUKASEY: At the time they were used, they were enormously valuable. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who had a trove of information, cracked like a dam, and when that dam broke, he disclosed enormous amounts of information that stopped ongoing projects that they had, and that disclosed a lot of valuable information, including some information that was part of the trail that led eventually to bin Laden. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 5/9/11]

Briggs: "[W]as President Obama's Decision Not To Reconsider" EITs "Putting America At Future Risk?" On the May 8 broadcast of Fox News' Fox & Friends Sunday, co-host Dave Briggs said that bin Laden's death has "reignited the debate over harsh interrogation techniques, like waterboarding." He asked, "So, is President Obama's decision not to reconsider these using these techniques putting America at future risk?" [Fox News, Fox & Friends Sunday, 5/8/11]

Bozell: "It Is Because Of Waterboarding That Osama Bin Laden Is Dead." On the May 6 broadcast of Fox News' Fox & Friends, Media Research Center President Brent Bozell claimed that following the raid which killed bin Laden, "you [could] hear the sound of thousands of people in Washington, DC peeling egg off their faces" because "enhanced interrogation techniques -- let's call it what it is. It's waterboarding, you know what, it is because of waterboarding that Osama bin Laden is dead, and everybody knows it." [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 5/6/11]

Experts Dispute Claims That EITs Directly Led To Bin Laden

Former Interrogators And Intelligence Officials: "Torture Did Not Lead The U.S. To Bin Laden."In a May 4 statement, four former interrogators and intelligence officer issued the following statement regarding the use of EITs and the hunt for bin Laden:

Torture Did Not Lead the U.S. to bin Laden, It Almost Certainly Prolonged the Hunt

We are concerned about the suggestion by some that the use of waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques led U.S. forces to Osama bin Laden's compound.

The use of waterboarding and other so-called "enhanced" interrogation techniques almost certainly prolonged the hunt for Bin Laden and complicated the jobs of professional U.S. interrogators who were trying to develop useful information from unwilling sources like Khalid Sheik Muhammed.

Reports say that Khalid Sheik Muhammed and Abu Faraq al-Libi did not divulge the nom de guerre of a courier during torture, but rather several months later, when they were questioned by interrogators who did not use abusive techniques.

This is not surprising. Our experience is that torture is a poor way to develop useful, accurate information.

We know from experience that it is very difficult to elicit information from a detainee who has been abused. The abuse often only strengthens their resolve and makes it that much harder for an interrogator to find a way to elicit useful information.

We believe that the U.S. would have learned more from Khalid Sheik Muhammed and other high value detainees if, from the beginning, professional interrogators had a chance to question them using the sophisticated, yet humane, approaches approved by U.S. law.

We are convinced that the record shows that abusive questioning techniques did not help, but only hindered, the United States' efforts to find bin Laden. [Huffington Post, 5/4/11]

HuffPo: Interrogators And Experts Argue That EITs "May Have Slowed Hunt For Bin Laden, Not Hastened It." In a May 6 Huffington Post article, Senior Washington Correspondent Dan Froomkin cited numerous experts and officials arguing that "bin Laden could have been caught much earlier had those detainees [subjected to EITs] been interrogated properly." From the May 6 article:

Defenders of the Bush administration's interrogation policies have claimed vindication from reports that bin Laden was tracked down in small part due to information received from brutalized detainees some six to eight years ago.

But that sequence of events -- even if true -- doesn't demonstrate the effectiveness of torture, these experts say. Rather, it indicates bin Laden could have been caught much earlier had those detainees been interrogated properly.

"I think that without a doubt, torture and enhanced interrogation techniques slowed down the hunt for bin Laden," said an Air Force interrogator who goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander and located Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, in 2006.

It now appears likely that several detainees had information about a key al Qaeda courier -- information that might have led authorities directly to bin Laden years ago. But subjected to physical and psychological brutality, "they gave us the bare minimum amount of information they could get away with to get the pain to stop, or to mislead us," Alexander told The Huffington Post.

"We know that they didn't give us everything, because they didn't provide the real name, or the location, or somebody else who would know that information," he said.

In a 2006 study by the National Defense Intelligence College, trained interrogators found that traditional, rapport-based interviewing approaches are extremely effective with even the most hardened detainees, whereas coercion consistently builds resistance and resentment.

"Had we handled some of these sources from the beginning, I would like to think that there's a good chance that we would have gotten this information or other information," said Steven Kleinman, a longtime military intelligence officer who has extensively researched, practiced and taught interrogation techniques.

"By making a detainee less likely to provide information, and making the information he does provide harder to evaluate, they hindered what we needed to accomplish," said Glenn L. Carle, a retired CIA officer who oversaw the interrogation of a high-level detainee in 2002. [Huffington Post, 5/6/11]

Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Feinstein: "To The Best Of Our Knowledge," None Of The Intelligence "Came As A Result Of Harsh Interrogation Practices." From a May 3 TPM Muckraker post:

More and more evidence suggests a key piece of intelligence -- the first link in the chain of information that led U.S. intelligence officials to Osama bin Laden -- wasn't tortured out of its source. And, indeed, that torture actually failed to produce it.

"To the best of our knowledge, based on a look, none of it came as a result of harsh interrogation practices," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee in a wide-ranging press conference.

Moreover, Feinstein added, nothing about the sequence of events that culminated in Sunday's raid vindicates the Bush-era techniques, nor their use of black sites -- secret prisons, operated by the CIA.

"Absolutely not, I do not," Feinstein said. "I happen to know a good deal about how those interrogations were conducted, and in my view nothing justifies the kind of procedures that were used." [TPM Muckraker, 5/3/11]

NSC Dismissed Efficacy Of Torture In Developing Intel On Bin Laden. The New York Timesreported:

Glenn L. Carle, a retired C.I.A. officer who oversaw the interrogation of a high-level detainee in 2002, said in a phone interview Tuesday, that coercive techniques "didn't provide useful, meaningful, trustworthy information." He said that while some of his colleagues defended the measures, "everyone was deeply concerned and most felt it was un-American and did not work."

Obama administration officials, intent on celebrating Monday's successful raid, have tried to avoid reigniting a partisan battle over torture.

"The bottom line is this: If we had some kind of smoking-gun intelligence from waterboarding in 2003, we would have taken out Osama bin Laden in 2003," said Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council. "It took years of collection and analysis from many different sources to develop the case that enabled us to identify this compound, and reach a judgment that Bin Laden was likely to be living there." [The New York Times, 5/4/11]

The New Yorker: "This Timeline Doesn't Seem To Provide A Lot Of Support For The Pro-Torture Narrative." From a May 2 post to The New Yorker:

Many key details are still missing. But according to the New York Times, the turning point came when detainees being held in Guantánamo--not in the C.I.A.'s secret black-site prisons--revealed to American interrogators the pseudonym used by a key bin Laden courier, whom they also identified as a protégé of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Then, four years ago, American interrogators were able to learn the real name of the courier. It then took two more years, according to the Times, before American officials were able to piece together the geographic region in which he operated. They didn't succeed in tracking him to the suspicious compound, in which bin Laden resided, until last August.

This timeline doesn't seem to provide a lot of support for the pro-torture narrative. One would think that if so-called "enhanced interrogations" provided the magic silver bullet, and if the courier was a protégé of K.S.M.'s, then the C.I.A. might have wrapped this up back in 2003, while they were waterboarding the 9/11 mastermind a hundred and eighty-three times. Despite these contradictions and complications, the two sides on the torture debate are already off and running. [The New Yorker, 5/2/11]

Deputy National Security Advisor: Integral Intelligence Was Not Obtained By Waterboarding "To My Knowledge." From the May 3 edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe:

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: So we've been talking about the different details and methods that led up to this moment, and obviously there is word out today that waterboarding played a very big role or a role in actually getting the information that was integral in finding Bin Laden. Is that the case?

JOHN BRENNAN: Not to my knowledge. The information that was acquired over the course of nine years or so came from many different sources: human sources, technical sources, as well as information that detainees provided. And it was something that as a result of the painstaking work that the analysts did, they pieced it all together that lead us to the Abbottabad compound last year and resulted in the very successful operation on Sunday. [MSNBC, Morning Joe, 5/3/11]

CIA Director Panetta: Whether Torture Was Needed To Track Bin Laden "Is Always Going To Be An Open Question." From the May 3 edition of NBC Nightly News:

LEON PANETTA: We had a multiple source -- a multiple series of sources -- that provided information with regards to this situation. Clearly, some of it came from detainees and the interrogation of detainees. But we also had information from other sources as well. So, it's a little difficult to say it was due just to one source of information that we got.

BRIAN WILLIAMS: Turned around the other way, are you denying that waterboarding was in part among the tactics used to extract the intelligence that led to this successful mission?

PANETTA: No, I think some of the detainees clearly were, you know, they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of these detainees. But I'm also saying that, you know, the debate about whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always going to be an open question. [NBC, NBC Nightly News, 5/3/11, via RealClearPolitics]

TPM: Attorney General Said "He Didn't Know" If Information Obtained Through Torture Led US To Bin Laden. From a May 3 post on TPM Muckraker:

Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday that he didn't know if any information obtained from detainees undergoing enhanced interrogation techniques lead to the killing of Osama bin Laden.

"There was a mosaic of sources that lead to the identification of the people" who lead to bin Laden, Holder told members of the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. Pressed by Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA) on whether any information used to find bin Laden came out during enhanced interrogation, Holder said he didn't know. [TPM Muckraker, 5/3/11]

Right-Wing Media Have Been Praising EIT Program Since Bin Laden's Death Announced

Right-Wing Media Tout Bin Laden Death As Victory For Torture, Ignore Dispute. Beginning May 2, the day after President Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed in a U.S. military raid, right-wing media jumped to declare victory for former President Bush's EIT program. [Media Matters,5/4/11]