Tag: Carl Levin

The Manchurian Handbook.

“The military trainers who came to Guantanamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of ‘coercive management techniques’ for possible use on prisoners, including ‘sleep deprivation,’ ‘prolonged constraint,’ and ‘exposure.’ What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners…The only change made in the chart presented at Guantanamo was to drop its original title: ‘Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.‘”

How low have we sunk under Dubya? Apparently, under this administration, we’ve actually been plagiarizing Maoist torture techniques for use in the Gitmo gulag. “‘What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,’ Levin said. ‘People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.’”

Like a Junkie to the Needle.

“‘Both parties talk a good game on cutting earmarks, but at first opportunity, the House larded up,’ said Stephen Ellis, vice president of the watchdog group. ‘This is just another broken promise.’” With another big defense bill imminent, congressional earmarks are sadly back in vogue. “In the Senate, Lieberman led the way with his participation in 14 requests worth more than $292 million, some of them involving more than one lawmaker, the watchdog group data show. Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) made 48 requests, many with colleagues, worth more than $198 million. Sens. Jeff Sessions (Ala.) and Elizabeth Dole (N.C.) led Republicans by participating in requests totaling $188 million and $182 million, respectively.”

Feeling the Walter-weight.

In a story unfolding last week that I’m behind on posting on, Dubya goes the bipartisan commission route to try to take the sting out of the brewing scandal over mismanagement at Walter Reed (and other military hospitals) that has already resulted in two firings and some contentious congressional hearings. “Good leadership should have taken these steps long ago, without prompting by a series of embarrassing news articles,’ said Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), the committee’s chairman[.]”

Gates of Fire.

“‘What we heard this morning was a welcome breath of honest, candid realism about the situation in Iraq,’ Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) said during a midday break.” The Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously approved Robert Gates, who helped his case considerably by admitting the obvious fact that Iraq’s looking ugly, as Rumsfeld’s replacement at the Pentagon yesterday. Among those impressed with Gates was Slate‘s Fred Kaplan: “I’ve been watching defense secretaries in confirmation hearings for 30 years, off and on, but I don’t think I’ve seen any perform more forthrightly than Gates did this morning.” Update: Gates goes through, 95-2.

Al Liars.

“‘Saddam only expressed negative sentiments about bin Laden,’ the former Iraqi foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, told the Federal Bureau of Investigation when he was asked about Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda’s leader…’He specified that if he wanted to cooperate with the enemies of the U.S., he would have allied with North Korea or China,’ says a passage in the nearly 400-page report.” A new Senate intelligence report confirms what has become patently obvious: There was no link between Iraq and Al Qaeda before the war. “Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., a member of the committee, said the long-awaited report was ‘a devastating indictment of the Bush-Cheney administration’s unrelenting, misleading and deceptive attempts’ to link Saddam to al-Qaida.”

The Sheltering Sky.

“‘The universe of offshore tax cheating has become so large that no one, not even the United States government, could go after all of it.” A new Senate report delves into offshore tax shelter schemes by extremely wealthy individuals, ones which cost the American public billions in federal tax revenues (and which often utilized fronts based in the Isle of Man, once the long-time home of my now-deceased English grandparents.) “‘We need to significantly strengthen the aiding and abetting statutes to get at the lawyers and accountants and other advisers who enable this cheating,’ Senator Levin said, adding that ‘we need major changes in law to stop the use of tax havens’ by tax cheats.”

Cooking Rice.

“‘I really don’t like being lied to, repeatedly, flagrantly,’ Mr. Dayton said.” In a display of dissent that bodes well for the Dems’ outlook in the coming term, several Senate Dems — most notably Ted Kennedy, Mark Dayton, Carl Levin, Evan Bayh, Robert Byrd, and Barbara Boxer — use the Condi hearings to call out the administration on Iraq. (Newcomer Ken Salazar and Joe Lieberman, on the other hand, rolled over immediately.) Update: She’s through, but not before racking up the most No votes (13) in 180 years (since the “Corrupt Bargain” backlash against Henry Clay in 1825.)

At long last.

Dubya may have tied up the release of the Reagan papers indefinitely (hmm, whatever for?), but at least one branch of government has the courage to air their dirty laundry. Senators Susan Collins and Carl Levin announce the release of the McCarthy hearing transcripts (available here.) There’s probably a number of good dissertation topics in there…