Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Second rate reporter says what?

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Let there be snark.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

“woke” is the new caravan.

The words do not have to be perfect.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

American History and Black History Cannot Be Separated

You are here: Home / Politics / Torture / Convenient

Reader Interactions

36Comments

  1. 1.

    MikeJ

    Is that curveball?

    On edit: To answer my own question, Rafid Ahmed Alwan was curveball. So no.

  2. 2.

    jon

    So, he recants his statements publicly in 2004 and he’s “liquidated” 5 years later? Is that the conspiracy theory? lol

  3. 3.

    Dennis-SGMM

    It’s no wonder that Republicans are freaked about anything that even looks like an investigation of torture. Once they start turning over rocks this will not be the most odious thing they find.
    Cheney’s flurry of on-air appearances, replete with bizarre statements, can now be seen as preparing for an insanity defense.

  6. 6.

    r€nato

    is this one of those deals where the prisoner commits suicide by shooting himself in the head four or five times?

    Probably…

  7. 7.

    Dennis-SGMM

    @jon:
    Did it ever occur to you that the fact there’s now a realistic possibility of investigations and that the CIA Inspector General’s 2004 report on torture is about to be released might be factors? He probably wasn’t offed but it’s awfully coincidental.

  8. 8.

    Rosali

    I’m not a conspiracy theorist but I’ll go ahead and assert one in this case. Cheney’s getting desperate and desperate times call for desperate measures.

  10. 10.

    Dennis-SGMM

    @r€nato:
    He was so remorseful that he shot, stabbed, hanged, drowned and bludgeoned himself then he ran over himself with a car.
    Although it was likely a coincidence, it will be fun seeing the outfit that still mutters darkly about Vince Foster tying itself in knots explaining how there’s nothing to see here.
    The real question to be answered is how the fuck this guy wound up in Libya. Remember Libya? Pan Am Flight 103 and the 270 dead? This is too reminiscent of the Cold War when we’d cozy up to the worst sort of dictators as long as they were anti-communist.

  12. 12.

    Mr. Stuck

    @Dennis-SGMM:

    Did it ever occur to you that the fact there’s now a realistic possibility of investigations and that the CIA Inspector General’s 2004 report on torture is about to be released might be factors?

    From early reports about it’s content, it seems this may well be the reason behind Cheney’s frantic efforts to justify what was done. I read where a dem staffer had seen the thing and called it the “Holy Grail” on the torture issue, that shows conduct way beyond what the Bybee memos authorized. We shall see.

  13. 13.

    LD50

    Great. Either way, now we’ll never know what he knew. Crap.

    Well, some people might have come to know what he knew, but WE never would have.

  14. 14.

    jon

    @John Cole: Fair enough. I retract my characterization of your original post.

    @Dennis-SGMM: What are the odds that any US investigator is going to be allowed to go into a Libyan prison to take a statement from him? Or why would anyone care about him unless he could put Rummy or Cheney(or someone like that) in the room with him when he’s getting tortured? Or why would anyone believe him? I wouldn’t believe this “someone in the US govt had him killed” theory even if he was being held by a friendly government. And if this guy knew anything that could make the US gov look bad, he would have had an “accident” when the CIA had him after he recanted in 2004.

  16. 16.

    jon

    @Mr. Stuck: And there’s already a paper trail in the record about what he claimed about AQ and Iraq(along with his recanting and treatment) that’s been exposed and testified on. Killing him doesn’t “silence” him.

  17. 17.

    Zifnab

    I would think the fact that a key informant in Saddam’s nuclear Al Qaida link is stuck in a Libyan prison for five years would be what raises eyebrows. That he dies in a Libyan prison? Well… no shit. It’s a Libyan prison. It would be a bigger conspiracy in answering why he lasted as long as he did.

  18. 18.

    tim

    Oh for god’s sake…after eight years of hard core, bloodthirsty, Cheney-level insanity, we’re still feeling intimidated against calling suspicious, convenient murders exactly what they appear to be?

    Please. For my money, I ASSUME he was murdered unless something proves otherwise, not vice versa.

  20. 20.

    John Cole

    @tim: I guess I don’t think it is that unusual for someone rotting in a Libyan jail after being tortured for close to a decade to kill himself. I probably would at the first opportunity.

  21. 21.

    asiangrrlMN

    @LD50: Too true, LD50, too true.

    John, yeah, I can see that, too. Sometimes, death may not be the worst option.

  22. 22.

    Mr. Stuck

    @John Cole:

    When you think about it. Why would anyone murder him, at least at the behest of Americans. Unless Cheney himself attached the electrodes to his noodle, we already know what happened. He got rendered to Egypt for torture. though it is interesting that he was asked a question and his answer was a neo-cons delight.

  23. 23.

    Montysano

    Was there some sort of Iraq-Al Qaeda connection? At some level, I’m sure there was. So what? You can’t kill that with a bomb. Hulk Smaaash!1 is still a stupid foreign policy.

    Did anyone else see Countdown tonight, and specifically the report that Al Qaeda isn’t even in Afghanistan anymore? So now we’re chest deep in the graveyard of empires, fighting someone who isn’t there. Wonderful.

  24. 24.

    Fulcanelli

    @Zifnab: Correct. Why is he there, of all places. Why is he still alive. And who wanted him kept alive after he outlived his usefullness.
    Here, we’re just gonna tie this rope with a noose on the end from the ceiling and store this loaded pistol in your cell for safe keeping. Don’t do anything stupid that might embarass us, now.
    After being tortured and kept rotting in a Libyan prison for as long as he was, how the hell could he have the strength to commit suicide? And with what?
    And in other news… We’ve got Cheney out of his coffin parading around on the TeeVee in broad daylight, on Sundays, no less.
    Nope, nothing to see here…

  25. 25.

    Zifnab

    @Fulcanelli: So you’re saying its all one big cover up to keep people from thinking that Cheney is a Vampire. That explains so much.

  26. 26.

    AnneLaurie

    I guess I don’t think it is that unusual for someone rotting in a Libyan jail after being tortured for close to a decade to kill himself. I probably would at the first opportunity.

    That’s the Hall of Mirrors problem: Because “we”, meaning Dick Cheney’s minions in and out of the CIA, tortured the poor bastid until he was willing to confess to whatever crimes necessary to gin up “our” war with Iraq, we will never know whether he actually committed suicide. Or why the means for him to do so were suddenly available five years after his “confession” was discredited, and five days before the ugly details of its coercion are supposed to be made public. Or which low-to-medium-level minion of the Libyan government or the CIA might have decided that leaving a gun or a rope or a bottle of pills in al-Libi’s cell would be… convenient.

    The one thing we *can* be sure of, as Agent #99 said in the first BradBlog comment, is that…

    Even if he killed himself, or died of a heart attack or burst aneurysm, however he died, it was still murder.

    And in a just world, Cheney would be in the dock for al-Libi’s murder.

  27. 27.

    Ohmmade

    @Mr Stuck: “Why would anyone murder him, at least at the behest of Americans. “

    Why do they have him in the first place unless there was collusion between the US and the Lybian gov?

    I’m not saying there’s definitely a conspiracy, but whenever the name “Cheney” is mentioned, it’s a well-deserved natural reflex to make sure the tin-foil hats are within reach. :)

  28. 28.

    Mary

    Well, people were starting to ask “Where’s Al-Libi?” No one knew where he was. He was disappeared. If I had to guess, I would say he probably died a long time ago and this is just a cover story.

    Now they’re saying Bin Laden is dead too. Also convenient.

  29. 29.

    OriGuy

    The real question to be answered is how the fuck this guy wound up in Libya.

    Cause he was Libyan? That’s what the al-Libi means.
    His Wikipedia entry makes interesting reading:

    In November 2006, a Moroccan using the pseudonym Omar Nasiri, having infiltrated al-Qaeda in the 1990s, authored the book, Inside the Jihad: My Life with al Qaeda, a Spy’s story. In the book, Nasiri claims that al-Libi deliberately planted information to encourage the U.S. to invade Iraq. In an interview with BBC2’s Newsnight, Nasiri said Libi “needed the conflict in Iraq because months before I heard him telling us when a question was asked in the mosque after the prayer in the evening, where is the best country to fight the jihad?” Libi said Iraq was chosen because it was the “weakest” Muslim country, according to Nasiri. Nasiri suggested to Newsnight that al-Libi wanted to overthrow Saddam and use Iraq as a jihadist base. In the book, Nasiri describes al-Libi as one of the leaders at the Afghan camp, and characterizes him as “brilliant in every way.” Nasiri explains that learning how to withstand interrogations and supply false information once captured was a key part of the training in the camps. Nasiri claims that al-Libi “knew what his interrogators wanted, and he was happy to give it to them. He wanted to see Saddam toppled even more than the Americans did.

  30. 30.

    scarshapedstar

    I don’t think he was “liquidated” or “silenced” or whatever.

    That is a level to which John will not stoop!

    Luckily, I am not so restrained. I bet five bucks that evidence of his murder will surface by May 2013.

    Nobody ever went broke underestimating the stupidity of the American people the depths of the abyss that our imperial fantasies have dragged us into.

  31. 31.

    gil mann

    Was there some sort of Iraq-Al Qaeda connection? At some level, I’m sure there was. So what?

    Yeah, here’s the connection: Iraq was under a secular dictatorship, Al-Qaeda wanted secular dictatorships overthrown.

    We helped them over there so we don’t have to fight them here, I guess.

  32. 32.

    The Moar You Know

    And before I get 500 people claiming I am asserting there is a conspiracy, no, I don’t think he was “liquidated” or “silenced” or whatever.

    Fine. I’ll do it for you.

  33. 33.

    DBrown

    Sullivan had this informative bit about the man’s death:

    We still have memos and a bureaucratic paper trail. But we don’t have the tapes of those torture sessions which were destroyed – yes this is a Hollywood movie – by the CIA. And as for al-Libi, a man who could also flesh out the details of his torture and what Cheney forced him to say … well, for a long time, he simply went missing:

    “I would speculate that he was missing because he was such an embarrassment to the Bush administration,” said Tom Malinowski, the head of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch. “He was Exhibit A in the narrative that tortured confessions contributed to the massive intelligence failure that preceded the Iraq war.”

    Yesterday, he was found dead in a Libyan jail, an apparent “suicide”.

    You still think his daeth was just ‘Convenient’?

  34. 34.

    binzinerator

    @tim:


    Oh for god’s sake…after eight years of hard core, bloodthirsty, Cheney-level insanity, we’re still feeling intimidated against calling suspicious, convenient murders exactly what they appear to be?
    Please. For my money, I ASSUME he was murdered unless something proves otherwise, not vice versa.

    This, exactly. After 8 years of organized crime behavior (John you even got a category called “Repub Crime Syndicate – aka the Bush Admin”.) and someone who is a link in the whole torture/war pretext/Iraq conspiracy ends up dead and somehow we’re supposed to assume it has nothing to do with anything at all?

    For Fucks Sake John the guys who have the most risk if this guy testifies are with the same guys who destroyed all those videotapes of the torture sessions.

    You know, they didn’t exactly have to smother him with his own pillow. All they had to do was break him and isolate him to the point of suicidal behavior and then leave him unattended.

    In fact this is what the Bush criminals excel at — crimes that can be excused as incompetence or negligence. “Gosh, who woulda thunk this guy, after being tortured and mentally broken and driven to the edge, would commit suicide?”

    His death is way too fucking convenient.

  35. 35.

    scarshapedstar

    For Fucks Sake John the guys who have the most risk if this guy testifies are with the same guys who destroyed all those videotapes of the torture sessions.

    Nameless, faceless spies who already act like the Mafia would never dare to actually kill anyone, aside from the 98 motherfuckers they already did kill.

  36. 36.

    binzinerator

    @scarshapedstar:

    Nameless, faceless spies who already act like the Mafia would never dare to actually kill anyone, aside from the 98 motherfuckers they already did kill.

    Exactly.

    If this guy had been a victim of the mob and was now a witness where he could finger said mob for committing dozens of horrific crimes AND it was known that this same mob was behind multiple murders resulting from the crimes the guy was going to squeal about AND that this mob is known to have connections to powerful people in the very same organizations that are holding this guy …. THEN why is it so damn hard to say the guy’s death is suspicious?

    Suspicion would be a fucking no-brainer if this were the Gambino mob.

Comments are closed.