Think Progress
Monday, July 28, 2008

Last night (Friday) on PBS, Bill Moyers interviewed investigative journalist Jane Mayer and mentioned that in Mayer’s new book, she notes that FBI agents refused to participate in the CIA’s interrogation of terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay because they determined it to be “borderline torture.” Moyers then asked, “Who were some of the other conservative heroes, as you call them, in your book?”

Mayer remembered one top Justice Department lawyer and “very conservative member of this administration” who said that after participating in White House meetings authorizing torture, he believed that “lunatics had taken over the country.”

Mayer said two other top DOJ lawyers had to develop a system of speaking codes because they feared they were being wiretapped while others described an “atmosphere of intimidation,” mainly from Vice President Dick Cheney:

MAYER: There was such an atmosphere of intimidation. … They felt so endangered in some ways that, at one point, two of the top lawyers from the Justice Department developed this system of talking in codes to each other because they thought they might be being wiretapped…by their own government. They felt like they might be kind of weirdly in physical danger. They were actually scared to stand up to Vice President Cheney.

Watch it:

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Mayer later said that “there is a paper trail” documenting U.S. torture policies “that goes right to the top of our govenment” and that Congress “is beginning to” get to the truth and “piece it together.”

Mayer added that the truth to the White House policies is “a humungous jigsaw puzzle” because “there are many, many secrets we still don’t know. There are legal memos that nobody’s ever seen.”
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Buy Jane Mayer’s Book – The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals

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Liberty Papers
Saturday January 5, 2007

Bill Moyers has published an interesting interview with Ron Paul on his website.

He makes many good points. He calls for less government regulation of media, even in the face of Fox News’ refusal to include him in the upcoming debates. He talks about the need to raise a new generation that believes in self reliance rather than waiting for someone to give them hand-outs.I found two passages to be very meaningful. On the ideological differences between the mainstream candidates vying for both the Democratic and Republican nominations, here’s what he had to say:

… when you get up on the leadership ladder, it seems like policies aren’t a whole lot different.

Foreign policy never changed. Domestic fiscal policy, the welfare entitlement system never changes. Monetary policy won’t even be discussed. And that’s both parties. And the vehicle that you use I think is not as relevant as the message. And that has been what has driven me is the fact that we need to change course in this country. I highly respect the Constitution. But I’m not even overly rigid about the Constitution. There’s a vehicle for changing it. I just I’m not overly rigid don’t ignore it. Don’t go to war without declaring it. And you know, you listen to the Fourth Amendment. Listen to what it says about the privacy rights of the American people.

On foreign policy he makes the point that all too often is missed by his supporters and detractors. Regardless of the needfulness of the wars, we cannot afford them. Sooner or later we won’t be able to afford these adventures, and rather than having some measure of control of how these wars wind down, the wars will end disastrously for the U.S. government and to the citizens and residents of the country.

If you go by years, it was our worst year. We lost 900 men in Iraq, over 100 in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is blowing up. It’s coming unraveled. We’re involved in two countries they are trying to nation build. At the same time, it looks like we’ll be in Pakistan. So, this whole idea that there’s some type of victory going on over there, and it’s a disaster.

And they would like us to not talk about it anymore. But we cannot hide from it, because it’s tied into the finances. All great countries end when they extend themselves too far overseas. And the litmus test is what do they do to their currency? We did not have to fight the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union [collapsed] because of economic reasons. That is what’s going to happen here. We willfully invaded. You know how many weapons we have. We have more weapons, probably twice as many as everybody else put together. Nobody would dare touch us. And yet everybody’s frightened. “Oh, who’s going to attack us? And who’s going to deliver us?” But it’s the financial thing that will finally bring us to our knees.

In the end Ron Paul is accomplishing a very important task. Even if he is unsuccessful at forcing a brokered convention, his candidacy has inoculated a significant part of the U.S. electorate against making the same mistake our grandparents made in the late 1920’s and 1930’s when they embraced the fascism of Hoover and FDR, plunging the U.S. into a depression that lasted well into 1947.