George Clooney explains why Sony caving into North Korean hackers is a big deal for all of us.

Courtesy of Deadline:  

DEADLINE: How could this have happened, that terrorists achieved their aim of cancelling a major studio film? We watched it unfold, but how many people realized that Sony legitimately was under attack? 

GEORGE CLOONEY: A good portion of the press abdicated its real duty. They played the fiddle while Rome burned. There was a real story going on. With just a little bit of work, you could have found out that it wasn’t just probably North Korea; it was North Korea. The Guardians Of Peace is a phrase that Nixon used when he visited China. When asked why he was helping South Korea, he said it was because we are the Guardians of Peace. Here, we’re talking about an actual country deciding what content we’re going to have. This affects not just movies, this affects every part of business that we have. That’s the truth. What happens if a newsroom decides to go with a story, and a country or an individual or corporation decides they don’t like it? Forget the hacking part of it. You have someone threaten to blow up buildings, and all of a sudden everybody has to bow down. Sony didn’t pull the movie because they were scared; they pulled the movie because all the theaters said they were not going to run it. And they said they were not going to run it because they talked to their lawyers and those lawyers said if somebody dies in one of these, then you’re going to be responsible. 

We have a new paradigm, a new reality, and we’re going to have to come to real terms with it all the way down the line. This was a dumb comedy that was about to come out. With the First Amendment, you’re never protecting Jefferson; it’s usually protecting some guy who’s burning a flag or doing something stupid. This is a silly comedy, but the truth is, what it now says about us is a whole lot. We have a responsibility to stand up against this. That’s not just Sony, but all of us, including my good friends in the press who have the responsibility to be asking themselves: What was important? What was the important story to be covering here? The hacking is terrible because of the damage they did to all those people. Their medical records, that is a horrible thing, their Social Security numbers. Then, to turn around and threaten to blow people up and kill people, and just by that threat alone we change what we do for a living, that’s the actual definition of terrorism.

Clooney goes on to say that he sent a petition to all the heads of major studios, asserting that they would stand with Sony against the hackers, and none of them would sign it. 

Of course Clooney is dead right here, and I don't think that we have yet to understand just what has happened and how it will shape how this country deals with cyber attacks in the future.

The other day a lot of people seemed to suggest that the producers of "The Interview" should have known better, and that they brought this on themselves.

Those people completely miss the point.

The horror that is the CIA torture report.

I have been listening to reporting on this all morning, from essentially every cable news outlet, and I have to say that I think I am going to have some trouble sleeping tonight.

I knew some of this, but to have it all laid out like this...well it's like being punched in the stomach.

Here are the most horrific revelations according to TPM:

Torture didn't work, though the CIA told everyone it did.

I knew this, but still........

The CIA used brutal and gruesome methods like 'rectal feeding' and 'rectal hydration' 

Coercive interrogation methods included waterboarding, sleep deprivation for up to 180 hours, nudity, slaps, slamming detainees against a wall. At least three detainees were threatened with harm to their families, including the threat of raping a detainee's mother. And it gets worse. 

"At least five CIA detainees were subjected to 'rectal rehydration' or rectal feeding without documented medical necessity," the report reads, documenting in gruesome detail one such example involving detainee Majid Khan. 

The CIA once used harsh interrogation tactics on two of its own informants.

Seriously?

The CIA was extremely secretive and fought congressional oversight.

This part should not surprise anybody.

Potential congressional oversight scared the CIA into destroying its interrogation tapes. 

In late 2005, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) proposed an independent commission to investigate U.S. interrogation policies, which prompted interest within the CIA in destroying videotapes of its interrogations. Although Levin's amendment failed on Nov. 8 of that year and the committee was not yet aware that the tapes existed, the CIA went ahead and destroyed them one day later anyway.

Yeah they clearly broke the law here. Gee I wonder if anybody will be punished for it?

The LA Times has more:  

One detainee in CIA custody was “chained to a wall in the standing position for 17 days” and another looked like “a dog who had been kenneled,” according to a CIA description cited in the report. 

Some detainees were kept awake for nearly 180 hours, “usually standing or in stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their heads.” Some were placed in ice water baths. 

At least five captives were subjected to painful rectal rehydration or rectal feeding, without documented medical necessity. In one case, the CIA put a captive’s lunch — hummus, raisins, pasta and nuts — into a blender and inserted the food into his colon through a tube. 

The CIA applied its methods “in near nonstop fashion for days or weeks at a time,” the document states. If you torture someone long enough, they'll confess to being Santa Claus. All people eventually break under torture, and the victims will do whatever the interrogators want in order to end the pain. 

Some of the agency officers responsible had “documented personal and professional problems of a serious nature — including histories of violence and abusive treatment of others — that should have called into question their employment,” let alone their suitability to run a sensitive CIA program, the report states. 

The most gruesome conditions described occurred at a site in a former brick factory north of Kabul, Afghanistan, that was used by the CIA for interrogations starting in November 2002. 

In the facility, referred to as “COBALT” in the Senate report but code-named Salt Pit by the CIA, conditions were so dungeon-like that interrogators wore headlamps to navigate pitch-dark passageways. 

“At times, detainees there were walked around naked and shackled with their hands above their head,” the report states. “At other times, naked detainees were hooded and dragged up and down corridors while being slapped and punched.” 

An Afghan militant named Gul Rahman died in the Salt Pit of suspected hypothermia in November 2002 after he was beaten, stripped naked from the waist down and left chained to a concrete floor in near-freezing temperatures.

This thing reads like a Stephen King horror novel. 

Make no mistake we did this. This is us.

Perhaps we were not the ones slapping the detainees, depriving them of sleep, or leaving them to die in the cold, but this is now how America is defined. And we are, after all, Americans. 

We can shrug off the blame and claim we did not know what was going on, but we knew for quite some time that the US was using "enhanced interrogation techniques," what exactly did we think those were?

And though some of us spoke out back then we simply did not yell loudly enough, and others simply pretended that we were justified in doing ANYTHING so long as it made us safe at home.

Well it didn't. If anything it prolonged the risk, and has done much to help create terrorist groups that will continue to frighten the American people for many, many years to come.

Simply put the Bush Administration is an organized crime syndicate, who broke multiple laws, sent thousands to an early grave based on lies, and destroyed the very fabric of what makes us America by doing to these suspected terrorists what we have condemned others for doing for decades.

If this is not enough to keep Americans from electing another Bush in 2016, or ever again for that matter, I cannot imagine what will.

By the way as to the idea that the release of this report will inspire attacks against Americans, there was one analyst today who said "We are currently actively bombing ISIS. They already have plenty of reasons to want to attack us. It is unlikely that the release of this report will give them any more."

Today is the day that they are releasing the CIA torture report. About damn time!

Courtesy of USA Today: 

"There are some indications that the release of the report could lead to a greater risk that is posed to U.S. facilities and individuals all around the world," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Monday. "So the administration has taken the prudent steps to ensure that the proper security precautions are in place at U.S. facilities around the globe." 

The report's release by the Senate Intelligence Committee sparked a fierce debate in Congress. 

Some lawmakers said it's important for the report to be released so the U.S. government will never again use torture as a method of interrogation. Others said it will inflame extremist groups in the Middle East and elsewhere and threaten the lives of U.S. diplomats, military members and other Americans overseas. 

The Intelligence Committee is expected to release Tuesday a 500-page summary of a 6,200-page report on the the CIA's use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, humiliation and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" against al-Qaeda prisoners during the George W. Bush administration. 

While the revelations of torture are not new, the report will detail the broad scope of the controversial practices, which took place at secret detention centers in the Middle East and Asia. It also will allege that the CIA tried to hide what they were doing from Congress and the White House. Perhaps most controversial of all, it will conclude that the CIA's tactics failed to gather any useful information to save American lives. 

"The president believes that, on principle, it's important to release that report, so that people around the world and people here at home understand exactly what transpired," Earnest said. He added that "something like this should never happen again."

There are of course dire warnings that the release of this report will result in attacks on American soldiers overseas, of course many of those are coming from folks who are about to look really bad when this thing comes out, but in the end I think it is important that Americans come to terms with what we did.

We mistreated people for no other reason than somebody somewhere did not like them and told the CIA that they were a terrorists. Based on such slim evidence we captured and tortured some of these people for many years.

These techniques created far more terrorists than we have ever captured or killed, and it has inspired the formation of groups like ISIS which are now terrorizing people all over the Middle East. 

And because we were afraid we turned a blind eye to what was being done in the name of protecting the homeland.

Which by the ways sounds uncomfortably like something that was said in Nazi Germany in the 1940's.

New report finds that yes religion is the source of most of today's terrorism.

Courtesy of the Guardian: 

Religious extremism has become the main driver of terrorism in recent years, according to this year’s Global Terrorism Index. 

The report recorded 18,000 deaths in 2013, a rise of 60% on the previous year. The majority (66%) of these were attributable to just four groups: Islamic State (Isis) in Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Taliban in Afghanistan and al-Qaida. 

Overall there has been a fivefold increase in deaths from terrorism since the 9/11 suicide attacks. 

The report’s authors attribute the majority of incidents over the past few years to groups with a religious agenda. 

Before 2000, it was nationalist separatist terrorist organisations such as the IRA and Chechen rebels who were behind the most attacks. The number of incidents from nationalist separatist groups has remained relatively stable in the years since while religious extremism has grown. 

The prevalence of Islamist groups in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria is the main driver behind these trends. 

This report is interesting because it flies in the face of  arguments given by Islamic apologists, like Reza Aslan, who argue that religion is NOT the trigger for extremist views or violence.

And in fact making this connection was what got Bill Maher into so much trouble recently.

However I would be quick to mention that just because it seems that Islam is the religion of choice for most terrorists today, there is still plenty of terrorism in the name of Christ as well.

And it could be argued that in the not too distant past Christian terrorism terrorized communities around the world for many hundreds of years before it was brought under some semblance of control by more civilized minds.

As Steven Weinberg once said, "Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

Michele Bachmann gets her own security detail after ISIS issues threats. Oh you know she LOVES this!

"Oh yeah those ISIS folks are trying to shut me up don'tcha know. Not very Christian of them."

Courtesy of Politico: 

Federal law enforcement officials are taking an ISIL threat against Michele Bachmann so seriously that Capitol Police have given the Minnesota Republican her own security detail. 

An online threat against Bachmann emerged recently, according to multiple law enforcement officials familiar with the situation. Last week, Bachmann was provided a security detail in response, according to the sources. 

Members of the U.S. Capitol Police’s Dignitary Protection Division were briefed on the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The police security will continue until Bachmann, who will retire at the end of this Congress, is no longer in office. 

A police detail of this type typically means 24-hour protection when a member of Congress is on Capitol Hill or back in the home district.

I think Bachmann might want to take note of the fact that her security detail only lasts until she is out of office. Might want to STFU around then.

Apparently Bachmann, who has been going after ISIS like a dog with a bone, had a portion of her Voters Values speech featured in a recent ISIS propaganda video.

Personally I doubt if Bachmann is in any real danger, though I can certainly understand the terrorist group's desire to make her stop talking.

I imagine with this new credibility Bachmann is a shoo-in for a hosting position on Fox News. So we all have THAT to look forward to.

Would it be wrong for me to root for the bad guys just this once? It would right?