CIA historian: “The debate’s over, Torture stained the honor of the United States.”

By GottaLaff

Former BushCo employee Marc Thiessen has been publicly ripping President Obama's national security/terrorism policies, and builds a verbal shrine to those of the Bush crime family.

Watch the video of Thiessen get a royal smackdown by Lawrence O'Donnell here. Then watch it again, because it's that good.

Now read about another evisceration of Thiessen, this time by a Pulitzer Prize-winning CIA historian:

“It was not the most successful intelligence program in the history of the CIA by a long shot,” he emails. Weiner added that by the long view of the CIA’s history, there is no more debate.

“The debate’s over,” he said. “Torture stained the honor of the United States.”

Weiner also strongly contested the notion that Obama’s approach represents a dialing back to a pre-9/11 mentality. “The Obama administration has some pretty robust programs going on, killing suspects all over Afghanistan and Pakistan with armed drones,” he said.

Weiner also contested another Thiessen chesnut: That the Obama administration is killing too many terrorists, rather than subjecting more of them to enhanced interrogation. Weiner dismissed Thiessen’s case as tantamount to arguing that targeting terrorists abroad “more closely resembles treason than counterterrorism.”

Treason indeed.

Of course, Dickless McHeartStent needs to sell his future book, so he'll join Thiessen's irrational, drool-stained love affair with torture, and continue to sputter and stammer about his man crush on waterboarders and how he and his band of thugs saved America. ... after they allowed 9/11 to happen.

Gradually, we will eradicate the toxic Bush stain.

Official Army History: BushCo Neglected Afghan War, Diverted Resources to Iraq

By GottaLaff

Global Research, January 1, 2010

Heh. As if we needed more proof:

Contradicting Rove and Rumsfeld, the historians blame the Iraq war for the lack of resources in Afghanistan, as well as top Bush officials and the president himself:

The historians say resistance to providing more robust resources to Afghanistan had three sources in the White House and the Pentagon.

First, President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had criticized using the military for peacekeeping and reconstruction in the Balkans during the 1990s. As a result, “nation building” carried a derogatory connotation for many senior military officials, even though American forces were being asked to fill gaping voids in the Afghan government after the Taliban’s fall. [...]

Third, the invasion of Iraq was siphoning away resources. After the invasion started in March 2003, the history says, the United States clearly “had a very limited ability to increase its forces” in Afghanistan.

The historians also note that, as was the case in Iraq, Bush officials had neglected to properly plan for what to do after the government fell.

Think Progress has a whole lot more, but that's the gist of it.

Please see my last post for commentary. It would be redundant to post it all again. I will add that this just compounds BushCo's problems and um, "complicates" their legacy.

Then again, BushCo would find a way to diminish and demean the conclusions of even the most credible sources. The one thing they excelled at was ignoring vital information and plowing ahead with whatever nefarious plans they were hatching. Nothing has changed in that respect.

How historians judge Bush: He's in the Top 10 of America’s worst presidents

By GottaLaff

Georgie Bush told us all that we should wait to see how historians will judge him. Why? Because they would look back on him kindly, that's why. Boy howdy, was Bushie Boy extra crispy wrong!

Today, C-SPAN released its second Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership, in which “65 presidential historians ranked the 42 former occupants of the White House on ten attributes of leadership.” Coming in first was Abraham Lincoln, followed by George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, and Harry Truman. Finishing last was James Buchanan. George W. Bush came in 36th, just beating out Millard Fillmore, who ranked 37th:

Color me pessimistic, but I'm thinkin' things won't look any better to historians in 10, 20, or 50 years.

Oh, and Joe Lieberman was wrong, too. Shocking, huh?

Historians: John Sidney McCain doesn't stand a chance

By GottaLaff

Poor John Sidney McWannaBe. From an historian's p.o.v., he's a loser. Come to think of it, from any p.o.v., he's a loser. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure it's intentional, part of his brilliant plan, playing the role of underdog. Or maybe he's delusional, perversely believing that failure has its own peculiar sort of allure or mystique. Or maybe he's just a loser:

One week into the general election, the polls show a dead heat. But many presidential scholars doubt that John McCain stands much of a chance, if any.

Historians belonging to both parties offered a litany of historical comparisons that give little hope to the Republican. Several saw Barack Obama’s prospects as the most promising for a Democrat since Roosevelt trounced Hoover in 1932.

It's obvious to J Sid that as long as he, with all that experiency, wisdomy knowhow, keeps on advocating perpetual imprisonment for low-level grunts, pushing tax cuts for rich, poolside investors, and slinging the C-word around, he'll attract voters the way BushCo attracts flies. Which, you see, is why he won't win.

Allan Lichtman, an American University presidential historian, whose forecasting model has correctly predicted the last six presidential popular vote winners:

“This should be an overwhelming Democratic victory [...] Republicans face what have always been insurmountable historical odds.” His system gives McCain a score on par with Jimmy Carter’s in 1980.

Presidential historian Joan Hoff, a professor at Montana State University and former president of the Center for the Study of the Presidency:

“McCain shouldn’t win it.” [...] She compared McCain’s prospects to those of Hubert Humphrey, whose 1968 loss to Richard Nixon resulted in large part from the unpopularity of sitting Democratic president Lyndon Johnson.

Alan Abramowitz, a professor of public opinion and the presidency at Emory University:

“It is one of the worst political environments for the party in power since World War II... It would be a pretty stunning upset if McCain won.”

What could be savvier than embracing the policies and intractability of the worst president in history:

But the biggest obstacle in McCain’s path may be running in the same party as the most unpopular president America has had since at least the advent of modern polling. Only Harry Truman and Nixon — both of whom were dogged by unpopular wars abroad and political scandals at home — have been nearly as unpopular in their last year in office, and both men’s parties lost the presidency in the following election.

Sidney Milkis, a professor of presidential politics at the University of Virginia:

“I can’t think of an upset where the underdog faced quite the odds that McCain faces in this election... Truman didn’t face as difficult a political context as McCain.”

Aw, don't give up, J Sid. Keep trying, because:

(click on graphic to enlarge)