End of discussion.

I’ve been travelling, late to the Tiller story. Salon’s got a lot.

Transcript via Crooks and Liars (I’m posting from the road and can’t get a link to work for some reason, but there’s one over to your left.)

MacCallum: Where do you think those people should go?

Gen. Petraeus: Well, it’s not for a soldier to say. What I do support is what has been termed the responsible closure of Gitmo. Gitmo has caused us problems, there’s no question about it. I oversee a region in which the existence of Gitmo has been used by the enemy against us. We have not been without missteps or mistakes in our activity since 9/11 and again Gitmo is a lingering reminder for the use of some in that regard.

MacCallum: What about the concern that a Khalid Sheikh Muhammad or anybody of that ilk might be tried here in a US court and the possibility that some of the treatments that were used on them that they could go free.

Gen. Petraeus: Well, first of all, I don’t think we should be afraid of our values we’re fighting for, what we stand for. And so indeed we need to embrace them and we need to operationalize them in how we carry out what it is we’re doing on the battlefield and everywhere else. So one has to have some faith, I think, in the legal system. One has to have a degree of confidence that individuals that have conducted such extremist activity would indeed be found guilty in our courts of law.

MacCallum: So you’re confident that they will never go free.

Gen. Petraeus: I hope that’s the case.

MacCallum: (Ticking time bomb scenario)

Gen. Petraeus: ….T here might be an exception and that would require extraordinary but very rapid approval to deal with, but for the vast majority of the cases, our experience downrange if you will, is that the techniques that are in the Army Field Manual that lays out how we treat detainees, how we interrogate them — those techniques work, that’s our experience in this business.

MacCallum: So is sending this signal that we’re not going to use these kind of techniques anymore, what kind of impact does this have on people who do us harm in the field that you operate in?

Gen. Petraeus: Well, actually what I would ask is, does that not take away from our enemies a tool which again have beaten us around the head and shoulders in the court of public opinion? When we have taken steps that have violated the Geneva Conventions, we rightly have been criticized, so as we move forward I think it’s important to again live our values, to live the agreements that we have made in the international justice arena and to practice those.

Bill Clinton on George W. Bush, New York Times, May 28, 2009:

Clinton’s relationship with the younger Bush evolved over the years…Clinton and George W. Bush agreed to appear onstage together in Toronto on May 29 for a 90-minute discussion of current events.

“You know, I’m a Baptist,” Clinton explained. “We don’t give up on anybody. We believe in deathbed conversions.”

Bill Clinton on Saddam Hussein, New York Times, January 14, 1993:

Mr. Clinton made clear that he certainly did not view Mr. Hussein as the ideal ruler of Iraq, but that he also did not see him as a irredeemable foe of the United States, who had to be destroyed no matter what…

“I always tell everybody I am a Baptist. I believe in death-bed conversions.”

As someone who has picked meticulously through Colin Powell’s lies during his UN address, and is also familiar with the grim history of his climb to power, I didn’t think Powell had any tricks left in his Giant Bag of Sleaze that would surprise me.

Oh, how wrong I was!

Check out this amazing exchange yesterday between Sam Husseini and Powell. As you’ll see, Powell denies knowing anything whatsoever about the torture of Ibn al-Libi, which elicited one of Powell’s claims in his UN address about connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and thus has generated screaming international headlines for several years:

Sam Husseini: General, can you talk about the al-Libi case and the link between torture and the production of tortured evidence for war?

Colin Powell: I don’t have any details on the al-Libi case.

SH: Can you tell us when you learned that some of the evidence that you used in front of the UN was based on torture? When did you learn that?

CP: I don’t know that. I don’t know what information you’re referring to. So I can’t answer.

SH: Your chief of staff, Wilkerson, has written about this.

CP: So what? [inaudible]

SH: So you’d think you’d know about it.

CP: The information I presented to the UN was vetted by the CIA. Every word came from the CIA and they stood behind all that information. I don’t know that any of them believe that torture was involved. I don’t know that in fact. A lot of speculation, particularly by people who never attended any of these meetings, but I’m not aware of it.

It’s a veritable 9th Symphony of Lies. Colin Powell, I will never underestimate you and your scumminess again.

ALSO: Powell has used the “you have to understand, I’m an incredibly incurious moron” defense before, although not with such panache.

AND: Here’s what Powell said referencing al-Libi in his UN presentation:

I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to al Qaeda.

Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story. I will relate it to you now as he, himself, described it.

This senior al Qaeda terrorist was responsible for one of al Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan.

His information comes firsthand from his personal involvement at senior levels of al Qaeda. He says bin Laden and his top deputy in Afghanistan, deceased al Qaeda leader Mohammed Atef, did not believe that al Qaeda labs in Afghanistan were capable enough to manufacture these chemical or biological agents. They needed to go somewhere else. They had to look outside of Afghanistan for help. Where did they go? Where did they look? They went to Iraq.

The support that (inaudible) describes included Iraq offering chemical or biological weapons training for two al Qaeda associates beginning in December 2000. He says that a militant known as Abu Abdula Al-Iraqi (ph) had been sent to Iraq several times between 1997 and 2000 for help in acquiring poisons and gases. Abdula Al-Iraqi (ph) characterized the relationship he forged with Iraqi officials as successful.

Words fail me.

It is, in fairness, charity, and for a good cause. But still.

Via Bors.

The new cartoon brought in an expected range of responses: I’m being too hard on Obama, not hard enough on Obama, Obama is a fascist, it’s too soon to criticize Obama, etc., etc. Personally, I tend to agree with Roy:

Most of us, however, were voting for someone who would deliver us from the imbeciles who had been mismanaging the country for eight years. We got that, along with some idiocy, both fresh and vintage. ‘Twas ever thus. Reintroducing sanity to our governance was always going to be an uphill climb.

We voted for a centrist technocrat, who campaigned as a centrist technocrat, and who promised to govern as a centrist technocrat — and now the true believers are shocked to find a centrist technocrat in the Oval Office. (And the right wing fringe — well, as noted in the cartoon, despite their inexplicable ability to set the terms of the debate on subjects like national security, they are quite literally insane.)

… adding: none of which is meant to imply happy acquiesence to Obama’s own versions of indefinite detention and military tribunals.

When it comes to national security, Republicans always manage to set the terms of the debate.

This is how busy I am lately: I haven’t seen the new Star Trek movie, five days after it opened. But I have enjoyed watching the old show undergo a cultural rehabilitation after all these decades as a somewhat embarassing pleasure:

In its narrative ambition, its talky, theatrical density, its high-minded moral tone and its nerdy philosophizing, that episode captures a great deal about what made “Star Trek” such a potent cultural force. I guess that’s why it’s included, along with three other episodes, on “The Best of Star Trek: The Original Series,” a new DVD/Blu-ray release presumably meant to lure viewers of J.J. Abrams’ hit film back to the source material. No “Star Trek” fan could possibly be happy with such a mini-collection — where, I ask, is “Mirror, Mirror”? “The Doomsday Machine”? “The Devil in the Dark”? — but I enjoyed watching this tremendously.

Watching “Star Trek” in 1970s syndication was such an important part of my childhood and adolescence — I’ve seen every episode at least five or six times, and some many more than that — that I’m not capable of assessing the show’s uneven, low-budget craftsmanship with any degree of detachment. For me, “Star Trek” and the Rolling Stones, as much as they might appear to be polar opposites — one supremely American and the other English, one Apollonian and optimistic, the other Dionysian and pessimistic — were the cultural phenomena that made the pre-punk-rock early ’70s tolerable. A person interested in those things was, prima facie, not interested in Donny Osmond or “Happy Days,” had conceivably read a book not required by teachers and furthermore could plausibly have access to decent weed.

The real-life ticking bomb scenario.

The talented Mister Bors has a slideshow and talk in Portland (Oregon) this coming Monday, at 1:30 p.m. Details here. Say hi from me if you go.