Bush's Accountability Moment?

"The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

"Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret 'alternative' interrogation methods. . . .

"The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled 'Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War' and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

"Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been 'brainwashed,' and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies' harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.

"In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners."

The American Civil Liberties Union today released thousands of pages of documents related to Navy investigations of civilians killed by coalition forces in Iraq, released in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the ACLU filed in June 2006.

And Christopher Hitchens writes in Vanity Fair about trying waterboarding firsthand: "You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it 'simulates' the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning -- or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure."

Iran Watch

Is a war with Iran in the offing? Seymour Hersh wrote in the New Yorker this week about an expansion of covert operations, prompting more speculation that Vice President Cheney has plans to address the Iranian nuclear threat -- possibly by force -- before he and Bush leave office. (See my Monday column.)

Matt Corley blogs for thinkprogress.org that Andrea Mitchell asked Hersh on MSNBC yesterday if the U.S. was "planning military action" against Iran or "planning to support Israeli military action?"

Hersh: "Oh, you know, how the hell do I know? . . . What I can tell you is we're loaded for bear. And we've been looking at it for three years... If Israel goes -- I'll tell you what Cheney says privately. . . . What he says privately is, 'We can't let Israel go because, first of all, they don't have the firepower, we do. We have much more firepower. And secondly, if they go, we'll be blamed anyway.'"

For his part, Bush certainly didn't dampen speculation about possible Israeli action during his brief press availability in the Rose Garden this morning.

After Bush spoke about his goals for the upcoming G8 summit, he was asked two direct questions about Israel. Was he confident they wouldn't launch an independent attack on Iran? Would he strongly discourage such an attack? Bush dodged both questions entirely, repeating his position that "all options are on the table."