Greg Sargent has a great find this week:
Check out this nugget buried in an interview Bond, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, gave to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos:
Bond believes the administration "released far too much information," adding that he thinks Al Qaeda will use this information to train their followers to resist interrogation and that it will provide "propaganda for Al Qaeda’s media machine."
Bottom line: Bond believes this release will "make us less safe and "heighten anger" in parts of the world "where we’re trying to make friends."
...Bond is arguing that the image of America torturing would provide "propaganda" for terrorists and leave us less safe. But the claim that the image of America torturing would have this effect has been made by opponents of torture for years — and it’s an argument that has long been dismissed as irrelevant by "harsh interrogation" proponents.
Why is Bond concerned about releasing the memos?
He knows the veil of plausible deniability has been removed.
I'm very familiar with this after working for years with recovering addicts and alcoholics. Brennan Manning, the married Catholic priest and sometimes-recovering alcoholic, wrote about this in his book, The Ragamuffin Gospel. He describes the story of a man with inflated ego who denied that his drinking had harmed anyone else. The counselor rolled a phone into the group room and called the man's wife, who told the story of a time when the man had taken his nine-year-old out for Christmas Eve.
She was crying. "My husband met some old Army buddies in the tavern. Swept up in the euphoria over the reunion, he lost track of time, purpose, and everything else. He came out of the Cork 'n' Bottle at midnight. He was drunk. The motor had stopped running and the car windows were frozen shut. Debbie was badly frostbitten on both ears and on her fingers. When we got her to the hospital, the doctors had to operate. They amputated the thumb and forefinger on her right hand. She will be deaf for the rest of her life."
Max appeared to be having a coronoary. He struggled to his feet making jerky, uncoordinated movements. His glasses flew to the right and his pipe to the left. He collapsed on all fours and sobbed hysterically...
No man will ever forget what he saw that day, the 24th of April at exactly high noon.... Max's denial had to be identified through merciless interaction with his peers. His self-deception had to be unmasked in its absurdity.
You see, as long as the Republican Party in the United States could maintain plausible deniability, they could continue deceiving the rest of the country and pretending that the abuses of power never happened. They could continue to rail against the "sins" of abortion and gay marriage and the "rights" to threaten their fellows with guns and whine about high taxes.
But with the release of the Bush Administration's memos, there is no longer any question as to whether or not the ex-President knew what was going on. There is no longer any question about whether Abu Ghraib was the act of a few rogue servicemen and women or if it was part of a strategic effort by the Bush Administration to bully, abuse, and threaten their political opponents and international rivals.
Kit Bond realizes that he can no longer deny that he knew what he knew. He can no longer pretend that he was unaware of what was happening, or that he is not responsible for failing to speak up and speak out.
And as all of the victims of GOP smear attacks can confirm, the Republican Party in the United States has ruthlessly and systematically engaged in the worst kind of evil, made all the more pernicious by the fact that they did so under the guise of patriotism and the illusion of protecting the country.
Kit Bond isn't concerned about the safety of the American people. If he was, he would have done the right thing in the first place. Kit Bond is just upset that he got caught.