Bad Pennies Award - Penigma Lie of the Year, 2014

It's a tie, with plenty of dirty old bad pennies to spread around!

Politifact gives their award for lie of the year to lies, plural, about the Ebola virus, spread by conservatives, especially anti-Obama conspiracy theory peddlers. (Once again, proving conservatives are fact-averse and believe things which are false, which they could EASILY verify -- if they WANTED to know the truth. They don't.)

You can read the Ebola lies enumerated here.

We join politifact, in giving the lie of the year award to both the Ebola lies, but also to Dick Cheney, for his lies about torture and valuable intelligence, and his criticism of the Senate investigation, which found substantive challenges to the Bush administration revisionist version of history - in other words, LIES.)

Factcheck.org, in their piece Cheney's Tortured Facts, itemize many, if not all, of the lies from I'm-a-Dick Cheney.

First, let's be clear. Torture does not result in truth. Torture results in whatever 'information' the torturers want to hear. Torture results in the waste of intelligence resources, chasing false results from torture. What DOES work is non-violent, non-humiliating interrogation.

Waterboarding and other techniques authorized by Bush and Cheney were torture, whatever euphemism they tried to stick on it or whitewash it.

Waterboarding was torture back in the dark ages.

Commons Getty Collection - waterboarding, lower right corner

Waterboarding was torture in 17th and 18th century (with the occasional variation of replacing water with urine):








And it was recognized as torture in the late 19th and early 2oth century, including being condemned by famous figures in our history, like Mark Twain, when we did it in the Philippines during our 'liberation', 1899 -1902.  A member of our armed forces was prosecuted in 1901 for waterboarding a Philippino.


Twain's words, back in the day, addresses the failure of waterboarding or other torture to produce results:

"To make them confess -- what? Truth? Or lies? How can one know which it is they are telling? For under unendurable pain a man confesses anything that is required of him, true or false, and his evidence is worthless."

In 1901 Maj. Ed Glenn was suspended and fined for torture in the Philippines. From an NPR report:

In his review, the Army judge advocate said the charges constituted "resort to torture with a view to extort a confession." He recommended disapproval because "the United States cannot afford to sanction the addition of torture."

and another Republican president tried to excuse torture (from the same report):

Yet President Theodore Roosevelt defended the practice. "The enlisted men began to use the old Filipino method: the water cure," he wrote in a 1902 letter. "Nobody was seriously damaged."

Vietnam era waterboarding
circa 1968

In 1947, a Japanese soldier, Yukio Asano was prosecuted for waterboarding during WW II; in 1968, an American soldier was court martialed for waterboarding during the Vietnam war.

So, we know waterboarding is torture, we know waterboarding is wrong, and we know waterboarding doesn't work to produce reliable intelligence information.

Let's then turn to the excuses, the pretexts, for it, again citing from the NPR article quoted above:

Stephen Rickard, Washington director of the Open Society Institute, says that throughout the centuries, the justifications for using waterboarding have been remarkably consistent.

"Almost every time this comes along, people say, 'This is a new enemy, a new kind of war, and it requires new techniques,'" he says. "And there are always assurances that it is carefully regulated."

I would go a step further. When Bush and Cheney insist they only used torture to protect us from terrorists, they were attempting to make us complicit in their crimes. It is a thinly veiled excuse of "we did it for you", or "you made us do it to protect you". It is nothing more or less than an attempt to shift the blame for their bad decisions to us, their CRIMINAL decisions to us, without our having knowledge or approval of those decisions.

Further, they LIED to the people of this nation about their actions.

Bush and Cheney and those in the administration who contrived to give them false cover are the ones who should be held accountable as war criminals for their clear and obvious war crimes, like those before them.

It is worth noting that some of the worst and most brutal regimes have NOT used waterboarding - notably the Soviet Union under their 20th century dictators, and not the Nazis (although their allies, the Japanese DID).

Torture is wrong, torture is useless, and the use of torture makes us LESS safe, not more safe.  That claim by Cheney about attacks on the U.S.? Wrong.

From the Guardian:

The Global Terrorism Database has recorded terror attacks across the world - with data from 1970 covering up to the end of 2011. It's a huge dataset: over 104,000 attacks, including around 2,600 in the US - and its collection is funded by an agency of the US government: the Science and Technology Directorate of the US Department of Homeland Security through a Center of Excellence program based at the University of Maryland.

Under Bush/Cheney there were `12 attacks on diplomatic missions, technically U.S. territory.  Under Bush/Cheney, there were also attacks in the U.S. (although not all were successful, or resulted in injury or death.) From our own national statistics, attacks DECLINED, including when President Bush, and then subsequently President Obama terminated the torture practices and other humiliating and harsh interrogation.

From the "Integrated United States Security Database: Data on Terrorist Attacks on the United States Homeland 1970-2011", completed in 2012:

• There were a total of 207 terrorist attacks in the United States between 2001 and 2011.Total attacks declined from a high of 40 in 2001 to nine in 2011.
• Between 2001 and 2011, we recorded a total of 21 fatal terrorist attacks in the United States.
• The highest proportion of unsuccessful attacks since 1970 occurred in 2011, when four out of nine recorded attacks were unsuccessful.
• From 2001 to 2011 California (40) and New York (19) experienced the most total terrorist attacks against the U.S. homeland.
• The three cities in the United States that experienced the most attacks from 2001 to 2011 were New York City (12), Washington, DC (9) and Los Angeles (8).
• The most common weapons used in terrorist attacks in the United States from 2001 to 2011 were incendiary devices (53% of all weapons used) and explosives (20% of all weapons used).
• For the period from 2001 to 2011, biological weapons were tied with firearms as the third most common weapon used in terrorist attacks (both represented 8% of all weapons used). This unusual result is due to the anthrax attacks in October 2001.
• From 2001 to 2011, non-explosive attacks aimed at damaging property or reducing the functionality of a system but not causing direct human injury accounted for more than half (54%) of all tactics used. Many of these cases were due to an increased reliance on arson, much of it associated with environmental and animal rights violent extremist groups.
• From 2001 to 2011, the most common targets of terrorists in the United States were businesses (62 attacks), private citizens and property (59 attacks), and government (43 attacks).
• The three terrorist organizations with the largest number of attacks on the U.S. homeland from 2001 to 2011 were the Earth Liberation Front (50), the Animal Liberation Front (34) and al -Qa’ida (4)

There have never been any school shootings in the US.

They have been over 100,000 gun violence incidents since Sandy Hook of which between 7 and 74 were at or near schools.

But, from what I understand, for a "school shooting" to occur:

1. The shooter needs to be a student
2. The shooting needs to be within the school
3. The shooter intended to kill students in the school
4. The shooting needs to happen during school hours
5. The shooting cannot be related to extracurricular reasons

Wow, that knocks out a lot of shootings.

In fact, using this criteria we can not only knock off a few victims from the toll, such as Rachel Scott who was shot outside the school at Columbine. We can also get rid of a few school shootings!

For example, the 1999 Jonesboro, Arkansas shootings occured OUTSIDE the school!

Even better, Adam Lanza WASN'T A STUDENT!  Even better, we can knock out a few of the victims are not students. This criteria confirms what gun nuts have been saying all along--The Sandy Hooks shootings weren't school shootings, but it was a mass shooting.

Now, if people want to look like dicks, then they have to admit this is the case and they can knock that one off the books.

The real confusion is whether a school shooting is a mass shooting or not.

Some people only want the mass shootings which happen in schools to be considered "school shootings".  That is the fallacy which Politifact falls into in their piece:

For many people, this is the first thing that comes to mind when they hear the phrase "school shooting" -- an incident such as Sandy Hook or, before it, the 1999 Columbine shooting in Colorado that left 15 dead, including the shooters.

But, the people who want to dispute these numbers want to limit the amount of School Shootings to a number which is somehow "acceptable" rather than address the issue that gun violence is far too pervasive in US culture.

On the other hand, The Daily Beast came up with the number 68:

We keep a tally of school shootings at The Daily Beast, too, using a slightly different methodology. We include only shootings that occur on school campuses while students are present. We count shootings that result in no fatalities as well as those where the only victim was a shooter who committed suicide.

We published a report last year using our data to show just what a school shooting looks like, noting specifically: “These events aren’t necessarily the types of tragedies that come to mind when one thinks of “school shootings”—madmen in fatigues roaming school hallways, strapped with automatic-style guns, murdering indiscriminately—nor do they receive the media attention of such mass shootings. But they can be similarly traumatizing for students and staff, and they have led to at least 24 injuries and 17 deaths over the past year.”

The following day, another school shooting at Arapahoe High School added to our tally. As of today, we count 68 school shootings, with 28 dead, and 66 injured.

Oliver Burkeman gets to the point in his post at the Guardian:

(If you think this kind of absurdity is confined to the fringe, see this only slightly less mendacious CNN piece (and Politifact), which brings the figure down from 74 to 15 by excluding, among others, shootings motivated by "personal arguments, accidents [or] alleged gang activities and drug deals". Johnson says the cable channel stole his work.)

What’s especially dispiriting about this flat denial of reality is how little prospect it offers for rational discussion or compromise. Even if you're a supporter of gun control, you can still hold a reasoned discussion with somebody who believes that the benefits of widespread firearms ownership outweigh the harms. You can discuss international comparisons; and how no comparable country experiences anything like this level of gun violence; the other person can seek to establish why those comparisons aren't relevant; or that, yes, violent deaths are actually in decline in the US, and so on. But when the pro-gun side of the argument consists of simply insisting that the gun violence that people are so distraught about isn't real gun violence? Then there's no clear way forward at all.

And let’s not forget the bigger point here. A pro-gun journalist applies the most stringent imaginable criteria to the term 'school shooting'; he rejects every instance he possibly can, for reasons many might regard as spurious, and then triumphantly declares that there have only been … seven bona fide school shootings in America since December 2012!

Only seven school shootings since December 2012.

I hope I never to get to the point at which the word "only" in that sentence makes even the slightest bit of sense.

As I said we can knock the numbers down even further if we want to say there have never been any school shootings in the US.  That should appeal to the people who do nothing to stop the plague of US gun violence.

So, do we want to split hairs or try to come up with a solution to a real problem is the real issue here.What is important is that people died. What category some people choose to put a specific shooting is irrelevant to our mission. Our mission is to stop future shooting, no matter what the location or circumstance.