In that spirit, consider some newly-declassified information from the so-called Combatant Status Review Tribunals — a now-abandoned procedure to determine if a detainee posed a threat to U.S. interests — at Guantanamo Bay of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah. KSM:

“I make up stories,” Mohammed said, describing in broken English an interrogation probably administered by the CIA concerning the whereabouts of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. “Where is he? I don’t know. Then, he torture me,” Mohammed said of his interrogator. “Then I said, ‘Yes, he is in this area.’ “

Abu Zubaydah:

“They told me, ‘Sorry, we discover that you are not Number 3, not a partner, not even a fighter,’ ” said Abu Zubaida, speaking in broken English, according to the new transcript of a Combatant Status Review Tribunal held at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Now, according to former Vice President Dick Cheney — and, just so we don’t get distracted, I AM NOT SAYING DICK CHENEY IS AS BAD AS MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD — there are two CIA documents from 2004 and 2005 wherein the CIA vouched for the accuracy of information it obtained from torturing Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah. It would be nice to see those documents. But what could they possibly indicate other than that the agency told Cheney what he wanted to hear about a cherished interrogation program? Or are we to believe that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is lying about having lied? His diabolical skills of deception are just that good? Waterboarding him 183 times, denying him sleep for a week by contorting his body into unnatural positions, restricting his diet to between 1000 and 1500 calories a day — that’s the stuff that works, not any of the rapport-building crap that trained interrogators like Ali Soufan of the FBI advocate because of, like, their experience.

On Friday, the CIA will release a 2004 report on interrogations and detentions written by former inspector general John Helgerson, a report referenced in the recently declassified Office of Legal Counsel documents from 2005. Read it and ask: what would we say about this behavior if another country performed it?

Now, irony is when someone who helped broker the sale of American weapons to the Iranian government calls someone else “a leading apologist for the regime,” but if you read my colleague David Weigel’s piece today about conservative advice for Obama on Iran, you noticed that Michael Ledeen said exactly that about Parsi. Dismissing Parsi’s argument that external rhetorical support for the opposition could be used against it by Ahmadinejad, Ledeen told Weigel, “Why would a statement supporting the freedom of the Iranian people undermine the movement?”

Parsi said he wouldn’t reply to personal attacks. But he said, “no serious human rights actvist has gone out and supported making the U.S. the issue in the election,” since real human rights activists support “condemning the use of violence” by the regime. “What these conservatives are saying — they’ve got no track record of supporting real human rights in Iran, and are only seeking to advance their own agenda” by making “the U.S. part of the issue,” Parsi said. “They pretend to speak in favor of the protesters without ever considering what the Iranian people want. And the people who brought us the Iraq war don’t have a leg to stand on on this issue.”

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Protesters in Tehran on Monday (Flickr: .faramarz)

Before voters went to the polls in Friday’s elections in Iran, critics of President Obama’s Iran policy — and of his outreach to the Middle East in general — attempted to pre-empt the possible defeat of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by pronouncing it meaningless. John Bolton, the former United Nations Ambassador for George W. Bush, warned that a victory for the president’s chief opponent Mir Hossein Moussavi would “not change the fundamental direction of Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs or its support for terrorism.” Daniel Pipes, the president of the Middle East Forum, wrote that he was “rooting for Ahmadinejad” because it would be “better to have a bellicose, apocalyptic, in-your-face Ahmadinejad who scares the world than a sweet-talking Mousavi who again lulls it to sleep.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

But in the wake of the contested election and the surging rallies against Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs who rule Iran, the president’s more hawkish critics are changing the tune. The president, they argue, has an opening — if not a responsibility — to make a statement on the elections that aligns the United States with reformist elements inside of Iran. Monday began with a few disconnected critiques of the president’s silence, and ended with calls for a bold Obama statement from leading neoconservatives and one of the Republican Party’s most prominent leaders in the House.

“The president should be questioning the legitimacy of the elections,” said Kim Holmes, former assistant secretary of state in the Bush administration who is now vice president of foreign policy and defense studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “He doesn’t need to go into any great detail. He needs to show that, in the long run, the United States is on the side of the Iranian people.”

Critics of the Obama White House are very much aware of the fears that have, up to now, forestalled a statement from the president. As one official told TWI over the weekend, there is great caution about appearing to favor one side over another. On Monday, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs would only say that there was “concern” about the election results and that “Iranians are looking into this.” After news that one man had been killed at a massive Tehran rally, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly would only say that the administration was “deeply troubled” by events. At the end of the day, the president responded to events with a four minute-long statement that recognized the nation’s “sovereignty,” credited the nation with “looking into” the election results, and pleased few critics of Iran.

“Why would a statement supporting the freedom of the Iranian people undermine the movement?” asked Michael Ledeen, the freedom scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies whose books about Iran include “The Iranian Time Bomb” and “Accomplice to Evil: Iran and the War Against the West.” Ledeen, like many critics of the official stance, framed the choice as a moral one. “Would a statement supporting the mullahs strengthen the opposition? Ridiculous. If America stands for anything it stands for freedom. We should have supported the Iranian people a long time ago. The current silence from the White House is shameful.”

Some pro-Iranian activists have disagreed with this sentiment and portrayed the administration’s silence as unfortunate but politically necessary. Over the weekend, Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council told TWI that an Obama statement might allow Iran’s leaders to portray the unrest as a Western conspiracy. But Ledeen dismissed the spokesman and the argument. “Trita Parsi is not a human rights activist,” Ledeen said. “He’s a leading apologist for the regime.”

Other critics of the Obama administration have called for a statement in a more subtle manner. Early on Monday morning, Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, urged fellow conservatives to temper their criticism and try to make their case to the president. “We should hope Obama does the right thing,” he wrote at his magazine’s website, “and urge and pressure him to do so.” Hours later, in The Washington Post, Kristol drew comparisons between the situation in Iran and the run-up to World War II and argued that dissidents could be helped by a speech “for liberty” coming from “the popular and credible speaker-to-the-Muslim-world, Barack Obama.”

Pipes, the controversial scholar who had rooted for an outright Ahmadinejad victory until the votes came in, called the uncertain result “the best result possible” and said that the apparent win represented “a slap in the face of the American president’s pro-Islamist policies.” Reached on Monday by TWI, he, too, suggested that the president could further American interests by taking a side. “This is the moment for the outside world to let the Iranian people know they are not alone by manifesting its rejection of Khamene’i's despotic rule,” said Pipes. “The U.S. government should side with the Iranian people and the opposition forces.”

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) (WDCpix)

All of this — and a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll that found 66 percent of Americans calling the administration “not tough enough” on Iran — have loosened the tongues of Hill Republicans. Early on Monday, the most prominent congressional statement on Iran and the American response came from Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who called the election a “mockery of democracy” and expressed “hope that President Obama and members of both parties in Congress will speak out.” Republican comments were somewhat muted until a mid-day appearance by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in which the 2008 presidential candidate suggested that the president “speak out strongly in opposition” to Ahmadinejad. At 5 p.m. Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the House Republican whip who has frequently criticized candidate and then President Obama over his policies toward Israel and Iran, released a statement attacking “the Administration’s silence in the face of Iran’s brutal suppression of democratic rights” and labeling it “a step backwards for homegrown democracy in the Mideast.”

“President Obama must take a strong public position in the face of violence and human rights abuses,” said Cantor. “We have a moral responsibility to lead in opposition to Iran’s extreme response to peaceful protests.”

All of this has given the president’s critics some optimism, the hope that the president could be drawn into making a clear statement on Iran, edging away from what Republicans had termed an “apology tour” to hostile nations. Watching the surge of liberal and left-leaning activism in support of Iran’s protesters, some of the long-time opponents of the Mullahs are starting to see the possibility of a breakthrough, of an issue that had been partisan becoming more mainstream.

“I’m delighted if people on the left call for supporting the Iranian people,” said Ledeen. “They should have been doing it all these years. Ahem.”

The fraudulent Iranian election has mobilized opposition to the Mullah regime; the U.S. should back them, now’s the time for a regime change

Arrrrgggggh why am I screaming into the wind on this. Why not just announce that we’re going to convert them to Christianity? Do we want to undermine the opposition as Western puppets? Sensibly, the National Iranian American Council responds:

Rohrabacher has the honor and distinction of representing one of the highest concentrations of NIAC members in any district in the country, yet his comments are absolutely contrary to the overwhelming opinion that we have been hearing from Iranian Americans.

Meanwhile, according to @micha– uh, I mean Time’s Michael Scherer, President Obama just told the Iranian opposition, “They should know that the world is watching.”

With riot police and armed militiamen beating and, in a few reported cases, killing unarmed demonstrators in the streets of Iran’s cities, for the Obama Administration to continue parsing equivocal phrases serves no purpose other than to make it look feckless. Part of realism is showing that you have a clear grasp of reality—that you know the difference between decency and barbarism when both are on display for the whole world to see. A stronger American stand—taken, as much as possible, in concert with European countries and through multilateral organizations—would do more to improve America’s negotiating position than weaken it. Acknowledging the compelling voices of the desperate young Iranians who, after all, only want their votes counted, would not deep-six the possibility of American-Iranian talks. Ahmadinejad and his partners in the clerical-military establishment will talk to us exactly when and if they think it’s in their interest. Right now, they don’t appear to. And the tens of millions of Iranians who voted for change and are the long-term future of that country will always remember what America said and did when they put their lives on the line for their values.

What’s missing here is an effort at determining what the Iranian dissenters want from the Obama administration. The fact that it’s not clear what the answer to that question is itself serves as a powerful indicator that the protest movement is first and foremost concerned about handling this on its own. As best I can tell from NIAC and from Twitter and from talking with Iranian human rights advocates in the United States, the dissenters want the Obama administration to refuse to recognize Ahmadinejad’s claims of victory; to express concern for the safety of the protesters; and then to get out of the way. The Obama administration can be fairly criticized for not saying enough on the second point, though if, as Michael Scherer believes, Obama’s going to say something at 5 p.m., maybe that will change. But it doesn’t follow from Obama’s muted discussion of the dissenters that he’s indifferent to their plight. From talking to administration officials, I am convinced that they are very concerned that American rhetorical support will immediately become a cudgel in the hands of Ahmadinejad. Would that outcome advance human rights?

It’s emotionally unsatisfying not to proclaim unequivocal support for the protesters. But the truer measure of support, as Trita Parsi told me, is to follow their lead. Moussavi, for instance, has not issued any statement about what he wants the international community to do. If the protesters begin calling for a more direct American response, then that really will have to compel the administration to reconsider its position. But until then, with so many lives at stake, the administration can’t afford to take a stance just because it makes Americans feel just and righteous.

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TWI is on Twitter. Please follow us here.

we are accessing twitter from open proxies. they are closing them as fast as we can find them.

and:

I have massive incoming mail from twitter. cannot possibly reply. our internet conection is 27kb.

@PersianKiwi sent that from the Web, by the way. I’ll check this out for later in the day, but it’s fascinating that the regime is unable to block this powerful social-media tool.

And as the media is getting increasingly booted from Iran — a reporter friend who just left Tehran emailed last night that the regime is blaming the street demonstrations on foreign journalists and is arresting some — @PersianKiwi is live-Tweeting a demonstration from Tehran’s Engelhab Square: Can hear helicopters, cannot see them… my last ISP downed. have redialed new ISP, slow process. streets are packed with people. seems peaceful… the city is very busy. seems like everone is out but most shops are closed, business all quiet. not much normal traffic… call in from Enghelab Sq. Baseej [pro-regime paramilitary] outnumbered, just watching people march… am being told that there are injured students stuck in Tehan dorms. surrounded by baseej…. hearing rumours that Mousavi and Khatami are in azadi square now, unconfirmed…

So what should the Obama administration do? Around 1 p.m., White House spokesman Robert Gibbs put out this statement:

Like the rest of the world, we were impressed by the vigorous debate and enthusiasm that this election generated, particularly among young Iranians. We continue to monitor the entire situation closely, including reports of irregularities.

That’s flat, tepid and noncommittal. The White House is trying to strike a balance between three pressures: speaking in a Samizdat fashion to the Moussavi supporters who have just seen the election stolen by Ahmadinejad and the regime; not interfering in post-election events out of a very justified concern that the appearance of U.S. involvement will act as a delegitimizing force; and preserving the administration’s freedom of action should it have to accept a second Ahmadinejad term.

And with the exception of respecting the third consideration, the strongly anti-Ahmadinejad Hadi Ghaemi, New York-based spokesman for the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, doesn’t think the White House ought to say much else.

The White House statement may not fully capture the depth of the crime committed against the Iranian people. “But I think it’s wise for the U.S. government to keep its distance,” Ghaemi said in a phone interview. The White House can and should “show concern for human life and protesters’ safety and promote tolerance and dialogue.” But to get any further involved, even rhetorically, would “instigate the cry that the reformers are somehow driven and directed by the United States, whether under former President George W. Bush or under President Obama, and there’s no reason to give that unfounded allegation” any chance to spread.

Ghaemi continues to say that the international community should present a united front that gives “no legitimacy” to the election. In particular, he wants United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to express “serious grievances” about how the election was conducted. “Sanctions and military threats, all these things are counterproductive,” Ghaemi said. The initiative has to be expressed and promoted by the Iranians themselves, particularly from Moussavi and other exponents of popular Iranian outrage. “It very much depends on what leading reformers, including Moussavi, ask them to do, and how much responsibility do they take for exposing them to danger. If they put their tails between their legs and walk away, it will be very sad.”

After years of being told in this country that no initiative for the expansion of global human rights will occur absent active U.S. support, Ghaemi’s advice can come across as passivity or indifference. But that reflects a certain arrogance, and occurs at the expense of the goal in question. “We should not have the U.S. lead,” says Ghaemi. Instead, the Iranian people have to lead, and the international community, with the United States in a background and muted role, ought to refuse acceptance of the regime’s contentions, and not offer positive endorsements of the dissidents and the protesters.