Come Saturday Morning ... the Torturers Strike Back

You didn't expect the jackbooted Jack-Bauer-worshiping sadists to go away quietly, did you?

Faced with President Obama's order setting in motion the shutdown of Gitmo and other US-run-and-approved torture sites, the folks who in a really just world would be in the dock at The Hague are now doing a full-on, lie-driven media pushback:

In a January 22 article, the Associated Press falsely stated, "The Pentagon recently reported that 61 former prisoners at Guantanamo have returned to the fight against the U.S. and its allies." Similarly, during the 1 p.m. ET hour of the January 22 edition

of CNN Newsroom, anchor Kyra Phillips asserted, "New Pentagon figures actually say 61 released detainees have been linked to some kind of terror activity." Both the AP and Phillips were discussing President Obama's executive order requiring that the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay be closed within a year. But the Pentagon has not confirmed that 61 former Guantánamo detainees have, in the AP's words, "returned to the fight"; that figure includes 43 former prisoners who are "suspected" of doing so.

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Additionally, as Daily Kos contributing editor Joan McCarter noted, Seton Hall University School of Law professor Mark Denebeaux [sic] has disputed the Pentagon's figures, asserting: "Once again, they've failed to identify names, numbers, dates, times, places, or acts upon which their report relies. Every time they have been required to identify the parties, the DOD has been forced to retract their false IDs and their numbers."

As Media Matters goes on to show, the lies are being spread far and wide by a very helpful GOP/Media Complex.

Right on cue, Lidice Logic is being invoked by everyone's favorite would-be dictator, Rudy Giuliani, who tried and failed to use the bombing of the Twin Towers as an excuse to blow off the mayoral election and stay on as mayor. Rudy's now waving around the case of a Yemeni who was released from Guantanamo and went on to commit crimes as a reason to keep Gitmo going. Our own Jane Hamsher's ripped into what he said on Joe Scarborough's Morning Joe yesterday: