Remember when Chicago radio talker Erich "Mancow" Muller volunteered to be waterboarded -- and then had to admit after only seven seconds that yes, it is torture?

I'd like to see big-talking Fox News-bot Megyn Kelly volunteer to be pepper-sprayed, to back up her claim that "it's just a food product":



Last night Rachel Maddow explained how pepper spray resembles a food about as much as botulism does:



Now, I realize that actual science has no place in Republican and its associated media doctrine, but here's the science on pepper spray:

The reason pepper-spray ends up on the Scoville chart is that – you probably guessed this - it’s literally derived from pepper chemistry, the compounds that make habaneros so much more formidable than the comparatively wimpy bells. Those compounds are called capsaicins and – in fact – pepper spray is more formally called Oleoresin Capsicum or OC Spray.

But we’ve taken to calling it pepper spray, I think, because that makes it sound so much more benign than it really is, like something just a grade or so above what we might mix up in a home kitchen. The description hints maybe at that eye-stinging effect that the cook occasionally experiences when making something like a jalapeno-based salsa, a little burn, nothing too serious.

Until you look it up on the Scoville scale and remember, as toxicologists love to point out, that the dose makes the poison. That we’re not talking about cookery but a potent blast of chemistry. So that if OC spray is the U.S. police response of choice – and certainly, it’s been used with dismaying enthusiasm during the Occupy protests nationwide, as documented in this excellent Atlantic roundup - it may be time to demand a more serious look at the risks involved.

My own purpose here is to focus on the dangers of a high level of capsaicin exposure. But as pointed out in the 2004 paper, Health Hazards of Pepper Spray, written by health researchers at the University of North Carolina and Duke University, the sprays contain other risky materials:

Depending on brand, an OC spray may contain water, alcohols, or organic solvents as liquid carriers; and nitrogen, carbon dioxide, or halogenated hydrocarbons (such as Freon, tetrachloroethylene, and methylene chloride) as propellants to discharge the canister contents.(3) Inhalation of high doses of some of these chemicals can produce adverse cardiac, respiratory, and neurologic effects, including arrhythmias and sudden death.

Their paper focuses mostly, though, on the dangerous associated with pepper-based compounds. In 1997, for instance, researchers at the University of California-San Francisco discovered that the “hot” sensation of habaneros and their ilk was caused by capsaicin binding directly to proteins in the membranes of pain and heat sensing neurons. Capsaicins can activate these neurons at below body temperature, leading to a startling sensation of heat. Repeated exposure can wear the system down, depleting neurotransmitters, reducing the sensation of the pain. This knowledge has led to a number of medical treatments using capsaicins to manage pain.

Its very mechanism, though, should remind us to be wary. As the North Carolina researchers point out, any compound that can influence nerve function is, by definition, risky. Research tells us that pepper spray acts as a potent inflammatory agent. It amplifies allergic sensitivities, it irritates and damages eyes, membranes, bronchial airways, the stomach lining – basically what it touches. It works by causing pain – and, as we know, pain is the body warning us of an injury.

In general, these are short term effects. Pepper spray, for instance, induces a burning sensation in the eyes in part by damaging cells in the outer layer of the cornea. Usually, the body repairs this kind of injury fairly neatly. But with repeated exposures, studies find, there can be permanent damage to the cornea.

The more worrisome effects have to do with inhalation – and by some reports, California university police officers deliberately put OC spray down protestors throats. Capsaicins inflame the airways, causing swelling and restriction. And this means that pepper sprays pose a genuine risk to people with asthma and other respiratory conditions.

And by genuine risk, I mean a known risk, a no-surprise any police department should know this risk, easy enough to find in the scientific literature.

Except that police departments are clearly not interested in scientific literature. Look, this is about hippie-punching, clearly and simply. It's been going on for forty years, and it's going to continue to go on every time large numbers of people dare to threaten the status quo. The Occupy movement has learned its lesson from Chicago 1968, and its discipline has created a startling underscore to the disproportionate response from police. It's just a hideous irony of our times that major city police departments are so staunchly defending the very people who regard them as suckers at the public teat whose pensions and pay should be cut in the very service of those they persist in defending.

As for Megyn Kelly, well, I think it's just a trial balloon to have pepper spray classified as a vegetable for the school lunch program. As a pizza topping.

Labels: Fox News, police state, That Woman Is An Idiot, torture

Then:

Now:

President Barack Obama approved Monday the resumption of military trials for detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, ending a two-year ban.

It was the latest acknowledgement that the detention facility Obama had vowed to shut down within a year of taking office will remain open for some time to come. But even while announcing a resumption of military commission trials, Obama reaffirmed his support for trying terror suspects in U.S. federal courts - something that's met vehement resistance on Capitol Hill.

"I strongly believe that the American system of justice is a key part of our arsenal in the war against al-Qaida and its affiliates, and we will continue to draw on all aspects of our justice system - including Article III courts - to ensure that our security and our values are strengthened," the president said in a statement.

The White House also reiterated that the administration remains committed to eventually closing Guantanamo Bay, though Monday's actions didn't seem to bring that outcome any closer.

Now:

For over seven months, Manning has been detained in solitary confinement at a maximum security military brig in Virginia. He has been forced to endure widely condemned conditions and could face the death sentence as a result of charges recently leveled against him. He has yet to receive so much as a preliminary hearing.

Labels: guantanamo, just another outrage, the more things change the more they stay the same, torture

One of the reasons why the story of Henry VIII resonates as much as it does to this day is that it combines sex with almost unimaginable cruelty. We watch telling after telling of the story, which reaches its gruesome apex with the horrific executions in 1452 of the barely-twenty-year-old Queen, Katherine Howard, along with her lover Thomas Culpeper, and her former lover Francis Dereham from well before her marriage to the King. The series The Tudors on Showtime plays fast and loose in many ways with history, but its graphic depiction of the torture and executions of Culpeper and Dereham are straight out of history (Warning: highly graphic video):

The Spanish Ambassador at the time, Eustace Chapuys, wrote an account of Katherine's fall and the executions of Dereham and Culpeper:

This year on 13 November Sir Thomas Wriothesley, secretary to the king, came to Hampton Court to the queen, and called all the ladies and gentlewomen and her servants into the great chamber, and there openly before them declared certain offenses she had committed in misusing her body with certain persons before the king's time, because of which he there discharged all her household; and the morning after she was taken to Sion, with my Lady Bainton and two other gentlewomen and certain of her servants to wait on her there until the king's further pleasure. And various people were taken to the Tower of London, such as my Lady Rochford, Master Culpepper, one of the king's privy chamber, and others.

On 1 December Thomas Culpepper, one of the gentlemen of the king's privy chamber, and Francis Dorand, gentleman, were arraigned at the Guildhall in London, for high treason against the king's majesty, in misdemeanor with the queen, as appeared by their indictment which they confessed to, and they were sentenced to be drawn, hanged, and quartered, the lord mayor sitting there as chief, the lord chancellor on his right hand, and the duke of Norfolk on his left hand, the duke of Suffolk, the lord privy seal, the earls of Sussex, of Hertford, and various others of the king's council sitting with all the judges also in commission that day.

And on 10 December the said Culpepper and Dorand were drawn from the Tower of London to Tyburn, and there Culpepper, after exhorting the people to pray for him, stood on the ground by the gallows, knelt down and had his head struck off; and then Dorand was hanged, dismembered, disemboweled, beheaded and quartered. Culpepper's body was buried at St Sepulchre's church near Newgate, and their heads were set on London Bridge.

For some reason, we fail to draw parallels between the tortures meted out by corrupt European royals during long-ago history and what is being done to human beings in our name in our own time. We like to think we're somehow more enlightened.

Except that we're not, as Sebastian Doggart horrifyingly reveals over at Down With Tyranny:

War criminal? Torturer? Condi Rice?!

I had the same response while making my investigative documentary on Rice, American Faust: From Condi to Neo-Condi. Over the course of researching and producing it, I have come to share Professor Gilbert’s view that the gravity of Rice’s crimes and misdemeanors, still largely unknown to the American people, outweigh the benefits of President Obama’s view that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

The conviction that we need to read the page of history before we can turn it underpins American Faust. Through the form of a biographical documentary, we tell a Faustian story of a woman whose hubris tempted her into a pursuit of power that destroyed her core values, and hurtled America into a perilous new direction. It’s a portrait of a woman who has changed the world but about whom most people know very little. It overturns the popular misconception of Rice as a yes-woman to Bush and reveals her as his chief confidante-- with deeper and more enduring influence than even Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, or Karl Rove-- and thus responsible for much of the Bush legacy.

[snip]

it was Condoleezza Rice who is primarily responsible for the Bush Administration’s torture program. It was she who ordered the CIA to use torture techniques including genital mutilation, fingernail extraction and electrocution in countries across the world. The CIA agents who carried out these interrogations were acting under orders which came directly from the chairwoman of the Group of Principals: Condoleezza Rice. The role of the Principals-- a group that included Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney Generals John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales-- was to select and authorize ‘enhanced interrogation methods’ proposed by CIA Director George Tenet.

According to Christopher Anders, attorney for the ACLU: “The CIA would come in and give a presentation of what they wanted to do, to the point where, where they were choreographing interrogations and the torture from the basement of the White House itself.”

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Kessler says: “These ‘enhanced interrogation methods’ included water-boarding, fingernail extraction, and sleep deprivation. Condi signed off on the orders to the CIA with the words, ‘This is your Baby, go do it!’” Richard Clarke, US chief counter-terrorism adviser between 1992-2003 concurs: “Rice decided what torture to use on what person.”

American Faust reveals that the techniques that Rice approved went far beyond the mock executions and water-boarding already made public. Our film has first-hand accounts of torture techniques that make stress positions look like a slap on the wrist. Binyam Mohamed had his penis cut, and acid poured into the wounds. Khalid el Masri was drugged, sodomized and imprisoned without charges. Abu Omar was tied to a wet mattress and electrocuted. Mamdouh Habib had his fingernails torn out.

Even John Ashcroft, known for a nutty rendition of his song Let the Eagle Soar but not for his leniency to Moslem prisoners, objected to the torture meetings that Rice chaired: "Why are we talking about this in the White House?” he asked. “History will not judge this kindly."

But perhaps they will make a Showtime series about it. And our descendants will, just as we do, think they are more enlightened than that.

Labels: Condoleeza Rice, The Tudors, torture

THIS is why Rachel is the best in an industry where far too many so-called "journalists" do nothing but fellate Republicans:

Labels: Dick Cheney, Rachel Maddow, torture

When the history books write about the Obama Administration, Barack Obama's biggest shortcoming won't be his coziness with Wall Street, but his refusal to see justice done to the worst war criminal in the history of the United States: Richard Bruce Cheney.

Here's how confident Cheney is that he won't be prosecuted: Not only did he advocate waterboarding a suspect who was already talking, as I noted yesterday, but he came right out and said that he was a "big supporter of waterboarding", and also came right out and said that the orders for CIA operatives to torture detainees came right from himself and his ventriloquist's dummy from Texas:

The reason I've been outspoken is because there were some things being said, especially after we left office, about prosecuting CIA personnel that had carried out our counterterrorism policy or disbarring lawyers in the Justice Department who had -- had helped us put those policies together, and I was deeply offended by that, and I thought it was important that some senior person in the administration stand up and defend those people who'd done what we asked them to do.

So now you have the most recent vice-president of the United States admitting to a war crime, and NOTHING is going to be done about it by his successor.

And THAT is going to be the biggest failing of Barack Obama.

More here, here, and here,

Labels: Bush Administration crimes, Dick Cheney, torture, war crimes

If you don't know what the title of this post refers to, here you go:

During a recent stop of the Bold & Fresh Tour with fellow Fox News personality Glenn Beck, right-wing talker Bill O'Reilly couldn't help but to spin a hypothetical.

In his fantasy world where Obama hires him as a presidential adviser, O'Reilly explained the first thing he'd do is lavishly decorate his office. Thing two would be having the CIA director kidnap top Democrats and "waterboard" Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

He was, of course, "joking" during the Jan. 23 appearance. The audience roared with laughter, even as O'Reilly had cautioned, "Don't tell anyone I said this, please."

Yes, because advocating abduction and torture of a public official, especially a female one, is such a laff riot. Ladies and gentlemen, meet your teabaggers.

I'm not sure what O'Reilly would get out of this, other than the boner he clearly gets when images of violence against women dance in his sick little cranium, but if he thinks waterboarding would somehow get her to "confess" something, he's wrong about that too:

Well, it's official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn't know what he was talking about.

Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency's intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC's Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.

[snip]

Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up.

"What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts," he writes. "I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence."

But never mind, he says now.

"I wasn't there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I'd heard and read inside the agency at the time."

Kiriakou needn't worry about his so-called reputation being marred with the wingnuts, though. Because for them, even if there is a one percent possibility that something could be true, in an alternate universe, every sixteenth leap year on February 29th, in the snow, both ways, uphill, it means it is a certainty.

Labels: American Idiots, torture, violence, waterboarding

OK, here we go; US Military law does not really allow for guilty pleas in cases where the death penalty is a possible outcome. According to the New York Times today, President Obama and his administration are looking at ways to make this law less ambiguous. The push to clarify this comes from military prosecutors who don't want to have to put on an entire case if a defendant pleads guilty....really?...Isn't putting on cases sorta what they do?

But American military justice law, which is the model for the military commission rules, bars members of the armed services who are facing capital charges from pleading guilty. Partly to assure fairness when execution is possible, court-martial prosecutors are required to prove guilt in a trial even against service members who want to plead guilty.

Why?
Well, what comes to mind immediately for me is that the military is a very controlling apparatus, just like, say, a terrorist group, in that there is a strong belief system so deeply held that one would gladly die for it, to keep a code of silence, or to become a martyr. When young recruits are broken down and built back up, they are imbued with a code that could maybe, in some off chance, in a system that has been proven time and again to be imperfect, falsely incriminate themselves.
If that part of the law was left "ambiguous" maybe it was so that cases could be decided on their individual merits and depending on the judge. I'm happy to have all of the evidence presented if we are going to put anyone to death, much less a soldier or an enemy combatant. There are certain standards of morality and ethics that have to be upheld, even if it seems like an exercise to these supposed prosecutors.

I'm no law expert, and I'm definitely no military law expert, but in the middle of a certain amount of confusing backpedaling by the Obama Administration, I find it incredibly disconcerting to hear that the idea is being kicked around to allow certain Guantanamo detainees to plead guilty to the 9-11 attack and therefore be executed without a full trial.

This is not because there is some 100% way to know they are guilty. Their stated intent has been to die as martyrs by execution, and because their confessions are completely the fruit of torture techniques that have been proven to elicit false confessions, it would seem to be a little counter intuitive to just give them what they want. It would, however, make the problem of what we did to them go away pretty nicely!

It appears to me that Obama has had to backtrack on the military tribunals because in a regular court these guys might just go free under the weight of how these confessions were coerced out of these very same detainees. The idea of cutting out the tribunal altogether is not only far fetched but pretty unbelievable! We may need a new set of laws and a new sort of prison to deal with this sort of detainee over the long term, but I've got to say that putting them to death on the strength of confession elicited by torture is not the way to go.

As much as the New York Times seems to be sure that this idea has legs in the administration, it seems like a long shot that it could ever work. The administration is, for some reason, going to great lengths to try to prevent the details of torture on the Bush watch from coming out, but in so doing they are implicating the Obama administration as more of the same. This is a slippery slope that none of us wants to start sliding down; and I'm afraid that we are already there.

It seems that alot of this revolves around the 9-11 case and our usual need for vengeance by death penalty. According to the Times:

Lawyers who were asked about the administration’s proposed change in recent days said it appeared to be intended for the Sept. 11 case.
“They are trying to give the 9/11 guys what they want: let them plead guilty and get the death penalty and not have to have a trial,” said Maj. David J. R. Frakt of the Air Force, a Guantánamo defense lawyer.

I can just hear the wheels turning in the conspiracy theorists minds. But, if this is just about that pound of flesh, and also serves to cover up the crimes committed by the Bush Administration, its not worth the long term effect on the law and our constitution, which will be skirted in a way that will not serve anyone but the Bush folks, who really need to be at least investigated!

Further:

Cmdr. Suzanne M. Lachelier, a Navy lawyer for one of the detainees in the Sept. 11 case, Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, said of the Obama administration, “They’re encouraging martyrdom.”

Which is exactly right, and a shortsighted band-aid on a long term problem, exacerbated by the very treatment that is now being glossed over in this way. The Bush answer to martyrs would be "Martyr This, You Asshole...Bring it On!" But that reverberates across the world and creates thousands of more of these same guys. Hiding what happened is not goign to prevent more terrorism; its going to incite it. The best thing that we can do is, if they want to plead guilty, have a trial and then keep them in a small cell forever; take the execution option off the table, at least. The need to make the torture facts go away is a crime in itself, and the need for a pound of flesh in regards to 9-11 is a big example of human weakness. What would Jesus do, after all?

I say that as a non-religious person trying to understand the methods and logic of how these things work in the minds of good religious and community minded people of all ilks. If heaven and martyrdom is the ultimate gift to some, and death is the ultimate punishment to others, where do logical people find a common ground?

Considering that we each live on this earth for a speck of time in the grander scheme of history, and considering that it seems like a relatively long time to us, during which we go through many changes mentally, doesn't it make sense that perhaps the better punishment for a criminal is to make them live out their lives in a high security facility with little contact with the outside world? Is our need to cover up our own misdeeds so strong that we would, in their minds anyway, let them go freely to their reward in heaven? And if there is the slightest possibility for these guys to ever fully realize the gravity of what they've done and to suffer the anguish of having to live with it, day in and day out, into old age, isn't that a worse punishment?
The real story may lie in the fear that we have of realizing the gravity of what was done in our names while we crumbled to the terra and went shopping. We are all guilty of that, but our system and our way of being should allow for us to look at that so that it never can happen again. The ruined cases of these alleged 9-11 conspirators will go down in history as a reason that we don't torture; you cant make a real case out of what you find out that way.



If President Obama is behind this misguided idea, I'm going to have a very hard time reconciling the image that he presents in his wonderful speeches around the world with this ass backward, Bushian idea. I never thought I would agree with President Obama on everything, but on the issue of torture and holding the previous administration accountable, its going to be very hard to get past what seems to be purposeful governmental roadblocks to justice! I've said it before and I'll keep saying it: We can not heal and learn from the past unless and until we look hard at what went on, the good and the bad; there is no moving on! There is only repetition of our mistakes until we fully understand what went into making them. Alot of that may be fear, and fear is an issue that human beings have alot of trouble looking at. But, if we don't look, we can be controlled by it; and thats exactly what happened!! So, face it, and move ahead; but do it in the right way, like real Americans, not scared and embarassed children.

My theory at this point is to wait and see, but I would hope that some sort of check and balance system would kick in in order to give the people a voice. In the meantime, I am heading over to the White House page to drop him a note.

c/p RIP Coco

Labels: guantanamo, lies, President Barack Obama, torture

The intrepid Batocchio has come up with a convenient scorecard you can use to connect the dots, as it were, of the public statements of torture advocates.

Labels: Bush Administration, torture

For that matter, can we please stop this nonsense that ANY religion has any kind of moral authority?

On the evangelical side, we have closet case and meth user Ted Haggard, embezzler Jim Bakker, hooker-fucker Jimmy Swaggart, and on and on and on. While the ex-Nazi Pope goes around the world lecturing us on the evils of abortion, his minions in Ireland have been committing child abuse for decades -- and the Church hierarchy did nothing:

Tens of thousands of Irish children were sexually, physically and emotionally abused by nuns, priests and others over 60 years in a network of church-run residential schools meant to care for the poor, the vulnerable and the unwanted, according to a report released in Dublin on Wednesday.

The 2,600-page report paints a picture of institutions run more like Dickensian orphanages than 20th-century schools, characterized by privation and cruelty that could be both casual and choreographed.

“A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions,” the report says. In the boys’ schools, it says, sexual abuse was “endemic.”

The report, by a state-appointed commission, took nine years to produce and was meant to help Ireland face and move on from one of the ugliest aspects of its recent history. But it has infuriated many victims’ groups because it does not name any of the hundreds of individuals accused of abuse and thus cannot be used as a basis for prosecutions.

[snip]

In a litany that sounds as if it comes from the records of a P.O.W. camp, the report chronicles some of the forms of physical abuse suffered in the boys’ schools:

“Punching, flogging, assault and bodily attacks, hitting with the hand, kicking, ear pulling, hair pulling, head shaving, beating on the soles of the feet, burning, scalding, stabbing, severe beatings with or without clothes, being made to kneel and stand in fixed positions for lengthy periods, made to sleep outside overnight, being forced into cold or excessively hot baths and showers, hosed down with cold water before being beaten, beaten while hanging from hooks on the wall, being set upon by dogs, being restrained in order to be beaten, physical assaults by more than one person, and having objects thrown at them.”

Some of the schools operated essentially as workhouses. In one school, Goldenbridge, girls as young as 7 spent hours a day making rosaries by stringing beads onto lengths of wire. They were given quotas: 600 beads on weekdays and 900 on Sundays.

Girls were routinely sexually abused, often by more than one person at a time, the report said, in “dormitories, schools, motor vehicles, bathrooms, staff bedrooms, churches, sacristies, fields, parlors, the residences of clergy, holiday locations and while with godparents and employers.”

The Vatican had no response. But leaders of various religious orders — who often argued during the investigations that the abuse was a relic of another time, reflecting past societal standards — issued abject apologies on Wednesday, taking care to frame the problem as something that is now behind them.

Aborting babies = bad.
Abusing them after they're born = perfectly OK.

Tens of thousands of children subject to the most foul kinds of abuse -- and the response is to "face it and look forward"? What about those who were abused? What about justice for them?

When you think of the self-righteousness of this ex-Nazi head of this so-called religious hierarchy with as foul a history as we've ever seen, going around the world preaching about morality, it's difficult to imagine how anyone on the face of the earth can embrace a theology put forth by such people. But when criminals in high places commit the most vile of crimes, we're supposed to "face it and look forward." But if you get caught stealing a case of baby food from Wal-Mart, you're going to go to jail. If you get caught smoking a joint in your house that's within 1000 feet of a school, you're going to jail. But if you put on a clerical collar and you have the power of the Vatican institution behind you, you can abuse children with impunity -- and when the facts come out, well, there's nothing to be gained by prosecutions. It's all just so icky, can't we just let bygones be bygones and just move on from here?

No, we can't.

If you want to know why those of us clamoring for investigation and prosecution of Bush Administration officials are doing so, THIS is why. I've long talked about a "tipping point of evil" -- a point at which the doings of an institutional structure are just so foul that they stretch our ability to face that our species and the institutions we think of as authoritative are capable of such things. When one man abuses one child, we can wrap our minds around that and want to stone him to death. But what do we do when hundreds of people abuse tens of thousands of children under the auspices of an institution that holds itself up as having a direct conduit to God? What do we do when the President and Vice President of a country that holds itself up as a beacon of decency and freedom and opportunity to the world order the most foul torture of people captured on a battlefield even AFTER they've given up whatever information they have?

I'll tell you what we don't do. We don't say "Well, it's behind us now, let's move on." We seek justice. And we never, ever take the claims of authority of these institutions at face value ever again.

Labels: hypocrisy, religion, sex crimes, torture

David Waldman on CNN's Blogger Bunch, showing how it's done:


Note how the Limbaugh-lookalike in the bowtie attempts to filibuster Waldman, using lots of buzzwords like "American soldiers" (who are completely irrelevant to this discussion). Note also the disgusting spectacle of Erica Williams from the Center for American Progress spouting the party line about "looking forward". It may very well be that Americans don't care. But the soul of this country is at stake here, and Waldman is spot-on: that this discussion of torture is not about whether torture is acceptable to protect the country, it's about whether torture is acceptable when used solely for political purposes, which is clearly the case here. Perhaps if the pollsters whose work shows that Americans don't care asked the question "Do you favor the use of torture against detainees to glean false information for political purposes?", we might see different responses.

(h/t)

Labels: Democrats with balls, torture, truth

Every piece of information that comes out about the ginned-up case for war increases the horrible reality of how sick, depraved, and cynical the people we Americans allowed to lead this country for eight years were.

Last week, Rachel Maddow connected all the dots we have so far, and it's not a pretty picture:


I wonder if the same people who are willing to accept the legitimacy of torture in the nonexistent "ticking time bomb" scenario are as willing to accept it if the primary reason for torturing captives is to obtain not truthful, but FALSE information in order to gin up a false case for war?

Because if we as a people are willing to do so, even within the "context" of the climate here in the U.S. in 2002 (a climate whipped into a frenzy by the very same Bush Administration that resorted to the tactics of the worst tyrants in history in pursuit of a war they wanted so desperately), then there is in fact nothing in America that's worth saving. We are just another lost empire gasping its dying breaths in our lifetimes.

With Dick Cheney out on the hustings crowing about how torture kept us safe after the 9/11 attacks, one has to wonder why, with people like Richard Clarke trying to tell the Bush Administration what was coming, and with the now-infamous August 6 PDB screaming that Osama Bin Laden was "determined" to strike in the U.S., Dick Cheney was not "able" to "keep us safe" that day in 2001. I keep going back to this -- what some of us called LIHOP over the last seven years -- because every bit of information that comes out about how the Bush Administration used torture not to prevent another attack, but to gin up a case for war that George W. Bush had said he wanted even before being selected to the Presidency on December 12, 2001, points to my worst notions of a cost/benefit ratio being calculated in the Oval Office of what the potential negative fallout would be of allowing an attack to play out versus the potential gains in terms of support for the Iraq War.

This is why we now have the ridiculous spectacle of Newt Gingrich, who opposes any kind of investigation of the Bush Administration that ORDERED the use of torture techniques, running around demanding a Congressional investigation of Nancy Pelosi for claiming that the briefings she received about "harsh interrogation techniques" in 2002 and 2003 were incomplete and inaccurate. "Don't look here," he seems to be saying. "Look over there! Shiny object!"

Because the more information that comes out about why torture techniques were used by the Bush Administration -- to falsify a case for war -- the more it begins to look as if there really ARE no limits to which these people would have gone to go into Iraq. And if there are no limits, then you have to look at Dick Cheney in his underground bunker on 9/11/01, with George W. Bush conveniently out of town, ordering fighter jets to stand down while four planes are hijacked and head for the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Everything that came out of the Bush Administration from that day on can be traced directly back to that day -- a day which served them so well that suddenly the "inside job" people start sounding not quite so crazy. I'm not prepared to go that route, but if ginning up a fake case for an invasion of Iraq was that important, and since we know that Donald Rumsfeld ordered Richard Clarke immediately to find a link, is it really beyond the realm of possibility that allowing what they thought would be a 1993-style attack to play out would serve the needs of the Administration? Once you know just how depraved this bunch is, can you really draw a line and say "This is where they will not cross"?

I'm not going to go to the mat for Nancy Pelosi -- or any of the gutless Democrats who allowed George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to run amok for eight years -- a free pass on this. I know full well what the climate was in this country in 2002, but it is Congress' job to provide oversight -- and there was none. When I heard John Kerry's impassioned speech against a rush to war -- and then he voted for it anyway -- I knew that we could not rely on any kind of opposition to provide oversight. The Democrats allowed themselves to be cowed by bullies for eight years, and so were complicit in the ruination of this country.

And now we have the Obama Administration backtracking on all its promises in regard to cleaning up the worst offenses of the Bush Administration. So at this point I wonder: With what have they been threatened?



(h/t)

Labels: america R.I.P., Democratic sellouts, despair, Newt Gingrich, torture

So, who is he blocking these pictures from? In the shadow of the looming snowball rolling down the hill behind him, President Obama seemingly caved today and decided to block the release of the new array of torture photos coming out of Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq. The pictures are more of the same series that we've seen already, and many have been already published in other countries. In a way, the President was able to play both sides of the fence in that the pictures had already been leaked anyway, and so he was able to appear thoughtful on the effect that these photos would have on our soldiers serving around the world, but also he could be sure that the outrage would be there because they, or some of them, would be out in a bigger way than they had been previously. The problem is that in trying to cover this up for whatever reason, we hurt ourselves more, in that anything short of demanding a thorough investigation of the torture program of the previous administration will not be enough to regain our worldwide moral standing.

In covering his bases, Obama maintains his legendary cool but can also find his outrage along with the people. He should, however, be careful in that there will be a point, if it hasn't come already, that he starts to seem disingenuous in his handling of the situation. There is really only one response to what has gone on; it has to be addressed, not buried. Whatever the reasons are for his decisions so far, there is no excuse for not appointing an independent prosecutor to look at this; especially in light of Nancy Pelosi's statements today...talk about disingenuous!I'm having alot of trouble buying that deer in the headlights exclamation of surprise! If I knew they were lying about everything then what did the likes of Ms. Pelosi need? We are supposed to believe that just now she put the dates of reported torture together with the briefings and realized that they lied to her!!? At least she has the power to demand an investigation, and it looks like she will. I think that we are going to see more and more of this, because the vortex of wrongdoing is going to suck everyone in who doesn't get on the right side of this thing. (and for a really disgusting experience, see Rove's article in the Wall Street Journal today about the Pelosi timeline, breaking down what she knew and when she knew it, according to the master manipulator himself!)



Lets recap, for those who have been watching the Cheney media circus this past week, and who might be a tad confused. First of all, contrary to the blathering of the Cheney machine, we know that torture doesn't work. This is a fact that has been proven by numerous experts over many years, and this example of torture has proved it again. Torture is only used to force captives to make untrue statements incriminating themselves and their countries or groups; this would be helpful only if one wanted to connect something like, say, 9-11 to Saddam Hussein...um...yeah.

The Bush/Cheneys decided to disregard all real expert opinion, and surround themselves with only those who would be blindly loyal to their plan, (Plan: the concept of which I use lightly in this instance,) and that meant that they had to find malleable fundamentalists or blind patriots who had less experience in these issues than they should have had and that would follow orders without question; as Bill Maher said "low hanging fruit."

So, how could this happen? The channels that are the checks and balances of this country were corrupted, so If the orders came directly from the oval office that this was an unprecedented national emergency, then I suppose that the spy agencies might lie to the congress, right? Who knows? It was such a mess and Bush/Cheney were rewriting the rules as they went along. The only example that I can think of as anything like this situation is, unfortunately, 24! That's all well and good, but the glaring sticking point is that it went on for so long. This wasn't a one shot deal, it was a program that reportedly came directly down from the Vice President's office.



Ultimately, all of that tin-foil-hat stuff that we were trying not to succumb to, turned out to be true. All along, I kept saying that next comes the dancing girls and elephants, because I couldn't believe that it could possibly get this much stranger than fiction. I have trouble still believing that all of this was done for the money and/or revenge for Bush one, but anything could be true....the only thing that resonates with me is that this is a sort of fundamentalist mental illness, and group-think of the kool-aid variety; cognitive dissonance. To break the very tenants that this country was founded on, and to perform acts that we tried and convicted others of in the past, thereby creating more recent law that we can cite along with the actual laws and the Geneva Convention, and to do it all so openly, leads me to believe that there is some sort of real deep mental problem here which we would could call any number of things, but the actions performed in it's service were clearly illegal and must be addressed.



Obama can block the images all he wants but they will see the light. The thing is that he must come out in favor of investigation of these crimes soon, regardless of any precedent he might set for prosecution of prior Presidents of the Untied States. He must assume that neither he or any other President would commit such acts and if they were ever implicated for actions in office, they would welcome at least an investigation. To not investigate and try to bury this is much more of a danger to our troops all over the world than looking at it in the light and punishing the criminals.


c/p RIP Coco

Labels: cognitive dissonance, Dick Cheney, liars, Nancy Pelosi, torture

Dispatches from around Blogtopia (™ Skippy):

At Bradblog, a long and thoughtful post by a man whose father was waterboarded by the Japanese during WWII: Says Ernest A. Canning: "...for the moment, if such practices are not finally brought to an end, once and for all, hopefully through accountability for those who justified them --- fixing the facts around the policy --- the President's promise that it won't happen again is little more than a vague wish."

Richard Blair warns us not to be distracted by the shiny object that is torture. The real issue is the Bush Administration's use of torture as a device to gin up a fake connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda to try to justify their illegal war. This one's a must read. So is this one by Larisa Alexandrovna.

Digby gives us another reason to hate Chris Matthews.

Mark Karlin makes the case that premedited murder in the first degree would not be an outrageous charge against Bush officials.

Paul Krugman has a word for torturing people to fabricate a link between a country that did not attack us and an organization that did. (Hint: People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil">M. Scott Peck wrote about it, except that Peck believed in redemption, something that I don't think is possible for this bunch -- certainly not after watching Cheney sneer gleefully about the "good information" they got from torturing people.)

Ornery Bastard thanks Marcy Wheeler for being all over this story. (If you want one place to keep up with all this, you could do worse than bookmark Emptywheel over at FDL.

I'll have more on implications of the Bush Administration resorting to torture to gin up a case against Iraq immediately after the 9/11 attacks as soon as I have more than five minutes to do the research and put a post together. Put on your tinfoil chapeau, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Labels: Bush Administration crimes, evil, torture

Every day it is becoming more difficult for the Obama Administration to continue to embrace the appalling Peggy Noonan Doctrine of "just keep walking" where the Bush Administration's embrace of torture as a war tactic is concerned. Now that the OLC memos have been released, former State Department counselor Philip Zelikow has decided to speak up in Foreign Policy magazine:

1. The focus on water-boarding misses the main point of the program.

Which is that it was a program. Unlike the image of using intense physical coercion as a quick, desperate expedient, the program developed "interrogation plans" to disorient, abuse, dehumanize, and torment individuals over time.

[snip]

There is an elementary distinction, too often lost, between the moral (and policy) question -- "What should we do?" -- and the legal question: "What can we do?" We live in a policy world too inclined to turn lawyers into surrogate priests granting a form of absolution. "The lawyers say it's OK." Well, not really. They say it might be legal. They don't know about OK.

[snip]

The underlying absurdity of the administration's position can be summarized this way. Once you get to a substantive compliance analysis for "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" you get the position that the substantive standard is the same as it is in analogous U.S. constitutional law. So the OLC must argue, in effect, that the methods and the conditions of confinement in the CIA program could constitutionally be inflicted on American citizens in a county jail.

In other words, Americans in any town of this country could constitutionally be hung from the ceiling naked, sleep deprived, water-boarded, and all the rest -- if the alleged national security justification was compelling. I did not believe our federal courts could reasonably be expected to agree with such a reading of the Constitution.

I remain unconvinced that there weren't ugly little corners of the Administration; the "You're with us or you're with the terrorist" crowd, who weren't thinking about exactly that possibility. But Zelikow's point about using lawyers as surrogate priests is, to my mind, the crux of the matter. The Bush Administration, and yes, the Obama Administration, are hiding behind lawyers like John Yoo and Jay Bybee to exonerate them from any kind of wrongdoing. "The lawyers said it was OK." What's appalling to me is that there is NOTHING in the psyches of these men that said "Wait a minute, this is really ugly stuff." You have to be a sick, twisted, sadistic psychopath to waterboard someone, no matter how odious he is, 183 times in one month -- and still think you can take any kind of moral high road.

For over a decade, we've heard the right wing talk about morality, but only in the context of private sexual behavior. It didn't start with the impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about a blowjob in a private civil case, but it gained critical mass with the impeachment. What this focus on sexuality allowed the right wing to do is to reframe all notions of morality into the context of what individuals do in their bedrooms. So as long as morality could be put into this very small box, when it came time for the Bush Junta to go to war, anything they wanted to do was fair game. Because the lawyers -- the same lawyers Republicans rail against during their campaigns -- said it was OK.

Zelikow spoke with Rachel Maddow last night:

Meanwhile, elsewhere at General Electric, Chuck Todd has shown that he's willing to embrace the torturers as part of the hazing process to become an entrenched, inside-the-beltway good ol' boy:

There does seem to be a little bit of a reaction to how this was received on the left. And the president, when he went on in those comments, Andrea, to suggest that he'd be open to some sort of special commission that was bipartisan, you know, he said, on one hand said he's worried about the process getting politicized, and frankly this feels like a political food fight now. Vice President Cheney on one side, President Obama on the other. The hard left, the hard right, fighting over this in the blogosphere. When he talks about - he fears the politicization - that may be too late, so the compromise might be, and the president basically comes out and endorses it in that photo op, questioning that he got there, which is a special commission to look into this but it opens up all sorts of doors on when legal opinions matter and all that. That is just -- this is some touchy situation, issues having to do with legal opinions, the constitution, it's a real tightrope. And the political pressure on both sides is intense.

This is what passes for political analysis in the Washington press corps these days. A moral question like torture is reduced to a political food fight between warring political parties. And note Chuck Todd's use of the term "Vice President Cheney" instead of "Former Vice President Cheney" -- as if Cheney were still very much in office (which given Cheney's claim that he has "ordered" release of documents that will show all the "good information" he got from feeding his dark soul with the screams of the tortured may very well be true). That is the third time yesterday I heard Dick Cheney referred to this way.

The Beltway crowd can paint this as a "fringe blogger" vs. the forces of All That is Good and Holy all they want to; it doesn't change the fundamental fact: We are no longer a nation with any moral authority. We are Saddam Hussein. We are North Vietnam in the 1960's. We are the Japanese during WWII, the same Japanese that WE tried and convicted for using the very same techniques that are now deemed by Bush's psychopathic lawyers to be perfectly acceptable.

The right loves to talk about religion as being necessary for morality. It kind of makes me wonder what kind of fight we're in when the religion that our leaders invoke can allow them to think that torture is an intrinisic good when WE do it.

Labels: Bush Administration crimes, torture

It's almost a conspiracy theorist's dream scenario, =ahem =, OK, an independent speculative investigator's dream scenario. Here's a centrist president whose very existence so freaks out the right that they start amassing guns 'n' ammo at a furious rate; a former Constitutional law professor whose campaign was built on hope and change and accountability, and within his first 100 days, makes very clear that where his predecessor's war crimes are concerned, it's "Ah, that's in the past now, let's just look ahead."

This is such a specious argument it's laughable. There's the old Yiddish joke about the definition of chutzpah being the man who kills his parents and then pleads for mercy because he's an orphan. The idea that crimes are not prosecutable because they have already happened is preposterous, particularly for someone who claims to have as one of his administration's goals to bring in Osama Bin Laden. Weren't "I really am not that concerned about him" the words of Barack Obama's predecessor? We expected lack of accountability to be an integral part of the Bush Administration, but we never dreamed that Obama, even if we knew he wasn't the progressive dreamboat most of the netroots thought he was, would sign onto the "move on, nothing to see here" doctrine.

So what does YOUR spidey-sense tell you? A deal made where Bush wouldn't declare a state of emergency so as to avoid handing over power in return for this sort of executive immunity? Some kind of Ivy League torture cabal? Remembrance of John F. Kennedy and how there have always been rumblings of the CIA being involved in his assassination? The potential for investigations to demonstrate that many high-profile Democrats in Congress knew and approved of torture as well? Or is it a matter of Barack Obama being corrupted by Washington this quickly?

Well, he may not have a choice as to whether to investigate, because except for the most sick, rabid wingnuts, most people are horrified that even a monster like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times:

Pressure mounted on President Obama on Monday for more thorough investigation into harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects under the Bush administration, even as he tried to reassure the Central Intelligence Agency that it would not be blamed for following legal advice.

Mr. Obama said it was time to admit “mistakes” and “move forward.” But there were signs that he might not be able to avoid a protracted inquiry into the use of interrogation techniques that the president’s top aides and many critics say crossed the line into torture.

And while Mr. Obama vowed not to prosecute C.I.A. officers for acting on legal advice, on Monday aides did not rule out legal sanctions for the Bush lawyers who developed the legal basis for the use of the techniques.

The president’s decision last week to release secret memorandums detailing the harsh tactics employed by the C.I.A. under his predecessor provoked a furor that continued to grow on Monday as critics on various fronts assailed his position. Among other things, the memos revealed that two captured Qaeda operatives were subjected to a form of near-drowning known as waterboarding a total of 266 times.

Some Bush administration officials, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, accused the administration of endangering the country by disclosing national secrets. Mr. Cheney went on the Fox News Channel to announce that he had asked the C.I.A. to declassify reports documenting the intelligence gained from the interrogations. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the former C.I.A. director, has also condemned the release of the memorandums and said the harsh questioning had value.

On the other side of the spectrum, human rights activists, Congressional Democrats and international officials pressed for a fuller accounting of what happened. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, wrote Mr. Obama asking him not to rule out prosecutions until her panel completed an investigation over the next six to eight months.

Mr. Obama tried to calm the situation with his first visit to C.I.A. headquarters since taking office. Concerned about alienating the agency, Mr. Obama went out of his way to lavish praise on intelligence officers, using words like “indispensable,” “courage” and “remarkable” and promising his “support and appreciation.”

“Don’t be discouraged by what’s happened in the last few weeks,” he told employees. “Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we’ve made some mistakes. That’s how we learn. But the fact that we are willing to acknowledge them and then move forward, that is precisely why I am proud to be president of the United States and that’s why you should be proud to be members of the C.I.A.”

I don't know what's more disheartening, that an erudite guy like Barack Obama can come up with no better term for willful and gleeful torture as a policy than resorting to the Kissingerian passive voice of "mistakes were made"; or that there's some kind of "It's OK if you're an American" exception to Nuremberg Principle IV ("The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."). It's either intellectual laziness or the height of cynicism. Either way, if he thinks that giving the Bush Administration a free pass for its crimes is a way to ingratiate himself with the right, last week's hysteria and the fact that the eliminationist militia movement has awakened from its eight-year-long slumber already disproves that notion.

Labels: cynicism, President Barack Obama, torture

183 times?

In ONE MONTH?

According to the May 30, 2005 Bradbury memo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002.

On page 37 of the OLC memo, in a passage discussing the differences between SERE techniques and the torture used with detainees, the memo explains:

The CIA used the waterboard "at least 83 times during August 2002" in the interrogation of Zubaydah. IG Report at 90, and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM, see id. at 91.

Note, the information comes from the CIA IG report which, in the case of Abu Zubaydah, is based on having viewed the torture tapes as well as other materials. So this is presumably a number that was once backed up by video evidence.

The same OLC memo passage explains how the CIA might manage to waterboard these men so many times in one month each (though even with these chilling numbers, the CIA's math doesn't add up).

...where authorized, it may be used for two "sessions" per day of up to two hours. During a session, water may be applied up to six times for ten seconds or longer (but never more than 40 seconds). In a 24-hour period, a detainee may be subjected to up to twelve minutes of water appliaction. See id. at 42. Additionally, the waterboard may be used on as many as five days during a 30-day approval period.

So: two two-hour sessions a day, with six applications of the waterboard each = 12 applications in a day. Though to get up to the permitted 12 minutes of waterboarding in a day (with each use of the waterboard limited to 40 seconds), you'd need 18 applications in a day. Assuming you use the larger 18 applications in one 24-hour period, and do 18 applications on five days within a month, you've waterboarded 90 times--still just half of what they did to KSM.

The CIA wants you to believe waterboarding is effective. Yet somehow, it took them 183 applications of the waterboard in a one month period to get what they claimed was cooperation out of KSM.

That doesn't sound very effective to me.

Nor to me. In fact, you almost have to have a certain grudging respect for anyone who can withstand that kind of waterboarding (OK, cue the wingnuts popping into the comments calling me a terrorist sympathizer -- especially you guys calling for secession and violent overthrow of the president).

This is a stain on this nation that will never be washed clean. We are supposed to be better than this. We are supposed to be about accountability. We are supposed to be the beacon of justice and righteousness, and yet we have allowed ourselves to be led by men of unfathomable thuggishness and perversity. We looked the other way even though we knew what they were doing. And now we are led by a man who knows full well what has been done, and says that we should not look back, but instead look forward. Does the kid who gets caught with a bag of pot get to look forward? Or the shoplifter? Or the guy who robs the gas station? Why do we have to look forward and ignore what has been done?

We were once a great nation. We became a nation of madmen -- frightened and venal lunatics who have forgotten what we are supposed to be; what we fancy ourselves to be. We no longer care. We are no longer human. And as long as the men who brought us to this depraved state in the name of illusory safety while they allowed the real dangers to continue to accumulate, there is nothing that will ever cleanse this stain from our national soul.

We are a lost people.

Labels: torture

This is one of those mornings when I really want to write something and there's just no gray matter left. That's why I left it to Mr. Olbermann, who isn't waist deep in what sometimes feels like the equivalent of jumping into second year medical school with nothing but a tech school certificate in air conditioner repair, to opine on the Bush Administration torture memos released yesterday by the Obama Administration -- right before telling us that they don't plan to do a damn thing about them.

I still think that there was some sort of agreement hatched between the two administrations between the election and January 20th -- something along the lines of "We'll go quietly and not tell the country that the economy is too dire to risk a change of leadership, and in return you won't prosecute us." But that's just me. My brain is too busy trying to absorb the difference between hematology blood chemistry and how the hell we're going to lay out the form that captures study drug dose changes so that I can present it at a teleconference this morning so that I don't look like someone they just pulled off the street to deal with oncology data capture to even try to imagine what justification there can be for saying about now-known criminals, "We know they committed the most heinous of crimes, but we have to just look ahead." I mean, I can't even get out of a parking ticket by saying that, and Barack Obama wants to let a bunch of buys who are so evil that they clearly got a thrill, perhaps even a sexual one, off of torturing people they captured, off the hook.

I recognize that the Bush Junta left a mess the magnitude of which I don't think we even know yet, and perhaps Barack Obama does, and there's only so much that even SuperPresident can do at once. There's also this little problem of the "ZOMG THERE'S A BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE" crowd who for some reason have adopted the slang of gay sex for their anti-government demonstrations after being silent for eight years while George Bush and Dick Cheney used the language of patriotism to spit on the Constitution. There's also this little matter of the media, which is predisposed to want to topple any Democratic president while giving a Republican one a free pass to commit the most heinous violations of everything humans hold decent. But perhaps the reason George Will is reduced to admonishing wealthy Americans to stop wearing blue jeans because it's unseemly is because there is just nothing in movement conservatism to defend anymore. The cerebral conservatism of William Buckley became the party of Dick Cheney and torture and is now the party of tantrum-throwing attention hogs like Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber, and teabaggers screaming about high taxes after theirs are cut.

So here I am, it's Friday, I'm wondering if I can just maybe spend the weekend cleaning my house instead of sitting in front of my work computer, and there just aren't words for what the government we employed for the past eight years is about to get away with.

So I'm kicking it over to some more inspired people, starting with Jonathan Turley on Rachel Maddow's show last night:


If you read nothing else about what our government did, read Digby here, here, and here.

Glenn Greenwald reprints some of the memos.

Stephen Reynolds wonders why the Bush Administration didn't get its inspiration from Indiana Jones movies (because sometimes you have to get your Roberto Benigni on or you'll scream).

Alex Koppelman offers links to the documents themselves and holds out a shred of hope that even though underlings won't be prosecuted (and I thought the Nuremburg trials did away with the "I was just following orders" defense) the Bush Administration officials who ordered it might. Note to Alex Koppelman: don't hold your breath.

It seems that I'm not the only one rendered at least temporarily speechless by what our government did, and by the current president's unwillingness to put justice ahead of temporary political expediency....either that or my progressive compatriots are still digesting how to respond in a way that doesn't throw Barack Obama under the bus but tries to find a way to demonstrate that he DOES have the political support, if he just turns off Morning Schmegegge and stops listening to Mike Barnicle and Pat Buchanan and Wolf Blitzer, for doing what a good Constitutional law professor should do. Ordinarily I find the Firedoglake folks rapidly joining the pull-up-the-ladder-behind-them brigade, but at least they're not ignoring the fact that the president we elected is about to let his predecessor get away with war crimes.

Labels: Bush Administration crimes, President Barack Obama, spinelessness, torture

Tonight's honoree: Keith Olbermann:

Labels: accountability, Bush Administration crimes, Keith Olbermann, President Barack Obama, torture

And to WHOM it's dangerous:

Last night on The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly showed a clip of a Fox News producer ambushing Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) to accuse him of political hypocrisy for urging an investigation into Bush crimes after he had opposed the Clinton impeachment. “This Leahy thing — this is beyond the pale,” O’Reilly moaned.

Marc Thiessen, Bush’s former chief speechwriter, agreed. Not only would the investigations be hypocritcal, he said, but worse, they would be “terribly dangerous” because they would expose the “facts” of the U.S.’s interrogation techniques to Osama bin Laden:

THIESSEN: [T]he facts that they want to get out are the techniques we use to interrogate terrorists. The techniques that we used to intercept e-mails and communications and telephone calls. And when you get those facts out, it’s not just going out to the American people and to the viewers on television. It’s going out to Osama bin Laden. It’s going out to the terrorists who can use those information to get around our intelligence and plan the next attack.

So it’s very deadly — this is very deadly serious stuff. … And it’s terribly dangerous.

He also emphasized that the people Leahy might investigate “aren’t torturers, they’re heroes.” “They should be getting a parade on Pennsylvania Avenue,” he added. Watch it:

Somehow I think an investigation would be far more dangerous to Bush Administration criminals than it would be to national security

Labels: Bush Administration crimes, secrecy, torture, wingnuttia

In an ideal world, John McCain's latest tirades about Barack Obama having "a September 10 mindset" and his trotting out of the now-hopefully-discredited Rudy Giuliani would be greeted with hoots, catcalls, and the tossing of metaphorical salmonella-tainted tomatoes. And the now-unassailable evidence that whatever George W. Bush says, what the U.S. has inflicted upon its "prisoners" -- in many cases guys they just swept off the street -- is, in fact torture, and that torture has been unacceptable in civilized societies for generations, would be met with horror and calls not just for the impeachment of everyone involved, but prosecution at the World Court, conviction, and punishment.

The problem is that all too many Americans still see people from the Middle East as "them" -- latent terrorists whom we can treat as we wish. And skyrocketing fuel prices don't help. After all, Americans have been told for the last eight years that our profligate, gas-guzzling lifestyle is somehow blessed by God, and it's an easy leap to "these people" interfering with that lifestyle.

So I don't know how much impact the assertion by a two-star general that this administration has, in fact, committed war crimes, is going to have.

In his 2004 report on Abu Ghraib, then-Major General Anthony Taguba concluded that "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees." He called the abuse "systemic and illegal." And, as Seymour M. Hersh reported in the New Yorker, he was rewarded for his honesty by being forced into retirement.

Now, in a preface to a Physicians for Human Rights report based on medical examinations of former detainees, Taguba adds an epilogue to his own investigation.

The new report, he writes, "tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the rest of these individual's lives on their bodies and minds. Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors.

"The profiles of these eleven former detainees, none of whom were ever charged with a crime or told why they were detained, are tragic and brutal rebuttals to those who claim that torture is ever justified. Through the experiences of these men in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, we can see the full-scope of the damage this illegal and unsound policy has inflicted --both on America's institutions and our nation's founding values, which the military, intelligence services, and our justice system are duty-bound to defend.

"In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored. . . .

In the piece quoted above, Dan Froomkin refers to this series of investigative reports by McClatchy newspapers -- a series that you must take the time to read. It is a devastating indictment of not just the Administration that perpetrated these crimes against humanity, but also of all of us. It's an indictment of a cowardly legislative branch that refuses to exercise its oversight role because its members are afraid of what a media that worships the bellicose hypermacho of the Bush Administration would say. It's an indictment of a frightened American population, too many of whom have applauded the torture in the name of retribution for 9/11. And it's an indictment of thosse of us who have been decrying torture since the beginning -- because we've been so spectacularly ineffective in somehow getting those whose job it is to put the brakes on this bunch of psychopaths that not looking the other way at these crimes is the right thing to do -- no matter what Chris Matthews says.

It should have people congregating outside the White House demanding the arrest of everyone in the West Wing, but it won't.

Labels: Bush Administration, torture, war crimes