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Torture 
Mon May 09, 2011 at 06:00:05 AM MST
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On Fox "News" this Sunday criminal Former VP Dick Cheney said the following about returning to the use of waterboarding in terror interrogations:
I certainly would advocate it; I'd be a strong supporter of it
This is an area of contention that I have had with President Obama nearly from the first days of his administration. Namely the purely political decision not to follow through on our legal responsibility to investigate any credible allegations of torture and to prosecute those who were found responsible.
The fact that the criminal Bush Administration admitted to waterboarding at least three of our detainees, which has been by US and international law an act of torture and a potential war crime yet none of the top level people have ever been investigated for it is a national shame that will not be wiped away for a long time to come.
Worse it has left the issue of torture and waterboarding in particular open. At this late point it is easy to get academic about this form of torture. Given that I thought I would give everyone a taste of what is would be like to be waterboarded. This is a first person fictionalization of it, it is my best attempt to reproduce what a person would feel in that situation.
Warning: if you have been a victim of torture, you might not want to read this. I have been told that it can be triggering for traumatic memories and while I want everyone to get as vicsoral as possible an understanding of torture I don't want to traumatize anyone:
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Fri Feb 04, 2011 at 18:52:44 PM MST
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You think that just because President Obama is afraid of the consequences of investigating the criminal Bush administrations State Sponsored Torture program that the former President and his henchmen are off the hook? Well think again. And this is not just on theoretically either. I'll have a lot more detail on this on Monday, but here is what I got from a friend of mine at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR)
President Bush was supposed to be in Geneva on Monday. He was going to address a group at the Hotel President Wilson. It was to be one of those big dollar events where the Ex-President speaks to a rah-rah crowd for a big passel of cash. That is now canceled, and just canceled this evening. Why is that?
Well you see the CCR and its allies in Europe had been preparing a bit of a surprise for the 43 President of the United States and unindicted torturer. They had been working for months to bring two complaints against George W. Bush under the International Conventions Against Torture. One in the name of Al Jazeera reporter Sami el-Hajj and a current CIA detainee Majid Khan, who is to this day held at Guantanamo Bay without charge.
CCR and the European Center of Constitutional and Human Rights have put together a 2.500 page case against the criminal President Bush and had intended to file it Monday when Bush was in Geneva. They had been keeping the a pretty tight lid on this, talking to reporters under a news embargo and preparing a press conference. Some how it seems that it has leaked and lo and behold, W suddenly can't attend and the event is being canceled.
Of course this swill be spun by the organizers and the handlers for the former President, but I agree with Jen Nessel of the CCR when she says:
Whatever Bush or his hosts say, we have no doubt he cancelled his trip to avoid our case.
You may be able to play the law in one country. Your allies might be able to make the cost of following the rule of law so high that the administration following you finds their hands tied, but that does not make you safe from international law. It really doesn't make you safe from domestic law, it just might buy you enough time to age and die without being indicted for your war crimes.
It has been said before and it bears saying again, if you are a torturer you had better not make any plans to travel outside the United States. You might think you can brag about ordering torture and swagger around. Keep thinking that, because the wheels of justice grind slow but they grind exceedingly fine!
I can't tell you how happy it makes me to be able to talk about the real possibility of the members of Bush Administration facing a court for their war crimes. The only thing that would have made it better is if it was a U.S. Court. But justice is justice and I'll take any step towards it that I can get.
What's on your minds tonight Firedogs? The floor is yours.
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Sun Jan 30, 2011 at 11:00:29 AM MST
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America can increase its standing in the world immeasurably by how we react to the democratic uprising in Egypt. As President Barack Obama just said the other day to Hosni Mubarak, who promised change and a hint of democracy in Egypt:I told him he has a responsibility to give meaning to those words, to take concrete steps and actions that deliver on that promise.
We can support Mohammed el Baradai in stabilizing the country with the help of the Muslim Brotherhood. I am not afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood nor is it viewed as a credible threat to take over Egypt.
We can also clear the air on extraordinary rendition and torture, and quite possibly turn Osama bin Laden into a relic just like Mubarak by showing that we will be the United States that the world once believed in: "If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear - never to see them again - you send them to Egypt."
Like another historic figure once said - "The time is always right to do the right thing." Now is that time.
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Thu Jan 20, 2011 at 06:58:14 AM MST
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Graphic courtesy of lazyevaluator via Flickr
File it under going down the wrong damned path, again. The New York Times is reporting that the Obama administration is preparing to lift the ban on new military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay. Shortly after he was inaugurated President Obama directed Defense Secretary Gates to order a freeze on new indictments for detainees at our national shame of a prison camp. The intent was two fold, one to review the incredibly slipshod cases against the men held there and to allow for the planning to begin closing the prison camp.
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Tue Oct 05, 2010 at 06:05:00 AM MST
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Noted Conservative Hack Jonah Goldberg posted a little article tearing into the idea that the Supreme Court is the place where we define what is and is not constitutional. He is defending the new radical Republican talking point that all legislation should have a constitutional justification attached to it. This is the Tenther's (folks who think that the powers of the Federal Government are completely enumerated in the Constitution and the Tenth Amendment gives all other powers to the states individually) favorite meme.
They would use this thinking to end the Federal minimum wage, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. All the big Tea Party faves have this idea, with Joe Miller, Sharon Angle and Christine "I am not a witch" O'Donnell really leading the charge.
This idea is nuts on the surface but it is packed full of nutty goodness as you get deeper as well. The whole push for "constitutional fealty" by the Right is a ruse and always has been. The reason that they want to return to so called original intent it so wipe out two centuries of case law that does not suit their radical agenda.
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Tue Jun 15, 2010 at 05:38:35 AM MST
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There is nothing about torture that is good or positive. The act itself is one of the most brutal and heinous that humans have ever committed. The affect on a society that condones torture is one of rising fear and brutality. The information (if it can be called that) gained under torture is so suspect as to be worthless. Perhaps the worst aspect is that torture, once accepted is used not only on enemies or bad people, but innocent victims as well.
On Monday the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of one such innocent victim of torture, Mr. Maher Arar, a Syrian born Canadian citizen. In 2002 he was returning to Canada from a trip abroad. At a stop over at JFK Airport he was detained by the US Government and held in solitary confinement for two weeks without access to an attorney. Mr. Arar was then deported, not to his nation of citizenship, Canada but, to Syria and put in the hands of the Syrian intelligence services, who are well known for their torture activities.
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Fri Jun 04, 2010 at 12:33:09 PM MST
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"Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed," Bush told a Grand Rapids audience Wednesday, of the self-professed 9/11 mastermind. "I'd do it again to save lives."
huffingtonpost.com
Bold text added by the diarist
President Obama says "We can't go backwards"
Ex-President and Unindicted war criminal George W. Bush is basically saying "Why not go backwards, look at the wonderful legacy I have left you!"
Yeah, those were WAR CRIMES, the kind Reagan forbid and made illegal under US law, but, now that you have reminded us that the only thing in your legacy that you want to remind us of is how torture worked in your book, I say we encourage George W. to keep talking. Keep reminding us of that legacy, Georgie, cause you sure didaheckuvajob.
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Thu Jun 03, 2010 at 06:04:58 AM MST
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The normalization of torture continued apace yesterday as the criminal President Bush said in a speech in Grand Rapids, MI that if he had it all to do over again he would still order the waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. That's right this unindicted war criminal still thinks that ordering this crime, which produced no actionable intelligence was not only the legal thing to do but the right thing.
Lest we let time wash away our memories KSM was waterboarded 183 times in the course of one month. That is an average of five times a day that they tortured this man and exactly nothing came of it. Sure we got some BS that banks and malls might be attacked, but there were not operations to do that, just the desire on the part of the tortured to say anything, everything to make it stop.
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Thu Apr 29, 2010 at 11:21:10 AM MST
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There are a lot of reasons to be frothing at the mouth angry at the criminal Bush administration. One of the biggest is the way that they not only managed to overturn a half century of certainty about what torture is and the use of it, in doing so they have also extended the immunity of those committing torture in the name of national security. The use of the State Secrets privilege to quash cases brought by torture victims was the standard operating procedure in the Bush administration.
It has sadly continued in the Obama administration. Without letting our current Executive Branch off the hook at all, it is easy to understand how that happens. How many of us have ever been willing to give up privileges we have, even if we are fairly sure it is not a good idea for anyone to have them? Since no one, not even the former V.P. Dick Cheney is the villain in the movie of their life, everyone thinks they will use these powers only for good.
This is why we need groups like the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights to fight against the expansion of governmental power and accountability for any illegal acts the government might commit.
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Tue Apr 27, 2010 at 10:58:01 AM MST
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The Obama Justice Department (on April 15th 2010)* announced that it has secured a ten-felony-count indictment against Thomas Drake, an official with the National Security Agency during the Bush years.
~snip~
(T)he DOJ alleges "that between approximately February 2006 and November 2007, a newspaper reporter published a series of articles about the NSA," and it claims "Drake served as a source for many of those articles, including articles that contained classified information."
~snip~
Although the indictment does not specify Drake's leaks, it is highly likely (as Shane also suggests) that it is based on Drake's bringing to the public's attention major failures and cost over-runs with the NSA's spying programs via leaks to The Baltimore Sun.
salon.com
Bold text and some editing* done by the diarist
The indictment of Thomas Drake has NOTHING to do with the illegality of the Bush warrantless wiretapping program, rather, it has to do with Drake's uncovering of major failures and cost over-runs within the domestic spying program. As Greenwald writes . . .
I used to write post after post about how warped and dangerous it was that the Bush DOJ was protecting the people who criminally spied on Americans (Bush, Cheney Michael Hayden) while simultaneously threatening to prosecute the whistle-blowers who exposed misconduct. But the Bush DOJ never actually followed through on those menacing threats; no NSA whistle-blowers were indicted during Bush's term (though several were threatened ). It took the election of Barack Obama for that to happen, as his handpicked Assistant Attorney General publicly boasted yesterday of the indictment against Drake.
salon.com
Bold text added by the diarist
Wait, wait, wait! If Obama's DoJ is prosecuting crimes from the Bush era isn't that an act of "Looking backwards, not forward"? ( and yes, revealing state secrets, even if done for the good of the public as whistleblowers do, is still illegal. )
Why doesn't Obama's dictate that we "Look Forward, Not Backward," protect this NSA whistle-blower from prosecution at least as much as the high-level Bush officials who criminally spied on American citizens? Isn't the DOJ's prosecution of Drake the classic case of "Looking Backward," by digging into Bush-era crimes, controversies and disclosures?
salon.com
Bold text added by the diarist
So prosecuting a Bush/Cheney era whistleblower who uncovered waste and incompetence is important enough to "Look backwards on", but not the lies and war crimes that lead us to war in Iraq based on evidence derived from illegal torture?
And what effect will this move by the Obama DoJ have?
As Lucy Dalglish, Executive Director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Presss, told the NYT today: "The whole point of the prosecution is to have a chilling effect on reporters and sources, and it will."
salon.com
When the Bush/Cheney administration came down on whistleblowers the left was outraged and loud about it. But now, almost total silence.
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Wed Apr 07, 2010 at 06:32:21 AM MST
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I have few absolutes in my life. This is by design, the fewer things that you have no bending on the greater the chance that you can find common ground and get progress on issues or even have a happy life. The two I'll talk about today are torture and political violence.
We have seen a disturbing trend in the last few months of violence based on political views. The man who flew his plane into the IRS, the assassination of Dr. Tiller for performing legal reproductive services, the killing of police officers for the supposed plan by the Obama administration to seize the guns of private citizens, the brick throwing at Democratic political offices and the cutting of gas lines at the family home of the brother of a U.S Representative whose address was posted on the internet by mistake.
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