And why did all this happen? Because four Blackwater military contractors were killed. Not only that, but the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (yes, it's a government committee) "fault Blackwater in Fallujah ambush." (Unfortunately, this report came out 3 years after the fact. We never seem to know these things at the time, or our 'leaders' don't.) So, because four contractors were killed, we basically go into a city use depleted uranium and other toxic weapons and destroy the entire city, killing thousands. This is clearly a war crime, and people need to be taken to task for it.

We're right back where we've really always been, aren't we?

"I share the President’s conviction that as a nation, we must, to the extent possible, look forward and not backward when it comes to issues such as these. While this Department will follow its obligation to take this preliminary step to examine possible violations of law, we will not allow our important work of keeping the American people safe to be sidetracked.

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From the Daily Mail:

Hillary Clinton has threatened to end intelligence sharing with Britain if the High Court publishes its findings on what happened to former terror detainee Binyam Mohamed.

Letters from the U.S. Secretary of State and the CIA to the Government warn they will cease co-operation with British counterparts if two judges release details about Mr Mohamed's alleged torture.

Human rights campaigners yesterday claimed the threat - which could put British lives at risk - was merely a ' smokescreen', but Foreign Secretary David Miliband insisted it was serious.

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Salon has a full transcript. I'm just gonna hit the highlights here (hat tip to Athenae at First Draft, who is dead solid perfect in her reaction to Todd's half-coherent special pleading that if you have a trial, the Democrats will be perceived as "mean" and the world will end in all 32 wingnut flavors, again.) [ why does a TV News department need a political director?]

Chuck Todd looks to me to be covering for torturers in advance, and through the use of misdirection, in a way that I find purely despicable. Is Chuck Todd really saying murders -- more than 100 murders of POWs -- shouldn't be investigated because it'd cause a row in political circles?

Glenn Greenwald: My guest today on Salon Radio is NBC News political director Chuck Todd, who participated in a discussion on the MSNBC show Morning Joe earlier this week regarding potential torture investigations and prosecutions by the Obama Justice Department.

So far, so good. We get the who, (NBC's Chuck Todd) the what, (potential torture investigations) and the when (recapping a discussion from MSNBC earlier) to back up the discussion about to open. Props to Greenwald for getting three of the W's in his lede. He then asks a good, if possibly overcomplicated, question:

I want to begin by asking you this: discussions of torture prosecutions in the media typically focus on waterboarding, and that was true of the television segment that I just mentioned. The reality, though, is that there have been at least 100 detainees who have died in US custody, many that died during or as a result of interrogations, and many of those are deaths that the US government itself classifies as homicides.There have been a lot of other cases where detainees didn't die but were brutalized severely during interrogation. Eric Holder said that reading the reports of what happened there, quote "sickens" him.
Do you think that investigations by the Justice Department to determine if there were crimes committed, violations of our laws -- either by individuals interrogators or high-level policy makers in the Bush administration -- is nothing but a petty, unimportant distraction from what really matters?

Greenwald goes right by the waterboarding -- there have after all been non-prisoners who underwent a version of it, as well as SERE school alumni who have talked and written about it, and it is obviously torture. He wants to know whether politics ought to outweigh murder in importance. It's a simple question: do you let powerful people get away with ordering murder?

Immediately, Chuck Todd starts to dissemble, lose coherency, ramble, obfuscate, and in general not give an answer. "Let me clarify," "the thinking behind the political thinking on this -- which is that, politically, these things can turn into a distraction." "this is where I took some issue with it, and maybe I was inartful --"
and then he completely changes the subject into the future role of the CIA. You never get an answer to the question -- he even says that his 20 years of watching the special prosecutor process leads him to this conclusion.

If this guy was at the White House Press Office podium (especially if he were there as a GOP Press Secretary), that'd be one thing (and I'd've expected this level of non-answer). But this guy's supposed to be a reporter, for catsakes!!!

New President, new Congress, new policy, new rules, new Joint Chiefs, new chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Same old torture. Same old coverup.

Six months in,

These are ugly images, so I'm warning you ahead of time.
The person who originally put them online has seen more and speaks about that in a posting at another blog.

Australians have seen more of the photos that the Obama administration is refusing to release, if I read that posting right. It is important that we keep after the Democrats in Congress and in the Obama administration so that the torture Bush and Cheney ordered is not the torture Bush and Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld, and their myriad minions, get away with.

More pictures beyond the break.

is this one, and for those of you whose delicate sensibilities preclude a visit to DKos, this time you should go read it anyway, because it's not cross-posted anywhere else. Don't let it be the last thing you read at night, though.

but it's one I found today re: Gen. J. Karpinski.

to be sent with the help of the ACLU.

Here's mine:

President Barack Hussein Obama
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, District of Columbia, USA

Dear Mr. President:

Today I read that you have changed your mind about revealing the photographic evidence of the torture and war crimes committed against detainees by contractors and American GIs in Iraq, Guantanamo, and other secret prisons.

I am so ashamed to hear that you have chosen to bolster the dishonesty and cover up the lawbreaking instituted by the previous administration during this wanton war.

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Say what you will about the former Minnesota governor and ex-wrestler, Jesse Ventura has some cred on this issue: a SERE school survivor, he served as a SEAL in the Navy in the Vietnam era.   Read more…

I will harp again on this point. We must not let George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Cheney, Libby, Yoo, Bybee, Rove, Hughes, and the cabal with which they infested Washington, D.C. for eight years walk away scot free. We must not. Why?
Because these sorry excuses for homo sapiens made this happen:

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand a foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18 24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night.
Sensitive but Unclassified FBI Memo Apr 2, 2004

and because we cannot let them get away with it. Some things, to misquote that old Tex Ritter song about High Noon, are indeed worth the fight. "And I must face a man who hates me, or lie a coward, a craven coward, or lie a coward in my grave." I don't believe there's a question left about whether the draft-dodging high officials in the past administration are or ever were anything but craven cowards.

Because we are the United States of America. We are not a Bush League Nation. I don't give a flying damn what post-partisanship demands -- those who authorized, ordered, okayed, torturing prisoners belong behind bars. Preferably for life, without possibility of parole. I would not demand solitary confinement; but I damn sure would lobby for hard labor -- based on the work they did to destroy our country in the name of their values and their morals and their enhanced interrogation techniques, to feed their sadistic need to appease their rage and enlarge our fears, they've earned it.

Hanging is too good for them.

Can we indict w now? As if desertion wasn't enough, as if stealing the nation's highest office via lawsuit and riot wasn't enough, the Federal Bureau of Investigation refused to have its personnel participate in interrogations George W. Bush's signed executive order authorized because the methods used were torture. (It's a PDF or I'd post it here. Invictus has a link.)

This.

Posted by Fox News online. I'm thinking there's pretty much of a national consensus at this point. It seems the fringe neocon rightwingnuts and the Village Media are the only ones still defending torture or pretending that there's a rational argument in favor of it.

Because, as she points out, unless we WIN we don't accomplish anything. This is why I think you need to hear her out:

First, the bottom line: From the perspective of anyone who wants Bush and Cheney and their top aides to be held accountable for their crimes, the designation of some sort of independent prosecutor right now would be the worst possible eventuality. It's a move that has so many downsides - and holds so few real benefits - that I would be more inclined to question President Obama's motives if he appointed a special prosecutor than if he did not.

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J'adore Russ Feingold, all over again. Because Russ Feingold (D.-Spinal Integrity) doesn't think Peggy Noonan's point of view is legitimate any more than I do.

"If you want to see just how outrageous this is, I refer you to the remarks made by Peggy Noonan this Sunday," he said, referring to the longtime conservative columnist's appearance on ABC's This Week. "I frankly have never heard anything quite as disturbing as her remark that was something to the affect of: 'well sometimes you just have to move on.'"

"Some things in life need to be mysterious," Noonan said on Sunday about the release of the torture memos. "Sometimes you need to just keep walking. ... It's hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, oh, much good will come of that."

Feingold's remarks, delivered before the Religious Action Center convention, represent some of the most forceful pushback against the line coming out of the White House to date. Emanuel and senior adviser David Axelrod have suggested that prosecution of Bush officials is likely off the table due to the political sensitivities that would accompany such retroactive action. On Tuesday morning, however, the New York Times reported that White House "aides did not rule out legal sanctions for the Bush lawyers who developed the legal basis for the use of the techniques."

A member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a long-time critic of torture, Feingold viewed investigations and, perhaps, prosecutions as a key tool to restoring America's moral standing.

The Wisconsin solon also understands how poverty motivates both pirates and terrorists, and that the two need not be seen as interchangeable.

Because, seriously, Peggy Noonan? George Will? Walking away? Transparent for the terrorists too?

There is nothing bad enough that can be done to you. Your souls are too shallow and your intellects are too shrivelled and your non-existent consciences too seared.   Read more…

So via Pat Lang, this deliciously bad translation:

"Basically, this is the action illegal, and guilty of an unlawful group of lawyers and determined that use of malevolent their respective positions and legal knowledge and in contravention clear legal rules and ethics governing the profession attorneys (both domestic and international) dedicated their efforts to the creation of a regulatory code that is right positive deviates substantially from being right in the broad sense of the word processed, with merely a legal cloak to promote, practice and abetting torture in various forms in particular conjunction with Article 4 of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading of December 10, 1984 and ratified by Spain on October 21, 1987."

day 80 of the 100 days to Close Guantanamo & End Torture campaign.



[the 198-fold path]

To all those Americans who wish they had the benefits or protection of Canadian citizenship, well, the value of the above has dropped like a stone in recent history, and none so obviously as with the current absurd Abousfian Abdelrazik episode. The poor man has a family in Canada, is a Canadian citizen by refugee asylum, and has been stuck in a Kafkaesque multiyear nightmare starting with imprisonment and torture by the Sudanese government, and ending with his residence at the Canadian embassy in Khartoum, which will not offer him a passport to return to Canada.

Again last week more than 600,000 Americans lost their jobs. One professor on leave from UC Berkeley was not among them, and at the very least that's a dirty shame, despite this fawning tribute from Esquire.

Is this a war? How can the president respond? Can he use the Army? Will he need congressional approval? Is this a war?

“It’s like pornography,” one student says. “You know it when you see it.”

It’s just semantics, says another. “When there’s something as powerful as war, we don’t want the president to just go ahead.”

But why not? Yoo asks.

“Because we like checks and balances and we like the Constitution?”

“So you’re worried about one person making mistakes. War is so dangerous, the stakes are so high, you wouldn’t want one person making that decision?”

“That’s why it’s so important to have checks and balances,” the student agrees. “Otherwise the president could run wild. Like we have today, with the powers of an unchecked president -- I call that running wild.”

“So you’re worried about errors,” Yoo answers, perfectly calm. “That’s certainly the case with Iraq. We overestimated the benefits and underestimated the costs.”

But now the hour is up and the students gather their papers -- and Yoo still keeps shooting out last-minute questions. “Is the president really prone to error more than the other branches? Isn’t that also true of Congress? If you require Congress to give preapproval for every conflict, what is the cost? Why didn’t Truman ask for a declaration of war in Korea, even though Congress would have given him one?”

That taxpayer funds continue to keep this guy afloat seems to me at least as rotten a proposition as anything AIG execs did with their bailout money -- because they were crooks, but this guy wasn't just a garden-variety swindler, a member of the "ownership society" -- he was an ADVOCATE for violating the Geneva Conventions and turning the US into a nation that does, in fact, torture.

Who? John Yoo.

Bush is out of a job.

Cheney isn't working.

Even Randian disciples Rumsfeld and Rice are reduced to writing books and seeking professorial pulpits from which to pontificate on the brave new world they sought to create during the past eight years. But this guy is still drawing a salary -- and he works for the government, in a state with a multi-dozen-billion-dollar deficit.

So who do I want to see moved out of his comfort zone? The guy who wrote the pro-torture memos for President George W. Bush. The guy whose legal expertise -- if you want to call his right-wing hard-line inhumanity anything other than psychopathic raving -- brought us Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and helped gut Posse Comitatus as well as the First and Fourth Amendments, all the while claiming the US Constitution itself could justify overturning the rights it spells out for the citizenry.

From the Esquire interview:

But (Yoo's memos) remind us of what we have done and what we will continue to do. Consider the fight over Michael Mukasey’s nomination for attorney general, when Mukasey refused to call waterboarding torture. He said he didn’t want to put the CIA officers who made these judgments in the heat of battle “in personal legal jeopardy.” It seemed so ridiculous, right out of 1984. The Khmer Rouge used waterboarding. We prosecuted Japanese generals for doing it. But Mukasey was confirmed anyway, and four months later President Bush vetoed a law that banned waterboarding. Consider also that courts and Congress have endorsed many of Yoo’s opinions, including the use of military commissions and the extended detention without criminal charges of “enemy combatants” who are American citizens.

Yoo recently whined

It looks like the Pentagon is continuing on its all-out offensive to keep the Guantanamo Bay prison camp open by trying to put cosmetic touches on a prison set up on inherently unconstitutional grounds: indefinite seizure and gaining intelligence by torture.

WASHINGTON, (AFP) – A Pentagon report has found conditions at the controversial Guantanamo prison in line with the Geneva Conventions, but called for the isolation of some inmates to be eased by allowing them more social contact and recreation.

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extraordinary rendition, torture. All that secret stuff. Maybe Obama will have to address this?

From Center for Constitutional Rights, which:

...today released documents obtained from the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and U.S. Department of State (DOS), resulting from their lawsuit seeking the disclosure of government documents that relate to secret detention, extraordinary rendition, and torture. At a public press conference, the groups revealed that these documents confirm the existence of secret prisons at Bagram and in Iraq; affirm the DOD’s cooperation with the CIA’s ghost detention program; and show one case where the DOD sought to delay the release of Guantánamo prisoners who were scheduled to be sent home by a month and a half in order to avoid bad press.

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Over the past few weeks, I've written about a particular aspect of Rick Warren that has so far seen very little formal media attention--his extensive connections to groups and persons connected to the "New Apostolic Reformation" aka "Joel's Army", a particularly virulent "Christian Nationalist" movement (which had its initial origins in neopentecostal dominionist churches but has since spread via "cuckoo" cell-churches to even some mainstream denominations).

had the following to say:

Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause... for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country." - George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775

There is much more information on this at DKos and in the Seattle Times.
I wonder just how seriously the FBI and other DHS agencies will take this WMD threat?