Please take a moment to remember Irene Sendler.
What she did the last time nations with the kind of economic and political power as ours chose to behave as filthily as ours saved the lives of countless children; she paid a terrible price for her kindness, as she was tortured upon capture by the German ’conquerors’ of Poland.
In this Feb. 21, 2008, file photo, Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Israel Yona Metzger, left, speaks with Holocaust hero Irena Sendler, right, during a meeting in Warsaw, Poland. The family of Polish social worker Sendler, credited with rescuing 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis during the Holocaust, says she has died. Sendler’s daughter, Janina Zgrzembska, says her 98-year-old mother died Monday, May 12, 2008, morning in a Warsaw hospital. Sendler organized the rescue of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto during Nazi Germany’s brutal World War II occupation. (AP Photo/Alik Keplicz)
From The Guardian: “Senior [Bush] officials bypassed army chief to introduce interrogation methods.”
America’s most senior general was “hoodwinked” by top Bush administration officials determined to push through aggressive interrogation techniques of terror suspects held at Guantánamo Bay, leading to the US military abandoning its age-old ban on the cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners… Read more
Lynndie England, of Abu Ghraib fame, gives a lengthy interview in the German magazine Stern. England was sentenced to three years in prison for her part in the deeds there. She served 521 days and is now out on parole. How’s life for her?
“(She sighs) Oh, it’s just little things going wrong. I’m just trying to get by. Trying to find a job, trying to find a house. It’s been harder than I expected. I went to a couple of interviews, and I thought they went great. I wrote dozens of applications. Nothing came of it. I put in at Wal-Mart, at Staples. I’d do any job. But I never heard from them.” Read more
A May 2005 report by Lieutenant General Kevin Kiley confirms that each interrogation at Guantánamo was videotaped. Lieutenant General Randall Schmidt issued a report the following month stating that more than 24,000 interrogations of detainees took place at Guantánamo over a three-year period. In the meantime, the Bush administration has announced it will pursue the death penalty for six detainees who will stand trial for crimes related to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Professor Mark Denbeaux, Director of the Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall Law, commented, “Our students proved that Guantánamo interrogations were videotaped, which impacts the impending trials of the six detainees. We all want to see the perpetrators of 9/11 punished. But if the tapes of those interrogations still exist, it is imperative that we understand, before these trials start, whether the information was obtained through standard interrogation procedures or through torture.”
Link A recently unclassified report from the Pentagon from 1998 has revealed an investigation into using laser beams for a few intriguing potential methods of non-lethal torture. Some of the applications the report investigated include putting voices in people’s heads, using lasers to trigger uncontrolled neuron firing, and slowly heating the human body to a point of feverish confusion - all from hundreds of meters away.
Wouldn’t just participating in such research constitute a war crime?
Just to remind everyone about what’s at stake in November, we have these pearls of wisdom from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia:
“Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the constitution?” he asked.
“It would be absurd to say you couldn’t do that. And once you acknowledge that, we’re into a different game.”
Oh wow! I saw that episode of “24,” too! Yeah, that was so cool how Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles by smacking that …. oh, wait. That was a TV show.
I swear I’m not making this up! And it saddens me, just a little, truly. I would have thought that McCain, having been tortured, would be the very last Republican candidate to throw his hat in this particular ring:
But doggone it—hat tip to alert reader muttley66—once again I just wasn’t cynical enough.
At the very end of Froomkin’s chat yesterday, there is this little gem:
Stony Brook, N.Y.: Everybody seems to accept the claim that the CIA tapes were destroyed. Given the long history of deceptions by this administration, shouldn’t we ask for proof, or at least sworn statements to that effect?
Dan Froomkin: A good point. And consider this. Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball write in Newsweek: “At one point portions of the tapes were electronically transmitted to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., so a small number of officials there could review them. A counterterrorism source, who also asked for anonymity when discussing this subject, said that there was no reason to believe that any recordings of such an electronic feed still exist.”
No, no, of course not. No reason whatever. (Except that, as we know from the Stasi and, say, Guatemala, totalitarian regimes hang onto all their data.)
And who knows the dataflows? Where the data goes, its nature and volume, its timing, and who has privileges to see it? The techs. Could we talk to them, please? Didn’t we get good results when we talked to Alexander Butterfield? Read more
I realize that Porter Goss and others are likely trying to taint Democrats with their own bad acts by leaking this information. But sadly, these Democrats actually do seem to be complicit. If it’s the case that they have been being blackmailed with this information all these years, then Goss was quite foolish to show his cards. Now these Democrats have little to lose by revealing what they know, and they should. They must all come clean, take their medicine and tell the American people what they knew about the administration’s torture regime from the beginning. They may suffer politically for it, but then they probably deserve to.
There is nothing stopping Speaker Pelosi from holding hearings on the tapes and the torture regime as a whole. It’s all “out there” now.
what’s off the table, mommy
what has fallen to the floor?
what never even made it
what proves less is more?
when you carve your blessed beast
when your knife is painted red
will you smile for the cameras
with a tear to shed
just one tear to shed
(chorus)
cascading showers
rivulets of rain
rising waters in america
drowning once again
cascading showers
dropping from the clouds
cascading showers
no one can hear the screams
no one can hear the screams
among the silent crowds Read more
Well, I guess now I know why impeachment was “off the table.” Anybody for Barney Frank as the new speaker? Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen in WaPo:
In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique[ly illegal and unconstitutional?] CIA program designed to wring [torture] vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the Bipartisan group, which included future-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites [gulags] and the harsh techniques [torture] interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.
Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill [not to mention the US military**]. But on that day, no objections were raised.
With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods [torture] during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).
Yeah, the Village is a big sack of pus just waiting to be lanced. Unfortunately, some of that pus is blue.
Which is pretty funny, since as President, Bush seems to have pre-approved pardons for every war criminal with a Republican party card. McClatchy’s Joe Galloway has the money quote:
When George W. Bush was the governor of Texas, the state investigated, indicted, convicted and sentenced to prison for 10 years a county sheriff who, with his deputies, had waterboarded a criminal suspect. That sheriff got no pardon from Gov. Bush.
Of course waterboarding’s illegal. And that would make Bush a war criminal. No wonder Mukasey crawfished on torture—he didn’t want his boss to ever have to go before a tribunal. The only wonder, if it is, indeed, a wonder, is that Senate Judiciary members DiFi and Upchuck sold out Leahy and Feingold, and let Mukasey’s nomination proceed.
Of course waterboarding is torture. Galloway:
Is waterboarding torture?
The answer to all of these questions, put simply, is yes.
All of Judge Michael Mukasey’s artful dodging and word play to avoid acknowledging the obvious to the august members of Senate Judiciary Committee does nothing to change the fact.
Every member of the Senate Judiciary Committee knows that waterboarding is torture, even the majority who voted to send Judge Mukasey’s nomination to be attorney general, America’s chief law enforcement official, to the floor for a vote.
When you hog-tie a human being, tilt him head down, stuff a rag in his mouth and over his nostrils and pour water onto the rag slowly and steadily to the point where his lungs fill with water and he’s suffocating and drowning, that is torture.
The Op-Ed pages of the Times are chock full of Republican apologists today, aren’t they? And, funny thing, they’re all advocating retroactive im[m|p]punity for criminals! [The state of our Republic is illustrated at left.] Of course, some of the Republican apologists are nominally Democrats, but that’s nothing new, is it? Chuck’s headline:
A Vote for Justice
Reach me that bucket, wouldja, hon?
Schumer’s bottom line in two sentences:
Most important, Judge Mukasey has demonstrated his fidelity to the rule of law, saying that if he believed the president were violating [note the careful, lawerly use of the present tense] the law he would resign.
I believe that the cruel and inhumane technique of waterboarding is not only repugnant but also illegal under current laws and conventions.
Ah, yes. The triumph of hope over experience. Saying is demonstrating? A Republican? Are you fucking kidding me?
Nevertheless, Schumers sentences exhibit beautiful, beautiful craftsmanship; they’re tiny, faceted jewels of misdirection, obfuscation, and mindfucking. Look what they do: Read more
Bush nominee passes “torture test”
Two leading Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California, dropped objections to Mr Mukasey’s nomination, apparently after a closed-door meeting in which he promised to uphold any future law passed by Congress explicitly defining one method, called water-boarding, as torture [Of course, waterboarding is already defined as torture.]
Good God. What have we come to? A nominee for the nation’s chief law enforcement office promises to uphold the law, and this is news? Read more
Mukasey also demurred when he was repeatedly asked whether a simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding constitutes unlawful torture. Mukasey had strongly condemned the use of harsh interrogation tactics yesterday and said that the president could not order treatment that violated constitutional prohibitions.
But Mukasey said he could not elaborate on what techniques might be allowed, and specifically refused to answer questions from Democrats about whether waterboarding specifically was unconstitutional, saying he did know enough about what the technique entailed.
Oh, bullshit. Pure obfuscation. How about we keep it simple, and just say that if the Spanish Inquisition did it, it’s torture. Well, guess what? Read more
Via TPM comes confirmation in the Times that everything we heard from the Village on torture was—and I know you’ll find this just as hard to believe as I did—kabuki, and that under the carefully crafted constititional Theory Of We Get To Do Whatever The Fuck We Want (or, in the original German, fuhrerprinzip), Bush is doing whatever the fuck he wants. Scott Shane, David Johnston and James Risen report:
Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations
When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations [Torture].
But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion [so-called: Only a court can render an opinion], this one in secret.
As Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” [torture] treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion [sic], one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.
The classified opinions [sic], never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.
It depends on what the meaning of torture is, doesn’t it? Don’t you wish for the happy, innocent days of the Clinton administration, when the entire Beltway was convulsed, for years, over a blowjob?
As with everything about the criminal Bush regime, the only question is whether it’s (1) awful or (2) vile beyond even our worst imaginings. Looks like the torture policies are behind door #2. So there’s really no story here, is there?
Anyhow, I thought it would be helpful to go through and extract the euphemisms for torture in the article, as a prophylactic against the exercise in politics and the English Language that we are about to see. I’d use the phrase “tortured denials,” but that wouldn’t really be funny, would it?
In a way, Russert’s deliberate distortion in Wednesday’s debate made Hillary look better to most of us, and not only because of her blanket rejection of torture as some kind of acceptable post-9/11 American norm; when Russert sprang his trap, announcing that the scenario she’d just rejected had been offered up by her husband and our former President, Bill Clinton, her quick witted response - “He isn’t the one standing here” - was her best moment of the evening.
So far, though, not many people seem to have realized that Russert’s characterization of Clinton’s Meet The Press comments, circa, Sept of 2006, was essentially a lie. Read more
Sorry, that’s a metameta meme I’ve seen spreading around the intertubes. Does it come from a TV show or something? I wouldn’t know. Ahem. Seriously: “Some periods in history don’t allow the moral luxury of standing aside. This is one of them.” Read the comments too, they are fascinating. Overton window shifting is so fun, forgive this very lazy linkage pretending to be a post. But if you get to my comment, you’ll know the spirit I was in writing it and this post.
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What a surprise. Maybe somebody could ask Mukasey if