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.

Just laying this down as a data point:

And then the teacher walked in. He had a gray crew cut, a message-free tank top and shorts, without a Buddhist bead or Sanskrit phrase visible anywhere.

“Come on people, let’s get started,” he said in a New York accent, as if leading a conference call.

Then he cranked up “Misty Mountain Hop” by Led Zeppelin and led the students through a warm-up of sun salutations. Soon he had them stretching into a difficult split pose. Read more…

Oh, Obama's failing us again because Gitmo's still open!!!!! Outrage meter up to 11-plus, Stat! Call for impeachment! This is horrible! We were promised CHANGE, and we're getting NOTHING but rhetorical flourishes!!!

Only not so much, because Obama isn't Bush, and it turns out you have to have money to close a prison -- even one as heinous as Guantanamo Bay's military detainment center.

President Obama will seek today to wrest back control of the debate on the future of Guantánamo Bay after the Senate stripped $80 million (£50 million) earmarked for closing the detention centre from a war funding Bill.

Yesterday’s 90-6 vote, after a similar decision by the House of Representatives last week, shows how far the Administration’s national security agenda risks being blown off course by powerful political crosswinds even within a Democratic-dominated Congress.

Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, said that the Administration had to work with Congress on a number of tough choices resulting from a “hasty decision” to close the base: “The President has not decided where some of the detainees will be transferred.”

Mr Obama will deliver what aides describe as a big-picture speech clarifying the philosophy that led him to order the closure of the detention camp in southeastern Cuba and publish secret memos on interrogation techniques — while resorting to many of the same security tools or legal arguments for which the Bush Administration was widely denounced.

You also have to figure out where to send the people who are in that prison when you close it. Some of them you can probably just turn loose because you had no right to hold them in the first place. Others you might need to hang onto, but nobody wants to help you make sure they're safely (let alone humanely) detained.

The vote came as FBI Director Robert Mueller warned that bringing the bad guys here presented risks that ranged from “concerns about providing financing, radicalizing others” to increasing “the potential for individuals undertaking attacks in the United States.” And, of course, somewhere there breathes a federal judge who will seek to begin the process to release them, even here if no other nation will take them.
U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), responding to public concerns, has introduced legislation called “Protecting America’s Communities Act” to prohibit the transfer. Said Chambliss:
“People across America are very concerned that this administration has not developed a plan for what to do with these hard-core terrorists once the detention center at Guantanamo is shuttered. Americans are concerned that they will be released into the United States. It is important to remember most detainees held at Guantanamo were captured on the battlefields in Afghanistan or Iraq and were determined to be a threat to our nation’s security. Whatever their ties to terrorists groups or activities, these individuals should never be given the privilege of crossing our borders, even if incarcerated. To do so would be nothing short of an invitation for al-Qaida to operate inside our homeland.”
Under Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 of the Constitution, Congress has the absolute power to exclude aliens for security reasons that include terrorist activities, he said. He;d add to the no-entry list “an alien who, as of January 1, 2009, was being detained by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.”
Other provisions would seek to ensure that if the President does find a way to transfer them here, they won’t be released until another country is willing to take them. The legislation also acknowledges that armed conflict exists with al-Qaida, the Taliban and related forces and reaffirms the President’s authority to detain enemy fighters regardless of where they’re captured.

Some of them you probably shouldn't just turn loose, and some of them -- especially from a place as heinous as Gitmo -- it would be inhumane not to take care of, considering the damage that's been done them in our names because we were stupid enough not to actively stop w and Cheney when we had the chance.
So now we have to live with the consequences, and it's not fun. But if we're going to turn ours back into a better nation, Read more…

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

As I was reminded while perusing another blog today -- where I found not merely an account of the murder of young Emmitt Till but a photo of his corpseafter its recovery from the river where his body was "hidden". Graphic? Sensational? Disturbing? Damn straight -- and damn sure necessary, in its day and time, to make utterly clear the distribution, extent and severity of not just his fate but the unsung and unremarked and undeserved fates of countless other black men, boys, children, and women at the hands of racists in the US. Did that photo help convict the men who killed that boy? No. But it changed the limits of tolerance for a generation of Americans. That's why hiding the torture photos is wrong. Read more…

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. Read more…

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…

Just aksin.

Would it be wrong not to?

There is nothing, *nothing* that is "funny" nor "entertaining" nor easily dismissed, about the act of torture. Ever.

This is not hard for civilized people to understand. And religious people, too. Their sacred texts agree. And decent atheists, and humanists, and people who love children, or care for the weak and helpless. Or have been such.

I am likely too "serious" for this business, but I feel all my Divinity School training coming forth, as well as my personal experience as an abuse survivor. Please, stop the jokes and foolish dismissals of the American, and indeed all, record of "approved" methods of torture. As they say, 'you don't know it's not funny until it happens to you." Just stop it. And stop excusing it.

This extends not only to the current and past administrations, but all those who would make a joke of child-rape, or electrocution, or any of the other humiliations and tortures of those who are the subject of current discussion, regardless of how well they suit the purpose of casual snarking. It's disgusting. Inhumane. And most of all, something that will rebound ten-fold upon those who treat it casually, if that is the only thing that motivates. Yes, it can happen to you. And I promise you, you won't laugh when it does.

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.

 Read more…

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. Read more…

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…

Memo Says Prisoner Was Waterboarded 183 Times....

Initial news reports about the memos in The New York Times and other publications did not include the numbers, but several bloggers, including Marcy Wheeler of the emptywheel blog, discovered the numbers over the weekend.

I actually don't think making President Obama do this is a good idea. Now, wait. It's not that it isn't just a great idea, but a necessity, one of the demands of justice that we can't hold back.

But there's more to this than that: it isn't a President's job -- unless you want a unitary and all-powerful executive, that is. Isn't that one of the things we've been bitching about since December 2000? 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." Read more…

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. Read more…

We thought we had an idea of how evil the Bush regime was. We thought the "you've covered your ass" line from the Slacker in Chief and the WMD hysteria from Colin Powell and the "go to war with the Army you have" smart-off from Rumsfeld showed us what kind of cretinous monsters with which we had to contend.

We were wrong.

Lawrence Wilkerson was chief of staff for Colin Powell. This is part of his column on what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. He's talking about the detainees here, and how this ill-considered, poorly-executed Foxtrot Uniform turned into a serious Romeo Charlie Foxtrot. He gives us the firsthand, on-the-ground information that, if our new President gave a damn about justice, would see our former SecDef and VP in chains before the Hague (where, I might add, not merely they but their boss and all his henchmen involved in starting a baseless war of choice belong):

This was quite a few of them, including Uighurs from China and, incredulously, citizens of the United Kingdom ("incredulously" because few doubted the capacity of the UK to detain and manage terrorists). Standing resolutely in Ambassador Prosper's path was Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld who would have none of it. Rumsfeld was staunchly backed by the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney. Moreover, the fact that among the detainees was a 13 year-old boy and a man over 90, did not seem to faze either man, initially at least.

The fourth unknown is the ad hoc intelligence philosophy that was developed to justify keeping many of these people, called the mosaic philosophy. Simply stated, this philosophy held that it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance (this general philosophy, in an even cruder form, prevailed in Iraq as well, helping to produce the nightmare at Abu Ghraib). All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from him and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals--in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.

Thus, as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work. The detainees' innocence was inconsequential. After all, they were ignorant peasants for the most part and mostly Muslim to boot.

The sheer unadulterated evil that was Bush 43's presidential reign still makes my jaw drop. Read more…

That is a fact. Now, you may ask "why is this important?"

Leading up to a 2004 visit to Vancouver, Canada, lawyers there sought to have him charged for his criminal behavior resulting in a court decision that reflected the Canadian Attorney General's view that Bush could not be brought up on torture charges at that time because he had diplomatic immunity:

“These charges were properly laid and backed up by powerful evidence. The government didn’t deny that evidence because it couldn’t deny it. Diplomatic immunity is purely procedural. It doesn’t affect the validity of the charges, only whether they can be proceeded with, for the time being, in a foreign court, in this case a Canadian court. Even if Bush has immunity, it’s only temporary and it won’t shield him or anyone in his administration from Canadian law, or any other law, when they leave office. That the Canadian government would try to hush this up by hiding Bush behind diplomatic immunity was only to be expected. Paul Martin invited Bush here to ingratiate himself with the President, despite the President’s crimes against our laws and against international law, despite even his inadmissibility as a war criminal under Canada’s immigration laws – above all, despite the unending human disaster the President’s ‘war of choice’ has brought to the people of Iraq.”

Cut back to 2009, as Bush makes plans to deliver a speech in Calgary, Canada, and this time? Read more…

Senator Patrick Leahy

I have proposed the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate abuses during the Bush-Cheney Administration -- so they never happen again. These abuses may include the use of torture, warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary rendition, and executive override of laws.

Please sign this online petition, urging Congress to consider establishing a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate the Bush-Cheney Administration's abuses.

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. Read more…

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

would that his successors all had been men of such tender conscience and sensitive honor.

Via TFT:
Obsidian Wings:

I'm not sure it tells anything we don't already know (read, e.g., The Dark Side). But the Levin-run Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainee abuse is now out (pdf exec summary). And it deserves some press attention. Read more…

Will Obama Buy Torture-Lite?

You’ve got to hand it to them. Torture aficionados at the White House and CIA have conned key congressional leaders into insisting not only that torture-lite would be a swell idea, but advocating that the overseers of torture be kept on.

From change-you-can-believe-in, we seem to be slipping back to fear-you-can-trade-on.

It is not just Obama, or even the Intelligence Committees, it is the entire palace of moral bankruptcy that makes this possible.

Hoss makes a good point about this utterly devastating critique from Digby on yet another shitstain excuse for a piece of journalism, but I'd like to make a gooder point, if I may. I actually suffered to read Nooner's entire article, and what struck me was the completely self-absorbed tone and perspective she employed. Which isn't really surprising unless like me you tend to avoid that sort of writing, but still, what does Pegster really mean when she says "Bush kept us safe?"

Surprisingly, even the comment boards at the WSJ took her to task for such a ridiculous and willfully blind assertion of facts screamingly in evidence to the contrary. But she wasn't really talking about "safety" and "national security" in the way that you and I do. She was talking about how Bush has kept Villagers and the very wealthy safe...from us.

If you can stomach it, follow the link at Digby's (I won't give the WSJ linklove here) and read the piece and see if you agree with me. It's all there. Sneering condescension for the new "oh my god he's black!!1!" president who can't possibly be smart enough to govern without the advice and consent of the Village on account of his race, the usual hatred for HRC and her lack of membership in the Kewl Kidz club, the casual dropping of elites status and invitation to the 'right' parties, and most importantly for me, a soulful review of the material culture of her world, in the form of people's (read: people like her) homes. Ah, how I miss being so close to McClean and all those monstrous, sprawling megahomes that would've made Scarlett O'Hara blush, after she married Rhett for his money.

But Noonan's pride and defense of Bush are telling to me, for they reveal what it is she really fears: masses of angry, didn't-go-to-the-right-Ivy, showering after work DFHs and Flyover rubes, beating down her doors in angry mobs, demanding a return for all the money her class has stolen from us, and acting in full command of the rights they've taken away from us. Noonan knows that Terraists will never darken any doorstep that only she and her kind may enter freely. But now that Bush is finally leaving, her nervousness is increasing. Like so many wingers, I have no doubt she sits around in frenzied masturbation, mentally and perhaps otherwise, daydreaming of "Red Dawn" scenarios and "24" episodes, safe in the knowledge that her Hero Bush and the rest of the Terror Warriors will keep her Village cocktail parties Free, just like the Constitution says they should be. But that time is coming to an end, and when she relates the question of Republicans at her party "are still we important?" she really means "do we still have the clout to keep them from coming after us for all our crimes? I'd like to say, "No, It is not safe." We'll see if I get that chance Read more…

Until 1947, the United States habitually told the truth about at least one thing. The job title of the Pentagon's highest ranking civilian was the Secretary of War. But the recent slaughter of tens of millions in the Second World War had given the Pentagon's real function a bad name. So Democrat Harry Truman rebranded the Department of War, naming it the Department of Defense. From that day, the Secretary of War became the Secretary of Defense. War plants, war expenditures and bloodthirsty war industries became more benign-sounding defense plants, the defense expenditures and the patriotic defense industry. Read more…