American Woman

When I  read this I immediately thought of the 70's rock song by the Canadian band "Guess Who".

From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day—for seven straight months and counting—he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he’s barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he’s being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs. Lt. Villiard protested that the conditions are not “like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole,” but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out. In sum, Manning has been subjected for many months without pause to inhumane, personality-erasing, soul-destroying, insanity-inducing conditions of isolation similar to those perfected at America’s Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado: all without so much as having been convicted of anything. And as is true of many prisoners subjected to warped treatment of this sort, the brig’s medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation.
Just by itself, the type of prolonged solitary confinement to which Manning has been subjected for many months is widely viewed around the world as highly injurious, inhumane, punitive, and arguably even a form of torture. In his widely praised March, 2009 New Yorker article—entitled “Is Long-Term Solitary Confinement Torture?”—the surgeon and journalist Atul Gawande assembled expert opinion and personal anecdotes to demonstrate that, as he put it, “all human beings experience isolation as torture.” By itself, prolonged solitary confinement routinely destroys a person’s mind and drives them into insanity. A March, 2010 article in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law explains that “solitary confinement is recognized as difficult to withstand; indeed, psychological stressors such as isolation can be as clinically distressing as physical torture.”

There is absolutely insane and it makes me ashamed that my country has turned into such a brutal and repressive regime and that it can inflict such treatment on someone that has not been convicted of any crime and was actually(from all evidence) doing what he thought was in the best interest of the U.S. 

I guess what really bothers me the most is that this will not be picked up of the MSM and even though it is likely that the President knows about this nothing will be done. What is even more disturbing is that this is probably happening to others in this home of the free and the land of the brave. Stalin, Pol Pot,  and Idi Amin would be so proud.

You should read the whole article by Greenwald at Salon

What Josh Said

As you may or may not know, Darth Cheney is going to rebut President Obama'a speech today about closing GITMO. Josh Marshall at TPM reminds us about who and what Cheney really is. We should all keep this in mind for reference as the mainstream media talking heads vainly attempt to put Cheney on an equal footing with Obama. You should read the entire post but I especially like the middle two paragraphs.

This is someone who not only organized and seemingly directed a policy of state-sponsored torture. He did it in large part to get people to admit to crankish conspiracy theories he got taken in by by a crew of think-tank jockeys in DC whose theories most even half way sensible people treated as punch lines of jokes. So it's Torquemada or 1984 but only after getting rescripted by Mel Brooks.

This is an extremely gullible man who has just come off being the driving ideological force in an administration that most people can already see produced more fiascos and titanic, self-inflicted goofs than possibly any in our entire history. By any standard the guy is a monumental failure -- and not one whose mistakes stem in some Lyndon Johnson fashion from tragic overreach, but just a fool who damaged his country through his own gullibility, paranoia and bad judgment. Whatever else you can say about the Cheney story it ain't Shakespearean.

Gitmo Pussies

Am I just a clueless rube? Can someone tell me what it is going to take to get the Democratic Congress to understand that their Republican opponents are completely fucked, morally and politically, and there is absolutely no fucking reason in the world that they need be appeased?

Gaze upon their latest creation and weep :

Washington -- A bill by Senate Democrats would fund the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but it would block the transfer of any of the detainees to the United States....

...Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii) on Wednesday circulated an approximately $91.5-billion measure that includes $50 million to shutter the Guantanamo facility and move its prisoners -- with the proviso that they can't be sent to the United States. The Senate bill appears to favor paying foreign governments to accept the prisoners.

Did the Dems go out and hire stupid consultants and pay them $4000 an hour to come up with the stupidest idea they could come up with. If there is one thing the United States knows how to do, it is how to incarcerate people. Jeebus we've got two million people locked up in this country...we lead the civilized world in locking up. There isn't anybody we can't lock up. We've even got a town in Montana that is volunteering to take the Guantanamo detainees.

Does anyone really believe that the American people are really afraid of being slaughtered in their beds if Gitmo detainees wind up being imprisoned in the high security prisons here in the U.S.? What an insult to our intelligence! Sen. Inouye and the rest of the Democrats, who think the right thing to so is fawn before the wingnuts on this issue, Wake up! The opposition are among the most hated public figures in the country. You don't have to listen to them any more, and there is absolutely no reason in the world to appease them.

Let's close Gitmo, release the teenagers, and bring the hardcore here and try them. If the government has evidence then we put them in prison for a while. If it doesn't we send them home. We'll just pretend we haven't created life long enemies in the process.

More on Jesus and Torture

From the Salt Lake Tribune:

Although the decisions which put us in the grim business of torture, body-snatching, extraordinary renditions, making people disappear, indefinite confinement without charges and warrantless wiretapping were made by the president and vice president, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints served as helpful enablers. Not only did they provide the legal architecture, they provided the "scientific" patina for the plunge into the barbaric business of torture.

Take Latter-day Saint Timothy E. Flanigan, deputy White House counsel, who, along with David Addington, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, and Jim Haynes comprised the secretive "War Council" of lawyers -- a self-appointed group Mayer describes as having virtually no experience in law enforcement, military service, counterterrorism or the Muslim world....

BYU law school graduate Jay S. Bybee was the assistant attorney general directing the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel. At the instigation of Addington and Yoo, Bybee issued official legal opinions that redefined the crime of torture to make it all but impossible to commit. Barbarity was not torture unless it created pain equal to death or organ failure. A newly-declassified Bybee memorandum lists 10 previously top-secret interrogation techniques approved for use by the CIA, including waterboarding.

Incredibly, Bybee seems to have been unaware that the United States had prosecuted waterboarding as a war crime after World War II. In 2003, before his role in authorizing U.S. torture was known, Bybee was given a lifetime judicial appointment on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Had his role in torture been known, it is unlikely he would have been confirmed.

Two devout Mormons also engineered the more grisly wet work. Because the CIA lacked personnel in 2001 with interrogation expertise, the agency turned to two psychologists, James E. Mitchell and John B. Jessen, who had worked with the Air Force's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape programs. Neither had an intelligence or interrogation background or had experience with Muslim terrorists, but, according to the FBI, they had experience in designing, testing, implementing and monitoring torture techniques that were illegal in the United States and elsewhere in the civilized world...

Mitchell advised that suspects must be treated like dogs in a cage. "It's like an experiment, when you apply electric shocks to a caged dog, after a while, he's so diminished, he can't resist."

h/t Americablog

Waterboarding for Jesus

Who would Jesus torture? Why don't you look up your local Bible thumper and find out.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new analysis.

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

It Gets Worse

On top of finding out we tortured captives 6 times a day and put their children in boxes full of bugs.... The Senate Armed Service Committee has released its full report on detainee abuse by the US Armed Forces. I have only just read the executive summary on Balloon Juice and it is shameful, to say the least. People like Donald Rumsfeld, Ricardo Sanchez and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller are shown for the criminals they are, not to mention George Bush.

I went through SERE training which teaches you what to expect if you are captured by an enemy that doesn't recognize the Geneva Conventions. When I think about George Bush and others authorizing techniques specifically designed to violate the Conventions without a second thought it just makes me sick. There are a lot of controls and safety mechanisms built into the SERE protocols that don't exist in the actual theater. It's no wonder captives died in our hands. What really bothers me is that the people authorizing and executing this are militiary people who should know better. Didn't they have a problem using these techniques against captives in Afghanistan, Iraq and GTMO?

The link is here to get the full (15 mb) .PDF of the report?.

h/t Balloon Juice

Not Yo' Momma!

Let me make this perfectly clear. If you believe that everyone deserves the right to challenge his or her imprisonment in a court of law and require the government to produce the evidence to justify your imprisonment then John McSame is your worst enemy. Today the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision which rejected the Bush administration's grab for imperial power and restored the ancient right of habeas corpus. This is a hugely important decision with respect to whether this is a country of laws or not.

Today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) criticized to the Supreme Court’s ruling granting Guantanamo Bay detainees the right to challenge their detention in civilian courts:

It obviously concerns me. These are unlawful combatants. They are not American citizens. We should pay attention to Justice Roberts. It is a decision the Supreme Court has made and now we need to move forward. As you know, I always favored the closing of Guantanamo Bay, and I still think we ought to do that.

This statement defines McSame and his philosophy completely. It clearly demonstrates his fundamental lack of understanding of the true issue surrounding Gitmo and the actions of the Bush administration. The issue has never been about closing Guantanamo. While Gitmo will be a stain on the soul of America for generations and it should have never been established, its existence is not the paramount issue. Hello, it's the fundamental violation of human rights that is at issue here!
McSame talks endlessly, while leaning on his credentials as a former POW, about no torture and treating prisoners humanely but every time he has had the chance to do something meaningful, whether legislatively or rhetorically, he's wound up up crawling into bed with the administration.

This via Think Progress:

– In 2004, the Supreme Court ruled in Rasul v. Bush that the Bush administration had no jurisdiction to strip habeas corpus rights from detainees. In 2005, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) introduced legislation overturning this decision and thus stripping detainees of their rights. McCain voted for the bill, which passed 49-42.

– The Military Commissions Act of 2006 denied anyone Bush labeled “an ‘illegal enemy combatant’ the ancient right to challenge his imprisonment in court.” McCain weakly pushed to strengthen the torture restrictions in the legislation, but ignored the lack of habeas rights. In the end, he voted for the Military Commissions Act.

– In 2007, Senate conservatives successfully filibustered legislation that would have “given military detainees the right to protest their detention in federal court.” In a 56-43 vote, the chamber fell just four shy of the 60 needed to cut off debate and proceed with the bill. McCain was part of the conservative filibuster and voted against moving forward with the legislation.

Today, the McCain campaign blog also approvingly cited Justice Antonin Scalia’s exceptionally extreme rhetoric on the consequences of the decision.

Somehow, with the unchallenged assistance of the American media, McSame has created the meme that he will "do the right thing" when it comes to torture and prisoners of war. Somehow, his experience as a POW in Viet Nam has made his opinion unassailable when it comes to such things. The reality is that he is our worst nightmare on these issues. At every turn McSame has gathered around the GOP camp fire and he's right there holding hands and singing along with Shrub and Cheney.

Cruising to Hell

A story in the Guardian has renewed my disgust in my country today. It appears that, according to a human rights group, that not only are we continuing to abuse innocent people at Guantanamo and other secret prisons around the world but we also operating prison ships to continue our assault on human rights on the high seas.

The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.

Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained [...]

Ships that are understood to have held prisoners include the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu. A further 15 ships are suspected of having operated around the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which has been used as a military base by the UK and the Americans.

Reprieve will raise particular concerns over the activities of the USS Ashland and the time it spent off Somalia in early 2007 conducting maritime security operations in an effort to capture al-Qaida terrorists [...]

The Reprieve study includes the account of a prisoner released from Guantánamo Bay, who described a fellow inmate's story of detention on an amphibious assault ship. "One of my fellow prisoners in Guantánamo was at sea on an American ship with about 50 others before coming to Guantánamo ... he was in the cage next to me. He told me that there were about 50 other people on the ship. They were all closed off in the bottom of the ship. The prisoner commented to me that it was like something you see on TV. The people held on the ship were beaten even more severely than in Guantánamo."

Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve's legal director, said: "They choose ships to try to keep their misconduct as far as possible from the prying eyes of the media and lawyers. We will eventually reunite these ghost prisoners with their legal rights.

Why am I not surprised? I continually think that Bush/Cheney can't lower the bar on a civilized society any further but they disappoint on a regular basis. It looks like Darth and Shrub have taken a lesson from their corporate owners. It shouldn't be surprising that they're using the same practices as their corporate overlords like offshoring, outsourcing, etc., to avoid American law and taxes. That's why Guantanamo has been put into service and that's the point of these ghost ships. Operating in secrecy and outside the auspices of the law is the hallmark of this administration.
One should note the irony of using a ship named 'Bataan' to pursue these nefarious goals. How many Japanese did the Americans prosecute for war crimes for the abuses suffered on Bataan by American and Phillipine POW's?
January 2009 is way too far away for my sensibilities.

No More GWOT

Over at YDD, Steve Bates alerts us to the absurdity and tragedy of what George Bush and his cronies are doing to Mohammed al-Qahtani, a suspected 9/11 operative, and dozens and dozens of other so-called "suspects".

Charges Against 9/11 Suspect Dropped
His Statements Were the Result of Abusive Interrogation, Officials Say
By Josh White and Julie Tate
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, May 14, 2008; Page A04

U.S. authorities have long considered Mohammed al-Qahtani one of the most dangerous alleged terrorists in U.S. custody, a man who could have been the 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11, 2001, plot if he had not been denied entry into the country.

But yesterday, amid concerns about using information obtained during abusive military interrogations, a top Pentagon official removed Qahtani from the military commission case meant to bring justice to those behind the vast Sept. 11 conspiracy.

Susan J. Crawford, the appointed official who decides which cases will be heard in the largely untested commission process, dismissed the charges against Qahtani while affirming those against five other alleged terrorists to stand trial at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Prosecutors reserve the right to charge Qahtani again, and the military says it can hold him without trial for the duration of the counterterrorism wars. But his defense lawyers and officials familiar with the case say it is unlikely that Qahtani will face new charges because he was subjected to aggressive Defense Department interrogation techniques -- such as intimidation by dogs, hooding, nudity, long-term isolation and stress positions.

This is an edited version of my comment:

How embarrassing as an American! I was thinking that maybe one of the first things our new Democratic President should do is officially declare the Global War on Terror lost and over. The reality is that the terrorists have done pretty much what they wanted. They have set us on a path of destruction by our own hand, caused us to sacrifice our fundamental and founding principles and turned us into a nation sniveling cowards afraid of the evil brown person under the bed. We don't even want to talk about what they have given Shrub and company an excuse to do to our treasury and to our young men and women in the military.

I haven't quite settled on a name but something on the order of a Global Search for Understanding, Peace and Tolerance might work but feel free to leave your own suggestions in the comments.

Without the excuse of a GWOT the thugs at GITMO and the other illegal torture prisons we are maintaining around the world will have no reason to hold all the mostly innocent people. The GWOT has gone on long enough and we have lost. Need to regroup and bring some new ideas to the game.

No Moral Authority

Just an observation, but all of the calls for Bush to boycott the opening of the Olympic games kind of ring hollow. Where does the U.S. get off on criticizing China for its human rights violations and oppression of Tibet when we are so dirty? What China is doing and has done to Tibet is wrong without question but there are some serious questions with respect to human rights and proper behavior that the George Bush and company need to answer before they get on their high horse over Tibet.

How do we get off firing Tomahawk cruise missiles into Somali villages whenever we feel like it? Did Somalia attack us? Are we at war with them.

How do we justify holding people at Guantanamo without the right of Habeas Corpus?

How do we explain the 108 people who have died in detention? In a large number of these cases, the deaths have been ruled a homicide and connected to torture.

That's just the tip of the iceberg.

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

Updated below:

So the famous John Yoo torture memo has finally been released. While we all pretty much knew what was in the memo (Part 1; Part 2.) it is still a very interesting read. It will be extremely interesting to see how the traditional media deal with it, if they deal with it at all. In a nutshell, it says that civilian law doesn't prohibit torture since it doesn't apply to the military and likewise our treaties with other countries don't apply because they only apply to uniformed enemy soldiers. The same goes for the War Crimes Act. Finally it also says that federal laws that prohibit torture don't apply to things and go on on military bases. Overall, it paints a pretty broad stroke of permission to the commander-in-chief in a time of war.

Even though this memo was rescinded it is still pretty frightening because it basically says that not only don't federal statutes and treaties apply there is nothing that Congress or the courts can do to change it.

Any effort by Congress to regulate the interrogation of enemy combatants would violate the Constitution's sole vesting of the Commander-in-Chief authority in the President....Congress can no more interfere with the President's conduct of the interrogation of enemy combatants than it can dictate strategic or tactical decisions on the battlefield.

What about the Convention Against Torture? If the president orders someone to be tortured, that automatically suspends CAT:

Any presidential decision to order interrogations methods that are inconsistent with CAT would amount to a suspension or termination of those treaty provisions.

Finally:

If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network. In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions.

What this says is that the president can authorize any action at all as commander-in-chief during wartime and Congress can't stop him. The president is not bound by treaties nor can the courts stop him. The memo basically says that the president's power is virtually absolute during wartime.

One big question that is still hanging out there is what justification was used for classifying it? There was nothing in it that compromised national security. I can only assume that the DOJ and the White House thought it best not to have to justify a grant of absolute power to the president to the rest of the world.

One of the comments by KM over at TPM wraps this whole thing up pretty well...

This is genuinely chilling. What shocks the conscience is that a legal scholar from one of our most prestigious institutions of law and higher learning could in his own mind on behalf of a government seeking to find a way around legal obstacles offer the same banal rationale for perpetrating unspeakable acts of torture and cruel treatment as all other totalitarian regimes: The ends justify the means. Why? Because someone cloaked with authority says it does.

All humans self-justify. This is our nature. Our nation was founded as one of laws rather than men for the very reason of establishing limits on the worst excesses of human imagination, lust for power, and the capacity to self-justify. Perhaps such a sociopathic mindset fails to rise to the standard Yoo offers for criminal prosecution of torture only when “inspired by malice or sadism,” but this distinction is a matter of degree rather than kind and an incredibly fragile thread on which to hang our national humanity and reputation, to say nothing of the destroyed lives and sufferings of the victims.

What also shocks the conscience is that we have reached such a profound state of exhaustion or indifference to such shocking revelations that disclosure of the Yoo document is unlikely to cause much of a ripple in the news cycle.

Update: Here is the analysis from Glenn Greenwald and from Christy Hardin Smith. Both are legal beagles and much more effective at this analysis than I.

In Your Name

Nicholas Kristof has an op-ed in the NY Times this morning that is extremely upsetting. Yeah, I know we have been doing bad things in Gitmo for years and a lot of the "prisoners" aren't really guilty of trying to kill us but were just unlucky enough to be in the wrong place when the "liberators" came along but when it gets this specific and you can put a name and details on the absolutely unbelievable things being done in our name as Americans it gets your stomach in knots.

The most famous journalist you may never have heard of is Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman who is on a hunger strike to protest abuse during more than six years in a Kafkaesque prison system.

Mr. Hajj’s fortitude has turned him into a household name in the Arab world, and his story is sowing anger at the authorities holding him without trial.

That’s us. Mr. Hajj is one of our forgotten prisoners in Guantánamo Bay.

[snip]

After Mr. Hajj was arrested in Afghanistan in December 2001, he was beaten, starved, frozen and subjected to anal searches in public to humiliate him, his lawyers say. The U.S. government initially seems to have confused him with another cameraman, and then offered vague accusations that he had been a financial courier and otherwise assisted extremist groups.

[snip]

Most Americans, including myself, originally gave President Bush the benefit of the doubt and assumed that the inmates truly were “the worst of the worst.” But evidence has grown that many are simply the unluckiest of the unluckiest.

Some were aid workers who were kidnapped by armed Afghan groups and sold to the C.I.A. as extremists. One longtime Sudanese aid worker employed by an international charity, Adel Hamad, was just released by the U.S. in December after five years in captivity. A U.S. Army major reviewing his case called it “unconscionable.”

Mr. Hajj began his hunger strike more than a year ago, so twice daily he is strapped down and a tube is wound up his nose and down his throat to his stomach. Sometimes a lubricant is used, and sometimes it isn’t, so his throat and nose have been rubbed raw. Sometimes a tube still bloody from another hunger striker is used, his lawyers say.

“It’s really a regime to make it as painful and difficult as possible,” said one of his lawyers, Zachary Katznelson.

Mr. Hajj cannot bend his knees because of abuse he received soon after his arrest, yet the toilet chair he was prescribed was removed — making it excruciating for him to use the remaining squat toilet. He is allowed a Koran, but his glasses were confiscated so he cannot read it.

You would think that in a country with so much information flowing on radio, TV and the Internet that I would have heard about Mr. Hajj before this since I do pay attention. Wrong! Something is terribly wrong. Oh, and John McCain thinks this is OK.

How to "Un-Torture"

Via the Washington Post we discover that the FBI has been trying to "untorture" the six suspects that they want to kill in the big show trial the Shrubbery has planned.

The Bush administration announced yesterday that it intends to bring capital murder charges against half a dozen men allegedly linked to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, based partly on information the men disclosed to FBI and military questioners without the use of coercive interrogation tactics.

The admissions made by the men -- who were given food whenever they were hungry as well as Starbucks coffee at the Defense Department's Guantanamo Bay prison -- played a key role in the government's decision to proceed with the prosecutions, military and law enforcement officials said.

FBI and military interrogators who began work with the suspects in late 2006 called themselves the "Clean Team," and set as their goal collecting of virtually the same information the CIA had obtained from five of the six through duress at secret prisons.

Via Crooks & Liars

John D. Hutson, a retired Navy rear admiral and former judge advocate general. “Once you torture someone, it is hard to un-torture them. The general public is going to be concerned about the validity of the testimony.” …

That pretty much sums it all up in my book!

Wearing of the Orange

The ACLU is organizing a nationwide protest this Friday, January 11, to protest the ongoing shame that is Guantanamo Bay. They are encouraging everyone to wear orange that day. It's an interesting idea and a novel approach for protesting the disgusting behavior of Bush/Cheney in creating and maintaining this huge black mark on our country's reputation. Find out more via the ACLU's Web site here.

I don't know how well this will go over with staunch Irish Catholics but maybe for such a good cause they will overlook it for just the one day.

More Humanity

New Jersey has banned the death penalty!

In signing the bill, Gov. Jon Corzine called it a “momentous day” and made the Garden State the first state to ban capital punishment since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated it in 1976.

Corzine on Sunday commuted the sentences of eight men sitting on the state’s death row. They will now serve life in prison without parole, according to the governor’s office.

“It’s a day of progress for the state of New Jersey and for the millions of people across our nation and around the globe who reject the death penalty as a moral or practical response to the grievous, even heinous, crime of murder,” Corzine said.

This is a super "Christmas present". Of course, there are still a lot of states left to come out of the dark ages and there is still the question of my country torturing people but this is definitely a positive thing.

Where Is The Moral Compass?

In light of the article today in the Washington Post that reveals that the Democratic Congressional leadership was complicit in the ongoing torture conducted by the CIA in the last 5 or 6 years all I can say is that I am rapidly losing hope that we can right the grand ship that was America. We have wrung our hands and pointed fingers at Shrub and his enablers and at the complicit GOP thugs in the Congress. Now we find that it is not just the extreme right that enables and condones torture but that the apple is rotten through and through. How can we hope to turn from this abysmal course when all that drive the bus are guilty of paving the way to hell?

With this revelation we have now reached the nadir of American moral substance. We no longer have the right to chasten others for the abuse of human rights. We no longer have the right to expect nor demand our soldiers be treated in accordance with the Geneva conventions. We no longer have the right to expect American civilians traveling abroad be treated fairly by foreign governements. We are completely and despicably morally bankrupt.

We at least used to have the excuse that this was just Shrub and company and just give the Democrats a chance and we'll make right. This last 7 years is just a small blip on the great tradition of respect for human rights and democracy that has been the hallmark of our great country. Oh no, this is all lost to us now. An apology to the rest of the world is not enough when we are so black. All I can think of is Walt Kelly's “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

As usual Glenn Greenwald is all over this:

Just look at how compromised Congressional Democratic leaders are when it comes to those charged with exercising "oversight" over our intelligence communities. And one finds this with almost the entire list of Bush abuses.

Whether it's the war in Iraq or illegal surveillance or the abolition of habeas corpus and now the systematic use of torture, it's the Bush administration that conceived of the policies, implemented them and presided over their corrupt application. But it's Congressional Democrats at the leadership level who were the key allies and enablers, never getting their hands dirty with implementation -- and thus feigning theatrical, impotent outrage once each abuse was publicly exposed -- but nonetheless working feverishly the entire time to enable all of it every step of the way.

As is Marcy Wheeler:

• Frankly, I think our intelligence oversight has put the Administration in as difficult a position as John Yoo has. That is, by signing off on something (and, as the WaPo describes, in several cases encouraging it), our Congressional intell leaders gave the Administration the legal sanction to torture. And now, after years of it, they're trying to shut it down. Shutting it down is far overdue--that has to happen. But we're now in the difficult place of condemning, as a society, practices that our society sanctioned as legal just a few years ago.
• We need to find a way to make intelligence oversight useful. On every major revelation like this, we have had at least one Democratic leader who objects to illegal practices. Yet that person is virtually helpless to respond.
• And for that matter, we need to get better intelligence leadership. As I showed yesterday, Jello Jay's first instinct when hit with one of these revelations is literally to parrot the script of the CIA. That's not oversight. If nothing else, this revelation needs to spark a call for real leaders in Intelligence, not the script-reader in the Senate and and not someone whose brother is the CIA torture master's buddy in the House. I nominate Russ Feingold and Rush Holt.

This nation has a lot to answer for before the rest of the world. Ugh.

I am sure more of the liberal blogs will have more and better posts on this but I couldn't let this pass without expressing my deep shame at what has become of the country I love. Shame on all of us for letting it happen.

Keep Digging

The following reminds me of the old saw..."When you find yourself in a hole the first step is to quit digging."

Late last night, by a vote of 53-40, Michael Mukasey was confirmed as the next Attorney General. I think it is a pretty safe bet that he will continue to allow Bush/Cheney to run roughshod over the Constitution, ignore the laws of the land and torture whomever they choose. Of course, it will all be done in the great war on terror in order to protect us from the hordes of non christianist hordes massed upon our borders just itching to kill us in our sleep, rape our mothers, wives and daughters all the while outlawing cold beer and pork BBQ.

We should not overlook the special efforts of Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, without whose decision to support Bush and Mukasey this would not have been possible. Thanks, really guys, you shouldn't have.

Who Is Daniel Levin Anyway

If you, like me, wondered who Daniel Levin was after watching Olbermann's Special Comment then you would be disappointed in the coverage his story got in the mainstream media. As far as I can tell it was only covered on the ABC News website and nowhere else. I am not even clear if it made the ABC broadcast news. It was covered on a few blogs but not much even there.
This is a travesty. Here is what can be found from the ABC News website.

A senior Justice Department official, charged with reworking the administration's legal position on torture in 2004 became so concerned about the controversial interrogation technique of waterboarding that he decided to experience it firsthand, sources told ABC News.

Daniel Levin, then acting assistant attorney general, went to a military base near Washington and underwent the procedure to inform his analysis of different interrogation techniques.

After the experience, Levin told White House officials that even though he knew he wouldn't die, he found the experience terrifying and thought that it clearly simulated drowning.

Levin, who refused to comment for this story, concluded waterboarding could be illegal torture unless performed in a highly limited way and with close supervision. And, sources told ABC News, he believed the Bush Administration had failed to offer clear guidelines for its use.

The administration at the time was reeling from an August 2002 memo by Jay Bybee, then the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, which laid out possible justifications for torture. In June 2004, Levin's predecessor at the office, Jack Goldsmith, officially withdrew the Bybee memo, finding it deeply flawed.

When Levin took over from Goldsmith, he went to work on a memo that would effectively replace the Bybee memo as the administration's legal position on torture. It was during this time that he underwent waterboarding.

In December 2004, Levin released the new memo. He said, "Torture is abhorrent" but he went on to say in a footnote that the memo was not declaring the administration's previous opinions illegal. The White House, with Alberto Gonzales as the White House counsel, insisted that this footnote be included in the memo.

But Levin never finished a second memo imposing tighter controls on the specific interrogation techniques. Sources said he was forced out of the Justice Department when Gonzales became attorney general.

As Keith says, it is all about protecting Junior. The Constitution, American values, the rule of law, all are secondary to making sure Bush and Cheney don't have to answer for their war crimes. Today, once again, the Dems are going to roll over and let Bush have his way when they approve Mukasey as AG. What the hell have we become?

Keith Speaks

You might want to head over to Crooks and Liars and listen to Keith Olbermann's Special Comment from last night.

No matter how thorough you might try to brand disagreement as disloyalty, Mr Bush, there are still people like Daniel Levin who believe in the United States of America as true freedom, where we are better not because of schemes and wars, but because of dreams and morals. And ultimately, sir, these men, these patriots will defeat you and they will return this country to its righteous standards, and to its rightful owners: The People.

It's a keeper!