The Man in the Iron Bubble

Maybe if we all take up a collection, we can raise enough money to bribe Dick Cheney to just go away. He may be the most politically tone deaf politician in recent history, acting as if everyone agrees that the Bush administration's policies have been dazzling in their genius. You wonder if Dick actually checks any news sources or if he just relies on a circle of fawning sycophants who only tell him what he wants to hear. If Bush was the boy in the bubble, Cheney's may be the model that bubble was based on.

Or maybe "bubble" is the wrong word. More like "armored iron sphere." Not only doesn't truth seem to reach Dick, but it seems to be actively repelled. Nothing sinks in, because no truth ever gets close enough to touch him. There's a certain segment of the population who seem to believe that you can force your beliefs to become fact. All it takes is a sincere and fervent faith that your view of the universe is correct and it magically becomes true, true, true. You see it with creationists, Holocaust-deniers, global warming naysayers, free market moonies, and other various and assorted species of flatearthers. No fact can get in, because facts are the enemy of faith. Every bit of evidence that your position is wrong -- no matter how damning or conclusive -- is rejected immediately. The logic of this illogical thinking is simple; you're right, therefore, any evidence to the contrary must be wrong. That's all the proof you need to keep believing that the Earth is in the thrall of UFO overlords or that Vladimir Putin is really a robot or that Dick Cheney is right.

Of course, it may just be that the former-VP is just slinging propaganda when he pretends to be as ignorant and stupid as he often seems to be. It may just be that Dick's familiar with reality, but uses lies and fearmongering to try to change our perception of it. It may just be that he's not wrapped in a cocoon of yes men.

But, as always when we're talking about neocons, I'll go ahead and take them at their word on what they believe and don't believe. I'll assume that Dick Cheney's not a lying sack, but just a stupid and ignorant man. Honestly, you can't be generous with these people -- it's completely impossible. Your choices are always "they're lying" or "they're stupid." Somewhere along the line, we've established that it's a terrible, terrible thing to call these guys liars, so we're left with stupid. And that's being charitable.





While it's both fun and easy to throw rocks at Dick like this, I do have a reason to revisit the bad old days of a couple of weeks ago, when Dick Cheney and his sidekick (some guy named Bob Shrub or Jimmie Tree or Lennie Asparagus... something like that) worked in the White House, desperately trying to rewrite history in their favor. It was called the "Legacy Project" and the idea was to make a last, Hail-Mary attempt to rehab the neoconservative image after eight long years of nearly uninterrupted disaster.

But there's no reason that the attempt has to stop after the Bush administration (that's the name! Bush) left the White House. As former administration officials, they can still get a reporter or two to come a'runnin' whenever they feel the need drop some whoppers and try to get everyone to wet their pants just one more time.

In this case, it was three reporters; Mike Allen, Jim Vanderhei, and John Harris of Politico. I guess dealing with the sheer volume of horse crap here is a big job that takes many hands.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.

That's right, one more pitch for torture. I won't say "one last pitch," because I'm sure it's not. If Dick's as much of a psycho- or sociopath as he seems to be, I'd imagine that it's hard to get him to shut the hell up about torture. I so don't want to know what sites the bookmarks on his laptop link to.

I could go through and point out the problems with Dick's view, but that'd just mean rewriting older posts. Suffice it to say that Dick only knows one song -- "WE'RE ALL GOING TO FREAKIN' DIE!!!" We all know how it goes, it's been stuck in our heads for the last eight years. Dick can come up with nothing new, despite the fact that the mojo wore off this particular spell a long time ago. We're tired of being terrified. It's probably time to give courage a spin.

But Dick's in his iron bubble and it doesn't make any difference whether the bubble is real or he's just pretending it is. Either way, he can't stop behaving as if we're all on the same page, 100% behind the path the mastermind Bush administration laid out for us.

It's almost sad, really. This tired, sick old mental patient babbling away as if anything he said made any sense and as if every word hadn't worn out its welcome a long, long time ago. Like a lunatic on street corner, Dick yells out "The end is near!" to anyone who comes within shouting distance.

Maybe it's time everyone started avoiding that street.

-Wisco

Gitmo's Closing, Everybody Panic!

Now that Barack Obama has signed an executive order to close the detention facility (read "prison camp") at Guantánamo Bay, one thing is becoming clear -- we're all going to freakin' die. Depending on which right wing nut you ask, the president will have no choice but to move at least one deadly terrorist into either your bedroom or your closet. We are doomed.

Writing for the Center for American Progress, blogger Matthew Yglesias helpfully lays out the arguments being advanced by talking heads in the media. Unfortunately for those same talking heads, he translates the arguments from BS into English:

-The fact that the Bush administration has let dangerous terrorists go free means Obama should keep innocent people detained.

-The fact that the Bush administration screwed up the paperwork on detainees shows that there was more wisdom to Bush’s policies than Obama acknowledged on the campaign trail.

-Obama’s promise of change was empty and hypocritical because it will take time to implement his executive orders.

-The “Guantánamo” issue is primarily about the physical location of the facility rather than the legal status or treatment of the detainees.

-Since many liberals live in San Francisco, anyone who thinks it would be ill-advised to transfer prisoners to a museum in the San Francisco Bay that hasn’t been a prison for decades is a hypocrite.

When you put it that way -- i.e., in plain English -- the arguments don't look so good. No fair using logic, because reality has a liberal bias.





But the argument that's being thrown around the most is that released detainees are "returning to the battlefield." This isn't so much true. The Pentagon has claimed that 61 detainees have "returned to the fight," but can't confirm that number. In fact, of those 61, 43 are "suspected" of terrorist activities.

"[T]hey’ve failed to identify names, numbers, dates, times, places, or acts upon which their report relies. Every time they have been required to identify the parties, the DOD has been forced to retract their false IDs and their numbers," wrote Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall Law School. "They have included people who have never even set foot in Guantánamo—much less were they released from there. They have counted people as 'returning to the fight' for their having written an Op-ed piece in the New York Times and for their having appeared in a documentary exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival. The DOD has revised and retracted their internally conflicting definitions, criteria, and their numbers so often that they have ceased to have any meaning—except as an effort to sway public opinion by painting a false portrait of the supposed dangers of these men."

So writing for the New York Times or being interviewed for a documentary is terrorism. Someone arrest William Kristol immediately. He obviously plans to kill us all.

Also ignored is the unfortunate fact that the Guantánamo prison has done nothing to reduce terrorism in the world. In fact, it's had the opposite effect.

Agence France-Presse:

A US closure of Guantánamo Bay could deprive militants of a major propaganda tool and help Pakistan in the fight against extremism, analysts said Sunday.

Opened in January 2002 after the United States invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime for sheltering Al-Qaeda, the prison detained hundreds of alleged militants without judicial review.

As the United States sought to fend off accusations that tactics at Guantánamo amounted to torture, the prison became fodder for militants who used its imagery to capture young minds and recruit volunteers to drive extremist attacks.

[...]

Pictures of open-air cages, inmates wearing orange jumpsuits with black bags over their heads and testimony from ex-prisoners about ill-treatment made Guantánamo a symbol of the worst excesses in the US-led "war on terror".

Worse, many of the people we put there weren't terrorists. These people developed an understandably poor opinion of the United States while they were in our torture camp. Far from keeping us safer, Gitmo has been a terrorist recruitment center.

"A McClatchy investigation found that instead of confining terrorists, Guantánamo often produced more of them by rounding up common criminals, conscripts, low-level foot soldiers and men with no allegiance to radical Islam — thus inspiring a deep hatred of the United States in them — and then housing them in cells next to radical Islamists," Wrote McClatchy Newspapers' Tom Lasseter in June of 2008. "The radicals were quick to exploit the flaws in the U.S. detention system."

How many of these terrorists "returning to the battlefield" are actually fighting for the first time? It may be impossible to know. But we do know that more terrorists have come out of Gitmo than have gone in. Lasseter calls it a "school for Jihad." Guantánamo is having exactly the opposite of its intended effect. It doesn't reduce terrorism, it increases it -- either by giving terrorist organizations a propaganda tool or by radicalizing non-terrorist detainees.

In the end, there is no good reason to keep Guantánamo open. None of the arguments in favor of it are any good and all of the arguments in favor of closure are sound and reality-based.

If you still feel the need for something to freak out about, then freak out about the fact that Gitmo's still operating. Every day it exists increases terrorism in the world.

-Wisco

It's Torture. We Tortured. There was Torture.

Let's start out with a few quotes.

I think on the left wing of the Democratic Party there are some people who believe that we really tortured.
--Dick Cheney

It's torture. It's a means of extracting information that I didn't even believe these people probably had. It's a means of making their lives more miserable.
--Chris Arendt, formerly stationed at Guantanamo

We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case [for prosecution].
--Susan J. Crawford, convening authority of military commissions

Some on the left may think "we really tortured" Dick, but those in the know do too. We've gotten to the point where simple denial isn't going to be good enough. "We don't torture" doesn't wash when everyone knows we do. When cases are thrown out of court because the accused was tortured, then there was torture. When people who work in the prisons say they saw torture, then there was torture. When people coming out of those prisons say they were tortured, then there was torture.

At this point, denial isn't just useless, but it's insulting to everyone's intelligence -- the denier's included. There was torture.





Front page on the Washington Post yesterday was the article "Detainee Tortured, Says U.S. Official." It kind of gives the impression that someone was tortured -- namely, accused would-be 20th 9/11 hijacker Mohammed al-Qahtani. The finding was made by Bush-appointee Susan J. Crawford, who oversees the trials -- such as they are -- of Guantanamo detainees. According to the report, "Crawford, a retired judge who served as general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration and as Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense, is the first senior Bush administration official responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo to publicly state that a detainee was tortured."

Hey Dick, that doesn't sound much like "the left wing of the Democratic Party," does it? Sounds more like a principled conservative with respect for the rule of law. The Post piece lays out the specifics.

"For 160 days his only contact was with the interrogators," said Crawford, who personally reviewed Qahtani's interrogation records and other military documents. "Forty-eight of 54 consecutive days of 18-to-20-hour interrogations. Standing naked in front of a female agent. Subject to strip searches. And insults to his mother and sister."

At one point he was threatened with a military working dog named Zeus, according to a military report. Qahtani "was forced to wear a woman's bra and had a thong placed on his head during the course of his interrogation" and "was told that his mother and sister were whores." With a leash tied to his chains, he was led around the room "and forced to perform a series of dog tricks," the report shows.

The interrogation, portions of which have been previously described by other news organizations, including the Washington Post, was so intense that Qahtani had to be hospitalized twice at Guantanamo with bradycardia, a condition in which the heart rate falls below 60 beats a minute and which in extreme cases can lead to heart failure and death. At one point Qahtani's heart rate dropped to 35 beats per minute, the record shows.

When your interrogation is so harmful to you that you need to be hospitalized, you kind of think that this might qualify as torture. Asked for comment, the White House took Dick's lead -- deny the obvious. "Let me just make sure it's clear -- and I'll say it on the record one more time -- that it has never been the policy of this president or this administration to torture," spokesperson Dana Perino told the Associated Press.

AP also got a comment from the Pentagon:

"We have always taken allegations of abuse seriously," [Pentagon spokesman Bryan] Whitman said. "We investigate all allegations, all credible allegations, of abuse," and have done some dozen investigations of interrogation methods, Whitman said.

And the Pentagon did investigate Qahtani's case in 2005. US generals Randall Schmidt and John Furlow looked into it. The Schmidt-Furlow report documented everything that Crawford mentions in the WaPo piece, as well as "twice reducing his body temperature to 92-97 degrees Fahrenheit." The dog tricks, the insults, the humiliations were all laid out, yet Schmidt-Furlow found it was all "legally permissible under the existing guidance," that it didn't "rise to the level of prohibited inhumane treatment," but warned that if overdone, it would be abusive -- "the cumulative effect being degrading and abusive treatment," the two fine generals wrote.

Wait a second, making a guy where women's underwear and forcing him to perform dog tricks is only degrading if you do it too often? Really? What's the number of times that goes too far? How often can you humiliate someone before it becomes degrading? And aren't "humiliating" and "degrading" pretty much synonymous? Schmidt and Furlow apparently left logic to reach conclusions they wanted to reach.

But someone out there is reading this and thinking, "Qahtani deserved it." Here's a question for you, what other crimes do you think people should be punished for before they're tried? What if you had to pay a fine first, then go to court to see if you got your money back? Would that seem fair or just to you?

Somehow, I doubt it. If it had turned out that Qahtani was innocent, how would you pay him back for nearly killing him twice anyway? When punishment precedes trial, justice is impossible.

Yes, there may be some people out there who believe we really did torture, Vice President Cheney. And those people may actually believe that torture isn't just wrong, but un-American, unjust, and illogical.

Those people are what you call "realists."

-Wisco

Shutting Down Gitmo

While the most visible military action is in Afghanistan, America is acting elsewhere. We now have troops in the Philippines, helping to train that country's armed forces to go after terrorist cells that have executed an American, and still hold hostages. Our soldiers, working with the Bosnian government, seized terrorists who were plotting to bomb our embassy. Our Navy is patrolling the coast of Africa to block the shipment of weapons and the establishment of terrorist camps in Somalia.
-George W. Bush, 2002 State of the Union address

Yeah, about those terrorists in Bosnia -- Bush's case against them was just thrown out of court. Judge Richard J. Leon of the Federal District Court in Washington has said the government's evidence was too weak to hold the five Algerians. Six years after Bush bragged about arresting them, they were ordered released from the concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay. The case against them rested entirely on "a classified document from an unnamed source," the judge said. "To rest on so thin a reed would be inconsistent with this court’s obligation."

This was the first legal test of the evidence against the men and the case against all of them gets thrown out. This is the kind of evidence we've been relying on to justify throwing people in a hole for years -- evidence so thin it practically gets laughed out of court. Meanwhile, the five men have lost six years of their lives to our tropical prison camp.

Far from making us safer, Guantánamo is actually losing cases. People leave there with a deep hatred for the American government. Think about it, if you were snatched out of your bed, flown halfway around the world, locked into a prison camp, abused, tortured, and then sent home, wouldn't you give very serious thought to becoming a terrorist? Slap any other name than the United States of America on that country and wouldn't you see a moral justification in bringing that nation down? That's what the prison at Guantánamo Bay is doing for us. And that's all it's doing for us.





Remember how the neocons defended torture? Remember how we absolutely had to use "harsh interrogation techniques" or terrorists were going to get away with everything and we were all going to die? Remember that?

It turns out that by using "harsh interrogation techniques," we're letting terrorist get away with everything.

American Civil Liberties Union:

Less than a month after throwing out an alleged confession obtained through torture, a judge late Wednesday rejected more evidence gathered through coercive interrogations in the military commission case against Afghan national Mohammed Jawad. Army judge Col. Stephen Henley held that evidence collected while Jawad was in U.S. custody cannot be admitted in his trial. Previously, the government had told the judge that Jawad's alleged confessions were the centerpiece of its case against him.

"For the second time in less than a month, the judge has thrown out evidence at the heart of the government's case against Mr. Jawad because it was obtained through torture. All of Mr. Jawad's alleged confessions have now been suppressed and the government is left with no case," said Hina Shamsi, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. "If the government continues to prosecute this case, it will only provide further evidence that the military commissions system is a sham aimed at obtaining convictions regardless of the facts or the law."

If you're one of those people who just can't get it through their heads that torture is not only wrong, but literally evil, then consider this -- it's screwing up our case against the people we're torturing. Innocent or guilty, torture has made it a damned good bet that Jawad's case will go in Jawad's favor. Maybe we're lucky with Jawad, maybe he really is innocent (like that better, torturing an innocent man?), but we can't be this lucky forever. Relying on evidence obtained through abuse guarantees -- with nearly 100% certainty -- that a guilty terrorist is going to be dealt a Get Out of Jail Free card.

Torture is not making us safer. It's nearly inarguably putting us at risk. Those are the facts and the facts don't care whether or not you like them. Guantánamo isn't making us any safer either, since the innocent people in there are just learning to hate the US. It turns out that -- just as all we pansy-assed, weepy liberals said all along -- there's nothing about any of this that qualifies as a good idea. The hard-headed neocon realists turn out to be blockheaded neocon dreamers; Guantánamo has failed.

There's a way to correct this amazing, astounding, astonishing failure. Get Obama to close Gitmo. Not eventually, but immediately. The longer it holds prisoners, the longer it causes us problems in the long run. The ACLU has an online petition to urge Obama to do just that.

Dear President-Elect Obama,

I was deeply moved by your recent affirmation that you will close the Guantánamo detention facilities and shut down the military commissions, which have been a stain on America here, at home and abroad.

Nothing would make me prouder than to see you act on your first day in office to restore America's moral leadership in the world.

With one stroke of your pen, you can close Guantánamo Bay prison, shut down military commissions, and ban torture.

If this strikes you as somewhat unrealistic to expect Gitmo to shut down day one, it probably is. But in politics, it's always a good idea to ask for more than you expect to get. That way, you have something to compromise down to. Gitmo is going to be closed, we just have to keep that closure a top priority. Go sign the petition and help bump this up on the radar a little bit.

If something's not working, then there's no reason to waste any time in stopping it.

-Wisco

An End to Gitmo

It's hard to think of a better symbol of the abuses of the Bush administration than the prison at Guantanámo Bay, Cuba. It was put in Cuba so the administration could claim that American law didn't apply there. It was meant to be a loophole in the Constitution and the American concept of justice. "Cuban sovereignty over Guantanámo exists only in the abstract," wrote human rights lawyer Joanne Mariner for FindLaw.com. "Yet it is, for the U.S. government, a convenient legal fiction. In the current litigation over the fate of the hundreds of detainees held on Guantanámo, the government's position is premised on the fact that Guantanámo is technically foreign soil. Because Guantanámo is part of Cuba, argues the government, it is beyond the reach of American courts."

Of course, this was a ridiculous argument -- the prisoners are inarguably in US custody, not Cuban -- and it was eventually shot down by the courts. Prisoners at Guantanámo Bay had the right to habeas corpus restored, with the right to trial. So, the administration decided the wisest thing to do would be to drag their feet. In June, I ran the math and figured out that, at the rate the trials were going, the last Gitmo detainee could expect to see the inside of a courtroom about 583 years from now. The phrase "justice delayed is justice denied" is usually meant less literally.

Many of the detainees at Guantanámo were innocent, swept up in a bounty program that required no proof of anything. People would be captured by locals and basically sold to the US. Some were terrorists, but some were just neighbors someone had a problem with, street criminals, political rivals, or complete strangers kidnapped and turned in for the bounty. As a result, innocent people were exposed to terrorist ideology and radicalized. In the end, Gitmo is creating terrorists and terrorist sympathizers.

McClatchy Newspapers:

Mohammed Naim Farouq was a thug in the lawless Zormat district of eastern Afghanistan. He ran a kidnapping and extortion racket, and he controlled his turf with a band of gunmen who rode around in trucks with AK-47 rifles.

U.S. troops detained him in 2002, although he had no clear ties to the Taliban or al Qaida. By the time Farouq was released from Guantanamo the next year, however — after more than 12 months of what he described as abuse and humiliation at the hands of American soldiers — he'd made connections to high-level militants.

In fact, he'd become a Taliban leader. When the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency released a stack of 20 "most wanted" playing cards in 2006 identifying militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan — with Osama bin Laden at the top — Farouq was 16 cards into the deck.

And each day these people are kept in our tropical concentration camp, the more likely it is that they'll become terrorists themselves -- or at least terrorist sympathizers.





Those who manage to get through the process and secure their release are finding they might as well be terrorists. Once they get home, they often aren't welcomed.

Reuters:

Former Guantanámo prisoners released after years of detention without charge went home to find themselves stigmatized and shunned, viewed either as terrorists or U.S. spies, according to a report released on Wednesday.

The report by human rights advocates urged U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to form an independent, nonpartisan commission with subpoena powers to investigate the treatment of U.S. detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Guantanámo Bay U.S. Navy base in Cuba.

"We cannot sweep this dark chapter in our nation's history under the rug by simply closing the Guantanámo prison camp," said study co-author Eric Stover, director of the University of California at Berkeley's Human Rights Center.

"The new administration must investigate what went wrong and who should be held accountable," Stover told Reuters. Worse, those who are accepted back into their communities are suffering from the experience of being unjustly imprisoned. The report looked at 62 released prisoners and found that "two-thirds of the former captives said they had psychological and emotional problems" and "only six had regular jobs." Employers are reluctant to hire people who've been released from Gitmo.

"It doesn't matter that they cleared my name by releasing me. We still have this big hat on our heads that we were terrorists," said one, now living in Albania.

"Among the 55 freed captives who discussed their interrogations, 31 said they were abusive and 24 said they had no problems," Reuters reports. "The majority held 'distinctly negative views of the United States' but many said that was directed at the U.S. government, not the American people." In the end, we may be creating more problems than we're solving. One third say they were sold to the US in the bounty program.

Barack Obama plans to close Guantanámo Bay. Under Obama, the military tribunals would be abandoned and prisoners would be able have their day in an actual court. But some say that doesn't go far enough.

In a press release, the American Civil Liberties Union said, "In addition to ordering the closure of Guantánamo, the ACLU calls on President-elect Obama to sign Day One executive orders banning the use of torture and abuse and ending the practice of extraordinary rendition." A ban on torture and abuse should be redundant, but the Bush administration has dragged us to a dark, dark place where it's necessary.

Investigations into the offense to justice that is the Guantanámo Bay camp should also begin. And those investigations should go as far -- and as high -- into the Bush administration as is necessary. War crimes have been committed and war criminals should answer for them.

These investigations should be thorough. Unlike the Bush administration, an Obama administration should give a damn whether or not they've got the right guys.

-Wisco

Justice is the Old Way

It may be that George W. Bush is the King Midas of crap. Everything he touches turns into the stuff. From gas prices to the environment to the world's opinion of the United States, Bush has left pretty much everything much, much worse than he found it. You've really got to wonder if any terrorist could've done as much lasting damage.

A big part of the problem is Bush's apparent belief that every damned thing the country has ever done was done incorrectly. In the invasion of Iraq, Bush -- listening to deluded visionary Donald Rumsfeld -- decided that sending an overwhelming force (as Colin Powell had recommended) was the wrong way to go. That had been done to death, apparently. All the cool kids were invading with a light force. Fast and lithe and, above all, cheap.

As a result, US forces rolled into a town, chased off all the insurgents and militias, then rolled off in a triumphant cloud of desert dust. And, of course, as soon as we rolled off, the militias and insurgents would come right back. Worse, ammo dumps and armories were cleared of Iraqi military, then left unprotected. The insurgents then came in and armed themselves with all the rifles and RPGs and mortars. IEDs that still kill people on the roads of Iraq are made from abandoned artillery shells and mortar rounds. In short, the "plan" -- such as it was -- was such a stupid, stupid idea that anyone capable of learning to play checkers should've known it would lead to disaster.

But the non-disastrous way of doing things was the old way. Never mind that the old way worked, never mind that the new way was idiotic beyond words, everything anyone had done before the neocons showed up was wrong, wrong, wrong. Everything had to be rebuilt from the ground up. Like the first Chinese emperor Chin, the neocons believed that history began with them.

So it's no surprise that our treatment of detainees would be entirely retooled. Where the Geneva Conventions were a primary consideration for prisoners, those international laws were now deemed "quaint." It was now a new world, led by great men -- Ubermenschen, really. And these men were so great that anything that wasn't actually their idea was wrong.

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Worse, as these visionaries follow this line of so-called reasoning, no one can correct them. You have to belong to the club to be right. Even the Supreme Court, in restoring rights of Habeas Corpus to detainees, isn't allowed to have input. The Bush administration will pretend to comply, but slow the progress of compliance to a dead stop with foot-dragging and procrastination.

McClatchy Newspapers:

A federal judge handling the appeals of more than 200 Guantanamo detainees vowed Tuesday to hold lawyers' "feet to the fire" to insure that the cases are handled as quickly as possible.

In the first hearing held since a Supreme Court decision gave the detainees the right to challenge their imprisonment in court, U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan said he recognized the unprecedented nature of the proceedings.

But he warned both government and defense attorneys that he would be "suspicious" of any requests for delays because the detainees' constitutional rights were at stake.

Addressing Justice Department lawyers directly, he told them to prioritize the lawsuits over all other cases.

"We have to have a prompt resolution to these matters," the judge told them, "The Supreme Court has spoken."

Yesterday, Justice Department lawyers said they'd cleared 54 detainees for release. Judge Hogan asked whether they could be released "without delay" and was told, "[T]hat's the issue the executive branch is struggling with."

"Maybe we can assist them," Hogan said.

Of course, if you can't slow down your own lawyers, you can slow down the lawyers for the defense. In another piece, McClatchy reports, "The U.S. government is blocking the American Civil Liberties Union from paying attorneys representing suspected terrorists held here, insisting that the ACLU must first receive a license from the U.S. Treasury Department before making the payments."

The reason for blocking payment is completely insane -- the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) says it needs to make sure that the American funds aren't used to aid terrorist groups. In other words, we can't take people to trial to find out if they're terrorists without risking helping a terrorist.

And, of course, if they ever get that little merry-go-round of circular logic straightened out, the detainees still are pretty much guaranteed an unfair hearing. They don't have access to much of the evidence against them because it's classified. Worse, McClatchy interviewed 66 former detainees and found that at least 40 "had tribunal hearings, but none was able to submit testimony from witnesses outside the detention facility."

"Former detainees singled this out as the most serious flaw in the operation of the combat status review tribunals," we're told, "but it was only one of many."

Another "serious flaw" is, of course, torture of detainees. The "harsh interrogation techniques" used by interrogators is far from reliable. In fact, they weren't designed to elicit truth.

New York Times:

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of "coercive management techniques" for possible use on prisoners, including "sleep deprivation," "prolonged constraint," and "exposure."

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

What the hell good are false confessions? Well, to a group of visionary masterminds who must always be proven right, they're invaluable. Other than that, they're pretty much useless. In fact, the very idea that some of the confessions were coerced and false puts all confessions in doubt. It may very well become the precedent that these confessions are inadmissible. As a result, the neocon geniuses have made it more likely that a bona fide terrorist will be set free, not less.

Which, of course, explains all the delaying tactics. If no one ever goes free, there's no danger of that. Just skip the trial, hold them until they die, and that's that. The plan is, of course, flawless -- it just needs a little tweak here and there. What's a little obstruction and miscarriage of justice when the reputation of the neocon worldbuilders is at stake? If some poor Afghani farmer has to rot in prison for the crime of being in prison, then that's the way things are going to be. There are important people and unimportant people. Important people are the neocon dreamers, the unimportant are everyone else.

George W. Bush may be the Midas of crap, but we aren't supposed to notice. In fact, the assumption is probably that we aren't smart enough to notice. Remember, everything you think is obvious is wrong. The new way is the best way, no matter how effed up it must seem to the unenlightened.

King Midas decrees it so.

-Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; Bush; White House; torture; human rights; civil rights; Guantanamo; law; Constitution; Supreme Court; When it comes to the War on Terror, only the neocons are right -- even after they've been proven wrong

Losing the Fight Against Evildoers

I've never been comfortable using the word "evil." It's too simple for what it describes, too cartoonish to be taken seriously. Dracula is evil, the devil is evil, Lex Luthor is evil. In children's stories, evil does evil for the sake of evil. It doesn't make any sense and it doesn't describe anything that happens in the real world. When someone uses the word, it goes straight to the part of my brain that detects ridiculousness. When George W. Bush talks about "evildoers," the first thing I think of is Cesar Romero as "The Joker" on Batman. Evil has become a word to describe either impossible supernatural creatures or absurd criminals who steal diamond encrusted jack-in-the-boxes.

For me, evil is a word to be used sparingly -- the word has already been abused into near meaninglessness, I don't want to further the erosion. As a result, when I do use the word, I'm either using it correctly (about 10% of the time) or as comic hyperbole ("According to Jim is a horrific evil that must be erased from human history").

Now is one of the 10% of times. When I say evil, I mean evil. Because torture is evil. Don't agree with that? How about this? Torturing children is evil. Agreed? How about people who "you could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas" about ways to torture people?

Now that we're all on the same page -- excepting, of course, the deluded and the genuinely evil -- let's look at evil in America today.

Let's look at the Bush administration.

Washington Post:

The Justice Department sent a legal memorandum to the Pentagon in 2003 asserting that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned al-Qaeda captives because the president's ultimate authority as commander in chief overrode such statutes.

The 81-page memo, which was declassified and released publicly yesterday, argues that poking, slapping or shoving detainees would not give rise to criminal liability. The document also appears to defend the use of mind-altering drugs that do not produce "an extreme effect" calculated to "cause a profound disruption of the senses or personality."

Although the existence of the memo has long been known, its contents had not been previously disclosed.

Interrogators, according to Yoo, would be protected by a "national and international version of the right to self-defense." Of course, this is such crazy BS that you wonder how anyone could make the claim with a straight face. If someone came over to my house and beat me up, I wouldn't then be able to sit around for a while thinking, "That sucked," before kidnapping the guy and torturing him. Claiming the right to self-defense would get you laughed out of court and straight into prison. As it should. I guess there are times when evil really is as ridiculous as the word makes it seem. To bring it back to the reality of evil, it was John Yoo who argued that we have every right to torture children -- including crushing some kid's testicles.

Yoo had this exchange with Human Rights scholar Doug Cassel:

Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

To those who occasionally defend torture in the comments -- defend this.

Of course, I suppose you could argue that this is purely academic, that this is a hypothetical situation that -- while repulsive -- has never happened. That brings up a damned good question; how do you know that?

The Bush administration hasn't exactly been the most transparent in history. And we didn't find out about the abuses at Abu Ghraib until after they'd occurred. You can't say it's never happened. You can't even say it's probably never happened. The best you can logically argue is that you hope it's never happened. If the belief is that it's not illegal, then there's nothing actually stopping it from happening -- other than conscience and shame. Few in the Bush administration have either.

I think history has proven that the Bush administration rules nothing out -- no matter how boneheaded or how cruel. This has been a lawbreaking administration, with no respect for human dignity or the rights of the individual. For them, the Constitution and law are merely impediments to be sidestepped. They exist only to slow down the weak-willed and the less-than-visionary. There's a new neocon world to be built. A New American Century of what amounts to military domination of the globe. Law applies to the menschen, not the ubermenschen. Visionary supermen are the new tomorrow.

Writes Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson:

[The Yoo memo argues] The president is unbound by international law -- ever -- and not constrained by either federal law or the Constitution in his role as commander in chief, which gives him carte blanche authority to have illegal enemy combatants who are detained on foreign soil assaulted, maimed, tortured, and otherwise subjected to war crimes, so long as the president deems it necessary or in “self-defense” of the nation.

I’m literally sick.

As am I. Dickinson's reading of the memo shows that Yoo argues that there are laws that "would conflict with… Commander in Chief power": "assault… maiming… interstate stalking… war crimes… and torture."

And John Yoo's mind is not the only repugnant little slice of hell in all of this. The whole damned administration thinks like this -- and have acted on these beliefs. This has gone beyond the acedemic and theoretical into the realm of the actual and the practical. This reasoning has been applied.

In a very thorough piece in Vanity Fair ("The Green Light: Politics & Power"), Phillippe Sands reveals that these "legal theories" aren't theories at all, but practices that have been applied since 2001.

The Bush administration has always taken refuge behind a “trickle up” explanation: that is, the decision was generated by military commanders and interrogators on the ground. This explanation is false. The origins lie in actions taken at the very highest levels of the administration—by some of the most senior personal advisers to the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense. At the heart of the matter stand several political appointees—lawyers—who, it can be argued, broke their ethical codes of conduct and took themselves into a zone of international criminality, where formal investigation is now a very real option. This is the story of how the torture at Guantánamo began, and how it spread.

It's much more expansive than I can comment fully on here -- I advise you to go read it when you have the chance. Suffice it to say that no one gets off easy -- not Alberto Gonzales, not Dick Cheney, not Bush himself. What Sands details are not theories or hypothetical "ticking time bomb" scenarios. What he finds is a direct link between the White House and war crimes. He finds evil.

One last quote and then I'll wrap it up. From a Gitmo interrogation log, relayed by Sands:

Detainee began to cry. Visibly shaken. Very emotional. Detainee cried. Disturbed. Detainee began to cry. Detainee bit the IV tube completely in two. Started moaning. Uncomfortable. Moaning. Began crying hard spontaneously. Crying and praying. Very agitated. Yelled. Agitated and violent. Detainee spat. Detainee proclaimed his innocence. Whining. Dizzy. Forgetting things. Angry. Upset. Yelled for Allah...

Urinated on himself. Began to cry. Asked God for forgiveness. Cried. Cried. Became violent. Began to cry. Broke down and cried. Began to pray and openly cried. Cried out to Allah several times. Trembled uncontrollably.

Let me remind you that this is done in your name and on your behalf. Is this the very best we can be? Is this the government you want? When the president asserts that he has the legal authority to kick anyone he wants in the nuts, the question isn't who'll protect you from the terrorists, but who'll protect you from the president.

When your government is evil, terrorists are the least of your problems.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; law; Constitution; Guantanamo; human rights; war crimes; John Yoo; neocon; The Bush administration -- torture central

Proving Hypocrisy isn't Poisonous

I'm not one of those "everything happens for a reason" types, but if you need some sort of justification for George W. Bush's existence, you could point to the fact that he's living proof that hypocrisy is non-toxic. President Bush may be one of the healthiest executives ever to sit behind the big desk in the Oval Office. Yet, he indulges in hypocrisy as often as is humanly possible -- without any obvious symptoms of some sort of poisoning. Hypocrisy is harmless to the hypocrite, apparently.

For an example, we go to the Roosevelt Room in the White House. That'd be the Republican Teddy Roosevelt, not the Democrat Franklin. Teddy was a progressive Republican, but so what? History doesn't matter much to this president. The entire purpose of the location is that Bush stand beneath a portrait of Teddy in his "Rough Rider" uniform from the Spanish-American War. A war fought in Cuba.

Standing beneath that portrait (one that unfortunately reminds us of another pointless war of choice), President Bush scolded the world on its treatment of Cuba. In all seriousness, Bush spoke of Cubans "trapped in the tropical gulag," where they're "subjected to beatings, inadequate medical care, and long separations from their family."

If your mind immediately jumps to Guantanamo Bay -- a tropical gulag coincidentally within Cuba -- you're not alone. In what may be a record setting display of hypocrisy, President Bush was complaining about human rights abuses in Cuba -- while committing human rights abuses in Cuba. Brilliant.

He called out the international community. "Unfortunately, the list of countries supporting the Cuban people is far too short -- and the democracies absent from that list are far too notable," he said. "When a new day finally dawns for Cubans, they will remember the few brave nations that stood with them, and the many that did not." The world community would be right to greet Bush's wagging finger with a laugh. Hypocrisy aside, the US policy of embargo has been a failure of historic proportions. Are we supposed to believe that the majority of Cubans support it? And since when is cutting off an entire nation standing by that nation's people? As is all too common, Bush isn't making a damned bit of sense here. "Come join us in our decades old failure that only hurts the Cuban people," Bush is saying. It's not a compelling argument.

But we're getting a little far afield of the subject here, which is Bush's hypocrisy. I ran a search for the word "torture" in Bush's address. It's not there. He does complain that "last weekend, Cubans were pushed and shoved and beaten as they distributed copies of the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights," but it's hard to see how Bush really thinks this is such a bad thing -- torture is banned under the declaration. Article 5 reads, "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." Article 7 can't be real popular within the White House either, since that one reads, "All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination." It's hard to see how that would allow imprisonment without charge or trial.

But, in case that's not clear enough, Article 8 tells us, "Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law," and Article 9 reads, "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile." Bush also violates Article 10; "Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him." Article 11 is more of the same. "Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence," we're told.

And not all of Bush's violations of the Declaration are Gitmo-centric. "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation," reads the warrantless wiretap-unfriendly Article 12. "Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."

To return to the idea that hypocrisy is non-toxic, Bush managed to criticize another nation over illegal Cuban prisons and violations of the UN Declaration on Human Rights without keeling over. A massive hypocrite suffers no ill effects from his hypocrisy. Kind of sad, really. You kind of wish this sort of thing was self-correcting and self-punishing.

And, almost as if he wanted to prove the point, Bush turned around and vetoed a torture ban the very next day.

Washington Post:

Democrats and human rights advocates criticized President Bush's veto Saturday of a bill that would have banned the CIA from using simulated drowning and other coercive interrogation methods to gain information from suspected terrorists.

Bush said such tactics have helped foil terrorist plots. His critics likened some methods to torture and said they sullied America's reputation around the world.

"This president had the chance to end the torture debate for good, yet he chose instead to leave the door open to use torture in the future," said Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

She said Bush ignored the advice of 43 retired generals and admirals and 18 national security experts, including former secretaries of state and national security advisers, who supported the bill.

Again, he managed the veto without even a cough or a chill. Healthy as a horse (and half as smart), Bush sent the bill back unsigned. No ill effects at all.

Proof positive that you can be the biggest hypocrite on the planet and not even break a sweat. Not only does this prove that hypocrisy is non-toxic, but that you can survive without a conscience, as well.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; Human Rights; law; Cuba; Guantanamo; torture; White House; Bush proves that hypocrisy isn't bad for you

"Quagmire" at Gitmo

The more we find out about what happens at Guantanamo Bay, the more the whole thing seems like a waste of time, at best, and a terrible injustice, at worst. For verifications of both takes, we need only turn to an op-ed by a former Gitmo lawyer, Morris D. Davis, for the Los Angeles Times:

I was the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, until Oct. 4, the day I concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system. I resigned on that day because I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively or responsibly.

In my view -- and I think most lawyers would agree -- it is absolutely critical to the legitimacy of the military commissions that they be conducted in an atmosphere of honesty and impartiality. Yet the political appointee known as the "convening authority" -- a title with no counterpart in civilian courts -- was not living up to that obligation.

That "convening authority" being Susan Crawford, chosen by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to replace Maj. Gen. John Altenburg. This convening authority, created by the Military Commissions act, participates in military tribunals as sort of a one person grand jury -- among other things -- who "chooses who serves on the jury, decides whether to approve requests for experts and reassesses findings of guilt and sentences, among other things." In this capacity, the CA is supposed to be impartial. Crawford, apparently and not very surprisingly, has not been.

In his piece, Davis comes across as a man more concerned with justice and the law than partisanship. According to his Department of Defense bio, Morris Davis "was selected as the Outstanding Judge Advocate for Headquarters Air Force in 1990." He's hardly some lefty whiner.

Judge Susan Crawford's relatively short career at the facility has been marked by one non-trial. Australian detainee David Hicks was released from Gunatanamo into Australian custody after a "plea agreement that was kept secret from a panel of military officers who recommended a longer sentence."

Why was Hicks released over the objections of these officers? The terms of the plea deal speak volumes -- Hicks cut a deal to keep his damned mouth shut.

Associated Press:

Under his plea deal, Hicks stipulated that he has "never been illegally treated by a person or persons while in the custody of the U.S. government," [Marine Col. Ralph] Kohlmann said. In the statement read by [his defense attorney, Marine Corps Maj. Michael] Mori, Hicks thanked U.S. service members for their professionalism during his imprisonment.

Furthermore, the judge said, the agreement bars Hicks from suing the U.S. government for alleged abuse, forfeits any right to appeal his conviction and imposes a gag order that prevents him speaking with news media for a year from his sentencing date.

Hicks and Crawford cut a deal after Hicks filed an affidavit alleging he'd been tortured. In that document, Hicks claimed he'd be blindfolded, beaten, and drugged, among other abuses. He also claimed to have witnessed abuse of other detainees. The deal essentially forces him to disavow his affidavit.

Morris hints at this incident in his op-ed announcing his resignation. "[Former CA] Altenburg's staff had kept its distance from the prosecution to preserve its impartiality," writes Morris. "Crawford, on the other hand, had her staff assessing evidence before the filing of charges, directing the prosecution's pretrial preparation of cases (which began while I was on medical leave), drafting charges against those who were accused and assigning prosecutors to cases, among other things." This from the "impartial" convening authority.

"How can you direct someone to do something -- use specific evidence to bring specific charges against a specific person at a specific time, for instance -- and later make an impartial assessment of whether they behaved properly?" he asks. Crawford had negotiated Hicks' plea deal with defense attorneys, shutting prosecutors out of the process.

Looking at Morris's charges and the Hicks case, what we see is a facility set up more as a information gathering facility and a holding tank for "intelligence assets" than a prison to hold accused criminals. Crawford's use of the system set up by the Military Commissions act shows that act to be a fig leaf -- a pretense of justice and an excuse to hold detainees indefinitely. They all have the promise of some sort of trial, just not right now. Instead of show trials, we have show charges, without trials. And, as the non-trial of David Hicks proves, this system of phony justice actually impedes the prosecution of the accused.

But Crawford isn't the only one who Morris criticizes. Far more troubling was his new boss.

Finally, I resigned because of two memos signed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England that placed the chief prosecutor -- that was me -- in a chain of command under Defense Department General Counsel William J. Haynes. Haynes was a controversial nominee for a lifetime appointment to the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, but his nomination died in January 2007, in part because of his role in authorizing the use of the aggressive interrogation techniques some call torture.

I had instructed the prosecutors in September 2005 that we would not offer any evidence derived by waterboarding, one of the aggressive interrogation techniques the administration has sanctioned. Haynes and I have different perspectives and support different agendas, and the decision to give him command over the chief prosecutor's office, in my view, cast a shadow over the integrity of military commissions. I resigned a few hours after I was informed of Haynes' place in my chain of command.

Morris tells us, "The first step, if these truly are military commissions and not merely a political smoke screen, is to take control out of the hands of political appointees like Haynes and Crawford and give it back to the military."

According to Morris, "Only one war-crime case has been completed." That'd be Hicks. And the way Hicks' case turned out explains why there haven't been any more. "It is time for the political appointees who created this quagmire to let go," he says.

Quagmire in Iraq, quagmire at Gitmo. You've got to wonder how often the neocons have to fail before they realize their entire ideology is profoundly screwed up?

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; law; crime; terrorism; human rights; torture; Guantanamo's not a place where Military Tribunals take place, it's just a warehouse

Torture as an American Value

Let's start off a quote:

Iraq is a free of a brutal dictator. Iraq is free of the man who caused there to be mass graves. Iraq is free of rape rooms and torture chambers. Iraq is free of a brutal thug. America did the right thing.
-- George W. Bush, 2003

As the original reasons for invading Iraq fell through -- no WMD, no ties to al Qaeda -- and the insanely optimistic predictions of troops being met in the street by cheering crowds with 'sweets and flowers' proved insanely optimistic, the administration relied more and more on one incontrovertable truth -- Saddam Hussein was a really bad guy.

It's kind of a silly argument. Only about half of the world's nations are democracies and even some of those don't respect human rights. If we're required to act militarily when we know a government is committing crimes, then we've got one helluva lot of work ahead of us -- we can start with North Korea, move on to China, then roll around the world overthrowing governments until we finally go to war with Cuba or Turkmenistan. Of course, that will require a huge sacrifice in lives. As far as the cost in dollars goes, many people would learn numbers they'd never heard of before. "What the hell's a 'quadrillion?' That one of those made up numbers like a 'jillion?'"

Oddly, no one who uses the 'Saddam was evil' argument follows through on it like this. Good thing, too. It turns out that Iraq's rape rooms and torture chambers never closed, they just changed hands. If we were required to overthrow any government that did these things, we'd have sort of an interesting problem -- how does a nation overthrow itself?

Seymour Hersh has a piece in The New Yorker which recounts crimes committed at Abu Ghraib that we've never heard before. The article is actually about Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba, who's truthful investigation into the crimes committed by US forces in Iraq destroyed his career. The powers that be wanted a coverup, not a factual report. We, after all, were the good guys -- whether or not we actually acted like it.

Taguba describes a meeting with Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, among others, where he was called to the carpet for reporting the truth in what has now become known as the Taguba Report. Asked at the meeting if he thought what he found constituted abuse or torture, Gen. Taguba told Hersh that he "described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, 'That's not abuse. That's torture.'"

And rape. The sexual abuse of prisoners was horrifying. He saw 'a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee' which was 'not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it.' "I learned from Taguba that the first wave of materials included descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees," Hersh writes.

Rape rooms and torture chambers. Hersh writes that 'early on, a senior general in Iraq had pointed out to [Taguba] that the abused detainees were "only Iraqis."' It's easy to imagine Saddam Hussein offering the same defense.

Donald Rumsfeld looks especially bad in Hersh's piece. Phrases like 'Rumsfeld was in denial' and 'Rumsfeld's lack of knowledge was hard to credit' pepper the piece. To me, this suggests that the cultish nature of the neocons was at work here. The story of the invasion of Iraq was already written, before George W. Bush as president was even a thought, and it didn't include war crimes, just as it didn't include a resistance. The narrative arc had heroic US forces and a grateful iraqi populace -- all had been foretold. The prophets of the Project for a New American Century had determined exactly how the war would turn out in 1998. Donald Rumsfeld was one of those prophets and the idea that his band of visionaries had been terribly, terribly wrong was unthinkable.

It doesn't stop with Abu Ghraib, of course. If it happened there, it can happen anywhere -- and it has. The International Committee of the Red Cross determined that conditions at Guantanamo Bay 'cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual, and degrading treatment and a form of torture.' Similar treatment has been reported in Afghanistan.

There's plenty of evidence that Rumsfeld not only knew about this, but that he ordered some of it. Gen. Janice Karpinski told a spanish newspaper that she'd seen a letter, signed by Rumsfeld, 'detailing the use of harsh interrogation methods.' "The handwritten signature was above his printed name and in the same handwriting in the margin was written: 'Make sure this is accomplished'."

This is the neocon idea in action -- a certainty that evil lies in the motive, not the actions, and that the end justifies the means. It's a philosophy that throws out morality and ethics in favor of expediency. Morals and ethics are old values, unworthy of our new reality. Our new reality requires tough men who do hard things to bad people. You can't be a criminal if your victim is evil and no one is given the benefit of the doubt when the neocons' goal hangs in the balance. It's the belief that police only arrest guilty people and justice is only a pain in the ass that criminals have made up to protect themselves from the righteous and their punishment. It's the philosophy of the cop who reads you your rights while he beats the hell out of you.

This is why the Bush administration has been so unbelievably bad. If I were to list all the crimes these guys have committed over the years, I'd have to write a separate post and I'd be absolutely certain to forget more than one. You just can't keep track of it all -- and there's probably stuff we don't even know about yet. The Bushies all believe that the future they see is the ultimate good and anything at all you do to get there is likewise good. If you have to kick a few innocent people in the teeth or sodomize some poor slob with a light stick to get there... Well, that's just the way it has to be. It's unfortunate and regrettable, sure, but who'll remember them when everyone's living in Utopia? Like those theoretical iraqis, we'll all be incredibly grateful.

If Donald Rumsfeld and Abu Ghraib and Iraq and the neocons and al Qaeda and 9/11 have taught me anything, it's one simple message -- beware of true believers. Absolute certainty is the most dangerous force in history. We've let that certainty lead us to a very bad place and we've let it change who we are.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; war; Iraq; Afghanistan; Donald Rumsfeld; Bush; crime; Torture isn't evil when it serves the neocon dream