Being Terrified is No Way to Fight Terrorism

When it comes to terrorism, the right has a narrative. Barack Obama is terrible at fighting it. If he were more like George W. Bush -- the president who saw the world's most deadly terrorist attack happen under his watch -- then he'd be doing things right. Never mind that, by their own arguments, Obama has been wildly successful in fighting terrorism. The rightwing line in defense of Bush's crimes of torture and wiretapping has always been that we haven't been attacked since 9/11 (which isn't at all true, by the way). Ignore the worst intelligence failure in the history of America -- Bush supposedly did a good job after that. I guess you get a do-over or something when you're a new president -- and a Republican.

But Obama's record is already better than Bush's. He hasn't needed that do-over. The big catastrophic attack we were warned about during the campaign still hasn't happened, meaning that President Obama has already beat Bush's record. Every day after 9/11/09 without a huge, flaming disaster is one more day that this president has kept us safe longer than the previous president managed. But those are facts and logic. We've already established that facts and logic don't fly in rightwing world.

Some, like the perpetually boobish Rep. Pete Hoekstra, argue that a failed attempt at terrorism under Obama counts as a bona fide "terrorist attack." This is proof that Obama's a huge failure. But these same people won't count failed attacks under Bush, which means Bush was a huge success. Yeah, it makes my head hurt too. I think I might be allergic to either stupid or ridiculous. It's hard to pin down which it is, since Bush apologists tend to give you both at once.





But the big proof for the right of President Obama's complete cluelessness about all things terrorist is that the failed underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was read his rights -- after which he clammed up.

Weekly Standard:

The Associated Press has a fascinating blow-by-blow account of the interrogation of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab that adds several new details to previous reports on his handling. Overall, however, this news does not change the disturbing picture of the reflexive, law-enforcement-first approach the Obama administration took with the al Qaeda operative. And with the new details come new troubling questions.

The story tells us that Abdulmutallab was Mirandized approximately 10 hours after he was taken into custody. Before then, he received medical attention and was interrogated twice. The first interrogation was conducted by local FBI agents and included a Customs and Border Protection official and an agent from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. The first interview lasted 50 minutes, and Abdulmutallab reportedly talked freely. The second interview, five hours later, the FBI used a "clean team" that included elements of local joint terrorism task force.  The second interrogation yielded nothing.  When Abdulmutallab was Mirandized, he stopped cooperating altogether.

You know what else is fascinating? The AP got it wrong.

L.A. Times:

The decision to advise the accused Christmas Day attacker of his right to remain silent was made after teleconferences involving at least four government agencies -- and only after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had stopped talking to authorities, according to knowledgeable law enforcement officials.

Among those involved in the hastily called teleconferences were representatives from the Justice Department and the FBI, along with officials from the State Department and the CIA.

So the "terrorist mirandized, terrorist shuts up" scenario is exactly bass ackward. In retrospect, this should've been obvious. I don't care where you're from, if TV exists there, you can recite your Miranda rights verbatim. No one's ever told that, in America, they have the right to remain silent and answers with, "I didn't know that."

But now that he's shut down, we have to torture him, right? That's also a rightwing meme -- it's the only way you can get a terrorist to talk, because they aren't criminals. If you treat them like criminals, you'll fail. These people are magic and torture is like crosses to vampires to them. You have to torture them or they'll never cooperate.

New YorkTimes:

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up a jetliner bound for Detroit on Dec. 25, started talking to investigators after two of his family members arrived in the United States and helped earn his cooperation, a senior administration official said Tuesday evening.

According to the paper, which spoke to officials in the case, Abdulmutallab "began speaking to FBI agents last week in Detroit and has not stopped."

"With the family, the FBI approached the suspect," said one official. "He has been cooperating for days."

Look at all the torture we didn't do. And look at all the success we had. And what else have we accomplished here?

Well, we've treated him like a common criminal. If you ask most people on the right, this is supposedly a terrible mistake. But this means he's not some hero to extremists, he's not a soldier in a "war on terror," he's just a nut. He's a failed murderer, not a captured soldier. In short, we've cut his propaganda value down considerably. He's not some monster we all have to be terrified of, he is what he is -- some would-be killer who's no better or worse than a common street thug. He's not the honorable enemy in a time of war, he's just the same sort of scum who kills people in a drive-by shooting.

And we've gotten him legally -- without torture. Someone needs to remind the world that we're the good guys here. It's a lot harder to do that when you're strapping people to boards and drowning them. That doesn't actually look like a good guy thing to do. Mostly because it's so obviously evil.

Don't expect the facts to sway anyone though. There will still be calls to try him in military court and, among the most sadistic and stupid, calls to torture him just for the hell of it. But the facts of the case show that the system of law that has protected this nation for more than two centuries miraculously manages to still protect it now. Imagine that.

Keep that in mind the next time some panicked moron argues we have to crap our pants, drop everything we've always believed in and stood for, and give up on the law because some cultists say they want to kill people. There are a lot of reasons why those people are wrong, not the least of which is their shameful cowardice.

-Wisco


Get updates via Twitter

The Mad Neocon

If you ask Dick Cheney, changes in counter-terrorism tactics by the Obama administration mean we're all going to die in a big terrorist attack. And that's what CNN's John King did this weekend; ask Dick Cheney. As always, he was less than convincing. I don't think Dick's capable of excitement and this makes him a pretty bad liar -- his warning of the inevitable destruction of the world's first modern democracy was delivered in the same tone of voice he might use to talk about a flat tire. The destruction of America's unfortunate, of course, but that's just the way things are. No use getting all riled up about it.

Maybe Dick's like Cassandra, who was able to predict the future, but cursed in that no one would believe her. Why knock yourself out with histrionics if no one's going to buy it?

Another possibility is that Dick's not especially worked up over our oncoming doom because he knows it's a bunch of crap. That'd put him in the same boat as most of us, who also aren't extremely concerned about Cheney's doomsaying either. Other than the wingnut right who'll believe anything, we're all pretty sure that Dick's a BS dispenser and we don't lose a lot of sleep over his warnings.

There's a third possibility; that Dick believes what he says because he's a dangerous lunatic prone to paranoia. Cheney's not especially animated at the thought of another 9/11 because he's used to living in a world where disaster is always right around the corner. His lack of excitement doesn't indicate a lack of earnestness, it's just the consequence of living in constant fear.





After all, this is the man who wouldn't let Google Earth display his residence. If you're a paranoiac, the knowledge that satellites really are looking down and watching you must be unbearable. His obsession with secrecy was taken to absurd lengths, when he argued that the Office of the Vice President was actually a fourth branch of government.

Dick Cheney may have said and done crazy things as VP because Dick Cheney's crazy. Take his Vice Presidential Hit Squad. The White House had an "executive assassination ring" that answered to Cheney's office. "Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving," says investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. "That’s been going on, in the name of all of us." It's this sort of that Cheney argues is the only thing standing between us and destruction. He must believe it -- otherwise, why would this hit squad have existed?

"When you go back to the law enforcement mode, which I sense is what they're doing, closing Guantanamo and so forth ... they are very much giving up that center of attention and focus that's required, that concept of military threat that is essential if you're going to successfully defend the nation against further attacks," Cheney told King in the interview.

It's an unfortunate coincidence for Dick that the things he thought had to be done to keep us all safe were revealed that same weekend. In an op-ed for the New York Times, journalist Mark Danner revealed details of a 2006 Red Cross investigation of US treatment of detainees. Not surprisingly, the methods used by US personnel indicate a desperation born of paranoia. These are the sorts of things you'd do if you really did believe the world was going to end tomorrow.

A few accounts from the detainees themselves tell us all we need to know:

– “I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck; they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room.”

– “Both my feet became very swollen after one month of almost continual standing.”

– “A thick flexible plastic collar would also be placed around my neck so that it could then be held at the two ends by a guard who would use it to slam me repeatedly against the wall..."

Unfortunately for the mental health of the nation, there's no shortage of cowardly "patriots" who are willing to argue that waterboarding isn't torture. Let's see them defend these practices; in what lunatic world is physical beating not torture?

"What we can say with certainty, in the wake of the Red Cross report, is that the United States tortured prisoners and that the Bush administration, including the president himself, explicitly and aggressively denied that fact," writes Danner. "We can also say that the decision to torture, in a political war with militant Islam, harmed American interests by destroying the democratic and Constitutional reputation of the United States, undermining its liberal sympathizers in the Muslim world and helping materially in the recruitment of young Muslims to the extremist cause. By deciding to torture, we freely chose to embrace the caricature they had made of us. The consequences of this choice, legal, political and moral, now confront us. Time and elections are not enough to make them go away."

Torture didn't make us safer, it just proved the terrorist propaganda right. We were evil and unjust.

And how does this keep you safe? I'd point out that all of these people were suspects. None of them had been convicted of a crime. If the US government can grab you off the street, stick you in prison, and torture you without having to prove you did anything at all, how safe are you from the government? 3,000 people out of a population of some 300,000,000 died on 9/11 -- that's one in every 100,000 people. One million are on the terrorist watch list -- that's one in every 300 people. Which set of odds do you like better?

Maybe the time has come to admit the truth; there's a good chance that Dick Cheney -- who many believe was the real power in the Bush White House -- is pretty much completely insane. Keep that in mind the next time some media type seeks out his opinion.

-Wisco


Get updates via Twitter

Planet America

Things are looking good for former Bush administration officials. You wouldn't think this would be the case, looking at some of the news stories that have come out after they'd packed up their stuff and left the White House. But that'd be because you think rationally; that doesn't fly in DC anymore. Post-Bush, the nation's capital is still dominated by denial.

Sure, Bush was an abuser of the law and -- under the paranoiac Dick Cheney's guidance -- played a little fast and loose with legalities. But that doesn't mean he actually broke the law and, since we don't know for sure, we should probably forget the whole thing. When it comes to anti-Constitutional behavior, human rights abuses, and war crimes, it's probably best to ignore things -- no one wants to open up that whole can of worms. We used to say that no one was above the law, now we worry that upholding the law might be inconvenient or embarrassing. As it is now, some people are above the law -- but only if those people are members of the Bush administration.

Outside the US, people don't get this. They insist on bringing this stuff up over and over. Out in the big, wide world, they just don't get that the Bush administration gets a pass for anything and everything, because to do otherwise would be bad politics. Forgive and forget. Look forward, not backward. Let's move on. Some people don't get the simplicity of solving a problem by pretending it never happened.

Take David Crane, an international law professor at Syracuse University. As a former UN prosecutor, Crane is a citizen of that big, wide world and doesn't see things through the lens of political expediency and an insular American media. For Crane, the United States is not a separate planet in its own orbit and things that happen in one nation inform and set precedent for things that could -- and sometimes should -- happen in other nations.

In Crane's world -- which, admittedly, is that part of the world that isn't the US -- a warrant for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir means that other leaders could be held accountable for their crimes.

Crane says that the Bashir warrant "may even be extended to the former president George W. Bush, on the grounds that some officials in terms of his administration engaged in harsh interrogation techniques on terror suspects which mostly amounted to torture." Turns out that when something's a war crime for one leader, it's a war crime for all leaders.

Crazy, huh?





But has the US actually tortured? We've called what we did "enhanced interrogation techniques." So it can't be torture, because we didn't call it that. Of course, the fact that we've "enhanced interrogation techniqued" people to death kind of puts a ding in that argument.

Griper News:

"[Prisoners] were handcuffed to fixed objects above their heads in order to keep them awake," reads the [Church report]. "Additionally, interrogations in both incidents involved the use of physical violence, including kicking, beating, and the use of 'compliance blows' which involved striking the [prisoners] legs with the [interrogators] knees. In both cases, blunt force trauma to the legs was implicated in the deaths. In one case, a pulmonary embolism developed as a consequence of the blunt force trauma, and in the other case pre-existing coronary artery disease was complicated by the blunt force trauma."

When you've got people dying because of your interrogation techniques, "enhanced" is an understatement. I'd also point out that interrogations are approached from a position of ignorance -- there are things you want to know, which is the entire purpose of the interrogation, and this means there are things you don't know. Among those things, you might reasonably include whether or not the subject knows anything more than you do and whether or not they're actually a terrorist. While many would argue that a terrorist deserves anything they get, not many would argue that we should punish a crime with torture or that we should punish a prisoner for a crime we don't know they committed. The assumption of guilt isn't justice.

But that's all logic and logic is a tool of that big, wide world. It's been banished from the separate planet that is the United States. Our government can do anything to anyone, because that's how they've kept us safe. Logic would dictate that if your government can do anything to anyone, then it can do anything to you, and this doesn't exactly make you safe from your government. Luckily for Bush and Cheney, logic doesn't fly here.

If it did, they might worry about a report on a UN probe of "secret" CIA prisons. I put "secret" in quotes because they're the worst-kept secret the US has -- everyone knows about them.

Of the prisons, Manfred Nowak, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, said, "We call on all governments to cooperate, not just in clarifying the facts, but in ensuring that such secret detention centres will no longer be used in the future." His colleague Martin Scheinin, Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-terrorism, went further, calling them "one of the most horrendous practices" that the Bush administration instituted after 9/11.

I'm guessing that Scheinin didn't know about this:

Raw Story:

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell on Tuesday when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that the military was running an "executive assassination ring" throughout the Bush years which reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The remark came out seemingly inadvertently when Hersh was asked by the moderator of a public discussion of "America's Constitutional Crisis" whether abuses of executive power, like those which occurred under Richard Nixon, continue to this day.

"It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently," Hersh said. "They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. ... Congress has no oversight of it."

"It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on," he continued. "Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us."

I think the word you're looking for is "murder." When we weren't enhanced interrogating people to death, we were doing it the easy way -- with an assassin's bullet in their head. Hersh says he's collecting enough evidence to convince "even the most skeptical."

But, as I said, we don't live in the big, wide world where any of this is a problem. We live on Planet America, where the severity of a crime depends on the political convenience of that crime's prosecution. And prosecuting Bush, Cheney, and other former White House officials would be extremely inconvenient -- especially for a Democratic congress that refused to lift a finger while all of this was going on. There were no investigations into these international crimes and talk of impeachment was positively taboo. As a result, many of the Democratic congressional leadership are complicit. They may not have liked this stuff, but they allowed it and blocked every attempt to stop it.

And that's why we aren't going to see Bush or Cheney tried. Guilty of war crimes, guilty of murder, they'll make bundles of money speaking to right wing audiences about just how freakin' great they were. There's a truth commission building, but to be absolutely honest, that won't do a damned thing to keep a future group of White House lunatics and paranoiacs from doing exactly the same thing. Nothing short of arrest and trial would do that.

But that's not going to happen here on Planet America, because we want to pretend that the neocons acted alone. A complicit congress of enablers can't be shown for what they were.

-Wisco


Get updates via Twitter

What if Bush was the Peanut Guy?

The Peanut Corporation of America is responsible for hundreds of cases of salmonella in the United States. Investigators found "dead rodents, rodent excrement and bird feathers" in its Plainview, Texas processing plant, prompting the Texas Department of State Health Services to recall every product ever made from peanuts shipped from the facility. In Blakely, Georgia, the story is the same -- Peanut Corporation of America ran an astonishingly unclean operation. All told, 600 people have suffered food poisoning. Nine have died. Calls to the company's telephone number "elicited a recording that said it was no longer in service." For all intents and purposes, Peanut Corporation of America no longer exists.

But the man ultimately responsible for his company's operations still exists. PCA owner Stewart Parnell was subpoenaed to testify to congress. He pleaded the fifth and refused to testify.

Clearly, congress has hit a dead end. Parnell can't possibly be prosecuted, his company is in no danger of ever returning to poison people, and it's time to let bygones be bygones. What we need to do is find out what happened, so we can avoid it ever happening again. And the best way to do that is to put together a blue ribbon panel and hold a third world style truth and reconciliation commission. No one will be charged, no one will go to jail, no one will pay any price, Parnell can get on with his life and we can get on with ours. But we'll get the truth and that's what really counts.

You might've noticed that my little synopsis veered off into crazy town around the third paragraph. Of course Stewart Parnell should be prosecuted -- along with those managers and executives who helped him sell garbage to unsuspecting families. So what if his company is shut down and will never sell poison again? So what if he won't testify? So what if all this has happened in the past?

Parnell lacks one quality that would apparently put him above or beyond the law -- he's not a former President of the United States. Stewart Parnell is just a former Poison Peanut King. When anyone else has committed a crime, they have to face the legal system. When a former President has committed a crime, we have to have a truth commission -- without prosecutions -- to get to the bottom of the crime and let the criminals walk away. There will be no jail time, there would only be embarrassment for the accused -- that is, if he weren't shameless. But the accused is shameless, so there wouldn't even be that. He would face the wagging finger of justice and retire to Dallas a rich, rich man. Maybe hire a ghost-writer and put out a memoir. And his example would do absolutely nothing to prevent future executives from committing similar crimes. After all, the crime without any real consequence might as well be legal -- without punishment, there is no crime.





But this is Sen. Patrick Leahy's solution -- not to the garbage vendor's crimes, of course, just to Bush's. What we need is a truth and reconciliation commission that, in any practical sense, would be a panel put together to write history. They'd have subpoena power and the ability to prosecute perjury, but no power to prosecute the underlying crimes. We'd get the truth, while criminals in the Bush administration get off scott free.

"People would be invited to come forward and share their knowledge and experiences, not for purposes of constructing criminal indictments, but to assemble the facts," Leahy said. "If needed, such a process could involve subpoena powers, and even the authority to obtain immunity from prosecutions in order to get to the whole truth."

Some find Leahy's suggestion a frustratingly wrongheaded. "There's no question that torture occurred here," constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann tuesday. "There's no question that it was a war crime. And so the only reason to have a commission of this kind is to avoid doing what we're obligated to do under a treaty."

"It is shameful that we would be calling for this type of commission..." Turley continued. "We're obligated to investigate. This whole discussion in front of the whole world is basically saying that we are not going to comply with the promise we made, not to ourselves, but to the world." Not surprisingly, law professor Turley is absolutely correct about our obligations under international law. Prosecuting torture is not optional. In other words, Leahy's solution is most likely illegal.

"At the end of the day, no one believes that people will be prosecuted for a known war crime -- and when we do that then we will become accessories," Turley said. "Those crimes of President Bush will become our crimes. His shame will become our collective shame."

Even worries that prosecutions would be politically unfeasible are misplaced. A USA Today/Gallup poll finds that about two thirds support investigations and, of those who want probes into Bush crimes, about 61% want to see prosecutions. In fact, more people (34%) would rather do nothing than those who'd like to see Leahy's proposal (24%). And it's hard to imagine that many who preferred Leahy's idea would be heartbroken if there were prosecutions. I think if you polled people and asked them which solutions they opposed most, you'd probably wind up with very different numbers.

If Leahy's truth and reconciliation commission is the best we get, I'll take it. But it's not the best we can do. We can hold criminals accountable for their crimes, no matter who they are or what position they used to hold. It doesn't matter if they were the president of a peanut company or President of the United States, the law is for everyone and applies to everyone. We shouldn't let crimes go unpunished unless we've got a damned good reason to do so.

In the case of George W. Bush and his administration, that "damned good reason" just isn't there. As I said, if you don't punish a crime, then it might as well be legal. With Leahy's proposal, some future president considering crime could look back in history and say, "Let's go ahead and do it, the worst that could happen is that we wind up like Bush."

No one fears the wagging finger of justice.

-Wisco

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

There's Only One Side to This Story

It's easy to look at a new Rasmussen poll and think that the United States is no longer a nation of laws. In that poll, 54% think war crimes weren't committed by the Bush administration. Worse, only 25% do. 70% believe "it would be bad for the United States if the former president and senior administration officials were brought to trial for war crimes," with even 54% of Democrats agreeing.

But these are the results of a population kept in ignorance. The media, with their stupid "two sides to every story" reporting, felt the need to pretend that no one really knows what torture actually is. Congress, spineless throughout the Bush's two terms -- even when his approvals were in the tank -- got the vapors and fell into a faint every time someone mentioned holding any Bushie accountable for anything. There were investigations into all sorts of crimes, complete with sacrificial lambs, but when it came right down to it, the investigations didn't accomplish anything, because there was no action taken on the findings. If the public thinks torture isn't a war crime, the press and Congress can be blamed for it. When it comes to this issue, both have failed miserably. The correct response to Rasmussen's question about war crimes should've been "how the hell should I know? No one tells me anything."

Those who study the issue closely and have some expertise in determining torture have done just that -- determined that the US, under orders from the Bush administration, has tortured. There isn't any gray area here; it's a crime like rape or theft -- either you did it or you didn't, you can't kind of do it a little, but not really.





In July 2008, the Red Cross determined that torture was being used by the United States. The report, cited in Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals," tells us that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah were "categorically" torture and included being confined in a box "so small he said he had to double up his limbs in the fetal position" and waterboarding. The Red Cross told the CIA "that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted."

Similarly, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak told CNN recently that the US had an "obligation" to investigate war crimes by the Bush administration, saying that there's already enough information out there to prosecute former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

"We have clear evidence," he said. "In our report that we sent to the United Nations, we made it clear that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld clearly authorized torture methods and he was told at that time by Alberto Mora, the legal council of the Navy, 'Mr. Secretary, what you are actual ordering here amounts to torture.' So, there we have the clear evidence that Mr. Rumsfeld knew what he was doing but, nevertheless, he ordered torture."

But, as I said, the media has this idiotic "two sides to every story" theory, which allows any idiot to spew BS and cast doubt on any issue -- no matter how settled. They do it with global warming, they do it with evolution, they even did it with tobacco and cancer, and now they're doing it with torture. This doesn't inform, all it does is confuse.

"The problem for the Bush administration is that they perfected plausible deniability techniques," constitutional law expert Johnathan Turley told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow in an interview about Red Cross report. "They bring out one or two people that are willing to debate on cable shows whether waterboarding is torture and it leaves the impression that its a closed question.

"It's not..."

As a result, people watch pundits try to talk over each other on cable news shows and actually come away from it less informed. There has never, in the entire legal history of the United States, been a time when waterboarding wasn't clearly torture. There has been no case where the defendant was charged with torture, but was later found innocent because it was "just waterboarding." It is torture and it is a crime.

Speaking to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, Turley explained that Obama is required to investigate and prosecute torture. If not, Barack Obama becomes an accessory to the crime. He told Olbermann he had "very little sympathy for the people that committed this torture. I've heard President Obama say we don't want talented people at the CIA looking over their shoulders. Well those talented people in this circumstance would be torturers."

"But in reality nobody thinks that they're going to be prosecuted," Turley continued. "They have something called the estoppel defense where they can say that they were told by people like John Yoo and others that what they did was legal. That does not protect the president and the vice president, and they're the ones and the people just below them who deserve to be investigated and they must be prosecuted if they've committed war crimes or we will shred four treaties and at least four statutes."

The majority of Americans who believe that war crimes weren't committed can hardly be blamed for their confusion. Torture apologists have used the media's "two sides to every story" reporting to their advantage, throwing doubt on what was once a widely accepted truth -- just as creationists have.

But the Barack Obama administration can't make the same claim. They know a crime has been committed and they have a choice to make. Barack Obama has said that we have to look forward, rather than look backward.

I can only hope this doesn't mean he'll look the other way. Because that would be a crime.

-Wisco

Not Prosecuting Torture is a Crime in Itself

George W. Bush wasn't going to be the president forever. That seems obvious to most people, but it almost seems to have caught Republicans in Washington by surprise. The president who brought his party to near irrelevance is gone now, but his actions linger on. Bush, having brought even more disaster to the Republican party than he did to the nation, leaves behind a legacy of crime and scandal. Having once hoped he would rebuild American government to match his vision, Bush left DC in worse shape than he found it -- the nation is impatient to see the vision undone.

Still, some Republicans seem to be completely unaware of these new realities, behaving as if nothing had changed, as if the Republican party were still wildly popular, and as if Bush's legacy is anything other than one of failure.

Politico:

Eric Holder’s confirmation vote before the Judiciary Committee will be delayed for up to a week as Republican senators continue to press him on his views about interrogation and other Bush administration intelligence methods.

The Judiciary Committee was originally scheduled to vote today on Holder’s nomination as attorney general, but Republicans have objected, and under committee rules they can delay the vote for up to a week. Holder was grilled last week by Republicans on his views about interrogations, Guantanamo Bay and his involvement in the 2001 pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) is seeking more information from Holder on whether the Department of Justice will pursue criminal prosecutions of "intelligence personnel" involved in detainee interrogations.

It was going to be the pardon of Marc Rich that was going to be the bump in the road to Holder's confirmation, but he went and told the senate in testimony that waterboarding is torture. Of course, it's their fault for asking him -- no one who's given it serious thought thinks it's not. "If you look at the history of the use of that technique, " Holder said, "we prosecuted our own soldiers for using it in Vietnam... Waterboarding is torture."





The question here isn't whether Holder will be confirmed -- it's a near certainty that he will. The question is what the hell answer was it they expected? The idea that waterboarding doesn't fit the definition of torture was always a legal fiction designed to create a loophole. Only ideologues and fools bought it. Any honest reading of the law would find it to be torture.

Which leaves John Cornyn, whose vocal support for torture would cause any principled human being to be ashamed of himself, in a bit of a quandary; he can try to block Holder's confirmation, but what would be the point? The next nominee would give the same answer -- and the next and the next. See, that's the problem with being dead wrong. You have to look long and hard for someone who'll agree with you.

In fact, the torture debate is pretty much over. Turns out, we're pretty solidly against it. A Washington Post/ABC News poll finds that most respondents opposed torture -- in any circumstance. In a question that suggests even the ridiculous "ticking time bomb" scenario, people where asked, "Obama has said that under his administration the United States will not use torture as part of the U.S. campaign against terrorism, no matter what the circumstance. Do you support this position not to use torture, or do you think there are cases in which the United States should consider torture against terrorism suspects?"

58% -- a clear majority -- said no, torture should never be used, regardless of the circumstance. This would've been higher, but Republicans continue to be outside the mainstream and throw the average. For Democrats, 71% said no. Independents against torture number 56%. Only Republicans support torture, with just 42% believing it should never be used. Still, even that number shows only weak support for torture.

Their support may be a moot point, however. In their grilling of Holder over waterboarding, they may have opened a big can of worms. Not only is torture illegal, but the law requires that it be investigated and prosecuted. By getting Holder to drop the "T" word, the senate may have begun a sequence of events that guarantee prosecutions.

When Ronald Reagan signed on to the Convention Against Torture, he brought us into the realm of international law. The convention is a treaty and treaties are the be-all and end-all if international law -- torture's illegal because we agreed it should be. That convention reads, "Each State Party [i.e., signatory nation] shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law," and that, if torture is committed, the nation must "submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution."

There aren't any exceptions here. It must happen. If Holder -- or any other would-be Attorney General, for that matter -- believes that we've waterboarded detainees (and no one thinks we haven't), he has to prosecute. His hands are tied.

In fact, torture prosecutions could happen outside the US, since torture is a violation of international law and a war crime. Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, has called on the United States to prosecute George W. Bush and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Citing the Convention Against Torture, Nowak says the US has a "clear obligation" under law. If it doesn't happen here, it might just happen in The Hague.

Republicans seem to suddenly have become aware of reality and, like John Cornyn, are trying to put the brakes on what may very well be inevitable. They're trying to slow things down long enough to figure out what the hell to do and it may just be that there's nothing at all that can be done.

-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

The Unpunished Crime Might as Well be Legal

I usually hate these "two headlines" things, where two sources report the same event and come up with entirely different takes. Usually, this means that, of the two, one of them is BS. But not always. Sometimes the event is difficult to assess and the headlines they write depend as much on what the writers had for breakfast that morning as anything else. If your inclined to see bad news, you'll see bad news.

The event in question here is an appearance by Barack Obama on This Week with George Stephanopoulos Sunday. Raw Story reports "Obama not likely to prosecute torture." Meanwhile, USA Today's The Oval blog tells us "Obama: Time to look forward, but Bush aides aren't above the law."

Given the noncommittal nature of Obama's statements to Stephanopoulos, it's easy to see how this could happen. He really didn't give any definitive answer. Maybe there will be prosecutions for torture, maybe not.





Asked by Stephanopoulos, "The most popular question on your own website is related to this. On change.gov it comes from Bob Fertik of New York City and he asks, 'Will you appoint a special prosecutor ideally Patrick Fitzgerald to independently investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping?'" Obama answered:

We're still evaluating how we're going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. And obviously we're going to be looking at past practices and I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. And part of my job is to make sure that for example at the CIA, you've got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don't want them to suddenly feel like they've got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.

If, like me, you think that the people responsible for torture must be prosecuted, this isn't the best news you've gotten lately. In fact, throughout the interview, Obama keeps falling back on that line, "looking forward." I know that's supposed to sound optimistic and high-minded, but the phrase that keeps going through my head is "those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it." Yes, I understand that the Obama administration won't be about the Bush administration, but I also understand that the past actually does exist. Planning for the future is realistic, pretending the past never happened is not.

Stephanopoulos pressed the issue, asking, "So, no 9/11 commission with Independence subpoena power?"

"We have not made final decisions, but my instinct is for us to focus on how do we make sure that moving forward we are doing the right thing," Obama said. "That doesn't mean that if somebody has blatantly broken the law, that they are above the law. But my orientation's going to be to move forward."

I think that's where the opinions split. It's maddeningly noncommittal. He doesn't rule it out, but he doesn't make any promises either. Personally, I think the idea of a blue ribbon panel is the worst option. And I didn't have to look far for someone to agree with me.

In an interview of former Nixon White House counsel John Dean -- a serious Bush critic -- MSNBC's Keith Olberman brought up the idea, saying that these sort of commissions are "almost openly dedicated to not pointing fingers."

"Don't we have to point fingers?" he asked. "Is that not the way justice works?"

"[T]his is going to really reflect terribly on the entire country, not just on the Bush administration which has engaged in these activities, but it really will reflect on the Obama administration for its refusal to pursue them and prosecute them." he answered. "I think there's serious consequences if they refuse to point fingers."

Those consequences could be in the form of another executive, somewhere in the future, deciding -- once again -- that torture is just fine. If no one is prosecuted this time around, we've essentially legalized it. Like the cowardly and useless Democratic leadership in congress who established the precedent that there's no such thing as an impeachable offense, Obama would be setting the precedent that there's nothing keeping an executive from ordering torture. If there's no consequence -- no punishment -- for a crime, it's virtually legal.

Pressed even further in the interview, Obama finally punted. "What I -- I think my general view when it comes to my attorney general is he is the people's lawyer," he said. "Eric Holder's been nominated. His job is to uphold the Constitution and look after the interests of the American people, not to be swayed by my day-to-day politics. So, ultimately, he's going to be making some calls, but my general belief is that when it comes to national security, what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed looking at what we got wrong in the past."

Passing the buck. Disappointing. It's starting to look like Raw Story's headline is the most accurate; Obama's not likely to prosecute torture. If this is the case, when he said, "I don't believe that anybody is above the law," he wasn't including the President of the United States. This would make the Bush administration will most definitely be above the law.

I guess once we stop fighting Bush, we start fighting Obama. That's the nature of democracy -- it never ends.

But, I'm still glad I'm not having this fight with McCain.

-Wisco

A History of Torture

President Bush finished what will apparently be his final press conference this morning. He managed to make most of the answers the press threw at him into defenses of his presidency. This guy's pretty much already punched out, thinking more about next Wednesday and beyond. For example, he spoke about the future in discussing Iraq.

"When the history of Iraq is written, historians will analyze for example the decision on the surge," he said. "I decided to do something about it, and to send 30,000 troops in as opposed to withdrawing. The part of history is certain in the situation did change."

This strikes me as kind of a crazy hope for the future, like saying that the lessons scholars take from Vietnam is that napalm works really well. It's the invasion itself that people remember, not some tactic used during the occupation -- Civil War history isn't all about Pickett's Charge. Bush may hope that historians put a lot of emphasis on his "surge" -- while also hoping they don't look too closely at it -- but that seems a vain hope.





For the past couple of months or so, the Bush administration has been all about defending their record and preemptively spinning away all their failures. The danger here is that it's nearly impossible to spin mistakes and crimes without discussing them. In many ways, this spin doctoring has always been a problem for Bush, keeping some issues alive longer than they would normally have lived. At other times, this spinning of major scandals created minor scandals of their own. And sometimes it leads to confessions to war crimes.

In an interview with FOX News Sunday, Bush had this to say:

One such person who gave us information was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed... And I’m in the Oval Office and I am told that we have captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the professionals believe he has information necessary to secure the country. So I ask what tools are available for us to find information from him and they gave me a list of tools, and I said are these tools deemed to be legal? And so we got legal opinions before any decision was made.

This is an admission that he personally authorized torture. That he asked whether it was legal or not is beside the point -- if a lawyer tells you to commit a crime and you're later busted for it, all you can really say is that you've got a lousy lawyer. You're still guilty. Ignorance of the law is famously no defense.

Bush argues that his torture policies have kept the United States safe, but most people who've looked closely at it say it's only making terrorism worse. In November, Matthew Alexander, an interrogator, wrote a piece for the Washington Post titled "I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq." In it, he called US interrogations "deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American."

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

Bush has always been shameless in hiding behind the military, but this is just one more example of how he serves poorly those who serve us. Bush, who bears a large part of the responsibility for 9/11, throws soldiers into the meat grinder in order to claim he's keeping us safe from terrorism. "Other than that one time the house burned down," he might as well say, "I've been a really good housesitter." Bush wants to be seen by history as being a great protector against terrorism -- as long as you don't count the worst terrorist attack in American history.

According to a criminal complaint that will be submitted to the Obama administration, Bush and thirty of his administration are guilty of war crimes, including "savage beatings, sleep deprivation, slow drowning, hanging by chains, being slammed head-first into concrete walls, temperature extremes, food deprivation, burial alive in coffin-like boxes for extended periods, and even threats against their families."

And does any of this work? Not really. A former senior CIA official familiar with the interrogations of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed told Vanity Fair that "90 percent of it was total f*cking bullsh*t." A Pentagon official told the magazine that "K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were." Either that or he was just tortured into false confessions. Torture me or you or anyone long enough and we'll confess to shooting JFK. Torture doesn't actually work as a way of determining truth.

But I think the worst crime here is incidental. We were once a society that hated torture. Just a few short years ago, torture was nearly synonymous with evil. Today, you don't have to look far to find someone who thinks it's a great idea.

Those people are cowards, just like the president they adore. But they're also poorly informed -- a claim the president can't make. He knows that torture is turning up crappy intelligence, he knows it's being used to recruit new terrorists, and he knows that it's putting US military personnel at risk -- people who believe they'll be tortured don't surrender, they fight to the death.

Bush can try to pre-emptively rewrite history and he's certain to fail. Too many of us know the truth and too many are more than willing to call BS on it all. He's made too many mistakes -- mistakes that were easily avoided -- for his revisionism to work. Whether he's tried as a war criminal is an open question, but whether he'll be remembered as a war criminal is up to us.

History is just human memory. All we need to do is remember the events of 2001-2009 correctly.

-Wisco

(Transcript of the final press conference is available here)

Crimes Without Consequence

A new Senate Armed Services Committee report [PDF] begins with the words of Gen. David Petraeus -- who the right has convinced themselves sits directly at Jesus's side in the pantheon of the unquestionable:

What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight... is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect. While we are warriors, we are also all human beings.

It's ironic then, that the report details not humanity, but monstrosity. The document, titled "Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody," kills neocon blame-shifting on its very first page:

The Abuse of detainees in US custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of "a few bad apples" acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority. This report is a product of the committees inquiry into how those unfortunate results came about.

In their cowardice, top Bush administration officials blamed everything on personnel acting on their own. Donald Rumsfeld, in testimony to the committee, said, "In recent days, there has been a good deal of discussion about who bears responsibility for the terrible activities that took place at Abu Ghraib. These events occurred on my watch. As secretary of defense, I am accountable for them. I take full responsibility. It is my obligation to evaluate what happened, to make sure those who have committed wrongdoing are brought to justice, and to make changes as needed to see that it doesn't happen again."

After taking "full responsibility," Rumsfeld almost immediately blamed it on others.





"It's important for the American people and the world to know that while these terrible acts were perpetrated by a small number of the U.S. military," he said, "they were also brought to light by the honorable and responsible actions of other military personnel." Rummie had nothing to do with it and was grateful that good people brought it out in the open. "It's all my fault -- although it pays to remember that I had absolutely nothing to do with it."

"I take full responsibility" has always been a magic incantation the Bush administration has used to avoid taking responsibility and avoid consequence. The theory seems to be that saying it is the consequence of wrongdoing. Say the magic words -- even if you contradict them right away -- and you're off the hook. Meanwhile, right wing media argues that what you did was exactly the right thing to do and that you're a freakin' hero -- no matter how lousy and stupid and counterproductive your actions were. As I've already said, the White House neocons are cowards -- and right wing media applauds them for it.

But cowardice only works for so long. You can hide behind others, but they drop one by one and you're left with no one to hide behind. You can keep throwing sacrifices into the volcano, but sooner or later, you run out of people to throw. The Senate report places the blame squarely where it belongs:

New York Times:

The report was issued jointly by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the Democratic chairman of the panel, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, the top Republican. It represents the most thorough review by Congress to date of the origins of the abuse of prisoners in American military custody, and it explicitly rejects the Bush administration’s contention that tough interrogation methods have helped keep the country and its troops safe.

The report also rejected previous claims by Mr. Rumsfeld and others that Defense Department policies played no role in the harsh treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 and in other episodes of abuse.

There are no surprises in the report. The testimony used in compiling it was public and commented on again and again. Bush, Rumsfeld, and other top White House officials are ultimately responsible for the actions of their "few bad apples." Even Bush rhetoric was so inconsistent that taking it at face value would be absurd. The White House argued that the Geneva Conventions didn't apply to detainees, since they were "unlawful combatants." But, at the same time, we were assured that the US doesn't torture. Why point out that you think you legally could torture these guys if you weren't planning to? As always, Team Bush believed that anyone who doesn't work in the White House is stupid. You'd never figure out the obvious, because only neocons are capable of thought.

In fact, Bush himself authorized torture, at least indirectly, by arguing in favor of it's legality. The report tells us:

On February 7, 2002, President Bush signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention did not apply to the conflict with al Qaeda and concluding that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or the legal protections afforded by the Third Geneva Convention. The President's order closed off application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would've afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees...

Why say that international law didn't apply if you weren't planning on violating it? Wouldn't that make the "fact" you've just made up an uninteresting bit of trivia? "We could torture these guys -- of course, we're not going to -- but remember, it'd be totally legal if we did" doesn't do much to put down suspicion.

There's a lot more -- 19 pages in all -- but there isn't anything there we didn't know. Bush, Rumsfeld, Pearl, Yoo, various and sundry other morons, are all torturers. They didn't do it personally, but they had it done. And they did it in the most cowardly way possible, but trying to avoid responsibility with what they thought would be plausible deniability.

They needn't have bothered trying to hide their guilt. The Senate Armed Services Committee report is just that -- a report. It comes with no consequence. The torturers in the White House get the wagging senatorial finger and they'll go on to write books and make big money on speaking tours. Having already established that there is no such thing as an impeachable offense, the congress is poised to set the precedent that it's impossible for Executive branch officials to commit war crimes. There is no longer any offense so heinous, so evil, so contrary to our common decency that the offender can't possibly avoid paying for it. The bottom has dropped out of the shebang -- there is no bottom, no lower limit to just how lousy and criminal and morally repellant an American president is allowed to be. The White House is the world's smallest anarchy, a patch of land about one city block where no law applies.

Richard Nixon once said, "If the president does it, that means it is not illegal." All these years later, Richard Nixon has won that argument.

-Wisco

Tortured Logic

If Bush is remembered for anything, it's my hope that he's remembered for torture. If the Republican party under Bush is remembered for anything, I hope it's for being the pro-torture party. There aren't many aspects of the Bush years that disgust me nearly as much as the policy of torturing detainees and none that disgust me more. The whole thing is so obviously evil that it almost seems cartoonish. If I wanted to accuse a president of something unthinkably awful, torture would be on the list, along with keeping child sex slaves and stealing human organs. If I had my choice, Bush would forever be remembered as the ridiculously, cartoonishly evil president. Like Sen. Joe McCarthy before him, Bush would become a living example of just how lousy a person can become in their quest for personal power, how the very worst person can wrap their crimes up in the flag, and how abusive and brutal even a democratic government can be if it abandons the law. Do me a big favor, would you? Spend the rest of your life talking about Bush this way. Evil, corrupt, and criminal. Make sure to include all the neocons and the Democrats and Republicans who've supported him in this.

Evil is the word. But another we can throw in is stupid. Bush's Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, demonstrated that stupidity yesterday.

Reuters:

Departing U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey said on Wednesday that he saw no reason for prosecutions or for pardons for those who gave legal advice on the Bush administration's terrorism policies.

Some human rights groups have urged President-elect Barack Obama to launch criminal investigations into the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques on al Qaeda terrorism suspects.

They also have questioned whether the Bush administration broke the law with its warrantless domestic spying program adopted after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Whether this is real stupidity or feigned stupidity is an open question. I'll take him at his word and assume he's as stupid as he may or may not be pretending to be. Mukasey is a former federal judge, so you'd think he'd know that torture is a felony. But it'd be a terrible, terrible thing to say he's being dishonest, so we'll assume he's being totally upfront and say he's as stupid as he wants you to believe he is. That's giving him the benefit of the doubt, because we want to be fair.





See, torture is illegal under title 18, chapter 113C of the US Code. How did I, someone who isn't a former federal judge, find this out? I took about ten seconds to type "federal torture statute" into Google. It was the first result. Mukasey wouldn't have thought of checking to see if torture's illegal because -- to be fair -- he's stupid.

But Mukasey's talking about people who didn't actually torture. He's talking about people who advised torturers, right? That comes under Title 18, U.S.C., Section 241. That crime is called "conspiracy against rights." How did I find that one? I typed "federal statute conspiracy" into Google. Not much of a stumper, but remember, we're cutting Michael Mukasey some slack and assuming he's a moron.

"There is absolutely no evidence that anybody who rendered a legal opinion either with respect to surveillance or with respect to interrogation policy did so for any reason other than to protect the security of the country and in the belief that he or she was doing something lawful," he said. "In those circumstances, there is no occasion to consider prosecutions, there is no occasion to consider pardons." Whether or not they believed it was legal is completely irrelevant. "I thought it was legal, but it turns out I was wrong" isn't much of a defense.

Of course, the Bush administration have painted themselves into a political corner here -- that's why Mukasey mentions pardons. If Bush were to pardon his torture team, he'd practically be admitting he knew their actions were illegal. They've got to pretend everything was above board and hope for the best.

Will they be investigated for what would literally be crimes against humanity? We're getting mixed signals on that front. Some on Team Obama say yes, while others say no. No matter which answer is true, experts say they should.

"The only way to prevent this from happening again is to make sure that those who were responsible for the torture program pay the price for it," Michael Ratner, a professor at Columbia Law School and president of the Center for Constitutional Rights said. "I don't see how we regain our moral stature by allowing those who were intimately involved in the torture programs to simply walk off the stage and lead lives where they are not held accountable." Put simply, if Bush and company get away with it, torture will only be technically illegal from now on. It'll be a crime without punishment. In their cowardice, this congress has already established that there's no such thing as an impeachable offense. The next congress and administration shouldn't established that the executive branch is beyond any law. That's the definition of dictatorship.

Even if no one is prosecuted or even investigated for this, we can still make sure they pay some sort of price. History can remember them as evil, stupid, and criminal.

Do me a solid and see to it that -- at the very least -- happens.

-Wisco

The Price Tag

There's a popular myth out there that jobs and wealth are created by businesses. This isn't true. Jobs and wealth are created by demand. I could open a business selling something for which there is zero demand and all the people I hired would be out of work again as soon as I went under. Consumers create jobs and wealth, not suppliers. It always gets me when people talk about business owners and CEOs as "job creators" -- they're not.

Likewise, Wall Street doesn't create wealth. Wall Street trades on wealth. Wealth is comes from the creation of objects for which there is a demand. These objects can be solid and tangible, like a boat or a hamburger, or they can be more conceptual, like a newspaper column or a novel. But it has to be a noun. Value is added to things that already exist by labor. The dead cow becomes the hamburger, the blank page becomes the novel. No one pays money for something they could easily find lying around. As Abraham Lincoln put it, "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

In the bailout debate, we're left arguing over whether the product of labor is worth more than the business of capital. Granted, the auto industry has pulled a lot of boneheaded maneuvers, but the fact is that the root of their problem is identical to the banking industry's problem -- a credit crunch. Car sales are just as dependent on loans as Wall Street. When it's hard to get a loan, it's hard to buy a car.





What would it really cost to bailout the automakers -- and, with them, all the labor involved? They're looking for $25 billion which, granted, is an insanely huge amount of money. But Politico's Roger Simon sees things in perspective:

I do not understand why some people are opposed to a $25 billion government bailout of the U.S. auto industry.

The price is cheap. That $25 billion represents less than three months of the cost of the Iraq war.

To put it another way: If Barack Obama would end the Iraq war just three months early, he could pay for the entire U.S. auto industry bailout, and have about $5 billion left over to spend on luxury items like U.S. education, health care and the environment.

"But nobody is putting it that way," he writes. "The media have grown bored with the Iraq war. We seem more fascinated with who is going to be the next deputy undersecretary of party hats at the inauguration than the continued fighting and dying in Iraq."

When all is said and done, it's likely that we will have dumped $3 trillion down a rathole in some godforsaken desert. The return on that investment will be zero. We're pouring that money down that rathole as we speak, yet we're supposed to be freaking out over a fraction of that amount being spent elsewhere. It's like worrying that the naked man standing out in the snow isn't wearing mittens. The naked man has bigger problems.

And some of the cost of the Iraq war can't be measured in dollars. In a Washington Post piece titled "I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq," an military interrogator wrote sunday that what we're doing in Iraq is costing us dearly in more than monetary terms. Matthew Alexander helped gather the intelligence that finally brought down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, and managed to do it without torture.

"I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information," he wrote. "I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of 'ruses and trickery'). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi."

In contrast, he calls the methods used by other teams "deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American." We should all consider that last one -- un-American. If we give up everything we stand for, then what are we protecting? You can't torture people and say it's in the name of justice, you can't invade other countries without reason and say you're fighting for freedom. Whatever it is we are fighting for in Iraq, it's not any America I recognize and it's not any America I want to have a damned thing to do with. It's cruel, it's stupid, it's brutal, and it's evil. How expensive is that?

I'm an atheist, so I'm not really comfortable talking about the soul. But, as a metaphor for our humanity and our sense of justice, it's pretty handy. And it's in that sense that I mean it when I say that what we're doing in Iraq is costing us our soul -- both nationally and individually. These things are being done in our name, just as surely as it's our money that's being poured down that rathole. Since this is a democracy (or, at least, the closest approximation of one I know of), we all share responsibility.

What's the price tag on that? How expensive are we willing to let the occupation in Iraq become in that sense? Whatever your answer to is that, add $3 trillion in more tangible reckoning.

I'm not saying we should ignore the cost of a possible big three bailout. And I'm not saying the automakers are off the hook for making big and drastic changes. But I am saying that there's a broader picture out there and it pays to consider it. There are other prices we should be freaking out over.

-Wisco