Dick Cheney unrepentant in having destroyed America

Richard Cheney, the 46th vice-president of the USA, is about to release his memoirs next week titled, "In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir. 

According to a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted when Dick Cheney left office in January 2009 his approval ratings (13%) were less than that of George W. Bush's (22%).  At their departure both men received historic disapproval ratings and continue to be considered by the majority of Americans as having failed to improve America.  The Bush presidency is highlighted by some of the following:

• advancing the unconstitutional notion of a unitary presidency
• repeated and consistent withdrawal from international treaties and agreements
• pushing through the civil rights destroying PATRIOT act
• massive and illegal wiretapping and spying on American citizens
• using torture upon seized enemy combatants and prisoners of war
• the failure to prevent the 9-11 attack on New York City and the Pentagon
• failing to adequately neutralize Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda's terrorist network
• pursuing the Iraq war under bogus pretenses and then failing to contain the regional civil war
• the abandonment of New Orleans and its citizens after Hurricane Katrina
• allowing the housing bubble to expand and eventually cause the financial collapse of 2008
• promoting corporate-written legislation that bolstered special interest profits
• promoting a laissez-faire regulatory framework that allowed corporate crime to exponentially grow throughout his two terms
• advancing the interests of oil and gas companies and rejecting sustainable and renewable forms of energy production
• denying climate change was occurring
• doubling the national public debt
• cut taxes for the richest Americans, while expanding the deficit
• cut national science and engineering budgets to pay for his wars and tax cuts
• limited scientific investigations on subjects deemed controversial for religious supporters, such as stem cell studies and environmental assessment studies
• preventing any international agreement that would prevent rises in global warming gases, which in the end may possibly be his greatest failure if even conservative predictions about climate change prove true

Cheney undoubtedly represented the very worst elements of the Bush administration.  Although Bush's approval didn't collapse until after Katrina, Cheney's approval amongst most Americans was in the gutter early into his first term.  His approval was constantly in the twenty-percent area and never improved.  He represented to his base an unapologetic statist who wanted to project American hegemony to its fullest level.  Cheney famously stated that "deficits don't matter!"  He was responsible for pursuing an energy policy that promoted America's addiction to foreign fossil fuels.  And as former Secretary of Defense, he was very familiar with the nature of the Pentagon machinery and sought to project America's military power domestically and across foreign shores.

To the rest of America, Cheney represented a Machiavellian operator.  With his over-the-top rhetoric, war making bravado, riddiculous claims that 3rd world nations with 2nd rate militaries were a threat to America, and his continuous scowl, the public turned on this crypto-fascist.

Reviews of Cheney's memoirs indicate a man who controlled both the president and policies of the Bush presidency in it early years. During the infamous 9-11 attack, Cheney states, despite clear lines of command set forth in the constitution, that it was him and neither Bush nor Rumsfeld who was in command of immediate operations.  At that moment in history, Cheney made it clear that the president of the United States had been unofficially deposed and that he had assumed all the controls of commander-in-chief.

The NY Times review of the book further highlights a man who is completely unrepentant of his actions.  The Times describes the book as being

often pugnacious in tone and in which he expresses little regret about many of the most controversial decisions of the Bush administration — casts him as something of an outlier among top advisers who increasingly took what he saw as a misguided course on national security issues.

So it is clear that as Cheney's policy failures mounted, George W. Bush and others in the Bush administration became progressively unwilling to accept Cheney's worldview and provocations.  In the end, the rift was so great that Bush himself was unwilling to even grant full pardon to Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby for his acts of lying to prosecutors in order to protect Mr. Cheney.

What we know is Mr. Cheney is on his last legs and death is hunting him. This book is an attempt by a dying man to justify his evil by throwing sand in our collective faces. I'm sure Ozymandias would have done the same.

Quote of the Day: Sanctioning American Torture

Between the political obstacles to criminal prosecutions, and the willingness of the courts to dismiss civil lawsuits whenever the government invokes the "state secrets" privilege, we essentially have a class of people operating in our intelligence services who are not bound by the law in any meaningful sense when it comes to actions they take in the line of duty. They're promoted rather than sanctioned when they act out of line, eliminating even any internal incentive to play by the rules.

- Adam Sewer, The American Prospect

h/t Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish, "Torturers: Failing Upwards"

On the Banality of Evil: A Psychiatric examination of Hermann Goering

Scientific American Mind has an interesting article on the post-war psychiatric examination of Hermann Goering; Hitler's deputy and president of the (Nazi) Reichstag.

The article summarizes the work of American psychiatrist Dr. David Kelley, who spent extensive time interviewing and evaluating Hermann Goering and other high-ranking members of the defeated Nazi government.  His analysis ran contrary to the allies own propaganda, which stated that Nazi's were "madmen" and insane.

[Kelley] believed that Goering and his cohorts were commonplace people and that their personalities "could be duplicated in any country of the world today"... In other words, the Holocaust and the war's other heinous crimes were the products of healthy minds.

The implications are not trivial.  For example, many of the events that have occurred as a result of America's own war against global terrorism can also be explained, not as the act of mentally deranged "bad apples," but of people seduced by their own power and thus willing to erase the boundaries of accepted behavior and engage in barbarism.  The obscenities employed in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, at black-site torture centers across the world, and even in America's own domestic prisons, are examples where seemingly normal people can deviate from established rules of conduct and pursue grotesque and monstrous criminality in the name of the state and ideology.

Obama, bagman for Bush's torture adventures

McClatchy Press has an excellent summary, through Wikileaks, of the Machiavellian maneuvers made by the Obama White House to undermine both international law and justice.

This blog has in the past described how the administration of Barack Obama over the past two years, has given "support and comfort" to the torturers and fiends of the Bush junta (here, here, and here). A number of prominent political and legal commentators have equally concluded that Obama, his AG, and members of his administration are now as culpable as their predecessors in concealing acts of torture, manipulating foreign governments to forsake investigations of American criminality, and failing to vigorously uphold constitutional prerogatives in prosecuting those who have violated domestic laws and international treaties, to which America is signature to.

In 2009, the Obama administration sent Republican Senator Mel Martinez to Spain to cajole the Spanish judiciary into abandoning investigations lead by Spanish magistrate, Baltasar Garzón into six Bush lawyers who laid, "the foundation for abuse of detainees in the months following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks." The Spanish investigations concerned Alberto Gonzales, who described parts of the Geneva conventions "quant" and "obsolete" after 9-11; Bush lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee; David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's counsel; William "Jim" Haynes, Defense Department General Counsel; and Doug Feith, a Pentagon undersecretary who handled policy issues for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The Spaniards were not swayed and told Martinez and the American ambassador to Spain, that "The independence of the judiciary and the process must be respected.''  Michael Ratner, a civil rights attorney affiliated with the Center for Constitutional Rights, states that "The U.S. prides itself on our own independent judiciary... But here you have the hypocrisy of the U.S. government trying to influence an independent judicial system to bend its laws and own rules.''

The timeline of the above diplomatic maneuvers coincides with Obama's attempt to marginalize Bush's crimes:

But by the time Spain's Association for the Dignity of Prisoners filed the torture complaint that U.S. diplomatic circles found so troubling, the Obama White House was resisting calls to set up a Truth Commission or assign a special prosecutor to examine the legal framework that set up Guantánamo and permitted "enhanced interrogation techniques'' that included waterboarding high-value detainees.

"Generally speaking, I'm more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards," Obama said on Feb. 9, 2009.

How Mr. Obama, a man who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, could become protector and defender of his predecessor's criminality, will be an issue that historians will grapple with for decades.  The emotional cheers of "change you can believe in" lie exposed as election based propaganda, told by the architects of Empire to confuse the guilible masses into believing that their opinion actually matters.

Why WikiLeaks matters in this age of Chinese Democracy

In Spain, the WikiLeaks disclosures have dominated the news for three days now. The reporting has been led by the level-headed El País, with its nationwide competitor, Público, lagging only a bit behind. Attention has focused on three separate matters, each pending in the Spanish national security court, the Audiencia Nacional: the investigation into the 2003 death of a Spanish cameraman, José Cuoso, as a result of the mistaken shelling of Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel by a U.S. tank; an investigation into the torture of Spanish subjects held at Guantánamo; and a probe into the use of Spanish bases and airfields for extraordinary renditions flights, including the one which took Khaled El-Masri to Baghdad and then on to Afghanistan in 2003.

- Scott Horton, "The Madrid Cables"

Within the elite political classes and global mainstream media, there is a rising anger and palatable contempt of Wikileaks' periodic information dumps.  The information to date has not been on the scope of the Pentagon Papers. As Fareed Zakeria said in Time magazine, "The Pentagon papers revealed that the U.S. engaged in a systematic campaign to deceive the world and the American people and that its private actions were often the opposite of its stated public policy."  The information clearly has shown governments across the world, be that autocratic or supposedly democratic, to have engaged in deceit, deception, and propaganda to achieve their own statist objectives.  Many in the MSM yawn and say that everything posted has been known.  Perhaps, but the MSM certainly didn't do their job in actively verifying those known suppositions.  Others, like CNN's Wolf Blitzer are filled with rage that anyone would dare to willingly examine the state secrets of the American Empire without first getting the state's tacit approval; like how him and all the other "respectable" laggards of the MSM do.

One commentator has said, "The difference between WikiLeaks and other media organizations is that WikiLeaks is doing its job properly."  Statist leaning politicians and right-wing bloggers on the other hand, are issuing their typical belligerent and illogical fatwas on WikiLeaks.  Despite an obvious understanding of the role of freedom of the press and in the case of America, the first amendment of the US constitution, we have the following verbal flatulence.

• Newt Gingrich, former Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives stated that Juilan Assange of WikiLeaks, "deserves to be hunted and executed" and held as an "enemy combatant."
• Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told NBC's David Gregory Sunday that Assange is a terrorist.
• Caribou Barbie (aka Sarah Palin) suggested that Assange deserved the same treatment as terrorists and insurgents.
• Sen. Lieberman (I-CT) has asked American companies to not assist WikiLeaks disseminate the data.  To date, Amazon.com has pulled WikiLeaks from its servers, PayPal has stopped donations, and a Seattle based company Tableau Software removed data visualizations published by WikiLeaks to Tableau Public.
• Tom Flanagan, a professor at the University of Calgary and former advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, half-jokingly called for Mr. Obama to assassinate Mr. Assange.
• National Review's Jonah Goldberg asked, "Why wasn't Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?"
• The same politicians who demanded that America illegally invade Iraq and permanently occupy Afghanistan, now claim that that WikiLeaks will have blood on its hands.

When the White House, the Pentagon, or any other agent of the government willingly passes "state secrets" to the press, such as in the lead-up to the Iraq war through the NY Times' Judith Miller or in the outing of CIA WMD investigator Valerie Plame, the same voices are silent.  When official court stenographer for the Bush White House, Bob Woodward, distributes state secrets in his books, in the way that teenage girls spread gossip, the mainstream press is agog with effuse praise.
 
On another level, the entire WikiLeaks criticism is typical of the fundamental contempt that the political and media class has for democracy, transparency, and government accountability. Governments do not want anyone to understand how incompetent and criminal they are in their everyday blunders. The American government has shown an extreme and persistent proclivity to lie to its citizens, to disseminate false information to the press and public, and conceal their criminal actions to further its own statist objectives. They and their paid cultural managers want a population engaged in the trivial and the irrelevant. A public that is aware and actively demanding accountability is an unacceptable situation for those leading the American Empire Project.

We are living in an age of Chinese Democracy, where the our imperious leaders tell us we are free to do as we are ordered.  The government continues to classify more and more of its activities behind the shield of state secrets, while maximizing its surveillance of innocent people through both legal and illegal means. This is why WikiLeaks matters. The lies that lead to the invasion of Vietnam, the falsehoods that attempted to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the evasion of responsibility surrounding the regulatory framework that lead to the Great Recession, the concealment of war crimes committed by US soldiers and CIA functionaries, the erosion of civil liberties and freedom... etc. are all reasons why whistle-blowers like WikiLeaks matter to functioning democracies.

Dubya is Threatened with Arrest if He Visits London, UK!

From Scott Horton's blog over at Harper's comes this exquisite piece of news, from the city of London's conservative Mayor.  I usually do not repost entire posts of others, but this succinct and insightful post is too valuable to not be shared in its totality. Bold print has been added by me.

London’s Tory mayor, Boris Johnson, has some strong words of caution for former president George W. Bush: if you come to Europe to promote your book, pack heavily and be prepared for a long stay. In fact, you may “never see Texas again.” As he sees it, Bush’s book and statements he has made in efforts to market it constitute admissions of serious crimes.

Initial reports about Bush’s autobiography did not go over well in Europe, and Britain’s new Conservative government was particularly eager to push back against suggestions that their conservatism had any resemblance to the Bush variety. Bush insisted this his decision to use waterboarding and other torture techniques kept Britain safe. But British Conservatives are having none of it:

In the case of the three men waterboarded on Bush’s orders, British ministers are not aware of any valuable information they gave about plots against Heathrow, Canary Wharf or anywhere else. All the policy has achieved is to degrade America in the eyes of the world, and to allow America’s enemies to utter great whoops of vindication. It is not good enough for Dubya now to claim that what he did was OK, because “the lawyers said it was legal”.

As Johnson sees it, the torture debate is ultimately about America’s claim to leadership in the world and the Bush team’s sullying of the nation’s reputation:

How could America complain to the Burmese generals about the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, when a president authorised torture? How can we talk about human rights in Beijing, when our number one ally and friend seems to be defending this kind of behaviour? I can’t think of any other American president, in my lifetime, who would have spoken in this way. Mr Bush should have remembered the words of the great Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who said in 1863 that “military necessity does not admit of cruelty”. Damn right.

***

I have been saying this for years.  In yesterday's blog on Republican corruption, I stated that it is only a matter of time before someone in the Bush junta is ensnared and eventually prosecuted for international legal problems arising from their years of legal misconduct.  Whilst America's media glosses over the fact that both Dick Cheney and George W. Bush have admitted to ordering torture, people around the world are looking carefully at the decider's words and movement and evaluating the possibility of bringing him or his henchmen in front of a magistrate to explain themselves in court.

What we have also seen is that Mr. Obama has made substantial efforts to collude with the former administration in shielding and protecting them from domestic and international prosecutions.  Andrew Sulivan states in his blog that the most recent WikiLeaks information dump, "reveal an extraordinary effort by the US embassy and the Bush and Obama administrations to cajole, pressure, redirect and try to rig legal cases that could reveal the war crimes of the previous administration."  Both administrations are bound by the pirate's ethic of evading responsibility and accountability for any action they or their Jolly-Roger-like counterparts may engage in.  The Obama administration is now culpable in the crimes of his predecessors, and needs to explain their actions, at the very least, to the voters who demanded change that they could believe in.

Natural Born Killers, Afghan War Vets

Newspapers across the globe are starting to elaborate on the outrageous criminal actions of the newest batch of natural born killers that the US military has produced.  Gruesome details of drug induced homicide, random killings, and the dismembering of Afghan civilians are coming to light.

The Boston Globe has a short summary in its editorial commentary:

SIX YEARS after the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq, the Army has another heinous atrocity on its hands in Afghanistan. It has charged five soldiers from the 5th Stryker Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division with killing three innocent Afghan civilians earlier this year. Moreover, the Army has to answer for the fact that a member of the soldiers’ platoon contacted his father in the United States about his concerns after the first killing and the father did all he could to alert the Army to what had happened — to no avail. The Army must proceed with court hearings, but it should also investigate why the father’s initial warning did not set off an inquiry that could have kept the second and third killings from occurring.

I have already discussed this matter in two previous blog entries (here and here), in which I made comparisons to similar conduct by the Americans in Iraq and Vietnam, as well as previous atrocities committed by the Soviets during their occupation of Afghanistan.

The NY Times has an excerpt of a conversation, from a military interview of one of the main defendant's in the case, Specialist Jeremy N. Morlock:

“[Sgt. Calvin Gibbs] kind of placed me and Winfield off over here so we had a clean line of sight for this guy and, you know, he pulled out one of his grenades, an American grenade, popped it, throws the grenade, and tells me and Winfield: ‘All right, wax this guy. Kill this guy, kill this guy,’ ” Specialist Morlock said in the video.

Referring to the Afghan, the investigator asked: “Did you see him present any weapons? Was he aggressive toward you at all?”

Specialist Morlock replied: “No, not at all. Nothing. He wasn’t a threat.”

It's pretty obvious why only a few outlets within America have sought to present this story until this point.  The recklessness and complete lack of ethics in which these soldiers have acted is not an aberration; rather, it is a symptom of the rot and moral degeneracy that the Af-Pak/Iraq wars have instilled in America's newest recruits to active combat.  Does anyone actually believe that this whole war is somehow ever going to end well for either the people in Afghanistan or America?  Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, said today that "America was never going to leave Afghanistan."  If that is true, the intentional and unintentional murder of Afghan civilians by US troops will never end either.

War Crime Allegations Threaten to Harm America's Image

Der Spiegel International has a good description and analysis of the Afghan war crimes incident, that I wrote about yesterday, in which American soldiers have been charged with murdering civilians and extracting trophy body parts during active duty.

The article outlines what is at stake:

It involves more than a court imposing a just penalty for brutal murders, and more than compliance with the military code of honor and the Geneva Conventions. At stake is the reputation of a country that, after eight years under the administration of former President George W. Bush, had set out to liberate itself from charges of moral failure. Indeed, the Seattle case raises the question of whether the United States has really turned its back on the days when it gambled away its reputation with images of naked Iraqis forced to form human pyramids in Abu Ghraib prison.

It discusses how this situation will make mockery of the entire narrative under the Obama administration that there has been a clean break from the sordid eight years under George W. Bush.

They allegedly fired at their victims with gusto, collecting trophies that included finger and toe bones, and even a tooth. The charges outline senseless, horrific acts reminiscent of a former America, an America of waterboarding, torture scandals and Guantanamo Bay. They also raise the question of what exactly has changed since the election campaign in which then-candidate Barack Obama promised so much, including a more responsible approach to warfare and the closing of the military prison in Cuba, an important symbol of America's moral failings under former President George W. Bush.

The article also reviews the fact that Soviet forces in their earlier conflict with the Afghan population, also engaged in horrendous criminality:

Feeling helpless in their inability to counter the resistance of the Afghans, Moscow's troops turned to drugs and alcohol. Having lost their inhibitions, they committed atrocities they would never forget. In September 1982, a group of Russian soldiers burned 105 villagers alive in an irrigation canal south of Kabul. Women were thrown naked from helicopters. In a particularly horrific incident, soldiers doused a boy in kerosene and set him on fire in front of his parents

US Troops Harvesting Afghan Body Parts for Souvenirs

According to international newspapers US Army soldiers have been charged in the premeditated murder of Afghan civilians, the beating of one or more fellow soldiers, wrongfully taking and/or possessing photographs of dead bodies, and "keeping trophy body parts from Afghan corpses, including a skull and fingers!"

The soldiers, all from the same company in the 5th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, are charged with a total of 76 crimes.

McClatchy Press elaborates on what they describe as "one of the most serious war crimes cases to emerge from the nine-year war in Afghanistan."

The accused soldiers are with the 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Tacoma, Wash., Some 3,700 soldiers in the brigade were deployed throughout southern Afghanistan, involved both in combat and in wide-ranging efforts to open schools, train Afghan forces, improve agriculture and take other measures to win the support of civilians.

Vietnam Redux?

This behaviour was also found in the Vietnam war.  The Toledo Blade, in 2003, ran a comprehensive series of reports about Tiger Force, a task force of the United States Army, 1st Battalion (Airborne), 327th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade (Separate), 101st Airborne Division.  Investigations conducted by journalist Michael Sallah into the actions of this group during 1967, resulted in the disclosure that members of the task force had engaged in "the routine practice of intentionally killing unarmed Vietnamese villagers including men, women, children, and elderly people" and collecting body parts, which they used in necklaces and personal talismans.  The Blade journalists won the Pulitzer Prize for their reporting.

***

Is this what happens when soldiers know that torture and the liquidation of whole swaths of brown skinned people is acceptable?  Where is the outrage from the American population?  Where are the so-called moral leaders of America in proclaiming that this type of activity is not acceptable anywhere, anytime, period? From the very beginnings of the Afghan-Iraqi conflicts, more than just bad-apples have been observed.  Constant, predictable, and enduring levels of violence perpetrated by US forces on foreign populations has occurred: CIA contractors murdering detainees; torture at Guantanamo and black sites across the planet; the shocking and disturbing events at Abu Ghraib; the rape and murder of Iraqi women and children by US troops; helicopter gunships and automated drones liquidating unarmed civilians at weddings and villages in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

What type of victory can be salvaged in this moral wasteland?

Quote of the Day: Sullivan on Obama

Andrew Sullivan is one of the few persons who has constantly and unequivocally condemned Republicans and Democrats, under the Bush junta and the Obama administration, of condoning and actively participating in the torture and murder of war on terrorism detainees.  In a blog entry that addresses the Machiavellian undercurrent to American politics, he condemns Mr. Obama for his recent cowardliness in preventing those who have been wrongly "extraordinary renditioned" and tortured by American forces to seek redress in court.

Aggressively trying to prevent torture victims from having their day in court merely using unclassified evidence is active complicity in the war crimes of the past. And such complicity is itself a war crime. Either we live under the rule of law and the Geneva Conventions, or we don't. And when Obama says we don't - as he unmistakably is - the precedent he is setting all but ensures that torture will come again, that there will never be consequences for it, and that the national security state can cloak itself in such a way that the citizenry has no way of penetrating its power. Bush and Cheney remain the real culprits here; but watching Obama essentially surrendering to their trap is a betrayal of a core rationale for his candidacy.

Nader Interviews Judge Andrew Napolitano

I encourage everyone to watch and understand the vast scope of criticisms leveled by conservative legal authority Judge Andrew Napolitano.  Despite his affiliation with Fox News and the less than lucid histrionics of his comrades at Fox, the above interview with Ralph Nader -conducted for CSPAN- consolidated the fact that there are issues that are beyond the false media symmetries of right and left or conservative and liberal.

The interview outlines a vast scope of criminality, violations of the constitution, and historically unprecedented actions committed by the Bush White House against American citizens and in many cases perpetuated by the Obama White House.

Napolitano declares that:

1. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should be indicted and prosecuted for torture, domestic spying, and the illegal arrest and confinement of both American citizens and non-American citizens.
2. Questions the legality and morality of the Obama Administration's use of extra-judicial killing of American citizens while outside American territory.
3. Discusses the failure of persons within the Bush WH, such as Jay Bybee, to provide sound legal advice relating to the use of torture.
4. Asks where is this generation's Thurgood Marshall, the venerated Supreme Court Justice who attacked Jim Crow laws as a civil rights litigator.  Despite there being more lawyers than ever in the history of the USA, there remains very few entities (outside the ACLU, CCR, and human rights organizations) or persons willing to challenge the egregious criminality of the American president.

That Strange Concept Called Accountability!

Something remarkable happened last month that the press seems to have thoroughly overlooked here in the Americas.  The newly formed Conservative-Liberal Democrats coalition government in Britain told the country that they were going to reform civil liberties that had been badly diminished under Labour and equally, hold the previous government accountable their years of participating in the kidnapping, rendition, and torture of persons across the globe.

Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime-Minister, made a speech declaring that the coming changes would be the biggest shake-up in UK democracy since 1832.  He railed against a litany of previous Labour government policies that formed the basis of Britain's surveillance state:

• ID Card schemes
• national identity registers
• biometric passports
• the storing of Internet and email records
• DNA databases
• proliferating security cameras
• repressive restrictions on free speech and assembly rights

Mr. Clegg's party before the election didn't mince words.  The Liberal-Democrats stated in their party platform that, "The Government believes the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused fundamental human rights and historic civil liberties."  He further inveighed against the current criminal justice system which imprisons too many citizens without improving public safety, and "pledged radical reform to empower citizens" over entrenched and wealthy interests.

William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, announced that an independent judge will investigate whether the British government was complicit in the torture of terror suspects.  The Guardian summarizes:

The judicial inquiry announced by the foreign secretary into Britain's role in torture and rendition since September 2001 is poised to shed extraordinary light on one of the darkest episodes in the country's recent history.

It is expected to expose not only details of the activities of the security and intelligence officials alleged to have colluded in torture since 9/11, but also the identities of the senior figures in government who authorised those activities. . . . Those who have been most bitterly resisting an inquiry -- including a number of senior figures in the last government -- may have been dismayed to see the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition formed, as this maximised the chances of a judicial inquiry being established.

Glenn Greenwald describes the mindset of Barack Obama, who claimed during the 2008 election that it was his desire to hold the Bush junta to account for their crimes.  To date the Obama administration has held none of the fiends who lied and took America to war on bogus premises, engaged in wholesale torture across the globe, and violated the Geneva conventions.  George W. Bush has already admitted that he knew his top national security advisers discussed and approved specific details of the CIA's use of torture.  Earlier this month, he further admitted that "Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was waterboarded by the US, and said he would do it again 'to save lives'." This is consistent with Dick Cheney's bold statement to the world, back in February,where he announced that he was a "big supporter of waterboarding."

Andrew Sullivan and Scott Horton have both said that president Obama and his AG are now obligated to prosecute both Messrs Bush and Cheney.

[T]he attorney general of the United States is legally obliged to prosecute someone who has openly admitted such a war crime or be in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention on Torture. For Eric Holder to ignore this duty subjects him too to prosecution. If the US government fails to enforce the provision against torture, the UN or a foreign court can initiate an investigation and prosecution.... Cheney himself just set in motion a chain of events that the civilized world must see to its conclusion or cease to be the civilized world. For such a high official to escape the clear letter of these treaties and conventions, and to openly brag of it, renders such treaties and conventions meaningless.

How far down the rabbit hole have we all gone, where the Conservatives of Britain are willing to hold their people to account, while the Obama administration gives the worst government in the history of the American republic another "get-out of jail" card and the press doesn't bother talking about any of it?

Torture me Slowly: Bush's Medical Experimentation Program

With each turn and further examination of the Bush Administration's institutional program of torture, the history becomes more surreal and terrifying.  According to a report issued by Physicians for Human Rights, the Bush Administration engaged in human experimentation with detainees across the globe in order to empirically assess the degree to which they could inflict pain on their prisoners without killing them.

Health professionals engaged in research on detainees, in violation of the Geneva Conventions and other international and domestic prohibitions against human subject research and experimentation. This research included monitoring the effects of abusive treatment, including waterboarding and sleep deprivation, in order to assess how far "enhanced interrogation techniques" could go and still be within the legal parameters and to guide the future application of the techniques.

James Risen, who exposed the existence of the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program in 2006, has written another article in the NY Times outlining the findings of the PHR report.

The data collected by medical professionals from the interrogations of detainees allowed the C.I.A. to judge the emotional and physical impact of the techniques, helping the agency to “calibrate the level of pain experienced by detainees during interrogation, ostensibly to keep it from crossing the administration’s legal threshold of what it claimed constituted torture,” the report said. That meant that the medical professionals crossed the line from treating the detainees as patients to treating them as research subjects, the report asserted.

This is not a triviality.  Medical physicians and psychologists, as the report, the Times article, and numerous others have pointed out, are prohibited by national and international codes in conducting human experimentation without informed consent.  There are no persons undecided as to if the Nazi's, the Imperial Japanese, or the Khmer Rouge were not criminal when they engaged in these heinous actions.  However, these practices also remind us of America's own dark history of eugenics, experimentation on black citizens and prisoners throughout the 20th century, and military/CIA studies on large scale groups, which has all been well chronicled.  It is therefore no surprise when these sadists rear their ugly heads and perversely claim that torture (or "wink" something like it) is a necessity required to protect Americans from foreign enemies.  What has been done is inexcusible; it is a war crime.

The authors provide evidence about the government's meticulous studies:

The report cites agency guidelines for health professionals involved in interrogations requiring that they document each time a detainee was waterboarded, how long each waterboarding session lasted, how much water was applied, exactly how the water was applied and expelled, whether the detainees’ breathing passages were filled, and how each detainee looked between treatments.

Andrew Sullivan asks, "where was the experimentation taking place? How many doctors and psychologists were involved? Was there a separate facility, as at Bagram, for experimenting with torture? Did these experiments ever go wrong?"

Whereas, Glenn Greenwald asks what is President Obama doing to investigate, prosecute, and prevent this from occurring again?  The horrible answer is obvious; nothing.  Obama has decided that the country and more importantly the American Empire cannot afford to be hijacked by squabbles over petty matters like constitutional law or war crimes committed by the executive.  Rather, the nation must boldly ignore the slight inconveniences of the previous Bush administration and get on with the business of voting for the next American Idol.

CIA Agents Sought by Spanish Prosecutors

Scott Horton at Harper's Magazine is stating that, "Prosecutors attached to the Audiencia Nacional in Madrid are reportedly requesting that Judge Ismael Moreno issue an order for the arrest of thirteen CIA agents involved in an extraordinary rendition operation from 2004."

The agency has come under substantial investigation over the past few years for their gross incompetence and servitude to the Bush junta's policies of extrajudicial kidnapping, torture, and murder.  For example, only last year 23 American intelligence officers were found guilty, in absentia, of the kidnapping and extraordinary rendition of an Egyptian cleric known as Abu Omar, who the CIA agents seized off the streets of Milan, took to Egypt, and then subsequently tortured.

Similarly, in 2004 another individual named,

Khaled El-Masri, a greengrocer from Neu-Ulm, Germany, [was] seized by the United States as a result of mistaken identity while he was on vacation in the former Yugoslavia. El-Masri was placed on a CIA-chartered jet that arrived in Macedonia from Palma de Majorca in January 2004, en route ultimately to Afghanistan. It appears that Majorca was used regularly as a refueling and temporary sheltering point for the CIA, with the knowledge of the prior conservative government. While held in the notorious CIA prison known as the Salt Pit, El-Masri was apparently tortured during extensive interrogations before intelligence officers realized that they had seized the wrong man. The Washington Post reported that CIA agents, fearing the consequences of releasing him, argued for his continued detention and in fact held him for at least several weeks after his release had been ordered. Condoleezza Rice, then national security advisor to President Bush, intervened and directed his release. El-Masri’s CIA abductors entered Spanish territory using forged British passports, according to the prosecutors.

Criminal proceedings are also underway in Germany on similar charges of kidnapping and torture.

Suicides staged to cover up torture at Guantanamo

It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood
- Macbeth, Act 3, Sc4. 121.


Part I - Background

Research conducted by Human Rights Watch investigator John Sifton and the ACLU have determined that at least 100 persons have, "died during interrogations, some who were clearly tortured to death."  Retired US Army General Barry McCaffrey has said, "We probably murdered dozens of [detainees] during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A." 

The American public cannot claim ignorance about the festering myasis that has become normative behavior amongst intelligence gathering agencies and the US military this past decade.  Reports published as early as 2002 in both the NY Times and Washington Post, describe the beating deaths of Afghan detainees by US troops and CIA field contractors.  Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker magazine exposed the truculent grandstanding by Rumsfeld's all too willing "rotten apples," when orders for the gloves to come off at Abu Ghraib were made.  Extraordinary rendition, CIA black-site torture camps, civilian massacres by mercenary forces, Bush's torture memos authorizing -if necessary- genital mutilation, regular doses of water-boarding against Al Qaeda high-value operatives, and Guantanamo's Muslim concentration camp are all piece-and-parcel of the Bush junta's Global War on Terrorism that were on public display. 

A review of homicide cases, however, shows that few detainee deaths have been properly investigated. Many were not investigated at all. And no official investigation has looked into the connection between detainee deaths and the interrogation policies promulgated by the Bush administration.

Gen. Antonio Taguba, after investigating the Abu Ghraib abuses, said that "there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

In spite of the obvious facts, the false narrative offered by both the government and their accomplices, is that torture (otherwise stated as 'enhanced interrogation' in the MSM) is limited to those "ticking time-bomb" cases and even when used, is innocuous and not permanent and therefore justifiable.  The following case proves the complete opposite is true.

Part II - Cover Up of Guantanamo Homicides

Scott Horton at Harper's magazine has unfolded another horror story at Guantanamo, that includes the staged suicide of three detainees and the subsequent cover up by the military and Department of Justice officials under both Bush and Obama administrations.

According to the NCIS documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

The article presents the accounts of military officers who were stationed at Guantanamo at the time, which indicate that each of the three detainees were subject to torture at a classified sub-site at 'Gitmo' referred to as Camp "No" (i.e. "no" it doesn't exist) and returned to their cells in the dead of night.  Horton claims that a concerted effort was subsequently made by military brass to paint the deaths as a publicity stunt coordinated by the inmates in order to tarnish American image.  Government investigators dismissed the purported suicides as nothing more than 'asymmetric warfare' by the enemy. 

Andrew Sullivan interjects that further investigation is warranted and that no one in government can be trusted to handle the truth:

This case deserves a thorough and complete and exhaustive inquiry and investigation. I no longer believe that any entity in the US government can be trusted with such a task. The investigation must be able to go right to the very top of the torture program and do so with no political influence whatsoever.

What US Generals used to think of Torture

Tom Ricks, over at Foreign Policy, posts a quote made by US Army Maj. Gen. George Davis, who in 1902 lambasted all who, at the time, believed water-boarding was not torture and that "enhanced interrogation techniques" were acceptable in the face of international obligations.

No modern state, which is a party to international law, can sanction, either expressly or by a silence which imports consent, a resort to torture with a view to obtain confessions, as an incident to its military operations. If it does, where is the line to be drawn? If the ‘water cure' is ineffective, what shall be the next step? Shall the victim be suspended, head down, over the smoke of a smouldering fire; she he be tightly bound and dropped from a distance of several feet; shall he be beaten with rods; shall his shins be rubbed with a broomstick until they bleed?

Why do you make them so stupid, God?

Every time I review a poll done assessing the average American's grasp of economics, public policy, or science I cringe. The latest is a doozy!

According to the a Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey no less than 44% of Americans polled wish that Dubya was still in the White House managing affairs. As a quick recap, lets look at Mr. Bush's greatest accomplishments and legacy:

• Failed to prevent terrorists from attacking America on 11-Sept. 2001
• Invaded Afghanistan, but failed to capture and prosecute Bin Laden
• Assisted members of the Bin Laden family and assorted Saudi nationals to leave America eight days after 9-11
• Illegally invaded Iraq to the opposition of nearly the entire planet
• Mismanaged the entire Iraq War and let terrorism exponentially grow across the world
• Allowed nuclear weapons proliferation to rogue nations like North Korea and Iran
• Ignored New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck and let the city nearly be destroyed by his administration's incompetence and neglect
• Tried to scuttle and then block corporate crime prevention legislation, after the first wave of corporate criminality (i.e. Enron, WorldCom,...etc.)
• Produced virtually no jobs during his eight years in office, that is capped by two recessions
• Caused the greatest economic meltdown in the history of the world (in terms of absolute size) through his deregulatory and laissez-faire policies
• Increased the US National Debt by 86% (i.e. $4.9 Trillion)
• Eliminated the 800 year rule of habeas corpus in common law
• Instituted torture, extraordinary rendition, and indefinite imprisonment as common tools against enemies of the state and created concentration camps and CIA controlled "black-sites" for torturing/executing prisioners overseas
• Conducted a series of wide reaching and illegal searches of Americans personal email, phone calls, physical mail, purchasing habits, library and book borrowing habits, and monitored public speech
• Criminalized public protest of Republicans during his election convention in 2004
• Stole or rigged three elections (2000, 2002, and 2004) through well documented forms of fraud, voter intimidation, destruction of ballots, and suppression of Democratic voters
• Attempted to create a unitary Presidency in violation of the US Constitution
• Politicized every office and branch of the US government to serve his dogmatic Christianist and pro-business agendas.
• Denied man-made Climate Change was occurring for years, then when he said that it did exist, stated that there was nothing anyone could do about it.... etc.

What type of world are these people living in that they think George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Tom Delay, Donald Rumsfeld, Condollezza Rice, and rest of the criminal junta that ran America off the cliff and made it the most loathed nation in the world, should be allowed back into the White House?

Well, it is most likely the same world inhabited by Americans, who in another Pew survey, think that the world's leading economic power is China. An incomprehensible 44% of Americans polled thought that China, a country with an economy one-sixth as large as the US and where the majority of people have no indoor plumbing and are agrarian farmers, has the world's largest economy. They are also equally likely to be amongst the, "19% of the public [that] says the use of torture is often justified to gain important information from terrorist suspects... [or the] 35% [that] say the use of torture in these circumstances is at least sometimes justified."

There you have it! A large percentage of Americans believe that Bush should have remained as president, that torture is an excellent and ethically sound policy, and that China is economically more significant than America. FUCKING RETARDS!

The Torture Debate: Making comparisons

NY Times Editorial column comes down hard on the cowardice that has become the legal system in America when it comes to addressing the high crimes of the Bush junta. It makes the comparison between the Maher Arar case that was recently dismissed in American courts versus the verdict issued last week against CIA operatives in Italy regarding the extraordinary rendition of an Islamic cleric. Again and again as the editorial elaborates, the US judiciary dismisses these cases of gross institutional criminality on the basis of fatuous "state secrets" claims or punts the claimant's to higher courts.

***

NYT: A National Disgrace

Two courts, one in Italy and one in the United States, ruled recently on the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition, which is the kidnapping of people and sending them to other countries for interrogation — and torture. The Italian court got it right. The American court got it miserably wrong.

In Italy, a judge ruled that a station chief for the Central Intelligence Agency and 22 other Americans broke the law in the 2003 abduction of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, a Muslim cleric who ended up in Egypt, where he said he was tortured.

Two days earlier, a federal appeals court in Manhattan brushed off a lawsuit by Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was seized in an American airport by federal agents acting on bad information from Canadian officials. He was held incommunicado and harshly interrogated before being sent to Syria, where he was tortured. He spent almost a year in a grave-size underground cell before the Syrians let him go.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decided that none of that entitled Mr. Arar to a day in court.

In Mr. Nasr’s case, authorities said that they had reason to suspect he was involved in recruiting militants to go to Iraq. It has long been established that Mr. Arar was not guilty of anything. Canada admitted that it had supplied false information to American authorities, and in 2007, it apologized and offered Mr. Arar $10 million in damages. Neither the Bush nor Obama administrations followed suit, leaving Mr. Arar to pursue litigation.

In June 2008, a three-judge panel of the same court dismissed Mr. Arar’s civil rights suit on flimsy grounds. The court then took a rare step, scheduling a rehearing before all of the court’s active members before an appeal was filed. Sadly, the full court’s decision is even more insensitive to the violation of his rights and the courts’ duty to hold government accountable for breaches of the law.

Written by Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs, the 59-page majority opinion held that no civil damages remedy exists for the horrors visited on Mr. Arar. To “decide how to implement extraordinary rendition,” he wrote, is “for the elected members of Congress — and not for us as judges.” Allowing suits against policy makers for rendition and torture would “affect diplomacy, foreign policy and the security of the nation,” Judge Jacobs said.

The ruling distorts precedent and the Constitutional separation of powers to deny justice to Mr. Arar and give officials a pass for egregious misconduct. The overt disregard for the central role of judges in policing executive branch excesses has frightening implications for safeguarding civil liberties, as four judges suggested in dissenting opinions.

It is painful to recall that this is the same federal circuit court that declared in 1980 that even foreigners accused of torture in foreign countries can be called to account in American courts.

The torturer is the “enemy of all mankind,” the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit declared back then. One of the dissenters, Judge Guido Calabresi, said that “when the history of this distinguished court is written, today’s majority decision will be viewed with dismay.”

The damage to Mr. Arar, America’s reputation and the rule of law is already quite plain. The Supreme Court should reverse this ruling.

Taxi Drivers to the Dark Side Convicted

In common law, rendition "is a transfer of persons from one jurisdiction to another, and the act of handing over, both after legal proceedings and according to law." Whereas, extraordinary rendition is a rendition, which is illegal and exists outside the bounds of international law. Although the practice has existed for some time, according to the ACLU, it was refined during the Clinton administration by CIA officials in the mid-1990s who were trying to track down and dismantle militant Islamic organizations throughout the Middle East. What came next under the watchful eye of the Bush junta and its own clandestine services, has come to exemplify the reckless cowboy-like swagger and irresponsibility of both the policies and people tasked to execute those orders.

Canadians are well versed in the tawdry details involved with the Mahar Arar extraordinary rendition case. As summarized in Wikipedia:

Arar, a Syrian-born dual Syrian and Canadian citizen, was detained at Kennedy International Airport on 26 September 2002, by US Immigration and Naturalization Service officials. He was heading home to Canada after a family holiday in Tunisia. After almost two weeks, enduring hours of interrogation chained, he was sent, shackled and bound, in a private jet to Jordan and then Syria, instead of being extradited to Canada. There, he was interrogated and tortured by Syrian intelligence. Maher Arar was eventually released a year later. He told the BBC that he was repeatedly tortured during 10 months' detention in Syria — often whipped on the palms of his hands with metal cables. Syrian intelligence officers forced him to sign a confession linking him to Al Qaeda. He was finally released following intervention by the Canadian government.

These illegal embarrassments, when revealed, have been completely ignored by the American judiciary and investigations into criminal activities committed by the Executive under George W. Bush have been scuttled by the Obama administration. However, not all countries consider the principles of justice to be malleable and subordinate to governmental abuse. After years legal blockage, an Italian judge has sentenced 23 Americans in absentia to up to eight years in prison on Wednesday for the abduction and extraordinary rendition of a Muslim cleric.

The case surrounds the actions of CIA agents, who were tasked with "the secret kidnapping of a radical Muslim cleric off the streets of Milan in early 2003, his transport via US airbases in Italy and Germany to Egypt, and there, evidently with the CIA station chief for Italy riding shotgun, directly into the hands of Egyptian torturers." The problem with the whole affair was that their actions were anything but secret. Believing they were immune from all prosecution and international law, the agents were observed by Italian police publicly talking on their cell phones, running up huge expenses at luxury hotels, and were caught in their rental cars by local traffic cameras "as they drove illegally through pedestrian walkways." Obviously not being able to watch the Bourne Ultimatum in cinema, they were completely unaware of how clandestine operations were to be conducted.

According to the NY Times,

The heaviest sentence -- eight years in prison -- was handed down to the former head of the CIA's Milan station, Robert Seldon Lady, while 21 other former agents got five years each. U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Romano was also sentenced to five years, despite a request from the Pentagon that the case should be tried by U.S. courts. [Judge] Magi dropped the case against three Americans, including a former CIA Rome station chief, because of diplomatic immunity. Charges were also dropped against five Italians, including the former head of the Sismi military intelligence service, Nicolo Pollari, because evidence against them violated state secrecy rules. However, the judge sentenced two more junior Sismi agents to three years in prison as accomplices, indicating Italian authorities were aware of the abduction.

Instead of having foreign governments with an independent judiciary prosecute the criminal activities of the CIA and members of the Bush administration, the Democratic led Congress and Presidency should be reaffirming constitutional law and prosecuting those persons, agencies, and officials who violated America's treaty obligations and casually prescribed kidnapping, murder, and torture as America's new modus operandi in fighting terrorism. Then again, that would entail caring about anything other than just being elected.