September 8th, 2008 By SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
Don’t expect the Bush administration’s embrace of Nazi-like torture techniques to be a talking point as the presidential campaign heads into the home stretch. As despicable as the practice has been — and made worse by the cover-ups, obfuscations and junk-law opinions justifying its use — torture simply isn’t on the radar screen of most voters.
That so noted, and overlooking any mental torture that previous presidents may have suffered at the hands of their First Ladies, John McCain becomes the first potential president to have been physically tortured by an enemy while serving his country. As he has written in his memoirs, his North Vietnamese jailers withheld medical treatment, forced him to stand for long periods of time, put him in stress positions, beat him and deprived him of sleep during five and a half years of captivity.
All are clearly torture techniques, right?
Not according to Dick Cheney, the architect of the torture regime. Not according to his feckless boss, who long denied that he approved of torture and then publicly embraced it. Not according to the former concierge of the eponymously named Rumsfeld Gulag, a global system that includes Guantánamo Bay and secret prisons in foreign countries and aboard U.S. Navy ships. Not according to David Addington, who has proudly served as Cheney’s dungeon master.
It is the view of all of these cowards, smugly reinforced in John Yoo’s ethically- and morally-impaired Justice Department memos, that McCain was not tortured because the techniques employed against him were merely used to extract accurate information.
“The false confessions that McCain was forced to make were, according to the logic of the Bush administration, as accurate as the ‘intelligence’ we have procured from ‘interrogating” terror suspects.
“Feel safer?”
McCain’s service during the Vietnam War must be honored on its face. That is in no way diminished by the fact he was, by many accounts, the spoiled brat son and grandson of admirals and an underachiever at the Naval Academy and in the cockpit. He destroyed no fewer than three fighter jets (or four or five, depending upon the account) in the months before he was shot down, quite possibly because of the trademark impetuosity we saw in his selection of Sarah Palin.
But that is where I draw the line as a fellow veteran, albeit one who was never war hero material.
McCain has flipped and flopped on torture since the Bush administration’s mischief first saw the light of day and hasn’t spoken out forcefully against it — let alone commented on it — since he launched his campaign. Meanwhile, he has shamelessly played the POW Card when he doesn’t want to answer a question.
Does this diminish McCain’s stature as a war hero? No. Does it diminish his stature as a presidential wannabe? Absolutely.
Because in the end, accruing power and prestige has been more important to McCain than standing up for veterans, let alone standing on principle, which makes his newly minted claim that he is an agent of change so patently false.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House and here for an index with links to other torture-related posts.
According to Friday Morning’s Edition Of The Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, the Dutch intelligence service has halted a very successful operation to ’sabotage’ Iran’s weapons program due to an imminent American attack that would have put its activities and personnel at risk.
“The Dutch Intelligence Service AIVD [Algemene Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst or General Intelligence and Security Service ] has in recent years been running a top secret operation inside Iran with the aim of infiltrating and sabotaging the weapons industry of the Islamic republic.
The operation, described as being extremely successful, was recently discontinued in connection of plans for an imminent U.S. air strike on Iran. Well-informed sources have told De Telegraaf, some of the targets of the strike are directly linked to the Dutch espionage operation.”
August 21st, 2008 By SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
Nepal and Pakistan provide good lessons in foreign policy to both Barack Obama and John McCain. The democratically-elected new Prime Minister of Nepal, Prachanda (photo above) who led a 10-year guerrilla war, now professes that his country’s era of “capitalist democracy” has begun. He was sworn in by Nepal’s first president, Ram Baran Yadav.
Lesson No. 1: The president or prime minister of any country must not be sponsored/pushed by the USA to remain friendly. Good diplomacy is making friends out of enemies.
Lesson No. 2: If the USA looks for, and sponsors, loyal and subservient leaders in the world, the public in that country would rise against their own subservient/sponsored leaders and the USA.
Lesson No. 3: It is a dangerous foreign policy to bribe foreign leaders/dictators and tempt them to follow the US policy. Only myopic policy needs to find supporters abroad with the help of bribery. Corruption would ultimately corrode the democratic functioning in the USA itself. Unaccounted billions of dollars went to the Musharraf regime from the US administration. In the end the USA has become a staunch enemy of both militants and the Pakistan public.
Lesson No. 4: To turn an enemy into a friend needs patience and sincere efforts. In other words SINCERITY and PERSEVERANCE. The BUSH and MUSHARRAF strategy of BLUFF and BLUSTER ultimately boomerangs. It also empowers/strengthens terrorism.
Lesson No. 5: NEVER take foreign policy decisions/actions unilaterally. There is the United Nations. Only dictators act unilaterally. The USA has lost much credibility with its actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even in Afghanistan there should be UN troops, if at all. The US will never be able to justify (or get results) by only taking NATO forces. The Musharraf tangle was solved when the US involved Britain, Saudi Arabia and other countries for parleys.
Lesson No. 6: If my neighbour has begun to treat his family violently, I can only call the police. I can’t force my way into my neighbour’s house and then tell him that I am going to stay there for years to prevent violence (as in Iraq).
Let’s come back to Nepal. After months of bickering among the political parties, a huge majority of the assembly has elected a former rebel as prime minister. The Economist notes many firsts. “(Prime Minister Prachanda) wore Western clothes (another first) but made a gesture to national custom by donning a traditional Nepali cap.
“It has been an astonishing transformation. For over a year the Maoists have been part of Nepal’s transitional government, heading ministries and becoming ambassadors. Many poor Nepalis will wonder whether, after ten years of war costing 13,000 lives, the Maoists will now sink into the comforts of power and prestige and forget them.
“The Maoists will have to prove them wrong. Their election manifesto called this the era of capitalist democracy in Nepal and stressed that the private sector is intrinsic to their plans. More immediately Prachanda must reassert the authority of the state, which has been badly eroded over the past two years as crime has spiralled and ethnic groups clamoured for their rights.”
“The disproportion of the military force used by Russia against Georgia belongs then, to the deep history that remains common to both peoples. The other certainty, no less historical, is the bankruptcy of the hegemonic role of the United States: driven by a resentment as irrational as it is mean-spirited, the American republic has continued to practice the delusional encirclement of post-Soviet Russia. Without a doubt, the twisted minds at the inept CIA’s Langley headquarters or the brains at the Pentagon have dreamed of having their own Cuba [reference to the Cuban missile crisis]. They thought they had found it in Georgia with their agent of influence, the current president Saakachvili.”
“And just like that retard Fidel Castro who, in 1962, wanted to launch atom bombs against Washington before the terrified eyes of his reckless allies in Moscow, here we have “Frankenstein-Saakachvili” wanting to involve his American patrons in the extreme and absurd logic that governs those who exalt in the narrow nationalism of Georgia. Indeed in Washington today, the climate is not indignation over the childishness of our news commentary, but about mutual accusations of irresponsibility, just as it was in Moscow the day after the Kennedy-Khrushchev duel over Cuba.”
So what’s the solution? Adler suggests:
“In the first place, put a permanent end to the logic of force to which Russia has tendency to give in to. Then, definitely inhibit the use of force by giving Russia the decent and necessary place that it must occupy in the construction of Europe. In addition, we must not push Ukraine toward confrontation with Russia. But also for Russia, do everything possible to ensure its historic reconciliation with our Polish and Turkish allies. This is a very tough, but indispensable road.”
When the Bush administration put out the word that only guilty verdicts were allowable at the Guantánamo Bay war crimes tribunal, Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann saluted crisply and answered the call.
Hartmann (small photo), an Air Force reservist and corporate lawyer, has been a relentless and aggressive advocate for the military commission system despite his supposedly neutral role and so shamelessly pro-prosecution that a military judge has barred him from acting as a legal advisor to an accused terrorist for the second time.
The judge, Stephen Henley, also ordered a new top-level review of the charges against Mohammed Jawad, who is accused of attempted murder for allegedly throwing a grenade as a teen that wounded two U.S. soldiers and their translator in a bazaar in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Hartmann’s aggressive advocacy in the media and other public statements ”compromised the objectivity necessary to dispassionately and fairly evaluate the evidence and prepare the post-trial evaluation,” Henley ruled in declaring that the general could not serve as a “neutral advisor” on the case.
The ruling means that Pentagon officials will need to appoint a new legal advisor over the trial, one of 20 so far in the pipeline. Hartmann still has oversight of the other 19.
Hartmann’s first disqualifiction was in the run up to the just-completed trial of Salim Ahmed Hamdan.
Hamdan, who admitted to being Osama bin Laden’s driver, received a 5 1/2 year sentence after being found guilty of only a lesser charge of material support for terrorism and acquitted of the far more serious charge of conspiracy.
The unexpectedly light sentence, which means that Hamdan could be released in about five months because of time served, has put the Pentagon in a quandary: While the White House got less than a half a loaf with the sentence, it can claim that the system worked but at the same time has vowed that Hamdan will not be released from custody until the Global War on Terror is over.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House, here for an index with links to torture-related post and here for the last of 25 excerpts from Jan Mayer’s The Dark Side.
Despite the excesses of the Age of Bush — notably the embrace of torture and willful subjugation of the rule of law — the U.S. remains a substantially open and just society. So it was inevitable that the consequences of the administration’s foulest deeds would begin nipping at the heels of the perpetrators sooner or later.
As far back as 2004, participants in White House meetings with Vice President Cheney, David Addington and Alberto Gonzales understood that these torture regime architects were objecting to calls for minimum treatment standards for detainees not just because of their belief that the U.S. had to be protected from future terror attacks but because they needed to protect themselves from future legal repercussions, and backpedaling would be evidence that they understood they were legally liable.
And so amidst the first U.S. war crimes trial since World War II, a proceeding that comedian Stephen Colbert darkly joked was “the most historic session of traffic court ever,” there are the first serious discussions about whether Cheney, Addington, Gonzales and others should be considered war criminals themselves.
While charging these officials with war crimes would certainly appeal to the emotional side of people like myself who as a proud American takes personally how my country has been hijacked by thugs in pinstripes, it is beyond the pale to think that a U.S. court of law would address the war-crimes issue as such. (That would be more likely were any of these officials to set foot in a number of European countries.)
More pertinent to the discussion — and there must be a discussion and not merely a partisan lynching party led by left-leaning screaming memes — is whether these officials knew that what they were doing might be illegal.
The answer is an emphatic “yes” because of the great lengths to which they went to first deny the existence of torture as a policy and then to wrap themselves in the obfuscations of a handmaiden by the name of John Yoo, whose singular talent in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel was to take desired outcomes such as giving torture a veneer of legality by green-lighting its use by backfilling with gibberish-filled memos. Attorney General Michael Mukasey actually has managed to outdo Yoo in advancing legal flotsam such as his view that Justice’s lawyers cannot commit crimes when they act under the orders of the president and the president cannot commit crimes when he acts under advice of these lawyers.
How then to proceed?
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House and here for an index with links to previous torture-related posts.
Photo illustration for Vanity Fair by Chris Mueller
Can someone explain this to me, please? This isn’t some sort of rhetorical device, by the way. I honestly would like some help in understanding the questions surrounding Ron Suskind’s allegations regarding the forged documents which sought to tie Saddam to AQ in an effort to gin up support for the Iraq war. According to his account, George Tenet delivered the order from the White House to the CIA, and they forged the documents. Now, the American Conservative is claiming that while the story is essentially correct, some of the specific facts are wrong.
The Suskind account states that two senior CIA officers Robert Richer and John Maguire supervised the preparation of the document under direct orders coming from Director George Tenet. Not so, says my source. Tenet is for once telling the truth when he states that he would not have undermined himself by preparing such a document while at the same time insisting publicly that there was no connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Richer and Maguire have both denied that they were involved with the forgery and it should also be noted that preparation of such a document to mislead the media is illegal and they could have wound up in jail.
My source also notes that Dick Cheney, who was behind the forgery, hated and mistrusted the Agency and would not have used it for such a sensitive assignment. Instead, he went to Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans and asked them to do the job.
Now obviously there are some supporters of the administration who are still crying foul and claiming that the entire story is bogus, but as more cracks appear in the walls, that’s looking less and less likely. With that aside, this leads me to the main question here.
On the one hand, perhaps Bush ordered Tenet to have the document generated. On the other, Cheney had the Office of Special Projects produce the forgery. It then winds up leaking into the press and cranking up the volume of the drumbeats for war. If either of the above scenarios are true, does it really matter who actually forged the letter? What is the point of noting the allegations in the American Conservative article? Are we to say, “Oh! I see! Suskind had it wrong about who forged the letter so the point is moot.”
If (and this is still a big “if”) the facts of the matter come to light and anyone in the Executive branch of our government ordered the forgery of such a document to build support for the invasion, isn’t that pretty much the end of the story? Should there not be some person or persons getting fitted for a set of leg-irons and slinking off toward a cell in The Hague? The fact that so many of us seem able to sit around and have a calm discussion of the question boggles my mind. I’m afraid the old argument of, “Well, we’re already in Iraq so it’s too late to waste time worrying about who was right or wrong in the beginning” isn’t going to cover the tab on this one. Could this story - should it prove true - actually come to light and result in nothing but a sigh and another sad footnote in the history of the entire Iraq debacle? Has my country really come to this?
If you have a good explanation as to why the distinction of which office ordered it or which one produced it actually matters, please let me know. I’ll be wrapping duct tape around my head until then just in case it explodes.
The overriding question in the wake of the conviction of a driver for terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden is whether he received a fair trial.
There are two answers and they depend entirely on your perspective:
* If you believe, as I do not, that the 9/11 attacks in particular and the Global War on Terror in general demanded that the bedrock judicial principles in the U.S. Constitution be cast aside and a legal system rigged by the prosecution, reliant on torture and shrouded in secrecy was called for, then you cheered the outcome of Salim Ahmed Hamdan’s two-week trial before a military commission at Guantánamo Bay.
* If you believe, as I do, that the Global War to Terror is being fought to protect those bedrock judicial principles and discarding them was shameful and even cowardly, then there is no satisfaction to be gained from Hamdan’s conviction.
There never was any question that the forty-something Hamdan was not a totally innocent bystander. He readily acknowledged his relationship with Osama bin Laden and offered to help the CIA in its search for the terrorist mastermind before he was tortured. Nor that the Yemeni wasn’t going anywhere even in the extremely unlikely event that he was acquitted of all charges against him since the White House had made it clear that he is signed up for a lifetime membership in the Rumsfeld Gulag.
As it is, the conviction was a rebuke for military prosecutors and only a qualified victory for the Bush administration, which despite its post-9/11 chest-pounding rhetoric, has suffered innumerable self-inflicted setbacks over the past seven years to bring Hamdan and others to trial.
Hamdan was acquitted of the more serious charges of conspiracy in the first war crimes trial since the end of World War II and was convicted of providing material support for terrorism.
While the jury of six senior military officers is sworn to secrecy, it would appear that they agreed with Hamdan’s lawyer that he was not involved in the planning or execution of the 9/11 attacks, nor knew anything of substance about them, but was one of the people who drove around a very bad man who remains at large.
Long story short, despite stacking the deck, it took the U.S. seven years to prosecute and convict a lousy driver. Had he been tried in a civilian court, the material-support charge would have been a slam dunk conviction and he would have begun serving his sentence, as opposed to moldering in a cell while the Bush administration went through its extralegal gyrations, years ago.
One of the underreported and unappreciated aspects of the Age of Bush is that despite the appearance of unanimity some administration officials, typically careerists and not political appointees, were horrified at the embrace of torture and other extralegal actions and spoke up. They were silenced and in some case were fired, demoted or resigned.
When an official whose loyalty to the rule of law ran deeper than their loyalty to the administration tried to fight back, they usually were met by a human chain saw by the name of David Addington. After the president and vice president, the chief of staff and former legal counsel to Dick Cheney has been the most powerful if relatively unknown man in Washington over the past seven-plus years.
History is filled with people like Addington who believed absolutely that they were doing right for god and republic but whose actions were so awful that what they saw as patriotism was in fact traitorous.
By that calculus, the foul deeds of Benedict Arnold, Alger Hiss and Aldrich Ames pale in comparison to Addington’s actions.
* * * * *
Indeed, Addington is in a class of his own. Before the fires at the World Trade Center and Pentagon had even been extinguished, Addington asserted himself as the indispensable man even though his legal, political and military bona fides were overshadowed by his far right-wing views, as well as a paranoia that extended to keeping his office locked at all times and a ruthless mastery of the art of confronting outright or backstabbing anyone who got in his way.
There were career lawyers in the Justice Department who had substantial experience with terrorism, but few in or out of the White House were conversant in presidential powers. Neither was Addington, but he was quick to fill this vacuum with his extreme opinions as the chief lawyer for another paranoiac, the vice president.
Although Condoleezza Rice was nominally President Bush’s national security advisor, it was Cheney who ran the national security show. Unfortunately for the victims of 9/11 and the nation as a whole, like Rice he still had a Cold War mindset, did not have the foresight to see the threat Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda represented and blew off the confidential papers and briefings that warned of this imminent danger with his trademark arrogance.
From the outset, Addington pushed what came to be known as “The New Paradigm,” a absolutist doctrine at the fringes of even conservative legal thinking that the president had the authority to disregard virtually all legal boundaries, including the Constitution, if national security required it.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House and here for an index and links to recent torture-related posts.
The ACLU has released some crucial memoranda which reveal the tortuous path by which the Bush Administration’s Department of ‘Justice’ taught the CIA to rationalize its way to a distinction between ‘enhanced interrogation’ and plain old-fashioned ‘torture.’ The Justice Department told the CIA that agents would be safe from prosecution if they they believed ‘in good faith’ that flies don’t have feelings so it doesn’t matter if they pull the wings off them, according to the AP. I may have paraphrased a bit. I know they don’t like being quoted.
Put it another way, you could say that the standard articulated in the memos works something like this: ‘Use only those enhanced interrogation techniques that wouldn’t shock the conscience of a sociopath.’ At that, it’s hard to believe that they drew the line at waterboarding. Evidently the CIA doesn’t have as many agents who think like sociopaths as television and films would lead you to believe. One effect of all this information is to make me feel a little better about them. They could have done so much more.
Whether the Bush administration, after years of vicious attacks on anyone who would dare to mention timetables for the U.S. disengagement in Iraq, is caving in to Maliki’s demands and is now itself discussing timetables, is debatable. But what is not debatable is the pains the administration is taking to avoid giving the impression that it is in fact discussing timetables.
Just examine the words and the language: a “general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals,” “goal dates for transition of responsibilities,” They even resurrected “aspirational goals.” (It must have taken a lot of inspirational neocons to come up with this latest cliché)
This language gets about as convoluted and, pardon the expression, as tortuous as the language Bush and his minions have used and continue to use to both justify and deny that the United States of America uses torture: “Enhanced interrogation techniques,” “alternative interrogation methods,” “coercive interrogation methods,” “fairly robust interrogation program,” and this best-selling one:
An act that “is equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”
But, don’t worry, “We don’t torture.”
While we are on the subject of torture, it is “aspirational” to revisit President Bush’s statement of June 26, 2003, on the occasion of the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture (Remember, this was before the world saw the images of Abu Ghraib, and before we knew about “rendition,” waterboarding, etc.):
Statement by the President
United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture
Today, on the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the United States declares its strong solidarity with torture victims across the world. Torture anywhere is an affront to human dignity everywhere. We are committed to building a world where human rights are respected and protected by the rule of law.
Freedom from torture is an inalienable human right. The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment, ratified by the United States and more than 130 other countries since 1984, forbids governments from deliberately inflicting severe physical or mental pain or suffering on those within their custody or control. Yet torture continues to be practiced around the world by rogue regimes whose cruel methods match their determination to crush the human spirit. Beating, burning, rape, and electric shock are some of the grisly tools such regimes use to terrorize their own citizens. These despicable crimes cannot be tolerated by a world committed to justice.
Notorious human rights abusers, including, among others, Burma, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and Zimbabwe, have long sought to shield their abuses from the eyes of the world by staging elaborate deceptions and denying access to international human rights monitors. Until recently, Saddam Hussein used similar means to hide the crimes of his regime. With Iraq’s liberation, the world is only now learning the enormity of the dictator’s three decades of victimization of the Iraqi people. Across the country, evidence of Baathist atrocities is mounting, including scores of mass graves containing the remains of thousands of men, women, and children and torture chambers hidden inside palaces and ministries. The most compelling evidence of all lies in the stories told by torture survivors, who are recounting a vast array of sadistic acts perpetrated against the innocent. Their testimony reminds us of their great courage in outlasting one of history’s most brutal regimes, and it reminds us that similar cruelties are taking place behind the closed doors of other prison states.
The United States is committed to the world-wide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. I call on all nations to speak out against torture in all its forms and to make ending torture an essential part of their diplomacy. I further urge governments to join America and others in supporting torture victims’ treatment centers, contributing to the UN Fund for the Victims of Torture, and supporting the efforts of non-governmental organizations to end torture and assist its victims.
No people, no matter where they reside, should have to live in fear of their own government. Nowhere should the midnight knock foreshadow a nightmare of state-commissioned crime. The suffering of torture victims must end, and the United States calls on all governments to assume this great mission.
When I was a kid back in the Seventies, a favorite sarcastic phrase used to peers who were getting a bit too full of themselves and getting all entitled and snippy about playing fair was: ‘What do you think you are — some kind of P.C.?’ ‘P.C.’ stood for ‘Privileged Character.’
Dick Cheney is now officially our nation’s most privileged character.
It seems that Cheney Branch has thought up another innovative new privilege to protect itself from Congressional Oversight. As Isikoff and Hosenball remark at Newsweek, (and as my colleague has likewise noted),
The decision by the White House to refuse to honor the subpoena from Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee for Cheney’s interview was hardly unexpected, given the administration’s history of fiercely protecting presidential prerogatives. (Newsweek)
But as the article remarks with wonderful restraint,
What was surprising to some legal scholars was the basis for shielding the FBI interview report. It was covered, Mukasey said, by what he called "the law-enforcement component of executive privilege." (Newsweek)
Let me see if I can interpret this. Reading between the lines, I would interpret it to mean that any legal scholars who know anything about executive privilege and who still believe in ‘rule of law’ are gobsmacked that Mukasey would have the gall to make this absolutely specious argument. (Newsweek)
But of course, any legal scholar who hasn’t spent the last seven+ years locked in an ivory tower with no internet access doubtless isn’t all that surprised that he did. Mukasey quickly learned the Bush administration’s foolproof strategy: if you’re the executive and refuse to account for yourself, who is really going to make you if you come up with some kind of color-of-law excuse to refuse? Even if the judiciary calls you out, you can always make up another one.
Or as Benen more succinctly puts it, ‘The Bush gang plays by its own rules — the ones they make up as they go along.’
Being Israel and protecting the values on which it was founded is one helluva tough job, but a funny thing happened on the way to the 60th anniversary of the Jewish state: It has subsumed some of those values for political convenience and is kissing George Bush’s ass when it comes to torture.
This has great pertinence because Israel apparently is one of the relatively few countries that would roll out the welcome mat for administration officials who approved of and participated in the use of torture at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere in the Rumsfeld Gulag in violation of international law. As a consequence, they might risk arrest as war criminals in, say, France, Germany or Italy.
Said Lawrence Wilkerson, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff of those officials — all practicing attorneys — in a pointed public statement:
“Haynes, Feith Yoo, Bybee, Gonzalez and — at the apex — Addington, should never travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code. In the future, some government may build the case necessary to prosecute them in a foreign court, or in an international court.”
It should be noted that Wilkerson can be outspoken to the point of intemperance, and he is no friend of the conservatives who run Israel.
It is no surprise that he would mention Saudia Arabia, a safe country for sure for those administration lawyers given its own religious and cultural embrace of torture. But Israel? A nation that emerged phoenix-like from the ashes of the Holocaust and the Nazi’s embrace of the very torture techniques that the CIA and other U.S. operatives have used?
How terribly sad.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House and here for an index and links to previous torture-related posts.
Photo illustration for Vanity Fair by Chris Mueller
CHENEY ONLY PRETENDED TO BE SLEEPING; MAYER WAS WIDE AWAKE
While it had been widely assumed that the decision to torture enemy combatants and other detainees in the War on Terror began at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the Bush administration long hid behind that “trickle up” explanation, it is now apparent that the origins of this dark chapter in American history — and the single most defining and insidious aspect of the Age of Bush — can be traced to Vice President Cheney.
Nevertheless, there has not been a satisfactory answer to the question of why in the wake of the 9/11 attacks the vice president and his cronies did not want to work within existing laws and systems with Congress and the courts, stubbornly objected to the creation of the 9/11 Commission and created an American gulag and rump court system that ignored constitutionally mandated niceties like habeas corpus.
Like the Watergate scandal of four decades earlier, the answer is that it was all about covering up, in this instance Cheney spearheading a not vast right-wing conspiracy that was predicated on scaring the crap out of Americans, hence the oft repeated mantra that “everything has changed” because of 9/11, and the use of that rationale for a descent into morally repugnant methods and actions unprecedented in modern American history.
The purpose was to cover up the administration’s failure to act on repeated warnings that Al Qaeda planned a major attack on the homeland, an attack that it now appears could have been prevented had the White House not been so caught up in its own arrogant sense of infallibility. (In Cheney’s case, this hubris is all the more amazing because he was obsessed with doomsday scenarios and had participated in many drills in previous years that simulated attacks that might destabilize the government.)
This descent included extracting false confessions through torture that became an underpinning of the bogus Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein connection and WMD threat that led directly to a war now in its sixth year, and even to satisfy grievances that Mayer says the vice president had been harboring for decades.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House, here for a new revelation concerning former Attorney General John Ashcroft, and here for an index with links to previous Bush torture regime-related posts.
The more we learn about the Bush torture regime, the more apparent it becomes that there is an interconnectivity between what once seemed random acts and events: False confessions are coerced from tortured detainees using Chinese Communist techniques perfected on U.S. fliers during the Korean War. Ethnic Muslims considered by the Chinese to be enemies of the state are held indefinitely by the U.S. and worked over at the request of Beijing’s interrogators. And so on and so forth.
But first a little . . . er, light comedy:
It is safe to say that the wheels have come all the way off the Bush administration’s legal wagon regarding the justification for indefinite detentions of alleged terrorist suspects when a three-judge appeals court panel with one of the most conservative judges in the land resorts to quoting Lewis Carroll.
In ruling that accusations against Huzaifa Parhat, an ethnic Uighur from a Muslim region of western China held for over six years were based on unverifiable claims, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia compared those claims to the absurd declaration of a character in Carroll’s poem “The Hunting of the Snark:
“I have said it thrice: What I tell you is three times true.”
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House and here for an index with links to previous torture-related posts.
Is Barack Obama’s honeymoon with Europe over already?
After months of the most effusive and unrestrained praise for America’s first serious Black presidential candidate, some of Obama’s most energetic European backers - the Germans - are growing skeptical.
“In the end, a disappointment is a deceit. So it’s for the best that we cast a serous German glance in the direction of the American Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama. He has called for the death penalty for child rapists, defends the right to possess firearms and is the first candidate since the Watergate scandal to reject public financing of his election campaign in favor of private, unlimited contributions. ‘Hey,’ some on this side of the Atlantic now ask, ‘we thought he was one of us?’ Far from it.”
“The facade of the wise, eloquent and charming golden boy has begun to crumble. There is a second - other Obama. And he’s about to be discovered: unscrupulous, selfish, and overambitious.’
“Who is the real Obama? Nobody knows for sure. For now because of his vagueness, it’s still possible to project various expectations onto him, in USA as well as in Europe. But here and there the impatience is growing: Obama, perhaps the first Black President, must not only be flexible, he has to take a stand.”
Condi studies briefing paper on Al Qaeda threat; Twin towers burn
Inconveniently for the Bush administration and presidential wannabe John McCain, the historic record showing that the White House slept while Osama bin Laden and his merry band of terrorists planned the 9/11 attacks continues to grow, which effectively undercuts allegations that Barack Obama (and John Kerry before him in 2004) have dangerously naive “9/10″ mindsets.”
The GOP noise machine is working hard to drown out any mention of this record of incompetence and failure by, among other things, calling Barack Obama’s national security bona fides into question.
The presumptive Democratic nominee is catching flak for correctly asserting that federal prisons and courts worked just fine after the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 in comments following last week’s Supreme Court ruling. The top court struck down as unconstitutional for the third time the rump legal system cobbled together by the White House that has resulted in indefinite detentions at Guantanamo Bay, including many innocents swept up in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the post-9/11 frenzy, but only a small handful of prosecutions of real terrorists six-plus years later.
And now Rudy Giuliani, nicely tanned but snarky as ever after taking some time off following an ignominious crash-and-burn in a primary race predicated on his supposedly awesome national-security chops, is shilling for McCain despite his own severe case of “9/10 mindset.”
Let’s be clear from the jump that the Clinton administration does not get a free pass. This is because . . .
GERMAN POWs CAPTURED BY U.S. TROOPS; PROFESSOR JOHN YOO
I have not supported calls to oust John Yoo from his tenured position at the UC Berkeley School of Law because of his despicable and key role in the Bush administration torture regime, but after reading his op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal this week I am changing my mind. This is because the man who wrote the infamous memo justifying the use of Nazi-like torture techniques is so willfully ignorant.
Yoo noted in the op-ed that last week’s Supreme Court decision in Boumediene v. Bush has been portrayed as a stinging rebuke of the administration’s antiterrorism policies:
“From the celebrations on most U.S. editorial pages, one might think that the court had stopped a dictator from trampling civil liberties. Boumediene did anything but. The 5-4 ruling is judicial imperialism of the highest order.”
Okay, let’s file that under the category of “strong opinion,” but what comes a little further down is absolutely mind blowing for a man who teaches at one of the nation’s leading law schools.
Yoo wrote that:
“In World War II, no civilian court reviewed the thousands of German prisoners houses in the U.S.
” . . . Judicial micromanagement will now intrude into the conduct of war. Federal courts will jury-rig a process whose every rule second-guesses our soldiers and intelligence agents in the field. A judge’s view on how much ‘proof’ is needed to find that a ’suspect’ is a terrorist will become the standard applied on the battlefield. Soldiers will have to gather ‘evidence,’ which will have to be safeguarded until a court hearing, take statements from ‘witnesses,’ and probably provide some kind of Miranda-style warning upon capture. No doubt lawyers will swarm to provide representation for new prisoners.”
Of course no civilian court reviewed the cases of those Germans because they were prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions and tried by traditional military courts. They w
That so noted, and overlooking any mental torture that previous presidents may have suffered at the hands of their First Ladies, John McCain becomes the first potential president to have been physically tortured by an enemy while serving his country. As he has written in his memoirs, his North Vietnamese jailers withheld medical treatment, forced him to stand for long periods of time, put him in stress positions, beat him and deprived him of sleep during five and a half years of captivity.
Hartmann (small photo), an Air Force reservist and corporate lawyer, has been a relentless and aggressive advocate for the military commission system despite his supposedly neutral role and so shamelessly pro-prosecution that a military judge 
As far back as 2004, participants in White House meetings with Vice President Cheney, David Addington and Alberto Gonzales understood that these torture regime architects were objecting to calls for minimum treatment standards for detainees not just because of their belief that the U.S. had to be protected from future terror attacks but because they needed to protect themselves from future legal repercussions, and backpedaling would be evidence that they understood they were legally liable.
Can someone explain this to me, please? This isn’t some sort of rhetorical device, by the way. I honestly would like some help in understanding the questions surrounding Ron Suskind’s allegations regarding the forged documents which sought to tie Saddam to AQ in an effort to gin up support for the Iraq war. According to his account, 
When an official whose loyalty to the rule of law ran deeper than their loyalty to the administration tried to fight back, they usually were met by a human chain saw by the name of David Addington. After the president and vice president, the chief of staff and former legal counsel to Dick Cheney has been the most powerful if relatively unknown man in Washington over the past seven-plus years.
Nevertheless, there has not been a satisfactory answer to the question of why in the wake of the 9/11 attacks the vice president and his cronies did not want to work within existing laws and systems with Congress and the courts, stubbornly objected to the creation of the 9/11 Commission and created an American gulag and rump court system that ignored constitutionally mandated niceties like habeas corpus.
The more we learn about the Bush torture regime, the more apparent it becomes that there is an interconnectivity between what once seemed random acts and events: False confessions are coerced from tortured detainees using Chinese Communist techniques perfected on U.S. fliers during the Korean War. Ethnic Muslims considered by the Chinese to be enemies of the state are held indefinitely by the U.S. and worked over at the request of Beijing’s interrogators. And so on and so forth.
I have not supported calls to oust John Yoo from his tenured position at the UC Berkeley School of Law because of his despicable and key role in the Bush administration torture regime, but after reading his