Shine, Perishing Republic

And now on top of all the other horrors of this annus horribilis, the CIA torture report - that is, the 500-page executive summary, not the 6000 pages of the actual report, which the righteous, God-fearing Republicans in Congress don't want you to see - not now, not ever.

The New York Times reports:

A scathing report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday found that the Central Intelligence Agency routinely misled the White House and Congress about the information it obtained from the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects, and that its methods were more brutal than the C.I.A. acknowledged either to Bush administration officials or to the public.

The long-delayed report, which took five years to produce and is based on more than six million internal agency documents, is a sweeping indictment of the C.I.A.'s operation and oversight of a program carried out by agency officials and contractors in secret prisons around the world in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It also provides a macabre accounting of some of the grisliest techniques that the C.I.A. used to torture and imprison terrorism suspects.

Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in American custody. With the approval of the C.I.A.'s medical staff, some C.I.A. prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the C.I.A.'s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.” C.I.A. medical staff members described the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a “series of near drownings.”

The report also suggests that more prisoners were subjected to waterboarding than the three the C.I.A. has acknowledged in the past. The committee obtained a photograph of a waterboard surrounded by buckets of water at the prison in Afghanistan commonly known as the Salt Pit — a facility where the C.I.A. had claimed that waterboarding was never used. One clandestine officer described the prison as a “dungeon,” and another said that some prisoners there “literally looked like a dog that had been kenneled.”

During his administration, President George W. Bush repeatedly said that the detention and interrogation program, which President Obama dismantled when he succeeded him, was humane and legal. The intelligence gleaned during interrogations, he said, was instrumental both in thwarting terrorism plots and in capturing senior figures of Al Qaeda.

Mr. Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney and a number of former C.I.A. officials have said more recently that the program was essential for ultimately finding Osama bin Laden, who was killed by members of the Navy SEALs in May 2011 in Abbottabad, Pakistan. . . .

The Intelligence Committee’s report tries to refute each of these claims, using the C.I.A.'s internal records to present 20 case studies that bolster its conclusion that the most extreme interrogation methods played no role in disrupting terrorism plots, capturing terrorist leaders — even finding Bin Laden.

Many of the most extreme interrogation methods — including waterboarding — were authorized by Justice Department lawyers during the Bush administration. But the report also found evidence that a number of detainees had been subjected to other, unapproved methods while in C.I.A. custody.

The torture of prisoners at times was so extreme that some C.I.A. personnel tried to put a halt to the techniques, but were told by senior agency officials to continue the interrogation sessions.

The Senate report quotes a series of August 2002 cables from a C.I.A. facility in Thailand, where the agency’s first prisoner was held. Within days of the Justice Department’s approval to begin waterboarding the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, the sessions became so extreme that some C.I.A. officers were “to the point of tears and choking up,” and several said they would elect to be transferred out of the facility if the brutal interrogations continued.

During one waterboarding session, Abu Zubaydah became “completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.” The interrogations lasted for weeks, and some C.I.A. officers began sending messages to the agency’s headquarters in Virginia questioning the utility — and the legality — of what they were doing. But such questions were rejected. . . .

Taken in its entirety, the report is a portrait of a spy agency that was wholly unprepared for its new mission as jailers and interrogators — but that embraced its assignment with vigor. The report chronicles millions of dollars in secret payments between 2002 and 2004 from the C.I.A. to foreign officials, aimed at getting other governments to agree to host secret prisons.

Torture, extreme, extended, even unto death in the most grisly, gruesome ways. Secret prisons all around the world. Lies. Cover-ups. Excuses and deceptions at all levels up to and including the Oval Office. And not one member of the BushCheney criminal gang has been made to answer for all this stinking heap of evil. Not one.

Is this the America you grew up in? Is this what your tax dollars pay for? Is this what brings a lump to your throat and a tear to your eye when you salute the flag?

Oh, and you think it can't get worse? In January, the Republican will control both houses of Congress, and 30 states. And in just two more years, as I sadly believe, they will be in the White House too. And do you think they will ever let go of supreme power again, willingly? You ain't seen nothing yet, boys - mark my words. When Republican majorities can no longer be had by democratic means, then will arise a line of American Caesars to be the "protectors of the people" - and that will be the end of the Constitution and the America we know, forever.

I'm too old and too weary to say more, fellas. You can read the report for yourselves, and weep for the death of the Republic as we knew it. But know this: all those wicked deeds, like hateful birds of prey, will come home to roost right here in your hometown and mine, one day. If the President and those under his command can use torture at will against foreigners, with no accountability, no publicity, no justice or law, they can and will use it against American citizens, as long as they think they can get away with it. And then no one will be safe from the whims of the Emperor.

What goes around, comes around. And paybacks are hell. Enough said.


Update, 12/10: Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) responds to the CIA report with a ringing condemnation of torture:




And thanks to Mimi at Wounded Bird for posting this crock of lies from 2007:

Love Your Enemies

Nikiforos Lytras, Antigone in front of the dead Polynices (1865)

From the Sermon on the Mount:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;

That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

Your Head Trucker feels old and weary, and not up to writing a lengthy, well-polished post today, so I will just throw out some thoughts and leave it up to you fellas to connect the dots, if they mean anything to you.

It's a gray, drizzly day here in Texas, where last night, several counties away from me, tornadoes destroyed a subdivision, killing or injuring scores of people. Which seems only to be expected somehow, in a week when the news has been brimful of scandal, crime, murder, outrage, and every kind of horrible mayhem. Too much to take in, and far too much to dwell on: it seems the veneer of civilization is worn through in many places, and the ugly, bloody, barbaric core is bleeding out. I suppose awful things have always been happening somewhere, to someone, every day of mankind's existence on this planet; but whereas news used to travel slowly and partially, now it comes roaring at you in living color at all hours of the night and day. Too much to bear. All one can do is look away, and occupy the mind with puttering around the house, and tending one's own narrow garden.

As much as I applaud the recent advances for gay rights and marriage equality that I often feature here in the Blue Truck, I also have to say that I can hardly help despairing for the future of the world, and to be honest, I am glad that whenever it is my time to depart from it, I will leave behind no posterity to worry about. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity," Yeats wrote a hundred years ago, and it is even truer now than it was then.

At nearly 60 years of age, few illusions about human nature are left to me; with time and experience, one comes to see people for who and what they really are, not what they pretend to be. It is particularly discouraging to see that the great mass of supposedly civilized Western people - the great majority of them at least nominally Christian - are all in a headlong rush to the worst excesses of barbarism. It feels that way, anyhow.  My second-grade teacher got it exactly right one day, fifty years ago, when she asked why a bunch of us little boys were all stepping on one another's shoes in the cafeteria line. "Well, he did it to me, so I did it to the other boy," was the repeated answer to her question. Summing up her inquest with a wry face and a disapproving shake of the head, she exclaimed, "Monkey see, monkey do."

Man is an imitative creature. You become what you think about, what you idolize, what you adore - which may be something quite different from what you say you do. And it seems to me that nearly everyone is doing their damnedest to behave just like characters in a low-class, scrum-bum reality show nowadays. Hence the decline of manners, of civility, of literacy and of reason. Of course, I have to remind myself that the worst examples are not necessarily representative of the whole in any group, but - "Monkey see, monkey do."

Continued after the jump

Torture? Forget about It

If no one can be brought to justice for torture and war crimes even under a Democratic administration, just think what a green light that gives to the next fascist Republican regime.  PBS transcript here.

"Please Torture Me in the Old Way"

Three years into the Obama administration, Guantanamo is still very much in business, guys, in case you forgot. An excerpt from The Independent, but do go read the whole article:

On the day he marks 10 years locked inside the world's most notorious prison without having been charged with an offence, the last UK resident in Guantanamo Bay pleads with his captors: "Please torture me in the old way . . . .  Here they destroy people mentally and physically without leaving marks."

Speaking from his cell through letters and comments published for the first time in The Independent today, Shaker Aamer, who has never stood trial, reveals the torment of his captivity and removal from his family. Yesterday a senior British source close to the talks admitted that Mr Aamer's detention was "unconscionable". His plight was raised most recently with the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week.

Fears are growing for the welfare of Mr Aamer, from south London, who is now 45 and has a wife and four children. He has never met his youngest son. His lawyers are particularly concerned by the deterioration of his mental and physical state, which Mr Aamer describes vividly in his letters. He has lost 40 per cent of his body weight and is suffering from health problems, aggravated by long periods in solitary confinement. . . .

A British resident, born in Saudi Arabia, Mr Aamer had indefinite leave to remain in the UK when he was reportedly sold to the US in 2001 by Afghan villagers for $5,000. He claims he was helping to build a school. The US claims he was fighting with the Taliban.

Ten years in prison, not seeing his family, tortured and put in solitary confinement - and has never been charged with anything, never been given a trial: all this is being done in YOUR NAME and on your behalf, my fellow Americans.

Do you give a damn?

Do you think it can't happen to you?

Somebody posted this comment on another blog:

Why am I supposed to care about the detainees in Gitmo? People get hacked to death by machete every day all over Africa. Nobody says anything. Nobody has ever died in Gitmo. If waterboarding these motherfuckers saves the life of one American, its fine with me.

What do you say, my friends?

Mission Accomplished: Smelling Like a Rose

"Bush Jesus": 
Notice the halo effect produced by the radar dome behind his head.

The canonization process of St. George of Guantanamo has begun.  Read and weep:

Justice drops inquiry into destruction of torture videos

Miami Herald:  The former director of the CIA's secret operations branch won't be charged with the destruction of 92 videotapes showing the use of waterboarding and other controversial interrogation techniques, the Justice Department announced Tuesday. . . .

In interview, Bush defends Iraq war and waterboarding

Washington Post:  In his first major interview since leaving office, former president George W. Bush defended the most controversial aspects of his tenure - including the use of waterboarding against terrorism suspects and the invasion of Iraq. . . .

George Bush's torture admission is a dismal moment for democracy

The Guardian:  Although it comes as no surprise, George Bush's straight admission that he personally authorised waterboarding – an act of torture and a crime under US and international law – marks a dismal moment for western democracies and the rule of law. When again will the US be able to direct others to meet their human rights standards? Certainly not before it takes steps to bring its own house in order.

Unlike the UK's coalition government, which has announced a judicial inquiry on allegations of British involvement in torture, Barack Obama's administration has apparently ended the practice – but has done nothing to investigate the circumstances in which it was used by the Bush administration.

Bush claims that the use of waterboarding on Abu Zubaydah "saved lives", including British ones. There is not a shred of evidence to support that claim, one that falls into the same category as the bogus intelligence relied on to justify war in Iraq.

Indeed, waterboarding and Iraq appear to be interconnected, as torture-induced information was relied upon to justify the invasion. Torture may produce information, but it doesn't produce reliable information, as every experienced interrogator I have spoken with repeatedly tells me – on both sides of the Atlantic. It produces the information that the subject believes the interrogator wants to hear. . . .

He would do better to take on board those with first-hand experience of what the embrace of torture might mean for Americans abroad, who recognise that its use by the US will justify its use against the US.

Hundreds leave Bush book-signing in Dallas empty-handed

Fort Worth Star-Telegram:  Hundreds of people left the bookstore in North Dallas where former President George W. Bush was autographing copies of his book, Decision Points, without getting a signed book Tuesday. Borders books officials by 10 a.m. had told those in the back of the line that they likely wouldn't be able to see the 43rd president, and get a signed copy of his book, but many stayed just in case.

Tricia Ditmore, 49, of Grand Prairie was among those who left empty-handed. "I wanted to see him and shake his hand," she said, as tears welled up in her eyes. "I wanted to tell him that we supported him - that he was loved and supported. I don't know if he knows. I hope other people told him that."

About 1,000 people were able to meet the former president, and take home signed copies of his book. Among the lucky ones were Terry and Tammy Jones of Justin. They were first in line, having camped out at the store in Preston Royal since about 2 p.m. Monday. After they bought four books autographed by Bush, and briefly met the former president, they couldn't stop smiling. "He shook my hand and he kissed Tammy's hand," Terry Jones said.

Said Tammy Jones: "I waited 18 hours for two seconds and a kiss on my hand. I'm never washing this hand again."


No comment from your Head Trucker.  What can any decent person say?

True Fasting

Ash Wednesday

Thus says the high and lofty one who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy:

Shout it aloud, do not hold back; raise your voice like a trumpet. Declare to my people their rebellion, and to the house of Jacob their sins. For day after day they seek me out; they seem eager to know my ways, as if they were a nation that does what is right and has not forsaken the commands of its God. They ask me for just decisions and seem eager for God to come near them.

"Why have we fasted," they say, "and you have not seen it? Why have we humbled ourselves, and you have not noticed?"

Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please and exploit all your workers. Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife, and in striking each other with wicked fists. You cannot fast as you do today and expect your voice to be heard on high.

Is this the kind of fast I have chosen, only a day for a man to humble himself? Is it only for bowing one's head like a reed and for lying on sackcloth and ashes? Is that what you call a fast, a day acceptable to the LORD?

Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?

Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter; when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? . . .

If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.

Andrew Sullivan has written a must-read post today on this nation's use of torture, and those who now boast their approval of it - even in the name of God.  Do go and read the entire post, which is entirely relevant to your belief in American values, regardless of what your religious convictions may be.  An excerpt:

To have lived in an America where its former vice-president can boast of supporting the torture of human beings is tragic and terrifying enough. For me and many others, this is not America. As a former president [George W. Bush] said of the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib,

“This is not America. America is a country of justice and law and freedom and treating people with respect.”

But it is more than disturbing, especially as we begin Lent, to watch a Catholic cable channel, EWTN, present a self-described Catholic, Marc Thiessen, defending torture on Catholic grounds as compatible with the Magisterium of the Church. . . .

Continued after the jump

Republic or Empire: If We Don't Fight, Who Will?

In addition to my earlier reflections on the President's State of the Union address, I was also struck by the spectacle of a third or more of our elected representatives sitting on their hands throughout the speech, refusing to applaud even the most nonpartisan points of the speech, or indeed even to acknowledge the President's courteous and sometimes humorous attempts to reach out to them.

I heard the TV commenters point out at the beginning of the event that the Republicans had been strictly charged by their party leaders aforehand that there were to be no Joe Wilson outbursts on this dignified (well, dignified for U.S. politics) occasion.  Well and good.  Even so, as the camera panned across row after row after row of silent but accusatory faces with gleaming eyes, it was hard to evade the thought of a wolf pack held momentarily at bay.  Silent, disdainful - and hungry for blood.  Hardened warriors ready for battle, eager to storm the ramparts.

A chilling scene at the heart of our republic.  And those faces were nearly all white, and nearly all male.  The kind that were the big jocks in school.  There were noticeably more women and more people of color on the Democrat side of the aisle.

The juvenile, assinine quibbling over which justice or general applauded or screwed up his face during the address is not worth commenting on, and misses the much more important point of a government brought nearly to a standstill by a reactionary minority party, convinced beyond a shadow of self-doubt of its own divine mandate, not merely to rule but to conquer.  Sullivan reflects further on Obama's character, and the looming peril facing the nation at this critical juncture in its history:

My foreboding sense is that America may have already passed the point of no return in terms of civil, constitutional governance. I do not believe that in the Bush administration, the United States was effectively governed by its Constitution. The forms were still there, but the reality wasn't. Beneath it all, the desire for despotism ran, fueled by the despot's greatest ally, fear. Fear of foreigners, fear of terrorists, fear of gays, fear of immigrants, fear of the inevitable uncertainties of real reform.

It was entrenched by the military's own embrace of the role of imperial adventure, by the CIA's embrace of torture, by the president's assertion of total, extra-legal power in a never-ending war that now encompassed the US as well as abroad and citizens alongside non-citizens, and by a resurgent, right-wing partisan media that saw its job as fomenting propaganda rather than seeking any kind of truth, and liberal mainstream media so afraid of its own shadow and so intimidated by accusations of elitism that it became the equivalent of Harry Reid. . . .

So this fever feels to me like either the kind that precedes the final death of this republic into a carnival of FNC-directed war and debt and drama led by charismatic media-emperors or empresses - or the fever that finally ends the sickness, and restores some sense of civic responsibility and republican virtue. Last night, I saw one of the few men left able to see the depth of the crisis and not lose faith in this country's ability to overcome it. My faith in this country - so strong in the past - is not as strong as Obama's now.

But I sure as hell believe in fighting for it, and for him, against the forces at home and abroad that would truly end this experiment in self-government while pretending, of course, that everything is exactly the same. I believe our crisis is deeper than many now believe - because it is not just a crisis of economics, of debt, of over-reach, of an empire now running on its own steam and unstoppable by any political force, but because it is a crisis of civic virtue, a collapse of the good faith and serious, reasoned attention to problems that marks the distinction between a republic and a bread-and-circuses Ailes-Rove imperium.

Those, in my view, are the stakes. Are you ready to get back into the arena and fight? And if you don't, who will?

Sullivan also responds to this inane remark:

"Umm, what was that Abu Ghraib scandal all about? It started out as misconduct between men and women and then it steadily deteriorated into abuse of prisoners. The common denominator is lack of discipline. Once you break down discipline, good order and discipline and morale, everything that’s required for unit cohesion, you undermine the culture and the strength of the armed forces," - Elaine Donnelly, in an "argument" against gays in the military.

At this point, you realize that they really do live in an alternate reality, immune to evidence, hostile to reason. The Abu Ghraib scandal was about the torture and abuse techniques authorized by Bush and Cheney and supported by the vast majority of Republicans actually being photographed and documented. It was an example of what happens when a president unleashes torture in wartime as a legitimate tool. That it could be used to argue against allowing many servicemembers to serve their country without being persecuted for it is simply gob-smacking.

Cooperating with Evil

Three horribly tortured bodies.  Shipped back to their families with their throats cut out.  A string of patently obvious lies and cover-ups.  A story the mainstream media won't fucking report.  A war crime the Obama administration won't investigate and will never prosecute.

Think about all this next time you sing, ". . . o'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave."

Sullivan:

Many branches of government must have been involved in such an act of torture or negligence or both, and the subsequent cover-up - from the FBI, the Justice Department, the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA, and JSOC. The cover-up appears to have been continued by the Obama administration - a staggering surrender to pragmatism that is in fact a cooptation of evil.

This deserves to be the biggest story on the torture issue since Abu Ghraib - because it threatens to tear down the wall of lies and denial that have protected Americans from facing what the last administration actually did. Notice that these torture sessions - so severe they killed three prisoners - were conducted in June 2006. Long after the original crisis was over. Long after we have been told real torture sessions occurred. They were part of an ongoing torture program whose methods were so extreme that the Pentagon has already conceded that over a dozen prisoners had been tortured to death and up to a hundred US authorized deaths-by-torture are alleged by many human rights groups.

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. The investigation must be conducted by an independent prosecutor - Patrick Fitzgerald comes to mind - or by the Red Cross or an international body. It must go up the chain of command to the very top to find the real people who are responsible for this war crime and three homicides.

Among those who need to be subpoenaed are the former president and vice-president of the United States.

I grew up believing America was the guardian of the Free World.

But quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

America the Terrible?

It's a year today since President Obama was inaugurated. There is much to be glad of regarding his first year in office. But there are some things that deserve closer scrutiny, too.

When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great.” Toward that end, the president issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo Naval Base “shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order.” Obama has failed to fulfill his promise. Some prisoners there are being charged with crimes, others released, but the date for closing the camp seems to recede steadily into the future. Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration with crimes that occurred during the George W. Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.  --Scott Horton

"Camp No," Guantanamo

A must-read if you give a goddamn at all about the values and the future of this nation:  Scott Horton's riveting, gut-wrenching expose in Harper's of the three Gitmo prisoners apparently tortured to death by American forces in 2006.

Sullivan: 

But of course, if you weren't a jihadist before you arrived in Gitmo, you sure as hell would be by the time they let you out.  I would be.

And especially if you knew that American soldiers in Iraq are using - right now, in 2010 - government-issued rifles with Bible verses engraved on the sights.

Fox/GOP Inaugurates Goddess Worship

Hear, O America, Sarah is our God, and Glenn Beck is her prophet. . . . 



"I think a voter first needs to sincerely know who that candidate is, to see what their track record is, and to see if they have lost their soul along the way."  Sarah Palin.

Andrew Sullivan:

The Ailes launch of a new political-media party is being framed around Palin as a "reluctant to serve" outsider, a new Washington combined with Esther. Hence her resignation is a reason to support her! It proves that she was too pure, too Godly, to survive the worldly political corruption that infects everything in Satan's capital city, Washington. And that's why the elites will do everything to destroy her - not because they have some idea that a political leader should not be a congenital liar or ignorant of fifth grade history or devoid of any relevant experience - but because they are on the side of Satan.

Ailes' new political-media party is fueled by Beck's integration into the paranoid far right, aided by O'Reilly's fading but still significant grip on ageing Reagan-Democrats, and galvanized by Hannity's nightly unvarnished propaganda and endless demonization of all things not-Republican. But until Ailes found Palin - a figure who instantly short-circuits rational thinking in those who support and oppose her, he had not yet found the sub-rational rallying point.

Now he does: the fusion of Fox Barbie-doll beauty, marinated in evangelical Christianity, mouthing every cliche that survives from the Reagan era until it has no relation at all to reality, propelled by what former Christianist Frank Shaeffer has called "the deepening inferiority complex suffered by the evangelical/fundamentalist community."

This FNC/RNC merger is another threat to reasoned discourse in public life, because it is a showman's concoction of very powerful emotional elements: resentment, sex, religion, anger. It creates its own reality. "We Do Not Torture"; everyone in Gitmo was the "Worst of the Worst"; the stimulus lowered growth; all the debt is Obama's fault; Obama is a Muslim and non-American; the White House is stacked with the Islamist/socialist enemy within; if we had not bailed out the banks, we would be roaring back from the recession; Obama wants to ignore the war in order to effect a radical transformation of America into some kind of scary version of France and Waziristan. And on and on. I'm not exaggerating. Listen to these maniacs.

The last idea was fomented by Dick Cheney. And they are waiting for their moment: another terrorist attack that they will blame on the deliberate negligence of Barack Obama. Then the Dolchstoss card, played only faintly so far by Cheney and Giuliani, will be played with a crudeness and radicalism that could well be explosive. You think they won't pull that trigger? Dream on.

This new political-media conglomerate endorses a supreme executive unrestrained in his or her conduct of the war against Islam (for that is the real import of the Giuliani complaint), and empowered to seize anyone anywhere and torture them in the name of national security. It is also critically connected to the settlement movement in the West Bank - for Palin's vision of more and more Jewish population expanding outwards in that region is part of the plan for the End-Times. Hence its belief in waging war on Iran.

Non-believing people have a hard time swallowing all this. It seems so wacko. Religious people who have had any experience of fundamentalism in their lives know it all too well.

Forget the RNC, Michael Steele or John Boehner. Ignore Romney.The new RNC is FNC. Roger Ailes is creating a new political entity that could redefine the right in America for a generation, and if it gets to power, will make the two terms of George W. Bush look like a golden era. No one in the GOP can stop this. Because Ailes now has their entire base in his hands. What he frames they will believe. When McCain surrendered to Palin, it was his last - and unintended - blow to a sane or responsible conservatism.

Jesse Ventura Slams Bush, Cheney

Macho man Jesse Ventura - Vietnam vet, Navy SEAL, and former Governor of Minnesota - tells it like it is on torture and the Bush regime:

Give me Dick Cheney, a waterboard, and one hour, and I'll make him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.

What America Do You Believe In?

Andrew Sullivan has another fine post today on official torture practices of the previous administration:

Here is what one FBI agent said he saw at Guantanamo (and God knows what went on there after the FBI walked out of the program):

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."

If you believe that America cannot survive without doing this to human beings, then what exactly is the America you believe in?

Compare all this with the hysterical reaction of James Dobson to the idea of hate crimes legislation and gay marriage in the clip I posted yesterday.

Sullivan also picked up on the Southern Baptist Convention's statement against torture - my, how convenient of them to take a stand on this, now that the political winds are shifting. Where the hell have they been all these years while Bush & Co. were committing their crimes without a murmur of criticism from the Christian right? Statement by Richard Land, president of the SBC's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission:

"It violates everything we believe in as a country," Land said, reflecting on the words in the Declaration of Independence: that "all men are created equal" and that "they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."

"There are some things you should never do to another human being, no matter how horrific the things they have done. If you do so, you demean yourself to their level," he said.

"Civilized countries should err on the side of caution. It does cost us something to play by different rules than our enemies, but it would cost us far more if we played by their rules," Land concluded.

The Southern Baptist Convention is America's largest non-Catholic denomination with more than 16.2 million members in over 44,000 churches nationwide.

What exactly is the America you believe in?

Sullivan on "elected tyranny"

Permanent, universal and secret powers to detain and torture people using the full force of state power strike me as inimical to the Western experiment in human history, or indeed to any society that prizes freedom. The fact that arguably the leading conservative intellectual in Washington, Charles Krauthammer, has openly supported the power of the president to torture solely on his own discretion and minimally if it could save one single life reveals how much contempt the current right has for individual liberty. This argument, mind you, is not even made retroactively; it is being made proactively - and the Bradbury memo outlines an ongoing permanent torture apparatus at a president's disposal.

There comes a point, in other words, when the executive's legitimate power to act in an emergency to save lives morphs into a de facto re-making of the constitution to grant the presidency the powers of a pre-modern monarch - subject solely to the voters' four year "moment of accountability."

To my mind, this is an elected tyranny. And the first Americans would gladly have lost a few cities - and countless lives - to resist it.

Sullivan also posts this picture of John Walker Lindh, and quotes from a reader's email:

The first American to get Abu-Ghraibed, long before Americans knew they were capable of such an exotic verb. The first to inspire Donald Rumsfeld to issue the order "Take the gloves off," and the first to be on the order's receiving end. The first to be denied medical treatment, the first photographed naked and bound, the first taunted while blindfolded, the first--certainly the first--to have SHITHEAD scrawled on his blindfold, the first whose digital photos made their way round the world as souvenirs, the first denied access to the Red Cross, the first to be ushered into a legal limbo created ex nihilo by the administration's notions of executive power...

John Walker Lindh was blindfolded and duct-taped naked to a stretcher in Afghanistan. He was being held in a shipping container, and he had a bullet in his thigh, and by the time an FBI agent interrogated him, the bullet had been in his thigh for nearly two weeks and the wound was starting to stink. "Of course, there are no lawyers here," the agent told him, and two days after he gave his statement, he was moved to a ship in the Arabian Sea and the bullet was finally extracted.

The point here is not whether Lindh, or anyone else held by American forces, did something deserving of prosecution and punishment; it's up to the courts to decide that by means of a fair and open trial. Rather, the point is all about barbaric punishments and torture, which are both illegal under our own laws as well as revolting to a civilized mind; AND the unlimited, unrestrained power of the government to apply any or all of the above to you or me - in secret, without limit - at any time, for any reason, on the mere whim of the President.

Violence in wartime or peacetime must be met with force, and lethal force if necessary; and evildoers must be punished. But, as every schoolchild on a playground knows, there is a sadistic streak always lurking in the shadows of human nature, ready to lash out if absolute power gives it an opening. That is why we have a Constitution, a Bill of Rights, and a long tradition of the rule of law, not of men, and not of kings who answer to no one and recognize no limit on their powers.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and all that criminal crew unleashed that beast, in the name of us all; if we do not utterly repudiate and exorcise that shameful thing from the halls of the Republic, a new Dark Age will surely come, and a worse one than has ever been known, "made more dark and more sinister by the lights of a perverted science" - to use Churchill's famous phrase.

Don't think it can't happen here. Don't think it can't happen to you. It very easily can, as a little reading of history will show. "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance" - a phrase of Jefferson's often quoted by military minded folks, has a particular relevance to our own day, after Bush and his cronies have proved what depths of moral degredation people of their ilk are capable of reaching when they attain the heights of power.

Waterboarding for Jesus

A new poll from the Pew Forum reveals that white evangelicals, and people who attend church at least once a week, are the groups most likely to approve of torturing suspected terrorists. How very, very sad. See the results for yourself:

Comparable percentages of Republicans (15%) and Democrats (12%) believe that the torture of suspected terrorists to gain important information is often justified, but twice as many Republicans as Democrats say torture is sometimes justified (49% vs. 24%). Similarly, while nearly identical percentages of Republicans and Democrats say torture under these circumstances is rarely justified, 38% of Democrats believe the torture of suspected terrorists is never justified, compared with 14% of Republicans.

(Honk to Andrew Sullivan)

"Believe Me, It's Torture"

Writer Christopher Hitchens, who previously had rejected the notion that waterboarding was torture, changed his mind after voluntarily submitting to the procedure last year, as shown in this video. From his Vanity Fair article about the experience:

If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

Hitchens goes on to relate the arguments of Malcolm Nair, author of The Terrorists of Iraq, against the use of waterboarding by the United States:

1. Waterboarding is a deliberate torture technique and has been prosecuted as such by our judicial arm when perpetrated by others.

2. If we allow it and justify it, we cannot complain if it is employed in the future by other regimes on captive U.S. citizens. It is a method of putting American prisoners in harm’s way.

3. It may be a means of extracting information, but it is also a means of extracting junk information. (Mr. Nance told me that he had heard of someone’s being compelled to confess that he was a hermaphrodite. I later had an awful twinge while wondering if I myself could have been “dunked” this far.) To put it briefly, even the C.I.A. sources for the Washington Post story on waterboarding conceded that the information they got out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was “not all of it reliable.” Just put a pencil line under that last phrase, or commit it to memory.

4. It opens a door that cannot be closed. Once you have posed the notorious “ticking bomb” question, and once you assume that you are in the right, what will you not do? Waterboarding not getting results fast enough? The terrorist’s clock still ticking? Well, then, bring on the thumbscrews and the pincers and the electrodes and the rack.

Show and Tell: Waterboarding

An excerpt from one of the torture memos, set to music:

Watch a volunteer actually being waterboarded:

AND IT'S NOT FUCKING TORTURE?

Oh please. There's no debate possible on this, guys. And we just don't do this in America.

Not.Ever.

Still having trouble making up your mind? Listen closely to the following, and keep your eye on the spinning elephant:

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F-Bombing Fox News

There can be no debate on the morality of torture: this is the clearest choice between good and evil you will ever see, despite the Righteous Right's murky attempts to confuse the issue.

Yet even among conservatives, it seems light is beginning to dawn. As witness Fox News anchor Shepherd Smith's passionate outburst during a discussion of the subject on April 22:

THIS IS AMERICA. WE DON'T FUCKING TORTURE. Period. Amen. End of story.

On a related note, an ABC/Washington Post poll last week of 1072 adults nationwide found that only 21 percent identify as Republican (and 35 as Democrat, 38 as independent). That's down from 32 percent Republican at election time last November.

(Here in Texas, 55.5 percent of voters went for McCain, 43.8 for Obama.)

The Republican party - the imperial party, the party of hatred, lies, big business, greed, wealth, war, and torture - is deservedly shrinking into irrelevance and obsolescence. But the remaining true believers are a hard, mean, nasty bunch; and that's dangerous.

Truth, Justice, and the American Way?

A couple of days ago, the Obama administration told a federal judge that it would release photographs of abuse of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq, as asked by the American Civil Liberties Union in a 2003 Freedom of Information Act request. ABC News reports that Dr. Mark M. Lowenthal, a former Assistant Director at the Central Intelligence Agency during the Bush administration, calls the ACLU's actions "prurient" and "reprehensible."

Lowenthal said the president's moves in the last week have left many in the CIA dispirited, based on "the undercurrent I've been getting from colleagues still in the building, or colleagues who have left not that long ago."

"We ask these people to do extremely dangerous things, things they've been ordered to do by legal authorities, with the understanding that they will get top cover if something goes wrong," Lowenthal says. "They don't believe they have that cover anymore." Releasing the photographs "will make it much worse," he said.

Even though President Obama has announced that the Justice Department will not prosecute CIA officers who were operating within the four corners of what they'd been told was the law, Lowenthal says members of the CIA are worried. "They feel exposed already, and this is going to increase drumbeat for an investigation or a commission" to explore detainee treatment during the Bush years, he said. "It's going to make it much harder to resist, and they fear they're then going to be thrown over."

Which is a good development, to my way of thinking. Lower-level officers and employees of the United States Government should think twice about carrying out illegal and immoral orders, no matter what Administration is in power; in fact, they should refuse to follow such orders.

The Nuremberg trials and the Tokyo War Crimes trials established the principle that "I was only following orders" is not at all a sufficient defense when it comes to violations of fundamental human rights and basic decency: this country along with its World War II allies prosecuted and punished a great many German and Japanese leaders and their subordinates for carrying out such orders.

Just imagine how different, how very different, the story of the Nazi regime would be if masses of German government employees as well as German soldiers had refused to follow the inhuman policies of the Nazi government.

Imagine how very, very different the world would be if everyone believed more strongly in "love your neighbor as yourself" rather than "my country, right or wrong."

As to who should be investigated and charged with war crimes now, in this country, well, that remains to be seen; I think the country, or at least the great flag-waving mass of ordinary people who don't want to believe anything truly evil has been done in their name, is just now starting to wake up to the fact that the schoolbook picture of America as a cartoon-colored fantasyland where nobody in government ever tells a lie or does anything wrong - is utterly false.

What I say is, let all the facts be uncovered and published, and then let the truth fall where it belongs. Andrew Sullivan:

It's the elite that doesn't want accountability. Because it's their asses on the line.

And:

There is a difference between good faith mistakes and a criminal conspiracy to violate and make a mockery of the rule of law. That's why a real investigation of all of it - including the alleged results - needs to take place and take its time. Give it two years to report, to allow emotions and tempers to cool. Then and only then make a decision on prosecution, so that there is no scintilla of haste or heat.

To close one's eyes and ears to the shocking, unpleasant, revolting, and highly inconvenient truth is to be a willing partner in all those crimes - a false patriotism that loves a pretty lie better than it loves one's country.

But "when I was a child, I thought as a child, and spoke as a child"; yet "now is the time to put away childish things."

It's hard, very hard, to tear one's self away from that pretty grade-school image of America; just as it is very hard to grow up and realize that your own mother and father are, after all, only human, and do make mistakes - sometimes very serious ones. Dysfunctional families are the ones who have lots of secrets, who tell long-running lies to outsiders and to one another in order to keep up appearances, who neglect the truth behind the facade they show to the world, who don't deal with the real problems at the heart of things.

Likewise, I would suggest that a true patriot is the one who educates himself to see past the rosy, false, Disneyesque myths about his country to see it as it really is - and then works to make right what is wrong, and to lift up what is fallen: "that government of the people, by the people, and for the people should not perish from the earth."

Listen to the words, not just the music, of this song - about an abusive family - or a dysfunctional nation?

Mac Thornberry: King of Denial

Squeaky-clean Mac Thornberry, a Congressman from Texas, thinks people are being "too free" with the use of the word torture for those nice, neat "doctor-supervised" "clinically controlled" "enhanced interrogations." He doesn't see anything wrong with all that. What torture?

And he's much more concerned about morale at the CIA than morality in the White House.

This is the kind of dickhead my neighbors just love all to pieces out here on the prairie, and will keep re-electing till Kingdom Come. I'm surrounded by them, millions of them.

Please send chocolate.

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Hate Thy Neighbor

World homosexuality laws, from Wikipedia: orange, red, and brown indicate criminal penalties for homosexuality, up to life in prison or death.

I'm not an atheist; but I am continually horrified at the many ways in which religion is used to justify the most inhuman, ungodly behavior - which to my mind suggests that men often make God in their own image.

According to a story in the New York Times,

The relative freedom of a newly democratic Iraq and the recent improvement in security have allowed a gay subculture to flourish here. The response has been swift and deadly.

In the past two months, the bodies of as many as 25 boys and men suspected of being gay have turned up in the huge Shiite enclave of Sadr City, the police and friends of the dead say. Most have been shot, some multiple times. Several have been found with the word “pervert” in Arabic on notes attached to their bodies, the police said.

Iraq remains religious, conservative — and still violent. The killers, the police say, are not just Shiite death squads, but also tribal and family members shamed by their gay relatives. (And the recent spate of violence has seemed aimed at more openly gay men, rather than homosexuality generally.) . . .

Clerics in Sadr City have urged followers to help root out homosexuality in Iraqi society, and the police have begun their own crackdown on gay men.

“Homosexuality is against the law,” said Lt. Muthana Shaad, at a police station in the Karada district, a neighborhood that has become popular with gay men. “And it’s disgusting.”

For the past four months, he said, officers have been engaged in a “campaign to clean up the streets and get the beggars and homosexuals off them.”

Gay men, he said, can be arrested only if they are seen engaging in sex, but the police try to drive them away. “These people, we make sure they can’t get together in a coffee shop or walk together in the street — we make them break up,” he said. . . .

In 2005, the country’s most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a religious decree that said gay men and lesbians should be “punished, in fact, killed.” He added, “The people should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing.” The language has since been removed from his Web site.

Boston EDGE reports:

An Iraqi GLBT advocate living in exile claims that gay men in Iraq are being subject to a loathsome, and fatal, form of torture: their anuses are being glued shut, after which the victims are force-fed a mixture that induces diarrhea, leading to their deaths.

Ali Hili, the London-based leader of Iraqi LGBT, was cited as making the claims in an April 21 article appearing at Queerty.

The Queerty item stated, "Buoying the theory that it’s the ’anal sex’ part of being gay that really infuriates homophobes, Iraqi militants are reportedly gluing shut the anuses of suspected gays.

"Repeat: Gluing shut their anuses. With a glue so resilient, you need surgery to remove it," the article continued.

"This is torture, and some 60 men have already been attacked with it."

The Denver Post:

An openly gay member of Congress, [Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colorado] has been investigating the treatment of gays in Iraq for several months, and last week he spoke through a translator by phone to a transgender Iraqi man who said he had been arrested, beaten and raped by Ministry of Interior security forces. Human-rights groups tracking the issue also passed Polis a letter, allegedly written from jail by a man who said he was beaten into confessing he was a member of the gay-rights group Iraqi-LGBT. The group said the man had been sentenced to death in a court in Karkh and finally executed.

"Is there anyone to help me before it is too late?" said the letter. Its author's name was being withheld to protect his family.

Polis carried some of that evidence with him to Iraq and presented State Department officials in Baghdad with a letter outlining the allegations and pressing members of the Iraqi parliament's human-rights committee.

"We will see whether the Iraqi government is serious about protecting the human rights of all Iraqis, and we can also see what role our own State Department can play in helping to protect this minority in Iraq," Polis said by phone Wednesday after leaving Iraq.

The Guardian (UK) points out the link between religious hatred and political oppression:

When human rights are undermined, those responsible sometimes claim to be defending virtue and national interests. In late 2001, as drastic measures were brought in supposedly to defeat terrorism, US attorney general John Ashcroft condemned critics: "to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil." Many people were convinced, or intimidated into silence. The grim consequences continue to come to light.

The rhetoric of patriotism and morality is currently being used to try to justify the same gender marriage (prohibition) bill in Nigeria. Sex between men is already illegal, but this bill could be used to imprison people of the same sex who live together "as husband and wife or for other purposes of same sexual relationship" and anyone who "witnesses, abet[s] and aids" such a relationship. Not surprisingly, it has been condemned by human rights activists in Nigeria and internationally. . . .

In a statement supporting the bill, [Anglican] Archbishop Akinola starts with his own (contested) interpretation of the Bible, and warns, "Any society or nation that approves same sex union as an acceptable life style is in an advanced stage of corruption/moral decay. This bill therefore seeks to shield Nigeria from the complete annihilation that will follow the wrath of God should this practice be accepted as normal in this land." . . . The fact that these dire predictions have not come to pass elsewhere in the world does not deter him. . . . In this apocalyptic worldview, it can be too risky to love one's neighbour as oneself.

But violating human rights ultimately damages morality and national wellbeing. According to a former judge advocate general of the US Navy, Admiral Hutson, "In dealing with detainees, the attitude at the top was that they are all just terrorists, beneath contempt and outside the law so they could be treated inhumanely . . . we had Abu Ghraib and its progeny. The self-respect of the military and the country was diminished. Our international reputation will be tarnished for generations." The Nigerian authorities should take note.

Meanwhile, back here in the land of the free and home of the brave: former New Hampshire Governor John Sununu, who was White House chief of staff under Bush 41, and is the current chair of the NH Republican Party, calls equal rights for LGBT people "garbage."

Did you catch that, God?