The plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty used to say, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door."
Now it says, "Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here."
We got the Bush Regime, arguably the most incompetent, corrupt and outright-treasonous Administration in American history. A regime so reckless, savage and gleefully bestial that it made the career-Nixon-hating Hunter Thompson actually pine for the good old days of Tricky Dick: "I miss Nixon. Compared to these Nazis we have in the White House now, Richard Nixon was a flaming liberal."
And, like Nixon, it is more than likely that not a single one of the smirking traitors who nearly wrecked this country will ever spend a day in jail. Instead they remain lodged in our flesh like so many ricin pellets, oozing their poison into our national bloodstream, waddle from one fawning audience to another, worming their way into major media outlets, or dispatching their degenerate children and underlings out into the world the keep their poison pumping.
They soiled our good name, bankrupted the country, shredded the Constitution and kicked the crutches out from under the global economy on their way out the door, and while it is sometimes hard to focus on them through the flames of the world they set on fire, we must.
America could have had justice.
But America didn't get justice.
America got Hopey McChange, who said he wants to look forward, not backward. Who said there must be no "retribution", no "vengeance", no "payback", who said the era of "divisive partisanship" must end.
Four War on Terra stories for a Wednesday afternoon:
1. The House of Representatives just voted No on a resolution to direct the President to remove the United States Armed Forces from Afghanistan within 30 days, or by Dec 31, 2010 if a later date is safer. 65 to 356. H Conn RES 248 was sponsored by Dennish Kucinich of Ohio and had 19 co sponsors. http://clerk.house.gov/evs/201...
Patrick Kennedy (D, RI) is down as a NO vote inspite of this story on HuffPo where he yells at the MSM for not paying attention to this national debate. "We're talking about war and peace, $3 billion, 1,000 lives and no press! No press !" WTF? No vote, dude! http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
The Yes on withdrawal votes were as follows. We thank the 5 Republicans who also voted for this (marked with ••).
Baldwin
••Campbell, John, CA 48
Capuano
Chu
Clarke
Clay
Cleaver
Crowley
Davis (IL)
DeFazio
Doyle
••Duncan John TN- 2
Edwards (MD)
Ellison
Farr
Filner
Frank (MA)
Grayson
Grijalva
Gutierrez
Hastings (FL)
Jackson (IL)
Jackson Lee (TX)
••Johnson Timothy (IL- 15)
Johnson, E. B.
••Jones Walter NC -3
Kagen
Kucinich
Larson (CT)
Lee (CA)
Lewis (GA)
Maffei
Maloney
Markey (MA)
McDermott
McGovern
Michaud
Miller, George
Nadler (NY)
Napolitano
Neal (MA)
Obey
Olver
••Paul, Ron, TX 14
Payne
Pingree (ME)
Polis (CO)
Quigley
Rangel
Richardson
Sánchez, Linda T.
Sanchez, Loretta
Schakowsky
Serrano
Speier
Stark
Stupak
Tierney
Towns
Tsongas
Velázquez
Waters
Watson
Welch
Woolsey
Keeping the pressure on the DoJ as well as John Yoo. CREW continues to get to all that is there or possibly destroyed as our Government joined those we Condemn in Torture and Human Rights violations. Not only leaving our Military Troops wide open to the same leaving us with no ability to condemn nor brings charges on the World Court venue, but opening up same for our own citizens anywhere with same results!
It also greatly weaken our National Security as it was one more of the many Failed Policies, of the previous decade, that has created greater hatreds, not just as to our government done clandestine but also the citizens of our country as we all share the guilt of those policies and leave that wide open with no accountability for crimes committed by those who approved and ordered!
Congratulations, American Psychological Association (APA), on re-writing your guidelines to unambiguously not justify or defend violations of human rights. While a policy of not justifying or defending human rights abuses is not the strongest language possible, APA has unequivocally graduated beyond justifying or defending the ancient black arts of coerced confessions and abject psychological domination brutally secured using physical and psychological crowbars into consciousness.
I don't have a lot to say about this except that a profession that professes to excel at understanding the human psyche probably should not have availed itself of that knowledge to inflict expert levels of long-lasting psychological trauma on their fellow humans, or be associated with those who do, regardless of who asked or paid for such services.
I'll refrain from offering any further sneering congratulations on the nature of these grave lapses in judgment or on the modest language not justifying or defending human rights abuses, and instead offer a heartfelt "thank you" for addressing this oversight at long last, insofar as you have, as well as thanking APA members who withheld their dues and/or support for APA until this policy was unambiguously clarified to not justify or defend human rights abuses.
Let's acknowledge this modest, but unambiguous win in the language of policy for all concerned. Abusers of human rights can no longer use the APA policy to justify or defend themselves.
Dick Cheney is shameless and is eager to be publicly guilty. He has made his life an open, defiant challenge to the US government. Does anyone have the courage to take him down, and unleash the inevitable whirlwind? Or does the entire DC establishment prefer to live in quiet, peaceful acquiescence? Those are the only options at this point. Cheney wants to cast as wide a net of complicity as possible; he wants not just his White House implicated but future ones. Not just the White House, but the executive branch. Not just the executive branch but the legislative and judicial branches as well. He wants as much company as possible so he does not go down as a singular villain. It is working, and will continue as long as our leaders prefer to put their immediate comfort over their obligations.
Yesterday afternoon, former Republican Congressman and 2008 Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr had the audacity to say, "Waterboarding is torture." The reason it took audacity is that he was at CPAC, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. He was promptly booed.
Instead of adhering to the Constitution or the Geneva Conventions, conservative ideological leaders and Republican leaders have decided to shoot for political expediency, stubbornness, and sadism.
This is essentially getting away with murder, or if you like, torture. Margolis has saved Yoo and Bybee from any disciplinary action, relying on Yoo and Bybee's own responses to the charges and what amounts to a generous reading of the law. Margolis basically took Yoo and Bybee's side, that OPR did not apply the necessary framework, over OPR. It amounts to "we cannot know what was in the heads of Yoo and Bybee."
That's how it reads to me, anyway, maybe others will disagree. They can decide for themselves. But basically, another, and perhaps the last, opportunity for accountability and justice for the Bush torture regime, at least from inside the US government, has been squandered.
Olbermann video with Turley here. THANKS to TheMomCat who embedded this video below in comments.
February 19, 2010 WASHINGTON - The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing to examine the Office of Professional Responsibility Report on the Office of Legal Counsel, Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) announced today. The report was released to Congress today.
The hearing will be held Friday, February 26, at 10:00 a.m. Witnesses will be announced in the coming days, and the hearing will be webcast live online.
Eric Holder, Assistant to Attorney General Lindsey Graham, continues to puzzle over who, if anyone, should be brought to justice over mountains of evidence and allegations of torture. The chief difficulty that continues to stymie Holder is the problem of credit assignment. Who in the world can he possibly indict? And where the heck in the complex and confusing chain of command would one begin? If only some whistle-blower had the courage of his convictions to step forward and start naming names, to heck with the reprisals and damn the torpedoes, that would make Holder's daunting problem that much easier.
Mr. Cheney said interrogators should have had the option to use the "enhanced interrogation techniques" his administration approved-including the use of simulated drowning, or "water-boarding." He called himself "a big supporter of water-boarding," which critics say amounts to torture.
"Now, President Obama has taken [those techniques] off the table," Mr. Cheney said. "He announced when he came in last year that they would never use anything other than the U.S. Army Manual which doesn't include those techniques. I think that's a mistake."
Enhanced interrogation techniques aren't torture -- the Bush Administration approved them, right???
A British Court of Appeals has ruled against the Foreign Secretary David Milliband, that the British government can no longer refuse to disclose what MI5 knew about the torture of Binyam Mohamed while in US custody, according to an article published today in the Guardian UK.
UK Foreign Secretary Milliband concured with the ruling only because of previous disclosures in a US Court, which would then preserve the "control principle" of one country doesn't turn loose intelligence without the cooperation of the other, if they share intelligence.
"The foreign secretary spoke last night to Hillary Clinton. He stressed to her that the court had strongly supported the control principle and would have agreed with HMG [her majesty's government] had it not been for the Kessler judgment in the US court last December, which had effectively disclosed the material in the seven paragraphs.
An MI5 officer known only as Witness B is being investigated by the Metropolitan police over his alleged role in questioning Mohamed incommunicado in a Pakistan jail.
Mohamed was detained in 2002 in Pakistan, where he was questioned incommunicado by an MI5 officer. The US flew him to Morocco, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay, where he says he was tortured with the knowledge of British agencies.
The 7 paragraphs that the British Government were trying to hide are below, below the fold. As noticed by commenters under another story at FDL, there are 2 dates. The date in the Guardian story says 17 May 2002 in the first paragraph. The date in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office dot gov dot uk site, has the date as 17 May 2001, with a disclaimer that "we have alerted the Court to a typographic error."
Oh, those pesky typos. What's a year, here or there ? ask Bush & Cheney.
Mayer on Rahm By: emptywheel Friday February 5, 2010 5:13 pm
I first teased out Rahm Emanuel's role in reversing Obama's early efforts to reclaim our country from torture last July. In August, my comments at Netroots Nation focused on Rahm's role in preventing accountability for torture. I kept tracking Rahm's campaign to prevent accountability here, here, and here.
Today, Jane Mayer has an extended profile of Eric Holder that fleshes out what we've all known: Rahm's the guy who killed accountability for torture.
...
All along Rahm's campaign against Greg Craig and Holder he left complaint after complaint that they had ruined the relationship with Congress. This, I suppose, is what Rahm means: doing anything-even those actions dictated by international law-that offend poor Lindsey's sensibilities is a mistake, tantamount to ruining the President's relationship with Congress. And I guess Rahm is okay with that-ceding the President's authority on national security and legal issues to Lindsey Graham.
And look what you get out of that: Lindsey in a snit, pouting that the Attorney General of the United States determined to try criminals in a civilian court. And in response, refusing to close Gitmo.
In other words, we can't close Gitmo because Obama's "crack" Chief of Staff has willingly ceded the authority of the Attorney General of the United States to one Senator from the opposing party, and that single Senator is pouting because the Attorney General might choose law over Kangaroo Courts.
These people are War Criminals.
They are Torturers.
They are Murderers.
All the way up the Chain of Command.
Yes, that includes George W. Bush and Barack Hussein Obama.
Just as guilty as the grunts who at their command raped children with chemical lightsticks in front of their family and sliced up Binyam Mohamed's penis.
And anyone who doesn't support their prosecution to the full extent of the law is no better than a Good German.
"If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us." Robert H. Jackson
Just days after being inaugaurated as America's 45th President, Sarah Palin has announced that her administration will renew the enhanced interrogation programs that began after 9/11.
"We take very, very seriously the threat that potential terrorists expose upon our freedoms, so I decided that we shouldn't take any options off the table. Now every police station in the country will be equipped to interrogate the thousands and thousands of terrorists that are hiding in our country. Until we know how many terrorists there really are in America my baby Trig and the rest of America can never be really safe, doncha know. And we can never really know until we start interrogating random Americans, who should have nothing to fear if they aren't involved with the terrorists. Also, just think of all the new jobs this will create, since we are gonna need a lot of new police officers to deal with all the new terrorists we have to find. Today is a great day for freedom." President Palin said with a wink towards the cameras.
As they say, "just one individual CAN make a difference."
"Prof. Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law, University of Illinois College of Law, of Champaign, Illinois, U.S.A., has filed a Complaint with the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (I.C.C.), in The Hague, against U.S. citizens George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Condoleeza Rice, and Alberto Gonzales (the Accused)." The Complaint is based on the "criminal policy and practice of 'extraordinary renditions' perpetrated upon about 100 human beings," which practice represents "Crimes against Humanity" and are "in violation of the Rome Statute establishing the I.C.C." * (emphasis mine)
The Honorable Luis Moreno-Ocampo
Office of the Prosecutor
International Criminal Court
Post Office Box 19519
2500 CM, The Hague
The Netherlands
Fax No.: 31-70-515-8555
Email: OTP.InformationDesk@icc-cpi.int
January 19, 2010
Dear Sir:
Please accept my personal compliments. I have the honor hereby to file with you and the International Criminal Court this Complaint against U.S. citizens George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice , and Alberto Gonzales (hereinafter referred to as the "Accused") for their criminal policy and practice of "extraordinary rendition." This term is really a euphemism for the enforced disappearances of persons, their torture, severe deprivation of their liberty, their violent sexual abuse, and other inhumane acts perpetrated upon these Victims. The Accused have inflicted this criminal policy and practice of "extraordinary rendition" upon about one hundred (100) human beings, almost all of whom are Muslims/Arabs/Asians and People of Color. I doubt very seriously that the Accused would have inflicted these criminal practices upon 100 White Judeo-Christian men. . . . .
[Note:A reading of the entirety of the Complaint can be found here.
two Department of Justice anonymous sources said that a Senior DOJ official who finalized an Office of Professional Responsibility report, changed the assessment of the torture memo's creator's Jay Bybee and John Yoo's behavior to "poor judgement."
But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed "poor judgment," say the sources. (Under department rules, poor judgment does not constitute professional misconduct.) The shift is significant: the original finding would have triggered a referral to state bar associations for potential disciplinary action-which, in Bybee's case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry.
/snip
Two of the most controversial sections of the 2002 memo-including one contending that the president, as commander in chief, can override a federal law banning torture-were not in the original draft of the memo, say the sources. But when Michael Chertoff, then-chief of Justice's criminal division, refused the CIA's request for a blanket pledge not to prosecute its officers for torture, Yoo met at the White House with David Addington, Dick Cheney's chief counsel, and then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. After that, Yoo inserted a section about the commander in chief's wartime powers and another saying that agency officers accused of torturing Qaeda suspects could claim they were acting in "self-defense" to prevent future terror attacks, the sources say. Both legal claims have long since been rejected by Justice officials as overly broad and unsupported by legal precedent.
John Yoo, a graduate of Harvard and Yale law school, who clerked for SC Justice Clarence Thomas, and served as a torture enabler in the Bush administration at the Dept of Justice from 2001 to 2003, is currently a law professor at the University of CA at Berkeley. http://www.law.berkeley.edu/ph...
Jay Bybee, a graduate of Brigham Young University and BYU's J Reuben Clark Law School, helped John Yoo write the torture rationalization memos for President Bush during his Dept of Justice Office of Legal Counsel tenure from 2001 to 2003. Bybee currently serves on the US Court of Appeals of the Ninth Circuit. http://www.fjc.gov/servlet/tGe...
It is not known at the current time when they will be displaying "poor judgement" again, nor how many fatalities might result.
In December 2007, the Washington Postreported on the first CIA agent to openly admit the government used torture. John Kiriakou says that the CIA used waterboarding on Abu Zubaydah, and that it worked.
Recall that it was later reported that Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times.
Kiriakou said:
"It was like flipping a switch," said Kiriakou, the first former CIA employee directly involved in the questioning of "high-value" al-Qaeda detainees to speak publicly.
In an interview, Kiriakou said he did not witness Abu Zubaida's waterboarding but was part of the interrogation team that questioned him in a hospital in Pakistan for weeks after his capture in that country in the spring of 2002.
He added:
The waterboarding lasted about 35 seconds before Abu Zubaida broke down, according to Kiriakou, who said he was given a detailed description of the incident by fellow team members. The next day, Abu Zubaida told his captors he would tell them whatever they wanted, Kiriakou said.
"He said that Allah had come to him in his cell and told him to cooperate, because it would make things easier for his brothers," Kiriakou said.
God wanted him to co-operate so his brothers wouldn't be tortured as well. Man the CIA is good.
"What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts," he writes. "I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence."
But never mind, he says now.
"I wasn't there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I'd heard and read inside the agency at the time."
[...]
But after his one-paragraph confession, Kiriakou adds that he didn't have any first hand knowledge of anything relating to CIA torture routines, and still doesn't.
So one of the main arguments trotted out to claim that torture works was a lie. This isn't surprising given all the lies from the previous administration. This guy was all over ABC News and other places "admitting" his story to anyone who'd listen and telling us that torture worked. Waterboarding saved lives.
It was just another campaign to make us believe lies the government wanted us to buy.
If accountability is off the table, so is Democracy.
In an age when the rich and powerful have more control over the creation of the law than ever we face the greatest threat to our Democracy we have ever known. We have met the enemy, and he is us.
If the rich and powerful can bribe lawmakers to do their bidding AND those lawmakers are not subject to the same laws they are supposed to uphold than there is no freedom, there is no equality, there is no justice. The biggest threat to our democracy is not a man with a bomb in his pants or a hijacker flying a plane, it is a man with unlimited power and no one that he must answer to. If that man is an American he is capable of doing more damage to America than any terrorist could ever dream of.
If you love freedom and Democracy please join me below the fold.
I spent Martin Luther King, Jr's birthday in Washington, D.C. as part of the Witness Against Torture fast, which campaigns to end all forms of torture and has worked steadily for an end to indefinite detention of people imprisoned in Guantanamo, Bagram, and other secret sites where the U.S. has held and tortured prisoners. We're on day 9 of a twelve day fast to shut down Guantanmo, end torture, and build justice.
The community gathered for the fast has grown over the past week. This means, however, that as more people sleep on the floor of St. Stephen's church, there is a rising cacophony of snoring. Our good friend, Fr. Bill Pickard, suggested trying to hear the snores as an orchestra, when I told him I'd slept fitfully last night.
There is a young boy in Mir Ali, a town in North Waziristan, in Pakistan, who also lies awake at night, unable to sleep. Israr Khan Dawar is 17 years old. He told an AP reporter, on January 14th, that he and his family and friends had gotten used to the drones. But now, at night, the sound grows louder and the drones are flying closer, so he and his family realize they could be a target. He braces himself in fear of an attack.
We're told that we will be more secure if the CIA continually attack the so-called lawless tribal areas and eliminates "the bad guys."
In late May and early June of 2009, while visiting in Pakistan, a man from the village of Khaisor, also in North Waziristan, told us about his experience as a survivor of a drone attack. Jane Mayer, writing in The New Yorker, mentioned that the people operating the drones and analyzing the surveillance intelligence have a word for people like him who managed to survive a blast and run away. They are called "squirters." So, I suppose he would have been considered a squirter.
This man, at some risk to himself, walked a long distance and took two buses to meet with us. Because of travel restrictions, we would not have been allowed to visit him in North Waziristan. His village is so remote that there are no roads leading up to it. Five hundred people live there. Often, western media refers to his homeland as "the lawless tribal area." One day, three strangers entered Khaisor and went to the home of vigil elders. For centuries, villagers have followed a code of hospitality, which demands that when strangers come to your door, you feed them and give them drink. It's not as though you can point them toward a Motel 6 or a 7-11. The strangers were welcomed into the home they approached and they left after having been served a meal. They were long gone when, at 4:30 a.m. a U.S. drone, operated by the C.I.A., fired 2 Hellfire missiles into the home they had visited, killing 12 people, two of whom were village elders. Children were dismembered and maimed.
This is disturbing enough, of course, and should lead to robust calls for an independent inquiry, but the problem may be that almost every branch of the government appears to be implicated in the cover-up that followed the deaths.
Reform Immigration -
March on Washington
