George McGovern on impeaching Cheney and Bush (from 2008)

In honor of George McGovern's passing, I'm reposting in full a post from 01/06/2008 which is one illustration of why I respected the man so much.

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Former South Dakota Senator and 1972 Democratic Presidential candidate George McGovern has an op-ed in the Washington Post today on impeachment, Why I Believe Bush Must Go 01/06/08. I'm pleased to see that he gives a reasonable description of the current partisan atmosphere:

Of course, there seems to be little bipartisan support for impeachment. The political scene is marked by narrow and sometimes superficial partisanship, especially among Republicans, and a lack of courage and statesmanship on the part of too many Democratic politicians. So the chances of a bipartisan impeachment and conviction are not promising. (my emphasis)

And the following is straightforwardly true:

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly "high crimes and misdemeanors," to use the constitutional standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team's assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged -- perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion -- by far the highest in our national history.

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in violation of international law. This reckless disregard for life and property, as well as constitutional law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners, including systematic torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

McGovern also has an appropriate description of the Bush Gulag, calling it a "shocking perversion".


And he doesn't forget about the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, which Cheney, Bush and Karl Rove decided to embrace as ethnic cleansing by natural disaster:

In addition to the shocking breakdown of presidential legal and moral responsibility, there is the scandalous neglect and mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. The veteran CNN commentator Jack Cafferty condenses it to a sentence: "I have never ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans." Any impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to act. Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land. It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray. This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot. (my emphasis)

McGovern, a bomber pilot in the Second World War, hasn't forgotten that patriotism is about more than listening to Rush Limbaugh and cheering about killin' foreigners. It also involves commitment to the notion that Andrew Jackson defined of a democratic nation that respects the Constitution.

McGovern, whose wife Eleanor just recently past away, ends on a poignant note:

I believe we have a chance to heal the wounds the nation has suffered in the opening decade of the 21st century. This recovery may take a generation and will depend on the election of a series of rational presidents and Congresses. At age 85, I won't be around to witness the completion of the difficult rebuilding of our sorely damaged country, but I'd like to hold on long enough to see the healing begin.

There has never been a day in my adult life when I would not have sacrificed that life to save the United States from genuine danger, such as the ones we faced when I served as a bomber pilot in World War II. We must be a great nation because from time to time, we make gigantic blunders, but so far, we have survived and recovered.

We could all aspire to be as lucid, engaged and committed to the public goods when we become octogenarians as George McGovern is.

Tags: bush administration, bush gulag, george mcgovern, impeachment, iraq war

Obama's speech on torture and Guantánamo

Joe Conason gives what is probably as generous a view of President Obama's speech on Thursday that it's reasonable to give in Another round for democracy Salon 05/22/09.

I must admit my own mood at the moment is more in line with Digby's satirical take in Let's Get Serious About Fighting Terrorism Hullabaloo blog 05/21/09.

Because as eloquent and helpful as Obama's speech was - and as welcome a contrast to Dark Lord Cheney's sneering pro-torture authoritarian rant - the arguments he articulated so well against the Cheney-Bush extralegal policies also apply to his misbegotten decision to attempt to continue the kangaroo court system.

And parts of his speech were grim:

We are indeed at war with al Qaeda and its affiliates. We do need to update our institutions to deal with this threat. But we must do so with an abiding confidence in the rule of law and due process; in checks and balances and accountability.

How long are we going to keep pretending that we're spending half the military budget of the entire world to protect ourselves against a fanatical cult hiding in the badlands of eastern Pakistan somewhere?

Rule of law and accountability require prosecuting all the perpetrators of torture. Due process means putting these allegedly fearsome terrorists in Guantanamo into the regular civilian and military court systems. Otherwise, those nice words are just hot air.

I know some have argued that brutal methods like waterboarding were necessary to keep us safe. I could not disagree more. As Commander-in-Chief, I see the intelligence. I bear the responsibility for keeping this country safe. And I categorically reject the assertion that these are the most effective means of interrogation. (Applause.) What's more, they undermine the rule of law. They alienate us in the world. They serve as a recruitment tool for terrorists, and increase the will of our enemies to fight us, while decreasing the will of others to work with America. They risk the lives of our troops by making it less likely that others will surrender to them in battle, and more likely that Americans will be mistreated if they are captured. In short, they did not advance our war and counterterrorism efforts -- they undermined them, and that is why I ended them once and for all.

That's the kind of statement against torture that every Democrat in Congress needed to be making since the Abu Ghuraib photos were first published in 2004. And he's dead right in saying that torture "undermine[s] the rule of law", although you can forget about our infotainers in the press corps from comprehending what that means.

But if his administration doesn't prosecute the torture perpetrators, the essential damage to the rule of law done by the Cheney-Bush administration will remain. As I said in an earlier post, ending torture doesn't mean that the Obama administration decides not to do it for pragmatic or PR reasons. It means deterring the Jeb Bush administration from doing it. And that requires prosecuting the perpetrators. The Dick Cheneys of the world have nothing but contempt for pretty rhetoric, as the Dark Lord himself showed in his Thursday speech. Deterring them will take enforcement of the torture laws. For the next set of Dick Cheneys, all the rest is just talk worthy only of their sneers.

This is most discouraging passage of all in Obama's speech:

Now, finally, there remains the question of detainees at Guantanamo who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people. And I have to be honest here -- this is the toughest single issue that we will face. We're going to exhaust every avenue that we have to prosecute those at Guantanamo who pose a danger to our country. But even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States. Examples of that threat include people who've received extensive explosives training at al Qaeda training camps, or commanded Taliban troops in battle, or expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden, or otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans. These are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States.

This comes after an eloquent rebuke of fear-mongering over the issue of Guantánamo prisoners. But what else is this passage but the same kind of fear-mongering? If they can't be tried in the courts, how does anyone know they are a threat?

Look at the categories he cites: "received extensive explosives training at al Qaeda training camps": if this is true, why can't they be charged with membership in a terrorist organization?

"or commanded Taliban troops in battle": in itself, this means nothing. The United States attacked Afghanistan, where the Taliban was the de facto government, though not legally recognized as such by the UN nor by most countries of the world. But they fought the invaders. I supported the American war in Afghanistan in its early years. But the idea that someone who fought on the other side is forever a threat is nuts.

This relates to an important failing in the Obama administration's legal clean-up of the mess created by Cheney and Bush. International law requires that prisoners captured on the battlefield have their status ruled upon by an independent tribunal to determine if they qualify as prisoners of war. I've never understood why the Obama administration didn't immediately incorporate that into its plans. We are still fighting in Afghanistan against enemies we call the "Taliban". So if these prisoners can be considered prisoners of war in an ongoing armed conflict, then classify them that way and follow the laws on prisoners of war.

"or expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden": Same question as above, if this is true, why can't they be charged with membership in a terrorist organization?

"or otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans": does this mean anything at all? People picked up for no good reason, held in a foreign prison for years away from their homes and families, tortured, denied any kind of trial, hold angry feelings against Americans? Does this mean if they finally get to return home they're going to take the first plane to the US to kill somebody? This is straight-up fear-mongering. If they or prisoners of war, classify them and treat them as such. If they have done something criminal, then try them in the regular courts. Threatening to murder someone is a crime, isn't it? Saying, "Damn, I'd like to kill some Americans" isn't.

I truly don't see how holding any of those alleged threats indefinitely outside the regular legal processes is justifiable or sensible. Obama is trying to con us on this one. Again, if they can't be tried in the courts, how does anyone know they are a threat? Obama didn't tell us.

"If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight." I'd like to take a generous interpretation of this and hope that Obama is talking about prisoners of war here. But protracted preventive detention is just imprisoning people who haven't committed a crime. Having a kangaroo court review it, or having a Committee of Congressional pants-wetters who quaver in fear at the mention of "Scary Terrorist!" won't change it or make it right.

If his speech is an indication, Obama is trying to minimize the number of people he keeps in the Cheney-Bush legal limbo. But if he really wants to clean this up in a way that comports with the rule of law, his argument for preventive detention undermines his case. If preventive detention for some is okay, the Republican bullies and Democratic pants-wetters in Congress will always be upping the ante on how many of the Scary Terrorists against whom we have no evidence to hold them that would stand up in a legitimate court should fall under preventive detention.

And the Jeb Bush administration will have another precedent to rely upon. As Glenn Greenwald puts it:

The fact that a Democratic President who ran on a platform of restoring Constitutional principles -- along with huge hordes of his supporters -- will now advocate creating and institutionalizing a system of indefinite detentions with no trial and no charges of lawbreaking (not only for current detainees but also future ones) is a pretty remarkable event.

... Obama and Senate Democrats are now advocating their own system of indefinite detentions without trial for what will be, by all accounts, the Permanent War on Terror.

Not pretty.

Or, as Juan Cole puts it (Informed Comment 05/22/09):

Obama says he doesn't want to re-litigate the last 8 years. That is frankly disingenuous. The last 8 years was never litigated. And crimes were committed. If they are not addressed, they will become norms, not crimes.

Actually torture will remain a crime. The question is whether the US will become such a rogue state that we will not enforce those laws against Republican administrations that violate them.

Tags: accountability for torture, barack obama, bush gulag, torture

Obama lets two issues get away from him politically

Another of the Abu Ghuraib photos that were scheduled for release May 28 that Obama and the Pentagon decided we shouldn't see
Correction 05/30/09: This photo had been previously published by Salon on 03/26/2006

It's been a painful week or two for us Democratic-base, DFH blogger types. Because Obama let the politics of the closure of the Guantánamo station of the Bush Gulag and the of the torture crimes get away from him. And it didn't have to happen that way.

At the start of his term, he seemed intent on following a law-and-order course on both. He announced he would close the Guantánamo gulag station by the end of 2009 within a year. And he made it clear that his administration would follow the laws against torture.

Both were right in terms of the law and both offered distinct political advantages. But he didn't seem to realize that there was no "bipartisan" compromise that could be used in achieving those things. In both cases, the other party was committing to violating and evading the law. For the Republicans, law-and-order for Republican officials is one thing, for African-American drug dealers or undocumented Latino immigrants it's a very different thing.

Obama and his team didn't seem to realize or to follow the logical and practical implications of those decisions. "Closing Guantánamo" meant shutting down the "military commissions" kangaroo court system. "Ending torture" meant prosecuting all those who violated anti-torture laws during the Cheney-Bush administration. Continuing the kangaroo court plan and discouraging prosecuting torture perpetrators - apart from the very real legal problems with both - was not going to make either issue go away.

The torture issue isn't going away. It's too serious a breach of the rule of law, and the US "footprint" in the world is too big for it to go away. And it happened. The crimes need to be prosecuted, the failure of our system that allowed the crimes to occur in the first place and to go on for so long has to be exposed and remedied. The two are very much connected: if the torture perpetrators aren't prosecuted, that for all practical purposes insures that if a Jeb Bush-Liz Cheney administration takes power in 2013, they will go back to torturing prisoners. The same is true with a Huckabee-Palin administration, or Palin-Romney, or any other Republican combination that is feasible at this point. Ending torture doesn't mean just that the Obama administration doesn't torture people. Ending torture means preventing a Jeb Bush administration from torturing people.

I try to put the legal issue prominently in what I write about torture, because the political establishment of both parties and our sad excuse for a press corps hardly seem to notice that there is a legal issue. It's a very central legal issue, too, with a special status in international law under the Torture Convention that bans political considerations in foregoing prosecuting torturers. If the accused can be tortured with impunity, our legal system as it exists won't work. It's predicated on a fact-finding process that excludes coercing torture from the accused or witnesses. And the notion that torture can save us from the future dangers we conjure up as phantoms of our imagination is pure magical thinking.

As Gleen Greenwald vividly describes, the Republican Party's policy on torture is based on a foundation of limitless fear: Terrorists in Prison: is there anything the Right doesn't fear? Salon 05/20/09. If the purpose of terrorism is to terrorize, then The Terrorists have completely defeated the Republican Party. And, watching Give-'Em-Whine-Harry Reid leading the Senate this to cave to the absolutely ludicrous meme that we can't dare to risk putting convicted terrorists in American prisons, I'd have to say the Senate Democrats look about as badly terrorized as the Republicans this week.

It's really been a bad couple of weeks for Democratic partisans.

To close the Guantánamo prison, you have to do something with the prisoners there. That's why I wasn't concerned until this week about the time-frame of the end of 2009 for closing it that Obama had announced. We have to dispose of their cases some way. Even for those who are completely cleared, that can be a problem. Because returning people to their own countries can't always be done: in a number of places, the fact of their having been in Gitmo brands them as a "terrorist" and might subject them to further imprisonment, torture or death.

For the others, the solution was always painfully obvious. Flush the "military commissions" down the toilet, and put the accused into the civilian and military court systems as appropriate to the particular cases and try them in those established courts under the established rules that have been vetted for over two centuries under the Constitution and before that in English common law. When the Republicans and Democratic pants-wetters like Give-'Em-Whine-Harry complained that Obama was "releasing terrorists onto American soil", Obama could have told them to stop whining and say if you were worried about that you should have been saying so when Dick Cheney and George Bush were screwing the whole thing up so badly.

But he didn't. Now the plan to keep the kangaroo courts is likely to delay indefinitely the closing of the Guantánamo gulag station. And it means Obama has now committed to entangling himself in all the legal and political problems that the kangaroo courts involved under Cheney and Bush. He dug himself deeper into that hole in his speech Thursday in which he said that some terrorists couldn't be convicted in court but were too dangerous to release. That's another way of saying he can't bring himself to shut down the extra-legal system that Cheney and Bush set up. And the same questions remain: if they can't make a case in court, how do they really know how dangerous someone is? Conversely, if they know someone is dangerous because they trained with Al Qa'ida or whatever, why can't they convict them of being a member of a terrorist organization or criminal conspiracy? This is what happens when you try to reinvent the wheel, which is what Cheney and Bush tried to do with the kangaroo court system and now Obama is continuing. The problems that have been worked out over two centuries plus in the regular civil and military courts all know have to be hashed out with the kangaroo court system.

And trying to avoid prosecuting the torturers has already meant that Obama is buying into some of claims for Executive power that Cheney and Bush made.

Despite all that, Obama presumably hoped that both things would diffuse those issues politically. Where did he go wrong on that? My thought is that he should probably sit down with Hillary Clinton for a long talk around that particular question. She could explain to him that any assumption that the Republican Party in Congress cares about doing what's right for the country is risky in the extreme.

And she could also explain to him that, while Democratic Presidents and politicians can often game the Establishment press, the Republicans are better at it because they've had more practice and because very-highly-compensated star pundits and reporters and TV anchors are very sympathetic to corporate conventional wisdom on many issues that aligns them broadly with Republican outlooks, even though that doesn't normally manifest itself as overt partisanship. But, even worse, the press corps is operating with a level of news judgment and analytical ability roughly equivalent to what you would find among the participants at a fraternity keg part at 2:00AM.

Given that combination of malfunctions - an opposition party that doesn't believe in democracy and a press of such bad quality that it will destroy democracy if alternatives don't develop fast enough - Obama was dreaming if he thought taking positions that nominally fit the High Broderist "bipartisan" script was going to put either issue to rest.

As much as the broken press wants to make both issues about Dem-vs.-Rep process, and also Reasonable Serious People vs. Crazed Law-and-Order Leftists, Obama's basic path to solution that follows the law and minimizes the additional political fallout is the same as it was on Inauguration Day: close down the Bush Gulag including Gitmo and put the prisoners into the regular civilian and military justice system, including treating those who are legally prisoners-of-war accordingly; and, prosecute everyone criminally involved in the Cheney-Bush torture program.

Also, recognize today's Republican Party and our broken-down national press corps for what they really are and act accordingly.

As I've said before, several bloggers have been following this and doing great work on it. Rather that try to cite individual posts from the last few days, I'll just link their sites: Digby and dday at Hullabaloo; Glenn Greenwald at Salon; Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel; and, Scott Horton at No Comment. And, of course, Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby keeps up his chosen role as a useful thorn in everyone's side by taking a hard look at the evidence that is being used in the discussions over the torture program and the Bush Gulag.

If you're looking to donate a few dollars to be used against torture, Marcy is a good choice. So are other organizations working on this issue, like the Center for Constitutional Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

And here are a few recent items of note:

Obama's 05/21/09 speech Protecting Our Security and Our Values at the National Archives Museum, prepared text Washington Post 05/21/09

How do the Republicans do it? (cartoon) by Tom Tomorrow Salon 05/19/09

Playing the Pelosi card: What? CIA operatives concealed the truth about torture from a San Francisco liberal? No! by Gene Lyons Salon 05/21/09

What Cheney Said, What Cheney Did by Joe Conason PolitikerNY 05/19/09

Truth & Consequences Commonweal editorial 05/12/09

Bottom line: the torture issue isn't going away.

Tags: accountability for torture, barack obama, bush gulag, torture

Not going away

Admiral Emilio Massera was the last head of the brutal military junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Not only are prosecutions over official misconduct, especially in cases of torture and murder, proceeding still in Argentina. But Italy is now seeking to have the old killer extradited to face charges for the deaths of Italian citizens during the junta. (Massera podrá ser juzgado en Italia Página 12 03.02.2009; Italia consideró que Massera no está demente y lo enjuicia Clarín 05.03.09)

And the Cheney-Bush torture program isn't going away. And in the torture program I'm including the whole Bush Gulag system of which it was an integral part.

I haven't yet read the reportedly gruesome memeos released yesterday on the particular kind of tortures the Cheney-Bush administration explicitly authorized. I want to read through them before I start commenting on that.

But the New York Review of Books has posted the entire International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report on torture in the Bush Gulag. Mark Danner has a two-part article there on the report: US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites 03/12/09; and, The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means 04/02/09. Ray McGovern, a long-time critic of the torture policy, weighs in on the ICRS report at some length in Anatomy of Bush's Torture 'Paradigm' ConsortiumNews.com 04/14/09.

As much as I appreciate the improvements Obama in making virtually across the board from the radically bad and often enough criminal conduct of the Cheney-Bush administration, nothing is going to substitute for a real prosecution of those responsible for the torture program. It has to be done.

Some strong advocates for prosecution of senior officials responsible for the torture program want to exempt low-level perpetrators from prosecution, although there have been a few already. But that makes no sense to me. If senior officials are prosecuted but no lower-level perps, the next set of Dick Cheneys will just take more elaborate precautions to have personal deniability. The people that administered the torture hands-on, the military officers who allowed it to occur under their commands and the soldiers who participated, the doctors and other health-care personal that violated their ethical obligations in the most basic way by participating in torture: they all should be prosecuted. If you need to give lower-level perps deals for reduced sentences or whatever to get testimony against higher-ups, fine. But why should anyone participating in this thing get off free?

Danner writes about how badly our Establishment press keeps failing on the torture issue:

It is a testament as much to the peculiarities of the American press—to its "stenographic function" and its institutional unwillingness to report as fact anything disputed, however implausibly, by a high official — that the former vice-president's [Cheney's] insistence that these interrogations were undertaken "legally" and "in accordance with our constitutional practices and principles" continues to be reported without contradiction, and that President Bush's oft-repeated assertion that "the United States does not torture" is still respectfully quoted and, in many quarters, taken seriously. That they are so reported is a political fact, and a powerful one. It makes it possible to contend that, however adamant the arguments of the lawyers "on either side," the very fact of their disagreement makes the legality of these procedures a matter of partisan political allegiance, not of law. ...

This political fact partly explains why, when it comes to torture, we seem to be a society trapped in a familiar and never-ending drama. For though some of the details provided - and officially confirmed for the first time - in the ICRC report are new, and though the first-person accounts make chilling reading and have undoubted dramatic power, one can't help observing that the broader discussion of torture is by now in its essential outlines nearly five years old, and has become, in its predictably reenacted outrage and defiant denials from various parties, something like a shadow play. [my emphasis]

Our press and our democratic political processes have so far failed badly in dealing with torture. And its now completely normal for Republicans, and some Democrats, to defend torture, though few like to use the word.

But this issue is not going away.

Tags: bush gulag, torture

Good news and bad news

Both from CIA to close secret overseas prisons, end security contracts by Jonathan Landay, McClatchy Newspapers 04/09/09. The good news:

The CIA is decommissioning the secret overseas prisons where top al Qaida suspects were subjected to interrogation methods, including simulated drowning, that Attorney General Eric Holder, allied governments, the Red Cross and numerous other experts consider torture, the agency said Thursday.

In an e-mail to the agency's work force outlining current interrogation and detention policies, CIA Director Leon Panetta also announced that agreements with the private security firms guarding the so-called black sites will be "promptly terminated," and contractors no longer will be used to conduct interrogations.

The bad news:

Panetta, however, said that CIA officers who were involved in interrogations using "enhanced" methods authorized by the Justice Department during the Bush administration "should not be investigated, let alone punished."

Not even investigated? This is a terrible idea. I hope the Justice Department does the right thing, the thing that in my understanding the law requires them to do, which is to investigate and prosecute everyone involved in the torture program.

I just don't buy the notion that "lower-level" perpetrators should get a free pass. Absolutely, the authors of managers of the policy, from senior civilian officials to any of our infallible generals who acted illegally, should be prosecuted according to the law. And sent to do serious prison time if convicted.

But the people that administered the torture hands-on, the military officers who allowed it to occur under their commands and the soldiers who participated, the doctors and other health-care personal that violated their ethical obligations in the most basic way by participating in torture: they all should be prosecuted. If you need to give lower-level perps deals for reduced sentences or whatever to get testimony against higher-ups, fine. But why should anyone participating in this thing get off free? There is no good reason. It's just protecting criminals from the legal responsibility for their crimes.

Tags: bush gulag, cia, torture

This isn't going away

Mark Danner reports for the New York Review of Books on a confidential report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on how the torture policy operated in the Bush Gulag (Al Gore's name for the Cheney-Bush administration's series of secret prisons and torture centers): US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites 03/12/09; 04/09/09 issue. He also discusses it in a podcast, Mark Danner on the ICRC Report on US Torture 03/14/09.

Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's longtime friend and assistant, also writes about the torture policy in Some Truths About Guantanamo Bay 03/17/09 at Steve Clemons' Washington Note blog. Wilkerson still tries to minimize or avoid the significance of his friend Powell's highly-likely participation in war crimes as Bush's Secretary of State. But he makes some very important points, such as the fact that those first captured in Afghanistan to be sent to the Gulag were haphazardly selected for imprisonment and torture:

... several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.

But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers. They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released. I am very sorry to say that I believe there were uniformed military who aided and abetted these falsehoods, even at the highest levels of our armed forces. [my emphasis]

The crimes involved in the torture policy need to be prosecuted. From the administration officials and government attorneys that designed and tried to provide legal alibis for it, to the people who carried out the torture with their own hands and feet, and everyone in between.

A "truth commission" just isn't enough. Without actual prosecutions and serious prison time for the perps, it's virtually guaranteed that Jeb Bush or some other Republicans will repeat the same crimes and worse when they next take control of the Presidency.

Tags: bush administration, bush gulag, torture, war crimes

George McGovern on impeaching Cheney and Bush

Former South Dakota Senator and 1972 Democratic Presidential candidate George McGovern has an op-ed in the Washington Post today on impeachment, Why I Believe Bush Must Go 01/06/08. I'm pleased to see that he gives a reasonable description of the current partisan atmosphere:

Of course, there seems to be little bipartisan support for impeachment. The political scene is marked by narrow and sometimes superficial partisanship, especially among Republicans, and a lack of courage and statesmanship on the part of too many Democratic politicians. So the chances of a bipartisan impeachment and conviction are not promising. (my emphasis)

And the following is straightforwardly true:

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly "high crimes and misdemeanors," to use the constitutional standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team's assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged -- perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion -- by far the highest in our national history.

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in violation of international law. This reckless disregard for life and property, as well as constitutional law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners, including systematic torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

McGovern also has an appropriate description of the Bush Gulag, calling it a "shocking perversion".


And he doesn't forget about the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, which Cheney, Bush and Karl Rove decided to embrace as ethnic cleansing by natural disaster:

In addition to the shocking breakdown of presidential legal and moral responsibility, there is the scandalous neglect and mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. The veteran CNN commentator Jack Cafferty condenses it to a sentence: "I have never ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans." Any impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to act. Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land. It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray. This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot. (my emphasis)

McGovern, a bomber pilot in the Second World War, hasn't forgotten that patriotism is about more than listening to Rush Limbaugh and cheering about killin' foreigners. It also involves commitment to the notion that Andrew Jackson defined of a democratic nation that respects the Constitution.

McGovern, whose wife Eleanor just recently past away, ends on a poignant note:

I believe we have a chance to heal the wounds the nation has suffered in the opening decade of the 21st century. This recovery may take a generation and will depend on the election of a series of rational presidents and Congresses. At age 85, I won't be around to witness the completion of the difficult rebuilding of our sorely damaged country, but I'd like to hold on long enough to see the healing begin.

There has never been a day in my adult life when I would not have sacrificed that life to save the United States from genuine danger, such as the ones we faced when I served as a bomber pilot in World War II. We must be a great nation because from time to time, we make gigantic blunders, but so far, we have survived and recovered.

We could all aspire to be as lucid, engaged and committed to the public goods when we become octogenarians as George McGovern is.

Tags: bush administration, bush gulag, george mcgovern, impeachment, iraq war

"I cannot explain it."

Why do our infallible generals have a credibility gap with the public? A disgraceful example named Gen. Thomas Hartmann illustrates why in his testimony defending the military's conduct in the Guantánamo station of the Bush Gulag ("Bush Gulag" is Al Gore's term). TPM Veracifier has the video:



I'm glad to see Sen. Dick Durbin continuing to pursue his own concern about the torture policy. But he also provided a sad and dramatic example of why the Democrats haven't been as effective as they should have been as the opposition party back in June of 2005 when he foolishly and unnecessarily backed down from criticizing torture in the face of ridiculous attacks that he should have simply brushed off. See my posts, Dick Durbin's apology 06/22/05 and It's public self-criticism for heretics now 06/23/05.

Tags: bush gulag, dick durbin, guantánamo, thomas hartmann, torture

Torture in the Bush Gulag: The issue isn't going away

"I wouldn't join the International Criminal Court. It's a body based in The Hague where unaccountable judges and prosecutors can pull our troops or diplomats up for trial.

"And I wouldn't join it. And I understand that in certain capitals around the world that that wasn't a popular move. But it's the right move not to join a foreign court that could - where our people could be prosecuted." - George W. Bush 09/30/04

"Men without conscience are capable of any cruelty the human mind can imagine." - Dick Cheney 01/26/05

"The President is always right." - Steve Bradbury, Acting Deputy Attorney General, 07/11/06

The Christian Science Monitor, which still commits acts of real journalism, has an important article out, Beyond Padilla terror case, huge legal issues by Warren Richey 08/15/07.

The article is the third in a three-part series by Richey. All quotes here are from the 08/15/07 article. The other two parts are:

US terror interrogation went too far, experts say 08/13/07

US Gov't broke Padilla through intense isolation, say experts 08/14/07

The Monitor also has an editorial commenting on the series, A verdict on Padilla – and the US 08/15/07.

Padilla was the Al Qa'ida wannabe who was arrested in what former Attorney General John Ashcroft promoted as a "dirty bomb" case. Although when the courts finally pushed the Justice Department into filing legal charges, the "dirty bomb" story apparently didn't have enough substance to become part of the formal charges. Because, as Richey writes, "the government's case in Miami included no mention of a dirty bomb."

And the Cheney-Bush administration proved in Padilla's case that they could get away for many months with blatantly denying an American citizen basic due process. And torturing him into a psychotic state.

Richey reports:

Padilla was given due process to file a lawsuit challenging his treatment by the government. But as an enemy combatant, he was stripped of every other constitutional protection and right, including the right to know that a constitutional challenge had been filed on his behalf.

Many legal scholars and intelligence experts say Padilla's ordeal highlights the danger of a government that obtains information through secret, coercive means and then selectively releases some of it to justify its actions.

"This is the hallmark of an authoritarian state," says Larry Johnson, a former State Department counterterrorism official and former analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency.

"At many of the points at which the government said 'dirty bomb,' there was no opportunity to respond for the reason that Mr. Padilla was in solitary confinement and no lawyer had been able to talk to him about the charges," says Diane Amann, visiting law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Defenders of the administration's illegal detention and torture programs like to pose the question, what will happen if those "terrorists" in Guantánamo and other stations of the Bush Gulag are let free? Why, they'll just go "back" to being terrorists!

I wish some of these authoritarians had made the effort years ago to step out of their six-year-old-brain mode and actually think about what the illegal detention and torture program meant.

The rule of law means having prodecures for things like trials and determining guilt that don't depend on the whims of fallible and even twisted individuals like Dick Cheney, Rummy and Abu Gonzales.

Because what has happened here? We have hundreds of people who have been detained, some on possibly good evidence - few veterans of the Bush Gulag have actually been convicted of anything in a real court procedures - and subjected for years in some known cases to treatment that it would be immoral and cruel to inflict on an animal.

Now, every bit of evidence they provided is tainted by the use of torture. And even if the government can scratch together enough evidence not tainted by torture to convict them, they have the problem that if the sadistic treatment to which they subjected the defendents comes before a jury, it will make the government's case far harder to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. As Richey writes:

Although they seek a life sentence, prosecutors introduced no evidence of personal involvement by Padilla in planning or carrying out any specific terrorist plot or violent act.

There is a reason the government's case is so thin, legal analysts say.

If prosecutors brought the dirty-bomb plot or other alleged illegal actions by Padilla into the Miami case, it would open the door for courtroom scrutiny of the government's use of coercive interrogation techniques against Al Qaeda suspects, including Padilla. And that would have taken jurors deep into the shadowy underside of America's war on terror – a journey in Padilla's case that wends its way from his cell on an isolated wing of the US Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, S.C., through covert CIA interrogation sites overseas to an alleged torture chamber in Morocco. (my emphasis)

Secrecy, crime, torture and incompetence are a matched set. If you're breaking the law by torturing, you need to keep it secret. If you have the ability to keep things secrecy, a man like Dick Cheney will fell more free to break the law and commit acts of violence and cruelty. And since secrecy shields the government from the necessary oversight by the Congress, the public and the press (pretending hypothetically that the latter institution were currently capable of such oversight), plain incompetence is also easier to hide. And government officials shielded from accountability by secrecy are also more likely to do their jobs poorly.

In other words, we have the rule of law and legal procedures to avoid just this kind of situation. That's not their only purpose. However much today's authoritarian and neosegregatist Republicans may sneer at the notion that A-rabs or other dark-skinned people have human rights, protecting the individual from improper government action is also a key reason in itself for having the rule of law. Some few Republicans - almost exclusively ones not sitting in Congress - are actually acting like they take they claimed "libertarianism" seriously by objecting the administration's extralegal procedures. But very few of them are doing so.

Then, once you've put a population like the Bush Gulag prisoners into a legal black hole like this administration has done, how does a responsible government then unwind the process and restore the rule of law?

Basically, it comes down to starting to apply the rule of law. Will that mean that some "bad people" will eventually go free? Probably. I have seen at least one report of a former inmate at Guantánamo was found to be involved in terrorist activity somewhere. Though Lord only knows on what kind of evidence that claim was based.

But, you know, if I had been arrested on false charges and tortured for years in a prison and denied all rights of due process, if I were sane enough to think like a normal human being after I got out, it would take a very large gift of divine grace for me not to harbor some serious thoughts of revenge on whatever entity had placed me in that situation. So it would be pretty much a miracle if none of those who have so far endured that experience don't have some thoughts of violent retaliation.

But that's the way the rule of law works. And there are effective legal procedures in place to handle those accused of war crimes, terrorist acts against Americans not falling within the definition of war crimes and conspirators with criminal organizations. There are also effective and well-established procedures in international law, to which the US has voluntarily bound ourselves, to deal with prisoners of war and with determining who should be counted as a prisoner of war and who not.

Restoring the rule of law will mean actually applying those legal procedures. If the government has proper evidence against criminals, it can be used. If their evidence relies on confessions induced by torture, it's just bad evidence and it can and will be thrown out. As Richey writes:

No judge in an American courtroom could permit the introduction of information gathered under such coercive techniques, in part because they carry a high risk of producing unreliable results. If the technique is coercive enough, a subject will say whatever it takes to make it stop, former interrogators say. In addition, the rules of procedure and long-established constitutional protections forbid the use of coerced statements as evidence in a trial.

Also, officials and employees of the government who participated in criminal acts of torture will be liable to prosecution. That's what the rule of law is about.

The torture fans will inevitably whine that those acquitted got off through a "loophole". The truth is that if there's any "loophole" in these cases, far and away the biggest one is that opened by the Cheney-Bush admistration in deciding to throw the rule of law to the winds in these cases.

The position a Republican takes on torture is a good way to tell whether there is anything "libertarian" about them or not. As Richey's article notes, sadly but accurately, when some of Padilla's treatment became public knowledge, "Although civil libertarians protested Padilla's detention without charge, there was no significant public outcry." Certainly there were very few protests from Republican "libertarians".

It's also a pretty good test for the nature of someone's Christian attitude, too. We Christians do claim to worship a God who took human form in Jesus of Nazareth who was brutally tortured to death. My guess is that a God who had that experience is unlikely to look very favorably on those who claim his title as Christians but who support the kind of sick, sadistic practices that have been part of the Cheney-Bush torture program.

Tags: bush gulag, jose padilla, torture

Closing the Bush Gulag

The greatest of the all the Cheney-Bush administration's scandals by far is what Al Gore has aptly called "the Bush Gulag", the network of prisons and torture centers of which Abu Ghuraib, Bagram in Afghanistan and Guantánamo are a part. As Jack Balkin put it at his Balkinization blog (Bush Justice Department Tries to Squelch Legal Representation at Guantanamo 04/26/07):

We should not forget this central point: The Justice Department is trying to do everything possible to prevent Guantanamo detainees from having any rights at all. It wants to get as close as it can to what it the Bush Administration sought before [the] Rasul and Hamdan [Supreme Court rulings] - a law-free zone. But the more the Justice Department tries to eliminate procedural protections and basic elements of fairness for the detainees, the more it undermines its argument that the detainees have a remedy that is just as good as habeas.

In fact, the Justice Department's argument about the adequacy of the remedy has always been disingenuous. The Bush Administration wants what it has always wanted - a legal black hole, a place where it can seize any non-citizen, declare them an enemy of the state and hold them without any means of redress. It wants, in other words, the very absence of law.

Although we have been momentarily distracted by the scandals over Alberto Gonzales, we should remember that the Administration's policies on detention and interrogation ... are the real reason why this Administration, and this Justice Department, have been such a disgrace to our country and to our traditions of government under law. (my emphasis)

I would definitely add the Iraq War to that "real reason", but the point is well taken.

Karen Greenberg takes a look at the practical steps a new President could and should take to shut down Guantánamo in Can Guantanamo Be Closed? What a New President Could Do TomDispatch.com 04/26/07. Her advice would largely apply to the other stations in the gulag, as well.

The whole article is worth reading. She also gives a good summary of the political and legal traps running a torture gulag has created. You snatch a bunch of suspects, usually with little or no actual evidence. You fly them off to a law-free zone and sadistically torture them for years.

But then what do you do with them? Any evidence you do get is extremely likely to be tainted in some way by the torture and other misconduct they experienced in the Cheney-Bush legal Phantom Zone. And putting them on trial in any kind of remotely fair process brings the prospect of their being acquitted. Then you have to let people go who you've advertised to the world as the worst kinds of terrorists. Instead, you could keep them in the gulag and keep on torturing them and sending more prisoners there for the same, and more and more people get caught up in the spiraling dilemma.

Here's a sample of what she says:

How could a new president extricate us from this mess? The next occupant of the White House should start by accepting the following very American principle: Those who are not going to be charged with a crime should be returned to their home country, a third country, or the country where they were initially captured.

Behind this principle lies a reality which must also be accepted. The current Guantanamo debacle has little to do with the rule of law, the Geneva Conventions, or even, for that matter, a realistic assessment of the more pressing terrorist threats to the United States. At its heart of hearts lies a simple fear of political embarrassment.

U.S. officials have consistently held that they are guarding vital national security interests by keeping the never-to-be-charged detainees in custody. However, the sad truth is that, when it comes to most of these prisoners, what's really been at stake is the administration's need to save face by concealing its utter ineptitude. Privately, even Bush administration officials will acknowledge that the detainees were captured and sent to Gitmo capriciously. Rather than housing the "worst of the worst" (as the administration has regularly bragged), Gitmo penned up the easiest to grab, especially in Afghanistan. Often these were simply the individuals that local bounty hunters could provide or who were found on or near the battlefield. Many were put on planes to Guantanamo based on nothing but an American unwillingness to assert with confidence that they would never be a threat to the United States. Instead of masterminds, what the Bush administration netted were cooks, chauffeurs, wanderers, the mentally deranged, and - sometimes - children.

When an administration defiantly adverse to ever admitting error decided not to send home those who had been seized by mistake, it set itself a trap that it has been unable to escape to this day.

She also deals with the inevitable question, what if some people go back to terrorism (or start practicing terrorism for the first time) after they are released? Her answer is basically: deal with it. As she puts it:

It is time to return to a system in which terrorists are tried in courts based on actual evidence. Unless this principle is accepted, Guantanamo won't be closed because there will always be U.S. prisoners who can't be tried and will never be freed.

A corollary to this that must be accepted is: There can be no absolute guarantee that some of the 160 former detainees, once freed and returned, won't commit acts of terror. But in the exponential growth of terrorist threats in recent years, particularly in the wake of the Bush administration's war in Iraq, a few of these small fry simply don't add up to a significant menace. After five years of interrogation, incarceration, and often long periods of isolation, many of them are, in any case, now deemed broken men. If any of them do prove threatening, let them be captured anew and tried for actual acts or plans on any of the many legal grounds available to law enforcement.

Essentially, the argument that we can't let anyone go that Dick Cheney thinks might someday somehow be dangerous is really the argument for tyranny that I suppose is as old as tyranny itself. The good people are in danger, and the government has to act in a lawless way to protect the good people from the evildoers. Then the lawless "protection" starts the cycle I just described - you can't convict them of a legal offense because you resorted to lawless (govermental) Terror and torture to deal with them; but they might be more dangerous now because of the way they were treated; so you have to keep on enforcing the lawless protection on more and more people. And on it goes.

The bottom line is that the next President has to restore the rule of law in place of the torture policy and the Bush Gulag.

Tags: bush gulag, guantánamo, torture

Torture in the Bush Gulag: Remembering the stakes

Scott Horton made a speech at Ole Miss Law School (University of Mississippi) in Oxford MS this past week on the grim subject of torture as practiced by the Cheney-Bush government: Accountability and the Renegade Executive Balkinization blog 03/29/07.

He began, appropriately enough for a presentation in William Faulkner's hometown, with a quote from him, from chapter 3 of Sanctuary:

"The Virginia gentleman one, who told us at supper that night about how they had taught him to drink like a gentleman. Put a beetle in alcohol, and you have a scarab; put a Mississippian in alcohol, and you have a gentleman -"

For some inexplicable reason, Horton ellided the two words "one, who" out. I always think you shouldn't tamper with Scripture without a good reason. (I consider Faulkner's works part of the Biblical canon.)

But Horton's subject was grimmer stuff. He connected the current scandal over the US Attorneys firing with the torture policy:

America today is in the grips of a scandal surrounding the machinery of justice, but it is a scandal being played out on more fronts than the mass media seems to realize. Indeed, in the end it turns on the concept of justice, not simply the bureaucracy that supposedly administers it.

The Cheney-Bush administration's Unilateral Executive theory puts the President and Vice President above the law and the Constitution. Obviously, they haven't been able to fully implement it in all areas. But they've gone much further in undermining democracy and the rule of law in the US than even Nixon did. Horton said:

It [the firing of the US Attorneys] is tied to a plan to use their offices to go after Democrats, whether a basis existed or not, and to pursue a voter suppression program focused on prospective Democrats. In other words, it's pure politics. Not high politics in the sense that Aristotle uses the term. But the crude gutter politics of the partisan hack. This sort of politics is not the exclusive province of one party. But over the last years, one party has exercised a monopoly on political power, and this appears to have led to a particularly virulent strain of political hackery.

Standing alone, this incident would be cause for grave concern. But it's just one aspect of a far broader crisis in which our country is enmeshed. The crisis has its start in the decision to introduce torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment - in contravention of 230 years of US military tradition, stretching back to George Washington's order after the battle of Trenton. Gonzales had a key role in this process as well, backed up by Cheney's chief-of-staff, David Addington and the now ever-present John Yoo. They tell us that they did this to insure that the president, as commander-in-chief, would have all the tools at his disposal that he might need to fight a war against terror. But if we strip the varnish off that, there are unmistakably unsavory elements underneath: one is a recognition that torture is a crime, and the second is a desire to enlist it into the president's arsenal notwithstanding what the law says. (my emphasis)

Horton is right on that point: the torture policy was the leap into the abyss of Presidential lawlessness. Reversing the torture policy and holding all those responsible for it accountable, legally accountable, is a necessary step to restoring the rule of law to the Presidency.

And he reminds us of the real purpose of torture as a government policy:

A former president of the Argentine bar, with whom I spoke two years ago, told me that his experience with torture in Argentina's "Dirty War" under a military dictatorship had been very clear. The dictator wanted torture as a talisman. It would show that the military rulers were above the law - subject to none of the restraints that marked the rule-of-law state. No one was under the illusion that torture techniques would actually get any useful intelligence. On the other hand, it would instill fear, and that was useful. He spoke to me with some conviction: the legal profession must oppose the introduction of torture, he said. In the end you will learn this is not about interrogation practices, it is about dictatorship, about tyranny. The experience of Argentina and Chile backs him up. Is the experience of America different? America is not governed by a military junta, of course. Nor can the brutality of technique and number of victims of the "Dirty War" yet be compared with the dark underside of the war on terror. But it is striking that most of the abusive techniques used by the Argentine junta were adopted and introduced in what President Bush has called the "program." This includes waterboarding, which the Argentinians called el submarino, the cold cell (or hypothermia), long-time standing and sleep deprivation in excess of two days. Nevertheless, this is a question we all should ponder. (my emphasis)

I'm not sure what he meant in saying, "Nor can the brutality of technique and number of victims of the 'Dirty War' yet be compared with the dark underside of the war on terror." It would be nice for Americans to be able to claim that. But I'm not at all sure it's true.

Tags: bush administration, bush gulag, torture, unilateral executive, unitary executive

The Cheney-Bush administration torture and "special rendition" programs

From "Der erster Gewinner war Bush" von Günter Lehofer Kleine Zeitung (Graz/Austria) 03.09.06:

Den Kampf gegen den Terror müssen aber auch the Europäer weiterführen - bei aller Skepsis gegenüber Bush Form des Anti-Terror-Kampfes. Die Europäer brauchen eine "Bush-freie" Anti-Terror-Arbeti mit Polizei, Geheimdienst, wachsamen Bürgern und starken Nerven; Konzepte, die nicht von den Weltmacht-Motiven der USA Durchtränkt sind. ...

Der Terror kann nur siegen, wenn wir die Nerven wegwerfen und ihm ähnlich werden. Sonst ist er selbst in seiner grausamsten Form zu schwach, um uns and unsere Art in Freiheit und Demokratie zu leben auch nur zu gefährden.

But Bush's use of the fear after 9/11 to drive through illegal programs has been a severe loss for American democracy. The admission last fall by Dear Leader Bush about the secret CIA prisons is being spun by loyal Bush supporters as an attempt to reclaim the "moral high ground", as though that were possible with Dick Cheney and George Bush in control of the Executive branch. Republican flack David Brooks gave his version of this line on the PBS Newshour of 09/08/06:

JIM LEHRER: David, the president's secret prisons, 14 terrorists transfer, alleged terrorist transfers, announced, how big a deal was that?

DAVID BROOKS: I think it's a pretty big deal. I think it reflects a couple things.

The first thing, obviously, is, there are some decisions that have forced their - their hand to be a little more open, but, secondly - and almost more importantly - change in the internal power structure of the administration.

There have always been two these tensions in fighting terror, one, to kill the bad guys, two, to have some moral authority to win over people and to - to be a good citizen of the world. And the former camp was winning for about three or four years. And, for a number of reasons, the latter camp is now winning.

The "liberal" viewpoint was taken that evening by Iraq War enthusiast Tom Oliphant, with his pencil neck and bow tie on display as usual:

JIM LEHRER: Do you see it the same way?

TOM OLIPHANT: Sort of.

One reason that I don't think it has proved to be a big deal is that the political content of this move was drained almost immediately. Factually, there is no rush here. I mean, the procedures for trials could be agreed upon tomorrow, and it would still be a long time before there would be any trials.

And, secondly, to the extent there's been a difference of opinion here, as David noted, it's been inside the administration. And it's also been between the president and Republicans in the Senate, and between the politicians in the administration and the uniformed military legal system in the Pentagon.

So, I think, when all this was - happened on Wednesday, there was an expectation of politics that the reality underneath it kind of eliminated.

No wonder this political debate is so impoverished when even the supposedly professional and responsible PBS Newshour presents as the "liberal" viewpoint some mopey, muddled rambling like Oliphant's:

El País editorializes as follows in Más luz sobre Bush 10.09.06, and manages to say the obvious that apparently sailed right though the "liberal" Tom Oliphant's head:

Bush no sólo no muestra propósito de enmienda respecto a sus excesos tras el 11-S, sino que intenta presentarlos como un ejemplo de eficacia en la obtención de información y en la prevención del terrorismo, cuyo fantasma ha vuelto a agitar ante sus conciudadanos al hablar de un país permanentemente en guerra.

El paso siguiente tras reconocer la existencia de cárceles secretas es que se llegue a desvelar dónde se encuentran, lo que podría colocar en difícil situación a países aliados de EE UU, algunos con credenciales democráticas. A la luz de esta revelación, tanto el Parlamento Europeo como el Consejo de Europa deberían reabrir sus investigaciones sobre los vuelos secretos de la CIA y las cárceles donde supuestamente se ha torturado a algunos de estos detenidos, mientras prosigue en varios países, incluida España, la investigación judicial a este respecto. A diferencia de lo que parece pensar la Casa Blanca, se trata de combatir las prácticas aberrantes con la ley, no de modificar la ley para que las prácticas aberrantes se conviertan en normales.

This San Francisco Chronicle editorial also nails Dear Leader Bush for living in An alternative universe 09/08/06:

Talk about doublespeak. President Bush insisted this week that "the United States does not torture. It's against our laws and it's against our values." In the same speech on Wednesday, he announced he would be asking Congress to effectively grant immunity to U.S. interrogators whose tactics may have violated what Bush derided as the Geneva Conventions' "vague and undefined" prohibitions on prisoner abuse, such as "humiliating and degrading treatment."

The president insisted that the CIA's "alternative set of procedures" for interrogating terrorism suspects stopped short of torture, though he refused to describe the tactics in question. ...

Also, on Thursday, the Pentagon's top uniformed lawyers warned that curtailing the suspects' access to evidence against them could violate the Geneva Conventions.

"I'm not aware of any situation in the world where there is a system of jurisprudence that is recognized by civilized people where an individual can be tried and convicted without seeing the evidence against him," said Brig. Gen. James Walker, U.S. Marine Corps staff judge advocate.

Congress must not be cowed into rubber-stamping the administration's requests. There is no contradiction between being tough on terrorism and being respectful of civilized standards for the detention and prosecution of suspects. Remember, this is supposed to be a war not only to preserve our lives, but to defend our values.

The problem, of course, is that for Christian Right Republicans and hardline nationalists like Dick Cheney and Rummy, torture is a positive value.

Tags: torture, bush, bush gulag, rendition, special rendition

Dick Durbin's apology

I'm with Steve Gillard on this one: Don't ask for my help again 06/22/05:

It is that kind of continued gutllessness in the face of rank GOP corruption which enrages many Democrats. We are tired of leaders who will not fight, especially when 15 or so of your collegues can take a pro-lynching stand and have nothing to pay for. Hey, it was just dead black people, so what if 15 Senators didn't have the decency to say lynching was wrong. I bet you'll all have a good chuckle over some Navy Bean Soup in the Senate Dining Room. The GOP can take the most outrageous stands, be totally protected by the media, and you people refuse to actially call them on their antics.

We both know the defense of torture at Guantánamo is reprehenshible, the report you read from came from an FBI agent. Yet because you lost your nerve, you became the issue and not the report. We know most service members are not torturers. But there are those that are and who shame this country and we need to acknowledge that.

People were ready to stand up for you, it's a shame you wouldn't stand up for yourself.

Tags: bush gulag, dick durbin, torture, guantánamo