Lean Left

An Elected Dictator
Posted by Kevin

That is what the GOP thinks the President really is:

The Justice Department sent a legal memorandum to the Pentagon in 2003 asserting that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned al-Qaeda captives because the president’s ultimate authority as commander in chief overrode such statutes.

The notion that the President can ignore any law, break any treaty, abandon any restraint as long as he claims he is doing it in the name of national defense is repugnant to the conscience of any decent person and completely at odds with the foundational principles of democracy, liberty and our government. Defending this marks one as the most servile of men, so far gone in fear and hatred and the need for an illusionary father-figure to protect you from the dangers of the world as to render your opinion on how to handle anything more dangerous than a housefly meaningless. Alternately, I suppose you could just be a monster, a person who so revels in the notion of causing others pain that he would throw away three centuries of hard-earned wisdom about the nature of governments and power and freedom to ensure that he could go to bed a night assured that someone was being tortured on his his behalf somewhere.

And save your pixels if you wish to inform me that I am being mean or contemptuous. I am being mean and contemptuous. Contempt is the least of what is owed people who order such practices and people who defend such practices. One of the clearest lessons of history is that unchecked, unsupervised, unaccountable power is the death of individual liberty and personal freedom. Our Revolution was fought over the exercise of just such unchecked powers and our constitution was specifically designed to prevent anyone from accruing unchecked powers under any circumstances. But the Bush Administration and its disgusting little toadies like John Yoo are perfectly content to throw away all of that accumulated wisdom and the modern conservative movement is perfectly willing to defend them. Why, Dear God, am I supposed to treat this frontal assault on the core principles of democracy with respect?

These people have declared war on the very underpinnings of freedom and democracy. They have advocated a legal regime that would have made George III and Pinochet nod their heads in approval. They argue that a President can do anything he wants to anyone one he wants anywhere in the world he wants as long as he says the magic words “national security” first. They want to elevate the President to a kind of elected dictator and give him powers that would make a 17th century European Monarch giggle with glee. When I call these people servile, disgusting, and enemies of justice, morality, decency and democracy I am not insulting them. I am describing them.

April 2nd, 2008 | General, Politics, Legal Issues, Torture | 24 comments

The Ordinary
Posted by Kevin

Imagine a man on vacation, riding an ordinary bus on his way to the ordinary airport where and ordinary airplane is waiting to take him back to his ordinary life. Imagine that the bus tops, short of the ordinary airport, and this man is taken off the bus by an ordinary police officer. But the ordinary police officer has an extra-ordinary reason for taking the man: a cash bonus for every “terrorist” he turns in. Imagine the ordinary man riding, in chains, on a quite extraordinary airplane to a prison where he is kept outside, in the freezing cold and asked daily about things no ordinary man knows of. Where are the terrorists? What are their plans? Who do you know and what are you training to do?

Imagine that our ordinary friend is tortured on a regular basis, so that the torture becomes ordinary. Hung from his arms for days at a time. Beaten with his head underwater so that he is forced to inhale water. Electrocuted so that his body went numb. All to find out the extraordinary things our ordinary man does not and could never have known.

Imagine being sent to another prison, where the ordinary rules of justice and decency don’t apply. Imagine the very extraordinary notion of not being allowed to talk to a lawyer, of never being charged with a crime, of being beaten and deprived of sleep and human company on a regular basis. Imagine police forces — three of them — outside the walls of the prison doing the very ordinary investigations and coming to the unanimous conclusion that our ordinary man is, indeed, an ordinary man with no connection to terrorism at all. Imagine our ordinary man kept in that extraordinary prison, where they beat and freeze and mistreat him to find the answers to questions the police already know he cannot answer, for three and one half years after the police have made that determination. Imagine being let go only after the head of the man’s government personally asked for his release. Imagine the ordinary man being asked to sign a confession stating that he is, indeed, a terrorist as he is being escorted home.

When Kafka wrote about a man caught in a court system that would not tell him what he was imprisoned for an did not give him an opportunity to defend himself against the charges, they called him a surrealist and turned his name into an adjective to describe the peculiar horror he wrote about. Today, that horror is an every day part of the official policy of the government of the United States of America. The government, egged on by people who, in their fear or their racism or their innate viciousness, apologized for torture and threw away concepts like innocent until proven guilty and habeas corpus and independent oversight, abused its power. Imagine that.

March 31st, 2008 | Politics, Legal Issues, Torture | 4 comments

Peggy Noonan Condescends to Barack Obama on “Authenticity”
Posted by KTK

Peggy Noonan mostly praised Obama’s speech, and largely seemed to understand it, which puts her in a minority of conservative commentators. But she criticizes him, near the end of her article, for . . . wait for it . . . not understanding America. Yes, snotty Reaganite lickspittles who made a profession of courting racists and religious bigots with coded signals, demonizing “welfare queens”, glorifying death squads and Nazi war dead, excusing incompetence and ignorance at every turn, and obsessing over wayward blowjobs, now presume to tell candidates of the working-class party what the real America is all about.

March 21st, 2008 | General, Politics, Church & State, Economics, Culture, News & Current Events, Fiasco, Torture | 9 comments

Bush: Now Using The Same Tactics As Japanese War Criminals
Posted by Kevin

What Bush approved:

The CIA on three occasions shortly after the September 11 attacks used a widely condemned interrogation technique known as waterboarding, CIA Director Michael Hayden told Congress on Tuesday.*

“Waterboarding has been used on only three detainees,” Hayden told the Senate Intelligence Committee, publicly specifying the number of subjects and naming them for the first time, as Congress considers banning the technique.

Those subjected to waterboarding were al Qaeda suspects Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Hayden said. [The CIA’s destroyed torture tapes, remember, documented the interrogations of Zubaydah and Nashiri.]

He said waterboarding has not been used in five years, but it was used then because of concerns of imminent catastrophic attacks on the United States and because authorities had limited knowledge of al Qaeda.

“The circumstances are different than they were in late 2001, early 2002,” Hayden said.

What we did to a Japanese officer who waterboarded Americans:

Twenty-one years earlier, in 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk.

“Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) told his colleagues last Thursday during the debate on military commissions legislation. “We punished people with 15 years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II,” he said.

George Bush is losing the war on terrorism. Not only did he take his eye off the ball and go after a contained secular dictator instead of the religious stateless actors that are the real threat, he has pissed away every bit of goodwill and good reputation the United states has built up over its history. Bush’s childish embrace of torture and idiotic insistence that the procedures at Gitmo be reduced to kangaroo courts tells the Muslim world that Al-Qaeda is right: the US has no interest in seeing them as human beings. It has one set of rules for itself and no rules or restraints when it comes to them. There is no doubt that if Iraqi insurgents captured an American pilot who they believed knew when the next air strike would take place — air strikes that can and have killed civilians — and waterboarded him to find out when it was coming under the justification that they were protecting civilian life, the Bush Administration would — rightly — condemn that act as torture. And there is absolutely no doubt that if Al Qaeda captured and tortured a general becasue they “had limited knowledge of ” American military procedures that such activity would be — rightly — condemned. Yet the Bush Administration admits to torturing Muslims under just those justifications.

Bush is proving Al Qaeda’s propaganda — that he is engaged in a war against Muslims, not a war against them — correct. After all, would a country that is actually concerned about making sure they don’t punish the innocent use torture to get information and then allow evidence obtained under torture to be used in what is supposed to be a trial? The fact that the Bush Administration has argued for just make sit incredibly easy for terrorists to convince Muslims that Bush is waging a crusade against Muslims in general, not the terrorist group in specific. After all, who would believe the monster that says there is one law for him and no law for you?

But more than all of that, there is a reason we punished Japaense officers who waterboarded. Waterboarding is torture and torture is the complete antithesis of civilized behavior. It destroys the minds and bodies of people for no useful purpose. There is a reason it has been the tool of dictators, thugs and cowards throughout history — becasue it is oly good for mentally destroying tis victims and for getting them to tell you what you want them to tell you. it is wrong and more than wrong: it is evil. And Bush has made it the official policy of the United States of America. Thank God someone restored honor and dignity to the White House.

February 7th, 2008 | Torture | 5 comments

ACLU: Close Gitmo Now
Posted by Kevin

I am sorry I missed this (been a busy day, personally), but the ACLU is kicking off a close Gito campaign. It has been six years since we opened that black hole. We haven’t given a single person in that camp the rights of a prisoner of war or charged them criminally. The BUsh Administration fought for years to keep them locked away forever, subject only to the whims of Bush or his surrogates. And when the Supreme Court, an institution as far right as any in the country, finally pointed out that such treatment was inhumane, illegal, and un-American, the Bush Administration created a process that kept the accused from seeing the evidence against them and allowed evidence based on torture to be used against them. The prison camp at Gitmo is a symbol to the world of our leader’s cowardice and viciousness and it is the single most effective propaganda tool the terrorists have. When they want to “prove” that all our high minded rhetoric about freedom and democracy is a lie, when they want to “prove” that our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are nothing more than a holy war against Muslim, all they have to do is say one word: Gitmo. It is long past time it be closed.

You can find out more here.

January 11th, 2008 | General, Legal Issues, Iraq, Terrorism, Torture | one comment

Harry Reid Helping Republicans Betray American Values
Posted by Kevin

From the ACLU:

We implore Senator Reid to lead,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “Reid has set up a Catch-22 that forces senators to choose either no immunity for the telecoms or minimal Fourth Amendment protections – but not both at the same time. The ACLU is not ready to accept the two current options as the only possibilities. The American people should not have to choose between telecom immunity and warrantless wiretapping.”

Fredrickson explained that Senator Reid employed a little-used Senate rule – Rule Fourteen – to bring up two different FISA bills taken from legislation passed by the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary Committees. The first bill, S. 2440, will be Titles 1 and 3 of the intelligence bill and does not include telecom immunity. The second, S. 2441, will be Titles 1 of the judiciary bill and 2 and 3 of the intelligence bill, which does include immunity. She explained that from the ACLU’s perspective, “Another way to think of it: S 2440 is good on immunity and bad on wiretapping while S. 2441 is bad on immunity but good on wiretapping. It looks as though Senator Reid has created two little FISA Frankensteins.”

The ACLU urges senators to vote against the Intelligence Committee bill, anything resembling the Protect America Act or any bill that grants immunity to telecommunications companies that broke the law over the past six years. Today a group of 14 senators urged Senator Reid to take up the Judiciary bill as it stands with no immunity provision. We are also asking senators to participate in the Dodd filibuster measure against any bill that lets the Bells off the hook.

“Senator Reid is forcing senators to trade the Fourth Amendment to avoid immunity or to give immunity in order to protect Fourth Amendment rights. The ACLU, on behalf its members across this country, asks that he bring the Judiciary Committee’s FISA bill to the floor — without immunity for companies that broke the law,” said Fredrickson.

This would literally destroy any freedom you have from being spied on. By establishing this precedent, that private companies must do as the government tells them to, law and Constitution be damned, we are saying that the Constitution does not apply. All the government has to do is to get a private company to act in its stead and your constitutional rights no longer exist.

The second worst thing, politically, to happen in the last eight years was the defeat of Daschle. Reid has been and will continue to be a disaster as leader. Not only is he completely incapable of dealing with GOP legislative maneuvers, he is apparently a fully paid up member of the authoritarian school of domestic law enforcement.

December 14th, 2007 | Legal Issues, Torture | 15 comments

Torture Works
Posted by Kevin

You can find out anything you already know:

Many hundred thousand good-nights, dearly beloved daughter Veronica. Innocent have I come into prison, innocent have I been tortured, innocent must I die. For whoever comes into the witch prison must become a witch or be tortured until he invents something out of his head and–God pity him–bethinks him of something. I will tell you how it has gone with me. When I was the first time put to the torture, Dr. Braun, Dr. Kotzendorffer, and two strange doctors were there. Then Dr. Braun asks me, “Kinsman, how come you here?” I answer, “Through falsehood, through misfortune.” “Hear, you,” he says, “you are a witch; will you confess it voluntarily? If not, we’ll bring in witnesses and the executioner for you.” I said “I am no witch, I have a pure conscience in the matter; if there are a thousand witnesses, I am not anxious, but I’ll gladly hear the witnesses.” Now the chancellor’s son was set before me . . . and afterward Hoppfen Elss. She had seen me dance on Haupts-moor. . . . I answered: “I have never renounced God, and will never do it–God graciously keep me from it. I’ll rather bear whatever I must.” And then came also–God in highest Heaven have mercy–the executioner, and put the thumb-screws on me, both hands bound together, so that the blood ran out at the nails and everywhere, so that for four weeks I could not use my hands, as you can see from the writing. . . . Thereafter they first stripped me, bound my hands behind me, and drew me up in the torture. [2] Then I thought heaven and earth were at an end; eight times did they draw me up and let me fall again, so that I suffered terrible agony. . . .

To support torture is to knowingly condemn innocent people to abuse and punishment that they do not deserve. It is to knowingly accept lies and exaggerations as the truth. It is to knowingly pervert justice by using those things you know to almost certainly to be lies and exaggerations as the basis for court proceedings.

There is a word for people like that: monster.

December 13th, 2007 | Torture | one comment

Torture Hypothetical
Posted by tgirsch

Patterico asks a hypothetical question:

Let’s assume the following hypothetical facts are true. U.S. officials have KSM in custody. They know he planned 9/11 and therefore have a solid basis to believe he has other deadly plots in the works. They try various noncoercive techniques to learn the details of those plots. Nothing works.

They then waterboard him for two and one half minutes.

During this session KSM feels panicky and unable to breathe. Even though he can breathe, he has the sensation that he is drowning. So he gives up information — reliable information — that stops a plot involving people flying planes into buildings.

My simple question is this: based on these hypothetical facts, was the waterboarding session worth it?

This has already been addressed quite handily by Sebastian (also here) and Katherine over at Obsidian Wings, but I want to throw my hat into the ring on this as well.

November 15th, 2007 | Terrorism, Torture | 11 comments

Schumer Doesn’t Understand the Concept of the Rule of Law And Is Probably a Political Coward To Boot
Posted by Kevin

Via Molly I at Atrios’s place, we see that Senator Schumner is either not terribly bright or thinks that we are not terribly bright. In his defense of the torture supporting Mukasey, Senator Schumer says this:

We are now on the brink of a reversal. There is virtually universal agreement, even from those who oppose Judge Mukasey, that he would do a good job in turning the department around. My colleagues who oppose his confirmation have gone out of their way to praise his character and qualifications. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, for one, commended Judge Mukasey as “a brilliant lawyer, a distinguished jurist and by all accounts a good man.”

Most important, Judge Mukasey has demonstrated his fidelity to the rule of law, saying that if he believed the president were violating the law he would resign.

They key phrase here is “if he believed” because we know that the President or his underlings have already broken the law and we know that Mukasey finds nothing wrong with that. We know that the US government has used water boarding and we are certain as anyone can be that such tactics were ordered, if not by the White House, then with the White House’s approval. That is the real reason that Mukasey will not simply state the obvious fact: water boarding is torture. If he did, he would have to either be unwilling to serve under a President who allowed such abuse to take place or be publicly committed to arresting and trying the people who committed and ordered that torture, no matter where that investigation would lead. Since he can do neither — an one gets appointed Attorney General if they intend to prosecute the President or his advisers — he must dance around the true nature of the torture his future boss has allowed to take place.

So Mukasey has already once decided that clear, black letter law does not apply to the White House. There is no reason to believe that Mukasey will not simple re-adjust his understanding of “illegal” as the situation warrants. he has done it once already on a very serious, very grave matter. Schumer would be an idiot to believe he wouldn’t do it again, especially if the stakes were not as high. I don’t think Schumer is an idiot. I think he is a political coward.

Schumer says something very telling in his op-ed:

Should we reject Judge Mukasey, President Bush has said he would install an acting, caretaker attorney general who could serve for the rest of his term without the advice and consent of the Senate. To accept such an unaccountable attorney general, I believe, would be to surrender the department to the extreme ideology of Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington. All the work we did to pressure Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign would be undone in a moment.

The specter of a fight over executive power, especially on the grounds of national security, is almost certainly what is driving Schumer to this vote. Yes, Bush would probably try to do exactly this, to make permanent an un-accountable choice. But the Senate can fight back against these maneuvers. They can stay in session, preventing a recess appointment. They can use the power of the purse to cut off spending on the salaries of senior Administration officials. They can prevent any of Bush appointments in other areas form moving forward. They can do a lot of things, some drastic some not so drastic. But doing those things means a very public show down over executive power, a showdown that Schumer clearly does not have the stomach for.

But the fight is there whether or not Schumer wants to have it. By refusing to face up to that fact, Schumer has just surrendered. he has plainly given up the power of the Senate to prevent the White House from using torture if he allows an AG who will not stand against such abuse to be confirmed. By running away, Schumer has lost and has lost badly. One more piece of the lunatic unitary executive has just been implicitly affirmed. The only way to stop this nonsense, to prevent the next generations of Cheneys, Bushs and Roves from pushing this destructive agenda is to stop it now.

But Schumer wont even try. He will quietly walk away form the most important fight in a generation, accept Mukasey’s pat on the head and soothing, if already proven worthless, assurances and hope things get better without him having to actually, at any point, behave as if he was a United States Senator.

November 6th, 2007 | Politics, Legal Issues, Torture | 3 comments

The Fall of Obama
Posted by Kevin

Has any candidate seen their stock fall so far so fast in recent times? I don’t mean their ability to win a contest, I mean their entire image. Obama promised a new beginning, a politics of hope and reconciliation. But in the last week, he has thrown all of that away with two really bone-headed decisions, the first of which was the deliberate choice to involve a horrible bigot in his gospel tour.

McClurkin is a hateful person, a man who is convinced that gays are trying to “kill our children”, and that homosexuality is a “curse” brought about by abuse and molestation. Those are not the words of a man genuinely concerned with the lives or souls of homosexuals; those are the words of a man who is so filled with loathing for something he dislikes that he is willing to to tell any lie or indulge in any smear to hurt those he hates. And this was the man the campaign chose to headline the event. And, of course, he took the opportunity to attack homosexuals on Obama’s time:

The whole controversy might have been forgotten in the swell of gospel sound except Mr. McClurkin turned the final half hour of the three-hour concert into a revival meeting about the lightning rod he has become for the Obama campaign.

He approached the subject gingerly at first. Then, just when the concert had seemed to reach its pitch and about to end, Mr. McClurkin returned to it with a full-blown plea: “Don’t call me a bigot or anti-gay when I have suffered the same feelings,” he cried.

“God delivered me from homosexuality,” he added. He then told the audience to believe the Bible over the blogs: “God is the only way.” The crowd sang and clapped along in full support….

Mr. McClurkin’s support for Mr. Obama could signal to some black evangelical voters that race and religion are more important than Mr. Obama’s support for gay rights.

This decision was bad enough, but then came the response:

Part of the reason that we have had a faith outreach in our campaigns is precisely because I don’t think the LGBT community or the Democratic Party is served by being hermetically sealed from the faith community and not in dialogue with a substantial portion of the electorate, even though we may disagree with them.

So progressives are “hermetically sealed” from the religious in this country? Really? Tell that, Mr. Senator, to these people, or these people, or, heck, even to me and the millions and millions like me:

For far too long, the right wing has gulled the media and the country into thinking that its religion was the only acceptable face of Christianity. It has used the respect for all religions on the left as evidence of the left’s irreligiosity. That has never been the case. The teachings of Jesus Christ are at the core of how millions define their support for liberal causes, myself included. John Kerry, with one small statement, has reminded the nation of that fact. Millions of us are liberal because of our religion. Millions of us are not represented by Opus Dei, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, or any of the other right wing talking heads the media turns to when it wants to “discuss” religion in this country. Antonin Scalia does not speak for all Catholics.

… The language of religion has always been spoken comfortably on the left, even if the principle of tolerance has caused it to occasionally be spoken too quietly. John Kerry is not speaking quietly now. Whatever George W. Bush may desire, whatever the editors of the Washington Post and New York Times may decree, Christianity and faith are not the property of the right wing. I have a faith, too, as does John Kerry and millions of others. It is strong, and sincere, and, as Kerry has reminded us, powerful. And in the face of provocation and distortion, it has no reason to be silent.

It is bad enough that you stupidly try to pander to a sense of bigotry among some segment of the South Carolina voting population. But to use the same, tired right wing smears against progressives as a justification for your pandering? Disgusting is perhaps the nicest thing that I can say about that decision. This is the worst kind of pandering. It has nothing to do with trying to tread the distance between where many of his supporters are on this issue and where Obama would like to lead them. Obama took one of the most hateful anti-gay bigots, a man who thinks gays are trying to “kill our children” and making him the face of the Obama campaign for the duration of this Gospel event. It is the explicit and deliberate decision to appeal to the basest nature of South Carolina voters in the desperate hope that those voters can deliver him an essential win. It is the worst kind of politics as usual.

And then Obama compounded this with another stupid mistake: an attack on Social Security:

A new Obama ad in Iowa shows the candidate talking to a small group of people are Social Security, and calling for an honest discussion about the problems that the program face

There is no Social Security crisis. Even with the GOP spending money as it grows on trees, the program is set through 2047. And the events of 2005 showed, people like the program just fine the way it is. Having spent all that time and effort beating back the privatization monster, it is incredibly depressing to hear a Democrat open the door for its return. But Obama needs an issue to attack Clinton on, and attacking Social Security is an issue that the media Village just adores and so is sure to pick up and treat favorably, especially since it fits into their notion of what a “serious” Democrat should be. A “serious” Democrat, of course, is one who is more than willing to attack the underpinnings of the New Deal and any other Democratic program that is popular with the general public but not with the Villagers.

There are plenty of other issues out there Obama could have chosen to differentiate himself from Clinton: the coming war with Iran, universal health care, fair trade, the war on drugs, the GOP’s war on the Constitution, etc, etc,etc. The problem, though, is that the Village disapproves of the progressive side on all of those matters, so taking on Clinton over any of them would have been meant with Village scorn. And that would have meant that it would have been harder to generate positive press and to force Clinton onto the defensive. That would have taken courage, something Obama does not seem to poses in any noticeable measure these days.

I had hopes for Obama. He came out of Chicago’s politics, so I knew that he knew how to brawl, but his rhetoric had given me hope that he would use those skills to advance a genuinely inclusive, progressive vision. Apparently, that is not to be. Twice in less than a week, Obama has chosen to take the low road, the easy way through the political landscape. Twice in a week, Obama has chosen to pander to the basest of motives of voters and the self-important nitwits that run our national press. Instead of actually being bold, instead of actually trying to build a new politics built on the Audacity of Hope, Obama and his campaign chose to take the basest route to the White House. They have embraced politics as usual — and as dirty as can be — with the speed of a drunk embracing a free case of beer. In the process, they have shown Obama to be a hollow candidate, a smiling face for the same old politics of division and sycophancy.

October 30th, 2007 | Politics, Legal Issues, Church & State, Religion, Culture, Torture | 14 comments

Torture is Wrong
Posted by Kevin

Contra Rudy, it is always wrong. It is wrong when you have the best intentions, it is wrong when it is done by “good” people, it is wrong. It is wrong becasue it gives you what you want to hear instead of the truth. It is wrong to abuse people, even bad people, because you cannot know who the bad guys are and who are the innocents for certain. It is wrong because once you cross the line, each subsequent crossing becomes so much easier. It is wrong because you don’t fight monsters by becoming monsters; that just gets you more monsters. It is wrong because human life and human dignity is precious and should be assured. And we should all know that, even if the bastards we are fighting do not.

Dear God, how did we get to a place where I have to explain something so obvious to the GOP front-runner as if he was five years old?

October 26th, 2007 | General, Politics, Torture | 2 comments

Monsters Working For Us
Posted by Kevin

Where did this happen?

As the second series of questioning was ending, Higazy requested that Templeton stop. He testified that he began “feeling intense pain in my arm. I remember hearing my heartbeat in my head and I just couldn’t breathe. I said, ‘Sir, sir, please, stop. It hurts. Please stop. Please take it off.’” Templeton unhooked the polygraph, and according to Higazy, called Higazy a baby and told him that a nine-year-old could tolerate this pain. Templeton left the room to get Higazy water, and upon his return, Higazy asked whether anybody else had ever suffered physical pain during the polygraph, to which Templeton replied: “[i]t never happened to anyone who told the truth.”

Higazy alleges that during the polygraph, Templeton told him that he should cooperate, and explained that if Higazy did not cooperate, the FBI would make his brother “live in scrutiny” and would “make sure that Egyptian security gives [his] family hell.” Templeton later admitted that he knew how the Egyptian security forces operated: “that they had a security service, that their laws are different than ours, that they are probably allowed to do things in that country where they don’t advise people of their rights, they don’t – yeah, probably about torture, sure.”

That’s right, it happen in the United States of America. A federal agent tortured a man (polygraphs do not cause pain. The device he used was obviously either a torture device made to look like a polygraph or a polygraph modified to cause pain) and then threatened to have that man’s entire family tortured in order to get a false confession. Monster seems an appropriate term here. So does criminal and immoral and war crimes and other such terms that are supposed to be quaint in this age of unreasoning panic.

When the President and his apologists talk about extraordinary interrogation methods, this is what they mean: physically and mentally abusing a man until he tells them exactly what they want to hear. It is wrong and more than wrong. It is monstrous. It destroys the entire rational for fighting a war on terrorism. What makes us better than the terrorists, what makes the United States worth emulation and defense by people other than Americans, is that represents an expansive notion of freedom and human dignity that applies ot everyone in the world. Or, it used to before Bush and Cheney drowned that ideal in blood and torture. This country has never lived entirely up to its ideals, but it has never so publicly and, God help us all, proudly proclaimed that its founding ideals were a lie, meant only for the special few who did not displease the United States government.

Right now, in the Muslim world, we have no defense against the propaganda of Al Qaeda. When they say follow us, we know the mind of God and thus know how to take care of you and yours” we used to be able to say “we know a better a way, a way that values you and yours as people and allows you the space and the freedom to make your way through the world as you see fit.” We cannot say that anymore. We invaded a country that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda and then we publicly proclaimed our desire to torture people, including those innocents who would inevitably be caught up in such practices. Our promises are worth nothing and our actions are those of a bully and thug. Thanks to the cowards in the White House, we have betrayed our morality and thrown away our most powerful weapon. All so that Bush and Cheney can feel proud of how well they are protecting the country as they read the false confessions of dangerous men like the completely and totally innocent Higazy.

October 23rd, 2007 | General, Culture, Terrorism, Torture | 3 comments

Obama On Torture
Posted by Kevin

More like this, please, Presidential candidates:

“The secret authorization of brutal interrogations is an outrageous betrayal of our core values, and a grave danger to our security. We must do whatever it takes to track down and capture or kill terrorists, but torture is not a part of the answer - it is a fundamental part of the problem with this administration’s approach. Torture is how you create enemies, not how you defeat them. Torture is how you get bad information, not good intelligence. Torture is how you set back America’s standing in the world, not how you strengthen it. It’s time to tell the world that America rejects torture without exception or equivocation. It’s time to stop telling the American people one thing in public while doing something else in the shadows. No more secret authorization of methods like simulated drowning. When I am president America will once again be the country that stands up to these deplorable tactics. When I am president we won’t work in secret to avoid honoring our laws and Constitution, we will be straight with the American people and true to our values,”

October 5th, 2007 | Politics, Legal Issues, Torture | 14 comments

Torture in Our Name
Posted by Kevin

Congratualtions, Mr. Bush, Mr Cheney: you have now establsihed a moral and legal code that would make Pinochet proud:

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

Torture is wrong. That used to go without saying, it used to be understood. But not now. No, now we have moral degenerates like Dick Cheney running the show, men who think that macho posturing makes up for their deep moral and intellectual failings, men who are too stupid to understand that torture is the leas effective method of interrogation, that it destroys the country’s moral credibility, and that it leads to bad information and wasted time chasing down false leads. Now we have men whose morality is so deficient that they think Pinochet is a model, not a monster.

There three kinds of people in the world, with respect to the United States. The first will hate us almost no matter what we do, because we represent something about the world and how to make your way in it that they despise. The second will love us no almost no matter what we do, for essentially the same in reason in reverse. The vast majority of the world falls into category three: people whose opinions of the US are shaped by what the US does. These people care about the US only to the extant that we touch their lives, impress their sense of the good, or offend their sense of morality. To these people we are what we do.

And what we do now, thanks to Bush and Cheney, is kidnap people, send suspects to be tortured by friendly tyrants, lock people away without much hope of a truly fair trial, and torture prisoners as a matter of policy.

The next time you wonder why they hate us, sit very still and listen for the screams, faint and distant, of the men entrusted to the morality of Dick Cheney and perhaps you will understand at least part of the answer.

October 4th, 2007 | Terrorism, Torture | 8 comments

More Restore Habeas: Fear and Senators in DC
Posted by Kevin

You know, this country survived a foreign invasion, civil war, two world wars, and a cold war with an enemy that possessed enough nuclear weapons to turn every inch of the planet inot glass a hundred times over. It survived these threats without throwing away the Constitution. But when a couple of failed goat herders got lucky once, our Congress pissed their collective pants and willingly voted away the Fourth Amendment. Senators tend to be concerned, sooner or later, with their legacy. It might help if you pointed out to them that, right now, their section of the history book is entitled “Notable Cowards of the Early 21st Century”

The cloture vote –the vote to break the GOP lead filibuster, just to be clear — is apparently sometime this morning. There are phone numbers at the link above. Please, call your Senators and remind them that we aren’t supposed to be a nation of cowards.

September 19th, 2007 | Politics, Legal Issues, Terrorism, Torture | 33 comments

Restore Habeas
Posted by Kevin

Do your good deed for the day:

This week, we have a critical opportunity to restore habeas corpus.

The Habeas Corpus Restoration Act gives us a chance to reverse one of the Bush Administration’s many assaults on our civil liberties.

We all want to make America safe from terrorism, but becoming a nation that sanctions the unlawful detention of its own residents — detaining and jailing them without the chance to appear before a judge — does not make us safe. Instead, it violates a value that we have held dear for centuries — safeguarding our individual freedom before arbitrary state action.

Please sign-on below as a citizen co-sponsor to the bipartisan Leahy-Specter-Dodd Habeas Corpus Restoration Act.

The right to challenge the government’s ability to detain you is fundamental to freedom. In a very real sense, no freedom can exist without it. Without it, the government can lock you away for ever and ever, with no hope of ever getting out, with no requirement that they justify that detention. The destruction of habeas corpus is the goal of men like Pinochet and Hussein. And our government willingly voted it away for a class of people. That’s not something to be proud of whatever the GOP frontrunners may tell you. The name for people who would vote away their foundational freedom is serf, not citizen.

Be a citizen, today, and help Dodd restore habeas corpus.

Link via Digby.

September 18th, 2007 | Legal Issues, Terrorism, Torture | one comment

Support Habeas Now
Posted by Kevin

Stealing from Hilzoy, who stole form FDL:

“I am told by a source who knows the head count that we are within a slim margin on the habeas restoration amendment — and that the vote could still go either way. It is a razor thin margin right now, which means there is no Senator whose vote can be taken for granted. (…)

The following list are the Senators who are currently being targeted for not having an announced position one way or the other:

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT)
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE)
Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE)
Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN)
Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID)
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME)
Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME)
Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN)
Sen. George Voinavich (R-OH)
Sen. John Sununu (R-NH)
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA)
Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR)
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN)

Please, take some time this morning to call both your Senators — whether they are on this list or not – and then call a few from the above list as well to voice your support for the full restoration of habeas. You can call your Senators toll free using the following numbers (h/t to katymine):

1 (800) 828 - 0498
1 (800) 459 - 1887
1 (800) 614 - 2803
1 (866) 340 - 9281
1 (866) 338 - 1015
1 (877) 851 - 6437″

I should not have to write this post. This is America; I should not have to ask people to beg their Senators to reject the notion that what was good from Pinochet and Stalin is good for the United States. I should not live in a country where people have become so cowardly, so afraid of a small band of murderers that they would throw away liberty wholesale. I should not have to remind people that without the ability to force the government to justify your imprisonment, people disappear and no one is free. There was a time not long ago, within in my lifetime, when these things were just understood. Now we live in a country where we have to beg Senators to stand up for the most basic, most uncontroversial freedoms.

Bin Laden’s greatest achievement was to so terrify our political class that they would destroy what made the country great themselves. Call your Senators and remind them that we aren’t supposed to be afraid of court proceedings, that they are charged with defending liberty, not running from it.

July 17th, 2007 | Politics, Legal Issues, Terrorism, Torture | 12 comments

A Famous Victory
Posted by Kevin

The Iraq war, which for years has drawn militants from around the world, is beginning to export fighters and the tactics they have honed in the insurgency to neighboring countries and beyond, according to American, European and Middle Eastern government officials and interviews with militant leaders in Lebanon, Jordan and London.

… In an April 17 report written for the United States government, Dennis Pluchinsky, a former senior intelligence analyst at the State Department, said battle-hardened militants from Iraq posed a greater threat to the West than extremists who trained in Afghanistan because Iraq had become a laboratory for urban guerrilla tactics.

Staff Sgt. David Safstrom does not regret his previous tours in Iraq, not even a difficult second stint when two comrades were killed while trying to capture insurgents.

“In Mosul, in 2003, it felt like we were making the city a better place,” he said. “There was no sectarian violence, Saddam was gone, we were tracking down the bad guys. It felt awesome.”

But now on his third deployment in Iraq, he is no longer a believer in the mission. The pivotal moment came, he says, this past February when soldiers killed a man setting a roadside bomb. When they searched the bomber’s body, they found identification showing him to be a sergeant in the Iraqi Army.

“I thought, ‘What are we doing here? Why are we still here?’ ” said Sergeant Safstrom, a member of Delta Company of the First Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division. “We’re helping guys that are trying to kill us. We help them in the day. They turn around at night and try to kill us.”

His views are echoed by most of his fellow soldiers in Delta Company, renowned for its aggressiveness.

“Today is May 21,” a naval official declared to a camera videotaping the event. “Right now we’re ready to do a root canal treatment on Jose Padilla, our enemy combatant.”

Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla’s bare feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla’s legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.

Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla’s cuffed hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.

… In an affidavit filed Friday, he alleged that Mr. Padilla was held alone in a 10-cell wing of the brig; that he had little human contact other than with his interrogators; that his cell was electronically monitored and his meals were passed to him through a slot in the door; that windows were blackened, and there was no clock or calendar; and that he slept on a steel platform after a foam mattress was taken from him, along with his copy of the Koran, “as part of an interrogation plan.”

… Mr. Padilla was added as a defendant in a terrorism conspiracy case already under way in Miami. The strong public accusations made during his military detention — about the dirty bomb, Al Qaeda connections and supposed plans to set off natural gas explosions in apartment buildings — appear nowhere in the indictment against him. The indictment does not allege any specific violent plot against America.

As many as 654,965 more Iraqis may have died since hostilities began in Iraq in March 2003 than would have been expected under pre-war conditions, according to a survey conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. The deaths from all causes—violent and non-violent—are over and above the estimated 143,000 deaths per year that occurred from all causes prior to the March 2003 invasion.

An August 2002 OLC memo, signed by the then head of the OLC—Jay Bybee—but drafted by Yoo, gave the agency what it needed. The controversial document, which became famous as the “torture memo” when it leaked two years later, defined torture so narrowly that, short of maiming or killing a prisoner, interrogators had a free hand. What’s more, the memo claimed license for the president to order methods that would be torture by anyone’s definition—and to do it wholesale, and not just in specific cases. A very similar Yoo memo in March 2003 was even more expansive, authorizing military interrogators questioning terror suspects to ignore many criminal statutes—as well as the strict interrogation rules traditionally used by the military. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld put some limits on interrogation techniques, and they were intended to be used only on true terror suspects. Perhaps inevitably, however, “coercive interrogation methods” spread from Guantanamo Bay, which housed terror suspects, into prisons like Abu Ghraib, where detainees could be almost anyone. (Poor leadership in the chain of command and on the ground was partly to blame, as well as loose or fuzzy legal rules.) The result: those grotesque images of Iraqis being humiliated by poorly trained and sadistic American prison guards, not to mention prisoners who have been brutalized and in some cases killed by interrogators in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

May 28th, 2007 | General, Politics, Iraq, Terrorism, Holiday, Torture | 2 comments

Yes Mistress!
Posted by KTK

Oh, man! If this isn’t a smash hit in the BDSM community, I’m sure it soon will be.

Micro remote dog trainer with pocket-sized handheld transmitter

300-yard range; 9 stimulation levels; tone-only training option

Backlit LCD digital display; collar fits neck sizes 8 to 24 inches

Electro-shock “dog” (yeah, right) collar with remote-control transmitter - you push a button to deliver a warning tone or 9 levels of voltage, adjustable for intensity or duration. When you say “Heel!”, they’ll heel!

March 20th, 2007 | General, Religion, Culture, Privacy, Doggie Bloggin', Humor, Torture | 2 comments

Restoration of the Constitution Act of 2007
Posted by Kevin

Go support this. They intend to:

The bill will restore Habeas Corpus protections to detainees, bar information acquired through torture from being introduced as evidence in trials, and limit presidential authority to interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions.

You know, those little things that the American Revolution was fought over and the US has supposedly been fighting to defend for the last two hundred odd years. Little, unimportant things like that. Easily overlooked, apparently, in the heat of the moment. Common mistake, happens all the time. I am sure that once the GOP and Bush have this little faux paus pointed out to them, then everything will be taken care of. This bill is certainly just a formality.

Christ, how did we get to the point where we had to defend against official torture and the government locking people away forever without charge or trial? Go back Dodd and remind people that America is supposed to be better than this.

February 15th, 2007 | Politics, Legal Issues, Terrorism, Torture | no comments