Thinkbridge Is Back - Let's Hope Torture Is Not

It's been over 10 days, the news is excreting at a rate that is positively diarrheal, and here is this blogger, stuck in a constipated time warp. There's the wonderful news that Obama signed a ban on torture and a return to the Army Field Manual. Add to that his order to close Gitmo. Tempered by that nasty court case indicated that the reversal won't be so clear-cut.

But Slumdog Millionaire's rise to the top of the Oscars is seen in the slums of Mumbai as a victory for them. Let's hope the same happens for the rights of the criminally accused, war on terror or otherwise. There's no such thing as an untouchable, and there's no such thing as an "unconventional" human being. An accusation is just that. An accusation. It's not a conviction. There's always the possibility that the accused could be innocent. Yet GW Bush was hell-bent on torturing - I repeat, torturing - the accused, even though the U.S. has always maintained that such torture doesn't produce a real, admissible confession.

"Unconventional". That was the Republicans' excuse for torturing the accused and throwing away the presumption of innocence. These were not human beings. These were unconventional human beings. I suppose it goes with the appellation of "aliens" as applied to migrants. Words are important. So when a man is called a "terrorist", regardless of whether he actually committed or contributed to any acts of terrorism,
it whets the appetite for revenge, hence torture.

Torture is not reasonable. It's an emotional "punishment". It is not a technique. It's a way of dehumanizing another human being, when their humanity is disturbing, when it gets in the way, when it threatens the severity of one's rage, one's ego, one's quest for superiority and control over others. And Bush, more than Cheney, was ruled by emotions. He was no thinker. He ruled from the gut. Cheney did not "rule" him, as many think. He brought out that "gut" into the realm of ruthless application.

Let's hope the vestiges of that horrific legacy are truly gone forever, and Obama will really abolish them, and not let the spectre of "national security" (remember the Nazis!) allow dehumanizing humans back into th e realm of social acceptibility.

The Consequences of Bush's "Outlaw Administration"

If you're sick that Bush and Co. are getting away with human rights abuse, lying their way into a War Without End Amen, torture, ruining the environment, and everything else, NOW READ THIS - it's entitled "Justice After Bush: Prosecuting an outlaw administration"and basically summarizes a superb article by Scott Horton at Harper's (needs subscription, though, so thanks for the summary!)where Horton says:

This administration did more than commit crimes. It waged war against the law itself. It transformed the Justice Department into a vehicle for voter suppression, and it also summarily dismissed the U.S. attorneys who attempted to investigate its wrongdoing. It issued wartime contracts to substandard vendors with inside connections, and it also defunded efforts to police their performance. It spied on church groups and political protesters, and it also introduced a sweeping surveillance program that was so clearly illegal that virtually the entire senior echelon of the Justice Department threatened to (but did not in fact) tender their resignations over it. It waged an illegal and disastrous war, and it did so by falsely representing to Congress and to the American public nearly every piece of intelligence it had on Iraq. And through it all, as if to underscore its contempt for any authority but its own, the administration issued more than a hundred carefully crafted "signing statements" that raised pervasive doubt about whether the president would even accede to bills that he himself had signed into law.

So Compound F (blogger at Docudharma who provided this summary) says we then face the harder issue of how to prosecute this disaster? How can we hold these criminals accountable to such a pervasive and insidious swath of crime?

What are we going to do? Prosecute our entire political class on all of the myriad crimes they have collectively committed? Obama is going to have his hands full just with the issue of Bush signing statements, not to mention achieving bi-partisan consensus on the ongoing crises of the economy, environment, and failed wars.

Horton gets pragmatic: Bust the Big Fish on Torture.

There can be no doubt that torture is illegal. There is no wartime exception for torture, nor is there an exception for prisoners or "enemy combatants," nor is there an exception for "enhanced" methods. The authors of the Constitution forbade "cruel and unusual punishment," the details of that prohibition were made explicit in the Geneva Conventions ("No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on of any kind whatever"), and that definition has in turn become subject to U.S. enforcement through the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the U.S. Criminal Code, and several acts of Congress. Nor can there be any doubt that this administration conspired to commit torture: Waterboarding. Hypothermia. Psychotropic drugs. Sexual humiliation. Secretly transporting prisoners to other countries that use even more brutal techniques. The administration has carefully documented these actions and, in many cases, proudly
proclaimed them. The written guidelines for interrogations at Guantánamo Bay, for instance, describe several techniques for degrading and physically debilitating prisoners, including the "forceful removal of detainees' clothing" and the use of "stress positions." And in a 2006 radio interview, Dick Cheney said simply that the use of waterboarding to obtain intelligence was a "no-brainer."2

And since banning torture is something President-elect Obama promised to do on 60 minutes as well as other occasions, our next step is prosecuting the jerks.

Horton also recounts how the administration was aware of the potential criminality early on in the process as they wrote various memos attempting to redefine torture (enhanced interrogation) and prisoner of war status (enemy combatants), and the very meaning of war (war on terror is non-conventional, making the Geneva Conventions "quaint"). Thus, there is evidence of "guilty minds," and guilty intentions. Cheney, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, Tenet, and Ashcroft met early on (2002) to discuss specific methods, when Ashcroft famously asked:

"Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."
He also recounts a conversation with Jane Mayer (author of Journey to the Dark Side) in which she quotes a CIA officer on the topic, who said:

"Laws? Like who the fuck cares?"

Which are the very things the President & Co. are sworn to uphold.

Law and order are wonderful, fragile things. Even should Obama simply end torture and shut GITMO, the knowledge and acceptance that our leaders can and have gotten away with torturing humans will not cease being a crisis of law and order.

Which makes Horton's conclusion less than satisfying. Among many possible venues for prosecution of these crimes, he believes the best is Commission of Inquiry ("Truth & Reconciliation"), something on the order of the Warren Commission, where we would try to get to the truth in exchange for immunity.

I think his prescription for Nuremberg-like trials is more appropriate in this case. We desperately need both accountability, and a deterrent for future governments.

Bush, Cheney et al: John McCain was NOT Tortured

This superb post by Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Dish has got to be one of the best, bringing up a critical issue: was John McCain tortured? Not by Bush-Cheney's definition.

In all the discussion of John McCain's recently recovered memory of a religious epiphany in Vietnam, one thing has been missing. The torture that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar?

According to the Bush administration's definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured.

Cheney denies that McCain was tortured; as does Bush. So do John Yoo and David Addington and George Tenet. In the one indisputably authentic version of the story of a Vietnamese guard showing compassion, McCain talks of the agony of long-time standing. A quarter century later, Don Rumsfeld was putting his signature to memos lengthening the agony of "long-time standing" that victims of Bush's torture regime would have to endure. These torture techniques are, according to the president of the United States, merely "enhanced interrogation."

No war crimes were committed against McCain. And the techniques used are, according to the president, tools to extract accurate information. And so the false confessions that McCain was forced to make were, according to the logic of the Bush administration, as accurate as the "intelligence" we have procured from "interrogating" terror suspects. Feel safer?

The cross-in-the-dirt story - although deeply fishy to any fair observer - is in the realm of the unprovable. But the actual techniques used on McCain, and the lies they were designed to legitimize, are a matter of historical record. And the government of the United States now practices the very same techniques that the Communist government of North Vietnam once proudly used against American soldiers. When they are used against future John McCains, the victims will know, in a way McCain didn't, that their own government has no moral standing to complain.

Now the kicker: in the Military Commissions Act, McCain acquiesced to the use of these techniques against terror suspects by the CIA. And so the tortured became the enabler of torture. Someone somewhere cried out in pain for the same reasons McCain once did. And McCain let it continue.

These are the prices people pay for power.

The article is so great it speaks for itself!

New Blockbuster Book: Bushco Violated Constitution, Committed War Crimes

(check review here)
Yes we all know it, don't we? But the evidence outside our own minds, actual legal evidence, is mounting, evidence that can be used in a court of law. And Jane Mayer's about-to-be-published (target date: July 15th) book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, is, according to its publisher:

a dramatic, riveting, and definitive narrative account of how the United States made terrible decisions in the pursuit of terrorists around the world-- decisions that not only violated the Constitution to which White House officials took an oath to uphold, but also hampered the pursuit of Al Qaeda. In gripping detail, acclaimed New Yorker writer and bestselling author, Jane Mayer, relates the impact of these decisions—U.S.-held prisoners, some of them completely innocent, were subjected to treatment more reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition than the twenty-first century.

THE DARK SIDE will chronicle real, specific cases, shown in real time against the larger tableau of what was happening in Washington, looking at the intelligence gained—or not—and the price paid. In some instances, torture worked. In many more, it led to false information, sometimes with devastating results. For instance, there is the stunning admission of one of the detainees, Sheikh Ibn al-Libi, that the confession he gave under duress—which provided a key piece of evidence buttressing congressional support of going to war against Iraq--was in fact fabricated, to make the torture stop.

In all cases, whatever the short term gains, there were incalculable losses in terms of moral standing, and our country's place in the world, and its sense of itself. THE DARK SIDE chronicles one of the most disturbing chapters in American history, one that will serve as the lasting legacy of the George W. Bush presidency.

And in a related video to be released for home viewing in September, called "Taxi to the Dark Side", it shows

According to the documentary, even the Pentagon has concluded that more than 35 detainees have died as a result of homicide while under American custody -- and they were killed by torture techniques authorized directly by the White House under the direction of Cheney, with the knowledge of Bush. Rumsfeld set the tone in the Pentagon for the torture to be undertaken as a routine procedure.

The CIA esitmated that a 1/3 of the "terrorist detainees" were not really terrorists; and other estimates place the innocent figure as high as 50%.

So why, may I ask, is impeachment off the table??????

US Holds Terror Subjects on Prison Ships!!

Actually, this came out around June 1st (it was reported by ask on dkos), and I just found out about it. It falls right in line with the horrors of the Bush Administration: Guantanamo, torture, secret renditions to outsource torture to other countries like Syria, Abu Ghraib and a thousand similar incidents as yet minimally reported or unreported, bold outright lies to con the American public to go to war for his personal/cronies' profit in oil, manipulation of the justice system, building up huge "security" prisons in America and housing entire families including infants in their prison walls... etcetera...


And now... prison ships!

The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested
in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has
been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.
Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in
countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention
without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was
yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those
detained.
Information about the operation of prison ships has emerged through
a number of sources, including statements from the US military, the Council of
Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners.

You can thank Reprieve for this investigation, which sounds almost out of another era, or a horror film. They also revealed:

there have been more than 200 new cases of rendition since 2006, when
President George Bush declared that the practice had stopped.
According to research carried out by Reprieve, the US may have used as many
as 17 ships as "floating prisons" since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboard
the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations, it is
claimed.
Ships that are understood to have held prisoners include the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu. A further 15 ships are suspected of having operated around the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which has been used as a military base by the UK and the Americans.
Reprieve will raise particular concerns over the activities of the USS Ashland and the time it spent off Somalia in early 2007 conducting maritime security operations in an effort to capture al-Qaida terrorists.
At this time many people were abducted by Somali, Kenyan and Ethiopian forces in a systematic operation involving regular interrogations by individuals believed to be members of the FBI and CIA. Ultimately more than 100 individuals were "disappeared" to prisons in locations including Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Guantánamo Bay.

Remember the South American dictators and the "disappeared" and the "mothers of the disappeared"? Now we have Muslim mothers worldwide whose sons have suddenly and unexplicably "disappeared" into the evil vortex of the so-called "War on Terror" in a supposed effort to maintain Americans' alleged "security". In fact, nothing could be further from the truth, of course.

The Reprieve study includes the account of a prisoner released from Guantánamo
Bay, who described a fellow inmate's story of detention on an amphibious assault
ship. "One of my fellow prisoners in Guantánamo was at sea on an American ship
with about 50 others before coming to Guantánamo ... he was in the cage next to
me. He told me that there were about 50 other people on the ship. They were all
closed off in the bottom of the ship. The prisoner commented to me that it was
like something you see on TV. The people held on the ship were beaten even more
severely than in Guantánamo."
Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve's legal director, said: "They choose ships to try to keep their misconduct as far as possible from the prying eyes of the media and lawyers. We will eventually reunite these ghost prisoners with their legal rights."

We hope this ugly history will unravel when Bush and his cronies-in-crime leave office.
CIA "black sites" are also believed to have operated in Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland and Romania.
In addition, numerous prisoners have been "extraordinarily rendered" to US allies and are alleged to have been tortured in secret prisons in countries such as Syria, Jordan, Morocco and Egypt.

As Reprieve's Director Clive Smith said:

“By its own admission, the US government is currently detaining at least
26,000 people without trial in secret prisons, and information suggests up to
80,000 have been ‘through the system’ since 2001. The US government must show a commitment to rights and basic humanity by immediately revealing who these
people are, where they are, and what has been done to them.”