The Surge to the Sinkhole

It's as if the American public believe that the President's main calling is Commander-in-Chief, to wage wars, and wage 'em real good. Why else would the number one quick fix for sagging popularity for any U.S. President be the Macho Maneuver: start or "rev up" a war? Of course, as Bushes I & II can attest, this pumped-up poll surge generally gives a fast, short-lived high, followed by a much-longer depressed state - unless the war is itself short-lived, euphoric, & sanitizable - e.g., Grenada. Afghanistan, Obama's albatross, is none of the above.

Granted, he gave fair warning during the campaign, stating that we oughta get out of Iraq and concentrate on Afghanistan where, as the story goes, the "real war on Terror" is fought. But Obama also promised to use diplomacy when at all possible instead of blanket military solutions; to listen to "folks on the ground", meaning seeing beyond the perhaps ego-laden views of top commanders; to use his considerable intelligence to weigh events as they occur in real time, and not apply old solutions inappropriately to new problems. In all of these more serious promises, Obama has been a huge let-down.

There is the omnipresent refrain, "if we leave Afghanistan, it will become a haven for terrorists." Same was said about Iraq. Same was said about Vietnam, inserting "communists" - the enemy du hour - for "terrorists." The truth on the ground is that an invasion is an invasion. You can never reconstruct it as a "liberation". Semantics don't feed the hungry, lay down arms, or grow crops. Those words are obvious lies and propaganda.

People in Afghanistan must have been thinking, "What are the Americans doing?" The answer seemed to be (from their viewpoint), killing people and enforcing a corrupt central government. The Taliban - unpopular during the invasion - has started to look like a People's Movement, albeit with nasty tactics. The "unaligned" middle ground of Afghanistan, which includes various tribal leaders, city-dwellers, and large numbers of people who just want their children to survive, may not see the wisdom of drones "surgically striking" homes where "insurgents" live with their wives & kids.

These are essentially foreign troops fighting people whose homeland is Afghanistan. It's very hard to change that fact to "win the hearts and minds" of those unaligned masses. Military action is the least effective way to do it - as it inevitably must disrupt civilian life in the most traumatic ways.

And as to the "terrorist haven" argument: such havens are created not by lack of well-trained foreign troops to target guys in the mountains - but rather by an overwhelming sense of oppression felt to be caused somehow by the West or the U.S. Military action only exacerbates this. They say people will always remember how you made them feel...

The real reason for the "surge" is not "liberation" or Afghan security or the war on terror. The terrorist threat from Afghanistan is no greater than the terrorist threat from, say, Pakistan, Indonesia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt. Why don't we fight all six at once?? Of course, that is suicidal or, at best, absurd. But so is the war on the Taliban. And no, it doesn't work as an "example" for all the other potential "havens" on the possibly-ever-expanding list. After Iraq, I'm sure they've noticed the U.S. is a sucker for overkill. The terrorists' tactic is the most basic of martial arts - get the "bully" or attacker to charge with all his weight - then get out of the way and watch him fall all over himself, collapsing in defeat. Use his weight against him. And the U.S. typically, is biting the bait. Obama, don't you remember LBJ and Vietnam? Happy replay.

The significant parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan are starkly presented in Thomas Johnson's incisive article in Foreign Policy magazine, notably the point where we, the Big Guys, don't get the nature of the war we're supposedly fighting:

In Afghanistan, the United States still insists on fighting a secular counterinsurgency, while the enemy is fighting a jihad. The intersection of how insurgencies end and how jihads end is nil. It's hard to defeat an enemy you don't understand, and in Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, this fight is being played out in a different war.

A refusal to learn from Vietnam and to understand the nature of the war has to have its reasons. Especially considering the supposed goal of "nation-building" and "helping the Afghani people", you'd think by now someone in power would've figured out that military action is NOT the way to do it. As Johnson points out, just as in Vietnam's stated goals of "helping" and "liberating" the Vietnamese:

Almost exactly the same percentage of personnel in Afghanistan has rural reconstruction as its primary mission (the Provincial Reconstruction Teams) as had "pacification" (today's "nation-building") as their primary mission in Vietnam, about 4 percent. The other 96 percent is engaged in chasing illiterate teenage boys with guns around the countryside, exactly what the enemy wants us to do.

And as in Vietnam, our "puppet" government in Kabul looks, tastes, and smells like Saigon, as Johnson describes:

Contemporary descriptions of the various Saigon governments read almost exactly like descriptions of the Karzai government today. Notwithstanding all the fanfare over this week's presidential voting in Afghanistan, the Kabul government will never be legitimate either, because democracy is not a source of legitimacy of governance in Afghanistan and it never has been. Legitimacy in Afghanistan over the last thousand years has come exclusively from dynastic and religious sources. The fatal blunder of the United States in eliminating a ceremonial Afghan monarchy was Afghanistan's Diem Coup: afterwards, there was little possibility of establishing a legitimate, secular national government.

We can't "democratize" people against their will, nor can we "free" them against their will because this is an oxymoron or worse - the very meaning of freedom and democracy holds that people are allowed their own free will to be enacted. And that means it can't be "our way" or our terms. So this cannot justify the surge.

No, the real reason for the Surge is pride. Military pride: "We can't be defeated! We're No. 1!" - Collective, patriotic pride: "America is The Superpower! USA! USA" - Political: who votes for a loser? or a yellow-bellied coward who backs down from a fight? - Simplistic: "To hell with the consequences! We gotta win!" - and Personal: "I'm not gonna go down as the Commander-in-Chief who backed down, who blinked." A chorus of Republican nasties are taunting already in the bleachers: "Are ya gonna GIVE UP? Are ya gonna LET ALL THOSE DEATHS OF PATRIOTS BE IN VAIN? Isn't America worth anything to you? WE wouldn't back down - we'd die with our boots on."
Etc., etc...

And pride is the downfall of nations, when it gets in the way of reason, logic, sense, or...principle. When it causes armies to invade other countries and call it liberation, in order to take revenge against a rag-tag group who are not in fact citizens of either of the two invaded countries. When it ignores or denies the fact that this invasion will cause the deaths of many innocent civilians, including women and children, not to mention thousands of men who were never involved in the original "triggering" crime - that pride has become conceit. When it causes a nation to use the methods of torture it banned and condemned, that pride has become conceit. When it causes the use of military might to take sides in other nations' civil internal strife or domestic issues, even claiming that this (invasion) will resolve economic and social problems - this is no longer pride, but at best, raw conceit. These are lies in action, and lies in action cannot create peace, prosperity, or the common good.

Conceit is false pride, pride taken to the level where it betrays its own principles. And America has reached that point. Maybe quite awhile ago.

We elected Obama to swallow that pride and lead us on a path of reason, principle, and inspiration. The road to Afghanistan takes him and us in the diametrically opposite direction.

Is Obama Repackaging Bush's War on Terror?

Andy Worthington's done it again. This time, asking if Obama is really just repackaging Bush's war on terror.

Changing the names of things was a ploy that was used by the Bush administration in an attempt to justify some of its least palatable activities. In response to the 9/11 attacks, for instance, the nation was not involved in a limited pursuit of a group of criminals responsible for the attacks, but instead embarked on an open-ended “War on Terror.” In keeping with this “new paradigm,” prisoners seized in this “war” were referred to as “detainees,” and held neither as criminal suspects nor as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, but as “enemy combatants,” without any rights whatsoever. Later, when the administration sought new ways in which to interrogate some of these men, the techniques it endorsed were not referred to as torture -- even though many of them clearly were -- but were instead described as “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Read more...

Iraqis Good Riddance to Bush

Unsurprisingly, Iraqis say good riddance to Bush with much bitterness.

"I hope Obama will correct the negative results Bush made. Iraq should be a country as wealthy as Gulf countries because we have oil, agriculture and splendid civilization," said Abass Majeed, a 38-year-old taxi driver from Sadr City in Baghdad.

But Iman Khalil, a 52-year-old widow, does not agree with him. "We will see no basic change between Bush and Obama. All U.S. presidents are the same: To protect Israel and plunder Iraq's oil reserves," she said emotionally.

Bush gets the boot from Iraq, where he falsely claimed he wanted to bring democracy. Right. By force. As if freedom comes by force. What did he expect? Love isn't by force either.

Don't Keep Preston Geren As Army Sec'y, Barack!

Preston "Pete" Geren may possibly be kept on by Pres-Elect Obama as Secretary of the Army. This would be a complete disaster, as Geren was a promoter of using the Army as DOD-funded "missionary soldiers" - yes, that's right! Goodbye, Separation of Church/State as we had to say goodbye to separation of powers, separation of govt branches, and other constitutional amenities. As this article shows,

In 2004, Geren participated in the infamous Pentagon Christian Embassy video, a promotional video filmed inside the Pentagon that, at the request of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), led to an investigation by the Department of Defense Inspector General. In July 2007, the IG issued a 45-page report finding seven officers, including four generals, guilty of violating a number of DoD ethics regulations. But, because of the IG's narrow choice of which regulations to focus on, the civilian DoD officials who appeared in the video, including then Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense Geren, got off scot free.

It's his ties to the CCC (see below) that are particularly alarming:

The Christian Embassy endorsed by Secretary Geren in the video is an arm of Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC), a fundamentalist Christian organization whose far reaching Military Ministry has become entrenched in every part of the military. Geren, who was a Congressman from Texas from 1989 to 1997, first became involved with Christian Embassy through their Capitol Hill branch. He continued this relationship when he came to the Pentagon in 2001, joining the organization's Senior Executive Fellowship. To understand why having a Secretary of the Army with long time ties to any part of this organization is of such great concern, here are a few examples showing what the goals of CCC are for our military.

And what are the CCC's goals?

"Responsibilities include working with Chaplains and Military personnel to bring lost soldiers closer to Christ, build them in their faith and send them out into the world as government paid missionaries."

and

A former CCC program director at the Air Force Academy, Scott Blum, said in a promotional video filmed at the Academy, CCC's purpose is to "make Jesus Christ the issue at the Academy" and for the cadets to be "government paid missionaries" by the time they leave.

According to MRFF (Military Religious Freedom Foundation) founder and president Mikey Weinstein,

In July of 2005, the Air Force's Deputy Chief of the Chaplains Corps, Brig. Gen. Cecil R. Richardson, boldly asserted in a front page story in the New York Times that the Air Force's official policy would continue to be to reserve its right 'to evangelize the unchurched.' I immediately registered my shock, telephonically, directly with Acting USAF Secretary Geren. Further, I demanded that the Air Force immediately retract this completely unconstitutional religious policy statement of evangelical Christian supremacy, which must have been vetted beforehand, as it had appeared in the New York Times -- the one newspaper most despised by the Pentagon.

Geren and I spoke several times on the phone over the next several weeks.
What disturbed me the most was that he was absolutely clueless as to the constitutional illegality of his service's ignominious declaration/intention of evangelizing the unchurched.

This is an ominous precedent that does not bode well for people of other non-Christian religious persuasions, such as Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, or atheists. But it also does not bode well with the tone and character of how wars themselves are conducted, notably the Global War on Terror. It really DOES fulfill the extremists' charge that this war is a war on Islam itself, not a war against terrorism per se as a method of battling perceived injustice, etc.

Another area of concern are the indications that Geren, like many who subscribe to the views of organizations such as CCC, may see the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a religious struggle, and that our own religious freedom here in America is somehow dependent on victory in these Muslim countries.

Is this what America is all about? Promoting religious war? Are we federally-funding a crusade? Are non-Christian military men and women being pressured to "convert" in order to form "God's army"? If that's not Obama's vision of America, then it's time

to weed out those DoD officials who have been complicit in promoting or endorsing what has in recent years evolved into a full-fledged constitutionally prohibited religious test for countless members of our armed forces.

Starting with Preston Geren.

War On Terror is Not What It Thinks It Is

Responding to the horrific attacks in Mumbai is not as simple as incorporating it into the general Global War on Terror. In fact, the GWOT is not really accomplishing what its proponents say - or wish - it was. Arundhati Roy's great article, "9 Is Not 11", examines the Mumbai attacks and the West's response to them,

We've forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching "India's 9/11." And like actors in a Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we're expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it's all been said and done before.

As tension in the region builds, U.S. Senator John McCain has warned Pakistan that, if it didn't act fast to arrest the "bad guys," he had personal information that India would launch air strikes on "terrorist camps" in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai was India's 9/11.

But November isn't September, 2008 isn't 2001, Pakistan isn't Afghanistan, and India isn't America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.

Her examination of the issues is heartrending and brutally, refreshingly honest.

The war on terror is not the Savior advertised in fear-mongering, simplistic propaganda. India is a showcase of how off-the-mark the GWOT is and how it merely creates more of the same - war and violence.

Almost always, when these stories unspool, they reveal a complicated global network of foot soldiers, trainers, recruiters, middlemen, and undercover intelligence and counter-intelligence operatives working not just on both sides of the India-Pakistan border, but in several countries simultaneously.

In today's world, trying to pin down the provenance of a terrorist strike and isolate it within the borders of a single nation state, is very much like trying to pin down the provenance of corporate money. It's almost impossible.

In circumstances like these, air strikes to "take out" terrorist camps may take out the camps, but certainly will not "take out" the terrorists. And neither will war.

It is not simply a "mistake" to overlook "cultural complexities" or to paint ideological fantasies over totally different realities on the ground, as Bushco has done. It is the sort of turn of events that creates unstoppable monsters.

Thanks largely to the part it was forced to play as America's ally, first in its war in support of the Afghan Islamists and then in its war against them, Pakistan, whose territory is reeling under these contradictions, is careening toward civil war.

As recruiting agents for America's jihad against the Soviet Union, it was the job of the Pakistani Army and the ISI to nurture and channel funds to Islamic fundamentalist organizations. Having wired up these Frankensteins and released them into the world, the U.S. expected it could rein them in like pet mastiffs whenever it wanted to. Certainly it did not expect them to come calling in the heart of the homeland on September 11. So once again, Afghanistan had to be violently remade.

Now the debris of a re-ravaged Afghanistan has washed up on Pakistan's borders.

Nobody, least of all the Pakistani government, denies that it is presiding over a country that is threatening to implode. The terrorist training camps, the fire-breathing mullahs, and the maniacs who believe that Islam will, or should, rule the world are mostly the detritus of two Afghan wars. Their ire rains down on the Pakistani government and Pakistani civilians as much, if not more, than it does on India.

If, at this point, India decides to go to war, perhaps the descent of the whole region into chaos will be complete. The debris of a bankrupt, destroyed Pakistan will wash up on India's shores, endangering us as never before.

And the worst way to deal with these dangers is to launch a Global War on Terror. It requires a particular mindset, one familiar to empires who have to make other people's decisions for them without knowing what the hell is going on.

It's hard to understand why those who steer India's ship are so keen to replicate Pakistan's mistakes and call damnation upon this country by inviting the United States to further meddle clumsily and dangerously in our extremely complicated affairs. A superpower never has allies. It only has agents.

Look at the history of the Indian subcontinent, when the last Superpower, Great Britain, partitioned India arbitrarily on ethnic/religious/cultural lines. Where's their democratic ideal here? Ah, the whims of the powerful, and their consequences...

The Radcliffe Line, which separated India and Pakistan and tore through states, districts, villages, fields, communities, water systems, homes, and families, was drawn virtually overnight. It was Britain's final, parting kick to us.

Partition triggered the massacre of more than a million people and the largest migration of a human population in contemporary history. Eight million people, Hindus fleeing the new Pakistan, Muslims fleeing the new kind of India, left their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Each of those people carries, and passes down, a story of unimaginable pain, hate, horror, but yearning too. That wound, those torn but still unsevered muscles, that blood and those splintered bones still lock us together in a close embrace of hatred, terrifying familiarity, but also love. It has left Kashmir trapped in a nightmare from which it can't seem to emerge, a nightmare that has claimed more than 60,000 lives.

Pakistan, the Land of the Pure, became an Islamic Republic, and then very quickly a corrupt, violent military state, openly intolerant of other faiths.

But it's not so simple. There's the same exact intolerance and militancy coming rom the Hindu side, back in "democratic, open" India.

Babu Bajrangi of Ahmedabad, India, of the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP, and a perpetrator of the genocide at Gujarat, said:

"We didn't spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire… we hacked, burned, set on fire… we believe in setting them on fire because these bastards don't want to be cremated, they're afraid of it… I have just one last wish… let me be sentenced to death… I don't care if I'm hanged... just give me two days before my hanging and I will go and have a field day in Juhapura where seven or eight lakhs [seven or eight hundred thousand] of these people stay... I will finish them off… let a few more of them die... at least twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand should die."

Their playbook is taken from Mussolini, their racism and hatred open and violent. Yet, unlike the Muslim terrorists, these are re-elected to public office, condoned, and encouraged as "partners" in the War on Terror.

The GWOT has taken the stance that all real terrorism is either local, or Islamic. Once terrorism is labeled "Islamic", it immediately becomes "global", drawn into the GWOT, where there is a no-holds-barred scorched-earth policy of bringing in every force available against the "Universal Foe". This creates reactions, complications, and worse, feeds into the very thing it supposedly is trying to fight.

The War on Terror has become a global industry. It has its own product - war - and the attendant arms industry that feeds off the mass distribution of that product. It has its own advertising sector - the largest ad firm being, of course, the U.S. government. But other governments, such as that of, say, Britain, are working hard there, too. It has millions of employees, from the US Department of Defense and all that entails - and it entails a hell of a lot - to Blackwater and all those mercenaries, to all those who want to cash in on this lucrative business in nations around the world. It has, of course, a megaladon of a distribution network, of which the intelligence industry in Western nations is often a part. And it has, like the Mafia, enforcers. The enforcers are those who serve the vast prison industry in the U.S., from Gitmo to the lesser-known terror prisons, to those country who do the GWOT's dirty work through "extraordinary rendition".

With this industry dominating the world economy, it has left many people without a sense of the value of their own lives, let alone the lives of others. They or their relatives were treated or perceived themselves as being treated, as pawns, as "collateral damage". In a sense, it's a huge ego-blowout. It's not about the reality of their stated goals at all. It's not about Islam, or Hinduism, or, in the case of Israel, the Jews. It's about pride. It's about saying to the world - a world which one day destroyed their very pride and sense of value as human beings - or rather, declaring loudly to the world, "We ARE HERE! You can't get rid of us! We have value! We are something which you have to deal with!"

And the only voice they seem to find satisfying to get that message across is violence, oppression, destruction of things "the world" finds valuable - especially human life. They choose a specific target, an enemy, and seek to humiliate it.

For example, with the Mumbai attacks,

If the men were indeed members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, why didn't it matter to them that a large number of their victims were Muslim, or that their action was likely to result in a severe backlash against the Muslim community in India whose rights they claim to be fighting for?

Same question is asked of Osama bin Laden. What the hell was he thinking? His own son popped that question. We still await the answer.

Terrorism is a heartless ideology, and like most ideologies that have their eye on the Big Picture, individuals don't figure in their calculations except as collateral damage.

But the War on Terror itself does the same thing. The "Big Picture" is an exceptionally vague idea of "democracy" and "freedom" which, translated by war, meanings the diametrical opposite. It means, in application by war, the destruction of freedom, of peace, of any hope of individual participation or voice. War loves dictators, not representative government.

It has always been a part of, and often even the aim of, terrorist strategy to exacerbate a bad situation in order to expose hidden fault lines. The blood of "martyrs" irrigates terrorism. Hindu terrorists need dead Hindus, Communist terrorists need dead proletarians, Islamist terrorists need dead Muslims. The dead become the demonstration, the proof of victimhood, which is central to the project.

And then there's the backlash, like GW Bush's Republican backlash:

Though one chapter of horror in Mumbai has ended, another might have just begun. Day after day, a powerful, vociferous section of the Indian elite, goaded by marauding TV anchors who make Fox News look almost radical and left-wing, have taken to mindlessly attacking politicians, all politicians, glorifying the police and the army, and virtually asking for a police state.

It isn't surprising that those who have grown plump on the pickings of democracy (such as it is) should now be calling for a police state. The era of "pickings" is long gone. We're now in the era of Grabbing by Force, and democracy has a terrible habit of getting in the way.

And this is the worst of all possible attitudes. India needs to get a grip. We all need to get a grip.

There are those who point out that U.S. strategy has been successful inasmuch as the United States has not suffered a major attack on its home ground since 9/11. However, some would say that what America is suffering now is far worse.

If the idea behind the 9/11 terror attacks was to goad America into showing its true colors, what greater success could the terrorists have asked for? The U.S. military is bogged down in two unwinnable wars, which have made the United States the most hated country in the world. Those wars have contributed greatly to the unraveling of the American economy and who knows, perhaps eventually the American empire.

(Could it be that battered, bombed Afghanistan, the graveyard of the Soviet Union, will be the undoing of this one too?)

The answer to this question is more powerful than we like to think. It's time for a decision, no doubt. Will Obama or the US Congress be up to it?

Terrorists like those who attacked Mumbai are hardly likely to be deterred by the prospect of being refused bail or being sentenced to death. It's what they want.

What we're experiencing now is blowback, the cumulative result of decades of quick fixes and dirty deeds. The carpet's squelching under our feet.

The only way to contain -- it would be naïve to say end -- terrorism is to look at the monster in the mirror. We're standing at a fork in the road. One sign says "Justice," the other "Civil War." There's no third sign and there's no going back. Choose.

This is a message to India. But also to a greater extent, to the United States. Only the "civil war" is fought on a larger turf. where will that turf be? The world economy? Get out of the GWOT business. Before it's too late.

Gitmo Prosecutor Quits Over Suppressed Exculpatory Evidence

A whole lot of shakin' is going on in Guantanamo - Cheney's sham "Military Commissions" are further brought into question, and the whole "terror trial" thing is going down as an attempt to set up a kangaroo court to railroad minor "suspects", picked up in the GWOT's web of suspicion, into a conviction to "show off" their fake "success" in their propagandized "war on terror." Andy Worthington reports:

On September 24, Col. Lawrence Morris, the chief prosecutor of Guantánamo's Military Commission trial system, announced that Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, the prosecutor in the case of Mohamed Jawad (an Afghan -- and a teenager at the time of his capture -- who is accused of throwing a grenade at a jeep containing two U.S. soldiers and an Afghan translator), had asked to quit his assignment before his one-year contract expired.

Although Col. Morris attempted to explain that Lt. Col. Vandeveld was leaving "for personal reasons," the real reasons were spelled out in a statement issued by Vandeveld, in which (as the Associated Press explained) he wrote that "potentially exculpatory evidence" had "not been provided" due to a failure on the part of the "prosecutors and officers of the court." On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that he had stated, "My ethical qualms about continuing to serve as a prosecutor relate primarily to the procedures for affording defense counsel discovery. I am highly concerned, to the point that I believe I can no longer serve as a prosecutor at the Commissions, about the slipshod, uncertain 'procedure' for affording defense counsel discovery."

Specifically, the denial of exculpatory evidence.

According to Michael Berrigan, the Commissions' deputy chief defense counsel, Vandeveld said that prosecutors knew that Jawad, who has always denied throwing the grenade, may have been drugged before the attack and that the Afghan Interior Ministry said that two other men had confessed to the same crime.

In his statement, Lt. Col. Vandeveld also wrote that he had wanted to offer Jawad a plea deal "that would allow him to receive rehabilitation after a short period of additional confinement," but that his commanding officers had disagreed. "As a juvenile at the time of capture," he wrote, "Jawad should have been segregated from the adult detainees, and some serious attempt made to rehabilitate him." He added, "I am bothered by the fact that this was not done."

Note that their high-profile cases are all juveniles "at the time of capture". The other high-profile no-holds-barred case being against Omar Khadr. This has not gone unnoticed.

Lt. Col. Vandeveld's departure -- and his reasons for leaving -- are another serious blow to the credibility of the Military Commissions, which were established by Dick Cheney and his close advisers in November 2001. In June 2006, they were ruled illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court, and although they were revived by Congress later that year in the much-criticized Military Commissions Act, they have never escaped accusations that they are a parody of justice, designed to secure convictions at all costs. Even so, Lt. Col. Vandevelt's profound criticisms of a system that imprisons juveniles instead of rehabilitating them, and that suppresses evidence relevant to the defense, is just part of a much darker narrative that has been unfolding for the last eighteen months.

That darker narrative includes torture, of course. And a refusal to relent from the untenable stance of denying justice to these accused who have fallen into Cheney's netherworld entitled "detainees."

From this perspective, an even more significant event was the Pentagon's announcement, on September 19, that Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann had been removed from his post as legal adviser to the Convening Authority overseeing the Commission process, which, as the Washington Post recently explained, is "a Pentagon office that is required to exercise a neutral role in the commissions, overseeing but not dictating the work of prosecutors and allocating resources to both the prosecution and defense."

Hartmann, a reservist whose civilian job is chief counsel to the Connecticut-based Mxenergy Holdings Inc., became the legal adviser to the Convening Authority in July 2007, and was also required to "exercise a neutral role." According to the rules set up for the Commissions, he was "supposed to provide impartial advice" to the Convening Authority (retired judge Susan Crawford), and was also supposed to "make an independent and informed appraisal of the charges and evidence," to help Crawford "decide whether charges proposed by the prosecutors are sufficient to go to trial."

So their confidence in the court system, especially of the Military Commissions, was so weak that they needed to hire an "outside point man" to advise their judge. Didn't they trust their own military judges? Aside from this point, was Hartmann's work done as proposed?

However, complaints arose almost as soon as Brig. Gen. Hartmann was appointed. Just two months after he took the job, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Col. Morris Davis, the Commissions' chief prosecutor, had filed a formal complaint alleging that Hartmann had "overstepped his mandate by interfering directly in cases." In a letter, Davis suggested that both he and Hartmann should resign "for the good of the process," adding, "If he believes in military commissions as strongly as I do, then let's do the right thing and both of us walk away before we do more harm."

Now Prosecutors are famous for liking to add convictions to their roster. But here you have a prosecutor who feels strongly that he's being pushed in one direction, and therefore unable to conduct a just and fair prosecution. It speaks volumes about the injustice from Cheney and Bush's side, and at the same time about the sense of justice and fairness from the military prosecution's side.

Officials who spoke to the Journal's Jess Bravin made it clear that Col. Davis was not alone in his complaints. A lawyer close to the process explained that, although Hartmann had complained that, after four years, the prosecution was "still unready to try cases," and was frustrated with their "can't do" approach, some of the prosecutors regarded him as "'micromanaging' cases he doesn't fully understand."

Brig. Gen. Hartmann escaped unscathed from Col. Davis' accusations -- and in fact it was Davis, alone, who resigned on October 4 -- and he also escaped censure the following month, when, during a pre-trial hearing for Omar Khadr (the Canadian who was just 15 years old when he was captured in July 2002), Khadr's defense team announced that they had just been informed of the existence of an eyewitness to the main crime for which Omar was being charged -- the death of a U.S. soldier in a grenade attack -- whose testimony could exonerate their client.

This was extraordinary enough, in and of itself, but what made the story particularly shocking was prosecutor Jeff Groharing's admission that, as the Los Angeles Times described it, "he had been prohibited from talking about the case" by Brig. Gen. Hartmann.

Which brings us to the question: who exactly put up Brig. Gen. Hartmann to this task? What exactly was his purpose? Since when does someone who is not a party to the court itself have the power to interfere with the prosecutor assigned to a case? Why did they impose Hartmann in a role that obviously is designed to practically force a conviction in a sham "trial"???? A sham trial of children???? Are these the terrorists we need to convict? Are we supposed to sacrifice our entire system of justice in order to convict some children of terrorism in order to say "Yes! This War Without End is justified!"????? It defies reason!

Finally, the judge presiding in Salim Hamdan's "terror" case (he was Osama bin Laden's driver), Capt. Keith Allred, disqualified Hartmann from the case, with this explanation:

"Telling the chief prosecutor (and other prosecutors) that certain types of cases would be tried and that others would not be tried, because of political factors such as whether they would capture the imagination of the American people, be sexy, or involve blood on the hands of the accused, suggests that factors other than those pertaining to the merits of the case were at play."

What a powerful indictment of the Bush administration's travesty of justice at Guantanamo and their sacrifice of any form of conscience for political gain. It's a pattern observed on every level - from the firing of prosecutors at the Justice Department to the catastrophic invasion of Iraq and the disastrous conduct of the war, and to the destruction of Constitutional guarantees in everything from surveillance of the general public, to their free-for-all economic tsunami to sham justice at Guantanamo - nothing is safe from their lust for power at any cost.

In August, Hartmann was excluded from Mohamed Jawad's trial for the same reasons. Jawad's lawyer, Maj. David Frakt, told the judge, Col. Stephen Henley, that Hartmann "usurped the role of a prosecutor -- rather than acting dispassionately -- and pushed to get Jawad charged because the case involved battlefield bloodshed." Frakt also pointed out that Hartmann had "failed to turn over defense documents" to Susan Crawford, even though these documents "outlined mitigating circumstances that might have altered her decision to endorse the charges." He also secured testimony from an unlikely ally, Brig. Gen. Zanetti, the deputy commander of Guantánamo's Joint Task Force, who declared that Hartmann's demeanor was "abusive, bullying and unprofessional … pretty much across the board," and described his approach to the Commissions as, "Spray and pray. Charge everybody. Let's go. Speed, speed, speed."

Three weeks ago, Hartman was barred for a third time, this time from any post-trial review in Omar Khadr's case. The judge, Col. Patrick Parrish, had refused a request from Khadr's lawyers to disqualify Hartmann from involvement in Khadr's trial, but he barred Hartmann from reviewing it, in the case of a conviction, for the same reasons as those described above.

Sounds like a bullet train to me - but not a trial. Who put this Hartmann guy up to this? Don't we already know?? So what happened to Hartmann? Was it "3 Strikes & You're Out"? No! When the Angler has a hand, his point man gets a promotion. Yes! This sucker got promoted. And it's all hush-hush...

Instead of losing his job, however, Brig. Gen. Hartmann was actually promoted to a new post, as director of operations, planning and development for the Commissions, responsible, as the Associated Press put it, for "such activities as the hiring of dozens of lawyers and paralegals and ensuring there are adequate resources for the massive legal undertaking. His deputy, retired Army Col. Michael Chapman, took over as legal adviser.

This move may have partly been done to take Hartmann off the front burner, as the heat of public scrutiny turns on. But on the other hand, Hartman did just get a promotion, and so he now actually has more power, not less:

Although the Associated Press reported that the new job "takes Hartmann away from direct supervision of the prosecution," other observers were not convinced. The Washington Post reported that Human Rights Watch had stated that "instead of trying to clean up house, the Pentagon has now moved a man accused of bullying prosecutors to bring cases to trial and dismissing concerns about evidence being tainted by torture into a position coordinating all matters relating to the commissions."

This was no mere cover-up ploy. It was a redeployment designed to implant the curse of Cheney's torture and injustice schemes deeper into the system.

Speaking to the AP, Davis was even blunter, comparing Hartmann to a "cancer" that had infected the entire Commission process. "The only way to ensure cancer can do no harm," he said, "is to get it out of the body."

Or, in Hartmann's own words,

"I feel like it's an elevation, a promotion, because it recognizes … the exponential growth of the commissions," the AP reported him as saying, and in the Washington Post he claimed that, although "the recent court rulings forced him and others at the Pentagon to think about his role," the reason for his new assignment was that "he and his superiors thought that the 'best way to run the system was to take this more senior leadership position."

Hartmann continued crowing in comments to the Miami Herald. Likening his new job to that of a "chief executive officer at a 250-staff corporate headquarters," and adding that he "had no fixed budget," he declared that his biggest challenge was "to keep the process moving, really intensely." He added, "Everybody needs to start seeing more trials. I want those courtrooms to be as filled up as they can possibly be -- six days a week."

What "exponential growth"??? Are they planning to make it so nobody can stop them? Is this a train wreck Cheney is pushing down the track of no return?? What the hell kind of justice system wants more, more, faster, faster? A kangaroo court has much more justice than the US Military Commission system as Cheney would style it.

Andy Worthington agrees:

And when this is looked at in detail, Hartmann appears, shockingly, to be little more than a puppet (albeit a willing and hard-working one), whose reassignment is a reward to prevent him from being a sacrifice, which was bestowed upon him by his masters -- in the Pentagon, and in the Office of the Vice President -- who have no interest in establishing a fair or just process at Guantánamo.

Back to the case of Australian David Hicks, who admitted to providing material support for terrorism in March 2007 in exchange for a nine-month sentence to be served in Australia, this was a deal cut directly by Dick Cheney to help his pal Australian Premier John Howard, who at the time was struggling to win re-election, by giving him Hicks as a "trophy". Fortunately for the Australians, they failed to be impressed and voted Howard out.

But how this deal went down shows Cheney's total disregard for the rule of law. He and his pro-torture cronies David Addington and two others - notably William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon's General Counsel, who was "known for his tight connections with the Vice President's Office" - worked out a deal to get Hicks off the hook, cutting off the prosecutor who had just began his seering opening argument painting Hicks as a terrorist. The prosecutor, Col. Davis, didn't find out about the deal until it was done. So instead of the prosecutor cutting the deal, as in actual "courts", here the Vice President and some of his "connections" worked out a deal without the involvement of the prosecution whatsoever, essentially cutting him off at the pass.

Apparently then, this war on terror works as a publicity stunt. Sincere prosecutors, believing themselves to be on the legal end of the war on terror, work on prosecutions. In comes Cheney and cuts a deal without even telling them. The prosecutors have to find out how their cases ended up by reading the newspaper. So it isn't really a war on terror. It's a propaganda tool to gain power, political power, for "Friends of Cheney", Inc.

Col. Davis was also critical of the role played not only by Hartmann and Haynes, but also by Susan Crawford, and he was dismayed by what he described as Hartmann and Crawford's desire to conduct trials "behind closed doors." "Transparency is critical," he wrote, adding that it was "absolutely critical to the legitimacy of the military commissions that they be conducted in an atmosphere of honesty and impartiality," and pointing out that "even the most perfect trial in history will be viewed with scepticism if it is conducted behind closed doors."

Davis also directed a specific attack at Susan Crawford, explaining that "the political appointee known as the 'convening authority' -- a title with no counterpart in civilian courts -- was not living up to that obligation." As he described it, Crawford, unlike her predecessor Maj. Gen. John Altenburg, whose staff had "kept its distance from the prosecution to preserve its impartiality," had overstepped her administrative role, and "had her staff assessing evidence before the filing of charges, directing the prosecution's pre-trial preparation of cases (which began while I was on medical leave), drafting charges against those who were accused and assigning prosecutors to cases." He continued: "Intermingling convening authority and prosecutor roles perpetuates the perception of a rigged process stacked against the accused."

As if this were not enough, said in an interview with the Nation:

"[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time," recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, which had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

"I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process," Davis continued. "At which point, [Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, 'Wait a minute, we can't have acquittals. If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can't have acquittals. We've got to have convictions.'"

Rigged trials, torture: the legacy of Bush and Cheney... Let's hope this shake-up will uproot the designed injustice those enemies of justice are trying to institute. Let's hope the American public will realize what's going on and let them know...

Only if Cheney et al feel that there is an outcry against them, and that they will be held responsible for undermining justice, then and only then, is there a chance that we can climb out of this darkest era in U.S. history.

Terrorism Against Muslims Hits Ohio in Ramadan

This disconcerting news about terrorism against Muslims is just in (quoted in full):

Baboucarr Njie was preparing for his prayer session Friday night, Sept. 26, when he heard children in the Islamic Society of Greater Dayton coughing. Soon, Njie himself was overcome with fits of coughing and, like the rest of those in the building, headed for the doors.

"I would stay outside for a minute, then go back in, there were a lot of kids," Njie said. "My throat is still itchy, I need to get some milk."

Njie was one of several affected when a suspected chemical irritant was sprayed into the mosque at 26 Josie St., bringing Dayton police, fire and hazardous material personnel to the building at 9:48 p.m.

Someone "sprayed an irritant into the mosque," Dayton fire District Chief Vince Wiley said, noting that fire investigators believe it was a hand-held spray can.

According to fire dispatch communications, a child reported seeing two men with a white can spraying something into a window. That child was brought to the supervising firefighter at the scene.

Wiley would not discuss that report, but said the investigation has been turned over to police. Police were not commenting.

The 300 or so inside were celebrating the last 10 days of Ramadan with dinner and a prayer session, but the prayer session was interrupted so those suffering from tearing, coughing and shortness of breath could receive treatment.

Wiley said an adult and juvenile were taken to area hospitals and others had their eyes or faces washed on the scene. He did not know how many people were treated at the scene.

Ismail Gula, ISGD secretary, said people were praying during the weekly service when some in the audience began to cough and experience breathing troubles, then left the building. Once outside, several of them called 911, Gula said.

Tarek Sabagh, a member of the ISGD board, wasn't present when the incident occurred.

He said his daughter called and told him to stay away because of the possibility of remaining fumes. Sabagh arrived shortly after and watched from the mosque's steps as members were allowed back inside about 11 p.m. to collect belongings.

"It's very disturbing," Sabagh said. "Something like this has never happened before."

Sabagh said members moved to a Beavercreek school to finish their prayer session as police continued to investigate.

"I don't know if people will have the feeling of trust to come back tomorrow or next week or next month," Sabagh said. "I don't know how people will feel."

Ramadan is the ninth month of the Muslim calendar. During the month, Muslims fast (do not eat) from sunrise to sunset. In the evening and in the morning before the sun comes up, they eat small meals. During this month, they take extra time for family, inner reflection, and spiritual growth.

This shows the anti-Muslim sentiment which is a direct result of the so-called Global War on Terror. You can't have a war based solely on ideology and win. It's always ultimately a lose-lose.

One loss is participation of Muslims in American politics and society, an important way of mitigating terrorism. In fact, it's the only real solution. Yet here's the reaction of one Muslim on dailykos after this incident:

Keep in mind, as many of you know, Muslims in america are well assimilated, mainstream moderate people, often times professionals who contribute greatly to the communities in which they live.

But because of Fox News, because of right wing organizations, like the Clarion FUND and their viscious attacks on islam, because of daniel pipes and ohers like him, Islam has been maligned to the extent thathate crime is an acceptable part of the rights tradition. They believe that Muslims are out to destroy America.

No matter the facts, no matter the reality, all that matters is the propaganda they listen to on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, etc....

Cal Thomas editorials are in my local paper virtually every day. The man rants against muslims all the time. And there are many others like him. Michelle Malkin. This Kathleen Parker who has recenltly called for Palins resignation has viciously attacked muslims in the past.

So many of them. And so, the regular people believe this crap, and they believe it is their duty to defend america against this Mortal enemy.

And when attacks like this happen. Nothing much is done, BECAUSE, muslims are ignored by and large. Their situation their suffering EVEN their votes dont seem to matter much.

Fortunately, a large and sympathetic response from the site assures us that not everyone has that divisive, partisan, emotional, fear-mongering, and unthinking attitude. Now we need more conscientious men and women of conscience in the media reporting an incident like this, and more public outcry.

New Spy Powers for Police: Democracy at Risk??

Today a new article in WaPo exposes Bush's latest tactic to bring the US closer to a true police state:

The Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years.

We're talking about local and state police, not some federal agents. And yes, that was "intelligence collecting", spying, not just enforcing the law. And what stringent safeguards, what conditions are in place to protect our real or imagined freedoms?? All the police need is "reasonable suspicion". Ah, yes, that wonderful and accurate cornerstone to prevent abuse: it's up to each officer's own renowned instincts, his "suspicion".

Or, to put it literally now:

law enforcement agencies would be allowed to target groups as well as individuals, and to launch a criminal intelligence investigation based on the suspicion that a target is engaged in terrorism or providing material support to terrorists.

And of course, this suspicion can be transmitted to

a constellation of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and others in many cases.

Shall we consult our astrologers to know what agencies in the "constellation" will be affected? Does anybody realize how this can taint a person's reputation and life?? The taint of suspicion, especially suspicion of terrorism, can absolutely ruin someone's life. And what about Middle eastern or Muslim Americans? What right-minded police officer wouldn't be suspicious of them?? And what does this do to our democracy - or what's left of it?

Jim McMahon, deputy executive director of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, said the proposed changes "catch up with reality" in that those who investigate crimes such as money laundering, drug trafficking and document fraud are best positioned to detect terrorists. He said the rule maintains the key requirement that police demonstrate a "reasonable suspicion" that a target is involved in a crime before collecting intelligence.

OK, maybe I'm not laundering money or faking documents. But what if I gave to a charity that later on was found to be, unbeknownst to me, contributing to some terrorist group? Will I be held in one of those new prison complexes the GOP has been preparing for just such a need? What if some police officer thought I was acting suspiciously? I know of a guy who was "taken down" by a team from the JTT (joint terrorism task force) and 5 squad cars with his children in the car just because he allegedly said to a grocery checker "Take care on the 4th of July" at a time when July 4 was on a "red" level terror alert (a few years back) and she knew he was from an Arab country. He was detained and questioned for hours until his attorney got him released a few days later. They refused to tell him what he was accused of, btw.

And that was THEN. NOW what level of suspicion and surveillance can they enact? Knowing the genius of police depts. around the country, there's no telling how this thing could play out. But don't worry:

Supporters say the measures simply codify existing counterterrorism practices and policies that are endorsed by lawmakers and independent experts such as the 9/11 Commission. They say the measures preserve civil liberties and are subject to internal oversight.

Ahhh, why didn't I mention that earlier? "Internal oversight" will be our checks and balances. Now doesn't that make you feel better?

Woman Gives Birth Under Torture: Homeland Security Hell

Is Naomi Wolf's predicted "fascist shift" accelerating, using the anti-migrant controversy as another "facilitating issue"?

As The NYT reported Sunday, a simple traffic stop of Juana Villegas, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who was nine months pregnant, turned into another case of Homeland Security Hell, of criminalizing poverty or the "crime" of not having "proper paperwork", in this case by torture.

But this was first reported at Political Salsa on June 13th by Tim Chavez, who heard her and described the torture, reminding him of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. It seems the war supposedly started to combat terrorism has now come home to torment anyone without the right paperwork: without papers, they're demons...
But is this even more sinister??

And so that - or what? - justifies this:

* A woman, three days before delivery of her fourth AMERICAN child, was wrongly arrested and incarcerated.

* Her water broke while she was in jail; she was transported to Metro General Hospital.

* When the nurse asked her to undress to get into hospital clothes, the sheriff's guard was asked to leave for the moment. He -- yes, he -- refused. So she had to undress in front of him. I don't know about your culture, but in the Mexican culture and Mexican-American culture, that is a highly offensive affront to our women, no to mention our mothers.

* Then, while in labor, she was handcuffed by her wrist and ankle to the bed. I've seen women in labor, and they constantly are shifting positions to try and get some sense of relief, if that is even possible. Now consider the pain if handcuffs prevented your movement.

* Thankfully, the handcuffs were taken off two hours before she delivered. But then she was restrained again in bed a day later. And every trip to the bathroom required leg shackles. When the nurse strongly objected, the sherrif's department stayed absolute. The nurse said the new mother would not be able to clean herself properly with shackles. The sheriff's guard said it didn't matter; he was doing his job.

Didn't we hear that excuse before at Nuremberg? Never forget; we still hardly remember. Our Jewish brothers and sisters deserve better from us.

* It also didn't matter if the baby received the critical mother's milk in its first days of life. The child was removed from its mother, and Ms. DeLaPaz was returned to jail.

* The final injury inflicted upon this CIVIL/MISDEMEANOR offender was the denial of her use of a breast pump to express her milk for the baby and her own comfort. The nurse again strongly objected, but the sheriff's department again played law enforcer, physician and God.

* Ms. DeLaPaz returned to her jail cell in great pain from her swollen breasts. She could not sleep due to the agony.

* Meanwhile, her infant son was taken to a pediatrican. There he was tested and found to have a blood level containing a high measurement of a dangerous chemical that produces jaundice, a yellowing of the skin. My father had jaundice before he died of cancer, so the condition denotes the medical seriousness of the moment.

The child's condition was due to a lack of mother's milk.

When the government can keep a mother from her newborn infant and prevent the baby from being breastfed because of some law, the law itself creates a crime. When being or appearing to be Hispanic leads to criminal investigation after a traffic stop, something is racist and wrong. When xenophobia creates anti-migration laws so draconian they criminalize what was once a civil matter, we end up with Homeland Security Hell.

"Illegal immigration" is violation of paperwork, not an act against another person. It was always civil, until manic Republicans criminalized it. And so human beings are fodder for someone's paranoid insanity-created law. The law itself becomes a source for inhumanity and crime.

Welcome to Homeland Security Hell.

The NYT sees it as a problem created locally by cooperation between local and federal authorities, and didn't specifically call it "torture":

Mrs. Villegas’s arrest has focused new attention on a cooperation agreement signed in April 2007 between federal immigration authorities and Davidson County, which shares a consolidated government with Nashville, that gave immigration enforcement powers to county officers. It is one of 57 agreements, known formally as 287G, that the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has signed in the last two years with county and local police departments across the country under a rapidly expanding program.

“Had it not been for the 287G program, she would not have been taken down to jail,” said A. Gregory Ramos, a lawyer who is a former president of the Nashville Bar Association. “It was sold as something to make the community safer by taking dangerous criminals off the streets. But it has been operated so broadly that we are getting pregnant women arrested for simple driving offenses, and we’re not getting rid of the robbers and gang members.”

But in fact it goes much deeper. ICE is the enforcement arm of the DHS (Dept. of Homeland Security). Under the anti-terrorist federal overhaul and the creation of the DHS, there is a mandate to "bring people in" in order to stay funded. This started with Gitmo and renditions and has, as Naomi Wolf predicted, come home to a town hear you. It's the ideology where We Americans are the Good Guys that need to Lock Up the Other Non-Americans, the Bad Guys. It starts with terror suspects, expands into immigrants, and catches stray "liberals" and other "dangerous" types. Soon, as Tim Chavez pointed out,

But beware, if your wife unknowingly is driving through a part of Berry Hill. And with her dark hair and new tan she got at Destin, she may look Hispanic from a distance.

Just pray that she isn't pregnant and about to deliver. Don't let her drive in Nashville after the fifth month of pregnancy just to be on the safe side. For sure, keep her out of south Nashville and ultimately out of the hands of Sheriff Daron Hall's department.

Viewed in light of Naomi Wolf's "Fascist America in Ten Easy Steps", the incident is even more ominous. Carolyn Baker, in her review of Wolf's book The End Of America: Letter Of Warning To A Young Patriot discusses this aspect of the overall change in law enforcement techniques, which seems not to be limited to only "287G", as the NYT would like us to believe:

Some of my students who are criminal justice majors tell me that the latest strategies now being taught to police officers are "shock doctrine" techniques which terrorize and intimidate civilians in order to control them. Law enforcement officers are no longer encouraged to "keep a cool head" but to "follow their own instincts" (which usually means their own internal, adrenaline-charged state of terror) and react with full force because it's easier to apologize (or encounter a lawsuit) than to ask permission or risk being killed. Terrified people should not be wearing a badge and carrying a gun, and when they are, a fully terrorized society is guaranteed.

It could be ... Los Angeles? New Jersey? Miami? Omaha? Why not? Every town now has a Joint Terrorist Task Force and an ICE team, looking for some suspects to round up. The rules that apply here are "protect Us." And "lock up Them."

And who are "them"?
Them "R" Us.

New Video of Omar Khadr Interrogation

This is my first uploaded video clip! And it's a blockbuster. According to the Guardian:

At the time the video was produced, February 2003, Khadr was 16. He had been subjected to what guards called the "frequent flyer" programme, in which detainees are deprived of sleep.
In Khadr's case, he was prevented from sleeping for more than three hours at a time for 21 days.
In the footage broadcast yesterday, Khadr's despair at his indefinite confinement is palpable. He strips his orange prison uniform over his head, rocks and holds his face in his hands, weeping and begging for help. "You don't care about me," he tells interrogators.
Commentators described his indistinct moans as Khadr saying: "help me", "kill me", or even calling for his mother in Arabic.
The video, which the Canadian government handed over to Khadr's lawyers on the orders of Canada's supreme court, was the first sight of some seven hours of footage of his interrogation by Canadian agents. The images were recorded by a camera hidden in an air shaft as Khadr was questioned over four days.

Of course, many right-wingers will look for "clues" to "lack of abuse." Followed by doubletalk. But see for yourself.

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??????

FBI's profiling of "Muslims" Is Racist, Oppressive, and Counterproductive

The FBI plans to "ethnically profile" Muslims in terror probes, an unconstitutional and dangerous Big Brother-style course. Why do neocons insist the only road to security is that taken by totalitarian dictatorships? Are they our new example of How to Run a Country and Secure Its Citizens? Don't they see they will become the problem, not solve it?
This article in Salon discusses the issue where the inimitable Juan Cole shows how this policy both violates the U.S. Constitution and at the same time does not help in the fight against terrorism.

The impending new rules, which would be implemented later this summer, allow bureau agents to establish a terrorist profile or pattern of behavior and attributes and, on the basis of that profile, start investigating an individual or group. Agents would be permitted to ask "open-ended questions" concerning the activities of Muslim Americans and Arab-Americans. A person's travel and occupation, as well as race or ethnicity, could be grounds for opening a national security investigation.

Wait a minute! Is this the United States of America? What happened to the Bill of Rights here? Does it again apply to some and not to others? Many "conservatives" in days gone by, not so far gone in fact, thought blacks to be a "threat" to "security". Were not lynch mobs created ad hoc in order to "enforce" "security"? Security being in the mind of the enforcer, not the accused, of course.

Where did due process go? Shall we hold a funeral? Congress, I'm sure, is almost ready for that. Hopefully, Barack Obama is not.

The new guidelines would lead to many bogus prosecutions, but they would also prove counterproductive in the effort to disrupt real terror plots. And then there's Attorney General Michael Mukasey's rationale for revising the rules in the first place. "It's necessary," he explained in a June news conference, "to put in place regulations that will allow the FBI to transform itself as it is transforming itself into an intelligence-gathering organization." When did Congress, or we as a nation, have a debate about whether we want to authorize the establishment of a domestic intelligence agency?

And this "technique" - ah, the all-forgiving word "technique! - is also against the law.

using race and ethnicity as the -- or even a -- primary factor in deciding whom to stop and search, despite being widespread among police forces, is illegal.

And ineffective, possibly even worse than ineffective:

If the aim is to identify al-Qaida operatives or close sympathizers in the United States, racial profiling is counterproductive. Such tiny, cultlike terror organizations are multinational. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, is a Briton whose father hailed from Jamaica, and no racial profile of him would have predicted his al-Qaida ties. Adam Gadahn, an al-Qaida spokesman, is from a mixed Jewish and Christian heritage and hails from suburban Orange County, Calif. When I broached the topic of FBI profiling to some Muslim American friends on Facebook, a scientist in San Francisco replied, "Profiling Muslims or Arabs will just make al-Qaida look outside Islam for its bombers. There are many other disgruntled groups aside from those that worship Allah."

So we end up spreading the "message" of al-Qaeda as a means to fight oppression rather outside the Muslim world, as if they really needed another incentive to violence. Great! Now we give a carte blanche to the neocons who promote Islam-bashing and Islamophobia, while at the same time increasing the power and breadth of terrorist groups. Not to mention alienating moderate and progressive Muslims whose willingness to assimilate culturally with America without losing its soul would be dealt a severe body blow. Chalk one up to extremists.

Oppression creates more oppression, much in the way pedophiles sometimes create more pedophiles out of their victims, or victims of abuse becomes themselves abusers. Healing and conciliation, reaching out and diplomacy may not be the macho choice in this world of Supermacho choices (al-Qaeda itself appealing to the Supermacho thing, as well as the neocon knee-jerk "bomb 'em" response - 2 sides of the very same coin whose currency is worthless and economy-wrecking). Racists raise up more racists. Dialog and government-enforced civil rights legislation was the only help. The marketplace does not eliminate oppression, unless moved to do so by government. The right is wrong on this.

It is a mystery why the Department of Justice has not learned the lesson that terrorists are best tracked down through good police work brought to bear on specific illegal acts, rather than by vast fishing expeditions. After Sept. 11, the DOJ called thousands of Muslim men in the United States for what it termed voluntary interviews. Not a single terrorist was identified in this manner, though a handful of the interviewees ended up being deported for minor visa offenses. Once it became clear that the interviews might eventuate in arbitrary actions against them, the willingness of American Muslims to cooperate declined rapidly, and so the whole operation badly backfired.

I believe the mystery can be solved if one looks to the neocon influence and islamophobia. It's motivated by the same thing that motivates racists - fear, and the easy path of choosing to label large groups of people for blame and self-promotion. It's based on the notion that "we" are somehow superior to "them", those nasty "Muslims". It's based on seeing the flag as a symbol of superiority rather than a symbol of democracy and human inalienable rights. The neocons were pushing us into a near-totalitarian, racist direction - are we not ready to give that up to keep the real reason for our country's previously good reputation? And change the world opinion that we are just another huge, overblown, conceited, rich, unweildy, powerful oppressor nation.

Gitmo Now Breeding Ground for Terrorists

According to this article,

A McClatchy investigation found that instead of confining terrorists,
Guantanamo often produced more of them by rounding up common criminals,
conscripts, low-level foot soldiers and men with no allegiance to radical Islam
- thus inspiring a deep hatred of the United States in them - and then housing
them in cells next to radical Islamists.
The radicals were quick to exploit the flaws in the U.S. detention system.
Soldiers, guards or interrogators at the U.S. bases at Bagram or Kandahar
in Afghanistan had abused many of the detainees, and they arrived at Guantanamo
enraged at America.
The Taliban and al Qaida leaders in the cells around them were ready to preach their firebrand interpretation of Islam and the need to wage jihad, Islamic holy war, against the West. Guantanamo became a school for jihad, complete with a council of elders who issued fatwas, binding religious instructions, to the other detainees.
Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, until recently the commanding officer at Guantanamo, acknowledged that senior militant leaders gained influence and control in his prison.
"We have that full range of (Taliban and al Qaida) leadership here, why would they not continue to be functional as an organization?" he said in a telephone interview.
"I must make the assumption that there's a fully functional al Qaida
cell here at Guantanamo."

Congratulations, neocons! Now we won't run out of enemies when we need them, so we can fight more cool wars and ruin more economies and increase the gap between rich and poor which should create the huge vacuum we need to survive as neocon "profligate conservatives"!

Genius!

British Court "Forces Government" to Hand Over Torture Docs in Gitmo Case

Here it is, from the Guardian's mouth:

(below is the article in its entirety, with my emphasis)

A British resident facing a life sentence at Guantánamo Bay has won a battle in a British court to force the government to hand over documents showing he was tortured into confessing he was a terrorist.
Binyam Mohamed, once a cleaner in Kensington, west London, is accused by the US of being an al-Qaida terrorist intent on the mass murder of civilians.
Yesterday it emerged that the high court had rejected a British government attempt to avoid a court hearing which would decide whether it should reveal evidence showing Mohamed was tortured by the US.
Mohamed, through his lawyers, who have visited him in Guantánamo, alleges he was "rendered" to Morocco, where his torture included his genitals being slashed.
The high court found the UK government supplied America with information to interrogate Mohamed and said the hearing should be held as soon as possible.

Mohamed's lawyer, Clive Stafford-Smith, said: "I have seen not one shred of evidence against him that was not tortured out of him. We know the British talked to Binyam in Pakistan, told him he was to be rendered and gave information to the US that was used in his torture in Morocco."

Wow! Rumsfeld on Tape Says Americans Need "Another 9-11" To Get Them On the "Right" Track

Conspiracy Theorists, rejoice! Harry Reid and Joe Biden, here's vindication! After the Republican Revolution fizzled in 2006, Secy of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is caught on tape saying:

This President's pretty much a victim of success. We haven't had an attack in
five years. The perception of the threat is so low in this society that it's not
surprising that the behavior pattern reflects a low threat assessment. The same
thing's in Europe, there's a low threat perception. The correction for that, I
suppose, is an attack.

Which means, of course, another 9/11... Jason Linkins reports here on Huffpost:

An ongoing exploration of the documents related to the Pentagon's "message
force multipliers" program has unearthed a clip of former Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld suggesting that America, having voted the Democrats back into
Congressional power, could benefit from suffering another terrorist attack, and
doing so in the presence of the very same military analysts who went on to
provide commentary and analysis of the Iraq War.
As documented by Newsvine, it all went down at a valedictory luncheon Rumsfeld
hosted for those analysts on December 12, 2006.

The comments from Newsvine also reveal:

...while the USA is involved in asymmetric warfare, we can't lose
militarily--but we can't win militarily, either.

and this gem, where an analyst says to Rumsfeld:

Iraq needs a Syngman Rhee. Rhee, if you are unaware, was the ruthless authoritarian dictator of South Korea from after World War II through the Korean War to 1960. Yeah, he was a son of @!$%#, but he was our son of a @!$%#, to borrow a phrase Franklin Roosevelt said of Somoza. Well, well, well. So much for "democracy," huh? But the special treat in this little clip--before Rumsfeld wistfully closes by bemoaning the fact that Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki is "no Syngman Rhee"--is the way Rumsfeld utterly trashes Maliki's predecessor Ibrahim al-Jaafari,
calling him a "wind sock."

And it goes on:

The kicker in this clip is at the very end where he insults the American people
for "weakened will" as he praises the Iraqi insurgents for being a "hellava lot
more skillful" at influencing the American public than is the Bush
Administration.

This is the perfect description of the Republican concept of "influence" and "argument": it's all about the military solution.

Now will someone ever proclaim loudly that it takes a helluva lot more taxes and spends a helluva lot more government money and makes a helluva Bigger Government to solve everything by war and by promoting "security" via more guns, less education, less health care, less social investment, less diplomacy??? So who's about lying, taxing, spending ... and killing? It feeds into the conspiracy theory that 9-11 was a plot to get people to follow the Republican line.

That may be absurd, but everything's possible when there's no conscience evident. And where is it? Where's the conscience?

Why Do 5 Former Secretaries of State Say Close Gitmo?

This just came in from truthout: Former Secretaries of State Colin Powell, Henry A. Kissinger, James A. Baker III, Warren Christopher and Madeleine K. Albright all agreed that Guantanamo should be closed.

James Baker went on to say:

"It gives us a very, very bad name, not just internationally," he said. "I have
a great deal of difficulty understanding how we can hold someone, pick someone
up, particularly someone who might be an American citizen - even if they were
caught somewhere abroad, acting against American interests - and hold them
without ever giving them an opportunity to appear before a
magistrate."
The former secretaries of State also urged that the U.S. open a line of dialogue with Iran, each saying it was important to maintain contact with adversaries and allies alike.

Iran? And what about Iran? Do you mean we shouldn't take McCain's word and "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran"?

Baker suggested the dialogue (with Iran) could center on a common dilemma,
saying a "dysfunctional Iraq, a chaotic Iraq, is not something that's in the
interest to Iran. There's every incentive on their part to help us, the same way
they did in Afghanistan."
Kissinger urged an open - if delicate - line of communication with
Iran. "One has to talk with adversaries," said Kissinger, who served the Nixon and Ford administrations.

Didn't think the old guy had it in him. Does that mean talk to .... terrorists, too? They are "adversaries", so "one has to talk" with them. So where were they when Gitmo was put in place as Our Torture Chamber?

War on Terror Fuels Itself; Economy, Democratic Values Pay

Tom Engelhardt's intro to Mark Danner's great article on "Taking Stock of the War on Terror" brings this eloquent take on the war on terror:

The announcement (not declaration) of "war" was, in fact, a necessity for this administration, the only lever available with which to pry a commander-in-chief presidency out of the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Without the President's self-proclaimed War on Terror, there would have been no "war" at all, and so no "wartime" atmosphere or "wartime" presidency to be invoked to cow Congress into backing Bush's future war of choice in Iraq. Without "war" and "wartime," it would have been impossible to bring the American people along so readily and difficult to apply "war rules" from the Guantanamo prison complex in Cuba and Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Otherwise, as Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris recently pointed out in the New Yorker, how could American officials and commanders have designated those prisoners seized by the U.S. military in Iraq as "'security detainees,' a label that had gained currency in the war on terror, to describe 'unlawful combatants' and other prisoners who had been denied P.O.W. status and could be held indefinitely, in isolation and secrecy, without judicial recourse."

In the meantime, consider with Mark Danner, author most recently of The Secret Way to War, the fate of that global Pax Americana which the War on Terror was intended to bring about, as he gave this clear, painfully true picture of the War on Terror:

How indeed to "take stock" of the War on Terror? Such a strange beast it
is, like one of those mythological creatures that is part goat, part lion, part
man. Let us take a moment and identify each of these parts. For if we look
closely at its misshapen contours, we can see in the War on Terror:
Part anti-guerrilla mountain struggle, as in Afghanistan;
Part shooting-war-cum-occupation-cum-counterinsurgency, as in Iraq;
Part intelligence, spy v. spy covert struggle, fought quietly -- "on the dark side,"
as Vice President Dick Cheney put it shortly after 9/11 -- in a vast territory
stretching from the southern Philippines to the Maghreb and the Straits of
Gibraltar;
And finally the War on Terror is part, perhaps its largest part,
Virtual War -- an ongoing, permanent struggle, and in its ongoing political
utility not wholly unlike Orwell's famous world war between Eurasia, East Asia,
and Oceania that is unbounded in space and in time, never ending, always
expanding.

Read more of this brilliant expose, of which this is another excerpt defining the GWOT:

... declaring war on "terrorism" -- a technique of war, not an identifiable group or target -- was simply unprecedented, and, indeed, bewildering in its implications. As one counterinsurgency specialist remarked to me, "Declaring war on terrorism is like declaring war on air power."

That's it! It's the war against "evil", against "terrorism", against something that is neither a nation nor a people, but rather an amorphous idea. Why not declare war instead on, say, the number 13?

And the impressive result? According to the National Intelligence Estimate of 2006, the Iraq War, what was to be the "clincher" against terrorism, has become its biggest promoter.

In fact, that NIE cites the "Iraq jihad" as the second of four factors "fueling
the jihadist movement," along with "entrenched grievances, such as corruption,
injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation, and a
sense of powerlessness"; "the slow pace of real and sustained economic, social,
and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations"; and "pervasive anti-US
sentiment among most Muslims." ...
Which means that telling the story of the War on Terror, a half dozen years on -- and "taking stock" of that War -- merges inevitably with the sad tale of how that so-called war, strange and multiform beast that it is, became subsumed in a bold and utterly incompetent attempt to occupy and remake a major Arab country.

Basically, the War on Terror is "an ideological crusade", and considering that bin Laden deliberately provoked the U.S. into attacking the Islamic world in order, as he envisioned it, to weaken America's military and economic power in a hopeless quagmire, it seems that Bush jumped right in. Into Iraq, that is, worse in so many ways than Afghanistan. And look at our military and economy now, going downhill fast.

The original idea was to shape up the Middle East and create a "Democracy domino effect. But as Mr. Danner points out:

The problem the administration faced, or rather didn't want to face, was
that the calcified order that lay at the root of the problem was the very order
that, for nearly six decades, had been shaped, shepherded, and sustained by the
United States.

Instead of dealing with the dictatorships that create instability and public resentment, we chose to invade an autonomous nation, causing already-existing potential rifts to morph into deadly civil war, further exacerbated by al-Qaeda who deliberately foment such violence.

... the Sunni-Shia divide running through Iraq in effect runs through
the entire Middle East. The United States, in choosing this place to stage its
Democratic Revolution, could hardly have done al-Qaeda a better favor.

Now we are hardly in a position to walk away. The moral victory is a distant fantasy. The terrorists have decentralized. They've become "viral al-Qaeda":

"viral al-Qaeda" -- "spontaneous groups of friends," in the words of former
CIA analyst and psychiatrist Marc Sageman, "as in [the] Madrid and Casablanca
[bombings], who have few links to any central leadership, [who] are generating
sometimes very dangerous terrorist operations, notwithstanding their frequent
errors and poor training."

And as Mr. Danner sums it up, we have passed into the "era of the amateurs",

...self-organized, Internet reliant, and decentralized, dependent not on
armies, training, or even technology but on desire and political will.

We keep feeding that desire and starving our own moral vision by refusing creative nonviolent options. It's time to use our minds in something other than creating enemies and hitting them with clubs. It's time to reassess our purpose on this earth. When you insist on fear, emotions get in the way of reason. A war on terror is self-destruction, and humankind deserves better.