Among the services that U.S. taxpayers unwittingly paid for were medieval-like dungeons, including a reviled former brick factory outside of Kabul known as "The Salt Pit." In 2004, a still-unidentified prisoner froze to death there after a young CIA supervisor ordered guards to strip him naked and chain him overnight to the concrete floor. The CIA has never accounted for the death, nor publicly reprimanded the supervisor. Instead, the Agency reportedly promoted him.Most importantly, the report "directly assigns culpability for these war crimes to the President and his policies." Greenwald highlights its scope:
And that just scratches the surface. He lists just a few cases in the post, but there are more out there in various other human rights reports, and both Jane Mayer's and, I believe, Ron Suskind's books as well. Like the former U.S. General and eponymous author of the Taguba Report said: "There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."The executive summary also traces the erosion of detainee treatment standards to a Feb,. 7, 2002, memorandum signed by President George W. Bush stating that the Geneva Convention did not apply to the U.S. war with al Qaeda and that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or legal protections.
"The president's order closed off application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment," the summary said.
Members of Bush's Cabinet and other senior officials participated in meetings inside the White House in 2002 and 2003 where specific interrogation techniques were discussed, according to the report.
The policies which the Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously concludes were authorized by Bush, Rumsfeld and several other top Bush officials did not merely lead to "abuse" and humiliating treatment, but are directly---and unquestionably----responsible for numerous detainee murders.
And voilà (here) Cheney brazenly acknowledges "playing a central role in clearing the CIA's use of an array of controversial interrogation tactics, including a simulated drowning method known as waterboarding": "I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared," he said to ABC News. Carl Levin, on the Rachael Maddow show, responded to this by underscoring the illegality of waterboarding and that the administration wrote legal opinions aiming to essentially rewrite the laws (This "technique" is meticulously covered in The Dark Side):
You can't just suddenly change something that's illegal into something that is legal by having a lawyer write an opinion saying that it's legal. Things can't work that way or else someone could get a lawyer to say a crime is not a crime and then that would be a defense.Again, no previous presidents, not even during a civil war in which over half a million Americans died, made such grand assertions of arbitrary power as this. Lincoln and Roosevelt, the two most commonly cited examples, exercised temporary emergency powers, but they never drafted legal opinions that ran contrary to any feasible interpretation of the law (Mayer goes into these comparisons, as do other scholars I've blanked on).
Adding to the chorus of whistle-blowers and dissenting voices against the government's "harsh interrogation methods," this courageous former special intelligence officer and interrogator admits that torture was widespread here, and has written a book on how interrogations should be conducted:
Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators' bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules -- and often break them. I don't have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.
Notwithstanding the many well-known tactical and ethical reasons to be against torture, this former interrogator provides more direct, experiential evidence as a professional in the field. He also makes the striking pronouncement that torturing our enemies directly leads to more American deaths:
It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me ---unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.
There really is too much pussy-footing around on this issue, when it should be quite clear: In order to protect the Constitution, and restore international confidence that we are a nation of laws and not men, there must be justice on this issue. However, there will be the apologists, obfuscators, and dissemblers for various reasons; and----shock!----it's not surprising that Democrats would find prosecution for war crimes inconvenient: Some of their own, like Nancy Pelosi, were informed about these programs and are complicit in these abuses. So it is time to acknowledge the "weapons" they will use to prevent prosecution, and thereby the general notion of accountability in republican government as well:
The weapons used to prevent such accountability are quite familiar and will still be potent. Those who demand accountability will be derided as past-obsessed partisans who want to impede all the Glorious, Transcendent Gifts about to be bestowed on us by our new leaders. The manipulative claim will be endlessly advanced that our problems are too grand and pressing to permit the luxury of living under the rule of law. When all else fails in the stonewalling arsenal, impotent "fact-finding" commissions will be proposed to placate the demand for accountability but which will, in fact, be designed and empowered to achieve only one goal: to render actual prosecutions impossible.
Because most thinking people who pay attention to this issue and have respect for the facts know that culpability lies with the chain of command, Greenwald lays down our options:
(1) treat these crimes as the serious war crimes they are by having a Prosecutor investigate and, if warranted, prosecute them, or (2) openly acknowledge----to ourselves and the world----that we believe that our leaders are literally entitled to commit war crimes at will, and that we----but not the rest of the world----should be exempt from the consequences.
Odds are we'll be proceeding with #2, Republican administration or not (unless we all heed advice from the great Network newcaster and let 'em all know we're mad as hell!)
Oh My Lord, Rick Warren?
The selection of Pastor Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation is truly despicable and utterly offensive. Obama's penchant for the symbolic is quickly becoming distressing. Why not just make a new position for Pastor Douche? Morality and Science Czar, anyone? Here's his thoughts on how "homosexuality disproves evolution" (Kill two birds with one stone, right?):
If Darwin was right, which is survival of the fittest, then homosexuality would be a recessive gene because it doesn't reproduce and you would think that over thousands of years that homosexuality would work itself out of the gene pool.
Brilliant! It reminds me of a snapshot taken in rural Illinois that my scientist soon-to-be-brother-in-law posted on his refrigerator for laughs: A church bulletin board reading, "If man evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" Holy shit! That kind of logic is unimpeachable (if you don't understand, nor ever read actual science books about evolution)! I do agree with Warren on one point though: That it is only "tone" that distinguishes him from James Dobson. Good work, Barack!
Out of all the pastors to choose from, he "shrewdly" (cynically) chose one who comes from a church that deserves to be taxed for its political advocacy, particularly against two huge constituencies of Obama's, the pro-choice and gay rights movements. Frankly, I'm sick to soul-excruciating death of genuflections to the evangelical right; I thought we voted against them this last election. Maybe we should have Douglas Feith for White House Legal Counsel, and David Frum to write all of the President Elect's speeches? The Axis of Change, perhaps?
According to this Warren asshole, you're a "Marxist" if you're more interested in "good works than salvation." That means doctrinally that Catholics are the evil Marxist boogie-men so commonly alluded to by conservatives as of late. In addition, this man considers pro-choicers "Holocaust deniers," homosexual marriages equal to incest, child rape, and polygamy (although Mr. Morality does admit he has "many gay friends...So they can't accuse me of homophobia"); and lastly, Pastor Douche maintains that stopping evil “is the legitimate role of government" because the "Bible says that God puts government on earth to punish evildoers.” In that same interview with Sean Hannity, he agreed that "we need to take him [Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] out.” That's as bad as holy-christer, Pat Robertson, who, on live TV, famously advocated assassinating Hugo Chavez.
How's that for the symbolism of unity, and the new visage of global cooperation? If Obama will make gross gestures like this in the name of supposed bipartisanship, what are the chances he'll hold anyone accountable for actual war crimes and other constitutional violations? Gross, gross, gross...
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