Holder May Probe Torture

This Newsweek article (release today from the pending July 20 publication) proclaims in its subheading, “Obama doesn't want to look back, but Attorney General Eric Holder may probe Bush-era torture anyway.” In the article the author, Daniel Klaidman, says, “For a new administration to reach back and investigate its predecessor is rare, if not unprecedented.” When compared with the “unprecedented” lawlessness which was the hallmark of the Bush Administration, that ridiculous excuse holds no water.

On the release of the “torture memos,” Klaidman writes:

Holder and his team celebrated quietly, and waited for national outrage to build. But they'd miscalculated. The memos had already received such public notoriety that the new details in them did not shock many people. (Even the revelation, a few days later, that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and another detainee had been waterboarded hundreds of times did not drastically alter the contours of the story.)

It is truly dishonest to make such a claim when the mainstream media—in the few instances in which the memos were mentioned at all—uniformly derailed the debate by using highly political (in MSM terms, “non-judgmental”) terminology to frame the issue (e.g. “enhanced interrogation techniques” and methods “which some call torture”) and quickly changed the debate to “did it work?” This was immediately followed by the obscene Cheney Torture Media Tour in which the former Vice Torturer repeatedly claimed that these “techniques” had “saved thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of lives.” A few public statements by President Obama and Attorney General Holder would have gone a long way toward refocusing the conversation.

If AG Holder hasn’t yet heard the voices of outrage, let’s help him out. He can be contacted at:

Office of the Attorney General
Phone: 202-514-2001
Email: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
Fax:202-307-6777

Why I (Still) Hate Kay Bailey Hutchison

Updated 7/9/2009
Update II 7/26/2009
Update III 7/30/2009

Below is an email dated July 1 from Kay Bailey Hutchison’s office. It’s really quite disconcerting to see how freely and blatantly our elected officials lie to us. While Republicans have by no means cornered the market on self-serving deceit, under the eight-year “leadership” of liar-in-chief W, they’ve certainly perfected it.

Dear Friend:

Thank you for writing me regarding the implications of President Obama’s Executive Order to close Guantanamo Bay. I welcome your thoughts and comments on this issue.

On September 11, 2001, the United States peered into the face of evil when 19 foreign terrorists brought the violence of Islamic extremism onto our soil, claiming the lives of nearly 3,000 Americans. That day changed the course of history, delineating the post-9/11 era from the days that came before. In the eight years since, America and its allies have boldly waged the Global War on Terror in an effort to prevent terrorism from ever reaching America’s shores again and to protect free nations across the world. This conflict has presented our nation with unique operational challenges for which there is no wartime precedent, such as where and how to detain captured terrorists, including the self-confessed mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Since shortly after 9/11, enemy combatants have been detained at a prisoner facility at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Now, the Guantanamo Bay detention facility has become a point of contention. Just two days after President Obama’s Inauguration, he issued an Executive Order to close the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention facility within a year. I believe this action is premature, and I am extremely concerned about the fast-looming deadline, particularly when no viable alternative for housing these dangerous terrorists and enemy combatants has been outlined.

President Barack Obama’s Executive Order states that the closure, which would require the release or transfer of nearly 300 detainees, should be practicable and consistent with national security interests. This cannot happen without a full discussion and thorough plan for the detainment of these enemy combatants. The policy contemplates five scenarios for handling current detainees: hand them over to their home countries for incarceration; transfer them to a neutral country; transfer them to prisons on U.S. soil; send them to U.S. facilities abroad; or release them outright. Unfortunately, all of these alternatives heighten the threat to the lives of Americans at home and abroad.

Without question, the worst of these options is to send Guantanamo prisoners to domestic prisons in the United States. By taking this action, we would essentially place terrorists in the neighborhoods and communities of American citizens. In 2007, the U.S. Senate expressed its firm opposition to any plans to release Guantanamo detainees into American society or to house them in U.S. facilities, by a vote of 94-3. Vice President Biden (then-Senator of Delaware) was among the 94 Senators opposing transfer of the prisoners to the U.S; President Obama (then-Senator of Illinois) was not present for the vote.

Alternatively, transferring enemy combatants to prisons in foreign states or releasing them to their home countries is also a dangerous proposition. In January, it was reported that former Guantanamo detainee Said Ali al-Shihri, who had been released into the custody of Saudi Arabia, has subsequently resurfaced as a terrorist operative. Today, he is al-Qaeda’s deputy leader in Yemen and is charged with planning and executing acts of violence against the U.S. and its allies. And al-Shihri is not the exception. According to the Pentagon, as many as 61 enemy combatants released from Guantanamo have since reconnected with terrorist networks and renewed their commitment to destroying America and our way of life. Even more frightening, these 61 former prisoners came from the group of 500 that were deemed less dangerous and were thus released. That means that the approximately 270 detainees currently in Guantanamo represent the most violent and nefarious prisoners.

Clearly, a viable alternative to Guantanamo has not yet been identified. Expediting closure of this detention facility without absolutely ensuring American lives won’t be endangered would place misguided foreign policy goals above the protection of our homeland.

Moreover, it signals a dangerous return to the pre-9/11 mindset.

On February 11, 2009, I sent a letter to the President, urging him to reconsider his Executive Order and to reject any option that could land terrorists in Texas or anywhere else on American soil. Before setting a deadline to close the detainment camp at Guantanamo Bay, the American people must first be assured that the transfer or release of detainees will not increase the risk of harm to American citizens at home or abroad. As it stands, the administration cannot give that assurance today.

Again, thank you for contacting me on this important issue, and please feel free to write or call me in the future with your opinions.

Sincerely,
Kay Bailey Hutchison
United States
Senator

284 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
202-224-5922 (tel)
202-224-0776 (fax)
http://hutchison.senate.gov

I believe I made it pretty clear in this post that I possess no deep and abiding affection for Senator KBH. But, once again, let me try to begin deconstructing the web of falsehoods in this reply.

Dear Friend:
OK, right off the bat—I’m not even sure Senator Hutchison is capable of friendship (at least outside of the “what-can-you-do-for-me?” Tom “Hammer” Delay kind). Besides, I really don’t want her to be my friend; I want her to be my representative—a concept with which she seems to be blissfully unfamiliar.

Thank you for writing me regarding the implications of President Obama’s Executive Order to close Guantanamo Bay. I welcome your thoughts and comments on this issue.

On September 11, 2001, the United States peered into the face of evil when 19 foreign terrorists brought the violence of Islamic extremism onto our soil, claiming the lives of nearly 3,000 Americans. That day changed the course of history, delineating the post-9/11 era from the days that came before. In the eight years since, America and its allies have boldly waged the Global War on Terror in an effort to prevent terrorism from ever reaching America’s shores again and to protect free nations across the world. This conflict has presented our nation with unique operational challenges for which there is no wartime precedent, such as where and how to detain captured terrorists, including the self-confessed mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Tell me she didn’t!* KBH and her ilk would have us believe that when we “peered into the face of evil” on 9/11, life as we knew it was vaporized into thin air! “That day changed the course of history, delineating the post-9/11 era from the days that came before.” Well, yes, I guess that day did “change the course of history”—not because of what happened (which, admittedly changed history, but not so much the course of history), but because of the way in which the Bush administration exploited the event to further its already-determined, course-of-history-changing agenda.

“In the eight years since, America and its allies have boldly waged the Global War on Terror in an effort to prevent terrorism from ever reaching America’s shores again and to protect free nations across the world.” That sentence is frothing with manipulative, fact-free, emotional and propagandistic language. I’ll just take that last part, “and to protect free nations across the world.” Well, if by “protect” you mean “bomb the hell out of them with ‘Shock and Awe’.” If by “free nations across the world” you mean “Christian nations”—and—even then—if you make exception for those cases in which citizens of Canada, Great Brittan, Australia, Italy, and the U.S. have been kidnapped, disappeared, tortured, indefinitely imprisoned, and in some cases murdered.

This conflict has presented our nation with unique operational challenges for which there is no wartime precedent.
Really? We have dealt with issues “such as where and how to detain captured terrorists” numerous times in our nation’s history, “including the self-confessed mastermind[s]” of terrorist actions. And we did so without torturing spurious “confessions” out of them.

I believe this action [issuing an Executive Order to close the Guantanamo Bay ‘terrorist detention facility’ within a year] is premature, and I am extremely concerned about the fast-looming deadline, particularly when no viable alternative for housing these dangerous terrorists and enemy combatants has been outlined.
Again, fraught with lies. First, continuing to label the detainees as “these dangerous terrorists”—when none has been proven guilty of anything and many have been known for years to be completely innocent—is utterly fraudulent. Then the assertion that “no viable alternative for housing these dangerous terrorists and enemy combatants has been outlined” here in a country teeming with high-security prison systems, with a vast prison industry, and with the highest rate of incarceration in the industrialized world is simply laughable.

[President Obama’s] policy contemplates five scenarios for handling current detainees: hand them over to their home countries for incarceration; transfer them to a neutral country; transfer them to prisons on U.S. soil; send them to U.S. facilities abroad; or release them outright. Unfortunately, all of these alternatives heighten the threat to the lives of Americans at home and abroad.
Yet, had KBH the slightest shred of integrity, she would have to admit that any of these options makes us more safe than our current policies of indefinite detention without trial (or with sham commissions), torture, and murder (not to mention indiscriminate bombing and disregard for civilian life).

In January, it was reported that former Guantanamo detainee Said Ali al-Shihri, who had been released into the custody of Saudi Arabia, has subsequently resurfaced as a terrorist operative. Today, he is al-Qaeda’s deputy leader in Yemen and is charged with planning and executing acts of violence against the U.S. and its allies. And al-Shihri is not the exception. According to the Pentagon, as many as 61 enemy combatants released from Guantanamo have since reconnected with terrorist networks and renewed their commitment to destroying America and our way of life. Even more frightening, these 61 former prisoners came from the group of 500 that were deemed less dangerous and were thus released. That means that the approximately 270 detainees currently in Guantanamo represent the most violent and nefarious prisoners.

We continue to hear the “returned to the battlefield” mantra regurgitated by Darth Cheney and the lap-dog MSM, but—for anyone with a miniscule functioning portion of a brain, that claim has been repudiated time and time and time again. A May 21, 2009 article by Shayana Kadidal appearing in the Huffington Post said:

Two Saudi guys who appeared in a video wearing tight camouflage t-shirts and claiming to be the new leaders of Al Qaeda in Yemen: Abu Hareth Muhammad al-Oufi and Sa'eed Ali al-Shihri. However, al-Oufi turned himself in to Saudi authorities after the Saudis made an appeal to their families and the families apparently called out for their kids to return, raising the question: how dangerous can a momma's boy really be?

Note that all of these men were released not by a court order, but by the Bush administration's own haphazard internal process. Perhaps if that administration had shown a commitment to charging and trying detainees, some of these men might be serving sentences for conduct prior to their detention. But instead, the Bush admin showed a mindless commitment to expanding executive power—deciding to hold men as long as they could to prove a point about presidential power, not to make us safer.

Might it be that we need to admit the possibility that what is most to blame for the potential of terrorism here is not the release of these detainees, but their indefinite detention and torture?

Moreover, it signals a dangerous return to the pre-9/11 mindset.
Ah, we could only be so lucky as to return to a pre-9/11 mindset! Alas, that seems impossible now in light of the many systematic (and systemic) aberrations the Bush Administration perpetrated against our Constitution (and which, to date, the Obama Administration continues).

Again, thank you for contacting me on this important issue, and please feel free to write or call me in the future with your opinions.
Yeah, right.

So. . . I still hate Kay Bailey Hutchison.

*Since 9/11 there have been few evocations of this exploitation (outside of the Bush Whitehouse) more obscene than this from Rudolf Giuliani’s speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City:

At the time, we believed that we would be attacked many more times that day and in the days that followed. Without really thinking, based on just emotion, spontaneous, I grabbed the arm of then-Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, and I said to him, "Bernie, thank God George Bush is our president."

What a truckload of absolute bullshit! And we (OK, not me, but as a nation) ate it up. (The mixed metaphors seem appropriate here).

UPDATE:
Yet another example (of the few to which we've been allowed access) of the depravity of the unsubstantiated claims of released detainees "returning to the 'battlefield'" appeared in today's news.

UPDATE II:
As is we needed any more proof that our would-be governor is an incompetent hypocrite.

UPDATE III:
Watch this slideshow from the Texas Democratic Party about KBH's disingenuous opposition to the confirmation of Sonya Sotomayor .

Obama Launches Review of Secrecy Policy

UPDATED: June 4, 2009
UPDATED: June 6, 2009

This article in today's Washington Post seems to bear very good news. Only time will tell whether it goes beyond more pretty words and soundbytes.

In predictable Washington Post fashion, many of the comments exhibit a very anti-Obama, pro-W regime bias (in fact total dumbass archfixxxer actually says, “sometimes ignorance is bliss”).

UPDATE: In retrospect, I realize I unfairly charactized the Washington Post. While the MSM has almost universally failed miserably in offering any real journalism or critical thinking in quite some time, I can hardly be this harsh toward the Post when compared with the other Capital paper, the Moonie/Wingnut Washington Times.

UPDATE 2: For a fresh view of the utter wingnutery of the Washington Times, see this article by Wesley Pruden, editor emeritus. For all Pruden's railing about Obama's apologizing for America's "manifold sins against civilization," an apology was the largest glaring omission from Obama's speech (even as Secretary Clinton had the nerve to criticize China for human rights violations of the past). Mr. Pruden's example of the mote versus the beam seems terribly misdirected.

Like Lemmings to the Sea--Deadly Complacency

Led by Pied Piper Obama, encouraged almost universally by Congress, and endlessly cheered on by the MSM, we as a nation are becoming more and more intrinsically complicit in the atrocities of the Bush Administration. This excellent cartoon by Tom Tomorrow reminded me of several warnings which have been voiced over the past months and years.

In July of 2008, I wrote this article, The Precipice of Congressional Complicity.

For me, one of the truly disheartening things about witnessing the FISA debacle in both the House and Senate was seeing the sheer enormity of apparent complicity among members of Congress on both sides of the aisle.

I also revisited this May 2008 article by the ever-prescient Glenn Greenwald, Growing Responsibility for the Bush Torture Regime.

The more time that goes by and the more we learn — particularly if we do nothing meaningful to stop it — the more the responsibility for these policies shifts from the administration to all of us collectively.

If that observation were true months ago (it was), then several torture memos, leaked photographs, interviews with numerous CIA, government, and legal sources, and quite a few nationally televised confessions by war criminal (and utterly creepy guy) Dick Cheney later, its truth is even more compelling.

We Are All Torturers Now By Mark Danner was published in the New York Times way back in January of 2005. In that article, Danner said:

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Americans began torturing prisoners, and they have never really stopped. However much these words have about them the ring of accusation, they must by now be accepted as fact. From Red Cross reports, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba's inquiry, James R. Schlesinger's Pentagon-sanctioned commission and other government and independent investigations, we have in our possession hundreds of accounts of "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment - to use a phrase of the Red Cross - "tantamount to torture."

Danner goes on to say, “By using torture, we Americans transform ourselves into the very caricature our enemies have sought to make of us.”

Over four years later, with a Democratic president, Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, and an undeniable mandate from the American electorate, we—as a nation—have still done essentially nothing (except to further entrench the extra-legal circumstances which led to these abuses). We don’t need any more debates. We don’t need any truth commissions. What we need is the immediate commencement of trials and prosecutions of those who committed these heinous war crimes in our names. Until we correct the egregious wrong turn in our national direction, “looking forward” will only serve to keep leading us down that same path—right over the cliff.

Talking out of Both Sides of Their Mouths

(Or is that “Buttering Both Sides of Their Bread”?. . . well, they have been doing a lot of teabagging lately!)

UPDATED 5-19-2009

The Republicans have stooped to new lows in the latest incarnation of the torture “debate.” Their current inconsistencies are so muddled, moronic, and absurd that it’s hard to believe they’re getting any play time in the media (OK, not too hard to believe considering the intellectual dishonesty of the MSM).

They want to insist that the United States has never tortured. Yet, not only did the torture work, if we don’t continue to torture the ubiquitous Scary Terrorists will annihilate us.

The Bush Administration broke no laws, but if they did, it was only to protect us, and they should absolutely not be investigated (and certainly not prosecuted). Yet, we definitely MUST investigate what Nancy Pelosi knew about torture and when she knew it.

Only the radical “Left” advocates investigations (though almost 75% of Americans are in favor—an awfully skewed left), and only for highly partisan reasons. Yet most of those calling for investigations believe in equal application of the law and want everyone who might have played a role in conspiring to create a system of torture—Republicans and Democrats alike—to be subject to investigation (many of us radical lefties have been calling for investigations of Reid, Pelosi, Rockefeller, et. al. for over two years).

The Republicans are the real Patriots, supporters of the troops, and true Americans. But they’re also the ones who are advocating total disregard for the defining characteristics of American Democracy: the Constitution and the Rule of Law. (Some, like the f*cking brilliant governor of my home state, are even suggesting secession, stupid asswipe!).

Those of us who think sending our troops into harm’s way based on brazen lies, violating their contracts with stop-loss, and bringing them home to inadequate health care and benefits is anything BUT supporting our troops (but as long as you put a bumper sticker on your car, it doesn’t really matter); those of us who think suspending habeas corpus, torturing and murdering prisoners (many of whom we know are completely innocent) expressly for the purpose of eliciting false confessions to justify our illegal wars of aggression, feloniously spying on our own citizens, ignoring Congressional subpoenas and court orders, and otherwise eviscerating the Constitution (that “god dammed piece of paper”) are things we should not be doing are labeled as “UnAmuhrkan.”

The cognitive dissonance of the right is astounding! Maybe any health care reform needs to include automatic psychotherapy for all registered Republicans?

Related to this post, it seemed appropriate to dredge up this lyric, posted quite some time ago.

UPDATE
This article by Matthew Yglesias on The Daily Beast, GOP's Torture Tricks Backfire, adds more perspective on this topic.