Doesn't matter that they didn't have a trial

They should have been killed.

A former CIA officer has said it's ridiculous that the Bush administration didn't execute numerous prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, regardless of whether they have had a trial, when it had the chance.

"Many of those individuals that are there are enemy combatants and that's based on the Geneva Conventions and should be executed," said Gary Berntsen, who spent 20 years with the CIA, to Fox's Gretchen Carlson on the show, Fox & Friends. "It's ridiculous that the Bush administration, after seven years, didn't deal with many of those that we know are enemy combatants."

Um... sir? What the hell are you doing quoting the Geneva Conventions?:

A combatant who does not qualify for POW status can, under the provisions of the Geneva Conventions, expect to be treated humanely; and before he is punished, can expect to get a trial in "a regularly constituted court."

So... we should give them a trial, and then shoot them? I suppose you think you're spreading democracy and stuff?

Waterboarding in the past

Was a terrible torture. Via Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing:

A letter by A. F. Miller, of the 32nd Volunteer Infantry Regiment, published in the Omaha World-Herald in May, 1900, told of how Miller’s unit uncovered hidden weapons by subjecting a prisoner to what he and others called the “water cure.” “Now, this is the way we give them the water cure,” he explained. “Lay them on their backs, a man standing on each hand and each foot, then put a round stick in the mouth and pour a pail of water in the mouth and nose, and if they don’t give up pour in another pail. They swell up like toads. I’ll tell you it is a terrible torture.”

We need to keep the YouTubed videos of the various Republicans getting themselves into pretzeled contortions of semantics and logic while explaining how waterboarding is only like getting water up your nose or taking a shower or going swimming and then show them repeatedly whenever they run for reelection. Or when we have a war crimes tribunal at the Hague.

As Cory points out, we gave the death penalty to the Japanese soldiers who used waterboarding on our prisoners of war. Changing the title of the prisoners of war to illegal combatants doesn't change the fact waterboarding is torture and has been considered so since the middle ages. It's just another Rovian word game.

Stating the obvious

Headline: CIA Boss: Waterboarding May Be Illegal.

Ya think?

Though now legally questionable, Hayden said waterboarding was legal in 2002 and 2003, a time period when the technique was used to interrogate Al-Qaida detainees.

"All the techniques that we've used have been deemed to be lawful," he said.

Hayden's comments came just hours after Attorney General Michael Mukasey, in a separate House hearing, said the Justice Department would not investigate whether U.S. interrogators broke the law when waterboarding accused terrorists following the Sept. 11 attacks.

And just why was it 'legal' between 2002 and 2003 and now is not? Could it just possibly be that the Bush administration demanded torture and insisted it be used? Is that why they insisted the Geneva Conventions were 'quaint'? Is that why Mukasey has to twist himself into humiliatingly painful contortions of logic and law to explain why he can't find waterboarding illegal? Is that why the Bush cabal is running for cover under rocks to hide from lawsuits?

This will be the legacy of George W. Bush, the gaseous whimpering of deflating hubris that made the Bush administration think they could shock and awe the world and have all cowering at their magnificence.

All they have is ruin and wreckage, quagmires and stench. And lawsuits hovering above their heads for ever after, amen.

More on torture

I've pulled this from this post:

David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo quoting a reader talking about his Air Force training:
"Imbued within this training during the Cold War was the sense that part of what set us apart from our communist adversaries was our adherence to the Geneva Conventions, and that the inhumane tactics used by those adversaries was part and parcel of the totalitarianism that we were combating. There was also the sense--a point of pride really--that we could and would prevail despite holding ourselves to a higher standard. It was, in fact, the higher standard that we were fighting for.
[snip]
"Our trainers were careful to instruct us on the Geneva Conventions and which interrogation techniques were covered and which were illegal. I have a very clear memory of what they said about waterboarding. As I recall, water boarding was classified as torture and was a violation of the Geneva Conventions. They told us about the technique for the simple reason that the North Vietnamese used it on American Forces. They wanted us to know about that technique in case we were ever captured by "scumbags who didn't respect the Geneva Conventions." There were no demonstrations; it was considered too traumatic."

“When did the liberal media decide…that waterboarding was torture?”

Joe Scarborough defending torture.

Does he listen to himself? So we won WWII by torturing Nazis? No. We won by luck and strength and the galvanizing sense we were on the moral high ground. We did not torture. We did not brutalize our prisoners of war. We did not need to.

So when did torture become an indication of strength rather than of cowardice? When did torture become the tool of the righteous? When did men think that torture is the way to behave on the battlefield? Is the saying now "Who would Jesus torture?"

So. A question for those who think that torture makes us fearsome and strong rather than craven and weak. What are you going to do when they show one of our captured soldiers being waterboarded? We no longer have the protection of the Geneva Conventions. We've made sure of that. So....

Is he being tortured?

And that's okay with you?

Want to address this, Madam Speaker?

Lambert of CorrenteWire:

Well, I guess now I know why impeachment was “off the table.” Anybody for Barney Frank as the new speaker? Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen in WaPo:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique[ly illegal and unconstitutional?] CIA program designed to wring [torture] vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the Bipartisan group, which included future-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites [gulags] and the harsh techniques [torture] interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill [not to mention the US military**]. But on that day, no objections were raised.

Update 12/10: What Digby said.

A fantasy of empowerment

Tom Engelhardt has written for the Asia Times a powerful article that addresses the Bush administration's obsession for torture and attempts to explain it. Something all of us could see was horribly perverted and wrong but had no way of challenging it. These people get off on torture and think it makes them powerful. As we can see, it is the coward's way of ruling.

Torture, along with repetitious, pretzled "legal" justifications for doing so, were bones that administration officials - from the president, vice president and secretary of defense on down - just couldn't resist gnawing on again and again. So, what we're dealing with is an obsession, a fantasy of empowerment, utterly irrational in its intensity, that's gripped this administration. None of the predictable we're shocked! we're shocked! editorial responses to the Times latest revelations begin to account for this.
[snip]
In a sense, the Bush administration has confronted a strange policy conundrum. Its compulsive urge to possess the power to detain without oversight and to wield torture as a tool of interrogation has led it, however unexpectedly, into what can only be called a confessional stance. The result has been what it feared most: the creation of an exhausting, if not exhaustive, public record of the criminal inner thinking of the most secretive administration in our history.

Let's recall that, in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the administration's top officials had an overpowering urge to "take the gloves off" (instructions sent from secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld's office directly to the Afghan battlefield), to "unshackle" the CIA. They were in a rush to release a commander-in-chief "unitary executive", untrammeled by the restrictions they associated with the fall of president Richard Nixon and with the Watergate era.

They wanted to abrogate the Geneva Conventions (parts of which Alberto Gonzales, then White House Council and companion-in-arms to the president, declared "quaint" and "obsolete" in 2002). They were eager to develop their own categories of imprisonment that freed them from all legal constraints, as well as their own secret, offshore prison system in which their power would be total. All of this went to the heart of their sense of entitlement, their belief that such powers were their political birthright. The last thing they wanted to do was have this all happen in secret and with full deniability. Thus, Guantanamo.

The article is only three pages but is powerful, and tells us something we already knew:

...how about the strange situation of an American president, who has, in so many backhanded ways, admitted to being deeply involved in the issues of detainment and torture - as, for instance, in a February 7, 2002, memorandum to his top officials in which he signed off on his power to "suspend [the] Geneva [Conventions] as between the United States and Afghanistan" (which he then declined to do "at this time") and his right to wipe out the Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War when it came to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. That document began with the following: "Our recent extensive discussions regarding the status of al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees confirm ..."

"Our recent extensive discussions ..." You won't find that often in previous presidential documents about the abrogation of international and domestic law.
[snip]
But American presidents didn't then see the bragging rights in such acts, any more than a previous American president would have sent his vice president to Capitol Hill to lobby openly for torture (however labeled). Past presidents held on to the considerable benefits of deniability (and perhaps the psychological benefits of not knowing too much themselves). They didn't regularly and repeatedly commit to paper their "extensive discussions" on distasteful and illegal subjects.

Nor did they get up in public, against all news, all reason (but based on the fantastic redefinitions of torture created to fulfill a presidential desire to use "harsh interrogation techniques") to deny repeatedly that their administrations ever tortured. Here is an exchange on the subject from Bush's most recent press conference:

Questioner: What's your definition of the word "torture"?

The president: Of what?

Questioner: The word "torture". What's your definition?

The president: That's defined in US law, and we don't torture.

Questioner: Can you give me your version of it, sir?

The president: Whatever the law says.

After a while, this, too, becomes a form of confession - that, among other things, the president has never rejected John Yoo's definition of torture in that 2002 memorandum. Combine that with the admission of "extensive discussions" on detention matters and, minimally, you have a president who has proven himself deeply engaged in such subjects. A president who makes such no-torture claims repeatedly cannot also claim to be in the dark on the subject. In other words, you're already moving from the Clintonesque parsing of definitions ("It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' ") into unfathomable realms of presidential definitional darkness.

Update: General says Bush and Rumsfeld were closely involved:

Drawing almost exclusively from the documents, the authors say there is a stark contrast between the public statements of President Bush and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the policies those and others in the administration were advocating behind the scenes.

President Bush gave "marching orders" to Gen. Michael Dunlavey, who asked the Pentagon to approve harsher interrogation methods at Guantanamo, the general claims in documents reported in the book.

The ACLU also found that an Army investigator reported Rumsfeld was "personally involved" in overseeing the interrogation of a Guantanamo prisoner Mohammed al Qahtani. The prisoner was forced to parade naked in front of female interrogators wearing women's underwear on his head and was led around on a leash while being forced to perform dog tricks.

“It is imperative that senior officials who authorized, endorsed, or tolerated the abuse and torture of prisoners be held accountable," Jaffer and Singh write, "not only as a matter of elemental justice, but to ensure that the same crimes are not perpetrated again.”

Cheney hates the Geneva Convention

Isn't it obvious this man has never... NEVER served on a field of battle, never felt the need of such protections in the face of the enemy? This man is into torture, into disappearing people, into all the trappings of a tinpot dictator.

Will he get to keep his secretly located bunker when he is tossed out of his vice-president's office? Will he go quietly?

Will there be an oh-so-conveniently timed terrorist attack that will let Bush and Cheney stay in office?

We can only wait and see....



Power... I must have more... power!

Indignant, immoral, huffy, corrupt, pompous, hypocritical, greedy, insincere....

Republicans have been and are all that. (Did I miss anything?) So why on earth should we do business with them?

Republicans are trying to call Democrats angry and asking why should they do business with us. Sure, I'll own up to being angry. Wouldn't you be angry after six plus years of this shit?

Mustang Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof:
So why, the Republicans innocently ask, are the Democrats so angry? Would you like a list?

- Iraq
- Katrina
- Valerie Plame
- Tom DeLay
- Terri Schiavo
- Randy "Duke" Cunningham
- the fired US attorneys
- Abu Ghraib
- Scooter Libby
- warrantless wiretapping
- the USA PATRIOT Act
- tax cuts for the rich
- the Federal Marriage amendment that would put gay-bashing into the Constitution
- stem-cells
- and on and on

(I'll add three, Mustang Bobby: Habeas Corpus, the Kyoto Accord, and the Geneva Convention).


It's like having your drunk brother-in-law moving into your house AFTER your sister has thrown him out. He parks his car on your lawn, maxes out your credit card, and starts a fight with your wife. He then proceeds to leer at your underage son, grope your daughter while preaching about morals and the dangers of homosexuality. He listens to your phone calls and reads your emails. He watches porn and snuff tapes. Finally, he burns the neighbor's house down, then threatens the neighbor beyond him. He then wonders why you are angry.

Because they weren't shocked and awed enough

We did this to the Iraqis: (Via No Capital, The Guardian):

Despite their prohibition under several international treaties and by the Geneva conventions, white phosphorus and a napalm derivative were used without discrimination on the civilian population of a city the size of Edinburgh throughout 2004.

[snip]

Few people know about the crimes committed during the two sieges of Fallujah - Operation Vigilant Resolve, launched three years ago tomorrow, and Operation Phantom Fury, in the following November - as a result of which 200,000 people became refugees. There are no official figures for civilian deaths.

In the face of repeated independent verification, US forces have now acknowledged the use of chemical weapons, and yet there remains no sustained international outcry and no official response (let alone condemnation) from any government or the United Nations. The US has overthrown a regime while supposedly searching for phantom weapons of mass destruction, only to use such weapons on the newly "liberated" civilian population. The cold hypocrisy of such actions is outweighed only by its extravagant viciousness.

Seventy articles of the Geneva conventions were breached in the two separate months of siege warfare.