IT'S ABOUT FUCKING TIME

ACLU Sues Ex-Psychologists Who Designed CIA Torture Program

They would like to have us forget they made the mess in Iraq.

As much as they want to rewrite history, we won't let them.

This should be front page news.

Bush and Cheney lied us into war.  But we knew that.  Even back then.

What Digby said.

We were close to war with Iran during President Cheney's reign

But I didn't realize how close.  If this is true, it was going to happen.

Susie Madrak introduces us: This is Gwyneth Todd, former member of President Clinton’s National Security Council and top Middle East advisor. (articles date from 2012.)

Military command of this invasion, to be done without consultation of congress or the United Nations was left to Vice Admiral Kevin J. Cosgriff and Admiral Will J. Fallon, both career opportunists with extremist political views, willing to do anything for promotion and the curry favor from the powerful criminal figures in US government. 

Their “cover story” was to sale a frigate up the Shatt al Arab, a disputed waterway between Iraq and Iran, hoping to stimulate a “response” from Iran. 

Their real plan was to create the response themselves, as was done by the Navy during the Tonkin Gulf Incident in 1964 when America “invented” an attack by North Vietnam as a prelude to a 10 year war America eventually lost. 

Their plans were to create phony radio traffic simulating an Iranian attack in order to push America into authorizing hostilities that they, themselves, had perpetrated in as part of a conspiracy.

Apparently there were attempts to follow Gwyneth Todd to Australia.  Juan Cole discusses events.

Starting the week with a bang... Or maybe a whimper...

Louisiana's coast is feeling the sea-level rise.

While state officials continue to argue over restoration projects to save the state’s sinking, crumbling coast, top researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have concluded that Louisiana is in line for the highest rate of sea-level rise “on the planet.” * Indeed, the water is rising so fast that some coastal restoration projects could be obsolete before they are completed, the officials said.
NOAA’s Tim Osborne, an 18-year veteran of Louisiana coastal surveys, and Steve Gill, senior scientist at the agency’s Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services, spelled out the grim reality in interviews with The Lens. When new data on the rate of coastal subsidence is married with updated projections of sea-level rise, the southeast corner of Louisiana looks likely to be under at least 4.3 feet of gulf water by the end of the century.

The Republicans are getting upset that the Democrats are standing back and letting them fall on their faces. Josh Marshall says it best:

Official Washington is accustomed to having a Democratic safety net — not cash transfers for those who fall through the cracks of the market economy — but that Democrats will come in and solve crises created by GOP government by crisis.

Cheney is afraid of being tried as a war criminal.

No chemicals, no GMO grain, India has record crop:

What if the agricultural revolution has already happened and we didn’t realize it? Essentially, that’s the idea in this report from the Guardian about a group of poverty-stricken Indian rice and potato farmers who harvested confirmed world-record yields of rice and potatoes. Best of all: They did it completely sans-GMOs or even chemicals of any kind

And farmers are demanding control over the seeds:

Vandana Shiva: 'Seeds must be in the hands of farmers',Biodiversity campaigner accuses corporate giants of trying to take over the world's seed supply through genetic engineering,

I have here in my hand... McCarthyism style innuendo doesn't quite work the way it did before YouTube and the internets....

Do we really need to list why we despise Dick Cheney?

Because even those who cheered him on during his reign of terror seem to have woken up.

But if you are interested....

(An aside... I've never been really clear when to use awakened, woke, awake etc.... so this was fun to find.)

Update: Robert Sheer takes a whack at the Cheney ego.

War crimes anyone?

Research links rise in Falluja birth defects and cancers to US assault

Karl, remember what your administration did to protesters?

Cages and arrests and stuff?

How does it feel now that they're loose, angry, and in your face?

NOW we can get him for war crimes!!

Right? Right? You heard him, he confessed right there!

Former Bush Adviser Karl Rove says he's "proud" the Bush administration used techniques like waterboarding "that broke the will of these terrorists, and gave us valuable information that allowed us to foil plots."

In an interview with the BBC, Rove was asked about the Bush administration's interrogation techniques, and whether he is "proud" of its use of waterboarding.

"I'm proud that we kept the world safer," he replied. These techniques are "appropriate, they're in conformity with our international requirements and with U.S. law."

Keep us safe? Really? Your actions were the greatest recruitment tool al-Qaeda ever had. Safe? You activated the worst planned vanity war in American history and broke our military. Safe? Historians will look back on the Bush era as the point where the USA finally stepped over the line and ceased to be a superpower. Safe? I don't fucking think so.

Jon Stewart's interview with Marc Thiessen

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - Marc Thiessen Extended Interview Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - Marc Thiessen Extended Interview Pt. 2
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - Marc Thiessen Extended Interview Pt. 3
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform

How really very odd....

John Yoo's emails are missing. Who could have predicted....?

Because the president is God.

Yoo: 'Sure,' The President Could Order A Village Of Civilians Massacred

Tell us again why Yoo is teaching at UC Berkeley? That he is even allowed to have access to students? That he won't be prosecuted for aiding and abetting war crimes?

May this strike fear into the Bush administration

War crimes are always prosecutable.

MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) – John Demjanjuk, an 89-year-old former Nazi camp guard, is due to stand trial on Monday on charges of helping to force 27,900 Jews into gas chambers in 1943.

But we knew this already...

Two years before the 9/11 attacks on America, George W. Bush told a Houston journalist if elected president, “I’m going to invade Iraq.”

Bush made the comments about starting an aggressive war to veteran Houston Chronicle reporter Mickey Herskowitz, then working with Bush on his book “A Charge To Keep,” later brought out by publisher William Morrow.

This disclosure was uncovered by Russ Baker, an award-winning investigative reporter when he interviewed Herskowitz for his own book, “Family of Secrets” (Bloomsbury Press) about the Bush dynasty. However, Baker says, when he approached The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times with the potentially devastating story to President Bush prior to the 2004 presidential election, they declined to publish it.

In a new book, “Media In Crisis”(Doukathsan), Baker quotes Herskowitz as telling him: “He (Bush) said he wanted to do it(invade Iraq), and the reason he wanted to do it is he had been led to understand that you could not really have a successful presidency unless you were seen as commander-in-chief, unless you were seen as waging a war.”

Bush told Herskowitz that his father (President George H.W. Bush) knew that from Panama and (President Ronald)Reagan knew that from Grenada and…(UK Prime Minister)Maggie Thatcher knew this from the Falklands.”

According to Baker, Bush told Herskowitz, “The ideal thing was a small war, and this is why Bush said nobody was going to be killed in Iraq because he thought it would be small war.”

Since we can't impeach him, can we at least have a war crimes tribunal?

Torture explained... for kids!

With pictures!

What Digby said

About who was actually turning the thumbscrews on torture and on Spain investigating US war crimes by the Bush cabal.

The can of worms has been opened.

It's WTF Thursday!

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Many detainees locked up at Guantanamo were innocent men swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants, a former Bush administration official said Thursday. "There are still innocent people there," Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a Republican who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, told The Associated Press. "Some have been there six or seven years."

Wilkerson, who first made the assertions in an Internet posting on Tuesday, told the AP he learned from briefings and by communicating with military commanders that the U.S. soon realized many Guantanamo detainees were innocent but nevertheless held them in hopes they could provide information for a "mosaic" of intelligence.

Most of us who were reading the news and searching the blogs knew this many years ago, that children and old men were involved, that innocents were swept up in the dragnets.... and that we did fuck all to get them out. We've tortured them, made many go insane, and all for 'intelligence'?

Bullshit.

Tell me again exactly why it was that we had to torture? Why?

As I've said before, the top administrators of the Bush cabal did it because they wanted to:

Let the wild rumpus begin

Rewriting history:

...In an article about the Obama administration's "effort to undo bonuses at A.I.G.," The New York Times reported, "The Treasury and Federal Reserve officials said they had known about the bonus program as far back as last fall." But at no point in the article did the Times note that the Treasury Department at the time was then-President Bush's Treasury Department. Indeed, the article did not mention Bush or his Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson at all, much less report that the Bush Treasury Department worked with the Federal Reserve in carrying out last year's bailouts and bought AIG stocks notwithstanding the existence of these bonus contracts.

The fake uproar about Gibb's joke about Dick Cheney:

Dick Cheney is one of the most divisive -- and disliked -- political officials in memory. Maybe Chip Reid and Rick Klein haven't heard, but he just presided over the virtual collapse of the American economy and is directly implicated in severe war crimes and other pervasive criminality. Yet they speak of him -- and demand that everyone else treat him -- as royalty: This is the former Vice President of the United States you're talking about; have you no decency?

Journalists love to depict themselves as hard-nosed, rambunctious, ornery adversaries of establishment orthodoxies and political power. The reality is the opposite: there simply is no class of people more reverent of the political establishment and more devoted to protecting and defending its prerogatives.

Good for you, Canada! Thank you!!:

CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) - More than 100 protesters chanted "war criminal" and flung shoes in Calgary on Tuesday, angry that former U.S. President George W. Bush was in the Canadian city to give his first speech since leaving the White House.

At least two demonstrators were hauled away by police after brief skirmishes, as 1,500 business people in the oil patch city waited outside a convention center for an hour to pass through tight security and enter the C$400-a-plate ($315) luncheon.

Media were barred from the invitation-only event, during which Bush had been expected to reflect on his eight years as president.

Because Bush and Cheney liked it

That's why they did it:

....the Nelly account shows that health professionals are right in the thick of the torture and abuse of the prisoners—suggesting a systematic collapse of professional ethics driven by the Pentagon itself. He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. This was a standardized Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability for contractors. The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgement that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes. While these techniques have long been known, the role of health care professionals in implementing them is shocking.

We want the names of these so-called health professionals. We want the names of these 'doctors' who helped with these horrors before they squirm back into the woodwork. We want them to explain to us why.

Because there won't be any reason. There can be no explanation. None.

And then we will hear them use Nuremberg Defense.

Define a fair trial.

Can we at least bring our pitchforks and torches?

Dear Attorney General Eric Holder,

We the undersigned citizens of the United States hereby formally petition you to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate and prosecute any and all government officials who have participated in torture and other war crimes.