Tag: politics

Dems Abroad passes sweeping Marijuana resolution at DC Meeting

Seth Anderson0 comment

Good for the Democrats Abroad! Common sense would suggest the United States government should reconsider its ill-guided anti-marijuana crusade. The majority of Americans espouse this position as well, only the retrograde faction also known as the US Congress, Senate and White House that resist change.

Live High aka High Life

Democrats Abroad (DA) is the overseas branch of the Democratic Party. We’re considered one of the 56 ‘state’ parties by the DNC and are one of the 6 non-state ‘states’ (along with Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, etc.). Our members live around the world and come from every US state.

We held our annual global meeting recently (April 24 ~ 26) in Washington DC and, in addition to doing things like our DC doorknock and sharing ideas for increasing voter turnout among Americans overseas in 2010, we considered a number of resolutions, including one (text below), calling for the regulation of marijuana and for treating it in the same manner we treat alcohol.

It was, as you can imagine, a somewhat controversial resolution but I’m proud to say that our members tackled the issue head-on and passed the resolution without modification fairly easily in the end. If you think the so-called ‘war’ on marijuana should be scrapped and would like to confront this issue in your own state party, read on.

[Click to continue reading Daily Kos: State of the Nation – Dems Abroad passes sweeping Marijuana resolution at DC Meeting]

[quote]

The text of the resolution:

Resolution text:

Resolution on Regulation of the Use of Marijuana

Whereas,

The Obama Administration has wisely stopped Federal prosecution of marijuana sold for medical purposes in a manner compliant with state regulation, thus alleviating the suffering of cancer patients and others who would benefit from medical marijuana.

Only thirteen states regulate the sale of marijuana for medical purposes.

Criminalization of non-medical uses of marijuana continues to contribute needlessly to organized crime at home and abroad, illicit drug trade, overburdening of the criminal justice system, and diverts valuable criminal justice resources away from more serious crimes.

The Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy heavily criticized U.S. drug policy and called on the U.S. to decriminalize marijuana in a report coinciding with increased drug-trade violence in Mexico;

The dominant argument against liberalized marijuana regulation, the gateway theory, has been consistently disproven, most recently by a RAND Corporation study commissioned by the British Parliament;

According to a World Health Organization survey conducted in 2008, the United States of America has the highest rates of marijuana use in the world.

In the Netherlands, where adult possession and purchase of small amounts of marijuana are allowed under a regulated system, the rate of marijuana use by both teenagers and adults is lower than in the U.S.

55% of Americans believe possession of small amounts of marijuana should not be a criminal offense, according to a 2005 Gallup poll.

In the U.S., almost 90% of more than 9.5 million marijuana-related arrests since 1995 were for simple possession – not manufacture or distribution.

BE IT RESOLVED that

We praise the Obama administration for its bold step to make marijuana available for medical purposes,

We call upon states that do not yet provide the reasonable regulation of medical marijuana to do so as soon as possible, to alleviate suffering wherever possible.

We recommend replacing the current policy of marijuana prohibition with a taxed and regulated system modeled on how alcohol is treated in the U.S.

Reading Around on May 21st

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading May 21st from 10:35 to 17:13:

  • David H. Murdock: A Recipe For Longevity: 33 Of The Healthiest Foods On Earth – No pills, not even aspirin, and certainly no supplements ever enter my mouth — everything I need comes from my fish-vegetarian diet, which incorporates 30-40 different kinds of fruit and vegetables every week. Even though I am Chairman and Owner of Dole Food Company, I do most of my own grocery shopping, and even took Oprah on an impromptu trip to Costco, in a day that included bike riding, exercise in the gym, and juicing vegetables in the kitchen. Oprah marveled at how much I eat, and yet never gain a pound. In fact, I expend a lot of energy in my 50-60 minutes of cardio and strength training every day. Plus there’s the fact that fruit and vegetables tend to be lower in calories, but higher in filling fiber and other nutrients that help you feel satisfied.
  • Expert Tips on Photographing Your Pets – Gadgetwise Blog – NYTimes.com – “Back in the day when I was obsessively photographing just my own cats, I’d wait for them to do something interesting or cute before I actually brought the camera up to shoot. Of course by that time, 1 or 2 seconds have elapsed, and they’re doing something less interesting, and I’ve missed the shot.Now, I sort of treat my still camera as a video camera. Even if I’m not actively shooting, and even if the subject is not doing something “capture-worthy,” I continue tracking through the viewfinder and recomposing. Because soon enough they will do something capture-worthy, and I’ll be ready to press the shutter the second it happens.”
  • Data.gov – The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data. Visit today with us, but come back often. With your help, Data.gov will continue to grow and change in the weeks, months, and years ahead


Swanksalot’s Geek Chart

Reading Around on May 19th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading May 19th from 19:48 to 22:04:

  • AND HE SHALL BE JUDGED: GQ Features on men.style.com – AND HE SHALL BE JUDGED Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld has always answered his detractors by claiming that history will one day judge him kindly. But as he waits for that day, a new group of critics—his administration peers—are suddenly speaking out for the first time. What they’re saying? It isn’t pretty
  • O Lucky Man! – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – As one of the film’s songs says: Smile while you’re makin’ it, Laugh while you’re takin’ it, Even though you’re fakin’ it, Nobody’s gonna know. In O Lucky Man!, Travis progresses from coffee salesman (working for Imperial Coffee in the North East of England and Scotland), a victim of torture in a government installation and a medical research subject, under the supervision of Dr Millar (Crowden).
  • Donald Ewen Cameron – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – In addition to LSD, Cameron also experimented with various paralytic drugs, as well as electroconvulsive therapy at 30 to 40 times the normal power. His “driving” experiments consisted of putting subjects into drug-induced coma for months on end (up to three in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and post-partum depression, many of whom suffered permanently from his actions. It was during this era that Cameron became known worldwide, serving as the second President of the World Psychiatric Association, as well as president of the American and Canadian psychiatric associations. He was also a member of the Nuremberg medical tribunal a decade earlier, where he accused German medics of things he himself did between 1934–60 or later, though his scientific work during World War II for the OSS has never been a secret.

Rumsfeld the Manipulator

Seth Anderson0 comment

Donald Rumsfeld was never a pious man, but, evil as he is, Rummy realized the easy way to manipulate George Bush was simply to cite biblical verse. So Rummy did. Bush considered himself some sort of medieval Crusador, so slurped up the rhetoric, and asked for more.

Two Sides to Every Midnight Tale

This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.

Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

[Click to read more Frank Rich – Obama Can’t Turn the Page on Bush – NYTimes.com]

Getchyer Kitschhere

Like this one:

dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)

What’s up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary’s actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world’s apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout “would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”

Cynical, and evil.

The new era of Obama

Seth Anderson2 Comments

from the archives1 :

Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the University of California Irvine School of Law
Never in my adult life has there been more hope surrounding the election of a president. And never in American history has there been a president as knowledgeable in the law, and especially constitutional law, as Barack Obama. The most obvious place where this will matter is in his judicial appointments. There likely will be somewhere between one and three vacancies on the Supreme Court over the next four years. Justice John Paul Stevens is 88 years old and it does not seem likely that he will still be on the court at age 93 in 2013. There are rumors that Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter might step down.

Obama’s replacing one or more of these individuals likely will not change the ideological composition of the court in the short term; he is likely to choose individuals who have similar views. But Obama’s picks for the lower courts, especially the U.S. Court of Appeals, could be transformative. Most federal courts of appeals have a majority of judges appointed by Republican presidents, but in many places that will change over the next four years. In light of a Senate with at least 56 Democrats, Obama should be able to pick judges without confirmation fights.

Obama’s knowledge of constitutional law will matter in other areas. He has the chance to overturn Bush administration policies that compromised basic human rights. One of Obama’s first actions should be to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay and either transfer its inmates to federal prisons or release them. Guantánamo is an international embarrassment and has become a symbol of America’s violations of international law.

Obama also needs to immediately rescind Bush administration policies authorizing torture, permitting renditions that violate international law, and authorizing extrajudicial spying on Americans. From the moment of his inauguration, Obama must declare that the United States will comply with international law and follow its own Constitution.

In fact, Obama must take the difficult step of initiating the process for war crimes prosecutions of men such as Dick Cheney, David Addington and John Yoo. In her brilliant book “The Dark Side,” investigative journalist Jane Mayer provides compelling proof that these, and likely other individuals, violated basic norms of international law. Moving forward requires taking the difficult step of holding these individuals accountable.

[From The new era of Obama | Salon ]

Footnotes:
  1. never finished this blog post for whatever reason [↩]

Stanford A Drug Informer and Bush Ally

Seth Anderson0 comment

Somehow the allegation that an 2006 SEC investigation into Sir Allen Stanford was dropped at the request of the Bush Administration because Stanford was too well connected, and a drug informant, does not surprise me. Rules are different for the very rich, no matter how they got their money. The Bush team was always more interested in loyalty than law-abiding anyway, and Stanford, being a fifth generation Texan, was a Bush Ranger1.

Sir Allen Stanford, who is accused of bank fraud, is the subject of an investigation by the BBC’s Panorama.

Sources told Panorama that if he was a paid anti-drug agency informer, that could explain why a 2006 probe into his financial dealings was quietly dropped.

…

On 17 February of this year, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) accused Sir Allen of running a multi-billion dollar Ponzi fraud – when cash from new depositors is used to pay dividends to old depositors – civil charges he has denied.

Two and a half months after the SEC filing, the Texan has not yet faced criminal charges.

He was initially investigated by the SEC for running a possible Ponzi fraud in the summer of 2006, but by the winter of that year the inquiry was stopped.

Panorama understands that the decision was taken because of a request by another government agency.

Panorama is aware of strong evidence that Sir Allen was a confidential agent of the DEA as far back as 1999 – the year he made out the $3.1m cheque to the DEA.

[From BBC NEWS | UK | Stanford drug informer role claim]

Stanford got his knighthood from Antigua and Barbuda, yet insists upon being called Sir Allen, by the way. A bit of a douche-bag, in other words.

Among several framed certificates hung on a wall is one with the gold seal of Antigua and Barbuda pronouncing Stanford Knight Commander, which allowed him to use the title Sir Allen Stanford, and a letter on White House stationery dated Jan. 25, 2006, signed by then-President George W. Bush.

If I’m not mistaken2, when Bush the Smarter3 was in the CIA, there were allegations of CIA drug smuggling, using the body bags of American GIs returning from Southeast Asia. Also using various drug lords in the Golden Triangle as fronts to pay various military operations supported by the US. Wonder if that’s how Stanford and Bush met?

Footnotes:
  1. I’m assuming [↩]
  2. too lazy to look right now [↩]
  3. aka George Herbert Walker Bush [↩]

Chief Gil Kerlikowske Confirmed As Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy

Seth Anderson0 comment

Follow up to a previous post, (Big) Chief Kerlikowske confirmed for his new post.

Big Pot of Smiley Faces

Vice President Biden issued this statement today after the United States Senate voted to confirm Chief Gil Kerlikowske as Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy:

“I am very pleased by the Senate’s overwhelming support for Gil Kelikowske today. Chief Kerlikowske is the right man for the job. With over 36 years of law enforcement experience at all levels, he has long been on the front-lines in the battle against drugs. And, while the challenge before him is great, the President and I believe that he will lead our nation’s efforts against illegal drugs with unshakable resolve.”

[From The White House – Press Office – Vice President Biden Issues Statement on the Confirmation of Chief Gil Kerlikowske as Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy]

The real question is whether Kerlikowske will bring sanity to the federal response to drugs, or whether he’ll take the easy route and keep the failed policies of his predecessors. The citizenry is ready for a change, is the Obama administration?

Vulgar Pig Boy Takes Down another Corporation

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Rush Limbaugh is nearly singlehandedly destroying another corporation. Too bad for him it’s the one paying his exorbitant salary.

Latinos Meat

I wonder about Limbaugh and the thousands of his laid-off Clear Channel colleagues, because the dichotomy is striking: Last July, just months before the radio economy went into free-fall, Limbaugh’s bosses at Clear Channel, who enjoy deep ties to Texas Republicans and who have been at the forefront of promoting right-wing radio, rewarded the turbo-talker with the biggest contract in terrestrial radio history. The contract included an eye-popping 40 percent raise over his already gargantuan pay, despite the fact it’s doubtful any other radio competitors could have even matched Limbaugh’s old pay scale.

The astronomical worth of Limbaugh’s eight-year pact: $400 million. The amount of money Clear Channel execs have been trying to scrimp and save this year as they lay off thousands from the struggling company: $400 million. Ironic, don’t you think?

The simple truth is that Limbaugh lives in the lap of Clear Channel-backed luxury, while Clear Channel employees are being axed with abandon. And those who are lucky enough to keep their jobs are told to do the work of three or four employees.

[Click to continue reading Limbaugh’s living large while radio boss Clear Channel implodes | Media Matters for America]

Boarding Stable

Can’t really bemoan the fact that Clear Channel is in trouble: they have long been an opponent of both liberals, and music lovers. I’d be happy to see them fade into bankruptcy court, and oblivion.

Waterboarding is Torture part the 99th

Seth Anderson0 comment

In Dan Froomkin’s roundup of torture news, he points to this op-ed by Joseph Margulies:

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, Joseph Margulies, a lawyer representing detainee Abu Zubaydah, reminds us “that there was a human being strapped to that board. His name is Zayn al Abidin Mohamed Hussein, known to the world as Abu Zubaydah….

“They tormented a clerk….[and] Abu Zubaydah paid with his mind….

“Today, he suffers blinding headaches and has permanent brain damage. He has an excruciating sensitivity to sounds, hearing what others do not. The slightest noise drives him nearly insane. In the last two years alone, he has experienced about 200 seizures.

“But physical pain is a passing thing. The enduring torment is the taunting reminder that darkness encroaches. Already, he cannot picture his mother’s face or recall his father’s name. Gradually, his past, like his future, eludes him.”

[From White House Watch – Torture Watch ]

Take Your Stand

More disgusting details from Mr. Margulies:

First, they beat [Abu Zubaydah]. As authorized by the Justice Department and confirmed by the Red Cross, they wrapped a collar around his neck and smashed him over and over against a wall. They forced his body into a tiny, pitch-dark box and left him for hours. They stripped him naked and suspended him from hooks in the ceiling. They kept him awake for days.

And they strapped him to an inverted board and poured water over his covered nose and mouth to “produce the sensation of suffocation and incipient panic.” Eighty-three times. I leave it to others to debate whether we should call this torture. I am content with the self-evident truth that it was wrong.

Second, his treatment was motivated by the bane of our post-9/11 world: rotten intel. The beat him because they believed he was evil. Not long after his arrest, President Bush described him as “one of the top three leaders” in Al Qaeda and “Al Qaeda’s chief of operations.” In fact, the CIA brass at Langley, Va., ordered his interrogators to keep at it long after the latter warned that he had been wrung dry.

But Abu Zubaydah, we now understand, was nothing like what the president believed. He was never Al Qaeda. The journalist Ron Suskind was the first to ask the right questions. In his 2006 book, “The One Percent Doctrine,” he described Abu Zubaydah as a minor logistics man, a travel agent.

Later and more detailed reporting in the Washington Post, quoting Justice Department officials, said he provided “above-ground support. … To make him the mastermind of anything is ridiculous.” More recently, the New York Times, relying on current and former intelligence officers, said the initial assessment was “highly inflated” and reflected “a profound misunderstanding” of Abu Zubaydah. Far from a leader, he was “a personnel clerk.”

I don’t care if the agents on the ground were just following orders from the lawless Bush Adminstration, they should be prosecuted for war crimes too. Torture is torture, and I am sickened and dismayed reading how agents of my government abused other humans in my name.

Condi’s Really Bad Day

Seth Anderson0 comment

Scott Horton of Harper’s Magazine catches Condoleezza Rice speaking lazily, as if she were still bantering with the complacent White House press corp and not being questioned by young folks not yet part of the corporate system.

For eight years, Condoleezza Rice dealt with the Beltway punditry and the access-craving White House press corps. The reception she got, with a handful of exceptions, was fawning. Which leaves her totally unprepared for a return to an academy populated with the Daily Show generation: bright young minds with a very critical attitude towards the last eight years. In a meeting with Stanford students at a dormitory reception on April 27, the school’s former provost got off to a shaky start and ended in a train wreck. She may in fact have her last words in the exchange quoted back to her some day in a law court.

…

Rice insists that waterboarding is not torture. Why? Rice pulls a Nixon. It was not torture because the president authorized it. In Condiworld, apparently, “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” What lawyer was advising Rice through this process? That’s a pressing question–the Senate Intelligence Committee suggests that legal counsel at the National Security Council was guiding her at every step–and evidently giving her some very peculiar ideas about the law.

(6) Whereas the Senate Intelligence Committee’s summary shows Rice giving authorization for waterboarding, Rice has a different recollection. “I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency.” This is dicing things very finely. But I think I know how Judge Garzón will understand this: Rice just confessed to a focal role in a joint criminal enterprise. Nixon White House counsel John Dean, who has a lot of first-hand experience with the legal issues in play, had the same take: Rice just admitted to her role in a conspiracy to torture, a felony under 18 U.S.C. sec 2340A.

[Click to continue reading Condi’s Really Bad Day—By Scott Horton (Harper’s Magazine)]

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijEED_iviTA

Ms. Rice should go to prison for her crimes against humanity, but doubt seriously if justice will ever be served on any of the Bush Administration criminals.

Michele Bachmann – The new Sarah Palin

Seth Anderson0 comment

Well, not necessarily new, Michele Bachmann1 been as wilfully ignorant as Sarah Palin for a while, but an apt comparison nonetheless.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdjRFJQuoiI

“I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter,” said Bachmann. “And I’m not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.”

Here’s what I find interesting: Michele Bachmann is so partisan or so stupid (or both) that she thinks she’s actually being coy enough not to be called out on this insidious piece of shit.

Gerald Ford was president during the 1976 swine flu outbreak

[From Daily Kos: Your new Sarah Palin]

February 5, 1976, per Wikipedia.

On February 5, 1976, an army recruit at Fort Dix said he felt tired and weak. He died the next day and four of his fellow soldiers were later hospitalized. Two weeks after his death, health officials announced that swine flu was the cause of death and that this strain of flu appeared to be closely related to the strain involved in the 1918 flu pandemic. Alarmed public-health officials decided that action must be taken to head off another major pandemic, and they urged President Gerald Ford that every person in the U.S. be vaccinated for the disease

Ms. Bachmann also is a little confused about American history:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jc1kvcf4w-M

As a matter of fact, the recession that FDR had to deal with wasn’t as bad as the recession Coolidge had to deal with in the early 20s. Yet, the prescription that Coolidge put on that — from history — is lower taxes, lower regulatory burden, and we saw the “Roaring 20s,” where we saw markets and growth in the economy like we’d never seen before in the history of the country. FDR applied just the opposite formula. The Hoot-Smalley Act [sic], which was a tremendous burden on tariff restrictions. And then, of course, trade barriers, and the regulatory burden and tax barriers. That’s what we saw happen under FDR that took a recession and blew it into a full-scale depression. The American people suffered for almost ten years under that kind of thinking.

So here’s the media note on this dumbass: First off, recognize that she speaks in Palinesque gibberish. “A tremendous burden on tariff restrictions?” What?

Worse still, as TPM’s Eric Kleefield correctly points out, the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill — not “Hoot-Smalley” — was signed into law by Herbert Hoover (R), not FDR. The lead sponsors of the measure, Sen. Reed Smoot and Rep. Willis Hawley, were both… yes, you guessed it… Republicans.

Again, from Wikipedia, since you were probably curious too:

The act was pioneered by Senator Reed Smoot, a Republican from Utah, and Representative Willis C. Hawley, a Republican from Oregon. When running for president in 1928, one of Herbert Hoover’s many campaign promises to help beleaguered farmers had been to raise tariff levels on agricultural products. Hoover won, and Republicans obtained comfortable majorities in the House and in the Senate in 1928. Hoover then asked Congress for an increase in tariff rates on agricultural goods and a downward revision in rates on industrial goods.

The House passed a version of the act in May 1929, raising tariffs on agricultural and industrial goods alike. The Senate debated its bill until March 1930, with many Senators trading votes based on their states’ industries. The conference committee then aligned the two versions, largely by moving to the higher House tariffs

But hey, what’s a little ignorance? I’d hazard a guess that more than half of the current Senators and members of Congress would fail a college-level history test, miserably. Congresswoman Bachman is just one of those easily-ridiculed ignorant, smug, faux-Christians I thought we were done with once Bush’s thousand year rein crumbled.

Footnotes:
  1. a proud Oral Roberts degree holder, ’nuff said [↩]

Torture planning began in 2001

Seth Anderson0 comment

and then, there is this factoid, as noted by Mark Benjamin

No Masturbation Jokes

The Senate Armed Services Committee has just released an exhaustive review of torture under the Bush administration that, among other revelations, torpedoes the notion that the administration only chose torture as a last resort. Bush officials have long argued that they turned to coercive interrogations in 2002 only after captured al-Qaida suspects wouldn’t talk, but the report shows the administration set the wheels in motion soon after 9/11. The Bush White House began planning for torture in December 2001, set up a program to develop the interrogation techniques by the next month, and the military and the CIA began training interrogators in coercive practices in early 2002, before they had any high-value al-Qaida suspects or any trouble eliciting information from detainees.

As the report puts it, “The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.” The report undercuts the Obama administration’s case for leniency against the CIA, since the agency was pursuing abusive techniques even before Department of Justice lawyers had issued their supposed legal justification for the techniques in August 2002. The report also shows that the administration appears to have attempted to use the abusive techniques to shore up its case for war in Iraq. Interrogators employed the techniques, which are notorious for producing bad intelligence, to get detainees to make statements linking Iraq and al-Qaida.

[From Torture planning began in 2001, Senate report reveals | Salon News]

(my emphasis)

Torture first, then torture the law until it allows you to justify torture. Fucking sadists.

In Adopting Torture, No Inquiry Into Prior Use

Seth Anderson1 Comment

All of the evil thugs who tortured captured prisoners in the name of the nameless, formless War On Terror should be prosecuted and hounded from polite society. I include the Bush Administration thugs, but also their enablers from both sides of our oligarchy, i.e. Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate plus their various lackeys on K Street and elsewhere. All should pay for sullying our country’s name, for allowing our government to be mentioned in future history books on the same page as Pol Pot and the Spanish Inquisition. Sickens and disgusts me that powerful, educated public servants would be so cavalier with the civil rights of others. I am not surprised, but sickened nonetheless.

Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti write, in part:

In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

[quote]

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

[Click to continue reading In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Past Use – NYTimes.com]

Now that the details of these crimes are being made public, the various participants are all furiously trying to point fingers at each other, evade responsibility for their actions. I wish I was a religious man, at least then I could take slight comfort in the thought of these scum burning in hell.

Like these scum populating a Tony Auth cartoon from a while ago1:

This Reuters report gives me a little bit of hope: perhaps the international outrage will be so fierce, Obama will be forced to conduct a full, detailed investigation into the details of the US torture program. Make an example of a few mid-level functionaries

President Barack Obama opened the door on Tuesday to possible prosecutions of U.S. officials who laid the legal groundwork for harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects during the Bush administration.

Obama also said he would not necessarily oppose an effort to pursue a “further accounting” or investigation into the Bush-era interrogation program that included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, shoving people into walls and other methods.

That marked a shift for the Obama administration, which has emphasized it does not want to dwell on the past with lengthy probes into policies put in place by President George W. Bush after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

But pressure in the U.S. Congress is growing for a full-blown investigation of the CIA interrogation program.

Controversy has erupted across the political spectrum over last week’s release by the Obama administration of classified memos detailing the program to question al Qaeda suspects.

[From Obama opens door to prosecutions on interrogations | Reuters ]

Footnotes:
  1. there is also a more recent variant [↩]

More Guns Means More Deaths

Seth Anderson0 comment

Bob Herbert reports this salient fact:

Killing People Is Rude

Since Sept. 11, 2001, when the country’s attention understandably turned to terrorism, nearly 120,000 Americans have been killed in nonterror homicides, most of them committed with guns. Think about it — 120,000 dead. That’s nearly 25 times the number of Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For the most part, we pay no attention to this relentless carnage. The idea of doing something meaningful about the insane number of guns in circulation is a nonstarter. So what if eight kids are shot to death every day in America. So what if someone is killed by a gun every 17 minutes.

The goal of the National Rifle Association and a host of so-called conservative lawmakers is to get ever more guns into the hands of ever more people. Texas is one of a number of states considering bills to allow concealed guns on college campuses.

[Click to continue reading Bob Herbert – The American Way – NYTimes.com]

First Stop Guns

I have nothing against hunters owning rifles, and even responsible homeowners having pistols, but allowing more weapons to be carried in public is ridiculous. I don’t want to live in Deadwood, circa 1872, I want to live in the modern world. Assault rifles in the hands of 19 year old college students is not a solution, it is a problem, it is a danger to all of us.