Come to New Mexico, Eric Bolling

So, the "special" students at Fox Business think torture is funny? Monica Crowley and Eric Bolling seem to think that it's just fine.

So here's a challenge for you, Bolling. Come on down to Albuquerque. You'll sign a release, and I'll waterboard you. And before I'm done, you will admit that you like to be ass-raped by Palestinians wearing tutus. On camera.

I guarantee it, you unamerican goat-fucker.

If you're a puss, I'll even have a doctor from the ER standing by. Come on down, son; I'll show you a real good time.

In fact, there are a lot of people out there claiming that torturing prisoners is just fine: hell, we got bin Laden because of our "enhanced interrogation techniques"! All of these people have suspiciously tiny penises (except for Ann Coulter - that reamed-out drag queen is hung like a horse).

Let's be clear here. It didn't happen. Over at Firedoglake, blogger emptywheel lays out the timeline. And the Rude Pundit (who, in the same post, explains other reasons it didn't happen that way) puts it best.

No scenario exists here that would justify the calculated mistreatment of people who were mistaken for terrorists.

What exists is the pathetic willingness of so, so many in this nation to cast aside our morality and laws for the expedience (no matter how long it took) of vengeance. Frankly, if the only way to get to bin Laden was waterboarding, the Rude Pundit would have rather bin Laden had stayed free. Because the Rude Pundit is more goddamned patriotic than any of these fuckers who put their animal instincts over the truly ethical principles that are supposed to guide us.

And you know who would back him up? Benjamin Franklin, man. In a mucho-quoted sentence, Franklin said, "That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved; never, that I know of, controverted." Except, of course, the false patriots of the right.

Aside from being morally repugnant to everyone but the completely unsalvageable pervert and sociopath, torture doesn't work. The person being tortured will tell you whatever he thinks you want to hear, true or false, just to get it to stop. You don't get "actionable intelligence" from torture: you get whatever the person being tortured thinks you want to hear.

John McCain broke under torture, and taped a confession calling himself an "air pirate" and "black criminal."

And in 1998, Qin Yanhong, a Chinese villager, confessed to the rape and murder of a woman he'd never met. Because he was tortured.

If you happen to be a Christian, remember that Christ was supposed to have been tortured before being crucified. How do you think He would feel about it? I mean, I thought all the fundamentalists watched Passion of the Christ because it brought them closer to Jesus. Not to masturbate.

America - Fuck Yeah!

You know, there are people out there who don't understand what it means to be an American!

I mean, you know what we learned today? That secret prisons where people got waterboarded led us to Osama!!!

Yeah! Waterboarding worked! How about that, libs? We got actionable intelligence by torturing somebody! Awesome, right?

I mean, yeah, there's this guy, Mohammed Basardah. He talked. He spilled all kinds of names and locations and everything else. They couldn't shut him up, he talked so much. They rounded up all kinds of people based on what he said. He gave them so much intel, they let him go out of gratitude for the help.

But, I mean, that's where it gets funny, right? Because Basrdah turns out to be just a small-time pot dealer in Mecca. He made up all this stuff, and threw in some names of people he didn't like, or that he'd heard of, or just fake names. So we round up all these people, and they have no idea what's going on, right? But we have "actionable intelligence" saying that they DO know, right?

So, they act like they don't know anything, and do we have a choice? Hell, no! We have to waterboard them to get the truth out! I mean, yeah, they don't know what the "truth" is, because it's just stuff Basardah made up, right?

But that's what's so funny!

Same thing with these people that the Pakistani tribes sold to us - they were just passing through, but we were offering thousands of dollars in bounties! What could the tribesmen do? How could they resist that kind of money? So they sold us tourists - can you blame them?

Now, we have these people in custody, and they claim they're innocent, right? As if! So we have to waterboard them, or chain them up, or do the sleep deprivation thing, until they answer us, right? I mean, do we have a choice?

You know, looking back, maybe there are some hippies who'll try to claim that when we torture innocent people, we might be making another generation of people who will stop at nothing to kill us. But what do they know, right?

Because we're Americans, motherfucker! We do what's right! Even if it seems like it's wrong! I mean, this is what we have got to do, right?

Right?

...right?

Obama goes to bat for the bad guys

Well, I was there and I saw what you did
Saw it with my own two eyes
So you can wipe off that grin, I know where you've been
It's all been a pack of lies

-Phil Collins-

The truth can set you free, and it can get you hanged. It all depends on who you know and how much they owe you. Yes, we may live in a world of denialism, mythology and cover-ups but I hope truth still has a few teeth left. That's why I'm rarely the first to scream 'treason' when someone blows a whistle or leaks a secret. Sometimes it even gives me hope.

So people have been asking me, since my last post on the latest Wikileaks fatwah, just what we learned that was useful enough to warrant embarrassing our delicate diplomatic efforts. Well a number of things, in my opinion. For one, we now have cause to reflect upon the Obama administration's efforts to thwart international prosecution of Bush, Cheney et al, for using torture to extract confessions from suspects.

Spain has had a lot of experience with torture and gruesome treatment of prisoners from the Inquisition right up through the last of the Fascist dictators. I think they've grown a bit intolerant and perhaps touchy on the subject of right wing excesses. So perhaps when that country set out to prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes, our current administration had many reasons to worry about turning tables, embarrassing revelations and the repercussions of such an investigation on our future conduct. Without Assenge and Wikileaks, we might never have known that Obama and company had a rare bipartisan success in 'persuading' Spain to squelch the effort. It's nice to know and it sheds some light on the puzzling friendliness that Bush has recently shown the man his party has been presenting as something loathsome and dangerous.

We didn't need any breaches of state secrecy however to learn that Dick Cheney's vast ossuary of a closet still has occupants with inconvenient stories to tell. Nigeria is planning to charge him and his Halliburton cronies with bribery and to issue an Interpol warrant, says Bloomberg Businessweek. You may recall that the Right Wing US Chamber of Commerce has been pushing Congress to ditch The Foreign Corrupt Practices act which makes such practices illegal under US law. If you were puzzled as to why we needed so badly to do that so quickly, perhaps we now can answer the question.

Will Wikileaks make Obama think twice about protecting war profiteers and international criminals - maybe even think a third time about trying to portray leakers as dangerous traitors now that we have had a glimpse of what's been going on?

Yoo's a viper

John Yoo called it a "Witch hunt" but he's lucky it wasn't. I have a feeling he'd have fared far worse had he been tried by a cross section of the American public who would have been more disgusted by his maintaining the legality of crushing an innocent child's testicles or murdering an unlimited of innocent bystanders by Presidential fiat in order to "keep America safe" than the actual jury of his peers -- other lawyers.

He hardly even seems grateful for having avoided the tar and feathers and the pillory, considering that he's upbraiding President Obama for not recognizing his efforts to allow a president to "keep America Safe" by exercising unlimited executive power under the aegis of a war he has the power to start for no other reason than to give him that power. Did any of our fabled founding fathers really envision such a thing except as the perfect opposite of an American President?

Yoo's image of an American president as unlimited by law, treaty or moral scruple to a degree not unfamiliar to Attila or Tamarlane or Ghengis Khan should be producing more widespread disgust than it is, but that no doubt shows the immense power of the massive, corporate sponsored, Republican organized eruption of noxious gas and poisonous accusations: a smokescreen the likes of which hasn't been seen since the close of the Permian.

No, Professor Yoo is claiming that even though the proceedings against him were initiated under the Republicans and he was let go by Democrats, he's a victim -- Obama's victim. That ungrateful man of sorrows who apparently is all things contemptible because with the power to do evil, we would surely be overwhelmed and conquered by a few dozen guys with explosive jockey shorts. He's a victim and it's because he loves keeping America "safe."

"an entirely false narrative of his own victimization." says Joe Mathis at the Philadephia Weekly. "Get this straight, the so-called 'smear job' came under the Republican president. The so-called 'vindication' came under the Democratic president."

Preposterous by the strictest definition of the word; the same problem with cause and effect that makes Obama guilty of Bush's economic train wreck.

Guilty of professional misconduct and poor judgment is a slap on the wrist considering that his support of giving the President the power to break constitutional law ad libidem as long as "there's a war on" might at one time have been punished quite severely. You'd think he'd just thank his luck and the corruption of justice that's become institutionalized in the US, but no, he has to be a victim, he has to vilify the administration that let him go free and he gets to keep his tenured job, his law license and most likely will have a great number of books bought up by CPAC and distributed for free to contributors so that he can be on the NewYork Times best-seller list and gloat about Democratic "Royalists."

There's a lot of money, there's a lot of safety in evil.

Dick the Impaler

We seem to have forgotten about torture. Comedians and far right shamans still make jokes about how those still left in the cages at Guantanamo are the "worst of the worst." People are heavily against giving them any amenities like flu shots and some have the audacity to say we treat them too well, even though so many of them have never had any case proved against them or have been cleared: so many are guilty of little more than being Muslim or accused of something by an enemy.

That Dick Cheney, the once and in his own mind future Führer pokes fun at the idea that we ever engaged in torturing prisoners and although he's not well liked by any but the most extreme subhumans, he has never suffered any consequences for having directed and promoted things we used to hang people for when I was a boy: kidnapping, torture and murder. Republicans prefer to believe him, many of the rest of us believe so much in our essential virtue that we just don't want to hear any more of it.

It's not that there is no evidence of the Bush Administration's capital crimes, not at all. We have imprisoned and tortured many people with essentially no evidence against them, but there has been a constant flow of increasingly horrible information about kidnapping and the kind of torture even Limbaugh or Dick the Impaler himself couldn't pass off as a frat-boy prank. Crain Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan now tells us, says Raw Story, that the people the CIA sent to secret dungeons there were raped with broken bottles and/or boiled alive until they "admitted" to being affiliated with Al Qaida. Some were forced to watch their children being tortured and all so that the Bush administration could justify destroying Iraq to the eager war lovers back home.

"I'm talking of people being raped with broken bottles,"

he said at a lecture in October that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network.

"I'm talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I'm talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on."

I'm not ashamed to say that I'm ashamed of my country. I'm ashamed not so much by the monsters and tyrants and murderers of children some of us still revere as heroes and patriots, but by the way we still support what they did, still can't accept the horror, don't want to be told about it, still want to continue crimes as hideous as any ever committed, because after all, these people are "suspects." These people are "the worst of the worst" whether guilty or not and most of all they aren't Christian, like us. It's not really important anyway, not like gay marriage or insurance company profits or ACORN or tax breaks for Cheney and Bush.

In the corner

". . . whether or not these techniques are immoral, or how immoral they are, surely depends on whether they worked”

said George F. Will regarding the use of torture. How sad that anyone considers this man "conservative" or in fact listens to him at all. Although he supported a commission to study (obfuscate) the matter on ABC's This Week yesterday, Will seems to consider an extreme utilitarianism a valid moral measure. If it works to reduce crime, why not human sacrifice? Perhaps Will would like to be on the commission to "study" that.

Although the idea that a practical end justifies any means or makes crime legal or worse, is the basis of moral judgment, is frankly horrifying and although such thinking may long have been with us, it hasn't, to my knowledge been so clearly championed. The idea that such things still need to be re-examined is sickening, considering that we used opposition to this kind of Spencerian social Darwinism as a rallying cry in WW II and it's more sickening still that Will can call opposition to it "liberal" and Dick Cheney can call it "far left."

Have even the most articulate supporters of Republican policy run so far out of arguments that they have to resort to these mindless dichotomies? A cornered rat does not think of right and wrong and neither, apparently does a cornered Republican. It's just me against you and anything I do to you is justified.

The Torturer of Tehran

Saaed Mortazavi is sometimes called the “Torturer of Tehran” but probably not to his face. The man also known as “Butcher of the press” has been given authority by the Iranian government to "interrogate" people involved, or said to be involved, in the demonstrations in Tehran. Mortazavi earned his nicknames for his role in the death of a Canadian-Iranian photographer who was tortured, beaten and raped during her detention in 2003 says the Times Online. The TOT was behind the detention of more than 20 bloggers and journalists in 2004, held for long periods of solitary confinement in secret prisons, where they were allegedly coerced into signing false confessions.

I expect to be hearing a great deal about how Iranian concern over the strange results of the recent election are the products of American propaganda and the protest sponsored, choreographed and financed from Washington, DC.

Of course such things are more effective in terrorizing the locals than in convincing them that these confessions don'e have more to do with cattle prods and genitals than with American interference, but isn't it too bad that the US has lost any ability to deplore enhanced interrogation? Isn't it too bad that the US must remain silent about starting wars and killing people based information extracted by torture?

Thank you George W. Bush and all the other cowards who dragged our proud country down to the level of these savages!

Raping for Freedom

Somebody must be running a little bit scared since the Commander Guy has put away his toys and has entered the stage, making excuses about torture. It's legal and I did it to protect you he said in Michigan last night and perhaps many of those people who decide they're "conservatives" and therefore trust whatever the Republican government says, will buy the story despite their pretended anti-government stance. "I'm from the government and I'm here to inspect your hamburger meat" scares the hell out of them, but "I'm from the government and I rape and murder women and children to protect you" slides down the throat as easily as the Flavor-Aid in Jonestown.

To be up-front about it, I think the experiment is over and democracy lost, but as a cynical observer of our national hypocrisy I'm anticipating a great deal of entertainment if and when the statements of General Taguba and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) are graphically depicted to the public as irrefutable proof. I truly want to see the Decider reduced to justifying the sodomy of little boys to "protect" us. I want to see him justify his love of war and conquest with unscrupulous cowardice. I want to hear Cheney justify shoving light sticks and batons up the rectums of crying and screaming teenagers as "saving lives." Of course they've already done that, but they've portrayed it only as making horned and bearded terrorist devils "uncomfortable" and the man who delights in shooting tame birds laughs at our squeamishness.

I want to hear Rush and Ann tell us that American prison guards were justified in forcing oral sex on captured Muslim women "because they might know something" and we all know they wanted it. I want to hear the lot of them giggle at these pictures. I want to hear them tell us that Iraq was not justified at rising up against us for these acts alone, costing us thousands of lives.

No, we didn't torture anyone, but when we did, it was legal because we make the law and the Geneva convention doesn't apply because old women and boys don't wear uniforms and besides Geneva is in a foreign country when the men are all girly Liberals and Festus, Missouri would long since have become a Taliban stronghold if we hadn't. You may laugh or cry or sputter like a Republican, but that's been the argument.

Did Bush and his henchmen actually save my life in his chambers of horror? If so, my life is worth nothing and your life and your honor is worth less than nothing if you defend it.

Torture, Cheney, and Spineless Democrats

First, the good news. Chicago-based conservative radio host Eric "Mancow" Muller underwent waterboarding in an effort to silence critics of the procedure by showing, once and for all, that it is not torture (no, that's not the good part). But, as it turned out, Muller decided waterboarding is torture. I'm thrilled for Mancow's revelation; hopefully his words rang true in the ears of torture excusers across the land.

Here's the video:



Now some more good news. A former 14-year interrogator thoroughly rebuked last week's remarks by former Vice President Cheney on torture. The interrogator has overseen more than 1,000 interrogations and conducted over 300 himself in Iraq, including the interrogation of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. And guess what? He did it all using traditional methods - no torture. Here's the video (a quadruple-level, immediate must-watch):



And now even more good news (we're on a roll). General Petraeus has endorsed Obama's close Gitmo/no more torture decisions.

I have long been on record as having testified and also in helping write doctrine for interrogation techniques that are completely in line with the Geneva Convention. And as a division commander in Iraq in the early days, we put out guidance very early on to make sure that our soldiers, in fact, knew that we needed to stay within those guidelines.

With respect to Guantanamo. I think that the closure in a responsible manner, obviously one that is certainly being worked out now by the Department of Justice -- I talked to the Attorney General the other day [and] they have a very intensive effort ongoing to determine, indeed, what to do with the detainees who are left, how to deal with them in a legal way, and if continued incarceration is necessary -- again, how to take that forward. But doing that in a responsible manner, I think, sends an important message to the world, as does the commitment of the United States to observe the Geneva Convention when it comes to the treatment of detainees.

That's pretty staunch support from a very prominent military leader (and one who has been praised up and down by all manner of conservatives).

And now the bad, yet unsurprising, news. The Democrats are wimps. I know, I know. It's a shock. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, in particular, is a wimp. The Nevada senator reportedly led the charge against the bill to provide funding to close Gitmo out of a concern of appearing too "liberal". Reid is, justifiably, afraid of losing his senate seat. But maybe, instead of trying to play politics with issues as important as national security and torture, he should do his job. Just a thought. It is nothing short of astounding that even though the Democrats control both houses of Congress and the White House and have at their helm the most charismatic, pragmatic leader in a generation (that being Obama) they are still bowing to Republican ideology at every turn. Furthermore Obama has already paved the road for them by taking very early stands on torture and closing Gitmo. All they have to do is follow. Yet they are completely inept at doing even that. Someone mentioned to me the other day that the Democrats are still acting like their in the minority (and the Republicans, unfortunately, think they're still in the majority). Mr. Reid, grow a pair or get out.

--

Originally posted at The Political Panorama.

Charles Krauthammer is…

…you guessed it…an idiot!

I know there has been a lot of discussion of this here lately, but it's so important I wanted to add this. In his Friday column, Charles Krauthammer outlined scenarios under which torture is appropriate.

Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb.

[...]

The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to save lives. This case lacks the black-and-white clarity of the ticking time bomb scenario. We know less about the length of the fuse or the nature of the next attack. But we do know the danger is great.

[...]

Under those circumstances, you do what you have to do. And that includes waterboarding. (To call some of the other “enhanced interrogation” techniques — face slap, sleep interruption, a caterpillar in a small space — torture is to empty the word of any meaning.)

Of course the ticking time bomb scenario never really occurs. We’ve been Jack Bauered into believing torture is occasionally the only means of gathering information needed to save lives. But in reality, effective interrogators can make even the most despicable terrorists sing without raising a fist. Krauthammer raises concerns that this less barbaric approach, while it can be effective, takes too long. But we are never really in a position in which we know of an impending threat and know exactly which captive has the exact information on that threat that we’re missing. We either have enough information to act without resorting to torture or we’re even more in the dark, in which case, unless we relentlessly torture everyone we come across, we can’t possibly get the right information in time anyway. This article from The Progressive a few years ago explains very well why all of Krauthammer’s logic is wrong (it’s a bit long, but a must read).

(And isn’t interesting that Krauthammer reduces prolonged sleep deprivation where captives are kept in a brightly lit room and doused with water any time they start to nod off to “sleep interruption.” It takes a special kind of depravity to turn something that is clearly cruel and inhumane into a mere “interruption.”)

Krauthammer goes on to cite intelligence officials - Tenet, Hayden, and Blair (at most one of which is reliable - Blair) - who said we gathered valuable information from these enhanced interrogation sessions. This of course ignores the fact that 1) we could have gotten the information through less horrendous means (which Krauthammer simply dismisses by saying that KSM wouldn’t have cooperated - but last I checked, Charles Krauthammer wasn’t a trained professional interrogator) and 2) information gathered through torture is unreliable. I ask all defenders of torture to try to put themselves in the shoes of these captives. Your strapped down. You have a towel placed over your face and a jug of water poured over the towel so you literally can’t breath. You feel as though you are drowning. Then you are subjected to that treatment 182 more times. At that point (most likely much sooner) would you not tell your interrogators anything they wanted to hear - true or not? I would. And that’s just the point. False confessions are too likely. And if just one confession is false, that brings into question the reliability of all other information gleaned through torture.

But there is a larger problem with the recent debate over torture - that there even is a debate. Torture is morally wrong, it’s ineffective, it creates an abysmal image of our nation abroad (and at home), and it even puts us on a slippery slope to worse practices (the above linked Progressive article effectively explains how torture policies can lead to extensive extrajudicial executions - the CIA notes that it’s Phoenix program during the Vietnam War resulted in more than 20,000 such executions). In short, torture is un-American. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out, even Ronald Reagan, not exactly a bastion of liberal thought, made a strong push against torture - he even helped ratify a treaty against it. Yet many of today’s conservatives argue that torture is justified. I’ll say this plainly: torture is never justified. How low have we sunk?

--

Adapted from a post at The Political Panorama.