The Week in Review: Fascism, Torture, and Nukes, Oh My!

This week, we found out what they'd been doing to Jose Padilla during the three and a half years he's been incarcerated. And, once again, we were unsurprised.

Here's Glenn Greenwald's take on it, and the motion to dismiss(pdf) that describes his treatment. Good thing he's an American citizen - they hadn't waterboarded him. Yet.

Why should you care? Here, let Lambert over in the Corrente Building lay out, from the "Military Commissions Act of 2006", the provisions that kill habeas corpus and allow Bush to disappear you.

We have some argument as to The Lancet's figure, via a Johns Hopkins study, of 650,000 Iraqi civilians killed due to the occupation. Most of the arguments, of course, from people who haven't read the paper and wouldn't understand the methodology of the survey if they did pulling competing figures out of their asses.

GENERAL GEORGE CASEY, US COMMANDER IN IRAQ: I have not seen the study; that 650,000 number seems way beyond any number that I have seen. I've not seen a number higher than 50,000 and so I don't give that much credibility at all.

REPORTER: The 50,000 number, where did you see that from?

GENERAL CASEY: I don't remember, but I have seen it over time.

REPORTER: That is that a US military estimate?

GENERAL CASEY: I don't remember where I saw it.

Let me give you a hint, Gen. Casey. Just before you flushed.

As far as North Korea goes there is more substantiative discussion, which I cannot mock as easily as poor Gen. Casey, as to whether or not North Korea detonated a nuke and if they did, whether or not it worked. The one consensus appears to be that ol' Chimpy screwed up once again - unless of course you're one of his codpiece-worshipers, then it's because Clinton had sex.

Wrapping it up - I've been keeping an eye out for software and equipment in order that I may attempt one of these newfangled "pod-casts", although God only knows where I'd find the time to make one. Probably in 2017.

Update: Thanks for the heads-up on the typos. Dammit.

Well, They Did It.

Looks like North Korea successfully tested a nuclear weapon.

From those wild-eyed leftists at Financial Times:

North Korea's probable test of a nuclear weapon on Monday has triggered the second nuclear crisis in 13 years on the Korean peninsula.

In 1993, North Korea announced it would pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, leaving it free to divert nuclear material from its energy reactors to make a nuclear weapon and setting off a round of crisis diplomacy led by the Clinton administration. The result was the so-called agreed framework, which - in return for supplies of fuel oil to North Korea - froze most aspects of Pyongyang's nuclear weapons programme for the rest of the decade.

The agreed framework was in effect consigned to history when the Bush administration came to power in 2001. The new administration argued that although the road to a plutonium-based nuclear bomb had been frozen, the North Koreans were cheating by attempting to develop a uranium-based bomb that was not explicitly addressed by the agreement.

That five years later, North Korea has tested a nuclear weapon will be widely interpreted as a sign of the failure of the tougher approach favoured by the Bush team.

Props to DemFromCT for pointing it out this morning. Welshman also opines - and El Piscador called it.

Oh, and reading Sadly, No this morning, I was caught by Brad's take on it:

In a normal country with a normal media, watching the craziest country on Earth get nuclear weapons would be a big deal. It would also be seen as a crippling blow to Bush’s doctrine of preemption, which stated that invading Iraq would somehow, someway deter countries like Iran and North Korea from pursuing nuclear wepoans. But we don’t live in a normal country, with normal people or a normal press. We live in America, a country where nobody reads, where we’re taught to be uncritical, and where we’re bombarded by ridiculous amounts of advertising each and every day. What I’m trying to say is, we’re fucking stupid.