IT'S ABOUT FUCKING TIME

ACLU Sues Ex-Psychologists Who Designed CIA Torture Program

News worth pulling your hair out over...

DEAR GOD. WTF?! Top Bush-era GITMO and Abu Ghraib psychologist is WH's newest appointment.

What's inside a Japanese quake grab bag?

American workers got what they deserved

A quote from Bob Herbert's last column for the New York Times:

Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.

The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

Why we need to watch the Japanese radiation leak patterns carefully.

Five myths about the UN.

Farmers Sue USDA Over Monsanto Alfalfa - Again

Good.

Have at it.

In a move that will put Britain's relationship with U.S. intelligence agencies under intense and possibly damaging scrutiny, British Prime Minister David Cameron has launched an unprecedented inquiry into whether security services were involved in the torture of terrorism suspects.

Americans don't 'torture', remember? (Nudge nudge wink wink) We just do necessary enhanced interrogations!



Renaming a war crime doesn't change the fact it's a crime, Georgie. Semantics won't save your prezidenting legacy.

We knew this all along

US medical staff experimented on terror suspects: report

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Medical personnel apparently experimented on terror detainees during CIA-led torture after the September 11 attacks, aiming to improve interrogation techniques, a human rights group said Monday.

"There is evidence that they were calibrating the harm inflicted by these techniques allegedly and also looking to extend their knowledge about the effects," said Nathaniel Raymond, from Physicians for Human Rights.

The group said it had used public records showing health professionals worked under the supervision of the Central Intelligence Agency during interrogations of "war on terror" detainees after the 2001 attacks.

The doctors and medical staff witnessed waterboarding, forced nudity, sleep deprivation, temperature extremes and prolonged isolation among other techniques.

"What we see is doctors collecting data that is used to draw conclusions related to whether or not the techniques or behaviors that they are observing violate the Department of Justice standard on what constitutes a level of harm, what makes it torture," Raymond told a press conference.

Who are these people? Did we just raise a generation oblivious to the horrors of WWII? Did we just create our very own Dr. Mengeles?

Who on earth could justify any of this?

“Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” the former president told a business audience in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “I’d do it again to save lives.”

Oh yeah. Him. And what about Cheney?

To many, Cheney is the dark side of the Bush administration, and this program will only cement that judgment. ``Frontline" chronicles the brutal campaign by two consummate political in-fighters -- Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- to decimate the CIA, politically emasculate Secretary of State Colin Powell, and construct a near-limitless concept of executive power during war. While many of these strands are familiar, they have not been assembled as effectively before on television to present a coherent picture of what happened after 9/11.

Cheney didn't trust the CIA after it missed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Iranian revolution, and Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, so he created through Rumsfeld's Pentagon his own intelligence network to suit his agenda. Powell and former CIA director George Tenet were no match for this pair, who have known each other for three decades. By the time that Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis ``Scooter" Libby, was indicted last fall, Powell and Tenet were long gone and the CIA was in shambles.

My theory is that these guys got off on torture. You don't need to waterboard somebody 183 times to get information. You do it because it makes you feel powerful. Non-military, cowardly, craven blunderers, they thought it made them manly and tough. What it actually did was make everything ten times worse.

And these 'doctors' who were involved in the torture?

We want their names.

We tortured children?

With bugs? In a tight confined space?


There are no words.

It's just a slap in the face...

It can't be torture....

dday at Hullabaloo:

Now that I've had some time to marinate in these depraved memos justifying and finding legal rationalizations for torture, I am convinced that the members of the Bush Administration who directed and authorized all this just willed themselves to believe they were doing the righteous and just thing. Sure, they knew enough to find some thin strand of legal reasoning to cover their naked bodies, but that was seen by them as a brave and forthright act. I don't see another way to live with approving Room 101 techniques like putting someone in a box with a bug unless you've convinced yourself of your own worthiness. The memos also produce a fact pattern of deliberate lies by the CIA to put their proposed torture of Abu Zubaydah in the best possible light (claiming he was of sound mental health when contemporaneous reports term him a basket case, for example). Combine that with typical Republican victimhood status, and you have the squealing pigs in the media today despairing about the release of these documents.

Fox News rises in defense of the indefensible.

Looks like they waterboarded everybody.

Limbaugh thinks that slapping himself is what the torturers did to the detainees. Remember how Rumsfeld complained that making people stand for only eight hours wasn't enough because he stood all day? So wasn't getting the Jenny Craig dieting company involved in telling the Bush administration how low they could go in calories the same thing? Standing or dieting people are doing it to themselves VOLUNTARILY, YOU MORONS. They are in charge of themselves and can change their minds when they want to. The dieters are usually FAT and they willingly WANT to lose weight. Doing it to a helpless detainee, stressed and frightened out of his wits IS NOT THE SAME FUCKING THING. They are NOT in control of their own bodies. Jesus Christ, just how stupid are these torture supporting people?

Buried on the seventh page of a 43-page document, the note on dietary restrictions underscores the painstaking detail to which the Bush administration went in order to validate the use of harsh interrogation techniques. It also reflects a tendency by the memo's authors to put some of their more interesting reflections not in the text of the memo itself, but in the footnotes.

Also listed at the bottom of some of the memorandum pages are admissions of interrogations that crossed medical and ethical lines, tips on how to prolong techniques while staying within the confines of the legal limits, and detailed efforts to objectively define what constitutes torture and pain.

They knew. The bastards knew.

And by the way, where is Hassan Ghul?

A suggestion as to why President Obama is acting the way he is:

Crazy people at the [Bush] White House got sane people in the agencies to do all kinds of things by isolating them from competent advice, depriving them of necessary and pertinent information, and just plain lying to them. Perhaps that is what happened to the line officers at CIA?

President Obama's position regarding those line officers, while I disagree with it, may be a reflection that he believes that they were manipulated and lied to by those they had a right to trust. Further, nothing in his statement yesterday suggests that the brass at CIA, DOJ or WH are exempt from prosecution.

It is my belief that we should start the investigation and prosecution at the top, where the illegal orders, and the lie that they were legal, first came from. As we work our way down the food chain, we can sort out relative culpability.

I think anyone who supports torture should be snatched suddenly off the streets and thrown into a van. Taken somewhere unknown in the dark. Placed in a freezing cell with a bag covering the head. Stripped of clothes.

Then slapped and strung up in a standing position, made to stay awake, fed hardly anything....

I think they'd call it torture after five minutes.

So are the supporters of torture that unable to imagine what it would be like to be denied control of your own body? Are they that stupid that they can't conceive of the fear for one's life these detainees would have?

Or are they so much into domination and making the 'other' submit that they can't see through their own fantasies to see what the whole world sees?

This is torture.

When will someone ask WHY?

Why was it necessary to break treaties and common sense to bring back torture? Because the answer is obvious?

We want their names.

Harper's magazine talks to Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side. Read it if you want to see where the United States lost its soul: (my bold)

In a series of gripping articles, Jane Mayer has chronicled the Bush Administration’s grim and furtive dealings with torture and has exposed both the individuals within the administration who “made it happen” (a group that starts with Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington), the team of psychologists who put together the palette of techniques, and the Fox television program “24,” which was developed to help sell it to the American public. In a new book, The Dark Side, Mayer puts together the major conclusions from her articles and fills in a number of important gaps. Most significantly, we learn the details on the torture techniques and the drama behind the fierce and lingering struggle within the administration over torture, and we learn that many within the administration recognized the potential criminal accountability they faced over these torture tactics and moved frantically to protect themselves from possible future prosecution.

About the doctors who helped the torturers:

A physician was called in for consultation—one of many instances in which health professionals have played truly disturbing roles in this program. (I personally feel that the medical and psychological professionals who have used their skills to further a program designed to cause pain and suffering should be a high priority in terms of accountability. It has long been a ghastly aspect of torture, worldwide, that doctors and other medical professionals often assist. The licensing boards and professional societies are worthless, in my view, if they don’t demand serious investigations of such unethical uses of science.)

We want names. We want the names of those in the medical profession who assisted in this horror. We want to know who they are and why they thought this was a patriotic thing to do. Or worse yet, why this would be an intriguing thing to do.

After interviewing hundreds of sources in and around the Bush White House, I think it is clear that many of the legal steps taken by the so-called “War Council” were less a “New Paradigm,” as Alberto Gonzales dubbed it, than an old political wish list, consisting of grievances that Cheney and his legal adviser, David Addington, had been compiling for decades. Cheney in particular had been chafing at the post-Watergate reforms, and had longed to restore the executive branch powers Nixon had assumed, constituting what historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “the Imperial Presidency.”

Before September 11, 2001, these extreme political positions would not have stood a change of being instituted—they would never have survived democratic scrutiny. But by September 12, 2001, President Bush and Vice President Cheney were extraordinarily empowered. Political opposition evaporated as critics feared being labeled anti-patriotic or worse. It’s a familiar dynamic in American history—not unlike the shameful abridgement of civil liberties represented by FDR’s internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry. One of the strongest quotes in the book, I think, comes from Philip Zelikow, the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission, former counselor to Secretary of State Condi Rice, and a historian who teaches at the University of Virginia. He suggests in time that America’s descent into torture will be viewed like the internment of the Japanese, because they happened for similar reasons. As he puts it, “Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools.”

We want names. We want the names of those in the legal profession who assisted in this horror. We want to know who they are and why they thought this was a patriotic thing to do. Or worse yet, why this would be an intriguing thing to do.

We won't let them sink quietly back into American society, becoming the lawyers who do our trusts or the doctors who prescribe pills to our children. They have participated in the torture of prisoners and it has brought shame to our nation and fury and revulsion to its citizens.

We want to know who they are.