Multi Medium

Republican Witch Hunt Of The Day

Well, this is thoroughly inappropriate and disgusting:

A day after a conservative group released a video condemning the Justice Department for refusing to identify seven lawyers who previously represented or advocated for terror suspects, Fox News has uncovered the identities of the seven lawyers.

(…)

The video by the group Keep America Safe, which dubbed the seven lawyers “The Al Qaeda 7,” is the latest salvo in a lengthty political battle.

For several months, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has led an effort to uncover politically-appointed lawyers within the Justice Department who have advocated for Guantanamo Bay detainees or other terror suspects.

“The administration has made many highly questionable decisions when it comes to national security, ” Grassley said in a recent statement. “[Americans] have a right to know who advises the Attorney General and the President on these critical matters.”

(…)

Before joining the Justice Department, Jonathan Cedarbaum, now an official with the Office of Legal Counsel, was part of a “firm-wide effort” to represent six Bosnian-Algerian detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, according to the web site of the firm WilmerHale.

That effort brought the case Boumediene v. Bush to the Supreme Court, which reaffirmed the right of detainees to challenge their detention.

So as far as the right is concerned, detainees may have the right to counsel, but attorneys don’t have the right to provide it.  Awesome.

Add comment March 4th, 2010 at 11:40am Posted by Eli

Whatever Happened To The Cheney Doctrine?

Peter Daou takes on the climate change deniers – I found this passage particularly compelling:

Another conservative writer goes on about “unsettled science,” as though we were engaging in a hypothetical legal exercise about the merits of reasonable doubt. In fact, this is our only planet. It’s the only place we can survive. We can’t afford to take chances. We can’t afford to do anything less than everything in our power to rectify the problem. We have no choice but to be alarmists — there’s no second chance. We get it wrong and we’ve doomed our children and their children. For what? Because we don’t want to recycle? Because we don’t want to stop polluting? Because we don’t want to bother making sacrifices? Because we don’t want some eager young kid who cares about the earth to dictate to us? Because we don’t like Al Gore? How profoundly selfish can someone be, to deny what they see with their own eyes: car fumes, bus fumes, truck fumes, factory fumes, chemical waste, human waste, toxins coursing through our waterways, in our food, filth we create in immense quantities turning our planet into a garbage dump.

If anything, we should be outdoing one another trying to address the issue, not smugly questioning the need for action under the guise that the science is imperfect. Reversing the damage we’re doing to the earth should be a priority for every citizen. Instead, environmentalism is treated like an annoyance that the media will occasionally poll about and that we bring to the fore once every April.

The right’s willingness to take the hugest of chances that global warming is junk science or some elaborate Al Gore hoax is particularly striking when you consider the Cheney Doctrine that they’re so enamored of:

Cheney defined it: “If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis … It’s about our response.” Suskind writes, “So, now spoken, it stood: a standard of action that would frame events and responses from the Administration for years to come.”‘

Why such a heavy bias towards action on an improbable threat, and such a heavy bias against action on a much more probable and truly existential one?  Republicans embrace a 1% Doctrine on terrorism, yet it’s more like 99.9% when the fate of the entire planet is at stake.

If I didn’t know any better, I might almost think that their policy prescriptions aren’t really about protecting us from harm.

Add comment March 3rd, 2010 at 11:29am Posted by Eli

Can Doctors Be “Disbarred”?

Looks like yesterday was Professional Misconduct Day on the NYT op-ed pages.

First, the torture doctors:

According to Justice Department memos released last year, the medical service opined that sleep deprivation up to 180 hours didn’t qualify as torture. It determined that confinement in a dark, small space for 18 hours a day was acceptable. It said detainees could be exposed to cold air or hosed down with cold water for up to two-thirds of the time it takes for hypothermia to set in. And it advised that placing a detainee in handcuffs attached by a chain to a ceiling, then forcing him to stand with his feet shackled to a bolt in the floor, “does not result in significant pain for the subject.”

(…)

The medical basis for these opinions was nonexistent. The Office of Medical Services cited no studies of individuals who had been subjected to these techniques. Its sources included a wilderness medical manual, the National Institute of Mental Health Web site and guidelines from the World Health Organization.

(…)

The shabbiness of the medical judgments, though, pales in comparison to the ethical breaches by the doctors and psychologists involved. Health professionals have a responsibility extending well beyond nonparticipation in torture; the historic maxim is, after all, “First do no harm.” These health professionals did the polar opposite.

Nevertheless, no agency — not the Pentagon, the C.I.A., state licensing boards or professional medical societies — has initiated any action to investigate, much less discipline, these individuals. They have ignored the gross and appalling violations by medical personnel. This is an unconscionable disservice to the thousands of ethical doctors and psychologists in the country’s service. It is not too late to begin investigations. They should start now.

And then the legal profession:

The Supreme Court has a chance to reinforce that fundamental protection in the case of Albert Holland. A Florida prisoner, he did everything he could to ensure that his lawyer filed his habeas corpus petition, which would allow the federal courts to review his state-court conviction for first-degree murder and other crimes.

He continually asked about it, and emphasized the importance of meeting the deadlines. The lawyer repeatedly assured Mr. Holland that he would take care of it, and then missed the habeas deadline. Mr. Holland was given a new lawyer, who argued that due to the first lawyer’s extreme negligence, the failure should be excused under “equitable tolling,” which allows for deadlines to be excused in the broader interests of justice.

The United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit rejected the argument, ruling that even gross negligence by a lawyer does not provide a basis for equitable tolling. Unless there was “bad faith, dishonesty, divided loyalty, mental impairment,” or something of that magnitude, the court said, the deadline would stand.

Disgraceful behavior by Holland’s lawyer, and disgraceful behavior by the appeals court.  I don’t have high hopes for the Supreme Court, but I hope the criminally incompetent lawyer got disbarred (not holding my breath).  And any doctor who facilitated torture should be shunned and shamed, and never allowed to practice medicine ever again.

1 comment March 2nd, 2010 at 07:01am Posted by Eli

This?

Obama can’t be bothered to involve himself in the healthcare reform process, but he wants to be all hands-on with THIS???

Glad to see that he’s got his priorities and signature issues straight and everything…

Add comment February 13th, 2010 at 02:42pm Posted by Eli

Same As The Old Boss

The more things change, the more they stay the same…

A Pomona College student filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday alleging that he was abusively interrogated, handcuffed and detained for five hours at Philadelphia International Airport in August because he carried a set of English-Arabic flashcards as part of his college language studies.

(…)

According to the suit, George, a college senior from Montgomery County, Penn., majoring in physics and Middle Eastern studies, was returning to school when TSA screeners saw his flashcards. A supervisor asked him his views on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, whether he knew who carried them out and what language Osama bin Laden spoke, adding, “Do you see why these cards are suspicious?,” the suit alleged.

Apparently “Arabic” still automatically equals “terrorism”.

Add comment February 11th, 2010 at 11:25am Posted by Eli

Environmentalist Of The Year

Osama bin Laden, who is so committed to the cause of preventing climate change that he’s willing to try to bring down the United States to save the Earth.  Awesome.

Of course, if he really wanted to do something constructive for the planet, perhaps he could have refrained from doing everything humanly possible to guarantee George W. Bush a second term…

(Also, there’s the little detail that taking down the US wouldn’t actually stop global warming.)

Add comment January 30th, 2010 at 01:13pm Posted by Eli

OMG NO

Multi Medium, 10/30/07:

As the shadowy, mysterious, and currently-under-construction Codename V. and I were commiserating about what a pain airport security is, I came up with an idea that, if implemented, would completely demoralize and crush the American spirit.

Two words: Underwear Bomber.

Of course, I would give the Underwear Bomber explicit instructions to make sure he got caught.

Reality, 12/26/09:

A Nigerian Banker’s son charged with trying to blow up a plane over Detroit claims he trained with Al Qaeda leaders who had explosives sewn into his underwear, it was reported Saturday.

(…)

A Saudi bomb maker rigged up a six-inch packet of high explosives – known as PETN – and a syringe and sewed it into his underpants, the report said.

We. Are. Doomed.

4 comments December 26th, 2009 at 08:42pm Posted by Eli

When America Does It, It’s Not Illegal

Shorter Cheney: Laws are for the weak.

A CIA inspector general’s report released Monday documented how interrogators menaced “high-value” detainees with a gun and a power drill, threatened their families and used other methods that went beyond even the permissive interrogation rules set by the Bush administration Justice Department.

Cheney, who strongly opposes the Obama administration’s new probe into alleged detainee abuse, was asked in the Fox News interview whether he was “OK” with interrogations that went beyond Justice’s specific legal authorization.

“I am,” the former vice president replied.

“My sort of overwhelming view is that the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives and preventing further attacks,” he said. “It was good policy. It was properly carried out. It worked very, very well.”

In other words, the ends justify the means, even when the means have nothing to do with achieving them.

Add comment August 29th, 2009 at 12:55pm Posted by Eli

What. I’ve. Been. Saying. (Again)

Almost four years ago, I observed that “Bush’s claim that he had to take extraordinary measures to fight terror is at odds with his resolute unwillingness to take ordinary measures against terror.”  Apparently the intel inspectors general agree with me:

We’ve known for years that the Bush administration ignored and broke the law repeatedly in the name of national security. It is now clear that many of those programs could have been conducted just as easily within the law — perhaps more effectively and certainly with far less damage to the justice system and to Americans’ faith in their government.

That is the inescapable conclusion from a devastating report by the inspectors general of the intelligence and law-enforcement community on President George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. The report shows that the longstanding requirement that the government obtain a warrant was not hindering efforts to gather intelligence on terrorists after the 9/11 attacks. In fact, the argument that the law was an impediment was concocted by White House and Justice Department lawyers after Mr. Bush authorized spying on Americans’ international communications.

(…)

So why break the law, again and again? Two things seem disturbingly clear. First, President Bush and his top aides panicked after the Sept. 11 attacks. And second, Mr. Cheney and his ideologues, who had long chafed at any legal constraints on executive power, preyed on that panic to advance their agenda.

It is absolutely criminal that these people are not being treated as criminals.

Add comment July 17th, 2009 at 09:35am Posted by Eli

People Unclear On The Concept

John McCain and David Gregory:

MR. GREGORY:  Should there be an investigation, do you think?

SEN. McCAIN:  I don’t know if–first of all, I’d like to know the facts of the case before there should be an, “an investigation.”

MR. GREGORY:  Mm-hmm.

Um.

Add comment July 14th, 2009 at 10:05am Posted by Eli

Fox Newsworthiness

So, according to BillO, the fatal shooting of an Army recruiter should have gotten a lot more media coverage, the fatal shooting of Dr. Tiller by a right-wing nut was over-covered, and the shooting of two Holocaust Museum guards by another right-wing nut isn’t even interesting at all:

O’Reilly never covered the shooting on his show. In fact, the only mention of the act of domestic terrorism came in a segment that, ironically, decried the media’s inadequate coverage of Long’s death:

O’REILLY: But the central question remains according to a new Pew study, the American media spent far more time on the murder of Tiller than on the murder of Private Long. … 10 to 1 the Pew study which was released yesterday, 10 to 1 more coverage. I mean, come on, come on.

[...]

O’REILLY: All right. Now, we had a murder today at the Holocaust Museum in D.C.

HENICAN: That was an awful case. Awful.

O’REILLY: Now, this is an 89-year-old anti-Semite bigot kills an innocent guy in the Holocaust Museum. OK? Now, what about the newsworthiness of this? … Is it as newsworthy as Private Long?

I can kind of see BillO’s point.  After all, is it really news anymore that the far right is populated by homicidal crazies?  It’s almost a dog-bites-man kind of thing.  Now, if someone from the left goes off and starts shooting people, that would be some news.

(Note: As best I can tell, that doesn’t appear to be what happened with the recruiter shooting.)

Add comment June 11th, 2009 at 07:57pm Posted by Eli

Nonexistent Right-Wing Extremists Strike Again

Right-wing extremists? What right-wing extremists? Oh, those right-wing extremists.

Even Fox News is admitting that yeah, maybe the liberal hippie DHS may have been onto something after all. Woohoo.

Add comment June 10th, 2009 at 06:29pm Posted by Eli

Nope, No Right-Wing Violence Or Incitement At All…

Oh yeah, all those accusations about the right wing inciting violence are totally overblown…

Internet radio host Hal Turner — accused of inciting Catholics to “take up arms” and singling out two Connecticut lawmakers and a state ethics official on a website — was taken into custody in New Jersey late Wednesday after state Capitol police in Connecticut obtained a warrant for his arrest.

Turner, who has been identified as a white supremacist and anti-Semite by several anti-racism groups, hosts an Internet radio program with an associated blog. On Tuesday, the blog included a post that promised to release the home addresses of state Rep. Michael Lawlor, state Sen. Andrew McDonald and Thomas Jones of the State Ethics Office.

(…)

The blog of the “Turner Radio Network” recounted the matter, then included the following remarks in a section labeled “commentary:”

“It is our intent to foment direct action against these individuals personally. These beastly government officials should be made an example of as a warning to others in government: Obey the Constitution or die.”

And, the post continued, “If any state attorney, police department or court thinks they’re going to get uppity with us about this, I suspect we have enough bullets to put them down, too.”

But wait, there’s more!

Anti-choice groups across the nation are busy insisting that since they didn’t personally pull the trigger, their protests, harassment, and hate speech are not to blame for the murder of Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller.  Yet some anti-choice activists — even now — seem only too happy to aid and abet the crazy ones who will resort to violence.   Or else why, three days after the assassination of a medical doctor who provides late-term abortions, did Jill Stanek post on her blog photographs of the clinic of Dr. LeRoy Carhart, another physician who provides late-term abortions and who has said he is willing to take over providing services at Dr. Tiller’s clinic?

By way of introduction, Stanek writes, “Let’s take a station break to view photos of Carhart’s “nondescript building,” taken in March 2009 on the day it reopened following refurbishment after a fire (NOT blamed on pro-lifers). It was almost immediately shut down because Carhart reopened without getting an occupancy permit, as I previously reported, and was running his electricity off a generator…”  She and her readers just want “to take a look.”  Why?  She wants to prove her point that it’s a dingy building?  Over Carhart’s safety, and the safety of his staff and patients?

Jill Not-Stanek at Feministe has a great comment on the right’s perverse sense of victimhood:

Hilariously, Stanek has the nerve to suggest that pro-choicers are “intimidating” anti-choicers when we say that calling abortion a “holocaust,” referring to abortion providers as “baby-killers,” and publicizing personal information about abortion providers just may encourage violence against them. Get that one straight, kids: Criticizing the terms that anti-choicers use is “intimidation” bordering on a violation of Constitutional rights. Shooting, bombing, assaulting, stalking, harassing and threatening abortion providers, or encouraging others to do so (and providing them with the necessary tools and information), is “a movement of nonviolence.”

Yes, that seems totally reasonable – the Republican perspective in a wingnutshell.

Add comment June 4th, 2009 at 07:19am Posted by Eli

No! Really?

This can only be good for Republicans!

The AP obtained partial results from a GOP poll that showed Republicans “are widely viewed by the public as less competent than Democrats to handle issue ranging from health care to education and energy.”

“Democrats were favored by a margin of 61% to 29% on education; 59% to 30% on health care and 59% to 31% on energy. Congress is expected to consider major legislation later this year in all three areas.”

“Democats were also viewed with more confidence in handling taxes, long a Republican strong suit. The only issue among nine in the survey where the two parties were rated as even was in the war on terror.”

Wow, no-one could have anticipated that FUCKING UP EVERY SINGLE THING YOU TOUCH might have an adverse effect on perceptions of your competence.

And while that last sentence may sound like a bit of a silver lining, remember that terrorism is supposed to be the one issue that the GOP totally owns, and they’re tied with the Democrats?  The Republicans are so screwed right now, and they have no-one but themselves to blame.  Not only was their flagship administration criminal and incompetent, but they chose to completely abdicate their responsibility to rein in that criminality and incompetence.

Chickens, meet roost.

(h/t Phoenix Woman)

Add comment April 30th, 2009 at 07:59pm Posted by Eli

More Torture Than Not

Well, that makes, like, one Republican in Congress who’s semi-rational on torture – or at least, that’s what I thought at first:

Rep. Don Manzullo apparently disagrees with his GOP colleague John Shimkus on the issue of “enhanced interrogations,” according to the comments he made an interview with WGN Radio’s John Williams this morning. Listen to this particular exchange, in which the Rockford Republican acknowledges — after Williams recounted the case of Abu Zubaydah — that “apparently waterboarding doesn’t work” (WGN has posted full audio of part one and part two of the interview).

Later in the interview, when asked by Williams whether waterboarding consitutes torture, Manzullo responded, “It’s more torture than not.”

It’s all downhill from there, though:

But Manzullo and Shimkus still agree on one crucial and disturbing point: Those in the Bush administration who authorized torture should not face any legal repercussions for their actions. Manzullo justifies his position using a variety of rationales, none of which hold up to much scrutiny.

For example, after admitting that waterboarding is torture, Manzullo tells Williams that he doesn’t think any laws were broken:

WILLIAMS: So you don’t think there were any U.S. laws or any international laws that we should look into. Nothing went wrong here? No laws were broken?

MANZULLO: Probably at this point, not.

WILLIAMS: You’re kidding?

MANZULLO: Probably.

WILLIAMS: You’ve read, I’m sure, the torture memos. You don’t think any laws were broken?

MANZULLO: It depends upon whether or not you think that the enemy combatants come under the Geneva Accords. …. That in itself there is a split of legal opinion.

Um.

This here is my favorite part:

Yet while Manzullo acknowledges that waterboarding “doesn’t work,” he doesn’t seem convinced that we should stop torturing. As you can hear in the first clip posted above, he erects an elaborate hypothetical in which a school locked and filled with 500 students is set to be bombed in 30 minutes and a person with knowledge of the school’s keys is in custody. “That,” he tells Williams, “would be a very unusual situation where anything goes in order to exact the codes and stop that slaughter.”

Damn.  Someone watches waaaay too much 24.  Since when do terrorists do anything remotely resembling that scenario?  “Exact the codes”?  WTF?

Add comment April 28th, 2009 at 10:19pm Posted by Eli

It’s Not A Bug, It’s A Feature

As I’ve said before, the fact that torture does not provide actionable intelligence was never a deterrent for the Bush administration, since they were a lot more interested in propagandizable intelligence.  False confessions are what torture gets you, and that’s just exactly what BushCo. wanted:

“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.

“The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”

It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubeida at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Mohammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document.

Jim White actually speculated about this on Sunday, and now it’s confirmed.

Amazingly enough, Zubeida and KSM were able to resist – possibly because they had no idea what their torturers were talking about.  And in the end, it didn’t really matter, since we ended up invading Iraq anyway.

Add comment April 22nd, 2009 at 06:12am Posted by Eli

Co-Wanker Of The Day, Part III

I know, right? So many wankers, so little time.

Shorter Wingnut Law Center: ZOMG Obama wants to take away our veterans’ constitutional right to join hate groups and kill people!

Add comment April 20th, 2009 at 08:50pm Posted by Eli

Conservatives Switch Sides In War On Terror

Apparently it is now unacceptable for the DHS to focus on violent extremists if even a handful of them are troops and veterans.

Republicans are now arguing that, for politically correct and politically expedient reasons, we should ignore this possible domestic terror threat identified by George Bush’s FBI and George Bush’s Department of Defense.

I understand that it’s politically correct, and fun political fodder, for Republicans to express false outrage over a new Department of Homeland Security report that noted, among other things, that right-wing extremists were trying to recruit US military members. But are the Republicans really now saying that Homeland Security should not keep an eye on terrorists’ efforts to recruit former US military members?

Yes, they are.

(…)

The Bush administration’s FBI and DOD documents thousands of cases of US soldiers being members of far-right extremist groups. Yet the Republicans are now saying that our anti-terror organizations should not keep an eye on this potential domestic terror threat because it wouldn’t be politically correct.

….Republicans don’t think the Dept. of Homeland Security should be paying any attention at all to domestic terrorists’ efforts to recruit members of the US military, because they think “defending the military” will earn them political points, even if it means risking another Oklahoma City style terrorist attack, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans in the process. Saving the country from another Great Depression or another major terrorist attack has taken a back seat to earning political points.

In other news, prominent conservatives have objected to repeated descriptions of the sky as “blue,” arguing that it is the height of presumption to claim that the heavens themselves lean Democratic.  House Minority Leader John Boehner has demanded an immediate halt to this baseless attack on the Republican Party’s legitimacy.

Add comment April 16th, 2009 at 08:44pm Posted by Eli

Why Does Dubya Hate Patriotic Conservative Americans?

Remember that DHS report on right-wing extremists that came out on Monday and which conservatives took remarkably personally? I know it’s hard to believe that it took more than a couple of months to slap together, but it’s true:

Fox News’s Catherine Herridge revealed that the report, along with an earlier report on radicalized left-wing groups, was actually “requested by the Bush administration” but not completed until recently:

HERRIDGE: Well this is an element of the story which has largely gone unreported. One looks at right-wing groups, as you mentioned. And a second is on left-wing groups. Significantly, both were requested by the Bush administration but not finished until President Bush left office.

Herridge’s reporting undermines her network’s own “reporting” over the past 24 hours. Since news of the DHS assessment broke yesterday, Fox anchors and guests have been seizing upon the report as evidence that the administration is trying to intimidate tea party goers or “stifle speech”:

– ANDREA TANTAROS: It’s free speech and the Obama administration is trying to shut it down.

– JAY ALAN SEKULOW: The Obama administration here under Department of Homeland Security has allowed a new regime to come into place that basically says this: Our focus is going to be on the right-wing groups.

– SEAN HANNITY: What do you think of that interpretation, especially coming from a guy that started his political career in the home of an unrepentant terrorist who bombed the Pentagon and capital and sat in Reverend Wright’s church for 20 years?

– DANA PERINO: If Bush had done that we would be having a very different conversation. It wouldn’t have taken a week to find it out. There would have been a special prosecutor. We would have had to come out and apologize.

Because it’s totally inconceivable that right-wing extremists could actually pose a threat (I mean, when have right-wing extremists ever harmed anyone?), so therefore this must be a liberal political hit job.

And if you need further proof that conservatives have absolutely no understanding of what these DHS reports are actually for, check out Tantaros complaining that the DHS report on left-wing extremists doesn’t include ACORN or Code Pink.

Add comment April 16th, 2009 at 07:16am Posted by Eli

Rush Discovers Compassion For Evildoers

Hey, remember when Rush was mocking concerns about prisoner treatment at Gitmo and claiming that we were treating them too well?  Looks like he has a totally different outlook towards bad guys that Obama acts against:

You know what we have learned about the Somali pirates, the merchant marine organizers that were wiped out at the order of Barack Obama, you know what we learned about them?  They were teenagers.  The Somali pirates, the merchant marine organizers who took a US merchant captain hostage for five days were inexperienced youths, the defense secretary, Roberts Gates, said yesterday, adding that the hijackers were between 17 and 19 years old.  Now, just imagine the hue and cry had a Republican president ordered the shooting of black teenagers on the high seas.  Greetings and welcome back, Rush Limbaugh, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.

They were kids.  The story is out, I don’t know if it’s true or not, but apparently the hijackers, these kids, the merchant marine organizers, Muslim kids, were upset, they wanted to just give the captain back and head home because they were running out of food, they were running out of fuel, they were surrounded by all these US Navy ships, big ships, and they just wanted out of there.  That’s the story, but then when one of them put a gun to the back of the captain, Mr. Phillips, then bam, bam, bam.  There you have it, and three teenagers shot on the high seas at the order of President Obama.

So, to sum up: Guilty, possibly teenage Muslims killed at Obama’s order is heartless and bad.  Innocent, definitely teenage Muslims illegally imprisoned and tortured at Bush’s order is Teh Awesome.

Is it that the pirates so perfectly embody the modern conservative might-makes-right/take-what-you-want ethos, or is it that Rush so desperately wants Obama to fail that he’s rooting for pirates now?

I predict that if American troops find and kill bin Laden during Obama’s term, Rush will suddenly become the world’s biggest advocate for due process.

UPDATE: Ah. I am informed that Rush was apparently deploying “irony”. I was wondering about that.

He still can’t stand the fact that Obama was able to pull the trigger and do something tough, even if it was kind of a no-brainer.

Add comment April 15th, 2009 at 07:10am Posted by Eli

Bush OLCer Laments That Obama DOJ Not As Ethical As Dubya’s (No, Really)

Yes, overriding the OLC on voting rights for DC is far, far worse than providing legal justifications for warrantless wiretapping, torture, and unlimited detention without due process.  This right here is my favorite part:

Holder didn’t ask for Katyal’s best judgment as to whether the D.C. bill was constitutional. He instead asked merely whether his own position that the bill is constitutional was so beyond the pale, so beneath the low level of plausible lawyers’ arguments, so legally frivolous, that the Solicitor General’s office, under its traditional commitment to defend any federal law for which any reasonable defense can be offered, wouldn’t be able to defend it in court.

Oh yeah, that’s a much more inappropriate standard than “Would I fight tooth and nail to keep this legal judgment from ever seeing the light of day?”, which was still higher than the bar used by the Bush administration.

This was also priceless:

Edward Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, served as principal deputy in OLC from 2001 to 2004. His portfolio did not include national security matters.

You know, I can’t remember the last time I ever saw one of those blurbs describing what the writer is not.  I can only assume that it was an attempt to somehow preserve his credibility and make his argument look less laughable.  Didn’t work.

Add comment April 7th, 2009 at 11:18am Posted by Eli

Right-Wing Spin Of The Week

Gary Bauer (no relation to Jack, to his eternal regret) agrees that Gitmo is turning prisoners into terrorists… but not through mistreatment:

[W]hile many liberal commentators believe inhumane treatment and religious persecution transforms detainees into suicide bombers and high-level terrorists, I believe the opposite is true: that the unprecedented and extreme religious accommodation granted to Gitmo prisoners has created a culture of Islamic radicalization.

(…)

Media reports of life at Gitmo highlight the extreme accommodation of religious practice. Prison guards go through special sensitivity training. Each Muslim detainee is provided with a Koran, which, in accordance with Muslim teaching, is never touched by non-Muslims (i.e. the prison guards). Each prisoner receives prayer beads, culturally appropriate halal meals, prayer rugs, daily calls to prayer, and each cell contains a stenciled arrow pointing the way to Mecca.

(…)

Harsh treatment regularly comes from the prisoners themselves. Muslim detainees who decline to submit to radicalization are ostracized. As one Afghan detainee told the Miami Herald, “There were detainees who did not pray or who spoke with female soldiers. We stopped speaking with these men. Sometimes we beat them.” The culture of radicalization is so pervasive at Gitmo that some former U.S. officials have called it the “American madrassa.”

Yes, that’s right, Gitmo is breeding terrorists by being too nice. Amazingly, Bauer makes no mention of the two types of fruit.

Add comment March 23rd, 2009 at 09:44pm Posted by Eli

Musical Torture

NYT’s Robert Mackey focuses on the use of rap and heavy metal music to torture detainees.  It’s about as awful as you’d expect, but it gets downright weird at the end:

But since the idea that being forced to listen to a certain song or record can be described as “torture” often strikes people hearing about it as funny, reports of the tactic are often cast in a comic light.

Mr. Piore later told the British writer Jon Ronson that when he called his editor at Newsweek from Iraq to describe the use of loud music on detainees, “I was told to write it as a humorous thing.” After Mr. Piore filed his report, Newsweek stressed the fact that one of the songs blared at detainees in Iraq was the theme from the children’s television show “Barney” and added a comic kicker to his the story:

The sledgehammer riffs of Metallica, that’s understandable. But can children’s songs really break a strong mind? (Two current favorites are the “Sesame Street” theme song and the crooning purple dinosaur Barney — for 24 hours straight.) In search of comment from Barney’s people, Hit Entertainment, Newsweek endured five minutes of Barney while on hold. Yes, it broke us, too.

In Jon Ronson’s book on the American military’s development and use of psychological operations, “The Men Who Stare at Goats” (soon to be a major motion picture, starring George Clooney, Kevin Spacey and Ewan McGregor), he writes that while loud music was used on detainees in Guantánamo, other sorts or sounds were deployed as well, often in puzzling ways.

Jamal al-Harith, another British man who was released from Guantánamo, told Mr. Ronson that recordings of loud screeches and bangs, “jumbled noises,” were played by his interrogators — and also that at one stage during his interrogation, he was asked to listen to songs played at normal volume for no apparent reason. According to Mr. Harith, an interrogator baffled him by playing CDs including one by a Fleetwood Mac cover band, another with a selection of Kris Kristofferson’s greatest hits, and an album by Matchbox Twenty. As Mr. Ronson notes in his book, Matchbox Twenty was one of the bands Mr. Piore found listed on the PsyOps playlist in Iraq.

The editor’s urging to trivialize psychological torture is pretty despicable, but… Matchbox Twenty?  Of all the potential weapons in thePsyOps toolkit, they chose Matchbox Twenty???

4 comments March 9th, 2009 at 07:41pm Posted by Eli

Republicans Admit To Wanting To Destroy America

Pete Sessions (R-Qaeda) spills the beans:

“Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban,” Sessions said during a meeting yesterday with Hotline editors. “And that is that they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person’s entire processes. And these Taliban — I’m not trying to say the Republican Party is the Taliban. No, that’s not what we’re saying. I’m saying an example of how you go about [sic] is to change a person from their messaging to their operations to their frontline message. And we need to understand that insurgency may be required when the other side, the House leadership, does not follow the same commands, which we entered the game with.”

(…)

“If they do not give us those options or opportunities then we will then become insurgency of a nature to where we do those things that are necessary to making sure the American public knows what we think the correct answer is,” Sessions said during the 60-minute interview. “So we either work together, or we’re going to find a way to get our message out.”

When pressed to clarify, Sessions said he was not comparing the House Republican caucus to the Taliban, the Muslim fundamentalist group.

“I simply said one can see that there’s a model out there for insurgency,” Sessions said before being interrupted by an aide. The staffer said Sessions was trying to convey that the Republicans need to start thinking about how to act strategically from their perch in the minority.

I guess this explains why they’re so willing to risk political suicide by blowing up the stimulus bill – it’s what their role model would call a “martyrdom operation.”

(Sadly, I fear that if they blow up the stimulus, Obama will take the blame for not capitulating to the right enough, but I don’t think it’s a sure thing either way.)

Add comment February 6th, 2009 at 07:30am Posted by Eli

An Early Victory In BushCo’s War On Humanity

Shorter Rummy: What part of “don’t feel bound by the Geneva Conventions” didn’t you understand?

The story begins in the first week of January 2002, when Joint Task Force 160, led by Marine Brig. Gen. Michael Lehnert, dutifully landed at Guantanamo Bay….

…[I]t wasn’t the logistics that most worried Lehnert. It was the policy vacuum into which he and his troops had been thrown. “We are writing the book as we go,” one officer said at the time. Lehnert said he had been told by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the Geneva Conventions would not technically apply to his mission: He was to act in a manner “consistent with” the conventions (as the mantra went) but not to feel bound by them….

In the absence of new policy guidance about how to treat the detainees, Lehnert told me that he felt he had no choice but to rely on the regulations already in place, ones in which the military was well schooled: the Uniform Code of Military Justice, other U.S. laws and, above all, the Geneva Conventions. The detainees, no matter what their official status, were essentially to be considered enemy prisoners of war, a status that mandated basic standards of humane treatment….

(…)

But there were early signs of trouble. Lehnert told me that his request to bring representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to Guantanamo — something international law requires for all prisoners being held in war-related situations — was, as he heard it, shunted aside somewhere up the chain of command. “The initial request,” he recalled, “was turned down.” He persisted….  [H]e wanted advice from ICRC professionals to help him ensure the prisoners’ safety and dignity.

Exasperated by repeated attempts to find out which guidelines to apply to the detainees, Col. Manuel Supervielle, the head JAG at Southern Command, picked up the phone and called the ICRC’s headquarters in Geneva. As one member of the Southern Command staff remembers the episode, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had warned the Gitmo task force that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s office opposed getting involved with the ICRC. But now, according to Supervielle, a U.S. officer was asking the ICRC to help out at Guantanamo. The ICRC answered with an immediate “Yes.”

(…)

Brig. Gen. Lehnert had built his own Guantanamo, one with ICRC oversight, a Muslim chaplain and an overriding ethos that stressed codified law and the unwritten rules of human decency. Lehnert’s team let the detainees talk among themselves; it provided halal food, an additional washing bucket inside cells that lacked toilet facilities, a Koran for each detainee, skullcaps and prayer beads for those who wanted them, and undergarments for the prisoners to wear at shower time, in accordance with Islamic laws that proscribe public nakedness.

Perhaps Lehnert’s Guantanamo could have been sustained. But Rumsfeld wanted something else: He expected to get valuable, actionable intelligence from the detainees. By late January 2002, according to Brig. Gen. Galen B. Jackman, Lehnert’s chief contact at Southern Command, the defense secretary told officers on a video conference call with Southern Command that he was frustrated by the absence of such information.

A displeased Rumsfeld seems to have decided to create a second command, one that would exist side by side with Lehnert’s. It would be devoted solely to gathering intelligence and would be headed by a reservist major general, a former U.S. Army interrogator during the Vietnam War named Michael Dunlavey. Jackman told me that he considered the idea of two parallel commands a “recipe for disaster.”….

As Dunlavey’s command took shape in late February and early March, the fabric of prisoner’s rights that Lehnert had woven was beginning to unravel. By the end of February, nearly 200 detainees had mounted a hunger strike to protest their treatment….

(…)

Thanks in large part to Lehnert’s efforts, the hunger strike dwindled to a couple of dozen fasters by the first week of March. But as much as he might have championed the need to respect the detainees as individuals — albeit allegedly dangerous terrorists — Guantanamo’s future had been decided. As the hunger strike wound down, Lehnert said, he and his unit were given notice that they would soon be leaving.

Once Lehnert’s troops departed, a new Guantanamo took shape — the Guantanamo that an appalled world has come to know over the past seven years. Inmates were kept in isolation, interrogation became the core mission, hunger strikers were regularly force-fed, and above all, the promise of a legal resolution to the detainees’ cases has eluded hundreds of prisoners.

It’s a little hard to believe that “actionable intelligence” was really a goal when Gitmo’s recordkeeping was such a mess – more likely that torture was an end in itself, or valued only as collective punishment, or a tool for extracting propaganda in the form of fake terror plots.

It’s not like we needed any further proof that concepts like human decency and the rule of law are completely anathema to Bush and his creatures, but it just keeps coming.  Even now, they’re still fighting a desperate rearguard action against them, trying to block Obama from closing Gitmo and giving the detainees proper trials.

2 comments January 25th, 2009 at 01:55pm Posted by Eli

Dumbass Of The Week

You have got to be kidding me…

The War on Terror has officially lapped stupid:

A US citizen was booted from a Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul to New York after he complained there were “Arab types” on board, Turkish news media reported.

Daniel Sussman Pincus, whose age and hometown were not given but who was described in one report as an American of German origin, shouted his complaints as the flight was preparing to depart Monday.

Imagine that, “Arab types” aboard a Turkish Airlines flight departing from Istanbul.  Why, I bet there were even some Muslim-esque individuals on board!   The nerve of some people!  You’d think they’d have been a bit more sensitive to Mr. Pincus’ bedwetting sensibilities.

I can’t really add anything to the The Poor Man’s analysis, other than to once again cringe in embarrassment at the idiocy and ignorance of my countrymen.  And to sadly observe that had it been an American airline, it probably would have been the “Arab types” getting booted off the plane.

(h/t Julia)

Add comment January 24th, 2009 at 03:50pm Posted by Eli

Tell Me Again About How Torture Keeps Us Safe

I mean, it’s not like it’s particularly effective at providing useful intelligence:

Interrogators are lauding President Obama for signing an executive order that will shut down secret CIA prisons and place the use of coercive interrogation techniques completely off limits.

“[The order] closes an unconscionable period in our history, in which those who knew least, professed to know most about interrogations,” said Joe Navarro, a former special agent and supervisor with the FBI.

“Some die-hards on the right – who have never interrogated anyone — are already arguing that forcing interrogations to be conducted within army field manual guidelines is a step backward and will result in ‘coddling’ dangerous terrorists,” retired Colonel Stuart Herrington, who served for more than 30 years as a military intelligence officer, said soon after the order was signed. “This is a common, but uninformed view. Experienced, well-trained, professional interrogators know that interrogation is an art. It is a battle of wits, not muscle. It is a challenge that can be accomplished within the military guidelines without resorting to brutality.”

(…)

Getting a suspected terrorist to talk is much more subtle than what one typically sees in the movies or on TV. A new book, “How to Break A Terrorist” by Matthew Alexander (a pseudonym), provides an inside look at how interrogation can yield more information if it is done humanely.

Alexander developed the intelligence that led U.S. forces to Al Zarqawi, the former chief of Al Qaeda in Iraq. While some were using abusive techniques to try to crack detainees, Alexander used a smarter, more sophisticated approach. He learned what the detainees cared about and then used that information to get what he wanted.

(…)

To illustrate how torture can lead to poor intelligence, Nelson cites the case of Al Libi, a detainee who was tortured and, under duress, gave misinformation about a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda. (Secretary Colin Powell quoted intelligence gained from Al Libi as justification to go to war with Iraq.)….

“The challenge we face does not have to do with so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ ” said Nelson. “We don’t want those. What we do need is to build a world-class interrogation corps. To do that, we need to pay more attention to recruiting, training, and managing interrogators. President Obama’s executive order is an important first step but there is still more to do.”

Better interrogation, yes.  “Enhanced” interrogation, no.  They are not the same thing.  Torture is certainly easier - any sadist orsociopath off the street can do it.

But that’s not the only way that torture fails to make us safer:

One hesitates to say this will amount to anything, but Marc Lynch notes that Mohammed Essam Derbala, a leader of Ayman Zawahiri’s Egyptian terrorist group that merged with Al Qaeda in 1998, today urged his former confederates to declare a unilateral ceasefire to “test Barack Obama’s pledges to establish a new relationship with the Islamic world and to close Guantanamo.”…..

(…)

Let’s be clear about a few things. Derbala has no power to call for or enforce any Al Qaeda ceasefire. But consider how overwhelmingly significant it is that a former terrorist of such obvious credibility would say something like this. And why’d he say it? Because Barack Obama just renounced torture. He put the United States on a clear path to repudiating the detentions, interrogations and, as important, humiliations that Muslims consider the U.S. to have inflicted not just on terrorists, but the entire Muslim world. Part of Al Qaeda’s entire propagandistic message is that the U.S. is an unchanging brutish entity determined to subjugate the Muslim world. What Obama did today severely complicates that narrative. But it’s not enough for us to consider the narrative to be complicated — it takes Muslim figures of credibility to say so. That’s what Derbala just did.

This is what Carl Levin was getting at earlier today when he said that renouncing torture would have security benefits for the United States. It’s, of course, unclear what Al Qaeda would do. But in an important sense, Al Qaeda isn’t the target audience here. It’s the pool of potential Al Qaeda recruits. In March, an Air Force colonel in Iraq briefed reporters on what motivated foreign fighters to come to Iraq instead of remaining in their home countries living a normal life. The answer was often “an image from Abu Ghraib.” That’s what Obama’s actions today have taken off the table for the U.S.’s adversaries. Its importance shouldn’t be underestimated.

Torture is not just ineffective and morally wrong; it makes the Muslim world hate us, and makes al Qaeda’s recruiting easier.  It may have been very satisfying to Dubya and Cheney’s thuggish mentality to know that Bad Things were happening to people they don’t like, but it compromised both our intelligence-gathering capabilities and our moral standing.  And forwhat?

Add comment January 23rd, 2009 at 07:24am Posted by Eli

It’s On.

Holy crap.

Looks like Israel has decided to invade Gaza to try to take out Hamas once and for all, and too bad for anyone else who happens to be living there.  I guess they were inspired by how well our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq went, and how effective they were at neutralizing terrorism.  Because if there’s one thing we’ve proven, it’s that nothing succeeds like unchecked brutality, right?

Israel has fallen into a trap similar to the one the Bush administration fell into with al Qaeda: elevating their enemies into an existential threat.  Of course, in Israel’s case, Hamas is a democratically-elected government which actually showed some willingness to negotiate.  They are not al Qaeda, and they are not the second coming of Nazi Germany.

But if they weren’t implacable enemies of Israel before, I’m pretty sure they are now – and unlike al Qaeda and the U.S., they’re right next door. Violence will only beget more violence, and death will only beget more death.

Today is a sad and tragic day for Palestine, but the future will be sad and tragic for both Palestine and Israel.

3 comments January 3rd, 2009 at 02:15pm Posted by Eli

Carrots And Honey

Still more evidence that while torture may be satisfying to sadists and useful to propagandists, it’s as ineffective as it is immoral:

In response to Steve’s probing questions, Naji proudly explained that his father was grooming him to be a mujahedin and a future leader of Al Qaeda. He also said that his father took him to important meetings.

A veteran interrogator the night before had told us we “should show the little punk who’s in charge.” This was the attitude of many of the old guard, the interrogators who had been at Guantanamo Bay and in Afghanistan and Iraq early in the war, when the “gloves were off.” They mocked those of us who didn’t imitate their methods of interrogation, which were based on fear and control. There was tremendous peer pressure to follow in their footsteps and not appear soft on our enemies.

We ignored the pressure. We believed that, particularly with a child, interviewing rather than interrogation got better results. Steve had been trained in interviewing children, and he used those skills with Naji, gently stroking the child’s ego and noting that he must have been a very important boy to have attended meetings. Soon, Naji started rattling off places where meetings had taken place. He detailed who was at the gatherings, how many guns were stored at the houses, what was discussed and what plans were made. Naji talked because Steve was sympathetic and made him feel good.

From the information he provided, it was clear that Naji’s father had been a mid- to high-level Al Qaeda leader with connections throughout Yousifiya and Al Anbar province. By the time the interview ended after an hour, Steve had filled up pages in his notebook with detailed information about Naji’s father’s network.

Back in our office, Steve and I marveled at all the intelligence Naji had provided — the names, the locations. He’d pinpointed the better part of Al Qaeda’s operations around Yousifiya. In the two weeks that followed, our soldiers put this information to good use and took out a significant portion of Al Qaeda’s suicide-bombing network in the area. For two weeks, violence dropped and many lives were saved.

(…)

Good interrogation is not an exercise in domination or control. It’s an opportunity for negotiation and compromise. It’s a common ground where the two sides in this war meet, and it’s a grand stage where words become giants, tears flow like rivers and emotions rage like wildfires. It is a forum in which we should always display America’s strengths — cultural understanding, tolerance, compassion and intellect. But that’s not how all interrogators see their role.

According to a recent report from the bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee, “The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot be attributed to the actions of a ‘few bad apples’ acting on their own.” The effects of the policy that allowed torture to happen at Guantanamo Bay, the report concluded, spread to Iraq through the interrogators who had first been at Guantanamo. The preference for harsh interrogation techniques was extremely counterproductive and harmed our ability to obtain cooperation from Al Qaeda detainees. Even after the old guard interrogators were forced to play by the rules of the Geneva Convention, there was still plenty of leeway for interrogation methods based on fear and control. I believe their continued reliance on such techniques has severely hampered our ability to stop terrorist attacks against U.S. forces and Iraqi civilians.

We will win this war by being smarter, not harsher. For those who would accuse me of being too nice to our enemies, I encourage you to examine our success in hunting down Zarqawi and his network. The drop in suicide bombings in Iraq at two points in the spring and summer of 2006 was a direct result of our smarter interrogation methods.

I used to tell my team in Iraq: “The things that make you a good American are the things that will make you a good interrogator.” We must outlaw torture across every agency of our government, restore our adherence to the American principles passed down to us and, in doing so, better protect Americans from future terrorist attacks.

As Alexander points out, it is not enough simply to outlaw torture.  Until all our interrogators understand that harshness is not the key to intelligence-gathering, they will continue walking up to the edge and being as brutal as they think they can get away with, and they will get nowhere.  Torture is about as effective for intelligence-gathering as invasion and bombing are for winning hearts and minds.  Who knew?

As with politics, the right thing to do is often the smartest thing to do… and also the hardest.

(h/t Brandon Friedman)

Add comment December 30th, 2008 at 07:21am Posted by Eli

The Lord Will Provide

Amazing:

Under state law, God is Kentucky’s first line of defense against terrorism.

The 2006 law organizing the state Office of Homeland Security lists its initial duty as “stressing the dependence on Almighty God as being vital to the security of the Commonwealth.”

Specifically, Homeland Security is ordered to publicize God’s benevolent protection in its reports, and it must post a plaque at the entrance to the state Emergency Operations Center with an 88-word statement that begins, “The safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God.”

State Rep. Tom Riner, a Southern Baptist minister, tucked the God provision into Homeland Security legislation as a floor amendment that lawmakers overwhelmingly approved two years ago.

As amended, Homeland Security’s religious duties now come before all else, including its distribution of millions of dollars in federal grants and its analysis of possible threats.

The time and energy spent crediting God are appropriate, said Riner, D-Louisville, in an interview this week.

“This is recognition that government alone cannot guarantee the perfect safety of the people of Kentucky,” Riner said. “Government itself, apart from God, cannot close the security gap. The job is too big for government.”

Nonetheless, it is government that operates the Office of Homeland Security in Frankfort, with a budget this year of about $28 million, mostly federal funds….

I don’t see why they need $28 million if they’ve got God watching out for them, but what do I know.  Maybe it’s a backup plan in case God falls asleep on the job.

And apparently God’s not just in charge of homeland security:

If you’re a school principal in Connecticut, it’s possible a group of moms is praying for you every week.

Not because you, specifically, need their prayers (although who among us couldn’t benefit from an extra prayer now and then) but because that’s what these moms do — they get together once a week and pray for their kids’ schools, including the principals, staff and all the students.

They pray for safe classrooms. They pray that bullies will be caught. They pray for an end to the illnesses that sweep through schools, and the homework tantrums their kids throw.

They even pray for Mastery Test scores.

(…)

Although there are Moms In Touch groups scattered around Connecticut, Lawrence said there aren’t any in Hartford, which struggles with some of the deepest problems of any school system in the state.

That’s a situation she’d like to correct.

“I totally believe with all my heart that if every school in Connecticut was prayed for every week it would be totally different,” Lawrence said.

See, we don’t even need money for schools!  Awesome!

Man, it’s a good thing God’s omnipotent, ‘cuz we sure are putting a lot of important stuff on His plate.

(h/t dakine)

8 comments November 29th, 2008 at 07:40pm Posted by Eli