It astounds me how many folks kept silent for so long.

OMG, there IS life beyond Franken/Coleman. This MNsotan is glad, even if it resurrects ghost of Darth.

And a lot of other petty shit that is being beaten to death, even here.

DIGG WAS OPEN when I got there

We are going to be in a lot of trouble, you and I, if we keep saying things like that! *g*

If this ghoulish list of abuse and torture is Limbaugh’s idea of frat pranks, I can only assume he belonged to Kappa Kappa Caligula.

-G

LOL. Good one.

They routinely collared and slammed detainees into plywood walls. How anyone could survive psychologically is hard to imagine. These people are destroyed forever by this torture. This is soul murder.

OMG these people are disgusting.

Why didn’t Powell put a stop to this when he was SOS?

I don’t know what is more disgusting, that Bush and Cheney did this or that Powell and Rice went along.

Sadly, I am not surprised this took as long as it did to work its way to the surface. I suspect the people in government who had access to it were in fear for their lives, careers or families while the Cheney Dictatorship was in office. I will not fault them for waiting until now (but I will if they continue to wait).

I will fault Obama and Holder for failing to prosecute the prior administration – it’s wrong and they make themselves complicit (as accessories after the fact and through misprision of felony) in that wrongdoing, quite needlessly I might add.

coulda gone the rest of my life without seeing that pic of Cheney “packin’ heat” again…

As Cheney, Addington and Libby know, once you start down that road, you can never turn back without self-immolating. But that wasn’t news to any politician, bureaucrat, lawyer, adviser or informed public citizen. The hubris that convinced Cheney he could do it and get away with it isn’t novel either.

What perhaps was novel is the combination of that ambition and hubris with a boy-president who thought giving all his powers to Dick was the same as responsibly delegating a few of them to a man of talent and restraint. Then again, a high school Shakespeare course topples that argument.

I am not an attorney (but have been married to two) But would it be possible to obtain a Writ of Mandamus to require DOJ to prosecute this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writ_of_Mandamus

And what can he possibly find that amuses him so much? Sickening.

Dead puppies?

How revolting.

New post with a guest economist upstairs.

You know, from the Abu Ghraib photos, to the Bybee memo, to the Jane Mayer articles, to the released-detainee testimonials, to the former Guantanamo prosecutor who said “torture,” to Cheney’s admission that waterboarding was used, to the limited release of OLC opinions, to umpteen other examples I’m not listing off the top of my head, we now have the ICRC leak and Wilkerson’s statements. And each time we’re all hepped up for a news cycle or two, thinking, “Maybe this at last is the smoking gun no one can deny.”

Yet perversely, the more dramatic and definitive the new revelation, the more the Leahys and Pelosis of the world can seize upon it to justify the inaction at all the previous revelations.

Of course we left impeachment/indictment off the table up to now, because we never knew [fill in the latest outrage]! But now there’ll be no stopping us in our relentless insistence upon [fill in the latest flaccid half-measure].

And then the next shiny object arrives.

The Bush team was plainly impeachable and remains indictable. This has been true for YEARS and will remain true after Danner/Wilkerson slips away from the news cycle, regardless of when or whether the next smoking-gun revelation appears.

I wish I had a tagline to this comment other than despair and disgust.

From Wilkerson: “the mosaic philosophy”

This is the human component of Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness program. It can easily justify the interrogation and torture of even innocent people if they can contribute in some way to the great intelligence mosaic.

Wilkerson is definitely not saying everything he knows. For instance, the fact that from the very beginning there was the use of hooding and isolation, and other forms of torture. The circumstances may have caused some “behavioral drift” a la the brutality of the treatment, and the fact they maybe didn’t plan well enough to have as many professional interrogators on scene as they would have liked. But likely they were using torture as part of shock and awe, and hoped the tales of brutality would get out. Torture is about terrorizing a population, about control and conquest, not information.

Re Wilkerson’s “limited hangout”: he says nothing for instance about the use of drugs for instance on prisoners. The Pentagon OIG has been investigating this issue since last summer, and still is. Steven Miles believes he has evidence of the use of prisoners for experiments and his new edition of Oath Betrayed, out next month, will document some of this. I will note they made a special effort to change the wording re use of drugs in interrogations as part of the 2006 revise of the Army Field Manual, and I will write on this very soon.

The Wilkerson tale is a little more forthcoming, but is mainly a cri de coeur not to charge Powell, Armitage, and maybe Rice. Powell and Rice were at the Principals meetings that oversaw some of the early torture, e.g. of Zubaydah. — Sorry, Larry. If there’s any justice, Colin will stand in the dock.

There have been leaked ICRC reports re torture before. This is just the first one to have substantial portions leaked, and is aimed at the CIA.
The whole “mosaic” philosophy is nothing new, and Joseph Marguiles wrote about it in his book Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power at least a few years ago.

The entire torture business is as corrupt and runs as deep as anything in the AIG/Wall Street scandals, and most likely are linked, i.e., the use of misappropriated funds to use for covert operations. That’s speculation by me, but would fit past behaviors by the ruling elite (BCCI, etc.)

The Obama administration doesn’t have much to do with any of this coming out. They still won’t admit to that any innocent people were held, but we’ve had public Federal court decisions, like the Kurnaz case and the original case involving the Uighurs, where Judge Roberts found them innocent of ever having been enemy combatants but was then barred from ordering their release (that was YEARS back, well before the current round of Uighur litigation post-Boumediene).

Harper’s had this Six Question with Dr. Emile A. Nakhleh, way back in Sept of 2006. Dr. Nakhleh (who is likely the CIA analyst referred to in Mayer’s book from last year, referring to a warning given to “the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake”) flat out told Silverstein then that we were holding innocent people at GITMO, that he knows because he was sent to investigate, and that we treated everyone the same, guilty or not.

So this stuff isn’t just coming out – these are only a few examples but this stuff has been out for a long time and if Obama got any kind of briefing, or even had bothered to pick up a magazine and read it now and then, he’s known all about it. And yet he and Holder still fight for the right to Presidential torture and to “classify” such torture and the torturers, in all the pending cases. It’s worse than sad and its a destructive legacy they are leaving – worse than Bush’es bc their legacy makes it clear that no amount of political change from the voting booth will change the usurpation of the right to torutre by the Executve branch – and they seal the proposition that no law bind the President and Executive branch regarding torture, that it is only a matter of something like imperial grace that keep anyone from such torture. Obama is opting to be the non-torture deification, but he’s making it very clear that he keeps the rights to torture and that others, like Bush and his torturers, are deifications above the realm of the law.

From the Haper’s article from way back in 2006

3. You traveled to Guantánamo in 2002. Were you surprised by what you saw there?

I spent hours talking with prisoners about why they had become jihadists and how they came to Guantánamo. Some of the detainees participated in jihad in Afghanistan, mostly against the Northern Alliance; others did not but were caught in the dragnet—having been at the wrong place and at the wrong time. Even the command down there knew that probably one-third of the prisoners were neither terrorists nor jihadists, and wouldn’t have been there if we weren’t paying a bounty to Pakistani security forces for every Middle Eastern-looking person they handed over to us. Almost every detainee I spoke to claimed that we paid $5,000 per person. Unfortunately, we treated everyone the same, which led the non-jihadists at Guantánamo to hate us as much as the rest, becoming more hardened in their attitudes toward the US and more disappointed in the American sense of fairness and justice.

That was in 2002. Imagine after anohter half decade or so of being held in abuse.

Obama still will not acknowledge it – will not acknowledge that anyone was innocent. All he does is yammer on about not giving constitutional rights to terrorists.

Pathetic.

here’s the deal;

cheney knows the information is comming out so he’s going on the attack to counter the critisism before it happens

tiz a fact that’s what’s going on

Much thanks, too, Phoenix Woman, for the linking of the article. It’s very appreciated!

acutally, what I wrote is what most people believe

Amen. We can only pray now that justice will be served. The other two branches have clearly been broken.

I understand completely. :-)