greg, I just had a thought and will post it around till I find out I am wrong or till I hear progressives making the point;

you know what would go very nicely in the torture timeline?

the time when the Iraq people suspected torture, (when they realized we were still using abu graeb) and the time we were no longer welcome as liberators

I suspect they coincide almost to the week.

if that’s true that marks the time our policies begin recruiting exponentially insurgents against our cause, our government and our people

if so, imagine how that would play when a progressive points it out

Steele shows he is — oh, I’ll be as PC as I can about it — challenged. Severely challenged. Or a Trotskyite entryist. Or auditioning for John Stewart.

Dovetailing with that, the inherent contradiction in arguing that release of prisoner abuse photos puts our personnel at risk, but our “interrogation techniques” are not motivating people side with anti-US interests.

I guess that means everything needs to remain secret. . . which, of course means that we must kill everyone we torture, abuse, render, or falsely imprison.

Has Obama replaced Bush’s DOJ lawyers and other DOJ functionaries, yet? Is that standard protocol?

After all, the Bush Attornies that were “let go” because they would not follow Rove’s instructions were Republicans appointed by Bush.

I think the U.S. had worn out it’s welcome within 6 months. By the Spring of 2004 the insurgency was in full swing. I recall thinking as U.S. casualties continued to mount that Kerry should have been hammering Bush for his apparent open ended commitment. Unfortunately Kerry disappeared between the primaries and the convention and by then his tepid campaigning was insufficient to close the deal.

I don’t think Kerry ever convinced the peace/anti-war movement that he was against the wars. We cussed him as much as we did Shrub.

and how far in did they discover we were not closi…ng abu graeb?…more then 6 monthgs?

I guess that means everything needs to remain secret. . . which, of course means that we must kill everyone we torture, abuse, render, or falsely imprison.

that would be the case if in fact the only reason you have policies of torture IS to advertise that fact

the purpose is to breed fear it’s not to gather information

now, if there was an isolated case where they actually did torture for immediate information then yes, they would have to kill that person…but as rayne poitned out, they never needed immediate information that was a ruse

The second is pretty much the classic and harmful attitude of all Bush-Cheney apologists—better to wage two hot wars, and ideological war without end, and spend trillions not capturing terrorists in order to impress themselves and warm their chickenshit hearts than it is to lock up the terrorists and show the world we have nothing to hide and nothing to fear.

The real reason, of course is to line the pockets of connected individuals and corporations like Halliburton with offshore tax havens – the military industrial complex.

Since the same actors own most of the media, we have discovered that as American citizens, we really love torture! And since we are dumbed down, we don’t know that it is illegal. And that St Reagan denounced it. Just ask Stephanopolis, David Gregory, Gloria Vanderbilt’s son Anderson Cooper, et al. All affirm that torture is good and we like it.

Did you hear that Bush daughter Jenna is destined for media stardom? Purely on merit of course.

Wow… DoJ takes its cues from the President… the President gets his info from the CIA about how to wage the “war on terror”. By simple logic, the CIA dictates to the President and controls the DoJ.

Rule of law for the GOP means rule of the strong over anyone they want to control. Even the ABC guys seemed somewhat taken aback by the anti-democratic tirade of this leader of the Republican Party.

Perris, ratfood, and others debating this…

I don’t think the U.S. was ever welcomed. Period.

Yes, come “shock and awe” us. It was invasion, opposed by most of the world, and many if not most Americans. The rest is government spin.

Michael Steele is the Stepin Fetchit of the Republican Party. Yaaasss Bossss, No Booosss, you want’s me to tap dance some morrres?

Yeah, just like Luke Russert was catapulted up the NBC hierarchy. NBC, the network of nepotism. The Nepotism Broadcasting Corporation. Is this a “free press” or what?

Obama can work with right wing operatives. He’ll have them on board in no time, or will they have him on board? Well anyway Obama has a plan. All the country has to do is move farther to the right and bingo, bipartisanship! A true leader for our times.

of course you’re right but there is the point, there was no reason for “shock and awe” that was for the fear in the first place, deposing saddam did not need “shock and awe”

and that’s my point, that was the purpose of torture also, to facilitate the “shock and awe” since the hardware was spent immediately they had to continue their shock somehow

even with the shock and awe, there was a window of anticipation whence we might have left and been seen as liberators

that was a few months and I am guessing the window was closed the moment they realized we were torturing captives who might not even have been assoicated with sadam, we already know they weren’t associated with bin laden and al qaeda

and there is antother time line shocker;

we already knew there was no link between al qaeda and bin laden, the cia told the administration, the fbi told the administration, the anti terror legue headed by clark told them there was no connection

yet they initiated their policies anyway

ba

da

bing

there was no intention of getting information, they wanted false confessions and they wanted the programs to become known

I guess that means everything needs to remain secret. . . which, of course means that we must kill everyone we torture, abuse, render, or falsely imprison.

I wrote about the brutal, insane yet ineluctable logic of the torturer back in Jan. ‘07 in the context of the Maher Arar case.

By my reasoning then, and I think it still stands, an innocent victim of torture is MORE likely to be murdered than a guilty one – to protect the torturer, the government and the policy that led to the torture. It’s much easier to justify brutalizing someone like KSM than it is an innocent like Arar, a software engineer from Ottawa with no connections whatsoever to terrorism.

Without habeas corpus there is no justice. The illogic of Steele does bring out this point.

Take him at “his word?” A liar doesn’t have a “word.” He is self-serving.