America’s Concentration Camps category archive

A poem by Moazzam Begg, based on his experience of being held in Guantanamo as an innocent man for more than three years, never charged with any crime:

In line with the Buzz Words post earlier today, Andrew Sullivan translates a less-than-benign example of doublespeak. Read the whole thing.

“Aggressive interrogation of captured terrorists” needs translation into plain English. It means “the torture of captives suspected of being terrorists.”

Chris Satullo in his commentary today. Listen here.

On the Media has more from the angle of journalistic ethics. Go to the website or listen here (MP3):

What Susie said.

The amorality of the Bush administration has so poisoned our discourse that some have forgotten that deciding to torture another creature is not a practical question.

It is a moral one.

Yet, there is more public furor over Michael Vick than ov–oh, never mind.

The U.S. military is denouncing the release of a video of an American soldier held hostage by Taliban militants in Afghanistan, saying to use a soldier for propaganda purposes is against international law.

I suspect that, thanks to the Previous Federal Administration, this claim carries little weight.

Yeah, I know.

It’s old news. But every time I hear about it, the rage returns.

Uighurs are Turkioc-speaking Muslims, a Chinese ethnic minority from the Xinjiang province of far-Northwest China. Violent protests have been breaking out since early July in Urumqi, the capital of this region, killing close to two hundred people. Several Uighurs are also former Guantanamo Bay detainees, who are free to leave Cuba, but are afraid to back to China in fear of inhumane treatment, and can’t find a nation to accept them. Our guests, history professor LINDA BENSON of Oakland University and Uighur detainee attorney SEEMA SAIFEE help us understand what the on-going problems are with this conflicted group of people.

Listen here (mp3) or follow the link and search the archives for July 14, 2009, Hour One.

Remember, it’s just one of hundreds of similar stories.

at least for those who paid attention:

While the Bush administration had defended its program of wiretapping without warrants as a vital tool that saved lives, a new government review released Friday said the program’s effectiveness in fighting terrorism was unclear.

The report, mandated by Congress last year and produced by the inspectors general of five federal agencies, found that other intelligence tools used in assessing security threats posed by terrorists provided more timely and detailed information.

Most intelligence officials interviewed “had difficulty citing specific instances” when the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program contributed to successes against terrorists, the report said..

Heck, when they had good intelligence data, they didn’t have the intelligence to use it. More data did not bring more intelligence.

It was never about national security. It was about power.

Illegitimate power.

Afterthought: John Yoo comes in for special mention. But I bet I’ll still have his columns to ignore in the Philadelphia Shrinkquirer.

Beyond disappointing.

The Obama administration said Tuesday it could continue to imprison non-U.S. citizens indefinitely even if they have been acquitted of terrorism charges by a U.S. military commission.

Here.

Andrew Sullivan on the pornographers of torture. Follow the link and read the whole thing:

It (Abu Ghraib) was a function of a policy of abuse and torture and mistreatment of prisoners in the war on terror in every theater of combat, directed and emanating from the will of Dick Cheney via the pen of George W Bush. It is simply impossible to review the evidence and conclude otherwise and no one, outside the Cheney cocoon, has been able to sustain the fiction that Cheney proposes as fact. The attempt to separate this from his own highly controlled, personally directed program of torture and abuse and coercion is a deep and malicious and wilfull lie.

Are Republicans really that stupid, or do they just think we are that stupid. Senator Imhoff, R-Landrush, extoling the virtues of indefinite captivity:

“Anyone, any detainee over 55 has an opportunity to have a colonoscopy. Now none of them take ’em up on it because once they explain what it is none of them want to do it. But nonetheless its an opportunity that they have.”

A Pome, not by Henry Gibson:

Ode To Tropical Breeze Colonoscopies
By Madeleine Begun Kane

I’m moving to Gitmo real soon
Cuz I’m told inmate health care’s a boon.
Colonoscopies free
After fifty-five. Whee!
So please lock me up, Sen. Buffoon!

Follow the link for more Mad Kane.

Afterthought:

All joking aside, the good Senator’s remark betrays a casual cruelty that is actually rather appalling.

As my three or four regular readers would guess, I disagree with Mr. Obama’s decision not to reveal the pictures of torture as conducted by the Previous Federal Administration.

Secrecy is the enabler of lies.

Josh Marshall sums up the latest:

We now have two big developments on the torture front that may allow the whole torture issue to take on a life of its own and frustrate President Obama’s attempts to close the door on the issue. First, as you’ve seen, is Nancy Pelosi’s claim this morning that the CIA is lying about what it told members of the Democratic opposition in the early part of this decade. (The CIA. Lie? It is to gasp.–ed.)

(snip)

Next you have a flurry of claims that a key motive behind the push to torture was to elicit ‘confessions’ about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida, which was of course the key predicate for the invasion of Iraq.

I have no way of knowing whether the reason for the the torture was to support the lies that sold the Iraq War. It is a commentary on the immorality of the proponents of that war that, at this point, no one other than the truest true wingnut believer would accept that as feasible, for it is consistent with the duplicity and venality of the Previous Federal Administration.

Now comes Clive Stafford Smith in the Guardian:

No matter how you dress it up, the question on the table is whether the Obama administration should continue to cover–up evidence of the criminal offence of torture, committed by US personnel. It is a truly remarkable notion that evidence of crimes should be suppressed because it might provoke anger around the world.

I suspect that the issue is not truly “anger around the world,” but rather embarrassment around Washington, D. C.

The damage around the world has been done. The anger already is.

However bad those photographs are, not revealing them will make them be visualized as worse than they probably actually are.

It is time to debride the wound and end the gangrene.

BlackwaterXe still playing soldier boy:

The company, now known as Xe, launched the 183-foot vessel McArthur in the fall, saying it was ready to begin patrolling the Gulf of Aden to protect merchant vessels against pirate attacks.

However, legal papers allege that it’s the McArthur’s own crewmen that need protection – from their superior officers.

The picture of life aboard the McArthur that emerges from those documents seems to be ripped from the pages of a pirate yarn of yore: Verbal and physical abuse. Alcohol-fueled outbursts. Racial harassment and retaliation. And the punishment for loose lips: being clapped in irons.

DougJ at Balloon Juice.

There can be no “reasoned debate” about torture.

There is no reasoned debate about cruelty and immoral conduct.

Over at Skippy’s place.

Vs. Broderism. Eric Alterman in The Nation discusses David Broder’s reluctance to seek the truth about torture. Sadly, Broder is just one amongst many who view politics as some sort of game divorced from ethics, morality, and the rule of law:

Sadly, Broder’s decision to avert his eyes from the distasteful and potentially criminal actions of his government is not exceptional; it’s how he defines his job. Forty years ago he scolded those in the Democratic Party who challenged Lyndon Johnson’s lies about Vietnam as “degrading…to those involved.” Twenty years ago he attacked independent counsel Lawrence Walsh’s investigation into criminal wrongdoing in the Iran/Contra scandal. (Reagan had mused that he would likely be impeached should his extraconstitutional actions ever be discovered.) Broder supported Republican efforts to impeach Bill Clinton, whose behavior he deemed “worse” than Richard Nixon’s police-state tactics during Watergate because Nixon’s actions, “however neurotic and criminal, were motivated and connected to the exercise of presidential power.” There is a pattern here, obviously. When a president abuses his constitutional warmaking powers, he can depend on Broder not only to defend his crimes but to attack those who would hold him accountable. This, in the eyes of perhaps the most honored and admired journalist today, is the proper function of the press in a democracy.

Dear Frank,

In spite of all the recent news, we still have some skeptics.

The release of new Bush-Cheney era torture memos by the Justice Department reveal just how far the past administration strayed from the law and our fundamental principles.

There is a renewed public call for accountability at BushTruthCommission.com, and many congressional leaders — like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chris Dodd — have now thrown their support behind our proposed truth commission, too.

Read more »