America’s Concentration Camps category archive

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 »

Follow the link for more Non Sequitur. It’s the closest thing today to the Far Side.

The Booman uncovers a little history.

Dick Polman recounts the history of American waterboarding, which dates back to the Moro uprising in the Phillipines over 100 years ago (it was called the “water cure” back then when I was a young ‘un).

Once again, there was a Republican president.

This one, though, wasn’t having any of it (emphasis added):

. . . a pro-water lobby quickly developed. For instance, a church official named Homer Stunz wrote a piece entitled “The ‘Water Cure’ From a Missionary Point of View,” and argued that the practice wasn’t torture because the suspect could make it stop at any time simply by agreeing to provide the requested information. Others argued that the security of American troops was at stake, thus requiring that strong measures be taken to extract intelligence.

But Theodore Roosevelt, the new president, didn’t buy those arguments. He didn’t try to manufacture any legal justifications. He didn’t bless the errant behavior by claiming that it was all conducted at the behest of his all-powerful executive authority. Instead, he kicked butt in a cable sent to the U.S. military authorities in the Philippines. The text can be found on page 100 of “Theodore Rex,” the second volume of the TR biography written by Edmund Morris. The key passage:

The president desires to know in the fullest and most circumstantial manner all the facts…for the very reason that the president intends to back up the Army in the heartiest fashion in every lawful and legitimate method of doing its work; he also intends to see that the most vigorous care is exercised to detect and prevent any cruelty or brutality and that men who are guilty thereof are punished. Great as the provocation has been in dealing with foes who habitually resort to treachery, murder and torture against our men, nothing can justify or will be held to justify the use of torture or inhuman conduct of any kind on the part of the American military.

At least five more torture memos, that is, including one that concluded that the Military Commissions Act, which specifically prohibited “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of U.S. prisoners” somehow authorized that same treatment. Follow the link to the AP story.

In the Orwellian Bushie world, down is up, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

Via Raw Story.

Terry Jones in the Guardian. I can’t excerpt anything from it without damaging it.

Just go read it.

Via Jack.

The torture memos:

President Obama does not intend to prosecute Bush administration officials who devised the policies that led to the harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said yesterday.

Emanuel and other presidential aides also pushed back against a GOP contention that national security was undermined by the release of memos detailing controversial interrogation methods approved under President George W. Bush.

The only security that is threatened is the security of those who think that the Gestapo is a fitting role model.

Phillipe Sands writes of the torture memos in the Guardian:

This is the stuff of dark nightmares, the rubber-stamping of policy rather than legal advice in the sense usually understood. It indicates how far the Bush administration fell, the kind of reasoning that infected a raft of policies and to which the British government often turned a blind eye. It has caused untold damage to US national security, and to its reputation.

When the memo was written, the administration had already fixed a policy of abuse, and the torture had already started. Lawyers were needed to provide the “golden shield” against prosecution. The memo did not benefit from the usual consultations; the many lawyers who would have objected were simply cut out of the process. A small group of lawyer-ideologues became participants in international crime, acts for which any state may, under the 1984 torture convention, exercise criminal jurisdiction. The evidence suggests complicity with the consequences that flowed from these flawed opinions – which went on to underpin CIA and military interrogations in Guantánamo, Iraq and beyond in the rendition programme.

(snip)

Obama is right not to target the interrogators in the sense that real responsibility lies much higher up. The senior lawyers and their patrons should derive little comfort from his intervention: they remain at risk of criminal investigation – or worse, in a legal black hole of their own making.

The torture memos.

Monsters.

Something is very clear from these memos. The Bush administration often liked to say that they needed these memos to remain confidential in order to preserve the principle that the administration should receive the most candid legal advice available. What that secrecy fomented was a culture in which the precise conditions under which a man who had been shot in the leg could be placed inside a cramped box — how many hours? — and subjected to insects crawling on him without it being blatantly illegal.

Via Atrios.

What Mithras said.

Truth is more important than prosecutions.

Delaware Liberal links to the memos.

From the Booman.

. . . still important, for it was evil done in your name and mine (pdf).

Via the Booman.

Evil has no better friend than the dark.

As reported by NEWSWEEK, the White House last month had accepted a recommendation from Attorney General Eric Holder to declassify and publicly release three 2005 memos that graphically describe harsh interrogation techniques approved for the CIA to use against Al Qaeda suspects. But after the story, U.S. intelligence officials, led by senior national-security aide John Brennan, mounted an intense campaign to get the decision reversed, according to a senior administration official familiar with the debate. “Holy hell has broken loose over this,” said the official, who asked not to be identified because of political sensitivities.

What, one wonders, do they fear, other than the truth.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Addendum, the Next Morning:

The Booman has some thoughts.

Andrew Sullivan, q. v.

From the New York Review of Books. Read the whole thing.

We think time and elections will cleanse our fallen world but they will not. Since November, George W. Bush and his administration have seemed to be rushing away from us at accelerating speed, a dark comet hurtling toward the ends of the universe. The phrase “War on Terror”—the signal slogan of that administration, so cherished by the man who took pride in proclaiming that he was “a wartime president”—has acquired in its pronouncement a permanent pair of quotation marks, suggesting something questionable, something mildly embarrassing: something past. And yet the decisions that that president made, especially the monumental decisions taken after the attacks of September 11, 2001—decisions about rendition, surveillance, interrogation—lie strewn about us still, unclaimed and unburied, like corpses freshly dead.

The most pernicious evil is evil done in the name of good.

Moving back towards sanity:

The Obama administration dropped the term “enemy combatant” and incorporated international law on Friday as its basis for holding terrorism suspects at Guantanamo prison while it works to close the facility.

The “enemy combatant” classification was created out of whole cloth with the sole purpose of evading the Laws of War.

It was nothing more than a cover story for concentration camps.

It is good to see it going away.

Sign Senator Leahy’s petition here.