Open Left - torture

Our Debt to Italy

davidswanson — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:04:25 GMT

The United States of America owes much of the hope it has right now of remaining what John Adams called "a nation of laws, not men" to Italian law enforcement. Were it not for the fact that Italian prosecutors, unlike their American counterparts, answer to the law rather than a president, the enforcement of laws against a massive crime spree by U.S. officials (and their Italian accomplices) would not have begun.

In 2003, the CIA and the United States military kidnapped a man, a political refugee, in Italy. His name was Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. Our CIA agents spied on him from their luxury hotels and gourmet-meal lives in Milano (all paid for by U.S. tax payers). They were told to kidnap Nasr and send him to Egypt to be tortured, and they did so. According to recent statements by two of them, they knew perfectly well they were violating the law. But they were not worried enough at the time to refrain from discussing the matter on their cell phones as they enjoyed the dolce vita and racked up credit card bills wasting the same currency our government claims it has a moral duty not to waste on healthcare.

Nasr was indeed kidnapped, flown to Egypt, and tortured. His wife, Ghali Nabila, testified in Italian court for over six hours. In October 2004, she had been able to see him, briefly out of Egyptian prison. (He was eventually released years later.) Nabila said in court:

"I found him wasted, skinny - so skinny his hair had turned white, he had a hearing aid."

Ordered, against her will, to describe his torture, she said:

"He was tied up like he was being crucified. He was beaten up, especially around his ears. He was subject to electroshocks to many body parts."

Asked if that included genitals, she replied "Yes."

Nasr himself wrote in a letter smuggled out of prison and printed in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera:

"I was hung by my feet from the ceiling, my head down, my hands tied to my back, my feet tied up. I was subjected to electric shocks all over my body, especially in my head, nipples, testicles, and penis. My testicles where also beaten with a stick and squeezed tightly if I refused to answer their questions or was suspected of telling lies. They fixed my body to an iron door and on a wooden instrument they call the bride, where my hands where tied over my head from behind and my legs tied together or sometimes each leg on different sides. The torture that takes place during this is electric shocks, and beating with a shoe and cables."

Presidents Barack Obama and Silvio Berlusconi oppose prosecuting Americans or Italians for kidnapping this man and transporting him to his torturers. The U.S. Department of Justice will, therefore, not prosecute. In Italy, on the other hand, there is still some measure of law, law as a standard applied to all equally, without immunity for those with the power to commit the greatest crimes.

Last Wednesday, an Italian court convicted 22 CIA agents, including the CIA's current second ranking official Stephen Kappes, and one member of the U.S. Air Force. The prosecutor Armando Spataro has repeatedly asked the Italian government to issue an international arrest warrant and request extradition by the United States. It has not yet done so.

One of the convicted CIA agents, Sabrina De Sousa, openly admits that the kidnapping was illegal, but says that she feels betrayed by those who authorized the operation and failed to protect its participants from prosecution. De Sousa ignores Nuremberg Principle IV, which requires noncompliance with illegal orders or instructions:

"The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."

But De Sousa also has a point, one well exemplified at Nuremberg: Those at the bottom are not the most responsible. Those who must be held accountable first and foremost are the decision-makers at the top. And who authorized the policy of kidnapping people and shipping them off to be tortured? Three top U.S. officials have authorized rendition: Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama. And in this case, the presidents responsible were Bush and, almost certainly, Berlusconi.

For justice to reach to those highest levels and thereby deter the practice of kidnapping, under the name rendition, in the years ahead, justice must be permitted to proceed on the paths it has blazed thus far. Americans must make Italians aware of our gratitude for their efforts to save us from ourselves. And Italy must be compelled to obey its laws rather than its president on the question of issuing international arrest warrants and a demand for extradition. The 23 fugitives already can expect arrest if they visit any nation of Europe. They should not be free to roam the rest of the world.

By U.S. standards, Italy would be justified in kidnapping these fugitives and "rendering" them to Italian prisons. An extradition request would be a generous favor of a sort that the United States does not grant to others. Failure to take that step on behalf of the rule of law will put the blood of future rendition victims on the hands of the Italian as well as the American people.

Vi prego, i miei carissimi fratelli e sorelli, salvateci da noi stessi.

PS: One opportunity for Americans to force this issue in our own country will occur when Attorney General Eric Holder testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee at 10 a.m. on November 18th in Dirksen room 226. We should ask Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who claims to oppose torture, and Senator Patrick Leahy who chairs the committee, as well as Senator Russ Feingold and the rest of them to raise these issues, and be there to raise them ourselves.

Does Holder consider rendition legal. How does he distinguish it from kidnapping?

Will Holder extradite 23 fugitives to Italy? Would he expect Italy to do the same?

Holder has accepted the instructions of the president not to prosecute top officials for known crimes. He needs to be grilled on that and informed that Congress will step up where he fails.

Holder is burying the OPR report (his departments own, years-old report on its authorization of torture), providing Congress with an excuse for inaction. He needs to be told to release it or watch it be subpoenaed and watch Congress proceed without using its delay as an excuse any longer.

In April Leahy asked top torture lawyer Jay Bybee to come in. He hasn't. Leahy needs to tell Holder that Bybee is being subpoenaed.

In April Holder testified on the House side and told me I'd be proud of my government -- When might I?

PPS: Speaking of the House side, Rep. Jay Inslee introduced this bill two years ago. This is the full text:

RESOLUTION
Directing the Committee on the Judiciary to investigate whether Alberto R. Gonzales, Attorney General of the United States, should be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors.

Resolved, That the Committee on the Judiciary shall investigate fully whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to impeach Alberto R. Gonzales, Attorney General of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors.

The momentum of cosponsors signing onto this bill was almost certainly a large factor in the decision to have Gonzales resign.

A similar resolution that would be of use now might read as follows:

RESOLUTION
Directing the Committee on the Judiciary to investigate whether Jay Bybee, former assistant Attorney General of the United States, should be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors.

Resolved, That the Committee on the Judiciary shall investigate fully whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to impeach Jay Bybee, former assistant Attorney General of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors.

Reasons to get this introduced:

The DOJ (and White House) have made clear they will not enforce the law.
We have very limited ability to influence them.
People all over the country who want a sign of hope and somewhere to put their energies that might have an actual impact could lobby for cosponsorship.
Cosponsorship of such a resolution would constitute a threat to expose secrets through a privileged impeachment hearing.
Such a threat would open up the possibility of committees using the power of subpoena as a lesser step.
A nation without laws cannot last.

####

David Swanson is the author of the new book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book.

Congress Must End Torture

davidswanson — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:27:19 GMT

A Call for Congress to Take Action on Torture
October 28th, 2009

Whereas over seven years have passed since President George W. Bush fraudulently induced the U.S. congress, the American people, and the world into the illegal war in Iraq,

Whereas it is nearly five years since Specialist Darby revealed the photos of Abu Ghraib that showed us torture being committed by our government in our name,

Whereas further evidence of torture remains secret and has been hidden from the public, courts, and Congress to insulate the perpetrators from appropriate criminal liability,
Whereas over the past years we have campaigned about the illegality of this war and the need to prosecute the high-level civilian and military officials who put in place the torture,

Whereas, notwithstanding all the congressional hearings and reports so far on these matters, those officials have not been brought to justice,

Whereas a prosecutor has been appointed to address only a very small number, perhaps as few as three, of the crimes committed and none of the crimes "justified" by the clearly illegal torture memos,

Whereas the Department of Justice's limited investigation of torture threatens to invite more torture around the world by undermining the Nuremberg precedent,

Whereas the Attorney General of the United States, under the influence of the President, appears unwilling to follow the facts about the illegal war in Iraq and torture to the full extent of the law,

Whereas we as citizens of the United States do not accept the damage to our country's honor committed by these persons, the threats to the lives and well-being of our children and fellow citizens sent to illegal wars, and the transformation of our country from a beacon of liberty to a beacon of torture,

WE NOW CALL FOR ACTION:

1. We call on Congress to start impeachment proceedings against Judge Jay Bybee of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, as it is unconscionable that one who encouraged violations of such fundamental laws as those against torture and aggressive war be trusted to apply and shape the law.

2. We call on congressional committees to subpoena those responsible for aggressive war and torture, including former president Bush, vice president Cheney, and other former senior officials complicit in war crimes; and to enforce those subpoenas through the Capitol Police, rather than the Department of Justice.

3. We call on state bar associations to begin the process of revoking the law licenses of those lawyers who put in place the legal analysis for the illegal war and the torture.

4. We call on state licensing authorities to begin the process of revoking the licenses of all other professionals who participated in the torture such as psychologists, psychiatrists and other doctors.

5. We call on the American people to contact their congressional representatives and insist that, on our watch, the high, who are the instigators of illegal wars and torture, will be brought low, and that low-level personnel will not be the only ones prosecuted for committing crimes authorized and encouraged by their superiors.

ADD YOUR NAME TO THOSE OF 83 HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS AND LEADERS AT
http://afterdowningstreet.org/...

Forward and Post Widely!

Help Stop Torture!

SIGNED BY:
Robert H. Jackson Steering Committee
Action Center For Justice
After Downing Street
AngryVoters.Org
Backbone Campaign
Bend-Condega Friendship Project
Benjamin G. Davis, Associate Professor of Law, University of Toledo College of Law
Berkeley Fellowship Unitarian Universalists Social Justice Committee
Bill of Rights Defense Committee
BuzzFlash.com
Campus Antiwar Network, Ole Miss
Center for Constitutional Rights
Chelsea Neighbors United to End the War, New York City
Chesapeake Citizens
Christiane Brown, The Solution Zone, KJFK
Citizens For Legitimate Government
CODE PINK: Women for Peace
Code Pink Portland
Marjorie Cohn, Professor, Thomas Jefferson School of Law
Collateral Repair Project
Consumers for Peace
Defending Dissent Foundation
Democracy for America - Tucson
Democracy for NYC
Democracy In Action (DIA)
Democrats.com
Democratic Activist blog
Docudharma
Eastside FOR
The Enviro Show,WXOJ-LP/WMCB
Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space
High Road for Human Rights
Humanists for Peace
IndictBushNow.org
Instruments For Peace
Jobs For Afghans
Justice Through Music
Liberty Tree Foundation
The Make America Again Project
Media With Conscience
Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored
Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute
Nashville Peace Coalition
Nicole Sandler, RadioOrNot.com
NC Democrats Network
New York Metro Progressives
North Country Coalition for Justice and Peace
Northeast Impeachment Coalition
OpEdNews.com
Oregon PeaceWorks
Peace & Justice Forums, Billings, Montana
The People's Email Network
PoetsWest (Seattle)
Progressive Democrats of America
Progressives Democrats of New York, 14th CD
Progressive Democrats of the Santa Monica Mountains
PDA/DFA Progressive Democracy South Jersey
Progressive Democrats Sonoma County
The Progressive magazine
Rebublicans For Impeachment
Reclaim The GOP
RiseUpTampaBay.com
Sitkans for Peace and Justice
Squadron13.com
SUV Network (Seniors United for Victory)
ThisCantBeHappening.net
Topanga Peace Alliance
Topplebush.com
Transylvanians for Peace of Brevard, NC
True Blue Network
Uncommon Thought Journal
Velvet Revolution
VeteransAgainstTorture.com
Veterans For Peace Chapter 099
Veterans For Peace Chicago Chapter 26
Voices of Conscience
Voters for Peace
War Crimes Times
War Criminals Watch
Washington for Impeachment
Hazel Weiser, Executive Director Society of American Law Teachers -- SALT
Western North Carolina Stop Torture Now
Young Americans for Liberty at Ole Miss

ADD YOUR NAME TO THOSE OF 83 HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS AND LEADERS AT
http://afterdowningstreet.org/...

This Is Why We Torture

Natasha Chart — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:00:00 GMT

Neither the MPs at Abu Ghraib nor the guards at Guantanamo Bay started the US down a path of being a nation that tortures all by their lonesome. They didn't even order it. And why should it be so surprising that there would be little squeamishness about torturing foreigners when our domestic culture has been encouraging in-house torture for a very long time?

The torture of US citizens is common in prisons. This includes dehumanizing solitary confinement and the threat of rape torture. Prisoner advocates have been pointing out for a very long time that prison rape is a casual punchline praised for universally accepted, though never proven, deterrence benefits. US prisoners of war considered solitary confinement among the most terrible tortures and nearly everyone considers rape to be torture, but we allow these things to be done in our country every day.

Though winking at torture never stopped with convicted inmates. Police brutality against minorities and uppity demonstrators has been a long-accepted staple of US national culture - almost as if getting to bully and beat people was a perk of being a law enforcement professional, because it's just so darn fun. Even if most members of the police force conduct themselves laudably and would never want to torment anyone, cases of sadistic behavior by law enforcement rarely raises the mainstream outrage meter, or any attention at all.

Now that Tasers have been approved for law enforcement use, police torture of even upstanding white people who've never protested anything in their lives has become commonplace. Which is great in a way, because then we're more sure to get news coverage of it. Still, it's disconcerting to realize how easy it was to sell everyone on the idea that the police should be able to torture whoever they feel like torturing whenever they want to.

Admittedly, Tasers don't usually cause major organ damage or death, so that's all right then. Except that technology advances are likely to begin making it so easy and efficient for the police to torture even large groups all at once that we might want to think harder about where this is going. Especially when the attitude of some people towards their fellow citizens has gotten so pitiless that moronic advertising company Saatchi & Saatchi of Los Angeles decided that terrorizing and threatening people would make for a good ad campaign, as did Toyota and a bunch of people who referred their 'friends' for this treatment.
Fun With Tasers

Here's my question: If Saddam Hussein's use of applying live electrodes to prisoners in Abu Ghraib was torture, and the suggestion to prisoners by US guards at Abu Ghraib that they might run electricity through cold electrodes attached to their bodies to create feelings of fear was torture, what does that say about Tasering someone with 50,000 volts?

Having read Digby and Pam Spaulding for a long time, I know that there are a significant number of cases where police tasered someone who was otherwise youngish and healthy and they either died immediately or went into shock immediately and then died. A man in Ukiah, CA died just this week after being tasered twice.

Thank goodness it didn't come to that when a school resource officer broke up a fight between two 14 year old girls with a Taser. But really? It's okay with everyone that 14 year olds can be tortured for fighting with each other. Would it be okay if that school resource officer had been thwacking at them with a police baton?

This doesn't even begin to touch on the horror of using Tasers against disoriented, mentally ill people being uncooperative but not posing a threat. The worst case being that of a mentally ill man whose mother called police to help get her son under control after he responded badly to medication. Police used a Taser to attempt to subdue the man while he was on a fire escape and he fell to his death. The officer who ordered the tasering was so distraught he killed himself - it probably never occurred to him that this (marketed as) non-lethal device could have resulted in the death of an innocent person, making for two families devastated by a rapacious marketing lie.

Not that Tasers usually get listed as a cause of death anymore. No. Because coroners around the country are on notice that Taser will sue you to remove the name of their product from death certificates and might win.

Or what about the tasered grandmother at the traffic stop:

A 72-year-old Texas woman who was Tasered during a traffic stop when she dared a deputy constable to use the stun gun said Tuesday that if she got pulled over again she would say nothing.
In an interview on NBC's "Today" show, Kathryn Winkfein acknowledged that she lost her temper during the May 11 confrontation and that if she had to do it over, "I would just not say anything, not react." ...

According to the article, an internal review concluded that the officer's conduct was fine. Since when is 'but they dared me' an excuse for otherwise stupid behavior? You can't even get away with that when you're 11.

So, get this: police officers are apparently within their rights to torture people who pose no physical threat if they're dared or mouthed off to. This has been true in practice towards the minority and protest-attending populations of the country for some time, often with much harsher force. Yet now that it's just torture, it can be administered to sassy 72 year old women pulled over for going 15 mph over the speed limit.

Is this the way a police force should function in a democratic society? Is it all right that some of them act like mad dogs who can't resist abusing their power, any power, when people are other than completely submissive and deferrent, or that the public is taught to think of them that way? Is it all right that others of them buy the line their department heads and the manufacturers tell them, that there's no way they could hurt anyone with these torture devices, only to be subjected to terrible anguish when they inadvertently discover they've been lied to? Is sanctioning randomly administered torture a good way to promote a trusting relationship between law enforcement and the public that serves the goal of keeping the peace and ensuring public safety?

To the extent police forces are told that it's appropriate to brutalize people in their custody or who may not have even done something warranting arrest, that it's just the price that has to be paid to keep the public safe in what can't be that cheerful of a job, we all share culpability for the results. They're asked to do things most people wouldn't want to be subjected to and it's partly up to the rest of us to set bright lines around things like torture, brutality, treatment of prisoners and support for constitutional principles that leave the determination of guilt and punishment in the hands of the judiciary.

And while I hope more law enforcement agencies will follow in the footsteps of the Sheriff who just said no to issuing weapons that can unpredictably kill people, I do wish they'd do so because it's torture. And torture is wrong.

You Will Comply

Now, on to the coming attractions in bulk torture.

Following on the heels of the use of "louder than bombs" sonic cannons on crowds at the Pittsburgh G-20 protests, was the story that a pain compliance burn weapon that's been under development by the military might be handed over for police to use in crowd control situations. It's supposed to create an intense, overwhelming sensation of having your skin burned as if held in an open flame, without creating permanent damage.

Is making someone feel as though they're standing in an open flame torture? Is that an appropriate punishment for someone standing on the street in a manner that annoys police? If a protestor dares police to use a pain compliance burn weapon, like our 72 year old speed demon did, would that legitimize torturing them and everyone in their vicinity?

Susie Madrak has been following burn weapon story for a while, from back when initial tests showed that it could cause burns from zippers and metal buttons, as well as other problems.

A 60 Minutes report on this infrared pain ray talked about some of the early military tests. If you use it properly, there are very few burns. If you test it with people facing away from the device, no one gets eye damage or has their contacts melted onto their retinas. What could go wrong with a device like that aimed at a large crowd, aside from the potential to cause a deadly panic and stampede?

Also, does your answer to the 'is this burning sensation device torture' question change if there's a risk of injury?

Now that there's a portable, handheld version, it may go mainstream and there are questions to be asked about the ethics of the situation:

"I'd like to know why they want another advanced pain compliance weapon like this," says Steve Wright, non-lethal weapons analyst at Leeds Metropolitan University in the UK. "Persuading by pain rather than brain - through conversation - has led to push-button torture in the past. If it leaves no mark on the skin how will anyone prove it's been abused?"

Let's hear it for calling this movement towards non-lethal weapons for what it is: an invitation to officially sanctioned mass torture. More than torture, it's often punishment without any conviction in a court of law for what may not even have been an offense worthy of an arrest.

Considering how safe and responsible Taser use has been in this country, what could possibly go wrong?

Jack Bauer Not Surviving Contact With Reality

danps — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:19:19 GMT

A long delayed report, a fine piece of investigative journalism and a recent scientific study have combined to seriously erode the credibility of arguments popularized by "24." Its influence will long outlast the series, though.

For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

It would be understandable if conservatives had become somewhat exasperated about the Fox show 24 and its lead character Jack Bauer. His image has undergone a transformation in the last few years in much the same way his regrettably nonfictional political counterparts have. The latter used to be called neoconservatives, and they portrayed themselves as stalwart warriors unflinchingly defending America's vital interests, perhaps its very survival, against implacable foes abroad and faltering appeasers at home. Now that their grand designs have not, to put it charitably, borne expected fruit the term has been derisively shortened to "neocon" and conjures up images of chickenhawks cheerleading for war as the first response to everything.

Bauer was once greatly admired on the right as well. In June of 2006 the Secretary of Homeland Security attended a forum on terrorism titled 24 and America's Image in Fighting Terrorism: Fact, Fiction or Does It Matter? "It reflects real life" he enthused, and lest you think he just got carried away by the moment he followed up over a year later with more praise. A Time article reported the vice president a big fan and declared, "Most damningly to critics on the left, Bauer's means of gathering intel (grab terrorist's finger, snap, repeat) make 24 a weekly rationalization of the 'ticking time bomb' defense of torture." Antonin Scalia - a Supreme Court justice! - proved so disconnected from reality that he actually said "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles." Unlike Chertoff or Cheney, Scalia has a lifetime appointment. Even if the narrowest view of the show's influence - are its high profile fans still serving? - is taken, it still is relevant.

The show is most valuable because it is one of the few places that reveals the conservative id. Whether it is Cheney's infamous "We also have to work sort of the dark side, if you will. We're going to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world" or the more flippant "What's needed is a little bit of smacky-face" of an intelligence officer, torture proponents have routinely couched their approval of brutal treatment with euphemism or dismissal. 24 does not need such decorum, so it can show lurid cruelty with relish. It gives free rein to vengeful fantasies otherwise sacrificed to the altar of political correctness.

The visceral argument it presents has been a linchpin of right wing justifications for years, but evidence continues to pile up against it. First it was all about the ticking time bomb scenario, where a detainee had details about an attack already in motion. That no such cases ever occurred in real life is testament to the power of saving a fictional Los Angeles. When the 2004 CIA Inspector General report was finally released and we learned as much, right wingers added the caveat that torture was fine as long as it produced information that could eventually have saved lives. Whether humane techniques would have done so, or whether the information really did save lives - which outside of the bomb case is fairly hard to nail down - is not discussed.

Then there was Shane O'Mara's article a few weeks ago on why torture does not work. It focused on the effect of torture on the brain, and he writes:

The use of such techniques appears motivated by a folk psychology that is demonstrably incorrect. Solid scientific evidence of how repeated and extreme stress and pain affect memory and executive functions (such as planning or forming intentions) suggests that these techniques are unlikely to do anything other than the opposite of that intended by coercive or 'enhanced' interrogation.

By focusing on how the quality of the information produced under coercion degrades, O'Mara makes the case - with evidence, unlike the intuitive "folk psychology" he rebuts - that traditional techniques are not just moral, but good policy.

Then last week Andy Worthington produced a detailed report on the torture of Fouad al-Rabiah. The government detained a man they knew was innocent, tortured him to make him say what they wanted to hear, conspired to cover it up, then insisted it was all proper when called to account. Worthington's damning indictment shows it was not the result of a few bad apples, but something more sinister. As Barbara Tuchman wrote of another ruler: "The King's excited state of mind communicated itself, as royal rage will, to his deputies."

This is where we end up when fictional narrative drives policy. Jack Bauer remains relevant because the right still ardently embraces his world view. Even when the show is long gone it will be useful to mention him as verbal shorthand for the fruitless and gratuitously violent outlook the right continues to champion.

Attention-Grabbing Ads

Adam Bink — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

I'm a big fan of out-of-the-box, attention-grabbing ads. These ones are running in the Farragut North metro stop here in DC (one of the busiest downtown stops and frequented a lot by DC organizational/lobbyist types) and I thought I would share.

"Close Guantanamo. End Torture. Investigate All Abuses."

"...it (torture) serves as a great propaganda tool for those who recruit people to fight against us."-Sen. John McCain talking about torture, FOX News, March 20, 2009

Osama bin Laden wearing an "I <3 Guantanamo" t-shirt

These are a sampling I took while waiting for a train. They're being run by Avaaz.org, which is doing a campaign to pressure Obama on the issue. More about it here.

This is an open thread.

Learned Helplessness.

NABNYC — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:51:56 GMT

Learned Helplessness.

There have been many reports in recent years that the U.S. government used psychiatrists and/or psychologists to assist in designing torture techniques to be used against Muslims in the middle east in connection with the U.S. War Against Afghanistan and Iraq. And maybe additional wars to come.

The reports are that the U.S. military trains its own people to survive torture and, in connection with that training, devised certain methods of torture that they believed no human being could withstand. Or at least at the conclusion of the use of these types of torture, the human psyche would be destroyed even if the body continued to function.

The desired outcome from the torture was to create in the prisoners a state of "Learned Helplessness." This is a term that comes from experiments done on dogs by an American psychiatrist who was invited by the CIA to lecture the U.S. military on his experiments, and his conclusions. Those lectures were, in turn, used by the CIA and the U.S. military in developing these torture techniques designed to destroy the human psyche.

The experiments done on animals, specifically dogs, showed the following: one group of dogs were put into a cage and given certain options for their behavior. They could, for example, try to escape, they could push a lever. But no matter what they did, no matter how hard they tried, they continued to be subjected to electrical shocks. They learned that they had no ability to stop the abuse. No matter what they did, the torture continued. When those dogs were allowed out of the cages, they simply laid down and submitted, no longer tried to avoid further abuse and torture. They had learned that they were helpless to have any control over their own lives.

This is the desired goal of the U.S. widespread torture programs in the middle east, as well as those which have been conducted in Central and South America by people trained by the U.S. at the School of Americas.

The original experiments were used as part of an investigation into depression and other forms of mental disease in which people feel helpless to do anything to improve their lives. No matter how bad the conditions, they are psychologically trained to believe that they must submit, they are helpless to change or to stop the abuse. This is probably a good explanation of the battered spouse, but also of large numbers of people in our society who are in unhappy relationships, or who are abused and mistreated in their work, but feel unable to try to make any changes. Often, changing jobs isn't a real solution if a country allows workers to be mistreated and underpaid, denied benefits or rights. So a state of learned helplessness exists in the American workforce. For good reason. They've been mistreated and abused, fired if they stand up for themselves, and have learned that they are helpless to stop the abuse.

Is it possible our entire society has been conditioned into a state of learned helplessness. No matter what people do, the government continues to simply take bribes from the corporations, lie to the people, conduct foreign wars of choice, steal our money, send our jobs overseas, give tax breaks to the rich and deny healthcare to the rest of us. This despite the historic number of people who got out and campaigned last year. All the people who believed in change are right now being taught the underpinnings of the state of learned helplessness.

Think about it: the Democrats control the House, have a 60-seat control of the Senate, and control the white house, and despite that they refuse to end the wars, they refuse to provide a real healthcare program for people, they refuse to create job programs, they refuse to hold the Bush administration responsible for its numerous violations of our constitution and other laws, they refuse to hold Wall Street responsible for its criminal theft from the public. They have, quite simply, done nothing for progressive or even for liberals since taking office, except to routinely bash us by calling us names. "The left won't like it," but they need to live with it. And we, as it turns out, are just now learning that we are completely helpless to do anything to affect what our government is doing.

Below is link to an article on the psychiatrist who developed the theory, and how it is the CIA and U.S. military used his theory to develop a program of torture designed not to get information, but instead to destroy human beings, to drive them crazy, to take away their will to live.

Naomi Klein argues in her book The Shock Doctrine that torture is often used after a coup to create a state of submission in the civilian population. Torture a few thousand, make it public, make it particularly brutal, get the information out to the rest of the public, and most people are likely to stop resisting, just do what they are told and try to survive.

We've heard a lot about the "ticking time bomb," by which people argue that we need to torture to find out whether someone has a nuclear weapon ready to go off in our country. But no one has ever provided any factual support to show that's why we began a program of systematic torture throughout Afghanistan and Iraq. Isn't it more likely that the torture program was designed from the outset to destroy human beings and create a state of submission among the other civilians, so the U.S. could keep its permanent military bases in the region, steal all the oil, bomb and attack the neighbors conveniently, with the majority of the population too terrified to do anything to stand up against them.

http://www.informationclearing...

http://NABNYC.blogspot.com

Two Retired Generals Denounce Former Vice President Cheney

David Danzig — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:59:10 GMT

It's not every day that retired generals denounce a Vice President. But two distinguished military leaders felt compelled to speak out against Mr. Cheney's support of torture, in an op-ed in today's Miami Herald.
General Charles C. Krulak and General Joseph P. Hoar have this to say:

In the fear that followed 9/11, Americans were told that defeating Al Qaeda
would require us to "take off the gloves." As a former Commandant of the U.S.
Marine Corps and a retired Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Central Command, we knew that was a recipe for disaster. But we never imagined that we would feel
duty-bound to publicly denounce a Vice President of the United States, a man who
has served our country for many years. In light of the irresponsible statements
recently made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, however, we feel we must
repudiate his dangerous ideas - and his scare tactics.

Cross-posted from Human Rights First Blog.

There Are So Many Days That Have Not Yet Broken

davidswanson — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:38:04 GMT

By David Swanson

I got pulled over for speeding in Texas yesterday and the officer looked like the kind of guy who dreamed about using his taser. So when he asked for my license and registration, I slowly got them out and handed them over.

"Do you know why I stopped you?" he asked.

I replied, "I think I do, sir, but I think you may be looking backward a little bit." Officer Rigveda (that was his name) looked behind him and then looked confused.

I tried to explain: "What I mean is, this is a time for reflection, not retribution. I know you don't want to hurt the morale of speeders and put the nation in danger."

"Step out of the car please."

I stepped out of the car, but I said roughly this: "I was just joking. Obama wants to prosecute prison guards for torture, but when it comes to the paper pushers who told them to do the torturing, he says 'this is a time to look forward, not backward.'" I used my best Barack Obama imitation, which is not saying much. I looked the man in the eye and tried to judge him, but all he said was:

"Place your hands on the roof of the car."

I didn't like how this was going, but I put my hands on the roof of the rented Chevrolet and said: "In my left front pocket you will find a memo drafted by my attorney which finds the speed I was traveling not to constitute a violation of the law. The memo is sealed but is potentially subject to release through a freedom of information act request, although -- again -- I don't really think you want to put our nation in danger. Do you?"

As Officer Rigveda searched me and administered a breathalyzer, I tried to explain the situation more clearly, since he just didn't say enough to reveal whether I was getting through to him. Mostly he gave one-sentence orders or asked questions.

"Where were you coming from and going to?" he grunted.

I said "Are you asking me that to be friendly or to investigate a crime, because if it's to investigate a crime then I don't recall."

He gave me a long look and finally said "I'm asking you to be friendly."

So, I said, "Well I'm late to get from the airport to a bookstore where I'm supposed to be signing copies of a book I wrote."

He asked what the book was called and I told him "Daybreak," and he seemed to think about it, somehow pleased by it, as if he'd caught me in something.

"Can you show me a copy of the book?"

I got one out of the car and showed it to him. He looked it over and quickly gave it back to me with a snort.

"You are a plagiarizer," he declared. Rigveda marched back to his police cruiser and pulled out a book, came over and handed it to me. The cover said: "Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality" by Friedrich Nietzsche.

Now it was my turn to look confused.

When I was able to think straight, I said "There cannot be more than one police officer in Texas who reads Nietzsche. Is Saul Alinsky in your backseat? Shouldn't I get a break just for having such astoundingly bad luck?"

He looked as me as if to say that he didn't think I constituted good luck from his point of view either. Then he cleared his throat and said:

"Beggars ought to be abolished: for one is vexed at giving to them and vexed at not giving to them."

Jesus Christ! He not only carried Nietzsche around in his taser mobile, but was quoting him at me.

Luckily, although I wasn't a plagiarist, I had named my book after another I liked. So I said: "Subjection to morality can be slavish or vain or self-interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or an act of despair, like subjection to a prince: in itself it is nothing moral."

Rig smiled, pulled out his taser, and said "I have no idea how I am acting! I have no idea how I ought to act! You are right, but be sure of this: you will be acted upon! at every moment! Mankind has in all ages confused the active and the passive: it is their everlasting grammatical blunder." He put his taser away and laughed for a half a second.

"One overlooks many moral weaknesses in a man," I told him, "employing in this a coarse sieve, provided he is a constant adherent of the most rigorous theory of morality! On the other hand, the lives of free-spirited moralists have always been put under the microscope: the rationale for this procedure is that a blunder in life is the surest argument against an unwanted insight."

And there I had stumped Officer Overman good. He stopped and walked around as I stood and sweated in the sun. But in a minute he came back with a big grin and said: "A man who says a lot and says it quickly sinks extraordinarily low in our estimation after even the briefest acquaintanceship and even if he talks sense -- not merely to the degree that he is burdensome to us but much lower than that. For we divine to how many men he has already been a burden, and add to the ill-humor he creates the contempt in which we suppose he is generally held."

I dropped to the ground and writhed in pain. Then I suddenly stopped and looked at him and said, rather loudly "Ah none of you knows the feeling the man who has been tortured has after the torture is over and he is carried back to his cell and his secret is with him! -- he is still clinging to it with his teeth. What do you know of the rejoicing of human pride!"

"You're not drunk," he replied, putting his breathalyzer away. "Just demented. I'll escort you to the book store."

We got in our separate cars, and he pulled his into the road beside mine and then screamed through his loudspeaker at a nearly deadly volume before flipping on his lights and siren:

"The higher we soar, the smaller we seem to those who cannot fly!"

David Swanson is the author of the new book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when the 50-city tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book

Did the Washington Post's Richard Cohen Scare the "#!#!" out of you?

David Danzig — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 21:42:35 GMT

Have you heard of Ishmael? He is the bogeyman of Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen.

In his column today, Cohen says that Ishmael, a fictionalized "terrorist or a suicide bomber or anything you want" who the U.S. will capture one day, won't talk because the Obama administration has outlawed the use of waterboarding and other abusive "enhanced" interrogation techniques.

He knows the new restrictions. He knows the new limits. He may even suggest to his interrogators that their jobs are on the line -- that the Justice Department is looking over their shoulders. The tape is running. Everything is being recorded. He is willing to give up his life. Are his interrogators willing to give up their careers? He laughs.

The implication is that the U.S interrogator - who sits across the table from this trained killer - can do nothing (but maybe cry) when the terrorist laughs.

The reality is that U.S. interrogators in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and elsewhere face thousands of real-life Ishmaels every day and they consistently get them to talk without abusing them.

Here are three real life examples that I hope Cohen (and others who are interested) will look into:

(1) The capture of Saddam Hussein

Eric Maddox, a former Army Staff Sergeant, spearheaded the effort to catch the most wanted man in Iraq. When he arrived in Iraq in July of 2003, he had never done an interrogation. Six months later he interrogated the man who was principally responsible for Saddam's security and he got him to reveal the location of the spider hole where the former Iraqi President was hiding within a matter of hours. Along the way he "broke" at least nine key insurgent leaders, using entirely legal techniques. He even has a book out describing how he did it - Mission Black List #1.

"There is nothing intelligent about torture," says Maddox. "If you have to inflict pain then you have lost control of the situation, the subject and yourself."

(2) The hunt for Al Zarqawi, the former head of Al Qaeda in Iraq
When Matthew Alexander (a pseudonym) began interrogating a cleric who used to bless Al Qaeda suicide bombers, the cleric told him that he wished he had a knife so that he could cut Alexander's throat. Three days later he willingly gave up info that set Alexander and his team on the path to find Zarqawi. Alexander, like Maddox, has been able to seduce senior level Al Qaeda leaders into talking to him about sensitive information hours after he begins an interrogation. Alexander's techniques are also described in a book that he wrote about the hunt for Zarqawi: How to Break A Terrorist.

"The former administration never brought Osama bin Laden to justice," says Alexander. "Our best chance to locate him would have been through Khalid Sheikh Muhammed or Abu Zubaydah had they not been waterboarded."

(3) Interrogations of Japanese soldiers during WWII

I chose this as a third example to show that this is not new. Generations of U.S. interrogators have been questioning hardened detainees and getting answers without resorting to abuse.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) recently published a study that reminds us that the most effective U.S. interrogators during WWII resisted the temptation to view their detainees as fanatical animals who should be brutalized. The same study catalogues efforts by three U.S. interrogators during the Vietnam War who treated their hard-core prisoners humanely and got them to talk. Check out: Interrogation: World War II, Vietnam and Iraq.

* * *

I have talked to Maddox, Alexander and COL Stu Herrington (one of the interrogators profiled in the DIA study). They all agree that torture can "work" in the sense that you can waterboard a detainee and he may talk. He may even tell you the truth.

Alexander says, "anything can work." He used to give a milkshake to a young kid whose dad used to bring him to suicide bomb Al Qaeda planning sessions. They'd drink their milkshakes and the kid would tell him who was involved and where they used to meet. Anything can work.

But they all say that the percentages are not on your side if you use waterboarding. "These are determined people," Joe Navarro, a former FBI interrogator explained to me once. "You think that if you rip their fingernails out or dunk them under water, they will all of a sudden change their minds and tell you everything? That's not how it works."

As we all know, torture leads to all sorts of larger problems. It undercuts the morale of your own force. It creates diplomatic hurdles. And it has been used as an extraordinary recruitment tool by the opposition. Intelligence officers who served in Iraq report that after the revelations of Abu Ghraib they often found pictures of U.S.-induced torture in the pockets of the foreign fighters they picked up on the battlefield.

Why would U.S. interrogators choose to use techniques that cause so much harm when other techniques have proven to be so much more effective?

If and when we do pick up the next Ishmael, I hope that the interrogator who questions him took the time to read Maddox's and Alexander's books and not just Richard Cohen.

David Danzig is the Deputy Program Director of Human Rights First, a New York City-based international human rights organization. Facebook Twitter

Slavery: It Works, So It Should Be Legalized

danps — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 10:14:48 GMT

In the wake of the latest blow to those who favor America's torture policy, their rhetorical ground for approving it has shrunk to a downright claustrophobic space. As it turns out, this development is not confining but downright liberating.

For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

The reaction to the CIA inspector general report on torture is surprising in a way. Alex Koppelman noted that the threats against the family of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were reported by Ron Suskind in 2006. Jane Mayer's book was received with radio silence but some of the details in the report are directly foreshadowed by it. For instance, on page 203 she writes about Major General Geoffrey Miller when he was in charge of Guantánamo Bay. An officer under him quotes him, "If the Torture Statute says 80 degrees is bad, we will set the thermometer at 79.9 degrees." Compare to the precision used in deciding just how much light, noise and cold a detainee could be subjected to. For anyone who has been following this closely it is tempting to say, "what exactly is new here?"

What is new is the climate. Marcy Wheeler and Glenn Greenwald both expressed deep concerns about Eric Holder setting up a whitewash. Unlike Abu Ghraib, though, this comes at a time of sustained pushback against torture. Books like Mayer's and Suskind's have been out for a while, their reporting percolating through the media. There have been two election cycles where the party that championed torture has suffered substantial losses. The absence of another major attack has changed the public mood (perhaps not to complacency as much as a sense that our leaders at the time were unforgivably distracted). I won't attempt to persuade anyone to trust my intuition over our history of letting high officials off the hook or the analysis of those with a good track record on these topics, but this time it feels different.

What has been most fascinating, though, has been the reaction on the right. Torture defenders can no longer stop the debate by fearmongering or questioning anyone's patriotism. For a while they gamely insisted we do not torture, then that became untenable. It morphed into the ticking time bomb scenario, where we stopped talking about what we actually did and started talking about what we might do in the most fevered, paranoid dreams of the neoconservatives. Now they unselfconsciously quote a report that flatly states, "This Review did not uncover any evidence that these plots were imminent." With that, Stephen Hayes brought them home to their new strategy: continued use of fabulous hypotheticals along with the dubious claim that torture worked. Hayes writes, "Reasonable people can - and do - disagree about the morality of using EITs. But only the most accomplished resister could continue to claim that they were not effective." Note the construction: Grab a phrase from the Nazis and euphemistically make an acronym out of it. Then claim there are people of good will on both sides of the issue. Morality is thus disposed of, so it becomes a strictly utilitarian issue. It is an astonishingly elegant formulation, and versatile too.

For instance, slavery is illegal in America and of course we do not practice it. But we are looking at near-double digit unemployment through the end of next year, and the economic picture is generally pretty bad. Without passing judgment on those who do not have a job, we can probably safely say they would like one. Providing one would liberate them from the stress they surely feel, so this would be an unalloyed good. We should therefore create a program with a catchy name like Work Makes Freedom to address it. The WMF's could be involuntarily matched up with employers, who for a nominal fee would provide permanent food and shelter in exchange for labor. A classic win-win situation. Unemployment would plummet, GDP would go up, and the economy would soar. Illegal immigration would all but end by virtue of eliminating the economic incentive to come here, business costs would go down and that would presumably redound to consumers in the form of lower prices. It would, in a word, work. While reasonable people might disagree on the morality of the WMF program, its effectiveness would be beyond dispute.

This outcome-focused approach to policy is perfectly in line with Antonin Scalia's recent observation that the legal system is not ultimately concerned with actual guilt or innocence. All that matters is that we have a well-defined, efficient process that comes to a final, immutable conclusion. Fact is, you can get mighty bogged down forever trying to establish a nebulous concept like justice, or figuring out when exactly interrogation becomes enhanced enough to be torture, or compulsory service becomes slavery. Who can say, who can say? These things are as unknowable as the mind of God, and chasing after them madness. While pondering them may make for an enjoyable academic exercise they have no place in the real world. I for one look forward to the coming era of clarity.

Bush Tortured

davidswanson — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 13:50:43 GMT

By David Swanson

It seems almost trivial to accuse someone who launched an illegal war that has killed over a million people of torture. But if we are going to prosecute the lowest ranked torturers, it makes sense to look up the chain of command.

There is no doubt that George W. Bush conspired to commit torture, cruel and inhuman treatment, and murder. How do I know? He said so.

In his January 28, 2003, State of the Union, Bush said: "All told more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: they are no longer a problem to the United States."

Too vague and wink-wink for you? Try this:

On April 11, 2008, ABC News produced a video interview of Bush during which he was asked about meetings his top subordinates had held to approve specific instances of torture. Bush said: "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved." The National Security Council's Principals Committee, which held the meetings, included Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet, and Attorney General John Ashcroft. In the same interview, Bush defended the use of the drowning torture on prisoner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, saying: "We had legal opinions that enabled us to do it. And no, I didn't have any problem at all trying to find out what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed knew."

On January 11, 2009, Fox News aired a video interview of Bush in which he admitted personally authorizing the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, saying: "One such person who gave us information was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. ... And I'm in the Oval Office and I am told that we have captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the professionals believe he has information necessary to secure the country. So I ask what tools are available for us to find information from him and they gave me a list of tools, and I said are these tools deemed to be legal? And so we got legal opinions before any decision was made."

Does anyone else verify this? Well, how about John Yoo and Dick Cheney? On January 29, 2009, John Yoo, a former official in the Office of Legal Counsel who had drafted secret memos authorizing torture, published an article in the Wall Street Journal with the headline "Obama Made a Rash Decision on Gitmo," in which he wrote: "On the advice of his intelligence advisers, the president could have authorized coercive interrogation methods like those used by Israel and Great Britain in their antiterrorism campaigns. (He could even authorize waterboarding, which he did three times in the years after 9/11.)"

On May 10, 2009, former Vice President Cheney appeared on the CBS News television program "Face the Nation." Asked what Bush had known about torture methods, Cheney replied, "I certainly, yes, have every reason to believe he knew -- he knew a great deal about the program. He basically authorized it. I mean, this was a presidential-level decision. And the decision went to the president. He signed off on it."

This is Yoo and Cheney saying "If you come after us you'll have to come after Bush." Pretty generous of them, I think. Douglas Feith, whose fate is also on the line here, argued in the Wall Street Journal on April 3, 2009, that it would make no sense to prosecute those who advised Bush without prosecuting Bush. Sign him up for the witness stand!

OK, but did Bush put his approval down in writing anywhere? He certainly did. On Sept. 17, 2001, Bush produced an executive order authorizing the CIA to set up unacknowledged detention facilities around the world. For years after this date, prisoners in these facilities were not identified to the International Committee of the Red Cross or provided due process. On February 7, 2002, Bush produced a Memorandum for the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, Chief of Staff to the President, Director of Central Intelligence, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the subject of "Humane Treatment of al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees." In this memorandum, Bush "determined" that "none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world," and "[C]ommon article 3 of Geneva does not apply to either al Qaeda or Taliban detainees," and "[T]he Taliban detainees are unlawful combatants and, therefore, do not qualify as prisoners of war under article 4 of Geneva," and "al Qaeda detainees also do not qualify as prisoners of war." On June 29, 2006, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that the Geneva Conventions apply to prisoners held under Bush's command at Guantanamo Bay. On December 30, 2005, Bush signed a signing statement, "President's Statement on Signing of H.R. 2863," in which he claimed the power to ignore a new prohibition on torture contained in the bill he had just signed into law.

Bush's subordinates, through the years of his presidency, established an official policy of torture, and cruel and inhuman treatment. The CIA produced secret guidelines authorizing torture. The Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice produced secret opinions authorizing torture. Bush's subordinates engaged in the widespread use of officially sanctioned torture. Incidents of torture, cruel and inhuman treatment, and murder by torture are extensively documented, including by a February 2007 International Committee of the Red Cross Report on the Treatment of Fourteen 'High Value Detainees' in CIA Custody.

Numerous incidents of torture by Bush's team have resulted in murder. On October 24, 2005, the government released to the ACLU military records that included 44 autopsies and death reports as well as a summary of autopsy reports of individuals apprehended in Iraq and Afghanistan. The documents showed that detainees died during or after interrogations by Navy Seals, Military Intelligence and "OGA" (Other Governmental Agency) -- a term used to refer to the CIA. According to the documents, 21 of the 44 deaths were homicides. Eight of the homicides appeared to have resulted from abusive techniques used on detainees, in some instances, by the CIA, Navy Seals and Military Intelligence personnel. On March 16, 2005, the Associated Press reported that "At least 108 people have died in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of them violently, according to government data provided to The Associated Press. Roughly a quarter of those deaths have been investigated as possible abuse by U.S. personnel."

On January 15, 2009, Susan Crawford, the convening authority for the Guantanamo military commissions, was quoted in the Washington Post as saying that the United States had tortured prisoner Mohammed al-Qahtani. "We tortured Qahtani," she said. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture."

Bush never voluntarily made public what he knew about torture, cruel and inhuman treatment, or murder by his subordinates. Instead, for years, he publicly denied that the United States ever used torture. When evidence of torture was made public, including photographs from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq made public in 2004, Bush did not investigate the problem, remove those responsible from office, or punish them. The military convicted several low-ranking soldiers, but did not pursue responsibility up the chain of command.

As an employee of the executive branch, Bush was governed by Executive Orders 12674 and 12731, which provide that executive branch employees hold their positions as a public trust and that the American people have a right to expect that they will fulfill that trust in accordance with certain ethical standards and principles. These include abiding by the Constitution and laws of the United States, as well as not using their offices to further private goals and interests.

Pursuant to the Constitution, his oath of office, his status as executive branch employee, and his presence in the United States, Bush is required to obey Amendment VIII of the Constitution which prohibits the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment; as well as treaties which under Article VI of the Constitution are the supreme law of the land, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which prohibits torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; the Third Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, and Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions which prohibits violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture, as well as outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which prohibits torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment which requires that the United States work to prevent all forms of torture; as well as Title 18, United States Code, Section 2340A which prohibits conspiring to torture; and Title 18, United States Code, Section 2441 which prohibits conspiring to torture or inflict cruel or inhuman treatment or murder.

Give him the fair trial he denied to so many others. Then and only then can we look forward to a future without torture.

Taser Nation: The New (and Even More Cowardly) Police Brutality

tremayne — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Three weeks ago at a Baptism party in Virginia, Prince William County police tasered the grandfather of the boy being Baptized. Here is a local news report on the incident:

The grandfather was tased multiple times for the crime of being drunk on private property while trying to show his I.D. Tasering has become routine. Cop thinks you're being mouthy: you're tased. If the charges are later dropped, which they often are, the tasing was your punishment for the crime of not being deferential enough. An internal investigation concluded procedures were followed.

A New York mom was tasered in front of her kids because she questioned why she was being ticketed for driving with a cell phone when she didn't have one. She filed suit this week. Take a look at the video:

In this case our "heroic and manly" officer, embarrassed at his own mistake, tries to save face by tasering the mom in front of her crying kids. All charges against her have been dismissed and police are conducting an internal investigation to see if they can find a way to justify what happened.

In Michigan, two teenage boys died this spring in separate incidents. These and many other cases are detailed inside.

In March, 15-year-old Brett Elder died after being tasered by Bay City police who were trying to arrest him. Witnesses say he was handcuffed at the time of the tasering. Police say he was not. One month later, 16-year-old Robert Mitchell was killed by a taser operated by police in Warren, Michigan. He was a passenger in a car pulled over for expired tags and had fled the scene, apparently fearful of police there.

Apparently Warren police use tasers routinely; here is another case from that department:

You've probably seen the case of the 72-year-old woman who was tasered after a traffic stop in Texas but here it is if you haven't:

Couldn't the cop handle this elderly woman without tasering her? If 15 and 16 year olds are dying from being tasered don't you think elderly men and women might be even more likely to die? Here's a case from 3 years ago in Georgia (complete with European mockery):

You think race might have been a factor in that one? Tasered for asking questions while not being white. Here's a case from Florida of a woman who tasered at Best Buy:

Tasering has become the preferred method for handling mouthy suspects. Shoot them and you are guaranteed a lengthy investigation. Beat them enough to leave marks and, again, you're facing a long suspension or reassignment to desk duty, possible lawsuits. But the taser is a great option for the angry cop because:

1. In most cases it doesn't leave unsightly physical damage that a jury might find objectionable.

2. You don't have to use your own body to subdue the suspect. This is perfect for the more cowardly cops. You can inflict pain without any chance of incurring pain.

3. You can be "Judge Dredd." So what if the suspect isn't really guilty of anything. They're guilty of not being deferential and you get to inflict the punishment without the mess of "courts" and "rights" and stuff.

4. Your supervisors think it's just fine.

But it's not a laughing matter. At least 200 people have died by taser. And the trend seemed to really pick up during the Bush administration; the culture of torture and "guilty until proven innocent" coming to your neighborhood.

Truckloads of Bodies

davidswanson — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 19:11:04 GMT

By David Swanson

Michael Vick, the football player who's all over the news, should have tortured humans instead of dogs. Then we would have been told to overlook it for the sake of moving forward. Better yet, he should have killed humans rather than only torturing them. Then we would have been told next to nothing about it at all. It might have been reported, but it wouldn't have become a hot topic, an echo-chambered story to be dismissed only after a great deal of hand-wringing. It certainly would not have interfered with watching football games.

No, I don't support harming dogs. No, I don't really want people tortured. (Yes, I've had to explain that to the severely satire-impaired after making the above statements.) And, no, I don't really think murder is better than torture. Nor do I think murder by bomb or gun or suffocation is necessarily any worse than murder by health insurance company. But I am concerned that we arrest and prosecute people in this country for individual small-time acts of torture and murder, whether of people or dogs, but never for the large-scale authorization of torture or murder. We do, however, publicly worry about our souls because of mass-torture, whereas mass-murder doesn't seem to gain the same coverage in our corporatized communications system. Of course I want torture prosecuted, but torture is a symptom.

The illness is aggressive war, a violation of the U.N. Charter and therefore of Article VI of the US Constitution. War crimes are unavoidable symptoms of aggressive war. And, even for those who support wars, there are war crimes that surpass the evil of torture. Who remembers the truckfuls of bodies, live bodies but only barely, dehydrated people licking and chewing the sweaty bodies beside them, screaming in agony, piled by the hundreds inside airless metal containers on flatbed trucks in desert heat, holes sometimes shot into the trucks with bullets for air -- but not into the roof, rather into the people already crammed inside -- remember that? Who remembers the truckfuls of bodies dumped out and buried by the thousands in mass graves by Afghan troops under U.S. command with U.S. forces present and aware, the same U.S. forces engaged in torturing prisoners who made it to the prison alive?

If you've forgotten, you may want to watch this excellent film and read this website created by Physicians for Human Rights: http://afghanmassgrave.org. Here's a diary with recent updates and an NPR interview. And here's a recent New York Times report on the failure of the Bush White House to investigate. Democracy Now covered the story again on Tuesday because a former CIA asset, the U.S.-purchased war lord who carried out the 2002 massacre, is actively campaigning for the reelection of Afghanistan's president, U.S. puppet Hamid Karzai. Check out, as well, the website of Dave Dienstag who spoke up passionately on this topic at the recent national convention of Veterans for Peace.

Now, it wasn't exactly news when the New York Times reported that Bush had failed to investigate or prosecute this crime. But when asked about it, President Obama replied that he would look into the matter, having just been made aware that a proper investigation had not been done. What, one might ask, would constitute a proper investigation of mass-murder, a proper investigation not resulting in criminal prosecutions or anything else that might become publicly known? And is that the sort of proper investigation that Obama intends to conduct now? Why is Eric Holder not conducting the investigation?

Imagine the outcry for the use of nuclear weapons if even a single truckload of Americans was murdered by a foreign nation. Imagine the great moral outrage. Imagine the difficulty one would have conducting a conversation about it without the name Adolf Hitler coming up. Then imagine what the people of Afghanistan must think of the foreign armies occupying their land. Imagine the treatment American prisoners are likely to receive by people whose countrymen have been stuffed like trash into a truck, driven and parked in the sun until the stench overwhelmed those around it and blood dripped out the doors.

Robert Jackson said at Nuremberg: "[T]he ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars, which are inevitable in a system of international lawlessness, is to make statesmen responsible to law. And let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment."

Yet the law has never condemned us. And we have so violated it that we are losing the ability even to sit in hypocritical judgment. If this is not changed and justice not upheld, we will eventually become indistinguishable from dogs, and torture will become ordinary and accepted.

Americans Are More Pro-Torture Than Chinese

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 17:00:00 GMT

It's Not So Much That We're Sadists, More That We Trust The Wrong People

The following graphic from The Economist caught my attention:

Showing that only a handful of countries have more people willing to endorse torture--we're neck-and-neck with Egypt, while Nigeria, India, Turkey and South Korea are the only countries with substantially more pro-torture sentiment the US.

And so I went back to the report it's based on, World Public Opinion on Torture (pdf), from worldpublicopinion.com. It has a more nuanced, though less graphic chart showing that most support for torture is limited to terrorists in the "ticking time-bomb" scenario--an exceeding rare situation. It presents a less harrowing picture of the US, but still a troubling one. Chart on the flip, with more info.
Support for the general use of torture is marginal in most countries--falling into single digits among 12 of 19 countries polled:

The problem clearly is the support for torture in exceptional circumstances, which, of course, can easily be abused. Thus, the American problem is less one of sadistic disregard for basic human dignity, and more a matter of trusting authorities who are generally the least worthy of such trust.

As Glenn Greenwald noted on Friday:

This week, two more Guantanamo detainees -- Khaled Al-Mutairi from Kuwait and Mohamed Jawad of Afghanistan -- were ordered released by federal judges on the ground that there was insufficient evidence to justify their detention. The Washington Independent's Daphne Eviatar notes this amazing fact: "In 28 of 33 Gitmo detainee cases heard so far, federal judges have found insufficient evidence to support keeping them in prison." Virtually all of those detainees were held for many years without charges and with no opportunity for judicial review. Once they finally got into a court, federal judges (including Bush-43 appointed judges) in the vast majority of cases concluded there was virtually no credible evidence ever to justify their detention. Just consider what that fact, standing alone, means about what our Government has been doing.

Running amuck, that's what it's been doing. Which is why our Bill of Rights is so fundamentally important, and why we so desperately need to restore strict adherence to it.

Here's the exact question asked:

Q30-T1: Most countries have agreed to rules that prohibit torturing prisoners. Which position is closer to yours?
Terrorists pose such an extreme threat that governments should now be allowed to use some degree of torture if it may gain information that saves innocent lives
Clear rules against torture should be maintained because any use of torture is immoral and will weaken international human rights standards against

And for those who said torture should be allowed, this followup question was asked:

Q30a-T1a: What about cases that have nothing to do with terrorism? Do you think that there should be rules prohibiting torture in all other cases or that in general governments should be allowed to use torture to try to get information?

The report itself stated:

A WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of 19 nations finds that in 14 of them most people favor an unequivocal rule against torture, even in the case of terrorists who have information that could save innocent lives. Four nations lean toward favoring an exception in the case of terrorists.
However, large majorities in all 19 nations favor a general prohibition against torture. In all nations polled, the number saying that the government should generally be able to use torture is less than one in five.
On average across all nations polled, 57 percent opt for unequivocal rules against torture. Thirty-five percent favor an exception when innocent lives are at risk. Just 9 percent favor the government being able to use torture in general.
The four publics that favor an exception for terrorists when innocent lives are at risk include majorities in India (59%), Nigeria (54%), and Turkey (51%), and a plurality in Thailand (44%).
Support for the unequivocal position was highest in Spain (82%), Great Britain (82%) and France (82%), followed by Mexico (73%), China (66%), the Palestinian territories (66%), Poland (62%), Indonesia (61%), and the Ukraine (59%). In five countries either modest majorities or pluralities support a ban on all torture: Azerbaijan (54%), Egypt (54%), the United States (53%), Russia (49%), and Iran (43%). South Koreans are divided....
"The idea that torture by governments is basically wrong is widely shared in all corners of the world. Even the scenario one hears of terrorists holding information that could save innocent lives is rejected as a justification for torture in most countries," comments Steven Kull, director of WorldPublicOpinion.org.
"Further," Kull adds, "since such a scenario is exceedingly rare, this poll suggests that virtually all torture used by governments is at odds with the will of the people."

My bottom-line conclusion is that our biggest problem is the media, which feeds us ticking time-bomb fantasies on the one hand, and utterly fails to question government authority figures and present contrary information on the other. Once again, the American people are not the main culprits here. The corporate media is much more to blame.

Scholars, Writers, Artists, and Advocates Urge Attorney General Holder to Uphold the Rule of Law

davidswanson — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 02:35:51 GMT

Nationally Renowned Scholars, Writers, Artists, and Advocates Urge Attorney General Holder to Uphold the Rule of Law and Appoint Prosecutor to Investigate Allegations of Torture and Other Serious Crimes

SALT LAKE CITY - Several prominent Americans, including authors, artists, legal experts, and renowned voices of conscience, today transmitted a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder urging the appointment of a prosecutor to investigate allegations of torture and other violations of human rights and civil liberties committed by former government officials and others. The signatories to the letter are:

* Daniel Ellsberg (former Marine commander, former assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, defense specialist, responsible for disclosure of the Pentagon Papers)
* Bruce Fein (specialist in constitutional and international law, former Associate Deputy US Attorney General (during Reagan administration))
* Andy Jacobs (represented Indiana's 10th and 11th Congressional Districts, 1965-1973 and 1975-1997, Korean War veteran)
* Paul Rogat Loeb (author Soul of a Citizen - Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time)
* Graham Nash (singer-songwriter (The Hollies; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young))
* Terry Tempest Williams (naturalist, author of several books, including Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; An Unspoken Hunger; The Open Space of Democracy)
* Bill McKibben (environmentalist, international organizer, founder of Step It Up, author of several books, including The End of Nature; Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future)
* John Nichols (Washington correspondent for The Nation, author of The Genius of Impeachment: The Founder's Cure for Royalism)
* Robert Feuer (attorney, 2008 candidate for Massachusetts First Congressional District)
* Jeremy Pikser (screenwriter, co-wrote Bulworth; wrote The Lemon Sisters and War, Inc.)
* Rocky Anderson (lawyer, civil and human rights specialist, former Salt Lake City Mayor; Founder and Executive Director, High Road for Human Rights)
* Mimi Kennedy (author, activist, and television and screen actress, co-star, "Dharma & Greg," recently starring in In the Loop)
* Naomi Wolf (author of seven books, including The Beauty Myth, The End of America, and Give Me Liberty)
* Robert C. Fellmeth (Price Professor of Public Interest Law, University of San Diego Law School)
* David Swanson (activist, author, Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union)
* Ralph Nader (lawyer, consumer advocate, author of several books, including Unsafe at Any Speed, The Menace of Atomic Energy, Who's Poisoning America?, Good Works, No Contest, The Good Fight)

High Road for Human Rights Education Project (www.highroadforhumanrights.org) is leading this effort to persuade the Attorney General to uphold the rule of law and longstanding traditions of human dignity and adherence to the values underlying our Constitution. According to Gallup and ABC News/Washington Post polls conducted in April, a majority of Americans favor a federal investigation into the treatment of detainees by government personnel.

"You can convey the message that we have become a nation where powerful, or formerly powerful, people can repeatedly violate the law (and call upon others to violate the law) with impunity," the letter reads in part. "Or you can convey that in this great country Lady Justice is still blindfolded and that the scales of justice are indeed balanced - that the law applies equally to all, without bias for or against any, regardless of wealth, power, or prestige. . . .Your principled application of the law . . . will be viewed for many generations as a crucial point in the history of a nation truly committed to equal justice, high moral principle, and the rule of law."

The complete text of the letter is attached to this release.

The letter calls on the Attorney General to appoint a prosecutor to commence an inquiry into whether government officials and personnel violated the law in connection with aggressive war, warrantless wiretapping, torture, extraordinary rendition, the illegal arrest and indefinite detention of US citizens without due process, the issuance of signing statements purporting to overrule laws passed by Congress, and the failure to inform members of Congress of intelligence programs or covert actions.

"We urge the Attorney General to affirm the crucial importance of upholding the rule of law, irrespective of political considerations, and appoint a prosecutor to investigate criminal activity committed in recent years by officials, other personnel, and contractors associated with the previous administration," said High Road's Executive Director, Rocky Anderson. "Investigating and, if appropriate, prosecuting perpetrators of these serious crimes is a crucial step to preventing the recurrence of this dark, demoralizing chapter in our nation's history, which has done so much to damage our national security and reputation abroad."

Contact:
Rocky Anderson
(801) 364-3560 ext. 117
rocky.highroad@gmail.com
www.highroadforhumanrights.org

# # #
The Letter
# # #

July 29, 2009

Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr.
The Department of Justice
Washington, D.C.

Dear Attorney General Holder:

We applaud your outspoken commitment to a "post-partisan" approach to criminal justice that is beyond politics and ideology. Your record, including many of your pronouncements, has made it clear you are dedicated to pursuing justice with integrity. From all appearances, you believe strongly in our Constitution and the rule of law.

You are at a challenging fork in the road, where you can choose either to (1) ignore evidence of egregious criminal wrongdoing by Bush administration officials and people working in concert with them, as urged by some in the White House, or (2) take a principled approach, regardless of political pressures or ideological concerns, in applying the law without bias and without favor toward those who have violated criminal laws.

No less than the rule of law is at stake. Your decisions and actions in this regard will be of historic importance.

You can convey the message that we have become a nation where powerful, or formerly powerful, people can repeatedly violate the law (and call upon others to violate the law) with impunity and escape any accountability because the present administration has an interest in avoiding the partisan attacks inherent in any investigation and prosecution of former government officials. Or you can convey that in this great country Lady Justice is still blindfolded and that the scales of justice are, indeed, balanced - that the law applies equally to all, without bias for or against any, regardless of wealth, power, or prestige.

The violations of law by Bush administration officials and others who acted in concert with them have been justified by some, including Dick Cheney and John Yoo, on the basis that the President is above the law because he is the head of the so-called "unitary" executive branch of government. According to these proponents of limitless executive power, the President alone decides the range of his power and the application of laws passed by Congress and treaties ratified by the United States Senate. The result of that approach would be that the rule of law is no longer extant.

Of course, that view of executive power is completely at odds with our Constitution and the system of checks and balances that has served our republic so well since its founding. Similarly, the failure to repudiate that view and to hold accountable those who have violated the law would be subversive to our constitutional form of government, our system of checks and balances, and the rule of law. Just as the rule of law prohibits powerful people from escaping the reach of our laws, so too does it forbid people in positions of power, such as the President or the Attorney General, from deciding, for the sake of political convenience, that the law will not be applied to some who have violated it.

The principled way of moving forward as a nation that adheres to the rule of law is for you to appoint a prosecutor to investigate whether government officials or others violated the law in connection with aggressive war, warrantless wiretapping, torture, extraordinary rendition, the illegal arrest and indefinite detention of US citizens without due process, the issuance of signing statements purporting to overrule laws passed by Congress, the creation of an assassination program, and the failure to inform members of Congress of intelligence programs or covert actions. Then, if a determination is made that violations of the law occurred, appropriate legal action should be taken.

Your decisions and actions will define the course of our nation's principled commitment to our Constitution, domestic law, and legal obligations under treaties, which, along with the Constitution and laws passed by Congress, are the supreme law of the land, pursuant to Article VI, Section 2 of the Constitution.

One's commitment to principle is demonstrated most clearly under difficult circumstances. We recognize that some people would forsake the rule of law because of a desire to achieve other political objectives and to avoid distractions and partisan divisions. However, an unrelenting commitment to the law should never be demeaned as a "distraction" or as a partisan matter. Your principled application of the law, particularly under present circumstances, will be viewed for many generations as a crucial point in the history of a nation truly committed to equal justice, high moral principle, and the rule of law.

Respectfully,

* Daniel Ellsberg
* Bruce Fein
* Andy Jacobs
* Paul Rogat Loeb
* Graham Nash
* Terry Tempest Williams
* Bill McKibben
* John Nichols
* Robert Feuer
* Jeremy Pikser
* Rocky Anderson
* Mimi Kennedy
* Naomi Wolf (
* Robert C. Fellmeth
* David Swanson
* Ralph Nader

_____
Footnotes
_______

1. The rule of law, as a safeguard against arbitrary governance, was provided for in the Magna Carta in 1215, which made it clear that King John, who previously governed any way he saw fit, was constrained by rules that applied to everyone alike. Our Constitution, the bedrock of our system of government, is founded on the principle of the rule of law. It spells out the powers of each branch of government and limits what government and government officials can do.

For our constitutional form of government to survive, and for the rule of law to prevail over the rule of dictatorship, each branch of government must be constrained by the rule of law, and by the parameters of its constitutionally designated powers. Each branch of government must jealously protect against the other branches exceeding and abusing their power. Members of the Bush administration endeavored in a systematic and dangerous fashion to extend the powers of the president in abusive, dictatorial fashion, completely at odds with our Constitution and the rule of law. Members of the Bush administration claimed extraordinary, unprecedented executive powers that they believed exempted the president from laws passed by Congress, from treaties to which the United States has bound itself, and from protections of our individual freedoms set forth in the Constitution. They pursued such authoritarian power, completely at odds with the rule of law, by asserting what they called a "unitary executive" power and a supposed "inherent power" that allows the president to make up the rules, even when contrary to what Congress and our Constitution have required.

2. President Obama has made it clear that he may qualify his allegiance to the rule of law because of his desire to "move forward," even perhaps by not applying the law to war criminals and others who broke the law during their service in the Bush administration. For instance, he stated as follows during an interview on January 11, 2009:

President Obama: "We're still evaluating how we're going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. And obviously we're going to be looking at past practices and I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. And part of my job is to make sure that for example at the CIA, you've got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don't want them to suddenly feel like they've got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering."

George Stephanopoulos: "So, no 9/11 commission with independent subpoena power?"

Obama: "We have not made final decisions, but my instinct is for us to focus on how do we make sure that moving forward we are doing the right thing. That doesn't mean that if somebody has blatantly broken the law, that they are above the law. But my orientation's going to be to move forward."

ABC News, This Week With George Stephanopoulos, January 11, 2009.

By the assertion of the "state secrets" doctrine, President Obama's administration, through the Department of Justice under your leadership, has continued the Bush administration's efforts to emasculate the courts as a branch of government intended by the Constitution to provide a vital check on abuses of executive power. See, e.g., Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., 563 F.3d 992 (9th Cir. 2009). The Obama administration has also continued to threaten withholding the sharing of intelligence with the British government if the U.K. High Court discloses information about the torture of a detainee held by the United States. Commenting about the implications of the Obama administration's threat on the rule of law, the U.K. High Court stated as follows:

Moreover, in the light of the long history of the common law and democracy which we share with the United States, it was, in our view difficult to conceive that a democratically elected and accountable government could possibly have any rational objection to placing into the public domain such a summary of what its own officials reported as to how a detainee was treated by them and which made no disclosure of sensitive intelligence matters. Indeed we did not consider that a democracy governed by the rule of law would expect a court in another democracy to suppress a summary of the evidence contained in reports by its own officials or officials of another State where the evidence was relevant to allegations of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, politically embarrassing though it might be.

Mohamed v. Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs [2009] EWHC 152 (Admin), para. 69 (emphasis added).

3. President Obama clearly contemplates that you will apply the law in a principled, unbiased manner, without regard to his political interests in ignoring past violations of the law under the guise of "looking forward." As he stated:

I think my general view when it comes to my attorney general is he is the people's lawyer. Eric Holder's been nominated. His job is to uphold the Constitution and look after the interests of the American people, not to be swayed by my day-to-day politics.

ABC News, This Week With George Stephanopoulos, January 11, 2009.

4. Among those violations of law, both civil and criminal, are the following:

* warrantless wiretapping of Americans' communications, in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (each violation is a felony, punishable by a fine of $10,000 and up to five years imprisonment);
* kidnapping and torture (and perhaps killing) of people in violation of the United Nations Charter; the Nuremberg Covenant; Geneva Conventions; the Convention Against Torture; the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the War Crimes Act; and the Torture Statute (18 USC § 2340) (each violation of the Torture Statute subjects the perpetrator to a fine or imprisonment for up to twenty years or, in the case death caused by torture, the death penalty; a government official conspiring to abuse a prisoner is subject to the same penalties as the person who inflicts the abuse);
* issuance of "signing statements" and orders to ignore legislation passed by Congress, in violation of the obligation of the president to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed" under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution;
* the failure to disclose to congressional intelligence committees the NSA warrantless wiretapping program ordered by President Bush, in violation of the National Security Act of 1947, Sec. 501 [50 U.S.C. 413] and Sec. 502 [50 U.S.C. 413a] (a) (1); 1991 Intelligence Authorization Act;
* the failure to disclose to congressional intelligence committees waterboarding and other abusive interrogation methods used on detainees, in violation of the National Security Act of 1947; 1991 Intelligence Authorization Act;
* the failure to disclose to congressional intelligence committees or the "Gang of Eight" the CIA assassination program, in violation of the National Security Act of 1947; 1991 Intelligence Authorization Act;
* the illegal arrest and indefinite detention, without any due process (including no charges, no trial, no allowance of the right to habeas corpus, and denial of legal counsel), of US citizens, in violation of their civil and constitutional rights
* the illegal and unconstitutional killing and maiming of hundreds of thousands of people during the course of a war of aggression prohibited by the United Nations Charter, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the Nuremberg Covenant, following a fraudulent campaign of misinformation to the United States Congress and the American people.

The Risks of a Partial Prosecution

davidswanson — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:29:58 GMT

By David Swanson

If Attorney General Eric Holder creates a special prosecutor for torture but forbids him or her to prosecute the lawyers who facilitated torture or the top officials who ordered it, proposing to go after only torturers who exceeded the limitations outlined in the lawyers' memos, what are the risks?

The risks for Holder could, for all we know, include being fired immediately, being asked to "resign" in three-and-a-half years, not being appointed to the Supreme Court, being called names by TV loudmouths, and not being invited to dinner parties. But these risks would be much greater if Holder obeyed the law and authorized a complete prosecution of all crimes. President Obama has publicly forbidden Holder from fully enforcing the law, but said that partially doing so is a decision for the attorney general. And failure to act carries its own risks, of embarrassing prosecutions by foreign and international courts, and of a shameful legacy and bitter and regret-filled retirement.

The risks to the rest of us are far more serious. If Holder does nothing, then almost everyone involved could walk away unpenalized, thus encouraging the continued use of torture. But if Holder creates a partial prosecution based on the idea that crazy insane OLC memos are law, the outcome could be better or worse.

It could be better because torturers would be prosecuted. After all, we know of torture that preceded the memos, and we know of torture that exceeded the memos. To my knowledge we don't know of any torture that, in fact, complied with the memos. And such prosecutions could easily lead to the publicizing of evidence against higher officials (not that it's currently in short supply), making it difficult not to expand the prosecution in additional stages. Prosecuting some could lead to prosecuting the rest of those responsible.

The potentially worse-than-nothing outcome is due to the following concerns. If you do nothing, the lesson for future governments is that criminal activity requires intimidating the succeeding governments into inaction. If, on the other hand, you treat the crazy insane OLC memos as law, the lesson for future governments is that criminal activity is guaranteed safe if you order your lawyers to write memos "legalizing" it. This would mean that anything at all could be "legalized." And it would mean that any existing memos that have not been retracted are law. And that would mean, among other things, that, as Jay Bybee obligingly declared in a memo, any president has the right to launch a war of aggression on a whim.

So, we're back to the shameful legacy and bitter regret-filled retirement for Holder despite his having risked being mocked, fired, shunned, and not appointed. A partial prosecution, unless later expanded, could be the worst of both worlds for him. This would seem to open up at least the possibility of Holder choosing to obey our laws and treaties in full, thus guaranteeing self respect, public respect, the gratitude of billions of people around the world, and the knowledge later in life of having done the right thing when he had it in his power.

But, even a complete prosecution of torture, even one that put Bush and Cheney away for life, would fall far short of having done the right thing. What Holder has to do, either at once or in stages, if he truly wants to comply with the law, is to prosecute much worse crimes than torture, crimes everyone used to talk about before the possibility of prosecuting torture came to dominate. Many instances of torture have amounted to murder, and in some instances torture has been used to generate war lies. But the Iraq War itself has left 1.3 million human beings dead, millions more wounded, traumatized, displaced, and impoverished. If Holder really wanted to do his job he would prosecute a lot more crimes, including the misspending of funds on war that were not appropriated for it, lying to Congress about the grounds for war (among other things), using false propaganda domestically, invading Iraq in violation of the Constitution and the UN Charter and H.J. Res 114, imprisoning children, employing assassination squads, using the U.S. military domestically, spying without warrant, exposing an undercover agent, and obstructing justice. And an attorney general who would do all of that (or even most attorneys general who wouldn't) would also overturn the prosecutions of political prisoners like Don Siegelman, Paul Minor, and so many others, and hold accountable those who used the Justice Department to target state and local elected officials, 85 percent of those prosecuted being Democrats and the other 15 percent consisting largely of moderate Republicans.

Now, all of this may scare Mr. Holder into doing nothing at all. The most strategic approach for advocates of justice may be to pressure him into beginning at least a partial prosecution of one relatively minor crime, planning to expand from there, while at the same time focusing much of our energy on demanding action from Congress, action that could begin with the impeachment of Jay Bybee, the sitting federal judge who signed his name, not only to torture memos, but to a memo purporting to legalize illegal wars, a memo that will have done that if we do not act. Our energy can also go into local and state prosecutions, foreign prosecutions, structural reforms, and so on. But it is critical that, whatever we attempt to prod Holder into at the moment, we ourselves not forget the larger picture, that we ourselves not begin thinking that exceeding crazy insane memos is the chief offense, or that writing those memos is the chief offense, or that ordering those memos written and used is the chief offense. If we do not deter wars of aggression, millions more will die, and many will be tortured regardless of what else has changed. Wars of aggression inevitably use torture, and worse. Our job is to stay focused, even if it takes decades, never be distracted or deterred, and never lose confidence that we will put an end to war.

Which TV Show Is A Better Guide To Fighting Terrorism: "24" Or "Criminal Minds"?

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 16:00:00 GMT

It's an article of faith on the right--not just the fanboys, but the ones who actually ran the Bush "War on Terror"--that way to fight to terrorism is to be learned from the TV show 24, as Dahlia Lithwick writes at Newsweek. Only problem is, experts are virtually unanimous: they're utterly wrong. Torture doesn't work to extract information quickly. In fact, it doesn't work to extract reliable information at all. Dahlia gets into all that in her Newsweek piece, as well as the rather pointed observation that Bauer knows what he's doing is illegal, and expects to pay a price for it:

that is the real source of his heroism-to the extent one finds torture heroic. He makes a moral choice at odds with the prevailing system, and accepts the consequences of the system's judgment.

All in all, she does a very good job of hitting the high notes in the crazy world of taking "24" as blue-print for fighting terror.

But there is another TV show that actually does provide some valuable insight into combating terrorism, the CBS show about FBI profilers, Criminal Minds. The premise of profiling is quite simple: to catch a criminal, you have to know how to think like a criminal. And not just any criminal, but the particular criminal that committed the particular crime you're trying to solve. Profilers are most famous for their work with serial killers, but profiling can be applied to a much wider range of crimes, including those that are political. A key insight is that no matter how "crazy" the criminal's thinking may seem, it all makes sense to them, and if you can understand what that sense is, then you are well more than halfway there to solving the crime.

There's a deep irony here: On the one hand, conservatives are utterly horrified at the very thought of trying to understand the terrorists who attacked us. So horrified, they can't even focus on what it means. At one point, Karl Rove mocked liberals, saying, "liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," On the other hand, conservatives are actually very close to the terrorists how they think--brothers under the skin, one might say: tribalist, ethnocentric, religious, fundamentalist, self-righteous, prone to violence and scornful of compromise or even dialogue. They are peas in a pod. No wonder conservatives don't want to understand the terrorists--they'd have to admit they're one and the same!
I said above that:

A key insight is that no matter how "crazy" the criminal's thinking may seem, it all makes sense to them, and if you can understand what that sense is, then you are well more than halfway there to solving the crime.

But it's not just that there's a logic to the serial pattern criminal's behavior, be they a serial killer, arsonist or whatever. More often than not, there's a morality to it. A sick and twisted morality, to be sure, but a morality, nonetheless. Understand the warped moral vision, and you understand the fundamental logic--they are one and the same. And this is another aspect of the profiler's art that drives conservatives crazy, since they always presume that (a) they alone are truly moral, and (b) "truly moral" means "truly good."

The idea of a twisted morality that could lead people who deeply believe in their cause to do monstrously horrible things--that idea is, of necessity, unthinkable to conservatives. And, of course, much like Richard Clarke's warnings about al Qaeda, the "unthinkable" is the key to a successful anti-terrorism policy.

One feature of Criminal Minds is that it explores the risks, the dangers involved in the characters getting close too serial killers--both inside their heads and physically close as well, but the former far more profoundly than the latter. Indeed, one profiler (one of my favorite characters, alas!) ended up crossing the line, and killing an "unsub" in cold blood. ("Unsub" = "unknown subject", the original designation of the person they're hunting, which stays in use, even after their identity is known) Another team member was falsely accused of being a serial killer in another episode--and it turned out that he did have a very dark secret, though not one of his making or volition. A third member was captured and repeatedly drugged by a serial killer, leading to a prolonged battle with addiction and fears about his own capacity for evil, the tenuousness of his own self-control.

Well, you get the picture. Getting into killers heads is the very heart of their jobs, and there's a price to paid for it. It makes for an inherently murky moral universe... on one level, and the exact opposite on another. After all, they are saving lives--the exact opposite of the unsubs they hunt. And the more similar their thinking may become, the most important it is that they be reminded of this. On team member may start to lose faith in their own humanity, another will remind them. Of course, the very fact that reminding is necessary speaks to the greater complexity that there are two levels. And this is what keeps them honest. They live a contradiction, and acknowledging it at one level resolves it at another.

This is what it takes to actually fight terrorism effectively, as well. We have to be able to think like terrorists, to enter their mindset, understand their logic--and we can only do that by letting go of our own logic, for however brief a time. This is not just true for those prosecuting the war--which, it should be obvious, should not actually be a war--but for all Americans as a whole.

We must be able to imagine ourselves being driven to committing terrorist acts like the ones that have been perpetrated against us. Because, in part, we have already done this. We have bombed civilians. Tortured innocents. Done everything we might accuse al Qaeda of doing. That's precisely what terrorists intend--it's the whole point of terrorism to destroy the legitimacy of an enemy that can never be defeated directly by getting them to destroy it themselves.

It's only by recognizing that capacity for evil in ourselves that we will ever have the slightest chance of success in the struggle against becoming the evil we fight.

Sic Semper Tyrannis

Daniel De Groot — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 02:38:55 GMT

Awhile back, Digby wrote she feels the torture debate slipping away. I'd like to try and put this in context. This was always going to be tough. It is a fight worth fighting, but nowhere in the world has the still potent previous ruling order ever rolled over and taken their lumps for the crimes they committed while in power without a massive fight. While we may make references to Nuremburg, the most important difference there was that the Nuremburg trials were an act of imposing international law on Germany and Japan after conquering them. This is an attempt to have domestic law enforcement mechanisms go after the leaders of the previous government for their official policy. In the US, I don't believe such a thing has been done. Worldwide, it isn't so common either.

Watergate is not an apt comparison either. Nixon's motivies were clearly about personal advancement. He wasn't ordering buildings firebombed and journalists murdered to "protect" America, he was cheating in the competitive game of politics. Further, he acted guilty and had been stupid enough to tape himself. The war crimes of the Bush Administration exist in a different realm, because they mostly lack a personal benefit motive on the part of the players involved. They are still all over television brazenly defending what they did and attacking Obama for not continuing all of it. It is still possible for them to claim all this was done to defend the nation, for the greater good and so on. Nixon's claims of this sort were not credible. For whatever reason, time and again personal failings bring down the scandal avalanche in a way that other illegality does not. No doubt part of this is the pernicious US domestic news media, but not all of it. People just seem to viscerally loathe bright line personal corruption in a way that makes, say, $90,000 in a freezer a much bigger deal than 90,000 (or 900,000) dead innocent Iraqi civilians. It's a serious challenge for the long term viability of democracy.
None of this is "as it should be" in any ideal sense. I'm just trying to describe how things sit. The nice theoretical accountability mechanisms in the US Constitution are fine, but actually bringing down very powerful people on the basis of ethical principles, even with bright lines like "the rule of law" has always been very difficult. The United States is over 200 years old, and has only successfully impeached a single-digit number of officials, and forced only 1 President to resign. Even Jefferson Davis didn't spend very much time in prison. This has never worked as designed.

Looking around the world, some have pointed to the recent conviction of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori. It's clearly exceptional in recent world history. He was chased from office to the point of Peru's Congress rejecting his (faxed) resignation so they could remove him from office themselves (a fate Nixon should have shared). Despite all the human rights abuses, the precipitate cause of his downfall was a key underling of his being caught on camera bribing members of congress. His domestic support had utterly (and rapidly) collapsed in a way Bush's never did. Even so, his case is a hopeful exception to the norm, perhaps there are lessons there which might be applied elsewhere.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, a domestic court has been established for prosecuting war crimes that took place during the civil war. As this OSCE report from 2005 notes though:

Moreover, monitoring has revealed the courts' reluctance to conduct effective prosecutions against defendants who held positions of power during the war and remain influential. Narrow interpretations of the facts and a lack of willingness to conscientiously explore the full circumstances have resulted in a number of
notable not guilty verdicts. Although 2004 saw several guilty verdicts and the imposition of lengthy prison sentences, a significant majority of these convicted defendants were low-ranking military personnel. OSCE monitoring also indicates that cases are processed less effectively and robustly where the defendants are
members of the majority local community and where the prosecution witnesses are from the minority.
(ii)

During the past decade, both France and Italy have wrestled with potential criminality of top officials. Both managed to obtain legal immunity. Chirac's supposedly ended when he left office, but he has not been charged as yet. Berlusconi, incredibly, is back as Prime Minister of Italy and has passed a second immunity bill for himself.

Consider Northern Ireland. British troops killed 13 people in the Bloody Sunday massacre (yes, the one U2 sings about), and as of today, no one has been prosecuted, and only the second inquiry into the event has yet to release their report. This is about events that took place in a liberal western democracy in 1972. Similarly, no one has been prosecuted for ordering the "Shoot to kill" policy that was reputedly followed by RUC and SAS forces in Northern Ireland. These weren't "war crimes" per se, but they were murders by state officials acting in an official capacity.

The past couple years have seen the governments of Canada and Australia apologize to their indiginous populations for crimes committed by the european dominant governments toward them. It is highly unlikely either country (or the US) will ever prosecute anyone for the various atrocities perpetrated on the aboriginals. Most of the perpetrators are dead anyway.

The US Senate just got around to apologizing for slavery. Need I go on?

Simply, nation-states are generally crummy at prosecuting themselves for systemic widespread criminality. In fact, this as all the more reason to need a powerful and active International Criminal Court. Self-enforcement is clearly not working.

No, if liberals prevail, and senior members of the Bush administration are investigated and prosecuted for war crimes by US authorities, that will be a remarkable feat of progress. It will be historic and noteworthy. Not doing so will just be the status quo, and not just in the US.. It will not spell the abject failure of the Obama Presidency, except perhaps its failure to succeed beyond the ken of dozens of other world governments put in similar situations after periods of madness.

But keep pressing. Lots of seemingly unwinnable fights were in fact won, for the betterment of all. Slavery was legal and normal almost everywhere not so long ago, until ethical people started to realize it was wrong, and a great evil. How difficult that must have seemed to the first people who began to organize against it. A break through would be splendid, but despair isn't the right reaction to failure on this front. After all, Henry Kissinger is still a free man, it's not even the first time in living memory that senior officials in an administration committed outright war crimes and didn't face any consequences for it. Hopefully, this time it will change.

Top Torture Lawyers Still in Govt

davidswanson — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:55:14 GMT

By David Swanson

We've heard of John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales, and maybe even Jay Bybee. Some of us recall John Ashcroft, Michael Mukasey, and even David Addington. William Haynes, Stephen Bradbury, and Douglas Feith occasionally make the news. If I had any say about it all 40 of these facilitators of torture would be universally known -- plus the eight more that readers of this article will call to my attention and angrily accuse me of trying to cover for by only being aware of 40. I would also make universally known the fact that two of the worst now work for President Barack Obama.
Even if you haven't read them, you probably know that the Justice Department under Bush-Cheney produced memos pretending to legalize torture, gruesome memos stipulating exactly how many times a particular victim could "legally" be tortured with a particular technique. John Yoo and Jay Bybee wrote the worst of these memos. But the memos take the form of responses to inquiries from a guy named John Rizzo. Yes, Mr. Rizzo, you may slam that guy against a wall. No, Mr. Rizzo, you may not drown that one unless you have a doctor present. And so on. The memos are all headlined thus: "MEMORANDUM FOR JOHN A. RIZZO."

So, Yoo and Bybee didn't invent the torture techniques out of their own sadistic imaginations. They replied to Rizzo's requests for "legal" permission to use detailed techniques. What if those requests from Rizzo had been turned into news headlines, rather than the Justice Department's responses? Would activists then be focused on demanding Rizzo's, rather than Yoo's, removal from one of our prestigious institutions of higher learning? That's actually a very easy question to definitively answer, and the answer is no. Rizzo doesn't work in academia: he is still, until he retires this summer the top lawyer at the CIA.

Retirement is what counts as accountability these days in Washington. Future consiglieri are hereby put on notice: you back torture and death squads and drone strikes and you'll be forced to retire with the LA Times printing a profile on your great influence and wonderful taste in expensive suits. Rizzo served as top lawyer at the CIA for years, without the title, because the Senate wouldn't approve him. Serving as the "Acting So-and-So" is what now counts as compliance with the Constitution. Senators are hereby put on notice: you fail to confirm an appointee, and he or she will get the job without the title.

Rizzo oversaw in detail the use of illegal detention, rendition, and torture at sites around the world. He requested Justice Department memos to cover his actions. He illegally sanctioned the destruction of videotapes demonstrating what he had done. He brazenly testified before Congress that torture was not torture. He authorized torture prior to receiving the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos. After receiving the memos, he authorized torture that far exceeded what they pretended to allow. He lied to the Justice Department, claiming that a captive (Abu Zubaydah) was not cooperative in the absence of torture. He ignored warnings that all of this was illegal, but made clear his awareness of guilt by requesting the memos and destroying the tapes.

And Rizzo didn't do all of this alone. He had help from another top lawyer at the CIA, Jonathan M. Fredman. Fredman now works in the Obama administration in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, with -- as far as I know -- no plans to leave. According to the Senate Armed Services Committee:

"On October 2, 2002, Jonathan Fredman, who was chief counsel to the CIA's Counter Terrorist Center, attended a meeting of GTMO staff. Minutes of that meeting indicate that it was dominated by a discussion of aggressive interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation, death threats, and waterboarding, which was discussed in relation to its use in SERE training. Mr. Fredman's advice to GTMO on applicable legal obligations was similar to the analysis of those obligations in OLC's first Bybee memo. According to the meeting minutes, Mr. Fredman said that 'the language of the statutes is written vaguely. . . . Severe physical pain described as anything causing permanent damage to major organs or body parts. Mental torture [is] described as anything leading to permanent, profound damage to the senses or personality.' Mr. Fredman said simply 'It is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies you're doing it wrong.'"

People like Rizzo and Fredman should not be working for our government a single day longer. They should be impeached. They should be prosecuted. They should be given fair trials and be imprisoned if convicted. And all existing information on what they did should be made public. Fed up with waiting for Congress or the Justice Department to act, a coalition of groups headquartered at http://DisbarTortureLawyers.com has gone ahead and filed complaints with bar associations to have torture lawyers disbarred and to call attention to the need for further accountability. Having already filed complaints against 12 torture lawyers, Disbar Torture Lawyers filed three more on Monday. Two of these were against Rizzo and Fredman.

Disbar Torture Lawyers held a press conference on Monday at the National Press Club, with remarks by Kevin Zeese, who filed the complaints, by Bruce Fein, a former Reagan administration lawyer, and by Shahid Buttar, Director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. I was not in town but am certain we can count on the Washington Post to give the story all the coverage it deserves.

Why Demand to Prosecute Torture Will Grow

davidswanson — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:00:42 GMT

By David Swanson

(Remarks at Torture Accountability Action Day rally in Washington, D.C., June 25, 2009 -- video of this and other speeches at AfterDowningStreet.org)

Have you ever held a little baby in your arms? Raise your hand if you have. A toddler is as delicate and precious as a baby, but able to move around and get hurt. Bigger kids can move faster and farther. Our instincts should be to protect them.

I was reading yesterday about a boy who was probably 12 years old when our nation imprisoned him in 2002. We held him in Afghanistan, but I don't mean "held" in the sense in which one lovingly holds a baby. We put a hood on him, stripped him, shackled him and shoved him down stairs. We brought him to Guantanamo, kicked him, beat him, broke his nose, pepper sprayed him, and deprived him of sleep for many days. In 2003 he tried to kill himself by slamming his head against a wall.
This boy, like most Gitmo captives, does not stand accused of international terrorism. And the evidence that this boy had, at 12 years old, fought back against the illegal aggressors in his country comes from torture, so our government is seeking to hold him forever without putting him on trial. He's now 19, having spent his entire teenage years in a death camp, in a place where the only way out appears to be death, and if our government has its way he'll move to some other death camp so that we can "close Guantanamo" and he'll be held there forever and ever until he dies, with his jailers performing annual reviews that they will grotesquely refer to as "due process." Meanwhile, prosecuting those who tortured this child, those who ordered it done, those who provided legalistic justifications, or those who created the entire torture program is not yet even under consideration.

I was on a radio show last night and a man called in to accuse me of perversely targeting the United States government for criticism and taking up the cause of the worst criminals on earth, when I could be focusing on fighting diseases that kill many more people than we have tortured. Well, many of us are active in campaigning for better healthcare, but pointing to some other cause of more deaths and injuries never excuses a crime. Torture is a crime. A president can pardon it. He cannot legally prevent our Justice Department from prosecuting it. And when he does, and we sit back on our couches and cheer for Iranians taking to the streets, then our president and all future presidents acquire the power to ignore all laws. Already our State Department has lost the ability to tell other nations not to torture, including nations that might torture the sort of people that all callers to radio shows in the United States can be counted on to care about, namely Americans. In fact, we can all agree quite easily that torture should be punished when Americans are the victims of it. The trick is to shift our attention to cases in which Americans are the perpetrators and yet maintain our ability to think straight. A poll today says a strong majority supports banning all torture. No news on what percentage knows it already is banned.

It is not at all clear, in fact, that any disease I could be researching a cure for takes more lives than US torture does. We've tortured many people to death. According to the U.S. military and the FBI, US torture has been a major recruiting tool for anti-U.S. terrorists and a cause of the death of thousands of Americans. And we tortured to force false confessions justifying an attack on Iraq. We even did so after the invasion. That invasion and occupation has killed over a million Iraqis and thousands of Americans at enormous cost in dollars and in safety and prospects for peace. One justification for the war was to stop Iraqi torture, but Iraq now tortures and America can say nothing against it. In fact we can say nothing against any war crimes or the crime of aggressive war. We have made the greatest horrors permissible.

Most of the people we have tortured have been innocent of any wrongdoing. And there is no evidence that torture has saved anyone's life. Expert interrogators do not use torture because it does not work as quickly or as reliably as other methods. So torturing someone to save your kidnapped child (which callers to radio shows will explain to you is the purpose of all torturing) would be less likely to save your kidnapped child than relying on a skilled interrogator.

Torturing people brutalizes the torturers as well, damaging them and those they live with. Torturing damages our society, brutalizing the thoughts and practices of prison guards, police, and citizens. And, most damaging of all, torture establishes the myth that certain people cannot be spoken to and must be brutalized. This creates horrible prejudices, because the people who supposedly must be tortured are always defined as part of a certain racial, religious, or cultural group that comes to be seen as sub-human. This allows torturing them to be justified as both an interrogation tool and a punishment without any need for logical coherence.

Torture is illegal and morally wrong with no imaginable utilitarian exceptions to that rule. It is our job not just to condemn torture but to prevent it, to deter it. And the only way to deter it is to stop treating it as a policy difference, start treating it as a crime, and quit attempting to look forward with our heads shoved up our ass.

Numerous reports document ongoing torture in Iraq, in Bagram, and in Guantanamo. As long as torture is not treated as the crime our laws make it, prison guards holding people outside any legal system are going to torture. You cannot end torture and yet not punish it, because only punishing it can end it. Justice Marshall back there behind me (a statue in the park) would think we'd put a king back on the throne.

There may be a vote today in Congress on whether to require that the military video tape its interrogations. That would be a start if it could get through the Senate, but will there be a penalty for not doing so, or for destroying the tapes? And what about the FBI and CIA? The president's task force is expected to recommend that teams formed from these two agencies interrogate captives in one way if they plan to charge them with crimes, and a different way if they just plan to illegally hold them. Our founding fathers designed systems expecting the worst of people. This plan requires better than angels. And as long as we do not prosecute torturers, these are the sorts of plans we will see.

The Park Service threatened to charge us with a crime if we demonstrated waterboarding here today. The Park Service should march with us this afternoon to the Department of Justice where we will expect the same demand to be made with regard to Richard B. Cheney.

While I work with a lot of groups on this issue I want to say a word about Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) because Joanne O'Neill stepped up and led the organizing of this day, and PDA is leading events in other cities today, as well as having led the struggle for peace and justice and impeachment and prosecution for a long time now. Principle before party. Peace before profits. Go to PDAmerica.org.

Open Left - torture

Our Debt to Italy

Congress Must End Torture

This Is Why We Torture

Jack Bauer Not Surviving Contact With Reality

Attention-Grabbing Ads

Learned Helplessness.

Two Retired Generals Denounce Former Vice President Cheney

There Are So Many Days That Have Not Yet Broken

Did the Washington Post's Richard Cohen Scare the "*#*!#!" out of you?

Slavery: It Works, So It Should Be Legalized

Bush Tortured

Taser Nation: The New (and Even More Cowardly) Police Brutality

Truckloads of Bodies

Americans Are More Pro-Torture Than Chinese

Scholars, Writers, Artists, and Advocates Urge Attorney General Holder to Uphold the Rule of Law

The Risks of a Partial Prosecution

Which TV Show Is A Better Guide To Fighting Terrorism: "24" Or "Criminal Minds"?

Sic Semper Tyrannis

Top Torture Lawyers Still in Govt

Why Demand to Prosecute Torture Will Grow

Did the Washington Post's Richard Cohen Scare the "#!#!" out of you?