promoted - cho

Dan Froomkin, on WashingtonPost.com, noted today that Vice President Cheney's chief of staff David Addington is going to appear before the House Judiciary Committee this Thursday.

From It Was Top Down, Stupid: The Bush administration's "bad apples" theory goes sour by Phillipe Sands, posted on Slate on Wednesday, June 18, 2008, at 1:19 PM ET:¹

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Unless the United States takes remedial actions, it is likely there will be criminal investigations abroad. Why? Because, as acting CIA General Counsel John Rizzo once told Congress, "a crime is a crime." The same point was made to me by a European judge and a prosecutor who have looked at the materials. There can be no doubt that the aggressive interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani (aka Detainee 063, alleged to be the 20th hijacker) amounted to torture and violated Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions (prohibiting cruelty and torture) and the 1984 Convention Against Torture. As a war crime and an act of torture, it can thus be prosecuted anywhere in the world.

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This is not good news for a nation that likes to pride itself on truth, justice, freedom and humanity.

It gets worse, of course:

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This is not just the story of a crime. It is also a cover-up—how the administration spun a false narrative, seeking to blame those on the ground at Guantananmo.

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Remember "It's not the crime, it's the cover-up" from the Nixon years? Read the whole article -- it's quite sobering.

For further information, here are two excellent write-ups about the latest revelations, particularly due to their multiple original source references:

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Clear Evidence of War Crimes: Stern Letters to Come? by Meteor Blades

WaPo: General Accuses WH of War Crimes (Update x2) by abundance

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Another excellent piece, this time showing how an old hand at GOP media manipulation tries to cover the collective exposed bottoms of the Bush Administration and the Republican party, comes from our very own Jeff Huber:

Newt the Impaler

This is an aggressively enhanced Open Thread.

¹ Hat-tip SaintMars.

From TruthOut, some disturbing news:

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Guantanamo Interrogators Told to Trash Notes

Michael Melia, of The Associated Press: "The Pentagon urged interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to destroy handwritten notes in case they were called to testify about potentially harsh treatment of detainees, a military defense lawyer said Sunday. The lawyer for Toronto-born Omar Khadr, Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, said the instructions were included in an operations manual shown to him by prosecutors and suggest the US deliberately thwarted evidence that could help terror suspects defend themselves at trial."

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Bush-style justice in a world where the Republicans have lowered the bar beyond the level of slime.

One wonders just exactly what Bush Administration officials (and Republican congress-critters, Republican DoJ appointees and reich-wingers) are smoking when they claim they're on the side of truth, justice and the American way -- and whether that brain damage is permanent.

This is an Open Thread.

Cross-posted from Unbossed. A team of psychologists, retired intelligence professionals, and ethicists are preparing a casebook on interrogation ethics and have asked for help in getting out the word to anyone who might be willing to contribute information about military interrogations, including the role played by psychologists. The Interrogation Ethics Casebook is a project of the End Torture Committee of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, and a really important step in the process of eliminating torture.

One of those working on the project is Dr. Donald Soeken. Dr. Soeken is well-known for his efforts to stop a government practice of orchestrating abusive psychiatric examinations as retaliation against whistleblowers. Below, with his permission is a more detailed description of the casebook project, along with contact information, from the Integrity International website.

Aaron Barlow interviews Svodoba after reading her searing book Black Glasses like Clark Kent: A GI's Secret from Postwar Japan.

Barlow begins:

“I think it’s unconscionable to train soldiers to kill and then offer them only two years of treatment after they return to recover from the experience of killing.” So wrote Terese Svoboda after I contacted her on finishing reading Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, her exploration of the distant events behind the suicide of her uncle Don. Motivated in part by the suggestion of an emotional connection between the events at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Don Svoboda's service guarding imprisoned US soldiers soon after WWII, there's an outrage and a sadness in this book turning it from the story of a “Superman” uncle into something of a polemic. At the end of the book, she positively pounds the table.

Read Aaron's questions and Terese's very personal answers on the Journal.

If you like what ePMedia's been doing with research, reviews and interviews, please consider donating to help with our efforts.

Update -- thank you to srkp23 on dKos -- who now has a much more detailed write-up and hat-tips our heads-up. Check it out.

From the New York Times via Mercury News, Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane report that the FBI tried to fight detainee abuse at Guatanamo Bay -- to the point where they even kept a growing file detailing abuses marked "War Crimes File" up until a senior FBI official ordered the file shut down some time in 2003.

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"Beyond any doubt, what they are doing (and I don't know the extent of it) would be unlawful were these enemy prisoners of war," Bowman wrote in an e-mail message to top FBI officials in July 2003.

Many of the abuses the report describes have previously been disclosed, but it was not known that FBI agents had gone so far as to document accusations of abuse in a "war crimes file" at Guantánamo. The report does not say how many incidents were included in the file after it was started in 2002, but the "war crimes" label showed just how seriously FBI agents took the accusations.

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War crimes. Committed by United States citizens.

Thank you, George W. Bush, Richard B. Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld. Thank you, Paul Wolfowitz and Alberto Gonzales, David Addington and Stephen Hadley. Thank you, John Bolton and Harriet Miers, Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell. And thank you, 109th Congress, specifically Tom DeLay, Dennis Hastert, Mel Martinez and Mitch McConnell, and all your little friends out there who went ape over Dick Durbin's comments when he first brought this abomination to light on the floor of the Congress in 2005. Your Republican majority and salivation over the prospect of a permanent Republican majority (HA! -- sorry, Karl!) led you to be known as the Rubberstamp Congress, and you upheld the title with foolish, arrogant pride.

You should all be so proud.

Your efforts have helped protect the Bush Administration -- and yourselves -- from the investigation of war crimes that you enabled and prolonged through this day and until the foreseeable future, at least until the last of your complicit supporters and obstructors of justice are dragged from the halls of Congress and replaced by lawful, upstanding citizens.

History will remember your names, your actions and your roles for many years to come.

On Saturday, 1 October 2006, I posted a piece in several locations entitled "The Pirates Aboard Our Ship of State."

We're now into May of 2008, and things have gone steadily downhill since then.

I thought it would be worth reprinting this, as-is, without adding in any of the newest outrages, new and continuing crimes or even the latest evidence of blatant disregard for the nation, the Constitution or the world we are building for our children.

So...onward.

A Sudanese photographer who worked for Al Jazeera was arrested and spent seven years at "Gitmo" without ever being charged. Now back in Sudan, He appeared on TV there to tell his story. Yesterday the Miami Herald covered what he had to say about his experience.

''After 2,340 days spent in the most heinous prison mankind has ever known, we are honored to be here. Thank you, and thank all those defended us and of our right in freedom.''

... snip ...

In high school, I read with interest Joan Baez's autobiographical musings Daybreak. At the time, 1968, I was quite involved with questions of non-violence and pacifism, and was constantly challenged by “what would you do if” questions that tried to force me to admit a hypothetical limit to my unwillingness to use violence. Baez, not surprisingly, had faced similar types of grilling. Unlike me, however, she didn't fall into the trap, sidestepping the questions by showing the absurdity by turning the questions themselves into a series of laughable impossibilities.

Her point was that one cannot set up principles as absolutes, that one cannot claim that he or she will act unequivocally in one fashion or another, regardless of the details of the situation. Principles provide guidelines for the future and a means for analyzing and even judging the past. No matter how much we want them to, they do not restrict one from particular actions in the moment. They cannot, for each situation differs from every other, as universals do not.

"The United States does not torture."
Pres. Bush, Sept. 6, 2006

Zubaydah, Bush and the Bureaucracy of Torture

Michael Collins
"Scoop" Independent News
Washington, D.C.

The devastating attack of 9/11 conferred unprecedented popularity on the Bush administration. This was more a reflection of the strong desire for national unity in the wake of a tragedy than an endorsement of Bush policies.

After the attack, there was a frantic effort inside the administration to show a major success in their newly proclaimed war on terror. The administration knew what the public didn't: Far from being surprised by airplanes used as weapons, they'd had a series of warnings from intelligence sources that commercial airplanes were indeed the next weapon of choice by terrorists. Once that information became public, the Bush administration would need something more to boost its image.