Something new to think about.
Oliver Laughland takes a look at some of the ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ used by the agency: How the CIA tortured its detainees: Waterboarding, confinement, sleep deprivation (The Guardian).
Showing posts with label torture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label torture. Show all posts
Standard Operating Procedure
When he was asked this morning about the conditions of Bradley Manning's confinement at Quantico, President Obama said that he had queried the Defense Department about Manning's detention and had been assured that the handling of the whistleblower -- you know, months of solitary confinement, forced nudity, and other abuses -- followed standard operating procedure and fell within the norms of humane incarceration.
Well, sure, Manning's treatment meets DOD's standards. Using nudity to impose a sense of helplessness, for example, that is, stripping detainees to "demonstrate the omnipotence of the captor," is standard operating procedure for the U.S. military now; but it has been only since being introduced in 2002 at the prison at Guantanamo by President George W. Bush to encourage cooperation from persons who were, nominally at least, enemy combatants. Not only will President Change not be closing Gitmo as he promised to do during his campaign, not only has he embraced as his own the illegal and immoral procedures introduced there by the Bush administration, but now he's gone the extra step of rationalizing abuse of an American citizen detained on U.S. soil by citing as standard operating procedure practices that were confined heretofore and only recently to military lockups.
The president's disingenuousness is almost touching. President Bush queried his people, too, on whether torture was legal and within standard operating procedure, and got thumbs-up. In claiming to accept DOD's assurances that Manning procedures meet basic standards, Obama either seeks plausible deniability or lacks a moral compass. Neither option is reassuring and both reinforce the new immorality that has become standard operating procedure under Bush-Obama.
Wait til Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio figures out how much more humiliation he can get per Maricopa County tax dollar by stripping off those pink jumpsuits and tenting his charges in the nude.
Forgetting for a moment that the obligation to treat the accused as "innocent until proven guilty" precludes any punishment before conviction, the ugly way the Marine Corps has handled Manning would be inhumane (and unconstitutional) even if he had been convicted on all counts.
How far we've come just in the two years of Obama's presidency. It was, after all, pictures of naked prisoners that inspired the outrage over Abu Ghraib. Now torture techniques that were offensive under Bush are justified as standard operating procedure. That's change, all right.
See, also: This shameful abuse of Bradley Manning by Daniel Ellsberg (Guardian UK 2011-03-11)
Manning’s Father Condemns Treatment of Imprisoned Son by Kim Zetter (Wired Threat Level 2011-03-10)
WikiLeaks suspect's treatment 'stupid,' U.S. official says by Ellen Nakashima (Washington Post 2011-03-12)
Crowley resigns as State Department Spokesman by Ed Henry (CNN PoliticalTicker 2011-03-13)
Comments on Prisoner Treatment Cause State Department Spokesman to Lose His Job by Jack Tapper (ABC News Political Punch 2011-03-13)
Well, sure, Manning's treatment meets DOD's standards. Using nudity to impose a sense of helplessness, for example, that is, stripping detainees to "demonstrate the omnipotence of the captor," is standard operating procedure for the U.S. military now; but it has been only since being introduced in 2002 at the prison at Guantanamo by President George W. Bush to encourage cooperation from persons who were, nominally at least, enemy combatants. Not only will President Change not be closing Gitmo as he promised to do during his campaign, not only has he embraced as his own the illegal and immoral procedures introduced there by the Bush administration, but now he's gone the extra step of rationalizing abuse of an American citizen detained on U.S. soil by citing as standard operating procedure practices that were confined heretofore and only recently to military lockups.
The president's disingenuousness is almost touching. President Bush queried his people, too, on whether torture was legal and within standard operating procedure, and got thumbs-up. In claiming to accept DOD's assurances that Manning procedures meet basic standards, Obama either seeks plausible deniability or lacks a moral compass. Neither option is reassuring and both reinforce the new immorality that has become standard operating procedure under Bush-Obama.
Wait til Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio figures out how much more humiliation he can get per Maricopa County tax dollar by stripping off those pink jumpsuits and tenting his charges in the nude.
Forgetting for a moment that the obligation to treat the accused as "innocent until proven guilty" precludes any punishment before conviction, the ugly way the Marine Corps has handled Manning would be inhumane (and unconstitutional) even if he had been convicted on all counts.
How far we've come just in the two years of Obama's presidency. It was, after all, pictures of naked prisoners that inspired the outrage over Abu Ghraib. Now torture techniques that were offensive under Bush are justified as standard operating procedure. That's change, all right.
See, also: This shameful abuse of Bradley Manning by Daniel Ellsberg (Guardian UK 2011-03-11)
Manning’s Father Condemns Treatment of Imprisoned Son by Kim Zetter (Wired Threat Level 2011-03-10)
WikiLeaks suspect's treatment 'stupid,' U.S. official says by Ellen Nakashima (Washington Post 2011-03-12)
Crowley resigns as State Department Spokesman by Ed Henry (CNN PoliticalTicker 2011-03-13)
Comments on Prisoner Treatment Cause State Department Spokesman to Lose His Job by Jack Tapper (ABC News Political Punch 2011-03-13)
Justice: Bradley Manning and the Case Against Solitary Confinement
[If there is anything positive resulting from the torture of Bradley Manning by USMC carabinieri at Quantico, it is that it has raised public awareness about the shockingly routine use in United States state and federal prisons of the cruel but not unusual punishment of solitary confinement. Yesterday, for example, Robert Gibbs was asked about Manning by ABC's Jake Tapper and MSNBC featured an excellent interview about his treatment with FireDogLake's Jane Hamsher. Like the tragic shooting in Tucson and the issue of gun control, the government's brutal handling of Bradley Manning has encouraged the media to begin to shine a light on a dark corner of American justice.]
by Lynn Parramore (new deal 2.0; 2011-01-23)
In the earliest days of our Republic, a group of well-meaning Philadelphia Quakers set out to reform the prison system. The idea was to remove convicts from the mayhem and corruption of overcrowded jails to solitary cells where sinners would return to mental and spiritual health through reflection. In the Walnut Street Jail, no windows would distract the prisoners with street life; no conversation would disturb their penitence. Alone with God, they would be rehabilitated.
There was a small problem. Many of the prisoners went insane. The Walnut Street Jail was shut down in 1835.
But the word penitentiary became part of the language, and the idea of placing prisoners in solitary confinement did not die. It seemed so reasonable - so much better than chain gangs or public stocks. New prisons opened to test the theory that solitude might bring salvation to criminals.
Charles Dickens had a keen interest in prison conditions, having witnessed his father’s detention in a Victorian debtor’s prison. When he heard about the latest American innovation in housing convicts, he came to see for himself. At Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, the wretches he found in solitary confinement were barely human spectres who picked their flesh raw and stared blankly at walls. His on-the-spot conclusion: Solitary confinement is torture. Dickens wrote:
That was 1842. Since then, piles of scientific studies, along with the vivid accounts of victims, have confirmed what was obvious to Dickens. Solitary confinement is worse than smashed bones and torn flesh. When human beings are deprived of social contact for even a few weeks, concentration breaks down, memory fades and disorientation sets in. Eventually, many prisoners experience explosive rages, hallucinations, catatonia, and self-mutilation. Some become irretrievably insane. Far from promoting safety, the most commonly cited justification, solitary confinement often amplifies violent impulses, turning prisoners into ticking time bombs who are far more dangerous to human society upon release than they ever were to begin with (see National Geographic’s documentary on the subject, available on Netflix).
Human beings need social contact for normal brain function. Solitary confinement is thus a method of inflicting traumatic injury upon the human mind. “It’s an awful thing, solitary,” wrote former Vietnam prisoner John McCain in Faith of My Fathers. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” Among its legion perversities, solitary confinement turns medical doctors into torturers; renders violent criminals more aggressive, and makes prisoners cut off from human society incapable of functioning in it.
In 1890, the United States Supreme Court nearly declared the punishment unconstitutional. It is banned by the Geneva Convention, condemned by the United Nations, and either prohibited or restricted in most civilized countries. And yet today, as Atul Gawande showed in his revealing 2009 New Yorker article, tens of thousands of Americans are tortured in this fashion every day, out of sight, in the “Supermax” prisons that have popped up like poisoned mushrooms on the American landscape since the 1980s. Some prisoners are consigned to these Houses of Unholiness for violations - both major and minor — of prison rules. Some for gang activity. Others for trying to escape. Or for violent behavior. Some are placed there because they are mentally ill and there is nowhere else to put them - the equivalent of casting a sufferer of pneumonia onto an Arctic tundra.
Save for the death penalty, solitary confinement is the most extreme sanction allowed by law. Like slavery and every other form of institutionalized inhumanity, it should be banished to the dark annals of American history as an example of what happens when our humanity slumbers.
Instead, it is being used as a method of terror and coercion by the United States government upon a citizen who has not even been convicted of a crime.
As Salon’s Glenn Greenwald and several other courageous journalists have documented, Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has been detained in solitary confinement for the last seven months, despite not having been convicted of any crime, having been a model detainee, and having evidenced no signs of violence or even disciplinary misdemeanors. Manning has been kept alone in a cell for 23 hours a day, barred from exercising in that cell, deprived of sleep, and denied even a pillow or sheets for his bed. As Greenwald reports, “the brig’s medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation.” A court hearing has not been set.
The message of the U.S. government to its citizens in this activity is clear: blow the whistle and your brain will be mutilated before you even have a trial.
But it may be that much to the shame of the U.S. government, our slumbering humanity is awakening. The solitary confinement - the torture, for we must call it that - of Bradley Manning is ironically shining a light on this brutality and tipping us off to the danger of authoritarianism. A United Nations probe is now investigating the Bradley case, and the drumbeat of outrage in the blogosphere grows louder every day. Protesters are organizing. Whatever one thinks of Manning and his involvement in the WikiLeaks release of classified information, there can never be any justification for torture. As Greenwald argues, such practices weaken the position of the United States government, both abroad and at home. Other countries will think twice before accepting extradition requests to a place where inhumane treatment of prisoners is sanctioned. Our moral standing in the world suffers, while the American citizenry, already suspicious of post-9/11 governmental abuses of power, grows even more alarmed. What kind of legitimacy adheres to a judicial hearing when the accused has been subject to sanity-threatening conditions? Even exposing the accused to duress is a violation of justice and of the U.S. Constitution — which applies to both civilians and soldiers. Trust and faith in American justice will deteriorate as long as such damaging practices continue.
As we spend time and rejoice with our friends and family in the new year — enjoying the social interaction that human beings require - let us pause for a moment to remember the thousands of people being tortured in American prisons, including Bradley Manning, and let us send our own message back to our government: We are Americans. We will not accept the intimidation and coercion of our fellow citizens, even from the Pentagon. Most assuredly, we will not accept torture in our name. Not of the accused. Not of the mentally ill. Not even of convicted criminals. When our civilized society is attacked, no matter what the justification, we will rise up to defend it.
The placement of human beings in solitary confinement is not a measure of their depravity. It is a measure of our own.
Lynn Parramore is Editor of New Deal 2.0, Media Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and Co-founder of Recessionwire. This article originally appeared here.
See, also: U.S. can't link accused Army private [Bradley Manning] to Assange (NBC News 2011-01-25);
Salon's Glenn Greenwald on "disgustingly harsh conditions inside prisons" and related matters (Salon 2011-01-25);
US accused of inhumane treatment over Wikileaks soldier case (Amnesty International 2011-01-24).
by Lynn Parramore (new deal 2.0; 2011-01-23)
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged
by entering its prisons. ~Fyodor Dostoevsky
by entering its prisons. ~Fyodor Dostoevsky
In the earliest days of our Republic, a group of well-meaning Philadelphia Quakers set out to reform the prison system. The idea was to remove convicts from the mayhem and corruption of overcrowded jails to solitary cells where sinners would return to mental and spiritual health through reflection. In the Walnut Street Jail, no windows would distract the prisoners with street life; no conversation would disturb their penitence. Alone with God, they would be rehabilitated.
There was a small problem. Many of the prisoners went insane. The Walnut Street Jail was shut down in 1835.
But the word penitentiary became part of the language, and the idea of placing prisoners in solitary confinement did not die. It seemed so reasonable - so much better than chain gangs or public stocks. New prisons opened to test the theory that solitude might bring salvation to criminals.
Charles Dickens had a keen interest in prison conditions, having witnessed his father’s detention in a Victorian debtor’s prison. When he heard about the latest American innovation in housing convicts, he came to see for himself. At Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, the wretches he found in solitary confinement were barely human spectres who picked their flesh raw and stared blankly at walls. His on-the-spot conclusion: Solitary confinement is torture. Dickens wrote:
I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers…I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.A man who had seen his share of inhumanities, Dickens pronounced solitary confinement to be “rigid, strict, and hopeless…cruel and wrong.”
That was 1842. Since then, piles of scientific studies, along with the vivid accounts of victims, have confirmed what was obvious to Dickens. Solitary confinement is worse than smashed bones and torn flesh. When human beings are deprived of social contact for even a few weeks, concentration breaks down, memory fades and disorientation sets in. Eventually, many prisoners experience explosive rages, hallucinations, catatonia, and self-mutilation. Some become irretrievably insane. Far from promoting safety, the most commonly cited justification, solitary confinement often amplifies violent impulses, turning prisoners into ticking time bombs who are far more dangerous to human society upon release than they ever were to begin with (see National Geographic’s documentary on the subject, available on Netflix).
Human beings need social contact for normal brain function. Solitary confinement is thus a method of inflicting traumatic injury upon the human mind. “It’s an awful thing, solitary,” wrote former Vietnam prisoner John McCain in Faith of My Fathers. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” Among its legion perversities, solitary confinement turns medical doctors into torturers; renders violent criminals more aggressive, and makes prisoners cut off from human society incapable of functioning in it.
In 1890, the United States Supreme Court nearly declared the punishment unconstitutional. It is banned by the Geneva Convention, condemned by the United Nations, and either prohibited or restricted in most civilized countries. And yet today, as Atul Gawande showed in his revealing 2009 New Yorker article, tens of thousands of Americans are tortured in this fashion every day, out of sight, in the “Supermax” prisons that have popped up like poisoned mushrooms on the American landscape since the 1980s. Some prisoners are consigned to these Houses of Unholiness for violations - both major and minor — of prison rules. Some for gang activity. Others for trying to escape. Or for violent behavior. Some are placed there because they are mentally ill and there is nowhere else to put them - the equivalent of casting a sufferer of pneumonia onto an Arctic tundra.
Save for the death penalty, solitary confinement is the most extreme sanction allowed by law. Like slavery and every other form of institutionalized inhumanity, it should be banished to the dark annals of American history as an example of what happens when our humanity slumbers.
Instead, it is being used as a method of terror and coercion by the United States government upon a citizen who has not even been convicted of a crime.
As Salon’s Glenn Greenwald and several other courageous journalists have documented, Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has been detained in solitary confinement for the last seven months, despite not having been convicted of any crime, having been a model detainee, and having evidenced no signs of violence or even disciplinary misdemeanors. Manning has been kept alone in a cell for 23 hours a day, barred from exercising in that cell, deprived of sleep, and denied even a pillow or sheets for his bed. As Greenwald reports, “the brig’s medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation.” A court hearing has not been set.
The message of the U.S. government to its citizens in this activity is clear: blow the whistle and your brain will be mutilated before you even have a trial.
But it may be that much to the shame of the U.S. government, our slumbering humanity is awakening. The solitary confinement - the torture, for we must call it that - of Bradley Manning is ironically shining a light on this brutality and tipping us off to the danger of authoritarianism. A United Nations probe is now investigating the Bradley case, and the drumbeat of outrage in the blogosphere grows louder every day. Protesters are organizing. Whatever one thinks of Manning and his involvement in the WikiLeaks release of classified information, there can never be any justification for torture. As Greenwald argues, such practices weaken the position of the United States government, both abroad and at home. Other countries will think twice before accepting extradition requests to a place where inhumane treatment of prisoners is sanctioned. Our moral standing in the world suffers, while the American citizenry, already suspicious of post-9/11 governmental abuses of power, grows even more alarmed. What kind of legitimacy adheres to a judicial hearing when the accused has been subject to sanity-threatening conditions? Even exposing the accused to duress is a violation of justice and of the U.S. Constitution — which applies to both civilians and soldiers. Trust and faith in American justice will deteriorate as long as such damaging practices continue.
As we spend time and rejoice with our friends and family in the new year — enjoying the social interaction that human beings require - let us pause for a moment to remember the thousands of people being tortured in American prisons, including Bradley Manning, and let us send our own message back to our government: We are Americans. We will not accept the intimidation and coercion of our fellow citizens, even from the Pentagon. Most assuredly, we will not accept torture in our name. Not of the accused. Not of the mentally ill. Not even of convicted criminals. When our civilized society is attacked, no matter what the justification, we will rise up to defend it.
The placement of human beings in solitary confinement is not a measure of their depravity. It is a measure of our own.
Lynn Parramore is Editor of New Deal 2.0, Media Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and Co-founder of Recessionwire. This article originally appeared here.
See, also: U.S. can't link accused Army private [Bradley Manning] to Assange (NBC News 2011-01-25);
Salon's Glenn Greenwald on "disgustingly harsh conditions inside prisons" and related matters (Salon 2011-01-25);
US accused of inhumane treatment over Wikileaks soldier case (Amnesty International 2011-01-24).
Accountability: Torture as policy in the Bush years
The Torture Report, an initiative of the ACLU's National Security Project, aims to give a full account of the Bush administration's torture program, from its improvised origins to the systematized, lawyer-rationalized maltreatment of hundreds of prisoners in U.S. custody around the world. In this video, Glenn Greenwald, one of the Report's expert contributors, and principal author Larry Siems, who directs the Freedom to Write and International Programs at PEN American Center, reflect on the Report and the ongoing struggle for accountability.
The Torture Report: Chapter 1 - Origins -- Creating the space for torture; Chapter 2 - Experimenting With Torture -- Experimenting With Torture; Chapter 3 - Black Sites, Lies, and Videotapes -- Black Sites, Lies, and Videotapes; Chapter 4, Part 1 - A Ponzi Scheme of Torture -- The Scheme; Chapter 4, Part 2 – A Ponzi Scheme of Torture -- The Story Unravels (Jose Padilla); Chapter 4, Part 3 (new) – A Ponzi Scheme of Torture -- The Story Unravels (Binyam Mohammed & Abu Zubaydah).
Chapter 5 will be released next week: Where Are We Now? by Larry Siems (The Torture Report 2010-07-14)
The Torture Report: Chapter 1 - Origins -- Creating the space for torture; Chapter 2 - Experimenting With Torture -- Experimenting With Torture; Chapter 3 - Black Sites, Lies, and Videotapes -- Black Sites, Lies, and Videotapes; Chapter 4, Part 1 - A Ponzi Scheme of Torture -- The Scheme; Chapter 4, Part 2 – A Ponzi Scheme of Torture -- The Story Unravels (Jose Padilla); Chapter 4, Part 3 (new) – A Ponzi Scheme of Torture -- The Story Unravels (Binyam Mohammed & Abu Zubaydah).
Chapter 5 will be released next week: Where Are We Now? by Larry Siems (The Torture Report 2010-07-14)
Saturday Catchup 2010-05-22
Nicole Belle on CrooksAndLiars.com: Many people "...didn't think things could get worse than jingoism and dishonesty of the Bush/Cheney years....that more than a year into the Obama presidency that things like the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1968 Fair Housing Act would be considered less than settled matters....that thinking that the world's superpower should be able to offer health care to its citizens would make one a Maoist/Stalinist/Communist, despite the fact that most Americans want it too...Or that suddenly the existence of undocumented workers has become so intolerable that we must address them with huge fences, detention camps, moats and all other matter of law enforcement, despite the fact that there have always been an underclass of undocumented workers and not one person has proposed focusing energy on reducing demand by going after the employers of said workers. What I came away with from all these conversations is that the dialogue in this country is fundamentally dishonest, just as these members of the People's Front of Judea are. I mean, honestly, apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? Change PFJ to 'Tea Party' and change Romans to 'government' and you've got an idea of the intellectual dishonesty rampant:
An OA meeting. The setting is a dingy meeting room in a church basement. Seated in a circle on rickety folding chairs are LP Record, VHS Tape, 8-Track, Cassette Tape, Compact Disc, Video Rental Store, SLR Camera, Instant Camera, TV Antenna, Dot Matrix Printer, Copy Machine, Fold-Out Map, Typewriter, others.
Moderator: Welcome to Obsoletes Anonymous! I've gathered you all here to welcome our latest member, the Print Industry.
Print Industry: Hello, everyone. But there's been a mistake. I don't belong here.
(chuckles all around)
Print Industry (continues): I'm serious. I'm not obsolete. I'm relevant. Print books have been around for hundreds of years. They're never going to be replaced.
VHS Tape: Yeah, we all thought like that once.
LP Record: It's called denial. It's tough to deal with at first. -- Is Print Dead? by J.A. Konrath (Huffington Post 2010-05-21).
R.I.P.: Martin Gardner, 1914-2010 (Discover 2010/05/22)
The Nature of Things / Martin Gardner from Wagner Brenner on Vimeo.
All of the survivors feel hatred toward the United States. It is a real problem,this rising hatred: "People who have seen an air strike live on a monitor described it as both awe-inspiring and horrifying. 'You could see these little figures scurrying, and the explosion going off, and when the smoke cleared there was just rubble and charred stuff,' a former CIA officer who was based in Afghanistan after September 11th says of one attack....Human beings running for cover are such a common sight that they have inspired a slang term: 'squirters.'" -- Drones and Democracy by Kathy Kelly and Joshua Brollier (truthout 2010-05-20).
WalMart isn't the only American organization to have brought something home from China: With rendition, suspension of habeas corpus, and other Bush-era human rights violations continuing and worsening under Obama, the report by Think Progress, Why Bush’s ‘Enhanced Interrogation’ Program Failed, has taken on new relevance and urgency.
Oops!: Arizona seems about to say it's sorry.
Watch on YouTube.
We have a dream, too, and it's nothing like Dr. King's: "To understand Rand Paul's agonized contortions over America's civil rights consensus, let's review the tainted pedigree of the movement that reared him. Specifically, both the Kentucky Republican Senate nominee and his father, Ron Paul, have been closely associated over the past two decades with a faction that described itself as 'paleolibertarian,' led by former Ron Paul aide Lew Rockwell and the late writer Murray Rothbard. They eagerly forged an alliance with the 'paleoconservatives' behind Patrick Buchanan, the columnist and former presidential candidate whose trademarks are nativism, racism and anti-Semitism." -- The roots of Rand Paul's civil rights resentment by Joe Conason (Salon 2010-05-21). Or as Bill Maher put it the other night: "The shit doesn't fall far from the bat."
Change Watch: "Over the past couple years, I've written numerous times about the serious left-right coalition that had emerged in Britain -- between the Tories and Liberal Democrats -- in opposition to the Labour Government's civil liberties abuses, many (thought not all) of which were justified by Terrorism. In June of 2008, David Davis, a leading Tory MP, resigned from Parliament in protest of the Government's efforts to expand its power of preventive detention to 42 days (and was then overwhelmingly re-elected on a general platform of opposing growing surveillance and detention authorities). Numerous leading figures from both the Right and Left defied their party's establishment to speak out in support of Davis and against the Government's growing powers. Back then, the Liberal Democrats' Leader, Nick Clegg, notably praised the right-wing Davis' resignation, and to show his support for Davis' positions, Clegg even refused to run a LibDem candidate for that seat because, as he put it, "some issues 'go beyond party politics'." Now that this left-right, Tory/Lib-Dem alliance has removed the Labour Party from power and is governing Britain, these commitments to restoring core liberties -- Actual Change -- show no sign of retreating. Rather than cynically tossing these promises of restrained government power onto the trash pile of insincere campaign rhetoric, they are implementing them into actual policy. Clegg, now the Deputy Prime Minister, gave an extraordinary speech last week in which he vowed "the biggest shake-up of our democracy since 1832." -- The Tory/Lib-Dem Government endorses actual change by Glenn Greenwald (Salon 2010-05-21).
Time saver: Eclectic Method remixes all of Phish’s list of "99 Albums":
Eclectic Method Goes Phish :: 99 Albums in 4:20 from Eclectic Method on Vimeo.
"It's alive!" As a non-believer educated by Jesuits and likeminded cultivators of inquiring minds, I've never understood the objection to "playing god." Why would a higher being be irked by his creatures' clumsy efforts to figure out what he had in mind? So I don't see it as a moral or ethical dilemma that researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute have created a new organism by injecting man-made genetic material into the empty body of a cell. Artificial organisms almost certainly will provide solutions to many serious health and environmental difficulties, from cancer to oil spills. The only real question, just as it is with other scientific developments such as nuclear power and genetically modified food and life-prolonging drugs and technology, is whether "synthetic life" is worth the risks as a matter of public safety.
Constructing artificial creatures "has unimaginable potential risks," naysays Oxford ethics professor Julian Savulescu, since by "engineering organisms that could never naturally exist," we expose ourselves to possible calamities — from bio-weapon terrorism to environmental catastrophes — so destructive they could wipe out life as we know it. Such an outcome is certainly undesired, but, counters Ken MacLeod in the Guardian, worries about blowback from playing god are entirely "misguided:" our "biosphere comes up with natural resistance to entirely new organisms every day;" and while the threat of bio-terrorism "may be great," it's "not in principle greater than those posed by natural organisms" that already exist; besides, the potential upsides are so phenomenal, practical benefits ought to trump whatever squeamishness anyone may have over theoretical disasters. One can more easily imagine a bacterium that sucks carbon from the air than one that leeches poison into our water supply. I'm with David Ropeik, author of How Risky Is It, Really?: Why Our Fears Don't Always Match the Facts, that the "almost unimaginable promise" of being able to create life "to our specifications" shouldn't be sacrificed just because we've seen too many movies about Dr. Frankenstein, although his caution is well taken that "far less of that promise will be realized if the people doing this work" treat it, as Venter seems to, simply as a race to fame and fortune, and "fail to recognize and address [the public's concerns] about what they are doing."
Editorial: The debt that the public owes to police officers for taking the risks that they take can never be repaid. -- Growing risk for the police -- Extreme views behind the West Memphis tragedy: Two officers are dead after a shootout with a delusional conspiracy theorist (The Commercial Appeal, Memphis TN 2010-05-22).
Resource: The earliest gangs of New York were not criminal groups. Many street gang members were employed, mostly as common laborers. Some were bouncers in saloons and dance halls, as well as longshoremen. A few were apprentice butchers, carpenters, sailmakers, and shipbuilders. “They engaged in violence, but violence was a normal part of their always-contested environment; turf warfare was a condition of the neighborhood." Gangs formed the “basic unit of social life among the young males in New York in the nineteenth century.” More dangerous street gangs than previously seen emerged around 1820 from the persistent disorder that gripped the city slums, tenements, saloons, and dance halls. The Forty Thieves gang was characterized as “the first important and decisively dangerous gang of the quarter century.” It and other new groups of gangs that emerged in this period were centered in criminal enterprises as much as in territorial disputes. “It is axiomatic that the more sophisticated the gangs became, the more violent they grew as well.” -- History of Street Gangs in the United States (pdf) by James C. Howell and John P. Moore (National Gang Center Bulletin 2010-04).
Cartoon Beatles do the Dead Kennedys' California über alles:
The truth is out there: The only way to debunk an enshrined falsehood is with maximum reportorial firepower. Toting big guns and an itchy trigger-finger is American University professor W. Joseph Campbell, whose new book, Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism, flattens established myths that you were brought up to believe were true: that Orson Welles sparked a national panic with his 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast; that the New York Times suppressed news of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba at the request of the White House; that Edward R. Murrow destroyed Sen. Joseph McCarthy; that publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst told an illustrator, "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war," before the Spanish-American war started; and more. -- The Master of Debunk: W. Joseph Campbell corrects the record on 10 important misreported stories by Jack Shafer (Slate 2010-05-21).
Here comes the sun: One year ago this Friday, U.S. chief information officer Vivek Kundra launched an ambitious website called Data.gov to make the government’s vast stores of data available to the public. The thinking behind the site then, as now, was to give app developers access to these rich, comprehensive datasets on all sorts of topics — health care, education, energy, the environment and so on — in the hope that they would create useful tools for analyzing a range of information, from air quality by county to crime statistics by neighborhood and foreign aid by nation. To make good on incoming president Barack Obama's promise of transparency and open government, Data.gov launched with 47 datasets. By its first anniversary on Friday, Data.gov had ballooned to more than 250,000 datasets and racked up 97.6 million hits — not bad for a website whose main attractions are massive databases and wonky graphs. However, the sailing has not been entirely smooth. Federal Computer Week complained that Data.gov was a demonstration of “how not to do open government” because it didn’t pass “the ‘mom test.’” By that, FCW meant it was too hard for the average person to figure out what to do on the site and where everything was. Kundra’s team redesigned the entire Data.gov with that sort of feedback in mind, and the new homepage is markedly more intuitive and user-friendly. -- Sneak Peek: Obama Administration’s Redesigned Data.gov by Eliot Van Buskirk (Epicenter 2010-05-19).
This is about all you need to know about Lost:
An OA meeting. The setting is a dingy meeting room in a church basement. Seated in a circle on rickety folding chairs are LP Record, VHS Tape, 8-Track, Cassette Tape, Compact Disc, Video Rental Store, SLR Camera, Instant Camera, TV Antenna, Dot Matrix Printer, Copy Machine, Fold-Out Map, Typewriter, others.
Moderator: Welcome to Obsoletes Anonymous! I've gathered you all here to welcome our latest member, the Print Industry.
Print Industry: Hello, everyone. But there's been a mistake. I don't belong here.
(chuckles all around)
Print Industry (continues): I'm serious. I'm not obsolete. I'm relevant. Print books have been around for hundreds of years. They're never going to be replaced.
VHS Tape: Yeah, we all thought like that once.
LP Record: It's called denial. It's tough to deal with at first. -- Is Print Dead? by J.A. Konrath (Huffington Post 2010-05-21).
R.I.P.: Martin Gardner, 1914-2010 (Discover 2010/05/22)
The Nature of Things / Martin Gardner from Wagner Brenner on Vimeo.
All of the survivors feel hatred toward the United States. It is a real problem,this rising hatred: "People who have seen an air strike live on a monitor described it as both awe-inspiring and horrifying. 'You could see these little figures scurrying, and the explosion going off, and when the smoke cleared there was just rubble and charred stuff,' a former CIA officer who was based in Afghanistan after September 11th says of one attack....Human beings running for cover are such a common sight that they have inspired a slang term: 'squirters.'" -- Drones and Democracy by Kathy Kelly and Joshua Brollier (truthout 2010-05-20).
WalMart isn't the only American organization to have brought something home from China: With rendition, suspension of habeas corpus, and other Bush-era human rights violations continuing and worsening under Obama, the report by Think Progress, Why Bush’s ‘Enhanced Interrogation’ Program Failed, has taken on new relevance and urgency.
Oops!: Arizona seems about to say it's sorry.
Watch on YouTube.
We have a dream, too, and it's nothing like Dr. King's: "To understand Rand Paul's agonized contortions over America's civil rights consensus, let's review the tainted pedigree of the movement that reared him. Specifically, both the Kentucky Republican Senate nominee and his father, Ron Paul, have been closely associated over the past two decades with a faction that described itself as 'paleolibertarian,' led by former Ron Paul aide Lew Rockwell and the late writer Murray Rothbard. They eagerly forged an alliance with the 'paleoconservatives' behind Patrick Buchanan, the columnist and former presidential candidate whose trademarks are nativism, racism and anti-Semitism." -- The roots of Rand Paul's civil rights resentment by Joe Conason (Salon 2010-05-21). Or as Bill Maher put it the other night: "The shit doesn't fall far from the bat."
Change Watch: "Over the past couple years, I've written numerous times about the serious left-right coalition that had emerged in Britain -- between the Tories and Liberal Democrats -- in opposition to the Labour Government's civil liberties abuses, many (thought not all) of which were justified by Terrorism. In June of 2008, David Davis, a leading Tory MP, resigned from Parliament in protest of the Government's efforts to expand its power of preventive detention to 42 days (and was then overwhelmingly re-elected on a general platform of opposing growing surveillance and detention authorities). Numerous leading figures from both the Right and Left defied their party's establishment to speak out in support of Davis and against the Government's growing powers. Back then, the Liberal Democrats' Leader, Nick Clegg, notably praised the right-wing Davis' resignation, and to show his support for Davis' positions, Clegg even refused to run a LibDem candidate for that seat because, as he put it, "some issues 'go beyond party politics'." Now that this left-right, Tory/Lib-Dem alliance has removed the Labour Party from power and is governing Britain, these commitments to restoring core liberties -- Actual Change -- show no sign of retreating. Rather than cynically tossing these promises of restrained government power onto the trash pile of insincere campaign rhetoric, they are implementing them into actual policy. Clegg, now the Deputy Prime Minister, gave an extraordinary speech last week in which he vowed "the biggest shake-up of our democracy since 1832." -- The Tory/Lib-Dem Government endorses actual change by Glenn Greenwald (Salon 2010-05-21).
Time saver: Eclectic Method remixes all of Phish’s list of "99 Albums":
Eclectic Method Goes Phish :: 99 Albums in 4:20 from Eclectic Method on Vimeo.
"It's alive!" As a non-believer educated by Jesuits and likeminded cultivators of inquiring minds, I've never understood the objection to "playing god." Why would a higher being be irked by his creatures' clumsy efforts to figure out what he had in mind? So I don't see it as a moral or ethical dilemma that researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute have created a new organism by injecting man-made genetic material into the empty body of a cell. Artificial organisms almost certainly will provide solutions to many serious health and environmental difficulties, from cancer to oil spills. The only real question, just as it is with other scientific developments such as nuclear power and genetically modified food and life-prolonging drugs and technology, is whether "synthetic life" is worth the risks as a matter of public safety.
Constructing artificial creatures "has unimaginable potential risks," naysays Oxford ethics professor Julian Savulescu, since by "engineering organisms that could never naturally exist," we expose ourselves to possible calamities — from bio-weapon terrorism to environmental catastrophes — so destructive they could wipe out life as we know it. Such an outcome is certainly undesired, but, counters Ken MacLeod in the Guardian, worries about blowback from playing god are entirely "misguided:" our "biosphere comes up with natural resistance to entirely new organisms every day;" and while the threat of bio-terrorism "may be great," it's "not in principle greater than those posed by natural organisms" that already exist; besides, the potential upsides are so phenomenal, practical benefits ought to trump whatever squeamishness anyone may have over theoretical disasters. One can more easily imagine a bacterium that sucks carbon from the air than one that leeches poison into our water supply. I'm with David Ropeik, author of How Risky Is It, Really?: Why Our Fears Don't Always Match the Facts, that the "almost unimaginable promise" of being able to create life "to our specifications" shouldn't be sacrificed just because we've seen too many movies about Dr. Frankenstein, although his caution is well taken that "far less of that promise will be realized if the people doing this work" treat it, as Venter seems to, simply as a race to fame and fortune, and "fail to recognize and address [the public's concerns] about what they are doing." Editorial: The debt that the public owes to police officers for taking the risks that they take can never be repaid. -- Growing risk for the police -- Extreme views behind the West Memphis tragedy: Two officers are dead after a shootout with a delusional conspiracy theorist (The Commercial Appeal, Memphis TN 2010-05-22).
Resource: The earliest gangs of New York were not criminal groups. Many street gang members were employed, mostly as common laborers. Some were bouncers in saloons and dance halls, as well as longshoremen. A few were apprentice butchers, carpenters, sailmakers, and shipbuilders. “They engaged in violence, but violence was a normal part of their always-contested environment; turf warfare was a condition of the neighborhood." Gangs formed the “basic unit of social life among the young males in New York in the nineteenth century.” More dangerous street gangs than previously seen emerged around 1820 from the persistent disorder that gripped the city slums, tenements, saloons, and dance halls. The Forty Thieves gang was characterized as “the first important and decisively dangerous gang of the quarter century.” It and other new groups of gangs that emerged in this period were centered in criminal enterprises as much as in territorial disputes. “It is axiomatic that the more sophisticated the gangs became, the more violent they grew as well.” -- History of Street Gangs in the United States (pdf) by James C. Howell and John P. Moore (National Gang Center Bulletin 2010-04).
Cartoon Beatles do the Dead Kennedys' California über alles:
The truth is out there: The only way to debunk an enshrined falsehood is with maximum reportorial firepower. Toting big guns and an itchy trigger-finger is American University professor W. Joseph Campbell, whose new book, Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism, flattens established myths that you were brought up to believe were true: that Orson Welles sparked a national panic with his 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast; that the New York Times suppressed news of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba at the request of the White House; that Edward R. Murrow destroyed Sen. Joseph McCarthy; that publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst told an illustrator, "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war," before the Spanish-American war started; and more. -- The Master of Debunk: W. Joseph Campbell corrects the record on 10 important misreported stories by Jack Shafer (Slate 2010-05-21).
Here comes the sun: One year ago this Friday, U.S. chief information officer Vivek Kundra launched an ambitious website called Data.gov to make the government’s vast stores of data available to the public. The thinking behind the site then, as now, was to give app developers access to these rich, comprehensive datasets on all sorts of topics — health care, education, energy, the environment and so on — in the hope that they would create useful tools for analyzing a range of information, from air quality by county to crime statistics by neighborhood and foreign aid by nation. To make good on incoming president Barack Obama's promise of transparency and open government, Data.gov launched with 47 datasets. By its first anniversary on Friday, Data.gov had ballooned to more than 250,000 datasets and racked up 97.6 million hits — not bad for a website whose main attractions are massive databases and wonky graphs. However, the sailing has not been entirely smooth. Federal Computer Week complained that Data.gov was a demonstration of “how not to do open government” because it didn’t pass “the ‘mom test.’” By that, FCW meant it was too hard for the average person to figure out what to do on the site and where everything was. Kundra’s team redesigned the entire Data.gov with that sort of feedback in mind, and the new homepage is markedly more intuitive and user-friendly. -- Sneak Peek: Obama Administration’s Redesigned Data.gov by Eliot Van Buskirk (Epicenter 2010-05-19).
This is about all you need to know about Lost:
Saturday Catchup: Stuff you might have missed
Politics: Guilty of Sedition? How the Right Is Undermining Our Government's Authority and Capability to Run the Country by Sara Robinson (Campaign for America's Future/AlterNet) | For more than 40 years, the Right has systematically sought to delegitimize the United States government. It is time to make them stop.
Public Policy: Wealth for the Common Good is a sensible, factual report -- by a network of business leaders, wealthy individuals and partners supporting public policies that promote shared prosperity and fair taxation -- that shows how tax policy over the last half century has favored the wealthiest Americans at the expense of a strong and secure middle class. Read the report. Sign a petition to end tax breaks for households with incomes over $235,000.
Security State: Abu Zubaydah: Tortured for Nothing by Andy Worthington (AndyWorthington.com 2010-04-06): A year ago, summing up the results of Zubaydah’s torture, a former intelligence official stated, bluntly, “We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms.”
Media: Is This the Future of Journalism?: Why Wikileaks matters by Jonathan Stray (Foreign Policy 2010-04-07) | Dismissed as just a website, Wikileaks shows how journalism is done, new media-style. Also: Wikileaks: reaction to the Collateral Murder video by Richard Adams (Guardian UK 2010-04-08). Update: WikiLeaks has a problem going mainstream: The content WikiLeaks has released has been shocking. So why has it has had so little effect? by Colin Horgan (Guardian UK 2010-06-27).
Media: How journalists become prisoners of their preconceptions: The Bias of Veteran Journalists by Lane Wallace (The Atlantic 2010-04-05).
Musical Interlude:
One, two, kiss your daddy do
Nine, ten, daddy will say when
Daddy loves his baby, daddy loves his baby
Daddy loves his baby and baby's gonna get a big bang outa that
(writer: unknown)
I'm just sayin'.
Media: The Creed of Objectivity and The New York Times by Barnabe F. Geisweiller: Just how objective can the New York Times' correspondent in Israel and Palestine, Ethan Bronner, be when he has a son serving in the Israel Defense Forces - the Israeli army. In an article published March 28, Bronner showed there was cause for concern (truthout 2010-04-06).
Media: Inside The Media Blackout Scandal in The Middle East’s Only Democracy by Max Blumenthal (AlterNet 2010-04-06) | Ours is not the only country where the military is intimidating the elected government.
Bozo Nation: "Right. I get it. I should probably ignore him. Why should I waste time writing about Glenn Beck again? As hard as it is to believe, most days I intentionally ignore Glenn Beck posts and videos on the blogs. My recurring reaction is generally twofold. One: he's exhausting to watch because just as I'm wrapping my head around one line of googly-eyed horseshit, he belts out another ridiculous, melodramatic or dangerous line, and before I know it, I'm faced with a log-jam of crazy, forcing me to scramble for either an oxygen mask or a stiff drink. And, two: why pay attention to the television equivalent of an escaped mental patient screaming gibberish on the median strip at a busy intersection?" -- Bob Cesca Exposing Glenn Beck as a Dangerous Fraud (Huffington Post 2010-04-07)
Profile: Merry Prankster still stirring the pot by Brad Oswald (Winnipeg Free Press 2010-04-05) | Paul Krassner has been an inspiration to me for 45 years. Plus, yesterday was his birthday.
Politics: Progressive Caucus Outlines Their Plan To Give Coal Lobby Everything It Wants
by Jane Hamsher (FireDogLake) The Hill has an article on the Progressive Caucus strategy for dealing with cap & trade. It leaves the reader to infer quite a bit, so FDL's mother hen helpfully translates.
If Duane Allman and Jack Bruce had a baby...
Book review: Behind Obama’s Cool by Gary Wills (New York Times 2010-04-07) | In his reading of The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, David Remnick's exhaustive pre-presidential biography, the always thoughtful Wills ponders how our shape-shifting prez got that way.
Social Media: How I learned to love Twitter by @MargaretAtwood (Guardian UK 2010-04-07) | I keep telling writers why they should love Twitter. Maybe now they'll believe me.
Oddities: Finally, a reminder from an unexpected source of all the little wonders of the universe that we miss every day:
Public Policy: Wealth for the Common Good is a sensible, factual report -- by a network of business leaders, wealthy individuals and partners supporting public policies that promote shared prosperity and fair taxation -- that shows how tax policy over the last half century has favored the wealthiest Americans at the expense of a strong and secure middle class. Read the report. Sign a petition to end tax breaks for households with incomes over $235,000.
Security State: Abu Zubaydah: Tortured for Nothing by Andy Worthington (AndyWorthington.com 2010-04-06): A year ago, summing up the results of Zubaydah’s torture, a former intelligence official stated, bluntly, “We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms.”
Media: Is This the Future of Journalism?: Why Wikileaks matters by Jonathan Stray (Foreign Policy 2010-04-07) | Dismissed as just a website, Wikileaks shows how journalism is done, new media-style. Also: Wikileaks: reaction to the Collateral Murder video by Richard Adams (Guardian UK 2010-04-08). Update: WikiLeaks has a problem going mainstream: The content WikiLeaks has released has been shocking. So why has it has had so little effect? by Colin Horgan (Guardian UK 2010-06-27).
Media: How journalists become prisoners of their preconceptions: The Bias of Veteran Journalists by Lane Wallace (The Atlantic 2010-04-05).
Musical Interlude:
One, two, kiss your daddy do
Nine, ten, daddy will say when
Daddy loves his baby, daddy loves his baby
Daddy loves his baby and baby's gonna get a big bang outa that
(writer: unknown)
I'm just sayin'.
Media: The Creed of Objectivity and The New York Times by Barnabe F. Geisweiller: Just how objective can the New York Times' correspondent in Israel and Palestine, Ethan Bronner, be when he has a son serving in the Israel Defense Forces - the Israeli army. In an article published March 28, Bronner showed there was cause for concern (truthout 2010-04-06).
Media: Inside The Media Blackout Scandal in The Middle East’s Only Democracy by Max Blumenthal (AlterNet 2010-04-06) | Ours is not the only country where the military is intimidating the elected government.
Bozo Nation: "Right. I get it. I should probably ignore him. Why should I waste time writing about Glenn Beck again? As hard as it is to believe, most days I intentionally ignore Glenn Beck posts and videos on the blogs. My recurring reaction is generally twofold. One: he's exhausting to watch because just as I'm wrapping my head around one line of googly-eyed horseshit, he belts out another ridiculous, melodramatic or dangerous line, and before I know it, I'm faced with a log-jam of crazy, forcing me to scramble for either an oxygen mask or a stiff drink. And, two: why pay attention to the television equivalent of an escaped mental patient screaming gibberish on the median strip at a busy intersection?" -- Bob Cesca Exposing Glenn Beck as a Dangerous Fraud (Huffington Post 2010-04-07)
Profile: Merry Prankster still stirring the pot by Brad Oswald (Winnipeg Free Press 2010-04-05) | Paul Krassner has been an inspiration to me for 45 years. Plus, yesterday was his birthday.Politics: Progressive Caucus Outlines Their Plan To Give Coal Lobby Everything It Wants
by Jane Hamsher (FireDogLake) The Hill has an article on the Progressive Caucus strategy for dealing with cap & trade. It leaves the reader to infer quite a bit, so FDL's mother hen helpfully translates.
If Duane Allman and Jack Bruce had a baby...
Book review: Behind Obama’s Cool by Gary Wills (New York Times 2010-04-07) | In his reading of The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, David Remnick's exhaustive pre-presidential biography, the always thoughtful Wills ponders how our shape-shifting prez got that way.
Social Media: How I learned to love Twitter by @MargaretAtwood (Guardian UK 2010-04-07) | I keep telling writers why they should love Twitter. Maybe now they'll believe me.
Oddities: Finally, a reminder from an unexpected source of all the little wonders of the universe that we miss every day:
War Crimes: Spanish criminals get our criminals off the hook
The big news while I was in Spain last month was the investigation by a local judge of the policy of systematic, institutionalized torture by Bush administration officials as part of the "war on terror." When I got home, I wasn't surprised to find the story hadn't gotten similar play in American papers, even though the six former 
Bush officials in the judge's sights include former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, torture memoist John Yoo, and David Addington, Cheney's chief of staff.
The judge in question, Baltazar Garzon, one of six investigating magistrates of the Criminal Court of Spain, acts on the legal theory that there is no statue of limitations on war crimes or crimes against humanity. He has pursued investigations of massacres of political opponents by Spanish fascists, murderous regimes in Chile and Argentina, and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's involvement in Operation Condor.
Now it looks like the Bush co-conspirators can rest easier in their beds, if not their souls. Judge Garzon is being targeted by the Spanish Right for investigating "disappearances" during the Spanish Civil War and Franscisco Franco era in contradiction to the granting of an official amnesty by the Spanish state. Since it seems clear the United States will not clean its own house with regard to criminal activity by past leaders, all we can hope for is now is that an international tribunal like the World Court will be moved to hold responsible for their crimes the torture perps of the Bush era.
Further reading:
Spain considers prosecuting U.S. officials for torture by Marjorie Miller (Los Angeles Times 2009-05-06)
Spain rejects US 'torture' probe (BBC News 2009-04-16)
Spanish judge opens probe into Guantanamo torture (Agence France-Presse 2009-04-16)
Spain Allows Case Against Noted Judge by Andrés Cala (New York Times 2010-03-25)
Also, although it is only tangently related, the drily titled Secondary Wars and Atrocities of the Twentieth Century is worth filing for future reference.
Bush officials in the judge's sights include former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, torture memoist John Yoo, and David Addington, Cheney's chief of staff.The judge in question, Baltazar Garzon, one of six investigating magistrates of the Criminal Court of Spain, acts on the legal theory that there is no statue of limitations on war crimes or crimes against humanity. He has pursued investigations of massacres of political opponents by Spanish fascists, murderous regimes in Chile and Argentina, and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's involvement in Operation Condor.
Now it looks like the Bush co-conspirators can rest easier in their beds, if not their souls. Judge Garzon is being targeted by the Spanish Right for investigating "disappearances" during the Spanish Civil War and Franscisco Franco era in contradiction to the granting of an official amnesty by the Spanish state. Since it seems clear the United States will not clean its own house with regard to criminal activity by past leaders, all we can hope for is now is that an international tribunal like the World Court will be moved to hold responsible for their crimes the torture perps of the Bush era.
Further reading:
Spain considers prosecuting U.S. officials for torture by Marjorie Miller (Los Angeles Times 2009-05-06)
Spain rejects US 'torture' probe (BBC News 2009-04-16)
Spanish judge opens probe into Guantanamo torture (Agence France-Presse 2009-04-16)
Spain Allows Case Against Noted Judge by Andrés Cala (New York Times 2010-03-25)
Also, although it is only tangently related, the drily titled Secondary Wars and Atrocities of the Twentieth Century is worth filing for future reference.
Standards: Bush’s Torture Memos Author OK with Nuking Civilians, Draws the Line at Crushing Children’s Testicles
George Bush's senior Justice Department legal adviser John Yoo defended comments that the president could unilaterally "massacre" civilians in wartime in a newly released interview.
The rest of the story:
Top Bush adviser defends using nuclear weapons on civilians by John Byrne (RawStory).
The rest of the story:
Top Bush adviser defends using nuclear weapons on civilians by John Byrne (RawStory).
Change Watch: Why Greg Craig had to go
Pres. Obama turned to Craig to roll back Bush-era policies in the war on terrorism. But by September, Craig had been sidelined by "pragmatists."
The rest of the story: The Fall of Greg Craig by Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopf (Time 2009-11-19)
Obama Is Playing Politics With Gitmo by Nick Baumann (Mother Jones Online/AlterNet 2009-11-23)
The rest of the story: The Fall of Greg Craig by Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopf (Time 2009-11-19)
Obama Is Playing Politics With Gitmo by Nick Baumann (Mother Jones Online/AlterNet 2009-11-23)
Change Watch: Gates Invokes New Authority to Block Release of Detainee Abuse Photos
"Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has blocked the release of photographs depicting US soldiers abusing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, invoking new powers just granted to him by Congress that allows him to circumvent the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and keep the images under wraps on national security grounds."
The rest of the story: Gates Invokes New Authority to Block Release of Detainee Abuse Photos by Jason Leopold (truthout 2009-11-14)
Follow up: Why Isn't Gates Blocks Torture Photos Bigger News? by RFK Lives (Daily Kos 2009-11-15)
The rest of the story: Gates Invokes New Authority to Block Release of Detainee Abuse Photos by Jason Leopold (truthout 2009-11-14)
Follow up: Why Isn't Gates Blocks Torture Photos Bigger News? by RFK Lives (Daily Kos 2009-11-15)
Action: Mobilization Against the War October 5
The National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance, a nationwide network of individuals and groups committed to ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and working for the abolition of torture, is calling for a nonviolent action next week at the White House. The organization, utilizing the nonviolent practices and disciplines of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Dorothy Day, will deliver a petition to President Barack Obama calling for withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, ending the illegal bombing with US drones, including in neighboring Pakistan, and the closing of the Bagram prison and ending indefinite detention and torture.
The letter will also call for the conversion of U.S. resources to life-sustaining uses, including the funding and the rebuilding of Afghanistan's and Iraq's infrastructure and and the provision of medical assistance to Afghans and Iraqis, in addition to poverty reduction programs in the United States and world wide. Finally, the groups are seeking to hold accountable those who have committed war crimes.
The gathering will begin at McPherson Square, 15th and I Streets NW, at 10 a.m. on Monday, October 5th and then silently proceed two and a half blocks to the White House to deliver a document to the president and request a meeting with him. Liz McAlister will speak. Participating will be various affinity groups, such as the Atlantic Life Community, Witness Against Torture, Veterans for Peace, The World Can't Wait, and Activist Response Team (A.R.T.). Other groups fully endorsing the action and participating are Peace Action, Code Pink, The War Resisters' League, Voters for Peace, The Washington Peace Center, and Student Peace Action Network. Participants are asked to wear either a "We Will Not Be Silent" t-shirt or a simple black shirt.
The letter will also call for the conversion of U.S. resources to life-sustaining uses, including the funding and the rebuilding of Afghanistan's and Iraq's infrastructure and and the provision of medical assistance to Afghans and Iraqis, in addition to poverty reduction programs in the United States and world wide. Finally, the groups are seeking to hold accountable those who have committed war crimes.
The gathering will begin at McPherson Square, 15th and I Streets NW, at 10 a.m. on Monday, October 5th and then silently proceed two and a half blocks to the White House to deliver a document to the president and request a meeting with him. Liz McAlister will speak. Participating will be various affinity groups, such as the Atlantic Life Community, Witness Against Torture, Veterans for Peace, The World Can't Wait, and Activist Response Team (A.R.T.). Other groups fully endorsing the action and participating are Peace Action, Code Pink, The War Resisters' League, Voters for Peace, The Washington Peace Center, and Student Peace Action Network. Participants are asked to wear either a "We Will Not Be Silent" t-shirt or a simple black shirt.
Clip File: CIA Torturers Running Scared
by Ray McGovern (After Downing Street 2009-09-23)
"For the CIA supervisors and operatives who were responsible for torture, the chickens are coming home to roost. That is, if President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder mean it when they say no one is above the law — and if they have the courage to stand up to brazen intimidation.
"Unable to prevent Attorney General Eric Holder from starting an investigation of torture and other war crimes that implicate CIA officials past and present, some of those same CIA officials, together with what in intelligence circles are called 'agents of influence' in the media, are pulling out all the stops to quash the Department of Justice’s preliminary investigation.
"In what should be seen as a bizarre twist, seven CIA directors—including three who are themselves implicated in planning and conducting torture and assassination— have asked the President to call off Holder.
"Can someone please tell me how could the whole thing be more transparent?"
The rest of the story: CIA Torturers Running Scared by Ray McGovern (After Downing Street 2009-09-23)
"For the CIA supervisors and operatives who were responsible for torture, the chickens are coming home to roost. That is, if President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder mean it when they say no one is above the law — and if they have the courage to stand up to brazen intimidation.
"Unable to prevent Attorney General Eric Holder from starting an investigation of torture and other war crimes that implicate CIA officials past and present, some of those same CIA officials, together with what in intelligence circles are called 'agents of influence' in the media, are pulling out all the stops to quash the Department of Justice’s preliminary investigation.
"In what should be seen as a bizarre twist, seven CIA directors—including three who are themselves implicated in planning and conducting torture and assassination— have asked the President to call off Holder.
"Can someone please tell me how could the whole thing be more transparent?"
The rest of the story: CIA Torturers Running Scared by Ray McGovern (After Downing Street 2009-09-23)
Change Watch: U.S. Says Rendition to Continue, but With More Oversight -- Times Headline
As I wrote during the late campaign, in foreign and military affairs, the Democrats' promise is not really to do things differently, just to do them better.
The Obama administration will continue the Bush administration’s practice of sending terrorism suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation, but pledges to closely monitor their treatment to ensure that they are not tortured, administration officials said Monday.The rest of the story: U.S. Says Rendition to Continue, but With More Oversight by David Johnston (New York Times 2009-08-24)
Human rights advocates condemned the decision, saying that continuing the practice, known as rendition, would still allow the transfer of prisoners to countries with a history of torture. They said that promises from other countries of humane treatment, called “diplomatic assurances,” were no protection against abuse.
Torture: Democracy cannot survive without accountablity
Attorney General Eric Holder is considering appointing a special prosecutor to investigate whether crimes were committed by Americans who tortured prisoners in the wake of 9/11. It goes without saying that torture is contrary to American values. It is also against the law. In the aftermath of World War Two, at the war crimes trials at Nuremberg, we held the 
architects and engineers of Nazism responsible for Germany's actions in violation of international law and civilized behavior. Today, justice will not be served equally if only low-level soldiers and security personnel are held accountable for crimes that were planned and executed at the highest levels of government. Holder is getting resistance from within the Obama White House and will need public support if he is to proceed. But it is important that, if he does go ahead, no compromise be struck that allows the appointment of a prosecutor who is prohibited from following the evidence up the chain of command.
Working Assets' CREDO Action has ginned up a petition to help the A.G. stick to his guns:
See, also: Clamor grows over CIA secrets.
Follow up: International Justice Group Takes Aim at Bush Officials (Washington Independent 2009-11-17)
architects and engineers of Nazism responsible for Germany's actions in violation of international law and civilized behavior. Today, justice will not be served equally if only low-level soldiers and security personnel are held accountable for crimes that were planned and executed at the highest levels of government. Holder is getting resistance from within the Obama White House and will need public support if he is to proceed. But it is important that, if he does go ahead, no compromise be struck that allows the appointment of a prosecutor who is prohibited from following the evidence up the chain of command.Working Assets' CREDO Action has ginned up a petition to help the A.G. stick to his guns:
"Attorney General Holder, it is your duty to uphold the constitution and protect the rule of law. The evidence before you demands that you launch an investigation into possible crimes committed under the Bush administration and to prosecute if warranted. This investigation must not be limited to low-level foot soldiers, but should seek justice at the highest levels. Assign a prosecutor to investigate torture and do not rule out as targets architects of the Bush administration's torture program including former Vice President Dick Cheney and his legal adviser David Addington."You can sign the petition here.
See, also: Clamor grows over CIA secrets.
Follow up: International Justice Group Takes Aim at Bush Officials (Washington Independent 2009-11-17)
Accountability: Was the Bush administration seditious?
If you are wondering if there is legally damning evidence of a conspiracy by the Bush-Cheney crowd to overthrow the Constitution, consider this from an interview by Naomi Wolf with Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. The recently released memos by Bush justice department attorney John Yoo, Ratner says, deliver a call for "law by fiat.
I call it 'Fuhrer's law.' What those memos lay out means the end of the system of checks and balances in this country. It means the end of the system in which the courts, legislature and executive each had a function and they could check each other.Go. Read: Do the Secret Bush Memos Amount to Treason? Top Constitutional Scholar Says Yes by Naomi Wolf (AlterNet)
What the memos set out is a system in which the president's word is law, and Yoo is very clear about that: the president's word is not only law according to these memos, but no law or constitutional right or treaty can restrict the president's authority.
What Yoo says is that the president's authority as commander in chief in the so-called war on terror is not bound by any law passed by Congress, any treaty, or the protections of free speech, due process and the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. The First, Fourth and Fifth amendments -- gone.
What this actually means is that the president can order the military to operate in the U.S. and to operate without constitutional restrictions. They -- the military -- can pick you or me up in the U.S. for any reason and without any legal process. They would not have any restrictions on entering your house to search it, or to seize you. They can put you into a brig without any due process or going to court. (That's the Fourth and Fifth amendments.)
The military can disregard the Posse Comitatus law, which restricts the military from acting as police in the the United States. And the president can, in the name of wartime restrictions, limit free speech. There it is in black and white: we are looking at one-person rule without any checks and balances -- a lawless state. Law by fiat.
Who has suspended the law this way in the past? It is like a Caesar's law in Rome; a Mussolini's law in Italy; a Fuhrer's law in Germany; a Stalin's law in the Soviet Union. It is right down the line. It is enforcing the will of the dictator through the military.
Torture: So it goes
Jeff Norman notes that treaty obligations, the Geneva Conventions, accepted international law, the U.S. Constitution and Eric Holder's testimony under oath combine to require that persons guilty of "acts of torture" be held accountable for their crimes. Glad that's settled.
Go. Read. Myths by Citizen Jeff.
Go. Read. Myths by Citizen Jeff.
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