We tortured people, not "folks" — a foreign yin to domestic yang

And, for nothing valuable on intelligence, because just about anybody will say anything to captors to end torture.

Anthony Romero, ACLU
Ex Dir/Wikipedia photo

But, the head of the nation's "premier" organization on "civil liberties" (sorry, scare quotes is the only way I can write) thinks we should pardon the torturers. See below for details on a new low from the ACLU.

The ACLU, the same folks who said last month that Citizens United is good, now think we should pardon the torturers.

And torturers they are.

And, if not torturers, orderers of torture, which, by law, means they were torturers too.

Period.

And, that's not all from an executive summary of the Senate report on the CIA's torture.

We killed one person (that we know of) from hypothermia. Waterboarding, aka simulated drowning, almost did the real thing to at least one person.

For all, that, though, most of the details, such as abu-Zubaydah's death and Gul Rahman's near drowning, have been known for years.

They were known to the general public and to President Obama before he made his pseudo-jocular "we tortured some folks" comment.



And, yet, the Dick Cheneys of the world continue to lie about what this achieved, even as the George Bushes of the world talk about "a few bad apples" and the Barack Obamas of the world refuse to prosecute either one.

Arguably, and connected with it due to salvage sale of surplus hardware, this is the flip side of domestic police violence.

While we're not all bad apples, either in foreign intelligence gathering or domestic policing, we're more than "a few."

And, here, as in a lot of places, power corrupts.

==

Back to the ACLU and Romero's very-pun-intented tortured reasoning.

Folks, if you want to donate to a civil liberties charity, there's one clear choice.

And, it's NOT the American Civil Liberties Union. It's the Center for Constitutional Rights.

A month after the group, in a press release, said Citizens United was good, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero has said we ought to pardon all the torturers for the torture they ordered to be committed.

This is the same Romero who, in conjunction with then-board president Nadine Strossen, engaged in a purge of "dissident" board members several years ago. I've got more on the purge, with links to extended pieces by Wendy Kaminer, on this blog. (Click the "ACLU" tag.)

Do NOT support the ACLU Nationwide. Period.

And, for a lawyer, Romero's reasoning to justify the pardons is incredibly stupid:

I have come to think that President Obama should issue pardons, after all — because it may be the only way to establish, once and for all, that torture is illegal.

So, we should pardon people we believe to have committed manslaughter or robbery, both of which, like torture, are on the books as defined crimes, because somebody else won’t prosecute?

More stupidity follows:

What is the difference between this — essentially granting tacit pardons for torture — and formally pardoning those who authorized torture? In both cases, those who tortured avoid accountability. 

 But with the tacit pardons, the president leaves open the very real possibility that officials will resurrect the torture policies in the future.

Really? And, they wouldn’t do the same with actual instead of tacit pardons?

A liar, a thug and an idiot, all three.

Besides, per Ben Emmerson of the United Nations, torture as a crime against humanity falls under international law, not just US law.

===

More UGH:

The two psychologists behind reversing the military's SERE training made $80 million for their pains. Let's also not forget that the American Psychological Association has never formally renounced or denounced psychologists participating in torture sessions. (The American Psychiatric Association, on the other hand, has been against it from the start.

That said, this too is nothing new; basic information about this, like most of the rest of the stuff in the Senate's executive summary, came out in 2009. Read this NYT piece.

And, as far as Folks Torturer? He named one of those unapologetic psychologists — the head one at Gitmo — to head up a task force on the health of military families.

==

Finally, let's not forget that I don't recall the racist, ultra-Zionist New Republic, now thankfully half-dead, ever criticizing this.

#Krugman guzzles #Obamiac Kool-Aid, the full party jug, gets an F for #fail

Paul Krugman is "doowwwn" with his Obama bromance!

Paul Krugman, possibly the best of the New York Times' op-ed columnists (of course, that could be seen as similar to the best bagel in Bismarck, North Dakota, and besides, overall, Gail Collins is better), once an Obama critic for the president having the Teddy Roosevelt-quipped "backbone of a chocolate eclair," now calls him "one of the most consequential, and yes, successful, presidents in American history."

Man, Krugman could't do much better, or rather, worse, if he were paid White House PR flak. And, if he were paid, it would be by the soft bigotry of low expectations count, because that's what ultimately drives twaddle like this.

Here's Krugman's tout list:

His health reform is imperfect but still a huge step forward – and it's working better than anyone expected. Financial reform fell far short of what should have happened, but it's much more effective than you'd think. Economic management has been half-crippled by Republican obstruction, but has nonetheless been much better than in other advanced countries. And environmental policy is starting to look like it could be a major legacy.

I'll go through that in detail in a minute.

First, Krugman dismisses the likes of Cornel West, who call him a fake progressive. Actually, I'd dismiss West by calling him a fake whiner; the reality of Obama's neoliberalism on fiscal issues, sellout on civil liberties issues, and other things, were all visible before the 2008 general election — a general election in which West avidly supported Dear Leader.

On health care, Krugman ignores that Obamacare was:
1. Written by AHIP and Mod Max Baucus;
3. Dilatory to the nth degree in its passage — whatever Dear Leader wanted should have been passed long, long before Scott Brown was elected to the Senate from Massachusetts
3. Based on Dear Leader lying all along about his stance on single-payer.

But, that's all pre-passage stuff.

Let's look at post-passage stuff.
1. More and more information that the most neoliberal parts of Obamacare, like electronic patient records, are nowhere near what they were cracked up to be
2. A horrible rollout (hey, Krugman, per Mike Dukakis, the fish rots at the top, especially on a "signature achievement")
3. Relatively modest proof so far of restraint of medical inflation rates.

Specific to that link on EPRs? From that story:

Frustrated medical professionals across the country told The Dallas Morning News that the expensive systems — the technology used by Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, part of a $200 million investment by its parent company — are often unwieldy and problematic.
 (Experts) have documented cases where patient histories and other information have seemingly vanished from software or ended up in the wrong place.
 And researchers have found that emergency room doctors are more frenzied in keeping up with data demands because of the complicated systems, even hiring personal scribes to input information for them on the fly.

That said, per the story, EPRs were actually fobbed off on the American public by Shrub Bush. But Obama gleefully embraced them.

Krugman touts a drop of about 10 million people without health insurance. Nice, but far short of the 25-30 million mentioned not too many years ago.

Krugman then claims single-payer wasn't politically feasible. I'd argue it was before Scott Brown was elected, at least. But, because it was never in the playbook of a man who, during the 2008 primaries, didn't "get" the need for the individual mandate, or else was lying on that issue too, what else can you say?

Financial reform? Here's Krugman:

You often hear Dodd- Frank, the financial-reform bill that Obama signed into law in 2010, dismissed as toothless and meaningless. It isn't. It may not prevent the next financial crisis, but there's a good chance that it will at least make future crises less severe and easier to deal with.

Well, if that ain't praising with faint damns, what is? I'll skip past the rest of this section, because it's that bad. It's ugly. It's doubly bad in that Krugman doesn't even mention Tim Geithner's hiring by name. It's triply bad because Krugman brings out the "soft bigotry of low expectations" card by comparing US recovery from the Great Recession to that of the European Union.

(Of course, Obama's whole presidency, when discussed by Kool-Aid drinkers, whether regular ones or Johnny-come-latelys, benefits from the "soft bigotry of low expectations" compared to Shrub.)

Krugman then dismisses with a light shrug Obama's approach to war crimes, etc., not even mentioning Dear Leaders "we tortured some folks" phrase.

And, the violations of civil liberties that got EXPANDED by Dear Leader?

Krugman mentions them not at all.

Hell, David Frum could have written something just like this from the other side of the aisle about Shrub.

Seriously, while Obama may not be in the bottom 10 of US presidents so far, he's closer to that than to the top 10.

 And,  two other asides.

First, I guess Krugman is OK with surrendering his civil liberties.

Second, we have two-plus years of encomia like this? Oy.

Sen. Betty Crocker — wrong on torture, wrong on American history

Dianne Feinstein, aka Sen. Betty Crocker thinks torture is an "error" to be admitted. That's why any huff she has with the CIA will eventually be solved only to help Congress and not We the People:

Senate Intelligence Committee chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., maintained that the eventual release of the summary and findings will show “that this nation admits its errors, as painful as they may be, and seeks to learn from them.”

She called the findings shocking, adding: “The report exposes brutality that stands in stark contrast to our values as a nation. It chronicles a stain on our history that must never again be allowed to happen. This is not what Americans do.”

The report “certainly depicts the program as much, much worse than generally thought,” said Alberto Mora, a former Navy general counsel and an early critic of the Bush administration program. “Oh my gosh, it’s a devastating critique.”

The finding that 26 detainees were held without legal authorization and the confirmation that the CIA in some cases went beyond the techniques approved by the Justice Department might fuel legal challenges.

Uhh, first, as the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates would tell you, it's what white Americans did to black Americans for some 200 years, under guise of some legality, until Emancipation, then continued to do a century after that.

And, we did it to other white people elsewhere, too. Perhaps not as much as other countries, but we shot surrendered prisoners of war, in WWII, in Germany and Italy.

And, later than that, we committed a laundry list of atrocities in Vietnam.

And various things to American Indians — though, with one partial exception, the smallpoxed blankets is a myth, and the Indians, even if on the defensive, had no problems inflicting torture themselves.

And, I'm just hitting the high points of the low points.

Second, I doubt the legal challenges. Hamdam and Hamdi, the Supreme Court gave a bare nod to rights of detainees. But, I'm sure a Bush v. Gore type majority will flatly cut off any such suits against the US government or its agents.

No, not every Euro-American in US history is rotten to the core. But, American history has been about more than bad apples. It's been about bad appleseed, too.

And, until the likes of American exceptionalists, including most politicians of both major parties, admit that, we'll still be proving Santayana true, though not Marx.

We'll continue to repeat our unremembered history. Unfortunately, it will be always as tragedy in matters like this and never as farce.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/04/03/4037714/mcclatchy-senate-panel-finds-cia.html#storylink=cpy

Bin Laden death and torture

Update, May 3: Unfortunately, any "debate" over Osama bin Laden's death and the value of torture has been clusterfucked by reporting by the AP and other MSM that give the appearance Khalid Sheikh Mohammed revealed the name of Osama bin Laden's courier under torture.

Rather, as Andrew Sullivan and Marcy Wheeler report, that's totally false.

Whether the reportorial problem lies more with the AP et al, or with confusing/bad early info from Team Obama, I'm not sure. But, we have this "meme" now out there which is ultimately irrelevant. — End update

So, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was a lead, if not the only one, to the lead that led to the Osama bin Laden assault that lead to his death. (And, per the NYT, which just says "Guantanamo detainees," there may have been several leads.)

The McClatchy story is right — this will reignite the debate over torture. (That said, when did McClatchy go "soft" and stop using that word?)

First, KSM could have given out inaccurate blather here just like he did with other things.

Second, at the time he named this courier, that person may not have been so close to bin Laden as he became in later years.

Third, the "right" result doesn't make a wrong action right anyway.

The larger civil liberties fallout of the hunt for bin Laden? Here is a good laundry list.

Torture-loving, refuted

And thoroughly. Jane Mayer takes torture-loving BushCo speechwriter Mark Thiessen to the woodshed for a book that probably could have been written in crayon.

NO PROOF torture got KSM to ‘fess up’ to truths

Conservatives are already spinning this “new” story about Khalid Sheik Muhammed coughing up all sorts of information under waterboarding torture. But, it ain’t necessarily so.

Here’s the contradicting details.

John L. Helgerson, the former CIA inspector general who investigated the agency's detention and interrogation program, said his work did not put him in "a position to reach definitive conclusions about the effectiveness of particular interrogation methods."

"Certain of the techniques seemed to have little effect, whereas waterboarding and sleep deprivation were the two most powerful techniques and elicited a lot of information," he said in an interview. "But we didn't have the time or resources to do a careful, systematic analysis of the use of particular techniques with particular individuals and independently confirm the quality of the information that came out."

Beyond that, we already know KSM claimed oversight responsibility for particular al-Qaeda actions that he, in fact, did NOT run.

And, in fact, I think this is why top WaPost reporter Walter Pincus only has an end-of-story “tagline” rather than a byline. I think somebody higher up was pushing an angle on this and he demurred at more detailed involvement.
-END-

Holder ‘torture probe’ a sham and head fake?

The Washington Post mentions the details of what would — and would not — get investigated if Attorney General Eric Holder names a special prosecutor to investigate torture allegations against BushCo members — something Newsweek, in what looks more like a fluff piece, omitted.

(Hat tip to Greenwald, among others.)

Here’s the bottom line:

Sources said an inquiry would apply only to activities by interrogators, working in bad faith, that fell outside the "four corners" of the legal memos. . . . The actions of higher-level Bush policymakers are not under consideration for possible investigation.

So, this would be a bottom-feeder investigation, fishing up minnows while deliberately ignoring the sharks — and while pretending the minnows actually are sharks.

Per other links within his post, Greenwald notes that letting John Yoo’s opinion stand as final is essentially Nixonian: “If the president does it, it’s not illegal.” (Tim at Balloon Juice has more.)

Scott Horton claims Holder plans a real investigation, but his claim is undercut by the New York Times, which agrees in broad outline with the Post story linked at top.

Scott, like Glenn, is too smart to fall for sandbagging, at least I think he is, so I don’t know what’s up.

Anyway, to tie back to the Newsweek fluff, rather than this being a sign of Holder’s independence, you have to wonder if this was discussed in detail with the Obama White House.

Leon Panetta at CIA gets half a pass from Jane Mayer

Jane Mayer has a largely great piece on President Obama’s choice to head the spook shack.

After noting how Panetta has been a bit of a weathervane to his boss on issues such as accountability and transparency, Mayer has a great line:

America’s intelligence community is an incestuous one, making it difficult for a President to break with old ways of thinking.

All part of the two-party duopoly.

That said, Mayer has a clunker or two, like, “Obama’s message has been uncharacteristically muddled on the question of accountability” (emphasis added).

Nope, not uncharacteristic at all, Jane.

All in all, Mayer does a very good job of connecting dots from the recently released Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel torture memos and more, while looking at where Panetta sits right now.

That said, she has another clunker when she claims Obama “surprised” liberals by pressuring the British government to block release of various memos in the Binyam Mohammed suit.

Didn’t surprise me at all, Jane. Your definition of, or association with, liberals must not be quite as, well, liberal as mine.

John Yoo can be sued for torture memos

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White of San Francisco said Jose Padilla can sue Yoo for “deprivation of Padilla’s constitutional rights.”

The Justice Department, that is the Obama Justice Department, representing Yoo, argued for dismissal of the suit. Although it hasn’t said so yet, you can bet it will appeal.

Hmm, is there also a connection, however tenuous, between this and Obama’s pledge to censor the Abu Ghraib 2.0 pix?

Now, will allegedly “liberal” Berkeley have the balls to give Yoo the boot, tenure or no?

Obama ‘terror’ speech – C-minus at best?

The normal rhetoric that so many, not just limited to Obamiacs, find inspiring (Obamiacs, I suspect, find it intoxicating)?

I’ve never thought Obama was that inspiring of a speaker. Especially today.

I guess, after eight years of Shrub, on both rhetoric and reality, Obama benefits from the soft bigotry of low expectations.

In any case, that rhetoric, whether that good or not, was undercut today by some of the brass tacks (or is that brass knuckles) comments he made at bottom line.

The bottom line starts yesterday, actually, with President Obama’s meeting with leaders of civil liberties organizations. In that meeting, he flat-out rejected the idea of even one torture prosecution, as AG Eric Holder sat in uncomfortable silence. Michael Isikoff notes that he also veritably bristled at being told he was making BushCo policies his own.

It should be no surprise then, that in today’s speech, as Digby notes, Obama also rejected the idea of a special prosecutor or investigation. After all, if you’ve just said you’re not going to prosecute anybody, why do you need a special prosecutor?

At the Washington Post, Dan Froomkin has a full transcript, plus analysis, of the speech. His take:

In some parts of his speech, Obama appeared to be defending actions and even taking positions that didn't live up to his own professed standards.

So even some promises of reality beyond rhetoric are undercut. And, sometimes flimsily:

Obama spoke passionately about his commitment to transparency, but offered up the same lousy and unpersuasive excuses he did last week for his decision to fight the court-ordered release of more photos of prison abuse. In particular, the weight he put on his responsibility not to release information that would inflame our enemies was deeply disturbing.

It makes me think this is why Obama didn’t take the lead in the PR world on the Gitmo detainees issue. He’s trying to have his progressive cake and eat centrist reality too, and now the cake clearly has no clothes.

Back to Isikoff for more on that point:

Another issue raised at the meeting was the idea of a "truth commission" to investigate Bush-era policies. Obama didn't completely reject the idea, two sources said, but instead complained that current congressional investigations into such issues were too time-consuming for key members of his administration. Looking directly at Holder, the president reportedly said the attorney general was already spending too much time dealing with litigation related to Bush-administration policies. “He was worried that his people would be consumed with responding to these things,” said one of those present. “He said his staff was stretched very thin.”

Well, boo-hoo for the Obama Administration. Stop hiring so many czars inside the White House instead of department staff, or else make the czars do more work.
Greenwald a full transcript, plus analysis on the good, the bad, and primarily the ugly.

Obama blocking torture pix connected to A-stan general?

Andrew Sullivan makes the charge that President Obama’s refusal to release the Abu Ghraib 2.0 pix is related to new U.S. commander in Afghanistan Stanley McChrystal’s aiding and abetting of torture in Iraq.

If you want more than Sully’s summary, visit the full story in Esquire.

Given that McChrystal also has connections to the Pat Tillman death coverup, this is one of the clearest signs yet that, in foreign policy and American imperialism, Obama is Just.Another.Politician.™

And, in the latest Obama torture sellout …

President Barack Obama has officially decided to fight the release of torture pictures whose release the ACLU has won in court.

And, the ACLU is calling him out on it:

“The decision to not release the photographs makes a mockery of President Obama's promise of transparency and accountability,” said ACLU attorney Amrit Singh, who argued and won the case in front of the 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals in New York. “It is essential that these photographs be released so that the public can examine for itself the full scale and scope of prisoner abuse that was conducted in its name.”

You know the answer to this – vote Green in 2012.

Is Team Obama behind CIA torture leaks?

Behind all the commotion by Congressional Democrats that the CIA is deliberately leaking its take on 2002-03 briefings of Congressional Democrats on torture and torture-lite, otherwise known as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold is looking even further:

Intelligence Committee member Feingoldsaid it appears that “members of the committee or their staff were not in any way involved in [the release of the document]. It appears to come from the executive branch itself. ... I think it’s unbelievable.”

Would be a hard form of “pushback” against torture investigation, wouldn’t it? “Chicago politics”?

Yes and yes to the two rhetorical questions, therefore, Feingold could be quite right.

Obama the torture-enabler continues

Glenn Greenwald has the latest details on how the Obama Administration is continuing threats to cut off U.S. intelligence sharing with the British if the U.K. legal system continues to investigate the Guantanamo Bay torture claims of Binyam Mohamed.

And, Greenwald makes clear this is not simply Team Obama repeating BushCo threats. This is all fresh and new Obama threats. To make that more clear, Greenwald has a link to a British government letter (PDF, see pages 6-9) that this is all new threats.

The Washington Times has details of the threats. It seems clear, as Glenn says, that the British government is perfectly OK with being “shackled” by an outside government, hence the lack of protests on the side of Her Majesty’s Government as led by Gordon Brown.

Again, don’t vote for Obama in 2012; vote Green.

If David Broder is agin it, I’m for it – prosecuting torture

The so-called dean of Washington opinionators, David Broder, tells President Barack Obama to stick by his guns and not prosecute torturers, torture abetters, etc.

First, Broder shows he’s as bad at psychology as opinion writing, worrying about the vengeance factor.

Second, he gets facts about Obama wrong:

Obama, to his credit, has ended one of the darkest chapters of American history, when certain terrorist suspects were whisked off to secret prisons and subjected to waterboarding and other forms of painful coercion in hopes of extracting information about threats to the United States.

Guess Mr. Broder’s never heard of a place called Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, and the expansion it’s undergoing right now.

Third, Broder claims this is more scapegoating. Really.

Even by Broder’s standards, this is both stupid and platitutdinous both. Read the column for yourself.

Spain will drop case against BushCo torture enablers…

IF, IF, IF the Barack Obama Department of Justice will open an official investigation.

That’s one of several interesting items on the torture issue offered by Scott Horton. He also tells us AG Eric Holder and top staff are irate at how White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel et al (presumably acting on “higher orders,” irony, hypocrisy both intended) so politicized this issue.

Obama torture apologetics logic undercut

Mark Benjamin succinctly makes the case, based on the details of the just-released Senate Armed Services Committee special report (PDF), that the CIA was engaging in at least “torture lite” BEFORE the Department of Justice’s Bybee-Yoo-Bradbury lawyers’ troika issued what is clearly an ex post facto green light in August 2002.

The Justice Department opinion condoning abusive interrogations did not come out until August, eight months after the Bush administration started putting the program together and presumably well after Zubaydah's torture had begun.

In fact, as Mike Madden notes, the Senate report shows in detail what has already been known, that by the end of 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was pushing for at least “torture light” if not more.

Oh, and in yet another tie-back to Obama, let’s not forget that this all started, NOT at Gitmo, NOT at Abu Ghraib, but at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, the place Obama wants to expand.

It’s going to be a long 45 months. Because you and I will not change the Obama Administration. You can sign 500 petitions, and they will not change Barack Obama.

And, I will refuse to sign any more petitions to Obama anybody else asks me to sign until they pledge to support third-party politics.

Team Obama won’t even use word ‘torture’

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs et al in Team Obama treat the very word “torture” itself like it’s political dynamite.

But yet, don’t want to prosecute, or even investigate for possible prosecution, torture, torture green-lighting, etc.

Will the real White House torture policy please stand up?

President Barack Obama is feeling more political pressure to reverse Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s pronouncements and legally investigate the BushCo enablers of torture, if not the actual doers of the deed.

But, “legal sanctions”? Is this like Bill Clinton being disbarred from practicing law before the Supreme Court? Puhleeze.

At the same time, according to Talking Points Memo, the White House has apparently walked back Rahmbo’s original comments on the issue:

(A)dministration officials said Monday that Mr. Emanuel had meant the officials who ordered the policies carried out, not the lawyers who provided the legal rationale.

I say “apparently” in light of the legal sanctions idea also mentioned in the story.

Meanwhile, from Bizarro World, Uncle Fester, aka Darth Cheney, says that if Obama’s going to release some CIA torture memos, release them all.

Well, when an idiot goes “all in” at the poker table, take his money. Uncle Fester thinks, as he always has, that torture provides actionable intelligence and the rest of the memos will show that.

Releasing all memos, in context, with analysis showing just how little torture found? Done.

Meanwhile, Mike Madden offers his take on Obama’s spinning, and operatives’ greeting for him, at Langley.

And, in a related matter, Jake Tapper channels ABC reporters trying to nail down the Jell-O of White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on the Big O’s love for state secrets in court.

Meanwhile, Gibbs et al in Team Obama treat the very word “torture” itself like it’s political dynamite.

Obama institutionalizes torture

Only a few thousand other bloggers have pointed out exactly this as the bottom line of President Barack Obama’s official refusal to prosecute the Bush Adminstration’s architects of torture.

Treaties ratified by our government spell out what torture is, and these people authored “legal” documents for CIA agents, along with abetting psychologists and others, to break the law.

As for those people, we rejected “just following order” at Nuremburg 1946.

Oh, I’m sorry, though, this is American exceptionalism, though.

Vote Green. Or Socialist.

Do NOT re-elect Barack Obama.