My New Name For A Blog

What Digby Said:

There was a time when the Village clucked and screeched about "defiling the white house" with an extra marital affair or hosting fund raising coffees. I would say this leaves a far greater stain on that institution than any sexual act could ever do. They did this in your name, Americans.

The vice president, national security advisor and members of the president's cabinet sat around the white house "choreographing" the torture and the president approved it. I have to say that even in my most vivid imaginings about this torture scheme it didn't occur to me that the highest levels of the cabinet were personally involved (except Cheney and Rumsfeld, of course) much less that we would reach a point where the president of the United States would shrug his shoulders and say he approved. I assumed they were all vaguely knowledgeable, some more than others, but that they would have done everything in their power to keep their own fingerprints off of it. But no. It sounds as though they were eagerly involved, they all signed off unanimously and thought nothing of it.

Naturally, the saintly General C. Lukewarm Powell was his usual evasive self when asked about it. (And if I hear one more person say he should be on the Democratic ticket I'm going to have an aneurysm):

Powell said that he didn't have "sufficient memory recall" about the meetings and that he had participated in "many meetings on how to deal with detainees." Powell said, "I'm not aware of anything that we discussed in any of those meetings that was not considered legal."

The Attorney General(!) also present and approving, was concerned that this was being done inside the white house:

Then-Attorney General Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources said.

According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."

That's what passes for integrity in the Bush white house.

He's certainly right about history not judging this kindly. Neither would a war crimes tribunal.


Derrick Jensen has a wonderful piece that he does about a time when he was still reluctant to use the word "apocalypse" to describe what's happening to our environment. A friend asked him, "What would it take for you to use that word? Would it take chemicals in the breast milk of every mother on the planet? We're there. Would it take dead zones in the Pacific Ocean? We're there. Would it take the extinction of carrier pigeons who were once so plentiful they darkened the skies? We're there. Would it take polar bears dying because they can't swim far enough to find the increasingly-scarce ice floats? We're there." And on an on.

I wonder what it will take for Americans to break themselves away from American Idol and Dancing With The Stars and America's Next Supermodel and take to the streets demanding consequences for this evil junta. Would it take the death of habeas corpus? We're there. Would it take warrantless domestic spying (almost certainly used on the media and Democrats)? We're there. Would it take lying the country into an illegal and immoral war that drained our economy of so much money that we had to go hat in hand to the Communist Chinese and look the other way while they slaughter Tibetan monks? We're there. Would it take the president of the United States of America shrugging and saying, "Well of course we discussed the sickening, obscene details of how to torture people"? Because, well, because we're there.

Vanity Fair

One of the minor ironies of the Bush interregnum is that Graydon Carter -- editor of a glossy magazine devoted to movie stars, ads for expensive watches and clothes, and the occasional gossipy story about some media mogul -- has for some time written some of the best and most accurately scathing attacks on the reigning junta. His Editor's Letter in this month's Vanity Fair -- spliced between ads for Land Rovers, articles about stage moms, and a photo spread featuring Julia Roberts -- is one of his best and one that gives me a great deal of hope.

Discussing a fictional account of a Tony-Blair-like former British Prime Minister who gets called to account for his role in approving torture, Carter notes:

All things being equal, such a legal fate may well await not only Tony Blair but our own President Bush, once his clenched-white fingers have been pried from the nuclear “football” for the last time, in January 2009. It is now evident that the United States, beginning at the very top levels of the administration, has been engaged in a coordinated and widespread campaign of extraordinary rendition and real torture—offenses that would have appalled most thinking Americans an administration ago. Thanks to a major report in The New York Times in October, we furthermore know that the Bush White House was enabled at every stage by a compliant Justice Department that clandestinely re-wrote U.S. laws so that the president wouldn’t technically be in violation of them when he broke them.

A year before his Iraq invasion, Bush sent a memo to his Cabinet declaring that the administration would hereafter not be constrained by the principles of the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. The White House document argued that, because a war on “terrorism” was not a conflict with a particular state or “High Contracting Parties,” the rules of war as stipulated by the Convention—especially those involving torture and due process—did not apply. Detainees suspected of having ties to al-Qaeda would thus not be covered by the historic conventions of war, because al-Qaeda is not a conventional nation-state. The administration then sought to legally and narrowly define what torture was. (Remember those balmy days of our youth when we got in a snit over a president who was parsing what was or was not sex?) Almost every manner of humiliation and punishment short of major-organ failure or death was declared permissible under the administration’s definition of torture. Note: the Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines torture as the infliction of severe bodily pain—as punishment or means of persuasion. It is worth remembering that America and her allies emerged victorious from both World War II and the Cold War without resorting to any form of organized or authorized torture.

Water-boarding, as we all know, gets two thumbs up from this administration. I’ve read many descriptions of it, but Robert Harris has one in The Ghost that is to the point. The prisoner is tightly bound to an inclined board with his feet higher than his head. His face is covered with cloth or cellophane, and when water is poured over it—some of which might leak into his lungs—the prisoner experiences an immediate drowning sensation. Harris says C.I.A. officers who have been subjected to water-boarding during their training have lasted an average of 14 seconds before giving up. Water-boarding can result in damage to the lungs and the brain, as well as long-term psychological trauma. In 1947, Harris says, a Japanese officer was convicted of a war crime for water-boarding an American prisoner and was sentenced to 15 years’ hard labor.

Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that the administration’s program for trials of accused terrorists by military commissions violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice as well as Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Article 3 is very clear on two points this White House has chosen to ignore. Subsection (c) forbids “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment” (my italics), and Subsection (d) forbids “the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples” (my italics again).

Should this all follow the president out of office, . . . the lieutenants and functionaries who provided enabling documentation should recall that, when it comes to war crimes, following orders is no defense. No less an authority than Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist, had this to say on the subject in an article he published in May 1944: “No international law of warfare is in existence which provides that a soldier who has committed a mean crime can escape punishment by pleading as his defense that he followed the commands of his superiors. This holds particularly true if those commands are contrary to all human ethics and opposed to the well-established international usage of warfare.” Goebbels was talking not about the Nazi atrocities—war criminals rarely discuss their own atrocities—but about Allied aerial-bombing attacks on Germany. And just as his words came back to haunt him, the White House’s re-writing of our own codes of conduct will most surely come back to haunt them and us.

About the only thing stopping the International Criminal Court from going after the president, the vice president, and the former secretary of defense and attorneys general is that the U.S. is not a signatory to its conventions of warfare. Most nations (and all other Western nations) are, but not us. China’s not a signatory; neither is Iraq. Such is the company we keep these days. You don’t even have to care about the safety of detainees in our custody to care about this issue, because it also governs how other nations treat our sons and daughters (or, in the case of the Iraq war, fathers and mothers of people in their 20s) when they are captured.

At the end of the day, the torture conversation is a reflection of how much America’s moral compass has shifted since 9/11. The administration’s colossally wrongheaded reaction to the attacks has caused the U.S. to retreat to the dark, Cheney-esque shadows. The issue of torture goes to the heart of any discussion of who we are as a world citizen. It is not just the top levels of the administration that bear the guilt of war crimes committed in our name. Every government lawyer who helped construct the legal paper trail for the White House is guilty. So are the administration underlings who turned blind eyes to things they knew were wrong. Every legislator and journalist who chose silence over the withering furies of right-wing demagogues and talk-radio hosts is guilty, too. We are all guilty, and we should be ashamed. A nation that used to be better than its enemies has, under the Bush administration, become its own worst enemy.

Carter has been doing this sort of thing since the beginning, back when it was as good as your job (Phil Donahue) or your entire career (the Dixie Chicks) to dare to even suggest that the emperor might be a bit shy of leggings, shirts, and various other accoutrements. I especially appreciate his acknowledgement that, "We are all guilty and we should be ashamed." I'm guilty of letting this go on. You're guilty. It's done in our name with out tax dollars and it's done because there aren't enough of us willing to throw ourselves against the barricades until it fucking stops. I hope that I live to see the war criminals tried and punished. Many of them are likely to live a long time and Karma, that brilliant bitch Goddess, is reputed to have a v. long memory. Now it would be nice of the folks in the middle, you know, the "serious" journalists somewhere above dirty bloggers and the silly editors of high-end gossip mags, would start to do some of the heavy lifting. Carter's been almost on his own for quite some time.

My New Name For A Blog

What Digby Said.

Just Watch

When these e-mails are found and, believe me, a forensic computer specialist can find e-mails you never dreamed that s/he could find, it's going to turn out that at least some of them dealt with warrantless domestic spying on the Kerry campaign, other Democrats, and members of the media. I'm saying it now so that when it happens, I can say "I told you so."

Fat Lady Warms Up Her Vocal Cords

Man, if Bush has lost the Saudis, it's all over but the shouting. First, Snarly Dick gets summoned to Saudi Arabia for a "talk" (aka ass-kicking) and now this. Those boys ain't dumb. They've now got lots of at least semi-sane world leaders to whom they can sell their oil.

Of Course They'd Say That Torture Is A State Secret -- Duh.

The NYT, after years of cheerleading and enabling the Bush junta, finally stumbles over its conscience, picks it up, dusts it off, holds it up to the light, and goes, "Oh, yeah. I remember now. This used to be America."

George Bush does not want to be rescued.

The president has been told countless times, by a secretary of state, by members of Congress, by heads of friendly governments — and by the American public — that the Guantánamo Bay detention camp has profoundly damaged this nation’s credibility as a champion of justice and human rights. But Mr. Bush ignored those voices — and now it seems he has done the same to his new defense secretary, Robert Gates, the man Mr. Bush brought in to clean up Donald Rumsfeld’s mess.

Thom Shanker and David Sanger reported in Friday’s Times that in his first weeks on the job, Mr. Gates told Mr. Bush that the world would never consider trials at Guantánamo to be legitimate. He said that the camp should be shut, and that inmates who should stand trial should be brought to the United States and taken to real military courts.

Mr. Bush rejected that sound advice, heeding instead the chief enablers of his worst instincts, Vice President Dick Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Their opposition was no surprise. The Guantánamo operation was central to Mr. Cheney’s drive to expand the powers of the presidency at the expense of Congress and the courts, and Mr. Gonzales was one of the chief architects of the policies underpinning the detainee system. Mr. Bush and his inner circle are clearly afraid that if Guantánamo detainees are tried under the actual rule of law, many of the cases will collapse because they are based on illegal detention, torture and abuse — or that American officials could someday be held criminally liable for their mistreatment of detainees. [That's exactly right. American officials, coughBush,Cheney,Rumsfeldcough ought to be held criminally liable for, inter alia their torture of illegally-held detainees. No one -- NO ONE -- is above the law. And it's far more important for presidents to know that than it is for some petty street criminal or some kid selling pot.]

It was distressing to see that the president has retreated so far into his alternative reality that he would not listen to Mr. Gates — even when he was backed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who, like her predecessor, Colin Powell, had urged Mr. Bush to close Guantánamo. It seems clear that when he brought in Mr. Gates, Mr. Bush didn’t want to fix Mr. Rumsfeld’s disaster; he just wanted everyone to stop talking about it.

If Mr. Bush would not listen to reason from inside his cabinet, he might at least listen to what Americans are telling him about the damage to this country’s credibility, and its cost. When Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — for all appearances a truly evil and dangerous man — confessed to a long list of heinous crimes, including planning the 9/11 attacks, many Americans reacted with skepticism and even derision. The confession became the butt of editorial cartoons, like one that showed the prisoner confessing to betting on the Cincinnati Reds, and fodder for the late-night comedians.

What stood out the most from the transcript of Mr. Mohammed’s hearing at Guantánamo Bay was how the military detention and court system has been debased for terrorist suspects. The hearing was a combatant status review tribunal — a process that is supposed to determine whether a prisoner is an illegal enemy combatant and thus not entitled in Mr. Bush’s world to rudimentary legal rights. But the tribunals are kangaroo courts, admitting evidence that was coerced or obtained through abuse or outright torture. They are intended to confirm a decision that was already made, and to feed detainees into the military commissions created by Congress last year.

The omissions from the record of Mr. Mohammed’s hearing were chilling. The United States government deleted his claims to have been tortured during years of illegal detention at camps run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Government officials who are opposed to the administration’s lawless policy on prisoners have said in numerous news reports that Mr. Mohammed was indeed tortured, including through waterboarding, which simulates drowning and violates every civilized standard of behavior toward a prisoner, even one as awful as this one. And he is hardly the only prisoner who has made claims of abuse and torture. Some were released after it was proved that they never had any connection at all to terrorism.

Still, the Bush administration says no prisoner should be allowed to take torture claims to court, including the innocents who were tortured and released. The administration’s argument is that how prisoners are treated is a state secret and cannot be discussed openly. If that sounds nonsensical, it is. It’s also not the real reason behind the administration’s denying these prisoners the most basic rights of due process.

The Bush administration has so badly subverted American norms of justice in handling these cases that they would not stand up to scrutiny in a real court of law. It is a clear case of justice denied.

Maybe this is too obvious to say, and yet, I think that it needs to be said:

The Bush junta is pure evil. These people torture, they spy on Americans without any cause, much less due cause. They sat back and allowed a lovely, unique American city to be destroyed and left its inhabitants to float, dead and bloated, for weeks. They sent billions of dollars -- money collected from middle-class American taxpayers who can't get health care or afford to send their kids to college -- over to Iraq ON PALLETS and then "lost" the money. Literally. Just don't know what happened to it coughCheney'sSwissaccountcough. They've "outsourced" every government function possible, allowing Haliburton to provide our soldiers with everything from substandard medical care at Walter Reed to contaminated water in Iraq. They've de-regulated every industry that our ancestors realized needed to be regulated, including services as essential as the provision of electricity and food inspection. They've brought in industry lobbyists and jejune true-believers and allowed them to control, undermine, and re-write the works of experienced government scientists. They've told the scientists not to speak to the press and, when those scientists persisted in telling the truth, they've intimidated and persecuted them via their evil Congressional minions. They've pissed all over and tried to erase the separation of church and state that our Founders considered so important, giving the tax dollars of those same middle-class Americans to whackjob fundies so that they could promote their monotheistic, patriarchal hatred of life and sex -- often in America's public schools. They've made the richest one percent of Americans much, much richer and have made many Americans much poorer than when the junta seized power.

This is a small, partial, incomplete list.

And I just need to say this: Everyone who enabled this junta is to blame. The Supreme Court, which ordered Florida to STOP COUNTING AMERICANS' VOTES and installed this evil junta is to blame. Diebold is to blame. Fox News is to blame. The oil industry is to blame. The MSM, which cheered the illegal and immoral Iraq War is to blame. NYT, I'm looking at you. Americans so fucking stupid and gullible and shit-their-pants scared of a few Saudi fanatics that they actually voted for George Bush and Congressional Republicans are to blame. Evangelical xians and the catholic church are to blame. (Culture of Life my sweet, round ass. Culture of death and torture, more like. Well, big surprise. Check out your most prevalent religious symbol.) And, I'm to blame. I didn't riot when SCOTUS declared that Americans would no longer be allowed to select their leaders by voting for them. I didn't riot when the junta initiated "faith-based funding." I still pay taxes. I still drive on the right side of the road and pay the fine when my library books are overdue. I keep trying to go on living as if I weren't in the middle of a nightmare; yet I know that denying reality never works in the long run.

This junta has got to be stopped. Anyone who doesn't think that they can do much, much worse damage than they've already done, who believes that they'll just run out the clock without unleashing even more evil on the world is wrong. Wrong. Wrong and to blame for what follows.

The Rest Shall Hear And Be Afraid

chidyke has a worthwhile reminder for the "party of moral values". You know. The ones who were going to "bring honor and dignity back to the oval office."

Racist Prick

Dick Cheney has been traveling around the world on, I am not making this up, a plane christened The Spirit of Strom Thurmond. Racist motherfucker.

Would someone in the press please call him on this?

A Lesson For Democrats

From comcast:

Vice President Dick Cheney refused Friday to take back his charge that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's opposition to President Bush's Iraq war buildup is playing into the hands of the al-Qaida terrorist network.

"If you're going to advocate a course of action that basically is withdrawal of our forces from Iraq, then you don't get to just do the fun part of that, that says, 'We'll, we're going to get out,' and appeal to your constituents on that basis," Cheney said.

The vice president had voiced the same criticism of Pelosi earlier this week during a visit to Japan, and the California Democrat accused the vice president of questioning her patriotism, saying she was going to call President Bush directly with her complaint.

"I hope the president will repudiate and distance himself from the vice president's remarks," Pelosi said. She ended up talking with White House chief of staff Josh Bolten instead of Bush.

The long-distance quarrel began in Tokyo, where Cheney earlier this week used an interview to criticize Pelosi and Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., over their plan to place restrictions on Bush's request for an additional $93 billion for the Iraq war to make it difficult or impossible to send 21,500 extra troops to Iraq.

During Friday's interview in Sydney with ABC News, Cheney said, "I'm not sure what part of it is that Nancy disagreed with. She accused me of questioning her patriotism. I didn't question her patriotism. I questioned her judgment."

"You also have to be accountable for the results. What are the consequences of that? What happens if we withdraw from Iraq?," he said. "And the point I made and I'll make it again is that al-Qaida functions on the basis that they think they can break our will. That's their fundamental underlying strategy, that if they can kill enough Americans or cause enough havoc, create enough chaos in Iraq, then we'll quit and go home. And my statement was that if we adopt the Pelosi policy, that then we will validate the strategy of al-Qaida. I said it and I meant it."

Asked if he was willing to take back his criticism of Pelosi, Cheney replied, "I'm not backing down."

Look, obviously, Cheney's being an ass, up to referring to Speaker Pelosi as "Nancy," something men often do to try and put women in their place. But there's an important lesson here for Democrats. The minute that he got some criticism, Cheney didn't back down and apologize. He took the opportunity to make his point even more strongly and to explain why he thought that he was right. Note that he White House backed him up; Pelosi was left talking to Josh Bolten's hand instead of to Bush.

This isn't new for Cheney. He's done this before, when, for example, he cursed out Leahey on the Senate floor and then insisted that he'd merely "expressed myself forcefully; felt better after I had done it." When his wife acted like an ass on Wolf Blitzer's show, he insisted that: "I thought it was great. We refer to it around the house as the slapdown. And she was very tough, but she was very accurate and very aggressive."

Contrast this with Obama rushing to apologize for saying something that we all know: that the lives lost in Iraq have been wasted. Contrast this with Kerry apologizing for a joke plainly aimed at George Bush, not the troops. Democrats are always saying completely sensible, true things and then apologizing for them.

Yes, in the world of grown-ups, rational people, and a responsible media, it would make sense to apologize for hurting someone's feelings. But we don't live in that world. We live in George Bush's world. In that world, the Democrats need to learn from Snarley Dick to quit apologizing. When you say something and it gets a reaction, react even more strongly. It's not that difficult.

Gee, Mary, Is That How You Think It Works? Welcome To Your Father's America.

NEW YORK - The decision to become pregnant and raise a child with her female partner was not political, Mary Cheney, a daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, told a Barnard College audience.

"This is a baby," Cheney said Wednesday at a forum sponsored by Glamour magazine. "This is a blessing from God. It is not a political statement. It is not a prop to be used in a debate by people on either side of an issue. It is my child."

You know, you ignorant bint, there's more than a few women who think that their reproductive choices shouldn't be anybody else's business. And, beyond that, I kind of think that Terry Schiavo's husband thought that, "This is my wife. She's not a political statement. She's not a prop to be used in a debate by people on either side of an issue. She's my wife." There are sick Americans who could be cured by research using stem cellls from tissue that's going to be discarded anyway. I kind of think that they'd say, "This is my health. I'm not a political statement. I'm not a prop to be used in a debate by people on either side of an issue. I'm a human being who'll die without this research." And, of course, as you well know, there are gay people out there who love each other and want to get married. They'd gladly tell Glamour Magazine that, "This is our love life. We're not a political statement. We're not a prop to be used in a debate by people on either side of an issue. We're just two people who love each other and want to get married."

And, hey, Mary! Guess what you privileged, protected, punk? Your fucking father and his fucking marionette in the WH disagree! They think that THEY, not you, have the right to make your reproductive choices, and to make medical end-of-life decisions for Terry Schiavo, and to prevent stem cell research, and to define marriage as "between a man and a woman" -- all in the name of placating some whackjob, woman-hating, gay-fearing fundies in order to harvest their votes and their donations. In fact, that's your daddy's base, although, as you well know, he holds them in as much contempt as he seems to hold 99% of the electorate.

And, gee, Mary, you filthy-souled sell-out to your gender, guess what else? You support that! You worked on your daddy's campaign. You didn't give a speech and say that Focus on the Family is a bunch of dirty-minded busybodies who have no business sticking their noses into America's vagina. You didn't issue a statement saying that Terry Schiavo's family ought to be left the fuck alone. No, Mary, you, you ugly-spirited sow, you are what we call a collaborator.

And, hey, guess what else, Mary, you moron! You may have thought, as all collaborators do, that your collaboration and your position of privilege would protect you. Yeah, poor women, black women, -- other people -- maybe the patriarchs that you've supported would interfere in their lives, but not yours. Your daddy's rich and powerful and so you thought that you'd get to flout the rules that Focus on the Family lays down for those of us with wombs; your reproductive decisions, unlike those of all the rest of us, would be "personal matters," your "choice," and not a political prop.

Well, all I've got to say to you was said a long time ago by Bob Dylan:

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?
People'd call, say, "Beware doll, you're bound to fall"
You thought they were all kiddin' you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hangin' out
Now you don't talk so loud
Now you don't seem so proud
About having to be scrounging for your next meal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

You've gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it
And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street
And now you find out you're gonna have to get used to it
You said you'd never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but now you realize
He's not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And ask him do you want to make a deal?

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all come down and did tricks for you
You never understood that it ain't no good
You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you
You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain't it hard when you discover that
He really wasn't where it's at
After he took from you everything he could steal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people
They're drinkin', thinkin' that they got it made
Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things
But you'd better lift your diamond ring, you'd better pawn it babe
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

Now shut the fuck up and quit complaining. You made your goddamn bed. Now sleep in it, bitch.