Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

I have learned how faces fall to bone,
how under the eyelids terror lurks,
how suffering inscribes on cheeks
the hard lines of its cuneiform texts,
how glossy black or ash-fair locks
turn overnight to tarnished silver,
how smiles fade on submissive lips,
and fear quavers in a dry titter.
And I pray not for myself alone . . .
for all who stood outside the jail,
in bitter cold or summer's blaze,
with me under that blind red wall.

*****

President Bush has declared that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen whom he alone determines to be a threat to our nation -- without an arrest warrant, without notifying them of what charges have been filed against them, and without even informing their families that they have been imprisoned. The president claims that he can simply snatch an American citizen off the street and keep him or her locked up indefinitely -- even for the rest of his or her life -- and refuse to allow that citizen the right to make a phone call or talk to a lawyer -- even to argue that the president or his appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person. . . .So a constitutional right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we used to think of in an old-fashioned way as "inalienable" can now be instantly stripped from any American by the president with no meaningful review by any other branch of government.

~Al Gore in The Assault on Reason

My Congresscritter: I Think I'll Keep Him

Mr. MORAN of Virginia. Madam Chairwoman, I first want to thank the chairman of the Armed Services Committee and his superb staff for helping redraft portions of this language so that it might be considered. The final language represents a common-sense agreement that I think we should all reach consensus on.

The amendment's purpose is to shed some light on what has become an increasingly invisible world down at Guantanamo Bay.

The first detainees were brought to Guantanamo in 2002 to bypass the U.S. legal system and avoid international conventions and public scrutiny. Since that time the detainment facility has become a blight on American ideals and principles.

We have captured, tortured and interminably held men that we call enemy combatants, some of whom are guilty of crimes against our Nation and should be punished. Others, however, are only guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We have created closed military tribunals that offer the false impression of justice, but they fall woefully short of what we should expect from our American system of justice.

Like Abu Ghraib, we've created an unnecessary rallying cry and recruitment tool for al Qaeda and militant Islamists throughout the world. I strongly believe that the continued operation of Guantanamo Bay puts Americans in harm's way and threatens the safety of any of our captured military and civilians abroad.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Rice have agreed that Guantanamo Bay represents a serious problem if we are to prevail in the global war on terror. They both advocated shuttering Guantanamo Bay's detention facilities. Even President Bush expressed a desire to see Guantanamo Bay closed.

This amendment offers a first step in giving the President, the Congress and the Department of Defense policy alternatives to Guantanamo Bay. This amendment will require the Department to develop a plan to transfer detainees from Guantanamo Bay.

The report must estimate how many detainees the Department will charge with a crime, how many will be subject to release or transfer, or how many will be held without being charged with a crime, but whom the Department feels that it must detain.

Lastly, the report would include a description of actions required by the Secretary and Congress to ensure that detainees who are scheduled for release are, in fact, released.

This last piece is particularly important, as the Department of Defense has scheduled release of 82 detainees. DOD and the State Department, however, face obstacles releasing these men to their home countries, and in some instances their home nations won't accept their return. In other instances, the State Department won't return detainees to their home nations for appropriate reasons. But we need to know what policy tools Congress can provide to expedite the release of innocent detainees.

All of this information is absolutely necessary for Congress and the administration to make informed decisions about what to do about Guantanamo Bay.

Whether you like it or not, whether you believe that Guantanamo Bay is a blight on our international standing, or whether or not you believe that these detainees should be held and tried in the United States, we should all agree that the policy options before the President and Congress should not be limited by a lack of information.

To opponents of shutting down Guantanamo Bay and my colleagues who believe its closure is a sign of weakness, I suggest that upholding our American principles of justice are not incongruent with our war against terror.

And in a speech before the Republican National Convention in 1992, I would remind my colleagues President Reagan emphasized that our greatest strength as a Nation comes not from our wealth or our power, but from our ideals.

I ask all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support this common-sense amendment, to move forward in our battle against anti-American sentiment, and to provide the President and Congress with real policy options for shutting down Guantanamo Bay.

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.

Gonzales Needs To Go

"...again, there is no expressed grant of habeas in the Constitution. There's a prohibition against taking it away. ... I meant by that comment, the Constitution doesn't say every individual in the United States or every citizen is hereby granted or assured the right to habeas. Doesn't say that."

-Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales


(at a meeting of the Judiciary Committee, 01/18/2007)

This Is Important

Via Eschaton:

WASHINGTON - TOMORROW, Tuesday, February 12, 2007, U.S. Senators Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ) will hold a press conference to discuss the Effective Terrorists Prosecution Act which will restore habeus corpus rights, ban torture and uphold the Geneva Conventions. The senators, both members of the Foreign Relations Committee, will discuss the need for these protections in the fight against terrorism. More here.

Call your Senators and tell them they'd better get behind this. There's little that's more important.