war crimes

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Mukasey: Don’t Know Much About Waterboarding

January 30, 2008 | 3 comments

Memo to Sen. Dianne Feinstein: thanks a whole big bundle.

Too well I recall the morning last November when I read your stated intention to vote in favor of confirming Michael Mukasey as U.S. Attorney General. It made what would have been a pleasant breakfast at a local café go down quite a bit less easily. I narrowly averted embarrassment, because your characterizations of Judge Mukasey as independent-minded and repulsed by the idea of torture were such stuff as spit-takes are made on. I couldn’t believe that you, my home state’s senior senator, had watched the same confirmation hearings as I had and not come away similarly disgusted at Mukasey’s craven dodging of the torture issue.

Your op-ed included a desire to see Judge Mukasey come before the senate panel again to have another chat about the whole Dick Cheney/Jack Bauer-iziation of American justice thing. Well, who’s back on the Hill today but your guy Mike the AG, front and center, talking waterboarding and destroyed CIA interrogation tapes. You must’ve been geeked, armed with a bucket of popcorn and ready to see The Muke torque up and bring the outrage, huh?

There are times when a mere “I told you so” doesn’t seem to cover it.
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We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby

October 23, 2007 | Permalink

Over at Balkinization, Brian Tamahana has shared a moment of sickening clarity:

I had lunch today with a prominent German Constitutional scholar who was flabbergasted about something that I could not adequately explain.

He asked me how the candidate to become the top legal official of the U.S. government could say that he does not know whether water-boarding constitutes “torture” (as Judge Mukasey stated yesterday in his confirmation hearings). My colleague insisted that in Germany any person who uttered such a statement would be finished. He found it shocking that a person could say this in America and still become our Attorney General.

At first I was surprised at his genuine disbelief; and then I felt a bit ashamed that I did not also react with disbelief.

And yesterday at Slate, a piece Read the rest of this entry »


Spit take-inducing Headline of the Day

August 9, 2007 | 1 comment

Put down that cup of coffee, unless you like a mess. Courtesy of TPM Muckraker:

Gitmo to Stay Open as Human Rights Sanctuary

Turns out it’s more than just a catchy headline. The story is that the good ol’ Bush administration wants to slim down the prisoner headcount at Gitmo from the current 360 to 150. So good news for 210 wrongfully-imprisoned and even-more-wrongfully tortured detainees? Actually, no. We’ve still got one more level of wrongful to go: there’s nowhere to drop them off. Their home countries and all of the possible foster-home states that have been asked either won’t take them, or won’t take them without promising not to torture or kill them. So they get to stay in Guantánamo, where their human rights will be, uh, protected.

I wonder if they’d take any consolation in not being among the other 150 prisoners – the ones the Bush DoD doesn’t want to get rid of. Of those 150, Bush & Co. have selected 80 finalists whom they want to [beverages down again...] charge with war crimes. I shit you not. The Bush administration, having exempted itself from international accords and the U.S. Constitution in order to avoid being charged with war crimes, is gearing up to charge some of the victims of its war crimes with war crimes. Yes, some of them are surely guilty of war crimes, but we’ll never really know with the kangaroo-court military tribunals that will try them.

What about the 50 semi-finalists? The Bush junta says that they’re too dangerous to release from Gitmo, but not bad enough to put on trial. Um… I have nothing to add to this point. I guess my disgust has reached critical mass, at least for the moment.

The thing that’s saddening me the most right now is that after 6+ years of Bush, this level of absurdity doesn’t even seem unusual anymore. It’s like a ghastly, global-scale version of one of the “Cowboys and Indians” games I participated in during my single-digit years: the ones where the biggest kids make up the rules as they go along, and their manipulations become more and more illogical until chaos and disillusionment set in and the game collapses.

Would that I could just say “I’m not playing anymore,” quit the so-called war on terror and walk home.


Torturama 2: Electric Boogaloo

October 23, 2006 | 1 comment

Here’s something I never thought I’d say: kudos to Bill O’Reilly.

From FOX News, via Andrew Sullivan:

O’REILLY: Now Brian Ross of ABC said — reported the CIA waterboarded [Khalid Sheik] Mohammed. That is dunked him in water, tied him down and then that broke him. Is that true?

BUSH: We don’t talk about techniques. And the reason we don’t talk about techniques is because we don’t want the enemy to be able to adjust. We’re in a war.

O’REILLY: Is waterboarding torture?

BUSH: I don’t want to talk about techniques. And — but I do share the American people that we were within the law. And we don’t torture. We — I’ve said all along to the American people we won’t torture, but we need to be in a position where we can interrogate these people.

O’REILLY: But if the public doesn’t know what torture is or is not, as defined by the Bush administration, how can the public make a decision on whether your policy is right or wrong?

BUSH: Well, one thing is that you can rest assured we’re not going to talk about the techniques we use in a public forum. No matter how hard you try because I don’t want the enemy to be able to adjust their tactics if we capture them on the battlefield.

But what the American people need to know is we’ve got a program in place that is able to get intelligence from these people. And we’ve used it to stop attacks.

Before we begin scanning the skies for flying pigs, it should be known that the tough questioning in this excerpt is not necessarily typical of the interview as a whole. Nevertheless, O’Reilly deserves credit for putting the waterboarding question directly to Mr. Bush – it was more than anyone else had done.

Bush’s ham-fisted evasion, “We’re not going to talk about techniques… because we don’t want the enemy to be able to adjust” is ludicrous on several levels. First, it’s such an obvious smoke screen that it practically begs for a Colbert-esque “I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ ” The absurdity is dialed up further with the notion that Bush’s answering the question would enable the enemy to “adjust.” This assumes that the preceding several weeks of public controversy over such interrogation methods somehow escaped the terrorists’ notice. To top it off, the president apparently believes that our foes are capable of turning themselves into amphibians in order to resist being waterboarded. This just in: Aqua-Man has defected to Al Qaeda.

George W. Bush is not just a bad president – he’s an embarrassment to the office. The loftiest hope I can summon for the next two years is that he does as little further damage as possible. The toll his policies have taken on the American citizenry is severe, and the stain he is leaving on the good name of our country will take years to scrub away.


YouTube of the Month, at Least

October 21, 2006 | Permalink

Aside from Andrew Sullivan’s considerable gifts as a writer, much of the value of his blog lies in his calling attention to unique, important expressions emailed to him by his readers. Of his scads of pithy and illuminating recent posts, this one affected me the most by bringing to my attention the video clip below. Major kudos to Sullivan.

At its core, Bronowski’s message is in no way political. It’s about hubris. With this in mind, it is at the very least profoundly sobering that our current president demanded — and was granted — full, unimpeachable authority to seize any person, anywhere, to detain that person indefinitely without charge or trial, and to determine what (mis)treatment of that prisoner is or is not torture. Among other things. You’ve gotta be pretty thoroughly immersed in your own moral universe to even reach for that kind of absolute power.


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