…the idea of torturing people for information is a very very horrible, slippery slope: London cops accused of waterboarding suspects.

From The Times report:

The torture claims are part of a wide-ranging investigation which also includes accusations that officers fabricated evidence and stole suspects’ property.

Oh, it’s all very well to not say anything when some ay-rab schmoe is taken off the street, with vague stories of possibly maybe terrorism.  But when it gets to be the cops taking you off the street because they just don’t like you or want a bust…or you’re in the way of the powerful.

But that, that’s different, innit?

Iraqi PM to Obama: If you release those unreleased photos from Abu Ghraib, my electorate will go up in blue flame and demand that the US get out yesterday.

…from Think Progress.   Give it a look for a summary of why it’s major bad news, if you didn’t know that already…unless you think you’re Jack Bauer or something.

As Jesse Ventura said on The View:

“If waterboarding is OK, why don’t we let our police do it to suspects so they can learn what they know?” he asked. “If waterboarding is OK, why didn’t we waterboard [Timothy] McVeigh and Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombers, to find out if there were more people involved? … We only seem to waterboard Muslims… Have we waterboarded anyone else? Name me someone else who has been waterboarded.”

And no, I don’t care if half the Democratic leadership knew something about the bad stuff pulled off by Bush; they should have had the guts to stand up at the time and say - NO - but they apparently didn’t.  Them being gutless wonders is not a reason to excuse anyone else from prosecution.  The more in the dock or politically dealt with and squished on this, no problem.

My focus is on justice, the law, and good government.  Torture and other arbitrary government crap has caused an awful pile of hurt to most all of us in some form from the past; just ask a Japanese-American whose family was in internment camps during WW2, or blacks who had to deal with government-backed racism in the South (or North, and I’m talking the Bull Connor sort of thing), or those of us out there who have family who were destroyed in the Holocaust or disappeared in the Gulags behind the Iron Curtain.

I’m beginning to think that Dick Cheney and company can’t tell the difference between repeats of 24 and reality.  Of course, it’s coming to look a lot like he had the idea from the beginning that there had to be a pony at the bottom of that dungpile - er, that there  had to be a link between al-Qaeda and Saddam, and that nothing else made sense.    So, even if those idiots in the field say X is cooperating and spilling his guts, let’s amp up the terror and torture the ‘truth’ about those links that Dick knew had to be there.  And would justify anything else that they wanted to do later for the world and the American voters.

This really is the explosive charge, because it reveals the real danger of torture in the hands of big government: it means our leaders can manufacture facts to justify anything.

Or, as Jesse Ventura put it:

“You give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.”

Or this:

If we eliminate the idea that torture works; if we eliminate the fact that the terror suspects who were tortured had previously revealed valuable information without being tortured; if we factor in the reality that these techniques were invented in order to gather intentionally false confessions; and if we look at the evidence showing that detainees were tortured so they would specifically connect Iraq and al-Qaeda, we’re left with no conclusion other than this. Or sadism as sport.

I cannot imagine what sort of dark cloud some of these people live in. Or the people who are justifying torture ‘just in case’ and ignoring the laws against it calling themselves civilized.   

Daniel Larison, the thinking man’s conservative pundit:

So, ironically, some of the defenders of the torture regime are making the best argument for the prosecution of past administration officials by their own invocations of past government illegalities. They are unwittingly reminding us that crimes unpunished today can easily become tomorrow’s conventionally accepted “correct” decisions. Every usurpation or instance of lawbreaking that is not challenged and reversed creates a precedent for the next round of usurpation and lawbreaking, and the fact that there is a non-trivial number of people in America who think that the illegal acts of Lincoln, FDR, Truman or others should have some mitigating effect on how we treat illegal acts under a more recent administration is one of the best reasons why crimes committed during the last administration must be investigated and lawbreakers must be prosecuted. Had many past administrations been scrutinized and their crimes investigated and punished, it is less likely that we would have to cope with an executive branch that acts as if it is above the law and which seems to be able to to break the law with impunity. If we fail to hold past administration officials accountable, we not only make a joke out of the rule of law, but we ensure that no legal or institutional constraints will prevent a future administration from committing similar wrongdoing in a time of crisis.

Another note on torture issues.   This post seems to put it all together that the prime people who got good, reliable information in World War 2 were people who followed the same gold standard we followed before George W Bush changed things around; that torture is only good for causing people to suffer and say whatever you tell them to say.   To get them to lie, to get them to scream (and doesn’t it sound lovely?) while you get off thinking you’re Jack freaking Bauer.

There’s been a tag on this journal for a while - sep_reality - and almost all of the tag instances are for situations where people were living in fantasyland, where they could make their own rules and create their own world where you are little people and they are the Big Bad Boss.    Where they could  trick themselves and others into believing that they knew their butt from a hole in the ground, and were running the show with endless ease.   The best trick, of course, was getting you to not understand what they were doing, and think it was awesomely awesome.

Somehow, through mindless showings of 24, or Kyriakou’s ‘torture made them sing’ stuff, now proven to be false, people got the very wrong idea that brave torturers got the goods on the bad guys and made ‘em fess up, saving us all.    And then the secret memos from the insiders started coming out of the Department of Justice and other areas, basically saying that people using the gold standard of persuasion got everything out of the Al Qaeda dudes, and then People With Orders came in and tortured the terrorists many dozens of times in a month’s time, demanding more information.  Information they didn’t have.

My guess is that as more things come out, the specific questions they wanted answered will come out.  And my strong bet is that the entire point of that torture was to get a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam, something they could then present as a ‘Saddam did this, let’s get him’ excuse to invade Iraq.

I don’t know this, and I certainly have no love lost for Al Qaeda or Saddam.  But I don’t like it when people lie to me to get me to support them in something they wanna do because I’d never support it otherwise.  As an American, I would hope that we’re better than that.

And frankly, the people who gainsay ooh-go-torture forget the long history of this country towards the protection of the rights of the individual.  Watch this clip from A MAN FROM ALL SEASONS, about the need for the law, and you see, perhaps, that once you allow the law to fall, you may be the next one up when you end up on the wrong side of people who have more power than you do.   Manzanar can be rebuilt for new tenants anytime, and with less reason.

….because I sure have.  Not for a while, though.  Thank goodness - I’ve been out of school for over 25 years.

New story on the Pakistani-American TV exec who beheaded his wife; dude had a LONG history of mental instability and rage - the dead woman was wife #3, and she wasn’t the first one to be worked over.  This things rarely happen in a vacuum.

MUNCIE, Ind. - A self-proclaimed white supremacist and Satan worshipper accused of biting a 9-year-old boy has accepted a deal with prosecutors under which he pleaded guilty to battery resulting in bodily injury.
Dmitriy V. Sklyarov, 20, of rural Muncie, also received a $100 fine under the deal. Prosecutors dismissed a charge of neglect of a dependent.

Investigators said Sklyarov bit the boy at least 13 times on the arms and legs last Oct. 8. Delaware Circuit Court Judge Thomas Cannon Jr. accepted the terms of the plea agreement during a hearing last week. Sklyarov was scheduled to go on trial Tuesday.
Public defender Steven Bruce said his client was engaged in horseplay with a child left in his care when the boy bit him.
“I bit him back,” Sklyarov said.  “Multiple times, correct?” Bruce asked.  “Yes,” the defendant responded.
Sklyarov will not begin serving his sentence until he finishes a 90-day term for contempt of court. At a Dec. 1 hearing, Sklyarov curse at Cannon’s predecessor on the Circuit Court bench, Chris Teagle, while also shouting “Heil Hitler!” and “white power!”

This was, of course, not the first time this nitwit was in trouble; he had a track record of waving around scary stuff like voodoo dolls allegedly soaked in his own blood, pot in high school, threatening teachers in school, and hokey crap like this:

On a web site, Sklyarov calls himself an Aryan sorcerer. He also suggests instead of sacrificing a dog, why not “sacrifice a high school teacher who promotes mixing of the races.” And another line states: “To be a black magician means to embrace knowledge of the dark forces.”

GMAFB, dude.  Indications are that the kid came over with his mom from Russia about 10 years ago, and has been a serious PITA to everyone since, with heaps of look-at-me-I’m-Dangerous-Dan stuff.

Article about Michael Isikoff of Newsweek’s latest investigative direction: that the internal DOJ oversight office delivered a report to the Attorney General under Bush that said, essentially, that the DOJ’s legal papers from John Yoo and others that backed up torture with a film of legal justification were  BS that were way off the line of legal research and were basically worthless; the AG sent it back with a ‘how dare you’ response and tried to deep-six it.

Gitmo: People reviewing the cases of prisoners are finding out that there’s really no solid files as such on anyone,  and that a lot of material is suspect or worthless - and scattered, disorganized and fifth-hand.   The realization is coming through that people were supposed to get confessions and information first and worry about anything else waaaaaaaay later, and that bunches of people in Gitmo and the other ‘black’ jails, like the taxi-drivers in Abu Ghraib, were just Joe Blows scooped up in a wide net and tortured at length for information they didn’t have.

25. The written statement allegedly containing Mohammed’s confession and thumbprint is in Farsi. Mohammed does not read, write, or speak Farsi. There are several factual assertions in the statement that are false, including Mohammed’s name, his father’s name, his grandfather’s name, his uncle’s name, his residence, his current residence, his age, and an assertion that he speaks English. The statement’s account of the grenade attack — the responsibility for which the statement ascribes solely to Mohammed — conflicts with the eyewitness accounts of the American victims. Yet, it was this statement that Respondents and their agents primarily relied on as a basis for Mohammed’s detention, and for the charges brought against him in the Guantanamo Military Commissions.\

That was written by one of the prosecutors, folks.

He was the lead prosecutor against a detainee, Mohammed Jawad, until he resigned last September. After spending over a year on the case, he became convinced that the government had no good case against Jawad, that Jawad had been badly mistreated and was suffering serious psychological harm, and that continuing to hold him was “something beyond a travesty.” (p. 1) That’s why he wrote the declaration in question, in support of Jawad’s habeas petition.

..of the Bush administration, a casualty of the war on terror, troubled and victimized soul that he is.

Details after the cut.

A reader of Andrew Sullivan’s blog writes:

But both of us have to realize what they’re up against: a nation of voters just like…my mom. She’s a lovely woman, Andrew. I love her to death. Sweet, kind, generous–she’s got it all. But whenever I try to talk to her about torture, warrantless wiretapping, the Military Commissions Act, and the rest she just tunes out. Not only has she never heard of any of this stuff, but when I bring it to her attention it’s as if she simply cannot believe any of it. She doesn’t get angry or anything–she’s not a “my country right or wrong” type. It’s more of a “these go to eleven” sort of thing: she just can’t get it into her head that these awful things are happening.

There are millions and millions and millions of voters just like her in this respect.

They have no clue about the things that so rile you and me, and when these matters are brought to their attention they find it easier to believe that the person who’s bringing them up is crazy than that they might actually be a problem. Moreover, the issues that do get her attention are of the Obama’s flag lapel pin type.

Read the whole post.

“It is by my order and for the good of the state that the bearer has done what has been done.”

Cardinal Richelieu, in The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

See inside for an analysis of the fallout  I expect from the CIA  torture tapes destruction. 

Agent Hubbard:  Come on General, you’ve lost men, I’ve lost men, but you - you, you *can’t* do this! What, what if they don’t even want the sheik, have you considered that? What if what they really want is for us to herd our children into stadiums like we’re doing? And put soldiers on the street and have Americans looking over their shoulders? Bend the law, shred the Constitution just a little bit? Because if we torture him, General, we do that and everything we have fought, and bled, and died for is over. And they’ve won. They’ve already won!</p>

……………….

General Devereaux:  I am here serving my president, and quite possibly not in the best interests of our nation. My profession does not allow me to make that kind of distinction.

 Watch the movie sometime.

“A ‘military victory’ in the sense of total control over the whole territory {of Iraq}, imposed on the entire population, is not possible.”

-Henry Kissinger, April 1, 2007

“During the rectification of the Vuldrini, the traveler came as a large and moving Torg! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the McKetrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor! Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!”

-Vinz Clortho, the Keymaster

“the great principle of habeas corpus and trial by jury, which are the supreme protection invented by the British people for ordinary individuals against the state. The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him judgement by his peers for an indefinite period, is in the highest degree odious, and is the foundation of all totalitarian governments… It is only when extreme danger to the state can be pleaded that this power may be temporarily assumed by the executive, and even so its working must be interpreted with the utmost vigilance by a free parliament… Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy. This is really the test of civilisation.”

-Winston Churchill

“What is so appalling is the underhand way in which the Iranians have got her “unhappy and stressed”. She shows no signs of electrocution or burn marks and there are no signs of beating on her face. This is unacceptable. If captives are to be put under duress, such as by forcing them into compromising sexual positions, or having electric shocks to their genitals, they should be photographed, as they were in Abu Ghraib. The photographs should then be circulated around the civilised world so that everyone can see exactly what has been going on.”

-Terry Jones, about the British sailors picked up by the Iranians.

One of the campaign experts who got Bush elected is saying - Bush is a terrible leader, and I helped get him to stop trying to persuade the center and just whip up the right wing base to run things. Maybe that was a bad idea? Eeeeeeh - could be!

The theory and practice of Letting the Partisan Amateurs Run Things. Bad in any administration, and this is a textbook example. You don’t have to be in a specific party to be a bad idea.

So we get a ‘westerner’ on trial on terrorism charges, supposedly a real bad egg, and he gets - nine months? Either he’s not that bad or the government blew the case or both. Considering what we’ve been hearing about these cases, you pick.

• Chinese cops: ‘Ya know, torture isn’t the cure-all that we thought it would be.’
• GOP House: ‘Ya know, it’s too much trouble to take care of these spending bills to keep the country running.  Let’s dump it off on the Democrats for next year, and go home.’
• Compassionate Conservatives in Massachusetts: ‘Ya know, it’s expensive to run those menal hospitals.  Let’s let the loonies out on the street.’