Six Years Ago Today....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C4I7y4fzlU
Happy Mission Accomplished Day!!!!
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"Sean Hannity told Charles Grodin during his show that he would get
waterboarded for charity. Rupert Murdock is concerned; he's afraid Hannity
might end up confessing that Fox news is not that Fair and Balanced."
- Pedro Bartes
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Official Defends Signing Interrogation Memos
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/us/politics/29bybee.html
Judge Jay S. Bybee broke his silence on Tuesday and defended the conclusions of
legal memorandums he had signed as a Bush administration lawyer that allowed
use of several coercive interrogation practices on suspected terrorists.
Judge Bybee, who issued the memorandums as the head of the Office of Legal
Counsel and was later nominated to the federal appeals court by President
George W. Bush, said in a statement in response to questions from The New York
Times that he continued to believe that the memorandums represented "a
good-faith analysis of the law" that properly defined the thin line between
harsh treatment and torture. ...
The two memorandums, which provided a basis for the use of techniques like
waterboarding, sleep deprivation and isolation under certain restrictions,
provoked a storm of controversy and a debate about whether Bush administration
lawyers had provided legal cover for torture. ...
Judge Bybee said he was issuing a statement following reports that he had
regrets over his role in the memorandums, including an article in The
Washington Post on Saturday to that effect. Given the widespread criticism of
the memorandums, he said he would have done some things differently, like
clarifying and sharpening the analysis of some of his answers to help the
public better understand the basis for his conclusions.
But he said: "The central question for lawyers was a narrow one; locate, under
the statutory definition, the thin line between harsh treatment of a
high-ranking Al Qaeda terrorist that is not torture and harsh treatment that
is. I believed at the time, and continue to believe today, that the conclusions
were legally correct."
Other administration lawyers agreed with those conclusions, Judge Bybee said.
"The legal question was and is difficult," he said. "And the stakes for the
country were significant no matter what our opinion. In that context, we gave
our best, honest advice, based on our good-faith analysis of the law." ...
In a reunion of law clerks last May at a Las Vegas restaurant, first reported
by The Recorder, a California legal newspaper, Judge Bybee also spoke about his
work at the Office of Legal Counsel, first saying he was proud of the work he
had done as a judge and the help given him by his clerks He then said,
according to several witnesses, "I wish I could say that of the prior job I
had." ...
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You think they didn't know?
Here's what Dubya had to say to Iraqis before we invaded Iraq:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyzty-UN3Yg
"War crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be punished and it will be
no defense to say, 'I was just following orders.'"
- President George W. Bush
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Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War
http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/91.htm
Article 3
In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in
the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each party to the
conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions:
..the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any
place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
(a) Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation,
cruel treatment and torture;
(b) Taking of hostages;
(c) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading
treatment;
(d) 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.
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Dubya got part of the "delegate" idea right, the part about letting underlings
do the actual work....
Unfortunately, he missed the part about the boss having to take responsibility
for their work when one does hand it off.
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"Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded,
because it comprises and develops the germ of every other."
- James Madison
http://blogdredd.blogspot.com/2009/04/what-is-americas-greatest-enemy.html
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'We Could Have Done This the Right Way'
http://www.newsweek.com/id/195089/
The arguments at the CIA safe house were loud and intense in the spring of
2002. Inside, a high-value terror suspect, Abu Zubaydah, was handcuffed to a
gurney. He had been wounded during his capture in Pakistan and still had bullet
fragments in his stomach, leg and groin. Agency operatives were aiming to crack
him with rough and unorthodox interrogation tactics—including stripping him
nude, turning down the temperature and bombarding him with loud music. But one
impassioned young FBI agent wanted nothing to do with it. He tried to stop them.
The agent, Ali Soufan, was known as one of the bureau's top experts on Al
Qaeda. He also had a reputation as a shrewd interrogator who could work
fluently in both English and Arabic. Soufan yelled at one CIA contractor and
told him that what he was doing was wrong, ineffective and an affront to
American values. At one point, Soufan discovered a dark wooden "confinement
box" that the contractor had built for Abu Zubaydah. It looked, Soufan recalls,
"like a coffin." The mercurial agent erupted in anger, got on a secure phone
line and called Pasquale D'Amuro, then the FBI assistant director for
counterterrorism. "I swear to God," he shouted, "I'm going to arrest these
guys!" ...
.. In an op-ed in The New York Times and in a series of exclusive interviews
with NEWSWEEK, Soufan described how he, together with FBI colleague Steve
Gaudin, began the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. They nursed his wounds, gained
his confidence and got the terror suspect talking. They extracted crucial
intelligence -- including the identity of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the
architect of 9/11 and the dirty-bomb plot of Jose Padilla -- before CIA
contractors even began their aggressive tactics. ...
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Balancing....
http://imgsrv.gocomics.com/dim/?fh=5984631bc0e5a589f1d5ac258d4ec2a8
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"It's interesting how the progression changes with the Republicans. First, when
they talked about torture, it was, 'Well, there's just a few bad apples.' Then
it was, 'Okay, we did it a couple of times.' Then it was 'not really torture,'
and now, 'it works'... No, it is fun watching the Republicans trying to defend
torture, because they insist that what's wrong with the Democrats on this issue
is they don't get what it's like in the 'real world.' And, to prove it, they
cite Jack Bauer, a character from a television show."
- Bill Maher
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The overwhelming refusal of christianist Republicans to condemn torture in a
clear unequivocal public way just points to the extensive dry rot at the base
of the Cross....
http://rlv.zcache.com/no_chromefishtians_tshirt-p235657806328732144o4vm_325.jpg
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Reagan's DOJ Prosecuted Texas Sheriff For Waterboarding Prisoners
http://tinyurl.com/d5w6et
George W. Bush's Justice Department said subjecting a person to the
near-drowning of waterboarding was not a crime and didn't even cause pain, but
Ronald Reagan's Justice Department thought otherwise, prosecuting a Texas
sheriff and three deputies for using the practice to get confessions.
Federal prosecutors secured a 10-year sentence against the sheriff and four
years in prison for the deputies. But that 1983 case -- which would seem to be
directly on point for a legal analysis on waterboarding two decades later --
was never mentioned in the four Bush administration opinions released last week.
The failure to cite the earlier waterboarding case and a half-dozen other
precedents that dealt with torture is reportedly one of the critical findings
of a Justice Department watchdog report that legal sources say faults former
Bush administration lawyers -- Jay Bybee, John Yoo and Steven Bradbury -- for
violating "professional standards."
Bybee, Yoo and Bradbury also shocked many who have read their memos in the last
week by their use of clinical and legalistic jargon that sometimes took on an
otherworldly or Orwellian quality. Bybee's Aug. 1, 2002, legal memo -- drafted
by Yoo -- argued that waterboarding could not be torture because it does not
"inflict physical pain." ...
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Appeasing The Lefties
http://cagle.com/working/090427/bors.jpg
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"They first said they tortured this Khaled Sheikh Mohammed -- and by the way,
if there's anyone who deserved it, it was him -- but first they said they did
it once. Now it comes out, 183 times that they waterboarded this moth...@#ker
in a month. This comes out to six times in a day. I would think after that, you
get used to it. He was showing up at his torture sessions in flip flops and a
beach towel, with a Danielle Steele novel. 'Would you like sparkling or flat
waterboarding today, sir?'"
- Bill Maher
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In other news, "Dick" Cheney visited the CIA 183 times in March '03....
(via IronicTimes.com)
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At The Library
http://cagle.com/working/090429/englehart.jpg
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"President Barack Obama shot hoops at the White House outdoor court with the
champion Connecticut Women's team. Barack won a game of P-I-G. But it wasn't
fair, Barack invoked the Dick Cheney rule: you had to make the last shot off of
a lawyer's face."
- Alex Kaseberg
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How '07 ABC Interview Tilted a Torture Debate
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/business/media/28abc.html
In late 2007, there was the first crack of daylight into the government's use
of waterboarding during interrogations of Al Qaeda detainees. On Dec 10, John
Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer who had participated in the capture of the
suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002, appeared on ABC News to
say that while he considered waterboarding a form of torture, the technique
worked and yielded results very quickly.
Mr. Zubaydah started to cooperate after being waterboarded for "probably 30, 35
seconds," Mr. Kiriakou told the ABC reporter Brian Ross. "From that day on he
answered every question."
His claims -- unverified at the time, but repeated by dozens of broadcasts,
blogs and newspapers -- have been sharply contradicted by a newly declassified
Justice Department memo that said waterboarding had been used on Mr. Zubaydah
"at least 83 times." ...
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Naughty, Naughty....
http://imgsrv.gocomics.com/dim/?fh=c8071bc1c81298e0d76816d2b85bf526
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You know the Republican's ticking time bomb scenario:
"A suspect has information about an imminent terrorist attack, and torture
might be the only way to retrieve that information fast enough to save lives."
What if we turn the ticking time bomb scenario around?
"This terrorist WILL tell you where the bomb is if you give him a blowjob You
are a heterosexual Christianist. There is no time to find a chubby Jewish
intern. LA could be nuked unless you blow this terrorist! We know torture
doesn't work, but blowjobs do!
You are small and weak and have no weapons to threaten or torture, you are
overweight and weak and your gun is in your other El Camino.
Will you suck terrorist dick to save lives? Why not? Do you hate America that
much? Is gay sex worse than torturing and killing another human being?"
Try offering up this scenario the next time the wingnuts put you into one of
their ticking time bomb scenarios. If they say it is ridiculous and that it
would never happen, tell them that their scenario is just as unlikely and they
really should stop using it.
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What We Talk About
http://www.credoaction.com/comics/TMW2009-04-29original.jpg
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"Yes, these things were necessary because of the opponents that existed."
- Hermann Göring
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Shades of Richard Nixon:
"When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal."
Since The President Authorized Torture, That Makes It Legal
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/04/30/condi-president-makes-it-legal/
Q: Is waterboarding torture?
Condoleezza Rice: The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be
outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against
Torture. So that's -- And by the way, I didn't authorize anything. I conveyed
the authorization of the administration to the agency, that they had policy
authorization, subject to the Justice Department's clearance. That's what I did.
Q: Okay. Is waterboarding torture in your opinion?
Condoleezza Rice: I just said, the United States was told, we were told,
nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture. And
so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our
obligations under the Convention Against Torture.
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"I didn't authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the
administration to the agency..."
Condi drove the getaway car, but she doesn't think she's involved....
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"If the President said to jump off a bridge are you going to do it?"
- My Mom (paraphrased....)
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Typical liberal hypocrisy....
"Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any
[prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and
exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend
to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and
in such a cause... for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to
themselves and their country."
- Gen'l George Washington
Charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775
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The Light Of Day
http://cagle.com/working/090429/matson.jpg
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"The U.S. Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday a lawsuit by five former terror
suspects of the CIA can go forward. They say they were kidnapped, beaten, cut
with scalpels and shocked. The Thanksgiving table at the Cheney house is not
for the faint of heart."
- Argus Hamilton
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BREAKING NEWS from PNN.news.com
-- Former veep's daughter defends 'harsh interrogation'; Liz Cheney says she
was waterboarded and slammed into walls as a child "with no lasting effect."
(via IronicTimes.com)
PNN:
Making you more informed and obnoxious than when you woke up.
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© 2008 PBen News Network, Inc. "We say it, you believe it."
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