What - Aren't You Proud to be an American?

I trust you have been at least monitoring the recent revelations regarding the bush administration's adoption of torture as the solution for what their marketing team dubbed the "global war on terror." I certainly have.

As is so common, we have not been well served by the corporate media - yes, I believe I have vowed to exclude them from my sources, but it is beyond difficult to do so. The Internet and more particularly blogosphere is lousy with the propaganda the government folks route through the supposed "journalists," very few of whom actually do anything resembling journalism. E.g., checking sources, insisting on more than one source, allowing anonymity only in extremities such as cases of whistleblowing.

First of all, we spent a week or more being badgered over Obama's assertion that we would not investigate or prosecute the perpetrators (yes, that is where "perps" comes from). The man can lobby all he wants, but last I heard the decision whether to investigate, how to investigate, and all that goes with that does not come from the White House.

Okay, yes, we did have a former arrangement where there was in-effect no longer an independent Department of Justice, and Congress played pussy-cat. That disgusting corruption of our laboriously-crafted system of checks-and-balances is one of the primary features of recent government many of us hoped would be subject to change.

So I hope we can at least get back to the AG making a dignified case on his own whether we will or will not adhere to equal applicability of the law to every person in this country. I hear encouraging noises to that effect. From what I can tell we are less prone now to having slimeballs more concerned about polishing their loyalty-to-the-prez badges and licking the cojones than actually doing their job occupying some of those key offices.

And then there is this business of debating whether torture "works," i.e., whether the flotsam from the mouth of a victim being drowned for the 183rd time turned out to be "useful." From what I can tell, the answer in almost every case is a resounding NO! But isn't this a specious attempt at "ends justify the means"? Torture is illegal. If it worked it would be illegal. It doesn't, and it is still illegal!! That vacuous blowhard who fled to Wyoming since his Texas residency would have precluded his place on the ticket, always similarly running, hiding, and with secrecy his motto when in office, is desperately pushing this. Find him a bunker for Good.

But the paranoid secrecy promulgated by cheney is gradually breaking down. We are now learning that torture techniques were in vogue well before any of the legal "memos" that pretended to justify them. And after all the high-and-mighty claims, apparently a significant motive for much of the early torture sanctioned and signed off on very probably by bush, cheney, and rumsfeld as well as the dozen familiar barracudas, was to "find" (i.e., manufacture) excuses for the Iraq invasion. Besides saving bush's face!

Our government was using the very methods we had learned from the NK and Chinese to be effective at extorting false confessions from our troops in an attempt to conjure up Iraq-Al Qaida linkages.

As you may well know (or can imagine), there is a certain froth out here on these issues, and rightly so. I have a half-dozen posts and articles logged, but will settle here with excerpts from just two for now. Glenn G has been as always one of the mainstays on this. One of his latest:

After President Obama announced last week that he opposes prosecutions of CIA officials who tortured detainees in reliance on OLC memos purporting to legalize that conduct (a decision which is not Obama's to make), the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, announced that Obama's policy of immunizing CIA torturers violates international law and, specifically, the clear obligations of the U.S. under the Convention Against Torture (signed by Ronald Reagan in 1988).

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Christy Hardin Smith helps us recall how our government found a way to spiral into the toilet on the issue of Human Rights:

Let's see if I have the chain of events that led to this searing SASC report on American use of torture techniques on prisoners in order here:

1. A doctrine against torture was championed by the US for decades, including through codification proceedings for Geneva Conventions and other international treaties that we helped enact as a preventative measure against our own troops and those of our allies being tortured. Because torture is bad and wrong. We know this from farther back than George Washington's day, and he set the standard that American troops would not torture British captives. This has been US military standard as codified in the UCMJ for years.
2. The Chinese and North Koreans torture captured American troops during the Korean conflict.
3. In order to prepare elite US covert ops troops to resist such techniques, they are reverse engineered so that some training -- in a highly controlled, limited environment with safety considerations built in as preparation for potential torture -- can be done.
4. At this point, torture is still something evil done by rogue nations (others) against the fighters for truth, justice and the American way (us).
5. 9/11 occurs.
6. SERE techniques are asked to be reverse-engineered as interrogation techniques to be used against US captives. (No one bothers to ask where we got them?)
7. Through some craven mind trick, legal justification for torture is written up despite torture being illegal under US and international law in the very treaties that the US wrote only a few decades ago. Administration officials and their political allies defend it vociferously.
8. Because it's not torture because Dick Cheney says so.

I don't even know what to say to something so searingly SEREingly illogical. And evil.

So I'll leave it to the Senate Armed Services Committee report to explain implications:

The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of "a few bad apples" acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies and compromised our moral authority.

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There's no way we are going to walk away from one of the ugliest chapters in American history without at least a major inquest, whether by Independent Prosecutor, Congress, or other means. It's pretty evident by now to all the world that the things we used to call "war crimes" when the Nazis among others (the same Nazis Prescott Bush made nooky with) committed them were sanctioned by bush, cheney, and their whole gang.

Either we can do it, like grownups, or we can have it done to us.

Mr. President, You Are Wrong!

I like Obama, or, more accurately, I admire Obama. He is a truly remarkable man who seems to overlap my interests and positions on key issues to a decent extent, but most importantly did seem to also reject bush idiocies at a high level. But I was quite unhappy over his failure to take anything in the way of a genuinely populist, anti-corporate-ocracy stance during the campaign (ditto Hilary), to the point of finding myself compelled to make a condemning statement at our local caucus, well out of my normal operational zone.

But here we are with the President we have. Who's up for the lemming approach where we just embrace whatever our leader wants and relinquish the idea that he is supposed to be representing us, responsive to our opinions, and working for our interests?

Not me, by whatever deity you choose!

And I'm very pleased that some major O-supporters continue to nip at his heals on the score of this outrageous Torture business. Mr. Olbermann, as I recall it a big O-booster (and never one to shy from the spotlight), has been properly on top of this:

As promised, a Special Comment now on the president's revelation of the remainder of this nightmare of Bush Administration torture memos. This President has gone where few before him, dared. The dirty laundry - illegal, un-American, self-defeating, self-destroying - is out for all to see.

Mr. Obama deserves our praise and our thanks for that. And yet he has gone but half-way. And, in this case, in far too many respects, half the distance is worse than standing still. Today, Mr. President, in acknowledging these science-fiction-like documents, you said that:

"This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke."

"We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history.

“But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.

Mr. President, you are wrong. What you describe would be not "spent energy" but catharsis.

Not "blame laid," but responsibility ascribed. You continued:

"Our national greatness is embedded in America's ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future."

Indeed we must, Mr. President. And the forces of which you speak are the ones lingering - with pervasive stench - from the previous administration. Far more than a criminal stench, Sir. An immoral one. One we cannot let be re-created.

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