RelentlesslyOptimistic

Thank You, John McCain

John McCain weighs in against torture, and chides the apologists and revisionists who claim it was responsible for the finding Osama bin Laden.

"under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear — true or false — if he believes it will relieve his suffering. Often, information provided to stop the torture is deliberately misleading."

via James Fallows in www.theatlantic.com

"The photo from Getty Images, is of the young John McCain meeting Richard Nixon at a reception for released prisoners of war, in 1973."

Bush calls for torture prosecution

"I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture..."

Official proclamation by President Bush, June 26, 2003.

From The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Image from Susan Walsh/AP Photo

Because their lips are moving: Top Officials Planned Detailed Torture, Bush Approved

ABC News reports that top officials of the Bush Administration, including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Ashcroft, discussed and approved detailed interrogation plans and methods of torture to be used. President "We-Don't-Torture" Bush said he knew about and approved of the discussions. The significance of this story is the shocking admission that top officials not only approved of the use of torture, but that they discussed and approved of specific techniques against specific prisoners.

Jan Crawford Greenburg's ABC News Blog posted a summary with links to key stories, and Digby sums it up by saying that:

"There was a time when the Village clucked and screeched about "defiling the white house" with an extra marital affair or hosting fund raising coffees. I would say this leaves a far greater stain on that institution than any sexual act could ever do.

The vice president, national security advisor and members of the president's cabinet sat around the white house "choreographing" the torture and the president approved it. I have to say that even in my most vivid imaginings about this torture scheme it didn't occur to me that the highest levels of the cabinet were personally involved"

Via Orcinus, image from ABC News

Tom Tomorrow on Torture

Via The World's Fair. Tom Tomorrow is published regularly at Credo Action, which also provided the nifty Bush Countdown timer at the top of the sidebar.

Iraqi torture explained

Tom Toles helps us understand: their torture practices are part of the process of Iraq taking over governing responsibility from us.

“Nobody was beheaded or killed.”

From Davenetics* : When Friends Torture comes this question:

"...what happens when we learn that the Iraqis have been torturing suspects in a secret facility?

The Iraqi Interior Minister defended the facility by explaining that “Nobody was beheaded or killed.”

Meanwhile, the administration is pushing Congress to allow it to operate just such facilities. Sort of complicates things, no?"

Regarding the title quote, I'd really hope for a higher standard than that.

Fair and disgraceful

Faux News - Fair and something....via Kantor.com

A (continued) history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies

Harpers.org re-posts this October 2003 piece quoting Bush Administration statements about the Iraq war on the same day that the AP quoted Bush:

"We do not torture," Bush declared in response to reports of secret CIA prisons overseas.
President Bush on Monday defended U.S. interrogation practices...[as he] supported an effort...to block or modify a proposed Senate-passed ban on torture.

Photo from Bob Harris

"We did it for amusement" "We kept it to broken arms and legs."

"We did it for amusement."

"Some days we would just get bored, so we would have everyone sit in a corner and then make them get in a pyramid"
 

"he had seen a soldier break open a chemical light stick and beat the detainees with it. "That made them glow in the dark, which was real funny"

"He told him to bend over and broke the guy's leg with a ...metal bat."

"after the Abu Ghraib scandal..."We still did it, but we were careful," he told the human rights group."

"As long as no PUC's [prisoners] came up dead, it happened." He added, "We kept it to broken arms and legs."

"We would give them blows to the head, chest, legs and stomach, and pull them down, kick dirt on them...This happened every day."

Which is worse? What we're doing to them, or what we're doing to ourselves?

3 in 82nd Airborne Say Beating Iraqi Prisoners Was Routine - New York Times.
Image source

Forbes reports that US acknowledges torture at Guantanamo; in Iraq, Afghanistan

The liberal backstabbing Forbes.com reports that the US acknowledges torture at Guantanamo; in Iraq, Afghanistan
 

GENEVA (AFX) - Washington has, for the first time, acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source said.

The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on on condition of anonymity.
...
UN sources said this is the first time the world body has received such a frank statement on torture from US authorities.

 

Threshholds and the relativity of torture: the "NABA defense"

Great post at slacktivist on the chorus of torture "we're Not As Bad As the gulags and it's unpatriotic to suggest otherwise" we've been hearing lately. The excerpts below (reordered for sense due to length) show that it is worth reading the entire post and the comments.

"In an earlier post, I described this as the “NABA defense” -- Not As Bad As...The American prison camps...are, in fact, not as vast or as brutal as Stalin’s gulags.

The United States of America -- as a matter of official policy conducted with our money, in our name -- tortures and abuses prisoners and detains people indefinitely without charge or due process.

The point here is that once you get beyond a certain threshhold, relative comparisons don’t really matter.

The only relevant and meaningful comparison is between those regimes that countenance torture and those that do not. Once a nation crosses that line any difference between it and other torture regimes is inconsequential in comparison to the difference between it and those nations which have refused to cross that threshhold."

A commenter quoted Avi Schlaim, an Israeli historian, "The issue isn't whether or not we are the same as the Nazis, the issue is that we aren't different enough"

But we're still not as bad as Hitler or Saddam -- Right? Right?

Jeanne at Body and Soul looks at the latest in torture relativism in her typically unique way: "Can you tell, without peeking at the linked articles, which group of torturers is on our side?" and asks:

Is it fair to draw comparisons between what Saddam's agents who are no longer working for Saddam do now and what they did before, and is it fair to note that the main difference between the "torture houses" of Iraqi insurgents and the prisons and military compounds where our abuses, and those of our allies, take place is probably that the latter are better equipped?

And when we talk about Iraq before the invasion, and Iraq after the invasion, somebody give me hint about what is supposed to have changed? I haven't read yet about amputations of limbs or ears. Was this a war for less chilling forms of torture?

A commenter points out that the stories of insurgent torture houses and chicken dinners at Gitmo are the results of a PR effort to lessen the impact of the new photos and videos from Abu Ghraib that will be released by June 30th due to a recent US District Court order. Photo via LA Times

Breathtaking

The Right Conversation for America. by Fred Hiatt in the Washington Post

The United States and this administration in particular continually assert the moral right to behave differently than other nations. We will not be bound by the International Criminal Court. We insist that other nations give up their nuclear weapons while we keep our own. We wage war without U.N. Security Council approval. We publish annual report cards on everyone else's human rights records.

The premise of this highhandedness is that the United States is, on balance, a force for good in the world -- a superpower that uses its might not to subjugate others but to allow them to live freely. This is a premise that The Post's editorial page on the whole accepts -- to the dismay of many readers.

The Post agrees, then, that might makes right, and that being a force for good excuses bad bahavior. The terrorists also believe that they are a force for good in the world, that they are fighting evil, and so justified in their extreme measures.

We have been a force for good in the world. But it's hard to say that we are one right now. The means determines the end. The means we use -- torture, indiscriminate killing of civilians -- are some of the same ones used by the terrorists. How can we acheive good by practicing evil?

Via Busy, Busy, Busy

Perspective

From CathiefromCanada via Alternate Brain:

Extraordinary Rendition may be more ordinary than claimed

According to the New York Times in C.I.A. Expanding Terror Battle Under Guise of Charter Flights the agency has expanded their air fleet far beyond the single plane used for "rendition" that previous stories had exposed.

"Behind a surprisingly thin cover of rural hideaways, front companies and shell corporations that share officers who appear to exist only on paper, the C.I.A. has rapidly expanded its air operations since 2001 as it has pursued and questioned terrorism suspects around the world.

An analysis of thousands of flight records, aircraft registrations and corporate documents, as well as interviews with former C.I.A. officers and pilots, show that the agency owns at least 26 planes, 10 of them purchased since 2001. The agency has concealed its ownership behind a web of seven shell corporations that appear to have no employees and no function apart from owning the aircraft.

...Since 2001, the battle against terrorism has refocused and expanded the C.I.A.'s air operations. Aero's staff grew to 79 from 48 from 2001 to 2004, according to Dun and Bradstreet."

Via the Sideshow and TalkLeft