Political Bloviation

That’s quite a defense, but it’s hard to disagree with that headline. If you haven’t been following this, it’s regarding the investigation of DOJ lawyers who provided the White House and DOD legal cover to torture detainees as long as it didn’t result in death or permanent injury:
Justice Department Will Not Punish Yoo and Bybee [...]

Glenn Greenwald points out that the massive increase in government surveillance has made us less safe, not more safe.  This fearful response to isolated acts of sabotage provokes stupid reactions that clogs our intelligence system with useless, unrelated stuff that prevents us from finding what we really need. We give up our freedom for this?
Every [...]

An upcoming article to be published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, discusses the science behind the assumption that torture works:
…captives have information in long-term memory that they choose not to share. Extended application of techniques that will induce stress and discomfort will make the captives release the information. The underlying assumptions are that the coercive [...]

Not so much…
A Central Intelligence Agency inspector general’s report set to be released Monday provides new details about abuses that took place inside the agency’s secret prisons, including details of how C.I.A. officers carried out mock executions and threatened at least one prisoner with a gun and a power drill.
via Report Provides New Details on [...]

via How civilized, law-abiding countries imprison terrorists – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.
Glenn points out that recently Turkey and Germany  both managed to use actual legal means to prosecute and imprison terrorists:
While the U.S. continues to debate whether it must imprison accused terrorists without charges or trial — and now even refuses to say whether it will [...]

ABC News’ interview with Lakhdar Boumediene and our current policies – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.
First of all Glenn Greenwald deserves a lot of credit for championing  basic human rights for US prisoners. In this piece he recounts the plight of Boumediene:
…who, while living in Bosnia working for the International Red Crescent, was arrested by the Bosnian [...]

Grand unified scandal – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com.
Krugman ties the torture program to a desperate search for a way to link 9/11 to Iraq.
The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s [...]

Walking and Chewing Gum | TPM.
Josh at TMP makes an intersting point bout the Harman-AIPAC-Gonzalez issue:
… But it does not take too big a leap to see this going down rather differently — seeing Harman, fairly or unfairly, compromised by these wiretaps and thus beholden to the administration.
Whether or not there’s anything to that hypothetical [...]

Major scandal erupts involving Rep. Jane Harman, Alberto Gonzales and AIPAC – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.
Greenwald reports that the ranking democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee (an oxymoron if there ever was one) and Bush wiretapping enabler, Rep. Jane Harman D-Ca was caught on tape offering to interfere with the espionage investigation of two [...]

The Bush DOJ’s take on the Constitution: “Constitution? We don’t need no stinking Constitution”:
via George W. Bush’s Disposable Constitution—By Scott Horton Harper’s Magazine.
Here’s Neil Lewis’s summary in the New York Times:
“The law has recognized that force (including deadly force) may be legitimately used in self-defense,” Mr. Yoo and Mr. Delahunty wrote to Mr. Gonzales. Therefore [...]

And we need no investigation?
He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. This was a standardized Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability [...]

Its’ sad to see that Obama is going to use the same state secrets argument to prevent the American public from seeing the disgusting depths the Bush administration stooped to:
Administration Invokes State Secret Argument – NYTimes.com.
“This is not change,” he said in a statement. “This is definitely more of the same. Candidate Obama ran on [...]

Op-Ed Columnist – Putting Torture Behind Us – NYTimes.com.
Kristoff seems to suffer from the common illusion that Republicans want to work together for the good of the country and putting them in charge of investigating Bush Administration abuse of detainees and blatant law breaking will somehow win them over. They only want one thing: to [...]

Obama Orders Halt to Prosecutions at Guantánamo – NYTimes.com.
That was quick! This is one of the main reasons why I voted for him. Gitmo will be remembered as a national shame, much like the WWII era imprisonment of Americans of Japanese descent. Gitmo has only enabled the recruitment of more sucide bombers and encouraged further [...]

Detainee Was Tortured, a Bush Official Confirms
File this under “no shit?”
The senior Pentagon official in the Bush administration’s system for prosecuting detainees said in a published interview that she had concluded that interrogators had tortured a Guantánamo detainee who has sometimes been described as “the 20th hijacker” in the 2001 terrorist attacks.
The public record [...]

It seems bizarre that it’s necessary to explain why torture is bad. I found this Rolling Stone piece via Andrew Sullivan on the path taken by a 15 year old prisoner from the early months of the action in Afghanistan. What happened to him at the hands of Americans is flatly, obviously torture. They took [...]

Tortures Blowback – washingtonpost.com
THE GHOSTS of interrogations past have come back to haunt the Bush administration. This week, the legal officer supervising the military trials at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, dismissed capital charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani, who allegedly would have been the 20th hijacker during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks [...]

Sources: Top Bush Advisors Approved ‘Enhanced Interrogation’
They should be in jail, but you know they’ll never see the inside of a court as defendants.

then this should really piss you off. Read the whole thing. It’s a view of the lawlessness that the Bush administration has dragged this nation to. These are not the principles that America was founded on. It shames and demeans us as a people. These people are guilty of numerous crimes and should, but probably [...]

Bush Warns House on Surveillance – New York Times
With the House moving toward a vote on electronic surveillance legislation that the White House has said falls far short of its requirements, President Bush warned legislators strongly Thursday morning against passing what he called “a partisan bill that will undermine American security.”
There is no issue affecting [...]