Not yet.

As the castiagting and purging of Republican party members for ‘purity’ advances, mayhaps we can expect a 3-way cage match of Sarah Palin, Samuel Wurzelbacher, Karl Rove and Glenn Beck as the last act in attempting to ideologically reach that ever elusive 99 and 44/100 per cent level (ref.).

Needless to say, substitute your own more contemporary (say, from Ronald Reagan onward) bits for the lyrics in this nevertheless relevant ditty from 1962 on the aciduous diminishment accompanying a hellbent for leather run via culling to some unattainable idealized endzone of party purity:

As for Sen. Specter, he’s spent a Congressional career talking out of both sides of his mouth as a matter of course (from among an virtual encyclopedia of examples, a topically relevant one here), so there are virtually no expectations from ye old scribe of his demonstrating anything approaching a stiff backbone or core stances in any case. His announced party switch today is just the other bookend to the one made of convenience and expediency when he first successfully ran for an office back in 1965 (ref.).

Naming the rot:

There’s a bomb of a contradiction at the heart of what’s passing for a debate on the torture regime of the past eight years. President Barack Obama calls those years of secret prisons and “enhanced interrogation techniques” a “dark and painful chapter in our history.””That’s not just a suggestion of something amiss. It’s an admission and an indictment of wrongs, in terms that have been applied to atrocities like war crimes and slavery.…

[snip]

CIA Director Leon E. Panetta opposed so much as the release of the memos, claiming it set a dangerous precedent for the disclosure of intelligence sources and methods. But sources of intelligence aren’t being revealed. Methods of torture are. Keeping them secret would only safeguard them for use in the future. And to date, not a single name of actual torturers (”interrogators,” as the preferred euphemism goes) has been released. Only the names of a posse of Bush administration staffers and lawyers tasked with finagling legality out of indefensible practices have: David Addington, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Steven Bradbury.

[snip]

But if there’s a bomb of a contradiction at the heart of this debate, there’s also an elephant: George W. Bush. His name is hardly mentioned in all these stories of shame and torture. It’s all about the lawyers, the process, the exigencies of the moment. But it isn’t. The decisions were his. “I am the decider,” as he put it. And so he was. This “dark and painful chapter” began with him. His orders for secret memos. His orders to torture. It should end with him. Source

At the time of the Watergate exposures, it took a protracted amount of time for the public and the investigative process to assess the situation and remold their worldview into one which accepted that a sitting president could be capable of (and culpable for) what was done.

That sobering lesson in introspection and patriotism applied above politics must now be relearned by new generations, but this time as applied to a president no longer in office.

“Let bygones be bygones” cannot be permitted to prevail, not when what perfidiously transpired (in secret and not) served to work to recast, reconfigure and redefine the very nature of the country and the very core of each of its people into something wrenchingly in opposition to bedrock tenets, historical precedent, reams of law and the pillars supporting publicly professed principles.

Under the precept that this is “a nation of laws, not men,” when the weight of evidence mandates warranted investigation and the submission of charges, the intrinsic operation of the legal machinery of the judicial and prosecutorial system is not optional and not beholden to decision or whim, and escpecially must remain exempt from political manipulation. Contra the previous administration on that last bit, the tectonic stress of truth has raised a growing mountain of evidence, with one more stratum added now (emphasis added).

“There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.

“Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.”

Senior administration officials, however, “blew that off and kept insisting that we’d overlooked something, that the interrogators weren’t pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information,” he said.

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq,” Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”

Excerpts from Burney’s interview appeared in a full, declassified report on a two-year investigation into detainee abuse released on Tuesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

[snip]

The report, the executive summary of which was released in November, found that Rumsfeld, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and other former senior Bush administration officials were responsible for the abusive interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo and in Iraq and Afghanistan. Source

Could not agree more with this in principle, though any decision as to whether or not to prosecute if legal determination so warrants (inclusive of both laws and treaties), any decision whether or not to honor, follow, have the proper authorities follow through and obey the law is not in the President’s bailiwick — nor a responsibility of the White House (to deny in such cases would be an obstruction of justice, to proceed absent just cause malfeasance and a miscarriage of justice) — it is an automatic “Yes” imposed by the oath of the office:

…Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m sick and goddamn tired of being told that, as a citizen, I am too fragile to bear the horrible burden of watching public criminals pay for their crimes and that, as a political entity, my fellow citizens and I are delicate flowers encased in candy-glass who must be kept away from the sight of men in fine suits weeping as they are ripped from the arms of their families and sent off to penal institutions manifestly more kind than those in which they arranged to get their rocks off vicariously while driving other men mad.

Hey, Mr. President. Put these barbarians on trial and watch me.… Citation

Brutality — and recognized as such by the bar.

“I ain’t no angel,” admitted a 172nd Infantry Brigade noncommissioned officer shortly before a military jury sentenced him Thursday to life in prison with the possibility of parole for the execution-style murders of four Iraqi detainees in 2007.

[snip]

Capt. John Riesenberg, assistant government trial counsel, told the jury that their sentence should be aimed at stopping other first sergeants and soldiers from doing what the Company A soldiers did.

“Send a message to the world that this is an army that recognizes that it is different, that American soldiers just don’t do this. They don’t execute detainees in the middle of the night by shooting them in the back of the head when they are bound and blindfolded and dump their bodies in a canal,” he said. Source

Over strident objection from entrenched interests, the administrtion has relased the latest four lengthy memos contrived by the previous regime’s torture (attempted) justification squad.

.pdf file formats of all four accessible here.

Page after page after page of convoluted (dare one say tortured) acquiescence to sadism, thuggery, flouting accepted law and parsing the vomit of tyranny.

Were these ‘techniques’ indisputably inflicted on a dog or other animal, the perpetrator along with any who gave the green light would rightfully be charged, convicted and punished.

Update April 17 12:30 p.m.: Indeed.

The four legal memos released by the Obama administration on Thursday confirm in excruciating detail that the Bush administration employed twisted and macabre legal reasoning to authorize the unspeakable – the torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of human beings.

[snip]

A child would recognize these tactics as cruel and inhumane. The United States itself treated waterboarding as torture when the Japanese used it against our troops in World War II. Yet through pages and pages of dense legal reasoning, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers somehow reach the conclusion that these tactics, even when employed in combination and over a 30-day period, are not torture, and not even cruel, inhuman, or degrading. Source

Comparing the sterile, soulless theories of institutionally sanctioned terrorism with the realities of application:

One memo, written in August 2002 and signed by then OLC Chief Jay Bybee, approves a list of 10 “enhanced interrogation” techniques that the CIA wanted to use against Abu Zubayda, who was believed to be a senior member of al-Qaeda. The techniques are described in a detached, clinical manner: “walling,” the act of throwing detainees against a “flexible wall,” and “close confinement,” the act of placing a detainee within a confinement box that forces the detainee to stand or sit. The memo also approves the use of insects with the confinement box to enhance detainees’ sense of terror.

[snip]

Alex Abdo, a legal fellow with the ACLU’s National Security Project, says comparing the clinical description in the OLC memos to the ICRC report was surreal. “The four memos were written by lawyers trying to construct a legal regime that allowed the unthinkable. The sterilized language they use in the memos as compared with the graphic descriptions of the ICRC report make that patently clear,” Abdo says. “It’s as though you’re in Alice in Wonderland.” Source

One shudders to contemplate what other segments of a panic-driven curriculum which would make Torquemada blanch ( for example) still remain shielded by claims of secrecy.

Walking the walk of reason, the core issue doesn’t get more crucial than as outlined by Mark Danner in the secon of two pieces published in The New York Review of Books:

Investigating what kind of intelligence torture actually yielded is not a popular task: those who oppose torture do not like to admit that it might, in any way, have “worked”; those who support its use don’t like to admit that it might not have. It is a regrettable but undeniable fact that torture’s illegality, or the political harm it may do to the country’s reputation, is not sufficient to discourage the willingness of many Americans to countenance it. However one might prefer that this be an argument about legality or morality, it is also an argument about national security and, in the end, about politics. However much one agrees with President Obama that Cheney’s “notion” that “somehow…we can’t reconcile our core values, our Constitution, our belief that we don’t torture, with our national security interests,” the fact is that many people continue to believe the contrary, and this group includes the former president and vice-president of the United States and many senior officials who served them.

[snip]

The only way to defuse the political volatility of torture and to remove it from the center of the “politics of fear” is to replace its lingering mystique, owed mostly to secrecy, with authoritative and convincing information about how it was really used and what it really achieved. That this has not yet happened is the reason why, despite the innumerable reports and studies and revelations that have given us a rich and vivid picture of the Bush administration’s policies of torture, we as a society have barely advanced along this path. We have not so far managed, despite all the investigations, to produce a bipartisan, broadly credible, and politically decisive effort, and pronounce authoritatively on whether or not these activities accomplished anything at all in their stated and still asserted purpose: to protect the security interests of the country.

This cannot be accomplished through the press; for the same institutional limitations that lead journalists to keep repeating Bush and Cheney’s insistence about the “legality” of torture make it impossible for the press alone, no matter how persuasive the leaks it brings to the public, to make a politically decisive judgment on the value of torture. What is lacking is not information or revelation but political credibility. What is needed is not more disclosures but a broadly persuasive judgment, delivered by people who can look at all the evidence, however highly classified, and can claim bipartisan respect on the order of the Watergate Select Committee or the 9/11 Commission, on whether or not torture made Americans safer.

This is the only way we can begin to come to a true consensus about torture. By all accounts, it is likely that the intelligence harvest that can be attributed directly to the “alternative set of procedures” is meager. But whatever information might have been gained, it must be assessed and then judged against the great costs, legal, moral, political, incurred in producing it. Torture’s harvest, whatever it may truly be, is very unlikely to have outweighed those costs.

[snip]

There is a sense in which our society is finally posing that “what should we do” question. That it is doing so only now, after the fact, is a tragedy for the country–and becomes even more damaging as the debate is carried on largely by means of politically driven assertions and leaks. For even as the practice of torture by Americans has withered and died, its potency as a political issue has grown. The issue could not be more important, for it cuts to the basic question of who we are as Americans, and whether our laws and ideals truly guide us in our actions or serve, instead, as a kind of national decoration to be discarded in times of danger. The only way to confront the political power of the issue, and prevent the reappearance of the practice itself, is to take a hard look at the true “empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years,” and speak out, clearly and credibly, about what that story really tells. Source

The vile repellant stain on the national fabric must be expunged, and the lesson be writ large: this is not who we are; this is not what we stand for; this shall not be permitted to be done in our name in any circumstance.

Can we take it as gospel that MBA has been revealed as standing for Monumentally Bogus Accounting and use that proposition as the new, more realistic baseline for debate, regulation and so on?

Just askin’.

Several pieces today of blatant importance, but shall refrain from much commentary. Go read ‘em. Promise it’s worth your while.

The Good:
1:

The Obama administration said Wednesday it will participate directly in group talks with Iran over its suspect nuclear program, another significant shift from President George W. Bush’s policy toward a nation he labeled part of an axis of evil.

The State Department said the United States would be at the table “from now on” when senior diplomats from the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany meet with Iranian officials to discuss the nuclear issue.… Source

2 (all emphasis added — and, by the way, an indicator of the sad state of affairs in general that it is necessary to have to say what is bolded here):

…A new white paper prepared by a group of former US ambassadors and progressive foreign policy experts urges the Obama administration not to succumb to hawks pushing an unduly harsh and counterproductive stance regarding Iran. At issue is how to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. In clear reference to Iraq invasion (remember those elusive WMDs Saddam was supposedly stockpiling?), the Iran Nuclear Policy Group warns, “publicly assuming the worst in the absence of evidence–and issuing an ultimatum based on that assumption–is a singularly bad idea.” Source

The Bad:
1)

Late on Friday, the Obama Justice Department filed an astonishing document with a San Francisco court. Seeking the dismissal of Jewel v. National Security Agency, a suit brought by persons who had been subjected to warrantless—and thus presumably unlawful—intercepts by the National Security Agency, the Justice Department advanced two arguments. First, it fully embraced the discredited Bush Administration view that by claiming “state secrets” it could simply terminate the lawsuit. This is a position that Senators Obama and Biden both criticized and members of their campaign insisted would never be asserted by an Obama Administration. That promise has now been repeatedly broken. Still more pernicious was a second argument. Directly contradicting the assurances of the legislation’s sponsors that suits against the government could proceed undisturbed, the Obama Justice Department argues that FISA amendments giving immunity to the telecom service providers accidentally granted “sovereign immunity” to the government, shielding it from suits by Americans in American courts.

[snip]

…These claims ring hollow. The real threat that the Justice Department seeks to combat is a citizenry that is increasingly angered by a national intelligence apparatus that ignores the law. We need a government that fears its citizenry, and not a citizenry that lives in fear of its government. Source

The Ugly:
1 (emphasis added, and possibly the most chilling – and, regretably, accurate – statement encountered in a long, long time):

“To hide relevant and exculpatory evidence from counsel and from the court under any circumstances, particularly here where there is no other means to discover this information and where the stakes are so very high . . . is fundamentally unjust, outrageous and will not be tolerated,” [Judge Emmett] Sullivan said, according to a transcript of the hearing.

“How can this court have any confidence whatsoever in the United States government to comply with its obligations and to be truthful to the court?”

[snip]

“I’m not going to continue to tolerate indefinite delay on the part of the United States government,” Sullivan said. “I mean this Guantanamo issue is a travesty . . . a horror story . . . and I’m not going to buy into an extended indefinite delay of this man’s stay at Guantanamo.” Source

2 (emphasis added):

When Sgt. X went to see [Army psychologist Douglas] McNinch with a tape recorder, he was concerned that something was amiss with his diagnosis. He wanted to find out why the psychologist had told the medical evaluation board that handles disability payments that Sgt. X did not, in fact, have PTSD, but instead an “anxiety disorder,” which could substantially lower the amount of benefits he would receive if the Army discharged him for a disability. The recorder in Sgt. X’s pocket captured McNinch in a moment of candor. (Listen to a segment of the recording here.)

“OK,” McNinch told Sgt. X. “I will tell you something confidentially that I would have to deny if it were ever public. Not only myself, but all the clinicians up here are being pressured to not diagnose PTSD and diagnose anxiety disorder NOS [instead].” McNinch told him that Army medical boards were “kick[ing] back” his diagnoses of PTSD, saying soldiers had not seen enough trauma to have “serious PTSD issues.”

“Unfortunately,” McNinch told Sgt. X, “yours has not been the only case … I and other [doctors] are under a lot of pressure to not diagnose PTSD. It’s not fair. I think it’s a horrible way to treat soldiers, but unfortunately, you know, now the V.A. is jumping on board, saying, ‘Well, these people don’t have PTSD,’ and stuff like that.”

[snip]

McNinch added that he also received pressure not to properly diagnose traumatic brain injury, Sgt. X’s other medical problem. “When I got there I was told I was overdiagnosing brain injuries and now everybody is finding out that, yes, there are brain injuries,” he recalled. McNinch said he argued, “‘What are we going to do about treatment?’ And they said, ‘Oh, we are just counting people. We don’t plan on treating them.’” McNinch replied, “‘You are bringing a generation of brain-damaged individuals back here. You have got to get a game plan together for this public health crisis.’” Source

The Other:
1)

With this publication, taxpayers can take stock of how the federal government spent each 2008 income tax dollar: 37.3 cents went towards military-related spending (military and military-related debt), while environment, energy and science-related spending split 2.8 cents.… Source

The bulk of the American media will only highlight an Iraq story if a bomb goes off and includes fatalities above some inscrutable threshold. The other quotidian violence remains mostly unbroadcast or beneath the radar in the U.S.

Beyond that, in the streets and the alleys – in the context of the building blocks of a society – how’s that “liberation” going?

Virtual labor slavery and insular hunt and assassinate squads? You betcha.

Click and read (short yet troubling articles from just the past few days) here and here.

Common sense advice regarding Wall Street from those whose progenitors built the original wall for which the street is named.

Money talks, and it is past time for the Treasury to be shouting.

Make it. so. Passing the committee is now the first obastacle passed. Still too many more to go, but this is vitally required legislation (even in a watered down version) to set the playing field for consumers on more level ground.

In a blow to financial firms, the U.S. Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday signed off on legislation that seeks to ban abusive credit-card practices.

While consumer groups and key Democrats lauded the committee’s move, the 12-to-11 vote in favor of the controversial bill was very narrow. Thus, the committee’s chairman, Sen. Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.), said he would work with lawmakers–both Democratic and Republican–to modify the bill and broaden support before the bill hits the Senate floor.

[snip]

The bill seeks to prohibit card issuers from unfairly raising interest rates. It would prohibit applying rate increases retroactively to existing balances and it seeks to boost consumer disclosures. Additionally, it seeks to limit certain over-the-limit fees and interest charges and creates new requirements for card issuers looking to extend credit to youngsters under the age of 21. The amended bill would also make it easier for gift-card recipients to use the cards.

[snip]

Still, one key Democrat joined Republicans to vote against the credit-card proposal. Sen. Tim Johnson (D., S.D.), said in a statement that the legislation “goes too far in prohibiting lenders from adjusting prices to account for increased risk.”…

[snip]

“The American Bankers Association is very disappointed by the action today of the Senate Banking Committee,” the bank group said in a statement after the committee vote. “We have deep concerns that the legislation passed by the committee will harm consumers and the economy at the very time our country can least afford it.”

At the same time, the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act, or CARD Act, is strongly backed by consumer groups such as the Consumer Federation of America and Consumers Union. Source

Gee, what might prompt a Congressperson from South Dakota to vote nay regarding reining in bank and credit cards, pray tell? (That’s a rhetorical question — see the link.)