Horrid.

The snippet comes from (and is linked to) a Google translation (slightly modified for clarity) of an article in Le Figaro:

Several stories circulating in the medical [sic], Rasoul Akram Hospital, not far from Tehran University, would have received from the “Black Monday” (June 15), 38 corps[es], including 28 wounded and 10 dead . “We found that the bullets had passed through the torsos to the diagonal, which means they were fired from above - ie [sic] a roof,” says the second doctor.

According to an official review, at least 17 people have been killed since the beginning of the dispute. However, a first quietly made by the nursing staff from different hospitals showed that to date more than 92 people died in Tehran and its environs. A woman eight months pregnant is one of the victims. Shot and killed, near the presidential palace, it was then transported to the hospital. Other disturbing stories are beginning to emerge in broad daylight. As one of the six corpses of young men found last week in Shahriar, on the outskirts of the capital. Their skulls had been smashed and their brains had been opened, presumably to retrieve the ball to clear the trace of the crime,” says the second doctor informed of this terrible massacre by a trusted colleague. Translated Source

Original article in French here.

What this horrible, terrible, no good, very bad ruling circumscribing the very notion of the concept of the individual boils down to is this: Human beings (and that proprietary data which makes you you) are not just subject to the laws of the state, they are commodities owned by the state and ipso facto subject to the use of any or all tools in the state’s arsenal — regardless of the initial purpose behind the acquisition and application of such tools — merely for the sake of expedience.

A judge in Niagra County, New York, ruled Thursday that DNA evidence, obtained only after police applied a Taser to a suspect who refused to provide evidence against himself, may be used by the prosecution because the electric shock was not administered with malice.

Judge Sara Sheldon Sperrazza, with this 17-page decision, becomes “the first judge in western civilization to say you can use a Taser to enforce a court order,” defense attorney Patrick Balkin said, according to The Niagara Gazette. Source

A bit more here.

The sheer leap from argumentation condoning the incapacitation of an assailant to condoning incapacitation of recalcitrance is beyond breathtaking.

Awful bookends for this month of May.

End of the month — Maj. Gen. (ret.) Anthony Taguba (Source):

“The mere description of these pictures is horrendous enough, take my word for it.”

Start of the month — Gen. (ret.) Barry McCaffrey (Source):

“We should never, as a policy, maltreat people under our control, detainees. We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A.”

Level-headed layout.

President Barack Obama’s support for preventively detaining terrorism suspects undoubtedly surprised some of his longtime backers.…

But the possibility had been percolating for months. With his pledge in January to close the Guantanamo prison within a year, Obama set off a fierce, mostly under-the-radar debate among legal experts about whether it will be possible to meet the goal he announced yesterday: to build “a legitimate legal framework” for imprisoning terrorism suspects indefinitely.

The question affects more than Guantanamo. The fates of 169 detainees there remain undecided, according to Obama’s numbers yesterday, and administration officials have suggested that they will be unable to prosecute as many as 100. But the legal status of thousands more held by the United States in Afghanistan and elsewhere overseas also hangs in limbo, and any detention policy will have ongoing effects as the fight against al-Qaida continues.

Here are some of the key issues facing the architects of a new preventive detention system, or, as it’s sometimes called, a “national security court”… Source

…yet remain too widely unlearned or willfully ignored.

Officials use torture when they have already dehumanized their victims —- a witch is not a normal person, a “terrorist” is a beast —- when a government puts revenge before other goals, and when a sense of helplessness rules.

Promoting fear of the unknown enemy who must be exposed through torture gives officials a great sense of their own importance; and, because they can waterboard a suspect like Abu Zubaydah 83 times, they do have considerable power —- to inflict pain, not to obtain useful information. In the process, the torturers dehumanize themselves.

Leaving all moral qualms aside, are we to learn nothing from the experience of keen observers who have understood torture’s uselessness over the centuries? Source

Why and how is there still any public deliberation deeming any approving torture as a tool of the state even marginally credible?

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.
– – Winston Churchill

And for those armchair Torquemadas who would still smugly or vengefully (and absent any record of proof, particularly of any sole or unique and testable, replicable value) tout that “torture worked” — well, slavery worked. Quite efficaciously for many centuries too, but the weight of its innate and central immorality, bigotry and wretched, corruptive maleficence properly cast it into obliteration as accepted practice.

As for Mr. Cheney, ye old scribe turns once more to Churchill:

A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.

The dangers and consequences of validating leadership, fomenting policy or upending and twisting universal, civilized illegalities into mandated practice under the banner of fanaticism are historically self-evident.

Update May 21: After listening to both speeches today, some quick thoughts.

Cheney: PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) is real, and giving a wide banner labeled ‘credibility’ to an obvious untreated long-term PTSD sufferer to spout rabid, repetitive and one-dimensional points, many spun out of the flimsiest of data(if indeed any at all) does not serve to bolster nor advance any cogent argument. Indoctrination by fear is no less offesnive and repugnant than is indoctrination by force.

Obama: Quicker and more sure-footed progress is always made when standing on solid ground than when balancing on a high wire. The latter position is where he chose to perch too frequently. Splitting the difference on inalienable human rights affords no rights at all, merely a facade of same. Compromise on basic tenets of justice gives succor and viability to the unjustified.

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

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.

Mafia tactics? You betcha.

Under the woebegone previous administration, freedom meant lying and gagging. (emphasis added)

U.S. authorities asked a Guantanamo Bay detainee to drop allegations of torture and agree not to speak publicly about his ordeal in exchange for his freedom, according to British court documents.

A ruling by two British High Court judges, issued in October but released only on Monday, said the U.S. offered former detainee Binyam Mohamed a plea bargain last year - six years after he was first detained as an enemy combatant.

It was the first time details of the plea bargain offer were made public. The ruling said U.S. military prosecutors also asked that Mohamed plead guilty to two charges, accept a three-year sentence and agree to testify against other suspected terrorists.

[snip]

He was freed in February after months of negotiation between the U.S. and Britain. All charges against him were dropped last year.

Mohamed refused to agree to any deal that prevented him from discussing his treatment, Lord Justice John Thomas and Mr. Justice David Lloyd Jones said in the ruling.

“He wanted it to be made clear to the world what had happened and how he has been treated by the United States government since April 2002,” Thomas said in the ruling.

[snip]

Issuing a judgment on the case in February, Thomas said there was evidence to show Mohamed was tortured, but that the documents could not be made public because of the British government’s national security concerns. Source

More:

The High Court ruling, which was made Oct. 22 but hadn’t been published previously because of agreements covering classified information between the U.S. and Britain, said that Mohamed was asked to agree to a plea “in circumstances where there are no pending charges against him, where he has no idea how any new charges against him will be framed and where he is not to receive sight” of exculpatory evidence against him.

[snip]

Lord Peter Goldsmith, the British attorney general in the Labor government under former Prime Minister Tony Blair from 2001 to 2007, said Monday that he “did not know there were any attempts to silence the detainees.” If clear evidence of such attempts exists, it suggests that “the people who had been detaining him had something to hide,” Goldsmith said. Source

The most efficient time to change course of the ship of state is when one has control of the helm.

Over objections from the U.S. intelligence community, the White House is moving to declassify—and publicly release—three internal memos that will lay out, for the first time, details of the “enhanced” interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration for use against “high value” Qaeda detainees. The memos, written by Justice Department lawyers in May 2005, provide the legal rationale for waterboarding, head slapping and other rough tactics used by the CIA. [“rough tactics,” even as a euphemism, is a decidedly milquetoasty and diluted defining construct — voxd] One senior Obama official, who like others interviewed for this story requested anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity, said the memos were “ugly” and could embarrass the CIA. Other officials predicted they would fuel demands for a “truth commission” on torture.

Because of an executive order signed by President Obama on Jan. 22 banning such aggressive tactics, deputies to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. concluded there was no longer any reason to keep the interrogation memos classified. But current and former intel officials pushed back, arguing that any public release might still compromise “sources and methods.”… Source

Do it.

Especially do it before becoming subsumed in the groupthink of entrenched bureaucracy. Whether it causes embarrassment or ruffles feathers are irrelevant considerations. Agencies or their officials operating devoid of informed critique or restraint by that very nature operate outside the framework of the governmental system. Such shrouded policies and methods carried out under our name are either defensible under the rule of law and the Constitution or they are not. Being indefensible is no rationale for sweeping them under the rug.

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FYI (and, if an actual reversal and when assiduously followed through, much more than symbolic — a reaffirmation of leadership and partnership in the company of nation-states):

The White House is set to reverse a key Bush administration policy by allowing some of the 240 remaining Guantánamo Bay inmates to be resettled on American soil.

The US is pushing for Europe to take a share of released inmates, but the Obama administration is reconciled to taking some of them, even though there will be noisy resistance from individual states.

Washington has told European officials that once a review of the Guantánamo cases is completed, the US will almost certainly allow some inmates to resettle on the mainland.

George Bush’s refusal to countenance a resettlement programme on US soil contributed to European reluctance to play host to freed prisoners.

[snip]

Some of those to be released can return to their own homelands, but there are many others who cannot, such as the Chinese Uighurs who would face the risk of a death sentence.

A European diplomat said today the change of course in Washington would make it easier to persuade her government to take part in an international resettlement plan. “It changes the whole tone,” she said. Source

When your words, actions, habits, location, etc. — when the sum total of social data which makes you you – is given to the control (and whims) of others (or simply taken from your control as a matter of course), you are no longer in any substantive sense free.

Welcome to the future, where everything about you is saved. A future where your actions are recorded, your movements are tracked, and your conversations are no longer ephemeral. A future brought to you not by some 1984-like dystopia, but by the natural tendencies of computers to produce data.

Data is the pollution of the information age. It’s a natural by-product of every computer-mediated interaction. It stays around forever, unless it’s disposed of. It is valuable when reused, but it must be done carefully. Otherwise, its after-effects are toxic.

And just as 100 years ago people ignored pollution in our rush to build the Industrial Age, today we’re ignoring data in our rush to build the Information Age.

[snip]

…Being constantly scrutinised undermines our social norms; furthermore, it’s creepy. Privacy isn’t just about having something to hide; it’s a basic right that has enormous value to democracy, liberty, and our humanity. Source (alternate link)

It’s a price most dear. It’s slavery by default in a digital dimension. It’s a creeping cancer on the concepts of personal space and individuality. It’s a super-highway to (to coin a term) slaveillance.

There are so many additional areas to delve into, one can but hope the initiative for shining light into the shadows does not fade.

As the old saying goes: Once the camel’s nose is in the tent, the rest of the camel is not far behind.

Still and all, hopeful noises.

The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to move forward with a commission to investigate torture during the Bush administration. Committee Chairman Pat Leahy, D-Vt., told Salon Tuesday that his panel would soon announce a hearing to study various commission plans. His staff said the announcement could come as early as Wednesday.

[snip]

Spearheading Senate efforts to establish a torture commission is Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse. As a member of both the Judiciary Committee and the Intelligence Committee, Whitehouse is privy to information about interrogations he can’t yet share. Still, regarding a potential torture commission, he told Salon, “I am convinced it is going to happen.” In fact, his fervor on the issue was palpable. When asked if there is a lot the public still does not know about these issues during the Bush administration, his eyes grew large and he nodded slowly. “Stay on this,” he said. “This is going to be big.”

[snip]

…”When push comes to shove, we are the legislative branch of government. We have oversight responsibilities. And we don’t need the executive branch’s approval to look into these things just as a constitutional matter.”

Plans to establish the commission still remain in their infancy, as senators and staff look at previous panels, such as the 9-11 Commission, and investigations following Watergate. Whitehouse, a former U.S. attorney, noted that a torture commission might need the power to immunize witnesses on a case-by-case basis. The prospect of future prosecutions, he said, are beside the point. Most important was putting a spotlight on abuses committed by the Bush administration.

[snip]

Last week, retired Maj. Gen. Tony Taguba, known for conducting an honest investigation of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib […] joined a group of former high-level diplomats and law enforcement officials who also announced their support for a torture commission late last week, along with 18 rights groups. Source

Shorter version: Hurriedly building on a flawed foundation cannot but tempestuously compromise or topple any structure constructed thereon.

Update Feb. 21 8:30 p.m.: A highly related and important read from yet one more who was right in the thick of it:

Darrel Vandeveld is an attorney and former military officer, who, in civilian life is a prosecuting attorney in Erie, PA. In the military, he attained the rank of Lt. Col. in the Army Reserve, serving, among other places, in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa, as well as serving as a senior prosecutor for the military commissions prosecuting Guantanamo detainees. Last year, he became the seventh attorney to resign as a prosecutor from the military commissions.…

[snip]

…When I arrived in May 2007, the Commissions and their predecessor tribunals, had been underway for almost six years. I fully expected that in that lengthy period of time, the evidence against the detainees would have been collected and systematized, that prosecution packages or files would have long since been assembled, and that informed, prudential decisions would have already been made about which detainees had committed war crimes, and which detainees had not.

Instead, what I found was precisely the opposite: despite the best efforts of the Chief Prosecutor at the time, Air Force Colonel Morris Davis, and his deputy, who I will not identify in order to respect his personal privacy, the prosecution enterprise was a shambles, in a state of disorganization that had me reeling in disbelief. It became clear to me within weeks after I reported for duty that the various military services had not assigned officers with the experience, skills, and motivation necessary to conduct the vital mission of prosecuting the war criminals with the sense of urgency and diligence the task required. As I’ve explained elsewhere – and my assertions have been confirmed by “senior Bush administration officials” familiar with the Commissions – the evidence and, more importantly, the missing evidence, had neither been assembled nor sought after with any diligence after prosecutors and investigators had discovered the evidence to be missing. The prosecution office, after detaining supposed enemy combatants for as long as six years, seemed to have accomplished little more than to install a security door in order to separate the prosecution offices from where the convening authority’s offices had then been located.…

[snip]

…seven or eight years to bring the detainees to trial is a travesty; holding for those who should have been released long ago (the plight of the Uighurs is particularly repellant) is unbelievable. Source

For the record, working to return the scales to nominal calibration.

After a three-year global study, the International Commission of Jurists said many states used the public’s fear of terrorism to introduce measures.

These included detention without trial, illegal disappearance and torture.

It also said that the UK and the US have “actively undermined” international law by their actions.

It concluded that many measures introduced to fight terrorism were illegal and counter-productive.

It called for justice systems to be strengthened and warned that temporary measures should not become permanent.

The Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) is a non-governmental organisation which promotes the observance of the rule of law and the legal protection of human rights.

The panel of eminent lawyers and judges concluded that the framework of international law that existed before the 9/11 attacks on the US was robust and effective.

But now, it said, it was being actively undermined by many states and liberal democracies like the US and the UK.

[snip]

The panel reviewed counter-terrorism measures in over 40 countries, and heard from government officials, victims of terror attacks, and from people detained on suspicion of terrorism.

It found that many states have used the fear of terrorism to introduce measures which are illegal such as torture, detention without trial, and enforced disappearance.

Some of the world’s top international law experts served on the ICJ panel…. Source

Link to the full report (.pdf file) is included at the source link.

So not so much as one single House Republican was moved to (pace McCain) put country first over ideology in today’s vote.

This was not loyal opposition, this was secession.

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Update 8:45 p.m.: In the Senate vote, abandonment of duty in abject deference to cowardice.

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Update Feb. 14 3:30 a.m.: The near-instantaneous logical inconsistency and outright hypocrisy are palpable.

It’s bad. Very bad.

The Obama administration’s argument, the very idea that an administration headed by someone versed in Constitutional law would unabashedly support broad-brush and unilateral denial of access to the judicial system, figuratively deploying the new broom to sweep the same dirt under the old rug, the continuance of one-sided use of classification as both a means and an end, the upheaval and degradation visited on those seeking to air their case — it all stinks to the heavens.

…”This is the first real test of the authenticity of Obama’s commitment to reverse the abuses of executive power over the last eight years.” Today, the Obama administration failed that test — resoundingly and disgracefully….

[snip]

That the Obama DOJ — when faced with its first real test to determine what it intends to do in these areas (as opposed to engaging in symbolic rituals and issuing pretty words) — explicitly adopts exactly the Bush position is about as inauspicious a start in these areas as one can imagine.

[snip]

What this is clearly about is shielding the U.S. Government and Bush officials from any accountability. Worse, by keeping Bush’s secrecy architecture in place, it ensures that any future President — Obama or any other — can continue to operate behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy, with no transparency or accountability even for blatantly criminal acts.

[snip]

They’re embracing a theory that literally places government officials beyond the rule of law. No minimally honest person who criticized the Bush administration for relying on this instrument can defend the Obama administration for doing so here. Source

More:

…State secrecy should exist to protect the nation’s military and diplomatic secrets, and those are the parameters which have governed its use since the time the Constitution was adopted. But state secrecy must not be invoked to keep materials secret because they would be politically embarrassing or harmful to individual politicians. And even more clearly, state secrecy must never be invoked to conceal evidence of a crime.

[snip]

…Using state secrecy claims to cloak criminal conduct without any acknowledgment of the misconduct that occurred is a bad, even criminal, idea. It can only bring the government itself into disrepute and will serve to undermine the nation’s security and respect for state secrets. Source

Preventing truth from being openly weighed in the public commons allows liars, sneaks, deceivers, charlatans and hordes of assaulters of liberty unchallenged access and voice.

Slacking off in stages from despotism and imperialistic hubris is not an option. A break, a cold turkey stoppage, a renunciation by deed, is the only honorable path.

A path decidedly not taken today.

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Update Feb. 11, 1:30 p.m.: Good on Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-MA).

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Also, highly related (emphasis added):

…”You, as commander in chief, are being denied access to material that would help prove that crimes have been committed by US personnel. This decision is being made by the very people who you command.”

It is understood US defence officials might have censored the evidence to protect the president from criminal liability or political embarrassment. Source

As the entirety of the secreted evidence rests wholly on the previous administration, ye old scribe is doing a bit of head-scratching on that last bit, and hypothesizing that holdovers from or careerists under that woebegone group may be engaging in some classic CYA methodology.

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Follow-up Feb. 11, 6 p.m.: Trust must be earned, not dictated. There is no rational (much less attributable) rationalization for this monumental miscarriage. It must be set right. The massive rent in the fabric of the American constitutional system must be mended and defended. To do otherwise without a clear, concise, and directly accountable explanation and laying out of all the principles and arguments involved is unconscionably incorrect and demonstrably dangerous — a retrograde revolution from within, and a pointed spitting in the eye of and slapping a gag on every person who has so much as heard the words “liberty and justice for all.”

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Update Feb. 12 8:15 a.m.: Working towards a necessity?

House and Senate committees yesterday introduced bills that would sharply curtail the government’s use of the “state secrets” privilege, a policy used by President Bush to argue that a lawsuit involving allegations of torture should be dismissed - and a position that the Obama administration has now adopted.

[snip]

“The administration’s decision this week to adopt its predecessor’s argument that the state secret privilege requires the outright dismissal of a case challenging rendition to torture was a step in the wrong direction and a reminder that legislation is required to ensure meaningful review of the state secret privilege,” said Representative Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat who is one of the House bill’s cosponsors.

Nadler said protecting sensitive information “is an important responsibility for any administration and requires that courts protect legitimate state secrets while preventing the premature and sweeping dismissal of entire cases.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, said the Senate version of the bill “will help guide the courts to balance the government’s interests in secrecy with accountability and the rights of citizens to seek judicial redress” in cases of wrongdoing. The bill, he said, “does not restrict the government’s ability to assert the privilege in appropriate cases. In light of the pending cases where this privilege has been invoked, involving issues including torture, rendition and warrantless wiretapping, we can ill afford to delay consideration of this important legislation.” Source

More:

A President who seeks to aggrandize his own power through wildly expansive claims of executive authority ought to be vigorously criticized. But the ultimate responsibility to put a stop to that lies with the Congress (and the courts). More than anything else, it was the failure of the Congress to rein in the abuses of the Bush presidency (when they weren’t actively endorsing those abuses) that was the ultimate enabling force of the extremism and destruction of the last eight years. Source

Oy vey.

Millions of people will be glued to the TV next week when President-elect Barack Obama takes his oath of office. But in Federal Way, students will need to get permission from their parents to watch the historical inauguration in school. Source

Quintuple yuppers.

This decision is so ridiculous that it can’t be boneheaded.…

[snip]

The televised inauguration of America’s next president is not a feature film. It’s a current event, one that everyone who has the opportunity to witness should watch. Our next Commander in Chief is going to speak to our future. Young people, especially, should hear his message. Source

The anti-knowledge, anti-history, anti-reality Leave No Child Educated phalanx, sad to say, is still kicking.

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
– – Ralph Waldo Emerson

With what has come out or is already etched on the record (and there is so much, much more yet to be revealed and corroborated), whenever Dick Cheney says “black” we must perforce always take that to mean “white” until unequivocally proven otherwise.

If the Dick Cheney of the past eight years sticks his noggin out of his hidey hole and says “legend,” we must perforce take that to mean “fact.”

Nearing the end of eight years as Vice President, Dick Cheney bluntly dismissed the frequent suggestion that he was the one calling the shots in the White House.

“It’s an urban legend,” he said. “It never happened.” Source

You can bet your sweet patootie, then, that it did happen. Evidence already extant is incontrovertible that the office of the Veep either was given (On what basis? By what ruling or order? By way of what Constitutional footing?), or baldly grabbed, or in the absence of fulfillment (or a vacuum at the top) usurped, powers, authority, processes and effectuation not a part of that office by any rational or cogent measure. Whether this occurred solo or in concert with the office of the President or with a wink and a nod from that office is irrelevant. It happened.

That he can’t or won’t fit it under the specific phraseology of “calling the shots” is irrelevant. It happened.

Whether he and G. Walker were metaphorically joined at the hip or not, it happened.

Whether through incapability, incompetence or disinterest at the top, it happened.

Whether such power and authority was abrogated or abandoned by its natural office, it happened.

Whether such power and authority was obtained or conferred deliberately, covertly, casually or informally, it happened.

A rose is a rose is a rose, and this one reeks like skunk cabbage.

To wit,

…There are virtually always “good reasons” that can be and are cited to justify war crimes and acts of aggression. It’s often the case that nationalistic impulses — or genuine fears — lead the country’s citizens to support or at least acquiesce to those crimes. War crimes and other atrocities are typically undertaken in defense against some real (if exaggerated) threat, or to target actual enemies, or to redress real grievances.

But we don’t accept that justifying reasoning when offered by others. In fact, those who seek merely to explain — let alone justify — the tyranny, extremism and/or violence of Castro, or Chavez, or Hamas, or Slobodan Milosevic or Islamic extremists are immediately condemned for seeking to defend the indefensible, or invoking “root causes” to justify the unjustifiable, or offering mitigating rationale for pure evil.

Yet here we have American leaders who now, more openly than ever, are literally admitting to what has long been known — that they violated the laws of war and international treaties which, in the past, we’ve led the way in advocating and enforcing.…

[snip]

The pressures and allegedly selfless motivations being cited on behalf of Bush officials who ordered torture and other crimes — even if accurate — aren’t unique to American leaders. They are extremely common. They don’t mitigate war crimes. They are what typically motivate war crimes, and they’re the reason such crimes are banned by international agreement in the first place — to deter leaders, through the force of law, from succumbing to those exact temptations. What determines whether a political leader is good or evil isn’t their nationality. It’s their conduct. And leaders who violate the laws of war and commit war crimes, by definition, aren’t good, even if they are American. Source

Or just watch a few minutes of related, stunning video form late last year:

Have mentioned the infusion of members filled with demented hate over the years here and in previous oncarnations of this blog.

The situation remains unaddressed, if not entirely sweept under the carpet. Small in gross numbers, perhaps, but it doesn’t take more than one or a very few professionally lethally trained, mentally irrational, venom-infused human time bombs to wreak great havoc.

…Military and Defense Department officials seem to have made no sustained effort to prevent active white supremacists from joining the armed forces or to weed out those already in uniform.

Furthermore, new evidence is emerging that not only supports the Intelligence Report’s original findings, but also indicates the problem may have worsened since the summer of 2006, as enlistment rates have continued to plummet, and the military has struggled to meet recruitment goals in a time of unpopular war. Asked about the latest developments, military officials this fall declined to comment.

A new FBI report confirms that white supremacists are infiltrating the military for several reasons. According to the unclassified FBI Intelligence Assessment, “White Supremacist Recruitment of Military Personnel Since 9/11,” which was released to law enforcement agencies nationwide: “Sensitive and reliable source reporting indicates supremacist leaders are encouraging followers who lack documented histories of neo-Nazi activity and overt racist insignia such as tattoos to infiltrate the military as ‘ghost skins,’ in order to recruit and receive training for the benefit of the extremist movement.”

[snip]

Currently, 46 members of the white supremacist social networking website Newsaxon.com identify themselves as active-duty military personnel. Six of these individuals are members of “White Military Men,” a New Saxon sub-group.

Earlier this year, the founder of White Military Men identified himself in his New Saxon account as “Lance Corporal Burton” of the 2nd Battalion Fox Company Pit 2097, from Florida, according to a master’s thesis by graduate student Matthew Kennard. Under his “About Me” section, Burton writes: “Love to shoot my M16A2 service rifle effectively at the Hachies (Iraqis),” and, “Love to watch things blow up (Hachies House).”

[snip]

As part of the research for his thesis, “The New Nazi Army: How the U.S. military is allowing the far right to join its ranks,” Kennard used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain from the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division investigative reports concerning white supremacist activity in 2006 and 2007. They show that Army commanders repeatedly terminated investigations of suspected extremist activity in the military despite strong evidence it was occurring. This evidence was often provided by regional Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which are made up of FBI and state and local law enforcement officials. Source