National Shit-Yer-Pants Day

When I think of the aftermath of 9/11/2001, I think of all that we willingly threw away. We threw away our right to morally object to another nation's war of aggression when the Bush Administration invaded Iraq. We threw away many of our civil liberties with the abysmally-named "USA Patriot Act". That piece of excreable lesiglation, among many other things, authorized "sneak-and-peek" searches, where the cops could legally sneak into your home and look for things that might justify a formal search. Over 99% of the "sneak-and-peek" searches had nothing to do with terrorism.

We had the FBI doing what they do best: Ginning up terroism cases based solely on egging on someone with a loud mouth and few brain cells. The FBI concentrated on locking up Achmed the Blowhard while refusing to look into the neo-Nazis and their ilk who were actually killing people. But to be fair, the FBI and the DHS (a Soviet-style security apparatus if there ever was one) were hampered in looking into far-Right terrorism because the GOP, even pre-Trump, recognized them as being part of their base.

We commemmorate a day when the intelligence agencies failed without acknowledging that they had all the tools and information that they needed before the attacks without giving them more power to further harass us. We commemmorate a day which happened after then then-sitting president was more interested in getting back to his golf game than being briefed on the therat that was posed. We commemmorate a day which was used as an excuse to launch a war of aggression that destabilized a region and which we are still dealing with. We commemorate a day which resulted using torture to prove a crime.

We criticize other nations for overreacting to a terrorist attack without ever having done a single thing to hold those who overreacted here to account for their actions. History may not judge the Bush Admininstration for having a discussion in the White House about using torture, but it's clear that we won't.

As I see it, there is little today that is worth commemmorating. Mourning would be more appropriate.

Twenty-Two Years On

We took a sucker punch from terrorists that were, I believe, funded by a country that is, at best, a frenemy. We threw away a lot of our freedoms. We became a nation that operated torture chambers. But I've said all this before.

About the only cheery thing I can say is that at least most retailers aren't running "9/11 Sales". That'll probably happen sometime in the next century. ("We're burning down our prices!")

Hell Gains Another Resident

John Rizzo, the CIA lawyer who approved the use of brutal torture, has died.

Promoting War Criminals

Trump wants Gina Haspel to be the next head of the CIA.

Other than being a woman, Haspel is notable because she oversaw the use of torture and then helped cover it up by overseeing the destruction of evidence.

So this is where the United States is today: People who should be doing time for war crimes are being rewarded and promoted. Chuckie Taylor, Prisoner 76556-004, is probably laughing at the irony.

Torturers Wore Black Hoods, Not Robes

In Texas, torturers wear black robes. A judge ordered his bailiff to repeatedly stun a defendant.

Even a court of appeals in Texas couldn't stomach that.

He'll get a new trial. The judge will probably be reelected. Because Texas.

The View From 2100

I believe that when historians look back on this time from the distance of a century, they will be amazed that Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were walking around as free men, rather than having been either imprisoned or shot for war crimes (warmongering) and crimes against humanity (torture).

At the CIA, the Doctors Take the Hypocritical Oath

From the Hippocratic Oath: "I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrong-doing."

But at the CIA, the doctors, in the finest traditions of the KGB and the Gestapo, gave advice on how best to torture people.

Sensitive agency documents, declassified on Tuesday, provide a new level of detail on the intimate involvement of its medical staff during its post-9/11 torture program. Officials assigned to the Office of Medical Staff (OMS) provided precise specifications for enforcing sleep deprivation, limiting the caloric intake of detainees’ food, and the proper positions for waterboarding, as outlined in a 2004 document providing “guidelines on medical and psychological support” for torture.

We have much to answer for. The relevant officials, including the members of the National Security Council, for the time that this was going on would be well-advised to not travel outside the country. It is possible that they are liable to be prosecuted under the Yamashita Doctrine.

For it's dead-nuts certain that we won't get around to cleaning up our own mess until long after everyone who was involved in torturing people has died. Just as we didn't face up to detaining over a hundred thousand of our own citizens during World War II until everyone who had more than a bit part in it was dead.*
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* The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was opposed by a majority of the Republicans in the House and a minority of Republicans in the Senate. Pres. Reagan signed the bill into law, even though he had opposed it.

Don't Worry, President Trump, They're Lying. It's What They Do.

A future president Trump or Cruz could be defied by his own intelligence chief, after CIA director John Brennan said on Sunday he would not allow members of his agency to carry out torture techniques such as waterboarding.

“I will not agree to carry out some of these tactics and techniques I’ve heard bandied about because this institution needs to endure,” Brennan told NBC News.

They're not so much worried about the future of the CIA as they are worried about their own skins, as the last CIA director admitted.

Which is sort of deciding not to kill your annoying neighbor, not because murder is wrong, but because you might get caught.

Horseshit. Bet your ass on this: If they're ordered to maim, torture and summarily execute prisoners, they will. As much as Hayden whines about CIA officers being investigated for torturing and killing people, not one of them spent a night in jail over it. No official of the Bush Administration has been charged with sanctioning, ordering or condoning torture. Those shitheel lawyers who provided legal justification for torture are sitting on the Federal bench, teaching at law school or otherwise lucratively employed.

Big punishment, eh? They had to answer difficult questions.

There are other shitheel lawyers who are happy to opine that what the CIA did wasn't torture. So if the CIA is ordered to torture people, bet the farm that they'll happily don their rubber aprons and go to work.

Carly Fionia: The Pro-Torture Candidate

Carly Fiorina has swallowed and is parroting the pro-torture caucus line that torturing people works.

Oh, and she's also pro-NSA.

Shit, if we're going to elect a Californian who is pro-torture and pro-NSA, why not just elect DiFi? At least that way, there'll be somebody who understands a little bit about how the legislative process works.

Shorter Balmer PD: "We Won't Do Our Jobs If You Don't Allow Us to Murder People, Now and Then."

A month and a half after six officers were charged in Mr. Gray’s death, policing has dwindled in some of Baltimore’s most dangerous neighborhoods, and murders have risen to levels not seen in four decades. The totals include a 29-year-old man fatally shot on this drug corner last month. Police union officials say that officers are still coming to work, but that some feel a newfound reluctance and are stepping back, questioning whether they will be prosecuted for actions they take on the job.

Let's be clear on this, shall we: "Good police work" does not entail putting a guy in cuffs, tossing him into the back of van, without belting him into a seat, and then deliberately tossing his ass around on a "black-dog ride".

Are the cops in South Carolina in an uproar after one of their own gunned a man down by shooting him in the back? This, after all, isn't Mexico, the Ley de Fuga isn't the law in this country (most of the time).

Torture by cops was supposedly outlawed in the 1930s. That it still goes on and is tacitly/overtly encouraged by many on the Right is a deep and shameful mark on this nation.

Torture Nation, Chicago Edition

More allegations about the Chicago P.D.'s black-site prison.

Don't expect ol' Rahm to do anything about it anytime soon. He's too busy fighting for his political life.

Torture, Chicago Style

The Chicago cops run their own black-site prison, where they hold people without booking them, deny them access to attorneys, and torture them.

Chicago has much to answer for. Fat chance that the city ever is compelled to do so.

The mayors for the time that the Chicago cops have been operating that site, including Mayors Richard Daley, Jr. and Rahm Emanuel, should be prosecuted under the doctrine of command responsibility. Slim chance of that ever happening.

When the Torturers Come Marching Home Again, Hurrah! Hurrah!

They bring their techniques with them. For one of the more sadistic torturers at Gitmo plied his trade as a Chiago police detective.

While }Chicago detective Richard} Zuley’s brutal interrogation techniques – prolonged shackling, family threats, demands on suspects to implicate themselves and others – would get supercharged at Guantánamo for the war on terrorism, a Guardian investigation has uncovered that Zuley used similar tactics for years, behind closed police-station doors, on Chicago’s poor and non-white citizens. Multiple people in prison in Illinois insist they have been wrongly convicted on the basis of coerced confessions extracted by Zuley and his colleagues.

Apparently Zuley learned his torturing skills in the Chicago P.D., which has a long and storied history of torturing people.

Note that Zully is now assigned to the aviation unit, which the Chicago P.D. likely uses as a rubber gun squad.

Convictions will be overturned. Convicted men and women will be exonerated. The real guilty parties have walked free for decades. The taxpayers of Chicago will be dinged for millions and millions of dollars in restitution. All because the cops are lazy and brutal.

What do the Roman Catholic Church and the United States of America Have in Common?

Both thought that they were moral and a force for good.

Both willingly surrendered the moral high ground.

Both for the same thing: Torturing people. Though for the Church, it was mostly children, but not always.

The Old Rule "First, Do No Harm" Does Not Apply to Psychologists; Torture Nation Edition

Two former Air Force psychologists raked in over $80 million from the CIA for instructing the CIA how to torture people.

The contract was for more than $180 million, but the contractors had only received $81 million when their contract was terminated in 2009.

Although the committee identified the contractors via pseudonyms, NBC News has previously identified them as Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, a Spokane, Washington, company run by two psychologists, Dr. John "Bruce" Jessen and Dr. James Mitchell, who had both previously worked with the U.S. Air Force.

The odd thing is that Mitchell donates to Amnesty International. One would assume that they're going to begin returning his checks. Jessen was appointed a bishop in the Mormon church, then quit once reporters began asking how Mormonism squared with being one of the architects of the American inquisition.

These are the Masters of American Torture:

Jessen

Mitchell

Don't think about filing ethics complaints, for allegedly the American Psychological Association has been just fine with the use of torture (if Americans do it)
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Warm Up the War Crimes Trials

Dick Cheney, The Man Who Lied Us Into War, undercut one of the efforts of the Senate Torture Report. The report's authors tried very had to shield the Bushies from prosecution for war crimes, by trying to prove that the senior members of the Bush Administration didn't know what the CIA was doing.

Dick the Torturer disposed of that.

BadTux brings another point: These clowns were not dictators who took power at gunpoint. They were elected. Which means that we own them and their crimes are the nation's crimes.

We are Americans. We tortured people.

And the ugly truth is that we, as a nation, are basically OK with that. We need to change the last line of the Star Spangled Banner, for "home of the brave" is no longer anywhere near close to the truth.

Torture Nation; Throwing the CIA Under the Bus Edition (and Abu Ghraib)

"Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly." -- Attorney General John Ashcroft, in one of many meetings about using torture.

The Bush Administration knew about it. The Cheney Cabal pushed for using more brutal methods.

As horrific as the report is turning out to be, it is also a profile in cowardice. There was no acknowledgement of the Bush Administration's demands that people be tortured. And the Obama Administration, aka MTAHNS, refused to turn over nearly ten thousand documents to the investigators. Obama opposed the CIA turning anything whatsoever over to the Senate inquiry, which makes Obama, for trying to cover up the commission of war crimes, as culpable as Bush.

The CIA and the Department of Defense committed war crimes. They committed the sort of crimes that, nearly seventy years ago, we executed enemy prisoners for doing similar things.

But they were not rogue agencies. The CIA and the military did what their bosses demanded of them. Which is not an excuse, but an explanation.

The release of the Senate report is a laudable step. But it is also a stark example of the shitty tendency of bureaucracy to blame the underlings for following the orders of the bosses.

Which leads me to this: We should either open a prosecution of the senior members of the Bush Administration for what they did, or pardon everyone who was convicted for torturing prisoners at Abu Graib. Either we follow through on being a nation of laws or embrace that we are a nation of war criminals. There really isn't any middle ground.

As for the Wingnut Weasels who are, to this day, defending the use of torture and decrying the release of the report about things the entire world knows that we did anyway, those folks are showing themselves to be beneath contempt. Their waving the bloody flag of patriotism as a justification for torturing people is simply despicable.

All honor to John McCain, for breaking ranks with the Pro-Torture/Republican Party on this issue.

See Dick Lie. Lie, Dick, Lie.

Dick Cheney was lying about the efficacy of torture.

But then again, he has had a long track record of winking at, approving and covering up war crimes.

The question now is this: Do we have the national integrity to deal with the fact that our government ordered the commission of war crimes?

I am betting heavily on "No".

(H/T)

Torture Nation

The report has been released.

You might want to download your own copy. For it's very likely that the Senate in the next (114th) Congress will try to jam this entire issue down the memory hole.

For the "small gummint" GOP is, at its core, very much an authoritarian and pro-police state party, and that includes approval of torturing people.

"Releasing This Report on Klan Atrocities Will Cause People to Lose Respect for the KKK!"

Which is pretty much the line being barfed out by the Defenders of the Torture State.

Not only did officials of the United State commit war crimes with the approval of the President, now we're going to try and sweep it under the rug?

It should also be noted that the Coverup Crowd includes people who are culpable.

So, what are we going to do? Are we going to hide this report away for fifty or seventy-five years, until 99% of everyone reading this post today is dead, and then release it and say "we're sorry that our ancestors were terrible people"?

There is a word for that: Cowardice.

This nation committed crimes. One of the first steps in getting past doing wrong is admitting to the crime and accepting that what was done was wrong.

One doesn't have to have a law degree to know that torture is illegal. The assurances of the pro-torture crowd (Bush, Cheney, Rice, Addington, Bybee, Yoo, Hayden and others) to the torturers that what they were doing was legal should not have passed the smell test. Even the FBI, an organization known for holding itself above the law, wouldn't partake of torture at Guantanamo (though they have no problem with torture by proxy).

We did this. As some of the commenters have noted, everybody knows already. Let's sack up and deal with it.

UPDATE: And we may not have a choice.