Tag: Torture

Fear and Loathing at Gitmo.

A NYT report finds mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo is much more widespread than earlier suggested by Rumsfeld and other administration officials. “One regular procedure…was making uncooperative prisoners strip to their underwear, having them sit in a chair while shackled hand and foot to a bolt in the floor, and forcing them to endure strobe lights and screamingly loud rock and rap music played through two close loudspeakers, while the air-conditioning was turned up to maximum levels…Such sessions could last up to 14 hours with breaks.”

Show us the bodies.

In three separate cases, the Supremes invoke the Magna Carta and the Founding Fathers to call out Dubya for the trampling of civil liberties under his watch. In the words of the Post, “the opinions, concurrences and dissents were decisive on this: They represent a nearly unanimous repudiation of the Bush administration’s sweeping claims to power over those captives.” (Nearly unanimous because Clarence Thomas, he of the “high-tech lynching,” saw no problem with the US government holding prisoners indefinitely without cause or access to courts…perhaps he’s trying to get invited to Cheney’s next hunting trip.) It’d have been nice if the Supremes had gone farther and also decided on the Padilla case rather than kicking it back to a lower court, but still, this is a solid showing by the Bush v. Gore gang. As Salon waggishly put it, let freedom reign.

Dubya to the Dogs.

While authorization for attack dog intimidation techniques implicate intelligence higher-ups in the horrors of Abu Ghraib, Bush gets legalistic to (not) explain the pro-torture policies emanating from his administration. Hmmm. I bet the White House is wishing Reagan could die every week right now.

1600 Pennsylvania’s Room 101.

I missed most of the recent discoveries about Dubya’s pro-torture policy changes during my cable outage, but Value Judgment has birddogged a nice Washington Post editorial that sums up the story so far. “There is no justification, legal or moral, for the judgments made by Mr. Bush’s political appointees at the Justice and Defense departments. Theirs is the logic of criminal regimes, of dictatorships around the world that sanction torture on grounds of ‘national security.’“

Geneva Schmeneva.

Jan 25, 2002: “‘As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war,’ Gonzales wrote to Bush. ‘The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians.’ Gonzales concluded in stark terms: ‘In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.’ Dismissing the Geneva Conventions, two full years before the atrocities at Abu Ghreib? That giant sucking sound you hear is the void left by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales’s incredible imploding Supreme Court bid. He’s probably got less chance now than Ken Starr of taking the nation’s highest bench, and for good reason.

Shoot the Messenger.

Earth to Inhofe? Earth to Inhofe? Nope, no answer. While several GOP leaders are turning on Dubya (and Rumsfeld) after recent events, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) is not among them. To the contrary, he lost it in committee today, proclaiming that he is “probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment” of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. (For their part, Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsay Graham (R-SC) disavowed Inhofe immediately.) One would be tempted to write Inhofe off as simply a crank, until you peruse the many similar responses emanating from the Right about the relative newsworthiness of US soldiers engaging in torture and assorted other depravities. Mind you, these are the exact same Defenders of American Values who wore moral outrage like a cheap cologne all through l’affaire Lewinsky…some people have no shame. Update: Sure enough, the Right rallies around Inhofe.

Ring around the Rummy.

With Rummy on the ropes, Dubya and Cheney rush to the defense of their man in Defense. Hey, hold him to your breast as long as possible, Mr. President…maybe then, you’ll all go down together come November.

Blowback.

From The Economist to the NY Times, Salon examines the growing calls for Rumsfeld to resign as a result of Abu Ghraib. When even Karl Rove is forced to admit the damage done by these horrifying pics, you know it’ll be rough for Rummy in the weeks ahead, even with Dubya’s vote of confidence. Well, I’m all for getting rid of Rumsfeld, but I don’t think he should be the only fall guy for this Iraq fiasco…the decision may have began with Cheney, Wolfowitz, & co., but it ended with Dubya. For Abu Ghraib as with so much else, they all gotta go.

A Moral Abattoir.

I don’t know how we will ever recover from this. Medley aptly sums up my stomach-churning disgust at the Iraq atrocity photos now circulating around the world. If there wasn’t a connection between Dubya’s carnival sideshow in Iraq and the war in terror before, there assuredly is now. And if a picture is worth a thousand words, just think how many possible US-hating terrorists have been born with each one of these vile and grotesque snapshots. Our entire nation and way of life have been shamed by these depravities, perhaps to fatal effect.