Here is a succinct executive summary of everything you need to know about torture:
Yes, Waterboarding IS Torture
President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, Malcolm Nance (an advisor on terrorism to the US departments of Homeland Security, Special Operations and Intelligence), Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples (the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency) and many other interrogation experts and high-level politicians say that waterboarding is torture
Everyone claiming waterboarding is not torture has changed their tune as soon as they were exposed to even a small dose of it themselves. See this, this and this
A new study in Psychological Science shows a fascinating history of Americans’ emotional responses to the unfolding events, as recorded in the text messages sent on 9/11. In 2009, Wiki Leaks published the content of more than 500,000 texts from that day. Scientists at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany decided to analyze the texts for emotion-related words. They categorized the emotional content of the texts as either sadness (e.g. crying), anxiety (e.g., worried), or anger (e.g., hate).
They then plotted the emotional content over a timeline of the day, starting from before the first plane crashed to after President Bush’s second evening address to the country.
Muntadhar Al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist hailed as a hero in the Arab world for throwing his shoes at the then President Bush, claims, “Under US pressure, Iraqi media covered up my torture and supporters were arrested.”
There they are, the people who brought you every bit of the action in the WikiLeaks video and all of the other horrors flowing from invasion of Iraq. Madeleine Albright (far right, above), former Clinton Secretary of State, is a good place to start. From 60 Minutes:
Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it. –60 Minutes (5/12/96)
An exhaustive study found that 227,000 children under five (table 13) died during the George H.W. Bush – Bill Clinton regime of total sanctions against Iraq from 1990 through 2000.
Back in 2005-06, I wrote a book, The Case for Impeachment, in which I made the argument that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, as well as other key figures in the Bush/Cheney administration–Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales–should be impeached for war crimes, as well as crimes against the Constitution of the United States.
These days, when I mention the book’s title, people sometimes ask, half in jest, whether I’m referring to the current president, Barack Obama.
Sadly, it is time to say, just 14 months into the current term of this new president, that yes, this president, and some of his subordinates, are also guilty of impeachable crimes–including many of the same ones committed by Bush and Cheney.
Let’s start with the war in Afghanistan, which Obama has taken full ownership of with an escalation that will bring the number of US troops in that country (not counting mercenaries hired by the Pentagon and CIA) to 100,000 by this August.
by Sitting Bull source: 9/11 Blogger April 13, 2010
In the hundreds of thousands leaked pager messages evidence emerged that the Secret Service did forward “Angel is next”!
A Secret Service page at 10:32 a.m. warned: “ANONYMOUS CALL TO JOC REPORTING ANGEL IS TARGET.” Angel is the Secret Service codeword for Air Force One; JOC means Joint Operations Center. When the president’s plane had departed Florida about half an hour earlier, it was en route to D.C. That anonymous threat seems to be what diverted President Bush on a high-speed flight across the country, first to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, and then to an underground command center in Nebraska.
They also feared that Air Force One itself was a target. Cheney told the president there was a credible threat against the plane. Using the code name for Air Force One, Mr. Bush told an aide, “Angel is next.” The threat was passed to presidential pilot Col. Mark Tillman.
We now know that the threat to Air Force One was part of the “Fog of War,” a false alarm.
But it had a powerful effect at the time. But Mr. Bush was clearly worried about it. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/09/11/60II/main521718.shtml
In a 45-page opinion, Judge Vaughn R. Walker ruled that the government had violated a 1978 federal statute requiring court approval for domestic surveillance when it intercepted phone calls of Al Haramain, a now-defunct Islamic charity in Oregon, and of two lawyers representing it in 2004. Declaring that the plaintiffs had been “subjected to unlawful surveillance,” the judge said the government was liable to pay them damages.
The ruling delivered a blow to the Bush administration’s claims that its surveillance program, which Mr. Bush secretly authorized shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was lawful. Under the program, the National Security Agency monitored Americans’ international e-mail messages and phone calls without court approval, even though the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, required warrants.
The Justice Department said it was reviewing the decision and had made no decision about whether to appeal.
This story belongs in the same folder as the following announcements made in the last 2 weeks:
The documents obtained by the ACLU (page 26), which have the signature’s of Rumsfeld, Tenet, and Ashcroft telling the 9/11 Commission Chairs that they can’t interview the 9/11 detainees due to National Security.
In a federal court filing, Justice backed away from the Bush administration’s statements that Zubaydah was the No. 2 or No. 3 official in al-Qaeda who had helped plan the 9/11 attacks, as well as even earlier claims from the Clinton administration that he was directly involved in planning the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa.
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.
The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.
Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”.
General Powell, who left the Bush Administration in 2005, angry about the misinformation that he unwittingly (Nor Cal Edit) gave the world when he made the case for the invasion of Iraq at the UN, is understood to have backed Colonel Wilkerson’s declaration.
Americans have been losing the protection of law for years. In the 21st century the loss of legal protections accelerated with the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” which continues under the Obama administration and is essentially a war on the Constitution and U.S. civil liberties.
The Bush regime was determined to vitiate habeas corpus in order to hold people indefinitely without bringing charges. The regime had acquired hundreds of prisoners by paying a bounty for terrorists. Afghan warlords and thugs responded to the financial incentive by grabbing unprotected people and selling them to the Americans.
Not Holding Leaders Responsable for Crimes Only Breeds More War
One reason the U.S. is continuously at war is that its leaders “are never held to any criminal responsibility for their actions,” a law school dean writes.
The U.S. hanged World War II German and Japanese war criminals “but no American leaders are held to criminal responsibility by America, no matter how dastardly their conduct,” writes Lawrence Velvel, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover.
”And we of course will not let any other country or body hold them to criminal responsibility for horrendous conduct,” writes Velvel, in his school’s “Long Term View” magazine. Indeed, he noted the President George W. Bush “with unaccustomed foresight refused to let America support and ‘participate’ in the International Criminal Court lest Americans be triable for their actions.”
”Why shouldn’t warmongering leaders enter wars for any reason that suits them, however fallacious or despicable, if they know they can retroactively justify the war if any arguable basis later turns up…and they also know that they face no possibility of criminal responsibility regardless of how terrible their conduct?” Velvel asks.
More than 300 individuals and groups have sued the government to get records in the year since President Obama pledged that his administration would be the most open in history.
In case after case, the plaintiffs say little has changed since the Bush administration years, when most began their quests for records. Agencies still often fight requests for disclosure, contending that national security and internal decision-making need to be protected.
The lawsuits cover a wide range of issues. A retired Marine wants to review soldier autopsies to learn whether the Pentagon has issued defective body armor. A Texas law professor questions whether the location of the U.S.-Mexico border fence unfairly harmed minority landowners. Closer to home, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation continues its battle to learn whether agencies are properly punishing those who destroy wetlands.
When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great.” Toward that end, the president issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo “shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order.” Obama has failed to fulfill his promise. Some prisoners are being charged with crimes, others released, but the date for closing the camp seems to recede steadily into the future. Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration with crimes that occurred during the Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.
Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.
As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guantánamo to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths “suicides.” In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. “I believe this was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only the prisoners’ families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion.
The Federal Reserve asked a U.S. appeals court to block a ruling that for the first time would force the central bank to reveal secret identities of financial firms that might have collapsed without the largest government bailout in U.S. history.
The U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan will decide whether the Fed must release records of the unprecedented $2 trillion U.S. loan program launched after the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. In August, a federal judge ordered that the information be released, responding to a request by Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News.
Posted by Brian 
