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RedditMaybe it's to be expected that a Bush Administration nominee for Attorney General refuses to say whether waterboarding--an interrogation tactic that simulates drowing and that has been prosecuted as torture in US courts since the Spanish-American war--is torture.
Michael Mukasey's elaborate tap dance of oral and written testimony, orchestrated by the White House, was clearly designed to avoid putting the CIA, other US interrogators and those at the very highest line of command in this Administration (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Addington & others) in legal jeopardy. Just remember that the Washington Post reported-- over a year ago-- that CIA and others involved in interrogations were seeking legal counsel. In deciding to vote for Mukasey's nomination, Senators Schumer and Feinstein are condoning waterboarding and damaging our values, our international relations and the safety of our own soldiers if captured.
Instead of following the lead of all the Democratic Senators running for President, and four on the Judiciary Committee, Schumer broke ranks and stated that "The best we can hope for is someone who will rebuild the Justice Department and remain independent, even when pressured by this Administration."
It seems pretty clear from his refusal to state that waterboarding constitutes torture -- in order to protect those who have acted criminally-- if confirmed, Judge Mukasey would continue to act as a team player, helping to cover up issues of torture, rather than as an independent enforcer of the nation's laws.
There is still time to tell Senators Schumer and Feinstein that torture is un-American and unacceptable. The Washington office phone numbers for the Senators are: Feinstein: (202) 224-3841 and Schumer (202) 224-8542. If they do vote to confirm Mukasey, do not contribute to the DSCC which Schumer heads. Instead, select those Senators running in '08 who stand against torture, in defense of the constitution and rule of law, and donate generously to them.
And support groups like the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Freedom Campaign--which are working to end torture. It is time we support defenders not subverters of our Constitution--and restore the rule of law, decency, dignity and human security to our country and the world.
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Katrina vanden Heuvel
Thoughts on politics, current affairs, riffs and reflections on what’s in the news and what’s not--but should be.
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We indeed need better leadership speaking out loudly again now--
GORE: The president claims that he can imprison that American citizen -- any American citizen he chooses -- indefinitely, for the rest of his life, without even an arrest warrant, without notifying them of what charges have been filed against them, without even informing their families that they have been imprisoned.
No such right exists in the America that you and I know and love. It is foreign to our Constitution.
(APPLAUSE)
It must be rejected.
At the same time, the executive branch has also claimed a previously unrecognized authority to mistreat prisoners in its custody in ways that plainly constitute torture and have plainly constituted torture -- in a widespread pattern that has been extensively documented in U.S. facilities located in several countries around the world.
Over 100 of these captives have reportedly died while being tortured by executive branch interrogators. Many more have been broken and humiliated. And, in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, investigators who documented the pattern of torture estimated that more than 90 percent of the victims were completely innocent of any criminal charges whatsoever.
This is a shameful exercise of power that overturns a set of principles that you're nation has observed since General George Washington first enunciated them during our Revolutionary War.
GORE: They have been observed by every president since then until now.
(APPLAUSE)
They violate the Geneva Conventions, the International Convention Against Torture and our own laws against torture.
The president has also claimed that he has the authority to kidnap individuals on the streets of foreign cities and deliver them for imprisonment and interrogation on our behalf by autocratic regimes and nations that are infamous for the cruelty of their techniques for torture.
Some of our traditional allies have been deeply shocked by these new and uncharacteristic patterns on the part of America.
For example, the British ambassador to Uzbekistan -- one of those nations with the worst reputations for torture in its prisons -- registered a complaint to his home office about the cruelty and senselessness of the new U.S. practice that he witnessed. "This material we're getting is useless," he wrote. And then he continued with this: "We are selling our souls for dross. It is, in fact, positively harmful."
Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution?
If the answer is yes, then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited?
If the president has the inherent authority to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant, imprison American citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do?
http://tinyurl.com/e2wcf
Posted by hsuBfools at 11/03/2007 @ 7:24pm
There is the old saying "You have to go-along to get-along." It seems Feinstein and Schummer are basing their decision on that. They may also be trying to be pragmatic here, in that even if the Senate refuses this nomination, Bush will put Mukasey in via recess appointment anyway. What Feinstein and Schummer seem to not understand, is that sometimes, when enough is enough, you need to dig, deep down, in to your core values, and have the strength of character to take a stand.
Posted by waynefrost at 11/03/2007 @ 8:15pm
frank, as i've stated prior, rules are rules, and we signed onto those rules which prohibit waterboarding. if these rules have no meaning, then the geneva conventions were just a piece of paper with no meaning. and there would have been no reason to have signed them to begin with.
the reason why "our guys" are getting worse treatment is because, at least in part, the united states has wreaked extraordinary havoc on our "enemies" for decades, stolen its oil and land, supported awful leaders, backstabbed and bribed, etc, etc.
you could argue that, in war, torture is inevitable. i believe this to be true. however, the geneva conventions were a way for civlized peoples to create rules for the inevitability of war, and the for treatment of prisoners of war.
if you have captured a prisoner, then you lock him up until all disputes between warring parties are settled. there is no reason to further insult and/or punish and/or dismember or humiliate an imprisoned man, even in the most dire of circumstances (like the ridiculously hypothetical scenario envisioned during the first republican presidential debate---something out of a TV show on fox). to hurt an already imprisoned man is beyond unconscionable.....according to the very standards to which we should all aspire as western democracies....
Posted by darladoon at 11/03/2007 @ 8:58pm
to create a grey area, a legal hedge, for torture is an enormous backward step in international relations. it's seriously like the age of enlightenment has flipped on its head. now, any philosophical or legal justficiation can be asserted to defend even torture. that's an extraordinarly bad development in the history of humankind....
in short, we are living in a nihilist age. not necessarily a bad thing.....but we now have torture.
Posted by darladoon at 11/03/2007 @ 9:01pm
So the interrogator needs to have some tools at his disposal
and are these "tools" applicable in all domestic and foreign interrogations? who determines when they are necessary? and upon whom?
if you open the doors to this sort of treatment in times of war, you have crossed a line of decency which blurs too many distinctions. when you are talking about inflicting pain upon someone, and justifying its use across the board, you have lost your humanity. plain and simple.
sure, war is inhumane too. but treatment of the already imprisoned is different.....he is chained, immobile, subservient, servile, weak, pathetic. to inflict pain upon said person is cruel.
Posted by darladoon at 11/03/2007 @ 9:05pm
I agree with most of what you say here. I just wish our enemies felt that way too.
how do you know what "our enemies" feel?
Posted by darladoon at 11/03/2007 @ 9:06pm
A good indicator would be the dead, beheaded bodies of the coalitions missing soldiers that we find
ok, so "they" (the ones presumably beheading our soldiers) don't have any rules........so why not just come out and say it legally? "our enemies" (or, those guys over there in the "orient") don't have rules, and we shouldn't either?
didn't see maher, sorry....
Posted by darladoon at 11/03/2007 @ 9:16pm
TORTURE HAS BEEN SHOWN TO BE VIRTUALLY USELESS AS AN INTERROGATION TOOL...
Its victims will say anything they're told to say, confess to imaginary crimes, provide worthless (because fictional) "intelligence," etc. Therefore, the real PURPOSE of torturing prisoners must be NOT to extract information from them but simply to PUNISH them in cruel and unusual ways, simply for being the enemy. End of discussion.
Posted by w_m_bear at 11/03/2007 @ 10:06pm
DARLA, you KNOW why FRANK is taking this view on torture, don't you?
Because he knows that Her Majesty is probably going to use it too!
BTW, did anybody happen to mention that WE....PROSECUTED...Japanese in war crimes trials for water-boarding?
Posted by Mask at 11/03/2007 @ 10:16pm
we sponsor terrorism...we torture...
we're the good guys!
Posted by ibbleblibble at 11/03/2007 @ 10:33pm
If we torture, we become as debased as those we are fighting. When the war is over, no matter who wins, the world wiil still be left with a regime that tortures to further its ends. The world loses. Even those who live in the country that "wins".
Posted by bjkron at 11/03/2007 @ 10:37pm
If we torture
I should have written::
When we torture....
Posted by bjkron at 11/03/2007 @ 10:39pm
Therefore, the real PURPOSE of torturing prisoners must be NOT to extract information from them but simply to PUNISH them in cruel and unusual ways, simply for being the enemy. End of discussion.
Posted by W_M_BEAR 11/03/2007 @ 10:06pm
I agree. It is to make us wary of opposing this regime too vocally. Speak out too loudly and you may be designated an enemy, stripped of your rights, and "disappeared".
Posted by bjkron at 11/03/2007 @ 10:43pm
Boy, that carpet-cleaning van has been parked infront of my house for over a week now..
Posted by bjkron at 11/03/2007 @ 10:44pm
we torture...we sponsor terrorism...
we're good guys...
the world looks at us and says, "oh, they torture, they sponsor terrorism..."
helps when trying to win hearts and minds...evil vs. evil
Posted by ibbleblibble at 11/03/2007 @ 10:49pm
Posted by IBBLEBLIBBLE 11/03/2007 @ 10:49pm
Yeah, but we torture for Jesus.
Posted by bjkron at 11/03/2007 @ 10:55pm
Posted by BJKRON 11/03/2007 @ 10:55pm |
and mammon...
Posted by ibbleblibble at 11/03/2007 @ 10:55pm
And oil
Posted by bjkron at 11/03/2007 @ 10:56pm
IT'S MEANT TO CAUSE F E A R AND EVEN M O R E -- F E A R
ALWAYS HAS ALWAYS WILL.
And isn't that what the world really needs now, and not just a little for some, but for everyone...
All together now--
"What the world needs now is fear, sweet fear it's the only thing that there's just too little of What the world needs now is fear, sweet fear, no not just for some but for everyone.
Lord, we don't need another mountain, there are mountains and hillsides enough to climb There are oceans and rivers enough to cross, enough to last 'til the end of time.
What the world needs now is fear, sweet fear it's the only thing that there's just too little of What the world needs now is fear, sweet fear, no, not just for some but for everyone.
Lord, we don't need another meadow there are cornfields and wheat fields enough to grow There are sunbeams and moonbeams enough to shine oh listen, lord, if you want to know.
What the world needs now is fear, sweet fear it's the only thing that there's just too little of What the world needs now is fear, sweet fear, no, not just for some but for everyone.
No, not just for some, oh, but just for everyone."
Posted by hsuBfools at 11/03/2007 @ 10:58pm
"And that would guarantee that America would have no confirmed Attorney General during this time of war."
'Waah! I'm big baby! If you don't hire my guy i'm going to take my ball and go home!
Wah! I got pick on in high school and i was a girlie man cheerleader in college. wah!
Buck you big baby! Would you toughin up man! and stop acting like a big baby!
I'm embarrassed for you man. totally embarrassed for you! Would you stop all the crying?
I can't stand all these sissies! How did we get all these sissies in office?
(How did all these draft dodging hippies get to run our the country again?)
Posted by steve real at 11/03/2007 @ 10:59pm
Posted by IBBLEBLIBBLE 11/03/2007 @ 10:55pm
mammon loves the oil...
Posted by ibbleblibble at 11/03/2007 @ 11:02pm
Posted by HSUBFOOLS 11/03/2007 @ 10:58pm
that was beautiful...
Posted by ibbleblibble at 11/03/2007 @ 11:03pm
I agree. It is to make us wary of opposing this regime too vocally. Speak out too loudly and you may be designated an enemy, stripped of your rights, and "disappeared".
Posted by BJKRON 11/03/2007 @ 10:43pm
IT'S GOTTEN TO THE POINT WHERE I'VE EVEN STARTED WORRYING...
About posting anti Bush/Cheney stuff online like this. Pretty paranoid, huh? But Homeland Security is already busy building those camps for us....
Posted by w_m_bear at 11/03/2007 @ 11:50pm
mammon loves the oil...
Posted by IBBLEBLIBBLE 11/03/2007 @ 11:02pm
AND (ESPECIALLY) THE BLOOD THAT BUYS THE OIL...
In the Bible, Mammon receives sacrificed children. Hence Mammon would seem to be doing a booming business in Iraq these days....
Posted by w_m_bear at 11/03/2007 @ 11:54pm
Yeah, but we torture for Jesus.
Posted by BJKRON 11/03/2007 @ 10:55pm
AND "MAIM A MUSLIM FOR MESSIAH"...
Replaces the old "Kill a Commie for Christ"....
Posted by w_m_bear at 11/03/2007 @ 11:56pm
Posted by W_M_BEAR 11/03/2007 @ 11:54pm
mammon loves the neocons!
Posted by ibbleblibble at 11/04/2007 @ 12:01am
mammon loves the neocons!
Posted by IBBLEBLIBBLE 11/04/2007 @ 12:01am
I think you'll find that's because he doesn't like being flushed down the toilet by the other mob.
Posted by lrjones4 at 11/04/2007 @ 12:31am
Posted by LRJONES4 11/04/2007 @ 12:31am
you are possessed by a zenlike sense of the language, LR. just getting back from church?
Posted by ibbleblibble at 11/04/2007 @ 01:09am
Everyone went to bed, how nice. Waterboarding, that's like in the movies when they hold the guy under water in a trough or something and say, "Who did it! You son of a bitch!" And he says, "I won't tell you a thing! Pig!" "Tell me now or I'll electrocute you and cut off your private parts!" "O.K. It was Dick Cheney! I mean Saddam! I mean Walter did it! AAAAAAAAAAAAhhhhh!" You mean that's not legal? They did that in lethal weapon though, right? To Mel Gibson, oh wait that was the bad guys. Hmmm.
Posted by Waltz at 11/04/2007 @ 01:17am
I made a mistake now that I think about it. They hung Mel Gibson from a chain and Gary Busey I think electrocuted him with a cattle prod. Waterboarding. Let's say half your neighborhood community was taken out by an errant U.S. bomb, what would you want to do to somebody from the U.S. (Frank Gritz)
Bombs Killed Victims as They Slept
By Nora Boustany Washington Post Foreign Service Thursday, February 14, 1991; Page A01
Post time line AMMAN, Jordan, Feb. 13--Relatives sobbed helplessly in a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood today as rescue workers brought out bodies -- most of them mangled, many of them charred beyond recognition, some still smoldering -- from the bombed-out structure where Iraqi civilians had taken shelter from U.S. raids.
"I saw one man, incoherent with grief, fall to the ground and bury his face in the earth. Eleven members of his family had been in the shelter," Alan Little, of the British Broadcasting Corp., reported from the scene.
At Yarmuk Hospital, nearby, Omar Adnan, 17, covered with bruises and burns, was shown by television cameras as he explained in a faint voice that his three sisters, his mother and his father had been killed and he was the only one left in his family.
"I was sleeping and suddenly I felt heat and the blanket was burning," he said. "I turned to try to touch my mother who was next to me but grabbed nothing but a piece of flesh."
"If you want a visual image of the sadness of war, this is it," Jordan's Information Minister Ibrahim Ezzedine said here today.
Posted by Waltz at 11/04/2007 @ 01:58am
"It has crystallized what we have been trying to do for days, weeks, and months to stop the gravity and cruelty of war." Jordan declared three days of national mourning for its neighbor.
From mid-morning, about five hours after the structure was hit by two powerful, laser-guided U.S. bombs, until nightfall, Iraqi authorities brought foreign reporters to view the damage and the rescue efforts and tour the site. Iraq said the building was an air-raid shelter for civilians, but the United States insisted it was a hardened bunker used as a military command center.
Some of the footage it received showing charred bodies was "too grim to show," the BBC told its viewers.
Foreign journalists were told, for the first time since the war began, that they could file their accounts without Iraqi censorship, the Associated Press reported.
And with controversy raging over whether or not the structure was a military target, Cable News Network's Peter Arnett said, "We have been advised that the press will be able to revisit the shelter in the morning," and "while we're there we'll certainly look again to see if there's any evidence -- any obvious evidence -- that it was used for any military purposes."
Late today, Iraqi authorities said that at least 400 people in the shelter had been killed. This would be by far the highest casualty toll announced for any single attack in the war. Foreign journalists reported seeing up to 40 bodies and there were conflicting accounts of the number of people who had been in the shelter. Some Iraqi officials said there were as many as 1,000 but Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz put the number at about 400. Aziz did not say how many had died.
As of late tonight, Baghdad radio had inexplicably carried no news of the bombing.
Foreign reporters who visited the site in the Amiriya section of southwest Baghdad today said that to all appearances, the structure was being used as a civilian shelter and that there was no indication it was a military facility.
The facility was built as a bomb shelter to protect Iraqis from attacks by Iran during their war, which ended in 1988. It had since been hardened, with a 10-foot-thick concrete and steel roof, to withstand indirect nuclear attack, and converted into a replacement military command and control center after bombing in central Baghdad forced a dispersal of such activities, U.S. military officials said.
An Iraqi living in England was quoted by Reuter as saying that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has a vast estate on the outskirts of Amiriya, on the road to the Baghdad airport. "It is a huge complex called Makasib village," the Iraqi said of the estate. "It contains many villas and is surrounded by a white wall. There is a big artificial lake and a man-made hill where Saddam was going to build a new palace."
Dozens of other Baghdad sites were hit overnight in 12 hours of some of the most intensive bombing the Iraqi capital has seen, AP reported. One of the targets hit was an internal security department office, but witnesses said 15 nearby homes also were destroyed.
Descriptions from reporters in Baghdad and U.S. military officials agreed that the bunker, where Iraq says more than 400 people were killed, is in a middle-class civilian neighborhood that also contains a supermarket, a school and a mosque.
Pentagon briefers said the site was surrounded by a chain-link fence with barbed wire, and covered with camouflage. They added that military personnel had been seen coming and going, and military vehicles had been parked outside "recently," but that no large numbers of civilians had been seen entering.
CNN's Arnett said that, while there were "a lot of military officials" at the site today, they seemed "simply there to supervise in the excavation and the rescue efforts." Little said reporters taken to the scene by Iraqi Information Ministry officials "were able to climb onto the roof of the shelter and we saw the cavities in the shelter roof where the bombs entered." He did not mention seeing camouflage, although television footage showed a high, wire fence protecting the building.
In Washington, White House and Pentagon officials insisted that U.S. authorities had been unaware that civilians were present at the time of the bombing. Army Lt. Gen. Thomas Kelly, operations director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters: "We are chagrined if {civilian} people were hurt, but the only information we have about people being hurt is coming out of the controlled press in Baghdad. . . . What I saw on television was from a controlled press."
Baghdad's police chief, Brig. Gen. Kamel Zedan, asked by Arnett whether there were any military targets at the site, said, "Absolutely there is not any military target, just residential area." He added that "we do not see military men in the shelter because this shelter is allocated for average people, for citizens."
Iraqi Health Minister Abdel-Salam Mohammed Saeed called the bombing "a criminal and premeditated attack against civilians."
Asked why civilians had gone into the shelter if, as the U.S. military said, there had been no air raid sirens preceding the bombing, Arnett said:
"Call it force of habit. There is often no air raid siren but . . . the public expects bombing any night. They don't wait for the air raid alert because it gets dark here about six o'clock at night. They're not about to be stumbling to an air raid shelter at three in the morning. People just take their bedding every evening and they go to these shelters. That is the pattern in Baghdad."
Witnesses told reporters that the concussion of the first bomb that hit the shelter jammed the thick steel doors, barring escape for most of those inside. The second bomb penetrated the hardened roof and exploded inside the windowless structure.
The BBC's Little, who was taken to the site in mid-morning to see rescue workers removing mangled and charred bodies, and again in the evening, as more bodies were brought out, described it as a scene that "really is beyond all ability, I think, of the Iraqi Information Ministry to stage-manage, if you like."
"This was a shelter that local people believed should withstand a nuclear blast," he said, but nevertheless the bombs had broken through and "had exploded inside, the reinforced walls containing the full impact of the explosion."
"This morning we saw the charred and mutilated remains of those nearest the door," he said. "They were piled onto the back of a truck; many were barely recognizable as human. Men from the district pushed and jostled through the crowd to find news of their families, many distressed to the point of panic."
Later, Little said, the reporters were taken to Yarmuk Hospital "and shown between 30 and 40 bodies, mostly women and young children. Some lay curled up as though they had died instantly in their sleep." The hospital said it had received only eight injured survivors, most of them critically burned.
Showing reporters the bodies laid out in the courtyard of the hospital, Dr. Paul Boghassian said, "Our main problem now is the identification. How are we going to identify them, tell their families? There's a child over there a month old."
Brent Sadler of Britain's Independent Television Network (ITN) told how "another unrecognizable victim was pulled outside in a blanket -- I think it was a woman, and they hurried outside with her remains." He said civil defense teams were digging through the smoldering debris, "working in intense heat and a choking atmosphere, plastic gloves melting on their hands."
By late today, authorities said it was unlikely any more survivors would be found. "There are no survivors anymore," one civil defense official told AP. "The fire is melting the metal. There's no way any human being could have survived until now," the official said.
The only American reporters allowed into Baghdad at the moment are Bill Blakemore of ABC and Marie Colvin, who reports for the Sunday Times of London, although other U.S. news organizations are represented there by non-American journalists.
© Copyright 1991 The Washington Post
Posted by Waltz at 11/04/2007 @ 02:08am
Would all you journalists please stop referring to waterboarding as "simulated drowning". It isn't simulated anything. It is real torture. Using the word "simulated" diminishes and sanitizes the act, allowing politician, journalist, and the public to treat torture as something for legal quibbling. Toture is torture, waterboarding is torture, waterboarding is suffocation, whether water goes in the lungs or not. Calling it "simulated drowning" makes it seem like it is all in the mind of the victim, just make believe, like all the violence in video games, movies, and on TV.
Posted by Tgasloli at 11/04/2007 @ 08:23am
Time to stop the "waterboarding" by means of politicalization of Presidential appointees!
the word "politicization" never really existed until bush took office
Posted by darladoon at 11/04/2007 @ 11:16am
well waterboarding is just one way we torture...
then there is palestinian hanging...well...here's a pic...
torturepic [tinyurl.com]
which can definately kill...sleep deprivation...food/water deprivation...saline injection, sexual abuse...
oh! and then there's our allies who we send them to who will happily electrocute testicles, apply thub screws, and all the classical "heavy" torture methods "we" wont...cuz we're the good guys...
but...with all the secrecy...who really knows what we are really doing?
we're the good guys!
Posted by ibbleblibble at 11/04/2007 @ 11:35am
a quesion for the forum:
if we were to eliminate all forms of torture on our "enemies" (i'm talking about any random, non-state or state actor who has been captured with our without reason) could we still remain the world's largest superpower.......or are these "enemies" so overpowering, so all-pervasive, so vital.....that we absolutely, positively must find out what said actor's buddies are up to?
Posted by darladoon at 11/04/2007 @ 11:56am
via the torture techniques listed on that url.....posted above....
Posted by darladoon at 11/04/2007 @ 11:57am
also, What happened to do process of law? These people aren't even accused of a crime necessarily or at least aren't charged with one. So we are sometimes torturing innocent people.
Posted by Waltz at 11/04/2007 @ 12:30pm
to answer Darla
could we still remain the world's largest superpower? Yes.
and the torture displayed in that url is completely disgusting.
real classy people did that I'm sure.
Posted by Waltz at 11/04/2007 @ 12:33pm
Why don't we waterboard 10 senators on the TV during the confirmation hearings and then let them vote on it and decide if it is torture or not. The Jurist
Posted by linwood at 11/04/2007 @ 2:35pm
i wonder exactly how many we have tortured...how muchinfo has been gained, how many complete innocents have been tortured, etc...
we will never know...
Posted by ibbleblibble at 11/04/2007 @ 2:47pm
I came here to read the postings, as I often do, in search of further information, and inspiration. There is much of both here, but, also as usual, there is some devil's advocacy as well. There is some consideration given to the efficacy of torture in today's world.
Let's think about that. Let's allow the possibility that we can compromise our sense of what is most human about us, and store our higher selves somewhere for more appropriate times. There is certainly more than enough support for that position throughout history. We can study those choices, and chart the paths they followed as a result.
There are too few examples where we clung to our humanity against all odds, but they are sufficient for me, and they inform my convictions as we go forward. I don't know if we learn any absolute truths from these lessons, but they resonate in ways no counter argument could ever do. If the state of being human is to have any meaning at all, I think it has to include that we stood for something. We're about to go on record about what we stand for, in just a few days.
Posted by Donald Weed at 11/04/2007 @ 3:46pm