What is more frightening -- that the C.I.A. got its jollies by torturing, even murdering human beings in its secret sodomy frat-houses -- or that the F.B.I. took one look, fled the scene and remained silent for years?

The topic below was originally posted on my blog, the Intrepid Liberal Journal.

Former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega has recently made news urging that we don't rush into appointing a special prosecutor to investigate crimes of torture during George W. Bush's presidency. In a provocative April 20th post entitled "Of Black Holes and Radio Silence," Ms. de la Vega wrote:

In an opinion piece in today's Washington Post Ruth Marcus poses the question:

"Should Bush administration officials be put on trial for crimes such as authorizing torture?"

The answer to that question is a simple and unequivocal "not yes, but, Hell yes, absolutely, yer darn tootin'."

Bear in mind that I live in a flyover state where many have limited tolerance for carefully parsed, nuanced or constipated prose, preferring instead to "throw it out on the lawn and see if any dogs come up and pee on it."

Ms Marcus says, less pithily and with a bit more ambiguity, that she is:

"just relieved to have this crowd heading out of office and its policies -- on torture, on indefinite detention, on warrantless wiretapping, on overweening executive power -- soon to be inoperative."

I share her delight in the departure of this gang of criminals but I fear that if they do not leave Washington in handcuffs and leg irons aboard a Federal prison bus that the chances of rendering the "policies" stated above "inoperative" are approximately ... zero.

President Bush recently vetoed legislation that would stop the CIA from using water-boarding and other harsh methods of interrogation because such methods "have a proven track record of keeping America safe."  

Thanksgiving Reflections of an Anti-Capitalist

By Jason Miller

Thomas Paine's Corner

http://www.bestcyrano.org/T HOMASPAINE/?p=453

Gluttony and greed kill more than the sword.

--Italian proverb

Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving.

~Charles Lamb, 1821

Another propaganda-driven greed-fest has nearly passed in the land of the corporatized and the home of the subservient. Obedient little wage slaves and consumers that most of us are (to varying degrees of course), we have once again dutifully greased the wheels of the monstrous capitalist machine and made our proper sacrifices at the altar of Mammon. Between our voracious inhalation of all manner of edibles to our obscene spree of rapacious spending using money eagerly fronted by the usurious kings of finance capital, Thanksgiving and Black Friday are celebratory days indeed for the moneyed elite comprising the allegedly non-existent ruling class in our "egalitarian" and "democratic" nation.

The next time Michael Mukasey is called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee I suggest that he be strapped to a stretcher, a rag placed in his mouth and water poured in the rag until he begins to answer completely and truthfully the questions put to him by the committee.

Now that waterboarding has become an accepted form of interrogation in these United States, I recommend that it be utilized not only with Mukasey, but with all future witnesses before committees of the congress. I think that there are subpoenas kicking around out there for Condi Rice and other executive department figures who have been less than forthcoming in past appearances, so perhaps as our favorite republican tough guy Rudy Giuliani says, we should question them aggressively.

It might be a good idea if the voting public were able to use the same technique in questioning the presidential candidates on their positions. For the rest of the debates all candidates should be wheeled in strapped to stretchers and aggressively questioned using this simulated drowning method.

Using these methods we may begin to get the truth from our "public servants" and declared wannabes.

This will not work in Atlanta however, they don't have enough water at the moment to achieve any kind of satisfactory results.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Michael Mukasey's refusal to answer whether he believed water-boarding to be torture should scuttle his nomination to be the nation's chief law enforcement officer. The Senate should refuse to bring his nomination to the floor. President Bush needs to be told that while he may allow garbage to amass in his administration, the Senate will not.

I am sick to death of all the pussyfooting around the subject that has occupied the media for the duration of this premeditated, illegal war of terror that we the people of the United States have allowed to be waged against the people of Iraq, in our name, for the last several years.

No matter how much lipstick and rouge we smear on the face of this war no matter how we attempt to  dress up the evil and bestial acts that have been performed in its unholy name, it still has the hideous countenance of an evil swine from hell.

It is an illegal war, begun and conducted under false pretenses, by a group of criminal liars and thieves in the United States Government, abetted by a cowardly congress who abrogated their constitutional duties in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funds and furthered by a complaisant press that ignored their obligation to remain independent from government, from their sponsors and report the facts. 

The members of the completely rogue executive department acted in their own self interest in a quest for personal power and wealth, in concert with the usual domestic and international corporate pirates who, in the depths of their insatiable greed, continually amplify human conflict to their own ends and bring poverty, war, suffering and death down upon the world.

There is no such animal as extraordinary rendition, nor do I know of the existence of any beasts called enhanced interrogation methods.

The first is kidnapping, it is illegal, a felony and the second word is torture, its meaning is clear:

NOUN:

  1. Infliction of severe physical pain as a means of punishment or coercion.
  2. An instrument or a method for inflicting such pain.
  2. Excruciating physical or mental pain; agony: the torture of waiting in suspense.
  3. Something causing severe pain or anguish.

Torture is illegal in this country, a felonious act, it is illegal in the world at large, according to several conventions that we are legally bound by. Anyone committing torture, causing it to be committed, directing its commission, or training others in its techniques is guilty, guilty of war crimes, of crimes against humanity and crimes against "Nature's God.

Jose Padilla, center, is escorted to a waiting police vechicle by federal marshals in this Jan. 5, 2006, file photo. He has been on trial in Miami for most of this year, charged with conspiring with al Qaeda to detonate a "dirty bomb" in the United States. Photo by J. Pat Carter, AP

On Thurday August 16 2007 A federal jury convicted Jose Padilla of three counts of conspiracy in a trial that was the culmination of five years of a criminal proceeding that is among the most shameful in the history of the United States justice system.

I am not an apologist for Jose Padilla, I belong to no "Free Jose" organizations nor am I a member of any "Jose Padilla defense funds," although maybe I should have been, maybe we all should have been because when they throw away the keys to Padilla's cell we will also throw away any pretense to being a nation of laws, a nation that respects human rights, we will throw away a large measure of what once made us a great and civilized nation.

I am also not a terrorist, nor am I a member of any terrorist organization and that declaration alone, in the modern, mandatory, cocoon of fear within which we are now required to live by governmental decree, is probably enough to have a tap placed on my phone and a couple of guys who look like the Blues Brothers parked in front of my house at odd hours. After all, if I have nothing to hide, why would I bring it up. Under the new Department of Justice rule book I must be indictable for something.

Jose Padilla was arrested over five years ago in May of 2002, picked up in Chicago after returning  from Europe and allegedly carrying over 10 grand in cash. He was held for  about a month as a material witness before Attorney General John Ashcroft delayed a trip to Moscow in order to announce that the US had discovered a plot to explode "dirty bombs" inside the country. Padilla was branded as the "Dirty Bomber" and George Bush declared him to be an illegal enemy combatant.

The EDSA Revolution, also referred to as the People Power Revolution and the Philippine Revolution of 1986, was a mostly non-violent mass demonstration in the Philippines. Four days of peaceful action by millions of Filipinos led to the downfall of the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos and the installation of Corazon Aquino as president of the Republic. EDSA stands for Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, the main highway in Metro Manila and the main site of the demonstrations.

In the last year or so I've posted more than a few articles protesting various aspects of the Cheney/Bush administration and their ill conceived, illegal and insane policies and on several occasions I've led the pieces with pictures that cast Cheney and Bush in Nazi uniforms. I have no facility with Photoshop so I "borrowed" the images from here and there around the web. My apologies to those unheralded graphic geniuses whose work I "borrowed."

The pieces were generally well received around the liberal blogosphere but locally, here in Dayton, Ohio I took no small amount of heat for comparing Cheney/Bush and his criminal minions with Hitler and his henchmen. I received some very unflattering comments, some hate mail, more than a few invitations to an ass kicking, mine was intended I believe, and one grammatically challenged death threat.

In the run-up to the 2000 decision of Bush v. Gore, the Republican establishment worked tirelessly to frame the events of those days as a 'constitutional crisis' -- a situation so dire, so delicate -- as to threaten the very foundation of our nation's existence.

So, it was with great relief that Justice Scalia hastily passed down the high court's decision to forego a genuine manual recount and award to George W. Bush the White House and all its associated powers, real or imagined.

Little did the Supremes (or the rest of the Republican establishment) imagine that those actions would be the catalyst that set forth a series of unfortunate, unforgivable, and completely unnecessary, events that would eventually lead to a genuine constitutional crises -- a situation truly dire and legitimately threatening to the founding principles of America.

But here we are -- crisis in hand.

If an individual's conformity to group, cultural, and national pathology is rewarded -- thereby encouraging the formation of what R.D. Laing termed, "False Self" -- how might one, stranded within the dysfunctional dynamic, resist it all and begin to work towards an awareness of their own essential nature, then perhaps arriving at an individual reckoning involving how to live, flourish, and subvert the life defying demands of the present era.

A Soul Defying, Tacit Approval Of Torture: how did we come to this?

By Phil Rockstroh

"True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that False Self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality . . . and through this death a rebirth, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer." --R. D. Laing

It's typical to criticize the Congress which just ended as a "do nothing" congress, one that spent more time on internal feuds than on getting things done.  But nothing could be further from the truth.  Actually, this was an extremely accomplished Congress, and one area where this Congress achieved almost everything it set out to do, comes in the nips and tucks applied to the Bill of Rights.

Like the Geneva Convention, the Bill of Rights was previously full of vague, difficult to interpret terminology.  How can any government agent be expected to apply terms like "secure in their persons" or "but upon probable cause?"  Such ambiguity can only lead to problems that stand in the way of the State taking proper action against all who oppose order.

This Congress has worked in hand in iron hand with the Executive branch, cutting red tape that kept the nation from a secure, orderly future.

Everyone is all excited the president admitted we have secret prisons.  Now that this administration and its apologists are busy fessing up to stuff they used to deny, claiming credit for stuff they didn't do, laying blame where it doesn't belong and asking us to blindly trust them to get things right while they keep doing exactly what they used to say they weren't doing...  all I want to know is:  Who do they think they are kidding?  

Here's my problem...actually two problems...actually three problems...well more than three, but for now I will only focus on two.....

Here's an important story that got knocked off the front page as all eyes turn to the Middle East and watched the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air, and proof through the night we've no plans over there.

The nomination of the Defense Department's general counsel, William J. Haynes II, to a U.S. appeals court is endangered by concerns about the truthfulness of testimony he gave at his confirmation hearing, senators said.

Their assessment came after the Air Force's judge advocate general, Maj. Gen. Jack L. Rives, disputed Haynes's assertion that he had consulted career military lawyers before recommending the use of physical and mental coercion to interrogate terrorism suspects."

For all those hysterical polemicists who ignored career military commanders when it came to invading Iraq and career military lawyers when it came to using torture.  Prepare to be shocked ....