Chinese water torture

If the U.S. government waterboards suspected terrorists - or someone unlucky enough to have alienated the wrong people in Pakistan's ISS - the New York Times won't call it torture. There are memos defending it!

If the Chinese government waterboards suspected grafters, suddenly the Times finds the word torture in its vocabulary - and not just the lawyered up extreme definition that the Bushists put forward in John Yoo's bullshit memos. (Those memos alone are war crimes.)

When party members are caught breaking the rules — or even when they merely displease a superior — they can be dragged into the maw of an opaque Soviet-style disciplinary machine, known as “shuanggui,” that features physical torture and brutal, sleep-deprived interrogations.

Taking sides

Ed Hornick of CNN repeatedly casts Republicans in the best possible light, but he covers his complicity in their lies with a pretense of getting the other side. Here's a clear example:

[Karl] Rove discusses the Bush administration's support for the controversial interrogation technique known as waterboarding, which Democrats and others have described as torture.

This is just normal amoral media bullshit about whether waterboarding is torture. John Yoo and Jay Bybee covered this question with a thin tissue of bullshit, and they have now escaped sanction for it, but that doesn't alter at all the plain fact that we have sent our enemies to prison and death for using torture, including waterboarding. Bushist apologists, for whom military opinion is fetish, should consider:

Waterboarding as an interrogation technique has its roots in some of history's worst totalitarian nations, from Nazi Germany and the Spanish Inquisition to North Korea and Iraq. In the United States, the technique was first used five decades ago as a training tool to give U.S. troops a realistic sense of what they could expect if captured by the Soviet Union or the armies of Southeast Asia. The U.S. military has officially regarded the tactic as torture since the Spanish-American War.

Hornick thinks he's being objective. He's really siding with the side of bullshit.

[Rove] defends the use of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs), arguing they were authorized by the Department of Justice in August 2002 and signed off by then-CIA director George Tenet. He also disputes claims that the administration failed to brief members of Congress on the use of these techniques.

"When these techniques were first authorized, Democratic leaders had been briefed about them. Their silence made them complicit in their use," he wrote. ...

He singled out House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, who charged in July 2009 that the CIA misled Congress in a secret briefing she received in 2002. Pelosi said the CIA failed to inform her and others at the briefing about harsh interrogation techniques being used on terrorism suspects.

The CIA responded by saying Pelosi was told about the harsh techniques, including waterboarding, at the classified 2002 briefing.

But the story didn't end there, despite Hornick's willingness to court Rove by implying that it did. Pelosi acknowledged being briefed on the existence of the torture memos but not on the actual use of torture the Bushists intended.

As for whether the techniques were actually torture, Rove says the president "never authorized torture," but rather "did just the opposite" by making sure the techniques "did not cross the legal line into torture."

In sum, Hornick and the big media remain willing to abet the Bushists' claim that a century of settled understanding that waterboarding is torture can still be legitimately disputed. The Bushists dispute it; it must be legitimate. Never mind their self-interested redefinition of the word. Yet Hornick and most of the media accept the word of the CIA, also oft-fetishized by Republicans, based on so-called proof that the CIA itself wrote, that Pelosi is not telling the truth.

Third degree

Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.

Truth hurts

... but the truth is not torture.

Waterboarding is.

Click image for full Garry Trudeau cartoon.

Sick of sycophants

The media continues to be a handmaiden to, well, not power but past power. Nothing exposes better their bias to give Republicans a pass, despite the rankest and most obvious bullshit, than their continuing polite refusal to choose the word torture to label even waterboarding - check out the audio clip. Instead, they weasel back to "some call it torture." The GOP has (mostly) stuck to a Minitru vocabulary that dismisses Bushist crimes as merely harsh interrogation - and who could be against that, girlfriend?

The media heaves a sigh of relief and hews to their so-called professional goal of blind, unjudgemental he-said-she-said stories. The big media appetite for bullshit is a journalistic failing that cannot be laid anywhere but the feet of the vaunted big media conglomerates. Their reporters, editors, and publishers did this as a response to fifty years of wingnut whining (see "Accuracy" in Media) about bias. Atrios would and probably has sarcastically called for a blogger ethics panel.

The pretense that there's a controversy over the meaning of the word torture doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. It's a well-known word with well-known past applications that led to punishment when Americans were outraged by Nazis, Japanese, and communists doing the torture. (Yes, that's whose company we have joined. Sorry to tell you the unpleasant truth if you've been storing your unused head up your-- uh, somewhere warm, moist, and dark.)

There is no news balance whatsoever in being unable to use the right word for fear of offending those who advocate the results of torture. As adults (allegedly), we at least ought to have strong enough stomachs to ask the question whether the intelligence Darth Cheney claims might possibly outweigh the monstrous moral crimes that elicited it. We should have strong enough stomachs to look straight at what was done by the President and the Vice President in the name of all Americans.

It's a blight and stain on our honor. Was it worth it? Should the confessed torturers who ran the White House - and DOD, State, and the OLC - walk?

I, of course, don't think so. I still believe that the rule of law is possible, though it's obviously honored less in the observance than in the breach.

As a society that still believes or at least pretends that it can govern itself, we owe ourselves the truth, at least. Without the truth, voting is largely an exercise in American idols instead of American ideals.

We need to ask questions intelligently. The right question about the efficacy of torture is not whether it ever led to good intel. The right question is whether it did at a higher rate or faster than legal means of interrogation.

There's another crucial question: Did the practice of torture lead to the birth of even more terrorists and thus to even less safety?

We need a fearless investigation. We need an uncompromising investigation. We need the truth.

I hope the truth would lead to criminal prosecution. This would not be the criminalization of policy differences. This would be the prosecution of criminal policies.

Mealy-mouthed

The Boston Globe is unwilling to state what's plain as the nose on their face:

With a few strokes of his pen, President Obama charted a new path yesterday in the fight against terrorism, signing executive orders ... to ban harsh interrogation tactics, such as waterboarding, that the Bush administration endorsed but that critics consider torture.

Look, we've prosecuted waterboarding as a war crime. Not someone we disagree with - we ourselves did this. Objectively, waterboarding is torture, and any media worth having would say so in no uncertain terms. Instead, our media acquiesces to the Bushists' redefinition of the word, as if that makes it a point that's arguable.

Of course, the pro-torture pantywaists are out in force commenting about the impending end of the world due to the new fact that America has again forsworn torture. I'm sorry but they can no longer get their thrills from imagining Jack Bauer at Guantánamo wiring up the scrotums of inmates to 120 volts.

We beat the Nazis, the fascists, and the Soviets without resorting to torture as a matter of policy. I think we can handle a bunch of 13th century throwbacks.

Click photo for CCA 3.0 Unported license info.

So much for mea culpa

Duhbya advocates change!

Of course, it's change back to the past, when he, Karl Rove, and the Republicans could fool enough of the people with bullshit about being compassionate conservatives. What Duhbya wants is to rekindle a story line, not to change any policy:

"I think that we shouldn't change our philosophy." But [Bush] added, "We may want to change our message."

He of course even continues to defend torture:

While President-elect Barack Obama spoke out in an ABC interview that aired today against an interrogation technique known as water-boarding, President Bush defended his administration's policies as legal and necessary. He said he would be concerned if Obama abandoned the techniques used by his administration.

"Obviously, I feel like it would be a problem," Bush said, "because these are tools that we have in place. I do want to -- you know, I firmly reject the word torture.

Yep, it's the word that he rejects, the word that has meant torture for generations. He thinks he can redefine it as his spoiled, rich-boy convenience.

The good news: Duhbya is going to take four years to write his bullshit book.* I'd advise him to wait for the market for wingnut tripe to recover, too. I mean, we all know he's not going to write it himself, and a ghost writer could easily knock out a memoir, uh, amnesoir, in six months. A coloring book? Even faster.

---

* Yes, I'm prejudging Duhbya's "work". While I'd love to hear him own up to the clusterfuck that is was his administration, expecting anything other than rank festering bullshit from him would answer to the classic Einsteinian definition of insanity.

Can't keep it all in our silly little heads

Incredibly, CNN retypes the Pentagon press release about five prisoners at Guantánamo who say they want to confess. Our media can't seem to find its brain today, or they would notice that the hard cases among the Guantánamo population - not to mention those isolated into mental illness - are looking forward to martyrdom, where they expect virgins instead of the panties of menstrual female interrogators.

Oh, hell, underwear, no matter its state of laundry, is not torture. But some of these guys may be ready to martyr themselves because they have truly been tortured or at least threatened with torture:

The White House has consistently denied that the United States practices torture, but CIA officials have admitted to using "waterboarding." The technique, which is said to simulate drowning, has been considered a war crime in the past.

Again, CNN can't come right out with the obvious and incontrovertible truth: Waterboarding has always been torture when someone else did it to us. Here's the truth:

The White House has persistently bullshitted the media and the people about the Bushist Republicans' consciously pro-torture policy, but CIA officials have admitted use of "waterboarding", which is well-known to be a war crime.

Does all of the media have to go broke before they understand that their job is to penetrate the bullshit, not simply to repeat whatever comes out of the flatulent anuses of official sources?

Flip flop flip

What does John McCain believe about torture today?

"Waterboarding to me is torture, okay? And waterboarding was advocated by the administration, and according to a published report, was used," McCain said. "I obviously don't want to torture any prisoners."

Good faith torture

There is no end to the base corruption of our American ideals by the Bushist war criminals. CNN unhelpfully fails to link to the documents obtained by the ACLU, which are comically redacted almost to nothingness. Given what the Bushists admitted, it's hard to imagine what they censored.

The interrogator's "good faith" and "honest belief" that the interrogation will not cause such suffering protects the interrogator, the memo adds.

Jay Bybee thinks lack of specific intent to cause severe pain is exculpatory. Even if so, what about the second use? The torturers can hardly claim ignorance of the pain they're causing.

"Your honor, even though he screamed the first thirty-nine times I waterboarded him, I was sure it wouldn't hurt him the fortieth time."

Insane. Like the reasoning of a Soviet lawyer. Or a press release from Kim Il Sung.

And specific intent is inextricably a part of the first torture, too. The torturers specifically intended to use torture to force a prisoner to answer a question. For those of us who understand cause and effect normally, there's no separate proof: They chose these methods to elicit a response. It's not as though they just happened to waterboard prisoners because they didn't have anything else to do that day.

For this service to the Bushists, Bybee received a Federal Appeals Court judgeship. The least we can do is impeach the SOB for his crimes. And I don't care a whit if the Judiciary Committee glossed over them in 2004.

Descent into evil, with lawyers

All the legal rationalizations in the Bushist world won't change the brute, ugly fact that torture is immoral. It's also illegal under American law, though in today's environment of fear and Democratic acquiescence, you never know how long that will remain true.

Duhbya promised moral clarity. Who knew that it would be immoral clarity.

Clear and present danger

The criminal current President says that waterboarding is not torture, flying in the face of centuries of understanding of what the word torture means. Duhbya says waterboarding can be used on his say-so without breaking the law.

He'd probably say that looting the treasury of California for Enron's corrupt gain is not a crime either. He'd probably find nothing wrong with trumping up a false case for war. He'd probably claim the right to disregard laws he doesn't like. He'd probably instruct the Navy to disregard a court ruling. He'd probably tell his attorney general to lie to Congress. He'd probably withhold all information from Congress, obstructing every investigation of his official malfeasance, misfeasance, oh hell, just overwhelming criminality.

I'm sure there's some special rule of the Bushists that only other people can be waterboarded "legally", that they are as usual immune from all consequences. If not, I'm sure they can make one up and pretend that it has always been true.

I don't care what they say. It's all bullshit anyway.

No law, only power

When you buy a pig in a poke, this is what you get. Banal bullshit delivered with a smile.

Yet there is no one in the Senate who will cast aside loyalty to colleagues' vacations to say, "Here I stand. I can do no other." We get a little from Dodd, a little from Feingold, a little from Boxer, a little from Kennedy, but no one addresses the fundamental corruption of our political system.

The Constitution and the rule of law that were hallmarks of the old order have vanished under the Orwellian onslaught of the Bushists. Chuck Schumer must be so proud.

Bushist facts

There is no real controversy about whether waterboarding is torture. It is now when Americans do it, and it was when the Nazis, the communist Chinese, the Viet Cong, and the Soviets did it. It even was during the Inquisition, but the New York Times still says:

To the already fierce controversy over whether the Bush administration authorized torture has been added the specter of a cover-up.

Duhbya and Rummy (with Darth Cheney in the dark shadows) authorized waterboarding, among other tortures. There's no doubt about it. They had everyone ask mother-may-I from Rummy. They even had Gonzo and John Yoo write down their transparently bullshit rationales that add up to two giggle-provoking assertions newer before imagined to be plausible in American law:

1. The President can do whatever he wants, especially in wartime, but really anytime.
2. Every restraint of law, domestic or international, is quaint - after all, al Qaeda is so much more scary than the Soviets and their ICBMs that we should all wet ourselves.

The rest of the story is such good work that the sentence I quote above was probably added by a chickenshit editor.

Speak intel

Lady liberty

Your hooded masses yearning to breathe free...

(Click on the image.)

Love the extended pinky, too.

Stress positions

Maybe I've missed it, but I haven't seen much written about stress positions. If the New York Times won't call waterboarding torture, you know they probably would liken stress positions to having a hangnail. (I just found Slate.)

So, how do you think our interrogators get their victims into those stress positions? You think they use sweet reason?

Republicans pro-torture

House Republicans are still carrying water for the Bushists, in this case carrying it over to the waterboard. The New York Times and the AP still can't bear to call it torture, but anyone whose head is not up his (or her!) ass knows it is.

At least half of Washington has gone drooling, gibbering, Freddy Krueger insane. When will the media notice?

The Inquisition among us

One American in ten agrees that waterboarding is torture but wants American interrogators to use it. Ten percent aren't even rationalizing the evil that they are willing to do.

Personally, I think these people should be lined up against a wall and shot.

Heh. Not funny. All the hyperbole that's left to satirize these brownshirts has to be too extreme to be funny.

Let's bring back trial by ordeal! Oh, right, Guantanamo, Jose Padilla, the black sites, extraordinary rendition. I'm too late again with my helpful suggestion.

In case you haven't noticed, the rule of law is over in this country.

Sunday comics blogging - the antidote

Mike Keefe nails the Bushists and their apologists, a better response than my previous post.