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12 Dec 09

Religious Anti-Torture Group Urges Holder to Produce OPR Report « The Washington Independent

  • Today, in response to that delay, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture sent a letter urging Holder to make good on his promise and release the report immediately.


    “The delay in the issuance of the report jeopardizes the admirable leadership the Administration has shown in calling for transparency in government and in ending U.S.-sponsored torture once and for all,” says the letter. “Release of the OPR report is not like release of the photographs of torture; release of the OPR report will not imperil the safety of our troops or encourage new recruits for the terrorists. Its effect will be exactly the opposite. Release of the OPR report will demonstrate the integrity of our government processes.”

The Pretzel Legal Logic behind Opposing KSM's Trial | The Progressive Realist

  • om:  Lawyers, Guns and Money    By:  Scott Lemieux


    <!-- /node-header -->

    This gets it right. Obviously, trying to pose as defenders of the rule of law when you believe that the government needs to be doing a lot more arbitrary detention and torture is going to lead you to a lot of illogical arguments, but I'm especially amused by the "if prosecutors have good evidence, it's like you're not having a trial at all!" routine.

  • This gets it right. Obviously, trying to pose as defenders of the rule of law when you believe that the government needs to be doing a lot more arbitrary detention and torture is going to lead you to a lot of illogical arguments, but I'm especially amused by the "if prosecutors have good evidence, it's like you're not having a trial at all!" routine.

Gonzo Being Gonzo | Talking Points Memo

  • You know it's bad when the second thing Alberto Gonzales says in an interview with Esquire is given an asterisk that directs you to more complete rendering of the facts the former attorney general is asserting.
  • We should have abandoned the idea of removing the U. S. attorneys once the Democrats took the Senate. Because at that point we could really not count on Republicans to cut off investigations or help us at all with investigations. We didn't see that at the Department of Justice. Nor did the White House see that. Karl didn't see it. If we could do something over again, that would be it.
01 Dec 09

Bitter And Afraid - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • The former vice president, the man who imported torture into the American constitutional system, failed to capture bin Laden, invaded a country under false pretenses, allowed the Afghanistan campaign to disintegrate, and added $5 trillion to the next generation's debt burden, is attacking a sitting president on a day he announces a critical military strategy in front of his troops.

  • The attack on Obama is an accusation of treason:


    “Here’s a guy without much experience, who campaigned against much of
    what we put in place ... and who now travels around the world
    apologizing,” Cheney said. “I think our adversaries — especially when
    that’s preceded by a deep bow ... — see that as a sign of weakness.”



    Specifically, Cheney said the Justice Department decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, in New York City is “great” for Al Qaeda.



    “One of their top people will be given the opportunity — courtesy of
    the United States government and the Obama administration — to have a
    platform from which they can espouse this hateful ideology that they
    adhere to,” he said. “I think it’s likely to give encouragement — aid
    and comfort — to the enemy.”

  • 2 more annotations...
23 Nov 09

A Talking Point Built Of Straw - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • To see how false this claim is, all anyone ever had to was look at the Classified Information Procedures Act, a short and crystal clear 1980 law that not only permits, but requires, federal courts to undertake extreme measures to ensure the concealment of classified information, even including concealment from the defendant himself.
21 Nov 09

The Barbarian Inside The Gate - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • "I was very struck also by Janet Napolitano’s comment, I hadn’t read it before to see her say that, that the number one priority is to bring [Hasan] to justice is such a knee-jerk comment and such a stupid comment. He’s going to be brought to justice. He is not going to be innocent of murder. There are a lot of eyewitnesses to that. They should just go ahead and convict him and put him to death," - William Kristol, appearing on Fox News.
  • Let us be clear: this is a fascist statement.

An Intelligence Bonanza Of Another Sort - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • What the trial will likely show, instead, is that there was a great deal of information already available
    before they started torturing KSM.
  • That’s the real risk for Yoo: not the illegal actions that the trial
    will expose. But how much evidence there was independent of Yoo’s
    little torture shop.
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Yglesias Award Nominee - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • "[T]here is no question about the legitimacy of U.S. federal courts to incapacitate terrorists. Many of Holder’s critics appear to have forgotten that the Bush administration used civilian courts to put away dozens of terrorists, including “shoe bomber” Richard Reid; al-Qaeda agent Jose Padilla; “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh; the Lackawanna Six; and Zacarias Moussaoui, who was prosecuted for the same conspiracy for which Mohammed is likely to be charged. Many of these terrorists are locked in a supermax prison in Colorado, never to be seen again,"
  • Jim Comey and Jack Goldsmith, deputy attorney general and assistant attorney general under George W. Bush, respectively.
20 Nov 09

American Service-Members' Protection Act - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  • The American Service-Members' Protection Act (ASPA) is a United States federal law introduced by US Senator Jesse Helms as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act and passed in August 2002 by Congress. The stated purpose of the amendment was "to protect United States military personnel and other elected and appointed officials of the United States government against criminal prosecution by an international criminal court to which the United States is not party".
  • authorizes the President to use “all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any US or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court”
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19 Sep 09

Dear President Bush, - The Atlantic (October 2009)

  • the failure to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora; the intelligence fiasco of Saddam’s nonexistent stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction; the failure to prepare for an insurgency in Iraq; the reckless disbandment of the Iraqi army; the painful slowness in adapting to drastically worsening conditions there in 2004–06; the negligence toward Afghanistan.
  • But because of the way you chose to treat prisoners in American custody in wartime—a policy that degraded human beings with techniques typically deployed by brutal dictatorships—we lost this moral distinction early
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11 Sep 09

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • Such as: arson investigators who got every important fact wrong, psychiatric diagnoses based on music posters and juries that should have been more skeptical.
01 Sep 09

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • "Aggressive interrogation of captured terrorists"  needs translation into plain English. It means "the torture of captives suspected of being terrorists." "One of the most effective intelligence-gathering tactics in the war on
    terrorism" also needs translation, since there is no evidence, as Bush DHS official Frances Townsend and every neutral observer has noted, that the intelligence, if accurate, could not have been achieved by legal, American and ethical means. We also know for a fact that the majority of all those who have been abused and tortured by the US under Bush and Cheney were innocent of any terror offenses. (At Abu Ghraib, one of the test-sites for Cheney's methods, up to 90 percent were completely innocent, according to the Bush administration). We have no idea how many of those captured, abused and tortured at Bagram were and are innocent. And we know that the Red Cross has definitively ruled the Bush-Cheney treatment as torture and, at the very least, illegal "cruel and inhuman treatment" of prisoners.
  • "Aggressive interrogation" means, in plain English, stripping suspects, hooding them, beating them, putting a collar around their neck and launching their bodies against a plywood wall up to thirty times, subjecting them to sleep deprivation in one case as long as 960 hours over 54 days, shackling them in stress positions used by the Vietnamese against John McCain, denying medical care in some cases, sexually traumatizing them, using Islam as a weapon against them, putting them in upright coffins, threatening to kill their children and spouses, threatening to drill their skulls with power-drills, freezing them in iced water or freezing air-conditioning until near-death, subjecting them to extreme heat, and sensory deprivation in isolation for months until they become mental and physical shells. It means Abu Ghraib, the one place where we have been able to see what neoconservatism has come to stand for: the brutal torture and abuse of Arabs and Muslims. It means murdering over a hundred of such prisoners - merely because they are suspects and Arab Muslims. It means verschaerfte Vernehmung, in which neocons eagerly adopt the precise methods and even terminology of the Gestapo and brandish their cooptation of Nazi standards of prisoner treatment as an American value.
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