Above the law

Our latest belief to be revealed as a delusion is the notion that we live in nation governed by the rule of law. As we all know now, Bush authorized secret, illegal spying on citizens following 9/11. Is anyone surprised at this? Some Senators act as if they are shocked by this but we all know that they know that the Bush war criminals have been doing whatever they damn well please and to hell with law all along.

We also all know in our heart of hearts that the “agreement” between Bush and McCain about rules governing treatment of prisoners is not worth a damn. It too is a charade and Bush and Cheney will allow and encourage torture of whomever whenever it pleases them. That’s what fascists do. They are above the law. Laws, treaties and agreements exist only to advance an agenda, placate the public and provide the complicit media with raw material to build cover.

McCain’s part in the drama is aimed solely at bolstering his presidential gambit, something to conceal the actual nonsense behind his media generated myth of tough guy straight shooter who acts on principle. McCain is only a couple of shades less slimy than Bush and the two together generated as slippery a slime fest as you could find. You can be sure those guys strung up, stretched out, toes barely touching the floor are not going to be spared one single water board session by this agreement. It means nothing.

Since the courts, from the Supremes on down, are being packed with right wing maniacs, confidence that we live in a country that delivers fair due process for everyone is about as valid as belief in the tooth fairy.

Here are some links to check out. Domestic Spying Criminal Penalties and Civil Liability and Did Bush Sell Us a Bill of Goods on Torture?

Update: And be sure to check out these Atrios Posts at Eschaton: This one and this one.

Vote fraud 2004

Here's an article on vote fraud from the same (Project Censored) site linked in the torture post below.

No Paper Trail Left Behind: the Theft of the 2004 Presidential Election*

The article includes a handy list anomalies favoring Bush. Here's the last two:

15) The National Election Pool’s exit polls13 were so far off that since their inception twenty years ago, they have never been this wrong, more wrong than statistical probability indicates is possible.

16) In every single instance where exit polls were wrong the discrepancy favored Bush, even though statistical probability tells us that any survey errors should show up in both directions. Half a century of polling and centuries of mathematics must be wrong.

These paragraphs come from the second half of the article

...An obvious question here is: why haven’t the Democrats been more vigorous in their objections to this fraud? The fact that they haven’t objected more (with a few notable individual exceptions) has been taken by some as definitive evidence that no fraud must have happened because the Democrats have the most to gain from objecting. In part the answer to this puzzle is that the Democrats don’t fully understand what has hit them. ...

...The Democrats’ meek acceptance of other races’ extremely peculiar outcomes prior to the 2004 elections illustrates this point further. As a result of the 2000 Florida debacle, Congress passed the “Help America Vote” Act in October 2002. While this act introduced a number of reasonable reforms, it also resulted in the widespread introduction of paperless electronic voting machines. This meant that there was no way to determine if the votes recorded by these computers were accurate and tamper-free. The GOP majority has blocked efforts subsequently by a few Democratic Congresspeople, led by Michigan Rep. John Conyers, to rectify this and ensure a paper ballot....

...The delicious irony for the GOP is that the Help America Vote Act, precipitated by their theft of the Florida 2000 presidential vote, made GOP theft of elections as in the preceding examples easy and unverifiable except through recourse to indirect analysis such as pre-election polls and exit polls.38 This is the political equivalent of having your cake and eating it too. Or, more precisely: stealing elections, running the country, and aggressively, arrogantly and falsely claiming that “the people” support it.

Link to all of the above where there is much, much more.

Oppose Torture, all the time, everywhere

No matter how finely the Bush regime splits the hairs to cover their criminal activities, torture is torture. We know what it is and we know our government is doing it.

It is our duty to oppose torture, all the time, everywhere.

Here’s an article I saw first in my local newspaper, The Pocono Record, and found on line by googling “Project Censorsed.”

Hard Evidence of US Torturing Prisoners to Death Ignored by Corporate Media
By Peter Phillips

Military autopsy reports provide indisputable proof that detainees are being tortured to death while in US military custody. Yet the US corporate media are covering it with the seriousness of a garage sale for the local Baptist Church.A recent American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) posting of one of forty-four US military autopsy reports reads as follows: "Final Autopsy Report: DOD 003164, (Detainee) Died as a result of asphyxia (lack of oxygen to the brain) due to strangulation as evidenced by the recently fractured hyoid bone in the neck and soft tissue hemorrhage extending downward to the level of the right thyroid cartilage. Autopsy revealed bone fracture, rib fractures, contusions in mid abdomen, back and buttocks extending to the left flank, abrasions, lateral buttocks. Contusions, back of legs and knees; abrasions on knees, left fingers and encircling to left wrist. Lacerations and superficial cuts, right 4th and 5th fingers. Also, blunt force injuries, predominately recent contusions (bruises) on the torso and lower extremities. Abrasions on left wrist are consistent with use of restraints. No evidence of defense injuries or natural disease. Manner of death is homicide. Whitehorse Detainment Facility, Nasiriyah, Iraq."

The ACLU website further reveals how: "a 27-year-old Iraqi male died while being interrogated by Navy Seals on April 5, 2004, in Mosul, Iraq. During his confinement he was hooded, flex-cuffed, sleep deprived and subjected to hot and cold environmental conditions, including the use of cold water on his body and hood. The exact cause of death was "undetermined" although the autopsy stated that hypothermia may have contributed to his death.

Another Iraqi detainee died on January 9, 2004, in Al Asad, Iraq, while being interrogated. He was standing, shackled to the top of a doorframe with a gag in his mouth, at the time he died. The cause of death was asphyxia and blunt force injuries.

So read several of the 44 US military autopsy reports on the ACLU website -evidence of extensive abuse of US detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan 2002 through 2004. Anthony Romero, Executive Director of ACLU stated, "There is no question that US interrogations have resulted in deaths." ACLU attorney Amrit Sing adds, "These documents present irrefutable evidence that US operatives tortured detainees to death during interrogations."...

For the rest of the article follow the Link

License to kill

PENNSYLVANIA HUNTERS SHATTER BEAR HARVEST RECORD
Hunters shot a new state record 4,123 black bears in the state's recently concluded bear season, according to the preliminary reports by the Pennsylvania Game Commission.

Link

A 733 pound male was the largest bear killed in Pennsylvania.

New Jersey Bear Hunt Ends With 280 Kills

About 280 bears were killed in New Jersey's six-day hunt aimed at thinning out the burgeoning population, which ended with more than 100 protesters waiting for hunters to emerge from the woods with their kills.

The hunt ended shortly after dusk Saturday with fewer bears killed than the 328 bagged in 2003, according to preliminary figures.

Black bears, once near extinction in the state, are now a common sight, menacing people, scampering through yards and rummaging in trash.

Link

I know reasonable resolution of the conflict between people and wild animals is a complicated issue, but there ought to be a better way than letting people pay for the joy of killing something. Bears come by here regularly. They pass through, going about bear business and agitating the dogs. Once, a bear tore a board off the side of our house. Now and then I’ve had to get up in the night to drag a barking dog out from under a treed bear. But mostly, we stay out of each other’s way.

It would give me no pleasure to kill a bear. 40 years ago I lost the ability to understand killing for pleasure and it still amazes me to see so many that think of it as fun. The way I see it, killing animals to make more room for people ought to be generally considered an odious task, like hauling trash or digging graves, and should require high pay to get someone to do it. But then there’s a huge amount of industry, from boots to guns, dedicated to feeding the illusion of wilderness for pretend woodsman. Truth is, there is no wilderness, only parks; no woodsmen, only dressed up folks from the suburbs; no wild animals, only semi tame deer eating the shrubs and bears looking for a box of donuts.

Election opiate

We don’t stand a chance of getting rid of this neo fascist regime because we still think the president is chosen by an election. This belief in elections is delusional, an opiate the plutocrats, including their tools in the mainstream media, use to tranquilize voters into a malleable wad.

Both election 2000 and 2004 were stolen and it is likely key congressional elections in 2006 will be stolen as well. A right wing coup took place in 2000 and since then the right has tweaked its election fraud engine to near perfection. Until we address that reality we are simple participants in a scripted exercise in make believe that provides an illusion of legitimacy to those who remain in power.

For more, visit The Sideshow here and here

From The Sideshow

Understand that this problem extends right into the liberal blogosphere. At the Daily Kos, it's an official policy that there was no fraud in the ballot-count and you pretty much can't even talk about whether the 2004 election was stolen. DKos is a terrific site for interested Democratic activists (and other aficionados of blogs), but they just won't entertain the possibility that the election was stolen, despite the copious evidence. It's one thing to say that it probably wasn't, but frankly it defies sanity to refuse to consider the possibility, and in this Bai and Kos are in harmony - they'd rather not know.

and visit The Huffington Post here for an interview with Mark Crispin Miller.

Press corpse

Every lefty knows the mainstream media has been largely absorbed into the reigning class of the plutocracy. But it never hurts to be reminded of just how diligently they labor to keep the wad of American voters comfortably deluded and how corrupt they have become.

Here’s a quote from Digby:

The DC press corps has no idea how they look to the rest of the country after more than a decade of running with GOP trumped up scandals, pimping for impeachment, trivializing the effects of an unorthodox presidential election in 2000, and then saluting smartly and following Dick Cheney over the cliff on Iraq. We liberals never thought of the press as particularly partisan. We thought of it as competent or incompetent. But for a lot of reasons, for the last 15 years the DC press corps have far too often aligned themselves with a manipulative GOP political establishment to the point where it's been hard to see where one ends and the other begins. It's not a matter of political preference. It's insiderism. And when you become an insider in a corrupt system, for money, access, fame, fun whatever ... you become corrupt yourself.

Link

Via Atrios

Something to vote for

Bernie Sanders gave an interview published in The Progressive. Here's one question and response.

Q: So what’s your message to progressives?

Sanders: We have got to change the political culture in America. We need a political revolution. That means we are working on politics not just three weeks before an election but 365 days a year. We have to develop a strong economic message which says every American is entitled to health care through a national health care program. And we’re not going to allow these large corporations to push through trade agreements which allow them to throw Americans out on the street and run to China. We’re not going to give tax breaks to billionaires and then cut back on the needs of our elderly or poor or kids or education. We’re not going to privatize Social Security—in fact, we’re going to strengthen it. We’re going to provide quality education for every kid in America, from preschool through college. We have to take on these corporate leaders who are selling out the American people, whose allegiance is now much more to China than it is to the United States. If we have the courage to take these people on, I think we can overwhelm Bush and his friends.

Here's where the rest is: Link

Via Kos

Sadistic, small minded little prick

Let's not forget then Governor Bush's mocking Karla Faye Tucker shortly before her execution in Texas.

"Please," Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "don't kill me."

link

Go read the whole reminisence. It recalls what should never be forgotten, a Bush defining moment. Read also this post on Altercation where I found the link to the Timothy Noah Slate article linked above and here.

Thumbs up; thumbs down

Capricious.

...Clemency has long been intertwined with politics.

Gov. Pat Brown, who in the 1950s and '60s commuted 23 death sentences, more than any California governor, acknowledged that he once let an inmate die in the gas chamber to get a minimum-wage bill through the Legislature.

Link

The issue is never the issue.

Status report

Just to keep things straight, here’s a brief status report.

Rumsfeld and Cheney are crazy. Condi is ambitious and semi smart but thinks mostly of her shoes and loves to travel. Bush is an ill tempered fool who is over his head and shitting his pants terrified the world is going to find out.

We torture prisoners. We invade a country that poses no threat to us and sell the imperialistic quest for control of oil to the public with lies designed to frighten us. We maintain a Gulag of fewer, but more widely scattered prisons than the Soviet archipelago version, perhaps more disturbing because their existence reveals a disdain for our fundamental principles.

Our government comes to power through election fraud. Fraud friendly Republican developed computer voting technology continues proliferate. Leading Democrats still talk about being “bipartisan”. Hillary wants to stop flag burning. The New York Times, that helped us into all of the above, is still referred to as liberal. Lots of people watch O’Reilly. NPR has been taken over by the right.

Go here, to noutopia, read the posts and scroll down to the cartoon.

Condi: torture ok because they're different

Condi justifies torture. ABC story.

Without mentioning any country by name, Rice acknowledged special handling for certain terrorists.

"The captured terrorists of the 21st century do not fit easily into traditional systems of criminal or military justice, which were designed for different needs. We have had to adapt," Rice said.

This is the ultimate bullshit excuse. One used, in one way or another, by every criminal regime to allow for everything from genocide to torture. Give a name to a group, disenfranchise them, propagandize how they are different, with "different needs" and then, once dehumanized, slaughter them or torture them, or whatever.

You would think Europeans would be too sensitive to this rationalization to fall for it. The Sportsmen for Bush fascist base, of course, are all for it.

Torture

Condi says the U.S. does not use torture. What she means by the word "torture" and what the rest of us mean by it are very different.

From Reuters: CIA prisons in Europe closed in November: ABC News

...ABC News cited intelligence officers as saying that Rice could say that because of a presidential finding that approved "enhanced interrogation techniques," which the United States has said are not torture. These include sleep deprivation and waterboarding.

...ABC cited its sources as saying that the al Qaeda suspects being held are regularly subjected to these interrogation techniques.

In the report on the Web site, ABC cited sources as saying that of the suspects held by the CIA, only one, Ramzi bin al-Shaibah, a suspected coordinator of the September 11, 2001 attacks, did not require water boarding before he talked.

The report said al-Shaibah broke down in tears after he was walked past the cell of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the attacks on the United States. The sources were cited as saying a visibly shaken al-Shaibah started to cry and became cooperative.

So, just what kind of shape was Khalid in that simply seeing him reduced al-Shaibah to tears?

War criminals all.

One good man

Condoning torture is all the evidence anyone should need to recognize an outlaw regime. Fortunately there are still some good guys close to the center of power.

Here’s an account of Marine General Peter Pace contradicting war criminal Rumsfeld’s comments on torture. Link

The nation's top military man, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, said American troops in Iraq have a duty to intercede and stop abuse of prisoners by Iraqi security personnel.

When Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld contradicted Pace, the general stood firm.

Rumsfeld told the general he believed Pace meant to say the U.S. soldiers had to report the abuse, not stop it.

Pace stuck to his original statement.

"If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it," Pace told his civilian boss.

Pace takes all the ambiguity out of the issue and makes it pretty simple for the troops and anyone else for that matter. Just basic ethics and good sense.

via Kos

Salvador option.

Basically the Salvador option for Iraq is one that encourages the Shiite dominated, U.S. supported army and irregulars to torture and kill Sunni's, innocent or not. This policy is an American tradition orginally developed for use in Latin America where our boys led and participated in well documented slaughters and torture fests.


Here's a Newsweek article, "The Salvador Option" from January 14, 2005:

...Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras. There is no evidence, however, that Negroponte knew anything about the Salvadoran death squads or the Iran-Contra scandal at the time. The Iraq ambassador, in a phone call to NEWSWEEK on Jan. 10, said he was not involved in military strategy in Iraq. He called the insertion of his name into this report "utterly gratuitous.")

Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK. ...

Link

Here's an article from the Covert Action Quartly, Summer 1990: "Death Squads in El Salvador: A Pattern of U.S. Complicity"

First paragraphs:

In 1963, the U.S. government sent 10 Special Forces personnel to El Salvador to help General Jose Alberto Medrano set up the Organizacion Democratica Nacionalista (ORDEN)-the first paramilitary death squad in that country. These Green Berets assisted in the organization and indoctrination of rural "civic" squads which gathered intelligence and carried out political assassinations in coordination with the Salvadoran military.

Now, there is compelling evidence to show that for over 30 years, members of the U.S. military and the CIA have helped organize, train, and fund death squad activity in El Salvador.

In the last eight years, six Salvadoran military deserters have publicly acknowledged their participation in the death squads. Their stories are notable because they not only confirm suspicions that the death squads are made up of members of the Salvadoran military, but also because each one implicates U.S. personnel in death squad activity. ...

From the final paragraphs:

...Carlos Antonio Gomez Montano was a paratrooper stationed at Ilopango Air Force Base. He claimed to have seen eight Green Beret advisers watching two "torture classes" during which a 17-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl were tortured. Montano claimed that his unit and the Green Berets were joined by Salvadoran Air Force Commander Rafael Bustillo and other Salvadoran officers during these two sessions in January 1981. A Salvadoran officer told the assembled soldiers, "[watching] will make you feel more like a man.''

Above are the accounts of the death squad deserters. Non military sources have also reported the participation of U.S. personnel. For example, another (highly placed anonymous civilian) source maintained that Armed Forces General Staff Departments 2 and 5 (organized with help from U.S. Army Colonel David Rodriguez, a Cuban-American) used tortures such as beating, burning and electric shock. U.S. involvement has also been asserted in sworn accounts by some victims of torture. Jose Ruben Carrillo Cubas, a student, gave testimony that during his detention by the Long Distance Reconnaissance Patrol (PRAL) in 1986, a U.S. Army Major tortured him by applying electric shocks to his back and ears.

Various sources have reported the use of U.S.-manufactured torture equipment. Rene Hurtado, for example, explained, "There re some very sophisticated methods...of torture..[like the machine] that looks like a radio, like a transformer; it s about 15 centimeters across, with connecting wires. It says General Electric on it...."

Many other documented accounts of brutality by U.S. trained and advised military units exist. Indeed, the elite Atlacatl Battalion has been implicated in several massacres over the past ten years and members of the battalion have been indicted for the November slayings of the six Jesuit priests and two women.

It is widely accepted, in the mainstream media and among human rights organizations, that the Salvadoran government is responsible for most of the 70,000 deaths which are the result of ten years of civil war. The debate, however, has dwelled on whether the death squads are strictly renegade military factions or a part of the larger apparatus. The evidence indicates that the death squads are simply components of the Salvadoran military. And that their activities are not only common knowledge to U.S. agencies, but that U.S. personnel have been integral in organizing these units and continue to support their dally functioning.

Link

U.S. on the rocks

Here's a thoughtful view of how low the Republican "corporatocracy" has dragged us.

From Jane Smiley's post on the Huffington Post, third paragraph.

We are a country that can no longer pay our bills, no longer wage an effective military action, and no longer protect our citizens from disaster. And it doesn't matter what fiscal responsibility individuals show, what bravery individual soldiers show, or what generosity individual Americans show. As a nation-as a geopolitical entity-we have been stripped of all of our superpowers and many of our powers, and it has been done quickly and efficiently, in the name of blind patriotism, by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and their neocon advisors....

From the second paragraph from the bottom:

...A decent place to live is one where a large employed middle class can most of the time afford to house, feed, educate, and care for their children, who are, in the regular course of events, safe. Canada is a decent place to live. The US is divided largely between those who live in indecent ghost-towns that have been gutted by the evaporation of jobs and those who live in indecent affluent communities that they can barely afford but are terrified to leave. When the corporatocracy paid the Reagan revolutionaries to roll back any and all regulations so that they could do every short-sighted and selfish thing they wanted to, they started us down the road to this. ...

Link

Not only are we busted in the big picture, but locally most of our communities can no longer afford to provide many basic services. Funding schools, largely supported by outrageously high property taxes, is helping to break the back of the middle class, especially senior citizens.

Reagan and the Bushes have managed to wreck the place, top to bottom.

Read Jane Smiley's post.

They don't count our votes

In case all the latest polls showing Bush's loss of popularity have deluded anyone into thinking we have a chance of wining either or both houses and also a chance of retaking the White House, I remind you that we will win nothing unless we address the issue of vote fraud.

Here's a post about the Ohio votes very much worth looking closely at:

"Democracy Breakin': Ohio's Electric Boogaloo
More on Ohio's Staggeringly Impossible '05 Results"

Found on Brad Blog, includes some disturbing information on vote count strangeness in Ohio.

Thanks to The Sideshow

Keeping our heads in the sand on this issue will inevitably ensure the Republican vote fraud machine will be left to operate smoothly in future elections.

Murtha takes no shit from Cheney

Here's a part of Murtha's speech you don't want to miss. From the NYT

...Mr. Murtha, a 73-year-old Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam combat, lashed back at Vice President Dick Cheney, who in a speech to a conservative group on Wednesday night condemned critics of the Iraq war. "The president and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing their memory, or their backbone, but we're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," Mr. Cheney said in an address to the group, Frontiers of Freedom, in Washington.

Mr. Murtha was disdainful of the vice president's remarks, saying that "people with five deferments" had no right to make such remarks. Mr. Cheney, like millions of other young men of the era, avoided military service during the Vietnam war....

Link

Link to Murtha's web site


The Times just can't print negatives about Cheney without softening the blow. What does this crack -- "like millions of other young men of the era, avoided military service during the Vietnam war.." -- add to the article?

When mentioning Cheney they can't help themselves; they must slide in the obligatory shuffles and bows.

Rumbling blunders

Lately, Cheney is taking a much deserved hammering in the press. One poll has his approval rating at 19%. I thought more Americans would be more enthusiastic about legal torture and that his position as national oracle was secure. Maybe not.

I also always thought there wasn’t much to Cheney. That he was truly an empty suit who had mastered the art of slow talking deeply, thus giving every utterance the weight of bedrock. His success is the triumph of form over content. His product: political lies and gibberish and world domination delusions rumbled down to us as if from Mount Sinai.

Not only is Cheney being revealed as a liar and an advocate of torture as defense policy, but more and more writers are discovering Cheney’s lengthy list of incompetent moves.

Here’s a year old profile, The Curse of Dick Cheney, from the Rolling Stone, which gives a good account of the real rodent squeak behind the contrived rumble of gravitas.

Here's a sample from near the end:

Those who have known him over the years remain astounded by what they describe as his almost autistic indifference to the thoughts and feelings of others. "He has the least interest in human beings of anyone I have ever met," says John Perry Barlow, his former supporter. Cheney's freshman-year roommate, Steve Billings, agrees: "If I could ask Dick one question, I'd ask him how he could be so unempathetic."

Enjoy it all here.

New New Jersey Senator?

In January newly elected New Jersey Governor John Corzine gets to appoint someone to finish his term in the Senate. The list of possible appointees so far circulated is pretty bland. Here's another suggestion.

Jon Corzine needs to appoint Bruce Springsteen to the United States Senate.

Crazy? Not any crazier than a violent action-flick actor from Austria with steroid use and groping allegations who can't even properly pronounce the name of his home state getting elected as its governor (a job with a lot more responsibility than a senator, by the way). Or not any crazier than electing a retired pro wrestler to the statehouse. And not any crazier than another rock star from across the pond coming within an eyelash of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Read the whole article here, Link.

via Atrios

Child molester

All you need to know about Alito is contained in the post below from T Bogg.

Mmmmmmm...strip searches.

Clarence Thomas to be joined by man after his own heart.

In Doe v. Groody, Alito agued that police officers had not violated constitutional rights when they strip searched a mother and her ten-year-old daughter while carrying out a search warrant that authorized only the search of a man and his home. [Doe v. Groody, 2004]

Coupled with his finding that a woman's uterus is something for her husband to have and to hold, I'd say he has some issues when it comes to non-PenisAmericans.

Follow the link to T Bogg to get a link to the case.

via Atrios