Chris Floyd: Plain and Simple: Nothing But Ouster Will Stop Bush-Cheney Torture Regime

[babylonsister]

Plain and Simple: Nothing But Ouster Will Stop Bush-Cheney Torture Regime
Thursday, 04 October 2007
by Chris Floyd

Our text for today is from the New York Times: Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations .

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture "abhorrent" in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales's arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document...The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures...

The 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said.

Look, it's very simple, and we've been saying it for years: Bush and his minions are liars. They are proven liars, confirmed liars; they lie for pleasure and they lie for profit, they lie as a matter of course, as a matter of policy. So when they say they are not torturing people, when they say they are following U.S. law and international law and the restrictions of the courts and Congress, they are lying. They lied about it in 2004, they lied about it in 2005, and they are lying about it now.

They lie about it because they want to torture people. That's the first thing you must understand: They want to do it. They enjoy the thought of it. They want to hear the details, they want to hear about the pain, about the broken spirits and the ruined minds. They literally, physically – perhaps even sexually – enjoy the idea of people getting beaten, tormented and waterboarded at their command. There's no question about this. Bush tortured animals when he was a child, and now he tortures human beings with the same kind of furtive, sniggering, naughty glee. And when someone catches him at it, he lies about it, just like a brattish child. And now the whole administration of the United States government operates on the degraded moral level of this profoundly stunted and twisted little wretch.

We know that the torture so assiduously and secretly pushed by Bush and Cheney has nothing to do with national security or "fighting terrorism;" every expert in interrogation – from law enforcement, the military, the intelligence world, and from analysts of KGB records and Nazi files, etc – confirms the obvious fact that torture produces garbage data; the victim will say anything to relieve the suffering. It is an established fact that more humane interrogation yields vastly greater rewards. Thus anyone using torture in the Bush-Cheney manner is manifestly not interested in garnering useful intelligence data about preventing terrorism or identifying and capturing its perpetrators. They are interested only in augmenting their own arbitrary power over other human beings – for sick psychological reasons, as noted above, and also to advance their ideological commitment to authoritarian government, run by and for unchallengeable elites.

more...

http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/2541/81/

[Solly Mack]

1. and yet...

America continues to pretend it isn't happening

[seafan]

2. This is where we are.

Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations

By SCOTT SHANE, DAVID JOHNSTON and JAMES RISEN
Published: October 4, 2007

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.

.....

Plain and Simple: Nothing But Ouster Will Stop Bush-Cheney Torture Regime

Thursday, 04 October 2007
by Chris Floyd

.....

There is really no point in Congress passing laws restricting the Regime's use of torture (assuming that these slavish sad sacks were actually interested in doing so); nor is there any point in the courts ruling against it (assuming that the Bushist apparatchiks, arrogant partisans and lying dimbulbs on the Supreme Court would uphold any lower court rulings outlawing the Regime's filthy practices). It is obvious beyond all dispute by now that the Bush Regime will simply ignore any and all attempts to put fetters on its atrocities. They will not stop torturing people. They will not stop kidnapping people and holding them without charges. They will not stop launching mass-murdering wars of aggression. They will not stop perverting the electoral system to keep their extremist fringe views ensconced in power.

The only possible way to stop these criminal depradations is to remove Bush and Cheney from office. Nothing else will do it. And any national political figure or presidential candidate who does not have this removal at the top of their agenda, who is not beating this drum day after day and using all their power and influence and position to help bring it about is, as we have noted here before, nothing but an accomplice to torture and murder.

It's that simple.

.....

To put it starkly, if we do not now remove George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney from power, nothing, absolutely nothing else will matter.

[Solly Mack]

3. Remove them - indict them - imprison them

Otherwise, America becomes the war crime nation that allows its war criminals to go free

[babylonsister]

4. And here's Fran Townsend on CNN claiming none of this is happening.

:eyes: She must feel really slimy when she goes home at night.

[Solly Mack]

5. I don't think they are bothered at all by it

They've told themselves so often that what they're doing isn't torture that they now believe it


and they feel justfied in doing what they're doing

[snappyturtle]

9. Yep....she's a real treat! Someone ought to tell her that the subject

of justifying torture does not spin well!

[seemslikeadream]

6. “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.”

She's present in our country right now, just waiting to make her - to carry out her divine mission







http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/27/1454229

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Nemesis was the ancient Greek goddess of revenge, the punisher of hubris and arrogance in human beings. You may recall she is the one that led Narcissus to the pond and showed him his reflection, and he dove in and drowned. I chose the title, because it seems to me that she's present in our country right now, just waiting to make her -- to carry out her divine mission.

By the subtitle, I really do mean it. This is not just hype to sell books -- “The Last Days of the American Republic.” I’m here concerned with a very real, concrete problem in political analysis, namely that the political system of the United States today, history tells us, is one of the most unstable combinations there is -- that is, domestic democracy and foreign empire -- that the choices are stark. A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can't be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, like the old Roman Republic, it will lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship.

I’ve spent some time in the book talking about an alternative, namely that of the British Empire after World War II, in which it made the decision, not perfectly executed by any manner of means, but nonetheless made the decision to give up its empire in order to keep its democracy. It became apparent to the British quite late in the game that they could keep the jewel in their crown, India, only at the expense of administrative massacres, of which they had carried them out often in India. In the wake of the war against Nazism, which had just ended, it became, I think, obvious to the British that in order to retain their empire, they would have to become a tyranny, and they, therefore, I believe, properly chose, admirably chose to give up their empire.

As I say, they didn't do it perfectly. There were tremendous atavistic fallbacks in the 1950s in the Anglo, French, Israeli attack on Egypt; in the repression of the Kikuyu -- savage repression, really -- in Kenya; and then, of course, the most obvious and weird atavism of them all, Tony Blair and his enthusiasm for renewed British imperialism in Iraq. But nonetheless, it seems to me that the history of Britain is clear that it gave up its empire in order to remain a democracy. I believe this is something we should be discussing very hard in the United States.




http://www.bushflash.com/14.html

or maybe this if you have time
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1656880303867390173&q=freedom+to+fascism&total=835&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0


War and Globalization
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3117338213439292490&q=Hijacking+Catastrophe&total=29&start=20&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=7


Hijacking Catastrophe:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SltOy_F6ZII&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YlcpXBFOXA&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZaWh0cJPQ&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8S_vOZqJbE&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GT7ti8LZ6A&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkOtqGNJ8qI&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C02QHS0D44&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YlcpXBFOXA&mode=related&search
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kBX00TR-aA&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jghh00bn_DA&mode=related&search=

[L. Coyote]

7. SO >>> Guess who is not really illegally spying on the DEMS?

[Altean Wanderer]

8. Chris Floyd is one of our best fearless bloggers

He gets to the heart of the fascists better than most.

And yes, that horrible torture is being committed by our government and its hired goons makes me very, very ashamed. Do the people with "God Bless America" stickers realize what's being done in their name?

[Disturbed]

10. The CIA recently announce that they will no longer Water board.

That is an admission that they were doing so.

Do you believe them?

[babylonsister]

11. He is a great writer; you can hear his anger, too. And I too am

ashamed. :(

[scarletwoman]

12. Aha! I was just doing a search to see if this had been posted yet! Thank you for being on the ball!

k&r, and all that.

Chris Floyd is absolutely necessary to my sanity. I wish every DUer were reading him, there might be far fewer senseless arguments over trivialities if people really "got" the big picture like Chris does.

Thanks again,
sw
:yourock:

[Solly Mack]

13. kick

[Mr Rabble]

14. Chris Floyd is doing something here that is quite rare.

He is telling the truth about US leadership.

Sure, he is also condemning the abhorrent policies of our leaders. However, the way I read that article it says that the rot has crept far beyond individual policy makers into the death of the American system.

I would recommend this twice if I could.

Kick!