RelentlesslyOptimistic

Because their lips are moving: Top Officials Planned Detailed Torture, Bush Approved

ABC News reports that top officials of the Bush Administration, including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Ashcroft, discussed and approved detailed interrogation plans and methods of torture to be used. President "We-Don't-Torture" Bush said he knew about and approved of the discussions. The significance of this story is the shocking admission that top officials not only approved of the use of torture, but that they discussed and approved of specific techniques against specific prisoners.

Jan Crawford Greenburg's ABC News Blog posted a summary with links to key stories, and Digby sums it up by saying that:

"There was a time when the Village clucked and screeched about "defiling the white house" with an extra marital affair or hosting fund raising coffees. I would say this leaves a far greater stain on that institution than any sexual act could ever do.

The vice president, national security advisor and members of the president's cabinet sat around the white house "choreographing" the torture and the president approved it. I have to say that even in my most vivid imaginings about this torture scheme it didn't occur to me that the highest levels of the cabinet were personally involved"

Via Orcinus, image from ABC News

Horrifying Toys #73: Russian Roulette for kids

From Blame It On The Voices

Because Their Lips Are Moving, Special Edition: Fox News

Jurassicpork of the Welcome to Pottersville blog has done a terrific job of collecting some astounding screenshots of Fox News stories that are, at best, dishonest. A few show simple mistakes, like putting a volcano in Indonesia instead of the Philippines, and some demonstrate Fox's militant fanaticism ("Why the fuss about torturing people who want us dead?"). But too many reflect clear attempts to mislead viewers, such as repeatedly referring to Republican gay pedophiliac predator Rep. Mark Foley as a Democrat.

 

Read all of Fox News at Its Finest

Congress authorizes torture, secret arrests and trials

I would never have guessed that I'd ever quote from conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan without criticizing what he said. But on this momentous day we have Andrew Sullivan united with liberal columnist Molly Ivins in opposition to the Military Commissions Act passed by the Senate yesterday. Sullivan calls the Democrats cowards for not standing up to the President, and notes that Bush will use opposition to torture as a campaign weapon against Democrats in upcoming elections.

Habeas Corpus is a legal right that allows those arrested to challenge in court the reasons for their arrest. It was first implemented in the Magna Carta in 1215 to eliminate the then-common practice of secret arrests, and has always been a part of American law. This bill allows secret arrests of enemy combatants with no timeline for charging the arrestee with a crime and no right to a lawyer other than one appointed by the military.

Of course, we're assured that only dangerous "enemy combatants," someone who “has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States” will be arrested under this bill. According to Ivins, "One person has already been charged with aiding terrorists because he sold a satellite TV package that includes the Hezbollah network."

The bill also allows those dangerous cable TV salespeople to be tortured, but only up to "serious pain, "defined as “bodily injury that involves extreme physical pain." In the secret trial before a military panel the government can use information collected without warrants to convict the detainee.

Ivins quotes George Bush in a speech from July 2003: “The United States is committed to worldwide elimination of torture, and we are leading this fight by example. Freedom from torture is an inalienable human right. Yet torture continues to be practiced around the world by rogue regimes, whose cruel methods match their determination to crush the human spirit.” I guess the example is that torture is OK, even if it is a human right.

The image above was posted by Andrew Sullivan yesterday pointing to a post from David Corn's blog with photos from Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, which has been turned into a museum documenting Khymer Rouge atrocities. We'll probably just create our torture museum in the Smithsonian, don't you think?

An Easy Call: Lying

Eugene Robertson, in a Washington Post Op-Ed about the latest domestic spying by the NSA:

At least now we know that the Bush administration's name for spying on Americans without first seeking court approval -- the "terrorist surveillance program" -- isn't an exercise in Orwellian doublespeak after all. It's just a bald-faced lie.

Bush and his people have tried to turn flouting the law into a virtue if it's a law they find inconvenient...We already knew the NSA was somehow monitoring phone calls, so what's the big deal?

Bush has tried to convince us that the overwhelming majority of Americans are not affected by domestic surveillance, but now we know that the opposite is true: The overwhelming majority of us are.

The president's claim, in his brief statement on the report, that the government isn't "trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans" is as disingenuous as Bill Clinton's claim that he "didn't inhale."

Are we safer yet?

IRS to allow sale of tax return info

The IRS has proposed a change in rules to allow tax preparers to sell any and all information from income tax returns. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer "accountants and other tax-return preparers will be able to sell information from individual returns - or even entire returns - to marketers and data brokers."

In true Orwellian fashion, the IRS announced the proposed change in a release with the headline: "IRS Issues Proposed Regulations to Safeguard Taxpayer Information." They claim that more protection is provided by requiring signed permission from the taxpayer before any non-tax use of information is allowed. Because we know that everyone will read every word of the dozens of forms they sign after having their taxes done, right?

It would be more efficient if the IRS just went into the business of selling the information themselves. Maybe they could make enough to fund another tax cut for upper income taxpayers.

Via Sunbelt Blog

Bush: the Constitution is "just a goddamned piece of paper"

According to Capitol Hill Blue, a White House meeting last month with Republican Congressional leaders to discuss renewing the Patriot Act resulted in Bush's outburst.

“Mr. President,” one aide in the meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.”

“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”

What if Congress had opposed Vietnam sooner?

Despite denials from the right, the Iraqi Quagmire resembles Vietnam in many ways, not the least of which is the response by the pro-war leadership to criticism. What if someone in Congress had had the courage to call for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam sooner? How would history have changed, how many more would have lived if we hadn't had to endure the endless peace talks seeking "peace with honor?"

Yesterday Rep. John Murtha (D-PA), a decorated Vietnam veteran and long-respected hawk (even Fox News calls him "one of Congress' most hawkish Democrats"), introduced a resolution that ignited Congress. As Dana Milbank at the Washington Post said:

"In his 37 years in the military, John Murtha won two Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star with a Combat "V," and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. As a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania for the past 31 years, he has been a fierce hawk, championing conflicts in Central America and the Persian Gulf.
Yesterday, he was called a coward."
[...]
Murtha, whose brand of hawkishness has never been qualified by the word "chicken," was expecting the attacks. "I like guys who've never been there to criticize us who've been there. I like that," the burly old Marine said, hands in pocket. Referring to Vice President Cheney, he continued: "I like guys who got five deferments and never been there, and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done."

Congressional Republicans submitted a weaker resolution that they sleazily also called the "Murtha Resolution," to replace the one Murtha championed. The gutted resolution failed after all Democrats and five Republicans voted against it. During the pre-vote debate, Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH) quoted as a constituent a former Marine and current Ohio State House Republican who sent a message to Murtha "that cowards cut and run, Marines never do." Think Progress reported (and has the video):

"Schmidt was later forced to return to the House floor and have her remarks stricken from the record. Despite having said the purpose of her “coward” statement was to “send Congressman Murtha a message,” Schmidt claimed:
"Mr. Speaker, my remarks were not directed to any member of the House and I did not intend to suggest they applied to any member, most especially the distinguished gentleman from Pennsylvania."

To translate from the Orwellian, I didn't say what I said and I didn't mean it anyway. GOP leaders also floated the idea of launching an ethics probe of Murtha.

Meanwhile, right-wing NewsBusters ("exposing and combating liberal media bias") used a misleading headline "Media Ignore Congressman Murtha’s Long History Of Opposition to the Iraq War" to muddy the waters around Murtha's positions on the Iraq war. Their story does report (as if it was a bad thing) that "Rep. Murtha has been expressing disgust with the Bush administration’s prosecution of this war since six months after it started."

So let me see if I understand: after initially voting for the war, a 37-year, decorated Marine later claims that the Administration's postwar planning was incompetent and that intelligence was manipulated. Somehow this fact is supposed to discredit his current position that the justification for war was based on manipulated intelligence, the war planning was incompetent, and that as a result the only sensible course left to us is immediate withdrawal. And the media ignoring this previous opposition is a liberal-media plot to destroy America. Maybe they've been talking to poor Bill O'Reilly.

Fair and disgraceful

Faux News - Fair and something....via Kantor.com

A (continued) history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies

Harpers.org re-posts this October 2003 piece quoting Bush Administration statements about the Iraq war on the same day that the AP quoted Bush:

"We do not torture," Bush declared in response to reports of secret CIA prisons overseas.
President Bush on Monday defended U.S. interrogation practices...[as he] supported an effort...to block or modify a proposed Senate-passed ban on torture.

Photo from Bob Harris