RelentlesslyOptimistic

Bush calls for torture prosecution

"I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture..."

Official proclamation by President Bush, June 26, 2003.

From The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Image from Susan Walsh/AP Photo

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

Tom Tomorrow on Torture

Via The World's Fair. Tom Tomorrow is published regularly at Credo Action, which also provided the nifty Bush Countdown timer at the top of the sidebar.

Iraqi torture explained

Tom Toles helps us understand: their torture practices are part of the process of Iraq taking over governing responsibility from us.

“Nobody was beheaded or killed.”

From Davenetics* : When Friends Torture comes this question:

"...what happens when we learn that the Iraqis have been torturing suspects in a secret facility?

The Iraqi Interior Minister defended the facility by explaining that “Nobody was beheaded or killed.”

Meanwhile, the administration is pushing Congress to allow it to operate just such facilities. Sort of complicates things, no?"

Regarding the title quote, I'd really hope for a higher standard than that.

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

"We did it for amusement" "We kept it to broken arms and legs."

"We did it for amusement."

"Some days we would just get bored, so we would have everyone sit in a corner and then make them get in a pyramid"
 

"he had seen a soldier break open a chemical light stick and beat the detainees with it. "That made them glow in the dark, which was real funny"

"He told him to bend over and broke the guy's leg with a ...metal bat."

"after the Abu Ghraib scandal..."We still did it, but we were careful," he told the human rights group."

"As long as no PUC's [prisoners] came up dead, it happened." He added, "We kept it to broken arms and legs."

"We would give them blows to the head, chest, legs and stomach, and pull them down, kick dirt on them...This happened every day."

Which is worse? What we're doing to them, or what we're doing to ourselves?

3 in 82nd Airborne Say Beating Iraqi Prisoners Was Routine - New York Times.
Image source

Forbes reports that US acknowledges torture at Guantanamo; in Iraq, Afghanistan

The liberal backstabbing Forbes.com reports that the US acknowledges torture at Guantanamo; in Iraq, Afghanistan
 

GENEVA (AFX) - Washington has, for the first time, acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source said.

The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on on condition of anonymity.
...
UN sources said this is the first time the world body has received such a frank statement on torture from US authorities.

 

Threshholds and the relativity of torture: the "NABA defense"

Great post at slacktivist on the chorus of torture "we're Not As Bad As the gulags and it's unpatriotic to suggest otherwise" we've been hearing lately. The excerpts below (reordered for sense due to length) show that it is worth reading the entire post and the comments.

"In an earlier post, I described this as the “NABA defense” -- Not As Bad As...The American prison camps...are, in fact, not as vast or as brutal as Stalin’s gulags.

The United States of America -- as a matter of official policy conducted with our money, in our name -- tortures and abuses prisoners and detains people indefinitely without charge or due process.

The point here is that once you get beyond a certain threshhold, relative comparisons don’t really matter.

The only relevant and meaningful comparison is between those regimes that countenance torture and those that do not. Once a nation crosses that line any difference between it and other torture regimes is inconsequential in comparison to the difference between it and those nations which have refused to cross that threshhold."

A commenter quoted Avi Schlaim, an Israeli historian, "The issue isn't whether or not we are the same as the Nazis, the issue is that we aren't different enough"