What's worse, the Defense Authorization Act or the Stop Online Piracy Act?

as soon as i read the story about hillary's unbelievably hypocritical speech at the hague extolling OTHER countries to espouse unfettered internet freedom, i just KNEW glenn would be all over it like white on rice...

Hillary Clinton and Internet Freedom

Hypocrisy from the U.S. Government — having U.S. officials self-righteously impose standards on other countries which they routinely violate — is so common and continuous that the vast majority of examples do not even merit notice. But sometimes, it is so egregious and shameless — and sufficiently consequential — that it should not go unobserved. Such is the case with the speech delivered by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday at a Conference on Internet Freedom held at the Hague, a conference devoted to making “a stand for freedom of expression on the internet, especially on behalf of cyber dissidents and bloggers.”

[...]

She astutely observed that “those who push these plans often do so in the name of security.” She added that “the first challenge is for the private sector to embrace its role in protecting internet freedom,” which — she lamented — has not always happened: “A few years ago, the headlines were about companies turning over sensitive information about political dissidents. Earlier this year, they were about a company shutting down the social networking accounts of activists in the midst of a political debate.” She concluded with a real flourish: “Our government will continue to work very hard to get around every barrier that repressive governments put up” even though such governments will try to maintain those barriers “by resorting to greater oppression.”

What Hillary Clinton is condemning here is exactly that which not only the administration in which she serves, but also she herself, has done in one of the most important Internet freedom cases of the last decade: WikiLeaks. And beyond that case, both Clinton specifically and the Obama administration generally have waged a multi-front war on Internet freedom.

[...]

Perhaps worst of all, many of the administration’s key allies in the Senate are now pushing a bill – in the name of stopping online piracy (SOPA) — that would vest the U.S. government and the largest corporations with draconian powers literally to shut down or otherwise disable Internet sites without due process. Hillary Clinton personally ”tacitly endorsed that bill,” enabling the bill’s key Democratic Congressional supporters to tout State Department support for it. As EFF’s Trevor Timm recently wrote: “Ironically, we know from the WikiLeaks cables that the State Department has also aggressively lobbied many other countries for strict new laws similar to SOPA. They have even offered to fund enforcement and literally draft the laws that sacrifice free speech for greater copyright protection for Hollywood.”

here's glenn talking with cenk uygur on current's young turks...

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Information about the CIA black sites continues to trickle in

i've posted extensively on the cia black sites, particularly the ones in poland, lithuania and diego garcia... here's some fresh information on the site in romania, dug up, no surprise, by a non-u.s. news organization, in this case, the german network ard...

The existence of a CIA prison in Romania has been widely reported, but its location has never been made public. The Associated Press and German public television ARD located the former prison and learned details of the facility where harsh interrogation tactics were used. ARD's program on the CIA prison is set to air Thursday.

The Romanian prison was part of a network of so-called black sites that the CIA operated and controlled overseas in Thailand, Lithuania and Poland. All the prisons were closed by May 2006, and the CIA's detention and interrogation program ended in 2009.

Unlike the CIA's facility in Lithuania's countryside or the one hidden in a Polish military installation, the CIA's prison in Romania was not in a remote location. It was hidden in plain sight, a couple blocks off a major boulevard on a street lined with trees and homes, along busy train tracks.

here it is, "hidden in plain sight"...


The National Registry Office for Classified Information, also known
as ORNISS, sits in a busy residential neighborhood minutes from
the center of Romania’s capital city of Bucharest in this recent photo.
Between 2003 and 2006, the CIA operated a secret prison from the
building's basement, bringing in high-value terror suspects for
interrogation and detention. A joint AP-ARD Panorama investigation
revealed the exact location of the prison. (AP Photo)

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And here's a damn good reason why I put up the previous post

need i say more...?

Court rules Obama’s detention powers not limited by laws of war

The Washington, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling Tuesday that upholds the Bush administration's broad claims of executive power to detain non-citizens.

The case, Al-Bihani v. Obama, "was the first by the Circuit Court to directly apply the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in Boumediene v. Bush creating a constitutional right for Guantanamo Bay detainees to challenge their captivity," according to the SCOTUS blog. "Unless reviewed and overturned either by the en banc Circuit Court or the Supreme Court, the new decision will control how scores of detainee cases are resolved in District Court in Washington."

The defendant in the case, whose habeas petition was denied by the court, is Ghaleb Nassar Al Bihani, a citizen of Yemen who served Taliban fighters as a cook and claims he never even fired a shot.

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Obama’s faux populism

robert scheer...

Barack Obama’s faux populism is beginning to grate, and when yet another one of those “we the people” e-mails from the president landed on my screen as I was fishing around for a column subject, I came unglued. It is one thing to rob us blind by rewarding the power elite that created our problems but quite another to sugarcoat it in the rhetoric of a David taking on those Goliaths.

In each of the three most important areas of policy with which he has dealt, Obama speaks in the voice of the little people’s champion, but his actions cater fully to the demands of the most powerful economic interests.

With his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, he has given the military-industrial complex an excuse for the United States to carry on in spending more on defense than the rest of the world combined, without a credible military adversary in sight. His response to the banking meltdown was to continue George W. Bush’s massive giveaway of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street, and his health care reform has all the earmarks of a boondoggle for the medical industry profiteers.

generally speaking, faux populism aside, obama started to grate on me quite some time ago... yes, the sell-out to wall street, the health care providers, big pharma and the corporate military industrial government complex is disappointing enough but when added to the dogged insistence on perpetuating virtually all of bush-era torture, detention, and surveillance policies it becomes positively galling...

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Democracy in Afghanistan...? Not so much... The Afghan Guantánamo...? You betcha... Interrogation techniques hazardous to your health...? Yes...

mr. khan would like peace, security and job opportunities... pardon me, but, no shit... while we're at it, how about some decent infrastructure like roads, electricity, water, health care, and schools... oh, yeah, and then there's decent food supplies that aren't so outrageously expensive that the folks starving to death on the streets might have a shot at basic nutrition...

Mubaruz Khan didn't bother to vote when Afghans went to the polls in the country's second-ever democratic election last month. He was too busy eking out a living selling cigarettes and soda for $3 a day, and didn't think voting would make a difference in his life.

Millions like Khan stayed home on Aug. 20, a sharp contrast to 2004, when Afghans jammed polling stations to give President Hamid Karzai his first term. Ominous warnings from the Taliban suppressed turnout, but some Afghans said they were also discouraged by the government's failure to halt endemic corruption, spiraling unemployment and crumbling security.

"We want peace. We want security. We want job opportunities," the 55-year-old Khan said Monday. "Otherwise, the democracy and the elections that they are all shouting about every day mean nothing to us."

meanwhile, just a few kilometers down the road from where i sit typing this lies bagram, the afghan guantánamo...

Bagram is "the forgotten second Guantánamo," says American military law expert Eugene Fidell, a professor at Yale Law School. "But apparently there is a continuing need for this sort of place even under the Obama administration."

From the beginning, "Bagram was worse than Guantanamo," says New York-based attorney Tina Foster, who has argued several cases on behalf of detainee rights in US courts. "Bagram has always been a torture chamber."

And what does Obama say? Nothing. He never so much as mentions Bagram in any of his speeches. When discussing America's mistreatment of detainees, he only refers to Guantanamo.

and bagram ain't small, either...

The Bagram detention facility, by now the largest American military prison outside the United States, is not marked on any maps. In fact, its precise location, somewhere on the periphery of the giant air base northeast of the Afghan capital, is classified. It comprises two sand-colored buildings that resemble airplane hangars, surrounded by tall concrete walls and green camouflage tarps. The facility was set up in 2002 as a temporary prison on the grounds of a former Soviet air base.

Today, the two buildings contain large cages, each with the capacity to hold 25 to 30 prisoners. Up to 1,000 detainees can be held at Bagram at any one time. The detainees sleep on mats, and there is one toilet behind a white curtain for each cage. A $60 million extension is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

i've never been up the road toward bagram... in fact, i've barely been out of kabul... however, if i ever do get the opportunity to see some more of this amazingly rugged country, bagram won't be anywhere near the top of my list of "must-see" places...

and as long as we're on the subject of detainees, it kind of leads into how they're treated, particularly in the interrogation process... apparently, our methods aren't necessarily contributing to mental and emotional health...

Prolonged stress from the CIA's harsh interrogations could have impaired the memories of terrorist suspects, diminishing their ability to recall and provide the detailed information the spy agency sought, according to a scientific paper published Monday.

The methods could even have caused the suspects to create – and believe – false memories, contends the paper, which scrutinizes the techniques used by the CIA under the Bush administration through the lens of neurobiology. It suggests the methods are actually counterproductive, no matter how much suspects might eventually say.

"Solid scientific evidence on how repeated and extreme stress and pain affect memory and executive functions (such as planning or forming intentions) suggests these techniques are unlikely to do anything other than the opposite of that intended by coercive or enhanced interrogation," according to the paper in the scientific journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[...]

"We've known for quite a while that stress radically impairs cognition. We know memory is very fragile to begin with," said Stephen Soldz, president-elect of Psychologists for Social Responsibility and a professor at Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. "It's just amazing that this has not been taken into account."

not so amazing... in fact, my guess is that it actually WAS taken into account and deliberately discounted because it didn't line up with the preconceived notions of those who were bound and determined that torture and useful interrogation somehow went together despite all of the principles upon which the foundation of the united states supposedly rests...

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I've never understood those who are so rabidly opposed to the ACLU

imho, they're doing most of the heavy lifting in the seemingly endless battle against our own government to uphold our civil liberties, accountability and the rule of law...

In the spring of 2003, long before Abu Ghraib or secret prisons became part of the American vocabulary, a pair of recently hired lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union noticed a handful of news reports about allegations of abuse of prisoners in American custody.

The lawyers, Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh, wondered: Was there a broader pattern of abuse, and could a Freedom of Information Act request uncover it? Some of their colleagues, more experienced with the frustrations of such document demands, were skeptical. One made a tongue-in-cheek offer of $1 for every page they turned up.

Six years later, the detention document request and subsequent lawsuit are among the most successful in the history of public disclosure, with 130,000 pages of previously secret documents released to date and the prospect of more.

The case has produced revelation after revelation: battles between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the military over the treatment of detainees at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp; autopsy reports on prisoners who died in custody in Afghanistan and Iraq; the Justice Department’s long-secret memorandums justifying harsh interrogation methods; and day-by-day descriptions of what happened inside the Central Intelligence Agency’s overseas prisons.

it's not as if we needed the aclu to stoke our suspicions about what's been happening but we sure as hell have needed them to help us move beyond mere suspicions to real facts...

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I never thought my country would be the proprietor of a bona fide chamber of horrors [UPDATE: Jonathan Turley]

guess what...? everything those of us who have been paying attention THOUGHT has been happening has ACTUALLY been happening...

sometimes i'd really rather be wrong, dontcha know...?

As the session begins, the detainee stands naked, except for a hood covering his head. Guards shackle his arms and legs, then slip a small collar around his neck. The collar will be used later; according to CIA guidelines for interrogations, it will serve as a handle for slamming the detainee's head against a wall.

After removing the hood, the interrogator opens with a slap across the face -- to get the detainee's attention -- followed by other slaps, the guidelines state. Next comes the head-slamming, or "walling," which can be tried once "to make a point," or repeated again and again.

"Twenty or thirty times consecutively" is permissible, the guidelines say, "if the interrogator requires a more significant response to a question." And if that fails, there are far harsher techniques to be tried.

Five years after the CIA's secret detention program came to light, much is known about the spy agency's decision to use harsh techniques, including waterboarding, to pry information from alleged al-Qaeda leaders. Now, with the release late Monday of guidelines for interrogating high-value detainees, the agency has provided -- in its own words -- the first detailed description of the step-by-step procedures used to systematically crush a detainee's will to resist by eliciting stress, exhaustion and fear.

lovely, eh...? and that ain't all...

In 2002, Iraqi Bisher al-Rawi, a permanent resident of Great Britain, was detained by local and CIA officials in the airport in the Republic of Gambia where he had legitimate, work-related business. Mr. al-Rawi recalls of his captors, detailed in In a court filing dated August, 2007, by the ACLU on behalf of five detainees who had been in US custody, or under US authority at various times:

“Then, without speaking, one of his escorts began to gently rub Mr. al-Rawi’s feet as they waited. The kindness of the gesture took Mr. al-Rawi by surprise and seemed to be almost apologetic in nature. Although he could have no idea of what was about to unfold, it was at this point that Mr. al-Rawi became convinced that something awful was about to happen.

After some time, the two Gambian officials stood up and, with Mr. al-Rawi between them, began to walk forward. They released him momentarily but then he was immediately grabbed from behind by two other men and dragged into a small, dark room located somewhere on the perimeter of the airport. In this room, several men and women – hooded and using flashlights to guide them – removed Mr. al-Rawi’s handcuffs and shackles, cut off all his clothes, and dressed him in diapers and different clothing. His handcuffs and shackles were replaced with new ones that were part of some sort of restraining harness. Something was then placed in or around his ears that impaired his hearing and both a blindfold and goggles were placed over his eyes. Mr. al-Rawi was then roughly manhandled on board a waiting aircraft, and once inside was restrained on a stretcher-like platform. For the duration of flight Mr. al-Rawi was unable to move or change position. He was also denied access to food, water, or a toilet. It was all he could do to keep himself from screaming.”

kinda makes the chills run up and down my spine...

as does this...

From the same ACLU legal filing comes the detention of Ahmed Agiza, a 45-year-old pharmacist and Egyptian citizen who had sought asylum in Sweden in 2000 to escape retribution for filing a lawsuit against the Egyptian government. The legal action was a result of torture Mr. Agiza endured while being interrogated about associations of a relative, and through no dubious or illegal actions of his own.

Declared to be a security risk, with no reason given to him or his appointed legal representative, Mr. Agiza was ordered to leave Sweden, and was met by US officials upon his expulsion. He recalls the encounter:

“All of the men wore dark hoods and were dressed in civilian clothes,” the report states. “Mr. Agiza was brought into a small room. There the men conducted a physical search, forcibly sliced off his clothes, including his underwear, inserted suppositories into his rectum, fitted him with a diaper, dressed him in overalls, blindfolded him, and placed a hood over his head. One of the men photographed the whole process.”

land of the free and home of the brave depraved...

[UPDATE]

jonathan turley on olbermann last night via raw story...

“It’s a very curious mandate,” law professor Jonathan Turley told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Tuesday. “I don’t see how he can possibly do what Holder’s asking him to do. … The question here is whether [Special Prosecutor John] Durham will have the leeway — and, frankly, the courage — to recognize the obvious.”

“It’s a bizarre thing for a professional prosecutor to do,” explained Turley, “to go in and say, ‘I’m going to look at a program that’s based on what is a well-defined war crime, and I’m going to see if any of these people went beyond what was authorized by people who were talking about a war crime.’”

“He’s got what are all the elements of a crime,” Turley emphasized, “including dead bodies, by all reports, and the question is, is he going to go after those sort of low-lying fruit targets who went too far, or is he going to go after the people who really set this thing in motion.”

yes, it IS bizarre but at least it's at least a tiny step in the right direction, something that wouldn't have had a snowball's chance in hell pre-obama...

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Yee-Ha...! Some prisoners at Bagram will come under U.S. court jurisdiction

this is good news and long, long overdue... (btw, as i type this, i am sitting at my desk in kabul, approximately 60km south of bagram...)

A federal judge ruled on Thursday that prisoners in the war on terror can use U.S. civilian courts to challenge their detention at a military air base in Afghanistan.

U.S. District Judge John Bates turned down the United States' motion to deny the right to three foreign detainees at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have the right to challenge their detention in court. But the government had argued that it did not apply to those in Afghanistan.

Bates said the cases were essentially the same and he quoted the Supreme Court ruling repeatedly in his judgment and applied the test created by it to each detainee. It is the first time a federal judge has applied the ruling to detainees in Afghanistan.

Bates considered the requests of four detainees asking to be released, but he reserved judgment on one detainee, Haji Wazir, because he is an Afghan citizen and releasing him could create "practical obstacles in the form of friction with the host country." He ordered Wazir and the government to file memos addressing those issues.

The other three detainees are from outside Afghanistan -- Fadi al Maqaleh of Yemen, Amin al Bakri of Yemen and Redha al-Najar of Tunisia.

All four of the detainees in this case were captured outside Afghanistan but have been held at the airfield for six years or more. Bates wrote that the determination to hold them as enemy combatants is part of a process even more inadequate at Bagram than it is at Guantanamo.

the detention center at bagram, mostly due to distance, has been much less in the public eye than guantánamo although, as the last line in the snippet above states, the process at bagram is "even more inadequate" than at guantánamo... all of these extra-legal hell-holes need to come under the careful eye of the u.s. justice system and it's about time it's happening...

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"What orifice, Mr. Cheney, did you pull those numbers out of?"

olbermann thinks the big dick should put his tail between his legs and quit the country... i couldn't agree more...

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The Bush administration memos behind torture, detention and warrantless wiretapping

from raw story...

Details about more than three dozen secret memoranda written by Bush Administration officials now sit atop a chart created by public interest reporting group. The memos track new details about dozens of secret Bush Administration legal positions on torture, detention and warrantless wiretapping.

Meanwhile, Obama's freshly-confirmed Attorney General Eric Holder told senators that he was open to declassifying White House legal memos if no support for their original classification could be found, signaling a likely showdown with former President George W. Bush over executive privilege.

from propublica...

The Missing Memos
by Dan Nguyen and Christopher Weaver, ProPublica - January 28, 2009

The Bush administration’s controversial policies on detentions, interrogations and warrantless wiretapping were underpinned by legal memoranda. While some of those memos have been released (primarily as a result of ACLU lawsuits), the former administration kept far more memos secret than has been previously understood. At least three dozen by our count.

The decision to release them now lies with President Obama. To help inform the debate—and inject an extra dose of accountability—we’re posting the first comprehensive list of the secret memos. (The ACLU first compiled a list, which ProPublica verified and expanded on.)

Note: Our list is quite inclusive, but we have chosen to leave off some documents, such as early drafts of later memos.

Click here for more

can we PLEASE get rolling on PROVING we are a nation governed by a constitution and the rule of law...? PLEASE...?

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Oh, crap...! Here we go again...! The U.S. holds another German citizen in Bagram without any solid evidence...

oferchrissake... don't we EVER learn (see khalid al masri and murat kurnaz)...? if i was a german high government official, i would be VERY PISSED...!

here's the lead-in...


A German soldier on patrol
near Bagram in Afghanistan

For the past three months, the United States military has detained a German citizen in Afghanistan on suspicion of terrorism. German security experts are convinced that the man, who has a history of psychological problems, is innocent.

[...]

An employee of the [ICRC] visited Gholam Ghaus Z., a German citizen, at the US air base in Bagram near Kabul, where he has been held under inhumane conditions since early January. The Americans believe that the 41-year-old man is a terrorist.

[...]

Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, has carefully investigated the man, who is from Afghanistan but holds a German passport and lives in the western German city of Wuppertal. They have also investigated the unmarried man's family members and acquaintances, but have not found any evidence of extremist activities or dubious contacts with Islamists.

now, here's the REAL low-down...

Gholam Z. claims that he traveled to the Afghan capital Kabul to visit members of his widely scattered family in early January. While he was there, he heard that Western-quality goods could be obtained in a supermarket on the grounds of a US military base in Kabul, and that he, as a German citizen, could go shopping there without any problems.

Gholam Z. borrowed a relative's car to go on what a security expert has called his "fatal shopping trip," during which he planned to buy a razor, among other items. According to his version of events, he drove up to the military base on Jan. 4, showed the guard his German passport in its red cover and was then allowed to pass through several security checkpoints without incident.

But then US soldiers must have suddenly noticed Gholam Z., and he was detained. To the soldiers, it looked like a terrorist had managed to enter the well-guarded camp by posing as part of a group of visitors. It was the sort of suspicion that would automatically put guards on edge, as the number of suicide attacks in Afghanistan had increased substantially during the year 2007.

The Americans searched Gholam Z.'s clothing and found cash in various currencies, with a total value of about €1,000 ($1,580), as well as telephone cards from several countries. For the US military, these items were strong evidence that they were dealing with an Islamist terrorist who was part of an international network.

Gholam Z. was also carrying a brochure for London's Tower Bridge, fueling suspicions that the landmark could be the target of an attack.

US military interrogators spent hours trying to extract information from the presumed terrorist. They refused to believe his attempts at an explanation. He had not planned an attack on Tower Bridge, he told them, but had merely visited relatives in London and gone on a sightseeing trip that included the landmark. But the man's story seemed confused to the interrogators.

The US military interrogators also considered the suspect's justification for the foreign currency he was carrying to be implausible. He told them that he had stopped in Iran on the way to Afghanistan, where he had sold a large number of used mobile phones from Germany.

The soldiers locked him up and continued to interrogate him, but without yielding any results. They also refused to allow the German to contact a lawyer.

[...]

But totally clean apparently isn't clean enough for the US military in Afghanistan, which is under permanent threat of attack. The Americans dealt with the man from Wuppertal in the same way they had proceeded in other cases where innocent people had come under suspicion -- they kept Gholam Z. locked up.

lock 'em up and throw away the key and who cares about evidence, lawyers, speedy trials, or any other vestige of due process... it's the AMERICAN WAY...!

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"Papers, please" - getting people used to the idea of suprise law enforcement raids and "disappeared" people

news flash... it ain't just about immigration... first of all, note the first paragraph... that's right... it's now expanded to include identify theft and document fraud... you don't have the proper papers...? what a shame... it's off to the detention center for you... what's that you say...? your children are in daycare and there'll be no one to pick them up or care for them...? what a shame... it's off to the detention center for you...

Officials say more than 290 people have been arrested at Pilgrim's Pride poultry plants in five states on suspicion of identity theft, document fraud or immigration violations.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials announced the figures Wednesday, the day of the raids. Authorities say the raids were part of a long-term investigation. Pittsburg, Texas-based Pilgrim's Pride says it cooperated fully and faces no charges.

More than 100 people were arrested for immigration violations in both Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Moorefield, West Virginia.

In Mount Pleasant, Texas, 45 people were arrested for alleged false use of Social Security numbers.

In Live Oak, Florida, more than 25 people face administrative charges of immigration violations, and will also face identity theft or document fraud charges, officials say.

In Batesville, Arkansas, more than 20 were arrested on federal warrants for alleged document fraud or identity theft.

imagine the scenario... you're an employee of pilgrim's pride... the ice agents come swooping in, lock the place down, and start checking people off against a list... everyone has to produce identification... the person you've worked right next to for the past year, the one who invited your children to her son's birthday party, gets pulled out of line and taken away... you're distressed but also relieved that nothing happened to you...

just wait... your turn is coming...

the horror of the "disappeareds," a tactic pioneered and tested by the u.s. in latin america (see "los desaparecidos" and operation condor), is coming back home... i've posted on this many times before (see here), but it's important to realize that we are being slowly but surely led to an acceptance of such treachery in our very own country... make no mistake... it IS happening...!

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And we should not find anything suspicious about this because...?

isn't it just so very interesting how so very many of those who question things they aren't supposed to question end up this way...?

UK Top Cop Who Led CIA Probe Found Dead

A city police chief who led an investigation into charges that Britain cooperated with secret CIA flights to transport terrorism suspects without formal proceedings has been found dead, his deputy said Tuesday.

Manchester Chief Constable Michael Todd, 50, was found dead in Snowdonia, about 240 miles northwest of London, Deputy Chief Constable Dave Whatton said. He had been missing since going out for a walk Monday during his day off.

Whatton said the body, which was found Tuesday afternoon, had not yet been formally identified but he believed it was Todd.

He said a coroner's inquest would investigate the cause of death and did not give any further details.

Todd was elected vice president of the Association of Chief Police Officers of England and Wales in 2006, according to a biography on his Web site.

The association gave him the task of looking into accusations that Britain allowed the CIA to use the country's airports to fly terrorism suspects to other countries without any extradition hearings, a clandestine procedure known as "extraordinary rendition."

Todd's investigation concluded last June that there was no evidence to back the claim. Last month, however, Britain admitted one of its remote outposts in the Indian Ocean had twice been used by the United States as a refueling stop for the secret transfer of two terrorism suspects.

that "remote outpost" would be the indian ocean island of diego garcia about which i've posted numerous times...

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Help tear down Guantánamo, stop torture and end illegal U.S. dententions

sign amnesty international's pledge here...

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Trailer - Taxi to the Dark Side

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Sold down the river by Congress since 2002 and we would be suprised by this because?

these aren't the rightful leaders of the legislative branch of our government... they are treasonous traitors, every bit as complicit in the destruction of our constitution and the abrogation of the rule of law as the criminals in the executive branch...

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

and this is supposed to make everything all right...?

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Worried about possible criminal charges? Destroy the evidence! [UPDATE: Hayden assures us the interrogation techniques were "legal"]

< duh > it's a no-brainer...

The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about the C.I.A’s secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said.

The C.I.A. said today that the decision to destroy the tapes had been made “within the C.I.A. itself,” and they were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value. The agency was headed at the time by Porter J. Goss. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Goss declined this afternoon to comment on the destruction of the tapes.

[...]

It was not clear who within the C.I.A. authorized the destruction of the tapes, but current and former government officials said it had been approved at the highest levels of the agency.

george...!?!? hey, GEORGE...!?!? TENET...!?!? yeah, YOU...! C'MERE...!! yeah, ok... you too, dubya... ok, guys... siddown... let's have us a li'l chat, k...? huh...? yeah, ok, porter... you can come along too...

[UPDATE]

c'mon, mike... reassure us that there's REALLY no reason whatsoever to be concerned... tell us again that our government has things well in hand and would NEVER, EVER cross a line, ANY line...

CIA Director Michael Hayden said House and Senate intelligence committee leaders were informed of the existence of the tapes and the CIA's intention to destroy them. He also said the CIA's internal watchdog watched the tapes in 2003 and verified that the interrogation practices were legal.

He said the CIA began taping the interrogations as an internal check on the program after President Bush authorized the use of harsh questioning methods. The methods included waterboarding, which simulates drowning, government officials said.

"The Agency was determined that it proceed in accord with established legal and policy guidelines. So, on its own, CIA began to videotape interrogations," Hayden said in a written message to CIA employees, obtained by The Associated Press.

The CIA also decided to destroy the tapes in "the absence of any legal or internal reason to keep them," Hayden wrote. He said the tapes were destroyed only after it was determined "they were no longer of intelligence value and not relevant to any internal, legislative or judicial inquiries."

whatever...

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Salon's Joan Walsh on Mukasey and waterboarding: "Torture is torture"

joan walsh at salon...

Torture is torture no matter what its context or purpose. We need an attorney general who knows that.

I saw this video earlier this year when I first visited Current TV, and I couldn't get it out of my head. I'm glad to have it here. It's disturbing, but it makes Mukasey's dodge that much more outrageous.

let's get REAL, folks, and stop our implicit consent to having torture propagandized as mainstream, rational public policy... it's not... it's TORTURE...

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A sobering thought

for some reason, i tend to watch tv when i'm here in argentina... yeah, they're u.s. shows on cable and i confess to having gotten attached to a few, namely scrubs, house, heroes, and crossing jordan... most of them air some months following their initial showing in the u.s., but since i don't watch tv in the u.s., that really doesn't matter to me...

getting to the point, last night i was watching an episode of crossing jordan... one of the characters, bug, a doctor from india who had become a u.s. citizen, was abducted from a parking garage by homeland security and detained under suspicion of aiding and abetting al qaeda... the scenes of his interrogation were very faithful to what has appeared in numerous articles and reports about how detainees are treated - the total absence of due process; the threat of torture, extraordinary rendition, and secret detention; the refusal to respond to any outside inquiries; and the denial of fundamental constitutional rights... when, at the very end, the usual television plot device of deus ex machina saw him released (they detained the wrong man) and reunited with his friends and colleagues, i experienced a sharp rush of relief and realized just how much emotion watching the story play out had generated in me... then it hit me... as most of us have, i've watched tv shows and movies that reflect some of those same things, but none quite as accurately as this one did... but the most stunning (and completely obvious) thought was, OMG, THIS IS MY COUNTRY...

i return to the u.s. on friday...

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Hayden joins McConnell in fear-mongering

echoing mcconnell's dishonest, fear-mongering in the lead-up to the passage of the shameful protect america act last month, michael hayden joins the drum-beating in an effort to keep the fires of fear well-stoked...

CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said Friday that the agency's ability to pursue Al Qaeda and other terrorist networks was being hampered by declining political and public support for aggressive methods that the CIA had used in interrogations and other counter- terrorism operations.

In a rare public speech by a CIA chief, Hayden lashed out at the media and complained that the political climate was slipping toward apathy and risk aversion characteristic of the period leading up to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"When I get in the car at Langley and drive down the George Washington Parkway," Hayden said, referring to the corridor between the CIA's headquarters in Virginia and downtown Washington, "it's not long before it begins to feel like Sept. 10.

and what would fear-mongering be without sharp attacks against anybody who dares question the wisdom of our all-powerful government's blatant disregard for the constitution, international convention or public opinion...?

Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Hayden provided new details to counter what he characterized as damaging misconceptions about the agency's interrogation and "rendition" operations.

In particular, he disclosed that the CIA had transferred fewer than 100 prisoners to other countries. Critics have contended that the rendition program has led to detainees being tortured in such nations as Egypt and Uzbekistan.

Hayden also lashed out at a European Parliament investigation that was harshly critical of CIA operations. He called the contents of its report "wild speculation."

fewer than 100, eh...? and that's supposed to make us feel GOOD...?

Under an executive order signed by President Bush this summer, the CIA is still allowed to use an array of interrogation techniques -- including sleep deprivation and so-called stress positions -- that are banned under the military manual that the Army adopted. The manual was developed in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.

Hayden argued in his speech that imposing the stricter military rules on CIA interrogators would damage the agency's ability to collect intelligence and protect the country from future attacks.

it's completely incomprehensible to me how torture can be defended under any rationale whatsoever, but that's obviously because i simply don't care that much about protecting my country from "future attacks..."

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