Torture r us - waterboarding, hypothermia, heat injury, forced nakedness, forced sex acts, mock executions, descrating religious objects

there's something truly rotten at the core of my country when our elected representatives cannot bring themselves to condemn torture... absolutely disgusting...

As it debated legislation to reauthorize U.S. intelligence programs, the House Friday morning at the last minute stripped language from a wide-ranging amendment that would have prohibited U.S. intelligence operatives from engaging in cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

The torture prohibition had been included Thursday in a package of amendments offered by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas) that was debated on the House floor. The section of the amendment was titled, “Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment in Interrogations Prohibited.”

According to Politico, the language was drafted by liberal Washington Democratic Rep. Jim McDermott, and included in Reyes’ package of amendments at the insistence of Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) .

The torture language drew immediate criticism from key House Republicans and conservative opinion leaders off Capitol Hill. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the ranking minority member of the Intelligence Committee, complained, “Republicans brought this to the attention of the American people, who were rightly outraged that Democrats would try to target those we ask to serve in harm’s way. … The annual intelligence bill should be about protecting and defending our nation, not targeting those we ask to do that deed and giving greater protections to terrorists.”

Before the House voted on the amendment, leaders decided that the provision should be removed, judging that its inclusion could put passage of the entire bill at risk. That required a hurriedly scheduled Rules Committee meeting Thursday evening to approve a rule that modified the Reyes amendment, to take out the torture provision. All of that delayed further action on the amendment, and the bill, until Friday.

When the House finally voted on the Reyes amendment Friday morning, it was on the modified version — sans the torture language, which would have specifically prohibited waterboarding, inducing hypothermia or heat injury, forcing a person to be naked or to perform a sex act, or conducting mock executions. The amendment also would have banned interrogators from forcing a prisoner to maintain stress positions or to desecrate a religious object.

reading things like this just make me want to cry...

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Another small step - a torture prosecutor

brother tim's comment on my previous post about the small step of releasing the names of detainees to the icrc openly voices his skepticism...

They may throw out a couple of bones, like they do to us, but there'll be no meat on them.

however, i'll still take a small, positive step, even though it may be relatively meaningless, to yet another clearly negative one... for my own mental health, i can't afford to discount even the smallest steps in the right direction...

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has decided to appoint a prosecutor to examine nearly a dozen cases in which CIA interrogators and contractors may have violated anti-torture laws and other statutes when they allegedly threatened terrorism suspects, according to two sources familiar with the move.

Holder is poised to name John Durham, a career Justice Department prosecutor from Connecticut, to lead the inquiry, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the process is not complete.

Durham's mandate, the sources added, will be relatively narrow: to look at whether there is enough evidence to launch a full-scale criminal investigation of current and former CIA personnel who may have broken the law in their dealings with detainees. Many of the harshest CIA interrogation techniques have not been employed against terrorism suspects for four years or more.

The attorney general selected Durham in part because the longtime prosecutor is familiar with the CIA and its past interrogation regime. For nearly two years, Durham has been probing whether laws against obstruction or false statements were violated in connection with the 2005 destruction of CIA videotapes. The tapes allegedly depicted brutal scenes including waterboarding of some of the agency's high value detainees. That inquiry is proceeding before a grand jury in Alexandria, although lawyers following the investigation have cast doubt on whether it will result in any criminal charges.

after 8 years of bush and going on 8 months of heavy-duty disappointment in obama, yes, i'm grasping at straws...

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The ongoing tragedy that is Afghanistan

brave new films via information clearing house...



and the reason that this is news you won't see on traditional news media is because it's truth that those who think they are in the best position to decide what we should and should not know have decided that we SHOULDN'T know about it...

glenn greenwald in salon, again via information clearing house...

The Bush-defending Right continues to insist, and huge numbers of Americans continue to believe, that the brutal abuses of Abu Ghraib were isolated and aberrational, the rogue crimes of a few low-level soldiers who were punished. These photos would prove that to be a lie. But no matter. For exactly that reason -- because they would expose the horrible truth of what we actually did -- these photos must be suppressed in the name of containing anti-American anger. Why should that reasoning be confined to suppression of the photos? Shouldn't it extend to information that is far more likely to inflame anti-American hatred, such as what we are really doing in Afghanistan? Isn't it best if the truth is just kept from us and the government suppresses it all so that we don't look bad in the eyes of the world? Isn't that obviously where this mentality leads -- and is already leading?

oh, and btw, evidently the worst revelations are yet to come...

raw story, AGAIN via information clearing house...

A crucial CIA Inspector General’s report from May 2004 is expected to reveal some long-hidden truths about the Bush administration’s use of torture.

[...]

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow [interviewed] Newsweek's Michael Isikoff . . .

[...]

“There are three key questions to look for,” Isikoff explained. “Were there harsh interrogations that began before the … legal authorizations? … Did they go beyond what was authorized? … Did it go beyond just finding out about possible plots against the United States to provide other information, such as supplying possible evidence that could be used to justify the war in Iraq?”

Isikoff noted that there are footnotes in the torture memos already released which “quote from the Inspector General’s report that what was actually done went beyond what was authorized — that how waterboarding was conducted, the frequency with which it was conducted, and the manner in which it was conducted was beyond what the CIA told the Justice Department it was going to do when the Justice Department authorized the technique.”

Isikoff emphasized, however, that almost none of this information is being released voluntarily. It’s being slowly pried out through Freedom of Information Act requests, most of them filed by the ACLU, and “it’s become trench warfare — document by document.”

“The CIA and the intelligence community has pushed back hard,” Isikoff stressed. “People in the intelligence community never wanted this stuff out to begin with.”

can't we get going on war crimes trials for the criminals who perpetrated this mess...? oh, i forgot... we now have NEW criminals continuing to perpetrate the same goddam mess...

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And, NOW, fresh from an engagement in the United States Senate, HE-E-E-EERE'S Barack OBAMA...!

give him a warm welcome...

Obama: From Anti-war Law Professor to Warmonger in 100 Days

How long does it take a mild-mannered, anti-war, black professor of constitutional law, trained as a community organiser on the South Side of Chicago, to become an enthusiastic sponsor of targeted assassinations, 'decapitation' strategies and remote-control bombing of mud houses at the far end of the globe?

There's nothing surprising here. As far back as President Woodrow Wilson, in the early 20th century, American liberalism has been swift to flex its imperial muscle and whistle up the Marines. High-explosive has always been in the hormone shot.

The nearest parallel to Obama in eager deference to the bloodthirsty counsels of his counter-insurgency advisors is John F. Kennedy. It is not surprising that bright young presidents relish quick-fix, 'outside the box' scenarios for victory.

Obama’s course is set and his presidency is already stained the familiar blood-red.

and...

Watching Obama Morph Into Dick Cheney

America has lost her soul, and so has her president.

A despairing country elected a president who promised change. Americans arrived from every state to witness in bitter cold Obama’s swearing-in ceremony. The mall was packed in a way that it has never been for any other president.

The people’s good will toward Obama and the expectations they had for him were sufficient for Obama to end the gratuitous wars and enact major reforms. But Obama has deserted the people for the interests. He is relying on his non-threatening demeanor and rhetoric to convince the people that change is underway.

The change that we are witnessing is in Obama, not in policies. Obama is morphing into Dick Cheney.

Obama has not been in office four months and already a book could be written about his broken promises.

and...

Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama

[W]hile much of the focus has been on the tactical use of torture at Guantanamo, almost no attention had been paid to a parallel force that was torturing prisoners in a variety of ways, including waterboarding them, and that is this riot squad of sorts that you referred to called the Immediate Reaction Force. The prisoners and their lawyers at Guantanamo call it the “Extreme Repression Force.”

And basically what this is is a thug squad that is used to mercilessly punish prisoners who show the slightest bit of resistance or who do things that technically they’re not supposed to do, infractions like having two Styrofoam cups in their cell instead of one.

Guards will call in this goon squad. They come in with their Darth Vader outfits, and they literally gang-beat prisoners. There are five men, generally, that are sent in. Each of them is assigned to one body part of the prisoner: the head, the left arm, the right arm, the left leg, the right leg. They go in, and they hogtie the prisoner, sometimes leaving them hogtied for hours on end. They douse them with chemical agents. They have put their heads in toilets and flushed the toilets repeatedly. They have urinated on the heads of prisoners. They’ve squeezed their testicles in the course of restraining them. They’ve taken the feces from one prisoner and smeared it in the face of another prisoner.

And while Barack Obama, almost immediately upon taking office, issued an executive order saying he was going to close down Guantanamo within a year and that he was going to respect the Geneva Convention while his administration reviewed Guantanamo, this force has continued to operate and torture prisoners under the Obama administration.

In fact, in February of this year, about a month after Obama was inaugurated, there were sixteen prisoners on a hunger strike at Guantanamo. The Immediate Response—or Immediate Reaction Force was used to go in and violently shove massive tubes down their noses into their stomachs. And what the IRF teams, as they’re called—when they beat someone, it’s called IRF-ing, or to be IRF-ed up by these teams. They would use no anesthetics or any painkillers, shove this massive tube by force down their nose into their stomach and then yank it out. Some prisoners have described this as torture, torture, torture. And many have passed out from the sheer pain of this operation.

This force has received almost no scrutiny in the US Congress or the US media and operates at this moment.

i don't need to add anything to these... it all speaks for itself...

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Khalid Sheikh Mohammed got waterboarded ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-THREE TIMES IN ONE MONTH...?!?!? [UPDATE: Doing the math]

call me naive, but when i've considered the use of waterboarding and the horrific sense of imminent death by drowning it produces in the victim, i thought that applying that particular torture technique to someone a very few times would be the maximum terror "our guys" would permit any one individual to be exposed to, but

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-THREE...!!!

i knew we had crossed the line from interrogators to torturers... i didn't know we had further crossed the line into being monsters...

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Was Waterboarded 183 Times in One Month By: emptywheel Saturday April 18, 2009 11:57 am

I've put this detail in a series of posts, but it really deserves a full post. According to the May 30, 2005 Bradbury memo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002.

On page 37 of the OLC memo, in a passage discussing the differences between SERE techniques and the torture used with detainees, the memo explains:

The CIA used the waterboard "at least 83 times during August 2002" in the interrogation of Zubaydah. IG Report at 90, and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM, see id. at 91.

Note, the information comes from the CIA IG report which, in the case of Abu Zubaydah, is based on having viewed the torture tapes as well as other materials. So this is presumably a number that was once backed up by video evidence.

The same OLC memo passage explains how the CIA might manage to waterboard these men so many times in one month each (though even with these chilling numbers, the CIA's math doesn't add up).

...where authorized, it may be used for two "sessions" per day of up to two hours. During a session, water may be applied up to six times for ten seconds or longer (but never more than 40 seconds). In a 24-hour period, a detainee may be subjected to up to twelve minutes of water appliaction. See id. at 42. Additionally, the waterboard may be used on as many as five days during a 30-day approval period.

So: two two-hour sessions a day, with six applications of the waterboard each = 12 applications in a day. Though to get up to the permitted 12 minutes of waterboarding in a day (with each use of the waterboard limited to 40 seconds), you'd need 18 applications in a day. Assuming you use the larger 18 applications in one 24-hour period, and do 18 applications on five days within a month, you've waterboarded 90 times--still just half of what they did to KSM.

oh, my dear lord, have mercy on my country and my fellow countrymen... we've fallen into the blackest of holes and may never find our way back...

[UPDATE]

i just did the math... 183 times over the space of a 30-day month equates to over SIX TIMES A DAY...! i'm simply stunned... words cannot express the depth of my revulsion...

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Armitage cops a plea on torture: "...had I known about it at the time..." [UPDATE]

ya know, i read shit like this and i just want to puke... armitage was high up in the government ranks, privy to damn near everything that was going on... besides that, he had the news media, both traditional and alternative, available to him just like the rest of us... when the torture issue became visible and, let's face it, it became visible early on in the bush administration, armitage would have been well placed to go find out the real skinny... now, he's out there telling us what he WOULD have done if ONLY he had KNOWN... how fucking disingenuous can this guy be and think that anybody is going to swallow it...?

A former senior US state department official has told Al Jazeera he hopes he would have had the courage to resign if he had known the CIA was waterboarding suspects while he was in office.

"I hope, had I known about it at the time I was serving, I would've had the courage to resign. But I don't know. It's in hindsight now," Richard Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state, told Al Jazeera's Faultlines programme.

He also said he considered the interrogation technique, where detainees are made to feel like they are drowning, to be torture, but said he did not believe CIA officials who used that method and other forms of harsh interrogation, should be prosecuted.

armitage is one of the craftiest snakes that's ever slithered through the higher echelons of the state department... he sees the writing on the wall... he's paying attention to what's happening in spain and he's going to be damned if he takes a fall... he's covering his own ass big time and, as he takes care to point out below, if he goes down, he's taking others down with him...

Armitage said members of US congress were as much to blame as Bush administration officials for failing to perform adequate oversight of US detentions, interrogations and "renditions" - the transfer of suspects to overseas prisons with different rules from the US.

"I don't think members of the senate particularly wanted to look into these things and they might have to look themselves in the mirror," he said.

"Where were they? They weren't doing their job, they were AWOL [absent without leave]."

what a positively disgusting, totally self-serving display of snake-hood...

p.s. my apologies to righteous snakes everywhere for conflating this scumbag with your species...

[UPDATE]

juan cole weighs in with his thoughts and the al jazeera youtube clip...

Armitage's revelation that he and his boss "lost" a battle to preserve a commitment to the Geneva Conventions in Washington in this period seems likely to me to become part of the Spanish prosecution.

if the bastard is fighting a "battle" and "lost," how the hell can he claim he was ignorant...? just askin'...

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Juan Cole on David Addington

i've noticed that professor cole is becoming much less reticent to mince words...

David Addington, Cheney's legal capo, can't say whether he authorized waterboarding because he is afraid that al-Qaeda might be watching C-Span.

Al-Qaeda is this crew's excuse for everything that they always wanted to do before there was any al-Qaeda.

speaking for myself, i no longer see al-qaeda as an "excuse"... i see it as a deliberate bush administration creation there for the sole purpose of justifying endless war...

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Waterboard Bush

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Dangerous cracks in the economy and Bush is smoking crack again

c'mon, house of cards, TOPPLE, WILL YA...?

Dangerous cracks appearing in job market

Dangerous cracks in the nation's job market are deepening. Employers slashed jobs by the largest amount in five years and hundreds of thousands of people dropped out of the labor force — ominous signs that the country is falling toward a recession or has already toppled into one.

For the second straight month, nervous employers got rid of jobs nationwide. In February, they sliced payrolls by 63,000, even deeper than the 22,000 cut in January, the Labor Department reported Friday.

The grim snapshot of the country's employment climate underscored the heavy toll the housing and credit debacles are taking on companies, jobseekers and the economy as a whole.

"It sounds like the recession bell is ringing for the U.S. economy, although it is still faint," said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group.

On Wall Street, stocks tumbled. The Dow Jones lost 146.70 points, a little more than 1 percent to close at 11,893.69. The Dow was down 370 for the last two days of the week.

The worsening situation will prompt the Federal Reserve to cut a key interest rate deeply — perhaps by as much as three-quarters of a percentage point — at its next meeting March 18, or possibly sooner, to help brace the teetering economy, analysts predicted.

The shower of pink slips was widespread. Factories, construction companies, mortgage brokers, real-estate firms, retailers, temporary-help firms, child day-care providers, hotels, educational services, accounting firms and computer designers were among those shedding jobs. All those cuts swamped job gains at hospitals and other health care sites, bars and restaurants, legal services and the government.

"Losing a job is painful, and I know Americans are concerned about our economy; so am I," said President Bush. "It's clear our economy has slowed."

ah, it's good to know the boy-king with the silver spoon in his mouth feels our pain...

and speaking of dangerous cracks...

Bush to veto waterboarding bill

President Bush is poised to veto legislation that would bar the CIA from using waterboarding — a technique that simulates drowning — and other harsh interrogation methods on terror suspects.

The president planned to talk about the veto in his Saturday radio address.

Bush has said the bill would harm the government's ability to prevent future attacks. Supporters of the legislation argue that it preserves the United States' right to collect critical intelligence while boosting the country's moral standing abroad.

"The bill would take away one of the most valuable tools on the war on terror, the CIA program to detain and question key terrorist leaders and operatives," deputy White House press secretary Tony Fratto said Friday.

The bill would restrict the CIA to using only the 19 interrogation techniques listed in the Army field manual.

The legislation would bar the CIA from using waterboarding, sensory deprivation or other coercive methods to break a prisoner who refuses to answer questions. Those practices were banned by the military in 2006, but the president wants the harsh interrogation methods to be a part of the CIA's toolbox.

it's also comforting to know that our president, the one who is tasked with stewarding our country's fundamental principles, is firmly going on the record in support of torture...

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Digby on Mukasey: "The ends justify the means"

it depends on what your definition of "is" is...



digby...

I'd like to once again thank all those who voted to confirm Michael Mukasey and those who didn't bother to vote. It was an excellent demonstration of leadership. (My recollection is that many of the Democrats felt they had already "won" by forcing out Alberto Gonzales.) But maybe next time, we could just have a a little baseline that the Attorney General of the United States can't believe that torture can legally be used if it might save lives. I think that might be considered a basic qualification going forward.

bastard... (i'm speaking of mukasey, of course...)

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"We were part of the shining light on the hill who didn’t do those things. Sadly, no more."

a navy attorney resigns over torture... may we continue to see individuals such as andrew williams doing the right thing, choosing to speak out, and taking action that aligns with our founding principles and the rule of law...

It was with sadness that I signed my name this grey morning to a letter resigning my commission in the U.S. Navy.

There was a time when I served with pride, knowing that by serving with the finest men and women in the country, we were part of an organization whose core values required us to “do the right thing,” and that we were far different from the Soviet Union and its gulags, the Vietcong with their torture camps and a society of surveillance and informers like Nazi Germany.

We were part of the shining light on the hill who didn’t do those things. Sadly, no more.

The final straw for me was listening to General Hartmann, the highest-ranking military lawyer in charge of the military commissions, testify that he refused to say that waterboarding captured U.S. soldiers by Iranian operatives would be torture.

His testimony had just sold all the soldiers and sailors at risk of capture and subsequent torture down the river. Indeed, he would not rule out waterboarding as torture when done by the United States and indeed felt evidence obtained by such methods could be used in future trials.

Thank you, General Hartmann, for finally admitting the United States is now part of a long tradition of torturers going back to the Inquisition.

very sad, indeed...

(thanks to think progress...)

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What are the odds that President Bush is innocent of war crimes?

hmmmmmm... < ponders, scratches chin, gazes off into space, ponders some more >

london sunday times...

What are the odds that the CIA would have sought to destroy tapes that could prove it had legally prevented serious and dangerous attacks against innocent civilians? What are the odds that a president who had never authorised waterboarding would be unable to say whether such waterboarding was torture?

What are the odds that, under congressional grilling, the new attorney-general would also refuse to say whether he believed waterboarding was illegal, if there was any doubt that the president had authorised it? The odds are beyond minimal.

Any reasonable person examining all the evidence we have - without any bias - would conclude that the overwhelming likelihood is that the president of the United States authorised illegal torture of a prisoner and that the evidence of the crime was subsequently illegally destroyed.

[...]

It’s a potential Watergate. But this time the crime is not a two-bit domestic burglary. It’s a war crime that reaches into the very heart of the Oval Office.

lemme see... how about zip...? zero...? nada...? zilch...? no way, josé...?

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"But the doctors are there so that they don't die, so as to be able to torture them one more day," and torture is fully supported by our president

juan cole posts a bone-chilling interview with former u.s. army interrogator, damien corsetti, translated from the spanish newspaper, el mundo...

"In Abu-Ghurayb and Bagram they were tortured to make them suffer, not to get information out of them". And the fact is that at times the torture had no other goal that "to punish them for being terrorists. They tortured them and didn't ask them anything". That is the case of the practice known as "the submarine": to simulate the drowning of the prisoner. "They have them hooded and they pour water on them. That makes it very difficult to breath. I think you can't die with the submarine. I certainly never saw anyone die. However, they do cough like crazy because they are totally submerged in water and that gets on their lungs. Perhaps what it can give you is serious pneumonia". The civilians who took part in the interrogations used the submarine whenever they wanted. They gave it to them for five or 10 minutes and didn't ask anything".

Other torture included using extreme cold and heat. "I remember one of my prisoners trembling with cold. His teeth wouldn't stop chattering. I put a blanket on him and then another, and another, and his teeth never stopped chattering, never stopped. You could see that man was going to die of hypothermia. But the doctors are there so that they don't die, so as to be able to torture them one more day".

here's corsetti talking about his experience...



this is what is being done in my name and the name of my fellow citizens of the united states of america... ours is a country, after all, where the power of government supposedly springs from "we, the people"... and our president, the individual that "we, the people" chose to represent us among the peoples of the world, to work for our common good, and to be a shining example of the principles upon which our nation was founded, is always fully prepared to show us how it's done...

The House approved legislation [Thursday] that would bar the CIA from using waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics, drawing an immediate veto threat from the White House and setting up another political showdown over what constitutes torture.

The measure, approved by a largely party-line vote of 222 to 199, would require U.S. intelligence agencies to follow Army rules adopted last year that explicitly forbid waterboarding. It also would require interrogators to adhere to a strict interpretation of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. The rules, required by Congress for all Defense Department personnel, also ban sexual humiliation, "mock" executions and the use of attack dogs, and prohibit the withholding of food and medical care.

[...]

Limiting the CIA to interrogation techniques authorized by the Army Field Manual "would prevent the United States from conducting lawful interrogations of senior al Qaeda terrorists to obtain intelligence needed to protect Americans from attack," the Office of Management and Budget said in a statement.

beam me up, scotty, there's no intelligent life here...

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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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"Is the medieval thumbscrew REALLY any worse than banging your thumb with a HAMMER?"

tom tomorrow...

"... a very different debate... one I damn sure never expected to see..."

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Waterboarding - an interrogator's manual

over at daily kos, hunter offers us a detailed, step-by-step guide to waterboarding...

a small snippet of a long post that should be read in its entirety...

WARNING...! don't try this at home...

The goal of this interrogation technique is to recreate that experience in a controlled fashion. A normal drowning death lasts mere minutes: using this process, however, it is possible to prolong the experience almost indefinitely. It is possible to take the initial sensations of panic, of water flooding the body, of pain, of oxygen deprivation, and indeed of imminent death, and extend them over hours, or days. It is a God-given gift to the interrogator: can you imagine the abject terror of drowning, not just lived as a brilliant flash of memory set beneath the surface of unfamiliar water, but prolonged for breath after breath, repeated time and time again, in a small room, over an indefinite span? It is impossible to adapt to, or even to learn to tolerate.

required reading for every american...

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Dear Chuck - Mukasey is ALREADY under the sway of "extreme ideology" or he wouldn't have been nominated

chucky thinks mukasey isn't under the sway of "extreme ideology..." he must be smokin' that funny stuff again...

Senator Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat who turned the tide for this nomination, said that if the Senate did not approve Mr. Mukasey, the president would get by with an interim appointment who would be under the sway of “the extreme ideology of Vice President Dick Cheney.” He argued that Mr. Mukasey could be counted on to reverse the politicization of the Justice Department that occurred under Alberto Gonzales, and that Mr. Mukasey’s reticence about calling waterboarding illegal might well become moot, because the Senate was considering a law making clear that it is illegal.

That is precisely the sort of cozy rationalization that Mr. Schumer and his colleagues have used so many times to back down from a confrontation with Mr. Bush. The truth is, Mr. Mukasey is already in the grip of that “extreme ideology.” If he were not, he could have answered the question about waterboarding.

what strange, powerful, magical spell must schumer and difi be under to so completely abandon not only their constituents but also the very constitution that they have taken an oath to defend...?

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Greenwald on Mukasey's confirmation: Why no filibuster?

damn good question, unless of course the answer is the usual one - another sellout...

Every time Congressional Democrats failed this year to stop the Bush administration (i.e., every time they "tried"), the excuse they gave was that they "need 60 votes in the Senate" in order to get anything done. Each time Senate Republicans blocked Democratic legislation, the media helpfully explained not that Republicans were obstructing via filibuster, but rather that, in the Senate, there is a general "60-vote requirement" for everything.

How, then, can this be explained?

The Senate confirmed Michael B. Mukasey as attorney general Thursday night, approving him despite Democratic criticism that he had failed to take an unequivocal stance against the torture of terrorism detainees.

The 53-to-40 vote made Mr. Mukasey, a former federal judge, the third person to head the Justice Department during the tenure of President Bush . . . Thirty-nine Democrats and one independent [Bernie Sanders] opposed him.

Beyond that, four Senate Democrats running for President missed the vote, and all four had announced they oppose Mukasey's confirmation. Thus, at least 44 Senators claimed to oppose Mukasey's confirmation -- more than enough to prevent it via filibuster. So why didn't they filibuster, the way Senate Republicans have on virtually every measure this year which they wanted to defeat?

we are so far off the track in this country... i just don't know what else to say...

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Mukasey confirmed 53-40 - a shitty way to end the day

say g'nite, folks...

The Senate confirmed retired judge Michael Mukasey as attorney general Thursday night to replace Alberto Gonzales, who was forced from office in a scandal over his handling of the Justice Department.

President Bush thanked the Senate, even though the margin had been whittled down from nearly unanimous by a sharp debate over Mukasey's refusal to say whether the waterboarding interrogation technique is torture.

"He will be an outstanding attorney general," Bush said in a statement from his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

i don't often succumb to blatant crudity, but i will now...

FUCK YOU, GEORGE W. BUSH...!

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Bush covering his ass on torture

always powerful, olbermann weighs in on waterboarding, torture, and mukasey...

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