Tortures ' "Bad Apples" Revealed: BUSH & CHENEY

Just as suspected all along, the approval for the torture of the prisoners of the US Military came all the way from the top. More disturbing is the the implication that these activities are the inevitable results of allowing pathologically disturbed individuals access to power. It's not so far from blowing up frogs to water-boarding and electro-shocking human beings.

Remember, these acts are committed in the name of "National Security" ie, YOUR security.

Who's for impeachment now?

Blue Ibis
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The Great Torture Scandal

Juan Cole
juancole.com
Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:36 EDT

McClatchy and other reporters are abruptly pulling the curtain away from the Bush team's illegal practices in arresting people arbitrarily, declining to offer proof that they were guilty of anything, detaining them indefinitely without trial or charges, and deliberately torturing them to the extent of leaving long-term scars and disabilities. The torture practices originated not with lower-level officers but with Donald Rumsfeld and others in Bush's inner circle, who then later blamed lower-level officials for developing the ideas that Rumsfeld ordered them to develop. Nothing they have done has survived a court challenge where one has been permitted.

©Salon.com

Recent reports, taken together, provide a chilling glimpse of a vast torture operation, deliberately planned out by serial torturers in Bush's White House and possibly by the president himself. The program was designed to repeal the Geneva Conventions, which the US and Israel have long found inconvenient, even though they were legislated to prevent further abuses such as those of the Nazis. AP interviews with former detainees show that they were systematically tortured and sometimes permanently injured.

A Senate report details the evidence that Rumsfeld and other high officials were complicit in ordering torture. That is, they are war criminals.

The Bush administration committed clear war crimes at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram, according to Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. The only question, he says, is whether anyone will be held accountable.

The Underscretary of Defense for Planning, Douglas Feith abruptly pulled out of his testimony on Capitol Hill about torture techniques, apparently because he was afraid to testify in the same session as Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff of Colin Powell. Wilkerson was high enough to hear the real story on a lot of issues and could have shredded Feith's lies into confetti if they testified together.

Medical examinations of former US detainees shows that they were tortured. The full report is here.

CIA counterterrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredson appears to have argued that virtually anything short of lethal force was permitted. He told the Pentagon that torture "is basically subject to perception." He did admit the principle that "If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong."

{Shades of the Inquisition! The same mindset is still with us. Only the name of the "demons" have changed"}

Then there is the McClatchy series, based on extensive interviews with dozens of released former detainees from Guantanamo and Bagram:

Tom Lasseter writes:

"The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn't the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers. It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials."

A lot of Bush's detainees had no connection to international terrorism. Some had even fought the Taliban, been captured, and then were sold to the Americans by the Taliban, who had in the meantime changed turbans and begun pretending to be loyal to Karzai.

At Afghan bases, the US military routinely practiced torture on prisoners.

In fact, the US torture turned some innocent detainees into terrorists, determining them to attack the US on their release.

McClatchy has posted many of the documents on which its series is based.

Aljazeera International interviews McClatchy reporters, who spent a year tracking down and interviewing former detainees.

Part I:

and Part II:

The Public Record wonders why Bush, McCain and the Wall street Journal are rushing to defend torture now. {????}

The tendency of the bureaucracy to experiment on human guinea pigs reached beyond the torture of detainees to mentally distressed Veterans. The Veterans Administration experimented on them with pharmaceuticals, without their knowledge. The VA neglected to tell them the drug they were being fed had serious side effects, including "anxiety, nervousness, tension, depression, thoughts of suicide, and attempted and completed suicide." Oh, yeah, that's what a person who has been through hell in Iraq and has post-traumatic stress really needs.

So all these revelations should be on cable news 24/7, right? Not so much.

As Gen. Taguba says, the fact of the extensive torture is not in doubt. The question is whether the Bushies will get away with it. It is looking as though they will. But there are going to be some European countries where Bush and his cronies would be ill advised to visit.

Beginning with the End: the Bush Logic and His "Legacy"

GAAAAK. Here is a man(?) who thinks raining death and destruction down on millions of people is a legacy of greatness?????? And he was dreaming about how to do this TWO YEARS before 9/11? Where is the famous SOTT "sick bag". We really need to impeach this lunatic and his truly evil puppeteer Cheney as soon as possible. Better yet, try them as war criminals. I can dream can't I?

Blue Ibis
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"A Legacy of Greatness": the Morality of a Psychopath

Stephen Saperstein Frug
Attempts Blog
Wed, 28 May 2008 11:45 EDT

©Unknown

Andrew Sullivan, writing about McClellan's new book is most taken with the fact that McClellan claims that Bush intentionally ignored the WMD evidence, saying "if the president intentionally ignored data refuting the existence of Saddam's WMDs, he should be impeached."

Frankly, the fact that Bush did this is old news; and impeachment is the least of the appropriate responses -- a war crimes trial would be called for. (I sort of thought Sullivan was farther along than this, actually.)

What struck me was the reason that McClellan gave for Bush's desire to go to war, which led to this "intentional ignoring" of evidence in the first place:

In Iraq, McClellan added, Bush saw "his opportunity to create a legacy of greatness," something McClellan said Bush has said he believes is only available to wartime presidents.

Of course, this isn't really news either:

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade·.if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency."

But McClellan's admission is further confirmation of this.

It's worth pausing to reflect on what this really means. Bush went to war -- in part, let us say for the sake of argument -- to be "seen as a great leader... as a commander-in-chief", to "have a successful presidency", "to create a legacy of greatness".

It is almost impossible to overstate the evil of this.

People died -- hundreds of thousands, most likely more than a million Iraqis; more than 4000 Americans -- for Bush to be seen as a leader. To have a legacy. (And how many more Iraqis have been made refugees, been wounded, had their lives otherwise destroyed? How many more American soldiers have been injured beyond recovery?)

They died for his gain. For his image. For his "greatness".

He took actions, knowing that many people would die -- for that. For gain: for glory. (Even if he didn't know how many... an assault that kills people, with malice aforethought, is charged with murder for each person killed, even if the assailant didn't intend to kill quite so many as all that.)

This is the morality of Raskolnikov -- murder as greatness. Death as greatness. It's the morality of a stock villain: to kill the innocent for power or greatness or glory. Except Bush has gained a far larger legacy than most of those who set out to do so by means of other's deaths.

I'll say it again: for Bush's "greatness" -- hundreds of thousands, probably millions, have died.

If murder is the greatest evil, aggressive war is its most powerful form: the death of others for profit or pleasure or greed or ambition. This is what Bush has done. What so many others eagerly helped him do.

Of course Bush should be impeached -- for this, among so many other things. But really, impeachment wouldn't even be a beginning of a reckoning for his crimes -- something that, for those who don't believe in a literal hell, is probably impossible in this universe. But to put him on trial for the most colossal form of murder there is -- aggressive war, a "crime against peace" -- is all that we can do, here, on Earth. It is what must be done, for the least scrap of justice to be achieved.

In my original conception of this post, I was planning on including some of the images of the Iraqi dead -- murdered children, people blown in half, row upon row upon row of flag-shrouded coffins. For that is what Bush has done -- that is his legacy. But the truth is, I'm weak. I don't have the stomach for it.

But Bush should look at them: should be forced to look at them, in the course of his trial for "crimes against peace". And as a just sentence, perhaps he should be forced to look at nothing else for the rest of his natural life. Just bodies blown to bits in pursuit of his "legacy of greatness".

And he's not the only one, by a long shot.

The murder of more than a million: that is Bush's "legacy of greatness". The least we can do is make sure he reaps the full consequences of that legacy, as much as human action allows.