Waterboarding -- The Musical!

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Simple Questions

Questions for those who are concerned about torture investigations:
1) Are you "tough on crime"?
2) Should people who break the law and brag about it on TV or in writing be investigated? If there is evidence to support their having broken the law, should they be tried? If convicted, should they be punished/rehabilitated?
3) Should someone who has admitted killing thousands of Americans avoid trial and punishment because "it's time to move forward"?

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Back Down Here on Earth, In America

Calls For Investigator/Prosecutor Increase

As Glenn Greenwald notes this morning, along with the New York Times
lead article in the Opinion section. Calls across the nation are increasing for the appointment of a special prosecutor/investigator to look long, and deeply at the abuses visited upon prisoners in the hands of U.S. invading and occupying troops.

Jonathan Turley has been especially present for a few months now. He speaks with the outrage of one who truly loves the law and is both sickened and shamed by the cruel and lawless behavior of the Bush Administration. He pointed out just two days ago to Keith Olbermann, that:

ultimately it will depend on citizens, and whether they will remain silent in the face of a crime that has been committed in plain view. . . . It is equally immoral to stand silent in the face of a war crime and do nothing.

He's absolutely correct. If these crimes, these vile acts of depravity are allowed to go unpunished or even unexamined, the damage to our nation might be irredeemable. With the pardons of Nixon, the commutations of other sentences we allowed the likes of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Buchanan, Colson, and many others to remain in public life, and eventually return to power. Without having to admit that what they had done in the service of a corrupt administration, and a corrupt and vile ideology was ever wrong. No, they say, they were merely understood, or the victims of a rat like John Dean.

Not prosecuting those at the top who ordered the crimes to be committed allowed the idea that "if the President does it, it's not illegal," to flourish.

These are the results of that.

The torture ordered by the President, the Vice-President, the Secretary of Defense, and many others was a clear crime. A crime against U.S. law, the laws of nations, and simple human decency.

They must, in our country, or in the World Court, be held to account for their actions.

Nothing less than the soul of our nation is at stake.

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Something I Did Not Hear

photo downloaded at antiwar.com

Nothing Said About Torture

Except when John McCain spoke of when he was broken by the Vietnamese. He said the torture broke him and he did what ever they told him to do.

That's the thing about torture. To my thinking, McCain is now in a zero sum situation. Either the torture did not get him to tell the truth, or it did.

In the Republican Military Commissions of Guantanamo, John McCain would be a self-confessed war criminal. He would be a man who purposely targeted civilians in an illegal war.

If he says that he only signed his "confession" in order to gain a small measure of respite from his continuous abuse, then he needs to be held to account for his support of the CIA secret prisons, the abuses that were begun and continue to be U.S. policy under the administration of George W. Bush. In the words of Desi Arnaz, he got some 'splainin' to do.

During the hurricane of hooey that is our political convention process now, I didn't hear any of the Democrats calling for the closure of Guantanamo, I haven't heard anybody screaming out for the people who have instituted this reign of terror as our national policy to be brought to account and justice.

If I missed it, please point me to those calls. Please.

I've seen torture. I've looked right into its ugly face. I've been close enough to be spattered by the messy results.

The fact that torture is not being a major issue in this campaign sickens me. I am also sickened by the recognition of the need for torture to be an issue in this campaign.

I'm not sure what sickens me the most. I don't write about it much, because there is an intense and deeply personal price to be paid for visiting those places. Mostly I do a lot better when I can "not think about that today," to cite one of my favorite philosophers, Scarlett O'Hara.

That John McCain was tortured to the breaking point was a crime. That anyone has been tortured to the breaking point by our policies is also a crime.

It's also a sin. Fucking. Mortal.

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McCain Speaks Out of Both Sides of His Mouth

Photograph: John McCain Wallpaper, John McCain Campaign Website

Photo illustration: Evan Robinson, Group News Blog

John McCain likes to present himself as a truth-telling Maverick who isn't afraid to buck the system or fight the people in Washington DC. He wants you to believe that he has principles, he stands by them, and he'd never, ever, tell you a lie for his own benefit.

But that's just a concocted image. Always has been, always will be. John McCain is either a liar, an opportunist, or so senile that he can't remember what he said from day to day and year to year. He's so unreliable that his own campaign has said that what John McCain says isn't to be taken as official policy of the campaign.

Yes, you heard that right. John McCain does not officially speak for John McCain.

A relatively simple search of the Intartubes will find numerous times when McCain vacillates, backtracks, contradicts himself, says he never said something he just said, and generally fumbles around reality and the truth with all the facility of a drunken leprechaun who's broken his leg, has crutches that aren't the same length, whose shoelaces are tied together, wearing sunglasses so dark he can't see where he's going, at night, on ice.

At Saturday's We The People event in Seattle, Rachel Maddow pointed out that the Democratic Party seems to have an identity problem. They self-identify as "not that!" (where that is the Republican Party's rush to shred the Constitution, commit illegal acts inside and outside the U.S., engage in wanton imperial adventures contravening international law, and ... like that). Rachel believes that the Democratic Party needs it's own identity.

So how about Intellectual Honesty and Consistency for a start? John McCain wavers in the wind. He got his ass kicked in 2000 by a vicious libel spread by George Bush's surrogates, but he embraces George Bush in 2008 when trying to get nominated. He's been tortured and says it's wrong, but he votes to allow the U.S. to torture prisoners.

This election is not just about Barack Obama. It's about John McCain and Barack Obama. And John McCain does not deserve to lead the United States. It's that simple.

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In The Washington Post Yesterday

Photo of Camp X-Ray downloaded from www.globalsecurity.org

I'm Home, but Still Haunted by Guantanamo

A horrifying, touching essay by one of the "enemy combatants" the Bush Administration deemed unworthy of being treated as a human being. His name is Jumah al Dossari.

Some excepts:

I arrived in Guantanamo in January 2002 after Pakistani forces handed me over to the United States, probably, I suspect, for a bounty. I had been in Afghanistan to assess the progress of a mosque-building project there, funded by people in my native Saudi Arabia. I knew that Afghanistan was a dangerous place, but I was paid for the trip and I needed the money, so I went. It is a decision I will always regret. When the U.S. began bombing Afghanistan in November 2001, I fled to Pakistan. At a border checkpoint, I asked Pakistani guards for help getting to the Saudi embassy. Instead, they put me in a prison, where I was kept for days with shackles on my legs.

Physical brutality was not uncommon during those first years at Guantanamo. In Camp X-Ray, several soldiers once beat me so badly that I spent three days in intensive care. My face and body were still swollen and covered in bruises when I left the hospital. During one interrogation, my questioner, apparently dissatisfied with my answers, slammed my head against the table. During others, I was shackled to the floor for hours.

Between suicide attempts, I tried desperately to hold on to the few fleeting moments of light that presented themselves to me. I met every few months with my attorneys and felt better whenever they were in Guantanamo, but my despair would return within a day of their departure. On occasion, I was helped by compassionate guards. After the beating in Camp X-Ray, a young female guard appeared at my cage, looking to make sure that no other guards were watching. "I'm sorry for what happened to you," she whispered to me. "You're a human being just like us." These words were a temporary balm for my bruises and loneliness. Ultimately, though, I believe it was God who did not allow me to die.

When I was watching "United 93," I thought of the soldier who had offered me compassion in Guantanamo. Her words reminded me that we all share common values, and only by holding on to them can we ensure that there is mercy and brotherhood in the world. After more than five years in Guantanamo, I can think of nothing more important.

This is important. This is not something redacted or euphemized beyond all recognition of language. This man was tortured. The "information" he gave was twisted and fabricated by the torturers and parroted by the victim in order to get the abuse to stop for a few minutes.

This is also being done in our name.

Two thoughts that struck me while reading this. Maybe the Cross in the Dirt story isn't complete and utter fabrication. Not bloody likely, but I will give him a maybe, maybe. I still think that I saw something just like that in "Quo Vadis" or maybe "The Robe." Still, there are times when human decency and compassion can shine through the darkest stuff. I will give him a maybe, maybe.

The other is that this man who endured five years of reprehensible, unjustified, and most certainly illegal dentention and torture is finding himself capable of forgiveness. That's far beyond something I would be capable of bringing. To this day I would be unsure of my reaction to meeting the rat bastard motherfuckers who put me through SERE training. I'm fairly certain that there would be blood as a result. Here's the nicest thing I have to say about that.

It accomplished jack fucking shit. It didn't train anybody in any kind of knowledge except that there were a lot of pissant low rent bastards who wore the same uniforms as us. Fuck SERE. Fuck their instructors. Fuck the shitheel dog breathed pissants who thought it up, fuck the horse they rode in on, the mail they carry, and the stamps they sell. It was nothing but a waste of time.

That we have allowed our President to bring our nation to the moral equivelant of Serbia, or Stalinist Russia, is something that needs to be remembered daily. And fought without ceasing.

Read this whole essay. Never forget what has been done in our name.

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sigh... Christopher Hitchens Waterboards Himself

As someone else who has "attended" SERE training, I read with interest this account of Christopher Hitchens having himself waterboarded.

The "official lie" about waterboarding, Hitchens says, is that it "simulates the feeling of drowning". In fact, "you are drowning - or rather, being drowned".

He rehearses the intellectual arguments, both for ("It's nothing compared to what they do to us") and against ("It opens a door that can't be closed"). But the Hitch's thoroughly empirical conclusion is simple. As Vanity Fair's title puts it: "Believe me, it's torture." -- The Guardian

To which I would reply:
NO SHIT SHERLOCK
If any member of congress would like to experience this, please let me know I still remember some of the dastardly things the dirty commies were going to do to us.

Torture it's the new black.

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Torture

Listen up...

Minstrel Boy has something to say.

Read it.

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Helping The Chinese Torture

U.S. military personnel at Guantanamo Bay allegedly softened up detainees at the request of Chinese intelligence officials who had come to the island facility to interrogate the men -- or they allowed the Chinese to dole out the treatment themselves, according to claims in a new government report.

Buried in a Department of Justice report released Tuesday are new allegations about a 2002 arrangement between the United States and China, which allowed Chinese intelligence to visit Guantanamo and interrogate Chinese Uighurs held there. --ABCNews.com

Wow, helping the Chinese torture. We've come a long way baby... Just 8 short years ago we were totally against torture. We constantly harassed the Chinese about their torturing dissidents and now... They grow up so fast. John Yoo must be so proud. Not to mention the members of our armed forces who did the actual "softening up", they must be proud of their service and the uniforms they wear. God Bless America.

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Gitmo Torture Victim's Records Lost

Now thats screwed up. What kind of a Gulag are we running down there? To have your "disappeared identity" be disappeared.

The former head of interrogations at Guantánamo Bay found that records of an al-Qaida suspect tortured at the prison camp were mysteriously lost by the US military, according to a new book by one of Britain's top human rights lawyers.

Retired general Michael Dunlavey, who supervised Guantánamo for eight months in 2002, tried to locate records on Mohammed al-Qahtani, accused by the US of plotting the 9/11 attacks, but found they had disappeared. -- The Guardian

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Team Torture!

In 2002 and continuing into 2003, deep down in the bowels of the White House, inside the dark and serious White House situation room these pseudo serious people got together, probably at the request of Dick Cheney, to discuss torture. You can almost hear him snarl: "And while we are at it we can't be handling these people with kid gloves, we can't afford to baby these people, Mr President we need to discuss some enhanced interrogation techniques, this way we get out ahead of this thing ya know, stake out the ground as it were before some hot heads go willy nilly torturing...err, i mean interrogating people. If we give them guidance it will be better, leading the way is the smart move here..."

How titillating it must have been for them. Honored, I am sure, to have to help decide which barbaric 15th century techniques were to be used by the United States in its quest for justice. These meetings must have been absurd, which techniques did they throw out? And who didn't like the rack? That's one that didn't make the cut. I presume there was levity, or at least what passes for it with these humorless people. "I will tell you what's torture, this coffee, whew!" hardy har har... Did they have some kind of stupid code name for this group? The Torquemada 12 or something, or was just a mundane "Team Torture". We have heard of all the principals who were there, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Ashcroft, Tenet, and my favorite, Rumsfeld. But what staffers were there? was Karen Hughes there? Hadley? Libby? Somebody was there taking notes and fawning over our brave leaders.

I have to agree with Digby though, the most shocking thing this weekend is the complete silence from the corporate media on this. 6 of the top people in the Bush administration were meeting for over a year, in the White House, to discuss torture techniques and the President knew and approved of it. But you can go to any of the news websites cbsnews.com, abcnews.com, etc and you wont find the story, well, maybe if you dig a little. Google News is a perfect example, it's an aggregate of the online news, even if you drill down to "U.S.", and/or Top Stories, its not even mentioned. There are endless stories on how some orange juice drinking politician said some Americans are bitter. I will tell you what is bitter, the taste in my mouth.

It's just bizarre, and exactly what Bush wanted when he put this out with the trash on Friday evening. It seems they had company in the situation room, at least in spirit, the U.S. news media must have been there, giggling along with the rest of them. Incredible.




Digby's Media Contact List





UPDATE: Mrs. Robinson correctly points out that ABC News actually broke this story, but you couldn't tell that from their home page!

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Team Torture!

I suppose LM will have to come up with some graphic for these fucking losers:

George W Bush
"Dick" Cheney
Condoleezza Rice
Donald Rumsfeld
Colin Powell
George Tenet
John Ashcroft

"Enhanced Interrogation"? No, sorry it's not a freaking dish-soap. The word is torture. These "techniques" are the same methods that have been around for ages. Ages.

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In Our Names

PHOTO DELETED.

The Evil of Abu Ghraib.

The GNB Stylebook calls for most longer stories to open with:

• SLUG
• PHOTO
• HEADLINE

Not this one.

There are ten photos. I want to throw up.

There is a video as well. I want to cry. I am suppressing tears as I write.

They did this in our name. Children. Boys and girls with guns tortured prisoners, beating them with fists, burning them with cigarettes and electricity, forcing them to do sex acts which were not only perverse but were deep moral abominations before God. These soldier-children threatened men with death and with dogs while fathers and men perhaps enemies, perhaps simply swept up in sweeps, turned in for revenge or religious reasons, or there by bad luck, for no real reason at all -- the men cowered naked or died. These men were forced to roll in human shit and pose covered in shit for the amusement of their captors who took photos. Even death was not an escape as our soldier girls and boys posed with tortured mutilated corpses, grinning at the lens.

And while it is not in this set of photos, we know from the Senate there are many thousands of photos and hundreds of hours of film, classified top-secret to prevent you and I from seeing them, of our soldiers raping boys in front of their fathers, and sexually assaulting daughters. These children were sent home, dishonored in a culture where sexual dishonor equals death.

Our soldiers did this. In our names.

I CAUTION YOU IN THE STRONGEST POSSIBLE TERMS... the photos are horrific to view. They will remain with you as long as your memory works properly. There is also a film, in its own way, better perhaps, but even more real as it puts the photos in a larger context and ads dubbed in sound.

It has been months at least, since I've had a medic flashback. I'm partially in one right now as I type. If there is any reason you should not see these photos, do not. They show human beings torturing other human beings, posing with the dead, committing war crimes.

There is a full article associated with the photos and film. I recommend reading it.

Article and film. (Film NSFW under any circumstances. Violently disturbing.)
Photos. (Absolutely NSFW under any circumstances. Violently disturbing.)

You may read the article without seeing either film or photos.

From the article:

Wired Magazine

Zimbardo conducted a now-famous experiment at Stanford University in 1971, involving students who posed as prisoners and guards. Five days into the experiment, Zimbardo halted the study when the student guards began abusing the prisoners, forcing them to strip naked and simulate sex acts.

His book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, explores how a "perfect storm" of conditions can make ordinary people commit horrendous acts.

He spoke with Wired.com about what Abu Ghraib and his prison study can teach us about evil and why heroes are, by nature, social deviants.

Philip Zimbardo: Those sets of things are found any time you really see an evil situation occurring, whether it's Rwanda or Nazi Germany or the Khmer Rouge.

Wired: But not everyone at Abu Ghraib responded to the situation in the same way. So what makes one person in a situation commit evil acts while another in the same situation becomes a whistle-blower?

Zimbardo: There's no answer, based on what we know about a person, that we can predict whether they're going to be a hero whistle-blower or the brutal guard. We want to believe that if I was in some situation [like that], I would bring with it my usual compassion and empathy. But you know what? When I was the superintendent of the Stanford prison study, I was totally indifferent to the suffering of the prisoners, because my job as prison superintendent was to focus on the guards.

As principal [scientific] investigator [of the experiment], my job was to care about what happened to everybody because they were all under my experimental control. But once I switched to being the prison superintendent, I was a different person. It's hard to believe that, but I was transformed.

Wired: Do you think it made any difference that the Abu Ghraib guards were reservists rather than active duty soldiers?

Zimbardo: It made an enormous difference, in two ways. They had no mission-specific training, and they had no training to be in a combat zone. Secondly, the Army reservists in a combat zone are the lowest form of animal life within the military hierarchy. They're not real soldiers, and they know this. In Abu Ghraib the only thing lower than the army reservist MPs were the prisoners.

Wired: So it's a case of people who feel powerless in their lives seizing power over someone else.

Zimbardo: Yes, victims become victimizers. In Nazi concentration camps, the Jewish capos were worse than the Nazis, because they had to prove that they deserved being in this position.

Wired: You've said that the way to prevent evil actions is to teach the "banality of kindness" -- that is, to get society to exemplify ordinary people who engage in extraordinary moral actions. How do you do this?

Zimbardo: If you can agree on a certain number of things that are morally wrong, then one way to counteract them is by training kids. There are some programs, starting in the fifth grade, which get kids to think about the heroic mentality, the heroic imagination.

To be a hero you have to take action on behalf of someone else or some principle and you have to be deviant in your society, because the group is always saying don't do it; don't step out of line. If you're an accountant at Arthur Andersen, everyone who is doing the defrauding is telling you, "Hey, be one of the team."

Heroes have to always, at the heroic decisive moment, break from the crowd and do something different. But a heroic act involves a risk. If you're a whistle-blower you're going to get fired, you're not going to get promoted, you're going to get ostracized. And you have to say it doesn't matter.

Most heroes are more effective when they're social heroes rather than isolated heroes. A single person or even two can get dismissed by the system. But once you have three people, then it's the start of an opposition.

So what I'm trying to promote is not only the importance of each individual thinking "I'm a hero" and waiting for the right situation to come along in which I will act on behalf of some people or some principle, but also, "I'm going to learn the skills to influence other people to join me in that heroic action."

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Yes, you may read the article, without viewing the film or seeing the photos.

I have to go be ill now.

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Battlestar Galactica Interview

Concurring Opinions Interviews BSG Creators

Roughly one hour of on-point interview (QuickTime) is available with Ron Moore and David Eick, creators of Battlestar Galactica.

Recommended for BSG fans ONLY. Everyone else, watch BSG first, or this will ruin the series for you. See my comments below.

Concurring Opinions

We are thrilled to offer readers of Concurring Opinions an interview with Ron Moore and David Eick, creators of the hit television show Battlestar Galactica. Daniel Solove, Deven Desai, and David Hoffman ask the questions. We would like to thank Professor John Ip for suggesting some of the torture questions. Our interview lasts a little over an hour.

Our goal was to explore some of the themes of the show in a deeper manner than many traditional interviews. Ron and David graciously agreed to give us an hour of their time, and we had a fascinating conversation with them.

Our interview is structured in three parts. Part I, available in two files (see the end of this post to download), focuses on the issues of legal systems and morality. It examines the lawyers and trials in the show. It also examines how torture is depicted, as well as how the humans must balance civil liberties and security.

Part II examines politics and commerce. It explores how the cylon attack affected the humans' political system, and it examines how commerce works in the fleet.

Part III examines issues related to cylons, such as the humans' treatment of cylons, how robots should be treated by the law, how the cylons govern themselves politically. Additionally, Part III explores the religious issues involved in the show.

The show is heavily influenced by modern events, especially terrorism, war, and torture. In a time of emergency, how should we balance security and liberty? How do we deal with enemies who may be burrowed in among us? How does a society decimated in a war reconstitute its political, economic, and legal systems?

Battlestar Galactica was honored with a prestigious Peabody Award and twice as an official selection of the American Film Institute top television programs for 2005 and 2006.

PART I-A: LEGAL SYSTEMS
Topics: The legal system, lawyers, trials, and tribunals.
Length: 11 minutes, 51 seconds
File Size: Approximately 11 MB

PART I-B: TORTURE, NECESSITY, AND MORALITY
Topics: Torture, necessity vs. moral principles, deference to the military
Length: 18 minutes, 1 second
File Size: Approximately 16.5 MB

PART II: POLITICS AND ECONOMY
Topics: Politics and commerce
Length: 13 minutes, 57 seconds
File Size: Approximately 13 MB

PART III: CYLONS
Topics: Cylons and humans, cylon rights, cylon society and governance, religion
Length: 16 minutes, 15 seconds
File Size: Approximately 15 MB

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I think Battlestar is the best program on television today, possibly the best drama I've every personally watched on television. And yes, I include Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The West Wing. Possibly Hill St. Blues was this good, in how it got people to care so deeply about a serialized multi-character single-camera show. But BSG is the culmination of decades of television writing.

It really is that good.

One word of caution for those of you whom have not seen Battlestar. I strongly urge you to not:

• read any of the comments for this post, and
• watch any and I do mean any repeats or reruns.

Just order Season One and watch from the beginning, starting with the mini-series -- which takes a little bit to get going, but then gets going and never stops. By the time you're two or three episodes into Season 1, you'll be completely hooked. Don't even get me started how by year three, they have TWO protagonists, the humans and the cylons, and you're genuinely uncertain whom to root for. That is GREAT writing and story telling.

However...

My point is, Battlestar, much more so than most shows, is serial. There are slow builds, character development, arcs, reveals, and surprises which will leave you in tears, anguished, shocked or stunned to your core. Should you watch the series out of order even for one episode in a season (depending on the episode), let alone skip seasons, an enormous part of the enjoyment of the series will be ruined. This is NOT a series to be spoiled for.

People in comments will talk about the series and that's fine. No doubt the creators will talk about the episodes to date, possibly even the final season to come. Go watch the series first, in order. It's worth everything you put into it.

The fourth and final season of Battlestar Galactica starts Friday, April 4, 10 ET/PT.

To Order:
Season 1 (Includes the mini-series)
Season 2.0 (Episodes 1-10)
Season 2.5 (Episodes 11-20)
Season 3 (Coming soon)
Battlestar Galactica: Razor (TV movie from Fall 2007)

h/t The Volokh Conspiracy

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John McCain, Waterboard Supporter

Shame on you John McCain.

Mr. McCain, a former prisoner of war, has consistently voiced opposition to waterboarding and other methods that critics say is a form torture. But the Republicans, confident of a White House veto, did not mount the challenge. Mr. McCain voted “no” on Wednesday afternoon.

You know better. The Vietnamese couldn't break you, but you have sold your own self out in search of power. There is a lesson in your depraved grasping for the rest of us. We have to fight these battles of character and courage every day. Yesterday doesn't count.

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Bush personally Authorizes Torture

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The CIA director on Tuesday publicly named for the first time the three suspected al Qaeda detainees who were subjected to the harsh interrogation technique of waterboarding.

"It was used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It was used on Abu Zubayda, and it was used on [Abd al-Rahim] al-Nashiri," CIA Director Michael Hayden told a Senate hearing. -- CNN

And Bush signed off on it personally. Information gained? Bubkis. What coincidence this was released today.

How many times do we know categorically Bush has lied?

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Icelandic Beauty Chained, Held, Tortured by Homeland Security at JFK

This is exactly how we can expect to increase our tourism dollars. Come to America,

Experience the Terror!
That can be our new tourism tag line...

During the last twenty-four hours I have probably experienced the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected. During these last twenty-four hours I have been handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep, been without food and drink and been confined to a place without anyone knowing my whereabouts, imprisoned.

This woman foolishly thought she could come and spend some Euro in New York. A little shopping trip. Unfortunately she hadn't realized that a computer somewhere said she overstayed a visa years ago. She's a dirty foreigner so... hilarity ensued...

I was photographed and fingerprinted. I was asked questions which I felt had nothing to do with the issue at hand. I was forbidden to contact anyone to advise of my predicament and although I was invited at the outset to contact the Icelandic consul or embassy, that invitation was later withdrawn. I don't know why.

I was then made to wait while they sought further information, and sat on a chair before the authority for 5 hours. I saw the officials in this section handle other cases and it was clear that these were men anxious to demonstrate their power. Small kings with megalomania. I was careful to remain completely cooperative, for I did not yet believe that they planned to deport me because of my "crime".

When 5 hours had passed and I had been awake for 24 hours, I was told that they were waiting for officials who would take me to a kind of waiting room. There I would be given a bed to rest in, some food and I would be searched. What they thought they might find I cannot possibly imagine. Finally guards appeared who transported me to the new place. I saw the bed as if in a mirage, for I was absolutely exhausted.

What turned out was something else. I was taken to another office exactly like the one where I had been before and once again along wait ensued. In all, it turned out to be 5 hours. At this office all my things were taken from me. I succeeded in sending a single sms to worried relatives and friends when I was granted a bathroom break. After that the cell phone was taken from me. After I had been sitting for 5 hours I was told that they were now waiting for guards who would take me to a place where I could rest and eat. Then I was placed in a cubicle which looked like an operating room. Attached to the walls were 4 steel plates, probably intended to serve as bed and a toilet.

I was exhausted, tired and hungry. I didn't understand the officials' conduct, for they were treating me like a very dangerous criminal. Soon thereafter I was removed from the cubicle and two armed guards placed me up against a wall. A chain was fastened around my waist and I was handcuffed to the chain. Then my legs were placed in chains. I asked for permission to make a telephone call but they refused. So secured, I was taken from the airport terminal in full sight of everybody. I have seldom felt so bad, so humiliated and all because I had taken a longer vacation than allowed under the law.

She didn't know it but they were trying to 'break' her. It wasn't by accident that she was not allowed to rest, and that they kept telling her she would be able to eat and sleep any time now. Instead her physical situation got worse. This is all technique. Its part of the process that every Gitmo detainee would recognize right away. Isolate, Shock, and Break. Luckily Icelanders are made of stern stuff. Although If they had more time, she would have broken. Everyone does. Someone should send her one of those Limbaugh T-Shirts, "Experience Club Gitmo". She did.

This is the kind of treatment that any visitor to the U.S. can now expect. Imagine your skin is brown and you are traveling with your children.

Lets see how low the tourism industry drops now. I wonder which airline is going to fail first?

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Waterboarding Effectiveness Questioned

WASHINGTON—The assertion by a former CIA interrogator that the tactic known as waterboarding was effective in shaking potentially life-saving information from a leading terrorist has infused new passion into the debate over torture, both in the presidential campaign and in government.

By tactic they mean "torture technique".

Retired CIA agent John Kiriakou made the rounds of network and cable news programs Monday and Tuesday describing how waterboarding, an interrogation technique that makes a prisoner believe he is in imminent danger of drowning, had prompted Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah to provide critical information after he had held out for weeks.

The retired agent's comments have revived one of the toughest questions in the torture debate: What if using distasteful, even repugnant, tactics is the most effective way to get hardened terrorists to reveal information that could save American lives?

Okay, here we go again. Look this guy is completely talking out of his ass. Since Kiriakou wasn't involved in the torture/debriefing of this nutjob Zubaydah then he would have no knowledge of what happened with the insane ramblings they recorded, he wasn't even there. In the unlikely event that Zubaydah actually blurted out some useful information this Trojan Horse supposed Ex-CIA agent Kiriakou would have no idea of its use in the field. Its called compartmentalization He would have no idea if field agents already had this "valuable" information. If he was one of the field agents he wouldn't know where the intell came from.

This guy is completely full of shit and it's 6 to 5 he still draws a paycheck from Langley.


UPDATE: I meant to post the link to the article "Agent's assertions revive torture debate". Which is complete bullshit and the Chicago Tribute should be ashamed at what a piece of crap it is. There is no debate. Torture doesn't work. period. end of statement.

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Alan Dershowitz, knucklehead and effectively pro-torture

Now, I understand that an ethical well-natured blogger is all about reasoned argument and completely against name-calling. However, readers of this blog know we are actually able to do both here to varying degrees. More of the name-calling then the reasoned argument, but whatever! Dershowitz is having a bit of a dust up with Larisa Alexandrovna over at the Huffington Post. I really can't follow what Dershowitz is going on about... However, Larisa points out a statement he made about torture while at the same time condemning the use of it, even though he thinks the democrats should be pro-torture, but also be against it... or something. (Like I said, I really can't follow it.) Anyway here is the quote:

There are some who claim that torture is a nonissue because it never works - it only produces false information. This is simply not true, as evidenced by the many decent members of the French Resistance who, under Nazi torture, disclosed the locations of their closest friends and relatives. -- Alan Dershowitz

He made the claim in the Wall Street Journal where he implores the democrats to be TOUGH© on Defense. Seems an odd venue to preach to democrats on, but since it was a silly-assed argument anyway, who cares. Not my point.

I wanted to address the thinking on torture here. Yes, the Nazi's were able to get names of people by pulling fingernails out with pliers and burning people and even waterboarding them. Most of the names they got were no good and the Nazi's tortured and killed a number of innocent people. However, there is a larger point here and this is where lunkheads like Dershowitz (oops, sorry) should stop trying to advise people on defense, counter-terrorism, and intelligence gathering. They just sound stupid, morally lost, and piss off the professionals.

When the S.S. started to torture people, 3 things happened. First, the resistance toughened up. They grew closer, and more people joined. Regular people were willing to turn a blind eye to operations they happened upon and provide more assistance. Secondly they started forming cell structures. So that if one member was caught they would not risk exposing many people and operations. Lastly, and from a intelligence aspect this was the biggy, the overall intelligence gathering information pipelines slowed to a crawl. Information was very hard to come by for the Nazi's. The resistance was able to continue to operate in France and played a major role in the D-Day landings. Torture didn't work. It had the opposite effect of stunting intelligence gathering overall. It also had an effect on U.S. troops after D-Day, who feared being captured and fought harder rather than surrender when cut off or surrounded.

All in all it was bad technique and provided little immediate value and had a long term negative effect on intelligence gathering operations.

So, Dershowitz, shut your pie hole unless you know what you are talking about. Dumbass.

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TASER :: It's Good For You...

Wow, this is some spectacular doublespeak, marketing bullshit and complete disengenuousness and it requires a complete disconnect from reality and commonsense to believe it. In order to obscure the fact that their product is increasingly killing people TASER wrote a press release.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Nov. 16, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- TASER International, Inc. (Nasdaq:TASR), a market leader in advanced electronic control devices, released the following statement regarding the mid-October confrontation between Mr. Robert Dziekanski and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police at the Vancouver airport. An amateur video of the incident that was released earlier this week has received sensational coverage from the media with many reports drawing an unsubstantiated and uninformed conclusion as to the cause of Mr. Dziekanski's death.

Uhm... yeah... It was a sensational death by TASER! So, should the reporting have been droll and sardonic maybe?

My uninformed conclusion was that they TASER'ed that poor bastard to death.

The video of the incident at the Vancouver airport indicates that the subject was continuing to fight well after the TASER application. This continuing struggle could not be possible if the subject died as a result of the TASER device electrical current causing cardiac arrest. His continuing struggle is proof that the TASER device was not the cause of his death.

That was the part I was warning you about. See, I think what they are saying is that he just happened to be also dying of a heart attack at the same time he was being wracked with pain from the application of 1,000 kilovolts of electricity. What a coincidence!

We are taken aback by the number of media outlets that have irresponsibly published conclusive headlines blaming the TASER device and / or the law enforcement officers involved as the cause of death before completion of the investigation. These sensationalistic media reports completely ignore the earmark symptoms of excited delirium shown in the video

Riiiight... Why blame the TASER, he clearly had 'excited delirum'. Which everyone knows is the #1 cause of heart attacks in police brutality detention cases. Excited Delirium, I don't even know what the fuck that is, and I am also pretty sure sensationalistic isn't a word. I wonder how much government money TASER gets? Maybe they should hire a copywriter. I suppose next they are going to tell me that it's good for me, helps cure excema or something.

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