What part of 'no exceptional circumstances' does Cheney not understand?

Back in the good old days when that highly-moral Bill Clinton was in power, this is what the US told the UN about torture:

Torture is prohibited by law throughout the United States. It is categorically denounced as a matter of policy and as a tool of state authority. Every act constituting torture under the Convention constitutes a criminal offense under the law of the United States. No official of the government, federal, state or local, civilian or military, is authorized to commit or to instruct anyone else to commit torture. Nor may any official condone or tolerate torture in any form. No exceptional circumstances may be invoked as a justification of torture. U.S. law contains no provision permitting otherwise prohibited acts of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment to be employed on grounds of exigent circumstances (for example, during a 'state of public emergency') or on orders from a superior officer or public authority, and the protective mechanisms of an independent judiciary are not subject to suspension.

Emphasis mine. I don't care how many things "changed" after 911, this statement doesn't permit torture under any circumstances. And there is no allowance for Cheney to argue about a Presidential exemption.
Even the White House appears to be backing off Cheney's campaign, telling reporters that they have to "ask the Vice-President's Office" why he is continuing to lobby the Senate about this. But I'll bet Cheney just will not give it up, because he can't stand to lose.
Laura Rosen writes:

I was in a torture chamber once, in the basement of a police station in Kosovo days after it was abandoned by Serb forces defeated by Nato. It was hideous as you would imagine. The British soldiers who were with me were equally shocked. A lot of the instruments and interrogation drugs I saw there also suggest they were not designed to cause organ failure or death in their victims, just pain and terror . . . Having laid my eyes on what such a scene looks like, I just associate such activities with the forces of not only the pathological and depraved, but those who are headed for defeat. If you've seen it, you realize in a way that's hard to explain, it's the tactics of the losers. If Cheney and his office mates haven't had the experience, perhaps they should. And I really don't think it's inconceivable that the remote possibility of the Hague may lie in some of their futures. Things change fast when they do, as history shows, and they could find their current willing protectors eventually chucked from office, and a whole new climate at home and abroad.

Khadr is a prisoner of war

When considering the Khadr case, Ottawa and everyone else needs to remember this: when the US talks about enemy combatants and how the Geneva Conventions don't apply in Afghanistan, they're wrong. Omar Khadr is actually a prisoner of war. He was captured on the battlefield: "Khadr was just 15 when he allegedly threw a hand grenade that killed an American soldier and wounded another during a firefight with Taliban fighters in Afghanistan in July 2002. " I don't know enough about the Geneva Conventions to know whether or not POWs can be put on trial what they did during battle.

Great line of the day

From John at AMERICAblog, in regard to Kansas deciding to teach creationism as science: "But look on the bright side. We no longer have to worry about those pesky Kansas kids competing with our kids to get into Harvard."

Gentlemen, we must avoid a mine-shaft gap

Oh, come on -- lets not get hysterical here. In this Calgary Sun column, Roy Clancy quotes a counter-terrorism expert as saying that international terrorism 'is maybe the biggest threat ever posed to humanity' and going on to say how terrorism is even worse than the Cold War.
What garbage! I guess its not surprising that a counter-terrorism expert would think his own job is the most important job ever, but the media have to have some balance here -- terrorists are an intractable problem, but there is no way that the scale of the terrorist threat is comparable to the danger humanity faced for 50 years of blowing millions and millions of people off the face of the earth and causing an environmental catastrophe for hundreds of years to come.
What worries me is where such ideas lead. If terrorism is "the greatest threat ever" than is it going to be suggested that they be stopped with the worst weapons ever, like small-scale tactical nukes? And suddenly then we find ourselves in Strangelove territory, where fear magnifies to the point of hysteria, and the unthinkable starts to appear logica and sane.

Vet to get pension after all

Here's some good news: Ombudsman says decorated air force vet deserves pension after 44 years: "A decorated air force vet who was unfairly denied a pension 44 years ago should get an apology and compensation, the military ombudsman said Tuesday. " Too many times, people who work in jobs where they hand out money start acting like they are on commission, and that they will get a nickel for every dollar they "save". Quit doing that!

Great line of the day

Today's great line is from Pat Buchanan, the poster boy for the Republicans delusionally in denial.
I read about this discussion on another blog earlier tonight, but I didn't believe it until I saw this transcript from the The McLaughlin Group on Sunday:

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Okay, the human toll: The U.S. military dead in Iraq, including suicides, 2,035; U.S. military amputeed, wounded, injured, mentally ill, 48,100; Iraqi civilians dead, 117,700. . . . Exit question: On an escape probability scale, zero to 10, zero meaning zero probability, 10 meaning metaphysical certitude, what's the probability of the Democrats escaping from their vote in favor of the Iraq war? Pat Buchanan.
MR. BUCHANAN: It is about zero. They were derelict in their duty to really force the president to make the case for war convincingly that it was necessary and had to be done now. They did a rotten job in the Congress of the United States, and they're not going to recover by attacking Bush.
MR. MCLAUGHLIN: The president lied to them about the causes for going to war.
MR. BUCHANAN: He did not lie to them. The president emphasized, cherry-picked, hyped the causes for going, and set the others aside. That's not lying . . .
MS. CLIFT: Hyped, cherry-picked, misled, whatever the words you used, to me are criminal offenses when you see the suffering that has gone into this war and the cost of this war. It was a war of choice that was sold to the American people on fear.
MR. BUCHANAN: But why didn't the Democrats stop it? Why didn't the Democrats stop it?

Emphasis mine.
Those damned Democrats -- damned traitors! How could they? How dare they believe President Bush and Vice-President Cheney and the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of State and the head of the CIA and the FBI and every single Republican member of the House and the Senate? Of course the Iraq War really is all their fault, I see it now . . .
And I guess the US will just have to elect a majority of Republicans at the congressional midterms next year to get them out of this mess. Oh, wait a minute . . .

Fruit of the poisonous tree

There is a legal principle called "fruit of the poisonous tree" by which evidence is inadmissable if it was generated from an unconstitutional or illegal act.
In discussions about the Iraq War, I think we need to talk more about its poisonous tree -- the first mistake which is the mother of all the other mistakes made in this awful war.
Josh Marshall describes what is happening now: "It seems the president's defenders have fallen back on what has always been their argument of last resort -- cherry-picked quotes from Clinton administration officials arranged to give the misleading impression that the Clintonites said and thought the same thing about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as the Bushies did."
Yes, this is exactly what the Bush apologists are doing.
But the right wing and the left wing are both making the same error -- neither is talking about the poisonous tree.
Folks, it doesn't matter WHAT Clinton thought. It doesn't matter what Sandy Berger thought, either. Or Al Gore. Or the whole Senate and House and Pentagon. Neither does it matter what Powell thought, or Rice, or Tenent, or Rumsfeld, or Cheney, or Bush himself.
The point is this -- regardless of what ANYBODY thought, they had no right to ACT -- not unless or until Saddam committed an overt act of aggression first.
Clinton, it should be noted, did NOT unilaterally start a war even if he thought Saddam's weapons bore watching.
But with George Bush, the US pomulgated the Bush Doctrine, giving itself the authority to strike preemptively, to start a war.
Now, this doctrine is illegal in terms of international law. Regardless of how powerful the US thinks it is, it cannot legally ignore the Security Council, and demand "regime change" in another country, regardless of what weapons Saddam had or how awful his government was.
The Bush Doctrine is the basic mistake here, the poisonous tree which has produced poisoned fruit. The inability of the US to establish a legitimate and respected government in Iraq flows from the basic illegality of the Bush Doctrine. As a result of this doctrine, the US and Britain started the Iraq War without international support or credibility, and hence their occupation of Iraq was not legitimate. From the very beginning, they lacked the moral authority to govern; no democratic government can ever be successful without such authority.
Now, what Juan Cole calls "the guerrilla war" in Iraq is killing hundreds of Iraqis every week, including a dozen or more American soldiers. The insurgency is so widespread and so powerful that there are more than 100 attacks against American soldiers every day -- that's right, EVERY DAY. Now the news comes that the US was using white phosporous bombs in Fallujah last November
Juan Cole writes "The lessons of British Iraq were mostly unknown to the American politicians who planned out and executed the 2003 Iraq War. One of them is that the military occupation of a conquered population is a barbaric business and can easily draw the colonizer into the use of horrific means to control the rebellious occupied. The Americans' moral fibre is being destroyed from within by things like Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, and other atrocities. In the end, America may not any longer be America. The country that began by forbidding cruel and unusual punishment is ending by formally authorizing torture on a grand scale, and by burning small town Iraqis down to the bone with white phosphorus."
Poison. Pure poison.

Great line of the day

d r i f t g l a s s writes:

". . . .the GOP hasn’t just hit a bad patch: they’ve “lost the room." . . . And in ways that are virtually identical to Republican Herbert Hoover’s response to the Great Depression, the GOP’s response to the calamity their own policies have created is to freeze up, do nothing, and hope it’ll all just blows over, even though that path leads to ruin. Why? Because they are ideologically bound on all sides. Because like the Christopaths that ate their Party, Republicans are congenitally unable to admit error. . . . the GOP will spend millions on scapegoats, but not one cent on solutions. Hoover's failure to deal decisively with the Great Depression effectively killed the Republican Party for a generation. Eisenhower brought it back, but with a humane and moderate touch that this generation of anti-American Gingrich and Falwell Republicans have completely repudiated, and now the brighter among them are beginning to dimly perceive the size and shape of the pit into which Bush has led them.
Because they can't get rid of him. If instead of yapping about it, the GOP really ran the government (which they now completely control) like a business, George W. Bush would have been out on his ass in April. He has bankrupted the United States in every way conceivable, blow his performance evaluation worse than any other man in modern history for four quarters in a row, and has presented no turnaround plan to the Board beyond three more years of the same corruption, deception and bumblefuckery that got us here in the first place. And there is no way to get him the hell off the stage. Their Chickenhawk-in-Chief has become a 500-pound albatross hanging around the neck of the Republicans Party.

Emphasis mine. I know, a little long, but I thought it was all pretty good.
The advantage of a parliamentary system is that a government will fall if too many people lose confidence in the leadership.

Good, bad, ugly

Good


Bad


Ugly

The week that was

Here's what the last week has been like for our boy Georgie.
Last weekend, Capitol Hill Blue reports

. . . When a GOP strategist suggested . . . that the President fire Rove, Bush exploded. 'You go to hell,' he screamed at the strategist. 'You can leave and you can take the rest of these lily-livered motherfuckers with you!' The President then stormed out of the room and refused to meet further with any other party leaders or strategists . . .

Then they announce Alito for the Supreme Court on Monday, but then his silly old mother immediately says he opposes abortion, with the result that the hearings won't even start until January so the base will be pissed about that
Then Harry Reid pulls a fast one Tuesday and gets Iraq back into the news.
Then Wednesday the CIA secret prison story broke.
Thursday Libby had his first court appearance.
Friday we see Cheney still promoting torture .
We continue to see stories about Tom Delay screwing up again.
Background noice all week was that the number of attacks in Iraq have continued to escalate, with several soldiers a day being killed. The 2000 mark has been passed. The flimsiness of the rationale for war and the incompetence of its execution has become a frame for all Iraq-related news stories now. The opinion polls have Bush at 35 per cent.
Also on Friday, Bush's trip to Argentina inspires tens of thousands of people to riot.
And coming on Saturday, the inane "ethics class" story will produce a loud raspberry across the country/
And then next week, Ahmed Chalabi is coming back.
And it was just a year ago that Bush was reelected . . .

Just follow the Jim Carey Rule

When I read this story -- Bush Orders Staff to Attend Ethics Briefings -- I recalled Jim Carey's best line in Liar, Liar: when asked by a client what he could do about his legal problems, Carey replied "Stop breaking the law, asshole!"

Great line of the day

Digby writes about the "I forgot" defense as it applies to Karl Rove:

In a court of law, perhaps Pat Fitzgerald would not be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Rove lied about that. In the court of public opinion, it is as ridiculous as the idea that OJ didn't do it. Perhaps Karl can spend the rest of his tenure in the White House looking for the real leakers.

Emphasis mine.

A-hunting

A-hunting we will go
A-hunting we will go
We'll catch a little fox
And put him in a box
And never let him go!
So take 500 plus or minus in Guantanamo, and add to them 100 or more spread around the globe in the CIA's prison system -- and of course don't forget the thousands and thousands now jailed in Iraq.
Almost none of them can be proven guilty of anything at all, at least not according to the standards of law that you or I would want to be judged by -- like in a trial, with admissable evidence or witnesses, and a defense attorney, and a judge. But neither the military nor the spooks are willing to let any of them out.
This story describes what has happened in the CIA:

. . . The CIA program's original scope was to hide and interrogate the two dozen or so al Qaeda leaders believed to be directly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, or who posed an imminent threat, or had knowledge of the larger al Qaeda network. But as the volume of leads pouring into the CTC from abroad increased, and the capacity of its paramilitary group to seize suspects grew, the CIA began apprehending more people whose intelligence value and links to terrorism were less certain, according to four current and former officials. The original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible universe was lowered or ignored, they said. "They've got many, many more who don't reach any threshold," one intelligence official said . . . the debate over the wisdom of the program continues among CIA officers, some of whom also argue that the secrecy surrounding the program is not sustainable. "It's just a horrible burden," said the intelligence official.

So what did they think was going to happen -- that their CIA officers were going to show restraint? That they would give some priority to determining whether these people were guilty or innocent, and then let the innocent ones just go home?
Nope. No more restraint than the military has shown in Iraq or Guantanamo, where the guiding principle seems to be that the only trustworthy Arab is the one on the other side of the barbed wire.
So you have people who are supposed to be in charge of US national security, who are quite willing to imprison people they KNOW are innocent, just because they cannot figure out what else to do with them.
And someday it will be 2010, and then 2020 -- and are we still going to be reading stories about Guantanamo and secret prisons?
Or will all the journalists be locked up by then too?

Hubris

Those whom the gods would destroy they first make all powerful.
Those whom the gods would destroy they first make proud.
Hubris is the description for just about all political administrations who have been in power long enough to believe their own press releases. Occasionally, that happens in about three days (ie, the Bush administration), but usually it doesn't happen until at least one successful reelection, maybe two.
When Hubris strikes, it ain't pretty.
Chretien obviously had a bad case of it before he (finally!) left. As witness the Gomery inquiry report today -- the key paragraphs in this Globe story are these:

. . . Judge Gomery said Mr. Chrétien must shoulder at least some of the responsibility for the program's problems. Mr. Chrétien, he said, chose to run the program from his own office and to have his own staff take responsibility for its direction. For those reasons, he said, Mr. Chrétien "is accountable for the defective manner in which the sponsorship program and its initiatives were implemented."
"Good intentions are not an excuse for maladministration of this magnitude," he said. "The Prime Minister and his Chief of Staff [Jean Pelletier] arrogated to themselves the direction of a virtually secret program of discretionary spending to selected beneficiaries, saying that they believed in good faith that those grants would enhance Canadian unity." Each, Justice Gomery said, had testified during hearings that they believed the program would be administered responsibly by Mr. Guité, who ran the program from its inception until 1999. But they also did not verify that assumption "even though they had created a program lacking all of the normal safeguards against maladministration."
"The assumption was naïve, imprudent and entirely unfounded," Justice Gomery said. Similarly, he said, Alfonso Gagliano, who was public works minister from 1997 to 2002, chose to continue with the "irregular manner" of directing the sponsorship program adopted by Mr. Pelletier, when he took office. "Contrary to his testimony to the effect that his participation was limited to providing political input and making recommendations about events and projects to be sponsored, Mr. Gagliano became directly involved in decisions to provide funding to events and projects for partisan purposes, having little to do with considerations of national unity." Just as Mr. Chrétien must accept responsibility for the actions of his exempt staff, so must Mr. Gagliano, Justice Gomery added.
The Quebec wing of the Liberal Party, Justice Gomery also said, "cannot escape responsibility for the misconduct of its officers and representatives." He said two successive executive directors "were directly involved in illegal campaign financing and many of its workers accepted cash payments for their services when they should have known that such payments were in violation of the Canada Elections Act."

Not only should they have known better, its quite likely that somebody TOLD them not to do it this way. Somebody said, this isn't right. Somebody said, you should be following the rules. And they ignored that aggravating bureaucrat, that stick-in-the-mud, that useless twit who couldn't get with the tour, that annoying naysayer who wasn't 'onside' with the program. So they remained secure in the comfortable belief that their cause was just and their aspect noble, so pure were they that they could not possibly be doing anything wrong, just cutting a little unnecessary red tape . . .

Oh, great -- now its war with Cuba

For crying out loud.
Isn't it enough that the US wants to go to war with Syria, Iran and North Korea? Now Cuba is being added to the list -- as soon as Castro dies, mind you. This new story writes "The inter-agency effort, which also involves the Defense Department, recognises that the Cuba transition may not go peacefully and that the US may have to launch a nation-building exercise."
So its not called a war anymore, its called a "nation building exercise".