Speaking Of The Government Investigating Itself For No Good End...

[See my previous posting on the Justice Department now "suddenly" wanting to investigate the Bush Administration's/CIA's willful and most criminal destruction of two videotapes depicting the torture of uncharged suspects "in our name".]

Glenn Greenwald has an excellent comprehensive piece about how the 9/11 commission - with its strangely picked crew by Bush and Cheney who fought the idea tooth-and-nail - had its work obstructed by... well, I bet you can guess that right on the very first try.

Torture And The Laws Bush Won't Even Pretend to Follow

At the same time he stands by his unmitigated nerve to cry foul against Russia in 2001 for its human rights abuses (talk about the skanky pot calling the Putey-Put kettle black), Bush wants everyone to notice he's "making illegal" what was already illegal to do but which he practices with all the fervor of a Republican Christian moralist paying a dominatrix for kinky sex (can you say William "Morals Czar" Bennett, anyone?).

Thus, may we assume (oh, yeaaaaahhhhh!) that President Bush signed a new law designed to "stop" torture in interrogations used against detainees and so-called terror suspects using invisible ink, with his fingers crossed behind his hand, AND with a signing statement that says, "this law applies only to Democrats and others not named Bush & Cheney"?

Meanwhile, the CIA is now allowed to return to interrogating whoever the hell they want, after many appropriate (and too many unasked) questions arose about how they conducted them.

His and Hersh: How Bush And Rumsfeld Created The Horror of Abu Ghraib, Then Protected Themselves

I posted this at All Things Democrat in the wee hours of this morning, but it needs as much attention as possible (remember how Rummy dismissed abuses in Iraq prisons as the work of "a few bad apples" - I can agree with this if you say those bad apples are named Georgie Porgy and Donny Dumbsfeld):

While perhaps too many Americans have been closely following interviews with England’s two princes (Harry and William) and the unanswered questions of what happened on the night of their mother’s - Princess Diana’s - death a decade ago, there’s a much bigger issue that needs attention: what Bush and Rumsfeld allowed happen at the Iraq prison Abu Ghraib (and elsewhere).

Hardhitting journalist Seymour Hersh, one of the first to break the stories of abuse of prisoners - many of whom were arrested only for being Iraqis or Muslim or simply looking different from Americans - by American soldiers in 2004, is back in The New Yorker with fresh details that tell us both President Bush and then Pentagon Secretary Donald Rumsfeld LIED LIED LIED about not knowing of the torture and degradation and unnecessary deaths while they worked tirelessly to keep any official investigation into it from looking beyond grunt soldiers and low ranking generals.

Much of the punch packed in Hersh’s latest piece comes from Major General Antonio M. Taguba, the man charged with investigating the abuses at Abu Ghraib when the Bush Administration and Pentagon could no longer look blankly and say, “What’s Abu Ghraib?” Taguba says that Bush and Rummy knew WAY before they say they did about the claims of massive abuses, tortures and even deaths at the prison, that they specifically BLOCKED Taguba from looking any higher up the food chain than lowly GIs and minor generals, and THEN forced Taguba to retire as punishment for trying to investigate as fully and fairly as a decent inquiry should.

The highest “hit” there, of course, was Janis Karpinski, a one star general then titularly in charge of Abu Ghraib but - she says - forced by the Pentagon to allow psy ops and torture proponents run the prison and then busted down when she did as ordered by Rummy; the rest were the likes of Lindy England (the Abu Ghraib poster girl for torture and leash holding as well as frequent model for sex pictures in and around prisoners).

Only in BushTopia: U.S. Races To Deport Wife Of American Soldier Missing In Iraq

Alex Jimenez is one of the three U.S. soldiers ambushed and still missing in Iraq weeks after several comrades in the same unit were killed in the same scuffle that resulted in these MIAs. As if this isn't sad enough, bhfrik at All Things Democrat tells us how the U.S. government wants to say thanks to his family by deporting Jimenez's wife, who applied for a green card four years ago.

Why does the story of Yaderlin deserve any more attention than hundreds of others facing deportation, separation from children and families and uncertain futures in a land thousands of miles from home? Because Alex is one of the two soldiers whose unit was attacked and is now missing in Iraq. A third member of his unit was also captured and later found dead near the Tigris river.

That’s right… the government is working to deport the wife of a soldier missing in Iraq. It would be bad enough if the couple were just dealing with Alex being in Iraq and having to go through this domestic nightmare. Can you imagine our soldiers having to worry about dodging IED’s in the broiling heat surrounded by misery and death on a biblical scale… and having to worry and fret about your wife’s immigration status. I wonder how many soldiers have been killed or wounded from being all distracted by thoughts on legal proceedings at home, rather than concentrating on surviving the hell hole they find themselves in.

Color me apoplectic and ashamed of any government agency that would do this, at this time.

In fact, I'm thinking perhaps the right-most Republicans clamoring so fervently for blood and tears in forcing so many immigrants back across borders should be deported themselves, perhaps along with those who came up with the execution of this plan against Jimenez's wife. Bet they're all sporting "Support Our Troops" bumper stickers featuring a ribbon as yellow as these people's bellies on a background as white as the skunk stripe down their hateful backs.

The National Disgrace Called Gitmo

We have committed at least as great atrocities against others - many of them just as innocent as so many who died on September 11th, 2001 - in the name of the national security we not only didn't have then but have even less of today. That we operate anything like Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, or many other politically-oriented prisons like those Jose Padilla is held in as well as the countless "secret" prisons throughout the world does more than endanger us; it betrays absolutely everything that this country and we, its people, are supposed to stand for.

From The New York Times Op/Ed page Wednesday (June 6, 2007):

Ever since President Bush rammed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 through Congress to lend a pretense of legality to his detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, we have urged Congress to amend the law to restore basic human rights and judicial process. Rulings by military judges this week suggest that the special detention system is so fundamentally corrupt that the only solution is to tear it down and start again.

The target of the judges’ rulings were Combatant Status Review Tribunals, panels that determine whether a prisoner is an “unlawful enemy combatant” who can be tried by one of the commissions created by the 2006 law. The tribunals are, in fact, kangaroo courts that give the inmates no chance to defend themselves, allow evidence that was obtained through torture and can be repeated until one produces the answer the Pentagon wants.

On Monday, two military judges dismissed separate war crimes charges against two Guantánamo inmates because of the status review system. They said the Pentagon managed to get them declared “enemy combatants,” but not “unlawful enemy combatants,” and moved to try them anyway under the 2006 law. That law says only unlawful combatants may be tried by military commissions. Lawful combatants (those who wear uniforms and carry weapons openly) fall under the Geneva Conventions.

If the administration loses an appeal, which it certainly should, it will no doubt try to tinker with the review tribunals so they produce the desired verdict. Congress cannot allow that. When you can’t win a bet with loaded dice, something is wrong with the game.

There is only one path likely to lead to a result that would allow Americans to once again hold their heads high when it comes to justice and human rights. First, Congress needs to restore the right of the inmates of Guantánamo Bay to challenge their detentions. By the administration’s own count, only a small minority of the inmates actually deserve a trial. The rest should be sent home or set free.

Read the rest here (no subscription required).

In Bush's Constant Warmongering, We Do Unto Others As We Most Fear They Could Do Unto Us

So we can dish it out, but we can't accept that it be served to us? Isn't "Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto Us" part of the Bible? Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense and the crazed leader of the Pentagon/Defense Department, only thought he walked on water.

From TPM Muckraker:

Many of the controversial interrogation tactics used against “war on terror” detainees in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan are similar to strategies the United States feared its worst enemies would use against captured soldiers during the Cold War.

Time magazine catches this connection in a recently declassified report, "Review of DoD-Directed Investigations of Detainee Abuse,” that has received little media coverage.

The same potential enemy tactics the U.S. military trained forces to face during the Cold War became interrogation strategies used on enemy combatants.

You know how badly this will work; we've already seen it with the grisly and gruesome deaths (by torture, by decapitation/beheading) of some soldiers and aid workers.

Bear in mind that, while U.S. Attorney Greed4all er.. Alberto Gonzales called the Geneva Conventions "quaint", these rules about combat and treatment of the enemy was developed in large part to keep American soldiers safe. But we can't demand better treatment for our men and women GIs than we afford others.

Too Fat To Be Executed? 10 Tries to Kill A Man And You Blame It On The Convict?

This, from one of only five countries in the entire world to apply the death penalty to those less than the age at which they can enter into a legal contract (as in children less than age 18-21, often called "kids" as in "immature" and "not fully cooked"):

LUCASVILLE, Ohio (AP) -- Death penalty opponents called on the state to halt executions after prison staff struggled to find suitable veins on a condemned man's arm to deliver the lethal chemicals.

The execution team stuck Christopher Newton at least 10 times with needles Thursday to insert the shunts where the chemicals are injected.

He died at 11:53 a.m., nearly two hours after the scheduled start of his execution at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. The process typically takes about 20 minutes.

"What is clear from today's botched execution is that the state doesn't know how to execute people without torturing them to death," American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio attorney Carrie Davis said Thursday.

Red Cross: Israel Violates Humanitarian Rights

Sadly, this latest report - the conclusions of which have been echoed elsewhere for years, such as with Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and others - is no surprise. And, as long as Israel continues its inhumane treatment of Palestinians (and the U.S. keeps making certain Israel has the money and military might to do that), there will be no peace in the Middle East.

Our Own Tough Times: New Orleans

Although it's unlikely you heard about it (since it's no longer "fashionable" to cover New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there was a big demonstration in NOLA over last weekend because these folks are so damned far from being able to call tbeir beloved city worthy of habitation... at least, worthy of habitation outside big and wealthy neighborhoods and major concerns moving in to grab cheapened land.

Let me share a horrific statistic: NOLA was pledged something like $830 million by various countries to provide aid. To date, the Bush Administration's federal government has released no more than $40 million of this to NOLA. We know they have far more sitting there, and other countries keep asking Washington when they can send their money so it can be used.

(facetious mode on) I'm certain keeping the majority low income, people "of color" population from the funds they need, especially in light of a Democratic mayor and a Democratic woman governor, plays no role whatsover.

And if you believe the last paragraph, I've got some lovely "real estate" in the Ninth Ward to show you.

Progress? Now We Have Iraqis Beat and Torture Confessions From Iraqis?

I just don't see that ordering Iraqis to beat and torture Iraqi civilians into making likely less-than-truthful confessions is quite the progress, justice, and democracy we (allegedly) want for post-Saddam Iraq.

America's Own Hostages: Conditions At Guantanamo Bay Worsening

So says the BBC of Gitmo where Bush has kept hundreds of detainees, almost all Muslims, with only 10 people ever charged. The same detainees the Supreme Court played coward to this week knowing they could not legally protect the Bush Administration's inhumane treatment of these prisoners if they took the case for consideration.

And yet how the U.S. and Great Britain howled at the "terrible" treatment of the Brit sailor hostages Iran gave new clothes and gift bags to upon release yesterday. Yeah, we've got standing to talk about "inhumane treatment" all right.

Bob Herbert: "Indentured Servants In America"

Don't think for a minute that this abuse of poor, often immigrant, workers is few and far between. We have very rich folks, for example, who hire these folks only to then treat them like very real prisoners, locking them into the homes, forcing them to pay extravagant prices for small amounts of food and cigarettes, and making up phony "tax" and other charges along with lies to make sure their "employees" feel their very lives are endanger if they so much as walk out the door on their own.

Read all of Bob Herbert's column here or content yourself with my byte:

A must-read for anyone who favors an expansion of guest worker programs in the U.S. is a stunning new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center that details the widespread abuse of highly vulnerable, poverty-stricken workers in programs that already exist.

The report is titled “Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States.” It will be formally released today at a press conference in Washington.

Workers recruited from Mexico, South America, Asia and elsewhere to work in American hotels and in such labor-intensive industries as forestry, seafood processing and construction are often ruthlessly exploited.

They are routinely cheated out of their wages, which are low to begin with. They are bound like indentured servants to the middlemen and employers who arrange their work tours in the U.S. And they are virtual hostages of the American companies that employ them.

The law does not allow these “guests” to change jobs while they’re here. If a particular employer is unscrupulous, as is very often the case, the worker has little or no recourse.

One of the guest workers profiled in the report was a psychology student recruited in the Dominican Republic to work at a hotel in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The woman had taken on $4,000 in debt to cover “fees” and other expenses that were required for her to get a desk job that paid $6 an hour.

But after a month, her hours were steadily reduced until she was working only 15 or 20 hours a week. That left her with barely enough money to survive, and with no way of paying off her crushing debt.

The woman and her fellow guest workers had hardly enough money for food. “We would just buy Chinese food because it was the cheapest,” she said. “We would buy one plate a day and share it between two or three people.” She told the authors of the report: “I felt like an animal without claws — defenseless. It is the same as slavery.”

The rest is available here.

Thoughts On The Right's Huge Concern For Poor Scooter Libby While They Yawn At Abuse of Troops

If there's one thing we've all witnessed over and over and over again this week - besides the clip of the Florida medical examiner hinting we're not done with the titillating details of Tits-for-Brains Anna Nicole Smith - is that the far right Bushie loyalists have sobbed over poor, poor, poor Scooter Libby. They wail about:

• What a terrible miscarriage of justice has been done to him
• How a great patriot like Libby should never have to spend a moment in jail
• That the American people owe Libby a momentous debt of gratitude and that they should demand the jury's guilty verdicts against him be set aside, then carry the man in their arms to the White House where the Medal of Freedom can be bestowed upon him
• That the jury is treasonous for what they did
• That this is all the result of an evil plot hatched by Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame themselves and it's Wilson-Plame who deserve to spend the rest of their lives in jail
• Bush should pardon Libby immediately because it's what God wants

Gag me with a spoon! To say this again and again and again while they yawn and ignore the travesty of troop care by the Bush Administration - insisting only that this is hardly Mr. Bush's fault but taking no interest in the matter beyond that - while they work themselves into a righteous frenzy about poor millionaire Scooter Libby is really too much.

Go back and read the piece from Bob Herbert - "Lift The Curtain" - I just snipped from as well as some of the other posts I've had up in the last few weeks on the subject of troop care and abuse (and I first started posting about this more than two years ago; amazing that I could know about it while the Bush Administration and Pentagon and those heading Walter Reed, right there in Washington and their job TO know, did not...).

Then tell me which is the more important situation: poor Scooter Libby or men and women who have lost brain function, limbs, organs, and their lives for a cooked war and then rate nothing but squalor and poverty once they return home.

More Of The Bushies' Fondness For Others' Right to Speak

On the heels of the story of GIs being told to zip it, the magnificent MissM brings us this:

Facility Holding Terrorism Inmates Limits Communication - washingtonpost.com

The Justice Department has quietly opened a new prison unit in Indiana that houses a hodgepodge of second-tier terrorism inmates, most of them Arab Muslims, whose ability to communicate with the outside world has been tightly restricted.

::sigh:: and grrrrrrrr.....

Military Serving Wounded GIs A Nice Big Cup of "Shut The Fuck Up"

Editor & Publisher reports today that wounded GIs, such as those ensconced at Walter Reed Hospital, are being told to "shut up" to the press, lest they reveal perhaps how well (translation: miserably and shamefully) many of them are being treated once they make it out of Iraq and Afghanistan alive.

Oh yeah, boys and girls, the Bushies just respect the hell out of the men and women they send over to fight Georgie's war of empire while the Bush Twins slut and drug their way through the decade, largely at taxpayers' expense.

And this graphic is one I shamelessly lifted from Ole Blue the Heretic (hi, Blue!) because it was sadly extremely apt given this story.

The Mentally Ill: "A Little Torture in Michigan"

Monkeyfister points us to this terrible - and sadly, less and less unusual - story of a man with manic depression who very quickly deteriorated and died in prison custody, presented by CBS. Solitary confinement and restraints can "break" a healthy person in a very short period of time. Yet throughout America as well as in America's "secret" prisons and Guantanamo Bay/Gitmo, often with people charged with no crime whatsoever or as in this case, a mere shoplifting charge, law enforcement and military and quasi military organizations use these techniques that result in unbelievable suffering, permanent mental illness, and, with growing frequency, death.

You wouldn't imagine these days that a mental patient could be chained to a concrete slab by prison guards until he died of thirst, but that’s how Timothy Souders died and he is not the only one.

Souders suffered from manic depression. And like a lot of mental patients in this country, he got into trouble and ended up not in a hospital, but in jail. It was a shoplifting case and he paid with his life.

As correspondent Scott Pelley reports, no one would have been the wiser, but a medical investigator working for a federal judge caught wind of Souders' death and discovered his torturous end was recorded on videotape. The tapes, which are hard to watch, open a horrifying window on mental illness behind bars.

Six months ago, Tim Souders was in solitary at the Southern Michigan Correctional Center. He was 21, serving three to five years. Though an investigation would show he needed urgent psychiatric care, Souders was chained down, hands, feet and waist, up to 17 hours at a time. By prison rules, all of it was recorded on a 24-hour surveillance camera and by the guards themselves.

The tape records a rapid descent: he started apparently healthy, but in four days Souders could barely walk. In the shower, he fell over. The guards brought him back in a wheelchair, but then chained him down again. On Aug. 6th, he was released from restraints and fell for the last time. Souders had died of dehydration and only the surveillance camera took notice.

Thanks, too, to Scott Pelley and CBS News/60 Minutes for presenting a story that would otherwise have gone unnoticed by all but those who loved this young man.