"Torture, Torture Everywhere But Don't You Make A Peep"

[Ed. note: You can find a much longer post on this torture case documentary, and on the torture brouhaha itself, at All Things Democrat, here and here including Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia insisting that, despite the Constitution's 8th Amendment, we shouldn't prohibit torture - (the fat bastard, why does he HATE America and our Constitution so much?).]

The longer the far right and the Bush Administration keep insisting that torture is a "good thing" (I suspect they'd like to torture Martha Stewart, too, since I believe she votes Democrat) while they condemn anyone, anywhere, at any time for questioning its legality, morality, the future repercussions of as well as the accuracy of the information obtained from those we extraordinarily rendition, the more important it becomes for each and every one of us, as American citizens and taxpayers to learn all they can.

Unfortunately, one very good tool to understand the dynamics of torturing detainees, even very innocent ones grabbed up by mistake everyday, is an independent documentary entitled, "Taxi To The Dark Side", has been pulled from the broadcast schedule of The Discovery Channel which bought the rights to show it. "Too controversial" is the only reason given.

To suggest that Americans should not see what is being done by their own government, especially given how loudly and aggressively we have prosecuted other war criminals (and yes, I consider Bush-Cheney two of the largest of all time) for using torture, is almost as obscene as the act of waterboarding and other forms of torture itself.

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.

Another Government Probe Of Itself That, Like The 9/11 Commission And the Torture Probe, Won't Amount To Jack Shit

My only question here is, "Why even bother?"

While some seem ready to applaud that the Justice Department announced this evening it WILL (ha!) investigate the willful destruction of the two known CIA torture tapes a judge ordered those under the Bush Administration involved in the matter NOT conveniently destroy, to me it's just another sad, piss poor example of the fox being allowed to investigate the case of chickens murdered in the hen house when it was one of the Fox's minions (in this case, the CIA with marching orders from the fox) who arranged not just the initial crime but the destruction of the evidence.

We see this again and again - hardly new to the Bushies yet they have taken it to ridiculously extremes as they have everything else - as when the Pentagon investigates its own.

This, my friends, is beyond criminal. And, as Bush would smirk and smug-it-up as he tells you, there's not one damned thing we can do to stop it while, at the same time, we know exactly what the results will be: nada, zap, ZERO. At best, they'll point to some very insignificant, powerless peon, throw the book at him while they feed him to the wolves, and then pretend it never happened.

Some democracy. And the new Attorney General Michael Mukasey can control everything this special prosecutor does and, as we've seen with his strange ignorance regarding torture and the American Constitution, he'll prove himself a loyal Bushie regardless of his distinctly token status as an alleged Democrat.

Bush And His Medals

Can't get anything past Bush, who awards the vaulted Medal of Freedom to a great-grandma who runs her own Guantanamo Bay-style prison in the basement and spent Halloween waterboarding toddlers who wet themselves.

Actually, he's giving it to Harper Lee, author of "To Kill a Mockingbird" - decades late, of course, and a safe choice since even many Republicans these days think blacks should not be lynched for absolutely no reason. Not Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity, of course, but still, more than a few dozen GOPeers. ::choke::

Repugnicants Love Torture - So Long As It's Done To Others

Much of the time, it's easy to believe you've heard it all, that nothing else can shock you.
But listening to MSNBC later Monday night, in a discussion of AG Nominee Mukasey, the way he's hedging on whether something like waterboarding is torture or not (gee, what is it if not torture?), and how this is making "a sure-fire nomination" into a testy affair, my "delicate sensibilities" were once again tested.

The offender in this case in Michael Reagan, the adopted son of former U.S. president Ronald Reagan, a right-wing talk show host who has always played very desperately into the extreme right fold because he knows he possesses neither the brain power nor the pizzazz to be anyone in his own right. Reagan, making fun of Sen. Lindsey Graham, a GOPeer himself - for having the nerve to question the Bushies' insistence that God WANTS America to torture anyone Muslim (or Dem or Progressive), uttered something like, "heck, the only thing we can be sure of is now we'd like to see Lindsey Graham waterboarded."

Nice. Really nice.

Michael Reagan has always sickened me. But this is a new low, even for him. That anyone in this country is even advocating torture - let alone making it sound like something fun to do to those who disagree with them - tells us a lot about the very wrong direction in which this country has been taken.

Terrorists on 9-11 didn't destroy our way of life - our leaders did it, and any of us who stood up and declared they could take away any rights or liberties or human rights protections from us just to keep us safe destroyed our way of life.

Why, oh why, do the extreme righters - and surprise others like Alan Dershowitz - hate America so much?

Confession Is Good For The (Bush) Hole?

Another absolutely right-on Jeff Danziger cartoon, this one (from March 16th) on the strange "confessions" by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who admitted to being a 9/11 mastermind, the Madrid train bombings, stealing candy from a baby, and making Michael Jackson become a sexual pervert (just to name an unlikely few). Mohammed, as you may recall, is one of our "poster children" for torture, with Rumsfeld and Cheney coming out saying that "waterboarding" is good (as opposed to the experts, who agree that torture-based admissions aren't worth the paper they're written on).