This Country Doesn't Torture

Yeah Right, and Pigs Fly, there really is a Santa Claus and 27 virgins wait just on the other side of the Pearly Gates.

Give Us Freakin' break, you little dim bulb

…even when our own partisan Justice Department, eager to obey our sociopath commander in chief, secretly says we can.”

I honestly don’t know why Dana Perino even tries, anymore. She has about as much credibility as a whore that says “I love you” and she can’t even come up with denials that sound any different than the lockstep drumbeat we were hearing about torture back in 2005.

It had come out yesterday a 2005 secret torture memo that was written, surprise surprise, right after Gonzo was installed as Attorney General, seems to contradict the 2004 anti-torture memo written by Ashcroft's Justice Department, the one piously held up by the Bush administration as the standard to which they still adhere.

CIA spokesman George Little said, as did Bush today, that all these “enhanced interrogation techniques” have “produced vital information that has helped our country disrupt terrorist plots and save innocent lives.” Uh huh.

Which neatly explains why Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff has been reduced to going by his “gut feelings” about future terrorism attacks.

Which neatly explains this:

After 9/11 the Bush Administration called in 80,000 foreign nationals for fingerprinting, photographing and "special registration" simply because they came from predominantly Arab or Muslim countries; sought out another 8,000 young men from the same countries for FBI interviews; and placed more than 5,000 foreign nationals here in preventive detention. Yet as of September 2007, not one of these people stands convicted of a terrorist crime. The government's record, in what is surely the largest campaign of ethnic profiling since the Japanese internment of World War II, is 0 for 93,000.

Which neatly explains why many of the so-called terror plots that have been stopped were actually Three Stooges plans to blow up buildings and airports by Muslim al Qaida wannbes who are no more affiliated with any known terrorist organization than college Republicans are with the Department of Defense.

Which neatly explains why two of the biggest convictions of which we can boast are those of Jose Padilla and Richard Reid, two bozos who proved to be as incompetent at overthrowing our government as the Bush administration was in overthrowing Saddam’s Ba’athist government.

The predictable spin from the White House is that neither 2005 memo, especially the secret one, officially supplanted its Dec. 2004 predecessor that banned torture, calling it “abhorrent.”

Naturally, this beggars the following responses:

If the secret 2005 memo was never intended for official policy purposes, then why commission it in the first place? Who commissioned it? And why had it been kept hush hush for 2/12 years before its existence (if not the text) had to be leaked to the NY Times?

No matter how many times you add it up, no matter how you try to fudge the math a la Arthur Anderson, a thinking person has to come to the same conclusions based on the facts and a rough, basic timeline.

A Justice Dept. memo from 2002 (the infamous Yoo memo) specifies that anything goes in an interrogation as long as it doesn’t result in organ failure or death (which, if accepted as legal fact, and if one were to completely ignore every one of the Geneva Conventions, would still leave the door open to bastinado, waterboarding, branding, thumbscrews, bamboo shoots under the fingernails and all sorts of wonderful, exciting versions of the FBI-preferred face-to-face, patient, repetitive questioning that actually produced results).

The 2004 memo banning torture in the Ashcroft/Comey era was looked at as a liability by the White House. Beset with legal “challenges” such as the use of torture, the sacking of the 4th amendment, the persecution of non-loyal Bushies, and the Executive branch’s relentless attempts to get the JD to see things the Bush/Cheney way, Ashcroft resigned or was forced to resign.

In comes Alberto Gonzales, a career, professional Bush bootlicker who’d already signed off on a torture memo as chief WH counsel and got Bush to do the same. If you ever needed a man not nearly as interested in following the rule of law as he is in blindly following the rule of the only man who has ever employed him in his entire legal career, then your man is Alberto Gonzales.

Considering the Chang and Eng Bunker relationship between Bush and Gonzales, it’s astounding in retrospect at how completely this symbiotic arrangement got by the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee during the confirmation hearings. These are largely the same Democrats, mind you, who are appealing to Peter Keisler and Mukasey both to turn over the secret memo. My guess is that Keisler the motherfucker's reason for stonewalling Congress this time around will be the Justice Department's investigating of the writing of the memo and we cannot hand over documents that are being investigated, blah blah. How much you want to bet?

Immediately after Gonzales’s installation as Attorney General, this memo relaxing torture guidelines is quietly written in invisible ink. In the process, John Ashcroft is now hailed by conservatives and liberals alike as a champion of constitutional rectitude by conspicuous relief, a neat trick indeed considering Ashcroft's own record if left to stand on its own.

The following year, the Military Commissions Act is passed by the still-honeymooning-with-Bush Congress, a bill that threatens to victimize American civilians if they, too, are disloyal Bushies who don’t see things the Bush/Cheney way.

Now they're trying to get us to believe that they didn't, in fact, pull some rock-for-treasure, Indiana Jones switcheroo and substitute the '04 memo for the first '05 memo, in essence resurrecting the draconian Yoo memorandum of '02.

Reading the NY Times article, one is astounded to read time and again that the people who were doing the actual torturing were constantly nervously appealing to the DOJ for guidance and advice in what they could or couldn’t get away with. Finally, the Yoo memo was circulated in 2002, essentially giving the CIA carte blanche to do whatever they wanted, short of “organ failure or death.”

Yet dozens of “terror suspects”, admits the Pentagon, died despite our tender ministrations. And we're supposed to forget all about the Sy Hersh article from 2004, expunge from our memories the pictures from Abu Ghraib, the ones taken during the same time John Yoo said they could torture to their hearts' content.

As a postscript to this story, I have to say that it‘s sad state of affairs indeed when Democrats have to sign something like the American Freedom Pledge promising to defend the Constitution (and maybe I’m misinformed but didn’t they already do that when they took the oath of office?) and to declare that we do not torture.

Hillary Clinton signed the petition. Finally.

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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.