How much mendacity are we expected to just....take???

I honestly don't know how many more things like this I am expected to absorb and still retain my sanity.

In December of 2002, when military trainers arrived at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp to train interrogators, they built their entire class around a chart that spelled out the effects of "coercive management techniques" and how those "techniques" might be employed against prisoners at the camp. The torture methods detailed on the chart included exposure to extreme temperatures, prolonged constraint, and sleep deprivation.

What the trainers did not tell the budding Torquemadas sitting in rapt attention was where that chart originated - and what disgraceful company Americans would all to soon be keeping.

Perhaps they were unaware - and if so that is a deplorable commentary in and of itself. But that chart they now used as a training tool had a nefarious, infamous origin. It was compiled by communist China as a how-to template for breaking United States Air Force personnel captured in Korea, designed to secure confessions, whether they be real or imagined.

The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Albert D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been “brainwashed,” and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies’ harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.

In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after reviewing the 1957 article that “every American would be shocked” by the origin of the training document.

“What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,” Mr. Levin said. “People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.”

No, we sure don't. False intelligence gets us, among other things, a never-ending war in Iraq. The chart was verbatim to the half-century old template save one word...The original was titled "Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance." The version used at Guantanamo wisely dropped the word "Communist" from the header.

A spokesman for the Department of Defense, Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Ryder, refused to speculate on the etiology of the chart, but also seemed to be trying to put some distance between the Gates Pentagon and the Rumsfeld Pentagram. “I can’t speculate on previous decisions that may have been made prior to current D.O.D. policy on interrogations,” Colonel Ryder said. “I can tell you that current D.O.D. policy is clear — we treat all detainees humanely.”

Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who also studied the returning prisoners of war and wrote an accompanying article in the same 1957 issue of The Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, said in an interview that he was disturbed to learn that the Chinese methods had been recycled and taught at Guantánamo.

“It saddens me,” said Dr. Lifton, who wrote a 1961 book on what the Chinese called “thought reform” and became known in popular American parlance as brainwashing. He called the use of the Chinese techniques by American interrogators at Guantánamo a “180-degree turn.”

The current occupant of the oval office has insisted that the use of torture has saved American lives and prevented terrorist attacks against this country, but that amounts to asserting facts not in evidence, or as they call it in the common vernacular "just making shit up." That is what your president does, America. He is a thug, a punk and a low-class cretin, and he has dragged you down with him when you didn't protest his perfidy and his propensity for being a lying sack of shit.

His bloodlust and thuggery, and willingness to play fast and loose with the rules has led to the dismissal of charges against one of those so-called worst-of-the-worst who might actually be a bloodthirsty, murderous terrorist!. The harshest interrogation inflicted at Guantánamo was reserved for Mohammed al-Qahtani, a member of Al Qaeda suspected of being the intended 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks. Terror charges against Qahtani were dropped suddenly and unexpectedly about six weeks ago. Officials at the time said the charges might be refiled at a later date, but declined to say whether the decision was influenced by concern about Mr. Qahtani’s treatment.

Another detainee, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, an alleged member of al Qaeda who stands accused of playing a major role in the bombing of the American destroyer U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000, was charged with murder and other crimes two days ago. In previous hearings, Mr. Nashiri, who was subjected to waterboarding, has said he only falsely confessed to being involved with the bombing because he was tortured.

A few years ago I said in a fit of pique that I did not spend my entire fucking life fighting the cold war, only to pave the way for a worse brand of authoritarianism and thuggery to take over here at home - and I was dismissed as being melodramatic and histrionic. Well, I was right. And I was not only not being melodramatic nor histrionic - I might actually have been understating the case.

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

At least 42 57 people have died today, making Easter Sunday one of the most violent days in Iraq in several months.

The warlike tenor of the day was set early, when Katyusha rockets started raining down on the heavily fortified Green Zone. No one was killed, but still in all, it's a rude awakening on a Sunday morning. A second barrage was volleyed about four hours later. Personnel were warned to "duck and cover" and stay away from windows as mortars and rockets were lobbed toward the international zone throughout the day. At least five people were killed by Katyushas that fell short of the Green Zone.

In the Shiite city of Hillah, an American base was barraged by mortar fire, but American forces did not respond to a request for comment about the attack. Although there was no comment, there were also no reports of injuries or deaths.

Iraqi soldiers in Mosul were not so lucky, and did not escape unscathed. A suicide bomber penetrated the security perimeter of an Iraqi army base in a tanker truck and detonated himself in a courtyard. The blast killed thirteen and injured forty-two more. Iraqi and U.S. forces have been engaged in operations in Mosul to root out what U.S. commanders are calling al Qaeda's last urban stronghold in Iraq.

Elsewhere in the north, a roadside bomb killed five Iraqi soldiers in Kirkuk, which has seen growing unrest and sectarian strife in recent weeks.

Back in Baghdad, at least seven shoppers were killed when gunmen traveling in three cars opened fire on a marketplace in the Zaafariniya neighborhood. At least sixteen more people were wounded. The gunmen fled the scene, they were neither killed nor captured.

Elsewhere, in the Shula district of Baghdad, a suicide bomber killed five people lined up to purchase gasoline.

In Samara, a suicide bomber plowed into the home of a tribal leader and killed three people.

Yet on every single Sunday chat-show, there was some damned republican jackass or another telling us how it was all going swimmingly, the Surge™ has been a spectacular success, and we have victory in our crosshairs.

Ah well, I guess it's okay on balance, since lying was one of the sins their Jesus died on the cross that they might be forgiven for. Right?

935 Administration Lies = 3931 Dead Americans

A recently-concluded study by two independent, non-profit journalism organizations, The Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism, has pinpointed 935 specific instances of the president and members of his administration lying to advance the narrative pushing for a war with Iraq. the study concluded that the lies peddled were "an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."

On at least 532 occasions, administration officials stated adamantly and unequivocally that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

"It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al-Qaida," according to Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism staff members, writing an overview of the study. "In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003."

Named in the study along with Bush were top officials of the administration during the period studied: Vice President Dick Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan.

Bush led with 259 false statements, 231 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 28 about Iraq's links to al-Qaida, the study found. That was second only to Powell's 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq and al-Qaida. (emphasis added)

The center said the study was based on a database created with public statements over the two years beginning on Sept. 11, 2001, and information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches and interviews.

"The cumulative effect of these false statements - amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts - was massive, with the media coverage creating an almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war," the study concluded.

So - four Americans who stepped up to serve have died for every lie these feckless bastards told. So far.

Yet Nancy the Nattering Nabob still insists that impeachment is off the table.

So how about the gallows? Can we apply them yet?

It's enough to piss off Pollyanna herself!

On the day that House and Senate negotiators reached agreement on legislation that will codify in law the prohibition of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation torture methods when interrogating suspected terrorists; CIA director Michael Hayden came clean and admitted that the CIA had destroyed video evidence of "harsh interrogation techniques" employed in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah (yet another top lieutenant of ObL - but aren't they all?) and another unnamed suspected high-ranking al Qa'eda member. (Zubaydah is one of three suspects who has been identified as having been waterboarded. Waterboarding, in case you have been under a rock for the last two years, is not just a "dunk in the water" as that bastard Cheney so glibly put it. It is controlled drowning.)

From the Washington Post:

All the tapes were destroyed in November 2005 on the order of Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the CIA's director of clandestine operations, officials said. The destruction came after the Justice Department had told a federal judge in the case of al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui that the CIA did not possess videotapes of a specific set of interrogations sought by his attorneys. A CIA spokesman said yesterday that the request would not have covered the destroyed tapes.

The tapes also were not provided to the Sept. 11 commission, the independent panel that investigated the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which demanded a wide array of material and relied heavily on classified interrogation transcripts in piecing together its narrative of events.

The legislation hammered out on Thursday will, in essence, make the Army Field Manual the last word on acceptable interrogation methods.

It also sets up a battle-royal between congress and the candy-assed, draft-dodgin' coward, Chimpy McWarPorn.

Of course, he is threatening to bravely veto the bill.

The spin coming off the decision to destroy the tapes is almost enough to create it's own gravitational field. The spooks doing the torturing are identifiable, and would be criminally liable. Period.

The spin is that the tapes present a security risk. "Beyond their lack of intelligence value -- as the interrogation sessions had already been exhaustively detailed in written channels -- and the absence of any legal or internal reason to keep them, the tapes posed a security risk," Hayden said. "Were they ever to leak, they would permit identification of your CIA colleagues who had served in the program, exposing them to and their families to retaliation from al-Qaeda and it sympathizers."

This, children, is what is known in the common vernacular as a bullshit story.

The CIA is in the business of keeping secrets, and of protecting their employees and the families of their employees (well, unless you are Valerie Plame Wilson, then you are Fair Game, but I digress.) They could most certainly secure a couple of videos. What they were scared of was the long arm of the law as the earth erodes beneath the feet of the feckless, and the fifth horseman (Accountability) appeared on the horizon. The tapes were destroyed because they likely contained evidence that could land former GOP congressman and CIA chief Porter Goss in the slammer, and Donald Rumsfeld might be in the next cell.

I am left with but one thought as I mark off another day of life under the inept, corrupt and floundering Bush regime...thank god these bastards are incompetent to their very core. You only think we are screwed now - If they had the savvy to pull off a two-car parade, then we would really know from screwed.

Can we impeach Cheney now?

So - the administration has known for a year that all sixteen intelligence agencies have determined that Iran halted their nuclear weapons program in 2003, but that little bit of inconvenient truth did not deter Cheney from not only advocating for another illegal war, one that would possibly (probably) use nuclear weapons, but he didn't stop there - he also attempted to stifle the report and tried to get the parts they didn't agree with stricken.

Remember how, a couple of months ago, the meme changed? Resident Evil said that the Iranians couldn't be allowed to have the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon. In October, aWol gave a dire warning about WW III if Iran obtained a nuclear weapon, and the warmongering old prick vowed "serious consequences" if the Iranians didn't (re)abandon their nuclear program. (It's all very cartoonish, in a tragic way. Remember your Looney Tunes? Bugs: "Batten down the hatches!" Buster:"I did! I did batten 'em down!" Bugs: "Well batten 'em down again. We'll teach those hatches!")

Gareth Porter pointed out a month ago that the NIE was being held up. (h/t Kevin Drum)

A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear programme, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers.

But this pressure on intelligence analysts, obviously instigated by Cheney himself, has not produced a draft estimate without those dissenting views, these sources say. The White House has now apparently decided to release the unsatisfactory draft NIE, but without making its key findings public.

Cheney got his knickers in a twist over more than the nuclear part of the NIE. He was also furious that there was no conclusive evidence that the Iranians were meddling in Iraq and arming Shiite militias.

So, congresscritters, especially you, Nancy Pelosi, read the god-damned NIE for yourselves, and then riddle me this:

Is it enough yet? Can we please make with impeaching the warmongering, pathological old prick? We can't risk another year with this psychotic madman at the levers.

Where I come from, they call lying to a senate committee “Perjury”

Two years ago, when AG Abu G went before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify on behalf of not letting the Partiot Apostasy Act sunset, he looked the Senators in the eye and lied. Blatantly and flat-out, he chose to not tell the truth to the Senators impaneled before him. He assured the lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent new terrorism-fighting powers. "There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse," Gonzo insisted.

Except – that was a lie, and he knew it when he told it. Less than a week before (even his notoriously feeble memory should go back six days) the FBI had sent a copy of a report to Gonzalez, and that report confirmed that agents had obtained personal information that they were not entitled to possess. That report was one of at least a half dozen that detailed abuses of the Patriot Act that had been received in the three months before Gonzalez appeared before the panel to lie his ass off. The reports he conveniently ignored detailed instances of “unauthorized surveillance, an illegal property search and a case in which an Internet firm improperly turned over a compact disc with data that the FBI was not entitled to collect, the documents show. Gonzales was copied on each report that said administrative rules or laws protecting civil liberties and privacy had been violated.”

Additionally, the reports detailed the abuse and over-use of the specious anti-terror tool, the national security letter (NSL). This was well before the Justice Department's inspector general brought widespread abuse of the letters in 2004 and 2005 to light in a scathing report this past March.

You might recall, this was all happening about the time they were touting him as a possible successor to the Supreme Court – which given what we know now and they knew then is especially sickening. Jolly Roberts and Scalito are bad enough – can you imagine a Supreme Court with Bush’s Chihuahua enjoying a lifetime appointment? I’m reaching for a valium at the mere thought…

So – have you had enough yet? It is time to bring these feckless traitors to heel.

To that end…

It's time to

ITMFA!!!

Some free advice to Lindsey Graham, et al - saying it doesn't make it so

Three Blind Lice

There seems to be a tremendous disconnect between the die-hard war supporters and reality.

On the one hand, you have Lindsey Graham drinking deep from the Raspberry Red and stepping up to the mike to declare that things in Iraq are definitely looking up. “The military part of the surge is working beyond my expectations,” Graham said. “We literally have the enemy on the run. The Sunni part of Iraq has really rejected al-Qaida all over the country. We’re getting more information about al-Qaida operations than we’ve ever received.”

It’s hard to tell, the way objectives shift and goalposts get moved, but I seem to recall that the purpose of the escalation was to secure Baghdad, and on that point the numbers do not lie. Violence in Baghdad is not appreciably down. In fact, 2% is a mere blip, and certainly not statistically significant. Between 20 June and 5 July, 472 civilians died in attacks in Baghdad. This represents a whopping 2 percent drop in civilian casualties from the previous 16-day period, according to a tally collected by the Associated Press from daily reports by Iraqi security and hospital officials.”

Just a brief perusal of the major news outlets would indicate that Graham is either delusional at best, or flat-out lying at worst. I’m going with the lying until proof is submitted to the contrary.

From Reuters:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Car bombs and mortar attacks killed 50 people in Iraq, police and local officials said on Saturday, while the U.S. military said six of its soldiers had been killed in the past two days.

One British soldier was also killed in the south.

The fresh violence follows a lull in Iraq, where tens of thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops are on the offensive against insurgents in a bid to halt a slide into sectarian civil war.

And the Washington Post:

BAGHDAD, July 7 -- Suicide bombings across Iraq killed nearly 150 and injured scores, including a massive truck assault in a northern Shiite village that ripped through a crowded market, officials said Saturday.

The violence came as the U.S. military on Saturday reported the deaths of eight American soldiers over the past two days, all killed in combat or by roadside bombs in Baghdad and the western province of Anbar. A British soldier was reported killed in fighting in southern Iraq.

The worst carnage unfolded in the Shiite Turkoman village of Amarly, 50 miles south of Kirkuk, when a suicide bomber rammed a truck laden with explosives into the central market, which is near a police station, officials said. The attack killed at least 115 people and wounded at least 210, according to district and hospital officials, adding that they expected the death toll to rise.

And finally, from the New York Times:

BAGHDAD, July 7 — Suicide bombers killed at least 122 people in two attacks north of Baghdad, officials said Saturday, and the strikes raised questions about whether insurgents who had fled intense military operations in Baghdad and Diyala are turning to more vulnerable targets nearby.

In the worst blast, a truck loaded with explosives demolished dozens of fragile clay-built houses and shops on Saturday in Amerli, a village of poor Shiite Turkmen about 15 miles south of Tuz Khurmato. The Iraqi police said the blast killed 1o5 people and wounded 210 more.

The American military also reported Saturday the deaths of nine soldiers and marines on Thursday and Friday, eight of them during combat or from roadside bomb attacks.

Witnesses in Amerli described a horrific scene of people running while on fire, and others shrieking for rescuers to pull them free from beneath scores of buildings that were turned into rubble by the blast.

Perhaps Lindsey will do us all a favor and next time he visits Iraq and conduct one of his patented pep-rallies outside the Green Zone, in the middle of Baghdad – without two Apache gunships, three Blackhawks, an entire company of U.S. soldiers surrounding him – and enough body armor to pass himself off as a body double for RoboCop.

If he did that, I might, for a couple of minutes, stop bitching about the stupidity of these dog-and-pony-shows when potentates visit the “troops in the field” to “get the real story” – oh please! You can take my first-hand account on this – any “troop in the field” who might be inclined to say something the potentates don’t want to hear, doesn’t get anywhere near the potentates. These trips are a waste of taxpayer money, and for what just one of these junkets costs, at least ten teachers could be trained for placement in inner city schools, and a couple of doctors for inner-city hospitals, too.

And I can tell you something else first-hand…when the word comes down from on high that a dignitary is coming, the cursing is voluble and eye-rolling is blatant...even from the commanders making the announcement, in a lot of cases. I can only imagine the reaction of troops in a war zone.

Fred Fielding Goes Long

Okay, buckle up and grab the dashboard. The route of Republican logic (snort at that oxymoron) we are about to traverse is as twisted a path as any Missouri two-lane blacktop.

White House Counsel Fred Fielding has sent along a letter ‘splainin’ why the White House is refusing to let Sara Taylor and Harriet Meyers testify if there is any record of the exchange.

Writes F²

"Obviously, there has been a lot of discussion back and forth in that regard. The position that the president took and conveyed to the committees and the offer of compromise did not include transcripts. The accommodation was designed to provide information, not to appear to be having testimony without having testimony. One of the concomitants of testimony, of course, is transcripts.

"As far as the debate goes, often cited is that a transcript is not wanted because otherwise there would be a perjury trap. And, candidly, as everyone has discussed, misleading Congress is misleading Congress, whether it's under oath or not. And so a transcript may be convenient, but there's no intention to try to avoid telling the truth." (emphasis added)

Perjury trap? Are they planning to lie?

I guess if you are a part of this freakshow, it’s better to be assumed a liar than to open your mouth to prove it.

Sara Taylor was overheard explaining to a friend at lunch that “orange makes me look sallow.”