Torture Follow-up and Other Matters

++Rachel Maddow last night reminded us of an awful truth about the torture program--it was run by young people who were inexperienced,was explicitly planned  by the CIA as a "torture" program even before they had any detainees,and the shrinks who created the program had absolutely no experience and got filthy rich. In their several media interviews,the shrinks thought it was odd that anyone ever believed they would get actionable intelligence from the program. 

++Andrew Sullivan again is on the warpath and rectally hydrates John Brennen for his lies during the press conference. You should read as Andrew walks down each case the CIA claimed were thwarted or prevented by the torture program. In each case, someone or something else thwarted the plot--never torture.

++The dance Obama is making on this issue to avoid accountability is the legal promise to the CIA in general that when an agent asks for a legal opinion he or she expects that she will be protected if the answer is that it is legal. A sort of Nuremberg Defense. The international community is unanimous in saying the individuals must be investigated and tried for the violation of the Geneva Conventions. 

++The Issue gets even muddier when you consider Justice Scalia claims that torture is not prohibited in our constitution. However, I would humbly submit that the Torture Convention is a treaty and as such is the law of the land or superior to the law of the land,according to our own constitution. 

++We will torture again until we take steps to prohibit it . The reason is that torture is one of the new profit centers of the military-intelligence-terrorist complex. 

++And now for something completely different, the attack on the Franks-Dodd restrictions on derivatives could make you as a taxpayer responsible for $303 trillion in derivatives if the market collapses. Elizabeth Warren got it right that the wording was word for word the language provided by Citigroup. My criticism is that she didn't make the stakes as explicit to the American people of what this little amendment means to our lives.