No,Torture Does Not Work and It Did Not Get bin Laden

I should also point out that George W. Bush had all the time from 9/11 until leaving office to capture bin Laden. He didn't and one can't give him credit for something he did not do and that took place almost two and a half years after he left office.

Dick Cheney was cute, saying he could help by wonder whether the techniques that were put in place didn't assist in getting bin Laden. He knows damn well they didn't.

Even Don Rumsfeld told Newsmax that waterboarding had nothing to do with getting bin Laden.

Heritage Foundation, the group who did the math of Paul Ryan's budget, out out a paper,"Detainee Interrogation Key To Killing Osama bin Laden."

John Yoo, who believes the President of the United States can crush the testicles of a boy to make a detainee speak but can not force a contractor to reveal his political donations, said that "Without the tough decisions taken by President Bush and his national security team, the United States could not have found and killed bin Laden."

Karl Rove told Fox and Friends that 'rendition, enhanced interrogation, obviously served (Bush's) succesor well."

Until past American officials are brought to justice for torture, we are going to repeat this nonsense until I am senile and in a nursing home. Point number 1: the compound was unknown to anyone at Gitmo because it had not been built yet. Point number 2: the pseudonym of the trusted courier--not his real name--was discovered in 2005 ot 2006--years after the torture program at Gitmo was shut down. The courier's name was not gotten from KSM during his waterboarding sessions.

The historical fact of the matter is that the Bush Administration failed to protect the United States against the 9/11 attacks after having been briefed on the imminent threast posed by Al Qaeda to the mainland of the country. The Bush Administration failed dramatically to capture bin Laden and his cohorts at Tora Bora. For a good explanation of this, watch PBS' "Bush's War", which explains how the bureaucracies fought over Afghanistan. The Bush Administration quickly downgraded the hunt for bin Laden and discontinued the unit that was in charge of this mission in 2006.

So, the Bush Administration in my view deserves no credit--even an afterthought--for the murder of bin Laden. None of the great torture techniques produced any usable intelligence for this recent mission.

ALERT! SHARIA POSTPONED

Yes, I was looking forward to sharia law being imposed by our President. There would be no interest charged on credit cards and mortgages and car loans so the US could get out of this Great Repression rather rapidly. I admit my wife would have to wear a Burka for a while but in the name of getting out of debt I'm sure --not really--she'll agree.

Well, it seems that Missile Defense Agency really didn't change their logo. They just decided to print a three color logo for handouts and publications. 3 color was cheaper than 5 color. And no, the Obama Administration didn't do this. It was all ordered during the Bush Administration. So no, it really doesn't imitate the Obama campaign logo either. And if another military officer has to answer these crazy questions, yes, we will have no missile defense system. Can you imagine government officials having to answer this nonsense! They do all the time but still.

Horrendous News from Chile as a 8.8 earhquake rocks the country--that's said to be hundreds of times stronger than the one which hit Haiti. Early photos show places I remember well in Santiago destroyed. I'm beginning to take all these natural disasters personally. It's like my mental landscape is being destroyed bit by bit. The entire Pacific Rim is on Tsunami Alert and Hawaii is preparing to evacuate. Climate Change anyone?

South Dakota has passed a law requiring teachers to say that climate change is a scientific theory, not a fact and that there are many reasons for it--including astrological. So, it's the Year of the Tiger--hence alot of tsunamis and earthquakes. What about theological? Jesus is coming; these are the days of tribulation and rapture is around the corner.

Tony Perkins--not the actor, he's dead-- of Focus of the Family was booted from the president's prayer breakfast at Andrews Air Force base because he attacked President Obama after the state of the union address for wanting to get rid of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. The Catholic representative at such prayer breakasts said that Tony's religious rights were being violated, a constant theme of the religious right. I don't think this crowd would make great Christian martyrs--they're big bunch of whiners.

Rev. Wallis of the Sojourners finally woke up after a long nap. He finally expressed the religious view that the Republicans were wrong about health care from a theological point of view and that their favoritism to the rich over the poor and the lower middle-class was against the Gospel. Given the energy the Religious Rights has poured into the debate, I have wondered why normal Christians hadn't been more forthright in supporting health care and suppport for the poor. Hopefully, this is the first shot across the bow.

Meanwhile, Utah passed a law that " miscarriage was an act of homicide". 50% of all pregnancies in Utah end up in a miscarriage. Under this law, women will be prosecuted for what most consider a tragedy. Are there any women legislators in the state?

Arizona's Trent Franks weighed in yesterday that blacks in America now have it worse than under slavery. He claims that 50% of black children are aborted. Actually it's about 30% and we don't know the number of viable fetuses but that has never stopped the so-called pro-life crowd in tallying numbers. Pat Buchanan previously this year said the best thing to happen to blacks was being forced to come to America. And, somewhere, Randy Newman is playing "Sail Away".

I received a fund-raising letter from the Hannah Giles Legal Defense Fund, which claims that Hannah, who was the female partner of Mr. Acorn pimp on Fox News, is being hounded by Barack Obama's ACORN thugs. It's like Ollie North's great fund-raiser," Mu'ammar Qaddafhi wants me Dead! Send money." Hannah and her partner apparently are being sued for manipulating the videotape they showed and taping illegally. But what price do you put on Freedom!

With the tea party's about to celebrate their first anniversary, some smartass decided to create the Coffee Party. Count me in!

If we have lived through enough right-wing madness recently, the Tenthers are holding a national summit in Atlanta under the auspices of the Tenth Amendment Center, featuring great Patriots like Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice and gubernatorial candidate Roy Moore and Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano. This is the third of the conservative conferences which are called Obama Resistance conferences. Nearby the NAACP held a rally, which was greeted by members of the KKK. History never dies, like Faulkner said,"it isn't even past."

Some of the things the tenthers are against--federal highway system, health care reform, the New Deal, desegregation and the federal income tax. Tenthers assert the rights of states to secede from the union. Even Fat Tony Scalia, reactionary extraordinaire, wrote this month that the civil war ended these issues once and for all.

Thomas DiLorenzo will lecture on Abraham Lincoln as an enemy of the constitution, now saying that the first Republican President was the original progressive despot and that Jefferson Davis was a beacon of freedom, defending liberty. Thomas Woods, the author of the Politically Incorrect Guide to History, a popular book among conservatives, will talk about conservatives' traditional sympathy for the American south and its people and heritage. Dr. Woods was at the founding of the neo-Confederate Organization, League of the South,which advocates "independence of the Southern people" from the "American empire."

The Tenth Amendment movement has sponsored so-called "state sovereignty resolutions", which ,depending on the state, call for states to secede if the federal government intrudes any further on (you fill in the blank). Georgia's state sovereignty resolution called for secession that further infringements on the right to keep and bear arms, including prohibitions of type and quantity of arms or ammunition' would trigger secession. The resolution also reserved for Georgia the right to judge "how far the licentiousness of speech and of the press may be abridged without lessening their useful freedom". Similar resolutions have passed in Oklahoma, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Idaho, Louisiana and Alaska. Sarah Palin signed Alaska's bill right before she resigned office. And, of course, the Texas Governor Rick Perry is a Tenther.

The good news for all of us is that all the states who have signed so far received far more federal money than they put into the national treasury. So we could sue for past compensation and probably halve the budget deficit. We could prevent stimulus money from going to these states--none voted for president Obama--and we could start withdrawing major federal projects like NASA from Texas and created thousands of jobs in states with patriotic Americans. It's a win-win. As I told a Texan friend of mine, who was mouthing this nonsense, then Texas would become part of Mexico.

The Queen of the birthers, Orly Taitz, Moldovan, Israeli and American, has petitioned the United Nations Human Rights Council for protection against the American government. The crime was that a federal judge finally fined her $25,000 for her nonsense in filing all the nuisance suits on Barack Obama's birth certificate. The Free Republic drummed her out of the wingnut movement because she appealed to "world government", which is a step more evil than President Obama.

John McCain got off a smart ad attacking J.D. Hayworth as a birther. It would work anywhere but the very state he is running. Over half the Republican Legislators are birthers and they persuaded their party to vote a resolution that in 2012 Obama must produce his birth certificate in order to get on the ballot. Since this is a closed primary, John may become the first real victim of the birthers. But never fear John still on Meet The Press--once again--in an exclusive. I'm sure he will trash Obama because he needs to be more right-wing than Republicans in his state.

Charlie Crist claims he will not run as an independent in Florida as Marco Rubio amasses a large lead in the primary. Crist also hasn't backed down from accepting stimulus money. Neither did Arnold Schwartzeneggar. The CBO said the stimulus either saved or created 2.1 million jobs. The problem as I've said repeatedly and Paul Krugman and Bruce Bartlett,the father of supply side economics agreed, was that it was too small.

President Smartypants in his Saturday address said that if we all were as united as we are in routing for our American olympic athletes, we can pass health care. He said he would compromise if the Republicans would. (But the time is up on Wednesday--he didn't say that.) Nice touch--that's why I support the guy.

On the Human Rights front. The House has passed a resolution to assist Argentina through the release of documents about the " dirty war" to locate the dispappeared.

The deleted torture number 12 of the lawyers' memos from Yoo was "mock burial". Yoo also wrote that a President could order the massacre of villagers, crush the tesicles of a son of a detainee to make him talk, order troops into mainland America (hence the legal rationale for Dick Cheney's planned invasion of Buffalo, New York), and the fake burials of detainees. Rep. Nadler has sent these documents to the appropriate Bar Associations asking them to disbar both Yoo and Bybee.

Speaking of the massacre of villagers, human rights violations linger far beyond the time when they were committed. It has been twenty-four years since I was on the OAS' Human Rights Commission and one of the last situations I dealt with was the disappeared in Guatemala. Last year, some brave souls actually found lists and locations for the disppeared. While we were investigating these killings, we never could obtain any documents about who, where and why these people were killed. And this is extraordinarily rare--since repressive governments always document the killing of their enemies. Today, the Guatamala Forensic Foundation begins excavation of a cemetary where they believe over 200,000 bodies may be buried. These bodies are from that time over two decades ago. Yet their families never knew what happened to them.

Last week, neo-Nazis wanted to commemorate the firing bombing of Dresden, an awful event that provoked a series of sermons from my grandfather and a novel from Kurt Vonnegut, who was there. Even in Just Wars, criminal acts are done and human rights are violated. That's why one hopes to protect human rights. We don't want the people who would violate them in the future to embrace victims of the past as justification for their future deeds.

Now for some lighter news. Carly Simon has revealed that "You're so Vain" was written about David Geffen, who was infatuated by his new star Joni Mitchell. In my view, Joni's Geffen albums were the best musically she did--that was her jazz stage. Get well, Joni. She suffers from a truly horrible and grotesque skin disease that forced her to cancel touring and recording last year.

To impress your friends and family, I provide you with a bit of trivia I only discovered reading Patti Smith's Just Kids. For the hip among you, you'll remember the Holy Modal Rounders, who used to play with the Fugs. Their great song was "I've got a daughter, she's half-grown; jumps on a man, like a dog on a bone. Hey, Black-eyed Susie." Now their drummer was----the great playwright and movie actor San Shepard. I know you're thrilled.

I have not mentioned J.D. Salinger's death because frankly I never cared for him. OK, Catcher in the Rye was about adolescence everywhere. The interesting issue is how many books did he leave behind. Here we have a literary recluse whom we are told wrote everyday from dawn until noon and by letters in the mid-1960s we have been told he had at least two finished manuscripts. This could be a literary case where the author actually left behind more finished manuscripts than he ever published in his lifetime. It would mean his whole work would have to be re-evaluated. That's neat.

Finally, Wayne Newton. Yes, Wayne Newton, las Vegas entertainer and compulsive gambler, returned to Virginia this past week to push the state to recognize his Indian tribe, the Powhatans. While Disney can make a film about them, our government can de-legalize them as they have with many Indian nations. Strange as it seems, the Powhatans were legally obliterated and Wayne came to seek a correction to this injustice.

The Party of Fat,Ugly,Rich White Men

Rush Limbaugh has weighed in that Sotomayor is a reverse racist as is President Obama. Naturally, he says he hopes she will fail, too as he assures his audience that Obama is going to fail. Charles Krauthammer has already penned a column that the choice is identity politics. And the newest Philadelphia Inquirer columnist, honorary whiteman John Yoo, the infamous author of the torture memo and supporter of the unitary theory of the executive branch of radical constitutional thinking, slammed the nomination because of the empathy issue and the fact that Sotomayor doesn't have the liberal firepower to initiate a change in the court revolution begun under Reagan. He may be right about the latter case,which is why I supported the one-legged lesbian law professor.

First, the empathy issue--which Orrin Hatch said was a codeword for an activist judge. If you lack empathy, you are likely to fall under the psychiatric classification of psychotic. The idea that empathy in a judge is a vice shows you how Orwellian our political debate has become. Hopefully, at some point, the fight will break into the open on this and the whole "activist" myth. Does the conservative theology of the Supreme Court still hold sway among the population at large? The cost has been enormous. Currently, the United States holds more of its citizens in prison that the whole combined as prisoners. A frightening reality for the Shining City on the Hill.

If you want our institutions to look more like America, then is appointing people of color identity politics or to avoid this must you appoint people who disown their background? I can't tell. 50% of the legal profession now are women. From the list created for Obama's choices, there are many extraordinarily talented women capable of being Supreme Court justices. Will the next woman be considered identity politics?

Or is the real identity politics here being that Sotomayor came from poverty? Only two other modern Supreme Court justices came from poverty--Clarence Thomas and William Douglas.

The conservative noise machine is likely to rabble rouse on this decision for the simple reason it needs to raise money. But the last weeks have been instructive in demonstrating that nothing President Obama does will not encounter the strongest resistance from the entrenched interests and the defeated conservative establishment. What is almost universal is that Obama's conservative critics, for the most part, are seriously overweight, ugly and very wealthy. The visuals have been unpleasant with Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney, and Rush Limbaugh dominating the screen. Do you really want to belong to these guys?

The Week That Was

I have been inundated with materials concerning the DOJ release of the Yoo memos and the various arguments for a Truth Commission and the prosecution of Bush officials. Kudos go to Harpers 'Scott Horton for his piece " George W. Bush's Disposable Constitution". Matthew Rothschild in "We Came an Inch from Martial Law, Bush Justice Department Memos Reveal" in The Progressive is worth a read. Long-time Bush-basher Robert Parry writes in consortiumnews.com "How Close the Bush Bullet". The most worrisome news came from an anonymous Bush Administration official who said,"the worst is yet to come."

John Yoo is fighting back through the pages of the Wall Street Journal in his ope-ed,"Yes, We Did Plan for Mumbai-style attacks in the U.S." to justify his position on suspending the Fourth Amendment.

While the prominent papers gave due notice of the revelations contained in the released DOJ memos, the odds are slim to none that there will be prosecutions or even a Truth Commission. Leon Panetta this week reassured CIA agents involved in "enhanced interrogations" that they would not face prosecution. The Obama Administration would love to have this issue disappear since the prospect of proscution and investigations have produced a backlash in the national security community. It's enough in their mind to "move forward" and try to change strategy and behavior.

The real issue is that a full-scale assault on our democratic system can not be revealed to the public. If the full picture were really known such as the FEMA plans for concentration camps and the dictatorial powers of the Presidency, then the myth of America would be shattered. We had a similar situation during the Watergate Days, when the ambitious plans of Richard Nixon to reorganize the entire federal bureaucracy were conventiently left out of the investigation and debate. The same applies to the Clinton impeachment proceedings, which serious proponents argued should have been based on the extent of the White House's dealing with Mainland China and its agents. In that case, presentations by Bill Cohen and Madeliene Albright to former OSS man Henry Hyde killed that line of inquiry.

In the case of George W. Bush, Pat Leahy also voiced the intention to uncover the role of Democrats in enabling warrantless wiretaps and the suspension of basic liberties. As Dick Cheney hinted in his exit interviews, key Democratic leaders were briefed and OK's everything from warrantless wiretaps to torture. It's a classic case of greymail.

The American people have always given a sitting President a wide lattitude in conducting wars. As Bush supporters point out, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and FDR interned Japanese Americans. After the Civil War, the American Congress passed laws forbidding any of Lincoln's violations in the future and a large consensus has emerged in America that the internment of Japanese Americans was a blot on our history.

But these exceptions, to my mind, do not entail an Administration's own lawyers writing legal opinions that would justify a presidential dictatorship. What is curious about the DOJ memos so far is that their are no counter-arguments or hesitations registered in these memos--no admonitions that some of these positions should not be taken. There is no indication that other lawyers had inputs that may have reflected real constitutional thought and not the blathering of John Yoo and his compatriots.

Remember Congress gave George W. Bush permission to wage the war against terror with all means necessary. The Bush Administration took that literally and without any hesitation. While Democrats thought the war meant to eliminate Al Qaeda, the Bush Administration security types thought it meant all islamic terrorists. And another subset felt it meant to wage war on all organizations that might lend material or intellectual support to people engaged in terrorism. The latter gets you the Sierra Club on the terrorist list because its enviromental positions might encourage eco-terrrorists in the Pacific Northwest, even though there is no direct link. If the actual foe is not defined, this becomes a recipe for a totalitarian system.

Bits and pieces of this policy are all over the landscape and ,frankly, no one in public office wants to put it all together. Homeland Security providing evidence against anti-war activists in nearby Maryland to justify their surveillance is just a small example. No matter the justification of such policies and such loony things such as the Patriot Act, it is always useful to remember that such policies are always implemented at the lowest common denominator. Sheer force will always dominate over subtlety or a graduated response.

The conservatives are now in high dungeon on the prospects of investigations or prosecutions to avoid any blunt reflection on the vast extent of the Bush Administration's constitutional over-reach. One only had to witness the reaction by the right to Justice Kennedy's Supreme Court decisions months ago concerning the habeas corpus rights of Gitmo detainees. In fact, alot of the posturing now, including the frequent media appearances of Karl Rove and other Bush officials, is meant to be prophylactic against legal prosecutions. Expect more John Yoo op-eds.