Innocent, Tortured, Human Being Freed

The Bush II regime is "proud to have water boarded" according to Dick Cheney.

I wonder if that goes for a famous captive at GITMO of whom it is said:

"He was deemed innocent of all charges relating to the participation in eventual terrorist activities by judicial decisions in several countries, including the United States," Chevallier said. "Now that he is free, we hope that Lakhdar Boumediene can resume a normal life." ... said French Foreign Ministry spokesman Eric Chevallier ...

(HuffPo, emphasis added). An innocent man tortured to elicit lies to cover up the despicable crimes of a mad, corrupt, and despicable Bush II regime.

The Supreme Court had ruled in Boumediene's favor in the past. The courts seem to be getting it that the Bush II regime was a pathological liar.

But is the Bush II regime now being protected by an Obama Administration gone awry?

I hope not. Good for the Obama Administration for releasing an innocent person!!!

This is also a microcosm for the condition the United States was left in by the Bush II regime; the U.S. on a stretcher asking the rest of the world for help ... e.g. money from China.

The Obama administration will not be able to change most of the chronic sickness of the society by becoming Ferengi on steroids.

R.I.P. Rubber Stamp Congress

Once upon a time, there was a rubber stamp congress which failed the American people again and again.

That infamous and spineless body would not stand up as the U.S. Constitution required of them:

"Congressional Republicans have become little more than rubber stamps for their twice-indicted leader, Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas)," Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Illinois) said November 3, 2005, in The Hill. "By blindly following DeLay and President Bush, these members of Congress are complicit in the flawed stewardship of this nation. Republicans in Congress are putting their rubber-stamp approach to politics ahead of the priorities of the people they represent. Meanwhile, the American people are crying out for relief."

(Source Watch). Once upon a time there were two elections after the congress became a rubber stamp, and the rubber necks were removed by the irate voters who found the congress to be disgusting.

I like the way Nancy Pelosi wants to stand up to the crooked CIA and resist the tendencies of Barack Obama to break his word and his faith with the voters.

Obama is being seen more and more as a phony who either lied to the American voters or who is becoming corrupt faster than usual. Stop it Mr. President.

Now we the people demand that the congress stand up to the democratic president Barack Obama; do your job. Help keep him safe, sound, and sane by standing up to him face to face.

Stand up to the Bush Sicks as well. End the friggin' wars already and close Guantanamo, as we voted that you should.

DO NOT become a rubber stamp or there will be another "Once upon a time" post on this blog telling about how both the democratic and republican sham political hack parties faded into the sewer of infamy.

The title of the post will be "Good Riddance".

9/11 Conspiracy Theorists Take A Hit

The conspiracy among 19 Arab terrorists mostly from Saudi Arabia, to fly airliners into buildings in New York and Washington, D.C. on 9/11/01, is the official conspiracy theory of the official 9/11 Commission formed by the U.S. Government over a year after the disaster.

One of the officials of the 9/11 Commission who advocated for that official conspiracy theory, Phillip Zelikow, went to work for the U.S. State Department after the 9/11 Commission broke up.

He testified yesterday before a Senate Judiciary Sub-committee that he wrote memos arguing against torture and that it was illegal, but was ordered by other officials in the Bush II regime to destroy the memo and all copies.

He has also stated that he now thinks 9/11 testimony elicited from some individuals, which is part of the official 9/11 record, may have come to the committee through resort to torture.

Zelikow is talking about torture being done before the 9/11 Commission was even formed on 11/27/02. Another Bush II regime official dates it:

What I have learned is that ... the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 ...

(Washington Note, quoting Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson of the State Department). This is consistent with reports that the Bush II regime was also illegally spying on Americans well before 9/11 ever happened.

The Bush II regime in 2002 first tried to link Al Qaeda to Iraq well before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It quoted a detainee who is now said to have "committed suicide" in a Libyan prison this week.

This surprised some officials who had recent information that the detainee was in good health and no problems were expected:

The story of the detainee, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, became a major embarrassment for the Bush administration after disclosures in 2004 that he had been the principal source for widely cited claims by the White House that Saddam Hussein had provided chemical - and biological-weapons training for Al Qaeda operatives. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Libi recanted his entire story, asserting that he had made it up in order to stop his abusive treatment by interrogators in Egypt —­ where he had been shipped by the CIA under the agency's controversial "extraordinary rendition" program.

(Newsweek). Information is surfacing that orders from Dick Cheney's office directed that al-Libi be tortured until he "revealed" links between Al Qaeda and the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.

That was done and al-Libi "revealed" such links, which the CIA at the time disputed. The detainee al-Libi recanted to Red Cross investigators not long after giving the information to Egyptians who were torturing him then at the behest of the CIA.

Why did the Bush II regime begin to monitor the opinions and statements of millions of Americans 7 months prior to 9/11? Why so soon after 9/11 was the Bush II regime trying to pin some of the masterminding of the 9/11 attacks on Saddam Hussein in Iraq?

Some of the "9/11 truthers" who do not buy into the official conspiracy theory say it was to divert guilt for those attacks away from the Bush II regime, whom they say were the real guilty parties, and to see how well the catapulting of the propaganda was working.

These "truthers" have varied professional backgrounds and are divided as to whether the Bush II regime actually participated, or were just doing such a heckuva job that even cavemen could attack the U.S. using commercial aircraft.

The truthers make a reasonable argument that either way the Bush II regime would have wanted to cover up their own guilt, if they had any such guilt.

If there is evidence of a cover up it would be evidence of a notion of guilt on the part of anyone participating in that cover up.

One reason supporting that argument is the possibility that the 19 young Arab conspirators also did the building demolition through highly sophisticated explosive weapons.

In such a case, there would be no need for anyone else to cover up by framing Iraq, or anyone else, if those 19 Arabs accused of doing it were the ones who actually did it.

Of course it is serious if Dick Cheney ordered torture for any reason, and especially so for political reasons or to frame someone else for his own errors.

UPDATE: Tonight (5/18/09) on Rachel Maddow, MSNBC, Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson focused a bit closer and said he has information showing that al-Libi was tortured in February of 2002 (a month earlier than the torture of others mentioned above).

February 2002 is over a year before the invasion of Iraq, 9 months before the 9/11 Commission began, and a relatively short time after the 9/11 attacks.

Col. Wilkerson went on to say that this torture had absolutely nothing to do with protecting from future attacks, but instead it dealt exclusively with linking the 9/11 attacks to Iraq.

It is clear that for some reason they were uncomfortable and needed to make a link to Iraq, and so they intensified the torture until al-Libi "revealed" the link.

Al-Libi said he made it all up to stop the torture.

UPDATE 2: The British Government ordered some redacted documents be un-redacted which reveal the Bush II regime was torturing a British citizen prior to the 9/11 Commission being formed.

When There's Nothing Right Left To Do

The evolution of partisan crime is emerging as the retrograde age settles upon us.

Our concept of law that crime is not a political issue is fading as our nation morphs into infamy.

The republican senators in a senate hearing yesterday expressed the opinion, mantra style, that prosecution of war crimes is something the democrats thought up as a political stunt.

Never mind the evidence.

If members of the Bush II regime flagrantly violated our law, contained in treaties we faithfully signed, it is partisan, Sen. Graham contends, to want to prosecute them for those crimes.

What is next, apportioning crime in liberal or conservative columns? Crime is a partisan notion?

Which column does bank robbery, murder, arson, fraud, war crimes, or tax evasion go into?

These types of debates, with the world looking on, show how wise James Madison and other of our forefathers were.

They warned of the tyranny and poison of war; we have ignored their wisdom and sought swill instead, and we have reaped the whirlwind of fools as punishment:

Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.

War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.

In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.

The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manner and of morals, engendered in both.

No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war, a physical force is to be created; and it is the executive will, which is to direct it.

In war, the public treasuries are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them.

In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle.

The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.

(James Madison, 4th President, Bill of Rights author, Congressman, Cabinet Member, also called the "Father of the U.S. Constitution"; above quote is from his "Political Observations," April 20, 1795, in Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, Volume IV, page 491, emphasis added).

A contemporary artist has some verbal imagery which might apply to the Roman Empire and to the U.S. Empire:

Ring them bells St. Catherine
From the top of the room,
Ring them from the fortress
For the lilies that bloom.
Oh the lines are long
And the fighting is strong
And they're breaking down the distance
Between right and wrong.

(Ring Them Bells, emphasis added). If the best we can do is to narrow the distance between right and wrong, but misname it "bipartisanship", then the best we can do is to pervert justice.

Maureen Dowd has the gift of the golden tongue on this matter.

The Surge Of Snap Sergeants

When Bill Gates and Colin Powell are morphed into one savy sergeant by military doctrine, then sent to strange war zones which their nation does not support, they are going to suffer internal damage.

Damage of the type that will last their whole lives; damage that will spread to others; to family and to friends. They will have to struggle against becoming IED events when they return to the "homeland", and they will have to struggle for a long time.

One sergeant did not make it long enough to return from Iraq because he snapped at the door of the mental treatment clinic.

In a bizarre form of "friendly fire" he took out 5 or so other soldiers also suffering from what James Madison called our worst enemy.

One of the sergeant's fellow soldiers, the commander in Afghanistan, was recently removed for covering up "friendly fire" and using that murder for propaganda purposes instead.

It is time we relocated these men to the true America, time we gave them liberal amounts of treatment, and time we have them stay home a long time.

Voodoo Interrogations - Torture

Bush I brought us the slogan "voodoo economics" and his protégé Bush II brought us the actual voodoo economics we still suffer from.

Bush II also brought us voodoo interrogations which we also still suffer from.

These voodoo interrogations, which in street English are called "torture", are slated at this time to become advocated politically and a plank in the GOP election platform.

These people think that you can put anyone on the water board and torture information out of them which information they do not have. It really is a belief in voodoo magic. Lets call it slack magic.

If people do not have information they cannot give it, no matter how many of their arms and legs Agent Orange tears off.

They will scream out information and it will be "useful", because it can be "used"; can be put in a bureaucratic file somewhere entitled "what does it mean Alfie", but it is not factual.

Come to think of it, facts never were that big of a deal in the "catapult the propaganda" Bush II regime.

Perhaps their next election sound byte to accompany their new torture plank will be "votes don't matter, principles do".

You can bet that the next election cycle textbook will have a chapter "How not to be a viable political party in the United States".

I hear that there is a GOP game to replace monopoly which they call "Panoply" which will replace "Water Works" with "Torture Works".

The Emperor's New Clothes

The business suits that generals wear when they work in the federal government contrast greatly with their camouflaged military uniforms.

But is the real camouflage cloth showing through so that we can now see what General Eisenhower was warning us about?

What president James Madison was warning us about?

We spend more on arming ourselves to the teeth and then talking peace than all the other nations of the world added together.

That is, add up the money each nation in the world spends on military weaponry and it is $123,000,000,000 less than what we, one nation, spend on preparation for war.

This does not pass the smell test.

GOP Strategy - To Prove Torture Works

The GOP spokesmen Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh do not want any moderates within the GOP.

So, they will no doubt be successful in that effort, because of their new doctrinal push to prove torture "works", and to prove it with "missing", "classified" documents that Dick and Rush say the bad guys won't give them.

Why can't they prove it works with logic if it really is that good? Is it because they know it does not work to accomplish the mission of bringing democracy and peace to the world?

Are they in effect saying "if you want peace and democracy in the world you must torture and make war"?

If so they have a tough case to prove, because peace and democracy were around before Dick and George started torture; it is just that they did not recognize it.

Consider the case which commences a torture session. A case where you do not know something. Where you have no idea whatsoever about a subject but you have a suspect in custody.

Lets put it in cowboy movie mantra mode like that portrayed in the song "Along Came Jones":

I plopped down in my easy chair and turned on [FOX news]

A bad gunslinger called Salty Sam was chasin' poor Sweet Sue

He trapped her in the old sawmill and said with an evil laugh, "If you don't give me the deed to your ranch I'll saw you all in half!"

And then he grabbed her ... (and then)

He tied her up ... (and then)

He turned on the bandsaw ... (and then, and then ...!)

(Along Came Jones). Lets add a couple of facts to the story, the first being that we are the CIA and Agent Jones is on the case. We have Salty Sam's buck board driver Dirty Dick in our custody.

Dirty Dick delivered a leather parchment with a demand written on it, from Salty Sam, which said "Give me what I want or Sweet Sue is a goner".

The problem at hand is that we don't know the location of the threatened future crime so we can attempt to stop it.

We don't know where Salty Sam is holding Sweet Sue (add scary music here).

The story goes that things are happening fast, fast, fast, that we must act quickly or else. We do not have "normal time".

The theory of conventional interrogation is to try to find some good cloud floating around in the head and soul of Dirty Dick. We tell him "you will be a murderer too, it is not worth it, come over to the good side", and that sort of thing.

We try to turn the tide quickly by using the same pressure Salty Sam used, by making "there is no time" statements to him.

If Dirty Dick comes clean we can test his statements by a quick high yo silver ride to the scene of the crime and hope we win the shoot out with Salty Sam.

The rationale for torture goes like this. If Dirty Dick won't talk we do not have time to deprive him of sleep for 11 days. No, we must torture now. So we get out the water board and the water.

In some amount of time after a few sessions, perhaps an hour, Dirty Dick is screaming and coughing and gasping for breath and when near death he blabbers something out.

"Stop and I will talk" Dirty Dick screams, coughs, gasps, and blabbers. We warn him that he gets more if the does not tell us where Sweet Sue is being held by Salty Sam.

But we do not even know if Dirty Dick knows where Sweet Sue is. If Salty Sam is worth his salt he would not have told Dirty Dick that information.

And we would not know whether to believe Dirty Dick or not when he says "I do not know where Sweet Sue is!" when he ask him where she is.

He tells us she is being held in a place other than the old mill because he really does not know. We do not know if he is telling the truth or not, and would not know if it was the truth either if he said the old mill. Neither would he.

We simply have no way of knowing, just by the fact that Dirty Dick tells us anything, whether the information is valid.

How do we ever know a criminal is telling us the truth if we do not have enough information to test the information we are given? To prove it?

Do we all of a sudden simply have faith in the bad guy being tortured when we didn't have that faith in the bad guy when we were on better terms before the torture?

Who says torture creates good faith we can believe in?

Anyway, the only way any information can be believed or disbelieved is to test it.

So we send Barney out to the location Dirty Dick gave us. Barney rides out and then rides back after a while. He is empty handed so we start up on Dirty Dick again.

The point is that we have no way of knowing when the torturer is telling the truth and when he is not unless and until the information is verified.

If we know nothing about a suspect whom we have paid someone to say bad things about, which is what happened in many Afghanistan cases, we really don't even know what questions to ask.

The question "where are the bombs hidden?" is a useless question unless the suspect is a bomb maker. Even if we ask him first "are you a bomb maker" how do we verify any of that type of questioning? We don't really know whether he says "yes" or "no" if he really is a bomb maker. Much of the subject matter cannot even be approached with torture, much less resolved.

In the case of Dirty Dick maybe an ex girlfriend, who was jilted, tells us he is a criminal and is a cohort of Salty Sam.

How do we know how to verify the information at the investigation stage? Do we just believe any accuser who says anything? In the world of competent investigation everything must be verified before acting upon it. It is a proven technique to avoid wheel spinning or wasting time.

And when suspects are from a country we know less about by far than our own country, the situation is all the more difficult, requiring more verification.

The GOP will never convince me they are telling the truth, now, when they have not been doing so for the past decade. They developed a reputation for lying led by Cheney and Bush. I certainly would not believe any information they gave while they were being water boarded.

They are just like a suspect who could not be trusted in the first place, and especially if tortured, cannot be trusted to give valid information.

There are better ways to find out what the GOP is up to. It does not take a lot of intelligence to see through them.

Like the terrorists, their agenda is no secret that can only be discerned with a gallon of water and a dirty old bandana.

UPDATE: The sequel Voodoo Interrogations - Torture is now available.

Thanks For The Bailout America - Dubai

We reported that Dubai received billions of dollars in TARP bailout money, while building some of the largest and most costly construction projects on earth.

Now they are purchasing many aircraft from Boeing.

We pointed out connections between that area, Swiss bank accounts, and AIG that are quite mysterious, unless of course you know how the robber barons were removed from the scene.

It would seem that children in Dubai, where Halliburton moved its headquarters, have a better upbringing than children in Afghanistan and Pakistan who are now fleeing and becoming refugees.

This is deja vu all over again, and reminds many of the mid-east curse one gives to an enemy: "may the bushies bring you freedom".

Mourning DOH! & The Eye In The Sky

Can one be an effective journalist while mourning about not having seen the two past election whippings coming, not seeing the minds and hearts of the American people he claims to inform, and not seeing past the mental barrier located at the tip of his nose?

DOH! is a word Homer Simpson has the sense to say, but Joe Scarborough of MSNBC's Morning Joe has not attained to that level of enlightenment.

Today he is, instead, psychotic about Dick Cheney, who is also psychotic about Dick Cheney.

Dick and Joe have been wrong about the past two revolutionary elections, and every issue those two elections turned on. And they wallow in that wrongness.

It is a spectacle I tend to look in on, every day or two, because dinosaur cognition is fascinating to me. How they think, reason, and conclude (never in that order) is amazing.

Like watching a horse walk backwards. I tend to imagine that the rush I get from it is like the java rush a clinical psychologist gets when he comes across a textbook case.

To Joe Joe, an eye in the sky is one of them thar flying choppers doing carnage somewhere, to "purtek" the 20% of Americans they hope to continue to influence in a wrong headed direction.

On the other hand, eye in the sky to others who call themselves journalists, is keeping an eye on what is really a grave danger to us, the Sun.

When we design our GPS, power grid, energy of choice, and other national security related systems as if the greatest danger to us was some cavemen in the mountains somewhere, we are the supreme DOH!

The master DOH! wasting dough and rewarding the ideologically blind as if they were the headlights.

The Phallic Sun And The Sexy Universe

"The universe is expanding" and "the Sun is going to expand out past the earth" are the current teachings of our science.

Cosmologists, astronomers, and scientists of all kinds have a saintly phallic predisposition that everything is expanding.

The "bubbles" in the dot com, real estate, and now bailout debt scene have all been called "expanding" at one time or another.

I watched one cosmologist on a "The Universe" show recently using a giant bubble toy in a major downtown city. He was making large bubbles while explaining and expanding these theories out to the maximum.

He was saying that there are "bubble mulitverses" of co-existing bubbles of universes expanding all over the place all of the time; and that we are going to find them soon.

I understand why the textbook publishers loose patience with these fellows from time to time, and especially physics students and professors.

I mean aren't there already countless used book stores with enough obsolete scientific textbooks in them; textbooks which have become obsolete because experimental facts come along and pop the current bubble?

The reality is that when the orgasm or "pop" comes along for these bubbles, the recession or depression universe theory becomes popular once again. At least with economists. Some textbooks then become an endangered species again.

I am not going to argue that we need more women in science to balance out this equation because that much is clear.

But I am going to argue that it seems that neither the homeland nor the world at large are paying full attention to our bubblyosophy.

The destruction of the entire planet earth is at the heart of the expanding sun theory, not just our homeland. But not enough folk seem to think that matters very much. It is just another orgasmic "pop" in the picture, just par for the "of course"?

As The Home world Turns is not a movie with global appeal any more, so one can legitimately wonder if our science is still the science of all the planet or is it for our own homeland consumption alone?

All life on this planet is doomed says our science. But we do not live our lives like that science really matters. How can we be taken seriously then?

But our homeland religion is beginning to get the blame for its doomsday ideology, so someone is paying attention to that. What gives?

Is the world just not reading or believing our scientific text? Are they all focusing instead on our religion because it is more compatible with theirs? Why is it becoming worldly to get mad about religious doomsdays, while exonerating scientific doomsdays?

Is the Bill Maher effect expanding?

Excuse me while I kiss the sky ... oooh la la ... I gotta go figure.

Expansion and growth may be synonymous or at least related enough that the post about 100 years of psychoanalysis may be an appropriate add-on to this thread.