Evolution From Left To Right - 6

The south has risen again ... at least as regards the U.S. Senate.

The map to the left shows the trend.

Any challenges to the trend will be handled in the First Interstate Starchamber of Amurka, previously designated as the FISA court.

One thing that the new right-wing star chamber will not do is the required prosecution for torture, even though it is in our law so clearly that once upon a time even police officers were indicted and prosecuted for doing water boarding (President Reagan Puts Cheney In Jail).

But now, we have devolved from that kinder and gentler place to the far right, where now the police can murder in open public and not even be charged by state officials.

A place where international treaties and US laws against torture are systematically ignored:

Readers don't have to go far into the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report before their stomachs start to turn. Detainees pushed to the edge of death, threatened with sexual assault, made to wear diapers and force-fed by way of a rectal tube -- and that’s just in the first few pages.

But despite the gruesome details, nobody at the CIA or in the military has been prosecuted for any wrongdoing related to the brutal interrogations. And it doesn't appear that's about to change.

It's up to the Justice Department to decide if legal charges should be brought. Beginning in 2009, John Durham, a special prosecutor appointed by Attorney General Eric Holder, looked into allegations of people being mistreated while in the custody of the U.S. government after the 9/11 attacks and ended up conducting two criminal investigations. But the Justice Department declined to prosecute in either case on the grounds that the admissible evidence wasn't sufficient "to obtain and sustain convictions beyond a reasonable doubt," according to a department spokesman.

(No Torture Prosecutions, cf. Torture is a Crime). Officials in the agencies that did the torture lie about it in public, on camera, without accountability.

Public figures such as Cheney and Bush II are in denial about there being anything wrong with them torturing people.

Meanwhile, drones that are piloted and navigated from Nevada kill innocent people (and perhaps some guilty people too) even as the current Obama administration sees nothing wrong with that (we don't know if those victims are innocent or guilty because they are not charged and tried as our constitution requires, rather, they are blown to bits).

All this is a stain upon the reputation of the U.S. and its people, which makes foreign policy much more difficult.

The loss of reputation comes at a time when we are clearly in decline in other areas (Phases Of An Empire Freezing To Death - 2, Economic War Of The Pacific - 4, Another Sign of Another Layer in the Oil Wars? - 2).

The elephant in the room is that the Senate Torture Report is written history posing as oversight, yet we know that true oversight must be at least done in real time, but it's even better when there is foresight in the oversight.

Otherwise, it is as if the ship of state is being steered by looking in the rear view mirror to see where we have been, instead of steering by looking out the front wind-shield to see where we are headed (Titanic Mistakes Using The W Compass).

This kind of psychotic official thinking is what destroys the fabric of once-healthy societies, because good governing requires vision and good morals.

The world is quite aware of the situation and has spoken out in public demanding a prosecution of those who did torture or aided and abetted it:

The summary of the Feinstein report which was released this afternoon confirms what the international community has long believed – that there was a clear policy orchestrated at a high level within the Bush administration, which allowed to commit systematic crimes and gross violations of international human rights law.

The identities of the perpetrators, and many other details, have been redacted in the published summary report but are known to the Select Committee and to those who provided the Committee with information on the programme.
...
It is now time to take action. The individuals responsible for the criminal conspiracy revealed in today’s report must be brought to justice, and must face criminal penalties commensurate with the gravity of their crimes.

The fact that the policies revealed in this report were authorised at a high level within the US Government provides no excuse whatsoever. Indeed, it reinforces the need for criminal accountability.
...
It is no defence for a public official to claim that they were acting on superior orders. CIA officers who physically committed acts of torture therefore bear individual criminal responsibility for their conduct, and cannot hide behind the authorisation they were given by their superiors.

However, the heaviest penalties should be reserved for those most seriously implicated in the planning and purported authorisation of these crimes. Former Bush Administration officials who have admitted their involvement in the programme should also face criminal prosecution for their acts.

President Obama made it clear more than five years ago that the US Government recognises the use of waterboarding as torture. There is therefore no excuse for shielding the perpetrators from justice any longer. The US Attorney General is under a legal duty to bring criminal charges against those responsible.

Torture is a crime of universal jurisdiction. The perpetrators may be prosecuted by any other country they may travel to. However, the primary responsibility for bringing them to justice rests with the US Department of Justice and the Attorney General.

(UN Official: Prosecute “Systematic Crimes and Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law”, emphasis added). Some Americans who have followed the situation are more harsh than the U.N. official:

From now on, the US is a human rights violator of the first order under international law, a rogue state that has explicitly tortured innocent people and never held anyone legally responsible. I know that sounds terribly harsh. But how is it untrue? And to refuse to prosecute war crimes is to condone war crimes. Not burglary or robbery – but the gravest crimes against humanity that we can imagine. The perpetrators walk among us, many still in the CIA, and some holding presidential Medals of Freedom. Whatever absurd self-congratulations about this report, we should be in no doubt that this makes us no better in this respect than some South American junta before the transition to democracy.

(How Obama Backed Impunity For War Crimes, emphasis added). Has the U.S. now evolved so far to the right that it is now a refuge for war criminals and the MOMCOM of ISIS (Isis: the inside story, How Neocons led US to war in Iraq)?

The previous post in this series is here.

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"Revolution", The Beatles (lyrics)

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Toxins Infect The Department of Just Us

This is the story about how the toxins of power, in Alice in Wonderland fashion, converted or morphed the concept of "torture" into the concept of "holy enhanced interrogations".

We can thank Representative Conyers, who has posted various DOJ documents on a website, for not swallowing that tea flavoured kool-aid.

The release of those documents precede his scheduled congressional hearings to oversee the DOJ meme complex.

He wants to get at the bottom of this white-wash of war crimes.

The original investigation by the DOJ meme complex, during the Bush II regime, produced a report that was strongly critical of John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Steve Bradbury.

As an example, here is a quote from the original report section that focused on Bybee:

Commentators, law professors and other members of the legal community were highly critical of the Bybee Memo. The Dean of Yale Law School characterized its authors as "blatantly wrong" and added that "[i]t's just erroneous legal analysis." Edward Alden, US Interrogation Debate, Financial Times, June 10, 2004 (2004 WLNR9744181). A past chairman of the international human rights committee of the New York Bar Association stated that "the government lawyers involved in preparing the documents could and should face professional sanctions." Id. A law professor at the University of Chicago said: "It's egregiously bad. It's very low level, it's very weak, embarrassingly weak, just short of reckless." Adam Liptak, Legal Scholars Criticize Memos on Torture, New York Times, June 25, 2004 at A14. In the same article, an expert in international human rights law at Fordham University commented, "The scholarship is very clever and original but also extreme, one-sided and poorly supported by the legal authority relied on." Id.

(Original Draft, page 2). Nevertheless, Bybee was rewarded handsomely for his poor scholarship with a lifelong federal judgeship, as millions of Americans who do not agree with Bybee lost their jobs, homes, health, and respect for DOJ.

Bybee was one of the original three stooges for the Cheney torture pig-circus who wrote memos of sophistry to try to morph the obvious into the oblivion of double-speak.

When it was clear where the original DOJ report was going, Dick Cheney came online in the main stream media doing disinfomercials promoting torture.

His delusion is that torture, in the form of waterboarding, is the only way to public safety.

Recently the apex of that delusion was reached when he admitted, on national TV, to promoting and advocating waterboarding until it was being done "regularly" (is 83 times a month on one individual regular?) during the Bush II regime's reign of madness.

That onslaught, mixed with the timidity of the Obama administration, Senate mindlessness, along with the spoon-fed deceit of the media, put pressure on the DOJ.

Finally the DOJ decided to waterboard the original report until it was watered down into a McJustice version scolding the bad boys for "misjudgement".

No biggie that hundreds were tortured with waterboarding, as a result of their memos, it was just poor judgment; and never mind that the DOJ during Ronald Reagan's presidency prosecuted republican Texas Sherrifs for waterboarding.

The premise that toxins of power spread within a meme-complex more readily than in the general populace seems to be vindicated by this DOJ narcissism.

Mourning Joe Takes Law Off The Table

The current Attorney General, like past AG's, took the oath to be the people's lawyer, and has now appointed another prosecutor, who is a republican, to dig into the matter of the illegal torture of detainees:

In appointing a prosecutor to investigate alleged CIA interrogation abuses, including episodes that resulted in prisoner deaths, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Monday shook off warnings from President Obama to avoid becoming mired in past controversies.

(Washington Post). I will not go over these torture issues that have been discussed on this blog in a series of posts.

This morning on MSNBC's Morning Joe, the apologists for the Bush II regime are taking law off the table.

They do not want anyone prosecuted for war crimes, so they are calling the use of the laws, that have been on the books for decades, a witch hunt.

It is ok to torture because that saves babies in Kansas is the mantra of the mythology of these unabashed neoCons.

The reality that escapes Mourning Joe because the sycophants, like Pat Buchanan, who MJ likes to have around constantly, are always saying "yep yep yep" to MJ's gyrations of fact and principle.

Eugene Robinson, the prize winning journalist from the same newspaper, has a more sound understanding of these matters:

I'm under no illusion that George W. Bush or Dick Cheney is actually going to be prosecuted by the Justice Department. But I want to know -- and I believe the nation needs to know -- the full, unvarnished truth of what they and others did in our name. It's probable that painful scrutiny and lasting disgrace will be the only sanctions that Bush and Cheney ever face. But history demands at least that much.

(Washington Post, Robinson). The university professors and political scientists know that history and common sense teach that without accountability there is no democracy and no rule of law.

If you take the law off the table you have taken the United States' famous "rule of law not rule of men" off the table, which is very unpatriotic.

Flood Of Prosecutions A Cover Up?

We are told that a flood of prosecutions may be coming for those who have done financial wrongs which led to our current financial demise.

I hope I am not being paranoid for worrying about whether those prosecutions will become cover ups or become place holders for some of the other serious crimes that have outraged the public.

Do we want that type of pacifier which lets the warsters off the hook while going after only the banksters?

Crimes like lying to us about practically everything, wrong wars, missing war money, torture, Plame outing, destroying evidence, politicization of the DOJ, obstruction of justice, secret rendition, and contempt of congress, to name a few.

Oh, I know that "the economy is fundamentally sound" types of fraud and deceit should be prosecuted too.

It is just that the other should not be forgotten because they tended to destroy our form of government, while the financial crimes tended to destroy the economy.

Every country has an economy, even China and Darfur, however the greatest value we have is our American constitutional way of life.

We must protect it with a signal to despots here that they will be prosecuted for those types of crimes too.

For Real - Iran Launches A Satellite?

If this is true what does it portend?

Israel must be very nervous, Secretary of State Clinton must be very nervous (because Israel is trigger happy), and the rest of the Obama Administration does not need these distractions at this time.

I can't believe at the moment that a country which fought eight years with Iraq when Saddam Hussein was Iraq's emperor (neither gained one foot of territory, not one village was captured, and not one victory either could point the world to as a sign of its glory) did this satellite thingy "homegrown".

Iran vs. Iraq in their last war killed each other for eight years, during that war, while standing in place. They are not the brightest bulbs in the chandelier you know.

So what is up with this? Was it Russia, China, North Korea, or all of the above, who gave Iran the gadgets to pull this off (assuming it happened)?

Are they all getting a little "jiggy wid it" because of our post Bush II woes these daze?

Are You Charged Up?

The American people were safe from Nixonian Corruption for many years after Nixon was nixed. One reason is that many of his cronies and partners in crime went to jail.

The same must be done to those who participated in the Bush era crime spree which makes the Nixon crime spree look like a picnic.

For instance, there is already two DOJ reports that show bushies broke the law abundantly. The Obama administration is wrong if they think it will all go away if we ignore it.

Let us not forget that democracy demands accountability now and forever.