How is this America's Problem?

The Uighurs at Gitmo are not terrorists. Even the Bush Administration found them not to be enemy combatants. And yet the consequences of their wrongful detention at Gitmo isn't America's problem, according to the beautiful mind of Newt Gingrich:

"WALLACE: Well, let me get -- let's take one example, the Chinese Uighurs, Chinese Muslims...

GINGRICH: Right.

WALLACE: ... who were arrested in Afghanistan, brought to this country. The Pentagon says they're not enemy combatants. At least one federal judge has said they're not a threat. But if they go back to China, they're going to be prosecuted.

GINGRICH: Why is that our problem? I mean, why -- what -- if the -- if the -- what -- what is it -- why are we protecting these guys? Why does it become an American problem?

WALLACE: So what, send them to China and...

GINGRICH: Send them to China. If a third country wants to receive them, send them to a third country. But setting this precedent that if you get picked up by Americans -- I mean, the Somalian who was recently brought here who's a pirate -- I mean, if you get picked up by the Americans, you show up in the United States, a lawyer files an amicus brief on your behalf for free, a year later you have citizenship because, after all, how can we not give you citizenship since you're now here, and in between our taxpayers pay for you -- this is, I think -- verges on insanity."

This verges on insanity, just not the way Gingrich meant.

And we wonder why the rest of the world grew to hate America during the Bush years.

DailyShow Nails Cheney/Bush - Was Bush President?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Excuse Me Your Dick Is Out
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

The Cheney quote they provide at the end makes the case that Dick Cheney was the acting President when it came to matters of National Security. Let us never again elect such a lightweight.

KO Takes Down Bill-O on Torture

Once again, Keith-O catches Bill-O wrongfully turning our friends into War Criminals. If you recall, he did the same thing with our own soldiers in WWII, when it was in fact the Nazi's that perpetrated the crimes at Malmedy he accused our boys of committing.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Once again, Keith is indispensable.

Waiting for the Attack...

If you look at Al Qaeda's timing, a striking pattern emerges which makes perfect sense in light of their strategic goals.  Remember, bin Laden said:

"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah," bin Laden said in the transcript.

He said the mujahedeen fighters did the same thing to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, "using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers."

"We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," bin Laden said.

He also said al Qaeda has found it "easy for us to provoke and bait this administration."

Al Qaeda thinks they won the Cold War, thank you very much!

In order to achieve these goals, they need reactionary, traumatized Presidents.  Therefore, they strike at the beginning of President's terms.  They were founded in 1990, and their first attempt to destroy the World Trade Center came in 1993, at the beginning of Clinton's term.  Clinton dealt with the pressure brilliantly - prosecuting and imprisoning those responsible.  Who knows what his reaction would have been if they had succeeded in bringing down the tower, however.

Bush, we all know, watched as 9/11 occurred 20% into his first term in office, and he did not handle it nearly so well.  He played right into bin Laden's hands, giving him the economically draining and Muslim-radicalizing war he wanted.

So, the question is, when is Obama's attack scheduled?  It'll come in the first year, if the pattern holds.

... Unless, of course, the terrorists see what I do in this young President.  I don't think he'll play into their hands the way our Cowboy President did, so they might be better served in waiting to attack in Q2-Q3 2012, thereby removing him from office in the elections.  If I were them, that's what I'd do.  Obama is never going to serve their strategic goals.

RedState Checkin

Here's an interestingly dumb story from Redstate:

LATimes: Obama’s New Muslim Appointment is Hope… for Egyptians?

I will begin this right at the top by saying that I don’t care a whit if the appointment of any American official brings hope to Egyptians. After all, an American official should be concerned with America’s interests not Egypt’s.

...

However, apparently the L.A. Times thinks that it is germane to U.S. interests that Egyptians are “rejoicing” that President Obama has appointed a female American Muslim to his administration. In, “Muslim woman’s appointment as Obama advisor draws cautious optimism” from April 22, Noha El-Hennawy is reporting from Cairo that Egyptians are happy with Obama’s purported outreach to Muslims.

Oh yes, I agree with Red State!  In a war against a decentralized, stateless enemy who relies on radicalizing Muslim youths to fill their ranks, there's absolutely no point in America making those Muslim youth's feel better about America.  Indeed, as RedState tells us, how Muslim youths feel about America isn't "germane to U.S. interests."

What a bunch of toolbags.

Beck Loves Vampires and Militias... and McVeigh?

If you've been watching Glenn Beck, then you know he's obsessed with Vampires sucking the blood of the innocent, by which he means the horrible atrocity that is a Government financed by tax revenue.  It's violent commentary - literally blood soaked.  If you think he's just weird enough to make it all up on his own, you can be forgiven, but it turns out to have a more storied pedigree:

There you see Operation Vampire Killer, where this rhetoric got it start.  It's proudly displayed next to the Militiaman's Handbook at a militia convention.  See if this sounds familiar:

We in America, Officers and private citizens alike, are fortunate that at this moment in our history we can still LAWFULLY EXTERMINATE these parasitic Global Blood Suckers by placing numerous "STAKES" made of words, paper, pen, and hard work through their hardened hearts.

[…]

Very soon, if we do not stop these world government proponents, and install in places of leadership honorable men and women, all military, national guardsmen and officers of the law will be used as the "enforcement arm" to guarantee a full complement of "volunteers" for these imperialists' "peaceful" socialist global society.

Beck talks about driving stakes through the hearts of the government vampires all the time.

This dovetails nicely with the reading McVeigh did before committing his heinous act of terrorism:

Mr. McVeigh's reading, which he pressed on his sister, Jennifer, among others, also included Spotlight, the newsletter of the anti-semitic Liberty Lobby, Patriot Report, a far-right Christian identity newsletter that would later declare the Oklahoma bombing a plot by "the real hate groups," namely the F.B.I. and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, to crack down on armed paramilitary groups, and a strange document titled "Operation Vampire Killer 2000."

Written by Jack McLamb, a former Phoenix police sergeant, it seeks to enlist police and military personnel against "the ongoing, elitist covert operation which has been installed in the American system with great stealth and cunning." It continues, "They, the globalists, have stated that the date of termination of the American way of life is the year 2000."

When the nuts amongst their followers take this rhetoric to its unavoidable conclusion, people like Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh and O'Reilly will scream bloody murder at the merest hint that they have some blame in the matter.  But clearly, they have created the climate for this violence.  They must take some responsibility.

What Digby Said

Keeping It Quiet

by digby

Over the week-end, I wrote a bit about the latest torture revelations concerning Abu Zubayda and the fact that everything they got from him under "enhanced interrogations" turned out to be garbage. I mused that they didn't really care what the torture revealed, merely that they got lots of "metrics" that could show they were making progress in the GWOT with their macho tactics. Reader Sleon pointed me in the direction of this post by Bmaz at Emptywheel which adds another intriguing bit of speculation along the same lines:

Such is the clincher as to why the torture tapes had to be destroyed. It wasn't just that Bush/Cheney et. al wanted to keep evidence of their torture program secret, there was never any complete way to do that. But there was only one thing that could prove they tortured for nothing and got nothing - the tapes. Cheney and his coterie of fellow Torquemadas were fiends proud of their handiwork; if they had evidence that it worked, they would have kept it. They burn spies for fun, crow on television about their willingness to torture and what they have accomplished, do you really think for one second they wouldn't retain proof if they had it?

And let us not forget just who we are talking about here - it is the White House Principals group:

The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of "combined" interrogation techniques -- using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time -- on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects -- whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies.

Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet and Ashcroft. Means, motive and opportunity. Who could have imagined?

This certainly explains why it was top White House lawyers including Gonzales, Addington, Bellinger and Miers, with "vigorous sentiment", assisted the CIA in the decision and process to destroy the torture tapes of abu-Zubaydah and others.

(Every time I am reminded of that principles group watching "choreographed" torture before signing off on it, I am shocked and appalled all over again. )

As to the question at hand, considering the fact that Cheney and Rummy spent their entire careers trying to correct what they considered the sins of the Nixon administration, Bmaz's speculation makes sense. After all, they believed that Nixon's catastrophic error was failing to destroy the ... tapes.

No International Vacations for the Bush Admin.

It looks like Spain might be getting ready to give the Bushies the Pinochet treatment:

A high-level Spanish court has taken the first steps toward opening a criminal investigation against six former Bush administration officials, including former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, on whether they violated international law by providing a legalistic framework to justify the use of torture of American prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, an official close to the case said.

The case was sent to the prosecutor's office for review by Baltasar Garzon, the crusading investigative judge who indicted the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The official said that it was "highly probable" that the case would go forward and could lead to arrest warrants.

No international vacations for any of the National Security "Principles" that approved torture.

Predator's Cat Outta the Bag

Back in 2006, the following image of a Pakistani airstrip was taken and merged into Google Earth:

This comes on the heels of Sen. Boxer's embarrassing slip that she understood the drone flights were based out of Pakistan.  She did a good job of covering for herself, saying that she was referencing a new story, not any privileged intelligence, but this seems to confirm the story.

The Pakistanis are not going to be happy.

(h/t Wired)

Terrorist Watchlist Edits

We've known for years the the Terrorist Watch List has millions of names on it, rendering it worse than useless as a tool for preventing actual terrorism.  Well, the Congress has finally gotten the ball rolling on fixing the program:

The House passed a bill Tuesday aimed at helping people who have been misidentified as terrorists clear their names from government watch lists and databases.

The bill (HR 559), sponsored by Yvette D. Clarke , D-N.Y., passed by a vote of 413-3....“This is a good bill,” said Pete Olson , R-Texas. “This is a bipartisan bill.”

It's always been sort of Kafkaesque that a gigantic security bureaucracy could stick your name on a terrorist watchlist and basically give you no way to get it off. It's long past time for Congress to address this.

About time.  Everyone agreed it was a problem, but the Republicans couldn't bring themselves to vote for it until Bush left town.

Hearts and Minds!

Now this is how you fight the War on Terror:

Al-Qaeda chiefs are raping young male converts to shame them into becoming suicide bombers, it emerged yesterday.

The intense social stigma and fear of more gay sex attacks leaves Muslims prepared to die.

The warped new tactic was revealed by a reformed Algerian militant. Abu Baçir El Assimi said: “The sexual act on young recruits aged between 16 to 19 was a means to urge them to commit suicide operations.”

Brilliant Psy-Ops!  I don't begin to care if this is true.  I'm sure that the CIA could engineer enough first-hand evidence to make it appear true enough for some Arab new outlets to run the story.  If we could push this meme into the consciousness of the Arab Street, we'll have won the war without dropping another bomb.

61 Gitmo Recidivists? More like 9.

Over and over again, we've been hearing that 61 former Gitmo detainees have returned to the battlefield.  Of course, it turns out to be nothing of the sort.

Robert Gates, who some may recognize as a Republican and the freaking Secretary of Defense, has said that only 4-5% of released detainees have returned to the battlefield.  Given that 245 detainees have been released, that puts it at 8 or 9 individual recidivists.  Not 61.

So where are they getting the high number?  Apparently, participating in a documentary about Gitmo is considered "returning to the battlefield."  Oy.

Hamdan Sentenced to Five Months!

Salim Hamdan, the man who won such a stunning victory in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld before the Congress took it away with the Military Commissions Act, was just convicted of being a dastardly driver for Al Qaeda.

The kicker, though, is that this panel of military officers only sentenced him to serve another 5 months or so, since his years already in captivity are credited against his sentence. The reason for this becomes clear when you remember that since he is considered a enemy combatant for doing all that evil driving, when his sentence is over the Bush Administration reserves the right to continue detaining him until the conclusion of the Global War on Terror.

Essentially they sentenced him to serve out the remainder of the Bush Administration. "These guys aren't going to let you out anyway, so we're giving you the lightest possible sentence." The lightness of the sentence proves that his crimes are not serious, I think.

"At Least Bush Deserves Credit for US Not Getting Attacked Again"

Even on talk radio everyone seems to hate President Bush. The most vigorous defense of their previously beloved President they can muster is to say that "well at least President Bush deserves credit for keeping us safe since 9/11."

There are a couple of things wrong with this, either of which is fatal to the argument.

First, and most obviously, we have not been kept safe since September 11, 2001. Although it had been swallowed by the memory hole until just recently, everyone should remember the Anthrax Attacks - attacks that only targeted "liberals." So, even on its own terms this argument is incorrect.

More significantly, however, is the fallacy of timing. Conservatives employing this argument will always list the terrorist attacks that predated 9/11 in order to drill home the impressiveness of us "not being attacked again since." The list will look something like this:

It was one of series of terrorist attacks that included the blackhawk down incident, the first World Trade Attack, Kobar Towers Attack, the Twin Embassy Attack, the USS Cole Attack...

"Wow," you think, "that was a lot of attacks from 1993 to 2001." Of course, only one of those attacks is a good analogue for the 9/11 attacks. Only the first attack on the WTC in 1993 was an attack on a civilian target, inside America. If one were to include attacks like the USS Cole Attack the number of terrorist strikes on "America" would have gone up astronomically thanks to Bush. Given that the first WTC attack was eight years before Al Qaeda's second attack on our soil, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect something like another 8 years until they try again. That puts it out of Bush's Presidency, and therefore not something to credit him with.

I know this is just the last refuge of a conservative movement that once followed George W. Bush as if he were the physical avatar of the God of Conservatism, but that doesn't mean I should leave it to provide even that illusory comfort, right? President Bush, after what he did to this country, deserves all the blame and derision we can heap on him.

Oped: Obama on Iraq

Obama wrote an Op-Ed for the NYTimes today:

In the 18 months since President Bush announced the surge, our troops have performed heroically in bringing down the level of violence. New tactics have protected the Iraqi population, and the Sunni tribes have rejected Al Qaeda — greatly weakening its effectiveness.

But the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true. The strain on our military has grown, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated and we’ve spent nearly $200 billion more in Iraq than we had budgeted. Iraq’s leaders have failed to invest tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues in rebuilding their own country, and they have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge.

The good news is that Iraq’s leaders want to take responsibility for their country by negotiating a timetable for the removal of American troops. Meanwhile, Lt. Gen. James Dubik, the American officer in charge of training Iraq’s security forces, estimates that the Iraqi Army and police will be ready to assume responsibility for security in 2009.

Only by redeploying our troops can we press the Iraqis to reach comprehensive political accommodation and achieve a successful transition to Iraqis’ taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country. Instead of seizing the moment and encouraging Iraqis to step up, the Bush administration and Senator McCain are refusing to embrace this transition — despite their previous commitments to respect the will of Iraq’s sovereign government. They call any timetable for the removal of American troops “surrender,” even though we would be turning Iraq over to a sovereign Iraqi government.

But this is not a strategy for success — it is a strategy for staying that runs contrary to the will of the Iraqi people, the American people and the security interests of the United States. That is why, on my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war.

Sounds like me. :)

Torture Verified

This is very illuminating. Greenwald always does an excellent job of making legal issues understandable and compelling:

According to the New York Times and Washington Post, both of which received an advanced copy, Mayer's book reports the following:

• "Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency's interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes."
• "A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were 'enemy combatants' subject to indefinite incarceration."
• "[A] top aide to Vice President Cheney shrugged off the report and squashed proposals for a quick review of the detainees' cases . . .

  'There will be no review,' the book quotes Cheney staff director David Addington as saying. 'The president has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.'"

• "[T]he [CIA] analyst estimated that a full third of the camp's detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions -- up to half -- were in error. Later, an academic study by Seton Hall University Law School concluded that 55 percent of detainees had never engaged in hostile acts against the United States, and only 8 percent had any association with al-Qaeda."
• [T]he International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were 'categorically' torture, which is illegal under both American and international law".
• "[T]he Red Cross document 'warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.'"

This is what a country becomes when it decides that it will not live under the rule of law, when it communicates to its political leaders that they are free to do whatever they want -- including breaking our laws -- and there will be no consequences. There are two choices and only two choices for every country -- live under the rule of law or live under the rule of men. We've collectively decided that our most powerful political leaders are not bound by our laws -- that when they break the law, there will be no consequences. We've thus become a country which lives under the proverbial "rule of men" -- that is literally true, with no hyperbole needed -- and Mayer's revelations are nothing more than the inevitable by-product of that choice.

That's why this ongoing, well-intentioned debate that Andrew Sullivan is having with himself and his readers over whether "torture is worse than illegal, warrantless eavesdropping" is so misplaced, and it's also why those who are dismissing as "an overblown distraction" the anger generated by last week's Congressional protection of surveillance lawbreakers are so deeply misguided. Things like "torture" and "illegal eavesdropping" can't be compared as though they're separate, competing policies. They are rooted in the same framework of lawlessness. The same rationale that justifies one is what justifies the other. Endorsing one is to endorse all of it.

In fact, none of the scandals of radicalism and criminality which we've learned about over the last seven years -- including the creation of this illegal torture regime -- can be viewed in isolation. They're all by-products of the country that we've become in the post-9/11 era, primarily as a result of our collective decision to exempt our Government leaders from the rule of law; to acquiesce to the manipulative claim that we can only be Safe if we allow our Leaders to be free from consequences when they commit crimes; and to demonize advocates of the rule of law as -- to use Larry Lessig's mindless, reactionary clichés -- shrill, Leftist "hysterics" who need to "get off [their] high horse(s)".

That is the mentality that has allowed the Bush administration to engage in this profound assault on our national character, to violate our laws at will. Our political and media elite have acquiesced to all of this when they weren't cheering it all on. Those who object to it, who argue that these abuses of political power are dangerous in the extreme and that we cannot tolerate deliberate government lawbreaking, are dismissed as shrill Leftist hysterics.

Read the whole thing. It's not too much longer.

Bush Outed a CIA Agent?

Firedoglake, the go-to people on the Libby case, thinks one of Scott McClellan's recent revelations has effectively proven that George W. Bush authorized the outing of a CIA Agent. McClellan says that Bush told him that he had authorized the selective declassifying of the NIE, which was intimately tied to the effort to destroy Joe Wilson. Just to make it clear how bad McClellan's book is for the WhiteHouse, that fact isn't even amongst the ones being heralded as scandalous.

Think of how much sense this makes. We have evidence that George Bush ordered Libby to respond to Joe Wilson on June 9, 2003. We now have Bush's own confirmation that he authorized the leak Libby made to Judy Miller on July 8, 2003--which included the leak of Valerie Wilson's identity. We know on July 10, Condi told Stephen Hadley that Bush "was comfortable" with the response the White House was making towards Wilson. And we know that--when Cheney forced Scottie McC to exonerate Libby publicly that fall, he did so by reminding people that "The Pres[ident] [asked Libby] to stick his head in the meat-grinder." We know that Libby's lawyers tried desperately to prevent a full discussion of the NIE lies to be presented at trial. And we know that--after those NIE lies did not come out, for the most part (though one juror told me that NIE story was obviously false, even with the limited information they received)--the President commuted Libby's sentence on July 2, 2007.

They have the full details, including links to all the trial testimony that reveals the cited facts. There are no flights of fantasy driven by Bush-Derangement-Syndrome. Everything is documented.

Daddy's not going to be happy:

“I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors.”

Junior sure showed him, huh? Add it to the "not-taking-out-Saddam" rebellion and the tax-cut fundamentalism, and you've got quite the pattern of Junior trying not to be the same "failed President" his Daddy was, and failing even more epically in the attempt. Looks like Daddy wasn't such a failure after all, huh?

Habeas Corpus

Proof:

If his cell were at Guantanamo Bay, the prisoner would be just one of hundreds of suspected terrorists detained offshore, where the U.S. says the Constitution does not apply.

But Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri is a U.S. resident being held in a South Carolina military brig; he is the only enemy combatant held on U.S. soil. That makes his case very different.

Al-Marri's capture six years ago might be the Bush administration's biggest domestic counterterrorism success story. Authorities say he was an al-Qaida sleeper agent living in middle America, researching poisonous gasses and plotting a cyberattack.

To justify holding him, the government claimed a broad interpretation of the president's wartime powers, one that goes beyond warrantless wiretapping or monitoring banking transactions. Government lawyers told federal judges that the president can send the military into any U.S. neighborhood, capture a citizen and hold him in prison without charge, indefinitely.

George Bush's America, ladies and gentlemen. A nation with a government possessing such powers cannot be described as Free. Time to call Boortz.

UPDATE: I've gotten some objections over the fact that Mr. Al-Marri is not an American citizen. But back as far as 1896 the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the clear language of the 14th Amendment:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Anyone within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States has constitutional rights. In fact, if you read the article, you find the following:

"What you assert is the power of the military to seize a person in the United States, including an American citizen, on suspicion of being an enemy combatant?" Judge William B. Traxler asked.

"Yes, your honor," Justice Department lawyer Gregory Garre replied.

The fact that "US Person = US Citizen" is canon in our legal system. So much so that even the crazy-assed Bush Administration doesn't try to argue the point. Case closed.

Respect for the Opinions of Mankind

Another example of why the Bush Administration members shouldn't be taking any European vacations:

The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.

...

Such episodes are among more than 250 cases The Washington Post has identified in which the government has, without medical reason, given drugs meant to treat serious psychiatric disorders to people it has shipped out of the United States since 2003 -- the year the Bush administration handed the job of deportation to the Department of Homeland Security's new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE.

Involuntary chemical restraint of detainees, unless there is a medical justification, is a violation of some international human rights codes. The practice is banned by several countries where, confidential documents make clear, U.S. escorts have been unable to inject deportees with extra doses of drugs during layovers en route to faraway places.

These guys really reach for the stars.

We Do Not Torture

My God. This is from Harpers:

The exact circumstances surrounding the dealings between Haynes and Yoo that led to the development of this memorandum are unclear. However, it is clear that Haynes had previously authorized the use of the torture techniques, and had secured an order from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld authorizing them.

Following the implementation of these techniques, more than 108 detainees died in detention. In a large number of these cases, the deaths have been ruled a homicide and connected to torture. These homicides were a forseeable consequence of the advice that Haynes and Yoo gave.

That's a lot of accidental murder for a country that does not torture.

Rehabilitating America as a brand will be one of Barack Obama's greatest tasks. Our moral authority is not important as some sort of platonic ideal we should strive to meet - its loss has real strategic consequences. In a Global Counterinsurgency, being the Shining City is by far your most powerful weapon.