Griper Blade: The Man in the Iron Bubble

Maybe if we all take up a collection, we can raise enough money to bribe Dick Cheney to just go away. He may be the most politically tone deaf politician in recent history, acting as if everyone agrees that the Bush administration's policies have been dazzling in their genius. You wonder if Dick actually checks any news sources or if he just relies on a circle of fawning sycophants who only tell him what he wants to hear. If Bush was the boy in the bubble, Cheney's may be the model that bubble was based on.

Or maybe "bubble" is the wrong word. More like "armored iron sphere." Not only doesn't truth seem to reach Dick, but it seems to be actively repelled. Nothing sinks in, because no truth ever gets close enough to touch him. There's a certain segment of the population who seem to believe that you can force your beliefs to become fact. All it takes is a sincere and fervent faith that your view of the universe is correct and it magically becomes true, true, true. You see it with creationists, Holocaust-deniers, global warming naysayers, free market moonies, and other various and assorted species of flatearthers. No fact can get in, because facts are the enemy of faith. Every bit of evidence that your position is wrong -- no matter how damning or conclusive -- is rejected immediately. The logic of this illogical thinking is simple; you're right, therefore, any evidence to the contrary must be wrong. That's all the proof you need to keep believing that the Earth is in the thrall of UFO overlords or that Vladimir Putin is really a robot or that Dick Cheney is right.

Of course, it may just be that the former-VP is just slinging propaganda when he pretends to be as ignorant and stupid as he often seems to be. It may just be that Dick's familiar with reality, but uses lies and fearmongering to try to change our perception of it. It may just be that he's not wrapped in a cocoon of yes men.

But, as always when we're talking about neocons, I'll go ahead and take them at their word on what they believe and don't believe. I'll assume that Dick Cheney's not a lying sack, but just a stupid and ignorant man. Honestly, you can't be generous with these people -- it's completely impossible. Your choices are always "they're lying" or "they're stupid." Somewhere along the line, we've established that it's a terrible, terrible thing to call these guys liars, so we're left with stupid. And that's being charitable... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Gitmo's Closing, Everybody Panic!

Now that Barack Obama has signed an executive order to close the detention facility (read "prison camp") at Guantánamo Bay, one thing is becoming clear -- we're all going to freakin' die. Depending on which right wing nut you ask, the president will have no choice but to move at least one deadly terrorist into either your bedroom or your closet. We are doomed.

Writing for the Center for American Progress, blogger Matthew Yglesias helpfully lays out the arguments being advanced by talking heads in the media. Unfortunately for those same talking heads, he translates the arguments from BS into English:

-The fact that the Bush administration has let dangerous terrorists go free means Obama should keep innocent people detained.

-The fact that the Bush administration screwed up the paperwork on detainees shows that there was more wisdom to Bush’s policies than Obama acknowledged on the campaign trail.

-Obama’s promise of change was empty and hypocritical because it will take time to implement his executive orders.

-The “Guantánamo” issue is primarily about the physical location of the facility rather than the legal status or treatment of the detainees.

-Since many liberals live in San Francisco, anyone who thinks it would be ill-advised to transfer prisoners to a museum in the San Francisco Bay that hasn’t been a prison for decades is a hypocrite.

When you put it that way -- i.e., in plain English -- the arguments don't look so good. No fair using logic, because reality has a liberal bias... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: It's Torture. We Tortured. There was Torture.

Let's start out with a few quotes.

I think on the left wing of the Democratic Party there are some people who believe that we really tortured.
--Dick Cheney

It's torture. It's a means of extracting information that I didn't even believe these people probably had. It's a means of making their lives more miserable.
--Chris Arendt, formerly stationed at Guantanamo

We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case [for prosecution].
--Susan J. Crawford, convening authority of military commissions

Some on the left may think "we really tortured" Dick, but those in the know do too. We've gotten to the point where simple denial isn't going to be good enough. "We don't torture" doesn't wash when everyone knows we do. When cases are thrown out of court because the accused was tortured, then there was torture. When people who work in the prisons say they saw torture, then there was torture. When people coming out of those prisons say they were tortured, then there was torture.

At this point, denial isn't just useless, but it's insulting to everyone's intelligence -- the denier's included. There was torture... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Shutting Down Gitmo

While the most visible military action is in Afghanistan, America is acting elsewhere. We now have troops in the Philippines, helping to train that country's armed forces to go after terrorist cells that have executed an American, and still hold hostages. Our soldiers, working with the Bosnian government, seized terrorists who were plotting to bomb our embassy. Our Navy is patrolling the coast of Africa to block the shipment of weapons and the establishment of terrorist camps in Somalia.
-George W. Bush, 2002 State of the Union address

Yeah, about those terrorists in Bosnia -- Bush's case against them was just thrown out of court. Judge Richard J. Leon of the Federal District Court in Washington has said the government's evidence was too weak to hold the five Algerians. Six years after Bush bragged about arresting them, they were ordered released from the concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay. The case against them rested entirely on "a classified document from an unnamed source," the judge said. "To rest on so thin a reed would be inconsistent with this court’s obligation."

This was the first legal test of the evidence against the men and the case against all of them gets thrown out. This is the kind of evidence we've been relying on to justify throwing people in a hole for years -- evidence so thin it practically gets laughed out of court. Meanwhile, the five men have lost six years of their lives to our tropical prison camp.

Far from making us safer, Guantánamo is actually losing cases. People leave there with a deep hatred for the American government. Think about it, if you were snatched out of your bed, flown halfway around the world, locked into a prison camp, abused, tortured, and then sent home, wouldn't you give very serious thought to becoming a terrorist? Slap any other name than the United States of America on that country and wouldn't you see a moral justification in bringing that nation down? That's what the prison at Guantánamo Bay is doing for us. And that's all it's doing for us...

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Griper Blade: An End to Gitmo

It's hard to think of a better symbol of the abuses of the Bush administration than the prison at Guantanámo Bay, Cuba. It was put in Cuba so the administration could claim that American law didn't apply there. It was meant to be a loophole in the Constitution and the American concept of justice. "Cuban sovereignty over Guantanámo exists only in the abstract," wrote human rights lawyer Joanne Mariner for FindLaw.com. "Yet it is, for the U.S. government, a convenient legal fiction. In the current litigation over the fate of the hundreds of detainees held on Guantanámo, the government's position is premised on the fact that Guantanámo is technically foreign soil. Because Guantanámo is part of Cuba, argues the government, it is beyond the reach of American courts."

Of course, this was a ridiculous argument -- the prisoners are inarguably in US custody, not Cuban -- and it was eventually shot down by the courts. Prisoners at Guantanámo Bay had the right to habeas corpus restored, with the right to trial. So, the administration decided the wisest thing to do would be to drag their feet. In June, I ran the math and figured out that, at the rate the trials were going, the last Gitmo detainee could expect to see the inside of a courtroom about 583 years from now. The phrase "justice delayed is justice denied" is usually meant less literally.

Many of the detainees at Guantanámo were innocent, swept up in a bounty program that required no proof of anything. People would be captured by locals and basically sold to the US. Some were terrorists, but some were just neighbors someone had a problem with, street criminals, political rivals, or complete strangers kidnapped and turned in for the bounty. As a result, innocent people were exposed to terrorist ideology and radicalized. In the end, Gitmo is creating terrorists and terrorist sympathizers.

McClatchy Newspapers:

Mohammed Naim Farouq was a thug in the lawless Zormat district of eastern Afghanistan. He ran a kidnapping and extortion racket, and he controlled his turf with a band of gunmen who rode around in trucks with AK-47 rifles.

U.S. troops detained him in 2002, although he had no clear ties to the Taliban or al Qaida. By the time Farouq was released from Guantanamo the next year, however — after more than 12 months of what he described as abuse and humiliation at the hands of American soldiers — he'd made connections to high-level militants.

In fact, he'd become a Taliban leader. When the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency released a stack of 20 "most wanted" playing cards in 2006 identifying militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan — with Osama bin Laden at the top — Farouq was 16 cards into the deck.

And each day these people are kept in our tropical concentration camp, the more likely it is that they'll become terrorists themselves -- or at least terrorist sympathizers...

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Gitmo Acquittals May not Result in Release

clipped from rawstory.com Some detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba will likely never be released because of the danger they pose, and those tried and acquitted will still be subject to continued detention as enemy combatants, a Pentagon spokesman said Tuesday. Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, made the remarks as Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni, awaited a verdict in the first war crimes trial to be held under a special regime created for "war on terror" suspects. He said efforts were being made to reduce the size of the population through transfers of prisoners to their home countries for incarceration or release. "But I think, you know, there are still a significant population within Guantanamo who will likely never be released because of the threat they pose to the world, for that matter," he said.

So, even if they're found innocent, they stay in prison. Kind of makes this whole military tribunal thing just a series of pointless show trials, doesn't it?

Gitmo Trial Defendants Face Absurd Obstacles

clipped from rawstory.com When accused September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed grumbled to the U.S. military war tribunal he couldn't get paper or file legal motions with the court, he was told to put his complaints in legal papers and file them with the court. When he asked for documents to be translated into Arabic so he could read them, he was told there was no requirement for the U.S. military commissions that will try his death penalty case to do that. But the judge said he would think about it. Lawyers for the five men accused of plotting the hijacked airliner attacks on the United States say the complaints brought last week before the war court in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, exemplify the trouble the men face getting a fair trial before the first U.S. military tribunals since World War Two. "You have from the sublime to the ridiculous. You have from the mundane to the serious and significant," said David Nevin, a defense lawyer assigned to Mohammed.

Another problem is that what the defendants tell their lawyers is classified. As a result, they can't even discuss their conversations among themselves.

"When we leave the room and we're not with him (Mohammed) any more, we can't turn to each other and say 'What do you think of what he just said?'" said Nevin, who has called the commission process "very, very unfair."

"And at the end of this, the government's desire is to execute Mr. Mohammed," said Capt. Prescott Prince, another of Mohammed's legal advisers. "I find that just insane."

Calling this "justice" is a joke.

White House Ignored Detainee Innocence

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com 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, according to a new book critical of the administration's terrorism policies. The CIA assessment directly challenged the administration's claim that the detainees were all hardened terrorists -- the "worst of the worst," as then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said at the time. But a top aide to Vice President Cheney shrugged off the report and squashed proposals for a quick review of the detainees' cases, author Jane Mayer writes in "The Dark Side," scheduled for release next week. "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."

As far as I can figure out, this is the Bush admin. worrying that it might be embarrassed by the ham-handedness of their wide net approach to collecting detainees. Instead of admitting that they may have gone a little overboard, they kept innocent people in prison.

This creates a new class of political prisoner -- the inconvenient and unrectified mistake.

Griper Blade: Justice is the Old Way

It may be that George W. Bush is the King Midas of crap. Everything he touches turns into the stuff. From gas prices to the environment to the world's opinion of the United States, Bush has left pretty much everything much, much worse than he found it. You've really got to wonder if any terrorist could've done as much lasting damage.

A big part of the problem is Bush's apparent belief that every damned thing the country has ever done was done incorrectly. In the invasion of Iraq, Bush -- listening to deluded visionary Donald Rumsfeld -- decided that sending an overwhelming force (as Colin Powell had recommended) was the wrong way to go. That had been done to death, apparently. All the cool kids were invading with a light force. Fast and lithe and, above all, cheap.

As a result, US forces rolled into a town, chased off all the insurgents and militias, then rolled off in a triumphant cloud of desert dust. And, of course, as soon as we rolled off, the militias and insurgents would come right back. Worse, ammo dumps and armories were cleared of Iraqi military, then left unprotected. The insurgents then came in and armed themselves with all the rifles and RPGs and mortars. IEDs that still kill people on the roads of Iraq are made from abandoned artillery shells and mortar rounds. In short, the "plan" -- such as it was -- was such a stupid, stupid idea that anyone capable of learning to play checkers should've known it would lead to disaster.

But the non-disastrous way of doing things was the old way. Never mind that the old way worked, never mind that the new way was idiotic beyond words, everything anyone had done before the neocons showed up was wrong, wrong, wrong. Everything had to be rebuilt from the ground up. Like the first Chinese emperor Chin, the neocons believed that history began with them.

So it's no surprise that our treatment of detainees would be entirely retooled. Where the Geneva Conventions were a primary consideration for prisoners, those international laws were now deemed "quaint." It was now a new world, led by great men -- Ubermenschen, really. And these men were so great that anything that wasn't actually their idea was wrong...

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Griper Blade: The Jewel of Liberty

Is the relinquishment of the trial by jury and the liberty of the press necessary for your liberty? Will the abandonment of your most sacred rights tend to the security of your liberty? Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings -- give us that precious jewel, and you may take everything else!... Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel.
-Patrick Henry

I went Constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald's blog at Salon to get the skinny on yesterday's Supreme Court decision ruling that prisoners at Guantanamo have habeas corpus rights. That quote comes from his post. It pretty much says it all. If we give up everything this nation stands for in order to protect it, what are we protecting? Once again, the idea that we're "fighting for freedom" is shown to be a bunch of crap. We're fighting for authoritarianism, which has much more in common with modern day China than those original thirteen colonies.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled that you don't get to lock people up forever without having to prove you've got a damned good reason to do it. That's it. They didn't set anyone free, they didn't keep anyone from being arrested, they didn't order Gitmo burned to the ground. All they did was require that the military and the administration give some good reason for keeping people in a dungeon.

The reaction on the right has been predictable. The BS flies fast and furious. The one response that really got to me while I was looking for reactions was Sen. Lindsey Graham's. "I am deeply disappointed in what I think is a tremendously dangerous and irresponsible ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court," Graham said. "The court has conferred upon civilian judges the right to make military decisions. These judges have virtually no training in military matters yet civilian judges, in some of the most liberal district courts in the country, will have an opportunity to determine who is a threat to the United States."

It's that "in some of the most liberal district courts in the country" that gets me. For the record, Lindsey Graham's a freakin' prick. What he's saying is that liberal judges aren't real judges and paints them as terrorist sympathizers. There aren't many people in government that I actually hate -- Lindsey Graham just made that short list with this divisive and stupid statement...

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Griper Blade: Losing the Fight Against Evildoers

I've never been comfortable using the word "evil." It's too simple for what it describes, too cartoonish to be taken seriously. Dracula is evil, the devil is evil, Lex Luthor is evil. In children's stories, evil does evil for the sake of evil. It doesn't make any sense and it doesn't describe anything that happens in the real world. When someone uses the word, it goes straight to the part of my brain that detects ridiculousness. When George W. Bush talks about "evildoers," the first thing I think of is Cesar Romero as "The Joker" on Batman. Evil has become a word to describe either impossible supernatural creatures or absurd criminals who steal diamond encrusted jack-in-the-boxes.

For me, evil is a word to be used sparingly -- the word has already been abused into near meaninglessness, I don't want to further the erosion. As a result, when I do use the word, I'm either using it correctly (about 10% of the time) or as comic hyperbole ("According to Jim is a horrific evil that must be erased from human history").

Now is one of the 10% of times. When I say evil, I mean evil. Because torture is evil. Don't agree with that? How about this? Torturing children is evil. Agreed? How about people who "you could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas" about ways to torture people?

Now that we're all on the same page -- excepting, of course, the deluded and the genuinely evil -- let's look at evil in America today.

Let's look at the Bush administration...

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Griper Blade: Proving Hypocrisy isn't Poisonous

I'm not one of those "everything happens for a reason" types, but if you need some sort of justification for George W. Bush's existence, you could point to the fact that he's living proof that hypocrisy is non-toxic. President Bush may be one of the healthiest executives ever to sit behind the big desk in the Oval Office. Yet, he indulges in hypocrisy as often as is humanly possible -- without any obvious symptoms of some sort of poisoning. Hypocrisy is harmless to the hypocrite, apparently.

For an example, we go to the Roosevelt Room in the White House. That'd be the Republican Teddy Roosevelt, not the Democrat Franklin. Teddy was a progressive Republican, but so what? History doesn't matter much to this president. The entire purpose of the location is that Bush stand beneath a portrait of Teddy in his "Rough Rider" uniform from the Spanish-American War. A war fought in Cuba.

Standing beneath that portrait (one that unfortunately reminds us of another pointless war of choice), President Bush scolded the world on its treatment of Cuba. In all seriousness, Bush spoke of Cubans "trapped in the tropical gulag," where they're "subjected to beatings, inadequate medical care, and long separations from their family."

If your mind immediately jumps to Guantanamo Bay -- a tropical gulag coincidentally within Cuba -- you're not alone. In what may be a record setting display of hypocrisy, President Bush was complaining about human rights abuses in Cuba -- while committing human rights abuses in Cuba. Brilliant...

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Griper Blade: "Quagmire" at Gitmo

The more we find out about what happens at Guantanamo Bay, the more the whole thing seems like a waste of time, at best, and a terrible injustice, at worst. For verifications of both takes, we need only turn to an op-ed by a former Gitmo lawyer, Morris D. Davis, for the Los Angeles Times:

I was the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, until Oct. 4, the day I concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system. I resigned on that day because I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively or responsibly.

In my view -- and I think most lawyers would agree -- it is absolutely critical to the legitimacy of the military commissions that they be conducted in an atmosphere of honesty and impartiality. Yet the political appointee known as the "convening authority" -- a title with no counterpart in civilian courts -- was not living up to that obligation.

That "convening authority" being Susan Crawford, chosen by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to replace Maj. Gen. John Altenburg. This convening authority, created by the Military Commissions act, participates in military tribunals as sort of a one person grand jury -- among other things -- who "chooses who serves on the jury, decides whether to approve requests for experts and reassesses findings of guilt and sentences, among other things." In this capacity, the CA is supposed to be impartial. Crawford, apparently and not very surprisingly, has not been...

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Griper Blade: Torture as an American Value

Let's start off a quote:

Iraq is a free of a brutal dictator. Iraq is free of the man who caused there to be mass graves. Iraq is free of rape rooms and torture chambers. Iraq is free of a brutal thug. America did the right thing.
-- George W. Bush, 2003

As the original reasons for invading Iraq fell through -- no WMD, no ties to al Qaeda -- and the insanely optimistic predictions of troops being met in the street by cheering crowds with 'sweets and flowers' proved insanely optimistic, the administration relied more and more on one incontrovertable truth -- Saddam Hussein was a really bad guy.

It's kind of a silly argument. Only about half of the world's nations are democracies and even some of those don't respect human rights. If we're required to act militarily when we know a government is committing crimes, then we've got one helluva lot of work ahead of us -- we can start with North Korea, move on to China, then roll around the world overthrowing governments until we finally go to war with Cuba or Turkmenistan. Of course, that will require a huge sacrifice in lives. As far as the cost in dollars goes, many people would learn numbers they'd never heard of before. "What the hell's a 'quadrillion?' That one of those made up numbers like a 'jillion?'"

Oddly, no one who uses the 'Saddam was evil' argument follows through on it like this. Good thing, too. It turns out that Iraq's rape rooms and torture chambers never closed, they just changed hands. If we were required to overthrow any government that did these things, we'd have sort of an interesting problem -- how does a nation overthrow itself?...

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