Griper Blade: There's Only One Side to This Story

It's easy to look at a new Rasmussen poll and think that the United States is no longer a nation of laws. In that poll, 54% think war crimes weren't committed by the Bush administration. Worse, only 25% do. 70% believe "it would be bad for the United States if the former president and senior administration officials were brought to trial for war crimes," with even 54% of Democrats agreeing.

But these are the results of a population kept in ignorance. The media, with their stupid "two sides to every story" reporting, felt the need to pretend that no one really knows what torture actually is. Congress, spineless throughout the Bush's two terms -- even when his approvals were in the tank -- got the vapors and fell into a faint every time someone mentioned holding any Bushie accountable for anything. There were investigations into all sorts of crimes, complete with sacrificial lambs, but when it came right down to it, the investigations didn't accomplish anything, because there was no action taken on the findings. If the public thinks torture isn't a war crime, the press and Congress can be blamed for it. When it comes to this issue, both have failed miserably. The correct response to Rasmussen's question about war crimes should've been "how the hell should I know? No one tells me anything."

Those who study the issue closely and have some expertise in determining torture have done just that -- determined that the US, under orders from the Bush administration, has tortured. There isn't any gray area here; it's a crime like rape or theft -- either you did it or you didn't, you can't kind of do it a little, but not really... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Not Prosecuting Torture is a Crime in Itself

George W. Bush wasn't going to be the president forever. That seems obvious to most people, but it almost seems to have caught Republicans in Washington by surprise. The president who brought his party to near irrelevance is gone now, but his actions linger on. Bush, having brought even more disaster to the Republican party than he did to the nation, leaves behind a legacy of crime and scandal. Having once hoped he would rebuild American government to match his vision, Bush left DC in worse shape than he found it -- the nation is impatient to see the vision undone.

Still, some Republicans seem to be completely unaware of these new realities, behaving as if nothing had changed, as if the Republican party were still wildly popular, and as if Bush's legacy is anything other than one of failure.

Politico:

Eric Holder’s confirmation vote before the Judiciary Committee will be delayed for up to a week as Republican senators continue to press him on his views about interrogation and other Bush administration intelligence methods.

The Judiciary Committee was originally scheduled to vote today on Holder’s nomination as attorney general, but Republicans have objected, and under committee rules they can delay the vote for up to a week. Holder was grilled last week by Republicans on his views about interrogations, Guantanamo Bay and his involvement in the 2001 pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) is seeking more information from Holder on whether the Department of Justice will pursue criminal prosecutions of "intelligence personnel" involved in detainee interrogations.

It was going to be the pardon of Marc Rich that was going to be the bump in the road to Holder's confirmation, but he went and told the senate in testimony that waterboarding is torture. Of course, it's their fault for asking him -- no one who's given it serious thought thinks it's not. "If you look at the history of the use of that technique, " Holder said, "we prosecuted our own soldiers for using it in Vietnam... Waterboarding is torture."... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Crimes Without Consequence

A new Senate Armed Services Committee report [PDF] begins with the words of Gen. David Petraeus -- who the right has convinced themselves sits directly at Jesus's side in the pantheon of the unquestionable:

What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight... is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect. While we are warriors, we are also all human beings.

It's ironic then, that the report details not humanity, but monstrosity. The document, titled "Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody," kills neocon blame-shifting on its very first page:

The Abuse of detainees in US custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of "a few bad apples" acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority. This report is a product of the committees inquiry into how those unfortunate results came about.

In their cowardice, top Bush administration officials blamed everything on personnel acting on their own. Donald Rumsfeld, in testimony to the committee, said, "In recent days, there has been a good deal of discussion about who bears responsibility for the terrible activities that took place at Abu Ghraib. These events occurred on my watch. As secretary of defense, I am accountable for them. I take full responsibility. It is my obligation to evaluate what happened, to make sure those who have committed wrongdoing are brought to justice, and to make changes as needed to see that it doesn't happen again."

After taking "full responsibility," Rumsfeld almost immediately blamed it on others... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Shinseki the Realist

I would say that what's been mobilized to this point -- something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required. We're talking about posthostilities control over a piece of geography that's fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems. And so it takes a significant ground-force presence.
-General Eric Shinseki to Sen. Carl Levin of the Senate Armed Services Committee, on the size of the force required to invade Iraq, 2003.

That got Shinseki fired. Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had long argued that the US needed to use a lighter force, with the emphasis on speed, and that anything else was fighting a 21st century war from a cold war mindset. Needless to say, Shinseki was right. Rumsfeld's strategy was shortsighted and simpleminded. When we invaded Iraq, our forces were too few to defend gains. We'd chase fighters off, declare victory, then roll of in a triumphant cloud of dust. Then the fighters would return and we'd be gone. This boneheaded "strategy" of Rumsfeld's had entirely predictable results. We'd chase off Iraqi guards from munitions stores, roll off in our big American cloud, and leave these ammo dumps completely unguarded, because we didn't have enough personnel to leave behind. Munitions captured by militias and terrorists are probably still being used as IEDs to this day. Donald Rumsfeld's brilliant plan for a light, fast fighting force was just as idiotic as it seemed to be.

But before all that happened, before Shinseki was proven right, the general was forced into retirement for not buying the neocon line. Rumsfeld said Shinseki's estimate in senate testimony "will prove to be high." Deputy SecDef Paul Wolfowitz said his numbers were "way off the mark."

It wasn't until 2006 that anyone admitted that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had bet on the wrong horse. "General Shinseki was right," Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, told that same committee three years later. Bush's "surge," while coming too late to correct the neocon vision for the military of the future, was basically an admission -- three years after the fact -- that Shinseki was right and the Rumsfeldian's side of the argument was as wrong as any ten year-old could've told them they were. As a result, Bush wound up claiming success for his surge, although the decrease in violence was due more to successful ethnic cleansing campaigns by militias and insurgents that might have been avoided. Violence had died down not because of an increased military presence, but because the killers had run out of people to kill. Rumsfeld's brilliant new strategy not only cost him his own job, but also countless lives. Entire neighborhoods went dark, the residents either dead or refugees...

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