Privatization turns AZ prison system into human rights nightmare

Salon: A new report alleges illegal and deadly mistreatment of Arizona inmates whose medical care the state contracted out to the country’s largest private prison health care provider.

The report, released last week by the American Friends Service Committee, a progressive Quaker group, comes as an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against the Arizona Department of Corrections awaits an appeals court ruling over the state’s challenge to its class action status. The ACLU alleges “grossly inadequate” care that creates “grave danger” for inmates, including “critically ill” people who were told to “be patient” or “pray” for healing, or that “it’s all in your head.”

Shortly before that lawsuit was filed in March 2013, the state contracted with its current for-profit health provider, Corizon, to replace the departed company Wexford. But the AFSC charges that “Correspondence from prisoners; analysis of medical records, autopsy reports, and investigations; and interviews with anonymous prison staff and outside experts indicate that, if anything, things have gotten worse.” Among the allegations: “delays and denials of care, lack of timely emergency treatment, failure to provide medication and medical devices, low staffing levels, failure to provide care and protection from infectious disease, denial of specialty care and referrals, and insufficient health treatment…”

Asked about the report, Corizon sent a statement saying that since March, it has “increased the number and skill level of our healthcare staff with the goal of continually improving patient outcomes.” Corizon said that its facilities are accredited and subject to internal audits, and that “ADC inmate patients receive care that meets their healthcare needs and satisfies constitutional requirements.” It added that “As with any large healthcare provider, litigation does arise from time to time. However, the vast majority of lawsuits filed against Corizon are without merit and are dismissed or settled with no findings of wrongdoing.” The Arizona Governor’s office did not immediately respond to an early morning Wednesday inquiry.

Part of the problem is that the prison-industrial complex is ripe for abuse. When you mention “people in prison,” people’s brains short circuit and they hear “people who deserve it.” For some reason, they imagine these sorts of things happening to rapists, murderers, or child molesters and forget that other, less terrifying people are in prison too.

The other part is that privatization is largely a scam. Prison health was the province of government for decades, with medical staff being employees of the Department of Corrections with the occasional visiting doctor from private practice.. The idea that corporations can do things cheaper than government is an offense to simple math, since government is non-profit and corporations are for-profit. Government can — and does — provide services at cost, while the private sector needs cost-plus-profit.

But that’s just your standard “everybody does it” level of government corruption, where you rip off taxpayers to send some easy business someone’s way and they help you out around election time. This is not that — or rather, it is that and much, much more. It’s not hyperbole to call this evil. People should go to the prisons they’ve turned into nightmares over this. The Justice Department should step in and shake out the prisons and the Arizona government and prosecute anyone and everyone remotely responsible for, or even aware of, this monstrosity. This isn’t some penny ante government corruption, this is a human rights abuse case.

Griper Blade: What if Bush was the Peanut Guy?

The Peanut Corporation of America is responsible for hundreds of cases of salmonella in the United States. Investigators found "dead rodents, rodent excrement and bird feathers" in its Plainview, Texas processing plant, prompting the Texas Department of State Health Services to recall every product ever made from peanuts shipped from the facility. In Blakely, Georgia, the story is the same -- Peanut Corporation of America ran an astonishingly unclean operation. All told, 600 people have suffered food poisoning. Nine have died. Calls to the company's telephone number "elicited a recording that said it was no longer in service." For all intents and purposes, Peanut Corporation of America no longer exists.

But the man ultimately responsible for his company's operations still exists. PCA owner Stewart Parnell was subpoenaed to testify to congress. He pleaded the fifth and refused to testify.

Clearly, congress has hit a dead end. Parnell can't possibly be prosecuted, his company is in no danger of ever returning to poison people, and it's time to let bygones be bygones. What we need to do is find out what happened, so we can avoid it ever happening again. And the best way to do that is to put together a blue ribbon panel and hold a third world style truth and reconciliation commission. No one will be charged, no one will go to jail, no one will pay any price, Parnell can get on with his life and we can get on with ours. But we'll get the truth and that's what really counts.

You might've noticed that my little synopsis veered off into crazy town around the third paragraph. Of course Stewart Parnell should be prosecuted -- along with those managers and executives who helped him sell garbage to unsuspecting families. So what if his company is shut down and will never sell poison again? So what if he won't testify? So what if all this has happened in the past?

Parnell lacks one quality that would apparently put him above or beyond the law -- he's not a former President of the United States. Stewart Parnell is just a former Poison Peanut King. When anyone else has committed a crime, they have to face the legal system. When a former President has committed a crime, we have to have a truth commission -- without prosecutions -- to get to the bottom of the crime and let the criminals walk away. There will be no jail time, there would only be embarrassment for the accused -- that is, if he weren't shameless. But the accused is shameless, so there wouldn't even be that. He would face the wagging finger of justice and retire to Dallas a rich, rich man. Maybe hire a ghost-writer and put out a memoir. And his example would do absolutely nothing to prevent future executives from committing similar crimes. After all, the crime without any real consequence might as well be legal -- without punishment, there is no crime... [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: A History of Torture

President Bush finished what will apparently be his final press conference this morning. He managed to make most of the answers the press threw at him into defenses of his presidency. This guy's pretty much already punched out, thinking more about next Wednesday and beyond. For example, he spoke about the future in discussing Iraq.

"When the history of Iraq is written, historians will analyze for example the decision on the surge," he said. "I decided to do something about it, and to send 30,000 troops in as opposed to withdrawing. The part of history is certain in the situation did change."

This strikes me as kind of a crazy hope for the future, like saying that the lessons scholars take from Vietnam is that napalm works really well. It's the invasion itself that people remember, not some tactic used during the occupation -- Civil War history isn't all about Pickett's Charge. Bush may hope that historians put a lot of emphasis on his "surge" -- while also hoping they don't look too closely at it -- but that seems a vain hope... [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: The Price Tag

There's a popular myth out there that jobs and wealth are created by businesses. This isn't true. Jobs and wealth are created by demand. I could open a business selling something for which there is zero demand and all the people I hired would be out of work again as soon as I went under. Consumers create jobs and wealth, not suppliers. It always gets me when people talk about business owners and CEOs as "job creators" -- they're not.

Likewise, Wall Street doesn't create wealth. Wall Street trades on wealth. Wealth comes from the creation of objects for which there is a demand. These objects can be solid and tangible, like a boat or a hamburger, or they can be more conceptual, like a newspaper column or a novel. But it has to be a noun. Value is added to things that already exist by labor. The dead cow becomes the hamburger, the blank page becomes the novel. No one pays money for something they could easily find lying around. As Abraham Lincoln put it, "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

In the bailout debate, we're left arguing over whether the product of labor is worth more than the business of capital. Granted, the auto industry has pulled a lot of boneheaded maneuvers, but the fact is that the root of their problem is identical to the banking industry's problem -- a credit crunch. Car sales are just as dependent on loans as Wall Street. When it's hard to get a loan, it's hard to buy a car...

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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: Creating a New Mandate

I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.
-Franklin Roosevelt, comment to reformers

Yesterday, I wrote that the winners of the 2008 election were the people and that the winners shouldn't go home. We can count on Obama to work on the agenda he spelled out on the campaign trail, but there is still a place for activism after your guy wins. While the right is trying to launch an "Obama doesn't have a mandate" narrative, this seems doomed to failure to me, since it requires you to believe BS about what it is you want. I kind of think you're the expert there. You really don't need some jerk explaining to you what you think. As spin jobs go, this one seems a little pointless.

But Obama only has a mandate to do what he proposed in his presidential campaign; restoring tax fairness, reforming health care, rebuilding the economy, getting out of Iraq, investing in infrastructure and green energy, etc. These are the things we can expect the new president to address in his first term.

But there are issues that weren't brought up on the campaign trail. In discussing the president-elect, we tend to forget the sitting president. George W. Bush hid out during the campaign, an invisible president who avoided the public spotlight the way a vampire avoids sunlight. One big issue was fairly successfully avoided by John McCain and that was what the hell to do about George W. Bush and company...

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McCain Reverses on Waterboarding

clipped from www.reuters.com Republican presidential candidate John McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, on Sunday issued some of his harshest criticism to date of the use of torture against terrorism suspects during President George W. Bush's administration. In an interview on Fox News, the Arizona senator laid out his differences with Bush on a number of issues, citing torture as a key sticking point between him and the current president. Fox interviewer Chris Wallace asked McCain if he was suggesting that Bush did want to torture prisoners. "Well, waterboarding to me is torture, OK?" McCain responded. "And waterboarding was advocated by the administration, and according to a published report, was used."

The problem here is that in February, McCain voted to allow the CIA to waterboard.

Maybe it would help if he wrote his positions down someplace, then referred to his notes when he's being interviewed.

Cheney-Connected Contractor Sued for Slavery

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com A Washington law firm filed a lawsuit yesterday against KBR, one of the largest U.S. contractors in Iraq, alleging that the company and its Jordanian subcontractor engaged in the human trafficking of Nepali workers. Agnieszka Fryszman, a partner at Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, said 13 Nepali men, between the ages of 18 and 27, were recruited in Nepal to work as kitchen staff in hotels and restaurants in Amman, Jordan. But once the men arrived in Jordan, their passports were seized and they were told they were being sent to a military facility in Iraq, Fryszman said. As the men were driven in cars to Iraq, they were stopped by insurgents. Twelve were kidnapped and later executed, Fryszman said. The thirteenth man survived and worked in a warehouse in Iraq for 15 months before returning to Nepal.

KBR is one of the no-bid contractors in Iraq and is a former subsidiary of Cheney's old company Halliburton.

Can we just go ahead and say that neocons are literally evil now?

Griper Blade: The Good Fight

I want to share a fun fact; the vast, vast majority of people think George W. Bush sucks. And there's this guy who's running for president who's close to Bush. This is a problem for that guy:



Yeah, it's not the newest poll, but that's kind of the point. Rev. Wright is a dead issue -- George W. Bush is not. And, while people may not like Jeremiah Wright, there aren't many who would argue that he's screwing up the country. Wright is not a national disaster, Bush is. In fact, Bush is such a disaster that the GOP was stuck with a little bit of a problem -- how to deal with him in their national convention?

They had to have him speak. It would be huge -- and counterproductive -- news if he weren't to address the convention. So they decided to hide him. Bush will address the RNC on the day most people won't be watching. Bush is scheduled for Labor Day evening -- a massive media black hole. The only way to get fewer viewers would be to have him speak on Christmas.

Bonus, they can hide Cheney in the same hole. So, of course, they did. There was some question as to whether Darth Cheney would address the convention at all, but -- like Bush -- it turned out that the bigger story would be to not feature him. The only place to hide Bush and Cheney was out in the open...

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Griper Blade: Keep It Simple, Stupid

I always get some criticism when I look at a conflict someplace in the world, consider the arguments of both sides, and decide that there aren't any good guys in the fight. There's something in American thinking that requires every fight to be a fight of good against evil. We choose sides, cast the conflict in incredibly simplistic terms, and decide that the team we're backing isn't just faultless, but incapable of wrong. For a long-standing example of this, look at the popular conception of Israel vs. the Palestinians. Israel -- despite consistently damning reports by Amnesty International -- is practically angelic in the average American's mind.

These good guy/bad guy narratives have seemed to spring up overnight in recent history. Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait supposedly came out of nowhere. But the truth is that Kuwaitis had been stealing Iraqi oil through "slant drilling" at the Iraqi border. While no one would argue that Hussein's actions weren't excessive, only those who don't know the facts would say they were unprovoked -- which, given the sorry state of our media, would be pretty much everyone. The invasion of Kuwait was never presented as a dictator vs. thieves. For the home audience, it was bad guy vs. good guys.

And we're seeing the same thing in the Russo-Georgian crisis. There aren't any good guys there, no one we should root for on merely moral grounds. In the conflict, there's no real case to make for the legality of Russia's invasion -- it's pretty much unquestionably a crime. But another question is whether Georgia deserves to be seen as heroic. Not every victim of a crime is a solid citizen; criminal on criminal violence is awfully commonplace...

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Griper Blade: A Potemkin Olympic Village

China is evil. Freakin' evil. Of that, there should be no doubt. We all remember Tiananmen Square and the brutal way a student protest was put down there in 1989. Prior to the Olympics, China also put down unrest in Tibet. As the Olympics are happening, China fights Uighur separatists in the western province of Xinjiang -- although there's very little coverage of that.

How should we respond to the oppression in China? President Bush, who never misses an opportunity to kiss the religious right's butt, cast China's entire human rights record as merely religious oppression -- as if China were guilty only of shutting churches.

Of course, part of the problem is that Bush -- who's used his term as president to spend money like a drunken sailor in a strip club -- has basically sold the US to nations like China. It's one thing to embarrass them slightly, it's another to call a criminal regime a criminal regime. Being part of a criminal regime all his own doesn't help Bush's position any, either...

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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: A Beautiful Disaster

Like anyone who appreciates film and, especially, photography in film, I have a love/hate relationship with documentary filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. A visionary fimmaker, Riefenstahl created what many consider to be the best documentary of all time -- Triumph of the Will.

Unfortunately, Triumph of the Will was also a masterpiece of nazi propaganda. This was the genius of the nazi movement -- they understood that the most successful propaganda had to either be really, really scary or really, really cool and they went with cool. Riefenstahl helped build the nazi movement into a national campaign and later claimed she didn't know about all of the horrific crimes the party committed. Her access to the highest levels of the party makes this claim hard to believe. When Riefenstahl died at the age of 101 in 2003, I thought it proved the old saying -- only the good die young.

Another great documentary by Riefenstahl is Olympia, a film about the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Like Triumph, Olympia was pro-nazi, using the Olympics to showcase Hitler's vision of a physically perfect people and casting the nazis as the direct descendants of the ancient greeks who were seen as the creators of western civilization. Nazi design looked Roman for a reason -- you were supposed to see a direct line from Athens to Rome to Berlin. The propaganda had it that Germany was the last, proud stand of the civilization that the Greeks began. Nazi supermen were the next step in the evolution of western civilization.

There may be two kinds of propaganda. There's the N. Korea "Everyone on Earth wants to kill you" model and the nazi/soviet "Trust this government, we're the best thing that's ever happened to humanity" model. Some governments, like the Bush administration, use a little of both -- although, in Bush's case, it's mostly the former.

All of which brings us to the Olympic torch relay. That's all Hitler. He turned the 1936 Olympiad into a "best thing that's ever happened to humanity"-style propaganda outlet. Olympia's breakthroughs in film technology, like mobile tracking cameras on pulleys and cables (which are still used in filming sports today), were meant to show the genius of the Master Race. And the torch relay was meant to symbolize the passing on of the torch of civilization from the ancient Greeks to the modern nazis, not the passing on of the Olympic ideal. Ignited by a parabolic mirror using "the rays of Apollo," the torch supposedly carried the light of civilization through benighted Europe to its new home in Berlin.

In other words, the torch relay has jack to do with the Olympics. It was born as propaganda and continues as propaganda's twin sister, marketing. The Greeks never did anything remotely like this.

So, I wouldn't lose any sleep of the politicization over the torch relay on its way to Beijing. It's nothing but an ad for the 2008 Olympics and a marketing campaign for China. It's meant as spectacle, so kick back and enjoy the spectacle. Adding to the fun is that this spectacle isn't the one that Chinese propagandists had planned for it to be...

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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: Super Tuesday Confession

One of the downsides to Super Tuesday was that it pushed every other news story to the side. In watching the returns on CNN, the only information I got about Tuesday's tornadoes -- and the death toll -- came from the infrequent breaks by the weather guy. A bona fide natural disaster was going on in mid-america and it was no more important than reports of golf ball sized hail. The big question for the talking heads was whether this would effect polling in the affected areas.

I guess there are some stories which just suck up all the oxygen in the news room. But, as I pointed out yesterday, talking heads are always talking, but that doesn't mean they always have something to say. Maybe the rule should be that, once someone says something stupid or obvious, it's time for a news break. I really don't need to be told that people don't vote for people they don't like or that 51% of left-handed Episcopalian steamfitters have broken for Obama. There's information and then there's some overpaid moron in a suit burning time until new numbers come in. If you don't have anything useful to say about the returns, talk about something else.

So, as tornadoes whipped through the south, I'm watching Wolf Blitzer repeat what someone just said in a speech. I'm watching John Roberts screw around with a touchscreen, just to show what it can do. I'm looking at pie charts breaking down which candidate Catholic Poles voted for and which candidate Inuits voted for. I don't freakin' care. In fact, they don't care -- they're just wasting time with minutia until something comes in.

So it was that the high profile admission of war crimes was lost in the shuffle. It wasn't even weather. CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden admitted that three subjects had been waterboarded...

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Griper Blade: Torture for Ethical Dummies

Let me make very clear the position of my government and our country. We do not condone torture. I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being.
-- President George W. Bush, June 22, 2004

Earlier this week, the New York Times published an article that proves the above statement a lie.

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture "abhorrent" in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales's arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

A secret legal opinion? WTF is that? A more honest description might be "a legal defense, loaded and ready to fire, on the off-chance that we wind up facing charges over this."

During his confirmation hearing, future (and former) Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gave a hint of the administrations' mindset when it came to torture. After Sen. Lindsey Graham suggested that torture might possibly be a bad thing and that we probably shouldn't do it, Gonzales said, "...I would respectfully disagree with your statement that we're becoming more like our enemy. We are nothing like our enemy, Senator. While we are struggling to try to find out at Abu Ghraib, they're beheading people like Danny Pearl and Nick Berg. We are nothing like our enemy."

So, as long as we're not sawing people's heads off, we're cool? Considering that terrorists will stop at absolutely nothing, this reasoning means that if we're willing to stop at anything -- no matter how extreme the action before we hit that limit -- then that's cool. If terrorists douse people in gasoline and light them up, we can do the same -- if we put goggles on them first, so we don't get the gas in their eyes. We are not, after all, barbarians...

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Griper Blade: The UK Can be Glad Its Sailors Weren't Captured by the US

Monty Python alumnus Terry Jones puts the recent capture of british sailors by Iran into context -- as only a member of Python could.

The Guardian:

It is [...] unacceptable that these British captives should be made to talk on television and say things that they may regret later. If the Iranians put duct tape over their mouths, like we do to our captives, they wouldn't be able to talk at all. Of course they'd probably find it even harder to breathe - especially with a bag over their head - but at least they wouldn't be humiliated.

And what's all this about allowing the captives to write letters home saying they are all right? It's time the Iranians fell into line with the rest of the civilised world: they should allow their captives the privacy of solitary confinement. That's one of the many privileges the US grants to its captives in Guantanamo Bay.

Compare how these the british detainees are treated with how the US has been treating detainees.

BBC:

[Abd al-Rahim] Nashiri's testimony was given at a military tribunal held at Guantanamo to determine his status as an "enemy combatant" on 14 March, AFP news agency reports.

"From the time I was arrested five years ago, they have been torturing me," the transcript of his hearing read.

"It happened during interviews. One time they tortured me one way, and another time they tortured me in a different way."

According to his testimony he eventually "confessed" to playing a key role in the bombing of the USS Cole.

"I just said those things to make the people happy," the transcript read.

"They were very happy when I told them those things."

Let me take a turn putting things in perspective -- when it comes to the treatment of foreign detainees, we suffer in comparison to freakin' Iran. What have we become?

For the sake of argument, let's say that Iran was waterboarding these people and drugging them and using other 'aggressive interrogation techniques.' What could we say with any moral authority? We can't argue that torture is wrong -- hell, the US argues that it isn't even illegal. By our own arguments, Iran would be well within their legal rights...

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