Trolls on your marks.  Get Set.  Counting down: 3, 2, 1.  Go.

John Ashcroft thinks it's okay to torture members of the United States Armed Forces.  However, Mr. Ashcroft sometimes has problems with facts and reality.  It seems unlikely that he would approve of the use of waterboarding on his own person.  Perhaps waterboarding would help change his mind.

A special shout out to Michael Savage.  The "brats" aren't faking autism.  In Michael's case I'd say he's not faking stupidity either.

Just for the record, in case anyone gets confused, I'm voting for the candidate who works out (That's bad, Nutz?).  He's a strong man, both physically and of character.  You may have heard of him.  His name is Barack.

Number of times I wanted Ron Paul to run the show: -1000
Number of insane things Congress has done:  I lost count.
Keep your head down, this bazooka has a hair trigger.
Onward.

cross-posted at Bleeding Heartland

If Congressman Steve King hadn't already won the "jackass award," someone would need to give it to him for the way he behaved at a House Judiciary Committee hearing this week.

It's no secret that King isn't interested in the Congress serving as a check or balance on executive power. As we saw just a few weeks ago, King believes former White House spokesman Scott McClellan could have "done this country a favor" by keeping his mouth shut about alleged lawbreaking and lying in the Bush administration.

Apparently not satisfied with his efforts to sidetrack the McClellan hearings, King used one parliamentary trick after another on Tuesday to prevent Democrats on the Judiciary Committee from effectively questioning Douglas Feith, the former number three Pentagon official.

As I've long suspected based on various reports coming forward, it appears that during the testimony of John Ashcroft before Congress that high profile detainees such as Abu Zubaydah were abused, tortured and waterboarded months before the Bybee and Yoo Memos offering legal justification for such actions were even written.

As reported by Salon via Thinkprogress.

   But during questioning, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., pointed out that the abuse of Zubaydah had reportedly begun weeks, if not months, earlier. "Did you offer legal approval of interrogation methods used at that time ... prior to August 2002?"

   "I have no recollection of doing that at all," Ashcroft responded. He added that he did not remember anyone else at the Justice Department doing so either. He said later in the hearing that Zubaydah’s interrogation "was done without the opinion that was issued on the first of August."

Continued...

I remember during the first term of the Bush administration that I spent a lot of my time worrying about John Ashcroft, the peculiar fellow who substituted crisco for Chrism as his father anointed him to high office, and sang a dreadful song in Fahrenheit 9/11.

Maybe that seemed harmless enough, downgrading Holy Chrism to vegetable oil. But it seemed emblematic somehow of the general lack of seriousness with which society in general and the Bush administration in particular are afflicted with. And his maudlin song about the Eagle soaring...

Let the Eagle soar/Like she’s never soared before/From rocky coast to golden shore/Let the mighty eagle soar.

Maybe the words are harmless; indeed, they probably are. But the reference to the 'mighty eagle' from the kind of Republican who actually has no interest in birds or wildlife seemed to me to be another example of the way the supposedly libertarian-leaning Republicans liked to exalt the state.

This is without words, MSNBC has got to be kidding me.  You can't be a viable news organization if you do this....

Short and sweet since the hearing is starting:

Full Committee
10:00 A.M. in 2141 Rayburn House Office Building
Hearing on: From the Department of Justice to Guantanamo Bay: Administration Lawyers and Administration Interrogations Rules, Part V

You can watch it at C-SPAN3 or via the committe website (scroll down for webcast link).

No pics, please!  Be kind to our dial-up friends.

Transcripts - post 'em as responses to the first comment.

Fun fact: Did you know that when Ashcroft was AG you had to file an FOIA request to see the NTSB accident investigation report on Mel Carnahan's fatal plane crash?

Once upon a time there was a f****d up Connecticut trust fund kid who was so f****d up that he could even f**k up getting f****d up. In fact he got so f****d up he had to stop getting f****d up, although that did not stop him from continuing to be a massive, world-class f**k up in all other respects.

Afterwards daddy’s firm got him various jobs, like it had before, but now they let him out in public, first in Texas and then in Washington. Eventually he had the Preznitcy stolen on his behalf under the cover of the robes of the Supreme Court. Good thing his handlers didn’t let him try to do it himself. He’d have f****d it up.

So, while this review ran back in February (when the film won an Oscar for best documentary), it's still essential viewing for a rigorous and non-partisan examination of U.S. policies and procedures during the so-called War on Terror.

It's currently available on DVD. See it. (review on the flip)

I have a ridiculously long post on torture and some of the revelations we've seen this week, in the Jane Mayer book, the Omar Khadr tape, etc.  Those who have been paying attention know what has been done in our name.  Much of the torture and abuse was subjected on people who had no intelligence value and were never credibly charged with any crime.  The methods were based on decades-old survival techniques produced by the Navy to resist torture, and a manual from the Chinese that used torture to elicit false confessions.  They used psychologists to develop a program of "learned helplessness", reverse-engineered from the SERE techniques.  In the end, not one terror suspect has been convicted of anything since 9/11.  The "intelligence" gained from the likes of Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was of the wild goose chase variety.  Evidence of torture inflamed the Islamic world and became a recruitment poster for Al Qaeda.  And on and on.

I wanted to reiterate some of it here, because it's indicative of the fundamental rot at the heart of the American system these days, and why we'll forever be diminished until we cut the rot away.

why Pelosi has been so "spineless" re FISA, impeachment, and other oversight duties to which her oath of office obligates her.

[David Dreier style freakout deleted (Thanks, David!  You restored my full belief in the nut of wingnut and Wallnuts.  I was concerned something sane might come out of the Rite-Ouing.  Now, not so much.)]

Morning music: Switchblade Symphony, Serpentine Gallery

My attempt to describe staying awake for 50 days, so you can understand what it means to be tortured by the CIA, Military Intelligence, psychologists and doctors:  How much meth would it take?  Even a kilo of glass wouldn't do it.  The most suicidal of methamphetamine addicts couldn't make it past 30 days without completely going insane and falling into a coma.  That's just a drug, though.  We are talking about torture, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls style of torture.  Hold still, girl, we're just going to cut off your...

What's that world?  Don't write another depraved description of torture used by the Bush regime?  Okay, I won't (it was going to be horrific... [so much fun, right Feith? {k- "only assholes don't support torture"}])

The fun's just getting started here.
Sources tell me to make the diary longer.
You got it.
Presto, in full craziness, after the flip.

Well now we have our smoking gun.

We now know why impeachment has been off the table, and why they pushed for (torture & surveillance) immunity from lawsuits. All this while, we've been accusing them of supine fecklessness when it's been nothing of the sort. It's just plain old craven, dirty CYA Washington politics as usual.

But they forgot to immunize themselves from prosecution, and Chimpy's not likely to pardon them like he would his buddies.

A multi-count federal criminal indictment against Pelosi, Reid, Hoyer, Rockefeller and the rest for criminal collaboration and conspiracy in war crimes, illegal surveillance and torture would garner substantial well-deserved attention to their crimes & complicity and send a clear & resounding message to current and future elected officials and their appointees.

Appearing earlier today on C-Span, Representative Jerrold Nadler stated that in a "just system" that was not politically charged we would have already impeached President George W Bush for war crimes.

Nadler has overseen many hearings on the administration's torture policies and has concluded that the administration acted unlawfully and committed "impeachable offenses". While this may not come as a hugely controversial finding to the KOS community, it is no doubt interesting to hear a U.S. Representative not named Dennis Kucinich making this argument on a platform like C-Span.

Watch the clip below and weigh in with your own feelings:

Provocative title, yes, but completely deserved.  Today on HuffPost is an article about the detention and torture of a 16 year old CHILD.  

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

As my sig says, I am a mother of six children.  Once you have a child and are up close to feel and see children in pain (even ordinary bumps and bruises type pain)you feel it for all children.

(I confess I am new at trying to embed so I am not sure if I managed to do so)

In the news again is the story of a young Canadian, Omar Khadr, captured and tortured in Afghanistan and Guantanamo by the U.S. The news is about a video which shows his interrogation, and about the sleep deprivation technique involving moving him from cell to cell every three hours. But once again, as when his story was in the news in March, what caught my eye wasn't the specifics of his torture, but the circumstances of his capture, so let me just repeat what I wrote back then:

Video that a Canadian court opened into the public domain gives us our first glimpse into the psychological state of an imprisoned Guantanamo inmate. The video depicts the state of Omar Khadr, a Canadian boy who was captured by US forces in Afghanistan when he was just 15 years old. The video has surfaced because Khadr has been charged with killing a US Army specialist, and his Guantanamo lawyers have been prying open the story using the more open Canadian court system.

Click here to see Globe and Mail coverage.

Sorry this is gonna be short but just wanted to let the Kos community know the NY Times has just published an article on the Times website titled

Video of Interrogation of Gitmo Prisoner Released

There are probably more, many more videos out there. Will this open the floodgates. Will this video, the first released to the public, one day be used as evidence in war crime trials?

"Any of us could be the man who encounters his double." -- Friedrich Durrenmat (1)

Jane Mayer's new book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (not due out in the bookstores until tomorrow), is already creating headlines and generating controversy. This article will examine the issues around U.S. torture practice, in light of new allegations in the book, and review an email conversation between myself and a prominent nationally-known psychologist whom Mayer says assisted in the planning of U.S. government torture.