Originally published at TomDispatch.com

We’ve now been at war with, or in, Iraq for almost 20 years, and intermittently at war in Afghanistan for 30 years.  Think of it as nearly half a century of experience, all bad.  And what is it that Washington seems to have concluded?  In Afghanistan, where one disaster after another has occurred, that we Americans can finally do more of the same, somewhat differently calibrated, and so much better.  In Iraq, where we had, it seemed, decided that enough was enough and we should simply depart, the calls from a familiar crew for us to stay are growing louder by the week.    

The Iraqis, so the argument goes, need us.  After all, who would leave them alone, trusting them not to do what they’ve done best in recent years: cut one another’s throats?    

Modesty in Washington?  Humility?  The ability to draw new lessons from long-term experience?  None of the above is evidently appropriate for “the indispensable nation,” as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once called the United States, and to whose leaders she attributed the ability to “see further into the future.”  None of the above is part of the American arsenal, not when Washington’s weapon of choice, repeatedly consigned to the scrapheap of history and repeatedly rescued, remains a deep conviction that nothing is going to go anything but truly, deeply, madly badly without us, even if, as in Iraq, things have for years gone truly, deeply, madly badly with us. 

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By David Swanson

Sixty-five congress members, including 60 Democrats and 5 Republicans, voted to end the occupation of Afghanistan on Wednesday. But 356 congress members, including 189 Democrats and 167 Republicans voted to keep the war going. The vote followed three hours of debate created by Congressman Dennis Kucinich's introduction of a privileged resolution.

The debate featured three leaders from three groups of congress members: the war opponents (almost all Democrats), the pro-war Democrats, and the pro-war Republicans. Given this alignment, which has existed for nearly a decade now, is there any reason for supporters of peace and justice to take heart? I think so. Here's why: If the 60 Democrats acted in good faith and would have voted the same way even if the bill had a chance of passing, or even if that could be said of only 38 of them, then we may very well see funding of the wars dry up. If the leadership includes unrelated measures in the next war funding bill ($33 billion coming in April or May), measures that lead all the Republicans to vote No (as happened last July), then only 38 Democrats have to vote No to block the bill.

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In his film Capitalism: A Love Story [set to be released on DVD and Blu-ray Monday], Michael Moore squares off with the free-market system for its role in leveraging the United States's wealth into the hands of a few.

But in one clip cut from the documentary [Moore] interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, who explains how capitalism is actually contributing to the very downfall of the human race and the "degradation of the planet."

"All sorts of people who have spent their lives studying climate change, from Bill McKibben on down, have warned us that we don't have a lot of time left," Hedges said. "So it's not just that capitalism has destroyed our economic system and hijacked our political system, but it literally is extinguishing the system that sustains life. If that's not thwarted soon...then we will begin to see massive dislocations, environmental refugees, further depleting of natural resources. Overpopulation is also an issue. The UN estimates that by 2050 the size of the planet will double."

The very concept of capitalism, Moore declares in the film, is the problem because it inevitably leads to a system where the richest few control the means of production as well as the levers of power -- leading to a "plutonomy," a term used in a leaked Citigroup memo from 2005, in which the finance juggernaut concluded that the United States is no longer a democracy.

In the interview, Hedges decries America's turn toward supply-side economics over the last three decades as the cause of stagnating middle class incomes, contrasting it with the increasingly lavish fortunes of the wealthy and the aid they often receive from the government at the expense of working people.

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In recent weeks, former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen has been on a public relations campaign defending the efficacy of waterboarding, going so far as to say that the torture technique sanctioned by the Bush administration is not only safe, but is in line with the teachings of the Catholic Church.

On Tuesday, in an interview with "Fox News," John Yoo, the former Justice Department attorney who was the principal author of legal memoranda that cleared the way for CIA interrogators to waterboard "war on terror" detainees and subject them to other brutal torture techniques, asserted that waterboarding was harmless.

Please click this link to listen to an interview with Jeffrey Kaye on the Peter B. Collins show.

In his defense of the practice, Yoo cited the thousands of US servicemen who have undergone SERE training and said, "we don't think it amounts to torture because we would not be doing it to our own soldiers otherwise."

However, a previously unreleased internal Department of Defense (DoD) memo, summarizing a review of the Navy SERE program in late February - early March 2007, reveals  that there was fierce criticism within the DoD of the Navy SERE school in North Island, San Diego, for being the only SERE facility to still use waterboarding in its training program.

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Last Sunday, Nancy Pelosi vowed to wrangle up the votes needed to pass a health care bill even if it meant some Democratic lawmakers would be voted out of office in November's midterm elections.

"Why are we here? We're not here just to self-perpetuate our service in Congress. We're here to do the job for the American people," Pelosi said in an interview on ABC News' "This Week."

"The point is we have a responsibility here ... " Pelosi said later on CNN's "State of the Union," explaining the urgency in passing legislation.

If only Pelosi and other Democrats applied the same aggressive attitude toward holding Bush administration officials accountable for implementing a policy of torture against "war on terror detainees" after 9/11.

While it may seem like a stretch to talk about health care benefits and torture in the same breath, there is a direct link between the two issues. Indeed, it was a Medicare benefits statute and other health care provisions that were used to form the basis for one of two August 2002 torture memos.

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Happy Monday. Welcome to the Dog’s letter writing campaign for torture accountability. This campaign is designed to keep the issue of accountability under the law for the Bush administrations torture program alive. Here is how it works, every Monday the Dog writes to one of the decision makers on the issue of torture accountability. You get involved (and increase the impact) by either cutting and pasting the letter over your own signature or just writing your own letter. The Dog even provides e-mail links so you can cc the letter to all the decision makers.

Originally posted at Squarestate.net

This week we are back to writing the Attorney General, as he has the final say as to whether comprehensive investigations will accrue or not.

Dear Attorney General Holder:

I write you once again to urge your action on the issue of the Bush Administration’s apparent torture program. The legal reasons why you should act are clear. Torture is both a Federal and International crime. Under the International Conventions Against Torture, any signatory has the obligation to investigate every credible allegation of torture.

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Let’s do a thought experiment; you are at home and there is a knock at the door. You open it and there is a police detective there. He wants to question you about a murder from thirty-one years ago. You know you never murdered anyone, so you consent. Then the detective tells you that your DNA was matched to a sample from the crime scene, would you be worried? You should be.

Originally posted at Squarestate.net

The little scenario is exactly what happened to John Puckett. Michael Bobelian has a story in Washington Monthly with the details. In 1972 a nurse by the name of Diana Sylvester was sexually assaulted and murdered. There was an eyewitness who gave a very general description but the case never really went anywhere and relegated to cold case status.

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By David Swanson

We're about to witness the pretense of war lawyer hearings without the war lawyers (commonly known as torture lawyers by those willing to ignore their role in "legalizing" aggressive war). This may highlight for many observers the little-known fact that Congress no longer has the power of subpoena.

During 2007-2008 Democratic congressional committees subpoenaed dozens of Bush officials, who simply refused to comply. Although any committee has the undisputed power to use the Capitol Police to enforce its subpoenas, none did. They asked the Bush Justice Department to do it. They sued the Bush Justice Department in court. But, with the exception of a weird deal for partial and secret compliance by Karl Rove in 2009, not a single one of the scofflaws has been compelled to show up.

During 2009-2010 none of the subpoenaed officials have been re-subpoenaed. When torture memos were made public in April 2009, Senator Patrick Leahy, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked memo author Jay Bybee to testify, and Bybee declined. Leahy did not issue a subpoena. Congressman John Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, in 2009 and 2010 has impeached a judge for groping and another for petty corruption, but has not so much as asked Bybee (or Yoo) to appear.

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Happy Monday and welcome to the Dog’s letter writing campaign for torture accountability. Last week was not a good week for the cause. The release of the Office of Professional Responsibility report with the conclusion that Mr. Yoo and Judge Bybee showed only poor judgment in their ginning up of legal cover for torture is a travesty. The Associate Attorney General David Margolis overrode the two previous versions of the report which called for them to be referred to their local Bar Associations for professional misconduct. Instead they are very mildly admonished and let go their merry way.

Originally posted at Squarestate.net

There is still an avenue to pursue and that is House and Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. The Dog would love to tell you this was going to be a place where things will be different, but the reality is that it is likely to be a lot of smoke and very little fire. However giving up is not an option, at least for this dog. So lets take all the shots we can and keep this issue alive.

Today we will be writing to Judiciary Chair Conyers, below is this weeks letter:

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What else can you call it when the Obama Justice Department rules that the Bush team lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, to quote the New York Times February 19 story, “had used flawed legal reasoning but were not guilty of professional misconduct”?

This decision shreds the carefully constructed reasoning that the United States prosecution team presented, and that was adopted, at the Nuremberg Trials. Under the Obama Justice Department’s rationale regarding Yoo and Bybee, all Nazi defendants tried under those proceedings, which set a precedent thereafter, would have been set free.

In the cases of the Nazi defendants the argument repeatedly asserted was “We were following orders.” Under the Obama Justice Department ruling the defense was more like “Oops, it is easy for anyone to make a mistake, particularly in moments of great pressure.”

Oddly enough, this is one time when Dick Cheney has demonstrated a higher standard of probity than those analyzing the conduct of Yoo and Bybee. It was Cheney who recently conceded that the executive branch controlled Justice Department “opinions” on torture.

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