A new report documenting the torture of more than two-dozen former prisoners held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2008 comes several months after a bipartisan Congressional committee linked the murder of two detainees held at the same prison facility to policies enacted by George W. Bush and ex-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The April report released by the Senate Armed Services Committee on the treatment of prisoners held in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan concluded that a combination of various torture techniques coupled with a series of brutal beatings administered by military interrogators caused the deaths of the two prisoners in December 2002.

One of the detainees, identified in the report as Dilawar, was the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side."

According to the Armed Services Committee report, another detainee identified as Habibullah was killed two days after Rumsfeld authorized the use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques against prisoners in Afghanistan. Dilawar was murdered six days after Habibullah was killed. The report labeled their deaths homicides.

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I know why you're here . . .

You're here because you know something. What you know is hard to explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with America. Something very wrong. You know what it is, but no one in power will do anything about it. And that frustrates you, your frustration is like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.

I know what you've been doing . . . why you hardly sleep, why you live the way you do, and why day after day, you read progressive blogs. You're looking for him. You're looking for a progressive leader. I know because I was once looking for the same thing. And when he found me, he told me I wasn't really looking for him. I was looking for the leadership within me, the leadership within each of us.

How do we achieve real change? It's the question that drives us. It's the question that brought you here. You know the question, just as I do.

But no one in power will ask it . . .

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Thunder on the mountain, and there's fires on the moon,
A ruckus in the alley and the sun will be here soon.

Or maybe not.

There’s been a ruckus in the alley for 30 years, but too many Democrats still keep bringing bouquets of bipartisan flowers to gun fights. They keep getting riddled with bullets, over and over again, but they still don’t seem to have a clue that their Bouquet of Bipartisan Flowers Strategy isn’t worth a flying fuck and never has been.

Thunder on the mountain, rollin' like a drum,
Gonna fight for change here, it's where the music’s coming from,
We don't need any guide, we already know the way . . .

Seeking the truth is the way. Seekers of truth are not conspiracy theorists, they are not purists, they don’t wear tinfoil fucking hats, they don’t need permission from Kos or anyone else to seek the truth about 9/11, about stolen elections, and about every other BushCo crime Cheney and his thugs keep high-fiving each other about while Eric Holder does nothing and Obama kisses the CIA’s ass and the Pentagon’s ass and the NSA’s ass and calls it change we can believe in.

I want justice we can believe in, I want accountability we can believe in, I want to hear thunder on the mountain like it's Judgment Day, I want to see every BushCo criminal prosecuted, convicted, and sent to prison.

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ANP: Senator Lindsey Graham was a passionate critic of the Bush Justice attorneys during this past summer's Armed Services Committee hearings on interrogation.

Lately, however, Graham seems to have had second thoughts on the matter. At a recent Judiciary subcommittee hearing investigating the torture memos, Graham mounted a feisty defense of Jay Bybee, John Yoo and the lawyers who provided legal cover for detainee abuse.

This performance sent ANP producer Mike Fritz back to the ANP archives to confirm that this was indeed the same Lindsey Graham we remembered from the summer, and sure enough, it was. As this video reveals, same tie - different message.

ANP/Real News Network - May 20, 2009
Lindsey Graham debates himself on detainee torture
Sen. Graham: "The Geneva Convention did not apply until 2006"

According to a RawStory article about an hour ago:

A report by the Senate Armed Services Committee released Tuesday night says that torture techniques used at Abu Ghraib prison and approved by officials in the George W. Bush administration were applied only after soliciting a “wish list” from interrogators.

President George W. Bush made a written determination that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, did not apply to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees. This act, the committee found, cleared the way for a new interrogation program to be developed in-part based on “Chinese communist” tactics used against Americans during the Korean War, mainly to elicit false confessions for propaganda purposes.

“In mid-August 2003, an email from staff at Combined Joint Task Force
7 (CJTF-7) headquarters in Iraq requested that subordinate units provide input for a ‘wish list’ of interrogation techniques [to be used at Abu Ghraib], stated that ‘the gloves are coming off,’ and said ‘we want these detainees broken,’” the report found.

The report is available as a .pdf file from the Senate Armed Services Committee site, and opens with this extraordinary paragraph:

On February 7, 2002, President Bush signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention did not apply to the conflict with al Qaeda and concluding that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or the legal protections afforded by the Third Geneva Convention. The President’s order closed off application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees. While the President’s order stated that, as “a matter of policy, the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of the Geneva Conventions,” the decision to replace well established military doctrine, i.e., legal compliance with the Geneva Conventions, with a policy subject to interpretation, impacted the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody.

Newly released US government documents, detailing how Bush administration officials punched legalistic holes in the Geneva Conventions' protections of war captives, stand in stark contrast to the outrage some of the same officials expressed in the first week of the Iraq war when Iraqi TV interviewed several captured American soldiers.

"If there is somebody captured," President George W. Bush told reporters on March 23, 2003, "I expect those people to be treated humanely. If not, the people who mistreat the prisoners will be treated as war criminals."

Then, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush, and other administration officials orchestrated a chorus of outrage, citing those TV scenes as proof of the Iraq's government contempt for international law in general and the Geneva Conventions in particular.

"It is a blatant violation of the Geneva Convention to humiliate and abuse prisoners of war or to harm them in any way. As President Bush said yesterday, those who harm POWs will be found and punished as war criminals," Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said on March 24, 2003.

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Sam Stein weighs in on Obama's pre-approved, bipartisan-tested, generic excuse for not enforcing the law against BushCo criminals . . .

Asked for the first time to respond to the likelihood that Spanish prosecutors will target officials in the Bush administration for sanctioning torture at Guantanamo Bay, Barack Obama stressed, once again, that he prefers to look forward, not backward. “I’m a strong believer that it’s important to look forward and not backwards, and to remind ourselves that we do have very real security threats out there,” said Obama.

I think it’s important to remind ourselves, Mr. President, that war criminals are still running around loose all over Washington D.C. Their smug faces can still be seen on national television, they’re writing op-eds in the fucking Wall Street Journal, they’re getting million dollar book deals and are still wined and dined at Georgetown cocktail parties, while the victims of their war crimes can't look forward to anything ever again because they’re dead, or are still in Gitmo, or have been shattered physically and psychologically by American torturers acting upon the orders of an American president and vice president, who paid American lawyers to tell them it was legal to violate the law, the Constitution, and the Geneva Conventions.

"Legal cover", bought and paid for . . .

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Crossposted from Docudharma
We are Americans. We live in and vote in America. We elect our leaders. Thus we are responsible for what our leaders do.

We here may look upon ourselves as different.

But each of the other 7 Billion human beings we share this planet with, looks at us as Americans.

As a country, as an entity. The Americans selected George Bush to lead them. A country is what its leaders do. And our leaders were George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld. In the period after 9/11, to the rest of the world, they represented America. The rest of the world was ready to join with America after the attacks. To the rest of the world, they were...and still are...America. What they did...America did.

Each and every American did. It is how we judge others, how we judge other countries....by what their leaders do.

And it is how we will be judged. How we are judged. By what George Bush, Dick Chenmey, and Donald Rumsfeld did. That is just how it works. Fair or not, it is true. America DOES torture.

We are Americans, and this is what we did.

The International Red Cross says so. The United Nations is investigating US.

We are torturers. We try to avoid that fact, here in our comfy little Exceptional American Bubble. But to the rest of the world, until there is justice visited upon the individuals who ordered torture...Americans are torturers. How does that feel?

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Glenn Greenwald and Jane Mayer appeared on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! the other day. There was a lot to be grateful for in letting these two important voices get further exposure. Both Mayer and Greenwald agreed there were things to be concerned about regarding the Obama administration's positions re suppression of state secrets privilege in cases such as that of Binyam Mohammed. Both agreed that the Bush Administration's organization of state torture deserved investigations and prosecutions. Both warned that dangers remain for those who would see the reestablishment of basic civil liberties.

While there is much to praise in the work of these intrepid journalists (see Glenn Greenwald's column at Salon.com on any given day, or read Jane Mayer's book, The Dark Side), a few of their comments at Democracy Now! bear further scrutiny.

Mayer, at one point, took umbrage at what she felt was Greenwald's overly negative representation of the Obama administration's actions thus far concerning torture, interrogations, rendition, and secrecy:

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