The CIA tortures, but as was the case for Nixon ordering goons to break into Democratic HQ, torture isn't the problem--it's all about the cover-up. In this case, the Justice Department is after the CIA, not for torture, but for destroying tapes of torture. America is weird.
Click on the cartoon to make it bigger.
Torture and Bush and Gonzales' sadism aside, the U. S. Navy, after the U.S.S. Cole incident, allows FIVE high-speed boats within striking distance of it's ships in the Strait to linger for an hour without erasing them? Seems the Bush administration WANTED another (alleged) Gulf of Tonkin incident to start another illegal war, this time with Iran. After all, isn't this what Bush and Cheney wanted all along? In the meantime, Bush shows how ignorant and incompetent he is by declaring peace between Isreal and Palestine, as though he can will peace via his direct connection wiht Jesus. Has there ever been a more clear sign that America is BEYOND the threshold of HELL than Americans standing by idly, the fourth estate, Supreme Court and Congress totally powerless and compromised, and Bush STILL making empty decrees and predictions totally without substance? With more evidence than Bush has in seven years in the most powerful government, intelligence community and military establishment in the world, I predict America will pass from the sad excuse we are for a democracy today to total nothing in one day's time. There will be NO oil and gasoline. Stores will be depleted of ALL merchandise. Warehouses will be raided in a last-ditch attempt for survivalists and government insiders. We will laugh, darkly, at the likes of Dick Cheney without medication and doctors to keep his robot body and foul mind operating. George W. Bush will cry crocodile tears before he puts Saddam Hussein's stolen pistol to his mouth and Laura pulls the trigger, because Bush doesn't even have the GUTS to off himself. Peace in Israel and Palestine? He CAN'T be serious! Or...OR, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney will don leather vests, saddle up the Harleys and go WEST as Mad Maxers, with no explanation where they get their food, medications, gasoline, ammunition, wimmin (or in Bush's case, MEN...about time we ended the myth that Bush fathered twin girls, you know, to keep the WASP tradition of lies and denial going), roll the credits, Herkimer.
ReplyDeleteIf it were'nt so funny it'd be sad.
ReplyDeleteThis is all about message framing, Ted. Who frames the message that it's about the cover-up and not about torture? Who sets the tone for what the Justice Department is allowed to do and what they're not allowed to do?
ReplyDeleteThe election of George Bush, coupled with the fact that most of the GOP candidates have already committed conspiracy to commit a war crime by advocating torture on stage at numerous debates, demonstrates that Americans are unwilling or incapable of holding their leaders accountable.
When you no longer have direct accountability, anything goes. This isn't even about people being labeled as criminals for their actions, it's about ego preservation.
We live in a country where people willingly sacrifice other people to preserve the egos of the ruling class. We're just pieces in a game of Stratego to them.
This notion that "BushCo" and Gonzalez ran rampant and unchecked torturing eveyone in site. If you are opposed to the methods used, that's a valid opinion, but have the intellectual honesty to blame everyone.From the WaPo:
ReplyDeletelong before "waterboarding" entered the public discourse, the CIA gave key legislative overseers about 30 private briefings, some of which included descriptions of that technique and other harsh interrogation methods, according to interviews with multiple U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge.
With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).
Individual lawmakers' recollections of the early briefings varied dramatically, but officials present during the meetings described the reaction as mostly quiet acquiescence, if not outright support. "Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing," said Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. "And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement."
Making the claim that more people are culpable is a really cheap attempt to distract the issue of overall leadership; where does the buck stop?
ReplyDeleteThe Bush Administration has played that game with regard to pre-Iraq War intelligence, implicating "others" around the world in this. In reality, there was massive opposition to the invasion for those exact reasons. . .history is simply rewritten on a daily basis.
Saying that congress had some power is missing the point; they're politicians, they want to stay in office. Only one person in congress voted against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and was immediately booted out. Remember Max Cleland? Americans are so militant that political leaders are doubly forced into militarism...but who drives it and benefits from it? A sensationalized media coupled with a military industrial complex.
The NY Times just recently published a piece on 126 cases of murder from war vets...it's not simply that we will never learn, it's that we don't create the institutional memory that allows future generations to understand the importance of....oh say....laws? This is my main beef with Libertarians...they sort of forget that the society we have now was gained through a process that is always ripe to fall.
Fascism never sleeps, it is always waiting in the shadows to take a 911 or Reichstag burning as a Clarion Call toward the abyss.
I guess it runs deep in our political culture. Outrage came over Nixon's cover up not the act, Gonzalez faced wrath for sacking of the AGs not for his denial of Habeas Corpus or Geneva conventions, Outrage broke out when it was revealed our domestic calls are being tapped not when just a week before it was revealed that International calls are being tapped. Some even blamed the Times for breaking the story....We care about the annoying stain, not about why there was blood.
ReplyDelete"it's not simply that we will never learn, it's that we don't create the institutional memory that allows future generations to understand the importance of....oh say....laws?"
ReplyDeleteAn important distinction. This should be part of what people mean when they say "public education". It took some doing to cause a timely demise to segregation and slavery (well, the institutionalized forms, anyway.) Libertarians, and anarchists need to do what they accuse socialists of not doing and realize that they are giving short shrift to human nature.
libertarians furhter need to understand that capitalism came to be as a result of some very fluky circumstances in one, small part of the world, not that long ago. It is not this inevitable, natural law that they like to think it is.
The sheeple just wish the gubmint had been smart enough to put down a couple tarps to collect the blood from the imprisoned, the tortured and the murdered.
ReplyDeleteStains on the carpet are, after all, terribly unsightly.
The consequence of a planet that was almost entirely colonized by just a handful of countries with an extremely similar model is the legacy of presumed hegemony of capitalism, of European notions of racialization, gender roles, and the primacy of military righteousness. It was not until World War II, when Europeans unleashed their barbarity on each other that they came to realize the injustices of it.
ReplyDeleteSpared this savagery on a very personal level, Americans never learned that, and just 5 years later nearly fell to the same level of fascist barbarism. The reaction to the colonial gangrape of the planet (consequently, perpetrated through joint stock companies: businesses who managed to turn nationalism and patriotism into tools of national sentiment to allow capitalist conquest) is in many ways far worse. But the fact that it is far worse does not diminish the horror that this entire process unleashed. On the one hand, we haven't even begun to reign in the corporate fascism that rakes the planet, we're still supporting it full steam. On the other hand, we're dealing with the consequences of post-colonial reactions on a daily basis. It's only the provincially minded peasant mentality of Americans that defines "us and them" in a way that allows "us" to escape the realities of "them"....as though there is no connection.
The religious movement of the United States chose to ally itself with this for status and power. In so doing they've condemned themselves to live in the annals of history along side the Inquisitors of 500 years ago.
nice, aggie
ReplyDelete