Category: Evil

Why Do Right Wingers Hate America

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Former CIA employee, and torture apologist, Michael Scheuer goes on Glenn Beck’s show on Fox, and says that Americans need to die from a terrorist attack:

Scheuer: The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. Because it’s going to take a grass-roots, bottom-up pressure. Because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans. It’s an absurd situation again. Only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary.

Beck: Which is why, I was thinking this weekend, if I were him, that would be the last thing I would do right now.

As Adam Serwer notes:

But understand, this is not unpatriotic. You can wish all manner of horrors on this country, but as long as these horrors might serve a specific political agenda, you’re not being unpatriotic. Unpatriotic is a public health care plan. Unpatriotic is a judge modifying subprime mortgage loans to keep a roof over someone’s head. Unpatriotic is phosphate free detergent. Patriotic is wishing for a terrorist attack on the United States.

Why should we listen to these people about anything. They hate America and Americans.

What Digby Said

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Seriously:

Today the ACLU and many bloggers who are concerned with the fact that the United States tortured prisoners and apparently has no intention of holding anyone responsible for it are blogging about a little known fact about the issue: the US Government didn’t just torture a bunch a prisoners, as bad as that was, and as horrible as it remains for those who survived it. The United States tortured many prisoners to death. This does not seem to be common knowledge, but the evidence is quite clear that this happened. Torture and death by torture was not isolated.

It should be noted that if the prisoner died, they were violating even the repulsive standards of Bybee and Yoo.

Read Bob Herbert

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Seriously, excerpts do not do justice to his essay on Mohammed Jawad, where he describes the US government torturing a 12-16 year old boy, and now is attempting to use his tortured confession to keep him confined, but here are the last 2 ‘graphs:

There is no credible evidence against Jawad, and his torture-induced confession has rightly been ruled inadmissible by a military judge. But the Obama administration does not feel that he has suffered enough. Not only have administration lawyers opposed defense efforts to secure Jawad’s freedom, but they are using, as the primary basis for their opposition, the fruits of the confession that was obtained through torture and has already been deemed inadmissible — without merit, of no value.

[Jawad’s former prosecutor] Colonel Vandeveld is no longer on active duty and has joined the effort by military defense lawyers and the American Civil Liberties Union to secure Jawad’s freedom. Six years of virtual solitary confinement, he said, is enough for someone who was not much older than a child when he was taken into custody.

(emphasis mine)

Barack Obama, tear down that wall.

But he won’t because it’s inconvenient.

Let There Be No Kings

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It appears that Barack Obama is moving forward with a system of non-judicial indefinite detention.

The reports are that he plans to implement this through an executive order.

We know that it’s a bad policy, because they are leading off with a lie:

One administration official suggested the White House was already trying to build support for an executive order.

“Civil liberties groups have encouraged the administration, that if a prolonged detention system were to be sought, to do it through executive order,” the official said. Such an order can be rescinded and would not block later efforts to write legislation, but civil liberties groups generally oppose long-term detention, arguing that detainees should either be prosecuted or released.

Every major civil liberties organization in the country denounced the plan. What’s more, the idea that civil liberties groups might think that would somehow be “better” if it were implemented through an executive order, which puts the power for the decision in the hands on one man, as opposed to legislation, which requires public debate and places the decision in the hands on 535 men, is simply a lie.

What’s more, the criteria for indefinite detention, at least on the basis of his speech ago at the National Archives, is whether or not a conviction can be guaranteed, which sets the precedent that the government will only accord the protections of a court to those for whom it is guaranteed to convict.

This is more than un-American, it is anti-American.

I will not vote for, or support in any way, a politician who supports this, even if the “Republicans are worse.”

Not Enough Bullets: Goldman Sachs Edition

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Yes, the masters of the universe are once again going to make obscenely huge bonuses to its senior staff:

Staff at Goldman Sachs staff can look forward to the biggest bonus payouts in the firm’s 140-year history after a spectacular first half of the year, sparking concern that the big investment banks which survived the credit crunch will derail financial regulation reforms.

Of course the very next paragraph seems to indicate that the nominal reason for these bonuses, retention of skilled staff, is not operative:

A lack of competition and a surge in revenues from trading foreign currency, bonds and fixed-income products has sent profits at Goldman Sachs soaring, according to insiders at the firm.

Lack of competition for business implies lack of competition for employees, but the bonuses keep going up.

This Didn’t Start Happening Until Clinton’s 2nd Term

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In Washington, DC, a white supremacist walked into the Holocaust Museum and started shooting, killing a guard, Tyrone Johns.

Gee, I guess that the DHS report warning about a potential upsurge in right wing terrorism was a bit more than some sort of PC Jihad.

I’m wondering how the hell this guy only served 6½ years when he attempted to hold members of the Federal Reserve hostage only 25 years ago.

I guess they had to keep space open for the “War on Drugs”

Leon Panetta Says that We Intend to Keep Torturing

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So, Barack Obama and His Evil Minions,™ are still arguing in court that there is no crime by Bush Cheney that they will not cover up:

The forced disclosure of such material to the American Civil Liberties Union “could be expected to result in exceptionally grave damage to the national security by informing our enemies of what we knew about them, and when, and in some instances, how we obtained the intelligence we possessed,” Panetta argued.

….

The “disclosure of explicit details of specific interrogations” would provide al-Qaeda “with propaganda it could use to recruit and raise funds,” Panetta said, describing the information at issue as “ready-made ammunition.” He also submitted a classified statement to the court that he said explains why detainees could use the contents to evade questions in the future, even though Obama has promised that the United States will not use the harsh interrogation techniques again.

(emphasis mine)

If you aren’t torturing any more, the information is no longer sensitive.

I cannot see any reason to make this argument unless the Gulags are still in place, and they intend to keep using them, or are still using them.

Here’s a Surprise

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And in my own backyard, no less.

We now have confirmation that a number of banks, most notably Wells Fargo, specifically and disproportionately targeted blacks for high interest subprime mortgages:

As she describes it, Beth Jacobson and her fellow loan officers at Wells Fargo Bank “rode the stagecoach from hell” for a decade, systematically singling out blacks in Baltimore and suburban Maryland for high-interest subprime mortgages.

These loans, Baltimore officials have claimed in a federal lawsuit against Wells Fargo, tipped hundreds of homeowners into foreclosure and cost the city tens of millions of dollars in taxes and city services.

Wells Fargo, Ms. Jacobson said in an interview, saw the black community as fertile ground for subprime mortgages, as working-class blacks were hungry to be a part of the nation’s home-owning mania. Loan officers, she said, pushed customers who could have qualified for prime loans into subprime mortgages. Another loan officer stated in an affidavit filed last week that employees had referred to blacks as “mud people” and to subprime lending as “ghetto loans.”

I don’t know what bothers me more, that this happened, or that I am so unsurprised that this happened.

And it ain’t just Wells.

Liberals in Congress Doing the Right Thing

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When you have something spearheaded by the repugnant Joseph Lieberman that has to do with national security, you can be sure that it will be a bad thing.

The same goes for self-hating closet case Lindsay Graham.

When you get the two of them together, the stench is such that it, to quote the late Edwin Newman, it positively buggers the mind, which is why we have the, “Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009,” which would specifically, “photograph taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009 relating to the treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained after September 11, 2001, by the Armed Forces of the United States in operations outside of the United States.”

The only way that this bill could be more repugnant would be if the Obama administration were supporting this, since Obama and His Evil Minions™ have determined that there is no sort of perversion conducted by either the military or the other state security apparatus during the reign of Bush and His Evil Minions™ against the law, international treaty obligations, common human decency, the Constitution of the United States of America, or the founding principles of this republic that they will not support and try to suppress.

Oh, wait, Obama and His Evil Minions™ are supporting this bill, and it’s not a stand alone bill, it’s an amendment to the “must pass” supplemental budget for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Thankfully, there is still a functional liberal wing of the Democrat Party in the house of representatives, and because this bill contains additional funding for the IMF, the Republicans won’t vote for it, and now Barney Frank, along with about 10 other liberal members of Congress, out of 39 needed to kill the bill, have publicly stated that they will vote against any bill that contains such a provision.

Call your Congressman, and tell him to do the right thing.

The Worst Person in Brooklyn

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Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio, who has threatened to close churches in the districts of state legislature if they vote to extend the statute of limitations on child sexual abuse:

Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio threatened state lawmakers by vowing to close churches in their districts — and blame them for the closures — if they dared support a bill making it easier for people who were sexually assaulted as kids to sue, legislators told The Post.

I guess it’s because that, you know, it might be expensive for the church.

Here’s an idea, how about Not Letting Your Priests Rape Children!

That would save even more money.

One note is that it appears that the good Bishop’s attempts at blackmail backfired, and a number of legislators are seriously looking at supporting the bill now.

Signs of the Apocalypse

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Richard Bruce Cheney has admitted that he was wrong:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney disavowed intelligence he once cited to suggest that then-Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein collaborated with al-Qaeda to stage the Sept. 11 attacks.

Cheney said today that information by the Central Intelligence Agency of collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaeda on Sept. 11 “turned out not to be true.” Still, Cheney said a longstanding relationship existed between Hussein and terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, that justified the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Not only is he admitting error, he is doing so on a signature issue.

I have no clue as to what is going on. First, he embarks on his “human snarl tour,” in which he says that he is right about everything, and now he is backing off of his biggest lie.

Either there are wheels within wheels beyond my understanding, or he’s throwing small strokes, and I cannot figure out which.

So, Just How Were We Better Than Saddam?

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It’s far far worse than I imagined.

When I wrote about Bush rape rooms, I cited Scott Horton, who detailed only rape by instrumentality, but the reality is that we are talking full genital rape here, including the rape of a boy:

At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

What’s more the Telegraph‘s source on this is unimpeachable:

Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.

Allegations of rape and abuse were included in his 2004 report but the fact there were photographs was never revealed. He has now confirmed their existence in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.

…

Maj Gen Taguba, who retired in January 2007, said he supported the President’s decision, adding: “These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.

We also know that Barack Obama lied when he talked about this:

Mr Obama seemed to reinforce that view by adding: “I want to emphasise that these photos that were requested in this case are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib.”

I don’t think that he could say that you have pictures of a boy and a woman being raped, in additional to the forcible stripping of a woman detainee to humiliate her, any honest description would be almost as inflammatory as the pictures themselves, but saying that they are “no big” will make him less credible the next time something like this comes up.

What Josh Said

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I don’t have much to say on Obama’s speech, I’ve only read the transcript, and Obama needs to be watch, but Josh Marshal finds the reality on Richard Bruce Cheney when suggests that Cheney is at best a figure of mockery and derision:

This is someone who not only organized and seemingly directed a policy of state-sponsored torture. He did it in large part to get people to admit to crankish conspiracy theories he got taken in by by a crew of think-tank jockeys in DC whose theories most even half way sensible people treated as punch lines of jokes. So it’s Torquemada or 1984 but only after getting rescripted by Mel Brooks.

This is an extremely gullible man who has just come off being the driving ideological force in an administration that most people can already see produced more fiascos and titanic, self-inflicted goofs than possibly any in our entire history. By any standard the guy is a monumental failure — and not one whose mistakes stem in some Lyndon Johnson fashion from tragic overreach, but just a fool who damaged his country through his own gullibility, paranoia and bad judgment. Whatever else you can say about the Cheney story it ain’t Shakespearean.

Indeed.

Signs of the Apocalypse

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It’s by Lanny Davis, a Washington, DC insider, and the guy who accused people supporting Ned Lamont in 2006 against Joe Lieberman of “Liberal McCarthyism“, and he is calling for the criminal prosecution of Dick Cheney for authorizing torture:

I have agreed with President Obama on the need to look forward, not backward.

But … I have changed my mind about the need to indict former Vice President Dick Cheney for complicity in illegal torture.

…

Even more, they seem to be an in-your-face dare by Mr. Cheney to the U.S. criminal justice system: “I am Dick Cheney, I approved violations of the law in the name of the war on terror, and what are you going to do about it?”

It reminds me of Gary Hart’s reaction in the early days of his 1988 presidential campaign to the rumors of his womanizing. …..

So as to Mr. Cheney: I think it is time to take him up on his implicit dare and indict him for violating the 1994 federal law against torture.

This is as big a Beltway Blowhard™ as they come, and he called for Dick Cheney to be prosecuted, and got it published in the Moonie Times (Link is to The Hill, which republished it.

I don’t think that he is suggesting this out of any real moral imperative, it’s just that he feels that Dick Cheney is, to paraphrase Bull Durham, “Calling the umpire a called the guy a c$#@sucker,” which offends his genteel Beltway sensibilities.

Obama’s Guantánamo Show Trials

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It just gets better and better.

So, the details of the plan are dribbling out and it’s a distinction without a difference as was made clear when the New York Times obtained a filing made to the judges running the military commissions.

Remember the statement that, “The accused will have greater latitude in selecting their counsel?”

Not so much, Bush and His Evil Minions™ required that the defendants’ lawyers be appointed by the Pentagon, and, “assigned to a special office of military defense lawyers for Guantánamo, which meant, among other things, that they had to be uniformed military, and in the filing to the judges, Obama and His Evil Minions™ say that a detainee would be allowed to select a lawyer of their “own choosing”, but that the, “requested lawyer must be assigned to the Pentagon’s office of military defense lawyers for Guantánamo.“

“Any color you want, so long as it’s black,” quoth Henry Ford.

Furthermore, the right to confront witnesses against them will be ignored by using a very broad hearsay rule, because, according to “senior administration officials” said that although federal courts bar many kinds of hearsay evidence, “the hearsay rule is not one of those things that is rooted in American values.”

The right to confront witnesses in court is one of the most basic of legal rights in our system since the excesses of the Star Chamber in England.

Note that while coerced testimony will not be allowed, that the defendant will not be allowed to question the primary source of the testimony, only their interrogator, or possibly just someone who reads the interrogator’s report, will confirm this.