Another Year. Another ...Year

Conditions: Sunny.


Scuttle Scuttle.

Ahhh, torture. For years the dirty little secret of the American government. Now out in the cold sterile open. It skitters across our conscience like a cockroach on a kitchen floor, desperate to escape. Who will bring down the frying pan of justice?

Washington - President Barack Obama said Wednesday night that waterboarding authorized by former President George W. Bush was torture, and the information gained from terror suspects through its use could have been obtained by other means. "In some cases it may be harder," he conceded at a White House news conference marking a whirlwind first 100 days in office.

Well okay, then. Obama himself decrees that torture was going on. Whhaaap!, in other words.

Obama also said he was "absolutely convinced" he had acted correctly in banning waterboarding, an interrogation technique that simulates drowning, and approved making public the Bush administration memos detailing its use as well as other harsh methods used on terrorist suspects. "Not because there might not have been information that was yielded by these various detainees ... but because we could have gotten this information in other ways, in ways that were consistent with our values, in ways that were consistent with who we are."

- truthout.org/

So who dares cheer the cockroach now?

President Obama's vow to keep Americans safe is in conflict with his decision to limit interrogation techniques to the Army Field Manual, opponents of his anti-terror policies say.

The Army Field Manual, which includes interrogation methods intended for captured soldiers rather than hardened terrorists, is "not useful at all," David Rivkin, a former official in the Bush Justice Department, told FOX News. "In fact, the Army Field Manual is, let's say, so anemic, that it goes below the level of coercion associated with police station level of interrogation."

For instance, the time-honored technique of "good cop, bad cop" is in question because insults are not allowed.

Michael Scheuer, a former CIA employee wonders how far Obama would go if the U.S. captured a terrorist who said nuclear weapons were set to go off in some American cities but refused to say which ones.

"What do you do in that case?" Scheuer said. "Is the president's moral repulsion about techniques that have protected America more important that actually going after an attempt to use a nuclear device in the United States."

- foxnews.com/politics/

Fox News, always reliably batshit insane. So, the ticking timebomb scenario so favoured by the fiction-writers. Is that the back-of-the-refrigerator safe haven the cockroach of torture can escape to?

As soon as Bybee [Judge Bybee, on the U.S court of appeals] gave the green light, torture followed: Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002, according to another of the newly released memos. Unsurprisingly, it appears that no significant intelligence was gained by torturing this mentally ill Qaeda functionary. So why the overkill? Bybee's memo invoked a ticking time bomb: "There is currently a level of 'chatter' equal to that which preceded the September 11 attacks."
[...]

The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantnamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: "A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful." As higher-ups got more "frustrated" at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, "there was more and more pressure to resort to measures" that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration's ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee's memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) "Downing Street memo," in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." A month after Bybee's memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on "Meet the Press," hyping both Saddam's W.M.D.s and the "number of contacts over the years" between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus "intelligence" from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.

- alternet.org/rights/

Denied! See, the thing about Jack Bauer electrocuting some asshole in order to find out where the next attack is about to take place is that: it’s bullshit! Life doesn’t work like that. And all the deluded assholes who’ve spent the last however many years torturing people in the belief of the ticking-bomb deserve to get thrown in jail, for their own benefit as well as the rest of us: Because they clearly need help to come back and live in the real world with the rest of us.



Film Review: The International.

Banks have been getting some bad publicity lately, so it’s not surprising the latest big Hollywood thriller is about an evil bank that has it’s fingers in everybody’s pies and only a few good people are trying to stop it. Clive Owen stars as, essentially, James Bond Lite, operating out of Interpol. He travels from city to city, all around the world, gradually pulling together the pieces of just how evil the IBBC bank is. Turns out financing international arms deals that develop into civil wars can create debt schemes that turn into nice earners for banks. Of course anyone who might give away the secret, or get in the way, has to be eliminated, which is what causes all the trouble.

Despite the gunfight in the Guggenheim museum, this is really a talkie, in the style of Michael Clayton. We get a glimpse of how ruthless the men of power behind the large organizations really are, and we watch an honest guy try to take them down. Unlike Michael Clayton, however, this film shows us that organizations like banks are larger than just their boards of directors. The company takes on a life of it’s own, and conducts business irregardless of the problems of individuals. These leaves the audience feeling a little hollow, not much is done, and not much can be done to stop large corporations from conducting immoral business practices.

It’s a well-made film, very international in scope, well paced and well acted by all. Clive grimaces his way toward a bitter ending while Naomi Watts and Armin Mueller-Stahl provide some interesting characters. Three and a Half Locations out of Five.


- Peace out