CNN.com - Ex-CIA chief: Cheney 'VP for torture' - Nov 18, 2005: "'I'm embarrassed the United States has a vice president for torture,' Turner said, according to ITV's Web site. 'He condones torture, what else is he?'

Turner said he did not believe U.S. President George W. Bush's statements that the United States does not use torture.

Turner ran the Central Intelligence Agency from 1977 to 1981 under former U.S. President Jimmy Carter."

(Via Martini Republic.)

Baghdad Burning: "The whole world heard about the one in Jadriya, recently raided by the Americans. Jadriya was once one of the best areas in Baghdad. It's an area on the river and is special in that it's greener, and cleaner, than most areas. Baghdads largest university, Baghdad University, is located in Jadriya (with a campus in another area). Jadriya had some of the best shops and restaurants- not to mention some of Baghdad's most elegant homes...… and apparently, now, a torture house."

(Via Iraq The Model.)

Doing Unto Others as They Did Unto Us - New York Times: "Washington — How did American interrogation tactics after 9/11 come to include abuse rising to the level of torture? Much has been said about the illegality of these tactics, but the strategic error that led to their adoption has been overlooked.

The Pentagon effectively signed off on a strategy that mimics Red Army methods. But those tactics were not only inhumane, they were ineffective. For Communist interrogators, truth was beside the point: their aim was to force compliance to the point of false confession.

Fearful of future terrorist attacks and frustrated by the slow progress of intelligence-gathering from prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Pentagon officials turned to the closest thing on their organizational charts to a school for torture. That was a classified program at Fort Bragg, N.C., known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Based on studies of North Korean and Vietnamese efforts to break American prisoners, SERE was intended to train American soldiers to resist the abuse they might face in enemy custody."

...

Three soldiers have been ordered to stand trial on murder charges in General Mowhoush's death. Yet the Pentagon cannot point to any intelligence gains resulting from the techniques that have so tarnished America's image. That's because the techniques designed by communist interrogators were created to control a prisoner's will rather than to extract useful intelligence.

A full account of how our leaders reacted to terrorism by re-engineering Red Army methods must await an independent inquiry. But the SERE model's embrace by the Pentagon's civilian leaders is further evidence that abuse tantamount to torture was national policy, not merely the product of rogue freelancers. After the shock of 9/11 - when Americans desperately wanted mastery over a world that suddenly seemed terrifying - this policy had visceral appeal. But it's the task of command authority to connect means and ends rationally. The Bush administration has too frequently failed to do this. And so it is urgent that Congress step in to tie our detainee policy to our national interest.

(Via Cryptome.)

Baghdad Burning: "The first day I read about it on the internet, on some site, my heart sank. White phosphorous in Falloojeh. I knew nothing about white phosphorous, of course, and a part of me didn’t want to know the details. I tried downloading the film four times and was almost relieved when I got disconnected all four times.

E. had heard about the film too and one of his friends S. finally brought it by on CD. He and E. shut themselves up in the room with the computer to watch the brief documentary. E. came out half an hour later looking pale- his lips tightened in a straight line, which is the way he looks when he’s pensive... thinking about something he'd rather not discuss.

‘Hey- I want to see it too…’ I half-heartedly called out after him, as he walked S. to the door.

‘It’s on the desktop- but you really don’t want to see it.’ E. said.

I avoided the computer for five days because every time I switched it on, the file would catch my eye and call out to me… now plaintively- begging to be watched, now angrily- condemning my indifference.

Except that it was never indifference… it was a sort of dread that sat deep in my stomach, making me feel like I had swallowed a dozen small stones. I didn’t want to see it because I knew it contained the images of the dead civilians I had in my head.

Few Iraqis ever doubted the American use of chemical weapons in Falloojeh. We’ve been hearing the terrifying stories of people burnt to the bone for well over a year now. I just didn’t want it confirmed."

(Via Iraq The Model.)

Drugs Now Legal If User Is Employed | The Onion - America's Finest News Source: "Seeking to 'narrow the focus of the drug war to the true enemy,' Congress passed a bill legalizing drug use for the gainfully employed Monday.

'Stockbrokers, lawyers, English professors... you're not the problem here,' said DEA Administrator Asa Hutchinson at a White House press conference. 'If you are paying taxes and keeping your yard tidy, we're not going to hassle you if you come home from a hard day of work and want to enjoy a little pot or blow. But if, on the other hand, you're one of these lazy, shiftless types hanging out on the street all day looking for your next high, we're coming after you.'"

(Via The Onion.)

t r u t h o u t - Report: Tomlinson Violated Federal Law: "Investigators at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting concluded today that its former chairman repeatedly broke federal law and its own regulations in a campaign to combat what he saw as liberal bias."

...

"The corporation's former chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, who was ousted from the board two weeks ago when it was presented in a closed session with the details of the report, has said he sought to enforce a provision of the Public Broadcasting Act meant to ensure objectivity and balance in programming. But the report said that in the process, Mr. Tomlinson repeatedly crossed statutory boundaries that set up the corporation as a 'heat shield' to protect public radio and television from political interference.

    

For instance, the report said that Mr. Tomlinson violated federal law by being heavily involved in getting more than $4 million in money for a program featuring the conservative editorial writers of The Wall Street Journal. The board is prohibited from getting involved in programming decisions, but the investigators found that Mr. Tomlinson had pushed hard for the program, 'The Journal Editorial Report,' even as some staff officials at the corporation raised concerns over its cost."

(Via t r u t h o u t.)

Salon.com | News Wires: "Pentagon officials acknowledged Tuesday that U.S. troops used white phosphorous as a weapon against insurgent strongholds during the battle of Fallujah last November. But they denied an Italian television news report that the spontaneously flammable material was used against civilians.

Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman, said that while white phosphorous is most frequently used to mark targets or obscure a position, it was used at times in Fallujah as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants."

(Via Salon.)

www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish: "This morning's NYT has an insightful op-ed on how the interrogation techniques now used by the U.S. were actually first developed by the Communist interrogators of the Soviet-controlled world. They were designed not to get actionable intelligence but to destroy a person's soul and enforce ideological conformity. In this 'Animal Farm' moment, where the United States has literally adopted the immorality of its erstwhile enemy..."

(Via Salon.)

Defense Tech: Rummy Backing off from Iraq?: "This article from Sunday's Washington Post Magazine is the second major attempt I've seen in the last few months to separate Donald Rumsfeld from the Iraq war. (Here's the other.)

The idea, basically, is that Rummy was more fixated on modernizing the military than invading any country. Iraq just happened to be the country that the President wanted to wack.

Rumsfeld portrayed the memo as a warning blast, an attempt to do 'everything humanly possible to prepare' Bush for the awful responsibility that had settled onto his presidential shoulders -- and his shoulders alone. For there comes a point when even the secretary of defense must realize that 'it's not your decision or even your recommendation,' Rumsfeld reflected with Woodward. By which he meant the Iraq war wasn't Don Rumsfeld's decision or recommendation."

...

"Rumsfeld may not like how this war is turning out. But he's been for it for a long time. And no amount of after-the-fact spin is going to change that."

(Via a DefenseTech.)

The Counterterrorism Blog: USA PATRIOT Act Reauthorization Looks Likely: "Sixteen provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act (technically an acronym for the 'Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism') expire at the end of 2005, and the reauthorization process appears to be grinding forward. The latest proposal includes a limit of seven years for most of the controversial provisions, longer than the four years suggested by a non-binding resolution passed by the U.S. House last week, but still shorter than the 10 years proposed by the Administration. Two of the provisions under strenuous debate by Congressional conferees and staff are Section 215, which enables the accessing of business and library records on suspects, and the 'lone wolf' provision enacted by the 2004 Intel Reform & Terrorist Prevention Act (availabe in the Counterterrorism Library), which allows monitoring of foreigners who are suspected of terrorism but who may not be directly associated with a terrorist organization. The draft would make it tougher for the FBI to issue 'national security letters,' which require businesses to provide information about a person without informing that person. The draft also changes the current federal funding formula for first responders; I assume that provision is included to make the bill more attractive to recalcitrant lawmakers and those worried about their vote on this controversial bill."

(Via The Counterterrorism Blog.)

Salon.com News | Gulf Coast slaves: "Halliburton and its subcontractors hired hundreds of undocumented Latino workers to clean up after Katrina -- only to mistreat them and throw them out without pay."

...

"But three weeks after arriving at the naval base from Texas, Martinez's boss, Karen Tovar, a job broker from North Carolina who hired workers for a KBR subcontractor called United Disaster Relief, booted him from the base and left him homeless, hungry and without money.

'They gave us two meals a day and sometimes only one,' Martinez said.

He says that Tovar 'kicked us off the base,' forcing him and other cleanup workers -- many of them Mexican and undocumented -- to sleep on the streets of New Orleans. According to Martinez, they were not paid for three weeks of work. An immigrant rights group recently filed complaints with the Department of Labor on behalf of Martinez and 73 other workers allegedly owed more than $56,000 by Tovar."

(Via Salon.)

www.GovExec.com - Forward Observer: Tortured Logic (11/14/05): "If Vice President Dick Cheney and his allies in the Bush administration manage to kill an amendment by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that would forbid the CIA or other U.S. government entities from torturing captives, brutal foreign governments will be less inclined than ever to observe the narrow firebreak between life and death when abusing U.S. prisoners."

...

"But the North Koreans and North Vietnamese stopped short of killing their American captives and tried to cover up bruises and other signs of torture before they were freed. The firebreak dug by the fear of international condemnation stayed their hand. But any U.S. government act that exempted the CIA or any other American agency from McCain's anti-torture amendment would almost certainly wipe away restraint while further blackening the United States' image abroad.

The Senate has passed the McCain anti-torture amendment twice, once as part of the fiscal 2006 Defense appropriations bill and again as an addition to the defense authorization bill.

One of McCain's fears is that the House, during a conference with the Senate on the appropriations measure, will strip his amendment on the grounds that it is now in the Senate's defense authorization bill. Then, warn backers of the McCain amendment, the House Republican majority, at the urging of the White House, will keep the defense authorization bill from being passed at all this year."

(Via NervousFishBlog.)

Martini Republic » Alito, 1985: “Constitution does not protect a right to abortion”:

"Alito denied that Constitution protected abortion."

(Via Martini Republic.)

Slashdot | Shareholders Pressure Internet Companies on Rights: "whamett writes 'A group of investment firms is putting their shareholder weight behind asking high-tech companies that deal with repressive regimes to pay more attention to rights violations. Meanwhile, two of the firms have drafted a separate resolution for Cisco shareholders that's up for vote on Tuesday. All this comes not long after Yahoo's involvement in the jailing of a Chinese journalist left a bad taste in everyone's mouth.' This isn't the first time that investment firms have stepped up to the plate on human rights violations."

(Via /.)