George W. Bush on torture.

"Torture anywhere is an affront to human dignity everywhere... I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture."~George W. Bush, June 2003

This goes with the below post.

We impeached Clinton for lying. Huh.

Another reason I'm no longer a Republican.

Waterboarding=Torture. A question.

This is a question for those in favor of waterboarding and/or torture for accused terrorists/enemy combatants/whatever. Specifically BluePitBull, The Red Head, Rivka, and others who have posted here and elsewhere in favor of this. How can you support this? Honestly, I want to know. Especially in light of the evidence below:

1. In 1947 we convicted a Japanese Officer for waterboarding, convicting him of torture in a war crimes tribunal.

2. Congress said its illegal. See the Congressional Ban on Torture.

3. We are a signator of the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which means we agreed to be subject to the explicit prohibition on torture under any condition. This was affirmed by Saadi v. Italy in which the European Court of Human Rights, on February 28, 2008, upheld the absolute nature of the torture ban by ruling that international law permits no exceptions to it.The treaty states "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture".

4. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in February 2008 that local considerations do not negate the absolute torture prohibition under international law.

5. John McCain said waterboarding is torture.

6. Waterboarding did not lead to any new information, nor any plots thwarted. It only confirmed one that had already been thwarted. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the Library Tower plot was thwarted in 2002. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan on March 1, 2003. He was waterboarded 183 times and then confessed to the plot that had already been thwarted.

Basically, since 1947 the US and the World agreed that waterboarding was torture and also a war crime. In 2001 through 2008 George W. Bush decided that international law and domestic precedent did not apply to him and had two laywers draw up secret legal loopholes to try and make it legal. And now conservatives are defending him.

In light of all the above, how can we legally, and morally, justify this?

Torture: A Crime that Requires a Verdict

Borrowed from sojourners: http://blog.sojo.net/2009/04/17/torture-a-crime-that-requires-a-verdict/

Torture: A Crime that Requires a Verdict

by Jimmy McCarty 04-17-2009

Dear President Obama,
Thank you for making the four memos approving of and describing the torture done to children of God in our name public even though many pleaded for you not to. Thank you for letting me know that my tax dollars were used to torture those carrying God’s image. I have known we made helpless people think they were drowning for a while now, but now I know we kept some awake for almost two weeks straight. Now I know we put collars around the necks of defenseless people and slammed their heads into walls. And now I know we put people in boxes so small they couldn’t move and put insects in those boxes the prisoners thought could seriously injure them with no way of escape.

We cannot know what we need to repent of without knowing what sins we have committed. Thank you for letting me know. Now I pray that we as a nation ask for God’s forgiveness for what we, because of our fear and complacency, allowed to happen in our name and work to ensure it never happens again.

Thank you also for vowing that we will never do this again. As a Christian I know God declares these actions completely sinful. There is no theological or ethical justification for torturing another human being. In doing so we demonstrated that we place our faith not in God, or some abstract notion of justice or liberty, but in violence and power. These foundations will not sustain us. Those who live by the sword die by it, and I am now afraid that we have lived by torture so long that we will also die by torture. We must never torture again, and we must work to make amends for the sins we have already committed.

I am not in complete agreement with what you have said, however. You have said no one will be held accountable for the acts of torture because they were approved by the justice department. While I understand the premise of your reasoning, I think it is wrong.

Perhaps those interrogators who physically administered the acts of torture were following orders, but those who gave them were not. They made a decision to pervert justice. Those in the know have not apologized for their conduct or admitted it was wrong; in fact they have vehemently defended it. What they did was illegal according to multiple international treaties and laws. We have prosecuted people from other nations for doing the exact same things we did. We cannot sweep this under the rug. While it may be deemed unnecessary, or impractical, to prosecute all involved from the top down, someone must be held responsible. Those officials that perverted our previously agreed upon notions of justice must be held responsible.

There must be an independent commission of inquiry into the actions of the Bush administration. Everyone, from former President Bush and former Vice-president Dick Cheney down to the justice department, who made the decisions to approve of torture must be brought before the American public and be held responsible. It is the only way the rest of the world will believe we have discarded these evil methods and know we are no longer a nation that tortures. Not to do so is to be complicit in the cover-up of the ways we have sinned and the perpetuation of that reputation of us throughout the world.

It is a sad day in American history. May God have mercy on us.

Barack Dubya Obama

Same sh*t, different piles.

Okay, so remember how during Obama's campaign he got people like me to vote for him because he criticized George W. Bush's domestic spying surveillance program and said he'd end it?

Well, I do. That's a huge reason I voted for him. I was tired of Bush's trampling over our Constitution and treating us as terrorism suspects.

Remember when Obama's campaign website said that "The Problem" is described in part as the Bush administration having "invoked a legal tool known as the 'state secrets' privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court"?

I do.

In February, President Obama's Justice Department quietly argued in a San Francisco court that it was maintaining the same position as President Bush's Justice Department on a case involving detainees trying to sue a private company for its role in their (allegedly) extraordinary renditions.

This time the issue was the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program, and whether courts would be able to assess its constitutionality in a case called Jewel v. NSA, where the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is challenging the NSA surveillance by suing on behalf of AT&T customers whose records may or may not have been caught up in the NSA "dragnet."
Last Friday, while President Obama traversed throughout Europe, his Justice Department sought to have Jewel v. NSA dismissed because "the Court lacks subject matter jurisdiction with respect to plaintiffs’ statutory claims against the United States because Congress has not waived sovereign immunity" and "because information necessary to litigate plaintiffs’ claims is properly subject to and excluded from use in this case by the state secrets privilege and related statutory privileges."

Argued the Justice Department: Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair "has once again demonstrated that the disclosure of the information implicated by this case, which concerns how the United States seeks to detect and prevent terrorist attacks, would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security."

"President Obama promised the American people a new era of transparency, accountability, and respect for civil liberties," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "But with the Obama Justice Department continuing the Bush administration's cover-up of the National Security Agency's dragnet surveillance of millions of Americans, and insisting that the much-publicized warrantless wiretapping program is still a 'secret' that cannot be reviewed by the courts, it feels like deja vu all over again."

Exactly. Deja vu. French for WTF Obama? You are alienating those who voted for you. You know, the ones tired of Bush and his policies. But you are continuing them? Wow.

"beyond even the outrageously broad 'state secrets' privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and -- even if what they're doing is blatantly illegal and they know it's illegal -- you are barred from suing them unless they 'willfully disclose' to the public what they have learned...

"Everything for which Bush critics excoriated the Bush DOJ -- using an absurdly broad rendition of 'state secrets' to block entire lawsuits from proceeding even where they allege radical lawbreaking by the President and inventing new claims of absolute legal immunity -- are now things the Obama DOJ has left no doubt it intends to embrace itself..."

Obama, you are going to lose your base. People like me. The majority of Americans voted for you because we opposed these policies. Do you think we'll vote for you again if you continue them?

Get it together, man.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/04/on-state-secret.html

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/09/tpm/index.html

IT'S MONDAY -- LET'S LAUGH AT CONSERVATIVES!

In honor of Pasadena Closet Conservative.

State Rep. Betty Brown, R-Terrell, told the Texas Legislature that voters of Asian descent should look at changing their names to names easier to pronouce by other Americans.

“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” Brown said.
Brown later told Ko: “Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?”

Now, Rep. Brown did not mean this to be mean-spirited. She was trying to give a suggestion on how voters could identify themselves easier at the polls. But this suggestion, while not meaning to be harmful, is ridiculous. Once again, the GOP rears its ignorant head and spouts off without thinking about the ramifications. Many of these Asian-Americans have been here for generations and are just as "American" as State Rep Brown and others with last names like "Jones" or "Smith."

So thank you, GOP, for reminding us once again of your irrelevancy and ignorance.

http://blog.sojo.net/2009/04/13/call-me-eugene-macgyver/