Kucinich wins Thom Hartmann Program straw poll
June 26

Thom Hartmann had a straw poll on his show Friday where he asked callers to state their presidential preference at just a few seconds of why. "Straw poll" means it's unscientific. The respondents were whoever was listening live (I listen by podcast), wanted to call in and got through, so a bit of luck and self-selection. Nonetheless, the result was interesting to this Kucinich supporter. Kucinich won, with Edwards a close second. No one else was even close. Moreover, many of those who cited Edwards said he was electable. Many of those who cited Kucinich said he agreed with them. So, there's an indication that if Kucinich could get past the "unelectable" label, he'd be top tier. As a side note, several callers volunteered Gore as their preference if he got in the race.

New label for Fred Thompson: Career Lobbyist
June 26

May I suggest that a good label for conservative golden boy Fred Thompson is "career lobbyist". It's known, on the left at least, that he was a lobbyist before he successfully ran for Senate as a man of the people. It turns out his lobbying included the savings-and-loan deregulation bill the brought about the industry's collapse at taxpayer expense. The public lost a bunch of money, but Thompson could easily afford that famous red pickup.

They're all Al Qaida, and body count is lower, as in "buried"
June 26

As if we didn't have enough reason to distrust what the government tells us about Iraq and the success of the surge --- making up WMDs and Al Qaida ties is tough to top --- there has been a trend of US officials using the term "Al Qaida" anytime they refer to Sunni insurgents, Al Qaida or not. If you look back over news reports, you won't see it until recent articles. The trend was brought to my attention by Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald, with input from his commenters. You might think the number of foreign fighters has boomed, or all the Sunnis joined Al Qaida. You can see this yourself by looking at the most current articles on Iraq, and you'll keep seeing sentences like, "Brig. Gen. Mick Bednarek, assistant commander for operations with the 25th Infantry Division, estimated that several hundred low-level Al-Qaida gunmen remained." Since the Army has previously said foreign fighters were maybe 5%, doesn't several hundred represent ALL of them?

Along with the change in language, the search for any sign the surge is working has included claims that fewer bodies are turning up each morning. That may not be because there are fewer dead. Leila Fadel of McClatchy has done what sounds like some very dangerous work in interviewing an individual who sounds like a midlevel commander in the Mahdi Army. She reports that Shiite death squads have taken to burying bodies. A commenter pointed out that this would seem to make the daily body count meaningless. The number of the disappeared might be better, but the point of making people disappear is you can't be sure what happened. Are administration and military spokesmen lying, or do they just not know? It's not like they've been terribly in touch so far.

You know, with support for the occupation of Iraq dropping and the acting president's approval rating creeping lower, what's there to lose with trying something radical: telling the public the truth.

Does it mean anything that John Kelly resigned?
June 26

One two-sentence paragraph in this story about USA for Minnesota Rachel Paulose caught my eye: "John Kelly, formerly chief of staff in the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys, visited the office at the request of Paulose to help resolve the dispute. He returned to Washington a week later and has since resigned." Does it mean anything that he resigned, and does it mean anything that it was so quick after helping Paulose get her office functional again? So many DOJ officials have resigned or look like they should, and Kelly works with USAs where Gonzogate began, it just makes me wonder.

Abu Ghraib revelations remind me of how much was known in 2004
June 24

While reading the commentary by Joe Gallowayon the new revelations about the Abu Ghraib scandal, I was reminded about how much was already known about it during the election campaign in 2004. The main scandal of course is how much was known by the people at the top, Bush and Rumsfeld, which appears to be much more than they admitted to at the time. However, I was thinking about the people who voted for the acting president to get a second term in 2004. I won't blame the majority of voters since, as is plain to anyone who has read this blog any amount of time, I'm convinced Bush stole 2004 at least as badly as 2000 (which is why I persist in referring to him as "the acting president"). Nonetheless, about half voted for the acting president even though they already knew about Abu Ghraib, not to mention we already knew the sales pitch for invading Iraq was a lie, and the 911 commission report showed he had bungled every thing that might have stopped the attack, and the ties of Bush and others in his administration to the corporate scandals had been dropped in 2002 with the rush to war, but had not been resolved. No, we didn't know nearly as much then, but we knew the generalities. Now, I can understand how in 2000 a person could have been fooled by the crap about a more humble foreign policy, about the tax cuts helping the middle class most, and of course "compassionate conservatism".

In 2004 though, you (being those who voted for Bush) knew better. I'm tempted to write "what the f___ were you thinking about?" except I spent time and pixels on that after the election, concluding that many Americans believe you have to support the president in wartime no matter what. In fact, trying to find where I said this, I found I predicted it before the election, just to pat myself on the back (feel free to contact me and pat my back yourself). That's an explanation, not an excuse. If you voted for Bush not once but twice, pardon my frankness, but I question your judgement. Thinking about this in context of recent polls, where Bush's support is down to a hard core quarter to third, you're the people about whom I ask "what are you thinking about?" in rough language. No matter how much is revealed, no matter how badly every last conservative policy is failing, no matter how stupid or hopeless the acting president's administration appears, about 26-33% still approve. Part of that I'm sure is that the country is still at war and the time for questions and criticism has still not come, but I wonder if a big part is that to disapprove of Bush now, you have to admit a mistake. No one likes that, especially not Bushies. To disapprove of Bush now, you not only have to admit making a mistake in 2000, you have to admit to repeating it in 2004 when any rational person had to have known better. If there's a spark of sanity left, then consider that the mistake doesn't get better as it goes on. Let me be frank to the point of insulting, which sounds bad but I guess I've just had it. The longer you go on approving of Bush, the stupider you're going to feel when you finally admit you screwed up.

OK, I'll grant you 2004 Bush voters that you couldn't have known about the bungled reaction to Katrina. But you know now about the negligence, the privatization, and the cronyism. So now what's your excuse?

Speaking of things that should make you think voting for the most corrupt government in history was a bad idea, the acting vice-president (that would be Cheney, who like Bush gets the "acting" title because he has yet to be legitimately elected) must be hiding something, or else why has he refused to comply with the executive order to account for his handling of classified materials, and made up a as an excuse the reason that he isn't part of the executive branch? Funny, he claims executive privilege when it comes to disclosing what his energy commission talked about. By the way, this is in the news because Rep. Henry Waxman asked Cheney to explain himself. The story first broke in April 2006.

Don't be manly about it, just get checked
June 21

Sometimes delays of several days between entries are just life getting in the way, but in this case I learned the meaning of "Transient Ischemic Attack". Basically it's a mini-stroke, and I'm way to young to have one, but I did anyway. I got a good scare and a visit from the local paramedic, plus a trip to the emergency room. I don't know yet what caused it, but the point is that even if I made some dumb lifestyle choice along the way, I was smart enough to call for help. I would have been fine anyway, but without understanding what happened and without getting the necessary tests. Like most men, I tend to take the "it's only a flesh wound" approach, but when your arm goes numb and then talking gets tough, just get help. OK, back to politics.

Gen. Taguba reveals the cover-up of Abu Ghraib
June 21

Seymour Hersh has written what may be the most important article yet about the torture of at Abu Ghraib. It's the first interview with Gen. Antonio Taguba, who wrote the report on what happened after photos of the torture of prisoners were revealed. Taguba was treated with the contempt reserved for a whistleblower and the people at the top lied about what they knew. It's a long article but worth the read. There are a bunch of quotes I could stick in the quotes column on the right. Where to start with the damning evidence that we should hope will one day be used at some war crimes trials. What's remarkable is how, according to Taguba, Rumsfeld and other generals avoided seeing the photographs in what appears to be an attempt at plausible deniability, and Taguba believes the same is true of Bush. If they didn't avoid learning what happened, then they lied about how little they knew. Taguba said, "You didn't need to 'see' anything --- just take the secure e-mail traffic at face value," and "Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap. There's no way he's suffering from C.R.S. --- Can't Remember Shit. He's trying to acquit himself, and a lot of people are lying to protect themselves." Of the acting president and the photos, Taguba said, "There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this."

Taguba's career was sidetracked and then ended. Even though he didn't choose to investigate Abu Ghraib, he was apparently expected to cover it up, and he was treated like a whistleblower is treated by those who got caught. At one point, when he got into the back of a Mercedes with Gen. Abizaid, who said, "You and your report will be investigated." Taguba said he thought, "I'd been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia."

What might be the most indicative is that Taguba was ordered to restrict his investigation to the lower ranks. There was never an attempt to investigate Bush of course, or Rumsfeld, or even the higher generals. I vaguely recall hearing back in 2004, when the Pentagon kept investigating and clearing itself, that investigators were unable as a matter of protocol to investigate anyone higher than themselves. This of course means only Bush could investigate Rumsfeld, and Bush was untouchable. Hersh said, "A dozen government investigations have been conducted into Abu Ghraib and detainee abuse. A few of them picked up on matters raised by Taguba's report, but none followed through on the question of ultimate responsibility. Military investigators were precluded from looking into the role of Rumsfeld and other civilian leaders in the Pentagon; the result was that none found any high-level intelligence involvement in the abuse."

What we're talking about here are war crimes. No euphemisms please. It's "torture", not "mistreatment" or "enhanced interrogation techniques". Call the institution of torture as a policy and the cover up to protect the higher ranking guilty a "war crime", not "a few bad apples" or "poor supervision".

Recent reports on secret prisons and torture by Bush administration
June 16

I'd like to put together three recent news reports for you. Two are probably vaguely familiar to regular news readers, though they may not be aware these are two separate stories that came out close together. The third is likely unknown unless you happened to see Salon that day.

The first story was the one about six human rights groups putting out a report claiming that the acting president's administration is holding prisoners in secret detention, meaning the government won't admit holding these people, won't say where the prisons are, and of course they deny the prisoners contact with the outside world. The groups putting out the report identify 39 people they believe are being secretly imprisoned. Not only are the prisoners being held, but the report includes multiple instances of wives and children being held, and there are claims these families are being deliberately mistreated. Here's a sample:

In an April 16, 2007 statement, Ali Khan (father of Majid Khan, a detainee who the U.S. government has acknowledged was in the U.S. Secret Detention Program and is presently held at Guantánamo Bay) indicated that Yusef and Abed al-Khalid had been held in the same location in which Majid Khan and Majid's brother Mohammed were detained in March/April 2003. Mohammed was detained by Pakistani officials for approximately one month after his apprehension on March 5, 2003 (see below). Ali Khan's statement indicates that:

Also according to Mohammed, he and Majid were detained in the same place where two of Khalid Sheik Mohammed's young children, ages about 6 and 8, were held. The Pakistani guards told my son that the boys were kept in a separate area upstairs, and were denied food and water by other guards. They were also mentally tortured by having ants or other creatures put on their legs to scare them and get them to say where their father was hiding.

That came out June 7. The next day, The Council of Europe released a report by special investigator Dick Marty. The report identified Poland and Romania as European countries which have allowed the CIA to run secret prisons. The report accuses the CIA of abductions, and names other European countries which allowed the CIA to use their airspace for transporting abductees.

How are secret prisoners treated? That's where the third article comes in, The CIA's favorite form of torture. The reporter, Mark Benjamin, whose name may be familiar because he broke the Walter Reed scandal, identified the favorite form of torture as sensory deprivation. At least they found one method unknown to 16th century witchhunters. Sensory deprivation essentially means depriving the prisoner of any sensory input with goggles to block sight, earmuffs to block sound, gloves to smother the sense of touch. If you haven't seen the footage of Jose Padilla, there's a photo in the article. Benjamin referred to a study of college students subjected to it:

The dark world of CIA-sponsored sensory deprivation research is plumbed in depth in the book "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation From the Cold War to the War on Terror," written by [Alfred] McCoy. "They've been doing this for 50 years," McCoy explained. His book discusses more CIA-sponsored research at McGill by Dr. Donald O. Hebb, who during the same era placed 22 college students in small, sound-proof cubicles, wearing translucent goggles, thick gloves and a U-shaped pillow around the head. Most subjects quit within two days and all experienced hallucinations and "deterioration in the capacity to think systematically."

So under the acting president, the government which represents us is kidnapping people off foreign streets (why would anyone expect them to refrain from doing so at home too, sooner or later?), imprisoning them without charge or trial, without admitting they hold them, without contact with family or lawyers, in prisons the existence and locations of which are secret, and then subjects prisoners to torture. The even hold wives and children, who allegedly are also subject to treatment that might amount to torture.

This has all been knowingly approved by Bush. Those of you still against impeachment, what else do you need? Forget mere impeachment; we should be debating his sentence for war crimes.