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POPS President above the law, Nominee for US Attorney General says
This warmongering White House just keeps unraveling our Constitution, our principle, our ideals, our society and our politics day after day. A common idea we use to have, for example, was that "No man is above the law." But apparently this nominee thinks the President is above the law. And the talk is still how he's suppose to be approved!? Screw him. Screw any politician who votes for him. Of course in the real world we all know that the rich, if not 'above the law,' normally have a 'better,' law, better results with the law, better lawyers, special consideration. So too big names, celebrities, Hollywood stars. Most of US prisons, for example, are overpopulated with the poor, the least educated and the minorities. (The USA has the biggest prison populations in the world, BTW, by %) The audaciousness of these warmongers. Theyshoot you in the face and expect/get the victim to apologize for being there (a Cheney factual example). Well...no longer a good country. Hopefully
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POPSAnother Bush Lie: On Torture From the article: "Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it."
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POPS'Torturer's Dicks got Hard with New Ideas'. She didn't have a Dick!
On December 2, Detainee 063 was in an isolated, plywood interrogation booth at Camp X-Ray. He was bolted to the floor and secured to a chair, his hands and legs cuffed. He had been held in isolation since August 8, nearly four months earlier. He was dehydrated and in need of regular hook-ups to an intravenous drip. His feet were swollen. He was urinating on himself. The pattern was always the same: 20-hour interrogation sessions, followed by four hours of sleep. Sleep deprivation appears as a central theme, along with stress positions and constant humiliation, including sexual humiliation. These techniques were supplemented by the use of water, regular bouts of dehydration, the use of IV tubes, loud noise, nudity, female contact, pin-ups. An interrogator even tied a leash to him, led him around the room and forced him to perform a series of dog tricks. He was forced to wear a woman's bra and a thong was placed on his head. Author Philippe Sands is a UK Queen's Council
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POPSSubcontracting Torture to the Terrorists You know, something occurs to me when looking at these three lovely destinations: it really does look like we are hiring the terrorists to interrogate potential terrorists. This is like Milo Minderbinder bombing his own base for the Germans!
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POPSEthics Rebellion in Psychology The votes on a resolution — by the psychology faculties at Earlham, Guilford and Smith Colleges — are an unusually public effort by departments to criticize collectively a key decision by their national association. A number of other departments are considering similar moves. Good for Earlham, Guilford, and Smith.
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POPSMinority Report is being materialized "The inventors of the technology claim the system can distinguish between people’s memories of events they witnessed and between deeds they committed" “As we enter more fully into the era of mapping and understanding the brain, society will face an increasing number of important ethical, legal and social issues raised by these new technologies,” Mr. Greely, the Stanford bioethicist, and his colleague Judy Illes wrote last year in the American Journal of Law & Medicine." Interesting article. Raises many questions; a) the easiest one is is it valid? why easiest because it can be one day answered, at least i assume so. b) if it is valid, should we use it? where is the line of privacy? should there be a line as such? i find it fundamentally challenging the human conceptual descriptions of what is self, identity, society and its relation. Fascinating. what do you think?
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POPSWaterboarding Demo in Congress !? To Prove not Torture!? "In the war crimes tribunals that followed Japan's defeat in World War II, the issue of waterboarding was sometimes raised. In 1947, the U.S. charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for waterboarding a U.S. civilian. Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. "'All of these trials elicited compelling descriptions of water torture from its victims, and resulted in severe punishment for its perpetrators,' writes Evan Wallach in the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law." Begs the question. How could he be charged in WW2 with the WAR CRIME of waterboarding? The recipient was a civilian seemed to be the point? Well so are the detainees in Guantanamo Bay. If there were POWs then it would NOT be a WAR CRIME but as Bush says they are not POWs then it is a WAR CRIME.
15
POPSDemocratic Senators Thwart Bush Appointments More: "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, announced December 19 that he would keep the Senate open with a series of "pro forma" sessions through mid-January." "Reid refused to approve Bradbury because of concerns about his involvement in crafting legal opinions for the administration on interrogation techniques of terrorism suspects." Maybe there is some hope that the Democrats will do even more to stop the tyranny of Bush and his administration. Go Dems!
15
POPSAxis of Evil: SOA School of the Americas/WHINSEC "SOA Watch is an independent organization that seeks to close the US Army School of the Americas, under whatever name it is called, through vigils and fasts, demonstrations and non-violent protest, as well as media and legislative work. The Pentagon has responded to the growing movement and Congress' near closure of the SOA with a PR campaign to give the SOA a new image. In an attempt to disassociate the school with its horrific past, the SOA was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in January of 2001."
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POPSHow Did Soviet-Style Torture Become ‘Interrogation’? A Senate investigation is underway, but many of the details are surfacing already. His question is only underscored by a 1956 article, “Communist Interrogation,” in The Annals of Neurology and Psychiatry, recently turned up by the Intelligence Science Board, which advises the spy agencies.... he article shows that methods embraced after 2001 were once considered torture that would produce false information.
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POPSU.S. History of Using Torture a very decent & extensive article on the US history on torture from Professor McCoy, the author of "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror". If this law stands, with its provisions for torture and drumhead justice, then the United States will suffer continuing damage to its moral leadership in the international community. Looking through a glass darkly into the future, Washington may try to return to that convenient contradiction that marked US policy during the Cold War: public compliance with human rights treaties and secret torture in contravention of those same diplomatic conventions. Yet the world is no longer blind to these once-clandestine CIA methods and this attempt at secrecy will likely produce another scandal similar to Abu Ghraib. But next time our protestations of innocence will ring hollow and the damage to US prestige will be even greater.
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POPSWP: Abu Ghraib Tactics Were First Used at Guantanamo Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who commanded the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and later helped set up U.S. operations at Abu Ghraib, was accused of failing to properly supervise Qahtani's interrogation plan and was recommended for reprimand by investigators. Miller would have been the highest-ranking officer to face discipline for detainee abuses so far, but Gen. Bantz Craddock, head of the U.S. Southern Command, declined to follow the recommendation. Within weeks of his departure from Abu Ghraib, military working dogs were being used in interrogations, and naked detainees were humiliated and abused by military police soldiers working the night shift. Some of the Abu Ghraib soldiers have said they were following the directionsof military intelligence officials to soften up detainees for interrogation, in part by depriving them of sleep. The photos that caused alarm around the world included some showing the MPs sexually humiliating the detainees
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POPSThe ‘Good Germans’ Among Us Instead of taxing us for Iraq, the White House bought us off with tax cuts. Instead of mobilizing the needed troops, it kept a draft off the table by quietly purchasing its auxiliary army of contractors to finesse the overstretched military’s holes. With the war’s entire weight falling on a small voluntary force, amounting to less than 1 percent of the population, the rest of us were free to look the other way at whatever went down in Iraq. “We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an M.I.T. physicist whose interrogation of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, took place over a chessboard. George Frenkel, 87, recalled that he “never laid hands on anyone” in his many interrogations, adding, “I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”
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POPSSmoke & Mirrors. American Justice (oxymoron?) "In the case of al-Qahtani, Time magazine published the secret log of his 49 days of 20-hour-per-day interrogation. The log described how the prisoner was forcibly administered intravenous fluids and drugs and forcibly given enemas, in order to keep his body functioning well enough for the interrogations to go on. The log, titled Secret Orcon Interrogation Log Detainee 063 (pdf), offered a daily, detailed view of the interrogation techniques used to get confessions from him from November 2002 to January 2003. These included: • Restraint on a swivel chair for long periods; • Deprivation of sleep for long periods; • Loud music and white noise played to prevent him from sleeping; • Various humiliations, such as training him to act as a dog and wrapping him in an Israeli flag; • Lowering the temperature in the room, then throwing water into his face; • Forcing him to pray to Osama bin Laden. ...Guardian
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POPSACLU: SODOMY Committed by Prison Guards on POW until death! Fuc@ 'em over until death after beating, burning, dousing with cold water in freezing weather. A quick beheading on TV might appear civilized in comparison!? Expect these men to return home and play happy families without some awful consequences for the children, wives and community? Ye, when you have machines, but not thinking persons doing the torturing and killing for the military. Meanwhile the vets will fill your prisons, mental hospitals and what used be your vets hospitals.
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POPSAir Force Charges Woman in Her Own Rape I thought this kind of ‘blaming the victim’ was a thing of the past — but apparently the Air Force still is using it to make it harder for women to fully participate in being part of their ‘big boys’ club. As I recall, this same thing happened to female cadets at the Air Force Academy.
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POPSPlaying with drugs for "Mind Control" LSD, radiation, and electroshock all ended up as dead ends in the MKULTRA program's quest for mind control. Still, the search for ways to penetrate minds continues. Recent studies suggest that noninvasive brain scans, taken with a functional MRI (fMRI), make the mind more transparent. Private companies tout fMRI as an improved lie detector, and the government has taken notice. Programs funded by the Department of Defense have looked into the feasibility of fMRI research.
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POPSOur Gulag: The Secret State of Torture "Journalist: Excuse me. It seems that out of an excess of caution, my colleagues keep asking you indirect questions. It would be better to call a spade a spade, so let's talk about torture. The General: The word torture isn't used in our orders. We use "interrogation" as the only valid police method. We could talk for hours to no avail because that is not the problem. The problem is this. The FLN wants to throw us out of Algeria, and we want to stay. Even with slight shades of opinion, you all agree that we must stay. We're here for that reason alone. We are neither madmen nor sadists. We are soldiers. Our duty is to win. Therefore to be precise, it is my turn to ask a question. Should France stay in Algeria? If your answer is still yes, then you must accept all the consequences."
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POPS'Now you are paralyzed, as we promised' / The twilight zone Throwing up with the vomit entering his nostrils, losing consciousness and being given only salt-water to drink, relieving himself in his pants, not sleeping or resting - all of that for four consecutive days and nights. What does the interrogator Maimon tell his children when he goes home? What do Eldad and Sagiv tell their wives about their daily labors before they turn in? That they tortured another helpless prisoner until they turned him into a cripple? That they beat this charming young man brutally and that at the end of the interrogation he was tried for only marginal offenses? And where is the Supreme Court, which in 1999 prohibited precisely the chain of torture that Luwaii Sati Ashqar, 30, who was married three years ago, underwent in the Kishon detention facility?
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