Sy Hersh in the Guardian

Guardian Unlimited | Guardian Weekly | Abu Ghraib's lesson unlearned:

There is much more to be learned. What do I know? A few things stand out. I know of the continuing practice of American operatives seizing suspected terrorists and taking them, without any meaningful legal review, to interrogation centres in southeast Asia and elsewhere. I know of the young special forces officer whose subordinates were confronted with charges of prisoner abuse and torture at a secret hearing after one of them emailed explicit photos back home. The officer testified that, yes, his men had done what the photos depicted, but they - and everybody in the command - understood such treatment was condoned by higher-ups.
What else do I know? I know that the decision was made inside the Pentagon in the first weeks of the Afghanistan war - which seemed "won" by December 2001 - to indefinitely detain scores of prisoners who were accumulating daily at American staging posts throughout the country. At the time, according to a memo in my possession addressed to defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, there were "800-900 Pakistani boys 13-15 years of age in custody". I could not learn if some or all have been released, or if some are still held.

stuff and nonsense

Here's a HuffPo blog entry from Danielle Crittendon that makes my teeth hurt. Every single word in it makes my teeth hurt. It's like fingernails on chalkboard. Read it at your own risk.

Support the troops:

The Bush administration disclosed yesterday that it had vastly underestimated the number of service personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan seeking medical treatment from the Department of Veterans Affairs, and warned that the health care programs will be short at least $2.6 billion next year unless Congress approves additional funds.

Veterans Affairs budget documents projected that 23,553 veterans would return this year from Iraq and Afghanistan and seek medical treatment. However, Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson told a Senate committee that the number has been revised upward to 103,000 for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. He said the original estimates were based on outdated assumptions from 2002.

This went around the blogosphere a while ago, but for those of you who don't hang around the blogosphere much, here is Iraqi blogger Riverbend on the state of the war:

"The Americans won't be out in less than ten years," is how the argument often begins with the friend who has entered the Green Republic. "How can you say that?" is usually my answer -- and I begin to throw around numbers — 2007, 2008 maximum... Could they possibly want to be here longer? Can they afford to be here longer? At this, T. shakes his head -- if you could see the bases they are planning to build -- if you could see what already has been built -- you'd know that they are going to be here for quite a while.

And here's a very powerful op-ed by an ordinary Republican on why he's quitting the party, after 25 years. Read the whole op-ed, but here's a piece:

I could go on and on - about how we have compromised our international integrity by sanctioning torture, about how we are systematically dismantling the civil liberties that it took us two centuries to define and preserve, and about how we have substituted bullying, brinksmanship and "staying on message" for real political discourse - but those three issues are enough.

We're poisoning our planet through gluttony and ignorance.

We're teetering on the brink of self-inflicted insolvency.

We're selfishly and needlessly sacrificing the best of a generation.

And we're lying about it.

While it has compiled this record of failure and deception, the party which I'm leaving today has spent its time, energy and political capital trying to save Terri Schiavo, battling the threat of single-sex unions, fighting medical marijuana and physician-assisted suicide, manufacturing political crises over presidential nominees, and selling privatized Social Security to an America that isn't buying. We fiddle while Rome burns.

Enough is enough. I quit.

TAPPED on Republican party threats to Major League Baseball about what privileges they'd lose if they allowed George Soros to buy the D.C. baseball team. Okay, I give less than 2 shits about baseball, but, um. Threatening MLB for considering a sale to a perfectly respectable person with the money to buy, simply because he's a rich Jew who tried to get John Kerry elected?

Digby on people who still insist that Saddam Hussein and OBL were linked -- including members of Congress, apparently:

I've been told more than once, as a conversation ender, that the government has the proof but they can't share it because it would endanger civilians. And it's used as evidence of Bush's selflessness that he won't provide the proof even though he has to take shit from liberals like me.

I kid you not.

And finally, Max saw this article this morning, and it is, bar none, the most hilarious thing ever. Snorting milk up nose hilarious, and having nothing to do with torture, war, or peak oil.

Birthday Wishes

Hello Biscuit readers, today is my birthday. I am thirty years old. Feeling generous? Want to get me a birthday present? (You don't, but let's pretend you do.) Donate to Human Rights First. Why? Because we're torturing children:

Juvenile detainees in American facilities like Abu Ghraib and Bagram Air Base have been subject to the same mistreatment as adults. The International Red Cross, Amnesty International and the Pentagon itself have gathered substantial testimony of torture of children, bolstered by accounts from soldiers who witnessed or participated in the abuse.

According to Amnesty International, 13-year-old Mohammed Ismail Agha was arrested in Afghanistan in late 2002 and detained without charge or trial for over a year, first at Bagram and then at Guantánamo Bay. He was held in solitary confinement and subjected to sleep deprivation. "Whenever I started to fall asleep, they would kick at my door and yell at me to wake up," he told an Amnesty researcher. "They made me stand partway, with my knees bent, for one or two hours."

A Canadian, Omar Khadr, was 15 in 2002 when he was captured in Afghanistan and interned at Guantánamo. For 2½ years, he was allowed no contact with a lawyer or with his family. Seventeen-year-old Akhtar Mohammed told Amnesty that he was kept in solitary confinement in a shipping container for eight days in Afghanistan in January 2002.

A Pentagon investigation last year by Maj. Gen. George Fay reported that in January 2004, a leashed but unmuzzled military guard dog was allowed into a cell holding two children. The intention was for the dog to " 'go nuts on the kids,' barking and scaring them." The children were screaming and the smaller one tried to hide behind the larger, the report said, as a soldier allowed the dog to get within about one foot of them. A girl named Juda Hafez Ahmad told Amnesty International that when she was held in Abu Ghraib she "saw one of the guards allow his dog to bite a 14-year-old boy on the leg."

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, formerly in charge of Abu Ghraib, told Maj. General Fay about visiting a weeping 11-year-old detainee in the prison's notorious Cellblock 1B, which housed prisoners designated high risk. "He told me he was almost 12," General Karpinski recalled, and that "he really wanted to see his mother, could he please call his mother."

Tomorrow is Stop-Torture Day

Silly me, I only found out about this today, but Amnesty International has organized lots of demonstrations in honor of the U.N. International Day for Victims of Torture, which is tomorrow, June 26th.

The Biscuit family plans to attend our local event, a vigil at Park Street Station, from Noon to 2 pm. So, internet stalkers, here's your chance!

Maybe he'll bite the head off a baby on TV?

Downing Street Is For Liars / Why aren't the media screaming about the latest proofs of Bush's war scams? Don't you know?
:

BushCo survived the illegal sanctioning of inhumane torture. They survived a gay male prostitute acting as a journalist. They survived Enron and Diebold and the rigging of the first election and they will survive Downing Street simply because all the people who should be on the attack about these atrocities all work for the guys who committed them.

So then, the question is not merely when will the stack of lies, of abuses become so high, so unstable, so inexcusable that the entire nation finally takes notice and the whole house of cards comes crashing to the ground in a big nasty soul-jarring spirit-cleansing patriotism-redefining whoomp and smothers the whole lot of them, but rather, can it be soon enough?

And to that question, we all know the answer.

Biscuit Teams

The New York Times reports on Guantanamo's Biscuit teams:

Bryan Whitman, a senior Pentagon spokesman, declined to address the specifics in the accounts. But he suggested that the doctors advising interrogators were not covered by ethics strictures because they were not treating patients but rather were acting as behavioral scientists.

He said that while some health care personnel are responsible for "humane treatment of detainees," some medical professionals "may have other roles," like serving as behavioral scientists assessing the character of interrogation subjects.

The military refused to give The Times permission to interview medical personnel at the isolated Guantánamo camp about their practices, and the medical journal, in an article that criticized the program, did not name the officials interviewed by its authors. The handful of former interrogators who spoke to The Times about the practices at Guantánamo spoke on condition of anonymity; some said they had welcomed the doctors' help.

Pentagon officials said in interviews that the practices at Guantánamo violated no ethics guidelines, and they disputed the conclusions of the medical journal's article, which was posted on the journal's Web site on Wednesday.

Several ethics experts outside the military said there were serious questions involving the conduct of the doctors, especially those in units known as Behavioral Science Consultation Teams, BSCT, colloquially referred to as "biscuit" teams, which advise interrogators.

"Their purpose was to help us break them," one former interrogator told The Times earlier this year.

The interrogator said in a more recent interview that a biscuit team doctor, having read the medical file of a detainee, suggested that the inmate's longing for his mother could be exploited to persuade him to cooperate.

Also, "in one example, interrogators were told that a detainee's medical files showed he had a severe phobia of the dark and suggested ways in which that could be manipulated to induce him to cooperate."

Does noting that these techniques come straight out of 1984 qualify me for the "Traitor" label?

'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.'

The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the further table. Because of the position in which O'Brien was standing. Winston could not see what the thing was.

'The worst thing in the world,' said O'Brien, 'varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.'

He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a better view of the thing on the table. It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was something that looked like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or four metres away from him, he could see that the cage was divided lengthways into two compartments, and that there was some kind of creature in each. They were rats.

'In your case,' said O'Brien, 'the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.'

A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he was not certain what, had passed through Winston as soon as he caught his first glimpse of the cage. But at this moment the meaning of the mask-like attachment in front of it suddenly sank into him. His bowels seemed to turn to water.

'You can't do that!' he cried out in a high cracked voice. 'You couldn't, you couldn't! It's impossible.'

'Do you remember,' said O'Brien, 'the moment of panic that used to occur in your dreams? There was a wall of blackness in front of you, and a roaring sound in your ears. There was something terrible on the other side of the wall. You knew that you knew what it was, but you dared not drag it into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side of the wall.'

'O'Brien!' said Winston, making an effort to control his voice. 'You know this is not necessary. What is it that you want me to do?'

O'Brien made no direct answer. When he spoke it was in the schoolmasterish manner that he sometimes affected. He looked thoughtfully into the distance, as though he were addressing an audience somewhere behind Winston's back.

'By itself,' he said, 'pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable -- something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wished to. You will do what is required of you.

Oh, to be 16 again, and held by the FBI

Questions, Bitterness and Exile for Queens Girl in Terror Case - New York Times

The Ever-Amusing Press Briefing

yesterday:

Q Scott, on another topic, has the President or anyone else from the administration responded to the letter sent last month by Congressman John Conyers and signed by dozens of members of the House of Representatives, regarding the Downing Street memo? Has the President or anyone else responded?

MR. McCLELLAN: Not that I'm aware of.

Q Why not?

MR. McCLELLAN: Why not? Because I think that this is an individual who voted against the war in the first place and is simply trying to rehash old debates that have already been addressed. And our focus is not on the past. It's on the future and working to make sure we succeed in Iraq.

These matters have been addressed, Elaine. I think you know that very well. The press --

Q Scott, 88 members of Congress signed that letter.

MR. McCLELLAN: The press -- the press have covered it, as well.

Q What do you say about them?

Q But, Scott, don't they deserve the courtesy of a response back?

MR. McCLELLAN: Again, this has been addressed. Go ahead.

Turning Toward Torture

Torture is in the news these days, again, and I'm glad of it. There was the Newsweek Koran-pissing news, and then the Amnesty International gulag news, and then the news that some members of Congress think maybe it's their job to debate the issue after all. These things make me hopeful, and I begin to hope that perhaps we can change things, that we can peaceably turn from what we have become in these terrible few years. I do not say, "turn from the path we are on, before it is too late" because it is already too late. What we do today will not make up for what we have done in the past. To see what's been done in our names, to abhor it, does not absolve us of our responsibility for it. But it does make it possible for us to do something different right now, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. In that sense, it will never be too late.

So part of me is hopeful. But another part of me worries that, as we have before, as we did last year when the Abu Ghraib photos were released, as we did when the Gonzales hearings were going on -- that we are simply taking a peek at torture, and that we will soon, once again, slam the door on it, cover our eyes from the sight of it, and go on as before, hoping against hope that we did not see what we saw, and do not know what we know, and are not responsible.

I worry about this because it has been a year now since Abu Ghraib, and little has changed. The revelations keep coming, and yet little has changed. Most Americans still, as the Times reported last Sunday (see my previous post), "want it blurry."

For a year now I've been torture girl, screaming and nagging and begging people I know and love, not just 'those other people out there, in the Red States', to look at the torture. And yet so many people will not. And I've wondered in desperation how to get people to see, why won't people see, why won't they pay attention? And the more I shouted and jumped up and down, the more people did not pay attention, and the more alone I've felt, and I've been filled with the frustration of seeing what others won't see. And I've been so angry. I've bee so angry at all of you, and you know who you are -- for covering your eyes.

But my anger and my agitation and my arm-waving hasn't gotten me anywhere. So, you who cover your eyes -- have you read this far, even? will you read this far? -- this is what I would like to say to you:

You ask me what good it will do to turn our eyes to the torture. Tell me what to do, you say, and I will do it, but don't ask me to look at something and feel helpless in its face. And I say, if you will not look at a thing, how can you begin to know what you can do to fix it? You stand in a different place than I do -- what good will it do for me to tell you what I must do about torture? What you must do, what you would see you must do, if you looked, if you saw it as it is, not out of the corner of your eye, but straight on, will surely be different.

Tell me it can be fixed before I look at it, you say to me, and I say to you that no such promise can be made. But if we cannot fix it, if we cannot make our government stop, then we must learn to live with it, and how can we do that unless we see it for what it is? Do you not have the sense, some part of each day, that there's something enormous that you're avoiding? Like that pile of bills on your desk, some of which are no doubt overdue. But you don't pay the bills, and you don't even open them, and you don't even look at them, and instead you think about easier things. And yet the bills are there, a hole of discomfort, a gravitational force that pulls at your mind. As long as those bills sit unopened, parts of you are sloughing off and drifting toward them.

Such is the power of unpaid bills, so imagine the great black hole that is torture. My friends who will not look, do not imagine that you thereby protect yourselves from the terrible force of this fact. Your fear grows and grows. You are afraid, and you feel guilty and ashamed that you are afraid, and all of these feelings are awful, and you hope, by not looking, that you will not have to feel them so much.

Feel your fear, friends -- it's a fearsome thing. Feel guilt and shame too. I certainly do. But do not let those feelings keep you from turning toward torture. Only by turning toward it can we hope to stop it. And if we cannot stop it, then, if we see it together, we can comfort one another. We can share the burden of seeing together. Surely that is better than staying locked, each in our own private horror. If we cannot stop the torture, then let us cry for it together. Let us beat our breasts and tear our hair together, in our guilt and shame and helplessness and fear and our despair. Let us witness, and witness honestly, and not convince ourselves that if we do not look that it does not affect our humanity.


In this moment, while torture again is in the news, we have the opportunity to pay attention, and to ask one another to pay attention to it.


I beg you to see, in this moment, and the next, and the next, and the next after that.. If we cannot help one another to do this, then there will be no end to our shame.

Torture: Making Things Clear - cribbed in full from Obsidian Wings

Many, if not most, of my readers do not click through. I would like you to read this entire post that someone else wrote. So I am reprinting it here, so you do not have to click through. If you would like to click through, feel free. If not, read on:

In the course of a somewhat frustrating NYTimes article on what he calls 'Torture Lite', Joseph Lelyveld writes this:

"It has been more than a year now since we (and, of course, the region in which we presume to be crusading for freedom) were shown a selection of snapshots from Abu Ghraib with their depraved staging of hooded figures, snarling dogs and stacked naked bodies. For all the genuine outrage in predictable places over what was soon being called a ''torture scandal'' -- in legal forums, editorial pages, letters columns -- the usual democratic cleansing cycle never really got going. However strong the outcry, it wasn't enough to yield political results in the form of a determined Congressional investigation, let alone an independent commission of inquiry; the Pentagon's own inquiries, which exonerated its civilian and political leadership, told us a good deal more than most Americans, so it would appear, felt they needed to know. Members of Congress say they receive a negligible number of letters and calls about the revelations that keep coming. ''You asked whether they want it clear or want it blurry,'' Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, said to me about the reaction of her constituents to the torture allegations that alarm her. ''I think they want it blurry.'' "

"Wanting it clear" means wanting an honest, open debate about what we want interrogators to do in our name. In the course of that debate, those who favor torture would have a chance to make their case. Is it useful in interrogations? Do ticking time bomb scenarios actually occur, and if so, how often? How much actionable intelligence have our "stress positions" and our "Fear Up Harsh" and "Pride and Ego Down" tactics actually yielded? Those who oppose torture would have a chance to ask: do these benefits, if they exist, outweigh the dangers of adopting a policy that seems to invite abuse? Do they create more terrorists than they allow us to capture or thwart? Have they made enemies of people who might have supported us? And are these methods consistent with our values as a nation, and with our noblest aspirations? When both sides had made their case, we could then decide openly what we want to do, and decide it as a nation.

"Wanting it blurry" means wanting to avoid that debate. It means caring less about considering the extremely serious issues at stake and getting them right than about being able to duck the uncomfortable knowledge that debating those issues might force on us. It means caring less about our country, its ideals, and its honor than about our own peace of mind, even when we have reason to think that that peace of mind might be undeserved. It means being willing to let taxi drivers whom we know to be innocent be beaten to death, detainees be sodomized with chemical lightsticks and have lit cigarettes stuck in their ears, and fourteen year olds be "suspended from hooks in the ceiling for hours at a time" while being beaten, in order to preserve the illusion that our own hands are clean.

Wanting it clear is for adults. Wanting it blurry is for children, who hope that problems they don't attend to will go away. And it is unworthy of citizens of a great democracy.

Susan Collins thinks that her constituents "want it blurry". Apparently, other members of Congress agree. As citizens of a democracy, we cannot react to this insulting idea by bemoaning the apathy of some unspecified group of other people. We are the people Collins is talking about, and it is up to us to prove her, and those who agree with her, wrong. So let's do it.

Here are links to the email addresses of your Senators and Representatives. Write them and let them know that you want things clear. For my part, I have done three things:

First, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings into detention at Guantanamo today. I wrote Senators Arlen Specter (the Chair) and Patrick Leahy (the ranking democrat) to thank them, and to urge them to hold more extensive hearings, so that we can fully debate all the issues raised by Guantanamo and come to considered conclusions.

Second, I wrote to ask my Senators to support S 654, and my Representative to support HR 952. Since none of my elected representatives has signed on as a sponsor of these bills, I asked each of them to do that as well. (If you click the links for each bill, you can find the lists of sponsors.)

S 654 and HR 952 are two similar bills, the first in the Senate and the second in the House. They would ban extraordinary rendition: sending people to other countries where we know they might be tortured: countries like Uzbekistan, Syria, and Egypt. (I wrote about HR 952 a few months ago.) If you need background on extraordinary rendition, you could read, well, any of Katherine's many posts about it on this blog, or this New Yorker article. It's an odious practice, and should be stopped. But both of these bills will die without more popular support. It is up to us not to let that happen.

Third, in all these emails I also wrote that I thought it was very important that the Congress conduct hearings on the following questions:

• What kinds of interrogation procedures, and procedures to 'set the conditions' for interrogation, have been used in our detention facilities at Guantanamo, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in undisclosed locations? (This question should cover the conduct not just of the military, but also of the intelligence services and military contractors.)



• What were the costs and benefits of each of those kinds of procedures? Which produced useful information? Which needlessly destroyed good will in Iraq or Afghanistan, or harmed our reputation as a nation committed to human rights and human dignity? Which, on reflection, do we think we should have used, and which do we think we should have placed off limits?



• Why did we use those procedures we now think we should not have used? If they were authorized, by who? If not, what led interrogators or guards to use them, and how can we prevent this in future?



• What standards should we adopt going forward, so that we can be as certain as possible that interrogation and detention will take place as we as a nation think right? And how can we ensure that we live up to these standards?

And I added that these hearings should be extensive, so that the important issues they raised could be fully debated.

What you write is, of course, up to you. But I'd urge you to write something, and to try to get others to do so as well. We all know why it matters. It's up to us to act on what we know.

The Destruction of Our Way of Life

Everyone's worried about it. The pro-torture party and its apologists insist that it's either torture, the PATRIOT act, etc., or it's the terrorists destroying our way of life and raping our daughters and forcibly converting us all to Islam. Lots of sane people then respond by asking what the point is of preserving our society if we destroy it in the process. Supposedly our great debate is all about the balance between liberty and safety.

This is bullshit. "Our way of life" is not a thing, and it cannot be preserved. "Our way of life" is constantly annihilating itself to become some other way of life. Safety? We are all unsafe, at every moment, despite our illusions. And each of us will die, and what will be left of our so-called "way of life" then?

We have allowed fear to shape a debate about our policies. Our fear is natural. But when we admit the need to balance 'security' and 'liberty', we are agreeing to the idea that there is some kind of simple balance: we can be absolutely secure, or we can be absolutely free, and our job is to find the something in between that we can all live with. But there is no absolute security in this world. The distance between certainty and uncertainty is infinite, and it cannot be bridged.

I do not argue that there are no reasonable ways to increase the feeling of security. I put my kid in a car seat just like everyone else. This makes him less likely to die in a car accident, but it does not bridge the infinite gap between my desire for his absolute safety and its impossibility. All our safety measures are as nothing compared to the inevitability of death.

My point is not that we should not try to keep terrorists from blowing up our national landmarks. Of course we should.

But why should we even have to debate if we are willing to lose our souls for the not-at-all-certain possibility of adding another drop of illusory security into the infinite bucket of impermanence and death? All we have is this moment, our way of life right now. Right now, we are torturers. We have traded our liberty and our honor, in this moment, for the wish that someday, some distant time in the future, we will be safe. It's one thing to sell your soul for some immediate benefit -- we've sold our souls for a hypothetical and utopian future, for the day the War On Terror ends, and Democracy and Freedom are everywhere.

Now, there are some things I am willing to sell for a hypothetical and utopian future: my station wagon, for example. Some, although not all, of my time. But my soul? I'd like to keep it, thanks. I don't know what the future may bring, but I'm pretty sure I'll need my soul to deal with it. Let us find our way of life, the new one we must create in each new moment, with the help of our souls, and let us stop believing that we can preserve the way of life we've got by giving them up.

Yes, You Can Make a Difference

Twice (here, and here )complained on this blog about Salon's introduction of a new weekly column called "Object Lust." Farhad Manjoo, of Salon, actually posted a comment in response to my first complaint, having, I assume, followed the Technorati link from the bottom of the first column. I responded with, if I do say so myself, a smackdown, which I also emailed to him, figuring he probably wasn't coming back to the blog to read my response.

He did not respond to my email (and that's not a complaint, I'm certain he has better things to do, and did not expect a response). However, I would like to point out that Salon has run exactly two "Object Lust" columns, May 18, and May 25, and then, it seems, has quietly dropped the idea. I am sure it had nothing to do with my objections, of course, but for just a minute I'll sit here, pretend it did, and feel effective.

Stifling dissent in Colorado - an Update

in the Denver Post, via TPM

Also via Atrios, Howard Dean on FOX News

ABC7Chicago.com: Howard Dean speaks out in Chicago:

"My view is FOX News is a propaganda outlet for the Republican Party and I don't comment on FOX News," Dean said. That was in response to vice president Dick Cheney calling Howard Dean 'over the top' on Fox News on Sunday.

Why the Downing Street Memo is important...

Via Atrios, :

Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who is now a war analyst at Boston University, said: "The memo is significant because it was written by our closest ally, and when it comes to writing minutes on foreign policy and security matters, the British are professionals. We can conclude that the memo means precisely what it says. It says that Bush had already made the decision for war even while he was insisting publicly, and for many months thereafter, that war was the last resort."

This is not hearsay. This is documentary proof.

More Yeats, with apologies to all the Witches I know

The Witch

Toil and grow rich,
What's that but to lie
With a foul witch
And after, drained dry,
To be brought
To the chamber where
Lies one long sought
with despair?


Why Yeats and no me? Well, lately I've found my own thoughts to be beyond tedious, and who wants to sit around writing stuff they think is boring?

Also, I'm reading his collected works right now.

To a Friend whose Work has come to Nothing

Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
from any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbours' eyes?
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.

-- William Butler Yeats


------------------------------------------------
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbours' eyes?
------------------------------------------------

Biscuit Variety Pack

Ted over at Crooked Timber writes an open letter to The New Republic, asking them why they think that Amnesty International's use of a word is more important to talk about than the Bush administration's use of torture.

Digby talks about tasering, and, eek, police applying pepper spray to the inside of nonviolent protestors' eyelids to force them to cooperate:

There are reasons why it is a bad idea for police to be allowed to inflict pain on people who are uncooperative or disagreeable --- the most important being that this means police are sanctioned to commit violence on the public under color of law in instances where their safety is not at issue. That's one of the hallmarks of a police state not a free society. (And yes, I realize that Saddam pulled the legs off of puppies on Christmas morning and I'm damned lucky not to be living under that kind of hellish nightmare. But every lil' totalitarian has to start somewhere.)

It's not just Gitmo. Sophisticated torture techniques are becoming common policing and interrogation methods in America. I remember watching the excrutiating video of police meticulously applying q-tips dipped in pepper spray to the inside of logging protesters' eyelids when they refused to unchain themselves from one another. It was explained that because they weren't actually blinded or permanently harmed, this was really the humane way to get them to cooperate. The most chilling thing about this was the dry, benign way the police calmly went about methodically pulling the immobile protesters' heads back and then their eyelids, to carefully daub the painful chemicals directly into the eye as they screamed in agony. Don't ever think that the systematic "banality of evil" regime couldn't happen here. The police didn't seem to be enjoying themselves, nor were they bothered. It was just all in day's work.

Did you know police did that right here in the U.S. of A.? Cuz I sure did not.

Oh, and on the Downing Street Memo, via Salon:

Jim Cox, USA Today's senior assignment editor for foreign news, offers up an explanation in his paper today that would do George W. Bush proud: "We could not obtain the memo or a copy of it from a reliable source," Cox says. "There was no explicit confirmation of its authenticity from (Blair's office). And it was disclosed four days before the British elections, raising concerns about the timing."

Bush and Blair on the Downing Street Memo

President Welcomes British Prime Minister Blair to the White House:

PRESIDENT BUSH: Steve.

Q Thank you, sir. On Iraq, the so-called Downing Street memo from July 2002 says intelligence and facts were being fixed around the
policy of removing Saddam through military action. Is this an accurate reflection of what happened? Could both of you respond?

PRIME MINISTER BLAIR: Well, I can respond to that very easily. No, the facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all. And
let me remind you that that memorandum was written before we then went to the United Nations. Now, no one knows more intimately the discussions that we were conducting as two countries at the time than me. And the fact is we decided to go to the United Nations and went through that process, which resulted in the November 2002 United Nations resolution, to give a final chance to Saddam Hussein to comply with international law. He didn't do so. And that was the reason why we had to take military action.

But all the way through that period of time, we were trying to look for a way of managing to resolve this without conflict. As it
happened, we weren't able to do that because -- as I think was very clear -- there was no way that Saddam Hussein was ever going to change the way that he worked, or the way that he acted.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, I -- you know, I read kind of the characterizations of the memo, particularly when they dropped it out in
the middle of his race. I'm not sure who 'they dropped it out' is, but -- I'm not suggesting that you all dropped it out there. (Laughter.)
And somebody said, well, you know, we had made up our mind to go to use military force to deal with Saddam. There's nothing farther from the truth.

My conversation with the Prime Minister was, how could we do this peacefully, what could we do. And this meeting, evidently, that took
place in London happened before we even went to the United Nations -- or I went to the United Nations. And so it's -- look, both us of
didn't want to use our military. Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It's the last option. The consequences of committing the military are -- are very difficult. The hardest things I do as the President is to try to comfort families who've lost a loved one in
combat. It's the last option that the President must have -- and it's the last option I know my friend had, as well.

And so we worked hard to see if we could figure out how to do this peacefully, take a -- put a united front up to Saddam Hussein, and say, the world speaks, and he ignored the world. Remember, 1441 passed the Security Council unanimously. He made the decision. And the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power.

No follow-up questions allowed, of course. So that's all we get. The memo was released to make Tony look bad, it was written before we went to the UN, it's wrong, and the world is better off now without Saddam Hussein in power. End of story.

Rude Punit on Nixon

The Rude Pundit is (as always) brilliant today.

The Rude Pundit thinks this: the American public, in growing numbers, knows in its heart that they've been lied to, just like in Vietnam, and that Americans are being killed for those lies, just like in Vietnam. But fear is a powerful thing: deep, psychological, repressed fear - that if the truth is not held back, then the monsters of anarchy must be unleashed. It is better to take down a President for something a great deal more prosaic than war crimes and mass murder. Because what does it say about us if our leader is guilty of such things?