I tried to get out, but the money and the yayo pulled me back....,

thenation |  A central player in the Bush-Cheney’s torture program is Jose A. Rodriguez, who, according to The New York Times, was then the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center during the worst of the barbarity—the rectal hummus flushes, drills, dogs, broken limbs, sexual humiliation and assault, sleep deprivation, intense heat, intense cold, blood thinners, beatings and deaths from exposure. When agents in the field began sending e-mails to voice dismay, Rodriguez told them to shut up: “Strongly urge that any speculative language as to the legality of given activities or, more precisely, judgment calls as to their legality vis-à-vis operational guidelines for this activity agreed upon and vetted at the most senior levels of the agency, be refrained from in written traffic (email or cable traffic).” “Such language is not helpful,” he said. Rodriguez was involved in an earlier scandal regarding Bush-Cheney torture, fingered for destroying “videotapes recording the interrogations of top al Qaeda operatives.”

Rodriguez was born in Puerto Rico and joined the CIA in 1976. Nineteen seventy-six was a key year in the evolution of the national security state—the high point of congressional efforts to rein in the imperial presidency (Gerald Ford was forced to sign his “no assassinations of foreign leaders’ pledge that year) and the start of the New Right’s efforts to build a workaround those regulations (i.e., Iran/Contra). Rodriguez spent most of his career in Latin America, bridging the Cold War and the war on drugs. His background is sketchy—there’s not too much public information on what he was doing where in Latin America and his autobiography is vague. According to the The Wall Street Journal, Rodriguez “is a product of what one former agency colleague called ‘the rough and tumble’ Latin American division, which was responsible for thwarting Russian aggression in that part of the world. That strategy eventually evolved into the Iran/Contra scandal.” The Latin American Division was thick into Iran/Contra, and Rodriguez was involved in Panama when Noriega was in charge, that is, at the height of the scandal. He was in Mexico in 1990, where he served as CIA station chief at the beginning of that country’s descent into narco-NAFTA madness.

After 9/11, he was tapped by the CIA to manage its torture program—even though he didn’t speak Arabic and had no experience in the Middle East. He apparently had other talents. Mark Mazzetti in the Times writes that he “won praise while in the job for an aggressive strategy to capture, detain and interrogate leaders of Al Qaeda.” Rodriguez’s promotion to a top slot in Washington’s torture program is a pretty stark example of Latin America’s serving as “empire’s workshop.” Elsewhere, I’ve given an overview of the torture techniques the United States helped work out in Latin America during the Cold War (as have others, including Patrice McSherry here). These included waterboarding, a technique called, in Spanish, “el submarino.” (After a 1992 investigation, the Pentagon destroyed copies of the seven infamous torture instruction manuals it had used to train Latin American allies; Marcy Wheeler, though, writes that Dick Cheney and his legal counsel, David Addington “saved the only known copies” for their personal files).

More recently, though, with the return of the Latin American left to political power, the region has refused to participate in Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld’s global torture archipelago, that is, its extraordinary rendition program, which implicated every region of the globe, even peace-loving Scandinavia, except South America.

As for Rodriguez, after he retired from the CIA he went private, walking through that “revolving door” that connects Langley to any one of those Virginia-based private security companies (Blackwater apparently recruited him, but he chose another firm). In any case, he is back in the public eye, writing one op-ed after another defending torture. “I know it worked,” he insists, contrary to critics who say that forced rectal flushing garnered no serviceable intelligence. He’s joined other former CIA officials to set up a webpage to push back on criticism: CIASavedLives.com.

in 1971 nixon declared an all-out war on drugs - millions of non-violent "offenders" are behind bars because of this "war"

the world as it is vs the world as you would like it to be...,

theatlantic |  So why not punish them now?

If CIA officers did abhorrent things that even their waterboarding colleagues managed to avoid, exceeding the orders and legal strictures they were given, why haven't they been prosecuted for torture as a duly ratified treaty compels the U.S. to do? Why hasn't Brennan ever remedied the failure to hold those men accountable? Why has he allowed people even he regards as criminals to remain at the CIA?

The reason is that he does not believe the rule of law should apply to the CIA.

Dick Cheney, Michael Hayden, and Brennan make a big show of invoking the legal cover given by John Yoo and others, as if they respect the rule of law. But beneath the posturing, they oppose jailing CIA officers no matter what, perhaps because those officers know things that could put them in prison. Among torturers, there can be only one code: Stop Snitchin'. Do you think that I exaggerate? 

As The Week notes, the only person in jail over CIA torture is a man who tried to expose it.

In the end, Andrew Sullivan comes close to the mark. "There is no organization in the US government that exercises the kind of power the CIA does–over the presidency, Congress, and the media," he writes. "It is unimaginable that any other agency in government could commit war crimes, torture innocents, murder people, wreck this country’s moral standing… and yet escape any consequences... There is no other government agency that launches elaborate public relations campaigns to discredit and undermine its Senate oversight committee. There is no other organization whose head can tell blatant lies about spying on its overseers and receive the president’s wholehearted support. There is no other agency where you can murder someone already in your captivity and get away with it."

The head of the CIA can go on national television, acknowledge that some CIA officers tortured using "abhorrent" tactics, admit that those tactics went beyond their orders and the law, note that they were never held accountable... and then do nothing more. This is a man President Obama still wants to head the intelligence agency, perhaps because while Brennan may not know "where all the bodies are buried," he knows where they were droned to death on sometimes illegal Obama orders.

Lawlessness begets lawlessness begets lawlessness.

let's not forget this pioneering angel-faced campfire girl...., (now a secretive investment banker)

NYTimes |  The last time George Tenet was asked about torture on television, he sounded defiant and jabbed his finger in the air. The year was 2007, and Mr. Tenet, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was promoting his memoir when a question about waterboarding came up while he was being interviewed on CBS’ “60 Minutes.”

“You know, the image that’s been portrayed is we sat around the campfire and said, ‘Oh boy, now we go get to torture people,’ ” Mr. Tenet said, growing angry as the newsman Scott Pelley challenged him on how the agency interrogated terrorism suspects. “We don’t torture people. Let me say that again to you, we don’t torture people. O.K.?”

This week the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a long-awaited report detailing the gruesome interrogation techniques employed by the C.I.A. on Mr. Tenet’s watch as well as the false claims the agency made about their effectiveness. But Mr. Tenet, now a managing director of a secretive New York investment bank, has been nowhere in public view, leaving it to one of his successors — Michael V. Hayden, who was much less involved with the brutal interrogation program — to serve as the C.I.A.’s most vocal defender.

While Mr. Hayden has been all over television this week, Mr. Tenet has responded only in writing. But they are working in concert; their disparate approaches are part of an orchestrated campaign by the two former directors — and a third, Porter J. Goss — to defend the agency they all worked for by attacking the report’s credibility.

Other former Bush administration officials — notably former Vice President Dick Cheney — have also defended the C.I.A., but Mr. Hayden, who served as C.I.A. director from 2006 to 2009 and whose folksy manner makes for lively quotes, has emerged as their smoothest — and most willing — spokesman.

“He’s always been a great communicator, he has a way of turning a phrase, he’s very energetic and willing to engage and we’re lucky to have him on our team,” said Bill Harlow, a former C.I.A. official who is acting as the spokesman for Mr. Tenet and helping coordinate the response effort. “When it comes to TV it’s hard to match him.”

current director of wrecked'em operations not about to discard $billions/generations of agency best practices...,

fp |  “I look back at the record and I see that this is a workforce that was trying to do the right thing,” Brennan said. But still, “I cannot say with certainty whether or not individuals acted with complete honesty,” he said about some officers who may have misled Congress and other U.S. officials. 

Brennan criticized the Senate committee for not interviewing CIA officials who ran the interrogation program when it functioned and instead relying only on memos and documents to compile the report.

Pressed by a reporter to answer if a future American president could turn to the now discredited techniques, Brennan said the CIA was out of the business of detentions.

“What happens in the future? The Army Field Manual is the established basis for interrogation,” Brennan said, referring to the September 2006 Army manual titled “Human Intelligence Collector Operations,” which prohibits “acts of physical or mental torture” meted out to captured prisoners. 

“We, the CIA are not in the detention program, we are not contemplating at all getting back into detention program, using any of those EITs. I defer to policymakers in [the] future,” Brennan said.

In 2009 when Obama ordered the closing of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, the agency gave up its formal role in interrogations. Obama also ordered the creation of the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group also known as HIG, which includes experts from several U.S. intelligence agencies but is overseen by the National Security Council.

In some areas, Brennan went further in acknowledging CIA missteps than he has before, particularly when it comes to letting specific CIA officers involved in the program off the hook. “We fell short when it came to holding some officers accountable for their mistakes,” he said.

The Senate report noted multiple instances where CIA leadership refused to punish officers who severely abused detainees, even when that behavior was specifically called out. “On two occasions in which the CIA inspector general identified wrongdoing, accountability recommendations were overruled by senior CIA leadership. In one instance, involving the death of a CIA detainee,” reads the report.

the history of cia interrogation from the cold war to the war on terror

democracynow |  AMY GOODMAN: Right, but also on prisoners, were there experiments?

ALFRED McCOY: There were some in prisons in the United States and also the Drug Treatment Center in Lexington, Kentucky. The Federal Drug Treatment Center in Lexington, Kentucky, had this. All of this research, all this very elaborate research —

AMY GOODMAN: On unwitting Americans?

ALFRED McCOY: Unwitting Americans, produced nothing, okay? What they found time and time again is that electroshock didn’t work, and sodium pentathol didn’t work, LSD certainly didn’t work. You scramble the brain. You got unreliable information. But what did work was the combination of these two rather boring, rather mundane behavioral techniques: sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain.

And in 1963, the C.I.A. codified these results in the so-called KUBARK Counterintelligence Manual. If you just type the word "KUBARK" into Google, you will get the manual, an actual copy of it, on your computer screen, and you can read the techniques [ Read the report. But if you do, read the footnotes, because that’s where the behavioral research is. Now, this produced a distinctively American form of torture, the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in centuries, psychological torture, and it’s the one that’s with us today, and it’s proved to be a very resilient, quite adaptable, and an enormously destructive paradigm.

Let’s make one thing clear. Americans refer to this often times in common parlance as "torture light." Psychological to torture, people who are involved in treatment tell us it’s far more destructive, does far more lasting damage to the human psyche than does physical torture. As Senator McCain said, himself, last year when he was debating his torture prohibition, faced with a choice between being beaten and psychologically tortured, I’d rather be beaten. Okay? It does far more lasting damage. It is far crueler than physical torture. This is something that we don’t realize in this country.

Now, another thing we see is those photographs is the psychological techniques, but the initial research basically developed techniques for attacking universal human sensory receptors: sight, sound, heat, cold, sense of time. That’s why all of the detainees describe being put in dark rooms, being subjected to strobe lights, loud music, okay? That’s sensory deprivation or sensory assault. Okay, that was sort of the phase one of the C.I.A. research. But the paradigm has proved to be quite adaptable.

Now, one of the things that Donald Rumsfeld did, right at the start of the war of terror, in late 2002, he appointed General Geoffrey Miller to be chief at Guantanamo, alright, because the previous commanders at Guantanamo were too soft on the detainees, and General Miller turned Guantanamo into a de facto behavioral research laboratory, a kind of torture research laboratory. And under General Miller at Guantanamo, they perfected the C.I.A. torture paradigm. They added two key techniques. They went beyond the universal sensory receptors of the original research. They added to it an attack on cultural sensitivity, particularly Arab male sensitivity to issues of gender and sexual identity.

And then they went further still. Under General Miller, they created these things called "Biscuit" teams, behavioral science consultation teams, and they actually had qualified military psychologists participating in the ongoing interrogation, and these psychologists would identify individual phobias, like fear of dark or attachment to mother, and by the time we’re done, by 2003, under General Miller, Guantanamo had perfected the C.I.A. paradigm, and it had a three-fold total assault on the human psyche: sensory receptors, self-inflicted pain, cultural sensitivity, and individual fears and phobia.

AMY GOODMAN: And then they sent General Miller to, quote, "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib. Professor McCoy, we’re going to break for a minute, and then we’ll come back. Professor Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His latest book is called A Question of Torture: C.I.A. Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, author of a number of books. The Politics of Heroin: C.I.A. Complicity in the Global Drug Trade almost had him killed. Afterwards, the C.I.A. tried to have the book squelched, but ultimately it was published. Then A Question of Torture: C.I.A. Interrogation from the Cold War to the War On Terror is his latest book, and we’re talking about the history of torture. Continue with what you were saying, talking about the Biscuit teams, the use of psychologists in Guantanamo, and then Geoffrey Miller, going from Guantanamo to, quote, "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib.

ALFRED McCOY: In mid-2003, when the Iraqi resistance erupted, the United States found it had no intelligence assets; it had no way to contain the insurgency, and they — the U.S. military was in a state of panic. And at that moment, they began sweeping across Iraq, rounding up thousands of Iraqi suspects, putting many of them in Abu Ghraib prison. At that point, in late August 2003, General Miller was sent from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, and he brought his techniques with him. He brought a CD, and he brought a manual of his techniques. He gave them to the M.P. officers, the Military Intelligence officers and to General Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. Commander in Iraq.

In September of 2003, General Sanchez issued orders, detailed orders, for expanded interrogation techniques beyond those allowed in the U.S. Army Field Manual 3452, and if you look at those techniques, what he’s ordering, in essence, is a combination of self-inflicted pain, stress positions and sensory disorientation, and if you look at the 1963 C.I.A. KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual, you look at the 1983 C.I.A. Interrogation Training Manual that they used in Honduras for training Honduran officers in torture and interrogation, and then twenty years later, you look at General Sanchez’s 2003 orders, there’s a striking continuity across this forty-year span, in both the general principles, this total assault on the existential platforms of human identity and existence, okay? And the specific techniques, the way of achieving that, through the attack on these sensory receptors.

the integral role of sadistic medical libertines in preserving sham respectability and collective not-seeism...,

theatlantic |  The role of doctors in torture during the War on Terror has been pretty well excavated on the Defense Department side, but the CIA [has some exemptions] from Freedom of Information Act requests, so that’s remained hidden. Essentially the doctors and psychologists were built in to the entire torture system. They weren’t simply bystanders who were called in to respond when the system went off the rails. Some doctors apparently protested this. But they kept their protests inside [the CIA], they never went outside, which they should have done when they saw these types of abuses.

In general, doctors in torture have a couple roles. Number one, they design methods of torture that do not leave scars. For example, the so-called “rectal feeding” which is actually a medieval technique in which the intestines are inflated with a viscous material to cause intestinal pain. The docs are also involved in making sure that the prisoners who weren’t supposed to die didn’t die. The third thing doctors do is they falsify medical records and death certificates to conceal the injuries of torture. [Ed.: Miles has written on this in the context of Abu Ghraib.]

Doctors play a critical role in torture in regimes that don’t want to leave scars, and that includes the United States.

Beck: Why would people use medical knowledge and expertise learned to heal people for the opposite purpose?

Miles: It’s pretty interesting, I’m writing a book on just that question. The docs who get involved in this, number one, are careerists. They get involved for rank and career, and the regimes never coerce them, or extremely rarely coerce them. Instead what happens is the regimes treat them as some kind of elite.

colon doesn't absorb nutrients: rectal feeding/rehydration is simply rape torture

WaPo | One of the things that the CIA did, as exposed in the report, has been getting a fair amount of rotation in news reports about the report. Let the New York Times take it away:

In exhaustive detail, the report gives a macabre accounting of some of the grisliest techniques that the C.I.A. used to torture and imprison terrorism suspects. Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in American custody. With the approval of the C.I.A.’s medical staff, some prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the C.I.A.’s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.”

Seems like a strong material for a question to put before the ex-CIA director. So Tapper opened a discussion of “unauthorized” procedures, and cited rectal dehydration as an example. Away they went:

Hayden: No, stop! That was a medical procedure. That was done because of detainee health — that the people responsible there for the health of these detainees saw that they were becoming dehydrated. They had limited options in which to go do this. It was intravenous with needles, which would be dangerous with a non-cooperative detainee; it was through the nasal passages –

Tapper: Pureeing hummus and pine nuts and –

Hayden: Jake, I’m not a doctor and neither are you, but what I am told is this is one of the ways that the body is rehydrated; these were medical procedures. To give you a sense …

Tapper: You’re really defending rectal rehydration?

Hayden: What I’m defending is history. To give you a sense as to how this report was put together — this activity, which was done five times and each time for the health of the detainee, not part of the interrogation program, not designed to soften him up for any questioning.

not-seeism gone wild: why ken even try to pretend obama took a page from wrecked'em's patriot playbook?

theatlantic |  Former Vice President Dick Cheney, the de-facto leader of the national-security team that failed to stop the most successful terrorist attack in U.S. history, is taking to the airwaves to defend the Bush Administration's subsequent torture of prisoners.

His Fox News interview rewards close scrutiny.

Early on, interviewer Bret Baier says, "The Feinstein report suggests that President Bush was not fully briefed on the program and deliberately kept in the dark by the CIA."

Dick Cheney denies this.

"Not true," he says. "Read his book. He talks about it extensively in his memoirs. He was, in fact, an integral part of he program. He had to approve it before we went forward .... We did discuss the techniques. There was no effort on our part to keep him from that." Cheney goes on to declare that "the men and women of the CIA did exactly what we wanted to have them do in terms of taking on this program."

Got that? Bush was fully briefed, and the CIA did exactly what Bush and Cheney asked. But attentive viewers would notice that Cheney subsequently contradicts himself.

Later in the interview, Baier notes a particularly depraved tactic. "At one point, this report describes interrogators pureeing food of one detainee and then serving it in his anus," he says, "something the agency called 'rectal rehydration.' I mean, is that torture?" (More to the point, did Bush and Cheney know about that? Is it "exactly" what they asked the CIA to do?) "I don't know anything about that specific instance," Cheney said. "I can't speak to that. I guess the question is, what are you prepared to do to get the truth about future attacks against the United States. Now, that was not one of the authorized or approved techniques. There were 12 of them, as I recall. They were all techniques we used in training on our own people."

So suddenly the White House wasn't fully briefed and the CIA went beyond what was authorized, using tactics that weren't "exactly what we wanted to have them do," and that Cheney implies he can't speak to and has never known about before.

Perhaps Cheney did know about "rectal rehydration," but is too ashamed or fearful of prosecution to admit it now. Explicitly defending the anal rape of prisoners is a bit much even for him. Or perhaps he really is just hearing about the tactic.

Either way, he story doesn't hold together. He can't have it both ways. Either the CIA hid depraved, unapproved tactics, or Cheney was perfectly okay with subjecting prisoners to anal rape. Perhaps Chuck Todd can ask him about this glaring discrepancy Sunday on Meet the Press. Until then, there is reason to suspect that, whatever Cheney knew, he doesn't have a moral problem with the anal rape of prisoners, a conclusion I draw from a succinct exchange later in the interview:

learned helplessness the goal of dick wrecked'em's patriot games....,

NYTimes |  The dogs wouldn’t jump. All they had to do to avoid electric shocks was leap over a small barrier, but there they sat in boxes in a lab at the University of Pennsylvania, passive and whining.

They had previously been given a series of mild shocks and learned they could do nothing to stop them. Now, they had given up trying. In the words of the scientists, they had “learned helplessness.”

The release of a Senate report on interrogation techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency has revived interest in that study, one of the most classic experiments in modern psychology. It and others like it, performed in the 1960s, became the basis for an influential theory about depression and informed the development of effective talk therapies.

Nearly a half-century later, a pair of military psychologists became convinced that the theory provided a basis for brutal interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, that were supposed to eliminate detainees’ “sense of control and predictability” and induce “a desired level of helplessness,” the Senate report said. The architects of the C.I.A.'s interrogation program have been identified as James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.

“My impression is that they misread the theory,” said Dr. Charles A. Morgan III, a psychiatrist at the University of New Haven who met Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Jessen while studying the effects of stress on American troops. “They’re not really scientists.”

One of the researchers who conducted the initial studies on dogs, the prominent psychologist Martin E. P. Seligman, said he was “grieved and horrified” that his work was cited to justify the abusive interrogations.

It is not the first time that academic research has been used for brutal interrogations, experts said. After the Second World War, the intelligence community began to study methods of interrogation, often financing outside psychiatrists and psychologists.

“A lot of the early work came out of psychoanalysis,” or Freudian thinking, said Steven Reisner, a psychologist in New York and co-founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, which opposes the profession’s participation in coercive interrogations. “Studies of sensory deprivation and sleep deprivation induced a psychosis, in which people lost control of what they said and what they thought.” At that point they might begin to cooperate — or so the theory went, Mr. Reisner said.

while they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption..., 2 Peter 2:19

NYTimes |  For decades, officials at Bob Jones University told sexual assault victims that they were to blame for their abuse, and to not report it to the police because doing so would damage their families, churches and the university, according to a long-awaited independent report released Thursday.

Bob Jones, an evangelical Christian institution in Greenville, S.C., displayed a “blaming and disparaging” attitude toward abuse victims, according to 56 percent of the 381 current and former students and employees who replied to a confidential survey and said they had knowledge of how the university handled abuse cases. About half the 166 people surveyed who identified themselves as abuse victims said the university actively discouraged them from going to the police.

 

In interviews with investigators and in written comments, some respondents detailed hurtful, often startling treatment.

“I was abused from the ages of 6 to 14 by my grandfather,” one respondent said. “When I went for counseling I was told: ‘Did you repent for your part of the abuse? Did your body respond favorably?’ ” The person reported being told by a university official that going to the police “tore your family apart, and that’s your fault,” and “you love yourself more than you love God.”

Another person said that at Bob Jones, “abuse victims are considered ‘second-rate Christians.’ ” And another said that university staff consistently told victims “that they bore the sin of bitterness and that they should not report abusers.”

Some people quoted in the report said Bob Jones University had shattered their faith, along with their psyches. The university made God out to be “someone who turns his back when children are harmed and then mocks and shames the child further,” one said, while another said, “by the time I left B.J.U., I didn’t think God loved me at all.”

The investigators’ recommendations included taking unspecified action against the university’s chancellor, Bob Jones III, who was president from 1971 to 2005, a potentially explosive idea at an institution where the founding family’s authority has gone unquestioned.

patriots are hard men doing dirty deeds in the middle of the night...,

Richard "Wrecked'em" Cheney so perfected his exit intrusion techniques that he was able to both extract important information and to plant the seeds of new ideas into his subject's head, achieving the effect known as "gut feeling" 

A sultry woman's voice-over, purrs, "Some people call it torture. But discriminating patriots know it as...'Deep Pleasures."
 

"We take the most luscious of fruits, mixed with healthy humus and the freshest organic vegetables, pureed to a blaze of color and texture.

"Then, and only then, are you invited to lean over and allow gravity to brighten your day as you experience, "Deep Pleasure."

"CIA contractors do not 'torture'; they lovingly cajole. And remember, no humans were killed (well, maybe just a few) in our testing research."

moral posturing on torture just isn't good enough...,

chicagotribune |  This was not a single, forgivable instance of terrible action under duress. It was an elaborate and ongoing system. In thinking through the rights and wrongs, that matters. There's a difference between ordinary mass killing and building a concentration camp.

Knowing only as much as this — that torture is disgusting, that it didn't work, and that the standard line of justification doesn't apply — you could accept that torture might be allowable in certain imaginable circumstances and still deplore the CIA program. To reach that conclusion, you don't need to consider the further, indirect costs of what was done. Let's consider them anyway.

The program was shameful and therefore had to be hidden. Congress was lied to. This undermined the rule of law — a matter on which the U.S. prides itself and likes to lecture the world. Notions of constitutional accountability were trashed by plausible deniability and outright lies. The CIA acted as a law unto itself, partly because it was allowed to, even asked to. (Just do what it takes. Spare us the details.) The program, in other words, was an assault on the American idea of lawful government.

Above all, it eroded, and continues to erode, America's moral standing. I'm less concerned about the effects this has on U.S. soft power and allies' willingness to cooperate, real as those may be, than I am with the effect on how Americans see themselves. To prevail in the struggle against enemies such as Islamic State, we need to know we are better than they are. It's important, when we feel revulsion at the video-taped beheadings of innocent people, that we don't also need to wonder if we aren't as cruel or as capable of evil.

Moral advantage makes you stronger. More than that, if we aren't better than they are, how much would it matter if they won?

rule of law: some "people" are just more deserving

Reuters | WASHINGTON – The marble façade of the U.S. Supreme Court building proclaims a high ideal: “Equal Justice Under Law.”

But inside, an elite cadre of lawyers has emerged as first among equals, giving their clients a disproportionate chance to influence the law of the land.

A Reuters examination of nine years of cases shows that 66 of the 17,000 lawyers who petitioned the Supreme Court succeeded at getting their clients’ appeals heard at a remarkable rate. Their appeals were at least six times more likely to be accepted by the court than were all others filed by private lawyers during that period.

The lawyers are the most influential members of one of the most powerful specialties in America: the business of practicing before the Supreme Court. None of these lawyers is a household name. But many are familiar to the nine justices. That’s because about half worked for justices past or present, and some socialize with them.

They are the elite of the elite: Although they account for far less than 1 percent of lawyers who filed appeals to the Supreme Court, these attorneys were involved in 43 percent of the cases the high court chose to decide from 2004 through 2012.

The Reuters examination of the Supreme Court’s docket, the most comprehensive ever, suggests that the justices essentially have added a new criterion to whether the court takes an appeal – one that goes beyond the merits of a case and extends to the merits of the lawyer who is bringing it.

The results: a decided advantage for corporate America, and a growing insularity at the court. Some legal experts contend that the reliance on a small cluster of specialists, most working on behalf of businesses, has turned the Supreme Court into an echo chamber – a place where an elite group of jurists embraces an elite group of lawyers who reinforce narrow views of how the law should be construed.

without torture prosecutions america can't claim to be a nation of laws...,

LATimes |  There’s a lot to be appalled about in the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee’s CIA torture report -- and yes, what the CIA did was torture. Beyond the atrocious physical abuse of detainees, the report details the agency’s incompetence -- it doesn’t know how many people it detained -- and its willful efforts to hide its misdeeds by lying to the president and Congress and maintaining a disinformation campaign with the media.

As others have noted, the conduct by the CIA and some of its contractors was inhumane and disgusting, regardless of whether they thought they were covered by Bush administration attorney John Yoo's legal rationalization. Much has been made that in the end, the “intelligence” the agents squeezed out of their victims was of little value, which makes a point of painful irony but obscures the darker reality. Even if the CIA had tortured a morsel of useful information out of someone, they still resorted to indefensible practices.

Imagine what the U.S. reaction -- from government officials to everyday people -- would be if we learned that agents of another country had grabbed people from outside its borders, spirited them away to clandestine chambers in third countries, and tortured them. Special forces would be deployed. The United Nations Security Council would convene. Sanctions would be imposed amid talk of isolating a rogue nation from the civilized world.

But because it was the U.S., it's likely nothing will happen despite calls for prosecutions. The Justice Department, which has already passed on prosecutions once, affirmed Tuesday that it will not reopen investigations into possible illegal acts committed by CIA agents and officials, or the people hired by them (yes, the U.S. even outsources torture).

If it is true that we are at war with terrorist organizations, then how is it not a war crime when U.S. agents take prisoners to secret complexes, deprive them of sleep, force them to stand on broken feet, manacle their hands above their heads, and “feed” them rectally?

Torture is illegal. Letting those responsible for such inhumane acts slip away without being brought to justice compounds the crime. We like to think of ourselves as a nation governed by laws, but to shrug off torture by agents of our own government tells the world that we not only find the crimes inconsequential, but we’ve turned off the international beacon of justice.

The Times editorial board read the report for what it is: An indictment:

you recall that the cia violated the constitution to keep its shotwell catacombs perversions secret...,

washingtontimes | “The CIA unconstitutionally spied on Congress by hacking into Senate intelligence committee computers. This grave misconduct not only is illegal, but it violates the U.S. Constitution’s requirement of separation of powers,” said Mr. Udall, a member of the committee. “These offenses, along with other errors in judgment by some at the CIA, demonstrate a tremendous failure of leadership, and there must be consequences.”

The internal CIA audit was conducted by the agency’s inspector general. It remains classified, but agency spokesman Dean Boyd said it showed that employees “acted in a manner inconsistent with the common understanding” of how documents were to be treated.

Mr. Boyd said Mr. Brennan has formed an accountability board to look into the findings and that employees could be disciplined.

The showdown stemmed from a yearslong Senate investigation into harsh interrogation techniques used in the years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. A key document known as the Panetta review, named after former CIA Director Leon E. Panetta, laid out a number of concerns including whether the interrogations were producing valuable information.

CIA officials accused Senate staffers of stealing the Panetta review, and Mr. Brennan’s top legal aide made an official referral asking the Justice Department to pursue a criminal case against staffers. Senators countered by starting their own investigation, demanding Mr. Brennan’s cooperation, and taking their own complaint to the Justice Department.

The CIA said Thursday that the Justice Department review has concluded without any finding on either side. The Senate is continuing its investigation.

one of the two sadistic leather tops who showed cia the "stick of truth" for $81 million...,

nbcnews |  One of two psychologists whose firm was paid $81 million to design the CIA's interrogation techniques for terror suspects is blasting a Senate report that criticized the program's brutality and effectiveness. 

"I always sleep comfortably at night," James Mitchell told NBC News on Wednesday. 

"I think the American people ought to know the men and women of the CIA and the armed services have given up their lives and their security to protect them. It's not always pretty," he added. "I wish this report had come out in a bipartisan way." 

In an earlier interview with the Associated Press, Mitchell said Senate report's accusation that he and his partner did not have experience as interrogators or an understanding of Al Qaeda is "flat wrong." He said he understood the shocked reaction to the report's claims. "I would be upset by it too, if it were true," he said. 

"What they are asking you to believe is that multiple directors of the CIA and analysts who made their living for years doing this lied to the federal government, or were too stupid to know that the intelligence they were getting wasn't useful," Mitchell told the AP. 

Mitchell, who spent 30 years in the U.S. Air Force, is identified by the alias Grayson Swigert in the report. His former business partner, John "Bruce" Jessen, is identifed as Hammond Dunbar. The report says that their firm had a $180 million contract but collected just $81 million before the contract was terminated in 2009.

rule of law: vote, protest, all you like - DC residents have no rights congress is bound to acknowledge....,

csmonitor |  Efforts to secure full voting representation in Congress for D.C. residents have a long history of frustration. The reality is that the federal enclave is not a state, and therefore its residents do not enjoy the same voting rights of states, as granted by the US Constitution. The Constitution also grants Congress jurisdiction over the District.

In 1973, Congress established “home rule” in D.C., allowing local officials to govern the District. But Congress maintains the right to overrule local decisions, including ballot measures.

Most of the time, Congress leaves D.C. alone, but on social policy, congressional Republicans have been known to jump in. On abortion policy, the District is not allowed to use its own tax revenues to fund the procedure for low-income residents. Republicans in Congress blocked sales of medical marijuana in D.C. for 11 years.

In the current Congress, Rep. Andy Harris (R) of Maryland is spearheading the effort to thwart legalized recreational marijuana in D.C. He claims “fairly broad-based support in Congress against legalization.”

But marijuana advocates aren’t taking this lying down.

shock and anal probe...,

guardian |  The Senate’s report confirms what we’ve long known: the United States systematically tortured detainees, sometimes to the point of death, and relied on the complicity of health professionals to commit and conceal these crimes.

Psychologists developed and actively participated in the CIA’s torture methods, and both psychologists and doctors were used to create a fiction of “safe, legal, and effective” interrogation practices. In reality, health professionals monitored and calibrated the infliction of severe physical and mental pain, withheld medical treatment, and failed to document medical evidence of intentional harm.

Torture is always illegal and immoral and, as the report shows, it provided little to no actionable intelligence. It compromised everything the United States stands for as a country based on the rule of law, but torture betrayed the core tenet of the healing professions – to do no harm.

The report is a critical step in establishing a public record of the nature and extent of CIA torture, but the question remains: Will those responsible for the authorization and implementation of torture be held accountable to ensure that these crimes never happen again? —Dr Vincent Iacopino, senior medical advisor, Physicians for Human Rights

While the torture report provides many new horrifying details, the saddest part is that even those who championed this much-needed report have failed to respond to its lessons going forward. Consider how casually the report describes that Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri – the alleged mastermind of the USS Cole bombing – went on a hunger strike. 

As if the response to a hunger strike should ever be to feed someone rectally!

Indeed, the comment – and the evidence such “rectal feeding” left on his body, suggests that Nashiri was anally probed as punishment for hunger-striking. Indeed, a doctor who recently testified about Nashiri’s torture as part of his military commission testified that he had the kind of “anal-rectal complaints” that “survivors of sexual assault experience”.

After 10 years of working on CIA abuses, I didn’t know it was possible to be shocked but not surprised.

We already knew of the brutal stress positions, forced standing, waterboarding and extended sleep deprivation with light and noise; now we know about the use of punitive “anal feeding” or “anal rehydration”, about forcing detainees with broken leg bones to stand shackled against a wall. Now we know about all the lies.

who was the first person to receive an alien anal probe?

jasoncolavito |  Why it is that aliens want to probe our butts; or, more specifically, when exactly did people start claiming that aliens gave them anal probes? I know this is a silly question, but silly questions often end up revealing hidden layers and secrets. And I have not been able to find a satisfactory answer to what should have been a simple question.

Anal probes are now such an established part of the UFO phenomenon that you’d think there’d be a clear answer to that question, but if there is, I can’t find one. Many UFO books refer to it, and many assume that it’s just a given during an abduction, but I can’t find a catalog of anal probing events or a timeline of when they supposedly started. Even the otherwise exhaustive Wikipedia lacks an entry for alien anal probes. There must be something about it somewhere, but since I am not as familiar with modern UFO material, I am not sure where to look for it.

Ufology isn’t much help in the matter. In his A UFO Hunter’s Guide (2012), Brad Lueder simply denies that there were any anal probes, dismissing the formulation as “misinterpreted and misunderstood” sex experiments. He’s wrong, of course, but it shows that some ufologists want to distance themselves from what Lueder calls the “sneers and jokes” of “modern popular culture.” On the other hand, Zen Benefiel self-published a book this year called Alien Agendas and Anal Probes that promised to investigate “the science behind the anal probes” and what these probes can tell us about why the aliens are really here. But his book isn’t a history so much as New Age-influenced fringe speculation.

We can probably put a terminus ante quem and terminus pro quem on our search by establishing that the trope was famous enough in 1997 to be the subject of South Park’s pilot episode, “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe.” The probing can’t be part of the abduction experience before there was an abduction experience, so it had to have developed after 1964, when under hypnosis Betty and Barney Hill claimed to have been subjected to surgical examination (Betty claimed a needle entered her naval) during a 1961 alien abduction. Or at least it would have developed after 1962, when claims that Antonio Vilas-Boas had been seduced into sex by an alien following a medical examination on a spaceship in 1957 were first published.

The interesting thing is that Barney Hill actually did claim to be anally probed, but because that claim was not included in The Interrupted Journey (1965), the account by John G. Fuller of the hypnotic regression he performed on the Hills, this claim was not generally known until a 1965 report by NICAP investigator Walter Webb was popularized much later. In that report, Webb stated that during the hypnotic regression, Barney Hill stated that “A cylindrical object was inserted up the rectum, and once again the witness believed something was extracted.” Fuller left this out of the book, along with a claim by Hill that a cup was used to extract sperm.