Alberto Gonzales Regrets Enemy Detainee Memo

By GottaLaff

Think his fingers were crossed when he apologized?

Well, heck, as long as he's sorry, let's just shake hands and put all that torture behind us:

Alberto Gonzales expresses regret over a memo he wrote defending the harsh treatment of enemy detainees. Some argue that the 2002 memo cleared the way for prisoner abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The former U.S. attorney general said he shouldn't have used the words "quaint" and "the Geneva Conventions" in the same sentence.

I shouldn't use the words Gonzo and dick in the same sentence either, but I am, and without a hint of regret.

Hey Alberto, the word "quaint" isn't the only thing you should be apologizing for. Not by a long shot.

What you should apologize for is only touched upon below. It's also what you should be imprisoned for:

All my previous posts on this subject matter can be found here; That link includes one specific to only Fayiz al-Kandari's story here. Here are audio and video interviews with Lt. Col. Wingard, one by David Shuster, one by Ana Marie Cox, and more. My guest commentary at BuzzFlash is here.

If you are inclined to help rectify these injustices: Twitterers, use the hashtag #FreeFayiz. We have organized a team to get these stories out. If you are interested in helping Fayiz out, e-mail me at The Political Carnival, address in sidebar to the right; or tweet me at @GottaLaff.

If you'd like to see other ways you can take action, go here and scroll down to the end of the article.

Then read Jane Mayer's book The Dark Side. You'll have a much greater understanding of why I post endlessly about this, and why I'm all over the CIA deception issues, too.

More of Fayiz's story here, at Answers.com.

VIDEO-- Feith Responds: ‘I Never Advocated’ For Torture, I Was Just ‘Giving Advice’

By GottaLaff


Here is my earlier post about Spain's taking steps to investigate BushCo 's illegal torture practices. Now Doug Feith is saying he merely gave advice about, you know, committing war crimes:

Yesterday, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, one of the officials implicated in the complaint, went on Fox News to defend himself in front of torture advocate Bill O’Reilly.

Feith argued that the charges that he helped approve torture are completely bogus. “I’m being criticized for a position that I never advocated. And so the facts are just wrong,” he said. Feith said he was simply giving “advice” to President Bush and had no role in “directing” torture policy. [...]

But last year, Feith himself bragged in an interview with British law professor Phillippe Sands that he played a pivotal role in ensuring that Geneva protections against “outrages upon personal dignity” did not apply to detainees:

I asked Feith, just to be clear: Didn’t the administration’s approach mean that Geneva’s constraints on interrogation couldn’t be invoked by anyone at Guantánamo? “Oh yes, sure,” he shot back. Was that the intended result?, I asked. “Absolutely,” he replied. I asked again: Under the Geneva Conventions, no one at Guantánamo was entitled to any protection? “That’s the point,” Feith reiterated. … “This year I was really a player,” Feith said, thinking back on 2002 and relishing the memory.

Indeed, Feith’s arguments became official U.S. policy with the signing of a presidential memorandum on February 7, 2002.

Isn't he just precious? How could we ever have thought the worst?

The Torture Report

By GottaLaff

Rep. Jim Moran (D- Virginia) just said on Hardball that the Obama administration won't move on the substance of this New York Times editorial, because they want to "move on". As the editorial says, it's too "politically fraught". Oy.

Duncan Hunter is on Hardball, too, and calls it "left wing rubbish", because, see, only three people were waterboarded and those three were bad, bad, bad guys who gave us "enormously valuable information that saved American lives" after being tortured. Great logic, Duncan. Moral high ground and real American principles be damned. Double oy.

All but President Bush’s most unquestioning supporters recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services.

Now, a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

The report shows how actions by these men “led directly” to what happened at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret C.I.A. prisons.

It said these top officials, charged with defending the Constitution and America’s standing in the world, methodically introduced interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War. [...]

The officials then issued legally and morally bankrupt documents to justify their actions, starting with a presidential order saying that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners of the “war on terror” — the first time any democratic nation had unilaterally reinterpreted the conventions. [...]

These top officials ignored warnings from lawyers in every branch of the armed forces that they were breaking the law, subjecting uniformed soldiers to possible criminal charges and authorizing abuses that were not only considered by experts to be ineffective, but were actually counterproductive. [...]

These policies have deeply harmed America’s image as a nation of laws and may make it impossible to bring dangerous men to real justice. The report said the interrogation techniques were ineffective, despite the administration’s repeated claims to the contrary. [...]

A prosecutor should be appointed to consider criminal charges against top officials at the Pentagon and others involved in planning the abuse. [...]

At the least, Mr. Obama should, as the organization Human Rights First suggested, order his attorney general to review more than two dozen prisoner-abuse cases that reportedly were referred to the Justice Department by the Pentagon and the C.I.A. — and declined by Mr. Bush’s lawyers.

Mr. Obama should consider proposals from groups like Human Rights Watch and the Brennan Center for Justice to appoint an independent panel to look into these and other egregious violations of the law. [...]

A good place for them to start would be to reverse Mr. Bush’s disastrous order of Feb. 7, 2002, declaring that the United States was no longer legally committed to comply with the Geneva Conventions.

Moran:

If we don't hold them accountable, we are not the nation the rest of the world wants us to be.