But he wears a flag pin!

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In observance of Flag Day I present to you Richard Bruce Cheney: Patriot.

Breaking!

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A positive link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda may finally have been documented. It appears that the link could have been one Richard Bruce Cheney.

Everybody needs to settle down about "torture porn"

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There's a kneejerk shitstorm of reaction today against Obama's decision to resist the release of more Cheney-era torture photos in response to a Freedom of Information Act request and a court decision supporting it. For once, however, I agree with the frequently odious Harry Reid: we've already seen enough torture pictures.

During the Cheney era, pictures of government-inflicted torture were hard evidence of crimes in progress --- crimes that were being denied and covered up in real time by the Bush administration. We have plenty of pictures now. More importantly, we have hard documentation of how Cheney-era torture policies were developed and implemented. I cannot see how the public release of more torture photos at this point in time contributes anything to public discussion of the subject. Pictures will sensationalize the issue, making it more difficult for the debate to proceed on its legal, logical, and philosophical bases.

All available effort, including the work of lefty bloggers, should be directed toward ensuring that the people who developed and implemented illegal and treaty-breaking interrogation policies for the U.S. government be criminally investigated and prosecuted. And elected officials who served as enablers for Cheney's monsters, especially gutless Democrats in the Congress, should be exposed and shamed for giving the Bush administration cover and comfort in this area.

Only prosecutions (and the imprisonment of those convicted) have a real chance to eradicate torture as a tool of U.S. military operations, intelligence, statecraft, and law enforcement. Horrifying pictures won't do it, except when introduced into evidence during criminal trials.

When torture prosecutions are completed, appeals have been exhausted, and the American public has understood for all time that torture is as unacceptable as terrorism or political assassination, then the pictures should be released to the national archives for examination by news organizations, scholars, and the public. They're part of our ugly history, and they need to be preserved and curated.

Meanwhile, professional "outspoken critics" should consider keeping their eyes on the real fucking ball if they want justice. The Congress and the President need to be lobbied mercilessly, shamed if necessary, into investigating and prosecuting those involved in the 8-year Cheney-era crime spree called the "Bush administration." Nobody must be let off the hook.

Proof that torture works

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Today Lindsey Graham (R-SC) asserted in a Senate hearing that torture must work because they've been using it successfully for 500 years.*

In other news, OBL asserted in a pimped-out mountain cave that terrorism must work because he's been using it successfully for 25 years.

* I heard him saying this on All Things Considered this afternoon but I can't find it on the NPR web site.

My own little "torture memos"

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This weekend I'll be writing some torture memos of my own to Senators Durbin and Burris, as well as Rep. Tim Johnson and the President. My point is going to be, of course, that it's a false choice to have politicians declare we need to decide whether we're going to look backward or forward. We have to do both, all the time, and everybody knows it. The "look forward" meme is simply code for "informally pardon powerful white people for their crimes". According to this phony logic, Pat Fitzgerald should tear up his indictments of Rod Blagojevich and let him prance off to the jungles of Costa Rica to become a TV star.

I'll post my memo in case you, the highly esteemed reader, wish to repurpose my text and send it to your elected representatives and executives. But there's no reason why you can't just compose and send your own.

Simpler times

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Of topical interest, our Fifty50 Military History Correspondent provides a clipping from page 4 of The Fort Riley Post (23 August 1963) giving an account of “‘Realistic’ POW Conduct Training” offered to unsuspecting soldiers of Company B, 8th Infantry, in West Germany. During a training-oriented deception operation, the soldiers were ambushed, captured, blindfolded, shackled, and detained in a barbed wire compound. The putative POWs were then given the business, thusly:

A good-cop interrogator offered the prisoners “liquid refreshment” (read “booze”) and cigarettes and conversationally probed them for religious and racial prejudices and “other possible character weaknesses.” Next, the men were moved to a venue where they were questioned by an attractive female, “dressed only in a negligee.” Then, because not everything was Rat Pack and Camelot during the Kennedy Administration, geopolitically speaking, the captured soldiers were moved to a “‘torture area’ where they were given a modified water torture and shock treatment.” Even then, the U.S. Army had lots to teach soldiers that previously had been learned from the Commies.

It would be interesting to know if torture has ever been documented to produce any outcome other than the confession that the torturer had expected to extract in the first place. Along those lines, it also would be interesting to know whether that preordained confession might be produced more quickly and humanely through a judicious offering of vice. U.S. military and civilian intelligence agencies must have catacombs full of data on this very subject (as do the Chinese). For more information on the subject, be sure to file a Freedom of Information request (with the Chinese).

Beyond "Good to Great"

From The Salt Lake Tribune, via TPM and reader DB (where I saw the relevant Trib excerpt), comes an account of a next-gen employee motivation program.

In the long term, employee motivation through management-initiated waterboarding is probably a welcome development for several reasons. First, it will weed all the sissies out of the sales team and put them on the streets where they really belong to begin with. Second, it will finally rid us of impermanent, namby-pamby management fad thinking epitomized by Harlequin-style boardroom romances such as Good to Great. Third, it will help to rip the grinning, baboon-like happy-mask off the Reagan Revolution and reveal just what it's always been about: applying wealth and brute force to deceive the innocent, intimidate the weak, and redefine human beings as an expendable capital resource for use by a handful of degenerate plutocrats and their enforcers.

Giant cockroach

That's what I feel like I'm gonna wake up as. Quick: Kafka someone with a broomstick!

Here, as seen on Atrios. Once, in gradeschool, I got in trouble for calling my cousin (who had lived in Germany) a Nazi.

Let us pray. (Relax: the church security guards have us covered from the bell tower.)