Fact-esque

A Great Day for Justice. Not.

Amazing. Two Supreme Court decisions came down yesterday and they are both travesties of anything that looks remotely like justice. First, we got CJ Roberts...well, here's the opening graf of Adam Liptak's NYT article, one of the most jaw-dropping ledes I think I've ever read.

Prisoners have no constitutional right to DNA testing that might prove their innocence, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in a 5-to-4 decision.

The Right-wing Bush court has just thrown the Constitution out the window because - dig this - it got in the way of a state's right to be stoopid, mean, and vengeful on the wrong guy's ass and - in Alito's words - gave prisoners a new excuse "to play games with the criminal justice system.” Mind you, defendants are not even allowed to provide the tests at their own expense. It's all up to the states. Because, you know, it always has been.

Bush Keeps Gitmo Open...Because It Might Embarrass Him to Close It

I kid you not.

A story by Steven Lee Myers in today's NYT signals a turnaround (we hope) in the NYT's 8-year "Cheerleaders for Bush" Phase because he doesn't even begin to pull punches, spin the truth so it sounds better for Bush, or ignore the implications. The fire is in the very first graf.

Despite his stated desire to close the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, President Bush has decided not to do so, and never considered proposals drafted in the State Department and the Pentagon that outlined options for transferring the detainees elsewhere, according to senior administration officials.

Is that a departure from the usual semi-quasi-propaganda the NYT has been dishing out under Nagourney and the like, or what? Myers avoids actually calling Bush a liar by simply connecting the dots made by facts (something the blogs have had to do since the day the would-be Emperor was selected because the press was too afraid to): he said he was going to close Gitmo and then didn't. What is that if it wasn't a lie? Confirmation: he didn't even bother to look at the plans the Pentagon drew up for the demobbing.

This is the sort of stuff that, until recently, you had to go to the foreign press to get. All of a sudden the NYT, which granted was never the war and Bush booster the WaPo has been, allowed somebody to lay out the facts without manipulating them or whitewashing Bush and His Gas House White House Gang. I was beginning to think I wouldn't live to see one of our last remaining major papers turn back to genuine journalism. It was a very pleasant surprise to be wrong - assuming, of course, that this isn't a one-off that slipped by the publisher's blue pencil.

I'd like to see a lot more 'cause it gets better.

Detainees Get Trials But Not Access to Evidence

As we said a couple of days ago, the Bush Administration began looking for ways to duck out from under last week's SCOTUS decision to reanimate habeus corpus the moment they knew they had lost. Today the NYT reports that they've found a way: let the detainees have civilian trials but bar them from access to the govt's evidence on the grounds of - here we go again - "national security".

The Justice Department has argued that the Supreme Court's decision last week granting the Guantanamo detainees the right to challenge their detentions in U.S. courts should not affect the military trials process. The department contends that the government plans to go ahead with military commissions for those who are facing war crimes charges.

Though the top legal adviser for the commissions process, Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, has said that the trials would be "fair, just and transparent" and that detainees would have full access to the evidence against them, Pentagon officials have now backed off of those claims. The Office of Military Commissions said last week that defendants representing themselves might not get access to information about their interrogators and that secret information might have to be redacted in order to be shared with them.

"If classified information is presented to the jury, the accused will see it, no exceptions," according to the Office of Military Commissions' written responses to Washington Post questions about how the military commissions will deal with classified evidence in the Sept. 11 case. But a further explanation reveals that classified contents of certain materials could be replaced by summaries and blacked-out documents. "It is possible that an accused representing himself will not be able to directly review some evidence; in such circumstances, his standby defense counsel might be involved."

It is unclear, however, what role the standby counsel would be allowed to play and how far the judge would let him go in cooperating in their client's defense.

Expect the restrictions to be fairly severe unless pressure causes the Pentagon to decide it can't do what Bush wants - railroad the detainees with mock military trials - without eroding its reputation for ignoring its own legal codes even further. And that pressure exists. The military is slowly becoming aware that Bush's imperial edicts, his advocacy of torture, and his dismissal of most standard defendant rights aren't sitting well with public opinion, which desperately wants to be pro-military but keeps banging its collective head on the inhumane treatment of detainees and the eradication of rights we used to believe in and that used to make us different from, say, Pinochet's Chile or the Junta's Burma.

The uncomfortable truth is that Bush's prison policies have been just as devastating to military morale as his economic policies have been to the financial health of the nation, and it's dawning on the more perceptive souls that the military could end up paying a price as the pendulum swings away from authoritarianism for being too obedient to a civilian authority that ordered them to break their own laws. The argument appears to be raging inside military circles around the issue of evidence. Part of the Pentagon wants the transparency that Gen Hartmann promised, another part doesn't, largely, it seems, because it would mean revealing the amount of torture applied to the detainees on trial and the names of the interrogators who tortured them.

The defendants, some of whom have already said they were tortured by CIA agents while held in secret prisons overseas, almost certainly will request to use highly classified evidence relating to their captures and alleged confessions under duress. Legal experts said that, in such cases, it would be critical to challenge the confessions as illegal because of coercion, even if the government did not seek to use them, because of the legal doctrine that if the defendant was abused, all of his following statements would then be tainted and inadmissible.

But the Office of Military Commissions will not guarantee that the defendants will be able to question and confront their interrogators or captors, saying that the "identities of intelligence interrogators are normally classified." Though the CIA has acknowledged using aggressive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, it is possible that the detainees will never learn their interrogators' names or have access to them.

What it boils down to, I think, is a decision forced on the miltary by Bush: "Which is worse for our reputation? Admitting that we tortured these people or covering it up?"

Seems to me Bush has put them in the middle of a Lose-Lose situation.

Lawyers Use Recent SCOTUS Decision to Challenge Military Trials

In a post Thursday I wrote;

That's all well and good but it only applies to appeals. What about the kangaroo-court nature of the original military trials? They're just as phony, just as rigged as the ones the Court struck down for being phony and rigged.

The same question occurred to lawyers of the detainees, and they're now getting ready to use the recent Supreme Court decision to restore habeus to the appeals process as an argument for restoring it in the military commissions trials.

A day after the Supreme Court’s ruling granting detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the right to challenge their detention in federal court, military defense lawyers said they planned to use the decision to mount new attacks on the government’s war crimes prosecutions that could stall or stop trials.

It should be noted that the SCOTUS decision by itself wasn't what motivated them to do this but a statement by the Mukasey Justice Dept that it saw no reason to change what it was doing.

The new attack on the military commission system at Guantánamo will directly challenge a public declaration by the Justice Department after the ruling Thursday. The department said that detainees have numerous legal protections and that “military commission trials will therefore continue to go forward.”

More or less what we expected a Bush legal dept to say: "We don't care what the SCOTUS says. Fuck em. We work for Emperor Bush and we do what he tells us to do because the law is whatever he says it is, not those liberal pansies in black robes." And I'm sure Bush's dismissive statement was another clear sign that once again, despite the "stinging rebukes" of the highlest court in the land, he, The Emperor, didn't intend to re-consider much less change anything he was doing even though the decision caused a number of Constitutional experts to conclude the military trials were no longer feasible.

“It is an open question whether the military commissions, as they currently exist, satisfy the requirements of the Constitution,” said Michael C. Dorf, a law professor at Columbia University.

The military lawyers said they would use the Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 ruling to argue that if detainees have habeas rights they are also entitled to other constitutional protections. They say the Constitution would bar the planned trials, asserting that legal procedures at Guantánamo violate basic legal protections. The lawyers cited commission rules that permit hearsay and evidence derived by coercion as examples of commission procedures that they argued would not be permitted by the Constitution.

“It no longer makes sense for the government to pursue these cases through military commissions,” said Lt. Cmdr. Brian L. Mizer, who said he would quickly press a federal court challenge on behalf of his client, Salim Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden. Mr. Hamdan is scheduled to be the first detainee to face a trial, now set for July 21.

The contempt for the law shown by the Bush/Cheney Administration from top to bottom for the past 8 years has poisoned not just the legal system but the way ordinary people feel about the law. The sooner we can reverse some of the most egregious and obvious destruction to the Constitution, the faster we can begin to get some respect for the law back into people's consciousness.

This isn't about just the detainees any more - if it ever was - these lawyers are fighting for all of us.

SCOTUS Says Gitmo Detainees Can Appeal in Civilian Courts (2 Updates)

For what is, I believe, the third or fourth time, the SCOTUS has decided against the Bush Administration's so-called "legal" policies (most of which aren't legal except in the minds of authoritarians like Bush and Cheney) on detainees.

Foreign terrorism suspects held at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba have constitutional rights to challenge their detention there in United States courts, the Supreme Court ruled, 5 to 4, on Thursday in a historic decision on the balance between personal liberties and national security.

“The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court.

Nothing, of course, will change since the Bush Administration has simply ignored the last 2 or 3 SCOTUS decisions that it was acting illegally in Gitmo and there have been no repercussions. Bush has placed himself above the Supreme Court, apparently feeling that the monarchic powers he assumes for his presidency absolve him from the need for compliance with the highest legal authority in the land.

Not very friendly considering he wouldn't even be president if the SCOTUS hadn't thrown their entire legal philosophy overboard to give him the election he lost in 2000.

Fat Tony, of course, a dissenter, aped the Bush Party Line almost verbatim.

Reflecting how the case divided the court not only on legal but, perhaps, emotional lines, Justice Scalia said the United States was “at war with radical Islamists,” and that the ruling “will almost certainly cause more Americans to get killed.”

The Fear Party never quits! Meanwhile, the other conservative dissenters had their own ways of dealing with another loss. Chief Justice John Roberts chose comedy.

Chief Justice Roberts said the majority had struck down “the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants.”

I should point out that in order to accept that sentence you have to be:

1. Brain dead
2. A committed ideologue
3. English-deprived
4. Someone who rejects all the previous SCOTUS rejections

IOW, that sentence only makes sense if Roberts is refusing to accept what the SCOTUS decided before. In yet other words, the Chief Justice just rejected the power of his own court to decide law.

But it's all moot anyway since the Bush administration won't be accepting or obeying this Supreme Court decision any more than they did the first three. That's the beauty of living in a monarchy.

UPDATE: (6/12/08) Bush doesn't care for the decision but ungraciously and unconvincingly claims he'll "abide by it".

We'll abide by the court's decision," Bush said during a news conference in Rome. "That doesn't mean I have to agree with it." The court's decision was sure to be popular in Europe, where many leaders have called for the closing of of Guantanamo.

In its third rebuke of the Bush administration's treatment of prisoners, the court ruled 5-4 that the government is violating the rights of prisoners being held indefinitely and without charges at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. The court's liberal justices were in the majority.

Yeah. Right. He said the same thing about the other decisions before he went right ahead and pretended they didn't exist. I ain't holding my breath.

UPDATE 2: (6/10/08) Glenn Greenwald explains better than I could. He says a key provision of the MCA was just struck down and we've got habeus back. Well, maybe but....

In a major rebuke to the Bush administration's theories of presidential power -- and in an equally stinging rebuke to the bipartisan political class which has supported the Bush detention policies -- the U.S. Supreme Court today, in a 5-4 decision (.pdf), declared Section 7 of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 unconstitutional. The Court struck down that section of the MCA because it purported to abolish the writ of habeas corpus -- the means by which a detainee challenges his detention in a court -- despite the fact that Constitution permits suspension of that writ only "in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion."

As a result, Guantanamo detainees accused of being "enemy combatants" have the right to challenge the validity of their detention in a full-fledged U.S. federal court proceeding. The ruling today is the first time in U.S. history that the Court has ruled that detainees held by the U.S. Government in a place where the U.S. does not exercise formal sovereignty (Cuba technically is sovereign over Guantanamo) are nonetheless entitled to the Constitutional guarantee of habeas corpus whenever they are held in a place where the U.S. exercises effective control.

In upholding the right of habeas corpus for Guantanamo detainees, the Court found that the "Combatant Status Review Tribunals" process ("CSRT") offered to Guantanamo detainees -- established by the John-McCain-sponsored Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 -- does not constitute a constitutionally adequate substitute for habeas corpus. To the contrary, the Court found that such procedures -- which have long been criticized as sham hearings due to the fact that defendants cannot have a lawyer present, government evidence is presumptively valid, and defendants are prevented from challenging (and sometimes even knowing about) much of the evidence against them -- "fall well short of the procedures and adversarial mechanisms that would eliminate the need for habeas corpus review." Those grave deficiencies in the CSRT process mean that "there is considerable risk of error" in the tribunals' conclusions.

That's all well and good but it only applies to appeals. What about the kangaroo-court nature of the original military trials? They're just as phony, just as rigged as the ones the Court struck down for being phony and rigged.

US Prison Ships

The American news media has made some progress this past year and I don't want to take that away from them, BUT there are still quite a few things the Bushies are up to that you'll have to go to the foreign pressm to find out about. Like the prison ships we're using to hide the real number of detainees.

The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.

Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.

Information about the operation of prison ships has emerged through a number of sources, including statements from the US military, the Council of Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners.

The analysis, due to be published this year by the human rights organisation Reprieve, also claims there have been more than 200 new cases of rendition since 2006, when President George Bush declared that the practice had stopped.

(emphasis added)

The military is admitting it? Yoicks. How many ships we talking about?

According to research carried out by Reprieve, the US may have used as many as 17 ships as "floating prisons" since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboard the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations, it is claimed.

Ships that are understood to have held prisoners include the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu. A further 15 ships are suspected of having operated around the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which has been used as a military base by the UK and the Americans.

(emphasis added)

So in addition to secret prisons for suspected "terrorists" all over Europe, prisons in Iraq itself, and Gitmo in Cuba, we've got 17 ships full of them steaming around the Indian Ocean? And I had to read about this in the British press?

(Via Avedon Carol)

Ex-Gitmo Prosecutor Slams Political Pressure

On Friday, Eric Martin of Total Information Awareness (TIA) reviewed a book by AJ Rossmiller called Still Broken about Rossmiller's time in the DIA. Part of that time was spent in Iraq, and at the end of his rotation he found himself helping process detainees.

[H]e had been tracking some insurgent activity, and earlier that night there had been a raid conducted using his intel.

One of the soldiers came over to the main table, his face tired but his eyes alert.

"We didnt' find the guys we were looking for, but grabbed some dudes at the targets' houses and then did some follow-on ops, too. We've got around forty or fifty coming in," he declared.

This news was alarming. Some of the evidence against our targets was questionable to begin with, and now we had dozens of guys who just happened to be in the houses we hit? In an environment filled with bad sources, double-dealings, a lack of knowledge of culture and language, and endless cases of mistaken identity, it was likely that few if any of our detainees were involved in the insurgency, and probably none would have intelligence value. I figured we would have to let most of them go.

Rossmiller was wrong of course. Instead, the deeply traumatized and humiliated prisoners were shipped off to Abu Ghraib prison - where they will remain imprisoned for months or years without formal charges or contact with the outside world.

That's as good a place as any to begin reporting the not-so-startling testimony in court today of AF Col Morris Davis. Col Davis used to be the chief prosecutor of the prisoners at Gitmo - those terribly dangerous career criminals terrorists, according to Bush and Cheney - the man responsible for seeing the guilty were prevented from ever again being a danger. Only it turns out, he never got much of a chance to find out how dangerous they were - or if they were dangerous at all. See, they'd already been tried-and-convicted by the very act of being picked up.

Davis told Navy Capt. Keith J. Allred, who presided over the hearing, that top Pentagon officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England, made it clear to him that charging some of the highest-profile detainees before elections this year could have "strategic political value."

Davis said he wants to wait until the cases -- and the military commissions system -- have a more solid legal footing. He also said that Defense Department general counsel William J. Haynes II, who announced his retirement in February, once bristled at the suggestion that some defendants could be acquitted, an outcome that Davis said would give the process added legitimacy.

"He said, 'We can't have acquittals,' " Davis said under questioning from Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, the military counsel who represents Hamdan. " 'We've been holding these guys for years. How can we explain acquittals? We have to have convictions.' "

(emphasis added)

The similarity in the two stories, Rossmiller's and Davis', is striking. Abu Ghraib was filled with accidental prisoners whose only crime had been being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were sent to Abu Ghraib to be tortured because the Bush/Cheney Administration needed examples they could point to, to prove their torture policy was working to protect us. That it was protecting us for the most part from people who posed no threat to begin with was on no account to be allowed into the public mind. The detainees at Gitmo could not be allowed a fair trial for the same reason - we might discover that those "career terrorists" that Bush called more than once "the worst of the worst" were usually no more terroristic than your Aunt Sadie on Bargain Basement Sale Day. The administration - and its torture policy - would look bad.

Testifying about his assertions for the first time, Colonel Davis said a senior Pentagon official who oversaw the military commissions, Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann of the Air Force Reserve, reversed a decision he had made and insisted that prosecutors proceed with evidence derived through waterboarding of detainees and other aggressive interrogation methods that critics call torture.

Called to the stand by a Navy defense lawyer and testifying before a military judge, Colonel Davis said General Hartmann directed him last year to push war crimes cases here quickly. He said the general was trying to give the system legitimacy before a new president took office. He testified that General Hartmann referred to the long difficulties the Pentagon had had in operating the military commissions and said, “If we don’t get some cases going before the election, this thing’s going to implode.”

(emphasis added)

You know, it seems nothing much changes. The Gitmo detainees have been locked up for 5 years, in most cases without charges ever be filed against them. They were denied due process when they came in because it might embarrass the Bushies. Finally forced to allow legal proceedings (after being told to twice by its otherwise tame SCOTUS), it is rushing them through because a careful examination of the cases might prove to be embarrassing to the Bushies. It seems the one constant here is sacrificing the poor suckers who got caught in the net rather than embarrass the Bushies.

Who have what to salvage politically at this point? I mean, the name of Bush is mud in its own country and around the globe, and the GOP is persona non grata everywhere. What more can possibly happen to Bush's horrendous reputation if we find out *yawn* that most of the detainees are innocent, few of them are threats, and alright, so we kept people in jail for 5 years that we shouldn't have because we didn't want you to know we shouldn't have because we wanted to look tough on crime terrorism for '04. Who's left that doesn't already know all this?

BTW, this is all the same attitude that comes out of the Republicans' standard anti-crime legislation: "Who cares if they might be innocent? They're probably guilty of something. Throw 'em all in prison and let God sort 'em out." Republicans have been seen as "tough on crime" whenever they talked or acted like schoolyard bullies, trashing the law, sneering at courts, and loudly proclaiming their "3 strikes, you're out" program and mandatory sentencing and protected search-and-seizure (King George III would have been so proud!) and warrantless arrests as if all those so-called "rights" were worthless, namby-pamby liberal hogwash.

All of that contempt for law was embodied in the Bush zest for the right to torture "enemies" and spy on friends, and it came from the long-standing Republican hatred of legal principles and anything else that restricted their need for revenge. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are the direct descendants of "Don't handcuff the police!" and Miranda warnings, the bugaboos of the Right for 40 years. They're the logical extension of our buying into a revenge-oriented right-wing demand for "frontier justice", and to that extent, we brought it all on ourselves.

Act V

This NYT story about the number of people imprisoned in the US and the efficacy of our booming prison industry got a lot of deserved attention today.  I can't add to what's been written but I can point you to an interesting episode of This American Life, which looks at a production of  Prison Performing Arts.   

We devote this entire episode to one story: over the course of six months, reporter and TAL contributor Jack Hitt followed a group of inmates at a high-security prison as they rehearsed and staged a production of the last act—Act V—of Hamlet. Shakespeare may seem like an odd match for a group of hardened criminals, but Jack found that they understand the Bard on a level that most of us might not. It's a play about murder and its consequences, performed by murderers, living out the consequences.

You can listen to the whole episode, which touches on some of the issues raised by the NYT story, here.

Closing Windows

Thomas has the good news that Adel Hamad, of Project Hamad, has finally been released and is back in Sudan.  The Project Hamad blog reminds us that

... we must remember that Adel is only one of many detainees cleared for transfer long ago, but who remain in legal limbo at Guantanamo. Adel Hamad’s downstairs neighbor in Pakistan, Ameur Mammar, detainee #939, is just one of many examples. Lets keep them in our hearts while we celebrate Hamad’s release.

Speaking of torture, Digby is rightly worried about what being a country that sanctions torture will do to us.

And we are in the process in this country of "defining deviancy down" in ways I never thought possible. We are legitimizing torture and indefinite detention --- saying that we will only do this to the people who really deserve it. One cannot help but wonder what "really deserves it" will mean in the years to come as we fight our endless war against terror.

But as I've already written here, we've been defining deviancy down for a very long time in this country.  I think part of our national depression is because of the torture that's happening in our name, but I also hold out hope that now that we are no longer able to pretend that we don't torture, we'll be able to have a productive conversation about whether we want to be that sort of place.   It's not going to happen overnight, but when it does, I hope the condition of our domestic prisons is considered as part of the same debate.

Money, money, money, money ...

The Income Gap widens - no surprise there.  But don't call it a class war because that's just rude.

Average After-Tax Income by Income Group, 1979-2005 (in 2005 dollars)
Income Category	1979	2005	Percent Change 1979-2005	Dollar Change 1979-2005
Lowest fifth	$14,400	$15,300	6%	$900
Second fifth	29,100	33,700	16%	4,600
Middle fifth	41,500	50,200	21%	8,700
Fourth fifth	54,300	70,300	29%	16,000
Top fifth	95,700	172,200	80%	76,500
Top1 Percent	326,400	1,071,500	228%	745,100
Source: Congressional Budget Office, Effective Federal Tax Rates:  1979-2005, December 2007.

The Senate Farm Bill stinks.  This is Bread for the World's diplomatic reaction to today's hideous developments in the Senate: (emph mine)

The farm bill passed by the Senate Agriculture Committee made modest changes, but did little to reform unfair commodity programs to make programs fairer for U.S. farm and rural families and enable poor farmers in poor countries to earn their way out of poverty. In addition, while the Senate bill provides $5.4 billion in new investments for the nutrition title, those program improvements are short-lived: essentially all new investments in the nutrition title sunset after 5 years. That means when the farm bill comes up again in 2012, Congress will have to find $9 billion just to continue the benefit increases included in this year's farm bill,. If those offsets are not found, the repercussions for low-income families will be immediate and severe: over 10 million food stamp recipients would see a reduction in benefits, and more than 100,000 low-income people would lose eligibility for food stamp benefits.

The full Senate had its chance to strengthen the nutrition programs and conservation and rural development programs and make the commodity programs fairer to all our nations' farmers. Despite the best efforts of Bread for the World members and our coalition partners, the Senate failed to take advantage of this opportunity.

Now it's on to conference where they'll do whatever they have left to do to to get the bill off of Dear Leader's veto list.   I hear that he's holding out for the exile of all small farmers and the turning over of their land directly to Archer Daniel Midlands.  I'm sure that Harry Reid can make that happen.

Union busting means less safe living conditions for everyone, but anyone in their right mind already knew that.

The Debate is Over

When the torture practices at Abu Ghraib were revealed, I went on record welcoming the torture debate, even such as it was, going on in the country.   From November, 2005:

Ever since Abu Ghraib hit the news and more frequently now that Bigtime Dick is running around D.C. trying to win converts to his torture policy, I’ve seen blogs on the left ask, “How horrible is it that we have to have this discussion in America?” I understand the point but I don’t agree. I’m grateful to Team BushCo’s obsession to make toture an official part of U.S. foreign policy and codify its use. Finally, if we’re able to rise above the din of the RW Noise Machine and if we can rouse ourselves from whatever is on televsion, we’re going to have a debate that is long overdue.

Americans have always been big fans of torture.  There’s no way that lynchings, for example, would have gone on as long as they did if we weren’t.  There’s no way that the official Senate apology for its refusal to take action against it  would have had to be a clownish and confusing voice vote if we didn’t still support torture.  Add to that our support for the Death Penalty, which elicits some of the same arguments we hear from pro-torture writers.  And don’t forget to add to the pile the barrage of popular televsion shows that feature torture; Alias and 24 are two absolutely brutal and popular shows that spring to mind.  Torture is Us.

But, while we’ve always been on the side of torture, we’ve never been quite so openly on the side of torture.  We’ve always been able to pretend at least that we don’t support it as a national policy.   The Native American Genocide is considered ancient history and a product of the "Wild West" when all bets were off.  It’s frequently and, God help us, easily denied.  When the Senate was refusing to address lynching and so tacitly endorsing it, we were able to compartmentalize the brutality.  That was a southern thing, we said - even though it wasn’t exculsively anything of the kind - and the rest of the country didn’t support it.   But the time that we’re able to hide our barbarism behind regional culture clashes is over and it required this kind of event, this modern war in which the United States officically sanctions torture as a detainment policy, for it to end. 

Now the debate seems to be over.  Barring a filibuster of the Great Torture Compromise, which, like Digby, I think is simply not going to happen, state-sanctioned torture will become the official policy of the United States of America.   When we vote, we will be voting in support of torture.  When we recite the pledge, we will be pledging our allegiance to waterboarding and other, undisclosed toture techniques.  When we pay our taxes, we will be paying for torture.  When our children, God, our poor children, write essays in praise of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, they will be writing in praise of torture.  That's what these cowards in power have done to us all.   

I don't know.   Maybe they're doing us a favor; at least now we don't have to pretend anymore.