The title above is a catchy moniker for a really fine roundup of recent revelations of the events which could very well serve as the endgame of the Bush family Dynastic Restoration, another ignominious one-term embarrassment for the Republican Party. It is from a site that perhaps many of you do not have on your must-read list, the Daily MoJo, the blog of one of the best magazines in the world, Mother Jones. While folks such as Josh Marshall and other well-known progressives are doing an excellent job in chronicling the Bush disaster, I want to strongly recommend that you check out the journalists that bring you the sample below:
"Congress lacks authority … to set the terms and conditions under which the president may exercise his authority as commander in chief to control the conduct of operations during a war…Congress may no more regulate the president's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield. Accordingly, we would construe [the law] to avoid this difficulty and conclude that it does not apply to the president's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants." (From a 56-page memo, "Detainee Interrogation in the Global War on Terrorism" written by a legal team for the Secretary of Defense on the eve of the Iraq War.)
"Congress shall have the power … to declare war and make rules concerning captures on land and water … to define offenses against the law of nations [and] to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces." (From the Constitution, David G. Savage and Richard B. Schmitt, Lawyers Ascribed Broad Power to Bush on Torture, the Los Angeles Times)
"We need to have a less-cramped view of what torture is and is not." (A military official explaining the approach of the team writing the above memo, Jess Bravin, Pentagon Report Set Framework For Use of Torture, The Wall Street Journal)
"It's a very cowboy kind of affair." (Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, who controlled the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib prison, speaking of the actions of the CIA unit there, R. Jeffrey Smith, Soldier Described White House Interest, the Washington Post)
Room 101
For his dystopia, 1984, his classic novel of totalitarianism, George Orwell created "Room 101," an interrogation room where a prisoner's deepest fears were to be realized and applied. Tier 1 in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, as the now-infamous photos indicate, was the Bush administration's Room 101 for the "Arab mind," and so the crown jewel of its global interrogation facilities; just as Guantanamo was the "crown jewel" of the prison camps in its global Bermuda Triangle of injustice; just as the new appointed "interim government" hidden within the ever-more fortified Green Zone in Baghdad and led by a prime minister and former CIA asset whose exile organization, we learned this week, once set off car bombs in downtown Baghdad, is now the crown jewel of "freedom and democracy" in the Middle East. This is our "war against terrorism." Talk about an Orwellian world.
As it happens, from the heart of Abu Ghraib's interrogation rooms and the acts of, as our President and other administration officials have repeatedly said, "a few people" or even "a few hillbillies," the nature of, extent of, knowledge about, and responsibility for such acts has been rapidly spreading outwards across the imperium, upwards into the highest reaches of our government, and backwards in time. We now know, for instance, that, to the various acts of horror caught on camera in Abu Graib, we must add murder (or rather numerous murders) in Afghanistan as well as Iraq, and the use of electric shocks on prisoners, as the Marine Corps Times reported recently.
In the meantime, responsibility for such actions has moved inexorably upwards. We know now that interest in information gleaned from interrogations, ranging from that of John Walker Lindh to those in Iraq was requested at the highest official levels (not so surprising, since our offshore mini-gulag was a pet project of top officials in this administration): "The head of the interrogation center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq told an Army investigator in February that he understood some of the information being collected from prisoners there had been requested by ‘White House staff,' according to an account of his statement obtained by The Washington Post." Far more specifically, R. Jeffrey Smith and Josh White of the Post reported this Saturday that, despite his denials to Congress, in the fall of 2003, "Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq, borrowed heavily from a list of high-pressure interrogation tactics used at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and approved letting senior officials at a Baghdad jail use military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation, and diets of bread and water on detainees whenever they wished, according to newly obtained documents."
In turn, thanks to Jess Bravin and Greg Jaffe of the Wall Street Journal, we now know that in December 2002 Donald Rumsfeld approved a very similar list of "interrogation techniques" right down to those dogs for Guantanamo: "U.S. military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could put prisoners in ‘stress positions' for as long as four hours, hood them and subject them to 20-hour-long interrogations, ‘fear of dogs' and ‘mild non-injurious physical contact,' according to [a] list of techniques Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved in December 2002." (The list was later rejiggered not because of any qualms Rumsfeld had but due to complaints from military officers about the severity of the methods suggested. The present list of approved techniques remains classified, but will undoubtedly soon be leaked to the press.)
There is a great deal more in this post, please go click on the Daily MoJo
