New York Times:

Legacy of Torture
EDITORIAL | Published: August 26, 2010

. . Because federal judges cannot trust the confessions of prisoners obtained by intense coercion, they are regularly throwing out the government’s cases against Guantánamo Bay prisoners.

A new report prepared jointly by ProPublica and the National Law Journal showed that the government has lost more than half the cases where Guantánamo prisoners have challenged their detention because they were forcibly interrogated.

The report details how the use of torture abroad, with the silence or assent of the U.S., and the use of George W. Bush’s ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’ in American facilities have produced a multi-tentacled legal monster, gumming up or destroying case after case against detainees, some of whom are probably legally responsible for crimes against Americans.

Judges have found it impossible to be sure of the detainees’ confessions given the circumstances under which they were obtained.

The government’s case for keeping the Guantánamo Bay prisoner locked away seemed airtight. He had confessed to overseeing the distribution of supplies to al-Qaida fighters battling U.S. forces in Afghanistan, even describing the routes where pack mules hauled the packages.

But a federal judge rejected Fouad Mahmoud Al Rabiah’s confessions, concluding that he had concocted them under intense coercion.

So insidious and long-lasting are the effects of torture that virtually all subsequent confessions become suspect as well:

Al Rabiah

Even statements that the government insisted Al Rabiah had made under noncoercive, or “clean,” questioning were tainted, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled, and she ordered that Al Rabiah be released.

The government has lost eight of 15 cases in which Guantánamo inmates have said they or witnesses against them were forcibly interrogated . .

To wit:

Government lawyers didn’t contest that [Saeed Mohammed Saleh] Hatim, while held for six months at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, had been beaten repeatedly, kicked and “threatened with rape if he did not confess to being a member of the Taliban or al-Qaida,” according to U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina’s opinion. Instead, they submitted confessions he gave after arriving at Guantánamo, under cleaner questioning. But Urbina found that Hatim’s confession was “tainted by torture” and ordered that he be released. The government is appealing the decision.

Does any of this surprise anybody? I doubt it. And the negative legal reach of torture isn’t trivial, moving well beyond the cases of the victims:

Last year, Justice Department lawyers tried to show that Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed was an al-Qaida fighter by using statements from another detainee, Binyam Mohamed, whose “harrowing” interrogation ordeal was described in an 81-page opinion by Senior Judge Gladys Kessler.

Binyam Mohamed, now free

For two years, beginning with his capture in April 2002, foreign interrogators holding him “at the behest of the United States” beat and kicked him, chained him to a wall, kept him half-standing for long stretches and cut him with a blade, including on his genitals. He was “fed information” and “told to verify it.” During that time, he was also interrogated by the FBI and CIA.

The government’s lawyers didn’t contest the allegations of mistreatment but instead argued that the treatment of the informant didn’t undermine the evidence he gave later . .

But Kessler didn’t buy that better treatment had done the trick. Given that, “throughout his detention, a constant barrage of physical and psychological abuse was employed in order to manipulate him and program him into telling investigators what they wanted to hear,” she wrote, it was “more than plausible” that he had also manufactured details in nonabusive questioning.

So, even with American handlers, under reasonable treatment, making statements against somebody else, the evidence is still junk.

Didn’t we all know we’d end up here? I think so.

If you’re considering the use of torture, you’re going to have to change completely the character and habits of a nation in order to be honestly successful. Good nations produce good legal systems. When the use of torture becomes apparent, the system rejects the ‘evidence,’ and the cases die. It’s predictable. Otherwise, you’d have to become Saudi Arabia or Egypt to rack up many wins. It looks bad now, but the tossing of so many cases is actually good news.

Oh, and haven’t the predicted verdicts come in against shortsighted Dick Cheney and his boss, George W. Bush, as well? Losers.

‘WTF?’ whackjob Ken Blackwell carves another gem.

Perhaps this mess can be read, only for a moment or two, — don’t waste your precious time — as a way to try to understand how the strange-brained right wingers manage to think themselves in knots.

Because I certainly don’t understand how giving people healthcare is in any way a Third Reich Tactic!, or how stimulating the economy with government spending is Unconstitutional!, so I certainly wouldn’t mind knowing how the discussions ever got there. Anywhere near there, really. I’m mystified as to how these people figure the world out.

Anyhoo, let’s listen in on excerpts of the careening Ken and his rangy diatribe . .

Do Liberal Editors Read Their Newspapers?

Circulation for the New York Times is way down. Some people are seriously speculating that the days of America’s great newspapers are over. They may be replaced by Kindle, or iPad, or some other newer technology . .

Liberalism, media and technology? Odd. Not exactly the usual ‘Liberals and their stupid evil stupidity.’

. . Recall these lines from a tender Simon & Garfunkle song of the 1960s. This poignant story of a mother’s anguish and her son’s lethal leap might not have been considered part of “all the news that’s fit to print” by the editors of the great Gray Lady, the Times.

– “Good God! Don’t jump!”
– A boy sat on the ledge.
– An old man who had fainted was revived.
– And everyone agreed it would be a miracle indeed
– If the boy survived.

– “Save the life of my child!”
– Cried the desperate mother

WOW. Where the hell is he going?

It happen again, Gateway Pundit has geek his post:

Thanks Barack… Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs; 4 Million Lose Their Job Under Obama

Millions without jobs; 4 million lose job? Sound are strange. Maybe they lift big building. Clean volcano.

The unemployment rate is now at 9.7% and it doesn’t look like things will improve much any time soon.

Millions of unemployed Americans will face years without jobs. The New York Times reported:

. . the NYT story were “Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs.” Obviously, Pundit spend much time read and analyze media, not just trumpet link that sound bad.

Another:

Leftist Hater Alan Grayson travels to Niger – Coup Breaks Out

Violence break out, he asshole?

Loudmouth democratic hater Alan Grayson traveled to Niger this week. While he was there a military coup broke out. Several members of the president’s guard were killed by the military and the democratic president was taken into custody. Grayson could hear the gunshots in the building next door.

Being a good democrat, he cut-and-run from the country.

Ah, he coward. Real man stay in Niger.

You can’t find an actual problem with CPAC? You’ve got to be blind:

CPAC Speaker Bashes Obama, in Racial Tones
By KATE ZERNIKE

How can conservatives win the youth vote that overwhelmingly went for Barack Obama in 2008? At the Conservative Political Action Conference, apparently, some are betting on using racial stereotypes.

. . He then mocked what he described, with a Chris Rock voice, as “diversity,” including, he said, college classes on “cyber feminism” and “what it means to be a feminist new black man.”

Describing the latter, he said: “Think of a crossover between RuPaul and Barney Frank.”

He described his book, to be published by Simon & Schuster, as an effort to create “a movement designed to capture and educate freedom-loving young people everywhere.” Offering up a slogan, he adopted the Chris Rock voice again: “Get your government off my freedom!”

Can we save our generation from Obama zombies, he asked. He answered himself by borrowing the president’s campaign slogan: “Yes, my brothahs and sistahs. Yes we can!”

Bullshit. Watch:

As predictably as the sun rising in the East, the right wing have begun to laud and defend James O’Keefe.

Because a guy who conspires with three of his fellow conservative idiots, two of whom dress as telephone repair men and demand access to Senator Mary Landrieu’s phones and electronic equipment, is a great American. Why wouldn’t he be?

Free James O’Keefe By Ben Stein on 2.1.10 @ 6:09AM

. . The men, under the leadership of a young media impresario named James O’Keefe, were querying why constituents of Sen. Landrieu had been unable to register negative feelings about Obamacare on the Senator’s phone line. They had been told that perhaps the phones were out of order…

The New York Times had a front page story about the men and their conservative college pranks. At the top of the story was a photo of each of the men in prison orange.

This was presumably to humiliate these men…

You can blame the police, too, for that cheap humiliation. Jerks.

I don’t see it that way. These men were journalists trying to get a story. They didn’t even touch a phone as far as I can learn. They were undercover reporters and TV operators. But that doesn’t matter. Their real crime was disturbing the peace and quiet of the nation’s liberal establishment and embarrassing ACORN. For this, these young overeager guerrilla journalists are charged with a federal crime. (“First Amendment? What’s that?”)

“Illegal? What’s that?” Remarkable. I’m sure if four liberal moonbat mudslingers invaded Senator John Cornyn’s office and got arrested for the same ‘journalism’, Ben would write an editorial. And it’d be the opposite.

Also, poor little Jimmie:

Interviewed on Fox just moments ago, Andrew Breitbart claimed that alleged Landrieu phone tamperer James O’Keefe “sat in jail for 28 hours without access to an attorney.”…

Breitbart complained that after the news of the arrests broke last Tuesday, O’Keefe’s attorney and Breitbart himself were being called by the media but they could not locate O’Keefe — “and that’s because he was sitting in jail without access to an attorney,” Breitbart said.

He accused the U.S. attorney of leaking information to the media in a “concerted effort” to frame the episode in a way that would put O’Keefe in a bad position.

Maybe O’Keefe put O’Keefe in a bad position? No?

He screwed up. Why can’t he accept blame, apologize and pay his debt to society? Why are Conservatives angry with everybody else except the guy who screwed up? Why proclaim your ‘values’ to be sacred and then forget them?

Strobelight ethics. When you’re a Republican, brickbats stand taller than values.

I feel bad picking on her because she’s so shockingly fucking moronic, but she’s also popular. God knows why.

If it was completely wrong for Sarah Palin to say “death panels,” why did the Senate scuttle the provision she was talking about?

Why didn’t the congressional Democrats defend their own bill? If it was so terribly wrong to say “death panels” — and what indignation was expressed! — then why wasn’t it easy to crush stupid, crazy Sarah for what she so outrageously said? By backing down and removing the language she leveraged, they not only seem to admit she had a point, they sacrifice credibility that they need to promote what’s left of the bill.

“Seemed reminiscent”? To whom? “Death panels” was a characterization of a provision in a bill — an aggressive, politicized attempt at interpretation of the text of the proposed law. It was a parry in the debate about the bill, and the bill’s defenders could have explained exactly why the text could not mean what Palin said it meant, or they could have rewritten the provision to make it absolutely clear that it meant whatever it was that they’d wanted it to mean when they wrote it. Rather than meet Palin’s attack, the Democrats pulled the provision altogether, leaving us wondering what other provisions would have to be pulled if someone subjected them to a memorable — viral — attack.

“HEY there, stranger! Welcome to Biddle Chevy Buick, the biggest Chevrolet dealer in the tri-county area. Are you in the market for a new car?”

“Nobody’s got a better selection of minivans than us. [walking] You picked the right time to get in the market, friend. Between Chevy’s factory incentives and the government’s clunker program, you won’t believe how easy I can get you into a terrific minivan. Like…[hand on hood] this one.”

“Wow. [pause] That’s actually better than I thought I could do at this price.”

[shock!] “NO WAY–the GNOMES.”

[annoyed] “There are NO LITTLE MONSTERS in the car! There are no standard GNOMES in the Uplander!”

[silence]

[silence]

[silence]

No wonder the Gods were always warring with each other without end, they’re dumbfucks. (And there’s the whole t-n-w Mythology Graduate Series 101 through 105b inclusive, sparing you thousands of dollars and a useless ‘Liberal Arts’ education–phooey.)

Anybody who is relatively sane and gets stuck reading Noonan knows she is an absolute mutant patrician clown. Of course she sees all the ‘lobbyist puppeteer/point and slap the yahoos/violence for the health industries’ democracy exorcisms called ‘Town Hall meetings’ on healthcare. And of course she understands what’s going on, this is exactly what the pundit gods are paid to know.

“What’s happening here is…the Democrats are turning into monsters in front of the little people who rightly feel scared about this brutal mistake: healthcare reform.

And done. Time for a Nectar Fizz.”

‘You Are Terrifying Us’
Voters send a message to Washington, and get an ugly response.

We have entered uncharted territory in the fight over national health care. There’s a new tone in the debate, and it’s ugly. At the moment the Democrats are looking like something they haven’t looked like in years, and that is: desperate.

This is the Democrats looking desperate?

They must know at this point they should not have pushed a national health-care plan…

50 million uninsured, 25 million with crap coverage, 1/4 of the nation. Of course we shouldn’t try–what a ridiculous idea. Heck, the last time we tried to solve this massive problem, our opponents were…very angry. And, look what we’ve got–they’re angry again! Why are we so stupid?! And Peggy Noonan, how did you get to be so wise?!

…And so the shock on the faces of Congressmen who’ve faced the grillings back home. And really, their shock is the first thing you see in the videos. They had no idea how people were feeling. Their 2008 win left them thinking an election that had been shaped by anti-Bush, anti-Republican, and pro-change feeling was really a mandate without context; they thought that in the middle of a historic recession featuring horrific deficits, they could assume support for the invention of a huge new entitlement carrying huge new costs.

The passions of the protesters, on the other hand, are not a surprise. They hired a man to represent them in Washington. They give him a big office, a huge staff and the power to tell people what to do. They give him a car and a driver, sometimes a security detail, and a special pin showing he’s a congressman. And all they ask in return is that he see to their interests and not terrify them too much. Really, that’s all people ask. Expectations are very low. What the protesters are saying is, “You are terrifying us.”

First of all, tough shit for that weak argument, Peggy. Second of all, we already know you to be a pathetic, warm-and-fuzzy dumbass. This is more of your same act: none of these a-holes ‘hired’ the ‘man’ Kathy Castor, whose Town Hall meeting is being destroyed in that clip. None of them are there to humbly confess ‘Gee, I feel scared.’ Your writing, as always, never amounts to more than obnoxious, disingenuous shit.

From the moment Obama was inaugurated, he’s been derided in the loudest, most screeching tones as a traitor, a Nazi, a communist, a socialist, an America hater, a white-race hater, a secret muslim, and, of course, a perfect Kenyan. No, I don’t need to provide the links, merely Google it and waste the next month of your life reading the bug-eyed rage yourself. On top of that, the amount of racism that’s been aimed personally at him is far beyond anything I would have imagined (and that’s probably but half of the posts I could link to).

The odds that these thugs are the local salt-of-the-earthers bizarrely acting out of character by your reasons is essentially zero. So your ‘please good people, these are regular ol’ Americans who just came out of their houses to ask a pressing question’ argument is one of the stupidest things any New York Times writer has ever written. And with the quality of the current NYT being what it is, that’s a serious achievement, but go on, hack away:

What has been most unsettling is not the congressmen’s surprise but a hard new tone that emerged this week. The leftosphere and the liberal commentariat charged that the town hall meetings weren’t authentic, the crowds were ginned up by insurance companies, lobbyists and the Republican National Committee. But you can’t get people to leave their homes and go to a meeting with a congressman (of all people) unless they are engaged to the point of passion. And what tends to agitate people most is the idea of loss—loss of money hard earned, loss of autonomy, loss of the few things that work in a great sweeping away of those that don’t…

Wow, a kingly turd paragraph on top of crap mountain. Nothing’s as unsettling as our fighting back, the screamers are ginned-up but you can’t address that, people only engage in nasty behavior for great reasons, and they’re all losing money except they’re saving money through competition, they’re losing autonomy except they’re gaining control over their healthcare security, and they’re losing things that work like the absence of healthcare. Peggy Noonan is almost too stupid to eat tacos.

But most damagingly to political civility, and even our political tradition, was the new White House email address to which citizens are asked to report instances of “disinformation” in the health-care debate: If you receive an email or see something on the Web about health-care reform that seems “fishy,” you can send it to flag@whitehouse.gov. The White House said it was merely trying to fight “intentionally misleading” information…

All of this is unnecessarily and unhelpfully divisive and provocative. They are mocking and menacing concerned citizens. This only makes a hot situation hotter. Is this what the president wants?

He wants healthcare, Peggy. Pretend to fret all you like in the pages of the Times, but he and we are not backing off. Healthcare is long overdue and we’re willing to go the long haul to get it, so, yes, we will be fighting back, and it will get uglier. An ounce of prevention, dear: water wings should prevent your demise by lachrymal means.

…frankly they ought to think about backing off. The president should call in his troops and his Congress and announce a rethinking. There are too many different bills, they’re all a thousand pages long, no one has time to read them, no one knows what’s going to be in the final one, the public is agitated, the nation’s in crisis, the timing is wrong, we’ll turn to it again—but not now. We’ll take a little longer, ponder every aspect, and make clear every complication.

You know what would happen if he did this? His numbers would go up. Even Congress’s would. Because they’d look responsive, deliberative and even wise. Discretion is the better part of valor.

Well, there’s a ‘magic dolphin’ solution, if ever I’ve heard one. The truth is that we are the only hard working mammals that can ever make this happen, and it’s an absolutely critical solution that’s already way, way past its prime.

Isn’t that obvious? Peggy Noonan, pathetic and stupid beyond words.

The only reason that this post will even exist is that I was curious as to how a Conservative would tear into the treacly right-winger, Peggy ‘dolphins!’ Noonan.

I began to read the post and thought ‘this guy could use an editor.’ And then he teed off on Peggy (and the New York Times) for being stupid because genius mistakenly thought her columns were obviously mangled piles of writing.

That was too much to resist:
A Seemingly Very Nice Middle-Class Girl
posted at 11:00 am on July 11, 2009 by Doctor Zero

Peggy Noonan used her Friday column in the Wall Street Journal to throw some dirt on Sarah Palin’s grave. It’s vintage Noonan: airheaded, dripping with condescension, and completely missing the point. No serious conservative needs to hear anything from Noonan except her groveling apology for being so horribly wrong about Barack Obama, who she energetically supported for president.

‘…whom she energetically supported for president.’

However, it’s worth picking through the flotsam and jetsam of this embarrassing column, to appreciate the kind of intellectual fat that conservatives need to trim from the Republican Party.

Comma after ‘column’? Is this ‘style’? Because it looks dumb.

Let’s begin by setting the stage: Sarah Palin resigned her governorship last week, and has no stated plans to run for elective office as of this writing.

No comma after ‘week’, moron. It’s a parallel construction. A bad one.

She has made it clear that she intends to remain on the public stage, and has a bright and useful future of public speaking, writing, and helping her party raise funds for 2010 and beyond.

No comma after ‘stage’, another parallel construction.

I personally disagree with the assessment that her resignation killed her political future, if she wants one. It will be an obstacle for her to work around, but I think she could overcome it – especially if Alaskans are clearly pleased with her successor, and think well of her as the 2012 elections get under way.

No comma after ‘successor’, parallel construction again.

After referencing the way “The left and the media immediately overplayed their hand, with attacks on her children,” Noonan says of Palin:

She went on the trail a sensation but demonstrated in the ensuing months that she was not ready to go national and in fact never would be. She was hungry, loved politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and doing the stump speech. All good. But she was not thoughtful. She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why.

I always thought the Wall Street Journal had editors that would review columns to make sure they don’t have annoying run-on sentences that don’t use commas but maybe they don’t and never will.

Nice run-on sentence dismissing howling imbeciles and their run-on sentences, dumbfuck: a comma is required after ‘commas’. There are no Noonan run-on sentences there, comma witch. You are a fucking idiot. And this weapon: ‘…to make sure they don’t have annoying run-on sentences that don’t use commas…’ doesn’t require ‘that don’t use commas‘.  It’s like saying ‘blind people that don’t see.’ Back to the Doc Zero seminar:

Poor sentence construction aside, Noonan couldn’t be more wrong to say Palin’s point of view “could have been a form of liberalism.”

Why the hell are we bothering with you? Oh, I remember–you’re a retard pedant. By all means, continue:

He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make.

…Granted that the older column I quoted above was written a couple trillion wasted tax dollars ago, before the advent of Turbo Tax Tim and the rest of Obama’s Epic Fail Cabinet, but you still have to love the way Noonan celebrated Obama’s “good judgement in terms of who to hire and consult.” He sure knew how to pick a spiritual advisor, that’s for sure! If only Sarah Palin could have the good judgement to consult with aging hippie radical terrorists, Peggy might finally admire her for something more than being “a very nice middle-class girl with ambition, appetite and no sense of personal limits.” By the way, Noonan delivers this backhanded compliment immediately after the paragraph where she declares Palin’s middle-classness to be a fraud.

He lifts and rips a Noonan quote but goes out of his way to misspell ‘judgment‘? Bill Buckley would not approve.

Politics as usual, or commentary as usual? You decide.

Contessa Brewer talks to NYT politics reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg about the passing of the stimulus bill. Sheryl puts out the angle that Obama once promised bipartisanship, but his ‘framing’ and D.C. reality put politics back to business as usual. Contessa comments that it might be the Republicans who are the problem, and Sheryl….gakks.