RON PAUL SLAPS DOWN CRAZY MCCAIN

Those crazy republicans are at it again. CNN?YOUTUBE debate if you want to call it that, was who could invade, torture and kill more than the other. Every candidate follows the bush/cheney/fox talking points and it makes me sick. Why is grover norquest a unindicted co-conspirator connected to ralph reed and jack abramhof allowed to ask a question? Because the MSM is afraid to ask repubs tough questions.

John Ashcroft: I’m Willing To Be Waterboarded

Last night, former Attorney General John Ashcroft delivered an address on national security at the University of Colorado. The event was marked by heated protests. About 20 student protesters wearing “shirts with ’shame’ written on the backs and wearing American flags over their faces, welcomed Ashcroft to the stage by standing up and turning their backs to him.”

During the speech, Ashcroft caused an uproar when he declared Guantanamo Bay was a “good place” for detainees. In addition, he defended the torture tactic of waterboarding:

Ashcroft also responded to questions from the audience. The first question came from a woman who asked if Ashcroft would be willing to be subjected to waterboarding.

“The things that I can survive, if it were necessary to do them to me, I would do,” he said.

Ashcroft apparently believes that torture should be allowed as long as it doesn’t kill him.

Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and William Delahunt (D-MA) have introduced the “American Anti-Torture Act of 2007” to make clear no U.S. government agency feels it can apply the Ashcroft standard while interrogating detainees. They write:

Waterboarding is not “simulated drowning.” It is drowning. It involves restraining a detainee — usually by strapping him or her to a board — with the head placed lower than the feet. The face or mouth is often covered or stuffed with rags and water is poured over the face to force inhalation. The victim’s lungs fill with water until the procedure is stopped or the victim dies. Waterboarding has been considered torture — even by our own government — until recently. Indeed, we prosecuted Japanese officers for subjecting prisoners to waterboarding in World War II.

Jessica Evans, a student who protested during Ashcroft’s speech, “said the angry outbursts from the audience was evidence that the Bush administration did not give enough voice to the concerns of the public.” Indeed, as John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales go around the country defending torture, they are being forced to confront the public disapproval that they did not heed while in office.

Waterboarding is Drowning, Waterboarding is Torture

Rep. Jerrold Nadler
Rep. William D. Delahunt
Torture and waterboarding have become part of our national dialogue, with the recent confirmation hearings of Attorney General Michael Mukasey highlighting concerns that many Americans have about how our government treats detainees. While Mr. Mukasey's careful answers to questions about whether or not waterboarding is torture left many things unclear, one fact is not: Congress must act to ensure that our government's interrogation practices reflect American values of human dignity, fairness, and the rule of law.

That is why we introduced the "American Anti-Torture Act of 2007." Our bill ensures that when interrogating detainees, all agencies follow the standards of conduct contained in the Army Field Manual. The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 -- also known as the "McCain Amendment" -- requires the Department of Defense to adhere to the Army Field Manual; our proposal merely extends this requirement to all other agencies, including the CIA.

We are deeply committed to making America safer and to locating and disrupting terrorist networks. These are bipartisan priorities. Contrary to the tenor of this debate, they are not within the exclusive domain of either party or the administration.

We understand the critical role that intelligence plays in helping us achieve these goals. But torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, besides being contrary to American values and traditions, have not proven to be effective in obtaining actionable intelligence. Current and former members of the military have made this clear. Indeed, General David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, recently wrote in an open letter to U.S. troops that the standards in the Army Field Manual, "work effectively and humanely in eliciting information from detainees." In the same letter, he stated that those that argue that torture would be more effective are "wrong."

Despite this, we often hear the argument that torture yields valuable information, and that this justifies its continued use. Ignored is the fact that we've also gotten and relied upon false information, with devastating consequences. In making the case to invade Iraq, for example, the administration relied upon the fabricated claim that Iraq trained al Qaeda members to use biochemical weapons. This claim was made after the detainee was subjected to two weeks of "enhanced" interrogation, and finally "broke" after being waterboarded and forced to stand naked in his cold cell overnight while being doused with cold water at regular intervals.

The Bush administration has long argued that it does not torture. But this is the same administration that requested and received secret legal opinions apparently concluding that techniques like waterboarding are not torture. Waterboarding is not "simulated drowning." It is drowning. It involves restraining a detainee -- usually by strapping him or her to a board -- with the head placed lower than the feet. The face or mouth is often covered or stuffed with rags and water is poured over the face to force inhalation. The victim's lungs fill with water until the procedure is stopped or the victim dies. Waterboarding has been considered torture -- even by our own government -- until recently. Indeed, we prosecuted Japanese officers for subjecting prisoners to waterboarding in World War II.

Torture is inconsistent with our democratic principles of freedom. It is un-American. And it places our service men and women, and our allies, at grave risk. We must accept that whatever we authorize and use against our enemies may be turned against us.

It is no wonder that countless current and former military officials have all called for the White House to renounce torture -- and not just through careful wordplay. It is time for Congress to clarify that waterboarding is torture and against the law. The "American Anti-Torture Act of 2007" accomplishes this by requiring adherence to the Army Field Manual, which expressly prohibits waterboarding. We were pleased when the House included our bill as part of the Orderly and Responsible Iraq Redeployment Appropriations Act, adopted on November 14, 2007. Now, it is time for the Senate to act, and join us in renouncing torture. Permitting the CIA and other government agencies to torture does not make us safer. It makes us less free.

Congressman Jerrold Nadler is the Chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and Congressman Bill Delahunt is the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight.

More on Time’s false balancing act

Earlier this week, Time magazine’s Joe Klein asserted that Democrats wanted to reform FISA in a way that “would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans.” After Glenn Greenwald noted the false accusations made by Klein, Time has finally posted a “correction”:

In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets. Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don’t.

Time has helpfully informed us that Democrats don’t agree with Republicans that their bill is providing terrorists equal rights as Americans. Jane Hamsher writes, “Shorter Time Magazine: Equal Time For GOP Propaganda.” Glenn Greenwald writes, “All Time can say about this matter is that Republicans say one thing and Democrats claim another. Who is right? Is one side lying? … Here, there are not two sides; the bill could not be clearer.” Kos points to the relevant text of the Restore Act:

‘CLARIFICATION OF ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE OF NON-UNITED STATES PERSONS OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES’
Sec. 105A. (a) Foreign to Foreign Communications-

(1) IN GENERAL - Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, a court order is not required for electronic surveillance directed at the acquisition of the contents of any communication between persons that are not known to be United States persons and are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence information, without respect to whether the communication passes through the United States or the surveillance device is located within the United States

Holt turns up the heat on Klein

Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) sets the record straight, after Time magazine columnist Joe Klein ignorantly claimed the Democrats’ FISA reform legislation “would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans.” Holt explains the Reform Act “explicitly states that no court order is required to listen to the conversations of foreigners that happen to pass through the U.S. telecommunications system. It does not grant Constitutional rights to foreign terrorists.” Glenn Greenwald writes, “It would be nice if other Congressional Democrats spoke up and objected to Time’s false smearing of them.” Meanwhile, FDL reports that Time is circling the wagons around Klein, refusing to answer questions about his errors.

Probe finds fake DHS press briefing in 2006

Late last month, FEMA came under intense criticism for staging a fake news conference on the California wildfires at which agency staffers posed as journalists and asked softball questions. But as AP reports today, this “was not the first time a Homeland Security public affairs official has acted like a reporter by asking questions during a briefing”:

In January 2006, an official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement asked a question during a news conference in San Antonio, Texas, according to an investigation by the Homeland Security Department — the parent agency of both FEMA and ICE.

The ICE public affairs official was standing with about 12 reporters but did not identify herself when she posed the question, Homeland Security’s head of public affairs, J. Edward Fox, wrote in a Nov. 19 letter to the chairman of the House Homeland Security committee. The government employee was verbally reprimanded for asking the question after the news conference, Fox told Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss.

Fox has assured Thompson that “reforms to FEMA’s external affairs are already under way.”

Flight logs reveal secret rendition

THE secret flight plans of American military planes have revealed for the first time how European countries helped send prisoners, including British citizens, to the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

Despite widespread criticism of alleged human rights abuses and torture at the US base in Cuba, a Sunday Times investigation has shown that at least five European countries gave the United States permission to fly nearly 700 terrorist suspects across their territory.

Three years ago, The Sunday Times published flight logs of CIA civilian jets in Europe, setting off a controversy over the whether countries across the continent have been secretly involved in America's rendition of terrorist suspects to countries that carry out torture.

The row is now set to be reignited. Inquiries by Ana Gomes, a Portuguese member of the European parliament, have uncovered not only more CIA flight logs but also more sensitive military flight plans, which until now have remained a closely guarded secret.

The logs show how most prisoners changed planes at a Turkish military airbase and flew across Greek, Italian and Portuguese airspace. Others reached Cuba after touching down in Spain, whose governing socialist party once expressed indignation at conditions in Guantanamo.

The flight logs show that three Britons — Shafiq Rasul, Jamal Udeen and Asif Iqbal — were flown across Europe to Cuba on January 14, 2002. Moazzam Begg, another Briton, was taken by the same route to Guantanamo on February 2, 2003; and Binyam Mohamed, a British resident whose release the British government is now trying to negotiate, arrived in Cuba after crossing Europe in a special flight in September 2004.

According to the flight plans, the first 23 prisoners to arrive at Guantanamo — including another British citizen, Feroz Abbasi, then 21, and an Australian, David Hicks — had arrived at the American naval base in Cuba after flying from the Moron airbase in Spain.

Abbasi has claimed in a statement that prisoners were abused within hours of arriving. "We were made to sit on our heels, one foot over the other, supported by one foot's toes alone, for hours. Some of us were old, weak, fatigued, and injured — they were the ones to drop first in the searing Caribbean heat."

Described by the Pentagon as the "worst of the worst" from Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the images of prisoners such as Abbasi dressed in orange jumpsuits, their heads shaved and shackled by their wrists and ankles, shocked the world. Within a day, Donald Rumsfeld, then US defence secretary, announced that the Geneva conventions would not apply to what were now called "enemy combatants".

Last week, Europe's leading watchdog on human rights alleged that European countries had breached the international convention against torture by giving the US secret permission to use its airspace.

Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe's commissioner for human rights, said: "What happened at Guantanamo was torture and it is illegal to provide facilities or anything to make this torture possible. Under the law, European governments should have intervened and should not have given permission to let these flights happen."

Gomes added: "It's clear to me that Guantanamo could not have been created without the involvement of European countries."

Methods used at Guantanamo Bay, condemned by Britain's Court of Appeal as a legal "black hole" and as a "monstrous failure of justice" by one law lord, have included the prolonged use of isolation, sleep deprivation, and use of stress positions. "These are methods that have been declared as unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights," Hammarberg said.

The military flight plans show that all key flights arriving in Guantanamo had come across European airspace either through Spain or the Incirlik airbase in southeastern Turkey. The Sunday Times compared the military flight plans against a database compiled by Reprieve, the British-based charity that represents Guantanamo prisoners, of when prisoners first weighed in at the camp.

The investigation, cross-checked against other Pentagon documents, shows for the first time which prisoner arrived on which flight at Guantanamo, and by what route. At least 170 other prisoners flew over Spanish territory, more than 700 crossed Portuguese space, and more than 680 were transshipped at Incirlik. Most flights also crossed Greek and Italian airspace, according to a source in European air traffic control.

On February 2 2003, for example, a US Air Force C-17 Globemaster plane took off from Incirlik with 27 prisoners on board for Cuba. The same day, prisoner number 558 weighed in at 136lb (62kg) at the camp. He can be named as Moazzam Begg, now 39, from Birmingham, who was released in January 2005, and has never been charged with a crime.

Interviewed by phone last week, Begg recalled: "Inside the plane there was a chain around our waist, and it connected to cuffs around my wrists, which were tied in the back, and to my ankles. We were seated but it was so painful not being able to speak, to hear, to breathe properly, to look, to turn left or right, to move your hands, stretch your legs, or anything." At the time flights were landing in Spain and crossing Spanish airspace, socialist leaders there were expressing "indignation" over conditions in Guantanamo. Now the socialists are in government after winning an election in March 2004 just after the Madrid train bombings and they are being asked to defend Spain's continued collaboration with American operations. Under international law, government and military planes can cross another country's territory only with diplomatic permission.

In a statement to the European parliament on the visits of CIA planes to Spain, the foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos has testified: "Our territory may have been used not to commit crimes on it, but as a stopover on the way to committing crime in another country."

Spain, it has now emerged, had a specific agreement with the US to allow flights and visits to Spanish airbases for American planes.

In Portugal, the foreign minister Luis Amado has said flights across his country's airspace took place "under the aegis of the UN and Nato and that Portugal naturally follows the principle of good faith in the relations with its allies". Nato's role in Guantanamo stems from a secret agreement made in Brussels on October 4 2001 by all Nato members, including Britain. Although never made public, Lord Robertson, the former British defence secretary who was later Nato's secretary-general, explained that day that Nato had agreed to provide "blanket overflight clearances for the United States and other allies' aircraft for military flights related to operations against terrorism".

Today, Nato is more coy about its role in helping send prisoners to Guantanamo.

In a letter to Gomes, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the current secretary-general, said no Nato planes had "flown to or from Guantanamo Bay" and that Nato "as an organisation has no involvement or co-ordinating role in providing clearance or overflight rights for other flights". Turkey, meanwhile, has declared that its agencies had "reached no findings regarding any unacknowledged deprivation of liberty conducted by foreign agencies within the territory of the republic of Turkey or any transport by aircraft or otherwise of the persons deprived of their liberty".

In London, Clive Stafford Smith, legal director of Reprieve, said, with America threatening that Guantanamo prisoners faced the death penalty, European governments had made "pious statements" that they would never send prisoners to the US without obtaining assurances they would not be executed.

Stafford Smith added: "Some European governments, it's now clear, systematically assisted in clandestine flights and illegal prisoner transfers to Guantanamo Bay. We need a full investigation and Europeans need to face their responsibility for these crimes."

Bush’s ‘Sixteenth Century Concept of Judicial Conduct’

Reports have begun to circulate that the Administration has put together a group of scholars headed by a right-wing activist judge to craft legislation to introduce a new court of Star Chamber, perhaps to be floated in the coming year. As we see in the public pronouncements of the Bush Administration, accusations leveled at detainees in the war on terror are leveled for political effect, and often to parallel partisan political campaigns. If those accusations are rejected by a court, it therefore undermines confidence in the Administration and the Party. Which is why, in the Bush view of justice, a failure to convict is unacceptable. And which is why the Bush view of justice is no justice at all.