April 24, 2009 archive

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning

An Opened Mind XXIII

Art Link

Devotion

Faith

Faith is the certainty

that we are not alone

Some people need the presence

of Someone who will intercede

for them before their

Higher Power

Some people need to know

that they belong to one group

only because they don’t belong

to another

I only need to know

that someone else also realizes

that we can’t be alone

if we are all here

together

–Robyn Elaine Serven

–date unknown

Late Night Karaoke

Highway Song  

What did Congress know about torture and when did they know it?

 

Over the past 16 months, what members of Congress knew and when did they know it has slowly emerged in newspaper accounts. Four select members of Congress were notified in September 2002 when the CIA gave a secret high level briefing regarding the use of “harsh interrogation” and “overseas detention sites”.

U.S. law requires Congress be informed of covert activities, but allows for limited access to briefings in sensitive matters. In this meeting, four members of Congress were informed. They were Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Porter Goss, and Senators Bob Graham and Richard Shelby. The ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees sometimes described as the “Gang of Four”.

According to the Washington Post in December 2007, the four Congress members raised no objections to the “interrogation” techniques described, including waterboarding.

THE history as it should be remembered

There are plenty of good diaries, essays and articles about the timeline of torture.  Let’s remember this history, THE history, as it should be remembered.

More after the fold…

Sometimes it’s straightforward.


The Difference Between Training And Torture: Consent

There is a meme being floated by the former VP and future War Crimes defendant Cheney and his daughter that because some of the techniques in the Bush administration State Sponsored Torture program have been used to train our service members, they can not possibly be torture. They always leave out the totality of the techniques which even if each one were in fact lawful would still rise to the level of torture by any reasonable person, but that is not what the Dog wants to talk about.  

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