Kos’s 6:00PM Open Thread:

Kos here. My five-year-old son and I were out for a drive yesterday doing errands, when he noticed trees swaying strongly in gusty wind. He pointed at one and said, “The trees are dancing!” I laughed quietly, and said, “No, it’s the wind blowing them around.”



He pondered that for a second or two, then said, “So the wind is like music to the trees, right?”

I’m still pondering that.

Reagan’s DOJ Prosecuted Texas Sheriff For Waterboarding Prisoners

by Jason Leopold, April 27, 2009 – 8:49am  

George W. Bush’s Justice Department said subjecting a person to the near drowning of waterboarding was not a crime and didn’t even cause pain, but Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department thought otherwise, prosecuting a Texas sheriff and three deputies for using the practice to get confessions.

Federal prosecutors secured a 10-year sentence against the sheriff and four years in prison for the deputies. But that 1983 case – which would seem to be directly on point for a legal analysis on waterboarding two decades later – was never mentioned in the four Bush administration opinions released last week.

The failure to cite the earlier waterboarding case and a half-dozen other precedents that dealt with torture is reportedly one of the critical findings of a Justice Department watchdog report that legal sources say faults former Bush administration lawyers – Jay Bybee, John Yoo and Steven Bradbury – for violating “professional standards.”

Read the whole thing here…

The brass ring is never so close as when it seems so far away and out of reach?

Or never farther way than when it is closest?

Over the past few months we’ve seen what appears to be an enormous shift or widening of the Overton Window of political possibilities from nearly zero chance to a sudden flood of public and media attention on the war crimes of George W. Bush and cronies.

Attention. And some soft polling indicating that it may include public demand.

Either way, it has resulted in incredible pressure on the Obama Administration to take a firm stand and make a hard choice either way, to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate and prosecute the crimes, or to sweep them under the rug in some nebulous fantasy of “moving forward” to escape having to prosecute.

It seems apparent that the wave of attention, not yet defined demand, but attention may soon start to eat away at Obama’s approval ratings, thus forcing him to make a choice.

What actions by Obama and others in the administration can we look at that might indicate which course of action he is leaning towards?

Obama has recently started to try to label calls for justice as calls for “retribution”. The only reasons I can conceive of for him doing this is that he is comfortable misrepresenting people who are calling for justice, and perhaps as well he simply does not does not believe that they are calls for justice.

These are personality traits and political manipulations that make me, for one, very suspicious of his motivations, and can easily lead to the conclusion that he simply does not want investigations and prosecutions to proceed or he places a lower value on justice than the average person.

Obama’s appointed Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair only last week tried to defend the use of torture and embraced the old Bush administration line on torture with the claim “in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists”.

An FBI interrogator involved in the interrogations has flatly contradicted Blair’s claim.

What are Obama’s choices?

It appears he can do one of a few things to take political advantage of this apparent wave of attention. I think it is helpful here to be mindful that he is a politician and by nature will seek approval.

He could continue as he has so far and hold off or ignore the calls and continue repeating his “look forward” meme.

So far doing that hasn’t hurt his approval ratings, and again he is a politician after all, so from his perspective he may be reading those ratings as the majority being happy and approving of him him continuing to do that.

Last I checked his approval ratings were higher than the percentage of voters who voted for him last November.

If he is seeing any indications of slippage in those approval ratings he could ask Attorney General Holder to appoint a Special Prosecutor conduct a proper investigative process leading eventually to, if the investigative process indicates enough hard evidence to do so, prosecution of Bush, Cheney, and some or all of the members of the entire War on Terror enterprise who are ultimately with Bush and Cheney responsible for the torture and other war crimes that have been enumerated repeatedly.

Now, there have been some suggestions made that appointing a Special Prosecutor would immediately bury the whole issue behind a wall of secrecy if the Special Prosecutor immediately convened a Grand Jury to issue subpoenas and take testimony in secret, but there are many more other opinions that that would not be the case and that a Special Prosecutor can conduct an open investigation.

There is also, I think, more than enough publicly available evidence already to warrant prosecution resulting in probable convictions, particularly after some of the recent public releases and revelations.

But I am not a lawyer or experienced in the legal aspects of Grand Jury testimony, and it may be that a Special Prosecutor could do it in such a way as to close off any further public knowledge and bury the whole issue forever.

So to summarize, it appears to me that Obama has three options.

One, He could continue as he has, deflecting and opposing all calls no matter how loud for a Special Prosecutor or for any kind of investigation.

Two, he could have Holder appoint a Special Prosecutor with instructions to make it as closed a process as possible dragged out as long as possible, as a way of effectively ending any hope of prosecutions.

To my mind, from seeing his actions so far, the first or the second will be the way he will probably go, and I think that perhaps the second is the more likely since it would allow him to claim that he is bowing to the will of the people and the demands for a Special Prosecutor while at the same time avoiding any possibility of prosecutions.

Three, he could ask Holder to appoint a special Prosecutor instructed to conduct an completely transparent open and public investigation. Every action I’ve seen from him so far to my mind makes it apparent that a transparent open investigation is the last thing he wants to allow to happen.

It’s a frikkin’ ocean!!!

Judith Miller tears strips off Cliff May on Fox News while Shep Smith yells louder:

“This government is of, by, and for the people — that means it’s mine,” Smith quipped. “That means — I’m not saying what is torture, and what is not torture, but I’m saying, whatever it is, you don’t do it for me! I want off the train when the government starts — I want off, next stop, now!”

According to a RawStory article about an hour ago:

A report by the Senate Armed Services Committee released Tuesday night says that torture techniques used at Abu Ghraib prison and approved by officials in the George W. Bush administration were applied only after soliciting a “wish list” from interrogators.

President George W. Bush made a written determination that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, did not apply to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees. This act, the committee found, cleared the way for a new interrogation program to be developed in-part based on “Chinese communist” tactics used against Americans during the Korean War, mainly to elicit false confessions for propaganda purposes.

“In mid-August 2003, an email from staff at Combined Joint Task Force

7 (CJTF-7) headquarters in Iraq requested that subordinate units provide input for a ‘wish list’ of interrogation techniques [to be used at Abu Ghraib], stated that ‘the gloves are coming off,’ and said ‘we want these detainees broken,'” the report found.

The report is available as a .pdf file from the Senate Armed Services Committee site, and opens with this extraordinary paragraph:

On February 7, 2002, President Bush signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention did not apply to the conflict with al Qaeda and concluding that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or the legal protections afforded by the Third Geneva Convention. The President’s order closed off application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees. While the President’s order stated that, as “a matter of policy, the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of the Geneva Conventions,” the decision to replace well established military doctrine, i.e., legal compliance with the Geneva Conventions, with a policy subject to interpretation, impacted the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody.