From TPM:

The Senate Armed Services Committee’s “Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody” has now been posted on the Committee’s website.

Warning, the link is a pdf of over 250 pages.

Just one excerpt:

Military Lawyers Raise Red Flags and Joint Staff Review Quashed (U)

(U) In early November 2002, in a series of memos responding to the Joint Staff’s call for

comments on GTMO’s request, the military services identified serious legal concerns about the techniques and called for additional analysis.

(U) The Air Force cited “serious concerns regarding the legality of many of the proposed techniques” and stated that “techniques described may be subject to challenge as failing to meet the requirements outlined in the military order to treat detainees humanely…” The Air Force also called for an in depth legal review ofthe request.

(U) CITF’s Chief Legal Advisor wrote that certain techniques in GTMO’s October 11, 2002 request “may subject service members to punitive articles ofthe [Uniform Code of Military Justice],” called “the utility and legality of applying certain techniques” in the request “questionable,” and stated that he could not “advocate any action, interrogation or otherwise, that is predicated upon the principle that all is well ifthe ends justify the means and others are not aware ofhow we conduct our business.”

(U) The Chief of the Army’s International and Operational Law Division wrote that techniques like stress positions, deprivation of light and auditory stimuli, and use of phobias to induce stress “crosses the line of ‘humane’ treatment,” would “likely be considered maltreatment” under the UCMJ, and “may violate the torture statute.” The Army labeled GTMO’s request “legally insufficient” and called for additional review.

(U) The Navy recommended a “more detailed interagency legal and policy review” of the

request. And the Marine Corps expressed strong reservations, stating that several techniques in the request “arguably violate federal law, and would expose our service members to possible prosecution.” The Marine Corps also said the request was not “legally sufficient,” and like the other services, called for “a more thorough legal and policy review.”

(U) Then-Captain (now Rear Admiral) Jane Dalton, Legal Counsel to the Chairman of

the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that her staff discussed the military services’ concerns with the DoD General Counsel’s Office at the time and that the DoD General Counsel Jim Haynes was aware of the services’ concerns. Mr. Haynes, on the other hand, testified that he did not know that the memos from the military services existed (a statement he later qualified by stating that he was not sure he knew they existed). Eliana Davidson, the DoD Associate Deputy General Counsel for International Affairs, said that she told the General Counsel that the GTMO request needed further assessment. Mr. Haynes did not recall Ms. Davidson telling him that.

(U) Captain Dalton, who was the Chairman’s Legal Counsel, said that she had her own

concerns with the GTMO request and directed her staff to initiate a thorough legal and policy review ofthe techniques. That review, however, was cut short. Captain Dalton said that General Myers returned from a meeting and advised her that Mr. Haynes wanted her to stop her review, in part because of concerns that people were going to see the GTMO request and the military services’ analysis of it. Neither General Myers nor Mr. Haynes recalled cutting short the Dalton review, though neither has challenged Captain Dalton’s recollection. Captain Dalton testified that this occasion marked the only time she had ever been told to stop analyzing a request that came to her for review.

Well I don’t usually do this, but I’m just going to whine tonight.  I thought I’d warn y’all upfront about that.

I was used to being invisible duriing the Bush years … I mean to the Democratic Party.  They were busy holding their powder and doing other secret things I just couldn’t figure out, and so I got used to never feeling connected, in the human sense, to my Democratic representatives.  It hurt, of course, but I got used to it.  Even after Katrina I got used to it — I was intolerably angry but I no longer expected my party to do much.  And they didn’t.

And I’m not talking legislation here, either.  I’m speaking of morale.  A silly thing, I guess, can’t quantify it, can’t even explain it all that well.  Just that feeling that someone gets it, on a visceral emotional level feels the way I do about what’s important.

And heck, I don’t style myself as the be all and end all of how one should feel.  It’s just that it got lonely, here I was, part of the Democratic base, and I felt so invisible.

Now, oh good lord, now it’s even worse.

(Gilbert O’Sullivan, Video courtesy of YouTuber Namikaze1028)

Every now and then I re-read all of Chaim Potok’s books.  I get in a certain mood, you see.

You may know Potok’s work from one of his biggest selling books, The Chosen.

All of Potok’s books deal with protagonists who eventually must confront the limitations of the touchstones they were given through childhood, their bedrock belief systems.  With the exception of Davita’s Harp, that touchstone is an Orthodox Jewish community.

In My Name is Asher Lev, we get to know Asher, the son of a man accomplished in the Jewish community, the right-hand assistant to the Hassidic Rebbe who is the highest authority in the community, a man who works hard to build yeshivas all over Europe, a man of integrity, all that.  And Asher, his son, is an artistic genius on the level of Picasso.  Long story short, Asher finds that his masterpiece painting expresses itself with a crucifixion as part of its form.  Needless to say, that causes a bit of a stir in his community, which already looks askance at his painting to begin with.  Add the family dynamic to that, and Asher is confronted with a heavy task.  And he is fully aware after he paints the picture exactly how much it will hurt his family, why it will hurt his family, and the kind of disapproval and anger it will draw down upon him.

We’re lawless now.  The only citizens of the United States who are subject to the law are those with no power … so it’s not really being subject to the law.  It’s being subject to power.

That’s dangerous.

We see the anger forming among the citizenry and we don’t yet know where that anger is going to ultimately land.  Right now the anger is directed towards the bankers.  But that could change rapidly given the big events we are confronting, from tent cities to climate change.  Round and round it goes and where it stops no one knows.  Unknown.  Danger and the unknown.

(Video courtesy of YouTuber UnivoxSuperfuzz – and sorry for abrupt cutoff at the end)

The danger, oh we are dangerous right now, all of us, we are dangerous and who knows what we will do when confronted by the unknown adventures ahead?

I read too many books that spoke of quests and fellowships and dangerous adventures.  It shaped the way I looked at things, sometimes to the point of absurdity.

I remember my first law firm job in New York City.  We had just gotten WANG stand-alone word processors.  I immediately went into Starship mode and began hollering out faux reports on how my work was going, “Deletion in process!  Stand back!”  That kind of stuff.  It was an adventure to me.

And now I blog about politics and the culture wars and such, and the same feeling grips me every now and then.

I guess they’re not called archetypes for nothing.

When I first got my own computer I started interacting on the AOL discussion boards, where there was no moderation.  I was amazed at some of the hate speech.

But then I started reading one fellow who was posting about the Valerie Plame case.

At first it was just fun being rude and argumentative to the hate-speech folks who were defending Bush.  Soon, though, I realized I had no real information and that became boring.  So I read some of the stuff this fellow was posting and it was fascinating to me.

It wasn’t long before there was a group of five or six of us researching the Plame case.  That’s how I discovered Josh Marshall and Talking Points Memo.

I felt like Nancy Drew!

In that fellowship I learned how to retain focus amid all the noise of the chatterers.

Full moon is tomorrow, some call it the Full Worm Moon.

From the Old Farmer’s Almanac — NOT to be confused with the Farmer’s Almanac (without the word “old”) which is not the same thing at all! — a little about full moons in my part of the world:

Historically the Native Americans who lived in the area that is now the northern and eastern United States kept track of the seasons by giving distinctive names to the recurring full Moons. Each full Moon name was applied to the entire month in which it occurred. These names, and some variations, were used by the Algonquin tribes from New England to Lake Superior.

Click on the link if you want to know the names … next month is Full Pink Moon.

Worms.  Figures.

Open thread is now open!

(crossposted at orange)

I’ve been reading some of the arguments over whether or not we should, as citizens, pressure the Obama Administration and, specifically, Attorney General Eric Holder, to appoint a Special Prosecutor over torture, with the aim of holding the most powerful accountable for their actions.

I have been dissapointed in reading comments suggesting that applying this pressure, as is our right as citizens, would somehow be insulting, disrespectful, or destructive to the Obama Administration.

What the naysayers seem to ignore is that the Obama Administration is already being pressured — and heavily — by the powers that be.

One example.  First we hear Mark Lowenthal saying:

“If Panetta starts trying to feed people to that commission (ed. a congressional commission), his tenure at C.I.A. will be over,” said Mark M. Lowenthal, a former senior C.I.A. official and an adjunct professor at Columbia University.

“If it happens, C.I.A. people are not going to start plotting against the president, but they are going to withdraw from taking risks, and then the C.I.A. becomes useless to the president,” Mr. Lowenthal said.

Then shortly thereafter Obama responds to George Stephanopoulos on This Week about Bob Fertik’s question on whether or not there will be a special prosecutor:

And part of my job is to make sure that for example at the CIA, you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.

I am not trying to read Obama’s mind here.  I have no idea what decisions he will make when it comes to our intelligence agencies and how we investigate them.  But it shows he is listening to what the CIA says, their objections.

Who is going to counter that?  Who, if not us, We the People?

So many of us have been writing about events that tear at the human soul, from hatred and ill treatment of our fellow human beings to the ultimate evil, torture.

I’ve learned so much of tragedy, from Winter Rabbit’s essays on how Native Americans and their precious culture are treated, to Robyn’s essays on having to fight to even go into the ladies’ room without fear of attack.  And those are only two examples.

Now there are going to be hearings this upcoming week on torture.

I wonder how I can stay human with such deep knowledge of the evil we can do to each other.

I think of what I hate.

And I believe in order to stay human, I also need to think about what I love.

I’ll tell you, sometimes it’s hard.  Sometimes I despair.

(courtesy of YouTuber SidewalksOfNY315)

(h/t to parryander for the link to The Center for Victims of Torture from buhdydharma’s post, “What Do You Know About Torture? Updated”).

Back in June of 2007, Dave Johnson, Executive Director of The Center for Victims of Torture began the work that ultimately helped lead to President Obama’s executive order banning torture.  It’s an interesting story for activists everywhere on this issue, and can be found at  MinnPost.com.

As the article states:

Many Americans know the arc of the events leading up to Obama’s order. But few know the behind-the-scenes work it took to build support that would help the new president end a practice which had bitterly divided the nation.

* * *

With presidential elections coming up, the stage was set for Johnson and others at the dinner to thrust the issue into the political dialog. A proposed presidential order could be the vehicle.

“We had a good debate about the whole idea of an executive order,” Johnson said.

Johnson and his group were methodical.  The idea was begun by Marc Grossman “who had been Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs during the first term of former President George W. Bush.”  Clearly this group had contacts, and they used them.  The intial group of 15 people worked  hard and one of Johnson’s first actions was to go to Capitol Hill with Albert Mora, an anti-torture advocate and former general counsel of the US Navy.

Johnson called his Capitol Hill tour with Mora “one of the most frightening days of my life.”

From Yin &Yang and the I-Ching written by Kelly L. Ross, Ph.D.:

Yin originally meant “shady, secret, dark, mysterious, cold.”  It thus could mean the shaded, north side of a mountain or the shaded, south bank of a river.

Yang in turn meant “clear, bright, the sun, heat,” the opposite of yin and so the lit, south side of a mountain or the lit, north bank of a river.

From these basic opposites, a complete system of opposites was elaborated.

Yin represents everything about the world that is dark, hidden, passive, receptive, yielding, cool, soft, and feminine.

Yang represents everything about the world that is illuminated, evident, active, aggressive, controlling, hot, hard, and masculine.

Everything in the world can be identified with either yin or yang. Earth is the ultimate yin object. Heaven is the ultimate yang object. Of the two basic Chinese “Ways,” Confucianism is identified with the yang aspect, Taoism with the yin aspect

Yin should not be confused with gender, by the way.

Although it is correct to see yin as feminine and yang as masculine, everything in the world is really a mixture of the two, which means that female beings may actually be mostly yang and male beings may actually be mostly yin. Because of that, things that we might expect to be female or male because they clearly represent yin or yang, may turn out to be the opposite instead.

So I go to the little straight NYC after hour mafia run dive where I am queen by virtue of the fact few women go there and I meet this porn actress, Precious, we play for the crowd pretending to be vying for dominance but really I’m just fascinated because I’ve never met a porn lady before and she was so pretty.  (This was, by the way, during the tail end of the era in NYC when the most hard core gay male sex clubs were fashionable for many famous hipsters and bored rich folks who wanted to go slumming.)

Eventually I just started talking with Precious, my curiosity winning out over giving the club some performance art (as I saw it) and she, I don’t know, didn’t have much to say and somehow we ended up taking a cab to a very straight sex club called Plato’s Retreat.  There was a chain of them, don’t know if they’re still around.  She said she could get me in for free.

And I’m really wanting this to be fascinating, here I am with a porn star!  Woo hoo, a chapter in my one day best selling novel!

(Lou Reed & Velvet Underground, “Venus in Furs,” courtesy YouTuber melgallagher)

(cross-posted from the orange)

Well Saturday is Valentine’s Day, so maybe this is appropriate — a Valentine to those revolutionaries who gave no quarter to tyranny.

In a comment to his diary, Senator Patrick Leahy described his view of prosecution of those in power who have committed crimes:

Would not rule out prosecution… A failed attempt to prosecute for this conduct is the worst result of all as it could be seen as justifying and exonerating abhorrent actions.  Given the steps Congress and the executive have already taken to shield this conduct from accountability, that is a likely result of an attempt to prosecute.

Of course, I would not rule out prosecution in appropriate cases, particularly for perjury.