Sure is good the Senate confirmed Michael Mukasey without him giving a straight answer about torture. As The Washington Post editorialized that his opponents were "working against the last, best hope to see the rule of law reemerge in this administration." Damn opponents. They were probably worried that if people were caught destroying evidence, he would help block inquiries into the obstruction of justice or something crazy like that. But that couldn't happen. After all, the Post said "Mukasey has demonstrated the ethical fortitude required of an independent attorney general" and Fred Hiatt is never wrong.
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Ah, Mukasey
14 Dec 2007 07:48 pm
Comments (27)
No, hanging is a slow and barbarous practice.
Quick bullet in the upper right of the brain is cheaper, faster, less painful (we assume - nobody has stepped forward to volunteer for an in vitro experiment and there's the issue of survivable instrumentation) and more effective.
Or just nuke Washington. As the officer in "Under Siege" said, one million people reach 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit in under ten seconds.
See "Terminator 2" for the image.
As for Mukasey, he still doesn't know whether water boarding is torture. "Don't rush me" is his motto.
Seriously - is anybody surprised?
Anybody?
Chris? Al? Fred? Mixner?
Th nuking idea is in some respect VERY attractive, aside from two problems - the many innocents like Matthew who would be killed, and the fact that the crazy fucks who remain would use the attack as an excuse to unleash horror on the rest of the world.
But it certainly would take a big bite out of our incredibly evil political establishment.
So, is tonight the "Lets leave crazy eliminationist comments on blogs" night? Or are people just drinking early?
well, as far as donald graham is concerned, fred hiatt IS never wrong, and since his is the only opinion that matters....
i will never forgive warren buffett for not warning katherine graham about the perils of nepotism....
Mukasey was the last best hope for the rule of law? What a depressing thought.
and there goes Sen Chuck's reputation, down the drain... he and Joe liberman will have a lot of chuckles to share.
Matt was absolutely correct in the post of a few days ago saying that Mikey was in the bag. He had to be or he wouldn't have been nominated. He was many say an outstanding judge but after years and years of dealing with the dregs of society a man who wants to still be a player might want to forget all that law stuff and grab a few handfulls of pure authoritarian power.
Bush found him sitting in with some sort of Rudy kitchen cabinet. Which suggested strongly that such was the case with Mukasey. He's a party man now through and through. He may still even be a Rudy man. On the other hand no sense putting your eggs all in one basket. He is in a position to do so many favors over the next year that his children's children's children should never have to worry about money again if he plays his cards half right. Already with the tapes thing he is almost a made man.
If he's the "best hope to see the rule of law reemerge in this administration", what the hell is the worst?
He is in a position to do so many favors over the next year that his children's children's children should never have to worry about money again if he plays his cards half right. Already with the tapes thing he is almost a made man.
Actually, Mukasey's son already works for... wait for it... Bracewell & Giuliani (where his job, as I understand it, is to make sure that no one gets a word out of Bernie Kerik until at least the middle of next November).
Let me point out a hypothetical scenario as to why information about aggressice CIA techniques (**NOT** torture) needs to be kept highly classified. Consider the following scene described in Mario Puzo's novel "The Godfather":
The two Capone men were bound hand and foot and small bath towels were stuffed into their mouths to keep them from crying out. Then Brasi took an ax from its place against the wall and started hacking at one of the Capone men. He chopped the man’s feet off, then the legs at the knees, then the thighs where they joined the torso. Brasi was an extremely powerful man but it took him many swings to accomplish his purpose. By that time of course the victim had given up the ghost and the floor of the warehouse was slippery with the hacked fragments of his flesh and the gouting of his blood. When Brasi turned to his second victim he found further effort unnecessary. The second Capone gunman out of sheer terror had, impossibly. swallowed the bath towel in his mouth and suffocated. The bath towel was found in the man’s stomach when the police performed their autopsy to determine the cause of death.
Now reimagine this scene with two Al-Qaeda operatives, say Abdul and Mohammed. Now the CIA can reenact the above with a **virtual** simulation of the above scene with a virtual Abdul as subject and the real Mohammed as horrified observer, and in another room the same with the roles of A and M interchanged. In virtually no time at all, A and M are singing like birds. And as former CIA agent John Kiriakou recently recounted, once they started singing they will continue to keep singing, without any further prodding. Moreover the reliability of their information can be cross checked against each other. On the other hand, once it became known to Al Qaeda that this was only a virtual simulation, this technique would become completely ineffective.
our reliable Dems...real oversight. We have to face it. the Dems are worthless. If we are going to stop the rape and destruction of BushCo we will have to figure out a way to do it outside of the Dems. They are worthless. Wait. I said that. I guess the whole system is broken. electoral politics seems to be the only method of change and within that only two parties...one criminal...the other pathetic and corrupt. So the system is utterly unresponsive to the populace or the nation's needs. forget 1776...the big boys have already torched that legacy.
Such things inevitably recall the Naderite both the parties are the same refrain, and, despite its loathsome results that we have seen in the last seven years, make one wonder if a Gore win would have changed a thing, just as the 2006 Democratic Congressional victory has not made an iota of difference.
Pox on both the parties indeed. Shame on Pelosi and Reid and the other Democratic leaders for ceding whatever ground the people had.
Well, then, Nabalzbbfr, you should obviously have kept your mouth shut. Now you've spoiled everything. (Assuming, of course, that we could ever devise a "virtual" simulation of such torture realistic enough to foll hardened Al Qaeda operatives, which is ridiculous to begin with.)
This, in turn, takes us to Prof. Darius Rejali's very informative and useful Post op-ed yesterday, "Five Myths About Torture" ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/13/AR2007121301303_pf.html ). Specifically, to Myth #5, "You can train people to resist torture":
"Supposedly, this is why we can't know what the CIA's 'enhanced interrogation techniques' are: If Washington admits that it waterboards suspected terrorists, al-Qaeda will set up 'waterboarding-resistance camps' across the world. Be that as it may, the truth is that no training will help the bad guys.
"Simply put, nothing predicts the outcome of one's resistance to pain better than one's own personality. Against some personalities, nothing works; against others, practically anything does. Studies of hundreds of detainees who broke under Soviet and Chinese torture, including Army-funded studies of U.S. prisoners of war, conclude that during, before and after torture, each prisoner displayed strengths and weaknesses dependent on his or her own character. The CIA's own 'Human Resources Exploitation Manual' from 1983 and its so-called Kubark manual from 1963 agree. In all matters relating to pain, says Kubark, the 'individual remains the determinant.'
"The thing that's most clear from torture-victim studies is that you can't train for the ordeal. There is no secret knowledge out there about how to resist torture. Yes, there are manuals, such as the IRA's 'Green Book,' the anti-Soviet 'Manual for Psychiatry for Dissidents' and 'Torture and the Interrogation Experience,' an Iranian guerrilla manual from the 1970s. But none of these volumes contains specific techniques of resistance, just general encouragement to hang tough. Even al-Qaeda's vaunted terrorist-training manual offers no tips on how to resist torture, and al-Qaeda was no stranger to the brutal methods of the Saudi police.
"And yet these myths persist. 'The larger problem here, I think,' one active CIA officer observed in 2005, 'is that this kind of stuff just makes people feel better, even if it doesn't work.' "
Note also his: "In fact, the problem of torture does not stem from the prisoner who has information; it stems from the prisoner who doesn't. Such a person is also likely to lie, to say anything, often convincingly. The torture of the informed may generate no more lies than normal interrogation, but the torture of the ignorant and innocent overwhelms investigators with misleading information. In these cases, nothing is indeed preferable to anything. Anything needs to be verified, and the CIA's own 1963 interrogation manual explains that 'a time-consuming delay results' -- hardly useful when every moment matters.
"Intelligence gathering is especially vulnerable to this problem. When police officers torture, they know what the crime is, and all they want is the confession. When intelligence officers torture, they must gather information about what they don't know."
Which is precisely why its effectiveness is extremely low, and why -- even on purely strategic grounds -- using it except in EXTREMELY rare situations is disastrously counterproductive.
Now reimagine this scene with two Al-Qaeda operatives, say Abdul and Mohammed. Now the CIA can reenact the above with a **virtual** simulation of the above scene with a virtual Abdul as subject and the real Mohammed as horrified observer, and in another room the same with the roles of A and M interchanged.
OK, I'm imagining it... it seems that two possibly innocent terrorist suspects who have suffocated to death on bath towels. What purpose was that supposed to serve?
The purpose, of course, was so anonymoose could cream his pants while typing descriptions of horrific torture. The obvious relish in sadism really undercuts the idea that it's a policy argument.
unbelievable: we now have assholes endorsing the notion that the united states government should be an active torturer because of something this dimwit read in the godfather.
how sick can you get?
Well Howard, Justice Scalia said "Jack Bower saved LA" by torturing a terror suspect so the Godfather has to be considered a good source.
Someday we might garner actionable intelligence to thwart an attack on somebody somewhere by using torture. That will be after thousands or tens of thousands have been tortured who know nothing because they are totally innocent of such knowledge or don't know the specifics of such plans because such plan demand strict compartmentalization of the full plan. For instance it is assumed many of the 911 hijackers didn't know they were going to fly into buildings.
What we will get from this torture is tons of false 'confessions'. The purpose of torture from the Spanish Inquisition to Stalins purge trials was to elicit false confessions. The other thing we get is sweet revenge and the sheer sadomasochistic thrill of torture. Liddy England and her boyfriend were on fire at Abu Graib you might recall.
For the most part the US has always farmed out their torture to surrogates like we did in Central America in the 80's. Where gouging out eyeballs with spoons and blow torches on underarms were considered some of the better coup de gras, not some mamby pamby death by hypo hypothermia.
American nun Dianna Ortiz was only raped and burned 200 times with cigarette's in Guatemala by Guatemalans before a weak American called that off. It's a shame he was so weak, doubly so because Americans themselves were not the interrogators. Those days are over. Americans will now be #1 in torture, proudly.
Omg. Enough already with the horseshit hue and cry over "torture." Three guys named Abdul get their lungs soaked for 2 minutes and suddenly democracy has imploded, the constitution is gone and, my personal favorite, Hitler and Stalin now define our spirit. What a hoot.
Get some frickin' perspective. The black man on the whole has been living his adult life in a 6x10 concrete cell, with no hope, no chance, no justice-and in the fine company of some desperado named Bubba who can't wait to shank his cellmate or bang him in the ass when the dreaded, inevitable moment is right. Try dealing with that existential agony for a lifetime, the lifetime of hapless millions, and then get back to me on our blogoshere need to discuss waterboarding ad nauseam.
Not to worry. That cultural nightmare that is torture embodied has only been going on since slaves were made free men and since society conveniently decided that prison is where we can hide our conscience. And our "guilty."
Lmfao.
Here's a suggestion; instead of getting your panties all aflutter over Bush's episodic dalliance with waterboarding, ask yourself why you haven't manifestly objected to the systemic torture of a race-in form and fashion-that is supposed to be your countrymen.
And don't even get me started with our treatment of the native American Indians. The ones who we didnt kill off, I mean.
Three guys named Abdul get their lungs soaked for 2 minutes and suddenly democracy has imploded
well, at least there's no racism behind your position.
Why am I not surprised at Mukasey's "shocking" behavior, despite all those endless attestations to behalf of his sterling character by lots of Sen. Schumer's big NYC donors?...
Anyone want to place bets that the prosecution of those AIPAC spies caught by the FBI soon disintegrates, just as Norman Pearlstine demanded of Mukasey in that big WSJ op-ed? Or that a Mukasey DoJ would have never allowed a Libby investigation to even get off the ground?
Being from a scientific background, I tend to form hypotheses, and then evaluate them them against empirical evidence, seeking a pattern of either confirmation or contradiction.
And over the last several years, I've finally concluded that rocks do indeed tend to fall downward...
What do you do with a Schmuck like Schumer?
You mean the Schumer who bragged in 'The Hill" of using his DSCC purse power to force through the Patriot Acts, the BK Act of 2005; and funneled his donor money away from the anti-war candidates Paul Hackett and Ned Lamont to bring back in Joe Lieberman?
You do what Donald Trump did. You keep him around use his sorry pandering ass in a way most suitable to someone of his stature: as a free prize on your game show.
Who the fuck takes the Washington Post seriously on questions like this -- or on anything else? Their editorial page staff has long since demonstrated that they have all the integrity and credibility of Der Sturmer.
"hanging is a slow and barbarous practice."
I'm given to understand that hanging is the quickest and most painless means of execution, if done correctly.
Probably like most of you, I'm anti-death penalty anyway. So execution is out of the question.
A much worse punishment for these guys is to stick them in jail.
@Nabalzbbfr: Seriously, is there anything stopping the US from reinacting the Puzo scene, hacking limbs off of detainees? The administration has already determined that anything short of death is not torture (but we've already killed some detainees as a result of over-exuberant "interrogation"). Also, there is a no (none, whatsoever) oversight of the interrogations. So really, though you may suppose that we may try to "trick" the detainees into thinking we'll commit a barbarous act against them, who's to say that we haven't or won't commit the actual act (or send them to another country to have other people do it)?
Three guys named Abdul get their lungs soaked for 2 minutes and suddenly democracy has imploded,
Yeah, well, what Jim Henley's co-blogger Thoreau said.
"I'm given to understand that hanging is the quickest and most painless means of execution, if done correctly."
Perhaps - IF done correctly, such that the neck snaps pretty much instantly. But it's hard to guarantee that, and then you end up with somebody kicking his feet for five minutes like the scene at the start of "V for Vendetta."
These morons can't even get lethal injection right so the guy dies quickly and painlessly.
But a bullet is still cheaper, quicker, and more effective than all the prep that goes into a hanging. A shot into the proper location of the brain shuts it down virtually instantly - no pain, no reflex action. Snipers are trained to do it to insure that a hostage taker can't get a shot off. And in this case, you're not sniping. You're firing at point blank range (maybe even an automated weapon that doesn't require a human hand on it to avoid the psychological issues involved with human executioners.)
By the way, I'm anti-death penalty as well as anti-punishment and anti-prison in general - as was Nietzsche by the way. But you have to revamp the whole society to get to that point, which ain't happening.
As for nuking Washington, yeah, it would wipe out Matt and assorted other people. But as Madeleine Albright said, "We think it's worth the cost."
But of course, you're right - such an act would lead the remaining morons to screw things up even worse.
Which is why we Transhumans will wait until we have the technology to do it right and not leave any morons with access to dangerous materials.
Resh is right about one thing - the US prison system is the "school for torture". It's no accident that many of the people indicted at Abu Ghraib were former correctional people - and that the Iraqi government prison system which is currently torturing people was set up by correctional officials from states with records of poor correctional facilities involving abuse of inmates.
Take a look at this asshole sheriff in Arizona, Joe Arpaio, sometime. He keeps getting elected over and over on a "tough on crime" stance that shows Americans just love torture when it's not being done to somebody they like.
As Tim Leary once said, if the average American were President, he'd run the country like Idi Amin.
Re AIPAC:
Mukasey - only the second jewish AG in history
Schumer - Dem enabler and AIPAC stooge
Feinstein - ditto
Connect the dots.
Comments closed December 28, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
I hope he is hanged by the neck until dead like every administration war criminal, all 100,000 of them.
Posted by hang em high | December 14, 2007 8:00 PM