“There was a major blow to the head on the right side. There was evidence of torture on the upper torso, and on the palms of his hand. There were needle marks on his right arm and on his left arm. I am a law enforcement professional. I know what to look for when examining … Continue reading Quote For The Day II
Today on the Dish, Steve Benen, Jon Cohn, Jonathan Bernstein, Nate Silver, Greg Sargent, Brian Beutler, Ed Rendell, and David Plouffe wanted to pass the damn bill already. A reader dissented. Zakaria was also critical. Jill Dorson presented a terrible case for independent outcry as Andrew and two readers piled on. Meanwhile, we saw positive … Continue reading The Daily Wrap
Today on the Dish we tackled the SCOTUS decision. Small reax here. Andrew reacted with measured criticism, Fallows furrowed his brow, Frum offered constructive reform, Walter Shapiro saw a grander scheme, and Justice Kennedy said "blog". In other commentary, Manzi approved of Obama's bank proposal, Emily Miller lauded the National Enquirer, Reihan challenged Andrew on … Continue reading The Daily Wrap
Dahlia Lithwick examines the Gitmo "suicide" story and the US MSM's refusal to touch it. Maybe someone somewhere can grapple with this narrative and investigate it seriously enough to verify if it really is as horrifying as it appears: The NCIS report failed to question why it took two hours for these suicides to be … Continue reading Too Terrible To Be True?
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch joins the Dish in calling for a full investigation of the Gitmo “suicides”: Prisoner abuse and botched investigations undermine national security, handing America’s enemies a devastating recruiting tool. Mr. Obama should appoint an unrelenting career prosecutor to the case, someone of the caliber of Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, … Continue reading “Enough Is Enough”
Greenwald's reaction to the MSM reaction to Scott Horton's ground-breaking article:
[O]ur media persists in sustaining the lie that the torture controversy is about three cases of waterboarding and a few "high-value" detainees who were treated a bit harshly. That's why Horton's story received so little attention and was almost completely ignored by right-wing commentators: because it shatters the central myth that torture was used only in the most extreme cases — virtual Ticking Time Bomb scenarios — when there was simply no other choice. Leading American media outlets, as a matter of policy, won't even use the word "torture." This, despite the fact that the abuse was so brutal and inhumane that it led to the deaths of helpless captives — including run-of-the-mill detainees, almost certainly ones guilty of absolutely nothing — in numerous cases. These three detainee deaths — like so many other similar cases — illustrate how extreme is the myth that has taken root in order to obscure what was really done.
The denial is in exact proportion to the horror.
As usual, the foreign press cover the new and powerful evidence that the Bush administration was using torture methods so severe they killed prisoners in Gitmo as late as 2006 – and then covered it up with claims of a triple-simultaneous-suicide. Here's the Guardian. And the Telegraph. And the Independent. Here's the Irish Times. And the Canadian Press. But the US papers?
Megan, a foe of the health insurance reform, reacts to the report on the three alleged homicides-by-torture at Gitmo:
I usually do not swear on this blog. But all I can think of is a quote from PJ O'Rourke on seeing young kids shot by the IDF: "This is bullshit. This is barbarism." This is not how a decent country acts, which is presumably why we lied about it.
I expect tomorrow, if Brown wins, we'll hear a lot of talk about a Republican resurgence. But unless the Republicans can come up with a more convincing program to keep stuff like this from happening–and a more convincing economic program than cutting taxes in the face of record deficits–I don't think they're ready to lead.
My conservative readers are no doubt winding up to tell me I'm a liberal sellout. But I don't think it's particularly bleeding heart to think that we shouldn't have to fake suicides to cover up for abusing prisoners. In fact, I think that's the stance of a hard core believer in law and order.
More accurately, the obvious inference from the Harper's piece is that the Bush administration faked suicides to cover up for torturing prisoners to death.
Today on the Dish we highlighted (here, here, here, here) Scott Horton's piece on the torturing and death of three people at Gitmo. Andrew grappled with the story here. As usual, nothing from the far right. Nate Silver tried to make sense of the polling in Massachusetts and we rounded up election coverage from the … Continue reading The Daily Wrap
This is the isolated part of Gitmo where paddy wagons came and went, whence screams could be heard during "aggressive questioning", and whence three corpses are believed to have emerged after the kind of treatment once reserved for totalitarian states but now indelibly part of the American way.
No, this is not a satellite of a secret Iran torture chamber; it is not a Soviet camp; it is not an isolated black site in North Korea. It is in Gitmo. And it is where America's founding principles came to die.
The corpses were delivered to their families with their necks cut out, to make it impossible to tell whether they were strangled to death in a session engineered by Cheney and Rumsfeld or whether they hanged themselves simultaneously as the cover-up insisted.
A closer-up version of the same photograph below the fold:
