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  Bonus:

Because, "drug dealer" = "terrorist" now: BONUS: "illegal immigrant" can also equal "terrorist" which means that torture's back on the menu: In a world where all those in power have to do is call their enemies "terrorists," "illegal immigrants" "drug dealers," or even "Antifa"... ...anyone can become a criminal by default, meaning that anyone can be punished. 

 When starving kids aren't taking $5 million to give up information, you have to question their effectiveness...

 From The Times of Israel : Dozens of pictures and videoclips have emerged over the past week showing IDF soldiers abusing and humiliating Palestinians apprehended in the West Bank, often while they are blindfolded and handcuffed. In one of the most brutal videos, which has been blurred, IDF soldiers filmed themselves as they abused seven West Bank laborers who were caught as they attempted to enter Israel without a permit, in an area south of the South Hebron hills. The footage shows the Palestinian men stripped naked or half-naked, blindfolded and handcuffed, and screaming in pain. One of them is being dragged on the ground. A screenshot from the video shows a soldier stepping with his boot on the head of one of the Palestinians, while another is pointing a weapon at him. The Whole World Is Watching.

 According to reports, these six officers went to confront two Black men who were staying with a White woman (who also happened to be a neighbor to one of the officers). Despite being there to help the owner, the Black men were accused of dealing drugs. They were tasered, beaten, had various food/cooking liquids poured on them, threatened with sodomy (via a dildo placed on a gun) and humiliated . Even with the officers being taken to court, this is still a very obviously racially-motivated crime .  And just a reminder that these incidents can escalate without Cop Watchers:

Their "legal logistics." They don't want to prosecute anyone from the Bush Administration, and now they want to make sure no one else can either.

All of our serious debates should be put in comic book form .

Doh . WASHINGTON -- A sharply divided Supreme Court ruled Monday that FBI Director Robert Mueller and former Attorney General John Ashcroft can't face a lawsuit from a former Sept. 11 detainee who argued they were responsible for his restrictive confinement because of his religious beliefs. The court on Monday overturned a lower court decision that let Javaid Iqbal's (Ick-ball) lawsuit against the high-ranking officials proceed. Iqbal is a Pakistani Muslim who spent nearly six months in solitary confinement in New York in 2002. He had argued that while Ashcroft and Mueller did not single him out for mistreatment, they were responsible for a policy of confining detainees in highly restrictive conditions because of their religious beliefs or race. But the government argued that there was nothing linking Mueller and Ashcroft to the abuses that happened to Iqbal at a Brooklyn, N.Y., prison's Administrative Maximum Special Housing Unit, and the court agreed. "The complaint ...

OK; let me see if I have this straight (if anyone can provide dates and such, cool): On 9/11/2001, America experiences its worst terrorist attack ever. The Bush Administration (specifically Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld) want to link this horrible event to Saddam Hussein for financial and ideological reasons. The US start capturing suspected terrorists and people who may have ties to terrorists. They began to interrogate them . The interrogations either yield nothing or nothing giving the pro-war-with-Iraq faction of the White House the information it needs. Without crucial "links" to Iraq, Bush Administration settles for real evidence linking to Afghanistan. Under the influence of key Bush White House officials, the Executive Branch redefines interrogation , adopting techniques that some lawyers and most lay people define as torture. The United States of America begins to apply these "techniques" in order to make the people that were captured "admit" t...

It ain't easy being a transitional president: WASHINGTON — Pressure mounted on President Obama on Monday for more thorough investigation into harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects under the Bush administration, even as he tried to reassure the Central Intelligence Agency that it would not be blamed for following legal advice. Mr. Obama said it was time to admit “mistakes” and “move forward.” But there were signs that he might not be able to avoid a protracted inquiry into the use of interrogation techniques that the president’s top aides and many critics say crossed the line into torture. And while Mr. Obama vowed not to prosecute C.I.A. officers for acting on legal advice, on Monday aides did not rule out legal sanctions for the Bush lawyers who developed the legal basis for the use of the techniques. The president’s decision last week to release secret memorandums detailing the harsh tactics employed by the C.I.A. under his predecessor provoked a furor that continued to g...

Oh, crap : Over objections from the U.S. intelligence community, the White House is moving to declassify—and publicly release—three internal memos that will lay out, for the first time, details of the "enhanced" interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration for use against "high value" Qaeda detainees. The memos, written by Justice Department lawyers in May 2005, provide the legal rationale for waterboarding, head slapping and other rough tactics used by the CIA. One senior Obama official, who like others interviewed for this story requested anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity, said the memos were "ugly" and could embarrass the CIA. Other officials predicted they would fuel demands for a "truth commission" on torture. Because of an executive order signed by President Obama on Jan. 22 banning such aggressive tactics, deputies to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. concluded there was no longer any reason to keep the inte...

Susan J. Crawford, Pentagon official: "Yeah, we tortured a 9/11 suspect ." Conservative TV and radio to slam Crawford in 3, 2, 1...

The Senate says, " With Bush and Rumsfeld ." A bipartisan Senate report released today says that former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials are directly responsible for abuses of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and charges that decisions by those officials led to serious offenses against prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere. The Senate Armed Services Committee report accuses Rumsfeld and his deputies of being the principal architects of the plan to use harsh interrogation techniques on captured fighters and terrorism suspects, rejecting the Bush administration's contention that the policies originated lower down the command chain. "The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own," the panel concludes. "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefin...

Jeepers : MEXICO CITY -- The death squads of the drug cartels are killing in spectacularly gruesome ways, using the violence as a language to deliver a message to society. Increasingly, bodies show unmistakable signs of torture. Videos of executions are posted on the Internet, as taunts, as warnings. Corpses are dumped on playgrounds, with neatly printed notes beside them. And very often, the heads have been removed. When someone rolled five heads onto the dance floor in a cantina in Michoacan state two years ago, even the most hardened Mexicans were shocked. Now ritual mutilations are routine. In the border city of Tijuana, 37 people were slain over the weekend, including four children. Nine of the adults were decapitated, including three police officers whose badges were stuffed in their mouths. "There is a new and different violence in this war," said Victor Clark Alfaro, the founder of the Binational Center for Human Rights, who moves around Tijuana accompanied by bodygua...

This isn't new, but still: wow. Like a said before: arrogant, stubborn sociopath .

When someone with some balls decides to prosecute anyone from the Bush Administration for the criminal act of torture, you can bet your bottom dollar that they'll use the " China Defense :" WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.” What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners. The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Ce...

Eugene Robinson on Bush and torture : " Bush's view of the world is based on the idea of American exceptionalism: that this country is unique, that its ideas and values are not just worthy or admirable but superior to any others ." Colin Powell on the same subject : " To say that we want to modify, clarify or redefine Common Article 3, which has not been modified for the 57 years of its history, I think adds to the doubt" [about U.S. morality]. Plus I believe that the legitimate concerns that the administration has can be dealt with in other ways ." I would hope that the worst thing Bush has in mind is take away the terrorist's Harry Potter books . And while I respect his decision of not going into specifics, the bottom line is Bush does not have the credibility to be taken at his word on this issue. You just can't trust that if he gets his way, there won't be a story in eight months about soldiers strangling prisoners with shoestring. And no on...