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By Aram Sinnreich
$22.45
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By Seth Rosenfeld
$40.00
$22
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Wanda Sykes gets heat from commentators about her jokes at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Jon Stewart echoes the critiques and reminds us that bad humor is harmful to the country but torture, well, maybe not so much.
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wilsonsalmanac.blogspot.com
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By Eugene Robinson — Can’t we send Dick Cheney back to Wyoming? Shouldn’t we chip in and buy him a home where the buffalo roam and there’s always room for one more crazy old coot down at the general store? For the final act of his too-long public career, Cheney seems to have decided to become an Old Faithful of self-serving nonsense.
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White House / Eric Draper
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Despite evidence, helpfully provided by the CIA, to the contrary, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi still insists she wasn’t aware that waterboarding would be on the menu of the Bush administration’s interrogation techniques when she was briefed in secret in 2002.
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AP photo / Alex Brandon
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The official paper trail about torture has apparently caught up with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has claimed that she wasn’t aware of the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on suspected al-Qaida operatives—but it now seems that she may well have been among the first to know.
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Tuesday on “The Colbert Report”: Condi Rice and Dick Cheney should have to justify their support for the use of torture to a jury of children. Perhaps the Bushies’ flip-floppy justifications might actually make some sense in Kidsville.
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theatlantic.com
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A Justice Department report suggests that the possibility of legal consequence for those who broke the law is steadily waning, as Bush administration lawyers who approved the torture-interrogation technique of waterboarding will likely escape prosecution.
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Elliot D. Cohen — The Obama administration is now considering reinstating the Military Commissions Act after a four-month suspension, in contradiction to the president’s promise to end military tribunals for detainees and to close down Gitmo.
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Cliff May, president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, was clearly on the defensive as he took the hot seat during Tuesday’s “Daily Show” with the unenviable task of debating whether or not waterboarding is torture, whether American officials have to follow the Geneva Conventions under all circumstances, and whether President Truman was a war criminal.
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By Amy Goodman — Back in the Watergate era, the Senate’s Church Committee exposed government abuses. Of course some people tried to block its work. You may have heard of a couple of them—Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
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By William Pfaff — The calls for an independent commission to investigate torture usually argue that a congressional investigation, or a Justice Department criminal investigation, would become so politicized as to be hopelessly compromised. I am not sure this is true.
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By Marie Cocco — History demands an investigation into U.S. torture. We have a contemporary model for how to conduct a politically sensitive inquiry properly, without undue theatrics and with respect for classified information. It is the 9/11 commission.
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Wikimedia Commons / Prolineserver
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Clearly, Paul Krugman, pictured above, is no fan of federal Judge Jay Bybee, legislative enabler of the “enhanced interrogation technique” that’s become one shameful symbol of the past eight years: waterboarding. You know it’s not good when Newt Gingrich is held up as a paragon of a bygone, and preferable, brand of Republicanism.
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White House / David Bohrer
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Ever the fan of cherry-picking, former Vice President Dick Cheney has called for the declassification of select intelligence he claims would polish his torture legacy. Whistle-blower extraordinaire Joe Wilson says the “most secretive individual in American politics” shouldn’t stop there—why not air all of the Bush administration’s dirty laundry once and for all?
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — How many ironies can a single presidency engender? A cool man who has aroused both warm feelings of affection and a fiery opposition, Obama is seen as too moderate by parts of the left, but the right thinks he has a radical statist agenda.
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Even Fox News’ Shep Smith said it: America doesn’t torture ... although the recently released set of torture memos belies that declaration. Meanwhile, President Obama’s none too pleased with credit card companies, and Chrysler has hit the skids. Was there any good news this week? Tony Blankley thinks so.
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So, Sean Hannity told Charles Grodin on Wednesday night that he would agree to be waterboarded “for charity”—and you’d better believe that that sort of talk wasn’t lost on Keith Olbermann. On Thursday’s “Countdown,” Olbermann upped the ante for Hannity’s date with “enhanced interrogation techniques” by offering to open his own pocketbook for the cause.
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smh.com.au
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After a series of denials by the Bush administration, the Obama administration has decided it will give in to demands by human rights groups and release up to 2,000 pictures of “prisoner abuse” (torture) to the public by May 28.
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By Marjorie Cohn — In order to justify George W. Bush’s illegal and unnecessary invasion of Iraq, Bush administration officials put heavy pressure on Pentagon interrogators to get Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah to say there was a link between Iraq and the 9/11 hijackers. That link was never established.
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“Cruel and Unusual” by Anne-Marie Cusac reveals a startling reality: Since 1973, America’s imprisonment rate has jumped more than five times and is now the highest in the world. Why?
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By Eugene Robinson — Obama wants to avoid a long, wrenching legal drama that almost certainly would be partisan and divisive. But I’m not sure it’s possible to skirt the criminal implications of what we already know.
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theblacksentinel.wordpress.com
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What to make of the administration’s policy on holding torturers accountable? Attorney General Eric Holder says he “will not permit the criminalization of policy differences,” but will pursue wrongdoing “to the full extent of the law.” The problem here is that when it comes to torture, policy differences just might be criminal.
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What has emboldened Dick Cheney and Karl Rove to so brazenly criticize the new administration? Has Cheney lost his trademark sneer since he left the White House? All this and more in this clip from Wednesday’s “Daily Show” episode.
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White House / Pete Souza
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If the president is so worried that prosecutions of America’s torturers and torture-enablers could feel like a partisan witch hunt, why not turn to a Republican with firsthand experience in being tortured?
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theatlantic.com
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In their effort to build a “new paradigm” for dealing with enemy prisoners, senior Bush administration officials, according to a report released by the Senate Armed Services Committee, suppressed or ignored conflicting legal opinions to ensure that “aggressive interrogation techniques” (torture) would be available to interrogators.
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By Amy Goodman — The door to bringing torturers to justice is open only a crack. Whether it is kicked open or slammed shut is not up to the president. Though he may occupy the most powerful office on Earth, there is a force more powerful: committed people demanding change.
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By William Pfaff — In 1935, Sinclair Lewis, the first American writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize, wrote a novel entitled “It Can’t Happen Here” to influence the 1936 presidential election. He was off by about 66 years.
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White House / Pete Souza
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Responding to reporters Tuesday, the president walked back from his “torture is a thing of the past” policy. While the administration still doesn’t want to hassle the good Germans who carried out torture, or even the superiors who ordered it, Obama said the Justice Department may go after the Bush lawyers who tried to legalize such abuses.
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By Marie Cocco — It is astonishing that someone who has proved in his memos to be so lacking in judgment and so ideologically twisted in his reasoning that he laid a blanket of legal immunity over those who wanted to torture now holds one of the most powerful and prestigious seats a lawyer can attain.
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By Mike Farrell — President Obama’s decision to spare CIA torturers from prosecution stands the Nuremberg principles on their head. “Good Germans who were only following orders” are not exempt from the bar of justice. Individuals must be held responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
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AP photo / Nam Y. Huh
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By Chris Hedges — Israel and the United States will together boycott the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Geneva. Racism, an endemic feature of Israeli and American society, is not, we have decided, open for international inspection. It’s times like this President Obama would do well to heed the sermons of his former pastor.
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Wikimedia Commons
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Was it for information or revenge that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man who claimed to be the mastermind behind 9/11, was waterboarded 183 times by the CIA? That figure, sussed out of a Justice Department memo by some enterprising bloggers and repeated in the pages of The New York Times, makes the president’s determination not to prosecute such torture all the more curious.
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Now that the Department of Justice has released the latest stunning Bush-era torture memos, this Al-Jazeera English interview with former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, in which he admits that the Bush administration flouted the Geneva Conventions and that he probably should have resigned, is even more alarming.
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youtube.com / sanderson1611
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Pastor Steven Anderson of Tempe, Ariz., says he was Tasered, assaulted and denied medical treatment after he refused to submit to a search by Border Patrol officers at an immigration checkpoint east of San Diego. The ACLU has called the area a “Constitution-free zone” where such abuse has become commonplace.
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guardian.co.uk
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After key Bush era CIA torture documents were released by the Obama administration, human rights officials are dismayed at the news that CIA agents who ordered and conducted torture will not be prosecuted.
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By David Sirota — As Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s posthumous infamy turns 10 on April 20, I wish I were surprised that Columbine-like shootings are still happening, or even that our national discussion about violence hasn’t yet matured past gun control and video games.
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By Eugene Robinson — I realize that many Americans, given the scope of the economic crisis and the ambitions of the new administration, would rather look forward than revisit the past. The business of torture, however, is too unspeakable to be left unfinished.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Marie Cocco — Indefinite and secret detention at the U.S. air base in Bagram, Afghanistan, was a fundamental breach of justice and morality when the Bush administration did it. It is made worse by the stench of hypocrisy when the Obama administration does it.
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By Joe Conason — In the struggle against the extremists and terrorists, the new president understands how to divide the enemy and neutralize their base—and is uniquely suited to accomplish the mission. He got elected in the United States of America, after all.
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U.S. Army / Staff Sgt. Jon Soucy
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Mark Danner made headlines last week with his essay in The New York Review of Books on the CIA’s use of torture and a secret report from the International Committee of the Red Cross detailing such practices. Find out why he says, “Torture is for people with weak nerves.”
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AP photo / M. Spencer Green
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By Chris Hedges — The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant. Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification. Our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse.
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secint50.un.org
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By Robert Fisk — Dr Salim el-Hoss is 80 now but remains a staunch defender of human rights and democracy, an opponent of the death penalty and an outspoken supporter of Palestinians. When I recommended to him a long article on American torture, he read it right through to the end and then put the paper down with a slap on his knee. “Terrible, terrible,” he muttered.
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abcnews.com
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A CIA sex scandal, or, more precisely, allegations that a CIA agent raped two Algerian women, has raised questions in Congress about how the agency polices itself. Oddly, discussions of the controversy have failed to emphasize another significant “oops” moment in CIA operations regarding corruption and the need for oversight: torture.
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The Guardian / Frank Baron
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Growing evidence of British complicity in “unacceptable activities,” including participation in U.S. torture practices, has prompted Prime Minister Gordon Brown to publish the rules that determine how U.K. intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6 can interrogate suspects.
Posted on Mar 18, 2009
READ MORE 
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U.S. Army / Staff Sgt. Jon Soucy
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President Bush repeatedly claimed that the United States, under his leadership, did not torture, but a confidential report prepared by the International Committee of the Red Cross found otherwise. The ICRC has a unique global role in monitoring the treatment of prisoners.
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The International Criminal Court recently issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, a move Sudanese officials denounced as politically motivated. Will it ever be the case that the ICC takes former U.S. President George W. Bush to task?
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By William Pfaff — Justice Department documents that demonstrate the Bush administration’s view of the president’s constitutional power in a “state of war” tell us things we suspected but didn’t want to know.
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aclu.org
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The Justice Department has released nine secret memos and opinions written by the Office of Legal Counsel that authorized some of the Bush administration’s unlawful national security policies.
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breakfornews.com
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The International Criminal Court is getting its teeth, as judges have ordered the arrest of Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity—including murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture and rape—marking the first time the ICC has issued a warrant for a sitting head of state.
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Marching in Chicago: Resisting Rahm Emanuel’s Neoliberal Savagery
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