Bush signs his KGB-Gestapo TORTURE bill today...
<< Bush was able to DIVERT ATTENTION from REPUBLICAN TROUBLES when he first asked for the legislation during a dramatic speech on Sept. 6 in the White House East Room attended by some families of Sept. 11 victims. >>
To the eternal disgrace of the Democrat Party, which didn't even TRY to muster a veto, Mr. Bush is signing his precious Gestapo-KGB torture bill today, Mr. Bush whining that he can't run America's GWOT without torturing anyone and everyone he desires to have tortured, regardless of innocence of those rounded up in vast counter-insurgency sweeps, or those fingered as "terrorists" by warlord allies paid a bounty for each suspect they deliver, or even by American officials with an ax to grind against locals who do not show enough deference to the new Rome.
<< Earlier this year, an anti-torture panel at the United Nations recommended the closure of Guantanamo and criticized alleged U.S. use of secret prisons and suspected delivery of prisoners to foreign countries for questioning.
- - - THE LEGISLATION NONETHELESS WON OVERWHELMING APPROVAL in the US HOUSE and SENATE. >>
In a way, Mr. Bush is correct: it is quite impossible to run CHATTEL SLAVERY without the constant threat of the whip, of beatings, of rape, exposure, and other forms of physical torture and terrorism known as corporal punisment and summary, or drumhead, execution. Even apart from chattel slavery, author Adam Nicolson, writing about the victorious British fleet at the battle of Trafalgar, notes that within two weeks of the great victory, almost two dozen men on the Royal Navy flagship Victory (Nelson's ship before he was killed in the battle) were subject to the ferocious sting of 60 lashes each, among other brutal punishments meted out by the ship's command to the very sailors and men WHO HAD JUST DELIVERED England's nation-saving victory!
As detailed in author Michael Lind's book "Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics," the re-establishment of a neo-Confederate empire based on violence, subjugation, and irrefutable dominance is indeed at the core of the Right-Wing agenda, especially as it is formulated by the ultra-conservative, hyper-wealthy oil barons of Texas and other powerful millionaires of the Deep South. Lind likens the new ('modern') conservative autocrats of the Deep South to the resource extraction robber barons of the ante-bellum South, plantation owners who ruled over a disenfranchised, powerless, eternally serville underclass subject at any moment to the ferocity of the whip, the merciless rage of the 'owner,' the fury of the lynch-mob and the animal terror of being trailed by the bloodhounds.
And make no mistake: THAT IS the right-wing agenda for America today, no matter how well the billionaire-funded right and their media machines and think tanks - AEI, CATO, Olin foundation, FOX 'news,' now even CNN, the Washington Post, and NY Times - try to slap a veneer of "Moral Values" or "family values" on the immediate autocratic, kleptocratic political goals of America's ruling class and political junta. And realize: THAT is the agenda for people right here in America; much less for the faceless colonial subjects of America's distant, extended empire as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and other Leo Straussian neo-cons see it in Iraq, the Mideast, and now even Central Asia, where a ruler with a reputation for boiling his opponents alive is one of America's "allies" in 'the war on terror.'
Author Adam Nicolson, in several chapters of his book on Nelson's victory at Trafalgar ("Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and the Battle of Trafalgar") echoes and amplifies Lind's notions of an American empire and ruling class bent on violence, ruthless authortarianism, and the systematic application of violence even on one's own people, even on one's own men on a ship of war, much less on distant, faceless, god-less, subhuman enemies.
http://www.powells.com/biblio?isbn=0060753625)
Trying to understand the behavior of the fighting fleet, how "Nelson had been able to summon a scale of aggression from his fleets drawn from among the innermost levels" of common men, Nicholson writes:
"There is a long tradition of English violence. More Catholics were burned at the stake in 16th Century England, than in any other country in Europe. A higher percentage of the population died in the English Civil War, than in the French Revolution. And the suppression and brutalization of the Scottish Highlanders after Bonnie Prince Charlie's rebellion in 1745, became the scandal of Enlightened Europe."
<< By 1805 the sequence of violent and revolutionary events in Europe over the previous 15 years had established in England, or to be strict, re-summoned, a form of millenarian fever which had not been seen since the 17th century.
The template for this fever came from the prophets of the Old Testament, from Dueteronomy, Daniel, Ezekial, and Isaiah, and from the Book of Revelation which draws from them.
Deep in that Jewish tradition, and radiantly powerful in those books, is the idea that a moment of fearful justice will come, when the wrath of the divine descends on earth. It will know no compromise, its very violence is a measure of its goodness. Peace is inaccessible without that violence, because violence is righteousness in action. Apocalypse is the root to millennium. Battle, sacrifice, the glittering sword, the rivers of blood, the midnight hour, the dangers that stand before you, all those were real enough at Trafalgar, and the new millennium of peaceful dominance they led to was not something in the next world, but in this, the unrivaled creation of a god-blessed, ragingly commercial British empire.
This was not the millennium of freedom and political equality of which the radicals in the 1790s had dreamed, but it was the only apocalypse, and the only millennium, which the British regime could allow. >>
It is also, of course, critical to note that the "millennium of peaceful dominance" that Nicolson writes of the Royal Navy enforced British empire was not all that "peaceful." To begin with, the appalling conditions in Ireland which led Jonathan Swift to write his ultimate satire "A Modest Proposal" in 1729 (70-odd years before Nelson's Trafalgar), would grow even worse, and by 1850 (that is, 50-odd years after Trafalgar) lead to the massive GREAT IRISH FAMINE, known in America and Britain as the Irish potato famine, even though British seizure of grain stocks were as much to blame for the death of ONE MILLION poor Irish as was the blight of the potato crop, to which Irish peasants and displaced families had been driven to subsist on. ONE MILLION Irish STARVED at the hands of their English overlords is not exactly what an objective observer would call "a peaceful dominance."
And, almost contemporaneously, England was subjugating the massive India sub-continent, and using enslaved Indian peasants to grow opium to export, at point of bayonet and canon-barrel, to China. Far from being the world's paragon of "MORAL VIRTUE," Queen Victoria was instead the world's all-time greatest drug-pusher. Not even the richest, most ruthless Columbian cartels have the Royal Navy, Marines, and Army at their disposal to enforce their turf wars and terrorize their enemies.
While THOSE may have been the victories of "PEACEFUL DOMINANCE" of the British empire in ascent that Nicolson is clearly (as an Englishman and writer) so fond of, within a few decades the British would themselves be victims of carnage on a massive scale, at the battles of the Somme, Flanders, Gallipolli, and Kut. (Iraq, where 15,000 British troops were marched to their death in 1917in an Ottoman reprisal of the Armenian Genocide, then on-going in the deserts of northern Turkey and eastern Syria.) And just two decades later, the British would again reel from the carnage of the Blitz, Dunkirk, Burma, and the atrocious casualties suffered by the RAF, and by English civilians at that hands of the V-1 and V-2 missiles.
WOULD that America's current infatuation with violence and torture not lead us to a similar similar level of carnage and an only illusory rise of empire.
===============================
Bush to sign law for tough interrogation
By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer
17 Oct. 2006
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061017/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_terrorism;_ylt=AlIqGarRpI8jIE8ejviL5qms0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3OTB1amhuBHNlYwNtdHM-
WASHINGTON - President Bush is signing into law new standards expediting interrogation and prosecution of terror suspects, a bill the White House says strengthens his hand in a time of war.
Bush's plan becomes law just six weeks after he acknowledged that the CIA had been secretly interrogating suspected terrorists overseas and pressed Congress to quickly give authority to try them in military commissions.
The bill ready for signing would protect detainees from blatant abuses during questioning — such as rape, torture and "cruel and inhuman" treatment — but does not require that any of them be granted legal counsel. Also, it specifically bars detainees from filing habeas corpus petitions challenging their detentions in federal courts.
White House press secretary Tony Snow said that after Bush signs the legislation Tuesday, the government will immediately begin moving toward the goal of prosecuting some of the high-value suspects being held at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He expected it would take a month or two to get "things moving toward a trial phase."
"In terms of having trials, for good and obvious reasons, you don't do that overnight," Snow told reporters. "You do have to make sure that the defense is going to be able to do its job properly and the prosecution the same."
The swift implementation of the law is a rare bit of good news for Bush as casualties mount in Iraq in daily violence. Lawmakers are increasingly calling for a change of strategy and political anxieties are jeopardizing Republican's chances of hanging onto control of Congress.
Bush was able to divert attention from Republican troubles when he first asked for the legislation during a dramatic speech on Sept. 6 in the White House East Room attended by some families of Sept. 11 victims.
But the distraction was short-lived as new revelations of Bush's handling of the Iraq war in a book by Bob Woodward raised fresh criticism of his administration. And Republican Rep. Mark Foley (news, bio, voting record)'s resignation from Congress after amid revelations of tawdry e-mails sent to former House pages drowned out Bush's terrorism agenda.
The signing ceremony offered Bush the chance to bask in a legislative victory. About 150 people were invited to the White House for the event, including military officers, members of Congress and members of Bush's cabinet.
"President Bush is going to mark this bill signing as a historic moment because it is a law that he knows will be effective in preventing terrorist attacks and keeping Americans safe," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino.
Bush needed the legislation because the Supreme Court in June said the administration's plan for trying detainees in military tribunals violated U.S. and international law.
The legislation, which sets the rules for court proceedings, applies to those selected by the military for prosecution and leaves mostly unaffected the majority of the 14,000 prisoners in U.S. custody, most of whom are in Iraq.
The Pentagon had previously selected 10 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay prison to be tried. Bush is expected also to try some or all of the 14 suspects held by the CIA in secret prisons and recently transferred to military custody at Guantanamo — including the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and architects of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole and the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
The bill also eliminates some rights common in military and civilian courts. For example, the commission would be allowed to consider hearsay evidence so long as a judge determined it was reliable. Hearsay is barred from civilian courts.
The legislation also says the president can "interpret the meaning and application" of international standards for prisoner treatment, a provision intended to allow him to authorize aggressive interrogation methods that might otherwise be seen as illegal by international courts. Snow said Bush would probably eventually issue an executive order that would describe his interpretation.
Many Democrats opposed the legislation because they said it eliminated rights of defendants considered fundamental to American values, such as a person's ability to go to court to protest their detention and the use of coerced testimony as evidence.
Earlier this year, an anti-torture panel at the United Nations recommended the closure of Guantanamo and criticized alleged U.S. use of secret prisons and suspected delivery of prisoners to foreign countries for questioning.
The legislation nonetheless won overwhelming approval in the House and Senate.
To the eternal disgrace of the Democrat Party, which didn't even TRY to muster a veto, Mr. Bush is signing his precious Gestapo-KGB torture bill today, Mr. Bush whining that he can't run America's GWOT without torturing anyone and everyone he desires to have tortured, regardless of innocence of those rounded up in vast counter-insurgency sweeps, or those fingered as "terrorists" by warlord allies paid a bounty for each suspect they deliver, or even by American officials with an ax to grind against locals who do not show enough deference to the new Rome.
<< Earlier this year, an anti-torture panel at the United Nations recommended the closure of Guantanamo and criticized alleged U.S. use of secret prisons and suspected delivery of prisoners to foreign countries for questioning.
- - - THE LEGISLATION NONETHELESS WON OVERWHELMING APPROVAL in the US HOUSE and SENATE. >>
In a way, Mr. Bush is correct: it is quite impossible to run CHATTEL SLAVERY without the constant threat of the whip, of beatings, of rape, exposure, and other forms of physical torture and terrorism known as corporal punisment and summary, or drumhead, execution. Even apart from chattel slavery, author Adam Nicolson, writing about the victorious British fleet at the battle of Trafalgar, notes that within two weeks of the great victory, almost two dozen men on the Royal Navy flagship Victory (Nelson's ship before he was killed in the battle) were subject to the ferocious sting of 60 lashes each, among other brutal punishments meted out by the ship's command to the very sailors and men WHO HAD JUST DELIVERED England's nation-saving victory!
As detailed in author Michael Lind's book "Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics," the re-establishment of a neo-Confederate empire based on violence, subjugation, and irrefutable dominance is indeed at the core of the Right-Wing agenda, especially as it is formulated by the ultra-conservative, hyper-wealthy oil barons of Texas and other powerful millionaires of the Deep South. Lind likens the new ('modern') conservative autocrats of the Deep South to the resource extraction robber barons of the ante-bellum South, plantation owners who ruled over a disenfranchised, powerless, eternally serville underclass subject at any moment to the ferocity of the whip, the merciless rage of the 'owner,' the fury of the lynch-mob and the animal terror of being trailed by the bloodhounds.
And make no mistake: THAT IS the right-wing agenda for America today, no matter how well the billionaire-funded right and their media machines and think tanks - AEI, CATO, Olin foundation, FOX 'news,' now even CNN, the Washington Post, and NY Times - try to slap a veneer of "Moral Values" or "family values" on the immediate autocratic, kleptocratic political goals of America's ruling class and political junta. And realize: THAT is the agenda for people right here in America; much less for the faceless colonial subjects of America's distant, extended empire as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and other Leo Straussian neo-cons see it in Iraq, the Mideast, and now even Central Asia, where a ruler with a reputation for boiling his opponents alive is one of America's "allies" in 'the war on terror.'
Author Adam Nicolson, in several chapters of his book on Nelson's victory at Trafalgar ("Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and the Battle of Trafalgar") echoes and amplifies Lind's notions of an American empire and ruling class bent on violence, ruthless authortarianism, and the systematic application of violence even on one's own people, even on one's own men on a ship of war, much less on distant, faceless, god-less, subhuman enemies.
http://www.powells.com/biblio?isbn=0060753625)
Trying to understand the behavior of the fighting fleet, how "Nelson had been able to summon a scale of aggression from his fleets drawn from among the innermost levels" of common men, Nicholson writes:
"There is a long tradition of English violence. More Catholics were burned at the stake in 16th Century England, than in any other country in Europe. A higher percentage of the population died in the English Civil War, than in the French Revolution. And the suppression and brutalization of the Scottish Highlanders after Bonnie Prince Charlie's rebellion in 1745, became the scandal of Enlightened Europe."
<< By 1805 the sequence of violent and revolutionary events in Europe over the previous 15 years had established in England, or to be strict, re-summoned, a form of millenarian fever which had not been seen since the 17th century.
The template for this fever came from the prophets of the Old Testament, from Dueteronomy, Daniel, Ezekial, and Isaiah, and from the Book of Revelation which draws from them.
Deep in that Jewish tradition, and radiantly powerful in those books, is the idea that a moment of fearful justice will come, when the wrath of the divine descends on earth. It will know no compromise, its very violence is a measure of its goodness. Peace is inaccessible without that violence, because violence is righteousness in action. Apocalypse is the root to millennium. Battle, sacrifice, the glittering sword, the rivers of blood, the midnight hour, the dangers that stand before you, all those were real enough at Trafalgar, and the new millennium of peaceful dominance they led to was not something in the next world, but in this, the unrivaled creation of a god-blessed, ragingly commercial British empire.
This was not the millennium of freedom and political equality of which the radicals in the 1790s had dreamed, but it was the only apocalypse, and the only millennium, which the British regime could allow. >>
It is also, of course, critical to note that the "millennium of peaceful dominance" that Nicolson writes of the Royal Navy enforced British empire was not all that "peaceful." To begin with, the appalling conditions in Ireland which led Jonathan Swift to write his ultimate satire "A Modest Proposal" in 1729 (70-odd years before Nelson's Trafalgar), would grow even worse, and by 1850 (that is, 50-odd years after Trafalgar) lead to the massive GREAT IRISH FAMINE, known in America and Britain as the Irish potato famine, even though British seizure of grain stocks were as much to blame for the death of ONE MILLION poor Irish as was the blight of the potato crop, to which Irish peasants and displaced families had been driven to subsist on. ONE MILLION Irish STARVED at the hands of their English overlords is not exactly what an objective observer would call "a peaceful dominance."
And, almost contemporaneously, England was subjugating the massive India sub-continent, and using enslaved Indian peasants to grow opium to export, at point of bayonet and canon-barrel, to China. Far from being the world's paragon of "MORAL VIRTUE," Queen Victoria was instead the world's all-time greatest drug-pusher. Not even the richest, most ruthless Columbian cartels have the Royal Navy, Marines, and Army at their disposal to enforce their turf wars and terrorize their enemies.
While THOSE may have been the victories of "PEACEFUL DOMINANCE" of the British empire in ascent that Nicolson is clearly (as an Englishman and writer) so fond of, within a few decades the British would themselves be victims of carnage on a massive scale, at the battles of the Somme, Flanders, Gallipolli, and Kut. (Iraq, where 15,000 British troops were marched to their death in 1917in an Ottoman reprisal of the Armenian Genocide, then on-going in the deserts of northern Turkey and eastern Syria.) And just two decades later, the British would again reel from the carnage of the Blitz, Dunkirk, Burma, and the atrocious casualties suffered by the RAF, and by English civilians at that hands of the V-1 and V-2 missiles.
WOULD that America's current infatuation with violence and torture not lead us to a similar similar level of carnage and an only illusory rise of empire.
===============================
Bush to sign law for tough interrogation
By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer
17 Oct. 2006
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061017/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_terrorism;_ylt=AlIqGarRpI8jIE8ejviL5qms0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3OTB1amhuBHNlYwNtdHM-
WASHINGTON - President Bush is signing into law new standards expediting interrogation and prosecution of terror suspects, a bill the White House says strengthens his hand in a time of war.
Bush's plan becomes law just six weeks after he acknowledged that the CIA had been secretly interrogating suspected terrorists overseas and pressed Congress to quickly give authority to try them in military commissions.
The bill ready for signing would protect detainees from blatant abuses during questioning — such as rape, torture and "cruel and inhuman" treatment — but does not require that any of them be granted legal counsel. Also, it specifically bars detainees from filing habeas corpus petitions challenging their detentions in federal courts.
White House press secretary Tony Snow said that after Bush signs the legislation Tuesday, the government will immediately begin moving toward the goal of prosecuting some of the high-value suspects being held at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He expected it would take a month or two to get "things moving toward a trial phase."
"In terms of having trials, for good and obvious reasons, you don't do that overnight," Snow told reporters. "You do have to make sure that the defense is going to be able to do its job properly and the prosecution the same."
The swift implementation of the law is a rare bit of good news for Bush as casualties mount in Iraq in daily violence. Lawmakers are increasingly calling for a change of strategy and political anxieties are jeopardizing Republican's chances of hanging onto control of Congress.
Bush was able to divert attention from Republican troubles when he first asked for the legislation during a dramatic speech on Sept. 6 in the White House East Room attended by some families of Sept. 11 victims.
But the distraction was short-lived as new revelations of Bush's handling of the Iraq war in a book by Bob Woodward raised fresh criticism of his administration. And Republican Rep. Mark Foley (news, bio, voting record)'s resignation from Congress after amid revelations of tawdry e-mails sent to former House pages drowned out Bush's terrorism agenda.
The signing ceremony offered Bush the chance to bask in a legislative victory. About 150 people were invited to the White House for the event, including military officers, members of Congress and members of Bush's cabinet.
"President Bush is going to mark this bill signing as a historic moment because it is a law that he knows will be effective in preventing terrorist attacks and keeping Americans safe," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino.
Bush needed the legislation because the Supreme Court in June said the administration's plan for trying detainees in military tribunals violated U.S. and international law.
The legislation, which sets the rules for court proceedings, applies to those selected by the military for prosecution and leaves mostly unaffected the majority of the 14,000 prisoners in U.S. custody, most of whom are in Iraq.
The Pentagon had previously selected 10 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay prison to be tried. Bush is expected also to try some or all of the 14 suspects held by the CIA in secret prisons and recently transferred to military custody at Guantanamo — including the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and architects of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole and the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
The bill also eliminates some rights common in military and civilian courts. For example, the commission would be allowed to consider hearsay evidence so long as a judge determined it was reliable. Hearsay is barred from civilian courts.
The legislation also says the president can "interpret the meaning and application" of international standards for prisoner treatment, a provision intended to allow him to authorize aggressive interrogation methods that might otherwise be seen as illegal by international courts. Snow said Bush would probably eventually issue an executive order that would describe his interpretation.
Many Democrats opposed the legislation because they said it eliminated rights of defendants considered fundamental to American values, such as a person's ability to go to court to protest their detention and the use of coerced testimony as evidence.
Earlier this year, an anti-torture panel at the United Nations recommended the closure of Guantanamo and criticized alleged U.S. use of secret prisons and suspected delivery of prisoners to foreign countries for questioning.
The legislation nonetheless won overwhelming approval in the House and Senate.
posted by verifi at 6:57 AM
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