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Transcript #127-1 A Torrent Of Additional Evidence Of Right-Wing
Torture-Mongering Partially hyperlinked to sources.
For all sources, see the data
resources page. Greetings!
You're listening to podcast #127 of Blast The Right.
I'm your host Jack Clark. Great
to have you on board. Today, you'll hear a torrent of new
evidence that's just come out which further details the Bush administration's
torture regime. You'll learn about
the self-styled "War Council," use of Chinese torture techniques,
vehement protests by the military's own lawyers, hiding the abuse from the Red
Cross, and, recent medical findings of marks of torture on detainee's bodies. In a concluding QuickBlast, you'll
hear Dick Morris serially lie about Democratic tax plans, and learn how to
respond to any right-winger spouting similar nonsense. Let's get right into it. audio: Bush I've said to the people that we don't torture, and
we don't. [source] Originally I intended to use today's
show to update several past podcasts. One
of the updates was to be on right-wing pro-torture policies.
There was a new story on that. But then there was another new story
the next day, and one the following day, and pretty soon I had five such new
developments at hand. So I'll spend the bulk of today on
five torture updates. While you probably already believe
the Bush administration tortures prisoners,
the more details that come out, the more impossible it is for the
Bushians to deny that they explicitly authorized and oversaw a program of
torturing detainees. Sources you'll hear include:
McClatchey newspapers, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, msnbc.com, the
Associated Press, the Washington Post, and CBS News. The first update would concern the
so-called "War
Council." Apparently there were five Bush
administration lawyers who were the driving force beyond the attempt to legally
justify torture. They drafted legal opinions
that circumvented the military’s code of justice, the federal court system and
America’s international treaties in order to prevent anyone - from soldiers on
the ground to the president - from being held accountable for activities that at
other times have been considered war crimes.
These five attorneys called
themselves the War Council. They conducted secret meetings every
few weeks in each other's offices to plot legal strategy. The War Council? Do you remember a few podcasts ago
you heard
how Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and others repeatedly met in the White House to
discuss which specific torture techniques to use on which prisoner?
I said if it were a movie script, no one would believe it. Well, this War Council name invokes
the same feeling in me. Does it strike you as odd, pathetic,
laughable as it does me? Where are Superman and Batman to get
the bad guys?! Or the Justice League
of America, the organization of superheros? Did War Council members set up phone
booths so they could change into superhero costumes before having their
draft-a-pro-torture-memo meetings? It's like little boys with their tree
house club rooms. Are offices of War Council members
festooned with knickknacks and little models in the form of guillotines and
torture racks and water boards? But really, this isn't funny. One of the members of the War Council
was John Yoo, who publicly stated that he couldn't rule out authorizing the
crushing of a child's testicles to force the child's parent to talk. audio: Yoo Questioner: If the President deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there's no law that can stop that. Yoo: No treaty. Questioner: And also no law by Congress. That's what you wrote in the August, 2002 memo. Yoo: I
think that depends on why the President feels that he needs to do that.
[source] Former Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales was another member of this august club.
So was David Addington, who's presently chief of staff to Dick Cheney. Enough of the War Council, the
"who" behind the creation of an attempted legal cover for torture.
On to another stunning revelation,
concerning the origins of the torture techniques the War Council was trying to
legally justify. In prior podcasts you learned how the
Bush administration torturers studied and adopted Soviet Union interrogation
techniques. Check out podcast
98, for example. Apparently the right-wing affinity
for adopting Communist torture methods didn't stop there. As reported
in the New York Times: The military trainers who
came to Guantanamo 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.” …[T]heir 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 Times dryly notes that: The only change made in
the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist
Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.” Yeah, I guess that might have given
the US personnel taking the class some pause. Democratic Senator Carl Levin of
Michigan is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
He conducted the hearing where this revelation was made.
He makes a critical point: What makes this document
doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions People say we need
intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence. Why not?
False intelligence is exactly what the Bush administration loves, to gin
up war. Why don't you ask your friendly local
right-winger, which torture methods they're partial to, Evil Empire Soviet, or
Red Chinese? Or do they prefer America use a
combination of the two? Next up: it's military attorneys who
raise vehement protests against the Bush administration's torture program! BREAK Did the Bushians establish a legal
edifice for torture, and teach Chinese torture techniques, without anyone with a
brain and a conscience noticing, and protesting? The Judge Advocate General's corps is
charged with enforcing the Uniform Military Code of Justice, which establishes
rules of war and forbids torture. Well, these JAG lawyers
warned the Pentagon that
methods it was using post-9/11 violated military, U.S. and international law.
Those objections were overruled… Or as McClatchey newspapers put
it: When they protested, the
War Council shut them out. Our friends the War Council. “We were absolutely
marginalized,” said Donald J. Guter, a rear admiral who served as the Navy’s
judge advocate general from 2000 to 2002. Some JAG leaders were, however, able
to speak bluntly to War Council members. Here's
Thomas Romig, who served from 2001 to 2005 as the Army's judge advocate general: John Yoo wanted to use
military commissions in the manner they were used in the Indian wars I looked at him and said,
‘You know, that was 100-and-something years ago. You’re out of your mind;
we’re talking about the law.’ ” The law, what's that?
Have you ever seen the right-wing meet a law they weren't all too happy
to violate? Here's quite the prescient military
official, Mark Fallon, a higher up in the Defense Department's Crinimal
Investigation Task Force. He …warned in an October
2002 e-mail to Pentagon colleagues that the techniques under discussion would
"shock the conscience of any legal body" that might review how the
interrogations were conducted. "This looks like the
kind of stuff Congressional hearings are made of," Fallon wrote. He added:
"Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this. What a powerful movie scene.
Too bad it's the real right-wing nightmare. And these right-wingers knew what
they were doing would not be looked kindly on by the rest of the world. The next revelation concerns the Red
Cross. The International Committee of the
Red Cross, the ICRC, is responsible
for monitoring whether Geneva Convention rules on the treatment of military
prisoners are being followed. So the right-wing made strenuous efforts
to prevent the Red Cross from finding out what they were up to. They concealed the harsh treatment. Listen to these quotes from the
minutes of a October 2002 meeting at Gitmo. This is Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, the
top military lawyer at Gitmo: We
may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around. It is better not
to expose them to any controversial techniques She also said,
regarding such techniques as sleep deprivation: Officially it is not
happening. It is not being reported
officially. The ICRC is a serious concern. They will be in and out, scrutinizing
our operations, unless they are displeased and decide to protest and leave. This
would draw a lot of negative attention. The Bushians also hid the location of
detainees. Here's another person at that
meeting, Jonathan Fredman, chief counsel of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center: In
the past when the ICRC has made a big deal about certain detainees, the DOD
(Defense Department) has ‘moved’ them away from the attention of the ICRC. The US often complains that other
nations prevent Red Cross access to prisoners, and that they'll temporarily
improve conditions when inspections are occurring. Sounds like we're doing the same
thing, doesn't it? Why don't you ask a right-wing friend
or acquaintance, the next time a foreign government seizes a US citizen and
denies holding him or her, how are we going to complain?
We do the same thing. Up next: medical exams provide
physical evidence of US torture of detainees. BREAK Alright, so you have the War Council,
the Communist Chinese techniques, the protesting military lawyers, and the
hide-and-go-seek with the Red Cross. Are your neck muscles all loosened up
from shaking your head in disbelief? Well, I hope your jaw is
well-lubricated, because it may drop now multiple times. Last on our hit parade of right-wing
torture-mongering, as reported in the Boston
Globe, quote: Human Rights Group Says It Has Proof of Detainee Abuse
by
Bryan Bender WASHINGTON
- A Cambridge-based human rights organization said it has found medical evidence
supporting the claims of 11 former detainees who were allegedly tortured while
in American custody between 2001 and 2004… Medical
evaluations of the former inmates found injuries consistent with the alleged
abuse, including the psychological effects of sensory deprivation and forced
nudity as well as signs of “severe physical and sexual assault,” Physicians
for Human Rights said in a report
scheduled for release today. Four of the prisoners were imprisoned
at Gitmo after capture in Afghanistan. Seven
were held in Iraq. Now as I detail some of this
evidence, you have to remember this: None were ever charged with a crime.
All have been released. I repeat: None were ever charged with a crime.
All have been released. Ok: One detainee, 41 year old Kamal, was
held for 9 months at Abu Ghraib. He
claimed to have been stabbed in the cheek with a screwdriver, among other abuse.
The doctors said a healed puncture injury matches that description. How's he doing now psychologically? Kamal’s
clinical presentation, reported history of abuse, and the result of
psychological testing support the presence of several psychiatric diagnoses the report said. The diagnoses
include depression,
a panic disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the report. How about Amir, late 20's, held at
Abu Graib for 16 months. He claimed that he had been sodomized
by his captors. The medical evidence showed
signs of rectal tearing that are highly consistent with his report of having
been sodomized with a broomstick Amir also said he was forced by his
interrogators to howl like a dog while a soldier urinated on him. He fainted, the report
said, “after a soldier stepped on his genitals." One more: Yasser, mid-40's, Abu Ghraib.
He claimed American personnel had subjected him to electric shock
torture. His thumbs had scars, and
his tongue irregularities, that supported this contention. These eleven prisoners of the United
States -- and remember, none were ever charged with a crime, all were released
-- these prisoners claim they were subjected
to other forms of physical abuse. Such
as sleep deprivation, extremes of heat and cold, being chained in stress
positions for over 18 hours. Psychological abuse including forced
nudity in front of female soldiers and interrogators, as well as being told that
their female relatives would be raped, and that they would be executed. The Physicians for Human Rights
report said that all eleven of these innocent former detainees are suffering
from physical or mental trauma as a result of their abuse while in American
custody. But hey, let's believe George when he
says: audio: Bush I've said to the people that we don't torture, and
we don't. [source] BREAK All of what you've heard, about how
the torture program was conceived, justified, executed and covered up, as well
as the suffering it inflicted on people, gives the lie to the biggest whopper of
all: audio: Bush: We certainly wish Abu
Ghraib hadn't happened But that
shouldn't reflect America. This the
action of some soldiers. [source] This bad apples argument has been
totally discredited. These torture
techniques weren't just used at Abu Ghraib, but were also used at Gitmo and at
other facilities and in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some, like the electric shock,
sodomizing and screwdriver through the cheek, are at this point at least, not
among the ones we know were officially authorized. But who knows what tomorrow's
revelations will bring. After all, we have this gem from the
minutes of the Gitmo meeting I discussed earlier.
It's from that senior CIA lawyer, Jonathan Fredman.
He said torture "is basically subject to perception." His only standard seems to have been If the detainee dies,
you're doing it wrong Yes, he really said that: If the detainee dies,
you're doing it wrong. That would seem to leave plenty of
room for even more gruesome forms of torture than have so far been revealed as
officially sanctioned Bush administration policy. Even without revelations of such
additional horrors, there's at least one retired military officer who's speaking
the truth based just on what we definitely know now to be true. Major General Antonio Taguba was in
charge of the official investigation into the
Abu Ghraib abuse scandal. He wrote
a preface to the Physicians for Human Rights report. Listen carefully: This
report tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our
custody when the commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic
regime of torture After years of disclosures by government
investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations,
there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has
committed war crimes. The only question is whether those who ordered the use of
torture will be held to account. To repeat: …[T]here is no longer any doubt as to whether the
current administration has committed war crimes. The only question is whether
those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account. Wow, pretty tough words from a former
Major General. So what'll happen?
Will anyone be held to account? Progressive forces are trying to push
for investigations and prosecutions. On the advocacy front, for example,
you have the ACLU.
It is increasingly clear
that the decision to abandon the rule of law and order torture and abuse was
made at the very top. We look forward to the
full investigative report from the Armed Services Committee and call on Congress
to hold accountable any and all public officials involved in ordering illegal
torture. On the actually doing something
front, A group of 56
Congressional Democrats last week asked the Justice Department to appoint a
special counsel to investigate whether any Bush administration officials may
have broken laws in approving the use of harsh interrogation techniques for
suspected terrorists. Only 56.
I wouldn't expect anything serious to happen anyway, since this is the
Bush Justice Department. They're not
going to seriously investigate themselves. On the other hand, under a President
Obama, more Democrats could find the courage to support such an investigation,
and a Justice Department headed by someone other than a Bush flunky could very
well undertake such an endeavor. Could, not definitely will, but
could. Certainly this would never happen
under a President McCain. Under a President Obama, it could. How to get from could to will? It'll probably require a heck of a
lot of pressure from us progressives to force it to happen. But then, so what?
Pressuring the government to do the right thing is what we progressives
are all about, isn't it? Pressuring even a centrist Democrat,
if that is what Obama turns out to be, is going to be a heck of a lot more
likely to succeed, than trying to pressure another Republican administration. Trying to do that would be a hopeless
task. Pressuring a Democratic
administration, and a much stronger Democratic majority Congress, is doable. Doable is a lot better than hopeless,
don't you think? On this and a whole host of issues. Transcript #127-2 Dick Morris Lies About Democratic Tax Plans Partially hyperlinked to sources.
For all sources, see the data
resources page. Here's a QuickBlast for you:
continued right-wing lies about Democratic tax plans. The source here is mediamatters.org Listen to right-wing pundit Dick
Morris: audio: Morris HANNITY: …President Obama -- what would he do? MORRIS: He would double the capital gains tax. That means that you get far less when you sell your home, or your 401(k), or your stock plan. He would double the dividends tax. That means that old ladies who clip coupons from corporate stocks get less money. He would double the -- he would increase the limit on Social Security taxes, which means instead of paying 12 1/2 percent of the first $100,000, you pay it on everything that you're making. HANNITY: Wow. If you've been listening to Blast The
Right, you can probably pick out the lies. Let's go through Morris's misleading
spiel, lie by lie: He would double the
capital gains tax. Morris omits that such would apply
only to those making over $250,000 a year, the wealthiest 3% of the population. That
means that you get far less when you sell your home, Again, only if you make more than
$250,000 a year. Moreover, Morris
omits the fact that in most cases you can exempt up to $250,000 in gains from
capital gains taxes for a home you occupy. For
married homeowners, that's $500,000. So
you'd have to have an income level of $500,000 or a million dollars, including
the profit on the sale of your home, before any increased capital gains tax
would kick in. Hardly applicable to most people. or your 401(k), or your
stock plan. Again, not unless you make over
$250,000 a year. And Morris maybe
doesn't even know, that most distributions from 401(k) and IRA accounts are
taxed as ordinary income, not capital gains! He would double the
dividends tax. That means that old ladies who clip coupons from corporate stocks
get less money. Again, that $250,000 exemption from
the increase. Only quite wealthy old
ladies clipping coupons would pay a higher tax, Dick. Finally, He would double the -- he
would increase the limit on Social Security taxes, which means instead of paying
12 1/2 percent of the first $100,000, you pay it on everything that you're
making. Wrong,
Obama's plan includes a "doughnut hole" where
income above the current cap but under, yes, you guessed it, $250,000 is
exempt. Obama has explicitly stated: "[A]nybody under
$250,000 would not be affected whatsoever. Ninety-seven percent of Americans
will see absolutely no change in their taxes under my plan." Obama couldn't be any clearer.
But that's only relevant if someone is interested in telling the truth.
It seems Morris isn't.
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