When did it become acceptable for Americans to allow

Torture?

When we all learned about the secret movement of "yet to be charged" prisoners to secret torture prisons in foreign countries, referred to as

Rendition; Where was the outrage?

When we all learned about the Secret prisons, where we took people to be tortured and that our President and Vice President had approved them; Why was our President not impeached?

Somewhat ironic, or, apropos, that this article hits today, on the eve of the SOTU.

For, it highlights one of the Bush Grindhouse's legacy accomplishments - turning the United States of America into a nation that tortures prisoners.

Ok, let’s review. The CIA carried it out – both the actual torture and the videotaping thereof. Former CIA agents (under contract) destroyed the tapes because current CIA officials refused to do it. CIA lawyers approved all of it beforehand even after the White House told them not to destroy the tapes. And, the pièce de résistance, the U.S. Congress [tacitly] approved of torture, in secret and after the fact.

So, we are to believe that the CIA took it upon themselves to (1) torture the detainees and then (2) destroy the videotapes -- against the expressed [official] wishes of the White House -- in order to protect the identities of the CIA officials who carried out the interrogations torture when Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Carl Levin (D-MI) says that if that premise is used, every single document or file in the CIA system database would have to be destroyed.

It’s not even close to being cause for celebration; not yet, but it’s difficult to keep from feeling at least a tad hopeful lately; we may be experiencing a small shift in the judicial winds against the Bush regime’s extra-legal military justice system.

It just seems to me that the judges are growing annoyed by the decider guy’s unconstitutional endeavors; especially where Guantanamo and CIA extraordinary  renditions are concerned. Judges have been coming down on the side of the U.S. Constitution more, and interrogators and defense attorneys alike are starting to break ranks and come forward to shine some much-needed light on a fundamentally flawed and unfair military justice system.

I just got out of the movie theatre after seeing "Rendition," a film which puts into light parallel aspects of the Maher Arar case. The United States is acting in a despicable fashion by picking up foreign nationals and shuffling them to countries where they can be tortured. Likewise, denying foreign nationals or even, which it will probably come to eventually, American nationals,is an absurd destruction of habeus corpus rights and the foundations of "freedom" provided by democracy in the "Western" world.

Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, was picked up in New York by U.S. officials, deported to Syria (of which he was also a citizen), and then brutally tortured for 10 months. Where does the U.S. government get the right to act like a dictatorship? What does the freedom to live (ccording to the Bill of Rights/Constitution) even mean anymore? By destroying other's right to litigate for their innocence, we ensure our own destruction through causation of horrific foreign policy relations and slippery slope-like activities.  

Contact your congressmen! Speak out against the self-destructive foreign policy decisions caused by the PATRIOT Act and MCA. Safety is important- so make sure that we follow Geneva accords and help repair the U.S. reputation aboad.

These days, there has got to be a whole bunch of American families who are getting real tired of Bush’s ‘war on humanity terror’ or at least the families of CIA agents who’ve been participating in the whole secret prisons/renditions thing are. Before long, the only European country they’ll be allowed to vacation at is Britain. One by one, European countries are discovering their own government’s complicity with the CIA’s clandestine "extraordinary rendition" program, providing fuel stops and rest-stops along the way to Cheney only knows where.

Among the corrosive lies a nation at war tells itself is that the glory - the lofty goals announced beforehand, the victories, the liberation of the oppressed - belongs to the country as a whole; but the failure - the accidents, the unaccounted civilian dead, the crimes and the atrocities - is always exceptional.

In the days after a shocked world beheld the vacation pictures of depraved American soldiers enjoying their stay at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein too enjoyed torturing innocent Iraqis, Phillip Kennicott of the Washington Post wrote these poignant words.

Americans, though by and large horrified by these scenes, were resting their collective conscience assured by the President that these reprehensible acts were the handiwork of no more than "a few bad apples", and not representative of the overall U.S policy toward the treatment of prisoners.

(I included the "?" in the title because I've yet to doublesource the facts of this story. However, I've come to rely on  Syed Saleem Shahzad, Pepe Escobar and the other intrepid investigative journalists at Asia Times Online (about us page). They've been, on a consistent basis, both accurate in what they're reporting and timely in their delivery of that reporting.)

Getting to know this administration's modus operandi over the past 6-years, I don't doubt its the story's authenticity but I offer this disclaimer only for those who might.

You decide...

Begin with a voice solemnly reading off excerpts from the just released report on the CIA's wrongdoing.  Show imagery of people assassinated, imprisoned or tortured during the period described.  

Cut to a clip of W talking about how he should be trusted with extraordinary powers.

End with a black screen with a stark question being read aloud: "Considering what happened the last time we trusted a President with extraordinary power, why should we trust one again?"

This story was first revealed in the British press last week, but I haven't seen anyone reference it yet, so forgive me if this is not news.

In September 2006, President Bush stated that the network of secret prisons has been shut down and all the captives transfered to Guantanamo.  Most of us suspected that he was being deceitful, if not boldly lying, but there was at the time little evidence to support it. But evidence is building that he was lying and there is one more piece of the puzzle here.

A recent news report had the Premier of Poland denying any involvement with "extraordinary rendition" or secret prisons in Poland to assist the Bush administration in its torture program and war on Arabs and other non-Western peoples.

 The denials were in complete opposition to the reports of several human rights groups like Amnesty International and others that cited evidence for the takeoff of airplanes that are chartered to the CIA and other US government agencies in a non-public capacity and that ferried individuals to Poland and Rumania, among others.

Plaintiffs:  The American People

Defendents:  Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice et/al

The CIA secret prisons existed in Europe and those imprisoned there were likely tortured. The existence of the prisons was confirmed by Polish and Romanian security officials. From The Guardian:

Despite denials by their governments, senior Polish and Romanian security officials have confirmed to the Council of Europe that their countries were used to hold some of America's most important prisoners captured after 9/11 in secret.

None of the prisoners had access to the Red Cross and many were subject to what George Bush has called the CIA's "enhanced" interrogation, which critics have condemned as torture. Although suspicions about the secret CIA prisons have existed for more than a year, the council's report, seen by the Guardian, appears to offer the first concrete evidence. It also details the prisons' operations and the identities of some of the prisoners.

McClatchy has the story up now. (Thanks, Just the Facts.)

"We have families who have not seen their loved ones for years. They've literally disappeared...."

said Joan Mariner, of Human Rights Watch.

I've been commenting for days, if not a few months, the the CIA still had Secret Prisons. I had based this on the CIAs refusal to confirm they if they were still using Secret Prisons when asked by the Press. All they would comment was that all the ones Bush had talked about, had been closed.

U.S. officials would not say where al-Iraqi was captured, but sources ruled out all of Iraq's immediate neighbors, as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan, and said he was not stopped at a border crossing. Officials said that several recent reports that al-Iraqi was operating freely were erroneous and that he has been in custody, in a third country, since late December. WaPo

The spin is:

"What the president said in September was that there was no one in CIA custody at that time," an intelligence official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "This individual was captured late last year, well after the president's speech

Mohamed Meshal opened the door to his Tinton Falls, NJ home late last year and found three FBI agents on the doorstep.  "Your son is in custody, in Ethiopia," the agents told Mr. Meshel and no, they're not sure why.  

McClatchy Newspapers lays out the troubling case of Amir Meshal, an American citizen who has been held overseas, without charges, for the past 4 months.  Interrogated by the FBI while he was held in Kenya, the officials told the New York Times "he's clean."  In mid-April, the State Department led Rep. Russ Holt to believe that Amir's release and return was imminent and the Congressman relayed that information to Mr. Meshel's father, Mohamed Meshal.  But Amir Meshal still remains in detention.

So, where is Amir Meshal and why hasn't he been returned to the U.S.?  

The past two weeks have offered a glimpse of the invisible universe.

April 5th, 2007, Associated Press: Ethiopia running secret prisons for CIA, holding detainees from nineteen countries.

April 8th, 2007, New York Times: Bush Administration allowed Ethiopia to purchase arms from North Korea, despite U.S. sanctions against the latter country.

April 15th, 2007, LA Times: CIA is fully funding Iraqi National Intelligence Service; one billion dollars a year.  Head of INIS has a home in U.S.

April 17th, 2007, New York Times: Senate Republicans block Democratic bill forcing disclosure of location of secret prisons.  The bill would also have required the Bush Administration to disclose details of the estimated 44 billion dollar intelligence budget.

Rather than allow Congress to do it's job of oversight,  Bush is threatening to Veto the Intel Budget. Why? In the new  budget is a provision that the Gov. must disclose how much is spent on the CIA Secret Prisons.

April 12 (Bloomberg) -- Administration officials will advise President George W. Bush to veto legislation requiring him to provide lawmakers with details of the CIA's secret prisons for terrorism suspects, a White House statement said.

Just what does Bush have to hide hmmmm? This story is from Bloomberg