I know for a fact that no more than three prisoners who were in US military custody died while they were in US military custody. None of these prisoners died because they were tortured to death by the US military.
[/quote
How laughably naive.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-05-05/how-many-were-tortured-to-death/full/
[quote]In February 2006, a review by Human Rights First determined that almost 100 detainees died in U.S. custody in Afghanistan and Iraq facilities as of 2005, and that almost half of the cases were clearly homicides. Several cases discussed in the report were clear cases of torture homicides.
To take one example, in December 2003, a 44-year-old Iraqi man named Abu Malik Kenami died in a U.S. detention facility in Mosul, Iraq. As reported by Human Rights First, U.S. military personnel who examined Kenami when he first arrived at the facility determined that he had no preexisting medical conditions. Once in custody, as a disciplinary measure for talking, Kenami was forced to perform extreme amounts of exercise—a technique used across Afghanistan and Iraq. Then his hands were bound behind his back with plastic handcuffs, he was hooded, and forced to lie in an overcrowded cell. Kenami was found dead the morning after his arrest, still bound and hooded. No autopsy was conducted; no official cause of death was determined. After the Abu Ghraib scandal, a review of Kenami’s death was launched, and Army reviewers criticized the initial criminal investigation for failing to conduct an autopsy; interview interrogators, medics, or detainees present at the scene of the death; and collect physical evidence. To date, however, the Army has taken no known action in the case.
Another infamous case from Iraq involved a CIA “ghost” detainee named Manadel al-Jamadi, who was tortured to death by a CIA interrogation team at Abu Ghraib prison in November 2003. Pictures of Abu Ghraib guards Charles Graner and Sabrina Harman posing with al-Jamadi’s dead body, the so-called Ice Man, were among the most notorious of the Abu Ghraib photographs published in April 2004. A CIA officer named Mark Swanner and an interpreter led the team that interrogated al-Jamadi. Nine Navy personnel were also implicated. An autopsy conducted by the U.S. military five days after al-Jamadi’s death found that the cause: “blunt force injuries complicated by compromised respiration.” Reporting by The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer and NPR’s John McChesney revealed that al-Jamadi was strung up from handcuffs behind his back, a torture tactic sometimes called a “Palestinian hanging.” After an investigation, the CIA referred the case to the Department of Justice for possible criminal prosecution of the CIA personnel involved, but no charges were ever brought. Prosecutors accused 10 Navy personnel of the crime; nine were given nonjudicial punishments, such as rank reductions and letters of reprimand, and a 10th was acquitted.
The government is not unaware of these homicides. In April 2006, a colleague of mine at Human Rights Watch and I met with Department of Justice criminal-division officials and requested information and updates on this case and several others. Justice officials were familiar with these cases, but our pleas for information were rejected.
There may be other CIA homicides yet uncovered. One case of concern involves a detainee in the CIA’s detention program named Hassan Ghul, a Pakistani who was arrested in northern Iraq in January 2004. Ghul’s interrogation was discussed in one of the May 10, 2005, Office of Legal Counsel memos signed by OLC head Steven Bradbury. Ghul’s name is mostly redacted but appears by mistake in one part of the memo.
I am starting to suspect that Ghul might be dead. After all, his name was redacted from the OLC memo, unlike that of other CIA detainees now at Guantánamo. Why would the CIA be afraid of mentioning Ghul? CIA doctors appear to have determined that Ghul was in poor health when he was captured, in fact, too unhealthy to be waterboarded. Unlike other former CIA detainees, human-rights groups have not confirmed that he was rendered to Pakistan or to a third country. Did the CIA perhaps torture Ghul to death? We do not know. He has now completely disappeared.
Debra, your quote of what I wrote is a disgustingly distorted excerpt from what I actually wrote.Debra Law wrote:All three of the things I said I would defend [torture, killing civilians, warrantless surveillance] are not UnAmerican and they are defensible. Their defense is their effectiveness in significantly limiting total civilian casualties.
Because you did in fact state that you defended torture, killing civilians, and warrantless surveillance, your position was not "disgustingly distorted." It's your position that is disgustingly UNAmerican.
joefromchicago wrote:Doesn't the fourth amendment require the government to obtain a warrant if it wants to wiretap someone's phone? Aren't you, in fact, arguing that the government should violate the constitution when you say you favor warrantless wiretaps? And isn't advocating a breach of the constitution tantamount to treason? So that makes you a traitor, right ican?
NO! The fourth Amendment doesn't say that. The 4th Amendment says this:
Quote:The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Tapping the phones of Americans for the purpose of providing for their common defense against those who have declared their objective is killing Americans whereever they can be found, is helping to secure American lives, houses, papers, and effects against enemies who would kill them and/or make unreasonable searches and seizures of their property.
Also, merely tapping someone's phone line is not perpetrating an unreasonable search or seizure of a person, a person's house, or a person's papers, and effects.
Debra, your quote of what I wrote is a disgustingly distorted excerpt from what I actually wrote.
jennybeth@teapartypatriots.org
Thank You for Making YOUR Voices Heard
Thank you so much for coming to make your voices heard in Washington and around the country yesterday. We had over 200 events in hometowns around the country in addition to the March in DC.
Standing by the stage and watching people fill in the Capitol West Lawn from Pennsylvania Avenue, I was amazed at the crowd and completely energized! Then more and more and more people arrived. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined what it would look like to see such a large crowd. As I stood there, I knew that there were even more people all over the country demonstrating with us locally as well.
The speeches were awesome! They were heartfelt and inspiring.
Many of the Tea Party Patriots Local Coordinators and Members spoke at the March. I especially enjoyed hearing the Tea Party Patriots speeches.
Thank you to all the volunteers around the country who organized buses, invited others to attend, drove to DC, made signs, helped at the March, organized local events, promoted the events locally, took photos, took video, made donations, and helped in the days and weeks leading up to yesterday! Thank you to my two Co-Coordinators for the March on DC, Brendan Steinhauser of Freedom Works and Darla Dewald of ResistNet, who are a pleasure to work with.
Thank you Tea Party Patriots for giving me the opportunity to serve you by organizing the event in DC. All the organizing and volunteering in the world would not have mattered without people showing up. Thank you for being in DC and at local events around the country to make your voices heard. You are the heart and soul of this movement!
Hopefully, Congress, the Administration, and the local and state elected officials from around the country can hear us now. If not, we will continue to stand shoulder to shoulder together to keep turning up the volume!!
Sincerely,
Jenny Beth Martin
Photos, Videos, Blog Posts
If you took video, photos, or wrote blogs posts about the event, please upload them and fill out this form so we know where to find them:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dC1QZnJRYnNnekxydHlWaGJ3c0ZBR3c6MA..
If you do not know how to upload them, you can email them to: jennybeth@teapartypatriots.org. Also, if you do not have a blog and would write your thoughts about the 912 March on DC, please feel free to email them as well to jennybeth@teapartypatriots.org.
LOST! Please Help!
There was a camera at Freedom Plaza that is lost. It is a black Panasonic DVX-100 DV camcorder with Freedom Works engraved on it. It was left on a silver tripod on stage at Freedom Plaza. An older man with gray hair and a yellow Don't Tread on Me t-shirt who was identified as a volunteer by CSI was seen with the camera when the stage was dismantled. There is important footage on it. If you have seen it, please email jennybeth@teapartypatriots.org.
You Are the Heart and Soul of Tea Party Patriots
Continue to keep up the incredible work you do to further our core values: fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets. You are the heart and soul of this movement. Please let us know if there is anything we can do to help you!
Tea Party Patriots National Coordinator Team
Amy Kremer (amy@teapartypatriots.org, 678-495-8271, gchat: amykremer)
Jenny Beth Martin (jennybeth@teapartypatriots.org, 404-326-0936, gchat: jennybethm, Hyatt 202-737-1234)
Mark Meckler (mark@teapartypatriots.org)
Rob Neppell (robn@teapartypatriots.org)
Tea Party Patriots, Inc. is a social welfare organization organized under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. Contributions to Tea Party Patriots, Inc. are not deductible as charitable contributions for income tax purposes.
Warrantless searches and seizures are per se UNREASONABLE unless the warrantless search or seizure falls within a recognized exception to the warrant requirement. There is no "common defense" exception to the warrant requirement. For the purposes of gathering "foreign intelligence," Congress enacted a federal law known as FISA. The law requires the government to seek warrants from a special court. For the purposes of gathering information for "domestic security" matters, the United States Supreme Court held that no safeguards against unreasonable government intrusion other than appropriate prior warrant procedures satisfy the Fourth Amendment. United States v. United States District Court, 407 U.S. 297 (1972).
Article I.
Section 8. The Congress shall have power
To ... provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States;
...
To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces; ...
"You aren't seriously going to make the claim that because their economy was largely based on income due from the worthless derivatives that our markets created that the capitalist market is preferable to the socialist one, right?"
"I'm not big on socialism, but what we have is close enough to the real deal that we may as well do it right (equal access for everyone to the level of health care that we can afford to pay for all) or kill it completely, remove insurance from the workplace, and put hc at the local level for everyone. There's no excuse for providing HC for the elderly and the indigent while taxing the working poor at a level which prevents them from having any reasonable coverage. And, NO, dropping in at the local ER is not reasonable coverage for the uninsured.
WHAT'S THE RUSH?
Jewish World Review
Sept. 8, 2009
By Thomas Sowell
The most important thing about what anyone says are not the words themselves but the credibility of the person who says them.
The words of convicted swindler Bernie Madoff were apparently quite convincing to many people who were regarded as knowledgeable and sophisticated. If you go by words, you can be led into anything.
No doubt millions of people will be listening to the words of President Barack Obama Wednesday night when he makes a televised address to a joint session of Congress on his medical care plans. But, if they think that the words he says are what matters, they can be led into something much worse than being swindled out of their money.
One plain fact should outweigh all the words of Barack Obama and all the impressive trappings of the setting in which he says them: He tried to rush Congress into passing a massive government takeover of the nation's medical care before the August recess— for a program that would not take effect until 2013!
Whatever President Obama is, he is not stupid. If the urgency to pass the medical care legislation was to deal with a problem immediately, then why postpone the date when the legislation goes into effect for years— more specifically, until the year after the next Presidential election?
If this is such an urgently needed program, why wait for years to put it into effect? And if the public is going to benefit from this, why not let them experience those benefits before the next Presidential election?
If it is not urgent that the legislation goes into effect immediately, then why don't we have time to go through the normal process of holding Congressional hearings on the pros and cons, accompanied by public discussions of its innumerable provisions? What sense does it make to "hurry up and wait" on something that is literally a matter of life and death?
If we do not believe that the President is stupid, then what do we believe? The only reasonable alternative seems to be that he wanted to get this massive government takeover of medical care passed into law before the public understood what was in it.
Moreover, he wanted to get re-elected in 2012 before the public experienced what its actual consequences would be.
Unfortunately, this way of doing things is all too typical of the way this administration has acted on a wide range of issues.
Consider the "stimulus" legislation. Here the administration was successful in rushing a massive spending bill through Congress in just two days— after which it sat on the President's desk for three days, while he was away on vacation. But, like the medical care legislation, the "stimulus" legislation takes effect slowly.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it will be September 2010 before even three-quarters of the money will be spent. Some economists expect that it will not all be spent by the end of 2010.
What was the rush to pass it, then? It was not to get that money out into the economy as fast as possible. It was to get that money— and the power that goes with it— into the hands of the government. Power is what politics is all about.
The worst thing that could happen, from the standpoint of those seeking more government power over the economy, would be for the economy to begin recovering on its own while months were being spent debating the need for a "stimulus" bill. As the President's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said, you can't let a crisis "go to waste" when "it's an opportunity to do things you could not do before."
There are lots of people in the Obama administration who want to do things that have not been done before— and to do them before the public realizes what is happening.
The proliferation of White House "czars" in charge of everything from financial issues to media issues is more of the same circumvention of the public and of the Constitution. Czars don't have to be confirmed by the Senate, the way Cabinet members must be, even though czars may wield more power, so you may never know what these people are like, until it is too late.
What Barack Obama says Wednesday night is not nearly as important as what he has been doing— and how he has been doing it.
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell090809.php3
As long as people deny that actions that cause death are torture there can not be a meeting of the minds.
Torture is clearly defined in international agreements. Certain acts of torture have clearly been prosecuted by the US in the past. To suddenly deny that those prior meanings have any validity seems to mirror the denial of the meaning of socialism. In one case the word's meaning is changed to justify an act and in the other the word is changed to demonize the acts.
I have to jump in here.
You said...Quote:As long as people deny that actions that cause death are torture there can not be a meeting of the minds.
That makes no sense.
You are saying that a soldier that shoots and kills an enemy is guilty of torture.
Or that a car accident that kills someone is also torture.
Clyburn’s point about reprimanding Wilson
(Cynthia Tucker, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 14, 2009)
I was ready to forget about Joe Wilson.
I had initially thought a formal rebuke of the South Carolina Congressman was a waste of time, a purely partisan, feel-good gesture that takes precious time away from more important things — like reforming health care, passing energy legislation and regulating Wall Street.
A “resolution of disapproval” also runs the risk of further elevating and sanctifying Wilson among his rabid rightwing base, who have already made him a hero. Several of the tea party protestors at Saturday’s anti-Obama rally in Washington were waving signs or wearing shirts in praise of Wilson. And, while the GOP leadership seems uncomfortable with the attention Wilson is getting, some of his GOP colleagues are only to ready to up the ante. Steve King, GOP Congressman from Iowa, is circulating a letter asking his Republican colleagues to come to Wilson’s defense: "Joe Wilson is taking a lot of heat and some of it is coming from Republicans. He may be the subject of a disciplinary resolution on the House floor as early as Tuesday. We all know Joe for the officer and gentleman that he is. I have penned a letter to him that urges him to stand his ground. It also points out that President Obama accused “prominent politicians” of lying in the sentence just prior to Joe’s outburst."
Now, it’s easy to see why Democrats are insisting on a reprimand. Wilson’s apology is looking less and less sincere as he makes the round of rightwing talk shows to portray himself as a victim standing up to oppression. He has also refused to publicly apologize before the House, which he should do, since he violated House rules of decorum.
But I was most convinced by Majority Whip James Clyburn, veteran South Carolina legislator and highly respected member of the House, on his reasons for pushing for a reprimand. He was quoted in Maureen Dowd’s column yesterday: "A lot of these outbursts have to do with delegitimizing him as a president,” said Congressman Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the South Carolina delegation. Clyburn, the man who called out Bill Clinton on his racially tinged attacks on Obama in the primary, pushed Pelosi to pursue a formal resolution chastising Wilson. “In South Carolina politics, I learned that the olive branch works very seldom,” he said. “You have to come at these things from a position of strength. My father used to say, ‘Son, always remember that silence gives consent.’ ”
I defer to the wisdom of the gentleman (that would be Clyburn, not Wilson) from South Carolina. He knows a lot more about the politics of his state than I do.
Besides, there does come a point where you have to stand up to a bully. And since Republicans already smell blood in the water, maybe Democrats should draw a line in the sand at yelling “You lie” during the president’s speech to a joint session of Congress.
" ... [A]t some point it's going to have to go to the Supreme Court. I wouldn't want it to go to the US Supreme Court now, because that homophobe Antonin Scalia has got too many votes on this current court."--Barney Frank
The Senate's top Democrat, Harry M. Reid of Nevada, called President Bush a "loser" yesterday just about the time Air Force One was touching down on foreign soil. Reid immediately called the White House to express regret.
The remark violated the restraint that the opposition party customarily exercises when a president is abroad and reflected the acrid environment on Capitol Hill as Republicans prepare to change a rule that lets Democrats use delaying tactics to block the confirmation of judges.
Reid made the remark while discussing the filibuster issue with about 60 Del Sol High School juniors, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal's Web site.
"The man's father is a wonderful human being," Reid said in response to a question about Bush's policies. "I think this guy is a loser."
Reid spoke about the time Bush landed in Latvia at the start of a five-day European trip.
Aides said Reid realized right away that he had overstepped. He at first tried to call Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. but when he could not reach him because the presidential party had headed to bed, the senator talked to deputy chief of staff Karl Rove. Reid later called the Review-Journal to say he had "apologized for what I said."
Reid told Rove that he wanted to express his regret, and asked Rove to pass that on to the president, the aides said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/06/AR2005050601814.html
MR. RUSSERT: When the president talked about Yucca Mountain and moving the nation's nuclear waste there, you were very, very, very strong in your words. You said, "President Bush is a liar. He betrayed Nevada and he betrayed the country."
Is that rhetoric appropriate?
SEN. REID: I don't know if that rhetoric is appropriate. That's how I feel, and that's how I felt. I think to take that issue, Tim, to take the most poisonous substance known to man, plutonium, and haul 70,000 tons of it across the highways and railways of this country, past schools and churches and people's businesses is wrong. It's something that is being forced upon this country by the utilities, and it's wrong. And we have to stop it. And people may not like what I said, but I said it, and I don't back off one bit.
h/t Brian Walsh
More, via Tim Grieve, from a 2005 Rolling Stone sit-down:
RS: You've called Bush a loser.
HR: And a liar.
RS: You apologized for the loser comment.
HR: But never for the liar, have I?
UPDATE: Vegas blogger Steve Sebelius opines that Reid didn't apologize because "Bush did lie."
"It should be noted that Reid did apologize for calling Bush a loser. But it’s also true that Reid called Bush a liar and never apologized, and that his fellow Democrats were not outraged.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennthrush/0909/Reid_called_Bush_liar_stood_by_comment.html
HYPOCRITES: Media Ignored Calling Bush ‘Nazi’, But Headlines Obama-Bashing
August 12, 2009
http://vocalminority.typepad.com/blog/2009/08/stop-the-presses-ive-found-nancy-pelosis-swastika-pictures.html
