Obama 2008
Our thoughts and prayers go out to the friends and family of the American POW captured by the Taliban earlier this month. He, like all POWs, deserves nothing less than our fullest efforts to bring him home.
I hope Lt Col Peters chokes to death on his own treasonous, cowardly words and rots forever in the pit of Hell. He is giving aid and comfort to the enemy by his ridiculous lies and deserves the harshest possible punishment.
Daddy’s little girl is all growed up and ready to start illegal wars in countries that didn’t attack us.
The Washington Times reports that Liz Cheney, daughter and primary defender of former Vice President and lying scumbag Darth Dick Cheney, has been making noises about running for political office sometime in the future. Read on:
“It’s something I very well may do,” said Elizabeth “Liz” Cheney, a lawyer and State Department appointee who has worked on two Republican presidential campaigns.
Ms. Cheney, 44, has emerged as one of the strongest defenders of the effectiveness and legality of Bush-Cheney policies on enhanced interrogation methods. More recently, she and her father have become two of the most outspoken critics of President Obama’s position on terrorism and other national security issues, which has led Republicans to consider her a strong candidate for national political office.
Ms. Cheney told The Washington Times’ “America’s Morning News” that recent new reports that her father ordered the CIA to hide information from Congress and that a government probe could follow appears like political cover for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats who have accused agency Director Leon Panetta of lying.
“It gets more and more appalling every day,” she said. “I think they’re very worried about Speaker Pelosi.”
Oh, please. This woman is even more detached from reality than her dickhead father is. Anyone who thinks waterboarding isn’t torture and that the CIA tells the truth to Congress and the American people, is an idiot.
I hope she does run for office. I hope she gets her ass handed to her. I hope the weight of her father’s crimes and scandals comes crashing down on her head like a ton of shit. I hope the entire Cheney family gets indicted for war crimes and sent to the gulag their supreme patriarch created.
One thing that’s been firmly established about Dick Cheney is that he’s a liar. Another is a that he’s a coward. He’s a lying coward who’s more than willing to sacrifice other men and women to serve his worthless causes, but lacks the courage to put his own sorry ass on the line for them. So when this little nugget came up on Faux News’ “On the Record” with Greta Van Sycophant, I had to wonder if someone had accidentally slipped truth serum in his daily serving of human blood:
“On the question of whether or not Iraq was involved in 9-11, there was never any evidence to prove that,” he told the “On The Record” host in a joint interview with his daughter Liz. “There was “some reporting early on … but that was never borne out,” Cheney said.
This brief bout with, erm… reality? Conscience? Truth? … didn’t stop him from throwing his former puppet boss under the bus, however:
“George … did say and did testify that there was an ongoing relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq, but no proof that Iraq was involved in 9-11.”
Interesting. The Dark Lord of the Sith seems to be realizing that he won’t get away with it forever. Next he’ll be telling us that KSM and others were waterboarded at Gitmo in order to create a false link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda.
As if we didn’t already know that.
Every now and then we hear some unvarnished truth from the national embarrassment that the Republican party has become. Take, for example, yesterday’s words from Senator John Ensign (R-NV) regarding the political prisoners detainees currently being held at Guantanamo Bay:
“They get better health care than the average American citizen does.
And if that don’t say it all, nothing does. We are an international disgrace.
Just when you thought the misguided, ill-conceived, bastard policy known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” couldn’t get any stupider, we have this:
Lieutenant Colonel Victor J. Fehrenbach, a fighter weapons systems officer, has been flying the F-15E Strike Eagle since 1998. He has flown numerous missions against Taliban and al-Qaida targets, including the longest combat mission in his squadron’s history. On that infamous September 11, 2001, Lt. Col. Fehrenbach was handpicked to fly sorties above the nation’s capital. Later he flew combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has received at least 30 awards and decorations including nine air medals, one of them for heroism, as well as campaign medals for Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is now a flight instructor in Idaho, where he has passed on his skills to more than 300 future Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force weapons systems officers.
Since 1987, when Fehrenbach entered Notre Dame on a full Air Force ROTC scholarship, the government has invested twenty-five million dollars in training and equipping him to serve his country, which he has done with what anyone would agree was great distinction. He comes from a military family. His father was a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, his mother an Air Force nurse and captain. Lt. Col. Fehrenbach has honored that tradition.
Now, I know you’d think the Air Force would want to keep this guy for the rest of his natural life. He’s the poster child for military heroism, honor, duty and integrity. But no; the military has been taken over at the highest levels by proselytes and religious fanatics who think that homosexuality is just too darn evil to be tolerated, even if the soldier, sailor, airman or marine exhibiting such sexuality has served honorably and bravely for nearly 20 years.
No, that sort of thing has no place in America’s military. We just serve and protect the country, we don’t accurately represent it.
Folks, this is stupid. There is no logical reason to discharge this man, nor was there any reason to discharge Lieutenant Choi last month. Lt. Choi, you will recall, was until recently an Arabic linguist whose horrible crime against decency and public order was, well, being gay. Again, a highly trained soldier filling a role in a critical field was kicked out for nothing more serious than violating 19th century standards of conduct. You’d think the Army would want to keep as many Arabic linguists as possible. Apparently ideology trumps operational needs.
This is madness, and it must stop. Unfortunately, the one man who now has the power to make it stop, has shown little inclination to do so. I’m talking about President Barack “Yes we can, but we probably won’t” Obama. His latest solution to the problem appears to be to ignore it for now.
Maybe changing the law isn’t possible at the moment. He can still issue an Executive Order directing the service chiefs to stop implementing it, in light of the critical need for specialist personnel. Whatever. He really needs to grow a pair and end this fiasco once and for all.
For his part, LtCol Fehrenbach has made his case tonight, live on the Rachel Maddow show. Watch it on MSNBC.
Just when you thought the torture debate couldn’t get any worse, there comes this report from CNN:
WASHINGTON (CNN) — The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.
The analysis is based on a Pew Research Center survey of 742 American adults conducted April 14-21. It did not include analysis of groups other than white evangelicals, white non-Hispanic Catholics, white mainline Protestants and the religiously unaffiliated, because the sample size was too small. …
Now, while the sample size was admittedly very small (742 is hardly a valid statistical representation of American Christians) and limited, the results are still disturbing. For me, it shows that a sizeable majority of people who claim to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, have no idea what those teachings actually are or how they should be applied to daily life or national policy.
It also speaks to a toxic moral relativism that has been creeping through our culture for a long time. It’s the contagion of an “ends justify the means” philosophy, the sort of thinking that allows all manner of legal, ethical and moral abuses as long as the goals are agreeable.
It also shows a shocking level of ignorance on the part of many Christians. How can anyone who claims to follow a faith founded on the teachings of a political prisoner who was tortured and brutally executed, possibly support our nation’s use of torture?
This is wrong. Torture is wrong, it is evil, and there can be no justification for us or any other nation engaging in it. In fact, we have a moral obligation NOT to do it, because we hold ourselves to a higher moral standard. The fact that we’ve done it doesn’t make it right, it makes it doubly wrong because in doing so we have ceded the moral high ground to the animals within our own society. We have willingly sacrificed that which we claimed to hold most precious, on the altar of political expediency.
We will pay for this. We will pay dearly. The torturers, their enablers, and their supporters are all traitors to this great nation. They have led us down the path of destruction and death. It will be years, perhaps decades, before we can regain our standing in the world.
The moral high ground, once lost, is rarely regained.
That’s how many times the illegal, unethical, immoral and unjustified “harsh interrogation method” known as waterboarding was used “sparingly” by agents of the CIA under the authorization of the Bush administration.
That’s how many times it was used on two men, both al-Qaeda operatives, AFTER they’d already given up any useful information they had.
This was not interrogation. It was revenge. It was punishment. It was torture.
And it was wrong. The men who wrote the memos authorizing it should be condemned, prosecuted and put in prison for a very long time. The men who did the torture must be brought to justice. And the so-called “leaders” who still, against all available evidence, insist it was necessary we do this to protect our national security should be held accountable to their crimes.
And maybe they should be waterboarded, but that’s not for me to say. I doubt Cheney or Bush would survive even the first five waterboardings, much less 266. Perhaps 266 years in prison for each of them, one year for each time this act of vicious revenge was committed, would suffice.
266. Six times a day for a month for Khalid Shayk Mohammed.
266. That’s what Bush & Cheney thought was “justified.”
266. The new Number of the Beast. Further proof, if we needed it, that neither of them have any morals whatsoever. This was not about protecting America. This was nothing more than abuse. This was torture.
266.
Talk about tortured logic. O’l Rushbo can’t get enough of the taste of his own feet these days. Take this utterly ridiculous statement from a recent broadcast:
LIMBAUGH: The idea that torture doesn’t work- that’s been put out from John McCain on down- You know, for the longest time McCain said torture doesn’t work then he admitted in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last summer that he was broken by North Vietnamese. So what are we to think here?
As reported by ThinkProgress.org, Limbaugh once again took a statement completely out of context and twisted it to suit his own needs. While McCain did, in fact, say that the VC “broke” him during a torture session, you need to dig a little deeper to find the truth. I’ll let McCain’s own words speak for themselves:
Eventually, I gave them my ship’s name and squadron number, and confirmed that my target had been the power plant. Pressed for more useful information, I gave the names of the Green Bay Packers’ offensive line, and said they were members of my squadron. When asked to identify future targets, I simply recited the names of a number of North Vietnamese cities that had already been bombed. – Faith of My Fathers
And this quote from a 2005 Newsweek interview sums it up nicely:
“In my experience, abuse of prisoners often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear — whether it is true or false — if he believes it will relieve his suffering.”
In other words, torture doesn’t work.
So, in answer to Rush’s question, what are we to think here? How about “Rush, you’re a fat, lying, puffed-up, egotistical, narcissistic jackass and a coward.” How about “Rush, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about and should keep your fat pie-hole shut.” Or how about just “Rush, fuck off and die, you useless coward.”
And that, my friends, is what we’re to think.
Pity the Fat Bastard. He hasn’t been having a good time of it lately, what with his party’s credibility and image in the toilet, and his own image suffering from, well, his own words. And then there was this recent on-the-air exchange from a veteran, wherein said veteran takes the pill-popping jackass to school, hands his fat ass to him, and proceeds to wipe the floor with him rhetorically. The Eric Cartman of the airwaves didn’t appreciate his beat-down. I’ll let the transcript speak for itself, courtesy of MediaMatters.org:
LIMBAUGH: We’re going to go to Chicago. This is Charles. Charles, thank you for waiting and for calling. Great to have you here. Hello.
CALLER: Thanks, Rush. Rush, listen, I voted Republican, and I didn’t — really didn’t want to see Obama get in office. But, you know, Rush, you’re one reason to blame for this election, for the Republicans losing.
First of all, you kept harping about voting for Hillary. The second big issue is the — was the torture issue. I’m a veteran. We’re not supposed to be torturing these people. This is not Nazi Germany, Red China, or North Korea. There’s other ways of interrogating people, and you kept harping about it — “It’s OK,” or “It’s not really torture.” And it was just more than waterboarding. Some of these prisoners were killed under torture.
And it just — it was crazy for you to keep going on and on like Levin and Hannity and Hewitt. It’s like you’re all brainwashed.
And my last comment is, no matter what Obama does, you will still criticize him because I believe you’re brainwashed. You’re just — and I hate to say it — but I think you’re a brainwashed Nazi. Anyone who could believe in torture just has got to be – there’s got to be something wrong with them.
LIMBAUGH: You know —
CALLER: And I know Bush wanted to keep us safe and all of that, but we’re not supposed to be torturing these people.
LIMBAUGH: Charles, if anybody is admitting that they’re brainwashed it would be you.
CALLER: No, no, no, Rush. I don’t think so.
LIMBAUGH: Charles. Charles, Charles —
CALLER: You, Hannity, Hewitt, and Levin are all brainwashed and you know it.
LIMBAUGH: — you said — you said at the beginning of your phone call —
CALLER: Yeah.
LIMBAUGH: — that you didn’t want Obama in there —
CALLER: That’s right.
LIMBAUGH: — but you voted for him because of me.
CALLER: I didn’t vote for him. I voted for McCain. I voted Republican.
LIMBAUGH: Oh, so —
CALLER: I voted Republican.
LIMBAUGH: — you’re saying I turned people off to —
CALLER: You turned people off with all your — all this “vote for Hillary” and all this BS, because you must think people are really stupid.
LIMBAUGH: That was Operation Chaos. That was to keep the —
CALLER: You — no. It didn’t work.
LIMBAUGH: — chaos in the [unintelligible] of the Democrat primaries.
CALLER: It didn’t work. And now what we have with you Hannity, Levin, and Hewitt: sour grapes. That’s all we have. And believe me, I’m not — I’m more to the right than I am to the left.
LIMBAUGH: Oh, of course, you are.
CALLER: I am, and that’s —
LIMBAUGH: Of course, you are. You wouldn’t be calling here with all these sour grapes if you weren’t.
CALLER: Well, I’m so tired of listening to you —
LIMBAUGH: Oh, of course, you are.
CALLER: — go on and on with this — you’ve been brainwashed.
LIMBAUGH: I don’t know of anybody who died from torture. I do not ever —
CALLER: We are not supposed to torture people.
LIMBAUGH: I do not ever —
CALLER: Do you remember World War II, the Nazis? The Nuremberg Trials?
LIMBAUGH: I —
CALLER: Do you remember the Nuremberg Trials?
LIMBAUGH: Charles —
CALLER: Klaus Barbie?
LIMBAUGH: Charles, let me say —
CALLER: Huh?
LIMBAUGH: Barack Obama —
CALLER: What’s the matter with you?
LIMBAUGH: Barack —
CALLER: You never even served in a military.
LIMBAUGH: Barack Obama is —
CALLER: I served in the Marine Corps and the Army.
LIMBAUGH: Charles, Barack Obama is president of the United States today because of stupid, ignorant people who think like you do. You pose — you and your ignorance are the most expensive commodity this country has. You think you know everything. You don’t know diddly-squat.
You call me a Nazi? You call me somebody who supports torture and you want credibility on this program? You know, you’re just plain embarrassing and ludicrous. But it doesn’t surprise me that you’re the kind of Republican that our last candidate attracted. Because you’re no Republican at all based on what the hell you’ve said here.
Well, Rush, you really showed him. Since you hung up on the caller before he really had the chance to give you the thorough tongue-lashing you deserve, I’ll say right now what he was too much of a gentleman to say.
Rush, you’re a fucking coward. You’re nothing but a lily-livered, yellow-bellied chickenshit who ducked your chance to serve your country when it was your time. Oh, I’ve heard the excuses and frankly, I don’t believe them. Because you’re also a liar and a fraud. You’ve done nothing for this country. NOTHING. You lacked the courage to serve, and yet you support sending other people’s children off to die in a war that never should have been started. And worse, you have the nerve to criticize a true patriot? You need to understand something, you fat, ugly, worthless piece of human filth.
Veterans stick together. We may rib each other from time to time, and take shots at the other services, but when you attack one, you attack us all. We don’t take shit from civilian cowards like you.
You are a brainwashed Nazi. You and all your worthless, chickenshit pals on the extreme right – Hannity, Bachmann, Coulter, Malkin, Beck, Gingrich and all the rest. Not one of you is a patriot in any sense of the word. The caller was right on all counts, and the reason you cut him off is because, as per usual, you couldn’t refute any of his charges without getting your ass handed to you.
On the other hand, keep up the good work – you and the others I mentioned are the best gift the Republicans have given the Democrats in a long, long time. Every time one of you opens your mouth, you remind me of why I voted for Obama last year.
A report from the International Committee for the Red Cross on CIA detentions and torture, recently released to the public, has shed the white light of truth on the previous administration’s darkest secrets.
It reads like something from the Nuremberg Trials or the Vietnam era. It describes the ordeals of fourteen “high value detainees” who were subjected to some of the worst treatment the CIA “interrogators” gave to their prisoners. In one example, detainee Abu Zubaydah described a fairly standard transfer flight:
“The detainee would be made to wear a diaper and dressed in a tracksuit. Earphones would be placed over his ears, through which music would sometimes be played. He would be blindfolded with at least a cloth tied around the head and black goggles. … He does not know how long the transfer took but, prior to the transfer, he reported being told by his detaining authorities that he would be going on a journey that would last twenty-four to thirty hours.
“The detainee … would usually be transported in a reclined sitting position with his hands shackled in front. …The detainee was not allowed to go to the toilet and if necessary was obliged to urinate and defecate into the diaper.” (ICRC Report, page 7)
Lovely. I’ve always said that the acid test for whether a given action is torture or not is if we’d put someone on trial for doing it to our people. This stuff sounds like the worst of the stories from forced-labor camps in Soviet Russia. And as usual, it’s not the worst. No, what’s worse is the way the CIA, under the direction of the Bush administration, corrupted the function of doctors in support of its heinous crimes.
“During the course of their detention, detainees described three principal roles for health personnel whom they encountered. Firstly, there was a direct role in monitoring the ongoing ill-treatment which, in some circumstances, involved the health personnel directly participating while certain methods were used. Secondly, there was a role in performing a medical check just prior to, and just after, each transfer. Finally, there was the provision of healthcare, to treat both the direct consequences of ill-treatment detailed in previous sections, and to treat any natural ailments that arose during the prolonged periods of detention.
“… In some cases it was alleged that, based on their assessments, health personnel gave instructions to interrogators to continue, to adjust or to stop particular methods.” (ICRC report, pp. 21-22)
In one case a detainee was told by a doctor, “I look after your body only because we need you for information.”
And you thought Cheney and Bush couldn’t sink any lower. This almost precisely mirrors the way medical personnel were used by the North Vietnamese on our soldiers.
Don’t give me any shit about “they were trying to kill us” or “those people are the worst of the worst”. Nothing justifies this – NOTHING. It offends me as a veteran, and it should offend the honor and morality of every American citizen. Bush and Cheney led us down the path of immorality, and they need to pay for it.
We should bring them up on charges of war crimes and torture, before someone else does, just to show the world that WE DON’T TOLERATE THIS.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot 
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