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This a "Wordle" compilation of my most commonly used words on twitter

If you use twitter, you can make a sweet “wordle” word cloud like this one at  tweetstats.com after entering your username and clicking on the tweet cloud link. 

Today we learned that one of the primary purposes of the systemic torturing of prisoners by US defense and intelligence officials was to try to establish the non-existent link between Iraq and al-Qaida, thereby justifying the illegal 2003  invasion of Iraq after the fact. McClatchy reports:

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003.

It really comes as no surprise that the neoconservatives in the Bush-Cheney administration, not content to merely tell the public lies, actually sought to create “evidence” through the use of torture; The poverty of their underlying philosophy actually promotes a bastardized version of the Platonic “noble lie.” But it seems that they’ve taken it to new extremes.

Andrew Sullivan captures this furious state of reality-denial (and “reality” creation) with respect to the use of torture in the term “imaginationland” he coined in 2007:

Torture gives false information. And the worst scenarios that tortured detainees coughed up – many of them completely innocent, remember – may well have come to fuel US national security policy. And of course they also fueled more torture. Because once you hear of the existential plots confessed by one tortured prisoner, you need to torture more prisoners to get at the real truth. We do not know what actual intelligence they were getting, and Cheney has ensured that we will never know. But it is perfectly conceivable that the torture regime – combined with panic and paranoia – created an imaginationland of untruth and half-truth that has guided US policy for this entire ["War on Terror"]**.

**(or should I now call it the “overseas contingency operation” -AMcIntyre)

In light of today’s news Sullivan explained the point even more clearly now that we are finally past the Bush-Cheney nightmare:

It ended, as all regimes bent on total power always end, with torture. Why? Because reality may differ from ideology; and when it does, it is vital to create reality to support ideology. And so torture creates reality by coercing “facts” from broken bodies and minds.

This is how torture is always a fantastic temptation for those in power: it provides a way for them to coerce reality into the shape they desire. This is also why it is so uniquely dangerous. Because it creates a closed circle of untruth, which is then used to justify more torture, which generates more “truth.”

The release of the information in the McClatchy article, and the ongoing uncovering of the details of the torture tactics, are provoking intense discussion around the Orwellian term “enhanced interrogation techniques” and other politically loaded terms like the “War on Terror.”  Yet, I sat with jaw hanging as I watched even the ultra-conservative Fox News check much of its own typical newspeak at the door in this discussion: 

To be “Fair and Balanced” I should provide some real context for this conversation:

Judith Miller is the former New York Times reporter who broke one of the key stories in the lead up to the illegal American invasion of Iraq called “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts” which was widely criticized as shoddy reporting. Further to that, in 2005 Miller again cherry picked information from the same nefarious network of neoconservative Bush admin. sources when she wrote a piece outing the identity of Valerie Plame, a former covert CIA agent whose husband happened to call B.S. on an attempt to tie Nigerian “yellow cake” uranium to Saddam Hussein.   

Clifford May is the president of a thintank called the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.  His defense of torture, even if he believes it to be “near-torture” fundamentally violates one of his own foundation’s tenants: “No one should be denied basic human rights, including minority rights, women’s rights, and religious freedom.” How ironic that Mr. May doesn’t seem to grasp that governments in democracies that flirt with torture, much less embrace it whole heartedly in their policies, are a much larger danger to their democratic values than ANY external threat could ever be. 

In spite of this typical Fox News non-disclosure and beltway-media-insider asshattery, when Mr. May asks Judith Miller this question at 5:30 “Judy… Is putting someone in a small … confinement with a caterpillar torture?” it instantly made me recall one of the most terrifying scenes in Orwell’s 1984 where Winston’s captors subject him to his worst fear: Rats. 

“But for everyone there is something unendurable — something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wished to.” 

Only by conjuring up his worst nightmares and placing him in a specialized tiny torture cage full of “old scaly grandfather[s] of the sewers” could they finally break Winston and make him hollow inside. 

With the long list of torture techniques the US had at its disposal, and the consistent involvement of psychologists and “doctors without morals” in the process, you be the judge as to the Bush administration’s intentions and their  ability to realize the worst fears of Muslim detainees: 

Waterboarding: simulated drowning. al-Qaida no. 2 KSM was waterboarded 183 times in one month. 

Walling: slamming prisoners into a flexible wall

Sleep deprivation: the CIA was ­authorised to deny detainees sleep for up to 180 hours.

Forced nudity: often in the presence of female guards to exaggerate the feelings of discomfort. 

Cramped confinement: placing detainees in uncomfortably small containers or boxes. 

Insect in confinement: placing detainees in a tiny box and introducing an insect

Repeated slaps: repeated slapping of detainees in the face and body

Water dousing: continual dousing of detainees with cold water

Food deprivation: slowly starving detainees by limiting them to a diet of 1000 calories a day. 

Just in case  Clifford May has forgotten Orwell’s dire warning about unchecked power in his mindless defense of torture in the name of democracy: 

Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

Yet, in a supposed democratic system of government that respects human rights, no matter how great the perceived threat and no matter how supposedly “effective” the techniques are, torture is never justified under any circumstances. The end never justifies the screams.

UPDATED: 4:21 PM April 23, 2009: This sad yet powerful song via Rob Hyndman (@rhh)

When Dwight Eisenhower warned the world of the United States’ “military industrial complex” and their permanent armaments industry in his farewell address on Jan 17th 1961, he spoke of “the potential of the disastrous rise of misplaced power.”

This morning I watched with disgust as CNN’s John King lobbed typical softball questions at former US Vice President Dick Cheney. I listened to Cheney defend the use of torture and  assert the ridiculous claim that Obama’s foreign policy shift is making the US “less safe.” At one point in the interview, CNN cut to a commercial similar to this one, and part of the same “How” ad campaign:

As I watch this ad promoting Cold War era weapons and the virtue of “America’s Air Dominance” in the age of asymmetric, low-intensity warfare that characterize the Iraq and Afghanistan imperial misadventures, what becomes crystal clear is that Cheney, his band of neoconservative ideologues, and even CNN, are the very threats President Eisenhower warned about.

Absurd Comic-Book-Style Villainy

Aside from being a dungeon master, secretive oil baron, elusive media manipulator and avid gun enthusiast, this week Seymore Hersh revealed that Cheney was also the leader of a secret CIA assassination squad.  This, of course, comes as no surprise for those familiar with Cheney’s quest to centralize power in the executive branch where this sad comedy reached its pinnacle as he invoked executive privilege while simultaneously claiming not to be a member of the executive branch.

Here is the hilarious lead from the Boston Globe article related to his fight with the National Archives’ Information Security Oversight Office’s attempts to get him to disclose information:

Dick Cheney, who has wielded extraordinary executive power as he transformed the image of the vice presidency, is asserting that his office is not actually part of the executive branch.

The Iraqi journalist who threw a shoe at George W. Bush was sentenced to 3 years in prison this week. When will we see the key players in the Bush administration pay for their crimes? Or am I a fool for still believing the illusion that the rule of law exists in the United States?

Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency

I’m about half-way through reading Barton Gellman‘s “Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency,” a book based on his series of Pulitzer Prize winning series of articles in The Washington Post.  It is a gripping portrayal of one man’s ability to navigate the bureaucratic structure of the American government with skill and precision mimicking that of a veteran sniper’s ability to select a target and pull the trigger. No one said that running a secret assassination squad was easy.

Late Update: The supervillain highlight reel from TPMTV

And this great screen capture image from Crooks and Liars, tells the whole story better than my 1000 words: