From Mshiltonj wiki

The Bush administration knows how to stick with a winning program: Deny any mistakes or wrong doing; smear and attack those who criticize them, questioning thier loyalty, integrity and patriotism; punish those who dare stand against you. It's been a successful formula since 9/11 -- Bush just pulls the "terrorist" trump card, says he "working hard" and that all those who oppose him either "hate America" or are "jeopardizing American security." Rinse and repeat. This happens with a seemingly complicit American mass media. But support may be running out.

Most recently, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat, Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin from Illinois, has compared the U.S. military's treatment of a suspected al Qaeda terrorist at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay with the regimes of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Pol Pot, three of history's most heinous dictators, whose regimes killed millions.

The Washington Times has lengthy coverage on the Gitmo abuse fbi email. You can read the full and complete text of Durbin's statement. The supposedly incendiary part is here:

We have recently learned that numerous FBI agents who observed interrogations at Guantanamo Bay complained to their supervisors about the use of these methods, methods which began at the desks of Alberto Gonzales and the Department of Justice, moving through the Department of Defense to Guantanamo Bay. In one e-mail that has been released under the Freedom of Information Act, an FBI agent complained that interrogators were using what he called “torture techniques.” This is not from a critic of the United States who believes that we should not be waging a war on terrorism. These are words from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Let me read the graphic language in an e-mail written by another FBI agent about what he saw:

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold....On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.

These are the words of an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who viewed the interrogation techniques at Guantanamo, techniques that flowed from the memo that came across Mr. Gonzales's desk to the Department of Defense down to these dimly lit cells. And the Red Cross and the FBI agree that they are torture.

Durbin is unapologetic about his statements. (For now. He is a politician, and I expect him to cave.)

The White House, predictably, has already began a smear campaign instead of answering the charges. They say his statements are "beyond belief" and ``Our men and women in uniform go out of their way to treat detainees humanely, and they go out of their way to uphold the values and the laws that we hold so dear in this country. They call his comments, "reprehensible. It's a real disservice to our men and women in uniform who adhere to high standards and uphold our values and our laws."

I don't understand how they can say this with a straight face. The FBI and the Red Cross have called the above described treatment torture, not humane treatment. It is dishonest to merely assert the humane treatment of detainees without directly anwering the charges. The credibility of the White House is not merely stretched -- it is beyond belief.

This is only the most recent example. Six months ago there was a story about repeated references in an internal FBI email suggesting that the president issued a special order to permit some of the more objectionable torture techniques used at Abu Ghraib and other US-run prison facilities around Iraq.

The BBC reports on a former US soldier who worked on interrogations at Guantanamo Bay has written a damning expose of the brutal, degrading treatment he says was meted out to prisoners there. They also directly to the link a December 2003 FBI Torture Email.

A funny thing about this particular event is trying to find information on the Internet about it. If you do a google search for aclu fbi torture email, you will find that *none* of the matches in the first few pages of results point to any mainstream American news source. No CNN, Fox, ABC, NY Times, Washington Times, etc. -- nothing from those guys.

Interestingly, one match from the first page is from The Memory Blog. Part of the The Memory Hole, the site "exists to preserve and spread material that is in danger of being lost, is hard to find, or is not widely known" with an "emphasis is on material that exposes things that we're not supposed to know (or that we're supposed to forget)." Does anyone else find that creepy a site like that is so obviously necessary?

Also recently, Amnesty International has reported that Guantánamo is the gulag of our time. You can read the full text of the Amnesty International Irene Khan Gulag speech. In it, she says:

In 2004, far from any sign of principled leadership, we saw a new and dangerous agenda in the making, rewriting the rules of human rights, discrediting the institutions of international cooperation and usurping the language of justice and freedom to promote policies that create fear and insecurity.

The US is leading this agenda, with the UK, European states, Australia and other states following.

Under this agenda, accountability is being set aside in favour of impunity; a prime example being the refusal of the US Administration or US Congress to conduct a full and independent investigation of the use of torture and ill treatment by US officials, despite the public outrage over Abu Ghraib and despite the evidence, collected by AI and other, of similar practices in Bagram, Guantanamo and other detention centres under US control.

Another example was the attempt by the UK – thankfully unsuccessfully – (in the Baha Moussa case) to argue that its soldiers in Iraq are not bound by human rights law (notwithstanding Mr. Blair’s claim that they are there to save the Iraqi population from Saddam’s abuses - but obviously not from British ones)

They pick and choose approach to international law is being replaced by a "erode where you can, select if you must and subvert where you will" approach.

The US refuses to apply the Geneva Convention for detainees in Afghanistan. It continues to press for bilateral agreements to provide its citizens immunity from prosecution of the International Criminal Court (Congress legislation last year to penalise those who refuse).

But nothing shows the disregard of international law as clearly as the attempts by the US, UK and some European countries to set aside the absolute prohibition of torture and ill treatment by re-definition and "rendering" – or the transfer prisoners to regimes that are known to use torture. In effect sub-contracting torture, yet keeping their own hands and conscience clean.

Under this dangerous agenda, justice is not only denied, it is also distorted.

In the UK, shortly after the House of Lords threw out the law on arbitrary detention of foreigners, the government rapidly introduced a new form of detention – this time in one’s own home.

In the US, almost a year after the Supreme Court decided that detainees in Guantanamo should have access to judicial review, not one single case from among the 500 or so detained has reached the courts because of stonewalling by the Administration.

Under this agenda some people are above the law and others are clearly outside it.

Guantanamo has become the gulag our times, entrenching the notion that people can be detained without any recourse to the law.

If Guantanamo evokes images of Soviet repression, "ghost detainees" – or the incommunicado detention of unregistered detainees - bring back the practice of "disappearances" so popular with Latin American dictators in the past.

According to US official sources there could be over 100 ghost detainees held by the US.

In 2004 thousands of people were held by the US in Iraq, hundreds in Afghanistan and undisclosed numbers in undisclosed locations.

AI is calling on the US Administration to "close Guantanamo and disclose the rest". What we mean by this is: either release the prisoners or charge and prosecute them with due process.

I call this frightening. Bush, again predictably attacking the messenger, dismisses these charges as "absurd." In the linked article, Human Rights Watch advocacy chief Reed Brody says of the Bush response, "It looks like a campaign. There's been a real drumbeat since Amnesty published the report. It seems like there's an attempt to silence critics."

Rinse, repeat.

But the real clincher of this is the Downing Street Memo. There's not much else I can say about this, other than to quote the link:

The Downing Street "Memo" is actually a document containing meeting minutes transcribed during the British Prime Minister's meeting on July 23, 2002—a full eight months PRIOR to the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003. The Times of London printed the text of this document on Sunday, May 1, 2005, but to date US media coverage has been limited. This site is intended to act as a resource for anyone who wants to understand the facts revealed in this document.

The contents of the memo are shocking. The minutes detail how our government did not believe Iraq was a greater threat than other nations; how intelligence was "fixed" to sell the case for war to the American public; and how the Bush Administration’s public assurances of "war as a last resort" were at odds with their privately stated intentions.

When asked, British officials "did not dispute the document's authenticity." and a senior American official has described it as "absolutely accurate." Yet the Bush administration continues to simultaneously sidestep the issue while attempting to cast doubt on the memo’s authenticity.

The memo was made public forty-seven days ago as I write this. What has the American mainstream media done with this? What has Congress done with it? Little to nothing, but it does finally look like they may be opening their eyes: Bush pressed to answer `Downing Street Memo' questions. The linked article starts with "A hearing Thursday on a secret British intelligence memo that said President Bush was committed to waging war on Iraq months before he said so publicly ended with a request for Congress to open an inquiry into whether Bush should be impeached for misleading the nation."

Impeachment? For lying to a American people and Congress and leading the U.S. Military into an abritary and unnecessary war on manufactured pretenses that has cost $207.5 billion, killed 1712 Americans, wounded 12855 Americans, and killed 25229 civilians? Hell yes, impeachment. Clinton ,and even Nixon, suffered impeachment hearings for much, much less.

White House response? Dismissal: The opposition "is simply trying to rehash old debates." Simply astounding. Mind-numbingly astounding. Denial: the memo "flat out wrong."

The linked news story says that "the Democratic congressmen were relegated to a tiny room in the bottom of the Capitol and the Republicans who run the House scheduled 11 major votes to coincide with the afternoon event." This is a great way to intentionally manipulate the news cycle. Amazingly, the American mainstream media continues to let itself get manipulated in such transparent and disgusting ways. No wonder blogs and alternative media keep gaining exposure.

And let's not forget other tactics the White House has at its disposal in its efforts to silence opposition and criticism. Further quoting the article:

Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson said, "We are having this discussion today because we failed to have it three years ago when we went to war."

"It used to be said that democracies were difficult to mobilize for war precisely because of the debate required," Wilson said, going on to say the lack of debate in this case allowed the war to happen.

Wilson wrote a 2003 newspaper opinion piece criticizing the Bush administration's claim that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger. After the piece appeared someone in the Bush administration leaked the identity of Wilson's wife as a CIA operative, exposing her cover.

These tactics and more are all courtesy of Karl Rove and his scorched earth tactics. Deny, attack, punish. Hey, it worked in 2000 and 2004. Why stop now?

How can anyone possibly believe anything that comes out the White House? Why does the American mainstream media continue to uncritically repeat what it gets spoonfed by Scott McClellan?

Support for this mass deception may be starting to crack. Some members of Congress, even Republicans, are urging the U.S to withdraw from Iraq. One member is Republican Walter Jones. He says US has done what it can in Iraq and the reason for going to war -- former president Saddam Hussein's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction -- has been proven false. The interesting part here is that Jones represents the huge Marine base at Camp Lejeune, home to tens of thousands of U.S. Marines and thier families. I wonder what kind of constituent mail he must be getting.

On top of all this dissent, Bush's approval rating continues to fall. "President Bush's job approval rating has dropped this month to just 42 percent, while 51 percent disapprove. His current approval rating is near the low reached in May 2004, after news and photos from the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal were made public."

I would herald these last two items as evidence of eye-opening behavior on the part of Congress and the American public, but I'm still skeptical. If the charade has gone on this long, then this may be only a minor disturbance in the Bush's control over the public debate. Past events show that repeated denials of the charges and attacking the accusers until the Administration can gain control of the news cycle and direct the American mainstream media to look at some other shiny object has been a bankable strategy. Will the media let it happen again?