Obama signs the orders closing Guantanamo

Barack Obama has moved quickly to reverse Bush's toxic policies on the treatment of terror suspects. Today President Barack Obama signed an executive order to shut down Guantanamo Bay's prison within a year.

He signed an executive order to require that all U.S. interrogations of terror suspects must now conform to the U.S. Army Field Manual, a move meant to restrict what the CIA can do. The president created an inter-agency task force to advise him on detainee policy.

In addition, the man tapped to oversee U.S. intelligence is promising Congress there will be no torture, harsh interrogations and warrantless wiretapping on his watch.

The direct quote from Obama:

Any interrogations taking place are going to have to abide by the Army Field Manual. We feel that the Army Field Manual reflects the best judgment of our military -- that we can abide by a rule that says we don't torture. But that we can still effectively obtain the intelligence that we need.

This is me following through on not just a commitment I made during the campaign, I think, but an understanding that dates to our founding fathers. That we are willing to observe core standards of conduct, not just when it's easy but when it's hard.

President Obama also harkend back to the Founding Fathers.

"This is following through not just on a commitment I made during the campaign but an understanding that dates back to our Founding Fathers, that we are willing to observe core standards of conduct — not just when it's easy but also when it's hard."

In related actions, Obama:

• Created a task force that would have 30 days to recommend policies on handling terror suspects who are detained in the future. Specifically, the group would look at what do do with the 245 Guantanamo detainees.
• Required all U.S. personnel to follow the U.S. Army Field Manual while interrogating detainees. The manual explicitly prohibits threats, coercion, physical abuse and waterboarding, a technique that creates the sensation of drowning and has been termed a form of torture by critics. However, a Capitol Hill aide says that the administration also is planning a study of more aggressive interrogation methods that could be added to the Army manual — which would create a significant loophole to Obama's action Thursday.
• Directed the Justice Department to review the case of Qatar native Ali al-Marri, who is the only enemy combatant currently being held on U.S. soil. The directive will ask the high court for a stay in al-Marri’s appeals case while the review is ongoing. The government says al-Marri is an al-Qaida sleeper agent.

Watch Keith Olbermann discuss this with Retired General Paul Eaton:

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Keith Olbermann's Special Comment: Prosecute Torture

Last night Keith Olbermann gave his final Special Comment of the Bush Administration.

Keith Olbermann:

In point of fact, every effort to merely 'draw a line in the sand' and declare the past dead, has only served to keep the past alive -- and often to strengthen it.

We compromised with slavery in the Declaration of Independence -- and four score and nine years later we had buried 600,000 of our sons and brothers in a Civil War.

After that War's ending, we compromised with the social restructuring and protection of the rights of minorities in the South. And a century later, we had not only not resolved anything, but black leaders were still being assassinated in the cities of the South.

We compromised with Germany and the reconstruction of Europe after the First World War -- nobody even arrested the German Kaiser, let alone conducted War Crimes trials, and 19 years later there was an indescribably more evil Germany and a more heart-rending Second World War.

We compromised with the Trusts of the early 1900's, and today we have corporations too big to let fail.

We compromised with The Palmer Raids and got McCarthyism, and we compromised with McCarthyism and got Watergate, and we compromised with Watergate and the junior members of the Ford Administration realized how little was ultimately at risk, and grew up to be Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

Watch Keith Speak about the need to Investigate and Prosecute those who have committed Torture:

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Cheney Takes Credit for Torture

Vice President Dick Cheney is a war monger and a criminal. On Monday he came out and said he was directly involved in approving torture methods used by the CIA. He also claimed that the prison at Guantanamo Bay is a good thing and should remain open indefinitely. The man is insane.

Cheney's comments also mark the first time that he has acknowledged playing a central role in clearing the CIA's use of an array of controversial interrogation tactics, including a simulated drowning method known as waterboarding. Cheney said in an interview with ABC News:

"I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared."

In a follow-up question Cheney was asked whether he still believed it was appropriate to use the waterboarding method on terrorism suspects, Cheney's answer: "I do."

His comments come on the heels of disclosures by a Senate committee showing that high-level officials in the Bush administration were intimately involved in reviewing and approving interrogation methods that have since been explicitly outlawed and that have been condemned internationally as torture. Of course our media is completely overlooking this scandal.

Watch Dick's interview here:

LibertyAir Blog

Where is the media?

Last week's bipartisan Senate report on the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere doesn't just lay out a clear line of responsibility starting with President Bush, it also exposes the administration's repeated explanation for what happened as a pack of lies.

The report notes that in early 2002, not long after the Defense Department legal counsel's office started exploring the application of the sorts of abhorrent practices later documented at Abu Ghraib, Bush signed a memo exempting war-on-terror detainees from the Geneva Conventions. "[T]he decision to replace well established military doctrine, i.e., legal compliance with the Geneva Conventions, with a policy subject to interpretation, impacted the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody," the report states. And the report concludes: "The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at [Guantanamo]. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely."

Yet where is the U.S. media? Where is our corporate media? Not covering this major scandal, that's for sure. No our TV pundit class has been consumed with righteous indignation over the titillating, sleazy, and in the end rather petty Governor Blagojevich and his Soprano-like scandal. Each talking head has seemed more intent on competing with one another over who could sound more righteous, and spew the most derision and scorn for this apalling figure. And while Blagojevich was brazen his crimes in the end were relatively inconsequential.

Bush lawbreaking and war crimes scandals gets no coverage, while a corrupt Illisnois governor gets 24/7 coverage. What is wrong with our media?

Yes Blagojevich was vulgar and reckless but the media fixation on this ultimately irrelevant scandal, when compared to their steadfast ignoring of the Senate report documenting systematic U.S. war crimes, is perfectly reflective of how our political establishment thinks.

Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball dig into the supporting documents and write for Newsweek: "The Bush administration approved the use of 'waterboarding' on Al Qaeda detainees after receiving reports from government psychologists that it was '100 percent effective' in breaking the will of U.S. military personnel subjected to the technique during training, according to documents released today by a Senate Committee. . . .
"'Use of the watering board resulted in student capitulation and compliance 100 percent of the time,' wrote Jerald F. Ogrisseg, the Air Force's chief of psychology services, in a July 24, 2002 memo released as part of the Senate report. . . .
"Much of the report, including the role top White House officials played in approving such methods, is based on material made public in two previous hearings by Levin's panel and other government reports. But it also includes some recently declassified documents, as well as new evidence showing how critical the use of SERE methods was in persuading senior officials to adopt interrogation techniques the U.S. government previously found strongly objectionable."

Bush Administration At Fault For Torture

A bipartisan Senate report released today says that former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials are directly responsible for abuses of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and charges that decisions by those officials led to serious offenses against prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere." Read more about it here.:

Rice and Torture

Because of the economic news and the current campaign season, a very big story has fallen by the way side. It turns out that Condoleezza Rice led Bush administration discussions of torture techniques, this according to documents secured and released by Senator Carl Levin as part of a congressional inquiry.

I can't tell from this article how complicit Condoleezza Rice was in authorizing torture but that she was in the meetings and complicit in policy-making on the issue now seems very clear. And we all know what the outcome was of these meetings. A dark stain on the honor of this country.