Archive for April, 2009
Same-old Same-old You Can Take To The Bank?
The auto industry news continues to be … I’m guessing a politician would call it sobering rather than depressing: Chrysler’s bankruptcy may come as soon as next week. GM, meanwhile, will shut down most of its plants for most of the summer. The financial sector, of course, which is responsible for the doldrums in the [...]
Madonna Constantine Rides Again
Columbia University’s noose-lady plagiarist professor, Madonna Constantine, is in the news again, doing what she does best: playing the race card to make outrageous claims of racial victimization. For the back story to what’s going down now, check out this post from February 2008. Bookmark on DeliciousDigg this postShare on Facebookshare via RedditShare with StumblersTweet [...]
Torture By Oversight?
It turns out that those who embraced, authorized or otherwise accepted our entry into the Torturers’ League of Nations knew not what they did: The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of [...]
Iraqi Millitias Are Listening to Too Much Wu-Tang
Think Progress (4/21/09): “A prominent Iraqi human rights activist says that Iraqi militia have deployed a painful form of torture against homosexuals by closing their anuses using ‘Iranian gum.’ …Yina Mohammad told Alarabiya.net that, ‘Iraqi militias have deployed an unprecedented form of torture against homosexuals by using a very strong glue that will close their [...]
Pick A Profit! Pick Any Profit!
For banks, profitability management is apparently an Alice’s Restaurant situation. Because the simple fact of the matter is: you can get anything you want. Citigroup reported its first quarter profits yesterday. It’s clear they could have ordered up whatever number they chose to report. After more than a year of crippling losses and three bailouts [...]
Water-boarders Gone Wild
(1) How’s this for a working definition of the word “overkill”: According to the May 30, 2005 Bradbury memo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002. Given that water-boarding is universally believed to create a state of pure terror, it is mindboggling [...]
Not Necessarily Doomed To Repeat History
One thing that comes through in the torture memos released yesterday is the fact that there were a hell of a lot of people involved in this state-sponsored-torture: Besides the interrogators, “medical and psychological personnel are on-scene throughout (and, as detailed below, physically present or otherwise observing during the application of many techniques, including all [...]
A Hole In Their Defense?
The whole point of the Bush administration’s torture memos was to cover everyone’s ass—from your entry-level torturer to the designers and approvers of fiendish tortures. But suppose there was a torture technique that was practiced — that was acknowledged to have been practiced — and those legal prostitutes who whitewashed every other technique were so [...]
Stand By For Nuclearity!
Now that President Obama has gone ahead and released the torture memos — with miminal redaction, too — it will be interesting to watch the Republican reaction. Especially in the Senate, where Republicans had threatened to stonewall several of Obama’s nominees for key legal positions. Senate Republicans are now privately threatening to derail the confirmation [...]
Lawyer Stuff
Jay Bybee insists he did not engage in torture, and was not responsible for torture, because he was just a lawyer doing lawyer stuff. He may not have acted in the torture movie but, boy, was he a hands-on director! You would like to place Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You [...]