One Utah

I hate the way the so-called War On Terror has been twisted to make morally repugnant acts like torture acceptable.
Rather than argue that torture is a moral good, supporters of torture have argued it is a regrettable moral necessity.
The argument goes like this:
Terrorists do bad things. Doing bad things proves they are bad men. [...]

Who’s up for The Long War? This is a term first popularized in February 2006 for the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, although its origins appear to date back further. In April 2005, James Jay Carafano, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, co-published a book titled Winning the Long War. [See comments below [...]

Some of us may be too young to remember the Winter Soldier Investigation from 1971, sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In ten days, the second Winter Soldier investigation will convene, with testimony from Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who served in those occupations, giving an accurate account of what is really happening day [...]

In Harper’s, Scott Horton writes about The Great Guantanamo Puppet Theater. The problem with the military commission trials is that they are really political tribunals controlled by Vice President Dick Cheney. The trials of six “high-value detainees” linked to the attacks on 9/11 are timed to coincide with the 2008 election, and the [...]

Today, CIA Director Michael Hayden for the first time divulged specifics about officially-authorized CIA torture sessions in a public Congressional hearing. Via Talking Points Memo:
In the life of the CIA detention program, we have held fewer than 100 people. And actually, fewer than one-third of those people have had any techniques used against them, [...]

Via the Associated Press:
Jose Padilla, once accused of plotting with al-Qaeda to blow up a radioactive “dirty bomb,” was sentenced Tuesday to 17 years and four months on terrorism conspiracy charges that don’t mention those initial, unproven allegations.
U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke rejected a prosecution request for a sentence of life imprisonment because Padilla was [...]

Brilliant editorial in today’s NY Times:
The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners — some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports — to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were [...]

h/t Crooks and Liars  A Crippling Legacy
By: Nicole Belle
Vanity Fair offers a sobering look at the costs that we — and our children and their children — will pay for the last eight years of Bush/Cheney economics.
The damage done to the American economy does not make front-page headlines every day, but the repercussions will be [...]

Randi Rhodes of Air America, speech to the 50th Anniversary party of “PEACE ACTION of Michigan” on November 11, 2007.
DO not miss this. It is the most honest REAL discussion of what is really happened over the past seven long years.

A day late, here’s my question for the CNN Republican YouTube debate.

I am Richard. I am from Draper, Utah, and how you answer this question will tell us everything we need to know about you. Do you believe every word of this book? Specifically, this book that I am holding in my hand, do you [...]

A new CNN poll found that, according to one percent of Americans, George W. Bush is the best president ever in American history.

Of course, 23 percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll released Thursday say that compared to other presidents in American history, President Bush is the worst ever.
Destroying the Constitution, illegal [...]

If you want to know if waterboarding is a form of torture, read this post on the Small Wars Journal blog. It’s by Malcolm Nance, a former Master Instructor and Chief of Training at the US Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego, California. He is one of the [...]