American people fucked again

I haven’t got the energy to summarize it or go into detail about why this is such a fucking outrage, but Glenn Greenwald, ever the energetic young man, has an analysis of the current selling out of the American people by the lay-down Democrats in congress:

“So all the Attorney General has to do is recite those magic words — the President requested this eavesdropping and did it in order to save us from the Terrorists — and the minute he utters those words, the courts are required to dismiss the lawsuits against the telecoms, no matter how illegal their behavior was.

That’s the “compromise” Steny Hoyer negotiated and which he is now — according to very credible reports — pressuring every member of the Democratic caucus to support. It’s full-scale, unconditional amnesty with no inquiry into whether anyone broke the law. In the U.S. now, thanks to the Democratic Congress, we’ll have a new law based on the premise that the President has the power to order private actors to break the law, and when he issues such an order, the private actors will be protected from liability of any kind on the ground that the Leader told them to do it — the very theory that the Nuremberg Trial rejected.

If that isn’t hard enough to stomach, Digby has more on the FISA laydown along with the currently running McClatchy series on torture by the Bush administration.

If you’re thinking “why doesn’t she just shut up about this?” “Can’t she write something about Betty and Bill, about the garden? Where did Lynette go?” If you’re thinking that, well hell, I’m thinking it too. How are you all surviving this? I can hardly bear to wake up in the morning because each day brings a new travesty, a new injustice. I find myself screaming at the stupid bloviating fools on what passes for cable news. I read books that tell me what I know to be true, just for confirmation that I’m not really losing my mind, that I’m not imagining things.

Are you staying sane while this nation is being destroyed? If you are, tell me how to find some balance in all of this. I am lost.

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war.criminals.

In the preface to the Physicians for Human Rights report on torture by the United States, Retired Maj. General Antonio M. Taguba writes the following:

This report tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. . .

The profiles of these eleven former detainees, none of whom were ever charged with a crime or told why they were detained, are tragic and brutal rebuttals to those who claim that torture is ever justified. . . .

In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored. And the healing professions, including physicians and psychologists, became complicit in the willful infliction of harm against those the Hippocratic Oath demands they protect.

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

The former detainees in this report, each of whom is fighting a lonely and difficult battle to rebuild his life, require reparations for what they endured, comprehensive psycho-social and medical assistance, and even an official apology from our government.

But most of all, these men deserve justice as required under the tenets of international law and the United States Constitution.

And so do the American people.” (Maj. General Antonio M. Taguba (USA-Ret.)

You can download the entire report on the medical evidence of torture by the U.S. here. Read it and weep, then get on the phone to Nancy Pelosi and demand that impeachment be put ON the fucking table and that these sociopaths in the Bush administration be arrested and imprisoned. There is no other way we can redeem ourselves as a nation.

Crossposted at Big Ass Belle’s Place

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