Palau

A Liar And A Coward

Here’s What’s Left catches Emperor Palpatine Dick Cheney in a blatant lie:

May 30, 2005
A liar and a coward

Vice President Cheney on Larry King Live:

KING: Amnesty International condemns the United States. How do you react?

D. CHENEY: I don’t take them seriously[.]

KING: Not at all?

D. CHENEY: No. I — frankly, I was offended by it. I think the fact of the matter is, the United States has done more to advance the cause of freedom, has liberated more people from tyranny over the course of the 20th century and up to the present day than any other nation in the history of the world. Think about what we did in World War I, World War II, throughout the Cold War. Just in this administration, we’ve liberated 50 million people from the Taliban in Afghanistan and from Saddam Hussein in Iraq, two terribly oppressive regimes that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of their own people. For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don’t take them seriously.

KING: They specifically said, though, it was Guantanamo. They compared it to a gulag.

D. CHENEY: Not true. Guantanamo’s been operated, I think, in a very sane and sound fashion by the U.S. military. Remember who’s down there. These are people that were picked up off the battlefield in Afghanistan and other places in the global war on terror. These are individuals who have been actively involved as the enemy, if you will, trying to kill Americans. That we need to have a place where we can keep them. In a sense, when you’re at war, you keep prisoners of war until the war is over with.

We’ve also been able to derive significant amounts of intelligence from them that helped us understand better the organization and the adversary we face and helped us gather the kind of information that makes it possible for us to defend the United States against further attacks. And what we’re doing down there has, I think, been done perfectly appropriately. I think these people have been well treated, treated humanely and decently.

Occasionally there are allegations of mistreatment. But if you trace those back, in nearly every case, it turns out to come from somebody who had been inside and been released by to their home country and now are peddling lies about how they were treated.

This is outrageous. The Vice President of the United States saying on national television that allegations of mistreatment at Guantanamo Bay are false. They are are not. He is, quite simply, a liar.

Indeed, Amnesty International’s report contains numerous allegations by prisoners at Guantanamo Bay (scroll down to section 12 for starters), and I suppose, if, like the Vice President of the United States, you’re not inclined to trust brown people, you might not believe a word of what any of the large number of them said. Surely, though, you would be less inclined to disbelieve your own Federal Bureau of Investigation:

An FBI document from December 2004, originally classified as secret for 25 years, included the following prior observations by FBI agents:[…]

Guantanamo Bay
A detainee?s mouth was duct taped for chanting from the Koran?military employee who applied the duct tape found it amusing;
A detainee being isolated for substantial periods of time;
Agents heard of detainees being subjected to considerable pain and very aggressive techniques during interrogations;
Agents aware of detainees being threatened?by dogs;
Agents have seen documentary evidence that a detainee was told that his family had been taken into custody and would be moved to Morocco for interrogation if he did not begin to talk.

That FBI agent must a bleeding-heart liberal, right Mr. Vice-President? Probably this one too:
An FBI memorandum dated 14 July 2004 stated the following about the treatment of a Guant?namo detainee:
“In September or October of 2002 FBI agents observed that a canine was used in an aggressive manner to intimidate detainee #63 and, in November 2002, FBI agents observed Detainee #63 after he had been subject to intense isolation for over three months. During that time period, #63 was totally isolated (with the exception of occasional interrogations) in a cell that was always flooded with light. By late November, the detainee was evidencing behavior consistent with extreme psychological trauma.”(329)

The Vice President says that he doesn’t take Amensty International seriously. Well, it’s hard to take the Vice President seriously if he is so willing to lie about undisputed facts.

But what I find really outrageous about the Vice President’s statement is its cowardice.

Many on the right have defended the harsh interrogation practices that the US has used in the “war on terror;” they downplay the practices as no worse than a fraternity hazing or claim it is a necessary evil. This viewpoint, while repellent, is at least intellectually consistent and courageous in its stupidity. In order to downplay the significance of prisoner abuse, the abuse must be conceded to exist. There is no such consistency or courage in Vice President Cheney. He is unwilling to face the reality of the situation for which he is, in part, responsible. It is morally bankrupt.

— Michael

IOKIYAR, again

I do so love it when some hypocritical fundie windbag is hoist by their own petard, and Dr James Dobson, that well-known unelected theocrat with the ear of GWB, is well hoisted in this post by BruceB at In The Darkling Wood:

Dr. James Dobson and me (well, my family)

Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family et al has been in the news rather a lot lately, and there’s been a great deal of discussion about his views on family life. As it happens, I got to see what he was actually like as a father back before he was a really big name on the national scene. This was, hmm, pause to count on fingers…the early 1980s, and my younger brother was in a Boy Scout troup with Ryan Dobson, the Dr.’s son. That was at the Church of the Nazarene, in Pasadena, California.

Ryan was possibly the most spoiled, least self-disciplined kid I’ve ever encountered.

The Dobsons made more or less endless excuses for his bad behavior. One camping trip was hours late departing because Ryan had broken his fishing rod – he’d been standing on it and pulling its ends up until it broke, and his parents wouldn’t let the trip leave until they went out and bought him a replacement. Another was equally late because of a very long argument between the scoutmaster and his parents about the appropriateness of the junk food and comic books he wanted to carry along; his parents finally reluctantly agreed that there was such a thing as a sensible weight limit…and then tried pressuring other boys in the troop to carry the excess so that Ryan wouldn’t have to do without any of what he wanted to bring. And it went like that.

There came a point when our mother flat-out refused to carry Ryan in her car. The church is, or at least was at that time, off a very busy and curving street, with a steep driveway down to the church. (When I was in driver ed later, the trainer used it as an example of wretched visibility.) Mom is and always has been a careful driver, taking extra time and needing her full concentration at tricky spots like that. One time I was riding along with a bunch of scouts in the back seat, and just as she was preparing to pull into traffic, Ryan started firing off a cap gun right behind her. She didn’t actually have an accident from sheer startlement, but it was close. I don’t now remember if she pulled back in and unloaded Ryan right then or if she completed that drive and spoke with his parents and the troop leaders later, but her message was simple: he couldn’t ride with her anymore, because that just wasn’t safe. His parents proceeded to make excuses for him, and I do particularly remember that they were down on Mom for discouraging his creativity and about the importance for kids of exploring. Mom stuck to her, er, guns, and Dad backed her up, but it was a real souring point, and later they heard that the Dobsons made at least some effort to get the family tossed out of the troop.

Partly because of that whole mess, and partly because of the usual growing up and changing priorities, my brother dropped out of that troop and then out of Scouting. The folks we knew at the church had the usual moving-on sorts of things happen, and then I went to college in the Pacific Northwest, and the Dobsons moved out of my sphere of experience altogether.

I have no idea what they may have done before or since, or much of anything about what they were doing with their daughter at about the same time, or how Ryan has turned out, or anything like that. I make no broad claims of any sort. But I do claim on the basis of my experience this: in those years, the Dobsons weren’t practicing anything like what they were already preaching.

Hahaha. HAHAHAHAhahaha.

I wouldn’t normally laugh at the way someone had brought their child up: lord knows I am and have been an entirely inadequate parent. But I don’t presume to tell a nation how to raise their children, or advocate corporal punishment because ‘God says so’, or forcefeed my kids and others’ a load of religious fundie codswallop – and I certainly don’t have the ear of the world’s remaining superpower’s leader, and most of all I DON”T ABUSE SMALL DEFENCELESS ANIMALS and then brag about it.

On The Insufferable Smugness of EU Liberals

From Apostate Windbag:

“There is an insufferable smugness with which the liberal (in the Anglophone sense of the word) encouragers of a Oui vote in France’s referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty tomorrow present their argument.”

[…]

“However, I wonder whether these liberal Ouistes have actually themselves read the very document they champion. Today’s leader on the referendum in the same paper calling for a Yes, contains this howler:

‘[T]he constitution does not warrant the opposition it has generated. For all the anger about liberal Anglo-Saxon economics, the text does not include economic prescriptions that are any different from those in the Treaty of Rome in 1957’

Just quickly, here are a handful of the key examples (which I already discussed in an earlier post) of how the ECT remains not merely neo-liberal through and through, but is additionally aggressively militarist, (incidentally undermining the traditions of neutrality of Ireland and Austria):

1. Articles 111-69, 70, 77, 144 and 180 all identically repeat that the Union will act ‘in conformity with the respect for the principles of an open economic market where competition is free.’

2. There are numerous clauses that specifically correspond to demands made by certain employer organisations.

3. The ECT demands unanimous voting for any measures that might go against corporate interests. This is the certainly case for measures against tax fraud, or taxation of companies. Such legislative movement in this regard requires a unanimous vote as, above all, “[it is] necessary for the functioning of the internal market and to avoid distortion of competition.” (111-63). Thus, any future proposed duty imposed on corporations would be subject to unanimous voting – something the Ouistes regularly trot out as being reduced under the ECT.

4. Shockingly, the ECT demands all states’ subservience to NATO: ‘[M]ember states shall undertake progressively to improve their military capacities.’ (1-40-3). Article 1-40-2 says that European defence policy shall be compatible with members’ NATO obligations, a direct recognition of the superior judicial status of that military organisation. Furthermore, the article continues with even greater precision that “participating member states shall work in close collaboration with NATO”. Even in situations of “internal serious disturbances affecting public order, in cases of war or of […] the threat of war”, member states are obliged to work together in order to avoid “affecting” the functioning of the “internal market”! (III-16)’

5. Perhaps most disturbing in the ECT is clause 17 of the third section, regarding the question of the break-up of public services: It is permitted that a member state can be in favour of maintaining a public service. But public services have: “the effect of distorting the conditions of competition in the internal market, [and] the Commission shall, together with the state concerned, examine how these steps can be adjusted to the rules laid dawn in the Constitution. By derogation of common law procedure, the Commission or any member state can apply directly to the Court of Justice which will sit in secret…” (III-17)’ Thus the constitution from the start commits member states to the ultimate elimination of public services.

I find it remarkable that the Guardian leader writers are not aware that the ECT explicitly codifies the dismantling of social services and expansion of European military capablilities. “

I too find it remarkable: it’s not as though the SWP and others haven’t been banging on about this for years. It’s simple: ratify the proposed constitution and public services are gone – dissappeared, nullified, privatised, gone. This has been the planned outcome since the start: to put it crudely, the funnelling of the taxes we pay directly into the pockets of corporations. Cut out the middleman, and if democratic accountability goes in the process, well, what the hell, what do the voters know anyhow?

This alleged constitution legitimises the corporate robbery of countries under the guise of spreading a spurious democracy. Remind you of anyone?

(crossposted to Take It as Red)

More on the No Vote

Lenin has similar views to mine, only he’s much more eloquent:

It is remarkable that the market and competition should be raised to the status of constitutional precepts. Even more remarkable is that even modest boureois principles of democracy should be cast aside – the Council of Ministers is not elected, but it has the powers of the executive and legislative together, so that neither popular sovereignty not separation of powers is respected. The only elected body, the European Parliament, has only limited veto powers and no executive powers to speak of at all. It is remarkable that the parties of the Socialist International (n?e Second International) have even attempted to flog this undemocratic neoliberal drivel to the voters. Fuck ’em. Let these bruschetta eating, shiraz-quaffing mofos drown their sorrow in mange touts and the finest red. This is, as someone said in the comments boxes below, the best May the left has had since 1968.

Speaking of the Socialist International – that duplicitous glob of opportunistic New Labour slime, EU Trade Commisssioner Peter Mandelson, was on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme this morning (listen here). He said that, as 49% of those referendum-ed in Europe other than the French had said yes, the French vote was basically irrelevant, and that the no vote was a mere protest against Chirac, and a complaint that the EU was no longer an extension of France. (The usual, condescending Mandelson style we all know and love so well.)

Dammit, this was a well-informed and well-discussed issue, and the French knew perfectly well what they were voting about, as do the Dutch. Mandelson is engaging in the usual New Labour practice: when an election doesn’t go your way, decry the electorate as stupid, xenophobic and ill-informed.

The Idiot’s Guide To Cruel and Inhuman Treatment, Part I

For those who have some problems recognising what’s torture and what isn’t ( and I mean you, Messrs Rumsfeld, Bush and Gonzales) comes this Interactive Primer from Slate ( via Body & Soul).

But enough of the snark. This is actually a very useful piece of work, provided they can sort out the various browser hiccups, and Slate should for once be congratulated.

The primer shows what torture is, who authorised it, the chain of command, the timelines and so on. An invaluable resource for those attempting to fight the use of torture and for those who still support international law. And let’s hope, because it’s in Slate, not known exactly as a hotbed of radicalism, that the average reader will find it enlightening, and enraging, too.