He [Speicher] may still be alive in Iraq, rumored to have been kept as a personal torture toy for Saddam’s older son.

How must Speicher’s widow and two children have felt when hearing such rumors, which were cynically manufactured by the likes of Bush, Rumsfeld, and Babbin to sell their war?

To be fair, that is literally progressive.

It was a point of pride that the Red Cross would never be allowed in the door, Jeff says. This is important because it defied the Geneva Conventions, which require that the Red Cross have access to military prisons. “Once, somebody brought it up with the colonel. ‘Will they ever be allowed in here?’ And he said absolutely not. He had this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there’s no way that the Red Cross could get in — they won’t have access and they never will. This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating, even Army investigators.” …

To Garlasco, this is significant. This means that a full-bird colonel and all his support staff knew exactly what was going on at Camp Nama. “Do you know where the colonel was getting his orders from?” he asks.

Jeff answers quickly, perhaps a little defiantly. “I believe it was a two-star general. I believe his name was General McChrystal. I saw him there a couple of times.”

Back when he was an intelligence analyst, Garlasco had briefed Stanley McChrystal once. He remembers him as a tall Irishman with a gentle manner. He was head of the Joint Special Operations Command, the logical person to oversee Task Force 121, and vice-director for operations for the Joint Chiefs. That put responsibility right in the heart of the Pentagon.

Within the unit, the interrogators got the feeling they were reporting to the highest levels. The colonel would tell an interrogator that his report “is on Rumsfeld’s desk this morning” or that it was “read by SecDef.”

Muriel Kane wonders whether McChrystal ran Cheney’s global assassination hit squads.

Hersh: “…let’s say Yemen, let’s say Peru, let’s say Colombia, let’s say Eritrea, let’s say Madagascar, let’s say Kenya, countries like that…”

Thanks to Douglas Valentine.

The sooner we stop pretending there is a “rule of law” which binds the power of our government, the better off we’ll all be.

That’s right. Bybee now says he “regrets that the memo was misused,” and that “the spirit of liberty has left the republic.”

Well, let’s just hope that when this most guilty of law-breaking felons finally dies in prison (if not the Salt-Pit torture dungeon outside of Kabul), someone will make sure to etch on his gravestone that “Here Lies the Man Who Tortured and Murdered the Spirit of Liberty in the Republic.”

Oh, who am I kidding? For him to go to jail would require the spirit of liberty in the republic he killed. It’s too late. There is no law.

And another thing: None of this is hyperbole. Jay Bybee is a criminal. He is a disgrace to mankind. These are just plain facts. No proud, red-blooded American should be too shy to say so. The fact that he’s sending his friends out to say boo hoo for him now means absolutely nothing. Plenty of convicted murderers and torturers claim they regret it. Find Jesus and everything. The only difference between them and him is that he’s a government employee. That’s all. See? No law. Just will. And torture.

As an economist who has specialized in the economic analysis of law, I am quite frustrated by the statements of some commentators that the Obama Administration and the Congress should not look backwards in trying to uncover and/or prosecute member of the Bush Administration who may have been guilty of illegal actions, war crimes, crimes against humanity, violations of the Geneva Conventions and so forth.

In a sense, the prosecution of any alleged criminal is pointless. The act is done – the past is irrevocable – so why not just look to the future and not let it happen again?

Life is not like that. The law looks backwards so that it won’t happen again – or, at least, that the chances that it will happen again are reduced. To wax philosophical for a moment: We live in time and there is continuity between the past, present and future.

With all of the advantages of power – especially secrecy – what are the incentives to keep the State in line? We have laws and treaty obligations. When they are violated, is it enough that those guilty merely be subject to public disapproval? We cannot vote Bush out of office. We cannot now impeach him. We cannot convict him in a trial before the Senate. Any Administration can avoid all of these things by keeping things covered up until they are out of office. So the incentive to secrecy is great. The power is there to accomplish it. So the “political system” can be prevented from doing its job of disciplining office holders.

So now what? If the Constitution and our laws have worth beyond the papers they are written on, there must be consequences. There must be investigations and prosecutions if warranted. There is no other option that can make the system honest.

People will say that there have been worse crimes than possibly approving torture, illegal wiretapping, etc. For example, there was the fire-bombing of Dresden during the Second World War – an act without justification except vengeance. (And I have not mentioned Harry Truman deeds.) But this is just evidence of what the government is capable of where there are no consequences.

More relevantly, there is the objection that an inquiry into the Bush Administration actions will split the country and cause unrest. My answer is simple. Americans need to know what went on if they are going to control their government in the future. If people argue about what the government has done and whether it was justified, then that is all to the good. It will take the place of discussions about Michelle Obama’s dresses, the first-dog, etc.

Finally, if we expose what was done and it is bad, then that exposure will give “ammunition” to our enemies.  First, the enemies almost certainly know more than the American people. (Perhaps they read the Washington Post or New York Times.) Second, we have bigger fish to fry: the integrity of our system of government. We can survive terrorist acts but we cannot survive the collapse of the rule of law. Third, we would not be simply exposing what when on but punishing it when appropriate. This is loyalty to great ideals. The world will notice.

But when it comes to serious stuff — preemptive war, torture, spying on Americans without warrant, the upending of the U.S constitution — these mainstream mavens (who are ever-so-fond of waxing nostalgic about their weaning during the Woodward & Bernstein glory years of the 70’s)  quickly “close ranks” and reframe the context of these stories to ensure the teeniest impact possible on the status quo. This typically means protecting their establishment friends in government, not rattling the corporate sponsors, and skittering off  to perceivably more ratings-grabbing news, like what really happened to Anna Nicole Smith, and what are the ladies on The View dishing about today? This is all done of course, in that gratingly condescending way (think and picture Chris Matthews)  that has all the subtle effect of nails filing down on a chalkboard.

The worst is when they completely ignore stories that put their “profession” in the most garish of lights, those little slivers of truth that peek out from time to time thanks to real reporters in the business. David Barstow won a Pulitzer Prize this week for his expose on the media using generals planted by the Pentagon to sell the war , but I bet most Americans haven’t heard of “message force multipliers” and wouldn’t know why they should care, since the story never made it to the nightly news.

As for the current torture scandal, of which we have hardly heard the full extent, Glenn Greenwald has an excellent analysis on his site today regarding the corporate media’s complicity in playing down the story throughout the Bush years and its ongoing attempts to frame it in the most self-serving way possible. A taste:

For years, media stars ignored the fact that our Government was chronically breaking the law and systematically torturing detainees (look at this extremely detailed exposé by The Washington Post’s Dana Priest and Barton Gellman from December, 2002 to get a sense for how much we’ve known about all of this and for how long we’ve known it).  Now that the sheer criminality of this conduct, really for the first time, has exploded into mainstream political debates as a result of the OLC memos, media stars are forced to address it.  Exactly as one would expect, they are closing ranks, demanding (as always) that their big powerful political-official-friends and their elite institutions not be subject to the dirty instruments that are meant only for the masses — things like the rule of law, investigations, prosecutions, and accountability when they abuse their power.

Read more here.

So, I guess the question is whether the leader of the Great Imperial Senate himself is as stupid as he thinks we all are?

Update: Harry Reid defends Judge Bybee.

Update: Robert “Obama’s Ari Fleischer” Gibbs is forced by a CNN reporter to demonstrate the abject hollowness of the administration’s absurd substitute for a legitimate argument why the law shouldn’t count in this case:

Via Glenn Greenwald.

Life in Washington is one damn paradox after another.

Kudos to the American Civil Liberties Union for their lawsuit that compelled the disclosure of the torture memos yesterday. But these are probably only the tip of the iceberg. Hopefully the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and supporters of disclosing Bush-era crimes will have sufficient clout to force the government to reveal far more information on the torture scandal. Obama becomes complicit for all the crimes he covers up.

I will be curious to see if the revelations of how the Justice Department tortured the law and rationality to set loose the CIA will have any broader impact on how Americans view the federal government. I ain’t holdin’ my breath.

In my interview with Danner on February 18th, he explained that the U.S. government granted full access to the ICRC in the understanding that the report would be kept between them.

Well, on April, 2, Danner published a second article: “The Red Cross Torture Report: What it Means,” and published also the entire text of the ICRC report.

We here at Antiwar.com just wanted to make sure you all had a chance to read it [.pdf]. Please do.