On the Right is going to go apeshit when they read this.

Before the Right Wing Echosphere can get the word in, Sully is not saying Bush=Hitler. He’s saying that once you start crossing the bright lines that separate acceptable interrogation from torture, you’re in some hidous company.

You’re kidding me:

Claims of terrorism represented less than 0.01 percent of charges filed in recent years in immigration courts by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, according to a report issued Sunday by an independent research group.

This comes despite the fact the Bush administration has repeatedly asserted that fighting terrorism is the central mission of DHS.

The Transactional Records Action Clearinghouse said it analyzed millions of previously undisclosed records obtained from the immigration courts under the Freedom of Information Act.

Of the 814,073 people charged by DHS in immigration courts during the past three years, 12 faced charges of terrorism, TRAC said.

Those 12 cases represent 0.0015 percent of the total number of cases filed.

“The DHS claims it is focused on terrorism. Well that’s just not true,” said David Burnham, a TRAC spokesman. “Either there’s no terrorism, or they’re terrible at catching them. Either way it’s bad for all of us.”

First off, the group is a little off in their criticism: one of DHS’s primary duties is handling immigration. They replaced the INS in that respect. Every step Sue and I took to get her Green Card dealt with DHS, not INS.

However, they are absolutely accurate in that the Bush Administration has always represented DHS as an anti-terrorism agency. To quote from the official announcement of its formation:

The mission of the Office will be to develop and coordinate the implementation of a comprehensive national strategy to secure the United States from terrorist threats or attacks. The Office will coordinate the executive branch’s efforts to detect, prepare for, prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from terrorist attacks within the United States.

But to lift a paragraph from my immigration post:
Continue reading DHS=BS →

Over at Right-Thinking, I’ve gotten this in response to opposing torture:

So, there is NO WAY to get information from a prisoner. Drugs? Thats torture, because it’s against his/her will. Asking nicely? No, that’s torture, because you think of the prisoner as an idiot and it insults him/her. And as we all know insulting a prisoner (a naked women in the room with a muslim) is torture. Just having a muslim prisoner being questioned by an inferior infidel is humiliating to said muslim, and humiliation is torture. Offering a cup of coffee and not tea to a muslim prisoner is torture. An interrogator eating a ham sandwich in front of a muslim prisoner is torture. All these don’t even have to do with muslims, and can be turned around by anyone looking to be a victim.

I’m sick of this ad hominem bullshit. If I say that water-boarding and sleep deprivation are torture, I therefore think that anything is torture. I’m a namby-pamby flower-sniffing, tree-hugging liberal who just thinks we should give all terror suspects blow jobs.

Why is it so hard for people to wrap your their minds around the idea that there are acceptable and unacceptable means of interrogation? Anything that threatens or inflicts physical pain or fear of death is, by the definition listed in our treaties and our laws, torture. Anything that doesn’t is acceptable. We don’t go have to go all culture-sensitivity patrol but can still be effective.

Read this excerpt from the Army Field Manual on effective interrogation techniques. Thinks like simple questioning, “good cop bad cop”, incentives, rapid-fire questions, yellling, appeal to family, appeal to ego. None of these are considered torture. Just because you don’t waterboard someone doesn’t mean you become a wuss.

Now these techniques – which involve nothing more than a patient interrogator, sound wimpy don’t they? “Oh Mike”, you say, “You pussy! That won’t work. That’s just namby-pamby liberal bullshit. We need to beat ‘em up!”

But you know what? We found them effective for two hundred years. The Soviet Union used these techniques when they wanted information, not breaking. The Israelis use them all the time. And cops use them in our own country so effectively that the vast majority of crimes are solved by uncoerced confession.

There is a difference between interrogation and torture. And I’m sick and tired of the Orwellian Newspeak that blurs the line between the two.

How repulsive is Dick Cheney? Sullivan’s been documenting his support for reckless war on Iran. Now he’s slamming Geneva at West Point.

“Capture one of these killers, and he’ll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States,” the Vice President said in the Saturday morning speech. “Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away.”

I am so fucking sick of this line of reasoning. “Al-Quaeda doesn’t observe Geneva, why should we?”

Why? Because we’re better than they are!. The British and Hessians were brutal in their occupation during the War of Independence; Washington insisted on humane treatment. The South had Andersonville; Lincoln had reasonable prisons. The Germans, Japanese, Koreans and Vietnamese tortured our people; we didn’t. Douglas MacArthur specifically instructed his soldiers to treat POW’s with honor. Because he wanted them to know that ciitizens of a Democracy were better, that their leaders were lying to them about how Americans tortured all prisoners. He defined America by a bright moral standard.

The Right is always railing against moral relativism. Liberals and Libertarians are supposed to be a threat to the very fiber of the nation because we tolerate gays, question drug prohibition and oppose abortion criminalization. But now they want us to define our morality relative to Al-Quaeda. What kind of broken is your moral compass when gay marriage is a threat to our national integrity but torture is OK?

Dick Cheney can define his moral compass by Al-Quaeda. I’ll define mine by George Washington, Abe Lincoln and Douglas MacArthur.

You know things are bad when you’re borrowing euphemisms from the Nazis.

Bush. He’s made everything liberals have ever said about conservatives true.

Ha! I knew people were getting too bent out of shape over the Muslim poll:

A reader writes:

What hasn’t been talked about much in the just released Pew poll is that, while 47 percent consider themselves Muslim first and American second, 42 percent consider themselves Christian first and American second.

And while 43 percent of American Muslims think mosques/churches should express views on political/social issues, 54 percent of American Christians think likewise.

I certainly hope America has enough genius to assimilate those Christians, too.

Another adds:

Clearly, there are troubling aspects to the poll, the suicide bombing response in particular. However, when it comes to issues of governance and influence there are parallels. A Pew poll from August 24, 2006 yielded the following: “(S)ix-in-ten white evangelical Protestants say that the Bible should be the guiding principle in making laws when it conflicts with the will of the people.”

From the same 2006 poll, 67 percent of those polled believe “the U.S. is a Christian nation.”

I would also add that 5% of Muslim liking Al-Quaeda is nothing to panic over. You can get 5% of people to agree to anything. And while it’s a concern that 20% of Muslims think suicide bombings are OK, I wonder what percentage of Christians think bombing abortion clinics or stoning gays is OK.

It is distressing that only 25% of Muslims accept the truth of 9/11. But then again, many Americans won’t accept the truth about JFK. What else do I have to say? People are stupid, Muslim, Christian, Jew or atheist, idiocy is universal.

Oh, things are going so well in Iraq:

Authorities in northern Iraq have arrested four people in connection with the “honor killing” last month of a Kurdish teen — a startling, morbid pummeling caught on a mobile phone video camera and broadcast around the world.

The case portrays the tragedy and brutality of honor killings in the Muslim world. Honor killings take place when family members kill relatives, almost always female, because they feel the relatives’ actions have shamed the family.

In this case, Dua Khalil, a 17-year-old Kurdish girl whose religion is Yazidi, was dragged into a crowd in a headlock with police looking on and kicked, beaten and stoned to death last month. (Watch the attack, and what authorities are doing about it )

Authorities believe she was killed for being seen with a Sunni Muslim man. She had not married him or converted, but her attackers believed she had, a top official in Nineveh province said. The Yazidis, who observe an ancient Middle Eastern religion, look down on mixing with people of another faith.

This is Kurd Iraq, where things are going well. The police stood around and watched because she might have been associating with a non-Yazidi.

So, here’s how the logic works: raise the question of blowback and you’re part of the 9/11 Truth Movement. This is disgusting.

I’ve had it up to here with this arrogant Administration and their myrmidons in the Right Wing Echosphere. They have become the Democrats. Smear smear smear. Obstruct obstruct obstruct. Lie lie lie.

George Bush. Sean Hannity. Michelle Malkin. Dick Cheney. You’d make Ronald Reagan switch back to the Democrats.

I have to disagree with Sulilvan and the Left on the Matt Diaz question. There is no doubt the Bush Administration was wagging its genitals at the Geneva Convention, Congress and the Supreme Court. But there’s a chain of command and ways of dealing with these things. Diaz took the law into his own hands.

Two more sissified weaklings who want the terrorists to win come out against torture.

Oh, wait. One is a former CENTCOM commander; one is a former Marine Commandant.

Why is that the military opposes torture and all the draft-dodgers and chickenhawks love it?

On the Party of Torture.

The simple legal definition of torture must be thrown in their faces at every opportunity. These people do not get to define torture in a country under the rule of law. We are not in a Lewis Carroll novel. The law and our treaty obligations define torture. And its definition is clear in the UN Convention to which the U.S. is a signatory:

“any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession.”

Who cares about treaties? The United States Consitution, that’s who. Because it explicitly states that any treaty we sign has the absolute rule of law, just as though it were an act of Congress.

They’re now moving to ban the one man who has had enough of this crap by claiming that he said we caused 9/11 (I watched it; he said nothing of the kind).

The GOP is quickly beginning to disgust me. I remain a Man With No Party.

I guess linking to this comparison, via Sullivan (scroll down to Abu Ghraib) not only invokes Godwin’s Law, but reveals me as a complete Commie Fag Junkie Who Wants the Terrorists to Win.

John Bolton was a lot easier to like when he kept his mouth shut. Since his terrible performance on The Daily Show, he’s now calling on us to invade Iran.

Look, I don’t like the idea of a nuclear Iran any more than he does. But we’re going to have to accept it. We don’t have the ability to invade. We’ve got our hands full with Iraq, a much smaller nation with no allies and no money and three different ethnic groups. Can you imagine invading a country several times its size with money, weapons, motivation and a single proud culture? Remember that invasion of Japan we managed to avoid in 1945? Iran would make it look like a picnic.

No, what we do with Iran what we did with the Soviet Union: we create a balance of terror. We give Patriot missiles to Israel, park nuclear missile subs in the Indian Ocean and make it very clear to the Iranians that if they ever launch a weapon, Tehran will cease to exist. We explain that with mass spectroscopy, we can trace a terrorist weapon to its source. And if we find they’ve given one to a terrorist, Tehran will cease to exist. This is what we did with the Soviet Union. This is what we do now. And it will work because even if John Bolton has sufficiently terrified himself, we will still have a thousand times as many nuclear weapons as Iran.

“But Mike”, you say, “they’re crazy! They think Allah will protect them!”. Really? Are they crazier than Joe Stalin or Nikita Kruschev, both of whom murdered millions? Is this insight into their nature based on anything real or just the hysterical supposition of the Right? Is it the same insight that told us the Iraqis would great us with flowers in Nasiriyah?

I actually don’t think Ahmajinedab is a religious fanatic. I think he, like most of the Islamists, is using religious rhetoric to advance a quite earthly political agenda.

There’s something else: the biggest gaffes in foreign policy come about from misreading the enemy, from seeing them the way we want to see them rather than the way they are. It’s 1861, when the South thinks they will whip the North in months. It’s 1939, when Chamberlain thought Hitler just wanted to reunite the German people. It’s 1968, when we thought that Vietnam wanted to become a puppet state of their thousand-year old enemy (watch Fog of War sometime).

It’s 2003, when we think Saddam is refusing to accomodate weapons inspectors because he has WMDs. We miss that he just doesn’t want the Iranians and the Shiites and the Kurds to know he’s powerless.

We’re in danger of doing that now with Iran. We see Iran’s nuclear program the way we want to see it: as a way to nuke Israel and the US. We fail to see the proud Persian people, looking at their conquered neighbor, surrounded by a nuclear Pakistan, a nuclear India, a nuclear Israel, a nuclear Russia, a nuclear US. They are afraid. And they feel that acquiring a nuke is the only way they will prevent their country from being next on Bush’s conquered list.

Bolton is a fool. He sees Iran the way he wants to see them. So does the rest of the Right. I don’t think we can afford another one of their blunders.