Initially, they claimed to only be (gently) interrogating the children. These children have a mother who, according to the CIA, is not involved in Al Qaeda in any way, yet they were taken into US custody as pawns in this torture game. How long were they kept? Are they still in US custody?  "We're going to kill your children." Was KSM submitted to a mock execution of his children? Is this where Blackwater comes in? In Iraq and Afghanistan, it has been reported that wives and children were often imprisoned until the wanted husband or father turned himself in. America, the beautiful (that would be us) using women and children as hostages; Could we stoop any lower? "We're going to kill your children." Isn't this what we were saying and are still saying to the non-compliant Muslim world? If our torture, abuse and murder regime inflicted on the Muslim population is once again covered up with a few scapegoats that will be our collective karma.

How are drone attacks not assassinations or murder (unsuccessful or not)? What is the difference between someone pulling a trigger on a Somalian "rebel" from right behind them or from a control room in Florida (and don't answer 5,000 miles, smart-ass)? I realize that there is argument now about CIA and/or military assassination squads, which was not so much a surprise as was the fact that Congress was left out of the loop. Bush allegedly rescinded President Ford's loosely defined assassination ban, but that hardly seems to matter considering the Bush administration's demolition of limitations on executive and military actions. (And when did the CIA become our military lead?) At the very least, it will surely at some point, encourage others to do likewise. What will we say then? What will our conflicts look like then?

I cite this instance only as an example of the ambiguous "global" nature of the endless war against "terrorists." It may, in fact, be a good example of the use of remote controlled killing since the target(s) were top Al Qaeda officers, shortly after we had been attacked by Al Qaeda. The Taliban, regardless of one's opinion of them were a state government. Does their association with AL Qaeda make every Taliban a target for assassination from here to eternity? I do not have a legal mind or background, but I wonder how remote-controlled assassinations in autonomous countries can be legal. And this does not even address the perpetual problem of "collateral damage."

Here's the latest model (being shown anyway). Travels almost 500 MPH and carries four Hellfire missiles. 

Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF, explains that the next phase will enable a single drone to provide as many as 60 simultaneous live video feeds directly to combat troops. Some new drones will be as small as flies, others walk -- all appear destined to work with decreasing human input.

"The future of how you use these un-manned systems or remotely piloted systems is really unlimited," says Deptula, based at the Pentagon and racing to keep pace with battlefield needs as well as Gates's demands. "We need to open our minds and think more about capability and impact we are going to achieve as opposed to how we've done business in the past."

What will our Global War on Terror look like in ten or twenty years, when the skies are full of invisible cameras and these killer drones, exponentially smaller, faster and more lethal, are scattered around the globe, ready at a moment's notice to pop up and take out anyone deemed a suspect and any unfortunate bystanders?

I don't completely disagree but think that too often valid criticism from the left is unfairly dismissed as the left version of Limbaugh just because it is blunt and doesn't pull its punches. When Al Franken writes a book entitled Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot (an excellent book with many criticisms that have been borne out) he is using Limbaugh's own m.o. to skewer him. The self-petarded Limbaugh is presented here in the form of satire. Satire is a tool as is Limbaugh who often attempts to use it himself. But it's a blunt instrument in Limbaugh's shaky pill-popping hand.  

Limbaugh is a large man who routinely says things like this (from today's radio show): "Barack Obama has one thing in common with God. Do you know what it is? God doesn't have a birth certificate either." Ergo, Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot. End of story. And then there are things like Limbaugh's travel to a known foreign haven that traffics in child prostitution with illegal prescriptions of Viagra!

Oops, have I gone too far? Yes, yes I have. Not because these things are not true and not because Rush Limbaugh isn't really a big fat idiot (he is a big fat idiot). But, the point is- who cares? 

From dailycensored.com:

The US is not only becoming a nation of obese people, but is on the verge of another phenomenon the equivalent of cultural and mental obesity. We are a nation awash in a sea of information yet we have a paucity of understanding. We are a country where over a quarter of the population know the names of all five members of the fictitious family from The Simpsons yet only one in a thousand can name all the rights protected under the first amendment to the US Constitution. Journalistic values have been sold out to commercial interests and not even our core, national and constitutionally protected values are sacred. 

Our torture regime is eerily similar to China's reverse engineering, and there is a good reason for that. We have recycled past methods that had been used by China and others- methods that we have always labeled torture and based torture-bans on. The Convention Against Torture was signed by Reagan to criminalize what was being done by those evil, dirty Commie Reds. I believe China also reverse engineered its torture methods from others like the Russians and Japanese who took theirs from Torquemadas past. 

From a 1957 study of the Chinese methods in Korea: We found that the Chinese Communists used methods of coercing behavior from our men in their hands which Communists of other countries had employed for decades and which police and inquisitors had employed for centuries...

It's widely reported that we reverse engineered the SERE program to produce our "enhanced interrogations." SERE was designed to train soldiers to resist, not the usual harsh interrogations that might come from a weaker enemy, but the extreme and absolute torture used by the Chinese, Russians, etc. So you could say it was reverse engineering itself. And two reverses make a forward.

But our use of Communist torture techniques did not just emerge from the SERE program. In fact we had an engineering program of our own; experimenting for decades to find "useful" regimes. We imprisoned a Japanese officer for waterboarding in WWII, but could they have adopted the method from "others"?

From the 1957 study: The methods they used to shape compliance into the now familiar pattern of the forced confession, we believe, can be understood as essentially a teaching procedure--teaching the prisoner how to comply.

Sounds remarkably like former American Psychologist Assn. President Martin Seligman's "learned helplessness" which was used in SERE (although Seligman used electric shock on dogs to "teach" helplessness in his experiments). We basically just adopted the Chinese and Russian Gulag methods studied at length in the past but converted from the reverse SERE program, which was based on those same Communist methods. Senator Durbin, labeled a traitor, had to get up and tearfully apologize to the country for calling Guantanamo a gulag, but he was right. And techniques with similar objectives were used against our soldiers in Iraq as elsewhere. 

To state the obvious, we have been using the very torture techniques that we have condemned for decades (centuries?).  And the object was not to maim or inflict physical harm on the suspect; it was to break him down mentally through a systemic combination of sustained abuses and deprivations. It was to damage the core of a suspect to get him to talk. And it does get them to talk, to say whatever their, by now, fragile minds think the interrogator wants to hear. That this talk might be babble, doesn't mean it's useless. The value of the information extracted by squeezing the mental life out of a person is, in all likelihood, going to be worthless as "actionable intelligence" but not worthless for other means.

The only question, then, is how did we profit from this? What did we get out of it? I do not doubt that there was more than a little vengeance involved, at least initially. Emotions were running high after 9/11, not without reason and I believe the military and intelligence agencies have been used that way before. But the real motivation could not have been only that. And I doubt they were getting much good intelligence for the effort expended. If real intelligence that thwarted real attacks had been uncovered, the Bush administration would have broadcast it, in some way, far and wide. After all, they broadcast many trumped-up or overblown plots and arrests of mentally deranged "terrorists." They trumpeted info from one case, obtained from a laptop, without torture I presume, even though the announcements blew a months long extensive British investigation into the group.

But, think of the Bush administration pre- vs. post- 9/11. They obtained their power and mandate from the WOT. I think if one scans the literature on these recycled torture techniques, one will find that they do not produce good intel, generally, but they do produce confessions and leads, even if they are false ones. And confessions were proof that our WOT was effective. Leads needed to be chased down. The US Government was keeping America and the world safe from terrorists, and oh, by the way, needed unlimited powers to do that. The Bush admin produced its own propaganda justifying their power grabs through torture and other WOT production techniques, sold it to congress and the press and much of the public, and profited greatly from it.

Liquidation, conservatorship and government subsidization; these are the three ways to fix the banking system. There is no fourth way. Geithner's plan is not a plan at all; it's mumbo-jumbo dignified with an acronym; PPIP. [snip] Geithner is clearly the wrong man for the job. His PPIP is nothing more than a stealth ripoff of public funds which uses confusing rules and guidelines to conceal the true objective, which is to shift toxic garbage onto the public's balance sheet while recapitalizing bankrupt financial institutions.

Excuse the indulgence. I posted a Ferlinghetti poem a couple of weeks ago and RobertinBeirut has sent me the original Khalil Gibran poem that inspired Ferlinghetti’s poem. I failed to note Ferlinghetti’s credit to Gibran in my original post. They make an interesting comparison.

Khalil Gibran:

Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.

Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave, eats a bread it does not harvest, and drinks a wine that flows not from its own wine-press.

Pity the nation that acclaims the bull as hero, and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.

Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking.

Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years and whose strong men are yet in the cradle.

Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.

Khalil Gibran
The garden of the Prophet (1934)

Ferlinghetti:

Pity the nation whose people are sheep, and whose shepherds mislead them.

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced, and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice, except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.

Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own and no other culture but its own.

Pity the nation whose breath is money and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.

Pity the nation -- oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode and their freedoms to be washed away.

My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti 2007

Pity the nation whose people are sheep,

and whose shepherds mislead them.

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,

and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice,

except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero

and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.

Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own

and no other culture but its own.

Pity the nation whose breath is money

and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.

Pity the nation -- oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode

and their freedoms to be washed away.

My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.