Violation of the bovine restrictions in the Geneva Conventions by using a minotaur for "enhanced interrogation" in an unnavigable labyrinth? 

Say it ain’t so.

Apparently Dick Cheney really wanted a griffin for the interrogator job, but he was too flighty.

Ahhhhh, The Onion.

Bless them for taking our policies and media to the extremes.  And, in the process, making it crystal clear how far we’ve really gone over the edge of the cliff.

Eugene Robinson lays it flat out:

For the Bush administration, torture was a delicate business. The aim was to injure but not incapacitate — to inflict precisely enough pain and terror to break a subject’s will, but no more. To calibrate the proper degree of abuse, the torturer needed an accurate sense of how much agony the subject’s mind and body can tolerate.

In the administration’s program of "enhanced interrogation," this expertise was provided by doctors and psychologists — professionals who are supposed to heal and comfort. A new report by Physicians for Human Rights assembles the evidence and reaches a sickening but inescapable conclusion: "Health professionals played central roles in developing, implementing and providing justification for torture."

Dwell on that for a moment, especially if you believe that the Bush administration’s decision to submit terrorism suspects to medieval interrogation practices was somehow justifiable — or even if you believe that torture was wrong, but that now we should "look forward" and pretend it never happened. This is how torture warps a society and distorts its values.

You tell me something that intricate and meticulously planned was just a few isolated incidents of rogue folks with no orders from the top of the chain of command.  Or that we all don’t shoulder some of the responsibility for it happening in our names. 

Or that there wasn’t a concerted effort to hide what we were doing because people knew it skirted legality.

Or that conduct like this helps the US instead of creating a more robust recruiting poster for the people we claim to be fighting against…all the while becoming them.  

We have traded our liberty and our long-standing fight for human rights around the world for the deliberately hyped illusion of a little safety.

And we have forfeited our souls in the process. 

Not in practice, mind you, but as a codeword sop to the masses as justification for defending the status quo.

The end result of bipartisanship is paring down a bill until it changes next to nothing of import.  And then selling it as if it were the greatest thing since the last bucket of lukewarm spit to pass this way.

This is nothing new in politics. The money has always been on the side of the status quo, since change can be costly to one’s bottom line. 

And the status quo has perennially been about "I’ve got mine.  Screw you," now hasn’t it? 

One only need watch the FDR Fala speech (Youtube above) to get that. Or read a little history, you can pretty much pick any era.

What is new? That there is no real voice for change and the little guy capitalizing on this moment in our nation’s history.

And it shows.

Jean Edward Smith has a fantastic op-ed in the NYTimes today talking about FDR, the false sop of bipartisanship and the real value of a little more backbone:

. . .this fixation on securing bipartisan support for health care reform suggests that the Democratic Party has forgotten how to govern and the White House has forgotten how to lead.

Roosevelt understood that governing involved choice and that choice engendered dissent. He accepted opposition as part of the process. It is time for the Obama administration to step up to the plate and make some hard choices.

He cites numorous examples of Roosevelt New Deal reforms which were enacted in spite of entrenched interests, and not because they’d been pared down to mere windowdressing to win their support.

Was Glass-Steagall passed in a bi-partisan fashion with entrenched interests on Wall Street given a seat at the negotiating table? Hell no. Social security?  Are you kidding me?!?

Were there membes of Congress consorting with moneyed interests trying to block the bill, much like Max Baucus’ lobbyist-filed anteroom? Undoubtedly.  Although, as Krugman points out, there’s a lot more of that lobbyist payola floating around these days.

But the real difference between then and now?

FDR sold the need for change at the grassroots by making that change actually happen.  And without selling the public’s interest down the river in the process.  Which made his grassroots support all the stronger, and enabled him to fend off opposition by painting them as being against the public, fueling more public support in the process. 

FDR drew his power for change from the people, not just from the people around him inside the Beltway.

Better political leadership in the Democratic party would help.  So would those leaders actually believing in the need for change instead of giving it political lip service and then undercutting it with their actions.

Can the Obama administration still make needed changes? Absolutely.

Will they? Well, that’s the big question, isn’t it?

Patterns via -sel-. Gorgeous macro detail and color.

Today, it’s another inane installment of the continuing saga of the GOP’s longest-running program wherein the buck stops anywhere but here.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the overwrought and not-so-dulcet tones of Kit Bond and friends, in Accountability For Thee, But Not For Me:

U.S. Senate Republican Whip Jon Kyl (Ariz.) was joined by U.S. Senator Kit Bond (R-Mo.), Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and other senators today to express concern about recent reports that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder intends to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate CIA officials who interrogated al Qaeda terrorists.

“We are deeply concerned by recent news reports that you are ‘poised to appoint a special prosecutor’ to investigate CIA officials who interrogated al Qaeda terrorists. Such an investigation could have a number of serious consequences, not just for the honorable members of the intelligence community, but also for the security of all Americans,” the senators wrote in a letter to Holder.

Shorter GOP: "No matter what illegal and unethical policies we may have championed or enabled, no matter what illegal activities may have been perpetrated, no matter what agencies of the federal government we have helped to corrupt, manipulate or mangle…accountability is only for the other guys. Never, ever for us."

If they were at least manning up to the need for investigations of illegality that reach however high such misconduct may have occurred, I might have the slightest glimmer of respect for them. Because, frankly, leaving line agents holding the bag for Dick Cheney, David Addington and the neocon crew isn’t exactly appropriate, now is it?

But nope, that’s not their point.

It’s bad enough that the special prosecutor mandate doesn’t seem broad enough at this juncture to encompass policy making at all levels. Because that sends a signal that if you hold power, you aren’t held to account. Only the little guy is.

Is it any wonder that so many things in this country are a mess right now when "look the other way" is considered appropriate behavior from our leadership?

I wouldn’t condone that as an excuse from my 6 year old. And I’m sure as hell not going to accept it from a sitting Senator who takes an oath to uphold the laws of this country and its constitution.

Emptywheel, Spencer, CCR, Glenn and the ALCU have more on the CIA docs.  I’m still reading through — looks like it will be a highlighter and post-its kinda week. (more…)

Word is that the DOJ is seriously beefing up the fraud enforcement unit within the Criminal Division. This is some very good news indeed: The department is looking for what Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer calls “a superstar” to lead the fraud section. It also plans to add 10 trial attorneys and fill the long vacant job of deputy chief for corporate, securities and investment fraud.

I’m contemplating a restart of the “You Work For Us Summer Tour.”

Last time, the issue was FISA. And all of us were seriously, seriously pissed.

And there was a unified front on pushing better government and accountability from everyone all at once.

This time? Health care is on the plate in a big way in the national discussion prior to the August recess.

Why is it in this country that it feels like we continually back people into a corner. Sometimes of our own making, sometimes of theirs, but oft times a combination of both. And then we bitch about them being in that damned corner. But we never really bother contemplating how they got there in the first place.

Last January, Sens. Dorgan and Casey and the Democratic Policy Committee pushed the Department of Defense to investigate multiple issues with electrocution deaths in Iraq. The IG delivered its report yesterday. As Sen. Byron Dorgan says: U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) said Monday a new Defense Department Inspector General investigation confirms findings of a hearing he chaired a year ago…

An interesting pattern has emerged among the federal judges charged with reviewing the habeas petitions of Gitmo detainees. Chisun Lee of ProPublica explains: A close examination of the decisions shows that some of the fears about sending terrorism cases to civilian courts have not been realized.