Kissinger-loving Herman Cain: Obliterate Cambodians! Slaughter Chileans! Massacre Bangladeshis!

By Michael J.W. Stickings 

In that interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Monday, the one in which he displayed astounding ignorance on Libya (and also, un-GOP-like, supported collective bargaining rights for public sector workers), Herman Cain says he talked to Henry Kissinger about being secretary of state in a Cain administration:

"Dr. Kissinger turned my offer down to be secretary of state. He said he's perfectly happy doing what he's doing," Cain said, when asked what kind of people he'd like to have in his administration.

Cain said he'd appoint a "majority of business people as well as some seasoned officeholders," specifically naming Paul Ryan, Jim DeMint, John Bolton, KT McFarland and John Chain, the former head of Strategic Air Command, as people he admires.

Last month, Cain named Kissinger, Bolton and McFarland — a former Reagan Pentagon spokeswoman and Fox News personality — as three of his top foreign policy influences.

Yes, I assume Kissinger is happy making millions advising his secret authoritarian clients, corporate and political alike.

But what does this say about Cain? Well, presumably that he admires and is influenced by war criminals, that he supports the carpet bombing of Cambodia, right-wing dictatorships like Pinochet's in Chile, mass murder around the globe, and gross violations of international law and human rights.

(Of course, given Cain's ignorance in Libya, it's doubtful he has any understanding at all of Kissinger past or present, just a vague sense that he's a Republican foreign policy big shot.)

Then again, what we also see here is just how ignorantly inconsistent Cain is. Is he a realist (Kissinger) or a neoconservative (Bolton)? Does he even know the difference? Unlikely.

And if he wants Ryan around, you know he also wants to destroy Social Security.

Looks like the Cain presidency's agenda is rounding into form.

**********

By the way, Politico offers an update: "Cain spokesman J.D. Gordon tells The Fix that Cain was just kidding about asking Kissinger. Though you wouldn't know it from his delivery or the response of the room."

Indeed, he was probably quite serious. The claim that he was joking is just post-embarrassment spin.

But even if he was joking... why Kissinger?

The Cheney Legacy

By J. Thomas Duffy

This guy just has no self-awareness.

And, our society ... Letting him run around, shouting his mouth off ...

It is almost the level of, say, giving Jeffrey Dahmer airtime on the Food Network.



The background.

You remember this;

On Tuesday, Cheney, serving in his role as president of the Senate, appeared in the chamber for a photo session. A chance meeting with Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, became an argument about Cheney's ties to Halliburton Co., an international energy services corporation, and President Bush's judicial nominees. The exchange ended when Cheney offered some crass advice.

"Fuck yourself," said the man who is a heartbeat from the presidency.

Not sure, in classic debating guidelines, that is acceptable, however, for Darth Vader, it is his proudest moment;

Cheney: Telling Leahy to ‘f*ck’ himself was ‘sort of the best thing I ever did.’

On Dennis Miller’s radio show today, Cheney suggested that his Leahy f-bomb was “the best thing” he had ever done:

MILLER: By the way, my, I also want to thank you, on the list of things I feel I should thank you for, almost kicking Patrick Leahy’s ass. Thank you very much.

CHENEY: Hehehehe.

MILLER: I love that move. One of my favorite stories. Muttering that.

CHENEY: You’d be surprised how many people liked that. That’s sort of the best thing I ever did.

Really?

I would have thought the mushroom clouds, or the never-happened Prague meeting lies would be up there ...

Or, shooting your friend in the face ...

Or, wait, wait ...

Exposing a covert CIA agent, for the purpose of getting back at her husband, for his exposing of your lies, would have grabbed the top spot ...

Your lackey, Little Scooter, almost went to jail for that one ...

The fact that you said this, with Dennis Miller, perhaps, and we'll have to check into it, the Has-Been Miller was simply auditioning new chimps to be his sidekick.

BarbinMD is shocked, that she actually agrees with Cheney;

Compared to the long list of heinous acts he perpetrated against this country, he's right. Being a total ass is the best thing he's ever done.

While Cheney can pat himself on the back, that using an invective was his greatest accomplishment, we, as a country, will have to wait a bit longer for ours.

That being, seeing this person, on trial, for his War Crimes.

I believe, when it's over, and he's carted off to prison, Cheney, and perhaps Miller, will be "surprised how many people liked that."


Bonus Darth Vader Cheney Riffs

James Mann: The Armageddon Plan

Source Says Secret Cabal Not In White House, But In Cheney Secret Bunker ...Wing of VP Hideout Dedicated To Iraq War, Neocon Strategy; Decisions Made Over Coffee and Krispy Kremes

Libby Trial Update - The Scooter and Cheney Show Theme Song

Top Ten Cloves: Slogans and Tag Lines For Caffeine-Free Diet Sprite – If Dick Cheney Was Pitchman




(Cross Posted at The Garlic)

Dick the Impaler

By Capt. Fogg

We seem to have forgotten about torture. Comedians and far right shamans still make jokes about how those still left in the cages at Guantanamo are the "worst of the worst." People are heavily against giving them any amenities like flu shots and some have the audacity to say we treat them too well, even though so many of them have never had any case proved against them or have been cleared: so many are guilty of little more than being Muslim or accused of something by an enemy.

That Dick Cheney, the once and in his own mind future Führer pokes fun at the idea that we ever engaged in torturing prisoners and although he's not well liked by any but the most extreme subhumans, he has never suffered any consequences for having directed and promoted things we used to hang people for when I was a boy: kidnapping, torture and murder. Republicans prefer to believe him, many of the rest of us believe so much in our essential virtue that we just don't want to hear any more of it.

It's not that there is no evidence of the Bush Administration's capital crimes, not at all. We have imprisoned and tortured many people with essentially no evidence against them, but there has been a constant flow of increasingly horrible information about kidnapping and the kind of torture even Limbaugh or Dick the Impaler himself couldn't pass off as a frat-boy prank. Crain Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan now tells us, says Raw Story, that the people the CIA sent to secret dungeons there were raped with broken bottles and/or boiled alive until they "admitted" to being affiliated with Al Qaida. Some were forced to watch their children being tortured and all so that the Bush administration could justify destroying Iraq to the eager war lovers back home.

"I'm talking of people being raped with broken bottles,"

he said at a lecture in October that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network.

"I'm talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I'm talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on."

I'm not ashamed to say that I'm ashamed of my country. I'm ashamed not so much by the monsters and tyrants and murderers of children some of us still revere as heroes and patriots, but by the way we still support what they did, still can't accept the horror, don't want to be told about it, still want to continue crimes as hideous as any ever committed, because after all, these people are "suspects." These people are "the worst of the worst" whether guilty or not and most of all they aren't Christian, like us. It's not really important anyway, not like gay marriage or insurance company profits or ACORN or tax breaks for Cheney and Bush.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

Exactly

By Creature

Andrew Sullivan gets to the torture nub:

One more point that [Richard] Cohen simply ignores. Torture is illegal. It is a war crime. You cannot get to the point of debating its pros and cons until you have changed the law, removed the US from Geneva and the UN Convention on Torture and placed the US legally on the same ground as the enemy. That's the only legal way to do it - by repealing the laws against it. But the laws were not repealed; they were secretly broken; and those who broke the law, the former president and vice-president chief among them, are above the law in Washington.

Torture is not a "policy" disagreement, it's a criminal act.

AG Holder leaning towards appointing special prosecutor

By Creature

Put me in the I'll-believe-it-when-I-see-it camp. While I don't want to see Obama's agenda stalled, the reality is that the same people who are currently saying no to anything Obama will be the same people up in arms over any decision to look into Bush era crimes. Sure there will be yelling on the TV. Sure we will be subjected to an endless loop of Newt and Liz, but that's about it. It's not like Republicans are playing nice now. If it's a choice between getting yelled at and the rule of law, well, that's not a very hard choice. Is it?

War criminal and mass murderer arrested in Serbia

By Michael J.W. Stickings

From the NYT:

Radovan Karadzic, one of the world’s most wanted war criminals for his part in the massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995, was arrested Monday in a raid in Serbia that ended a 13-year hunt.

And now it is time for justice in The Hague. And for Karadzic to spend the rest of his days in custody. Nothing will make up for what he did, but at least, and at long last, he has been found. And will be found guilty. Which is better than nothing.

Extreme Interrogations -- Revelations Gaining Momentum

By Carol Gee

The more we learn about what happens to those whom our government takes into custody as threats to our national security, I increasingly have the urge to wash my hands more frequently. This news will set the tone to which I refer.

Senator Kit Bond is floating something that would tell the government, what it could not do in the way of torture. Headlined, "GOP Senator Floats Compromise Torture Measure," it was written by Paul Kiel - May 8, 2008. He includes this AP quote:

Rather than prescribe what the intelligence agency is allowed to do in an interrogation, Bond wants to write into law only what the CIA cannot do: force detainees to be naked, perform sexual acts, or pose in a sexual manner; have hoods or sacks placed over their heads or duct tape over their eyes; be beaten, shocked, or burned; threatened with military dogs; exposed to extreme heat or cold; subjected to mock executions; deprived of food, water, or medical care; or waterboarded.

Fellow "handwashers" -- I am doing a little Round-up of "Torture Stories" for your reading pleasure today. I must give grateful credit to my unflagging sources in the Blogosphere, others willing to feel uncomfortable with the material contained in many of the current national security stories coming out: "mcjoan" at DailyKos, Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker, "emptywheel" at Firedoglake, Ryan Singel at Wired: Threat Level, and Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com. If I am away from the story for a few days, I can always count on one or more of these dedicated bloggers to keep their hands in.

"CNN, the Pentagon's "military analyst" program and Gitmo," is the title of a Glenn Greenwald post at Salon.com on May 9. Greenwald's source was a NYT-forced release of thousands of pages of Pentagon communications regarding the analysts program. Adding another twist to this messy scandal now coming out more fully, his comprehensive piece details how the true situation at the Guantanamo detention facility was white-washed during a Pentagon sponsored trip for the analysts to Cuba in 2005. Related to my recent "Tortured Thinking" posts Part I and Part II, I quote one of the key tidbits:

Demonstrating how controlled by the Pentagon were these "analysts," Shepperd's email to "help" was forwarded to top Rumsfeld aide Larry Di Rita, who replied (7470): "OK, but let's get him briefed on Khatani so he doesn't go too far on that one" -- referring to the so-called 20th hijacker Mohammed al-Khatani, whose Guantanamo interrogation had been particularly brutal, as he "was stripped naked, isolated, given intravenous fluids and forced to urinate on himself, and exercised to exhaustion during interrogations that lasted 18 to 20 hours a day for 48 of 54 days."

"The FBI's Hands Off Approach to Torture," was also written by TPM Muckracker's Paul Kiel - April 24, 2008. FBI Director Mueller appears to have been unable to have a hand in derailing the torture programs propelled by the DOD and DOJ attorneys' sullied legal opinions.To quote the key passage:

. . . what the FBI's reaction to the CIA's use of waterboarding and other forms of torture in 2002 had been: keep FBI agents out of trouble. But when House Democrats pressed as to why the FBI hadn't investigated the abuses, Mueller said his hands were tied. The CIA and the Defense Department had the green light. "There has to be a legal basis for us to investigate, and generally that legal basis is given to us by the Department of Justice."

Taken in hand by the TSA? The following information might be useful to you before your next airport terminal interrogation. Headlined, "Court: Government Must Reveal Watch-List Status to Constantly Detained Americans," by Ryan Singel, April 24, 2008, you should be able now to find out your watch list status. To quote from the opening of the story:

Eight Americans of south Asian and Middle Eastern descent who were repeatedly detained at the border for questioning will be able to learn if they are actually on the government's terrorist watch list, a federal court in Illinois ruled last week, marking the first time that citizens have been able to learn whether they have been added to a sprawling and error-prone list used for screening at borders and traffic stops.

The government invoked the powerful state secrets privilege in the case, arguing that letting the plaintiffs know if they are or aren't on the list would harm national security since that could alert them to the fact they have been under government scrutiny.

. . . The Terrorist Screening Center, which runs the list, says it has been pruning the list and removing errant entries, even as the list grows by an estimated 20,000 names a month. While the TSC says the majority of the names on the list are foreigners, most of the people compared against the list are Americans, who are checked against the list when they are stopped for a traffic violation, enter or leave the country or fly domestically.

The hand writing is on the wall -- Republican Senator Kit Bond thinks a list of "not-do's" is the answer to preventing torture. Knowing this group of interrogators with seemingly limitless inventiveness, however, they might just handily circumvent the list with any number of "other measures." If Guantanamo is closed there is no telling what secret locations might be the destiny of the detainees. And it seems that the Mainstream Media will continue to rely on their "military analysts" to keep us informed. Most people will never know how many of these retired military hands are dirty with conflicts of interest because the MSM will not even report that scandal. But at least, pretty soon we should all be able to find out if we are suspected terrorists or not.

Excuse me; I'm going to wash my hands now.

(Cross-posted at South by Southwest.)

Watch and weep

By Capt. Fogg

Many of us are going to get a government handout this month; you know, the kind of thing the Republicans have usually treated as another form of the Socialist Plague when the dollars are directed toward indigent children. For a good number of those recipients, that money will go not to purchase the Japanese cars, Korean televisions and Chinese everything else that we're being told is an economic stimulus plan that will prevent the recession that has already happened. For most, I think, it won't go to pay down the crippling debt or to pay for needed medical care, but to buy gasoline; the indispensable substance of a nation with the poorest public transportation system in the civilized world.

Our Bushtopia can always find a way to get you to buy oil, no matter who suffers in the process and they're very good at making it sound like patriotism. Of course real patriotism has little to do with lapel pins or stupid looking plastic flag holders clipped to SUV windows or yellow "Support the Troops" ribbons, and while you're pouring your government handout into the tank of your 7000 pound monument to fashionable folly, remember who is suffering and dying so that you can exercise your plastic patriotism.

Remember the men and women living in dirt and filth and blood for year after year until they either die or are discharged with a "personality disorder" like shrapnel in the skull, so as to deprive them of decent medical attention and the support they deserve. If you want -- if you really want to see how Uncle Scam treats our "heroes" when they return home to wait to be sent back for another 15 months watch this video. Watch all ten minutes of it and consider taking the hush money George is sending you and using it to defeat each and every Republican candidate with the gall to support this sham government and its sham war. Use that money to make sure not one of these criminals gets another term; these thugs who get free medical care, large pensions and all they can squeeze from the suffering citizens, abused soldiers and victims of American aggression. Watch it and weep.



(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Crimes of Yoo

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Must-read Greenwald:

The fact that John Yoo is a Professor of Law at Berkeley and is treated as a respectable, serious expert by our media institutions, reflects the complete destruction over the last eight years of whatever moral authority the United States possessed. Comporting with long-held stereotypes of two-bit tyrannies, we're now a country that literally exempts our highest political officials from the rule of law, and have decided that there should be no consequences when they commit serious felonies.

John Yoo's Memorandum, as intended, directly led to -- caused -- a whole series of war crimes at both Guantanamo and in Iraq. The reason such a relatively low-level DOJ official was able to issue such influential and extraordinary opinions was because he was working directly with, and at the behest of, the two most important legal officials in the administration: George Bush's White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and Dick Cheney's counsel (and current Chief of Staff) David Addington. Together, they deliberately created and authorized a regime of torture and other brutal interrogation methods that are, by all measures, very serious war crimes.

In short, the Bush Administration committed war crimes. Needless to say, a demand for justice is in order.

Make sure to read Glenn's entire post. And see also Scott Horton at Harper's, Phillippe Sands at Vanity Fair, and the ACLU.

Sands: "The abuse, rising to the level of torture, of those captured and detained in the war on terror is a defining feature of the presidency of George W. Bush."