Mukasey Approved by SJC: This is NOT America

Vyan

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Tue Nov-06-07 03:37 PM
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Mukasey Approved by SJC: This is NOT America

Edited on Tue Nov-06-07 04:10 PM by Vyan

At least that's what I keep telling myself.

This is NOT America!

The real America is still out there, like the elusive "Truth" from The X-Files, somewhere. This fear besotted place can't be it. It can't be America where the Senate Judiciary Committee would seriously entertain approving a candidate for Attorney General who couldn't find an act of Torture with a Map, a Flashlight, a Compass and a pocket GPS unit?

A man so supine to Presidential will that 24 Intel professionals wrote that if he can't answer a simple question on torture we'd be better off with no one at all.

We are aware that the president warned last week that it will be either Mukasey as our attorney general or no one. So be it.

Today as Mukasey is approved by the SJC by a vote of 11 to 8, I wonder who it is that can hear the low heart-sick gutteral groan from the heart of the real America that has remained hidden, clubbed, gagged and dumped in the basement for the past six years?

I keep wondering and hearing that line from the old Talking Heads song...

How did we get here?

Yes, yes - we all know about The 9-11 and how it changed everything.

Except that it didn't change justice. It didn't change cruelty. It didn't change the human heart. It didn't change our reality.

Or did it?

Six years have passed now and it's all been like some bad turgid nightmare. A simultaneous Phantasm for 300 Million people at once. The Technicolor has drained from the nation and it's all gone grey. A sick sepia tone grey with sharp edges of hard left and hard right.

At the Concert For New York, we all stood together as one America as one Firefighter stood and said (not an exact quote)...

Bin Laden can kiss my White Irish Ass!!

We all cheered and cried as The Who bashed out "Won't get fooled Again!"

But we did get fooled again.

We we're all together during the invasion of Afghanistan.

Then it all went horribly wrong. Bin Laden escaped at Tora Bora, and Bush got just. simply. got. bored. He used bad intel, and worse intel to justify invading the Country that had tried to kill his father back in the 90's. They said it would be a "Cakewalk". They said they had "WMD's" and Nuclear Ambitions.

It was none-of-the-above.

One lone former Ambassador to Iraq raised his hand to say "Hey! That's not what I saw!" and they tried to smoosh him and his Undercover CIA Agent Wife Working on Iraq and Iran WMD's like a bug.

Since then we've had Gitmo. Fallujah. Abu Ghraib. Haditha. Moumoudiya.

While our own country remains neglected to the tune of the storm surge from Katrina and the crash of Minnesota Bridge on the river below - the Fear Card keeps getting played over and over again like a endless set of "24" (Torture-Porn!) reruns.

You're either with us, or your with the terrorist!

No, we just don't think that America should use the same tactics and techniques as the Khmer Rouge - that's all. We really should have never reached a point where the Former Judge Advocate General of the Navy would ever have to actually come out and say something like this.

HUTSON: Well, what should have happened—what happened for you know, 200 years of American history and 500 years of world history, we should have identified this as torture and the administration should have said—this is a line over which the United States will not cross. In fact, we won‘t even come close to that line. But rather, in a sort of fearful sort of way, we said, well, maybe this is something we have to do. You know, torture is the interrogation technique of choice for the lazy, the stupid and the pseudo tough. It‘s not the technique of real intelligence officers.

You don't want us to listen to their coversations and stop their attacks?

No, we just want you to have Probable Cause first. And a Warrant, that's really not to Fracking much to ask for is it?

You don't want to win the War on Terror!

And losing would gain us what exactly? No, we want to win - but we also want to fight it with -- what's that word again? oh yeah -- a sense of Honor, Integrity and Decency. All that stuff Dubya promised to "return to White House" while he actually burying it somewhere deep on the south lawn.

He's the thing, if we "win it" your way - we've still lost.

You Liberals Hate America

No, we Love the America that actually does stand for freedom, human rights , due process and the rule of law --- all the stuff from that dusty ole Constitution thingy. But I tell you we do Hate what Right-Wing Jack-booted Delusional Syncophant Dickheads have being Doing to Our America since 2002.

You're a Phony Soldier!

This is what they say if you ever wore a uniform and then tried to tall the truth about the fact that the Iraq War has been a farce since it began, and we need our forces out of there because guess what - the Country that Bin Laden has actually been hiding in, and has a standing non-aggression treaty with the Taliban just had a freaking Military Coup and suspended their own Constitution!

And what's Dubya doing about it?

He's thinking a making a stern phone call to Musharraf. Maybe. After he cleared some more brush. In the meantime he's probably wondering how to pull the same trick here 'cuz...

Things would be a whole lot easier if this were a Dictatorship - as long as I'm the Dictator.

They keep telling us "we're turning a corner" and "Iraq is getting better" - the violence in Iraq is down (because all the Ethnic Cleansing has just about been completed) yet we just broke the annual world record (again) for the number of American Military Deaths in that country.

Woohoo.. We're Number one! We're Number One!

Er, or not.

God, can't you hear that groan?

It's like 100 freight trains grumbling under the Rockies.

It seems to me that Keith Olbermann hears the groan... like a clarion call.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arWJ358tZgU
Daniel Levin should have a statue in his honor in Washington right now. Instead, he was forced out as acting assistant attorney general nearly three years ago because he had the guts to do what George Bush could not do in a million years, actually put himself at risk for the sake of his country, for the sake of what is right, and they water boarded him. And he wrote that even though he knew those doing it meant him no harm, and he knew they would rescue him at the instant of a slightest distress, and he knew he would not die, still with all that reassurance, he could not stop the terror screaming from inside of him, could not quell the horror, could not convince that which is at the core of each of us, the entity who exists behind all the embellishments we strap to ourself, like purpose and name and family and love, he could not convince his being that he wasn‘t drowning.

Water boarding, he said, is torture. Legally it is torture. Practically it is torture. Ethically it is torture. And he wrote it down. Wrote it down somewhere where it could be contrasted with the words of this country‘s 43rd president. The United States of America does not torture. Made you into a liar, Mr. Bush. Made you into, if anybody had the guts to pursue it, a criminal, Mr. Bush.

Full Transcript

The Criminal Conspiracy that Olbermann speaks of was revealed long ago when Alberto Gonzales wrote the first torture memo - long before the infamous Bybee document - that directed the President to deny Geneva conventions to terrorist detainees not because they didn't "deserve them" but specifically to prevent being prosecuted for War Crimes.

Olberman's question of what might happen if a detainee were to die during waterboarding or "intense interrogation" isn't just a "hypothetical" - some of the abused detainees at Abu Ghriab died.

Amnesty International has reported that at least 34 detainees have died in U.S. Custody, some of them as the result of Homocide during Interrogation.

It is now known that at least 34 detainees who died in US custody have had their deaths listed by the army as confirmed or suspected criminal homicides. The true number of such deaths may be higher as there is evidence that delays, cover-ups and deficiencies in investigations have hampered the collection of evidence.(5) In several cases, however, substantial evidence has emerged that detainees were tortured to death while under interrogation (revealed, for example, in military autopsy reports, investigation records and recent court testimony). What is even more disturbing is that standard practices as well as interrogation techniques believed to have fallen within officially sanctioned parameters, appear to have played a role in the ill-treatment...

So the idea that somebody might die - eventually - isn't just a paranoid fantasy. It's already happened, repeatedly.

THAT IS WHAT AMERICA HAS BECOME. A country that not only tortures, but murders without due process or probable cause purely out of FEAR.

In the process we have become our own worst nightmare. We have become the overlords of former Soviet Union's Gulags. We have become the owners of The Killing Fields.

It's easy, as Keith does, to focus all of our horror at what this nation has become over the last half-dozen years squarely on the shoulders of George W. Bush.

But it would be wrong.

He didn't do this alone. Not hardly. He had an enormous heaping of help from Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby, David Addington, Karl Rove, Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzales, Jeff Gannon/Gucket, General Ricardo Sanchez, General Tommy Franks, General David Patreaus, Monica Goodling, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Roger Ailes, Brit Hume, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Alan Colmes, Bill Frist, Dennis Hastert, Tom Delay, Joe Liebermann, Diane Feinstein, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton and Millions upon Millions More who continue to sleep walk through this horror. Aiders and abetters to this False America's crimes yet seemingly oblivous to consequences of their own actions.

It's time for us to wake up from this nightmare. Starting in the next few months we have to make some hard decisions about the future direction of this country. We can't afford to wait until next November - we have to start taking a stand against unprovoked War, against Torture, against Unlimited Executive Power and for the Constitution, for the Rule of Law RIGHT FREAKING NOW.

We have to let our Representatives in Congress and those who Know that we can not let this stand.

It. Has. To. Stop!

But it won't be easy. All the other people besides George Bush who've helped create this Nightmare aren't going anywhere after January of 2009. They'll still be here. All of them. The Ugly Angry Americans. And we'll have to deal with them. They will fight us, tooth, nail and claw for every inch of the Constitution we try to restore. Many of those on "our side" will crumble under the pressure. We're gonna be called every name in the book. We're going to be threatened as the Dixie Chicks were, we're going to be harrased, ridiculed (like the New Eagles album has been), marginalized (as Bruce Springsteen's New Anti-War album was dropped by Clear Channel) and every once in a while jailed and physically attacked for daring to speak out and stand for peace (as Reveral Lennox Yearwood was in the Halls of Congress).

Be we must not lose hope. We must not lose faith that eventually this phony shadow vision of America will crumble and fade away and the real America of promise, freedom hope and genuine justice will emerge.

We have to get back to that America, the Real America. Failure is not an option.

It's America or Bust.

Are you with me?

Vyan