THE RISING TIDE

President Bush's "defining moment" is this: the head of an Iranian "terrorist" force has brokered a deal between the two leading Shiite parties in Iraq, Sadr's movement and ISCI.

From “The Lessons of Basra” The Nation March 31, 2008

By Robert Dreyfuss Apr 3, 2008 BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called on Thursday for 1 million Iraqis to march against U.S. "occupation" next week after his Mehdi Army militia battled U.S. and government troops. "The time has come to express your rejections and raise your voices loud against the unjust occupier and enemy of nations and humanity, and against the horrible massacres committed by the occupier against our honorable people." If I were George W. Bush’s karmic defense attorney, I would argue that his best chance to avoid conviction as a purveyor of false morality would be to pray for a hung jury in the afterworld. Norman Mailer From WHY ARE WE AT WAR? Eighty-one spine-crawling pages in a memo that might have been unearthed from the dusty archives of some authoritarian regime and has no place in the annals of the United States. It is must reading for anyone who still doubts whether the abuse of prisoners were rogue acts rather than calculated policy. The March 14, 2003, memo was written by John C. Yoo, then a Pentagon lawyer. He earlier helped draft a memo that redefined torture to justify repugnant, clearly illegal acts against Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners. The purpose of the March 14 memo was equally insidious: to make sure that the policy makers who authorized those acts, or the subordinates who carried out the orders, were not convicted of any crime. The list of laws that Mr. Yoo’s memo sought to circumvent is long: federal laws against assault, maiming, interstate stalking, war crimes and torture; international laws against torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; and the Geneva Conventions. Editorial There Were Orders to Follow Published: April 4, 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/opinion/04fri1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

When I returned home from the race track I turned on the T.V.

I put on 60 Minutes to see what I might find there, being a little fatigued from watching NBA and NCAA basketball---and following the race to the White House (which for the Democrats seems more like a snail race).

I caught the tail-end of the first segment on 60 Minutes.

It was about a German citizen who had spent years being tortured by the U.S. military---in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay.

When he was finally released, the United States even wanted him to sign a (false) confession that said he had been “AL-Qaeda all along.”

He didn’t sign it.

When this 60 minutes segment ended, I had this thought:

Who deserves the title of

ILLEGAL ENEMY COMBATANT…

This innocent German citizen or…

GEORGE W. BUSH

and

DICK CHENEY?

Mad Plato

IT’S THE OIL STUPID!

************************

In an interview with ABC News last week, Cheney alleged without any evidence that Iran was "heavily involved in trying to develop nuclear weapons enrichment, the enrichment of uranium to weapons-grade levels."

And as I wrote in my March 21 column, Bush falsely and inflammatorily stated that the Iranian government has "declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people."

These people appear to have learned nothing.

A segment of CBS News's " 60 Minutes" yesterday described the case of Murat Kurnaz, who at the age of 19, "vanished into America's shadow prison system in the war on terror. He was from Germany, traveling in Pakistan, and was picked up three months after 9/11. But there seemed to be ample evidence that Kurnaz was an innocent man with no connection to terrorism. The FBI thought so, U.S. intelligence thought so, and German intelligence agreed. But once he was picked up, Kurnaz found himself in a prison system that required no evidence and answered to no one."

First, he was taken to a U.S. base in Kandahar, Afghanistan. "Kurnaz claims his interrogations at Kandahar turned to torture. He told 60 Minutes that American troops held his head underwater.

"'They used to beat me when my head is underwater. They beat me into my stomach and everything,' he says.

"'They were hitting you in the stomach while you're head was underwater so that you'd have to take a breath?' [CBS's Scott] Pelley asks.

"'Right. I had to drink. I had to . . . how you say it?' Kurnaz replies.

"'Inhale. Inhale the water,' Pelley says.

"'I had to inhale the water. Right,' Kurnaz says.

"Kurnaz says the Americans used a device to shock him with electricity that made his body go numb. And he says he was hoisted up on chains suspended by his arms from the ceiling of an aircraft hangar for five days.

"'Every five or six hours they came and pulled me back down. And the doctor came to watch if I can still survive to not. He looked into my eyes. He checked my heart. And when he said okay, then they pulled me back up,' Kurnaz says.

"'The point of the doctor's visit was not to treat you. It was to see if you could take another six hours hanging from the ceiling?' Pelley asks.

"'Right,' Kurnaz says.

"'I suspect you know that the U.S. military will deny this happened. The U.S. military will deny that you were shocked. It will deny your head was held in a bucket of water. It will deny that you hung from a ceiling for days at a time,' Pelley remarks.

"'Doesn't matter whatever they will say. The truth will not change,' Kurnaz says. . . .

"After six weeks in Afghanistan, Kurnaz was loaded onto another plane, this time bound for Guantanamo. The Pentagon labeled the prisoners 'unlawful enemy combatants.' They didn't have the rights of prisoners of war and were beyond the reach of any court.

"At Guantanamo Kurnaz says he endured endless months of interrogations, beatings at the hands of soldiers in riot gear, and physical cruelty which included going without sleep for weeks and solitary confinement for up to a month in cells that were sealed without ventilation or were set up to punish him with extreme conditions.

"'It's dark inside. No lights. And they can punish you in isolation by coldness or by the heat. They have special air conditioners over there. Very strong. They can turn it very cold or very hot,' Kurnaz says.

"He says it went on year after year, always the same questions about al Qaeda, and the endless effort to break his will. He heard nothing from the outside and wondered whether anyone knew that he was there."

From Boos for Bush

By Dan Froomkin

Special to

washingtonpost.com
Monday, March 31, 2008;