…American guards arrived at the man’s cell periodically over the next several days, shackled his hands and feet, blindfolded him and took him to a padded room for interrogation, the detainee said. After an hour or two, he was returned to his cell, fatigued but unable to sleep.
The fluorescent lights in his cell were never turned off, he said. At most hours, heavy metal or country music blared in the corridor. He said he was rousted at random times without explanation and made to stand in his cell. Even lying down, he said, he was kept from covering his face to block out the light, noise and cold. And when he was released after 97 days he was exhausted, depressed and scared.
Detainee 200343 was among thousands of people who have been held and released by the American military in Iraq, and his account of his ordeal has provided one of the few detailed views of the Pentagon’s detention operations since the abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib. Yet in many respects his case is unusual.
The detainee was Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago who went to Iraq as a security contractor. He wound up as a whistle-blower, passing information to the F.B.I. about suspicious activities at the Iraqi security firm where he worked, including what he said was possible illegal weapons trading….
Bush/Cheney/Rummy have arrogantly brought torture and bad treatment of detainees into the light of day as official US policy. It has compelled me personally to go down the dark path of realization that torture has been a part of the US arsenal for a very long time. That little fact has caused intense personal pain and shame. It has also caused me to harden my views. My intolerance for all things that stink of neocon ideology has become central to my political view, for better or worse.
It is beyond wrong, it’s illegal, immoral, unethical God where do they stop? When do we stop them. I read this over at Kos this morning. It’s #1 on the rec. list there.
CabinGirl is soooooooooooo right…Impeachment is NOT just for blowjobs anymore.
The Senate’s top Democrat offered qualified support Sunday for a plan to increase U.S. troops in Iraq, saying it would be acceptable as part of a broader strategy to bring combat forces home by 2008.
President Bush’s former secretary of state, however, expressed doubts any troop surge would be effective, noting U.S. forces already are overextended. “The American Army isn’t large enough to secure Baghdad,” said Colin Powell, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman during the 1991 Gulf War.
Way to go Harry…nice of you to provide cover for those responsible for the mess, when even Colin Powell won’t do it anymore. More troops aren’t going to change the outcome: it’s an unmitigated disaster!
But I’m sure there’s some lovely explanation of why this is a brilliant strategic move on your part posted somewhere in the blogosphere…
Harry is providing cover for those responsible, and it includes him and his senate flock. If Pelosi takes the same route then I’ll consider the midterms a wash.
hi super…Reid’s logic is as idiotic as any rethug..he thinks a surge of troops should go in for not more than 3 months..well what the fucken hell is a few months going to do except get more troops killed.
Any dem who is still advocating or not calling for troops to come home is playing politics and afraid to look weak against the whole phony war on terror.
You’re right, Pelosi better not buckle under and do a flip/flop.
.
Palestinian comments: Tony Blair goes on a foreign trip when he’s in trouble at home!
… the Financial Times reported that Lord Michael Levy — Blair’s Middle East envoy and Labour’s main fundraiser, dubbed “Lord Cashpoint” — was understood to be the focus of the police investigation into the issue.
The business daily reported that detectives may soon interview Levy for a third time.
Police are investigating claims that seats in the House of Lords, were offered in return for financial help to political parties, including Labour since it came to power in 1997, in breach of the 1925 Honours (Prevention of Abuse) Act.
Blair is proving to be quite the slippery little skunk. He’s managed to cheapen the British image just as his buddy Dubya has done for the US. I imagine there are millions in the UK who can’t wait until he steps down for good.
The researchers caution they have yet to confirm their findings in people, but say they expect results from human studies within a year or so. Any treatment that may emerge to help at least some patients would likely be years away from hitting the market. Researchers on the team were excited: “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Dr. Hans Michael Dosch, an immunologist at the hospital and a leader of the studies. “In my career, this is unique.”
Their conclusions upset conventional wisdom that Type 1 diabetes, the most serious form of the illness that typically first appears in childhood, was solely caused by auto-immune responses — the body’s immune system turning on itself. More here
A Swedish study comparing the risks from different sources of air pollution, found a particularly harmful source of risk was air in the subway system. Particles from the Stockholm underground are much more damaging to cellular DNA than the other sources tested (e.g. wood smoke and cars). The airborne particles in the system were largely comprised of iron, and are formed by the abrasion of the train wheels against the rails. Damage is caused when these particles enter the body and form free radicals in the body’s cells. Free radicals are highly reactive molecules that can harm the cell’s DNA; although such damage can often be repaired by the cell, it can sometime remains untreated, and this increases the risk of cancer.
Planting trees can help fight global warming if they’re planted in the right spots, climate experts say. Tree-planting programs in the tropics work because tropical forests not only absorb carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, but also increase cloudiness, which helps cool the planet. However, an increase in evergreen forests near the poles can actually increase global warming, despite the CO2 the trees absorb, because the trees are darker than the snow they replace, and thus absorb more solar energy. More here.
WooHoo! I saw this yesterday and rejoiced out loud. Of course, when I read the part of the article out loud about diabetic mice to my husband, his comment was “Why don’t they just get the mice to stop eating sweets?” I threw a pillow at him. Hard.
Tree planting may be better in the tropics, but that didn’t stop hubby and myself. In the years we’ve lived here we’ve increased the tree coverage by at least 7 acres. There are now more birds, deer, fox and all kinds of other critters that make use of the land, much to our delight. You just can’t go wrong by planting a tree.
It’s the stuff that makes a chili pepper hot but has pain relieving properties. They use it in topical creams for arthritis right now. I have eaten white chocolate jalapeno mousse in the past for PMS and it works like a charm between the endorphins from the chili and the chocolate. It’s an already existing compound that is cheap….how will they be able to make huge money off of it because god knows they are making fortunes from the drugs they have out there to treat the symptoms of diabetes.
Thanks, Tracy. The word capsacin sounded vaguely familiar but I couldn’t place it. I always thought I liked hot peppers until I met a REAL hot pepper fan! White chocolate jalapeno mousse. All I can say is that it must taste better than it sounds and I’d be willing to try it.
Oh, they’ll make money, don’t worry about that! Someone has to turn all that hot pepper goodness into pills or injections or vaccines or something.
Usually what happens with a natural product is they figure out that if they make a tiny chemical alteration it’s now 10% more effective, or more soluble, or longer lasting – and because of that chemical change (a single atom or bond will do) it can now be patented and sold for a bazillion dollars profit. Better living (for somebody) through chemistry….
Tough talk:Professor Juan Cole has some tough talk today. He’s had it with the Bush White House censors noting how Elliot Abrams and others at NSC intervened to stop publication of Flynt Leverett’s op-ed In NYT. Calls for Abrams to go.
“The remaining Neoconservatives in the Bush administration, like David Wurmser in Cheney’s office and Abrams at the NSC have been agitating behind the scenes for war on Syria and Iran. These people hate peace the way the devil hates holy water. They confess themselves actively disappointed when a war doesn’t happen. They helped send US troops into Iraq where 24,000 have been wounded or killed, and they’d just love to expend some more lives on other pet projects.
That does it.
Elliot Abrams must go. Eliot Abrams is a felon. He was involved in stealing Pentagon weapons from US stockpiles, selling them to the Ayatollah Khomeini, and then stealing the Iranian funds so garnered to give to far-right Central American death squads, and then lying about all this to Congress. The Congress in the Constitution controls the budget. The Congress had cut off money to the rightwing death squads supported by Reagan and henchmen like Abrams. This elaborate criminal conspiracy inside the White House was the Right’s response. They shredded the Constitution (and ever since have been calling their critics “unpatriotic.”).”
Prof. Cole wooon’t be on Santa’s White House list. Not that he cares a jig.
It’s been difficult for me to truly believe that Cheney’s star is waning, what with Bush talking serious escalation in Iraq, but this from Doug Thompson actually gives me hope that it just could be true:
Dick Cheney’s waning influence over Bush
[…snip]
The November mid-term elections did much more than just cost Republicans control of Congress or send Bush a message that he needs to find a way out of the morass called Iraq. It sent a divisional spike between Bush and Cheney that White House insiders say may never heal and one that could mushroom into a full-blown White House civil war.
Both Cheney and Rumsfeld are old-school politicians, joined at the hip since the Nixon and Ford days. Neither respect Bush. They consider him a political and mental lightweight but were content to live with such shortcomings as long as he left them alone to craft policy in Iraq, drive billion-dollar no-bid contracts to Halliburton and run things pretty much as they wanted.
But Bush needed a scapegoat after the November election debacle and Rumsfeld, the public face for most of the failures in Iraq, took the fall.
Cheney, by most accounts, went ballistic and fought in vain to save his friend. Bush refused to budge. Cheney tried political arguments, saying Republicans would be pissed because of the timing. Bush still refused to listen. Since the firing, White House sources say the two men speak to each other mainly through memos, carry on very little conversation in cabinet meetings and appear together in public only when necessary.
[snip]
It goes on to say that amid all the talk of escalation in Iraq, even Bush realizes that the American people will eat him alive if he tries it. The money quote of the piece:
Whatever happens, it may mark the first time in the Bush presidency that he will make a decision on his own. Yes, “the decider,” the commander in chief who all too often mistakes stubbornness for resoluteness, will now have to see if his failing mental capacities are up to the job.
This was the headline story for the weekend in southern Arizona
A Midtown strip mall that should have housed the best of the best served as Corruption Central in Tucson.
Two military recruiting stations sit side-by-side there, one run by the Army, the other by the Marines. Between them, a total of seven recruiters were on the take, secretly accepting bribes to transport cocaine, even as most spent their days visiting local high schools.
They had help from several more recruiters at an Army National Guard office, where one recruiter was said to be selling cocaine from the trunk of his recruiting vehicle. – linkage
the cocaine dealers ;). It’s easier to be an Army of One that way, remember Tony Montana? What da ya expect Manee, they had a lot of time on their hands lately since they shut down the recruiting interrogation rooms and now nobody signs shit.
.
Bush established U.S. bases in Somalia to fight Al Qaeda in the Horn of Africa. Bush & co just lost that battle and the Islamists have grabbed power and are gaining support. The next terror state! News on Somalia
.
Even MSM CNNi have a review of the spread of terror from a rising Taliban/Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan into South-East Asia: Thailand, Phillipines, Malaysia and Indonesia.
Of course the oilmen Bush-Cheney were only interested in oil deposits of Mesopotamia. There was no Al Qaeda, nor WMD’s in the Iraq of Saddam Hussein. Therefore the Saudi Royal family members have told Cheney to mop up in Iraq, cleanup the mess the neocon family has created.
LONDON Dec. 18 — The London Array wind farm, which envisages providing power to at least one third of all London households, was today given the nod by the Department of Trade and Industry. The farm is to be constructed off the southeast England coast.
It will have 341 turbines in an area of 144 square miles located from Margate and Clacton. The project, estimated to cost £1.5 billion, would also boast of five offshore substations. Additionally there will be at least four meteorological masts.
on so many levels: NYT
The Bush administration needs to go.
Bush/Cheney/Rummy have arrogantly brought torture and bad treatment of detainees into the light of day as official US policy. It has compelled me personally to go down the dark path of realization that torture has been a part of the US arsenal for a very long time. That little fact has caused intense personal pain and shame. It has also caused me to harden my views. My intolerance for all things that stink of neocon ideology has become central to my political view, for better or worse.
It is beyond wrong, it’s illegal, immoral, unethical God where do they stop? When do we stop them. I read this over at Kos this morning. It’s #1 on the rec. list there.
CabinGirl is soooooooooooo right…Impeachment is NOT just for blowjobs anymore.
Call me when the revolution starts.
What is a right here and there for the average American citizen… bush is only using the Constitution as toilet paper because it is good for you.
Do all of those people out there in lala land still think it couldn’t happen to them?
Deeds such as these torture tales may be fueling the opposition at SMU to host W’s presidential library.
A TPM find that it’s thumbs down on the $500 million project.
Opposition grows at SMU over hosting W’s presidential library.. And guess who is leading the opposition? The Administrators, faculty and staff of SMU’s School of Theology.
These good people see a future war crimes trial and perhaps don’t want to be saddled with Bush’s legacy. Some legacy, huh.
Alive, and with his mind relatively intact.
continues his support for the Iraq war: AP/Yahoo
Way to go Harry…nice of you to provide cover for those responsible for the mess, when even Colin Powell won’t do it anymore. More troops aren’t going to change the outcome: it’s an unmitigated disaster!
But I’m sure there’s some lovely explanation of why this is a brilliant strategic move on your part posted somewhere in the blogosphere…
Harry is providing cover for those responsible, and it includes him and his senate flock. If Pelosi takes the same route then I’ll consider the midterms a wash.
hi super…Reid’s logic is as idiotic as any rethug..he thinks a surge of troops should go in for not more than 3 months..well what the fucken hell is a few months going to do except get more troops killed.
Any dem who is still advocating or not calling for troops to come home is playing politics and afraid to look weak against the whole phony war on terror.
You’re right, Pelosi better not buckle under and do a flip/flop.
.
Palestinian comments: Tony Blair goes on a foreign trip when he’s in trouble at home!
… the Financial Times reported that Lord Michael Levy — Blair’s Middle East envoy and Labour’s main fundraiser, dubbed “Lord Cashpoint” — was understood to be the focus of the police investigation into the issue.
The business daily reported that detectives may soon interview Levy for a third time.
Police are investigating claims that seats in the House of Lords, were offered in return for financial help to political parties, including Labour since it came to power in 1997, in breach of the 1925 Honours (Prevention of Abuse) Act.
Blair Calls Off Judicial Investigation into Saudi Bribery Scandal
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Blair is proving to be quite the slippery little skunk. He’s managed to cheapen the British image just as his buddy Dubya has done for the US. I imagine there are millions in the UK who can’t wait until he steps down for good.
There was a major auroral display, visible well into the Midwestern US and points farther south, last Thursday, as energetic particles from a major solar flare collided with Earth’s magnetic field.
A Swedish study comparing the risks from different sources of air pollution, found a particularly harmful source of risk was air in the subway system. Particles from the Stockholm underground are much more damaging to cellular DNA than the other sources tested (e.g. wood smoke and cars). The airborne particles in the system were largely comprised of iron, and are formed by the abrasion of the train wheels against the rails. Damage is caused when these particles enter the body and form free radicals in the body’s cells. Free radicals are highly reactive molecules that can harm the cell’s DNA; although such damage can often be repaired by the cell, it can sometime remains untreated, and this increases the risk of cancer.
Two-thirds of the forests in the Congo River Basin could disappear within 50 years if logging and mineral exploitation continues at current rates, environmental group WWF said in a report.
Planting trees can help fight global warming if they’re planted in the right spots, climate experts say. Tree-planting programs in the tropics work because tropical forests not only absorb carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, but also increase cloudiness, which helps cool the planet. However, an increase in evergreen forests near the poles can actually increase global warming, despite the CO2 the trees absorb, because the trees are darker than the snow they replace, and thus absorb more solar energy. More here.
Record warmth continues across Europe, as people begin to wonder if they’ll see a winter at all this year. More here Related item: The UN’s weather agency reports that the northern hemisphere is warming at twice the rate of the southern hemisphere. Meanwhile, in Antarctica, the relative population sizes of different penguin species shift in response to climate change. Yet hope remains, in the call to personal responsibility at an individual level.
“Diabetic mice became healthy…“
WooHoo! I saw this yesterday and rejoiced out loud. Of course, when I read the part of the article out loud about diabetic mice to my husband, his comment was “Why don’t they just get the mice to stop eating sweets?” I threw a pillow at him. Hard.
Tree planting may be better in the tropics, but that didn’t stop hubby and myself. In the years we’ve lived here we’ve increased the tree coverage by at least 7 acres. There are now more birds, deer, fox and all kinds of other critters that make use of the land, much to our delight. You just can’t go wrong by planting a tree.
It’s the stuff that makes a chili pepper hot but has pain relieving properties. They use it in topical creams for arthritis right now. I have eaten white chocolate jalapeno mousse in the past for PMS and it works like a charm between the endorphins from the chili and the chocolate. It’s an already existing compound that is cheap….how will they be able to make huge money off of it because god knows they are making fortunes from the drugs they have out there to treat the symptoms of diabetes.
Thanks, Tracy. The word capsacin sounded vaguely familiar but I couldn’t place it. I always thought I liked hot peppers until I met a REAL hot pepper fan! White chocolate jalapeno mousse. All I can say is that it must taste better than it sounds and I’d be willing to try it.
Oh, they’ll make money, don’t worry about that! Someone has to turn all that hot pepper goodness into pills or injections or vaccines or something.
Usually what happens with a natural product is they figure out that if they make a tiny chemical alteration it’s now 10% more effective, or more soluble, or longer lasting – and because of that chemical change (a single atom or bond will do) it can now be patented and sold for a bazillion dollars profit. Better living (for somebody) through chemistry….
Diabetic mice became healthy virtually overnight after researchers injected a substance, capsacin,…
that substance ‘capsacin’ is extracted from capsicum plants that produce those super hot, hot peppers.
Tough talk: Professor Juan Cole has some tough talk today. He’s had it with the Bush White House censors noting how Elliot Abrams and others at NSC intervened to stop publication of Flynt Leverett’s op-ed In NYT. Calls for Abrams to go.
Prof. Cole wooon’t be on Santa’s White House list. Not that he cares a jig.
It’s been difficult for me to truly believe that Cheney’s star is waning, what with Bush talking serious escalation in Iraq, but this from Doug Thompson actually gives me hope that it just could be true:
[…snip]
The November mid-term elections did much more than just cost Republicans control of Congress or send Bush a message that he needs to find a way out of the morass called Iraq. It sent a divisional spike between Bush and Cheney that White House insiders say may never heal and one that could mushroom into a full-blown White House civil war.
Both Cheney and Rumsfeld are old-school politicians, joined at the hip since the Nixon and Ford days. Neither respect Bush. They consider him a political and mental lightweight but were content to live with such shortcomings as long as he left them alone to craft policy in Iraq, drive billion-dollar no-bid contracts to Halliburton and run things pretty much as they wanted.
But Bush needed a scapegoat after the November election debacle and Rumsfeld, the public face for most of the failures in Iraq, took the fall.
Cheney, by most accounts, went ballistic and fought in vain to save his friend. Bush refused to budge. Cheney tried political arguments, saying Republicans would be pissed because of the timing. Bush still refused to listen. Since the firing, White House sources say the two men speak to each other mainly through memos, carry on very little conversation in cabinet meetings and appear together in public only when necessary.
[snip]
It goes on to say that amid all the talk of escalation in Iraq, even Bush realizes that the American people will eat him alive if he tries it. The money quote of the piece:
This was the headline story for the weekend in southern Arizona
the cocaine dealers ;). It’s easier to be an Army of One that way, remember Tony Montana? What da ya expect Manee, they had a lot of time on their hands lately since they shut down the recruiting interrogation rooms and now nobody signs shit.
the border patrol agents needed someone to complete the cycle.
.
Bush established U.S. bases in Somalia to fight Al Qaeda in the Horn of Africa. Bush & co just lost that battle and the Islamists have grabbed power and are gaining support. The next terror state! News on Somalia
BBC News (2001) – US targets Somali group
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
Even MSM CNNi have a review of the spread of terror from a rising Taliban/Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan into South-East Asia: Thailand, Phillipines, Malaysia and Indonesia.
Of course the oilmen Bush-Cheney were only interested in oil deposits of Mesopotamia. There was no Al Qaeda, nor WMD’s in the Iraq of Saddam Hussein. Therefore the Saudi Royal family members have told Cheney to mop up in Iraq, cleanup the mess the neocon family has created.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
LONDON Dec. 18 — The London Array wind farm, which envisages providing power to at least one third of all London households, was today given the nod by the Department of Trade and Industry. The farm is to be constructed off the southeast England coast.
It will have 341 turbines in an area of 144 square miles located from Margate and Clacton. The project, estimated to cost £1.5 billion, would also boast of five offshore substations. Additionally there will be at least four meteorological masts.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."