(h/t Huffington Post - original video from NJ.com)

There's a special place in hell for people like this:

Congressman Frank Pallone (D-NJ), the man who recently "let it be known" that he'd step in should Gov. Corzine drop out of the New Jersey gubernatorial race, had his hands full at a town hall meeting in Red Bank last week.

A new low for these meetings may have been set when the crowd shouted down a wheelchair-bound woman with "two incurable auto-immune diseases" who had the gall to ask a question. Read on...

WTF is wrong with these people? I struggle to understand how their minds must work. It has gotten to the point where I can barely stomach these videos, but we must continue to put them out there and expose the ugly truth about the Republican Party and the fringe crazies who are out there doing their bidding.

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July 23, 2009 News Corp:

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed outrage to his combatant commanders after seeing some of the detainee abuse photos now under wraps by the Obama administration, according to a highly sensitive memo obtained Wednesday by FOX News.

In the July 10 memo to service chiefs and battlefield commanders, Mullen says he is "appalled by even the suggestion that someone in an American uniform would behave in such a way."

The photos depict clear instances of abuse -- though not torture -- that included beatings and in some cases deaths during battlefield detentions in Iraq from 2001-2006.

He is the first top military commander to admit that what were in those photos included what would be described as "abuse."

The photos Mullen viewed are among thousands now at the heart of an ACLU lawsuit against the administration. President Obama ordered the photos not be released after commanders, including Gen. Ray Odierno, argued that their release could jeopardize the lives of American soldiers serving in Iraq and elsewhere.

And last month, the Senate quietly passed a ban on the release of any detainee abuse photos, preventing Obama from signing an executive order classifying the photos, a move that would have surely inflamed the left after his campaign promises for more "sunlight" in Washington.

Shortly after Obama's May 13 decision not to release the photos, Mullen was shown the first batch of these classified pictures. A few weeks later he was shown another batch. This was a couple weeks prior to a meeting of combatant commanders at the Pentagon.

Aides say Mullen "stewed on it for a little while" and eventually decided to put something in writing to the commanders.

According to a description of the photos, Mullen saw badly beaten detainees and in some cases detainees who had been killed.

What he saw in the photos included signs of "heavy handed physical abuse, beating."

"Some were horrific. He was disgusted by what he saw," a Mullen spokesman said.

Unlike the now infamous photos from Abu Ghraib prison, all these photos were taken during battlefield interrogations before imprisonment. In the memo, Mullen demands his forces be trained so they understand this kind of thing should never happen again.

It would be good to see them face charges for their torture policies. We can only hope the new administration feels the same. (h/t Avedon):

In early December, in a highly unusual move, a federal court in New York agreed to rehear a lawsuit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft brought by a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar. (Arar was a victim of the administration's extraordinary rendition program: he was seized by U.S. officials in 2002 while in transit through Kennedy Airport and deported to Syria, where he was tortured.) Then, on Dec. 15, the Supreme Court revived a lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld by four Guantánamo detainees alleging abuse there—a reminder that the court, unlike the White House, will extend Constitutional protections to foreigners at Gitmo.

Finally, in the same week the Senate Armed Service Committee, led by Carl Levin and John McCain, released a blistering report specifically blaming key administration figures for prisoner mistreatment and interrogation techniques that broke the law. The bipartisan report reads like a brief for the prosecution—calling, for example, Rumsfeld's behavior a "direct cause" of abuse. Analysts say it gives a green light to prosecutors, and supplies them with political cover and factual ammunition. Administration officials, with a few exceptions, deny wrongdoing. Vice President Dick Cheney says there was nothing improper with U.S. interrogation techniques—"we don't do torture," he repeated in an ABC interview on Dec. 15. The government blamed the worst abuses, such as those at Abu Ghraib, on a few bad apples.

High-level charges, if they come, would be a first in U.S. history. "Traditionally we've caught some poor bastard down low and not gone up the chain," says Burt Neuborne, a constitutional expert and Supreme Court lawyer at NYU. Prosecutions may well be forestalled if Bush issues a blanket pardon in his final days, as Neuborne and many other experts now expect. (Some see Cheney's recent defiant-sounding admission of his own role in approving waterboarding as an attempt to force Bush's hand.)

Constitutionally, Bush could pardon everyone involved in formulating and executing the administration's interrogation techniques without providing specifics or naming names. And the pardon could apply to himself. Such a step, however, would seem like an admission of guilt and thus be politically awkward. Even if Bush takes it, civil suits for monetary damages could still proceed; such cases, though hard to win, are proliferating. Yet most legal scholars argue that a civil suit would not the best approach here. Neuborne calls it an "excessively lawyer-centric" strategy and says judges are extremely reluctant to award damages in such cases. Conservative legal experts like David Rifkin (who served in the Reagan and first Bush administrations) argue that no accounting is necessary, since the worst interrogation techniques, like waterboarding, have already been abandoned and Obama is expected to make further changes.

Continue reading »

    The ACLU has won a landmark ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which has slammed the Bush administration for using ridiculous arguments for withholding 21 graphic photos of detainee abuse which formed part of a FOIA request.

The government claimed that the public disclosure of such evidence would generate outrage and would violate U.S. obligations towards detainees under the Geneva Conventions because they would embarrass or humiliate the prisoners.

But the court ruled in the first instance that outrage (over abuse and torture, mind you, so it would be justified outrage) where no specific individual could be named as being at risk was too wide an exemption to grant.

"It is plainly insufficient to claim that releasing documents could reasonably be expected to endanger some unspecified member of a group so vast as to encompass all United States troops, coalition forces and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan," the appeals court said.

And in the second instance, the Court pointed to the way in which the US had published pictures photographs of dead, tortured and abused prisoners in Japanese and German prison and concentration camps after World War II.

"Yet the United States championed the use and dissemination of such photographs to hold perpetrators accountable," the court said.

The ACLU's attorney Amrit Singh told the AP that:

"These photographs depict abuse at locations other than Abu Ghraib," she said of the 21 pictures that the court ordered for release. "Their release is to hold government accountable for torture policies and bring an end once and for all to the abuse of prisoners."

And the ACLU's press release continues:

(T)he appeals court today rejected the government's attempt to use the FOIA as "an all-purpose damper on global controversy" and recognized the "significant public interest in the disclosure of these photographs" in light of government misconduct. The court also recognized that releasing the photographs is likely to prevent "further abuse of prisoners."
 
"This is yet another case in which the administration used national security as a pretext to suppress information relating to crimes that were endorsed, encouraged or tolerated by government officials," said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project. "The appeals court was correct to recognize both that the administration's suppression of the photographs was without legal basis and that disclosure will further the purposes of the Geneva Conventions by deterring the abuse and torture of prisoners in the future."  

Singh noted that the government admits it has other photos which are not part of this ruling, but I'd like to remind everyone that photos are just the tip of the iceberg. Back in February a Seton Hall Law report revealed that the US military military videotaped all of the interrogations at Guantanamo and other interrogation centers and retained them. There were around 24,000 recordings made, in all and the Bush administration have been highly evasive about their current whereabouts.

Still the release of these photos will once again show the Bush administration's institutionalized use of torture to the world - and they should have their feet held to the fire for such acts. Not only will the Muslim world be outraged - for does anyone doubt that most or all of the victims pictured will be Muslim? But European nations will also come under renewed internal pressure to eschew co-operation in illegal rendition with any US administration that perpetuates Bush policy.

And maybe, just maybe, someone in the press will hold up the pictures to John McCain and ask him whether he thinks what he sees there constitutes actual torture, not any lesser "enhanced interrogation techniques".