"Conspiracy theory": the intellectual equivalent of a four-letter word

"'Conspiracy theory' has become the intellectual equivalent of a four-letter word: it's something people say when they don't want you to think about what's really going on."

-- Noam Chomsky, as quoted in Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

Barry Zwicker, author of Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-Up of 9/11, talks about Noam Chomsky and 9/11.

Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report on NDAA. He adds his voice to Glenn Greenwald, Jonathan Turley, Chris Hedges, the ACLU, Amnesty International, two four-star retired Marine generals, and even the New York Times (buried but well done in their Opinionator Blog).

George W. Bush, War Crimes, and the Mayor of London

The Mayor of London talks about George W. Bush and war crimes:

How is some tired and frightened American officer supposed to make head or tail of this sophistry, late at night in some bleak Iraqi jail? How is he supposed to calibrate the pain that comes from an organ failure or death? It is no wonder, with orders like that coming from the top, that the troopers misbehaved so tragically in Abu Ghraib. They failed to see any moral difference between waterboarding their suspects and putting hoods over their heads. They failed to see any moral difference between waterboarding them and terrifying them with alsatian dogs or attaching electrodes to their genitals. They failed to see any moral difference, that is, because there isn’t any moral difference.

That is the real disaster of the waterboarding policy — that we are left with the impression that the entire US military are skidding their heels on the slippery slope towards barbarism. And that is emphatically not the case. Yesterday at the Cenotaph we remembered the sacrifice of men and women not just in two world wars, but also in Iraq and Afghanistan. The purpose of these conflicts is not so much to defeat “the enemy”, but to defend things we believe to be inalienable goods — freedom, democracy and, above all, the rule of law.

I believe that, of all nations, America still best upholds and guarantees those things. It would be ludicrous to suggest that the waterboarding disaster, or the evils of Abu Ghraib, have set up some kind of moral equivalence between America and – say – the murderous Taliban regime, let alone Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. If you want to appreciate the difference, remember that the perpetrators of Abu Ghraib were court-martialled, and we know about US interrogation techniques because of rules on freedom of information. But if your end is the spread of freedom and the rule of law, you cannot hope to achieve that end by means that are patently vile and illegal.

Keith Olberman interviews Jonathan Turley on the Mayor's article:

Scotland Yard Report Finds British Citizen Was Tortured in Secret CIA Site - Raymond Bonner - International - The Atlantic

Scotland Yard Report Finds British Citizen Was Tortured in Secret CIA Site - Raymond Bonner - International - The Atlantic:

The British government admitted today that a terrorist suspect whose case has drawn international attention was interrogated by U.S. officials and tortured during the two years he was held in Morocco.

The findings, resulting from an investigation by England's highest criminal prosecution agency, contradict the obfuscation, stonewalling, and denials by American officials about the case of the suspect, Binyam Mohamed.

At one point, the Obama Administration threatened to cut off intelligence sharing with the UK if a British court ordered the release of classified documents in the case.

NDAA: How the House Voted

How the House voted on the NDAA

Republicans voted for this bill by a wide margin in the House. Still, 95 Democrats voiced their enthusiastic support in the form of a vote. Donald Payne, Democrat (NJ), did not vote. Rush Holt, Democrat (NJ), voted "no."

NDAA: How the Senate Voted (December 1, 2011)

The NDAA, which allows for the indefinite detention of US citizens without trial, was overwhelmingly passed in the Senate. The vote was 93-7, a bi-partisan attack on the Constitution.

"Bipartisan usually means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried out." George Carlin

Here the few Senators who stood up for the Constitution on December 1, 2011:

Coburn (R-OK)
Harkin (D-IA)
Lee (R-UT)
Merkley (D-OR)
Paul (R-KY)
Sanders (I-VT)
Wyden (D-OR)

Torturer’s Apprentice - Magazine - The Atlantic

Torturer’s Apprentice - Magazine - The Atlantic

The new science of interrogation is not, in fact, so new at all: “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation” and “waterboarding” all spring directly from the practices of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. The distance, in both technique and ideology, between the Inquisition’s interrogation regime and 21st-century America’s is uncomfortably short—and provides a chilling harbinger of what can happen when moral certainty gets yoked to the machinery of torture.