Follow this link to the New York Tmies story about President Obama’s national intelligence director telling colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists.

Admiral Dennis C. Blair said, “…there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means …”

It makes no difference whether or not any of these assessments are true.  Torture is still illegal and should not be used.

As President Obama said at his appearance at the C.I.A, “What makes the United States special, and what makes you special, is precisely the fact that we are willing to uphold our values and our ideals even when it’s hard, not just when it’s easy.”

Laws are not needed when you have no intention of committing the proscribed act.  They are only needed to prevent the act when you might be tempted to do it.

Article III Part 17 of the Geneva Convention states in part:

No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.

The authors of this section knew what captors would want to do with prisoners.  How much more specific could they have made it to ban what Bush/Cheney wanted to do?  In the infamous words of Bill Clinton does it matter “what the definition of is is?”

What part of this Geneva Convention paragraph is it hard for a lawyer to interpret?

Follow this link to the New York Times story on the pressure that is building up to investigate the use of torture under the Bush administration.

It is up to all of us to keep this pressure up.  Perhaps the value of the Nuremberg Trials after World War II has diminshed with the passing of time.  We need a refresher set of trials to reinforce the strictures against torture and to educate a new generation on the seriousness of the crime.

You can send a message to the White House Office of Public Liaison to express your concerns.

You can sign the petition at MoveOn.org. I signed the petition with the following additional comment:

The lessons learned from the Nuremberg trials are fading from our collective memory.

We need a booster shot for our moral indignation over torture.  Let the world know that there are consequences for those who use torture or try to justify its use.

Follow this link to the coverage on Huffington Post of the letter to shareholders by JPMorgan Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon.

Dimon cited “an expensive war in Iraq” as one of the possible triggers of the economic collapse. Spending on the war ballooned the deficit and crowded out investment in domestic priorities. Meanwhile, the trade deficit soared.

Luckily for George Bush, nobody is going to believe anything that bankers say these days.

Judge Jay Bybee, now a a federal judge in California, was one of President Bush’s torture advisors.

If you feel the need to take some action on the issue of the mental defectives that promoted this horrible policy, then you might want to respond to this request from the Courage Campaign.

Hi,

Have you heard that one of President Bush’s torture advisors is now a federal judge here in California?

In August 2002, Judge Jay Bybee wrote a horrific memo enabling the torture of detainees — including waterboarding — at Guantanamo Bay. In 2003, he was confirmed to a seat on the important Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Instead of sitting on the federal bench, he must be held accountable for his role in the unspeakable crimes that took place at Guantanamo Bay under President Bush.

The Courage Campaign is helping a diverse group of California progressive activists who are working to pass a resolution at this Friday’s California Democratic Party convention demanding that the U.S. House of Representatives begin impeachment proceedings against Judge Jay Bybee. This resolution is the first step in holding Judge Bybee accountable for what he has done.

Will you join me in signing your name as a supporter of impeaching Judge Jay Bybee and urge your friends to do the same?:

http://www.couragecampaign.org/ImpeachBybee

Thanks!

If you want to send a message directly to President Obama on this issue, consider contacting the White House Office of Public Liaison.

Follow this link to the story about what is in the Bush torture memos that are slowly being released by the Obama administration..

When I heard that the CIA used waterboarding on just a few prisoners, I never imagined that “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month.”  They waterboarded Zubaydah 83 times in one month.

Here is a quote from the New York Times article extracted in one of the comments:

Abu Zubaydah had provided much valuable information under less severe treatment, and the harsher handling produced no breakthroughs, according to one former intelligence official with direct knowledge of the case. Instead, watching his torment caused great distress to his captors, the official said.

These torturers may be walking among us.

Another commentor quoted:

From the Center for Victims of Torture’s ”Eight Lessons of Torture”:

4. Torture has a corrupting effect on the perpetrator

The relationship between the victim and the torturer is highly intimate, even if one-sided. It is filled with stress for the interrogator, balancing the job with the moral and ethical values of a person with family and friends. One way this cognitive dissonance is managed is through a group process that dehumanizes the victim. But still another way is to insure that some sort of confession is obtained to justify to the interrogator and to his superiors that pain and suffering was validly used.

This explains why it seems that the torturers must extract a confession even if they know that it will be a false one.

How much clearer can it be that the people at the highest levels who encouraged this treatment must be brought to justice?

Al Franken won the Minnesota Senate race, but DC Republicans keep bankrolling Norm Coleman’s endless court challenges. For them, it’s worth spending money to block the seating of Senator Franken.

So Howard Dean’s Democracy for America teamed up with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (which helps elect progressives to Congress) to ask people to give a “Dollar a Day to Make Norm Go Away.”

If thousands of us donate $1 to help progressives defeat Republicans in 2010 for each day Norm Coleman refuses to concede, we’ll reverse the incentives for DC Republicans. They’ll tell Norm, “Go away!” It’s a smart strategy. I just did it. Can you join me? Check out http://www.NormDollar.com

On The Daily Show With Jon Stewart John Oliver discovers that Americans don’t know anything about tyranny at a tea party protest in Morristown, NJ.