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Do you seriously believe American values should be spread around the world?

I'm talking about the values we exhibit in our treatment of others, not the values that we like to think we represent on the 4th of July.  One of the more disgusting and alarming views of our moral underbelly is this account of how we treat detainees at Gitmo -- and particularly Fadhel Hussein Saleh Hentif, one of those kids who was picked up in Afghanistan without clear cause.  Here he is now, some ten years later.

On April 13, with the hunger strike spreading, the military raided the prison and put the detainees back in solitary. It says it has done so because the detainees are more likely to eat if they are not surrounded by other hunger strikers. If so, it isn’t working; there are more detainees refusing food today than before the April 13 raid. To force food into them, the military now shoves a tube down their nose, in an extremely painful procedure it called “enteral feeding.”

Are there terrorists at Guantánamo? Yes. The government knows who they are and keeps them away from the other detainees. But the hunger strike is a vivid reminder that Guantánamo remains exactly what it has always been: a stain on our country.

On April 13, Hentif was returning from morning prayers when the raid began. He was pushed up against a fence and shot with rubber bullets at such close range that five of them penetrated the skin. He was handcuffed and taken to the clinic. Now back in solitary confinement, he is worried that one of his wounds is becoming infected. Given their concerns about hunger strikers, the military medical staff haven’t been able to pay him much attention.

Thus it was that one more time, Fadhel Hussein Saleh Hentif was in the wrong place at the wrong time. ...Joe Nocera, NYT

Much of this came from the Bush administration. But we can't duck the fact that now, six years later, we have done nothing to stop Bush/Cheney's deliberate brutality.  Nothing has changed.

About the same time -- couple of weeks  ago -- when the military raided the prison, the nonpartisan Constitution Project came out with its assessment of  the  treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo. 

 WASHINGTON — A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.

The sweeping, 600-page report says that while brutality has occurred in every American war, there never before had been “the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.” The study, by an 11-member panel convened by the Constitution Project, a legal research and advocacy group, is to be released on Tuesday morning. ...Lawfare

It's significant that at least one commenter defended the use of the torture.

It is easy to condemn torture until your life, or the life of a loved one, is on the line. When torture is condemned I often think of a very old "Dirty Harry" movie; the one where an insane person has an 8 year old child buried alive and if they do not find her quickly she will die.

Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood, captures the perpetrator and tortures him resulting in the little girls life being saved. After 911 I was cheering for Dirty Harry. It is easy to be against torture until it gets personal. I was not a fan of Dick Cheney and George Bush but in the case of 911 they did what they had to do.

As time passes torture is needed less, however it may rise again. Remember, after World War II all of the individuals charged with crimes against humanity were on the losing side of the war. Just think if we would have lost to Japan. ...Banicki,Michigan

Dirty Harry.  Fiction.  We live in a looking-glass America where the flag pins are real and where torture and Guantanamo are just stories.

NRA v. conspiracy theorists

There's just a bit of sanity on the right, but it's not showing up among Congressional Republicans.  Oklahoma's weird senator -- Jim  Inhofe -- has a new conspiracy theory.  He thinks Obama has ordered the Department of Homeland Security (a whole conspiracy theory, itself) is buying up bullets to prevent  them from being sold to righteous supporters of the Second Amendment.

The lawmakers say the Obama administration is buying up exceedingly high levels of ammunition in an attempt to limit the number of bullets the American public have access to on the open marketplace.
 
"President Obama has been adamant about curbing law-abiding Americans’ access and opportunities to exercise their Second Amendment rights," said Inhofe. ...The Hill

But the NRA disagrees, assuring members "that the high number of bullet purchases was normal for law enforcement agencies and that people should not be paranoid about the government’s intention on this area."

“Skepticism of government is healthy. But today, there are more than enough actual threats to the Second Amendment to keep gun owners busy… there is no need to invent additional threats to our rights,” the gun group wrote. ...The Hill

The NRA's rare show of judgment hasn't stopped Inhofe from teaming up with a representative of Oklahoma in the House on a new bill, the AMMO Act of 2013.   That's "Ammunition Management for More Obtainability."  It keeps prevents supplies of ammunition from being sold a profligate, murderin' gubment.

The conspiratorial commenters at The Hill are hard at work, showing their support  for Inhofe.  He must be really proud of his fans.

"Government appears to be stockpiling ammo for fear of a revolution since the truth has leaked out about the real Obama cover up, the Coup, the illegal war, the media blackouts, and this last mock election." ...BostonFalseFlagLeakedHere

Like, uh, where's George WMD  Bush when you need him.

Getting between Sanford and a political future? His staggering ego.

The Hill has a report today on five recent moves on the part of former South Carolina's governor, Mark Sanford, that are poisoning his efforts to be elected to the House.  The guy uses people and does so quite openly.

Among the five no-no's is this:

Sanford asks his ex-wife Jenny Sanford to be his campaign manager

Jenny Sanford was her husband’s campaign manager and top political adviser for most of his time as governor, until his “Appalachian Trail” affair ended their marriage and derailed his career.

She has been rumored to have political aspirations of her own, and before he jumped in to the race Sanford wanted to make sure he wouldn’t be running against her in the GOP primary. 

He told The Hill in February that he’d visited Jenny at her Sullivan Island, S.C. home to make sure she wouldn’t run for the House seat before deciding on his own campaign. 

But Jenny Sanford told New York magazine that she’d informed her ex-husband the day before that she wasn’t planning to run — and that he came that day to ask her to oversee his campaign. 

When she refused, the notoriously frugal politician reportedly tried to sweeten the pot.

“I could pay you this time,” he said.

Psychiatric expert labels House Republicans completely nuts

Oh all right if you insist.  Jonathan Chait is a political analyst -- a commentator -- not a psychiatrist.  But he's got the knack.  He studies the behaviors of Republican members of the House of Representatives and sees rampant insanity.

Oh! So you threaten to melt down the world economy unless Obama agrees to cut spending on retirement   programs, and then he offers to do that, and then you decide it’s too unpopular?

The decision that they no longer care about the thing they were prepared to unleash worldwide economic havoc to achieve has not caused them to abandon the debt ceiling as a hostage. (It’s the party’s Nelson Muntz–ian approach to resolving policy disagreements: “Gotta nuke something.") If obtaining retirement cuts went from so urgent it was worth threatening to nuke the world economy over to "meh," the next step is to figure out the next thing to nuke the world economy over. That thing, the Post reports, is tax reform.

But what is the GOP position on tax reform? It’s that tax reform must cut tax rates and not raise any revenue at all. So House Republicans are prepared to refuse to raise the debt ceiling unless Democrats agree to let them cut tax rates without increasing revenue. Their extraordinary threat, first presented as a way to force a reduction in the deficit, is now being wielded to prevent a reduction in the deficit. ...Chait,Daily Intel

Nuts with nukes!  We don't just need gun control -- background checks and the rest -- we need to take control of Republicans.  Cool, calm  place with a reliable lock on the door.  And maybe President Obama needs to quit treating them as though they're sane. He knows how to defeat them with humor.  He shouldn't limit those efforts to riffs at the White House Correspondents dinner.

The money dump

Somewhere in the neighborhood  of $50 billion went "missing" in Iraq -- remember?  Those cargo planes loaded with cash money "lost" around $6 billion.  More and more billions were invested in reconstruction projects that were never started, much less completed.  Etc., etc.

Congress appropriated a whopping $51.4 billion to help the country recover from the war by, among other things, training local police, building schools, hospitals and transportation systems, but much of the money has literally vanished. The funds were allocated to the DOD, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), though the DOD—especially the Army—has been the leader in handling the money. ...Judicial Watch

Funny how that happens.  Are we on track to do the same thing all over again in Afghanistan?

For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.

All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.

“We called it ‘ghost money,’ ” said Khalil Roman, who served as Mr. Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.” ...NYT

Certainly there's evidence that the cargo loads of dollars have not exactly turned the government of Afghanistan into a responsible rebuilder of its people's lives or particularly helped the CIA increase its influence on  that government.

But the C.I.A. has continued to pay, believing it needs Mr. Karzai’s ear to run its clandestine war against Al Qaeda and its allies, according to American and Afghan officials. ...NYT

See how that works?  Just trot out the magic phrase -- "Al Qaeda" -- and three branches of US  government melt like lovers.  Oh, and "Iran" works, too,  ever since we found out that the Iranian government was seeking the same kind of influence the CIA wants with the Karzai government.

By late 2002, Mr. Karzai and his aides were pressing for the payments to be routed through the president’s office, allowing him to buy the warlords’ loyalty, a former adviser to Mr. Karzai said.

Then, in December 2002, Iranians showed up at the palace in a sport utility vehicle packed with cash, the former adviser said.

The C.I.A. began dropping off cash at the palace the following month, and the sums grew from there, Afghan officials said. ...NYT

Can't get an accounting on this money.  It's "off the books."

America's convenient jihad

Maybe Al Qaeda was (and still is?) a potent terrorist-political gang.  I don't entirely believe that but I won't argue the point.  What is very clear, if you stand back and look at what we know of AQ -- from Bush/Cheney onwards to the derring-do at Abbottabad --  is how enormously convenient, how reinforcing Muslim extremism is to rightwing American politicians who have been egging each other on for decades in political and social extremism. Even the 2nd Amendment seems to express a "right" to use extreme violence.  And all in the name of self-protection or what you might call "personal national security." Honestly, I don't think the outcome our homegrown extremists want is any less authoritarian or "religious" than what AQ has been fighting for.

Joe Biden, speaking at MIT last week at the memorial service for MIT's campus police officer, gunned down apparently by the Tsarnaev brothers, had this to say:

“Why, whether it’s Al Qaeda,” asked Mr. Biden, “or two twisted, perverted, cowardly knockoff jihadis here in Boston, why do they do what they do?”

“They do it to instill fear,” Mr. Biden said. He later said, “We have suffered, we are grieving, but we are not bending.”

Addressing the students present, Mr. Biden cited the diversity of M.I.T., as well as its intellectual firepower.

“You are their worst nightmare,” Mr. Biden said. “All the things these perverted jihadis — self-made or organized — all the things they fear.”...NYT

"Knock-off jihadis"!  That's perfect!  Seems to me that, from Tsarnaev to Cruz, Issa, and a bunch of other pols in the Senate and House, we've been experiencing a determination to overthrow western democracy from our own internal enemy.  Tsarnaev?  McConnell?  Most of the tea party representation? Not to mention Biden's predecessor in the Office of the VP?  They have become role models for one another.  It's hard to determine exactly who is the more effective, misdirected, vicious jihadist.

Vice President Biden wasn't, of course, equating "knock-off jihadis" with some of his former colleagues in the Senate. 

But I do.