Happy New Year’s Eve to all of our blog family. We will be spending New Year’s Eve at home this year — preparing for our annual New Year’s party on January 1st. I will be toasting to everyone on our extended blog family.
Tonight Leslie and I will share our traditional bottle of Schramsberg Sparkling wine. This is my wedding anniversary. Thirteen years ago, Leslie and I eloped on New Year’s Eve after eight years years of dating. (There is an ongoing dispute over calculating the event, I insist that this is our 22nd anniversary but Leslie insists on not counting the eight years of dating). We always celebrate with a bottle of Schramsberg. This was the bottle I bought after we got hitched at Alexandria City Hall. I used my house school ring to seal the deal.
The kids made it to midnight and watched the painful display of Anderson Cooper trying to restrain Kathy Griffin. It turns out the Mayan Apocalypse merely predicted Griffin’s appearance on New Year’s Eve. This included her attempt to throw cash into the crowd – a moronic idea that had to be physically stopped by Anderson to avert a disaster. If this was Griffin’s idea of a joke, it came across as an unhinged, unfunny person trying to fill time. The kids insisted that we turn to NBC instead.
We are expecting 200 friends to share in Wasabi Bloody Marys) and our traditional soup: The Bowl of the Wife of Kit Carson Soup. I have smoked two turkeys to put into the soup. I also have enough Wasabi to light up Tokyo.
Everyone drive carefully and have fun. I will be giving a toast to our entire blog family tonight (and, of course, my marriage).
leej, I do know a bit about it. I know a woman w/ MS and she suffers from trigeminal neuralgia. She talks about the dark cloud lurking. You folks got it much tougher than I. As you know, gabapentin does effect cognitive abilities. It was tough when I was getting the dosage correct. Hell, I couldn’t remember basic stuff and I have a good memory. Now it’s fairly well managed.
“The president, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, has made it clear that no further investigations or inquiries will be made into America’s decade of torture. His Justice Department failed to prosecute a single torturer or any of those who helped cover up evidence of the torture practices. But it did deliver a jail sentence to one ex-CIA officer who refused to be trained to torture and was among the first at the CIA to publicly admit that the torture program was real.”
Which is one of the reasons – along with the extra-judicial “kill list” program – I wouldn’t vote for the man again under any circumstances. He violated he oath to protect the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic. That he was “better than the other guy” (a point I will not argue) does not vitiate the facts of his own betrayal of his office, his oath, the Constitution and the American people. Next time around? I’ll vote for the guy willing to investigate and prosecute members of both the previous and current administrations for their crimes. I don’t care if I’m waiting 16 years for it. I don’t care if they are prosecuting Dick Cheney’s zombie corpse and Bush, Bybee, Yoo, Ashcroft, Gonazles, Feith and the rest of those clowns have to be wheeled into court hooked up to life support. They can be propped up next to Obama and Holder. Let the trials begin! I want some justice for all. I already know how history is going to judge them. I want some jail time for them. All of them. Here is better, but the Hague would work too. War criminals are war criminals.
Our country will never recover domestically or internationally until the torturers and destroyers of civil rights are brought to justice.
I do have to say (folloiwing my comment about emotional being treatable whereas my physical pain probably not at this point) that, for those of you who may not know trigeminal neuralgia – all it takes is for a wisp of hair or the lightest breeze against the area of our face involved and the pain is torturous, there is no other word for it.
Thankfully I stopped having that part of the pain in 1998 yet not a day goes by despite my complete belief the pain will not return that apart of me still retains the fear.
How Zero Dark Thirty Sanitizes Torture
For torture victims, it’s the psychological wounds, not the physical ones, that never really heal.
—By Peter Van Buren
| Wed Jan. 2, 2013
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/how-zero-dark-thirty-sanitizes-torture
Excerpt:
This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.
If you look backward you see a nightmare. If you look forward you become the nightmare.
There’s one particular nightmare that Americans need to face: in the first decade of the twenty-first century we tortured people as national policy. One day, we’re going to have to confront the reality of what that meant, of what effect it had on its victims and on us, too, we who condoned, supported, or at least allowed it to happen, either passively or with guilty (or guiltless) gusto. If not, torture won’t go away. It can’t be disappeared like the body of a political prisoner, or conveniently deep-sixed simply by wishing it elsewhere or pretending it never happened or closing our bureaucratic eyes. After the fact, torture can only be dealt with by staring directly into the nightmare that changed us—that, like it or not, helped make us who we now are.
The president, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, has made it clear that no further investigations or inquiries will be made into America’s decade of torture. His Justice Department failed to prosecute a single torturer or any of those who helped cover up evidence of the torture practices. But it did deliver a jail sentence to one ex-CIA officer who refused to be trained to torture and was among the first at the CIA to publicly admit that the torture program was real.
At what passes for trials at our prison camp in Guantanamo, Cuba, disclosure of the details of torture is forbidden, effectively preventing anyone from learning anything about what the CIA did with its victims. We are encouraged to do what’s best for America and, as Barack Obama put it, “look forward, not backward,” with the same zeal as, after 9/11, we were encouraged to save America by going shopping.
Looking into the Eyes of the Tortured
Torture does not leave its victims, nor does it leave a nation that condones it. As an act, it is all about pain, but even more about degradation and humiliation. It destroys its victims, but also demeans those who perpetrate it. I know, because in the course of my 24 years as a State Department officer, I spoke with two men who had been tortured, both by allies of the United States and with at least the tacit approval of Washington. While these men were tortured, Americans in a position to know chose to look the other way for reasons of politics. These men were not movie characters, but complex flesh-and-blood human beings. Meet just one of them once and, I assure you, you’ll never follow the president’s guidance and move forward trying to forget.
(Nick, I am sorry you have chronic pain also. I too am on gabapentin and low level opiate. The alternativse dont help me but I am glad you are having benefit(s) from it. Enjoying your acupuncturist is a nice perk. (:
I don’t know, for me emotional pain I can get over (at some point). This, unless my brain stimulator starts working again, chances very, very slim.)
leej, You have sympathy from me. I’ve suffered from chronic pain since a bad accident in 2007. I take OTC pain meds along w/ gabapentin, opiates, etc. I’ve done alternative medicine of energy massage and acupuncture, the latter being the more effective. My acupuncturist is from China and she is a hoot. Having had my share of physical and emotional pain I prefer the former, but it’s a shitty choice!
Gene’s post made me think about the pain of trigeminal neuralgia, called the worst pain known to man.
I had a neurosurgeon say he would do one surgery (that had stopped my pain 99.9% the year before – it came back 3 mths later) only to tell me a doctor I neither liked nor trusted should do a procedure I did not want and had already had in a somewhat different manner (lidocaine instead of heat) with no benefit.
I fought against this, repeatedly saying “No.” until the pain took over and told me to say “Yes.”
Pain can make people do and say things they would otherwise not. Whether in an outright torture situation they would lie or hold out longer, or forever, I dont know. Just felt there was an anology to be made. (:
LeeJ,
The analogy between the terrible pain you suffer and torture is apt. From some of the pain of ailment I’ve been through (given your description nothing to compare to yours) I know that I would have done anything for relief and would have said anything if I felt that would relieve me. Torture it would seem is a failure given the many fine treatises contributed on this thread and that makes sense. It is a failure though because it seems to ensure ubreliable information rather than retrieve the facts.
ID, Just trying to keep it positive. It was a good link and I gave it kudos w/ a bit of humor. What’s wrong w/ that?
NickS,
Still using insults. Good luck with that. “Thanks for substance” Don’t you understand what you are saying to the others here by that?
If that is your pleasure. Do what you want.
I could take up waltzing the ladies in your absence, but don’t think they are interested in old cranks. 🙂
Take a timeout, IMHO you might need it.
MikeS and GeneH sell a good line. Believe it, try it and call their bluff after six months trial. Got nothing else to suggest.
No more pulpit sermons from me.
Write me at fallingpetals@hushmail.com from wherever you land, so we can continue discussing food, etc.
“The CIA Weighs In: Torture Did Not Help Find Bin Laden
By Josh Bell, ACLU at 5:09pm
Since the killing of Osama bin Laden, there has been much debate over whether the torture of detainees in U.S. custody helped American intelligence find the terror leader. It would be hard to find a better authority on where the truth lies than CIA Director Leon Panetta. Now the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent has released part of a letter from Panetta to torture opponent Sen. John McCain — and the contents leave little doubt that torture played no role in locating the courier who eventually led to bin Laden. Panetta wrote:
In the end, no detainee in CIA custody revealed the facilitator/courier’s full true name or specific whereabouts. This information was discovered through other intelligence means.
The most high-profile back-and-forth over the issue has been between Sen. McCain and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who has been doing some backpedalling on his initial claim that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed put U.S. intelligence on the courier’s trail after being waterboarded. Sen. McCain wrote in a Washington Post op-ed last week about how torture does not work because it only gets victims to say something — not necessarily the truth.
That point is backed up by former military interrogators such as Matthew Alexander, who helped track down al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Alexander told the Huffington Post last week:
I think that without a doubt, torture and enhanced interrogation techniques slowed down the hunt for bin Laden… they gave us the bare minimum amount of information they could get away with to get the pain to stop, or to mislead us.
Torture supporters like former senator and current presidential candidate Rick Santorum (who made some ludicrous statements Tuesday about Sen. McCain’s torture argument) have argued that lies from detainees helped in the bin Laden hunt because it showed that they were protecting important information. But of course, the same holds true whether the prisoners were tortured or not.
It’s not surprising that the proponents of torture would try to use the killing of bin Laden to support these illegal methods — unfortunately for them, their argument that torture works is false. But even if some shred of evidence were gained through torture, it would prove nothing, because the same or better information could have been obtained humanely. What we can do now is hold those responsible for this country’s use of torture accountable.”
http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/cia-weighs-torture-did-not-help-find-bin-laden
Elaine, Good substantive link. You win a free ticket to see Zero Dark Thirty!
Winning Message? ‘If You Love Waterboarding, Vote For Romney’
New polling shows that more Americans support torture in 2012 than they did under Bush
– Common Dreams staff
10/2/12
https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/10/02-3
Excerpt:
In a little noticed story in The New York Times last week, it was reported that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, if elected, would reverse the Obama executive order which put an end to the use of torture practices—euphemized by many as “enhanced interrogation” practices—employed by the US military and CIA during the presidency of George W. Bush.
If recent polling is reflective of the wider US electorate, Mitt Romney may just have a winning torture platform that would make George W. Bush and his legal advisers sigh with envy. (AP) On Tuesday, Politico reports that the Romney campaign has tapped former legal advisers to President Bush to join their legal team, including Steven Bradbury, “who led the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel from 2005 to 2009 and signed three 2005 memos reassuring the CIA and the DOJ that techniques like waterboarding were legal.”
To re-constitute a government torture program may not seem like an especially winning policy position to woo prospective voters. Unless, according to new polling data, the voters one is trying to win over happen to be American.
Commissioned by national security analyst Amy Zegart and conducted by the polling research company YouGov in August, the poll found that 41 percent of respondents said “the United States should torture prisoners captured in the fight against terrorism” while only only 34 percent said it should not.
Using the same questions as were asked in polls during the Bush presidency in 2005, those supporting torture are now 14 percentage points more prevalent under President Obama. What was more troubling, according to Zegart was that Americans are very specific in the kind of torture they like.
In her recent article for Foreign Policy, Torture Creep, Zegart explains that:
Respondents in 2012 are more pro-waterboarding, pro-threatening prisoners with dogs, pro-religious humiliation, and pro-forcing-prisoners-to-remain-naked-and-chained-in-uncomfortable-positions-in-cold-rooms. In 2005, 18 percent said they believed the naked chaining approach was OK, while 79 percent thought it was wrong. In 2012, 30 percent of Americans thought this technique was right, an increase of 12 points, while just 51 percent thought it was wrong, a drop of 28 points. In 2005, only 16 percent approved of waterboarding suspected terrorists, while an overwhelming majority (82 percent) thought it was wrong to strap people on boards and force their heads underwater to simulate drowning. Now, 25 percent of Americans believe in waterboarding terrorists, and only 55 percent think it’s wrong.
AP, I absolutely agree that the Constitution should not be held hostage to polls. But, politicians are obsessed w/ polls and pander to them. Again, 50-54% of Americans have no problem w/ waterboarding. That % goes up 10-20 points if we’re hit w/ chemical or nuclear by terrorists. “Noble” politicains[Feinstein, McCain, etc.] are trying to do everything they can to have those %’s not go up by any means neccesary, including but not limited to pressuring Hollywood movie makers. That’s because these “noble” politicians will sell out the Constitution in a NY minute if the the number hits the mid 60’s. Maybe not McCain, he has absolute integrity on this. Their “nobility” is really cowardice w/ a noble veneer.Thanks for some substance.
I only skimmed so if I come in ignorant, forgive me. But when the question is “does torture work?” or even, “did torture work this time?” my opinion has to be that the wrong question was asked.
Here’s what I think would work: If somebody is bad, kill them before they can do some harm. THAT would REALLY work.
On the other hand, let’s figure out what we would defend ourselves FROM as a nation. Would we defend ourselves from some foreign government that came in here and tried to take over and tried to, say: (a) Torture people if they had information about really bad stuff that could be stopped if they would divulge what they knew; and (b) arrange that someone can freely sexually abuse up to one/tenth of our children; and (c) keep big secrets about how the highest officials in our courts were deciding what to do with cases brought before them?
How hard would we fight to resist such a government?
Well, we have such a government. Get over it. We probably have no need to ever go to war again.
FYI, the second pic was taken thirty years after the first one. Celtic lassies do not get older, they get better.
OS,
It seems many of us regulars have the same predilection.
If there is a God, I think red heads are proof he wants to drive guys crazy. 😀
“And it’s not Darren’s integrity I’m worried about, Mike. Those gals are scary.”
Gene,
Yes they are scary and I’ve found there are always a few women attracted to men specifically because they are married, probably especially so if they’re rich. My single years taught me to be aware of the overt packaging though in that the most tempting package, often bore the most bitter fruit. Darren will do the right thing I’m sure, but also his Trillion$ can buy him some great security, since with wealth comes avarice and envy………..i’m just “sayin”.
Mike & Gene,
BWAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAH
http://i617.photobucket.com/albums/tt256/otteraylens/25c4d1e5.jpg
http://i617.photobucket.com/albums/tt256/otteraylens/5ff7bc36.jpg
OS,
You showoff you.
And it’s not Darren’s integrity I’m worried about, Mike. Those gals are scary.
Mike,
Yep.