The World Implodes

Remember the Cold War? All of that propaganda we had (with the benefit of substantial truth) about the Soviet penal system. We've seen evidence come out on this in bits and drabs, but today the full extent of the matter is laid out.

Remember "The Gulag Archipelago?"

Well, the Bush Administration has recreated it.

And any person who has not fully sold their soul to be a Bush Cheerleader should be sickened and fully, totally, and righteously pissed off.

Well, thanks the the Bush Administration, we've bought a controlling interest in the Gulag system, we even got some of the worksites:

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

...

The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.

How does the above make the Bush Administration different, in the four-corners of the paragraph above, from Stalin?

While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.

I cry for the loss of "the City on the Hill".

And it gets worse...

Host countries have signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as has the United States. Yet CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA's approved "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. They include tactics such as "waterboarding," in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning.

So we continue to violate the the very treaties we belong to and have signed. But what of "Our word is as good as Gold" Condi?

This action is BLATENTLY ILLEGAL. The programs were set up overseas because they violate domestic law. But as the United States has signed the "Convention against Torture" it is not made legal because it is done somewhere else...only more difficult to expose. Not only is Bush a liar when he states he is opposed to torture, he has explicitly violated every human rights law in the United States Code by authorizing and continuing this practice. This is Nixon authorizing the bombing of Cambodia, on a more methodical, systematic scale. He is shaming each and everyone of us, and the GOP controlled Congress (with some Democrat help no doubt) has enabled and perpetuated this crime.

And it is a crime. There is no legal authority for the President of the United States to authorize this, zero -- NONE.

Further, it is an impeachable crime, the very embodiment of a High Crime & Misdemeanor. Of course, a HUGE and self-funded swath of the citizenry actually get their lizard-minded jollies out of such depravity (see the post below). "Why should we lift a finger to help out these swarthies?" It's not like Bush has lied about something really serious like receiving the "oral sex". No, all Bush has done is create a legacy of the United States being just another imperialistic asshole of a nation, where might makes right. Bully for us -- we've become what we have always been able to fool ourselves into believing we could never be.

And if you think that "Bush must have to learn something with all his troubles", he has.

"MORE OF THE SAME"
Take Cheney's replacement for Scooter, David Addington:

Mr. Addington has done his best to crown King Cheney. As Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post, Mr. Addington pushed an obscure philosophy called the unitary executive theory that "favors an extraordinarily powerful president." He would go "through every page of the federal budget in search of riders that could restrict executive authority."

"He was a principal author of the White House memo justifying torture of terrorism suspects," Mr. Milbank wrote. "He was a prime advocate of arguments supporting the holding of terrorism suspects without access to courts. Addington also led the fight with Congress and environmentalists over access to information about corporations that advised the White House on energy policy." And he helped stonewall the 9/11 commission.

Every new day, brings another reason to call for the exposure, shaming, and casting out of these bastards.