Political Bunker

From Yahoo - Canada's foreign ministry, responding to pressure from close allies, said on Saturday it would remove the United States and Israel from a watch list of countries where prisoners risk being tortured.

Both nations expressed unhappiness after it emerged they had been listed in a document that formed part of a training course manual on torture awareness given to Canadian diplomats.

The current administration often claims that they'll be judged by history, assuming that in some distant future historians will look back with admiration towards President Bush and crew. However, if we look at our own history there's no reason why we can't judge this administration today!

Stephen King gives "the media" a piece of his mind in Time magazine...

ACLU - Torture of detainees. Secret government kidnapping. Indefinite detention.

These ideas should not represent the United States of America. Torture is un-American. And we need to tell our leaders and the rest of the world how deeply we oppose our government's unconscionable involvement in these acts.

I feel that Schumer and Feinstein's approval of Mukasey makes them complicit in the approval of torture. We must vote these posers out of office ASAP!

It's not often that I tag items as both humor and torture but here ya go...

Actually, I don't think I've ever used those two tags together!

Guardian - Torture and "humanitarian war" are similar in many ways. Both involve the inflicting of violence in order to force a change of behaviour.

Julia Layton - Most CIA officials say water boarding is not torture, although many see it as a poor interrogation method because it scares the prisoner so much you can't trust anything he tells you. Senator John McCain, who was tortured as a POW during the Vietnam War, says water boarding is definitely a form of torture. Human rights groups agree unanimously that "simulated drowning," causing the prisoner to believe he is about to die, is undoubtedly a form of psychological torture.

Smirking Chimp = We must elect--by an overwhelming, theft-proof majority--a candidate who promises to renounce Bush and all his works. A reform-minded president's first act should be to sign a law that reads as follows: "The federal government of the United States having been illegitimate and illegal since January 20, 2001, all laws, regulations, executive orders, and acts of commission or omission enacted between that infamous day and 12 noon Eastern Standard Time on January 20, 2009 are hereby declared invalid and without effect." Guantánamo, secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, spying on Americans' phone calls and emails, and "legal" torture would be erased. Our troops should immediately pull out of Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Somalia; we should apologize to our victims and offer to compensate them and their survivors. Bush should never appear on any list of American presidents. When he dies, his carcass shouldn't receive a state funeral. It ought to be thrown in the trash.

Unfortunately, no one like that is running for president. To the contrary, most of the major presidential candidates want to accelerate America's slide into outright moral bankruptcy.

Alternet - In Administration of Torture, two American Civil Liberties Union attorneys detail the findings of a years-long investigation and court battle with the administration that resulted in the release of massive amounts of data on prisoner treatment and the deaths of US-held prisoners.

"[T]he documents show unambiguously that the administration has adopted some of the methods of the most tyrannical regimes," write Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh. "Documents from Guantanamo describe prisoners shackled in excruciating 'stress positions,' held in freezing-cold cells, forcibly stripped, hooded, terrorized with military dogs, and deprived of human contact for months." ~ more from Alternet...