William L. Shirer’s “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” about some of the Nazi heirarchy getting off on watching the torture and murder of the Jews. I also read that book; my father, uncles, and cousins fought in WWII, so it was a big topic of my childhood. Shirer mentions that the Third Reich floated on a sea of booze, there were so many alcoholics in the upper echelons. My hunch: many of those were adults with undiagnosed learning disabilities (although not everyone who has problems with alcohol has LDs, there’s a lot of overlap). Hitler got rid of the competent, ethical civil servants; Bu$hCo has done the same it appears.

I think you have also answered something that has puzzled me for a very long while: Why has the Congressional leadership been so willing to roll over and play dead with regard to Bush and Cheney?
I’m also mystified. Meanwhile, the damage escalates. After the suspicions noted on these threads, plus reading Craig Unger’s book (”Fall of the House of Bush“) I am COMPLETELY fed up with Congressional lack of action. Just incredibly disgusted.

The truth, perhaps, is that the congressional leadership is very, very afraid of what Bush and Cheney might do in response to an attempt to remove them from office…they are both mentally unbalanced and perfectly capable of doing anything to preserve themselves.
I agree.
FWIW: I came across the work of a social psychologist, Roy Baumeister, while researching something unrelated to politics. Baumeister’s recent research has upended notions of who is most likely to be ‘criminal’. Baumeister’s research that seems to have a lot of validity in the way he set up his experiments; plus, they’ve been repeated by others and his results confirmed repeatedly. It’s a bit eery in view of what we know about Bush and Cheney.

Here’s the key revelation: people who are ‘egoists’ and who are also aggressive are the really dangerous among us. The people who are most dangerous have an exaggerated, inflated sense of their own importance and their own skills (but no real mastery of tasks or decision-making). In fact, some of Baumeister’s most aggressive, most egotistical research subjects (i.e., highest scores for ‘dangerous’) BRAGGED about the things they’d done. Wanted everyone to know what bad-ass things they’d done. (Thinking: flight suit on an aircraft carrier deck…) What’s even more interesting is how his research apparently synchs with the assessments of prison guards about who they most need to keep an eye on. Interesting, eh? (Goering, et al, fit Baumeister’s research very well, BTW.)

…Sad state of affairs, but we are all complicit… We have allowed ourselves to become complacent, and have given away our power.
I might have agreed two months ago, but no longer.
I no longer blame myself for wanting to believe that American civil servants and ideals were strong enough to withstand a CheneyBush disaster.

We were not complicit — we did NOT condone or agree to this.
Our Congress, our courts, our Secretaries of State, and the cursed, weasely, lazy US press SHOULD HAVE conducted their affairs so that Cheney’s true nature and alliances were clear to all the US public before Nov 2000; the press should NEVER have puffed up a criminal egoist like Rove into some kind of Master Strategist — they should have exposed him as the deceitful, illegal fraud he is.

I refuse to blame myself, or you, or my neighbors, or any commenters here for the fact that right wing ideologues found very wealthy people to fund their political agendas while the rest of us (oblivious of the danger) were doing our jobs, being ‘good citizens’ working on local issues, and exhausting ourselves driving kids soccer carpools.

I refuse to accept one more iota of blame.
Show me the reports from Campaign 2000 that talk about Wolfowitz, or Perle, or neocons, or who funded them, or their links with Cheney.
Show me the news coverage that explained the Gov of Texas is only a ‘ceremonial’ position, and that Dubya had no managerial talent.
Show me the news reports that laid out the relationships that Michael Moore so eloquently explained in Fahrenheit 9/11 between the Bushes, Carlyle Group, oil, Dubya going AWOL.

Some of us intuited that these people were bad news, but we were let down by a host of institutions — starting with Congress, and including the US press. Capped off by the US Supreme Court, which handed down an embarressingly PARTISAN legal decision that made many of us realize the shit was starting to hit a very bizarre fan.

Don’t you for one instant blame yourself!
I’ve read your comments for at least a year or more, and from what I can tell you represent the very finest in this country: curiousity, openmindedness, willingness to cooperate in a larger conversation. You da best (Well… aong with the insufferable bmaz, and Mad Dogs, and Mary, and Rayne, and Phred…

It’s not your fault, and it’s not my fault.
And neither of us should have to spend hours and hours and hours online trying to sort out why we’ve been lied to, defrauded, and our names drug through mud and filth because OTHER PEOPLE lacked the courage to stand up to neocon Think Tanks and the Karl Roves of this world.

You’re the best.
It’s not your fault.
It’s not my fault.

We’re simply the only ones pissed off enough, and tough, enough to ask questions and call bullshit on the criminal conspiracy that took over while we were busy trying to lead decent lives.

Godspeed.
Another rant from rOTL, but damn, I feel a bit better now.

Wow…. am I going to be working really late today, or what…? Yikies…

123 – Orion, you mean something like the state Padilla’s lawyers say he was left in (too worried that he would interfere with Bush-God’s plans for GITMO detainees, and too terrified of the thought of returning to detention, to assist in his defense?

Or something more like this:
http://online.wsj.com/article/…..whats_news

where the man dumped couldn’t even recognize his children.

This administration never plans ahead operationally, only politically. I have a difficult time believing they had the torture question ahead of having a subject to torture for this reason.

Thank you, Mary… for leading us deeper into a lower circle of hell.

Here’s some stuff:

From: International Law of War Association

This will give you an overview:

Outline: http://lawofwar.org/outline.htm

For the memos themselves and analysis:

url: http://lawofwar.org/Torture_Memos_analysis.htm

First torture memo was Jan 9, 2002. You’ll be able to see a timeline there for these early memos. Laying out who bush believed qualified (mostly not!) for being held under Geneva. And then the other memos (what I call the legal toothpicks underlying the whole “house of cards” they built in terms of detention, torture, etc.

Not sure how that fits with dates these guys were grabbed.

What I want to know, in addition to the questions above, is whether the parsing and scrambling about what constitutes torture began before/after possible live viewing/live auditing of torture….

bmaz (122) — I cured myself of the desire by working as an admin asst with paralegal responsibilities for a Fortune 100 legal department. I’d finished two semesters of business law, thought I should explore it further before committing to law school. Bigger assholes I have never worked for in my life. Granted, it takes some real swagger to be effective, but the guys who make it to the top of the corporate ladder never learn when to to shut it off. Eye opening, though; I encourage anybody toying with the notion of going to law school to find some way to work in that environment first. And I’m sure it’s very different to be in private practice than in the corporate world — but since I was looking at corporate law, I was cured of any interest.

i suspect that this is one of the goals of the sensory deprivation torture that jose padilla apparently endured.

recently, the german citizen who the cia kidnapped and shipped out for torture a few years ago went off the deep end (my interpretation). i doubt that this behavior was unrelated to his torture.

mental instability following torture would seem to be an effective way of achieving “built-in” lack of credibility vis-a-vis torturee testimony.