This stuff must reveal my residence at the other end of the social strata from the aristocracy, because I can’t muster even the slightest subtlety in snark about such wanton violation of international law.

Nor can I muster any sarcasm about the idiocy of pretending that kidnapping and false imprisonment along with torture and detention for unspecified periods of time are somehow not part of the subject dialog with DOJ-OLC.

If these indefinitely held detainees not charged with a crime are not prisoners of war, what the hell are they? Does it really matter whether they are held in the U.S. or overseas that they are kidnapped, falsely imprisoned and tortured? How hard would it have been for the jiggly-spined aristocrat to use those terms in his inquiry?

Standard operating procedure.

but I do believe this is an example of the form.

Quite. But then, who among us would not discover our hidden high horse on reading, in isolation especially, passages such as this,

Based on CIA assurances, we understand that the interrogations do not take place in any … areas over which the United States exercises at least de facto authority as the government. … We therefore conclude that Article 16 is inapplicable to the CIA’s interrogation practices and that those practices thus cannot violate Article 16.

In which it is revealed that to Bradbury, by merely stepping out of the bounds of territory under U.S. control, the obligations created by the Conventions Against Torture, are made to stand in a similar relation to the U.S. government and its organs, e.g. the CIA, as, I don’t know, maybe the rules of time stand to God. Things happen with the participation of USG agents, at the behest of USG and indeed, because USG has arranged for them to happen at such time and place. Yet, because the place where they happen is outside “areas over which the United States exercises at least de facto authority as the government,” the U.S. government and its OGA guys are no longer bound to maintain the parameters of the CAT over the proceedings.

Unfortunately the warm cozy feeling those thoughts give me cannot be conserved for use when winter comes.

http://shadow.foreignpolicy.co….._dissenter

The dismissal of the Fourteenth Amendment and then the Eighth by Bradbury when it is explicitly included in Article 16 is shocking.

Also, why has there been so little press attention given to Ramzi bin al-Shibh (who I learned about only by reading this blog)? One would think that the man who was the intermediary between the hijackers and al Qaeda leaders would get more press coverage. Something that strikes me about all of the interrogations is how little they tell us about the men who committed the acts on 9/11. Why is that?

You couldn’t be referring to a source like a memo from OLC, or other such official documentation could you Dragon?

I am with perris 100% on this; one of the primary purposes of torture, war, other violence perpetrated by those PTB, the ones like Rummy who have the power to make it happen, is satisfaction of an urgent internal need. Not only do they get off on it; they need it to survive and keep power.

Now since we have pretty well established that there was and is no NEED for mistreatment of prisoners; that is, nothing of value to anyone was gained by it, why do you ask for a source before you will accept a statement like perris’? He has simply dragged away the cobwebs of constant indoctrination to see more clearly what we are up against here. It ain’t just a pack of overaged frat boys screwing around.

Yes I know, it is OK to approve of using pain to extract info from an enemy since around half of Americans do approve(see recent Pew study). Perhaps in our righteousness we feel safe from that treatment and comfortable enough to wish it on others, whom we do not know, but simply because they are designated bad arabs, terrsts, whateva by big daddy Cheney and his gang of psychopaths.

My source is simply a long period of weeding through all the info that everyone has access to, building a sensible model from it, and concluding that classical education of the type we are all submersed in from birth is riddled with falsehood. So which sources can I trust? Those that pass the smell test. Only lately has the lying become so desperate and open that any fool can see right through it. God pity those who can’t.