Andrew Sullivan calls out Dick Cheney’s admission this weekend, “I was a big supporter of waterboarding,” and correctly notes that the former Vice President has thereby admitted to being guilty of a war crime. War Crimes must be investigated and prosecuted under U. S. law and international treaty, and the principle of Universal Jurisdiction applies (meaning, Cheney could be indicted and arrested by agents of a foreign government and held to account).

Of course, the Attorney General of the United States doesn’t seem to understand his solemn obligation:

[Attorney General Eric Holder] added that he had seen documents making clear that Cheney’s office was the driving force behind the Bush Administration’s most controversial counterterrorism policies, especially those sanctioning brutal interrogations. He said of Cheney, “I think he’s worried about what history’s judgment will be of the role that he played in making decisions about everything from black sites to enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Thanks, Eric Holder. Let’s all just sit on our hands and wait for history to render a judgment. It’s not like it’s your JOB to go around enforcing the laws of the United States!

(The Holder quote comes from this excellent article by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker, which I also referenced in a prior post.)

People are screaming about Defending America From Terrorists. Their method? Abandon bedrock American values. Of course!

“Some people believe our Constitution exists to grant rights to terrorists who want to harm us. I disagree.”

Jane Mayer called out that gem from a Senator (!) Scott Brown political ad that ran last month. Her profile of this “movement” is in the current New Yorker.

And, just for the record, Senator Brown: our Constitution actually does stipulate that “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury… nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

I believe the English language included the word “citizen” back in 1789, so I’m pretty fucking sure that when the framers wrote “No person,” that’s exactly what they meant.

In fact, I’m pretty fucking sure that the whole point of guaranteeing the rights of the accused is so that “terrorists who want to harm us” are afforded due process of law. I mean, the law is good enough for serial killers, rapists, arsonists, and mass-murderers, but it crumbles before a kid with explosive underoos?

Creepy but pretty interesting, too. Via the ISO50 blog.

“I mean, rather than campaigning for the right to serve in the military, I am going to organize a gang of faggots to extend the right to be ineligible for military service to all of humanity.” So sayeth IOZ, and I heartily concur!

No really, it IS. As long as you have a megaphone and plenty of hugs.

It’s even creepier than it sounds. Under the new “Secure Communities” program spearheaded by the Department of Homeland Security – named in the fashion of Bush’s “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” Initiatives – all local and state police bookings will be run through the DHS master immigration database. Anyone flagged as an “illegal alien” will be detained at the request of DHS.

The idea that your local police would be cooperating with DHS in enforcing immigration rules completely undermines whatever limited trust might still remain between community members and police officers. Don’t just take my word for it; here’s the conclusion of a lobbying group called the Police Foundation:

immigration enforcement by local police undermines their core public safety mission, diverts scarce resources, increases their exposure to liability and litigation, and exacerbates fear in communities already distrustful of police.

The fact that every single person arrested and booked will be run through this system is considered a civil rights PLUS because it avoids the “profiling” of people based on their skin color or perceived ethnic background.

With that so-called advantage, I’m sure a lot of liberals will line up and cheer for the Obama administration’s newest plan to help Keep Us Safe from all those house-cleaners, musicians, DJs, gardeners, nannies, computer programmers, strawberry pickers, and meat packers who currently enable threaten our way of life.

Supporting Democrats who won’t stand up for what we believe in is actually the same as supporting Republicans. Someday we’ll figure that out. Until then, we have Chris Floyd to explain it to us:

I know what it’s like to be hardwired for supporting Democrats, come hell or high water, giving them every benefit of the doubt, turning a blind eye here, making a furious rationalization there. These tribal loyalties are very difficult to lay down; it really can feel like turning your back on your family. And of course the belligerent, bellicose, willfully ignorant Republicans are loathsome and dangerous.

But there comes a time when you must face the truth – or be lost to truth forever. There comes a time to recognize that the Democratic Party and Republican Party are part of the same corrupted entity. There comes a time to recognize that the Democratic Party’s agenda is not only ruinous in itself, unworthy of the support of anyone who cares about justice, peace, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – it is also empowering those very same loathsome and dangerous Republicans. There comes a time for even the most partisan tribalist (and I have been one) to accept the hard judgment of reality: that the Democratic Party is part of the problem, not the solution.

To say that there is no alternative to supporting this locked-in, closed-off, two-faction system of war and greed is an act of craven surrender to that system. To dismiss all hope for forging genuine alternatives to this system — whether these be other political parties or more general movements aiming not for political power but for broader changes in social consciousness — is a counsel of despair. It condemns us, and the world, to yet another generation of violence, chaos and corruption, another long, long journey away from the light. It is, as noted above, a recipe for disaster in every way.

Martha Coakley was the Democratic candidate who referred to Curt Schilling as a Yankees fan and who misspelled the word “Massachusetts” in a campaign ad. As a Massachusetts native, I can tell you that I have not been so uninspired by a candidate since the last time John Kerry was running. When Coakley was asked by the Boston Globe if her campaign was being too passive, she mentioned that she was busy meeting with local leaders rather than choosing, like her Republican rival, to “stand outside of Fenway, shaking hands, in the cold.”

As Jon Stewart pointed out (that’s a Stewart quip in the headline, by the way), with the loss of Kennedy’s seat in the Senate, the Democrats are now down to… “an 18-vote majority in the Senate. Which is way more than George W. Bush ever needed to do whatever the fuck he wanted to do.”

But, hey… bipartisanship, compromise, working together, bridging the divide…

I guess it’s time to modify those old McGovern-era bumper stickers:

Since everyone in the media is all agog over the latest existential threat to our very way of life (i.e., Yemen), I thought I’d look around a little and see what I could find. Via a link Jonathan Schwarz’s A Tiny Revolution, I came across this excellent blog post by Adam Curtis, a documentary filmmaker who produced, among other gems, The Power of Nightmares (2004) and The Mayfair Set (1999).

It’s really worth reading the whole post, but one key takeaway is that

only forty years ago the British government fought a vicious secret war in the Yemen against republican revolutionaries who used terror, including bombing airliners… [T]he chaos that has engulfed the Yemen today and is breeding new terrorist threats against the west is a direct result of that conflict of forty years ago.

His blog post contains some excellent archival video from the BBC documenting British adventures there in the 1960’s. It’s worth every minute of your time.

The other key takeaway is that, apparently, British people call it “the Yemen.”

Chris Hedges nails it:

The tyranny we impose on others we finally impose on ourselves.