At Least Some Mormons Understand The Awful Nature of The Use of Torture

Here’s one:
Two devout Mormons also engineered the more grisly wet work. Because the CIA lacked personnel in 2001 with interrogation expertise, the agency turned to two psychologists, James E. Mitchell and John B. Jessen, who had worked with the Air Force’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape programs. Neither had an intelligence or interrogation background or [...]

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Why Are Republicans So Stupid?

Michelle Bachman is the latest.
Take a look at what she said on the House floor:
“We were led to believe that we would see great change, immediate change, and all we’re seeing is a prolonged effort, because just what happened in the 1930s with FDR.
“The more the government spent, the more the government regulated, the more [...]

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Judge Jay Bybee Is Unrepentant About Memos, Impeach Him

There you have it. He thinks the memos were just fine.
Judge Jay S. Bybee broke his silence on Tuesday and defended the conclusions of legal memorandums he had signed as a Bush administration lawyer that allowed use of several coercive interrogation practices on suspected terrorists.
Judge Bybee, who issued the memorandums as the head of the [...]

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Quote of the Day – LDS Church Position on Torture

This is the best anyone can get out of the LDS Church
LDS Church spokesman Scott Trotter on Monday told me: “Abuse of any kind is incompatible with the Church of Jesus Christ.”
Abuse of any kind. That should cover every kind of abuse. Waterboarding someone against their will is considered abuse. Depriving someone of sleep for [...]

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The Torture of A Detainee Gave Us the False Lead to Iraq

emptywheel has been working doubly hard at giving us a good understanding of the timing of the approval of torture. In this post, she offers the most important information of all.
At least according to the Senate narrative, they started discussing torture plans for Abu Zubaydah after February 22, 2002–when DIA first questioned Ibn [...]

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Hitting a Nerve

Truly, we’ve hit a nerve with some. Note the language, the fearmongering. If you don’t let us torture our enemies, you will die. This is good. Guys like Michael Scheuer, Michael Hayden, and Michael Mukasey squirming is a good thing for America. They’ve got nothing.

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Top 20 Most Used Keywords To Search My Blog

After three years of blogging, the following are the top 20 most used keywords people used to find my blog on the internet.

second world war 1,335
iraq 1,175
cho seung-hui 879
american civil war 760
mit romney 637
fox news sucks 525
larry craig mormon 460
the good democrat 373
causes of the civil war 329
why was the civil war fought 311
sleep deprivation torture 304
republican nominee 265
middle east map 264
mitt romney lies 254
sarah palin boots 249
where is christianity [...]

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Jay Bybee Apparently Regrets Writing Those Torture Memos

The circling of the wagons begins. Bybee’s friends and supporters are working the refs (the Media), trying to paint him sympathetically, so that when it comes time to render judgment against him, we’ll look more softly on him. And it will most likely succeed. It still makes him a weak coward. If he truly regrets [...]

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A Sad State of Affairs

Obama can’t get a truth commission going. Essentially because Boehner told him Republicans will be even more obstructive and destructive.
President Obama rebuffed calls for a commission to investigate alleged abuses under the Bush administration in fighting terrorism, telling congressional leaders at a White House meeting yesterday that he wants to look forward instead of [...]

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Churchill’s England and Hitler’s Germany Did Not Use Torture

Andrew Sullivan has examples of both.
In both cases, the two men in charge of interrogating enemy spies and soldiers never once laid their hands on their detainees. Surely in the most dire war to face both nations, both Germany and England, you’d think, based on the rationale used by most Mormons today and conservative Americans, [...]

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FBI Director: Torture Did NOT Produce Results

Surely the FBI director knows a thing or two about effective interrogations…
I ask Mueller: So far as he is aware, have any attacks on America been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through what the administration still calls “enhanced techniques”?
“I’m really reluctant to answer that,” Mueller says. He pauses, looks at an aide, and then says [...]

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Alyssa Peterson, Mormon, Stood Against Torture

Few Mormons have spoken out against torture. Few took stands of any kind. It is quite sad, because torture is so strongly against our principles and values. One Mormon did stand against torture. Alyssa Peterson. I don’t know how many remember her story, but some do. She was a Mormon soldier in Iraq who, in [...]

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On Torture and Suffering

Brilliant.

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Here We Have It, The Reason, Why George Bush Ordered Torture

At last, we have a motive. A real and true motive for why torture was used.
“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.
“The main one is that everyone was worried about some [...]

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Donald Rumsfeld Approved Torture for the United States Military

He should therefore be tried for war crimes.
The 232-page report, the product of an 18-month inquiry, was approved on Nov. 20 by the Senate Armed Services Committee, but has since been under Pentagon review for declassification. Some of the findings were made public in a Dec. 12 article in The New York Times; a [...]

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The Idiocy of Michael Hayden

Note here what he says.
Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who served as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency during the last two years of George W. Bush’s presidency, said Sunday that the Obama administration’s recent release of memos detailing harsh interrogation techniques would limit the agency’s ability to pursue terrorists in the future.
The C.I.A. used [...]

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Impeach Judge Jay Bybee

Hear! Hear!
In one of the more nauseating passages, Jay Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal judge, wrote admiringly about a contraption for waterboarding that would lurch a prisoner upright if he stopped breathing while water was poured over his face. He praised the Central Intelligence Agency for having doctors ready to [...]

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KSM, Waterboarded 183 Times, Observed by Medical Professionals

One other important point to make on the revelation that KSM was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 (we don’t know how many times in other months), is the fact that for every single 183 of those times, a medical professional was on hand to make sure KSM did not die. Think about that. That [...]

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Waterboarding Sucks

KSM (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) was supposedly waterboarded 183 times in one month!
The CIA used the waterboard “at least 83 times during August 2002″ in the interrogation of Zubaydah. IG Report at 90, and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM, see id. at 91.
One hundred eighty three times in the month of [...]

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A Must Read Article On Torture

From the New York Times,
The first use of waterboarding and other rough treatment against a prisoner from Al Qaeda was ordered by senior Central Intelligence Agency officials despite the belief of interrogators that the prisoner had already told them all he knew, according to former intelligence officials and a footnote in a newly released legal [...]

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