what waterboarding feels like

Here’s a personal account of waterboarding from someone who did it to himself to see what all the fuss was about.

Excerpt:

I’ll put it this way. If I had the choice of being waterboarded by a third party or having my fingers smashed one at a time by a sledgehammer, I’d take the fingers, no question.

It’s horrible, terrible, inhuman torture. I can hardly imagine worse. I’d prefer permanent damage and disability to experiencing it again. I’d give up anything, say anything, do anything.

The Spanish Inquisition knew this. It was one of their favorite methods.

You and I are paying with our taxes for this to happen to human beings.

This is currently happening to those designated as “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay and at secret prisons run by the CIA around the world whose existence was confirmed by Bush in September 2006.

You are an “enemy combatant” if the Executive branch of our United States says you are. The Military Commisions Act of 2006 removes from “enemy combatants” the right of habeas corpus, meaning that you are not allowed to know the “evidence” against you, you are not afforded a speedy trial, and other fundamental liberties that were previously guaranteed to American citizens by the Constitution.

You can be named an “enemy combatant” tomorrow if that serves the Executive. So could I. If this law is not reversed, it will be used for suppression of dissent.

a brief word from our sponsors

I watched episode 407 of The Office on NBC’s web site tonight, which couldn’t have been interrupted more than 5, 6, maybe 7 times by commercials. As they hoped and expected from a young male representative of the 18-35 demographic, I was left feeling entertained and oddly compelled to buy a new Mazda coupe and/or kill Middle Easterners for the US Navy to support our petrochemical-based foreign policy… neither of which, I reckon, would benefit the world’s second largest corporation and owner of NBC, General Electric, a prominent defense contractor for the US military. I used to think these guys just made toasters.

When you’ve had a few years of relief from constant exposure to commercials, watching a program laced with them feels like getting smacked over the head. They’re relentless.

CIA kidnapped and tortured the wrong guy, and now SCOTUS says he can’t sue.

Secret prisons in the name of national security…what nation is this? What ideals does this policy protect? Freedom?

from the Washington Post:

The Supreme Court declined [Tuesday] to open U.S. courts to a German citizen who said he was abducted, imprisoned and tortured by the CIA because he was mistakenly identified as a terrorist.
[...]
Masri, who is of Lebanese descent, has said he was detained by Macedonian police while on vacation on Dec. 31, 2003, and handed over to the CIA a few weeks later under a secret program that transfers terrorism suspects to other countries for interrogation. He said he was taken to a secret CIA-run prison in Afghanistan and physically abused before he was flown back to the Balkans without explanation in May 2004 and dumped on a hillside in Albania.

The government had invoked its “state secrets” privilege and said there was no way for Khaled el-Masri to bring his lawsuit, or for the government to defend itself, without the disclosure of information that would endanger national security.

from MSNBC:

At the height of Cold War tensions between the United States and the former Soviet Union, U.S. presidents used the state secrets privilege six times from 1953 to 1976, according to OpenTheGovernment.org. Since 2001, it has been used 39 times, enabling the government to unilaterally withhold documents from the court system, the group said. (emphasis mine)

We had nuclear missiles pointed at us and “state secrets” was invoked 6 times in 23 years. Now it’s been used 39 times in 6 years. You know that old aphorism “if you’re not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide?” The Bush Administration has been doing nothing but hide ever since it descended upon this country.

more than just a number

In Wisconsin, your driver’s license number encodes your sex, date of birth, and even an approximation of how your last name is pronounced. Check it out: Driver’s License Analyzer

at last, cable news that’s independent of government and business

It’s a pretty simple idea, and I think it’s going to work. I started my ongoing monthly contribution to The Real News Network today.

Ask your doctor if BigPharma is right for you.

Sicko.

Iraq

Republican Project: Segregate The Internet is going full steam ahead

Tammy Baldwin voted for network neutrality, although the Republican corporate slaves in the House stuck together with Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) and managed to get the COPE Act to pass the House Energy & Commerce Committee without the Markey Amendment that could have saved the Internet.

I’m not particularly surprised, but that won’t stop me from being extremely disappointed yet again by the shortsightedness of the current majority party.

It’s not over yet. Please read up on the issue and decide if it’s important to you to prevent COPE from becoming law. If so, please sign MoveOn’s petition as well as the petition at SaveTheInternet.

For an example of what happens when you let the “free market” provide for the communication needs of American citizens, check this out.  If the telcos had provided what they promised, and what we’ve already paid for, we’d have 45 mbps of symmetric bandwidth to our homes.  That’s 30 to 60 times faster than the average DSL or cable broadband service currently available to us.

say one thing, do another: the Bush NOLA plan

from the Washington Post:

The Bush administration said yesterday that the cost of rebuilding New Orleans’s levees to federal standards has nearly tripled to $10 billion and that there may not be enough money to fully protect the entire region…The news represents a shift for the administration; President Bush had pledged in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina to rebuild New Orleans “higher and better.”

That’s odd…there seems to be plenty of money for tax cuts and the continuing debacle in Iraq. If we could only somehow extract oil from the poor and black population of New Orleans, I bet the levees would already be rebuilt, 100 feet tall, and capable of withstanding a Category 14.

The loss of coastal wetlands protecting New Orleans from storms, as well as the lowering of the ground level in the area, have reduced the city’s natural safeguards from flooding — and altered assumptions.

Alas, wetlands, where did you go? You are “lost” and we cannot find you. Nobody knows what happened to you; you just disappeared. Well, maybe the developers who purposely destroyed them and the government that permitted it could clue us in.

Donald E. Powell, the administration’s rebuilding coordinator, said some areas may be left without the protection of levees strong enough to meet requirements of the national flood insurance program. Those areas probably would face enormous obstacles in attracting home buyers and investors willing to build there.

In the conference call yesterday, Powell reiterated the promise that the levees will be at least as strong as they were designed to be before Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29.

“If a hurricane such as Katrina hit the area, there would not be catastrophic flooding,” he said. But, he said, there might be some “manageable” flooding.

See, it will be ok. Since they’ll be at least as strong as they were designed to be before Katrina, we’ll only have that bothersome “manageable” flooding, like we had in August of 2005. Ah, those were the days, eh?