Men who are not police force a protester into a car and drive off in Pittsburgh

These are not police. They are wearing camouflage, NOT police uniforms. The vehicle that this protester is wrestled into (without being read any rights or any other statements) is NOT a police car.

There were certainly scuffles between police and protesters around the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh today but this 'arrest' (I don't know if you could call it that) is something new, something sinister.

Paramilitary squads now operating openly in the United States. Keep in mind that in other countries in the not-so-distant past, paramilitary squads did things the police could not do, including torture, murder and 'disappear' people.

I don't know if this was a leftist or a rightist protester, nor do I know who sent out the goon squad or what their agenda is. It doesn't matter. If they can do this to him, they can do it to you or to me.

UPDATE: Some chatter around the internet suggests that these MAY be members of the Pennsylvania National Guard. If they are and are operating under federal authority then that would be a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of federal troops (including federalized national guard) to conduct police operations within the United States. If they are national guard troops and if they were operating under the direction of Governor Ed Rendell then they have the legal right to act, but the method of arrest in which the protester was not read his rights and was wrestled into a car which then departed for an undisclosed location is still of questionable legality.

Infotainment Healthcare Coverage

Irresponsible media coverage doesn't even begin to describe it.

The Entertainment Value of Snuffing Grandma

Joe Bageant:

Every day I get letters asking me to weigh in on the healthcare fracas. As if a redneck writer armed with a keyboard, a pack of smokes and all the misinformation and vitriol available on the Internet could contribute anything to the crap storm already in progress. Besides that, my unreasoned but noisy take on this issue is often about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit. None of which has ever stopped me from making a fool of myself in the past. So here goes.

There ain't any healthcare debate going on, Bubba. What is going on are mob negotiations about insurance, and which mob gets the biggest chunk of the dough, be it our taxpayer dough or the geet that isn't in ole Jim's impoverished purse. The hoo-ha is about the insurance racket, not the delivery of healthcare to human beings. It's simply another form of extorting the people regarding a fundamental need -- health.

Unfortunately, the people have been mesmerized by our theater state's purposefully distracting and dramatic media productions for so long they've been mutated toward helplessness. Consequently, they are incapable of asking themselves a simple question: If insurance corporation profits are one third of the cost of healthcare, and all insurance corporations do is deliver our money to healthcare providers for us (or actually, do everything in their power to keep the money for themselves), why do we need insurance companies at all? Answer: Because Wall Street gets a big piece of the action. [...]

Whatever happens, we will not see Congress stand up against the extortion of its people by the healthcare industry. We will not see even the most ordinary kind of healthcare declared as a human right, as it is in so many other nations. We will see, however, greater access to the public treasury by the insurance corporations.

Every nation in the world is now party to at least one treaty that addresses health as a human right, including the conditions necessary for the delivery of health services. Healthcare is a right under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Hell, even Saddam Hussein provided healthcare.

That Americans cannot grasp this fundamental aspect of human rights (but then we cannot even get child nutrition, or limiting the number of times you can taser an old lady in an airport, out of the starting gate) and join the civilized world and assure its people of such things is testimony. Testimony that we live in a vacuum exclusive of the accepted standard of mercy and decency common to civilized democratic nations elsewhere. Testimony that even we the citizenry would rather maintain and spread lies than accept truths such as most people in countries with universal healthcare would not ever give it up in favor of the U.S. system.

Most of all though, it is testimony that we live under an induced mass hallucination where spectacle replaces fact, information and common sense. In place of actionable information, we are served up screaming red faces -- angry mobs manufactured for TV protesting "government interference in the people's healthcare choices." One must wonder what inchoate anger is really being tapped by the organizers of these strange "citizen protests."

Going Forward While Looking Back

Bush Era Horrors Will Haunt Us Until We Truly Face Them

We can't just "move forward." We need to face who we've been and just how badly we've acted, if we care to become something better.

Tom Engelhardt:

Let's review for a moment.

In the name of everything reasonable, and in the face of acts of evil by terrible people, we tortured wantonly and profligately, and some of these torture techniques -- known to the previous administration and most of the media as "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- were actually demonstrated to an array of top officials, including the national security adviser, the attorney general, and the secretary of state, within the White House. We imprisoned secretly at "black sites" offshore and beyond the reach of the American legal system, holding prisoners without hope of trial or, often, release; we disappeared people; we murdered prisoners; we committed strange acts of extreme abuse and humiliation; we kidnapped terror suspects off the global streets and turned some of them over to some of the worst people who ran the worst dungeons and torture chambers on the planet. Unknown, but not insignificant numbers of those kidnapped, abused, tortured, imprisoned, and/or murdered were actually innocent of any crimes against us. We invaded without pretext, based on a series of lies and the manipulation of Congress and the public. We occupied two countries with no clear intent to depart and built major networks of military bases in both. Our soldiers gunned down unknown numbers of civilians at checkpoints and, in each country, arrested thousands of people, some again innocent of any acts against us, imprisoning them often without trial or sometimes hope of release. Our Air Force repeatedly wiped out wedding parties and funerals in its global war on terror. It killed civilians in significant numbers. In the process of prosecuting two major invasions, wars, and occupations, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans have died. In Iraq, we touched off a sectarian struggle of epic proportions that involved the "cleansing" of whole communities and major parts of cities, while unleashing a humanitarian crisis of remarkable size, involving the uprooting of more than four million people who fled into exile or became internal refugees. In these same years, our Special Forces operatives and our drone aircraft carried out -- and still carry out -- assassinations globally, acting as judge, jury, and executioner, sometimes of innocent civilians. We spied on, and electronically eavesdropped on, our own citizenry and much of the rest of the world, on a massive scale whose dimensions we may not yet faintly know. We pretzled the English language, creating an Orwellian terminology that, among other things, essentially defined "torture" out of existence (or, at the very least, left its definitional status to the torturer).

And don't think that that's anything like a full list. Not by a long shot. [...]

Perhaps the greatest fantasy of the present moment is that there is a choice here. We can look forward or backward, turn the page on history or not. Don't believe it. History matters.

Whatever the Obama administration may want to do, or think should be done, if we don't face the record we created, if we only look forward, if we only round up the usual suspects, if we try to turn that page in history and put a paperweight atop it, we will be haunted by the Bush years until hell freezes over.

You know he's right. It's not just about the lack of credibility in the Bush administration, it is also about our credibility as a nation that believes in the rules of law.

War Crimes Accountability And Justice

Judgment at Nuremberg and American Torture

Michael Zucker:

"There are those in our own country who today speak of the protection of country, of survival. A decision must be made in the life of every nation ... when it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy to rest survival upon what is expedient."

That's lead Judge Dan Haywood, played by Spencer Tracy, in the powerful 1961 film "Judgment at Nuremberg", speaking for the panel that tried the film's four fictional defendants who had been high level judges in Hitler's Germany. Those judges had subverted the rule of law by rendering decisions based on what served the political ends of the Nazi regime. "A country (is) what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult," Haywood says in summation.

The film has particular relevance today since we've been engaged in the issue of the legality, morality, and efficacy of using our past enemies' inhumane interrogation methods against our current enemies. As the Stanley Kramer production examined the soul of the German people that emerged from its dark days under Hitler, the discussion in America in 2009 goes to the heart of who we are as a people.

Oscar-winning screenwriter Abby Mann's primary message was that the rule of law presumes that humans charged with its interpretation and administration owe their allegiance to it and not to government officials. That message resonates in the conclusions of the Senate Armed Services Committee Detainee Treatment Report that was released in April.

The report discloses that while interrogating detainees, we adopted techniques that were used by the Chinese Communists during the Korean War to elicit FALSE confessions from American prisoners. […]

The legal structure that the use of these techniques violated includes our signing (under President Reagan) the Convention Against Torture; Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War that was unanimously ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1955 and that specifically prohibits torture; and two additional covenants joined by the United States in 1992 and 1994.

The War Crimes Act (1996) that criminalizes torture and other grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, the Torture Act (2000), and laws enacted during the Bush/Cheney years reinforce the legal underpinning.

In 2006, the sitting judge advocates of our military services unanimously told the Senate Judiciary Committee that waterboarding was inhumane and illegal. In November 2007, four retired military judge advocates wrote to Senator Patrick Leahy that "cruelty and torture is neither justified nor legal in any circumstance", that "Abu Ghraib and other notorious examples of detainee abuse have been the product...of a self-serving and destructive disregard for the well-established legal principles applicable to this issue", and that "waterboarding detainees amounts to illegal torture in all circumstances. To suggest otherwise ... (is) an affront to the law and the core values of our nation."

Mr. Levin's committee concluded that when Justice Department officials John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Alberto Gonzales argued in 2002 that torturing prisoners was not against the law, they "distorted the meaning and intent of anti-torture laws (and) rationalized the abuse of detainees..." and that a GTMO legal review justifying a GTMO command request to use aggressive techniques similar to those in SERE training was "profoundly in error and legally insufficient."

"Judgment's" Dan Haywood said, "Under a national crisis ... even extra-ordinary men can delude themselves into the commission of crimes so vast and heinous that they beggar the imagination." That delusion is exemplified by Bush Administration people having directed American practice of torture in order to pursue political objectives. For example, on May 14, former NBC investigative producer Bob Windrem told MSNBC that a trail leading out of Dick Cheney's office carried the "suggestion" to the field in Iraq that interrogators should waterboard an Iraqi intelligence officer to elicit information about a non-existent link between al-Qaeda and Baghdad, even though that officer had already become cooperative under normal interrogation methods.

In May 2007, General David Petraeus told us "Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy. They would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they are frequently neither useful nor necessary... What the (detainee) says may be of questionable value..." On May 30 on Fox, in a coincidental echo of Judge Haywood, he said "I don't think we should be afraid to live our values. That's what we're fighting for, it's what we stand for..."

Just how far we have strayed from those values should be disclosed over the next few days when the CIA releases previously redacted information about Al-Qaeda detainee statements that say they were mistreated. According to a June 9 statement by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who has had access to the interrogation program, "The record is bad; we've been misled about nearly every aspect of this program; ...the story line that we have been sold is false in every one of its dimensions."

By Any Other Name?

Joan Walsh: Torture is Illegal Whether it Works or Not. (VideoCafe, with transcript)

WALSH: You know, I couldn't disagree more with my friend Chris. This is not a "he said/she said" situation. This is torture. Torture is illegal. We don't sit here, Howie, and say he said murder is illegal, but she said, well, sometimes murder's not so bad. These are clear matters of law.

Ronald Reagan signed the 1988 U.N. Convention Against Torture where we committed ourselves to prosecuting people who torture. It's the law. It's super clear. It's not a partisan witch hunt or a "she said/he said" situation.

- - - - -
WALSH: No, it's illegal, whether it works or not. It's illegal whether it works or not, David.

International human rights instruments

Convention Against Torture

International Committee of the Red Cross: International Humanitarian Law - Treaties & Documents

Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nüremberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal, 1950.

The United States is a Signatory to the Convention Against Torture

A Summary of United Nations Agreements on Human Rights:

This convention bans torture under all circumstances and establishes the UN Committee against Torture. In particular, it defines torture, requires states to take effective legal and other measures to prevent torture, declares that no state of emergency, other external threats, nor orders from a superior officer or authority may be invoked to justify torture. It forbids countries to return a refugee to his country if there is reason to believe he/she will be tortured, and requires host countries to consider the human rights record of the person's native country in making this decision.

The CAT requires states to make torture illegal and provide appropriate punishment for those who commit torture. It requires states to assert jurisdiction when torture is committed within their jurisdiction, either investigate and prosecute themselves, or upon proper request extradite suspects to face trial before another competent court. It also requires states to cooperate with any civil proceedings against accused torturers.

United Nations, Human Rights - Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights:

Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity

The War Crimes Act of 1996, a federal statute set forth at 18 U.S.C., makes it a federal crime for any U.S. national, whether military or civilian, to violate the Geneva Convention by engaging in murder, torture, or inhuman treatment:

Laws : Cases and Codes

U.S. Code : Title 18 : Section 2340A. Torture

U.S. Code : Title 18 : Section 2441. War crimes

Finding Justice

18 U.S.C. 2340-2340A:

"Torture" means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;...

OPERATIONAL ISSUES PERTAINING TO THE USE OF PHYSICAL/PSYCHOLOGICAL COERCION IN INTERROGATION: An Overview, July 2002:

...The requirement to obtain information from an uncooperative source as quickly as possible - in time to prevent, for example, an impending terrorist attack that could result in loss of life - has been forwarded as a compelling argument for the use of torture. Conceptually, proponents envision the application of torture as a means to expedite the exploitation process. In essence, physical and/or psychological duress are viewed as an alternative to the more time-consuming conventional interrogation process. The error inherent in this line of thinking is the assumption that, through torture, the interrogator can extract reliable and accurate intelligence. History and a consideration of human behavior would appear to refute this assumption....

CONCLUSION: The application of extreme physical and/or psychological duress (torture) has some serious operational deficits, most notably, the potential to result in unreliable information....

Here's what we know, based on the public record as represented above. A) Torture is illegal. B) The architects of the torture regime were informed that the "harsh interrogation techniques" they intended to use were torture, and that those methods were unreliable. C) Against that counsel from a military agency, torture was deployed--excessively, and it was used in part to extract information from detainees about ties between al Qaeda and Iraq, ties that the best intelligence the administration had access to had already deemed nonexistent, in order to justify the planned invasion--the chosen war--in Iraq.

We've known much of this for years, actually, and that the moment for deciding on how to reckon for it was coming.

Arriving at both accountability and light in this toxic political environment will be a massive challenge, but one from which our leaders shouldn't shirk. [...]

The damage of doing nothing is hard to calculate, but I think there are a few guarantees of what will happen. More and more information will continue to come out about what America did. There are a handful of official accountings still expected, but once those have all been released, we'll start seeing the product of the people who were tortured, and of those who did the torturing. There are more photos coming, as many as 2,000, but there could be more that the government doesn't know about. There will be more interviews and exposes from former detainees, and possibly guards. There will undoubtedly be memoirs from the tortured and the torturers. There is the possibility of indictments of Americans in foreign countries.

In short, it's a book that likely won't end for at least another generation. When we turn a page, there will be another page after it, and another after that. It won't really end. It will fester. It will add to the cynicism many in our country feel toward their government, will add to the disconnect, will cement the knowledge that there are two kinds of justice in our country, and that the Donald Rumsfelds go free, while the Lynndie Englands and Charles Grangers rot in prison.

Our standing will be diminished among our friends in the rest of the world, and among civilized nations who would be our friends. It will be much easier for those who might not otherwise be our enemies to find justification to turn against us. The effect of the United States getting away with torture would mean other nations would feel unrestricted in using it. The countries that abide by their treaty obligations--and their soldiers--would be at a disadvantage. And everybody's soldiers--America's included--would be more likely to face torture if captured.

It will have made torture a policy choice that future presidents will feel justified in turning to. Finally, it will mean that we're a country governed by the rule of law only when the people making and wielding the laws feel like following them.

Torture by any other description

Several years ago, I asked a veteran journalist for advice.

"I'm trying to figure out if I have an ethical conflict," I began.

"If you have to ask, you do," he said. [...]

It comes down to that. We're either a rule-of-law nation -- or we're not. We can't invent definitions of torture for one type of person that wouldn't be acceptable for another, no matter how much we may despise or distrust him. As Graham put it: "I don't love the terrorists, I just love what Americans stand for."

Meanwhile, how trustworthy are the confessions of the tortured? Not very, according to those who know.

Most important, we can hardly present ourselves as arbiters and protectors of human rights when we selectively abuse those in our custody, no matter how compelling our cause. When we parse definitions of "mental pain" and "suffering," we begin to slip down the slope of moral ambiguity where deceit finds company among the dead. [snip]

It is by the cool light of day that we devise our laws. And it is by that same light that we judge our actions.

Simple as that. In posing a question, we often reveal the answer.

Apply the same construct to torture. If we have to ask, it probably is.