I Hate What You Just Said

In-between throat clearings, Fred Thompson spoke last night at the RNC. For several minutes of the speech, I thought Fred was reading from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs instead of the teleprompter. But I was wrong. The Mel Gibson-grade torture porn Fred was spouting was actually a recounting of John McCain’s experience as a POW in Vietnam.

The truly curious thing about this speech is that it doesn’t present McCain the strong, McCain the Top Gun pilot, McCain the patriotic hero; rather, it presents McCain the victim, McCain the martyr, McCain the lying in his own feces. I assume that this is all about getting the attention of the Christian right, for whom Thompson’s speech will read like a fifth gospel.

The Gospel of St. McCain begins on October 26, 1967, high above the dense jungle of North Vietnam. It was on that day that “a surface-to-air missile slammed into John’s A-4 Skyhawk jet, blowing it out of the sky.” During the escape from the plane, McCain broke “his right leg, his right knee, his left arm and right arm in three places.”

As Thompson relates, what greeted him on the ground was even worse:

An angry mob got to him when he fell to the ground. A rifle butt broke his shoulder. A bayonet pierced his ankle and his groin. They took him to the Hanoi Hilton, where he lapsed in and out of consciousness for days. He was offered medical care for his injuries if he would give up military information in return.

John McCain said, “No”.

I’m sorry, but there is something in the description of the bayoneting of McCain’s ankle and groin — and the refusal of succor — that sounds a bit too much like the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The only difference is that while Jesus got a postmortem spear in the side, McCain got a bayonet in two places — and one of them was the crotch. Which is like one-upping the suffering of the Son of God. In short, Jesus was a pussy. And probably a community organizer.

Anyway, thank God McCain didn’t die. Just think of the theological confusion this would have created. Who would I worship then?

Thompson continued:

After days of neglect, covered in grime, lying in his own waste in a filthy room, a doctor attempted to set John’s right arm without success and without anesthesia. His other broken bones and injuries were not treated. John developed a high fever and dysentery. He weighed barely a hundred pounds. Expecting him to die, his captors placed him in a cell with two other POWs who also expected him to die.

At this point, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Nothing makes a Republican misty-eyed like the story of a man who can’t get adequate health care or one who experiences arbitrary imprisonment and senseless torture. There are 47 million citizens without health care in America. But doing anything other than praying for these people will introduce inefficiencies in the market. Jesus, CEO would be very displeased. And I have it on good authority that America would never torture. I prayed hard for that.

But Fred Thompson was just clearing his throat:

John McCain fought on. He persevered. So then they put him in solitary confinement for over two years — isolation, incredible heat beating on a tin roof, a light bulb in his cell burning 24 hours a day, boarded-up cell windows blocking any breath of fresh air, the oppressive heat causing boils the size of baseballs under his arms, the outside world limited to what he could see through a crack in the door.

For five-and-a-half years this went on. John McCain’s bones may have been broken, but his spirit never was.

We hear a lot of talk about hope these days. John McCain knows about hope. That’s all he had. [. . .]

He’d smile and give ‘em a thumbs-up.

The guards cracked ribs, broke teeth off at their gums. They cinched a rope around his arms and painfully drew back his shoulders. Over four days, every two to three hours, the beatings resumed. During one especially fierce beating, he fell, again breaking his arm.

John was beaten for communicating with other prisoners. He was beaten — beaten for NOT communicating with so-called peace delegations. He was beaten for not giving information during interrogation. [. . .]

Whenever John was returned to his cell — walking if he could, dragged if he couldn’t — as he passed his other fellow POWs, he would often call out to them.

Obama can form the word “hope” with his mouth. But it’s a mouth that hasn’t been repeatedly kicked by the boot of Charlie. And that makes all the difference. McCain has suffered more than Obama. Perhaps more than Jesus. Therefore, we can be sure that God loves him and favors him to lead our nation.

I can’t wait for Mel Gibson to buy the rights to this story.

Me likey.

“Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime.”

– Attorney General of the United States, Michael Mukasey

Washington Post on Bin Laden’s driver, Salim Hamdan:

Hamdan’s sentence of 5 1/2 years, which amounts to five more months in U.S. custody, was far lighter than some Pentagon officials had expected. Prosecutors had asked for a sentence of at least 30 years, and now officials are preparing for the possibility of having to set him free or hold him indefinitely as an “enemy combatant.”

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said it has always been the Defense Department’s position that detainees could be held as enemy combatants even after acquittal at military commissions or after serving a prison sentence. “That’s always been on our minds in terms of a scenario we could face,” he said. “He will serve his time for the conviction and then he will still be an enemy combatant, and as an enemy combatant the process for potential transfer or release will apply.”

Wheeeeee! I’m popping open a cold EuroBud in celebration of a really big number.  Ahhh, freedom never tasted so good.

The New York Times and Washington Post present the following set of stomach-churning facts gleaned from investigative journalist, Jane Mayer:

“Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes.”

“A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were ‘enemy combatants’ subject to indefinite incarceration.”

“[A] top aide to Vice President Cheney shrugged off the report and squashed proposals for a quick review of the detainees’ cases . . .’There will be no review,’ the book quotes Cheney staff director David Addington as saying. ‘The president has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.’”

“[T]he [CIA] analyst estimated that a full third of the camp’s detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions — up to half — were in error. Later, an academic study by Seton Hall University Law School concluded that 55 percent of detainees had never engaged in hostile acts against the United States, and only 8 percent had any association with al-Qaeda.”

[T]he International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were ‘categorically’ torture, which is illegal under both American and international law”.

“[T]he Red Cross document ‘warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.’”

Constitutional law professor, and former NSA lawyer, Jonathan Turley, throws in his two cents:

Given how corrupt and ineffectual the federal government has been lately, adding yet another government office hardly seems like the solution to our problems.

But this isn’t a bad idea. From Geoffrey R. Stone, in the NYT:

Presidents have a wide range of official advisers. There is a secretary of defense, a secretary of labor, a national security adviser, to name just a few. The next president should create a new executive branch position: a civil liberties adviser. Within the highest councils of every administration there should be a respected public official whose charge it is to defend our civil liberties against all comers.

Ideally, people like the members of congress, the attorney general, and the president should make it their business to protect our civil liberties. You know, because it is sort of their job. But in warrantless-wiretapping, Patriot-Act America, having an official solely dedicated to protecting our constitutional rights might help. After nearly 8 years of the Bush assault on civil liberties, we need all of the help we can get. And let’s just hope that if we do get an official civil liberties adviser position, the appointment will be made by this guy.

* * *

“I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.”

-Simone de Beauvoir

Steny Hoyer took some time off from fellating the Bush administration and the legal teams of several of the country’s major telecoms to gratify himself . . . with a goose-stepping interview over at Politico. The subject? What a great job he and the Democrats did on that FISA legislation that just passed the House:

In an interview with Politico on Monday, Hoyer called the FISA legislation a “significant victory” for the Democratic Party — one that neutralized an issue Republicans might have been able to use against Democrats in November while still, in his view, protecting the civil liberties of American citizens.

Hunter, over at DailyKos responds:

Call me old fashioned, but I’m suspicious about anything “protects” the civil liberties of American citizens by acknowledging that those civil liberties were being violated — then declaring amnesty for those acts. Or by protecting those civil liberties by granting that they can be taken from you using secret evidence, presented secretly, banning review, explicitly banning judicial leeway to determine whether laws were violated, or civil liberties infringed upon, or to determine anything at all but whether the administration said it was OK to do the thing in question. Oh — and that evidence is to be presented by the same people who broke the law in the first place, of course.

Greenwald is in the mix too:

In other words, Democrats achieved a “significant victory” because — by giving Republicans everything they demanded — Republicans are no longer able to criticize Democrats on this issue. What a shrewd strategy: “if we comply with all their demands, then they can’t criticize us for anything.” That’s the Democratic Party’s plan for winning, according to Hoyer.

I wish we had a few more like Chris Dodd in Congress.

Steny Hoyer, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid rally the Democrats under a new banner:

The Rude Pundit explains how I feel about the Democratic compromise capitulation on the FISA bill.