Nat Parry — Torture-Tainted CIA and State Nominees Recall Failure to Prosecute Bush-Era Abuses

The declining human rights standards on display with the Haspel and Pompeo nominations are the latest in a long line of policy failures that include the Obama administration’s lack of prosecutions of Bush-era torture, Nat Parry notes.

If a person is OK with torture and assassination, that person is OK with anything. Is this an indication of psychopathology or more seriously, sociopathology?

Consortium News
Torture-Tainted CIA and State Nominees Recall Failure to Prosecute Bush-Era Abuses

Nat Parry

Max Greenwood — Trump hits Bush: Invading Iraq 'the single worst decision ever made'

He got that right. Monumental strategic blunder, although I would argue that escalating in Vietnam was probably a worse blunder.

The Hill
Trump hits Bush: Invading Iraq 'the single worst decision ever made'
Max Greenwood

Russ Baker — Trump and the Bushes — the New Guy and the Old Guard Dance

And now, notwithstanding the tremendous enmity between the Old Money clan and the semi-new money guy, the Bushes and their allies and fellow travelers are finding ways back inside the White House.

One example is Rex Tillerson, Trump’s choice for Secretary of State. The only reason he was even considered was because Robert Gates and Condoleezza Rice suggested him to Trump.

Gates, of course, comes out of the Bush machine, having served as CIA director under George H.W. Bush and as defense secretary under George W. Bush. Ditto Rice, who also served under Bush father and son....

In fact, it now turns out that none less than George W. Bush himself, along with — wait for it — Donald Rumsfeld, worked their influence on behalf of Tillerson, albeit indirectly.…

Trump had been considering, as Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Haass, president of the old guard’s Council on Foreign Relations, and former member of both Bush administrations. But apparently [Roger] Stone has convinced Trump to not appoint him.

Stone considers Haass “New World Order…Globalist…Neocon” — anathema to Stone, with his paleoconservative/libertarian inclinations. Much of Trump’s rhetoric against elites has come from Stone....

WhoWhatWhy
Trump and the Bushes — the New Guy and the Old Guard Dance
Russ Baker

The Fallacy of a ‘Goldilocks’ War Policy

"Splitting the difference" between G. W. Bush and Barack Obama not a good policy approach.

Consortium News

The Fallacy of a ‘Goldilocks’ War Policy

Paul R. Pillar, 28 year veteran CIA analyst

Calvin F. Exoo — The Chilcot Report Fails to Speak Plain Truth: Bush Lied, So Did Blair

The newly released Chilcot Report on Iraq is British understatement, to a fault. In fact, it is understated so far as to miss the plain truth of the matter. Saying only that extremely questionable intelligence "was not challenged [by the Bush and Blair regimes] and it should have been" is failing to say plainly what the evidence so clearly shows: George W. Bush lied; so did Tony Blair.…

Truthout
The Chilcot Report Fails to Speak Plain Truth: Bush Lied, So Did Blair

Calvin F. Exoo

Also

Truthout
The Real Problem With the Iraq War: It Was Illegal

Juan Cole

Paul Robinson — Reflections on the war in Iraq and the Chilcot report

How shit happens, aka slouching toward war.

Chilcot suggests that the main reason Britain invaded Iraq in 2003 was that Prime Minister Tony Blair decided that the United Kingdom should stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with the United States come what may. Indeed, on 28 July 2002 Blair wrote a note to US President George Bush saying, ‘I will be with you, whatever.’

Blair preferred that the USA and UK not act unilaterally. Instead, he wanted them to gather international support for action against Iraq through the United Nations. Blair hoped that by standing resolutely alongside the Americans he might ‘influence’ them to go down the UN path. It also seems that he may have hoped that he could avoid war by persuading the UN to take a very firm stance against Iraq. The logic was that Saddam Hussein might back down if faced with the united opposition of the entire rest of the world. By threatening invasion, the UK could thereby prevent a war which was otherwise inevitable (given American preferences). The problem with this paradoxical logic was that a) Saddam didn’t actually have weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and so couldn’t ‘back down’, and b) Blair couldn’t persuade the rest of the world to support him in the UN. But once it became clear that this support was lacking, Blair had committed himself to supporting the Americans, and so had no option but to follow through with his threats, and to wage war.

Analysis: This story reveals the folly of the often repeated mantra that showing strength and resolution is the best way of preserving peace. Unfortunately, all too often such displays of resolution instead produce war. The story also provides further evidence of the folly of the idea that by standing alongside the Americans, you can somehow gain some useful ‘influence’ over them, and thereby promote your own country’s national interests, whereas if you fail to support America you will damage those interests.…

Pretty damning of all involved on the British side. The Americans come across as clueless and resolved to do what it takes, come what may. To the Hague with the lot of them.

Irrussianality
Reflections on the war in Iraq and the Chilcot report
Paul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

Nat Parry — New GOP Plans for Torture

President Obama’s failure to prosecute Bush-era torturers created an impunity that has encouraged some Republican presidential candidates to tout new plans for more torture if they reach the White House, a grotesque example of “American exceptionalism,” as Nat Parry explains.

Two huge fails for former constitutional law professor now President Barack Obama: the decisions not to prosecute torture or control fraud.

Both are serious failures that will have repercussions into the future until they are addressed, but of the two, the failure to address torture is the most serious since it undermines American moral authority and therefore soft power internationally.

Without moral authority and soft power, the US can only lead through threat of force backed by readiness to apply it.

Whatever else Obama has done for the good is cancelled by these monumental failures, which are both strategic failures and, worse, moral failures, proving that the man was not fit for the office.

Consortiums News
New GOP Plans for Torture

Nat Parry

Robert Parry — Bush-41 Finally Speaks on Iraq War

Robert Parry traces the history of the worst crime(s) thus far in the 21st century, and one for which there has been zero accountability. Now Poppy Bush tries to hang the blame on Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld for misleading his son. In fairness, though, Parry details how it was Cheney that engineered consent through lies and propaganda, and how the rest of the players were too weak to stand up to him and call him on it publicly.

The question lingers: why did Zinni not go public when he first heard Cheney lie? After all, he was one of the very few credible senior officials who might have prevented a war he knew was unnecessary. A tough, widely respected Marine intimidated by a Vice President with five draft deferments? It happens.  It happened.

Secretary of State Powell was also blindsided, but there is no sign he summoned the courage to voice any objections directly to the President about Cheney’s version of the threat from Iraq and what had to be done about it.

Even the nation's top warriors could not summon the courage to confront a draft dodger. Really!

Robert Parry tells us of his take on unfolding events while serving as an analyst.

Despite the propaganda and more tangible signs of incipient war in Iraq, my former intelligence analyst colleagues and I – with considerable professional experience watching other countries prepare for aggression against others – were finding it difficult to believe that the United States of America would be doing precisely that.

Still harder was it to digest the notion that Washington would do so, absent credible evidence of any immediate threat and would “fix” intelligence to “justify” it. But that, sadly, is what happened. On March 19, 2003, U.S. “shock and awe” lit the sky over Baghdad.

And they got away with it!

That was more than 12 ½ years ago. That not one of the white-collar crooks responsible for the war and ensuing chaos has been held accountable is an indelible blot not only on our country, but also on international law and custom. After all, the U.S./U.K. attack on Iraq fits snugly the definition given to a “war of aggression” as defined by the post-World War II Nuremberg Tribunal. Nuremberg labeled such a war “the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

And the evil continued to accumulate: torture, kidnapping, black prisons, extrajudicial killing, massive invasions of privacy, and even the annulment of such basic human rights as the great writ of habeas corpus that was wrested from England’s King John 800 year ago. And, in the wake of this criminality, bedlam now reigns across large swaths of the Middle East driving millions of refugees into neighboring countries and Europe.

That the U.S. and U.K. leaders who launched the Iraq war have so far escaped apprehension and prosecution might be seen as a sad example of “victor’s justice.” But there are no victors, only victims. The reality that President George W. Bush and his co-conspirators remain unpunished makes a mockery of the commitment to the transcendent importance of evenhanded justice as expressed on Aug. 12, 1945, by Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the chief U.S. representative at Nuremberg:

“We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it.”
Maybe it is partly because I know the elder Bush personally, but it does strike me that, since we are all human, some degree of empathy might be in order. I simply cannot imagine what it must be like to be a former President with a son, also a former President, undeniably responsible for such trespass on law – for such widespread killing, injury and abject misery.…

With his current modified, limited hangout – especially (his richly deserved) criticism of Cheney and Rumsfeld – Bush the elder may be able to live more comfortably with himself and to get past what I believe must be his regret now over having made no public effort to stop the madness back then.

Worst still, if Bush-43 is to be believed, Bush senior had guilty foreknowledge of the war-crime attack on Iraq….

In any event, Bush-43 includes the following sentences about informing his father about plans to attack Iraq: ”We both knew that this was a decision that only the president can make. We did talk about the issue, however. Over Christmas 2002, at Camp David, I did give Dad an update on our strategy.” …

Simple. Putin did it.

Consortium News
Bush-41 Finally Speaks on Iraq War

Robert Parry

“A Turning Point for Obama”: How the President Learned to Love the National Security State — Elias Esquith interviews Charlie Savage

Snippets.

Bush and Cheney were CEOs by background. They did not put a lot of lawyers in policymaking roles around them. The lawyers they did pick, especially in their first term, tended to have these pretty idiosyncratic views of executive power; and, as a result, they’re able to put in these wide-ranging changes, to have the the government run like a business. Overnight, it’s like, “we’re going to have military commissions”; no further ado; no second-guessing.

Obama and his administration are quite the opposite. Obama and Joe Biden, of course, are both lawyers and showed a clear tendency to put lawyers into policymaking roles around them. And this has consequences, having government-by-lawyer and not government-by-CEO. Lawyers are very incremental; lawyers have to really engage with the other side, because they have to prepare for everybody’s argument; they have to value process. That means they are going to be cautious about changing the status quo. They’re going to be cautious about dislodging what Bush has equipped to them.…

I definitely think it’s an interesting factor that people who are out in the world don’t fully understand.

I think there’s a very [mistaken] understanding of how the government works — which is that the president just does these things. Obama just does it. Once you work [in D.C.] for a while, you understand that that’s widely oversimplified. Most of the time, the president never knows about what’s going on. It could appear [so] at the most superficial level, but it’s really the 150 or so senior and mid-level executive branch officials that he’s appointed who are making these decisions and grappling with these dilemmas.

What you’re adding to that when you bring up [the deep state] is that, underneath, there’s this permanent state of security officials who have their own sort of world and expertise and turf and bureaucratic interests. All these forces encounter each other in ways that don’t reduce to “Bush did this” and “Obama did that.”

Salon
“A Turning Point for Obama”: How the President Learned to Love the National Security State Elias Esquith interviews Charlie Savage, author of Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post-9/11 Presidency

Dan Sanchez — How Russia's Syria Campaign Shocked the Neocon Quest for Empire

Good read.

Russia Insider
How Russia's Syria Campaign Shocked the Neocon Quest for Empire

Dan Sanchez

Jon Perr — Jeb's Friends Claim Dubya "Inherited" 9/11 and Recession

Count on Donald Trump having some more fun with this.

PERRspectives 

Jeb's Friends Claim Dubya "Inherited" 9/11 and Recession
Jon Perr

Oliver Knox — Hosting a Pope: Obama Learns from Bush

When Pope Francis makes his first visit to Washington, this week, President Obama will do something he has rarely done in his six years in office: He’ll follow George W. Bush’s example.

Obama will take the unusual step of welcoming Francis in person at Andrews Air Force Base, just outside Washington, greeting the head of the Catholic Church as he disembarks from the chartered aircraft that brings him to the United States after the first leg of his North American tour, a stop in Cuba.

Other world leaders don’t get that kind of reception.

Don't think that the pope has clout?

RealClearPolitics
Hosting a Pope: Obama Learns from Bush
Oliver Knox

Emails Show American Psychological Association Secretly Worked with Bush Admin to Enable Torture — Amy Goodman interviews Steven Reisner and Nathaniel Raymond

New details have emerged on how the American Psychological Association, the world’s largest group of psychologists, aided government-sanctioned torture under President George W. Bush. A group of dissident psychologists have just published a 60-page report alleging the APA secretly coordinated with officials from the CIA, White House and the Pentagon to change the APA ethics policy to align it with the operational needs of the CIA’s torture program. Much of the report, "All the President’s Psychologists: The American Psychological Association’s Secret Complicity with the White House and US Intelligence Community in Support of the CIA’s 'Enhanced' Interrogation Program," is based on hundreds of newly released internal APA emails from 2003 to 2006 that show top officials were in direct communication with the CIA. The report also reveals Susan Brandon, a behavioral science researcher working for President Bush, secretly drafted language that the APA inserted into its ethics policy on interrogations. We are joined by two of the report’s co-authors: Dr. Steven Reisner, a founding member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology and member of the APA Council of Representatives, and Nathaniel Raymond, director of the Signal Program on Human Security and Technology at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative....

NATHANIEL RAYMOND: There are four core findings. The first is that the American Psychological Association allowed, as you mentioned, Dr. Susan Brandon, it appears, who, three weeks before the APA engaged in its ethics process in 2005 on psychological ethics and national security, had been president Bush’s behavioral science adviser—she wrote what appears to be research language in the PENS report, the Psychological Ethics and National Security policy of the APA. That language, we now know because of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report, directly aligns with the legal memos authorizing the enhanced interrogation program, and provided an ethical get-out-of-jail-free card that aligned with the then-classified legal get-of-jail-free card. 

Secondly, we see clear deception by the APA, including some outright lies, including the assertion for many years that James Mitchell, the CIA torture psychologist you mentioned, had not been an APA member. We now know he was an APA member from 2001 to 2006. And the APA has also contended, according to Dr. Stephen Behnke, the ethics director, that they had had no contact on interrogations and interrogation techniques with Mitchell and Jessen. We now know that they discussed sensory overload and the use of psychopharmacological agents with Mitchell and Jessen in 2003. 

The last two critical findings, Amy, are that the APA, as we see throughout the emails, expressed no concern about clear evidence of abuse that at that point, between 2004 in 2005, was public knowledge. And lastly, what we see in this report is a clear coordination that directly mirrors the timeline inside the Bush administration when Office of Medical Services personnel inside the CIA were raising concerns about human subjects research as part of the program. The APA, whether they knew it or not, allowed the administration to write a policy that basically helped put down that rebellion inside CIA.

This is reasonably detailed account of how torture was "legalized" under US law in the Bush Administration by weakening the strict definition of international law (which still applies), and the role of the APA in it along with the legal work of John Yoo and Jay Bybee.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response to what Kirk Hubbard said, the former CIApsychologist, who in a 2012 interview with the Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment said that "Detainees are not patients, nor are they being 'treated' by the psychologists. Therefore the ethical guidelines for clinicians do not apply, in my opinion. Psychologists can play many different roles and should not be forced into a narrow doctor-patient role."

NATHANIEL RAYMOND: The Declaration of Helsinki and the Declaration of Tokyo, the Nuremberg Code, U.S. law, the Geneva Conventions are not based on whether someone’s a patient. It’s based on whether someone’s a human being. And the fact of the matter is that those codes were mangled and, in some cases, written out of what the APAdid. So the issue is not about doctor-patient relationship here. It is about war crimes and about crimes against humanity, which are not contingent on someone being your patient.

 Disgusting. Another nadir for American soft power.

Democracy Now!
Emails Show American Psychological Association Secretly Worked with Bush Admin to Enable Torture

Amy Goodman interviews Dr. Steven Reisner, founding member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology and psychological ethics adviser to Physicians for Human Rights. He’s the co-author of the new report, "All the President’s Psychologists." and Nathaniel Raymond, researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health and the co-author of the new report, "All the President’s Psychologists."

Even the "owners" are getting ripped off

The plunder of wealth by the oligarchs and elites has reached levels where even the "owners" of enterprises are being ripped off.

Remember George W. Bush and the "ownership" society? That was a euphemism for, "We're going to cut your wages and salaries, make jobs hard to get and fast-track the flow of wealth up to the top. So if you want a piece of the pie, you'd better become an owner, like, own stocks or assets or something. Own a business."

So that's what most people did because they had no choice. Jobs became scarce so they either had to take a risk and start a business (most fail) or, they were forced to scrimp and save and add, monthly, to their 401k's and other retirement vehicles that mostly invested in stocks. They became "owners."

This directive continues on today under Obama, so don't think that he is not part of this scheme. He is.

I'll leave aside for a moment that the banksters and other Wall Street "geniuses" nearly killed everybody's savings with their wild casino games (and many people still haven't recovered), which in the end we had to pay for with higher taxes and more cuts in spending (taxes), leaving us profoundly ripped off.

But some of us still had our stocks, either held directly or through those retirement plans and we were happy and placated, because stocks came back and dividends grew--not by much--but they grew and we felt as if that ownership society thing was finally paying off like they told us it would.

Oh really?

Well, take a look at these two graphs. One is corporate profits as a percentage of GDP and the other is dividends as a percent of personal income.

Corporate profits as a percent of GDP

 Dividends as a percent of Personal Income

As you can see, profits are at an all-time high as a percent of GDP, whereas dividends are not even though profits and stock prices are.

So what's happening here?

The only explanation is that the executives running these enterprises (who are, in 99% of the cases NOT the real owners) are taking more and more for themselves and giving us--the real owners--less. In fact, it almost looks like, if dividends rise too fast, as they did coming out of the Great Recession, they will deliberately slow the pace of  wealth sharing because they need to take even more for themselves.

And you wonder why stock analysts are now saying valuations are high? BECAUSE PROFITS ARE FLOWING INTO THESE MOTHERFUCKERS' POCKETS. THAT'S WHY!

This is once again a blatant screw job by elites and oligarchs who are really nothing more than a bunch of corrupt, scumbag mafia and they have taken control of our lawmakers our government and our lives. 

We really need to take back control of what is rightfully ours. This shit's gotta end.

Russia Beyond the Headlines — Putin confesses he expected radical upturn in relations with West after fall of the Communist regime

Putin and the then U.S. president George Bush had "an excellent relationship," Kremlin chief of staff Sergei Ivanov recalled.

However, the U.S. came to believe by that moment that Russia "entered a regime of colonial democracy, that we sort of got hooked on International Monetary Fund injections and that the experts' community must continue teaching us how we should further develop our economy and where we should pump our oil," he said.

"On the surface, though, everything looked extremely tactful: they would pat us on the shoulder and cheer us up: guys, your are sort of moving in the rights direction," Ivanov said.

Russia Beyond the Headlines
Putin confesses he expected radical upturn in relations with West after fall of the Communist regime

RT — Putin accuses US of backing North Caucasus militants

"At one point our secret services simply detected direct contacts between militants from the North Caucasus and representatives of the United States secret services in Azerbaijan," Putin said in the film, released by Rossiya 1 TV channel on Sunday.

"And when I spoke about that to the then president of the US, he said... sorry, I will speak plainly, he said, "I'll kick their asses", Putin recounts his conversation with George W. Bush on the issue. A few days later, he says, the heads of Russia's FSB received a letter from their American counterparts, which said they had the right to support opposition forces in Russia.

"Someone over there, especially the West's intelligence services, obviously thought that if they act to destabilize their main geopolitical rival, which, as we now understand, in their eyes has always been Russia, it would be good for them. It turned out, it wasn't," Putin muses, saying he had warned the West about the possible dangers of supporting terrorists.

Another juicy tidbit.

Putin also discussed the challenges he faced when he first became President. When the interview's host suggested that a group of oligarchs was in charge of Russia in the end of the 1990s, Vladimir Putin did not contradict. "They came to my office, sat in front of me and said, "Do you understand you will never be the real president?" We'll see, I told them", he recalls. When asked about it, he didn't elaborate on how he dealt with the oligarchs in the end, simply saying he "used various means."

Too bad US presidents just roll over before the US oligarchs, even if they had thought of bucking them in the first place. Probably never consider it considering where the money for campaigns comes from.

RT
Putin accuses US of backing North Caucasus militants

Also

A controversial Ukrainian website publishing personal information about ‘enemies of the state’ appears to have been run by a NATO cyber center in one of the Baltic states. The website went offline on Saturday following public pressure.

NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defense Centre of Excellence – СCD-COE has been exposed as providing technical support for Mirotvorec, a website of Ukrainian nationalists running ‘enemies of the state’ database.

NATO trace found behind witch-hunt website in Ukraine

Supporting terrorism and fascism.

Eric Zuesse — How Trustworthy Are U.S. & Western ‘News’ Media?

Rhetorical question, of course. Zuesse furnishes us with the evidence.

It's why we provide counter-narratives here from the world press and alternative media here at MNE.

Washington's Blog
How Trustworthy Are U.S. & Western ‘News’ Media?
Eric Zuesse

Heather Cox Richardson — It’s Worse than Scott Walker and Ted Cruz: Secrets of Conservatives’ Decades-Long War on Truth

Deep on page 546 of his 1,839-page budget, Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker tucked in a crucial idea. He proposed to strip a principle from the mission statement of the University of Wisconsin, a school that attracts students from all over the nation and from 131 foreign countries. From the core philosophy that has driven the university since the turn of the last century Walker wanted to hack out the words: “Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.” Rather than serving the people of the state by developing intellectual, cultural and humane sensitivities, expertise, and “a sense of purpose,” Walker prefers that the state university simply “meet the state’s workforce needs.” In the face of scathing criticism, the governor backtracked and, despite a trail of emails that led to his office, tried to claim the new language was a “drafting error.”

But Walker’s attempt to replace the search for truth with workforce training was no error. Since the earliest days of Movement Conservatism in the 1950s, its leaders have understood that the movement’s success depends on destroying Americans’ faith in the academic search for truth. For two generations, Movement Conservatives have subverted American politics, with increasing success, by explicitly rejecting the principle of open debate based in reasoned argument. They have refused to engage with facts and instead simply demonized anyone who disagrees with their ideology. This is an astonishing position. It is an attack on the Enlightenment principles that gave rise to Western civilization.

Make no mistake: the attack is deliberate....

In 1951, a young William F. Buckley, Jr. articulated a strategy for opposing the consensus that supported New Deal policies. Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom’” was a sophomoric diatribe by the Catholic son of a wealthy oil magnate, published by the small right-wing Henry Regnery Press. In it, Buckley rejected the principles that had enabled social progress for centuries and laid out a mind-boggling premise: The Enlightenment, the intellectual basis of Western Civilization, was wrong.
Rational argument supported by facts did not lead to sound societal decisions, Buckley claimed; it led people astray. Christianity and an economy based on untrammeled individualism were truths that should not be questioned. Impartial debate based in empirical facts was dangerous because it led people toward secularism and collectivism—both bad by definition, according to Buckley. Instead of engaging in rational argument, Buckley insisted, thinkers must stand firm on what he called a new “value orthodoxy” that indoctrinated people to understand that Christianity and economic individualism were absolute truths. Maintaining that faith in reasoned debate was a worse “superstition” than the Enlightenment had set out to replace, Buckley launched an intellectual war to replace the principle of academic inquiry with a Christian and individualist ideology..

In 1960, a new voice added anti-intellectual populism to Buckley’s rhetoric. Political operative Phyllis Schlafly wrote “A Choice Not an Echo” to support Barry Goldwater’s quest for the presidential nomination. In her world, correct political decisions were simple: The nation was engaged in a great struggle between good and evil, and educated Eastern Elites who insisted on weighing the realities of a complicated world had enlisted on the wrong side. Elites complained that Goldwater “had one-sentence solutions” for complicated problems, she wrote, but simple solutions were the answer. Communism was bad, so anyone advocating government activism was evil. Elites arguing for government action were parasites. All they really wanted was money from government contracts, paid for by hardworking regular Americans..

By the time of the George W. Bush administration, Movement Conservatives had constructed a post-modern political world where reality mattered far less than the popular story of Conservatives standing firm against the “Liberal agenda” of godlessness and communism. As a member of the Bush administration [Karl Rove] famously noted to journalist Ron Suskind, “the reality-based” view of the world was obsolete. It was no longer viable to believe that people could find solutions to societal problems by studying reality. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” this senior advisor to the president told Suskind. “We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”.

When Governor Walker replaced “the search for truth” with “meet the state’s workforce needs” in the charge to the University of Wisconsin, he did not make an error. He was articulating the principle that has driven Movement Conservatives since their earliest days: Facts and arguments can only lead Americans toward a government that regulates business and supports working Americans, and they must be squelched. The search for truth must be replaced by an ideology that preserves Christianity and big-business individualism. Religion and freedom for mega-business, Movement Conservatives insist, is what America is all about.

AlterNet
It’s Worse than Scott Walker and Ted Cruz: Secrets of Conservatives’ Decades-Long War on Truth
Heather Cox Richardson, Salon

Dan Froomkin — Obama Administration Reverses Bush Policy, Says U.S. Torture Ban Applies Abroad

As Charlie Savage of the New York Times reported last month, President Obama’s legal team was debating whether to reaffirm a Bush administration position that the United Nations Convention Against Torture imposes no legal obligation on the U.S. to bar cruelty outside its borders. 

The debate is over. And the good guys won — this time. See the following statement issued by the White House this morning, even as State Department officials were answering questions about the administration’s position in Geneva before the United Nations Committee Against Torture.….

Gnashing of teeth in the Cheney abode?

The Intercept
Obama Administration Reverses Bush Policy, Says U.S. Torture Ban Applies Abroad
Dan Froomkin

Former Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clarke: Bush Committed War Crimes

Amy Goodman: "Do you think President Bush should be brought up on war crimes [charges], and Vice President Cheney and [Defense Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld, for the attack on Iraq?"

Richard Clarke: "I think things that they authorized probably fall within the area of war crimes. Whether that would be productive or not, I think, is a discussion we could all have. But we have established procedures now with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where people who take actions as serving presidents or prime ministers of countries have been indicted and have been tried. So the precedent is there to do that sort of thing. And I think we need to ask ourselves whether or not it would be useful to do that in the case of members of the Bush administration. It’s clear that things that the Bush administration did — in my mind, at least, it’s clear that some of the things they did were war crimes."

Democracy Now!
Former Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clarke: Bush Committed War CrimesAmy Goodman interviews Richard Clarke