It's A Rummy World, After All ...

I suppose, we can update this now;

“You go to war with the torture program you have—not the torture program you might want or wish to have at a later time ..."

In, what will be likely, just another one, in a long line of "I'm shocked ... Shocked to find gambling going on here", a Senate Committee Report lays the torture of detainees on the desk of ol' Mister Snowflakes.

Bipartisan Report: Rumsfeld Responsible for Detainee Abuse; Senate Committee Finds Officials Made Decisions That Led to Offenses Against Prisoners

A bipartisan panel of senators has concluded that former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials bear direct responsibility for the harsh treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and that their decisions led to more serious abuses in Iraq and elsewhere.

In the most comprehensive critique by Congress of the military's interrogation practices, the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a report yesterday that accuses Rumsfeld and his deputies of being the authors and chief promoters of harsh interrogation policies that disgraced the nation and undermined U.S. security. The report, released by Sens. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), contends that Pentagon officials later tried to create a false impression that the policies were unrelated to acts of detainee abuse committed by members of the military.

"The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own," the report states. "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees."

Nice touch, using Rummy's own words to throw back in his face.

Can't you just see him, squinting, trying to understand this report, making one of his twisted faces, a real, harsh, "You don't know what you're talking about" distortion?

Likely, though Cheney's Weekend Armageddon partner saw this one coming.

That may be why, earlier this year, he called for a new U.S. Propaganda Agency.

Always The Thinker ... Gotta stay one step ahead of 'em...

Expect, in the coming days or weeks, for Rummy to make the grand Fixed News Network tour, touting up the failed policies, and defending his "enhanced interrogations".

They'll yuk it up, blame the report on some administration "dead enders" and shrug it off as "stuff happens".

Perhaps, at his future War Crimes Trial, stuff will happen, the prosecution using some "enhanced justice" against him.

How do ya like them apples, Rummy?


Bonus Rummy Riffs

Brilliant Juan Cole: Rumsfeld, Bush, Implicated in Torture by US Senate

Autumn Sandeen: It's Mostly Rumsfeld's Fault, Apparently

Brilliant at Breakfast: But after all, Jennifer Aniston posed naked and Oprah Winfrey is fat!

Jack Balkin: Armed Services Committee States Obvious: Detention Abuses Started at the Top

Garlic Exclusive! ... Rumsfeld Rolling On with Privatizing Forces ...Base Closings Tied To New U-Haul Self Storage Contract; Deal With National Vendors To Save Billions; Commissioned Officers Can Take Home Vehicles

“They’re coming here for the American experience” ...Rumsfeld Weighs In On Immigration Battle; Won’t Tie It To War With Iran; Suggests Army Recruiting Woes Could Be Solved With Mandatory Service By Illegal Aliens

Top Ten Cloves: What Would Be Different If Rumsfeld Was A Dog, But Still Secretary of Defense

Cavett and Rich Take On Petraeus and Crocker

Martin and Lewis... Rogers and Hammerstein ... Sandler and Young ... Sonny and Cher ... Evans and Novak (or better known, Errors and No Facts) ... Tom and Jerry

I think you get the idea.

Alas, after this past week, we add the dynamic duo of Petraeus and Crocker to the list, which, as it were, played out more along the lines of Fric and Frac, or Tweedledee and Tweedledum

The pomp and circumstance, the glorious fanfare was, well, rather muted this time around.

It's getting harder and harder, no matter how many medals and scrambled eggs you have on your uniform, to spin the disaster that is Bush's Iraq War.

When the biggest buzz word to come out the hearings this year was “fragile and reversible,” as the Golden Boy General spoke of Iraq, you know its big-time sucksville happening over there.

Which leads us to two, rather entertaining, Op-Eds today in the NYT.

First up, was the regular Sunday Column of Frank Rich, calling our new hearings' stars on stage with "The Petraeus-Crocker Show Gets the Hook", and lamenting how much the country has tuned out of Iraq.

Speaking on a screening he attended of the new Errol Morris documentary, "Standard Operating Procedure”, on the horrors of Abu Ghraib, Rich cites how poorly any number of the Iraq War films have performed.

This is not merely a showbiz phenomenon but a leading indicator of where our entire culture is right now. It’s not just torture we want to avoid. Most Americans don’t want to hear, see or feel anything about Iraq, whether they support the war or oppose it. They want to look away, period, and have been doing so for some time.

Then Rich lays out how its all, but over in Iraq;

The original stakes (saving the world from mushroom clouds and an alleged ally of Osama bin Laden) evaporated so far back they seem to belong to another war entirely. What are the stakes we are asked to believe in now? In the largely unwatched House hearings on Wednesday, Representative Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat, tried to get at this by asking what some 4,000 “sons and daughters” of America had died for.

The best General Petraeus could muster was a bit of bloodless Beltway-speak — “national interests” — followed by another halfhearted attempt to overstate Iraq’s centrality to the war on Al Qaeda and a future war on Iran. He couldn’t even argue that we’re on a humanitarian mission on behalf of the Iraqi people. That would require him to acknowledge that roughly five million of those people, 60 percent of them children, are now refugees receiving scant help from either our government or Nuri al-Maliki’s. That’s nearly a fifth of the Iraqi population — the equivalent of 60 million Americans — and another source of our shame.

Grim stuff but a good read just the same

"Try talking English, General. You mean more soldiers."

Going a different route with our newly-crowned pair, was the legandary Dick Cavett, the erudite writer, talkshow host and man of great wit.

Cavett weighs in - hysterically - with "Memo to Petraeus & Crocker: More Laughs, Please", where he with great mirth, and a fine ear, surgically cuts through the "sesquipedalianism" of P&C;

But back to our story. Never in this breathing world have I seen a person clog up and erode his speaking — as distinct from his reading — with more “uhs,” “ers” and “ums” than poor Crocker. Surely he has never seen himself talking: “Uh, that is uh, a, uh, matter that we, er, um, uh are carefully, uh, considering.” (Not a parody, an actual Crocker sentence. And not even the worst.)

These harsh-on-the-ear insertions, delivered in his less than melodious, hoarse-sounding tenor, are maddening. And their effect is to say that the speaker is painfully unsure of what he wants, er, um, to say.

Cavett was just warming up.

Petraeus commits a different assault on the listener. And on the language. In addition to his own pedantic delivery, there is his turgid vocabulary. It reminds you of Copspeak, a language spoken nowhere on earth except by cops and firemen when talking to “Eyewitness News.” Its rule: never use a short word where a longer one will do. It must be meant to convey some misguided sense of “learnedness” and “scholasticism” — possibly even that dread thing, “intellectualism” — to their talk. Sorry, I mean their “articulation.”

No crook ever gets out of the car. A “perpetrator exits the vehicle.” (Does any cop say to his wife at dinner, “Honey, I stubbed my toe today as I exited our vehicle”?) No “man” or “woman” is present in Copspeak. They are replaced by that five-syllable, leaden ingot, the “individual.” The other day, there issued from a fire chief’s mouth, “It contributed to the obfuscation of what eventually eventuated.” This from a guy who looked like he talked, in real life, like Rocky Balboa. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Who imposes this phony, academic-sounding verbal junk on brave and hard-working men and women who don’t need the added burden of trying to talk like effete characters from Victorian novels?

Cavett goes on, cutting the Generalspeak to ribbons (no pun intended, as you will read, at the beginning of the essay).

Now, if we can only get a few more of these mismatched pairs up in front of Congressional and Senate committees

Like Miers and Rove ... Addington and Yoo...

And, of course, the super mega, Top A-List, war-launchers and torture choreographers ... Cheney and Bush!


Bonus Links

Think Progress: ‘I don’t even know who Petraeus and Crocker are.’

Logan Murphy/C&L: Bob Schieffer Commentary: “No Longer Any Good Answers” On Iraq

Ambassador Crocker Meets Eddie Izzard

A Little Yoo Wop

Something this big needs some music.

It's not every day, we finally get documents released, that detail the war criminality of the Bush Grindhouse, and one of their star players, John "Torture Sounds Good To Me" Yoo.

Just in case, you're still playing the video over-and-over, in slow-motion, trying to find the snipers that Hillary Clinton had to avoid in Bosnia, or, you're scouring through the IMBD site, looking for Hillary Clinton in the credits of any one of the hundreds of Rocky films, blockbuster news dropped yesterday;

The March 2003 Yoo Memo Emerges! (not an April Fool's Joke): The Torture Memo to Top All Torture Memos

Subhead: The Big Kahuna: The Torture Memo that Makes the August 2002 Memo Look Like Objective and Thoughtful Legal Analysis

"On Friday, March 13, 2003, Jay Bybee resigned from his Office as the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, to become a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The very next day -- a Saturday, mind you -- John Yoo, merely a Deputy AAG in the Office, issued his notorious memo to the Pentagon, on behalf of OLC, which effectively gave the Pentagon the green light to disregard statutory limits on torture, cruelty and maltreatment in the treatment of detainees. This is the version of the 2002 Torture memo, which was addressed only to the CIA and the torture statute, as applied to the numerous statutes restricting the conduct of the armed forces. None of those statues, you see, limits the conduct of war if the President says so. It is, in effect, the blueprint that led to Abu Ghraib and the other abuses within the armed forces in 2003 and early 2004 ..."

Yoo's memo was, The Green Light, as Phillippe Sands writes in Vanity Fair;

"We talked about the methods of interrogation. “In terms of their effects,” she said, “I suspect that the individual techniques are less important than the fact that they were used over an extended period of time, and that several appear to be used together: in other words, the cumulative effect.” Detainee 063 was subjected to systematic sleep deprivation. He was shackled and cuffed; at times, head restraints were used. He was compelled to listen to threats to his family. The interrogation leveraged his sensitivities as a Muslim: he was shown pictures of scantily clad models, was touched by a female interrogator, was made to stand naked, and was forcibly shaved. He was denied the right to pray. A psychiatrist who witnessed the interrogation of Detainee 063 reported the use of dogs, intended to intimidate “by getting the dogs close to him and then having the dogs bark or act aggressively on command.” The temperature was changed, and 063 was subjected to extreme cold. Intravenous tubes were forced into his body, to provide nourishment when he would not eat or drink."

If you want to prime your scorecards, you can start adding the names of, well, The Commander Guy, and his distrustful sidekick, Vice President Darth Vader, and his home boy, David Addington.

There's lots more that the "War Criminal" placard should hang on, and there'll be a YooMemoPalooza of links below.

But we gotta get to the music, the fanfare for this occasion

And we turn to the legendary Sam Cooke, to provide us the tune.

You know it, so sing, or hum along ...

Yoo Tortured Me

Dammit, Yoo tortured me
I know Yoo tortured me
Dammit You tortured me
Dishonest John Yoo, dishonest John Yoo
Dishonest John Yoo, whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh

Yoo beat me
I know Yoo, Yoo, Yoo beat me
Dammit Yoo, Yoo, Yoo, beat me
Dishonest John Yoo

At first I thought it was interrogation
But Yoo, it's lasted so long
Now I find myself wanting
To query Yoo and break Yoo alone
Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh

Yoo beat me
I know Yoo, Yoo, Yoo beat me
Dammit Yoo, Yoo, Yoo, beat me
Dishonest John Yoo

Whoa-oh-oh, whenever I'm with Yoo
I know, I know, I know when I'm near Yoo
Mmm hmm, mmm hmm, dishonest John Yoo, dishonest John Yoo
Whoa-oh-oh, I know-oh-oh-oh

At first I thought it was interrogation
But Yoo, it's lasted so long
Now I find myself wanting
To query Yoo and break Yoo alone
Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh

I know, I know, I know, Yoo tortured me
I know Yoo tortured me
Whoa-oh-oh-oh, Yoo Yoo Yoo Yoo tortured me
Dishonest John Yoo

Bonus YooMemoPalooza Links

Sam Cooke - You Send Me 1958

Glenn Greenwald: John Yoo's war crimes

emptywheel/Firedoglake: Acting Counsels and Torture

Jack Balkin/Balkinization : The Legality of Evil: The Torture Memos and the Living Constitution

Christy Hardin Smith: Yoo Torture Memo: I’ll Take Addington At Cheney’s Behest For $1,000, Alex…

Space Cowboy/Shakesville: Bush: Legacy of S&M

emptywheel/Firedoglake: The “John Yoo, Let’s Pretend We’re Lawyers” Game

Paul Kiel/TPM: The Timeline Behind Yoo's Memo

Rummy On The Run? ... Let's Give Him Some Chase Music!

It's unlikely he would have been hunted down, panting, exhausted, with fear-filled eyes, a chalk-marked "M" stamped on his shoulder, like Peter Lorre in the Fritz Lang classic "M" (Sorry, won't daydream again while posting).

More the style of Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense, would be to stroll out of the breakfast he was attending in Paris, angrily barking to his aides "Arrest me! ... What planet do they think they are on", or some such Rummyesque verbiage.

Charges were filed in France against Dick Cheney's little weekend-warrior buddy, for torture, by the the International Federation for Human Rights along with the Center for Constitutional Rights, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights and the French League for Human Rights, criminal charges for "ordering and authorizing torture."

And since he was in Paris, for some type of meeting with Foreign Policy Magazine, they wanted to catch and arrest the little bugger.

So, as we have done so often for the Bush Grindhouse, we provide a song, some chase music for Rumsfeld to skulk out-of-town with.

Stepping out of our element (Jazz), we turn to a proverbial American Hero, Bruce Springsteen, and his classic anthem, "Born To Run" to provide the right vibe.

Anyone that was a teenager in the 1970's, or older, you sing especially loud.

Born the One's

In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American government
At night we ride through Middle East with suicide machines
Secure in cages out in Abu Ghraib
Chrome wheeled, fuel injected and steppin' all over the law
Bushie this town rips the bones from their back
Its a death trap, its a stuff happens rap
We gotta torture'em while were young
`cause Neocons like us, Bushie we were born the One's

Bushie let me in I wanna be your friend
I want to guard your dreams and visions
Just wrap your legs round these velvet rims
And strap your hands across my engines
Together we could break this rap
Well torture till we drop, Bushie well never go back
Will you torture with me out on the wire
`cause Bushie I'm just a scared and lonely Rummy
But I gotta find out how it feels
I want to know if torture is wild, Bushie, I want to know if torture is real

Beyond Saddam's palace hemi-powered Humvees scream down the boulevard
The Iraqis comb their hair in rear-view mirrors
And the guards try to beat them so hard
Our amusement park rises bold and stark
Prisoners are huddled on the beach, they're not missed
I wanna die with you Bushie on Baghdad streets tonight
In an everlasting kiss

The highways jammed with broken Neocons on a last chance power drive
All the Neocons out on the run tonight
but theres no place left to hide
Together Bushie we'll live with the sadness
I'll love you with all the madness in my soul
Someday Bushie I don't know when
were gonna get to that place
Where we really want to torture
and we'll walk in the sun
But till then Neocons like us
Bushie, we were born the One's

Bonus Rummy Riffs

Listen To A Clip of "Born To Run"

Top Ten Cloves: What Would Be Different If Rumsfeld Was A Dog, But Still Secretary of Defense

Rumsfeld Declares End to Memo 'Blizzard'

Seymour Hersh - The General’s Report: How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties.


"Hey, I can daydream, can't I?"