Intelligence officials claim that releasing the Senate’s torture report will cost American lives.
This is simply an attempt at CYA … no different from the NSA’s claim that revealing the extent of its mass surveillance would hurt national security.
Trying to Cover Up the Crime
American law – and top government officials – have said that the type of torture the U.S. engaged in is a crime.
People speaking out against releasing the torture report are simply trying to cover up the crime …
Matthew Alexander – a former top Air Force interrogator who led the team that tracked down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi – notes that government officials knew they are vulnerable for war crime prosecution:
They have, from the beginning, been trying to prevent an investigation into war crimes.
Why Releasing the Torture Report Will SAVE American Lives
Releasing the Senate torture report will actually save American lives.
Specifically, a top American counter-terrorism expert – former Chairman of the Department of International Studies at the National War College, number 2 counter-terror official at the State Department, and author of numerous books on terrorism (Terry Arnold) – told Washington’s Blog that prosecuting those who created the American torture program will REDUCE attacks against the U.S. and American troops.
How could this be? Well, top experts say that torture doesn’t produce any actionable intelligence … the only thing it produces is more terrorists.
Arnold explains that terrorists already know all about the torture. So it’s the American people – not the terrorists – who will be shocked by what’s in the torture report.
But publishing the report will demonstrate that America is actually backing away from its previous torture policy … which will have a huge impact on reducing terrorism. (Similarly, Arnold says that closing Guantanamo and releasing the majority of detainees who American government officials say are completely innocent would help reduce terrorism).
Similarly, Darrel Vandeveld – former prosecutor in the Guantanamo military commissions, and current Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Reserve – wrote:
Torture is a crime and the United States engaged in it. Those are two indisputable facts…
The process of self-examination and accountability has been, and remains, the only way to move forward and regain our moral and legal grounding…
We have a Department of Justice for a reason, and now it’s up to Attorney General Holder, the nation’s top law enforcement officer, to do his job and appoint an independent prosecutor to follow the evidence where it may lead…
It is critical that we hold accountable those who authorized, those who legally sanctioned and those who implemented the torture policies of one of the darkest periods in our nation’s history. What is at stake is nothing less than our democracy.
General Ricardo Sanchez, the former top coalition commander in Iraq, called for a Truth Commission so we might fully understand the failure of the military and civilian command to honor the pledge of our constitution.
Sanchez . . .stressed that the outcome must embrace a variety of solutions, including prosecution.
Sanchez stated, “When the president made the declaration that the Geneva Conventions no longer apply, we unleashed the hounds of hell and eliminated all the foundations for the training, ethics and structure we had built into our soldiers and our leaders for how to conduct these kinds of operations.”
Sanchez stated many problems could be traced to loyalties to individuals and political parties.
Former President Jimmy Carter is also calling for a truth commission with the possibility of prosecution:
“[I] like to see is a complete examination of what did happen, the identification of any perpetrators of crimes against our own laws or against international law,” said Carter. “And then after all that’s done, decide whether or not there should be any prosecutions.”
So – while the folks involved in the torture program are trying to stay out of jail – the reality is that releasing the report will save American lives.
That's nice. But it doesn't chnge the fact that Garner wasn't choked to death. He died of a heart attack.
If the trachea was crushed it would have been obvious to the medical examiner. Perhaps he couldn't breathe due to tightness in the chest preceeding heart failure exacerbated by the stress of the situation, physical restraint/injury and poor medical condition. As per usual though, all of the focus in media has been on the 'choke hold', and not on the fact that if the Stasi had left him the fuck alone he would still be alive.
Of course, on the other hand the whole sorry episode could have been yet another stage production intended to incite tension and division.
Very weird, in the video it looked like scented candles and for sure I think I heard classical music. There was also 3 full time masseuses waiting on him hand and foot. Weird he was stressed at all... Huh.. I think in the video he was so relaxed he just dropped to the floor in blissful anticipation.
I guess the pen wasn't working that day for Citations. Huh...
Next time I get pulled over in my car I am going to be excited for a possible back massage.
We massaged some folks.
Duplicate
"How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?"
ok maybe twice (Dupe)
swear i only hit it once
"How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?"
There is a principle in personal injury called "you take your victim as you find them". If you are negligent in a car wreck and you hit someone with brittle bones, you are liable for the amplified damages. It appears to me that Mr. Garner was a victim in this case, therefore his physical ailments are of no consequence in the determination of culpability on the part of the police. I think the man was harming no one, was accosted for the "suspicion of selling loose cigarettes" (a pathetic excuse for a crime) and would probably still be alive today if the police had just left him alone.
EGGSHELL SKULL BITCHEZ!
"suspicion of selling loose cigarettes" (a pathetic excuse for a crime)...
If I'm not mistaken, isn't this a "crime" to be prosecuted by the "Executive" branch of the government, since it's a presidential appointed "Department of Tobacco and Firearms" Homeland Security enforced militarized apparatus?
Bring charges and let the Judiciary exercise sentence.
Start at the top and work down, in my humble opinion.
Jmfrn.02c
If you were one of the shop keepers that do pay the tax and have invested in their business and that called the cops on Garner, would you still believe the police should get to decide which laws to enforce?
How would you feel if the Sheriff decides to not arrest someone that you allege assaulted your daughter?
Do you believe that when people resist arrest, the police should just leave them alone because they might have health issues?
1) I would be more angry at the government for levying such high taxes than I would some guy not paying those taxes.
2) An alleged assault on one's daughter is an allegation of a crime with a victim. Selling cigarets and not paying taxes on them is a victimless crime.
3) You are legally responsible for your own safety and that of your children, not the Sheriff. See DeShaney v Winnebago and Castle Rock v Gonzalez.
4) Yes, police should leave somebody with health issues alone over minor "nuisance" crimes.
5) This country did just fine early on when there were hardly any LEOs at all.
Are the shopkeepers that follow the law, and lose business to Garner because he has lower costs and can undercut them, not victims?
lose business to Garner because he has lower costs...
I realize this response will likely never see the light of day, (except in an NSA Utah crypt somewhere), but I'll feel better to type it out. Please forgive / indulge me. Thanks in advance.
My response is the laugh I got when reading a report from some NY high school students thanking our first lady for teaching them the most valuable lesson they have yet received on the campus of a state school on the subject of economics when the school prohibited the "official" sale of "junk" food during "school hours". Skittles went from frn1.00 to frn3.00 during school time when the resultant supply / demand paradigm was being artificially manipulated by a political "expediency".
Chalk another win up for non-cognitive dissonance.
If this activity had an Executive Branch Department with corresponding Czar overseeing it, I'm sure heavy handed "policing" action would be executed against this fellow student's friend for engaging in the trade during lunch time while he / she was eating lunch at a table owned by the "state".
Truly pathetic.
imho.
No. They're fools for electing a government that taxes the hell out of them. They deserve what they get.
The police DO decide which laws to enforce. They love chicken shit laws because they give cops carte blanche to harass people, particularly blacks. The more complex laws, like white collar fraud get less attention because cops can make their nut by using the chicken shit laws (particularly the drug laws) to prey upon the citizens. Plus, you don't have to use your brain so much, making the application of these laws desirable to most cops. You ask if I was a shop owner how would I feel? Personally I would feel the same, that the biggest thieves in the world are concentrated at the Fed/Wall Street/Big Banks. I would be pissed that harmless people like Garner get murdered by the police for non-crimes while scum like Dimon, Bernanke and Corzine walk around free with the keys to the kingdom. You can not equate assault with the selling of loose cigarettes, so I will not address that point. I believe that the police regularly instigate violent confrontations with people and use resisting arrest as a justification for their own violence. If the police had just left this man alone, there would have been no violence.
Objection.
Non-responsive.
For some reason I expected a better response from a lawyer. Maybe you're in patent law?
Maybe. But what about the next time, after they have rewarded Garner's behavior of resisting arrest? My understanding is that Garner had many prior arrests, which would suggest the liklihood of future arrests, no?
Whether or not the law was chickenshit or banking fraud, whether Garner weighed 400lbs or 140, he died while being arrested.
The police action either wholly caused or contributed greatly to his death.
The tactics used by at least one of the officers was against NYPD rules.
"I can't breathe" was the gasp of a man who was not only being choked but was having his chest compressed to the point that he wasn't getting enough air.
The policeperps use of deadly force was outrageously excessive. Anytime you close off a persons airway AND compress their chest you risk injuring them. These monkey pile methods cops use today maximize discomfort and distress to the one apprehended.
Other than you playing counterpart to the idiotic mentality many blacks display in refusing to acknowledge facts as in the Brown/Martin cases, you don't have an argument.
Somebody is going to get a deal on cheap cigarettes and then the world will come to an end.
" But what about the next time, "
What a stupid question. Seriously? All of this for cheap cigarettes???
Tax avoidance..... no one complained when they took down Al Capone
Youre really going to copare some dude selling cigs for a couple of bucks to AL CAPONE!?!? For real? Because Im pretty sure Al Capone had an army of gangsters that would kill cops with impunity and ran one of that largest most complex crime syndicates of all time. Not counting the Fed or US Gubmint.
I generally consider you to be clever, but you're on the wrong side with this one.
hedgeless_horseman: My main beef on George's article would have been that he missed what I would consider the biggest Must-Know fact about the Eric Garner saga.
The announcement on Tuesday night was followed by an unusually obvious trial run of the government's targeted internet censorship capability Wednesday morning. The test only covered access to alternative news sites from within California or access to content hosted on servers located in California.
Eric Garner was about the only big story at the time that might have had material impact on California cities, so it served as a good test for impact studies. Obviously, no one knows for sure what the timing meant - it doesn't matter, though. We all DO know is the ultimate purpose for such a test.
I have little doubt that Zero Hedge is squarely in .gov's targets as one of those dangerous sites that need blocking in times of emergency. What did your server logs look like on the morning of Dec. 4th for California IPs?
We may be on the verge of the largest financial collapse in history, and someone can arbitrarily decide that nobody will be able to read Zero Hedge that day (or week, or month...). How does that make you feel?
Same goes for you, George. You're clearly one of those dangerous skeptics that the government will electronically disappear from the internet when the time comes - but you already know that.
Israel brought NarusInsight to the U.S. almost seven years ago. I'm sure Boeing upgraded it considerably since their Narus acquisition. We will be able to read CNN or NYT or Harretz the day the chaos starts, but not Zero Hedge thanks to the wonders of unfettered deep-packed inspection.
I'm not sure I understand what you are saying. Were websites blocked in California recently>
Websites are always being blocked by .gov - you're just not suppose to know about them.
Something happened last week where access to many alternative news sites was blocked for a few hours. Blacklisted News reported on theirs, other news and blog sites noted suspicious geographic-based traffic anomalies on the 2nd and 4th. California and Comcast keeps coming up as common links, but nobody can prove anything. There were ways to get around the blocking, so the sites themselves were not the problem. It was all done in the routing equipment.
Nobody knows who did it or why, but hackers just don't target alternative news sites and obscure blogs. Certainly not while simultaneously ignoring mainstream news sites. Everyone figures it was intelligent, content-based censoring. Kind of a trial run for when they have to use the real thing.
Same thing happened in Europe last week except it wasn't a trial run. Ukriane's Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant had some kind of accident - it was mostly covered up but eventually word got out. Web sites - mostly blogs - that brought up the question of a possible radiation release went dark for a few days. Ukraine sites were most heavily censored, but there were plenty of other reports of outages from Northern Europe as well. Sites in the US were also affected. Search engines were either scrubbed of references to a radiation release or demoted links to relevant content. No idea what actually happened at Zaporizhzhya, but it was clear that the powers that be didn't want either you, Ukraine or Europe discussing it among yourselves.
That kind of event-based mass stealth censorship can only be accomplished by sophisticated traffic-snooping equipment looking at content, not a few random hackers. The government regularly regurgitates their weak, nonsensical threats from imaginary Chinese/Russian hackers as cover.
Eventually, the government will just ban 'thinking' as a terrorist activity. Until then, censorship remains their biggest and best club.
thanks, I figure once zero hedge goes dark it's time to bug deeper into the mountains
What side is that?
Are they not one in the same anyway?
Moar Ebola !
If I had a child he would look like sweet, young, innocent, little Trayvon, not that gun-crazy Zimmerman.
Poor innocent Mike was kneelin' on the ground, begging for his life, with his hands up saying, "Don't shoot!" Then that killer cop murdered him for no reason at all.
The Choke-Hold Killing of Eric Gardner.
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.
False equivalency and you know it.
Material equivalence, and we all know it.
I don't know it. I think the grand jury in Ferguson case made the correct decision. But this guy was running his mouth he wasn't "resisting" physically that i could see nor was he threatening anyone. The chokehold (or stanglehold) was excessive, to say the least.
The video does not show all of the encounter.
He refused to place his hands behind his back when instructed multiple times.
In addition, Garner had been arrested multiple times. He knew the drill.
hedgeless horseman, first: kudos to you for going against the stream, in many ways, here
second: why do people have to be handcuffed with their hands behind their back?
I wrote my piece of mind on why I expect policemen to uphold civility in a different ZH article on this subject, here the link
but I feel old, today. because I remember times when people were not handcuffed when arrested, or if handcuffed, not with their arms behind their backs (except when found engaging in violence)
in fact, I've been arrested various times in various countries based on various suspicions, but can't remember ever to have be thrown down on the pavement or have been handcuffed except once shortly before being brought in front of the judge, who immediately asked why I was handcuffed. That was in... Thailand
I repeat from my linked rant: I expect policemen to be civilians, and to be the upholders of civility. Non-violent crimes do not warrant violence in their handling from the police, violence is a monopoly of the state, to be dispensed only in the face of existing violence or by a court
This is the root of the problem, for me, or why I'd be inclined to spontanously resist arrest in NYC in Garner's position or to sympathize with his resistance. This to your "He knew the drill"
"The Drill" has radically changed, in the last decades. Perhaps it's time to have a hard look at it and perhaps it's time to change it
making excuses for cops that kill is very much going with the stream, not neccesarily here though
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rf2TNOuHsQ
Macarena anyone?
Jeeze H_H, you gonna have a little fagout every week now?
I know I ain't alright, and I know that I seem to contradict myself at times, but HH seems like a split personality, doesn't he?
Most times, he's all live and let live, but just now he's a champion of the police state. Makes my head hurt.
Anyway, the Mike Browns and the Eric Garners are swept into the dustbin by grand juries. I suppose I don't fully understand the grand jury selection process, eh?
The grand jury is composed of you and I. Its the only line of defense between the state and its unlimited resources raining hell down on your head, bankrupting or imprisoning you or both.
We might want to think about that long & hard before chunking it out the door.
Haha. Naive at best. The grand jury only hears what the prosecutor, ie: the state, wants them to hear. There is no defense present. Grand juries are a joke.
Naive you say? ;-)
The only issue before a grand jury is the states assertion of probable cause to charge you, not whether you're guilty or innocent.
I can see I'm going to have to keep going with this until you "stupid American voters" understand what you're advocating for.
Lets put it this way, if you want to leave it to the sole discretion of whether the federal government can bring someone to a jury trial or not, do away with the local grand jury system and see how many criminals have to stand trial. Who knows, perhaps you want to do away with jury trials too?
Here ya go, the DOJ closed this case of "civil rights" violation, the state of South Carolina (audible gasp!) did not stop persuing justice...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-04/s-carolina-grand-jury-indicts-ex-cop-for-man-s-death.html
Now, who is naive?
Exactly. Everytime the State investigates itself it finds it did nothing wrong! How can I get in on that action?
it finds it did nothing wrong! How can I get in on that action?...
Have Soros secure you a(n) (s)election.
nmewn, that's the theory, yes
note, though, that in continental europe we generally find all kind of juries and elected instead of appointed judges... dangerous. different history, different legal systems, fact is whenever I explain here how your system works to youngsters... they ask very pointed questions
like... who is paying for the judge's political campaign? or how do you ensure "people from the street" are qualified to make a judgment?
fact is that we have a fairly satisfactory system (actually several national ones) that do function without any Grand Jury, or jurys in most cases. just a thought, which rhymes with our distaste for building too many state prisons, or allow private prison systems
The presentation to the grand jury is what can be manipulated, such as cops presenting days of their defense before any witnesses speak, and the DA running the show, permanently married to the cops, no independent prosecutor. Citizen jurors can be directed along a desired path.
Is it just me, Hapte, or do a vast majority of your posts contain a reference to homosexuality?
http://www.zerohedge.com/search/user_comments?name=Hapte
Why is that?
I have to give it to you. You succeeded in de railing a thread with the second comment. Well done.
Well done trolls! You dont like HH's opinion so ad hom attack en masse.
Like it or not if Big Mike doesn't resist arrest...no one knows his name.
It's obvious the footage shown on TV is edited.
Should anyone die over "loose cigarettes" no... but aint noone complaininbout dem laws..an who wrote dem laws.
Divided we faLL