The Unimaginable Life

It was unimaginable a few years ago that we would have a black president and a black first lady.  If I had told you 18 months ago that Barack Obama would be the next President of the United States and that Hillary Clinton would be the next Secretary of State, you would have said that I was a fool.

The photos below were taken by my friend, and sometime Brilliant Politics photographer, Martin Saunders.

Frank Rich makes the case that the Bush Administration used torture in the summer of 2002 to try to establish a link between the 9/11 attacks and Iraq. There was no link and torture could not establish something that did not exist.

The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.

The use of torture by Americans, which is illegal and a war crime, has had a horribly corrosive effect on our bedrock democratic principles and on our reputation around the world. In addition to Frank Rich’s column today in the New York Times, essential reading on the subject of torture by Andrew Sullivan, such as “Cheney Lies Again” and “The Right Vs. the Geneva Conventions,” can be found regularly at his blog, The Daily Dish.  The following interview of a Republican congressman by Chris Matthews on Hardball on April 23 also gets to the heart of issue:

Al Gore, testifying before Congress yesterday, points to the massive fraud corporate polluters have perpetrated on the American public by covering up information about global warming. He refers to an April 23, 2009 article in the New York Times that shows that the oil, coal, and automotive industries financed the anti-global warming propaganda campaign.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is an environmental attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, noted in a speech in Buffalo last week that the oil and coal companies are gearing up for another massive propaganda campaign against the renewable energy industry. Don’t get fooled again.

“When we worked with people on their deathbed, we would often hear the following three complaints: I wish I had gotten divorced earlier; I wish I had taken a job for the love of the work, not money; I wish I had played and enjoyed myself more…. If we are not living the life we wish to live, how can we change that now, while there is still time?”

-Ondrea Levine, teacher of Vipassana meditation for 30 years, who now has leukemia and lupus