I have said it before and I'll say it again. We as a country hit rock bottom when the Bush administration began using torture in the post-9/11 world. International law makes it illegal to use torture, and experts believe that nothing good will come out of any torture session because the victim will say anything to stop the excruciating pain. Our use of torture can only result in reciprocal torture against American soldiers.

News is emerging that torture was approved by the highest levels of the Bush administration. Makes sense. President Bush is too dumb to know any better, and he is being advised by some very malignant people, like the Vice President. The tragedy of September 11 is now being used as an excuse to justify anything, anything at all, like the foolish Iraq war, saber-rattling against Iran, the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars for the Iraq quagmire, and torture.

This week, the media reported that the "torture memos" written by the Bush administration's highest-ranking lawyer suggested in 2003 that laws against torture cannot trump the President's war-time powers. The New York Times story is below. This argument only encourages a constitutional dictatorship, where the President can exempt himself from any laws that he chooses. Apparently, the government's analysis in this regard is not limited to the Iraq war. It is now American foreign policy. In the late-1970's, a disgraced Richard M. Nixon told an interviewer, in words and substance, "When the President does it, that means it's not illegal." This is why Nixon resigned: he was a pathological criminal with zero conscience who bombed and killed hundreds of thousands of people during the Vietnam war and subverted the U.S. Constitution in covering up the Watergate crime. Bush is the new Nixon. Whatever he does is legal. No questions asked.

Is the Bush administration ashamed at these relevations? No. One of the war planners, Douglas Feith, said that only "assholes" are worried about torture. Feith, with blood on his hands and one-way ticket to the flames of hell for promoting the Iraq war, a killer who easily could been a serial killer in another lifetime, has been rewarded with a distinguished university professorship.

Memo Sheds New Light on Torture Issue By DAVID JOHNSTON and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — A newly disclosed Justice Department legal memorandum, written in March 2003 and authorizing the military’s use of extremely harsh interrogation techniques, offers what could be a revealing clue in an unsolved mystery: What responsibility did top Pentagon and Bush administration officials have for abuses committed by American troops at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and in Afghanistan; Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; and elsewhere?

Some legal experts and advocates said Wednesday that the document, written the month that the United States invaded Iraq, adds to evidence that the abuse of prisoners in military custody may have involved signals from higher officials and not just irresponsible actions by low-level personnel.

The opinion was written by John C. Yoo of the Office of Legal Counsel, the executive branch’s highest authority on the interpretation of the law. It told the Pentagon’s senior leadership that inflicting pain would not be considered torture unless it caused “death, organ failure or permanent damage,” and it is the most fully developed legal justification that has yet come to light for inflicting physical and mental pressure on suspects.

While resembling an August 2002 memorandum drafted largely by Mr. Yoo, the March 2003 opinion went further, arguing more explicitly that the president’s war powers could trump the law against torture, which it said could not constitutionally be enforced if it interfered with the commander in chief’s orders.

The Rolling Stones are in the news this week. A new concert documentary covers their world tour a few years ago. The documentary is newsworthy because cinema great Martin Scorsese is directing it. The excitement over this news obscures this reality: the Rolling Stones have not issued a a great album since 1972's Exile on Main Street. That album capped an eight-year run that only the Beatles could match.

Don't waste your money on a documentary showing the Stones playing the same songs they mastered 40 years ago. If you want to see the real Rolling Stones, when they could still write songs and reign supreme over the competition, click below. The video clip below was created by a fan because the record companies were not focusing on videos in 1966. The album that year was Aftermath, a masterpiece that does not contain any of the songs that really made the Stones famous, like Satisfaction or Jumpin' Jack Flash. But Aftermath captures the Stones at a time when they were moving from straight blues towards late 1960's decadence. Aftermath brings us right in the middle of that transition.

Unless you are a Stones freak, you don't know the song below, "Think." Listen to the opening guitar sound, and the fuzz-tone. And the riff as a whole. Just listen to the whole thing. This was the sound of 1966.

Maybe the best political columnist in America is Bob Herbert of the New York Times. And Bob says it better than I can: we are a dysfunctional nation. Nothing works, everything is broken, nobody cares. We can't rebuilt New Orleans, we can't rebuild the World Trade Center, we can't stop the war, but for some reason we can timely build a new Yankee Stadium.

April 12, 2008 Op-Ed Columnist Losing Our Will By BOB HERBERT

I wonder what the answers would be if each American asked himself or herself the question: “How is the war in Iraq helping me?”

While the U.S. government continues to pour precious human treasure and vast financial resources into this ugly war without end, it is all but ignoring deeply entrenched problems that are weakening the country here at home.

On the same day that President Bush was announcing an indefinite suspension of troop withdrawals from Iraq, the New York Times columnist David Leonhardt was telling us a sad story about how the middle class has fared during the Bush years.

The economic boom so highly touted by the president and his supporters “was, for most Americans,” said Mr. Leonhardt, “nothing of the sort.” Despite the sustained expansion of the past few years, the middle class — for the first time on record — failed to grow with the economy.

And now, of course, we’re sinking into a nasty recession.

The U.S., once the greatest can-do country on the planet, now can’t seem to do anything right. The great middle class has maxed out its credit cards and drained dangerous amounts of equity from family homes. No one can seem to figure out how to generate the growth in good-paying jobs that is the only legitimate way of putting strapped families back on their feet.

The nation’s infrastructure is aging and in many places decrepit. Rebuilding it would be an important source of job creation, but nothing on the scale that is needed is in sight. To get a sense of how important an issue this is, consider New Orleans.

The historian Douglas Brinkley, who lives in New Orleans, has written: “What people didn’t yet fully comprehend was that the overall disaster, the sinking of New Orleans, was a man-made debacle, resulting from poorly designed levees and floodwalls.”

We could have saved the victims of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe, but we didn’t. And now, more than 2 ½ years after the tragedy, we are still unable to lift the stricken city off its knees.

Other nations can provide health care for everyone. The United States cannot. In an era in which a college degree is becoming a prerequisite for a middle-class quality of life, we are having big trouble getting our kids through high school. And despite being the wealthiest of all nations, nearly 10 percent of Americans are resorting to food stamps to maintain an adequate diet, and 4 in every 10 American children are growing up in families that are poor or near-poor.

The U.S. seems almost paralyzed, mesmerized by Iraq and unable to generate the energy or the will to handle the myriad problems festering at home. The war will eventually cost a staggering $3 trillion or more, according to the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. When he was asked on “Democracy Now!” about who is profiting from the war, he said the two big gainers were the oil companies and the defense contractors.

This is the pathetic state of affairs in the U.S. as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century. Whatever happened to the dynamic country that flexed its muscles after World War II and gave us the G.I. Bill, the Marshall Plan, the United Nations (in a quest for peace, not war), the interstate highway system, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the finest higher education system the world has known, and a standard of living that was the envy of all?

America’s commanding general in Iraq, David Petraeus, and our ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, went up to Capitol Hill this week but were unable to give any real answers as to when the U.S. might be able to disengage, or when a corner might be turned, or when a faint, flickering hopeful light might be glimpsed at the end of the long, horrific Iraqi tunnel.

A country that used to act like Babe Ruth now swings like a minor-leaguer. The all-American can-do philosophy has been smothered by the hapless can’t-do performances of the people who have been in charge for the past several years. It’s both tragic and embarrassing.

The war in Iraq stands like a boulder in the road, blocking progress on so many other important issues that are crucial to our viability as a society. We’ve seen this before. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which included the war on poverty, was crippled by the war in Vietnam.

On the evening of April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was assassinated, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. went into Riverside Church in Manhattan and said of the war in Vietnam: “This madness must cease.”

Forty-one years later, we can still hear the echo of Dr. King’s call. The only sane response is: “Amen.”

What's the best way to kill a man? In the caveman days, they clubbed you on the head. Later on, they got you by firing squad, but no one wanted to clean up the blood, so someone invented the electric chair. That wasn't good enough, either. The body shakes and goes into convulsions and even the executioner feels sorry for the deadly killer. So lethal injection was devised as a "humane" alternative. That was good enough for the state-sponsored executioners, and today it's good enough for the Supreme Court, which upheld lethal injections as consistent with the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and inhumane punishment.

A judge once told me that he thought that Supreme Court decisions were too long. He wasn't kidding. The case upholding lethal injections consists of 97 pages, including dissenting opinions. Very few people will read the whole case. Taken from the summary of the court ruling (with some modifications for readability), here's the gist (which got three votes on the Court):

1. The legal conclusions that got the most votes on the 9-member court are that "To constitute cruel and unusual punishment, an execution method must present a 'substantial' or 'objectively intolerable' risk of serious harm. A State’s refusal to adopt alternative procedures may violate the Eighth Amendment only where the alternative procedure is feasible, readily implemented, and in fact significantly reduces a substantial risk of severe pain." And, "Because some risk of pain is inherent in even the most humane execution method, if only from the prospect of error in following the required procedure, the Constitution does not demand the avoidance of all risk of pain."

2. Properly administered, the lethal injection is not likely to cause substantial pain. Sure, if someone screws up the process, lethal injection is like torture, and the Supreme Court has said that certain means of capital punishment, like torture and beheading, are unconstitutional. That risk is minimized where States use lethal injections."The Court has held that an isolated mishap alone does not violate the Eighth Amendment, because such an event, while regrettable, does not suggest cruelty or a “substantial risk of serious harm.'"

If you want the good stuff in a Supreme Court opinion, you can read the summary of the ruling at the start of the decision and then jump straight to the separate opinions of the Court's most conservative members, Justices Thomas and Scalia, who believe that the Constitution can only be interpreted by figuring out what the drafters were thinking in the late 1700s, when the Constitution was written. I am not kidding about this. This is called original intent jurisprudence. I refer to Justices Thomas and Scalia as "the good stuff" not because I like what they stand for (I don't) but because you can't believe what you are reading and hope to the Holy God that another Republican doesn't get elected in 2008 who can appoint more guys like this.

Justice Thomas thinks that the purpose of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment is directed at sadistic torture in the form of death penalty punishments, like disemboweling the killer or burning him at the stake. That's how they did in centuries ago, and of course those methods are frowned upon today, as they apparently were when the Constitution was written. He thinks that the best way to look at these cases is to disregard any risk analysis, i.e., whether there is a substantial risk of severe pain, which is the analysis adopted by the three Justices who wrote the main opinion. He writes:

I reject as both unprecedented and unworkable any standard that would require the courts to weigh the relative advantages and disadvantages of different methods of execution or of different procedures for implementing a given method of execution. To the extent that there is any comparative element to the inquiry, it should be limited to whether the challenged method inherently inflicts significantly more pain than traditional modes of execution such as hanging and the firing squad.

In other words, if lethal injection did create a substantial risk of serious pain, that would be legal under the Constitution, at least according to Justices Thomas or Scalia. The good news is that Thomas and Scalia are in the minority on issues like this, as even the other conservative members of the Court reject their far-out views.

The good news is that an encouraging opinion issued in this ruling by Justice Stevens suggests that the death penalty should be discarded as a means of punishment. He writes:

I have relied on my own experience in reaching the conclusion that the imposition of the death penalty represents “the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes. A penalty with such negligible returns to the State [is] patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment violative of the Eighth Amendment.”

But the bad news is that Justice Stevens is in his 80's and he won't be around forever. The next president will appoint his replacement. It is highly unlikely in this political climate that any president, Democrat or Republican, will appoint someone to the Supreme Court who opposes the death penalty.

The New York Times over the weekend had a lengthy article revealing that the Pentagon has been briefing retired military officers who provided opinions as "independent" analysts on television news. You've seen these guys: when the news covers the war, they bring out a retired general who talks about the Iraq war from the standpoint of an expert. Since these military officers don't work for the government anymore, they don't have to toe the party line. But they do, and several of them admitted that, during the briefings, the Pentagon gave them misleading information which the officers then repeated on television. Another reason why television news is worthless.

Here's the short version of this story:

A major article by David Barstow in the Sunday edition of The New York Times rips the veil off a Pentagon effort to promote its views, and those of the White House, via the press by the use of so-called "military experts," usually retired officers.

"To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as 'military analysts' whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world," Barstow writes.

"Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

"The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

"Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized."

The article admits that the Times itself published nine op-eds by the "propaganda analysts."

Although the article focuses on their TV work, the Times and every other major paper has long quoted some of these analysts in their news pages.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”

An interesting sidenote: publication of the story was delayed because the government dragged its feet in producing relevant documents pursuant to the New York Times' legitimate requests. The government provided the records after a court threatened it with sanctions. According to the reporter who covered this story:

This article would have come sooner, but it took us two years to wrestle 8,000 pages of documents out of the Defense Department that described its interactions with network military analysts. We pushed as hard as we could, but the Defense Department refused to produce many categories of documents in response to our requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act. We ultimately sued in federal court, yet even then the Pentagon failed to meet several court-ordered deadlines for producing documents. Last week, the judge overseeing our lawsuit threatened the Defense Department with sanctions if it continues to defy his deadlines for producing additional records.