In the midst of a spirited defense of the Bush administration's intentions in developing interrogation techniques, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) dropped a phrase that liberals may seize upon.

The Bush administration did not commit any crimes, Graham said, but "they saw the law as a nicety we could not afford." That's a view that squares pretty well with liberals' view that the Bush administration circumvented the law to reach conclusions it desired.

Graham, who said he disagreed with the Bush administration's legal rationale for waterboarding, nevertheless accused Democrats of politicizing the interrogation debate and attempting to criminalize their policy differences with Bush officials.

"The difference between the nobility of the law and a political stunt may be soon evident one way or another," Graham said. "And I don't know if this [hearing] is actually pursuing the nobility of the law."

Great comment from "A Hermit" below the article:

Of course this is political; and it should be. When you have political leaders whose policies depend on viewing the law as a mere "nicety" to be ignored when inconvenient then they need to be held accountable, not just legally but politically as well. Those who, out of cowardice or a lust for power or both, ignored the law and the people who supported them in their lawbreaking should be exposed as publicly as possible so future politicians will think twice before following their disgusting example.

Taleban using white phosphorus, some of it made in Britain

Taleban fighters have been using deadly white phosphorus munitions, some of them manufactured in Britain, to attack Western forces in Afghanistan, according to previously classified United States documents released yesterday.

White phosphorus, which can burn its victims down to the bone, has been found in improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in regions across Afghanistan including in the south, where British troops are based. It has also been used in mortar and rocket attacks on American forces.

Last night the US military in Kabul condemned the use of white phosphorus by the insurgents as “reprehensible”. White phosphorus is banned as an offensive weapon under international rules of armed conflict.

Major Jennifer Willis, a spokeswoman for the US Army at Bagram, near Kabul, said that markings on some of the white phosphorus munitions that had been recovered showed that they had been manufactured in a number of different countries, including Britain, China, Russia and Iran.

Although a full investigation is under way, it is not yet clear how the Taleban and other insurgent forces using them had acquired the white phosphorus munitions from Britain. However, Major Willis said that Afghanistan was littered with ordnance of every kind and it was not a surprise that the insurgents had got their hands on white phosphorus.

"We only use phosphorus responsibly," claimed US child-killer...
Rest of world notes bitter irony!

Tamil protesters take to streets

A series of protests at Westminster started in April

About 500 protesters calling for a ceasefire in Sri Lanka have blocked roads outside the Houses of Parliament.

Police said the demonstrators had spilled through police lines and taken to the streets in Westminster.

Protesters, including hunger strikers, have been camped in Parliament Square since early April.

The United Nations has described the situation in northern Sri Lanka as a "bloodbath" after reports of heavy civilian casualties at the weekend.

Police closed the approaches to Parliament Square from Westminster Bridge and Whitehall and blocked the protesters in with vans.

The main entrance to the Houses of Parliament was also closed off, to prevent the crowd surging towards the Commons through the Carriage Gates.

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: "At about 10.30am today about 500 protesters in Parliament Square pushed through police lines across the road towards the Palace of Westminster.

"The protesters are now sitting in the road between Parliament Square and Whitehall. Police are currently negotiating with the demonstrators to get them back into Parliament Square."

The demonstration is described as noisy but peaceful, with chants urging a ceasefire in Sri Lanka.

Section 44 allows police to search any person or vehicle without suspicion

Somebody in London is stopped and searched every three minutes, according to new figures obtained by BBC London.

The Metropolitan Police used section 44 of the Terrorism Act more than 170,000 times in 2008 to stop people in London.

That compares to almost 72,000 anti-terror stop and searches carried out in the previous year.

The Met said anti-terror searches had been more widely used since the planting of two car bombs in central London in July 2007.

Terror threat

Of all the stops last year, only 65 led to arrests for terror offences, a success rate of just 0.035%.

The UK government is helping create a "market for torture" by accepting intelligence gained by the practice, a former diplomat has told MPs and peers.

Former ambassador Craig Murray said he was told in 2003 the then foreign secretary Jack Straw had authorised acceptance of such intelligence.

He said it was "schizophrenic" to condemn torture but use its "fruits".

The government says it abhors torture but has said intelligence of threats to life cannot be completely ignored.

Giving evidence to the joint committee on human rights, Mr Murray, the former ambassador to Uzbekistan said he believed the government did "everything possible to disguise its position" on torture.

He said responses to concerns were always met with the the reply "we condemn torture unreservedly" but added: "The government doesn't come forward and volunteer the fact that it very happily accepts ... hundreds of pieces a year of intelligence that has come from hundreds of people suffering the most vicious torture."

Mr Murray told the committee he had been surprised to learn that the policy on accepting intelligence gained by torture had changed.

No reply

He said during a previous job before the first Gulf War he had been given "clear direction" from the then PM Margaret Thatcher "that we were not to use any intelligence which may have come from torture".

So when he raised concerns in two telegrams, at the end of 2002 and beginning of 2003, that Britain might be acting illegally he said he believed the Foreign Office did not know it was using information gained by torture.

I was told directly: This is the policy, you are a civil servant. You must follow it Craig Murray Former ambassador

He said he never received a written reply refuting his allegations but was called to London for a meeting with officials including Sir Michael Wood - then legal adviser to the Foreign Office.

"I was told: These things are best not put in writing," Mr Murray told the committee.

"I was told directly: This is the policy, you are a civil servant. You must follow it and we will accept intelligence that has come from torture as long as we don't do the torture ourselves," he said.

'Market for torture'

No British agents were directly involved with torture and he had thought no CIA agents were involved either - but they used information gained by the Uzbek security services, who routinely used the "most horrible forms of torture" against political dissidents in Uzbekistan, the committee was told.

He added that 95% of intelligence gathered was to do with internal Uzbek politics and much of it was inaccurate.

The British government, including the intelligence and security agencies, never uses torture for any purpose, including obtaining information Foreign Office spokesman

He said the legal position outlined to him was that receiving information was not in breach of the UN Convention on Human Rights - as long as Britain was not carrying out torture.

"I would argue that what you are doing is creating a market for torture," he said.

"We are talking about people screaming in agony in cells and our government's willingness to accept the fruits of that."

He accused the government of a "schizophrenic" policy on torture, on one hand saying they "unreservedly" condemn it but on the other hand being prepared to receive its products.

Interrupted

And he said it was difficult to criticise the policy at the time - in the build up to the war in Iraq - because there had been a "vogue for false intelligence".

He said he believed the policy had changed after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US - possibly when the UK became aware that the US was using "water boarding" techniques.

The session was briefly interrupted by someone in the audience who shouted demands for a general election before being escorted away.

The Foreign Office removed Mr Murray from his post in Uzbekistan in 2004. He made similar allegations against Jack Straw in a book, and stood unsuccessfully against him in his Blackburn constituency in 2005.

A Foreign Office spokesman said: "The UK unreservedly condemns the use of torture. The UK abides by its commitments under international law and expects all countries to comply with their international legal obligations.

"The British government, including the intelligence and security agencies, never uses torture for any purpose, including obtaining information. Nor would we instigate others to do so."

Reproduced in full because it's so fucking important!

“The United States is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example.” President Bush on UN Torture Victims Recognition Day 26 June 2003

We don't torture people in America and people who say we do simply know nothing about our country. - George W. Bush Interview with Australian TV - October 18, 2003

“Freedom from torture is an inalienable human right and we are committed to building a world where human rights are respected and protected by the rule of law … Many have been detained, arrested, thrown in prison and subjected to torture by regimes that fail to understand that their habits of control will not serve them well in the long term.” Statement by President Bush released by the White House on June 26, 2005

"We do not torture." President Bush to reporters during a visit to Panama in November 2005

C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported.

The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum. Abu Zubaydah has been described as a Qaeda operative.

A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

The 2005 memo also says that the C.I.A. used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The New York Times reported in 2007 that Mr. Mohammed had been barraged more than 100 times with harsh interrogation methods, causing C.I.A. officers to worry that they might have crossed legal limits and to halt his questioning. But the precise number and the exact nature of the interrogation method was not previously known.

The release of the numbers is likely to become part of the debate about the morality and efficacy of interrogation methods that the Justice Department under the Bush administration declared legal even though the United States had historically treated them as torture.

Marie Cocco, with the Washington Post, writes on Truthdig:

Now that he is home, Obama has to show that his words have meaning.

    He must immediately reverse his own inexplicable support for the Bush administration’s policy of indefinite and secret detention as the fate for more than 600 detainees now held at the U.S. air base in Bagram, Afghanistan.

    Bagram is the father of Guantanamo.

    When U.S. operatives under the Bush administration’s “war on terror” seized people around the globe on suspicion of terrorist ties, the prisoners often were sent first to Bagram, where, according to accounts by former detainees and human rights groups, many were brutalized before being shackled and shipped to what would become the notorious prison for alleged terrorists at the U.S. naval facility in Cuba.

    The symbol of Guantanamo—an offshore penal colony where hundreds of men have been incarcerated without charge, without access to any court and initially without access to lawyers—became such a blight on America’s reputation that during last year’s presidential campaign both Obama and Republican John McCain vowed to close it. Days after taking office, Obama ordered that Guantanamo be shut down within a year, and his administration began a case-by-case review to determine how to handle the detainees who remain there.

    But closing Guantanamo was a political promise, while Bagram went unnoticed during the long campaign.

    And just a month after the president—with some fanfare—ordered the Guantanamo closing, his administration embraced the Bush administration’s position that the Bagram detainees should properly be held in what is effectively a legal no man’s land, barred from having a court hear their cases.

    That premise, which the Supreme Court in several cases involving terrorism detainees already has rejected, now has been cast off by a federal judge hearing the claims of a handful of prisoners who were captured outside of Afghanistan—in Dubai and Thailand, for example—and taken to Bagram for detention. These prisoners, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates ruled last week, are “virtually identical” to the Guantanamo detainees in whose favor the Supreme Court already has ruled.

    “They are noncitizens who were (as alleged here) apprehended in foreign lands far from the United States and brought to yet another country for detention,” Bates wrote. Yet the administration, he added, advocates different treatment depending on whether it “ship[s] otherwise identically situated detainees to Guantanamo or instead to Bagram.”

    Arguing that Bagram detainees are different from those at Guantanamo because they are held in a “theater of war” seemed particularly galling to Bates. The U.S. government itself is responsible for taking these detainees into the combat zone. “Such rendition resurrects the same specter of limitless executive power” that the Supreme Court has rejected and reinvigorates the concern that the president can move detainees “physically beyond the reach of the Constitution and detain them indefinitely.”

    This was a fundamental breach of justice and morality when the Bush administration did it. It is precisely the same breach—made worse by the stench of hypocrisy—when the Obama administration does it.

Medical personnel were deeply involved in the abusive interrogation of terrorist suspects held overseas by the Central Intelligence Agency, including torture, and their participation was a “gross breach of medical ethics,” a long-secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded.

Based on statements by 14 prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda and were moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in late 2006, Red Cross investigators concluded that medical professionals working for the C.I.A. monitored prisoners undergoing waterboarding, apparently to make sure they did not drown. Medical workers were also present when guards confined prisoners in small boxes, shackled their arms to the ceiling, kept them in frigid cells and slammed them repeatedly into walls, the report said.

Facilitating such practices, which the Red Cross described as torture, was a violation of medical ethics even if the medical workers’ intentions had been to prevent death or permanent injury, the report said. But it found that the medical professionals’ role was primarily to support the interrogators, not to protect the prisoners, and that the professionals had “condoned and participated in ill treatment.”

At times, according to the detainees’ accounts, medical workers “gave instructions to interrogators to continue, to adjust or to stop particular methods.”