Bachmann is by no means America's sole demagogue. That she's been given a national stage to insult our collective intelligence, though, is cause for notice.
What We Don't Know
Marie Cocco, WaPo Writers Group
A copious report by the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee, released last month, provides a chilling compendium of what we know, and what we don’t.
We do not officially know whether the "enhanced interrogation tactics" used by the Bush administration were in fact criminal violations of federal statutes prohibiting torture and war crimes. We do not know what laws may have been broken through the use of "extraordinary rendition." This was the practice of sweeping people up and transferring them to secret CIA "black sites" or to countries -- Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Pakistan, for example -- where torture is believed to be practiced.
We do not know how many people were jailed and interrogated in this system. Estimates range from 100 to 150 to "several thousand renditions of terror suspects," the judiciary report says. We don’t know how a program of "rendition" that was occasionally used in prior administrations to deliver a suspect to face prosecution in a country where he was wanted on criminal charges metastasized into a global sweep of those who were detained for interrogation. We do not know what happened to "ghost" detainees held by the U.S. in Iraqi prisons -- prisoners who were never registered or identified and, for all we know, disappeared.
We do not know the full extent of the warrantless wiretapping of Americans that continues, in some form, to this day.
Sweeping this all aside in the interest of moving on isn’t a mark of how mature our political system is. It is an indictment of it.
Anti-Torture Protestors Arrested at White House
Arthur Delany, HuffPo
Sixty-one anti-torture protesters were arrested outside the White House on Thursday in a planned act of mass civil disobedience at the end of an event organized by Witness Against Torture and Amnesty International.
The protesters -- wearing black hoods and orange jumpsuits -- were part of a larger group of 150 that marched in a slow procession from the Capitol to Lafeyette Park across from the White House to protest the torture of detainees held in U.S. counter-terror efforts. Before the group of 61 triggered arrest by blocking the sidewalk outside the White House, speakers in Lafeyette Park demanded that the Obama administration close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay and investigate and prosecute officials of the previous administration who crafted harsh interrogation policies.
"This is the 101st day of the Obama administration and Gitmo is still open. That's why we're here," said organizer Frida Berrigan to the legion of detainees. "The only way to decisively break from the Bush administration is to indict those responsible" for torture.
One protester held a sign that played on Obama's campaign slogans. It said, "The Audacity of Torture" and "The Audacity of War Crimes."
"Obama presumably has to listen to the progressive wing of his party. He certainly does risk alienating his base on this issue," said WAT spokesman Jeremy Varon to the Huffington Post.
