Waterboard torture memo set to music

From Rock Cookie Bottom. (Via Andrew Sullivan)

[#1 posted by Lucifer, April 23, 2009 1:26 PM]

I would have greater respect for agents from high leadership to low who knowingly engage in the waterboarding of detainees if they took ownership of their actions as being morally and legally wrong but undertaken for the sake of results that went toward their view, misguided or otherwise, of a greater good. Instead, this pansy ass-covering legalism hair-splitting defense makes us look like a bunch of weasels and cowards.

catchy song tho.

[#2 posted by Noctis, April 23, 2009 1:43 PM]

I wish I lived in a world where I could post something snarky about writing a song about waterboarding, but I don't. I'm glad the video's getting exposure.

I hope that poignant yet ironic commentary on U.S. practices in the "War on Terror" like this actually get through to people. I teach at a large Midwestern American university, where, in an intro class of 350 college students this year, about 75% had never heard of Abu Ghraib or seen a photo of what happened there. About half of them had heard of waterboarding, but few knew what it actually involved. Most of the class was confident the U.S. "would never engage in torture," having no idea that we condoned it offically. It just makes me boggle anew at the level of ignorance that is commonplace in the U.S. So I salute any and all educational efforts.

[#3 posted by IamInnocent, April 23, 2009 1:53 PM]

You have to love those lawyers... to death.

[#4 posted by Boba Fett Diop, April 23, 2009 1:55 PM]

I think Black Metal might be a more appropriate musical genre for this memo,

[#5 posted by grimc, April 23, 2009 2:12 PM]

Instead, this pansy ass-covering legalism hair-splitting defense makes us look like a bunch of weasels and cowards.

...whereas the actual torture simply proves we're a bunch of weasels and cowards.

[#6 posted by zuzu, April 23, 2009 2:14 PM]

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

He's been really worked up about keeping this issue in the spotlight lately. Cheers to that!

Here's some of what he said on The Chris Matthews Show (19 April 2009):

What we have to remember is that the--President Bush looked at us and said he was shocked by what he saw at Abu Ghraib while he was authorizing all of that and much worse. So either--so he was lying directly on the gravest matter imaginable, and still insisting that it isn't torture; coming up with these terms, "enhanced interrogation," which, by the way, was coined originally by the Gestapo, verschaerfte Vernehmung, the actual terms for the exact same techniques.

But this precise kind of interrogation they're doing, which is to prevent permanent physical damage and injury so--or broken limbs, required what they called the third degree. We're talking about hypothermia. We're talking about freezing people till they can't take it any longer. We're talking about keeping people awake for weeks on end, which is what Stalin did and what Hitler did. We're talking about waterboarding, which is what the Khmer Rouge did. Just because we're America doesn't mean we don't torture. And just because we're doing it doesn't mean it's not torture. And we've been struggling about this forever.

[#7 posted by stosh machek, April 23, 2009 2:17 PM]

new heights in glib!
-currently this vid is right next to an army ad on my monitor-

[#8 posted by NuclearMoose, April 23, 2009 3:55 PM]

Maybe if waterboarding was part of a TV show, like Survivor, more 'mericans would know about it.

[#9 posted by dbarak, April 23, 2009 3:58 PM]

What? No Legos?

[#10 posted by Mantissa128, April 23, 2009 5:51 PM]

Boba Fett,

NEDM.

[#11 posted by Jim35031, April 23, 2009 6:46 PM]

LOL well I guess you can set music to anything now days.

[#12 posted by Slicklines, April 23, 2009 7:13 PM]

Freaking brilliant video. 'nuff said.

[#13 posted by Anonymous, April 23, 2009 9:31 PM]

Made me cry.

The "light softrock" style of the music underscores the irony of the way the legal opinion ignores the cruelty of the act, and chooses instead to pick apart the language of a treaty "we" don't feel like abiding by.

Still at some level its correct. Our agents weren't inflicting pain, they were inflicting terror. Yes friends, we are fighting terrorism with terrorism.

And all this on people who were picked up by bounty hunters and foreign governments far from US soil, and imprisoned by US forces without so much as an arraignment.

[#14 posted by Anonymous, April 24, 2009 4:37 AM]

Today's relevant torture links:
Do private contractors also get away with murder?
Will the patriotic CIA agents testify against these hired torturers?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/washington/22ksm.html

I guess some contractors were exCIA guys who had an aptitude for this type of work....

Sign the ACLU petition:

http://tinyurl.com/dkx6vn

Thanks again to Cryptome:

http://www.cryptome.org/

Secrecy in government leads to horrible criminal activity. The CIA was created in 1946. What other criminal activities are they permitted to do in secret?

[#15 posted by Anonymous, April 24, 2009 4:42 AM]

Anon #13: ..."without so much as A POSSIBILITY of an arraignment". Fixed that for you.
The US judiciary does not seem to give a hoot if people were tortured to death by your President's orders.
What is up with that?

[#16 posted by StRevAlex, April 24, 2009 4:38 PM]

#2: Are you surprised by the stupidity of your students? Because you shouldn't be. Those ignorant lil' punks don't know or care about anything but themselves.

[#17 posted by chrisburns, April 25, 2009 2:12 PM]

what a world - without the internet - no possibility for this song

[#18 posted by Rick from Boston, April 26, 2009 7:22 AM]

Without waterboarding, life itself (for possibly millions of people) would be impossible.

[#19 posted by Anonymous, April 27, 2009 10:23 PM]

Porter Goss writes in the WP:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/24/AR2009042403339.html

A disturbing epidemic of amnesia seems to be plaguing my former colleagues on Capitol Hill. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of the committees charged with overseeing our nation’s intelligence services had no higher priority than stopping al-Qaeda. In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House intelligence committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA’s “High Value Terrorist Program,” including the development of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and what those techniques were. This was not a one-time briefing but an ongoing subject with lots of back and forth between those members and the briefers.

Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as “waterboarding” were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.

Let me be clear. It is my recollection that:

— The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four, were briefed that the CIA was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists.

— We understood what the CIA was doing.

— We gave the CIA our bipartisan support.

— We gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities.

— On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.

I do not recall a single objection from my colleagues. They did not vote to stop authorizing CIA funding.

Posted by "Alex"