Every branch of government will institute some new rule, new law, or new policy under falsely declared emergencies, in other words, hoaxes, and justify their fascistic actions under that emergency, whether it's COVID, whether America was attacked on 9/11 by outside or domestic forces, or with domestic complicity, whether it incited, declared, and an engaged in a war on terror, they will use emergency powers to seize more government and mass murder. For it needs a trauma to sell the "moral" justification for expansion This is not conjecture. This is not conspiracy. This is not hyperbole. Nor is it hypothetical. The pattern is clear. And if we survive their horrors and read the details of what they pulled to get that power, it only sickens us that they still are walking unshackled.
From James Bovard,
Former FBI chief James Comey compares his courage to Martin Luther - "Here I stand - I can do no other." But Comey saved the Bush-era torture regime & personally approved barbaric interrogation methods including waterboarding & wall slamming. He complains in his memoir that he "lost sleep" over Bush interrogation policies - but that wasn't an option for detainees, since Comey approved forcibly depriving them of sleep for 180 hours straight. https://mises.org/.../james-comey%E2%80%99s-forgotten...
Clean-cut Comey is a war criminal.
“Here I stand, I can do no other,” James Comey told President George W. Bush in 2004 when Bush pressured Comey - who was then Deputy Attorney General - to approve an unlawful antiterrorist policy. Comey, who was FBI chief from 2013 to 2017, was quoting a line reputedly uttered by Martin Luther in 1521 when he told Holy Roman Emperor Charles V that he would not recant his sweeping criticisms of the Catholic Church. Comey’s quotation of himself quoting the father of the Reformation is par for the self-reverence of his new memoir, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership.
The apologies and praise for Comey come from the usual morally depraved stooges in the media. This time, it's Chris Matthews,
MSNBC host Chris Matthews recently declared, “James Comey made his bones by standing up against torture. He was a made man before Trump came along.” Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria, in a column declaring that Americans should be “deeply grateful” to lawyers like Comey, declared, “The Bush administration wanted to claim that its ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ were lawful. Comey believed they were not... So Comey pushed back as much as he could.”
Comey approved torture but fretted over their optics.
Martin Luther risked death to fight against what he considered the heresies of his time. Comey, a top Bush administration policymaker, found a safer way to oppose the worldwide secret U.S. torture regime widely considered a heresy against American values. Comey approved brutal practices and then wrote some memos and emails fretting about the optics.
Even after the horrific images of Abu Ghraib were leaked, Comey failed to stop the torture. Bovard explains that "Rather than ending the abuses, Comey repudiated the memo." Right, right. That's the problem--the leaked memo. That's where the real terrorist threat exists, right, James, and not the murderous Bush policies that you approved and unleashed.
Comey became Deputy Attorney General in late 2003 and “had oversight of the legal justification used to authorize” key Bush programs in the war on terror. At that time, the Bush White House was pushing the Justice Department to again sign off on an array of extreme practices that had begun shortly after the 9/11 attacks. A 2002 Justice Department memo had leaked out that declared that the president was entitled to ignore federal law in approving extreme interrogation techniques. Photos had also leaked from Abu Ghraib prison showing the stacking of naked prisoners with bags over their heads, mock electrocution via a wire connected to a man’s penis, guard dogs on the verge of ripping into naked men, and grinning U.S. male and female soldiers celebrating the bloody degradation. A confidential CIA Inspector General report had just warned that post-9/11 CIA interrogation methods may violate the International Convention Against Torture.
Rather than ending the abuses, Comey repudiated the memo. Speaking to the media in a not-for-attribution session on June 22, 2004, Comey declared that the 2002 memo was “overbroad,” “abstract academic theory,” and “legally unnecessary.” Comey helped oversee crafting a new memo with different legal footing to justify the same interrogation methods.
What depraved ghouls occupy the federal positions. As to waterboarding which sought to break detainees with waterboarding, or near-drowning, Comey greenlighted that.
Comey twice gave explicit approval for waterboarding, which sought to break detainees with near-drowning. This practice had been recognized as a war crime by the U.S. government since the Spanish-American War.
But Comey claims he was losing sleep over Bush's torture policies. Maybe. But it seems quite ironic that those same policies refused to allow prisoners to get any sleep at all, using torture to keep them awake for 180 hours straight. Let's see, how many days is that? 7.5 days.
Comey wrote in his memoir that he was losing sleep over concern about Bush administration torture policies. But losing sleep was not an option for detainees because Comey approved sleep deprivation as an interrogation technique. Detainees could be forcibly kept awake for up to 180 hours until they confessed their sins. How did this work? At Abu Ghraib, the notorious Iraqi prison, one FBI agent reported seeing a detainee “handcuffed to a railing with a nylon sack on his head and a shower curtain draped around him, being slapped by a soldier to keep him awake.”
But Comey had options. If the optics for waterboarding were untenable, why he also had available to him wall slamming, where detainees were thrown up against a wall 30 times. Was this before or after sleep deprivation? But I think Americans were too busy watching
Comey also approved “wall slamming" --which, as law professor David Cole wrote, meant that detainees could be thrown against a wall up to 30 times. Comey also signed off on the CIA using “interrogation” methods such as facial slaps, locking detainees in small boxes for 18 hours, and forced nudity. When the secret Comey memo approving those methods finally became public in 2009, many Americans were aghast - and relieved that the Obama administration had repudiated Bush policies.
Yes, the Obama administration repudiated Bush policies, but he failed to prosecute anyone for the crimes listed in the report. Same as it ever was . . . .
By the way, that "wall slamming" means slamming a detainee's head against a wall. Nice. Nice, nice. A quick aside, David Cole writes that
The memos’ matter-of-fact clinical descriptions belie the harsh tactics to which they gave a green light. They set the C.I.A. loose to slam suspects’ heads into walls up to 30 times in a row, to deprive suspects of sleep for more than a week straight, to confine them to small dark boxes for hours at a time, to slap them repeatedly in the face and abdomen, and to suffocate them with water to induce the perception that they are drowning.
As to waterboarding, that's what the Japanese did to American soldiers during WWII,
The United States itself treated waterboarding as torture when the Japanese used it against our troops in World War II. Yet through pages and pages of dense legal reasoning, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers somehow reach the conclusion that these tactics, even when employed in combination and over a 30-day period, are not torture, and not even cruel, inhuman, or degrading.
Ah, you've got to love official spin by the admin.
Back to Comey.
When it came to opposing torture, Comey’s version of “Here I Stand” had more loopholes than a reverse mortgage contract. Though Comey in 2005 approved each of 13 controversial extreme interrogation methods, he objected to combining multiple methods on one detainee. It was as if Martin Luther grudgingly approved of the Catholic Church selling indulgences to individually expunge sins for adultery, robbery, lying, and gluttony but vehemently objected if all the sins were expunged in one lump sum payment.
10 years later, a report is finally released. Ah, a report! That's excellent! That means proof of the criminals including the chain of custody from who approved it, funded it, staffed it, and committed the heinous acts of torture, right? Ah, not so fast there, Sparky. Government actors have immunity in almost every government atrocity. What's sickening, but not surprising, to learn is that "Psychologists aided the torture regime, offering hints on how to destroy the will and resistance of prisoners." And the only CIA official to go to prison for the torture in Iraq at Abu Ghraib was the guy who outed the program, whistleblower John Kiriakou.
In 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee finally released a massive report, Americans learned grisly details of the CIA torture regime that Comey helped legally sanctify - including death via hypothermia, rape-like rectal feeding of detainees, compelling detainees to stand long periods on broken legs, and dozens of cases of innocent people pointlessly brutalized. Psychologists aided the torture regime, offering hints on how to destroy the will and resistance of prisoners. The only CIA official to go to prison for the torture scandal was courageous whistleblower John Kiriakou.
Comey did nothing to prevent the torture. He approved it.
If Comey had resigned in 2004 or 2005 to protest the torture techniques he now claims to abhor, he would deserve some of the praise he is now receiving. Instead, he remained in the Bush administration but wrote an email summarizing his objections, declaring that “it was my job to protect the department and the A.G. [Attorney General] and that I could not agree to this because it was wrong." A 2009 New York Times analysis noted that Comey and two colleagues “have largely escaped criticism [for approving torture] because they raised questions about interrogation and the law.” In Washington, writing emails is “close enough for government work” to convey sainthood.
Was Comey fired? Nope.
Was Comey forced into early retirement? Nope.
Was Comey demoted? Nope.
Did Comey suffer a loss in pay, fined, rendered unfit for office? No. No. And no.
Well, what happened to him? What usually happens to government employees when the public finds out about their atrocities? They get promoted.
When Comey finally exited the Justice Department in August 2005 to become a lavishly-paid senior vice president for Lockheed Martin, he proclaimed in a farewell speech that protecting the Justice Department’s “reservoir” of “trust and credibility” requires “vigilance” and “an unerring commitment to truth.” But Comey perpetuated policies that shattered the moral credibility of both the Justice Department and the U.S. government. Comey failed to heed another Martin Luther admonition: “You are not only responsible for what you say but also for what you do not say.”
Torture Memos, The by David Cole (2009-12-03) https://t.co/EFkC9Jb2rE via @amazon
— St. Michael, the Archangel (@aveng_angel) May 1, 2024
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