The Republic of T.

Today is one of those days when I’m tempted to say things that aren’t supposed to be said, or that need to be said more artfully and with with more nuance than I can manage. So I’ll let others say it and just point to them.

I don’t know if anyone watches these video playlists, since they get kinda long, but for those who do, this collection seemed appropriate.

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…[Q]uality care shouldn’t depend on your financial resources, or the type of job you have, or the medical condition you face. Every American should be able to get the same treatment that U.S. senators are entitled to.

This is the cause of my life.

Sen. Ted Kennedy, ‘The Cause of My Life’

As I noted in the previous post in this series, it can’t honestly be said that the reason millions of American’s go without health insurance is because we can’t afford it. Nor is that the reason why more than 14,000 Americans lose their health insurance every day, or why:

• 25 million are underinsured — up from 16 million in 2003 — and pay more than 10 percent of their income on medical expenses despite having health insurance
• nearly 86 million Americans under 65 went without health insurance at some point between 2007 and 2008
• 45,000 Americans die every year because they lack health insurance, and thus access to care

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None of this is because these people don’t want health insurance, and certainly not because they don’t need it. Nor is it that we cannot afford to guarantee quality, affordable health care to all citizens. A fraction of our military budget, or the amount sunk into the Iraq war, for example, could go a long way towards providing coverage for many. So it’s not because we can’t do it.

We can. So, perhaps we simply lack the will to do so; to make it happen. Maybe we just don’t want to. But the question remains: Why?

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[Ed. Note: WARNING. Graphic Pictures Below Fold. NSFW. Possible Trigger.]

Word is, at least one of the pictures the Obama administration decided not to release shows an American soldier raping a female prisoner.

At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.

Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.

Allegations of rape and abuse were included in his 2004 report but the fact there were photographs was never revealed. He has now confirmed their existence in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.

The graphic nature of some of the images may explain the US President’s attempts to block the release of an estimated 2,000 photographs from prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan despite an earlier promise to allow them to be published.

Maj Gen Taguba, who retired in January 2007, said he supported the President’s decision, adding: “These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.

Not that it pleases me in the least to say, but …

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Listen to Tony Lagouranis, author of Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator’s Dark Journey Through Iraq, describe what he witnessed and did in Iraq.

One of the most disturbing things abut Lagouranis’ book is that over and over again he expresses concern — and makes a convincing case — that many of the people picked up and exposed to our "enhanced interrogation techniques were merely petty criminals at best, or at worst completely innocent of any crime or violence.

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I so appreciated DanK’s Torture Timeline on DailyKos. That I created a SMILIE Timeline version, which I’ve imported into Dipity, and embedded below.

I intend to keep this updated with further developments, and fill some events I though should have been included. But I thought I’d share.’

They’re going to get away with it.

I mean those Bush administration officials who redefined torture for the twenty-first century, and brought America’s longstanding enthusiasm for torture out of the closet.

Yeah. Them.

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It was five years ago today that we first glimpsed the pictures from Abu Ghraib.

We were told that it was all the fault of “a few bad apples.”

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This is getting ridiculous. Now conservatives are volunteering to be waterboarded. Now? Seriously? Where were they for the past eight years, when we were doing that and much, much more to people, many of whom weren’t guilty of more than jaywalking, let alone of terrorism against the United States?

Now, here comes Sean Hannity, belatedly offering himself up to be waterboarded.

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I’ve been spending my evenings pouring over the torture memos. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, or what I expect to find, but I want to get an idea of how bad it got. (Besides, you can find amazing things in the footnotes. Ask Marcy Wheeler a/k/a EmptyWheel. Though if I found something, it’d be days before I actually had time to post about it. Maybe even a week. Unless I just did a quick copy-and-paste. Otherwise, I’m pretty much left with analysis long after the story has broken.)

It won’t make headlines, but I have given the “torture memos” a nickname, if only in my own head: “The Not-So-Funny Papers” or the “Un-Funny Papers.”

Anyway, while researching material for a possibly upcoming post, I came across all kinds of editorial cartoons about the Bush administrations torture policies. “The Not-So-Funny Papers” popped into my head again, and this post was born as a means of sharing them.

Enjoy.

We did this 266 times.

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This is probably one of those times when I should keep my mouth shut. But why start now?

Suffice it to say, I’m not a huge fan of the Pope. (See a few of my previous posts for confirmation or more backstory than you probably want to know.) No awful thing he says ca surprise me at this point.

On the other hand, the pontiff still has the potential to leave me Pope Rehabilitates Holocaust Denier – NYTimes.com“>utterly mystified.

Pope Benedict rehabilitated on Saturday a traditionalist bishop who denies the Holocaust, despite warnings from Jewish leaders that it would seriously harm Catholic-Jewish relations and foment anti-Semitism.

The Vatican said the pope issued a decree lifting the excommunication of four traditionalist bishops who were thrown out of the Roman Catholic Church in 1988 for being ordained without Vatican permission.

The four bishops lead the ultra-conservative Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), which has about 600,000 members and rejected modernizations of Roman Catholic worship and doctrine.

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Finally.

With this, I think Obama is off to a good start.

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Ed. Note: The image below contains violent and explicit images and video footage. NSFW and possibly a trigger.

I’ll be honest. I haven’t paid much attention to Bush’s lame “victory lap,” as the clock finally runs out on his administration. I have no more stomach for hearing the man speak than I ever did before. And certainly not to hear him prattle on about his “legacy.”

Maybe it’s because I spent a good bit of the holiday rearching videos about how and why the United States came to join the company of those state that practice and/or facilitate torture.
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