jjjveryness.com

From Time:

According to a former senior American official, it appears another locale can be added to the international roster of interrogation sites — one both more obscure and potentially more controversial than the alleged sites in Poland and Romania. The source tells TIME that, in 2002 and possibly 2003, the U.S. imprisoned and interrogated one or more terrorist suspects on Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean controlled by the United Kingdom.
…
[CIA Director] Hayden’s attempt to set the record straight [about the US’ practices on Diego Garcia] has failed to quiet British protests about American activities on the island. Instead, an All Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition has begun an investigation, raising a variety of pointed questions about the island with Gordon Brown’s Labour government. Speaking to the BBC, Labor MP and Foreign Affairs Committee member Fabian Hamilton said this week that, “I think it’s important the British government makes plain its … deep concern that it’s not being told the truth and that our territories are being used for these purposes.”
…
Hamilton’s Committee insists that Britain can no longer take at face value America’s assurances that it is not torturing prisoners, and, in a clear reference to Diego Garcia, said the U.K. now bears a “legal and moral obligation” to make certain that no British territory abets American rendition flights or interrogations.

From the Independent:

President George Bush signed off with a defiant farewell over his refusal to accept global climate change targets at his last G8 summit.

As he prepared to fly out from Japan, he told his fellow leaders: “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.”

President Bush made the private joke in the summit’s closing session, senior sources said yesterday. His remarks were taken as a two-fingered salute from the President from Texas who is wedded to the oil industry. He had given some ground at the summit by saying he would “seriously consider” a 50 per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2050.

From USA Today:

In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday, 28% of Americans approve of the job Bush is doing; 69% disapprove. The approval rating matches the low point of his presidency, and the disapproval sets a new high for any president since Franklin Roosevelt.

The previous record of 67% was reached by Harry Truman in January 1952, when the United States was enmeshed in the Korean War.

Bush’s rating has worsened amid “collapsing optimism about the economy,” says Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies presidential approval. Record gas prices and a wave of home foreclosures have fueled voter angst.

Bush also holds the record for the other extreme: the highest approval rating of any president in Gallup’s history. In September 2001, in the days after the 9/11 attacks, Bush’s approval spiked to 90%. In another record, the percentage of Americans who say the invasion of Iraq was a mistake reached a new high, 63%, in the latest poll.

I’d love to know what 28% percent of Americans approve of.

Yesterday, the memos written by John Yoo that became the executive branch’s rationalization for torture, among other things, became public. The 81 page brief provides the rationale the executive branch employed (provided by a junior lawyer at the justice department) for unsettling scores of years of established law and engaging in torture. Commentary abounds.

Vanity Fair has written a breath-taking account of America’s role in torture. In 2006 Bush signed the Military Commissions Act, protecting the leaders involved from any future criminal prosecution. The VF article concludes with the consideration that blanket immunity exposes these government leaders and lawyers to war crimes prosecution internationally. One of the stipulations for international prosecution of war crimes is that the country of residence of the alleged law-breakers would not prosecute on their own. So by providing absolution from American prosecution, Rumsfeld, Bush, Yoo, etc are now exposed to prosecution by the world.

I can’t say whether the American government would ever allow high ranking administration officials to be prosecuted for such heinous acts. Then again, under Nixon’s presidency high ranking officials were prosecuted for Whitewater, his vice president resigned amidst bribery and tax evasion charges and ultimately Nixon himself stepped down.

At present no ranking officials have been held accountable for any actions ranging from gross intelligence failures leading up to 9/11, the complete mischaracterization of Iraq’s involvement to generate a war, or the American sponsored torture of prisoners.

I almost long for the days of our more moral corruption.