Republicans 0. Americans 219

Political Memo - Republicans Face Drawbacks of United Stand on Health Bill - NYTimes.com:

In their own words "

“There is no downside for Republicans,” Michael Steele, the Republican National Committee chairman, said Monday in an interview. “Only for Americans.”

But at the same time, many provisions of the bill that go into effect this year — like curbs on insurance companies denying coverage for pre-existing conditions, or the expansion of prescription drug coverage for the elderly — are broadly popular with the public. The more contentious ones, including the mandate for the uninsured to obtain coverage, do not take effect for years.

And in a week when Democrats are celebrating the passage of a historic piece of legislation, Republicans find themselves again being portrayed as the party of no, associated with being on the losing side of an often acrid debate and failing to offer a persuasive alternative agenda.

David Frum, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative research organization, said Republicans had tried to defeat the bill to undermine Mr. Obama politically, but in the process had given up a chance of influencing a huge bill. Mr. Frum said his party’s stance sowed doubts with the public about its ideas and leadership credentials, and ultimately failed in a way that expanded Mr. Obama’s power.

“The political imperative crowded out the policy imperative,” Mr. Frum said. “And the Republicans have now lost both.”

“Politically, I get the ‘let’s trip up the other side, make them fail’ strategy,” he said. “But what’s more important, to win extra seats or to shape the most important piece of social legislation since the 1960s? It was a go-for-all-the-marbles approach. Unless they produced an absolute failure for Mr. Obama, there wasn’t going to be any political benefit.”

Republicans also face the question of what happens if the health care bill does not create the cataclysm that they warned of during the many months of debate.

Closing out the floor debate on Sunday night, the House Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, warned that the legislation would be “the last straw for the American people.” Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, proclaimed several hours earlier, “Freedom dies a little bit today.”

…"

Remember. there's no downside for Republican'ts. Healthcare reform is only necessary for Americans. In their heart of hearts they don't see themselves as part of us. Americans exist to be frightened, bullied, manipulated and misled. The logic is irrefutable. No downside for Republicans, only for Americans.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/us/politics/23repubs.html?hp

Are you represented by a Highway Hypocrite?

Image via Wikipedia

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jen O'Malley Dillon, Democrats.org

mailto:democraticparty@democrats.org Date: Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 6:14 PM Subject: Are you represented by a Highway Hypocrite? Are you represented in Congress by a Highway Hypocrite? Highway Hypocrites voted against the Recovery Act and spent the last year attacking it -- while praising it in letters requesting funds and press releases touting projects in their districts. We've identified 118 Republican senators and representatives guilty of highway hypocrisy. But we know there are more. Click here to find out if you're represented by a Highway Hypocrite -- and help us expose others.

Related articles by Zemanta

• 200,000 To Lose Unemployment Benefits This Week (huffingtonpost.com)
• Like His Friends In Congress, GOP House Candidate In Tennessee Also Guilty Of Stimulus Hypocrisy (thinkprogress.org)
• Santorum to GOP: Stimulus hypocrisy 'does undermine your credibility.' (thinkprogress.org)

How to Spot a Deficit Peacock

How to Spot a Deficit Peacock By Michael Linden January 20, 2010

Deficit hawks come in a variety of breeds. There are those who believe that the long-term deficits pose serious risks, but that short-term deficits are necessary and wise during a recession. There are those who believe that deficits are always risky and should be avoided at all costs. Both kinds of hawks are genuine in their concern over our nation’s finances and are sincerely committed to working toward a more sustainable federal budget.

And then there is another species of deficit bird all together: the deficit peacock. Deficit peacocks like to preen and call attention to themselves, but are not sincerely interested in taking the difficult but necessary steps toward a balanced budget. Peacocks prefer scoring political points to solving problems.

1. They never mention revenues.

2. They offer easy answers.

3. They support policies that make the long-term deficit problem worse.

4. They think our budget woes appeared suddenly in January 2009.

President Bush took office when the nation had a record budget surplus . Yet he turned that surplus into a record deficit after repeatedly cutting taxes while prosecuting two wars and enacting billions of dollars worth of new spending programs without paying for any of them. When President Obama took office in the Congressional Budget Office projected a budget deficit of $1.2 trillion for the year. The steep decline from record surplus to record deficit resulted in a nearly $3 trillion increase in publicly held debt, the largest debt expansion in American history.

The steep decline from record surplus to record deficit resulted in a nearly $3 trillion increase in publicly held debt, the largest debt expansion in American history.

President Obama inherited the least balanced balance sheet in 60 years, took office in the midst of the deepest, most dangerous recession since the Great Depression. A large budget deficit is both necessary and wise during a recession. The extra spending and reduced taxes that cause big budget deficits help counter the recessionary spiral and ease its negative effects. Unfortunately, two terms of fiscal lunacy left the country in a much poorer position from which to respond to economic conditions, and left President Obama with little fiscal room to maneuver.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/01/deficit_peacock.html

Payback Time - Party Gridlock in Washington Feeds Fear of a Debt Crisis - Series - NYTimes.com

Payback Time - Party Gridlock in Washington Feeds Fear of a Debt Crisis - Series - NYTimes.com “After decades of warnings that budgetary profligacy, escalating health care costs and an aging population would lead to a day of fiscal reckoning, economists and the nation’s foreign creditors say that moment is approaching faster than expected, hastened by a deep recession that cost trillions of dollars in lost tax revenues and higher spending for safety-net programs.

Yet rarely has the political system seemed more polarized and less able to solve big problems that involve trust, tough choices and little short-term gain. The main urgency for both parties seems to be about pinning blame on the other, before November’s elections, for deficits now averaging $1 trillion a year, the largest since World War II relative to the size of the economy.…

The president is not giving up. On Thursday, administration officials say, he will sign an executive order establishing the 18-member National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. He also will name as co-chairmen Alan K. Simpson, a former Republican Senate leader from Wyoming, and Erskine Bowles, a moderate Democrat from North Carolina who, as President Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff, brokered a 1997 balanced budget agreement with Congressional Republicans.

“There isn’t a single sitting member of Congress — not one — that doesn’t know exactly where we’re headed,” Mr. Simpson said in a telephone interview Tuesday just before word of his role got out. “And to use the politics of fear and division and hate on each other — we are at a point right now where it doesn’t make a damn whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican if you’ve forgotten you’re an American.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/business/economy/17gridlock.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all

Op-Ed Columnist - Fiscal Scare Tactics - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist - Fiscal Scare Tactics - NYTimes.com

"The main difference between last summer, when we were mostly (and appropriately) taking deficits in stride, and the current sense of panic is that deficit fear-mongering has become a key part of Republican political strategy, doing double duty: it damages President Obama’s image even as it cripples his policy agenda. And if the hypocrisy is breathtaking — politicians who voted for budget-busting tax cuts posing as apostles of fiscal rectitude, politicians demonizing attempts to rein in Medicare costs one day (death panels!), then denouncing excessive government spending the next — well, what else is new?

The trouble, however, is that it’s apparently hard for many people to tell the difference between cynical posturing and serious economic argument. And that is having tragic consequences.

For the fact is that thanks to deficit hysteria, Washington now has its priorities all wrong: all the talk is about how to shave a few billion dollars off government spending, while there’s hardly any willingness to tackle mass unemployment. Policy is headed in the wrong direction — and millions of Americans will pay the price."

So, this choice is clear, begin to function or give in to fear.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/opinion/05krugman.html?ref=opinion

Dodd Denounces Pace of Banking Overhaul - NYTimes.com

Dodd Denounces Pace of Banking Overhaul - NYTimes.com

"Mr. Dodd said the White House was “on the right track” with its new ideas but warned of difficulty ahead.

“The refusal of large financial firms to work constructively with Congress on this effort borders on insulting to the American people, who have lost so much in this crisis,” he said.

He added that the financial services industry had sent “an army of lobbyists whose only mission is to kill the common-sense financial reforms the public demands.”

Only two days earlier, Mr. Dodd had sounded a different note when Paul A. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, testified on the two proposals he has championed. One would ban deposit-taking banks from proprietary trading — making market bets using their own money — and from owning hedge funds or private equity funds. The other would limit industry consolidation by capping the market share of a wide range of bank liabilities, not just deposits."

I'm far from sure that Senator Dodd isn't just as responsible for the slow pace of financial reform. To paraphrase Senato Durbin of Illinois, "Frankly, banks seem to own the Senate."

Expect more delay, followed by bipartisan fingerpointing, with a generous helping of fear, uncertainty and doubt. If that doesn't work, expect outright lies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/business/05regulate.html?th&emc=th

The Mendacity of Nope

Image via Wikipedia

(And the Horse He Rode In On, Part 2)

The majority of Americans oppose the Senate Healthcare Reform bill! Really!

But, When asked where they stand on what's in the bill, they support it, don't think it goes far enough.

So, how did we get here? Does it have anything to do with persistent, unending lies?

I think so.

Death Panels that never were, tax increases that will never be, fines that cannot be assesed, cuts invisble under a tunneling electron microscope are coming. The Republicans stir the dregs at the base of the tea cup, Tea Partiers become even more bitter. A new lie is added ever time things seem to be calming down and the main stream media covers the falsehoods as if they were indistinguishable from the facts.

Afte all, the opposition wouldn't tell bald=faced lies for partisan gain? Would they? Financial gain? Of course not, surrounded by parentheses, prefaced by another not!

It's proof positve that even pygmy elephants, moving as a herd can trample the most needed reform,just for the hell of it,

And the Horse Brown Rode in On. Part 1

Image via Wikipedia

I am sick and tired. I've been uninsured and uninsurable for twenty-five years. The faintest hope of healthcare reform has, at times, been all that stood between pain and insanity. It is the slim piton from which I've clung to life, like a climber clings to a rockface when all other anchors have failed.

I deeply resent the glee the mainstream media seems to feel. Apparantly, they think this is entertainment, so they're covering it like a season of some contact sport, some kind of hybrid of football, debate, WWE and ultimate fighting.

I lost my savings. I don't even have the mrmory of what a`pain free life is like   But, I have a condition , which most people from, if treated in the first few years. Unfortunately, it took over ten years to get a diagnosis. Waking, it burns. Sleeping, my jaw muscles clench so tight that I often wake up wit broken teeth. What about a mouth guard? Remember no insurance. Did you know, in many places even the Medicaid eligible aren't covered for dentistry? Where you are covered, you have to jump through hoops. Ever tried jumping through hoops when you're in so much pain tou ca;t see straight?

People who are trying to kill reform, whatever their reasons, are in fact trying to kill me. Every day without reform shortens my life and diminishes the quality of the life I have remaining. Bad teeth become inflammatipn become heart disease. Causalgia, burning pain, sustained  long enough can chane low blood pressure to high as if you flipped a switch. Inadequetely treated, these will kill. Without reform, tratment is a matter of luck.

But when people dig pits in the trail and camoflage them after lining the sides with punji sticks. They're trying to guarantee bad luck. That/s assault at best. At worst it's murder.

Maybe, I should have title this "And the Elephant Brown Rode in On."

So do you still eat hot dogs?

When I was much younger, I had the misfortune of reading a document that specified how many rat hairs and other loathsome contaminents were allowed in a frankfurter. It was years before I was able to eat a hot dog again. the weird thing was that back then chicken wasn't allowed, but rat hair (and other leavings) below a certain amount were.

Watching Lieberman and Nelson during the course of these negotiations, brings back those memories and the disgust. Did they ban chicken while alowwing rat leavings?

Will reconciled with the House Bill will it turn our stomachs?

Will it save lives?

in reference to: Negotiating to 60 Votes, Compromise by Compromise - NYTimes.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

Recovery?

In some places every other family suffers job loss. This seems to be the real tipping point on the path to every family in a neighborhood suffering. We started tolerating this inequality under Reagan. A generation now grown knows no other way to survive except to hope that spme of the value they produce will tridkle down from the advantaged people. Less and less does as time passes. Less and less will.

in reference to:

"A recent survey for the policy institute found that one in four families had been hit by a job loss during the past year and 44 percent had suffered either the loss of a job or a reduction in wages or hours worked. Economic insecurity has spread like a debilitating virus through scores of millions of American families. What kind of recovery are we talking about if blue-collar workers, and men and women without college degrees, and large percentages of ethnic minorities and the young and the poor are not part of it? And how can any recovery be sustained if economic insecurity is a permanent feature of even middle-class life?"
- Op-Ed Columnist - A Recovery for Some - NYTimes.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

Villains Hate Being called Villains

There shouldn't beany surprises here. All the insurace companies ever really supported was an expansion of their market. Even this is less an effort to derail reform, than a rationale for steply raising rates after reform's passage. They may even succeed in further weakining already weak cost sontrols.

in reference to: Democrats Call Insurance Industry Report Flawed - NYTimes.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

Five Senators Vote Against Public Need

Five Senators Vote Against Public Need:

"Besides Mr. Baucus, two Democrats, Senators Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, voted against both public option proposals. Two other Democrats, Senators Thomas R. Carper of Delaware and Bill Nelson of Florida, voted against the first amendment, but supported the second.
Mr. Carper said he liked Mr. Schumer’s proposal because it “would establish a level playing field” for competition between private insurers and the government plan.
The votes on Tuesday set the stage for a compromise under which the public plan could be offered in states where people could not find affordable private coverage, Mr. Carper said. He and Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, have proposed such a compromise."

Is fear what determines their votes? Right now the bill that came out of the Finance Committee could be titled the Insurance Industry Windfall Mandate because everyone is reqired to get insured, but insurance doesn't have to be affordable and the taxpayer will pay the difference in any case.
Where are the cost controls? Where is any pressure on the Insurance industry to lower their costs or even cut their overhead. Co-ops aren't going to do it because they are too small, by political intent. They're designed to look like an alternative without actually being one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/health/policy/30health.html?th&emc=th

Joe Lies! (Obama Heckled by GOP During Speech to Congress)

This isn't politics.

This isn't policy.

This is the spouse that lost custody accusing the winner of child molestaation, while planning to kidnap the child and go into hiding.

t r u t h o u t | Split on Health Care Goes Beyond Public Option

t r u t h o u t Split on Health Care Goes Beyond Public Option:

"The distance between the parties' leaders on health care was made clear on Tuesday when the No. 2 Republican in the Senate held a conference call with reporters. Asked by ABC News about a package of insurance market reforms that have been endorsed not only by President Obama but also by the insurance industry, Sen. Jon Kyl came out against all three proposals.

In particular, the Arizona Republican signaled that he opposes requiring insurance companies nationwide to provide coverage without regard to pre-existing conditions; requiring them to charge everyone the same rate regardless of health status; and requiring all Americans to carry health insurance.

'One of the concerns I have about the approach of the Democrats ... is an assumption that there has to be a national mandate on all insurers to do various things,' Kyl told ABC News when asked for his position the three issues.

'Those are techniques that states can, and some have, used in the past with fairly disastrous consequences,' he said.

Although the public option has dominated coverage of the health-care debate, Kyl's comments underscored that the rift between GOP leaders and Democrats runs much deeper."The more you look into [the views of congressional Republicans], the more you are going to find significant opposition up and down the board to most ideas on the table when it comes to comprehensive health-care reform," Jim Manley, the senior communications adviser to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told ABC News.

"Republicans are betting that the president will fail."

Kyl said he opposed guaranteed issue - requiring insurers to provide coverage without regard to pre-existing conditions - and community rating - requiring them to charge the same rate regardless of health status - because of concerns about cost.

"There's no question that it does raise costs," Kyl said. "And the objective here is to reduce costs."

Obama Supports Mandating Individuals to Have Health Insurance

Two years ago, the insurance industry commissioned a study of states that have pursued guaranteed issue and community rating.

The study, which was conducted by Milliman, Inc., found that these policies "have the potential to cause individuals to wait until they have health problems to buy insurance. This could cause premiums to increase for all policyholders, increasing the likelihood that lower-risk individuals leave the market, which could lead to further rate increases. If this continues, the pool or market could essentially collapse or shrink to include only the high risk population."

The insurance industry has since concluded, however, that these problems can be overcome by requiring all Americans to purchase insurance.

"If we can get everyone in the health-care system, we can do guaranteed issue, which means no denials on the basis of preexisting condition, and no rating by health status or gender," said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans (A.H.I.P.), the insurance industry's trade group.

Obama originally opposed requiring all adults to purchase health insurance. In fact, his opposition to an individual mandate was a flashpoint in his fight for the Democratic nomination against then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.

Since becoming president, however, Obama has changed his stance and he now supports an individual mandate, viewing it as essential to winning the insurance industry's support for guaranteed issue and community rating.

"So it's important when people ask me, why don't you do the insurance reform stuff and not expand coverage for more people, my answer is I can't do the insurance reform stuff by itself," Obama said Friday during a town-hall meeting in Montana.

"The only way that we can change some of the insurance practices that are hurting people now is to make sure that everybody's covered and everybody's got a stake in it," he said. "Then the insurance company are able and willing to make some of the changes." "

http://www.truthout.org/081909R?n

The Truth Ain't Funny If You're a Dittohead

But for tht rest of us…

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

What Makes Justice Scalia A Really Bad Judge

What Makes Justice Scalia A Really Bad Judge “This year, after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made public comments that seemingly may have questioned the need for more protection of private information, Reidenberg assigned the same project. Except this time Scalia was the subject, the prof explains to the ABA Journal in a telephone interview.

His class turned in a 15-page dossier that included not only Scalia's home address, home phone number and home value, but his food and movie preferences, his wife's personal e-mail address and photos of his grandchildren, reports Above the Law.

And, as Scalia himself made clear in a statement to Above the Law, he isn't happy about the invasion of his privacy:”

But, like other bad jurists, Scalia is unwilling to admit to a constitutional right of privacy because it doesn't mention the word. The philosophy of strict constructionism blinds him to the implication forcefully set out in the fourth and fifth amendments that make no rational sense without the concept of privacy. Also, the same philosophy requires him to ignore the fact that the constitution set forth rules regulating slavery, and how slaves were to be counted for purpose of congressional representation, without ever using the words slave or slavery.

Slaves and slavery existed. The constitution regulated them by implication. Yet Justice Scalia can't admitthat implication makes privacy a constitutional right. The philosophy that sees the law as something divorced from human practice and behavior probably explains some pof the bizarre opinions he's written as much as his briliant ones. Unfortunately, brilliant philosophy cab give you phlogiston instead of thermodynamics, epicycles instead of orbits, wonderful explication of things that never were, and a rage to with brilliant wit disprove and therefor silence simple self-evident truths.

The brilliantly wrong are the worst people possible to place in positionss of authority. The brilliant, bold but badly mistaken Justice Scalia is in position for life.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/05/googling_justic.html

DNC Web Ad: The Number Zero, Brought To You By The Party Of N-O

Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.

Restoring the Palimpsest until March 26, 2009

We share some bad habits of medieval monks. We decide a record isn't sll thst importsnt, scrub the parchment clean, then write our current, comforting interpretation on the page we insist is not just blank now, but has always been a tabula rasa.

Luckily, there are means of examination that reveal the original record and scholars like Dr. John Hope Franklin who patiently uncover the real past and set us on the path to our true destiny.

Dr. Franklin taught us to look and the looking expanded the scope of history to people who were written out and abandoned to the margins even when they were major players. He enabled us to see how far we've actually come and how far we yet must go.

He will be missed, because he cannot be replaced.

Alfred C. Ingram
Conceptual Design & Imaging
773 530-1554

Blueprint

Americans United for Change, a labor group, is beginning a “six-figure” buy for national cable TV stations to focus on several states whose lawmakers may be critical to providing votes that back the president’s plans. Jeremy Funk, a spokesman for the group, said the initial buy was about $350,000 and could double as the ad campaign runs through the time of the budget negotiations. The labor group’s ad highlights economic worries. Titled “Blueprint,” the ad closes by saying: “Call Congress. Tell them you support President Obama’s budget. Let’s all get to work rebuilding America.”

US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites - The New York Review of Books

US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites - The New York Review of Books:

There are no surprises here.

Their favorite show was "24". They thought it was real.

They thought our Constitution, and treaties like the Geneva Conventions, made us weak.

So, they did what Bin Laden could only dream of doing.

Damage no terrorist could ever do.

Damage we could only do to ourselves, from the inside.

Read these excerpts.

"…

The detainee would be photographed, both clothed and naked prior to and again after transfer. A body cavity check (rectal examination) would be carried out and some detainees alleged that a suppository (the type and the effect of such suppositories was unknown by the detainees), was also administered at that moment.

The detainee would be made to wear a diaper and dressed in a tracksuit. Earphones would be placed over his ears, through which music would sometimes be played. He would be blindfolded with at least a cloth tied around the head and black goggles. In addition, some detainees alleged that cotton wool was also taped over their eyes prior to the blindfold and goggles being applied....

The detainee would be shackled by [the] hands and feet and transported to the airport by road and loaded onto a plane. He would usually be transported in a reclined sitting position with his hands shackled in front. The journey times...ranged from one hour to over twenty-four to thirty hours. The detainee was not allowed to go to the toilet and if necessary was obliged to urinate and defecate into the diaper.

One works the imagination trying to picture what it was like in this otherworldly place: blackness in place of vision. Silence—or "sometimes" loud music—in place of sounds of life. Shackles, together sometimes with gloves, in place of the chance to reach, touch, feel. One senses metal on wrist and ankle, cotton against eyes, cloth across face, shit and piss against skin. On "some occasions detainees were transported lying flat on the floor of the plane...with their hands cuffed behind their backs," causing them "severe pain and discomfort," as they were moved from one unknown location to another.

…

A few weeks later, from October 6 to 11 and then from December 4 to 14, 2006, officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross—among whose official and legally recognized duties is to monitor compliance with the Geneva Conventions and to supervise treatment of prisoners of war—traveled to Guantánamo and began interviewing "each of these persons in private" in order to produce a report that would "provide a description of the treatment and material conditions of detention of the fourteen during the period they were held in the CIA detention program," periods ranging "from 16 months to almost four and a half years."

As the ICRC interviewers informed the detainees, their report was not intended to be released to the public but, "to the extent that each detainee agreed for it to be transmitted to the authorities," to be given in strictest secrecy to officials of the government agency that had been in charge of holding them—in this case the Central Intelligence Agency, to whose acting general counsel, John Rizzo, the report was sent on February 14, 2007. Indeed, though almost all of the information in the report has names attached, and though annexes contain extended narratives drawn from interviews with three of the detainees, whose names are used, we do find a number of times in the document variations of this formula: "One of the detainees who did not wish his name to be transmitted to the authorities alleged..."—suggesting that at least one and perhaps more than one of the fourteen, who are, after all, still "held in a high-security facility at Guantánamo," worried about repercussions that might come from what he had said.

In virtually all such cases, the allegations made are echoed by other, named detainees; indeed, since the detainees were kept "in continuous solitary confinement and incommunicado detention" throughout their time in "the black sites," and were kept strictly separated as well when they reached Guantánamo, the striking similarity in their stories, even down to small details, would seem to make fabrication extremely unlikely, if not impossible. "The ICRC wishes to underscore," as the writers tell us in the introduction, "that the consistency of the detailed allegations provided separately by each of the fourteen adds particular weight to the information provided below."

The result is a document—labeled "confidential" and clearly intended only for the eyes of those senior American officials to whom the CIA's Mr. Rizzo would show it—that tells a certain kind of story, a narrative of what happened at "the black sites" and a detailed description, by those on whom they were practiced, of what the President of the United States described to Americans as an "alternative set of procedures." It is a document for its time, literally "impossible to put down," from its opening page—

Contents Introduction 1. Main Elements of the CIA Detention Program 1.1 Arrest and Transfer 1.2 Continuous Solitary Confinement and Incommunicado Detention 1.3 Other Methods of Ill-treatment 1.3.1 Suffocation by water 1.3.2 Prolonged Stress Standing 1.3.3 Beatings by use of a collar 1.3.4 Beating and kicking 1.3.5 Confinement in a box 1.3.6 Prolonged nudity 1.3.7 Sleep deprivation and use of loud music 1.3.8 Exposure to cold temperature/cold water 1.3.9 Prolonged use of handcuffs and shackles 1.3.10 Threats 1.3.11 Forced shaving 1.3.12 Deprivation/restricted provision of solid food 1.4 Further elements of the detention regime....

—to its stark and unmistakable conclusion:

The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Such unflinching clarity, from the body legally charged with overseeing compliance with the Geneva Conventions—in which the terms "torture" and "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" are accorded a strictly defined legal meaning—couldn't be more significant, or indeed more welcome after years in which the President of the United States relied on the power of his office either to redefine or to obfuscate what are relatively simple words. "This debate is occurring," as President Bush told reporters in the Rose Garden the week after he delivered his East Room speech,

because of the Supreme Court's ruling that said that we must conduct ourselves under the Common Article III of the Geneva Convention. And that Common Article III says that, you know, there will be no outrages upon human dignity. It's like—it's very vague. What does that mean, "outrages upon human dignity"?^[5]

In allowing Abu Zubaydah and the other thirteen "high-value detainees" to tell their own stories, this report manages to answer, with great power and authority, the President's question."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22530