Should Bush Administration Be Prosecuted for Torture?

That would be one hell of an acronym--but I'm all for any joint ventures for world peace n stuff--I say your first job (after the US joins the reformulated EU, Al Queda and the Taliban disband, Israel and Palestine sign a peace treaty and North Korea acknowledges the South Korean government as its rightful overlord,) is for you to get the Adams Bros to release a 3D multilingual version of Dwarf Fortress for the entire world to play in lieu of having actual wars. Because..you know, there wouldn't be time.

Some more horrific detail I wish I didn't have to know:

Taguba on Abuse Photos

On Thursday an article in the Daily Telegraph reported that Taguba, the lead investigator into Abu Ghraib abuse, had seen images Obama wanted suppressed, and supported the president's decision to fight their release. The paper quoted Taguba as saying, "These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency."

But Taguba says he wasn't talking about the 44 photographs that are the subject of an ongoing ACLU lawsuit that Obama is fighting.

"The photographs in that lawsuit, I have not seen," Taguba told Salon Friday night. The actual quote in the Telegraph was accurate, Taguba said -- but he was referring to the hundreds of images he reviewed as an investigator of the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq -- not the photos of abuse that Obama is seeking to suppress.

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I'm thinking that doesn't reassure me much, actually.

Some actual good news on this topic for a change:

Palau to take Uighur Guantanemo Detainees

And apparently several other Uighurs were accepted by Bermuda. A start, anyway.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/06/17/detainee.photos/index.html

The Senate passed a bill Wednesday to block the release of the detainee photos. Dunno what the house is gonna do.

I don't really know where to put this little gem I came across -- a good illustration of why armies should stick to fighting wars and leave utopianism to harmless academics. It's a critique of the new US Army field manual for what are now called "stability operations."

[ http://blogs.nyu.edu/fas/dri/aidwatch/2009/06/jaccuse_the_us_armys_developme.html ]

In essence, it just expanded the Army's mission to establish a "legitimate civil authority" that:

2009 US ARMY STABILITY OPERATIONS FIELD MANUAL said:

Respects freedom of religion, conscience, speech, assembly, association, and press. Submits to the will of the people, especially when people vote to change their government. Maintains order within its own borders, protects independent and impartial systems of justice, punishes crime, embraces the rule of law, and resists corruption. Protects the institutions of civil society, including the family, religious communities, voluntary associations, private property, independent businesses, and a market economy.

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IMO it'd be good if you started by achieving all that at home first, before using the military to export it abroad... and I can't decide which idea I like less, an army that tortures people in secret prisons, or an army that sets out to save the world. Perhaps the latter; history teaches us that the results are usually far worse.

Well, I think everything after the first two sentences is completely valid for COIN/restabilization operations. I think if we're trying to create Democracy it's going to fail. I don't think the rest of the stuff is out of line, though - otherwise we might as well just start killing every male between the ages of ten and fifty in every country we conduct these operations in. It'd be easier.

And I'd definitely prefer the torture in the secret prisons bit. I hate idealism with a passion - I mean, hell, Bush and the neocons have the *ultimate* idealist international philosophy.