If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the website Wexler Wants Hearings, where Judiciary Committee members Robert Wexler (D-FL), Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) call for impeachment hearings for Vice President Cheney. If you’re the kind of weirdo who thinks the rule of law is a good thing, I strongly encourage you to sign the petition supporting them and then tell everyone you know about it. They have 56,000 people already in just two days, and the more clamor they hear from us here in Lilliput, the more willing they’ll be to go further.
Three New Democrats in Impeachment Effort
Robert Wexler (D-FL), Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), all members of the House Judiciary Committee, have created a website calling for impeachment hearings for Vice President Cheney:
This is particularly significant because Wexler isn’t a member of the progressive caucus, which indicates the center of gravity on the issue is shifting. The site has additional information, including their new op-ed and ways to support them.
Junk Media Makes Us Sick
From Stop Big Media and the talented Matt Thompson. (See some of Thompson’s previous work here.) You may notice how both videos make use of the work of a certain progressive cartoonist.
TomDispatch: Greg Grandin on the Torturable and the Untorturable
The Unholy Trinity
Death Squads, Disappearances, and Torture — from Latin America to Iraq
By Greg GrandinThe world is made up, as Captain Segura in Graham Greene’s 1958 novel Our Man in Havana put it, of two classes: the torturable and the untorturable. “There are people,” Segura explained, “who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea.”
Then — so Greene thought — Catholics, particularly Latin American Catholics, were more torturable than Protestants. Now, of course, Muslims hold that distinction, victims of a globalized network of offshore and outsourced imprisonment coordinated by Washington and knitted together by secret flights, concentration camps, and black-site detention centers. The CIA’s deployment of Orwellian “Special Removal Units” to kidnap terror suspects in Europe, Canada, the Middle East, and elsewhere and the whisking of these “ghost prisoners” off to Third World countries to be tortured goes, today, by the term “extraordinary rendition,” a hauntingly apt phrase. “To render” means not just to hand over, but to extract the essence of a thing, as well as to hand out a verdict and “give in return or retribution” — good descriptions of what happens during torture sessions.
Retraction
Please note that Ken Silverstein has retracted the most important part of the post several days ago about Silvestre Reyes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. (I mentioned this below.) Silverstein now says Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA executive catching blame for the destruction of the Al Qaeda interrogation tapes, is NOT in business with a brother of Reyes.