One of the Best Things Democrats Have Going for Them Between Now and November 2016

And all they have to do is let it sit there.

Sen. Robert Byrd, redux, after the arbitrary Iraq War began

And now, again from Sen. Robert Byrd, rest his soul, from September 13, 2006, long after George W. Bush, VP Dick Cheney and their administration arbitrarily took us into the long, wrong and humanly and materially costly war we now know: September 11 has come and gone, and as we remember those lost on that fateful day, and contemplate events since the horrific attack, one truth stands out. The war in Iraq has backfired, producing more recruits for terrorism, and deep divisions within our own country. It is a war we should never have begun. The detour from our attack on Bin Laden and his minions, hiding in the cracks and crevices of the rough terrain of Afghanistan, to the unwise and unprovoked attack on Iraq has been a disastrous one. … Where is the America of restraint, of peace and of inspiration to millions? Where is the America respected not only for her military might, but also for her powerful ideas and her reasonable diplomacy? Our country may have deviated occasionally from its positive global image in the past, but Abu Ghraib, the body snatching for torture, euphemistically called rendition, Presidential directives which unilaterally alter conditions of the Geneva Convention -- these are not the stuff of mere slight deviations from the America of peacefulness, fairness, and goodwill.… I cannot remember a time in our history when our elected leaders have failed the people so completely, and yet, so far, are not held accountable for costly misjudgments and outright deceptions. …Secretary Rumsfeld… President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. These men continue to try to make the American public swallow whole the line that the war in Iraq is the front line of a global war on terror, which must be continued at all costs. Stay the course, they say, despite three years of discouragingly little progress in Iraq.… Some of our citizens have apparently been convinced that it is unpatriotic to criticize one’s country when that country is engaged in an armed conflict. In fact, in our land today, there is a troubling tolerance for government overreaching on fronts at home as well as abroad. This Administration has repeatedly used fear and flag-waving to blunt the traditional American insistence on the Bill of Rights, personal freedom of thought and action, privacy, and one’s right to speak and write as one pleases. Such a cynical exercise on the part of high officials of our government is unconscionable. It is shameful behavior for which there is no excuse. The Congress, under the control of the President’s party has been submissive, a lap dog wagging its tail in appreciation of White House secrecy and deception. Even the vast majority of the opposition party has been too quiet for too long -- unable to find its voice, stunted by the demand to “support the troops.”… President Bush insists that his war must go on. He defends warrantless wiretapping of our own citizens as essential to his cause, despite a court decision that the President has no such authority under our Constitution. He defends torture and rendition, and says that they have produced valuable evidence which has subverted several terror attacks on our country. But, his credibility is so damaged that it is difficult to believe him. He demands the authority to hold terror suspects indefinitely, and then to try them using military tribunals which deny basic rights, also in defiance of a Supreme Court ruling. He seems convinced that he can “win” a global war on terror despite the demonstrated failure of his policies of unilateralism, militarism, overheated rhetoric, and a pathological dislike of diplomacy. It is up to the Congress to change course and to stop the heinous raiding of constitutionally protected liberties by a White House which does not fully appreciate the true meaning of the word freedom. I hope that we may find the courage. Link to original post: http://byrd.senate.gov/speeches/2006_september/rumsfeld_resignation.html

Another "last" from this President

First it was the last flight from this President in Air Force One a few days ago and today, the last Presidential Press Conference.

Thank goodness.

We're getting closer and closer.

But what a doozey this one was.

I was crossing town as I heard the Chucklehead speak and just couldn't believe how delusional and misguided and mistaken and just out-and-out wrong he was, in spite of his conviction.

You can see his excuses for himself, as they come out of his mouth and mind.

What was surprising was when he got what seemed to be angry about the "30,000 people the Coast Guard took off rooftops" in New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina made landfall.

According to W, virtually the worst thing his administration did was putting up the "Mission Accomplished" poster on the aircraft carrier about Iraq, just after our (internationally illegal) invasion.

He described not finding WMD's as a "disappointment."

Disappointment?

With 4,223 confirmed American Soldier deaths based on his directed misinformation, it seems it should be considered, even by this clown, as much more than a "disappointment" but no.

This President is so convinced of himself, in spite of raw data and facts, he has no problems with his actions and non-actions.

What's really rich, though, didn't come from today's insane, disconnected-from-reality press conference. What was really great came this weekend.

It seems W indicted himself on, of all things, Fox (Faux) News.

W couldn't stop himself since, of course, he doesn't know anything of war or troublesome things like law or culpability or responsibility so he blurted out how, yes, he condoned, himself, torture, in order to get information out of suspects at Abu Graib.

Uh, what's that Mr. President?

Unbelievable.

Uh, Mr. President, you need to know it is internationally agreed that torture, even during war, is a war crime and that those who order torture could possibly be open to being tried for that war crime.

So here it is, a two-fer:

W indicted himself, possibly, for one and two, it happened on Fox News.

It was a great day for truth and all that's good and right.

Thre's hope for this country and world yet, in spite of all the damage this clown and his minions did in the last 8 years.

More of why we should all be angry--and wanting justice

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

The Bush Administration's Most Despicable Act

By Joe Klein from Time Magazine

"This is not the America I know," President George W. Bush said after the first, horrifying pictures of U.S. troops torturing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq surfaced in April 2004. The President was not telling the truth. "This" was the America he had authorized on Feb. 7, 2002, when he signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention — the one regarding the treatment of enemy prisoners taken in wartime — did not apply to members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. That signature led directly to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. It was his single most callous and despicable act. It stands at the heart of the national embarrassment that was his presidency.

The details of the torture that Bush authorized have been dribbling out over the years in books like Jane Mayer's excellent The Dark Side. But the most definitive official account was released by the Senate Armed Services Committee just before Christmas. Much of the committee's report remains secret, but a 19-page executive summary was published, and it is infuriating. The story begins with an obscure military training program called Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE), in which various forms of torture are simulated to prepare U.S. special-ops personnel for the sorts of treatment they might receive if they're taken prisoner. Incredibly, the Bush Administration decided to have SERE trainers instruct its interrogation teams on how to torture prisoners. (Read "Shell-Shocked at Abu Ghraib?")

It should be noted that there was, and is, no evidence that these techniques actually work. Experienced military and FBI interrogators believe that torture leads, more often than not, to fabricated confessions. Patient, persistent questioning using subtle psychological carrots and sticks is the surest way to get actionable information. But prisoners held by the U.S. were tortured — first at Guantánamo Bay and later in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Armed Services Committee report details the techniques used on one prisoner: "Military working dogs had been used against [Mohammed al-] Khatani. He had also been deprived of adequate sleep for weeks on end, stripped naked, subjected to loud music, and made to wear a leash and perform dog tricks."

Since we live in an advanced Western civilization, there needs to be legal justification when we torture people, and the Bush Administration proudly produced it. Memos authorizing the use of "enhanced" techniques were written in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Council. Vice President Dick Cheney and his nefarious aide, David Addington, had a hand in the process. The memos were approved by Bush's legal counsel, Alberto Gonzales. A memo listing specific interrogation techniques that could be used to torture prisoners like Mohammed al-Khatani was passed to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He signed it on Dec. 2, 2002, although he seemed a bit disappointed by the lack of rigor when it came to stress positions: "I stand for 8-10 hours a day," he noted. "Why is standing limited to four hours?"

It would be interesting, just for the fun and justice of it, to subject Rumsfeld to four hours in a stress position — standing stock still with his arms extended, naked, in a cold room after maybe two hours' sleep. But that's not going to happen. Indeed, it seems probable that nothing much is going to happen to the Bush Administration officials who perpetrated what many legal scholars consider to be war crimes. "I would say that there's some theoretical exposure here" to a war-crimes indictment in U.S. federal court, says Gene Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School. "But I don't think there's much public appetite for that sort of action." There is, I'm told, absolutely no interest on the part of the incoming Obama Administration to pursue indictments against its predecessors. "We're focused on the future," said one of the President-elect's legal advisers. Fidell and others say it is possible, though highly unlikely, that Bush et al. could be arrested overseas — one imagines the Vice President pinched midstream on a fly-fishing trip to Norway — just as Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator, was indicted in Spain and arrested in London for his crimes.

If Barack Obama really wanted to be cagey, he could pardon Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld for the possible commission of war crimes. Then they'd have to live with official acknowledgment of their ignominy in perpetuity. More likely, Obama will simply make sure — through his excellent team of legal appointees — that no such behavior happens again. Still, there should be some official acknowledgment by the U.S. government that the Bush Administration's policies were reprehensible, and quite possibly illegal, and that the U.S. is no longer in the torture business. If Obama doesn't want to make that statement, perhaps we could do it in the form of a Bush Memorial in Washington: a statue of the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner in cruciform stress position — the real Bush legacy.


Click to Print Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1870319,00.html

The scummy Bush Legacy

The New York Times

Eight Years of Madoffs

By FRANK RICH
Published: January 10, 2009

THREE days after the world learned that $50 billion may have disappeared in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, The Times led its front page of Dec. 14 with the revelation of another $50 billion rip-off. This time the vanished loot belonged to American taxpayers. That was our collective contribution to the $117 billion spent (as of mid-2008) on Iraq reconstruction — a sinkhole of corruption, cronyism, incompetence and outright theft that epitomized Bush management at home and abroad.

The source for this news was a near-final draft of an as-yet-unpublished 513-page federal history of this nation-building fiasco. The document was assembled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction — led by a Bush appointee, no less. It pinpoints, among other transgressions, a governmental Ponzi scheme concocted to bamboozle Americans into believing they were accruing steady dividends on their investment in a “new” Iraq.

The report quotes no less an authority than Colin Powell on how the scam worked. Back in 2003, Powell said, the Defense Department just “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ” Those of us who questioned these astonishing numbers were dismissed as fools, much like those who begged in vain to get the Securities and Exchange Commission to challenge Madoff’s math.

What’s most remarkable about the Times article, however, is how little stir it caused. When, in 1971, The Times got its hands on the Pentagon Papers, the internal federal history of the Vietnam disaster, the revelations caused a national uproar. But after eight years of battering by Bush, the nation has been rendered half-catatonic. The Iraq Pentagon Papers sank with barely a trace.

After all, next to big-ticket administration horrors like Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and the politicized hiring and firing at Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department, the wreckage of Iraq reconstruction is what Ralph Kramden of “The Honeymooners” would dismiss as “a mere bag of shells.” The $50 billion also pales next to other sums that remain unaccounted for in the Bush era, from the $345 billion in lost tax revenue due to unpoliced offshore corporate tax havens to the far-from-transparent disposition of some $350 billion in Wall Street bailout money. In the old Pat Moynihan phrase, the Bush years have “defined deviancy down” in terms of how low a standard of ethical behavior we now tolerate as the norm from public officials.

Not even a good old-fashioned sex scandal could get our outrage going again. Indeed, a juicy one erupted last year in the Interior Department, where the inspector general found that officials “had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.” Two officials tasked with marketing oil on behalf of American taxpayers got so blotto at a daytime golf event sponsored by Shell that they became too incapacitated to drive and had to be put up by the oil company.

Back in the day, an oil-fueled scandal in that one department alone could mesmerize a nation and earn Warren Harding a permanent ranking among our all-time worst presidents. But while the scandals at Bush’s Interior resemble Teapot Dome — and also encompass millions of dollars in lost federal oil and gas royalties — they barely registered beyond the Beltway. Even late-night comics yawned when The Washington Post administered a coup de grâce last week, reporting that Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne spent $235,000 from taxpayers to redo his office bathroom (monogrammed towels included).

It took 110 pages for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan research organization, to compile the CliffsNotes inventory of the Bush wreckage last month. It found “125 systematic failures across the breadth of the federal government.” That accounting is conservative. There are still too many unanswered questions.

Just a short list is staggering. Who put that bogus “uranium from Africa” into the crucial prewar State of the Union address after the C.I.A. removed it from previous Bush speeches? How high up were the authorities who ordered and condoned torture and then let the “rotten apples” at the bottom of the military heap take the fall? Who orchestrated the Pentagon’s elaborate P.R. efforts to cover up Pat Tillman’s death by “friendly fire” in Afghanistan?

And, for extra credit, whatever did happen to Bush’s records from the Texas Air National Guard?

The biggest question hovering over all this history, however, concerns the future more than the past. If we get bogged down in adjudicating every Bush White House wrong, how will we have the energy, time or focus to deal with the all-hands-on-deck crises that this administration’s malfeasance and ineptitude have bequeathed us? The president-elect himself struck this note last spring. “If crimes have been committed, they should be investigated,” Barack Obama said. “I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.”

Henry Waxman, the California congressman who has been our most tireless inquisitor into Bush scandals, essentially agreed when I spoke to him last week. Though he remains outraged about both the chicanery used to sell the Iraq war and the administration’s overall abuse of power, he adds: “I don’t see Congress pursuing it. We’ve got to move on to other issues.” He would rather see any prosecutions augmented by an independent investigation that fills in the historical record. “We need to depoliticize it,” he says. “If a Democratic Congress or administration pursues it, it will be seen as partisan.”

We could certainly do worse than another 9/11 Commission. Among those Americans still enraged about the Bush years, there are also calls for truth and reconciliation commissions, war crimes trials and, in a petition movement on Obama’s transition Web site, a special prosecutor in the Patrick Fitzgerald mode. One of the sharpest appointments yet made by the incoming president may support decisive action: Dawn Johnsen, a law professor and former Clinton administration official who last week was chosen to run the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice.

This is the same office where the Bush apparatchik John Yoo produced his infamous memos justifying torture. Johnsen is a fierce critic of such constitutional abuses. In articles for Slate last year, she wondered “where is the outrage, the public outcry” over a government that has acted lawlessly and that “does not respect the legal and moral bounds of human decency.” She asked, “How do we save our country’s honor, and our own?”

The last is not a rhetorical question. While our new president indeed must move on and address the urgent crises that cannot wait, Bush administration malfeasance can’t be merely forgotten or finessed. A new Justice Department must enforce the law; Congress must press outstanding subpoenas to smoke out potential criminal activity; every legal effort must be made to stop what seems like a wholesale effort by the outgoing White House to withhold, hide and possibly destroy huge chunks of its electronic and paper trail. As Johnsen wrote last March, we must also “resist Bush administration efforts to hide evidence of its wrongdoing through demands for retroactive immunity, assertions of state privilege, and implausible claims that openness will empower terrorists.”

As if to anticipate the current debate, she added that “we must avoid any temptation simply to move on,” because the national honor cannot be restored “without full disclosure.” She was talking about America regaining its international reputation in the aftermath of our government’s descent into the dark side of torture and “extraordinary rendition.” But I would add that we need full disclosure of the more prosaic governmental corruption of the Bush years, too, for pragmatic domestic reasons. To make the policy decisions ahead of us in the economic meltdown, we must know what went wrong along the way in the executive and legislative branches alike.

As the financial historian Ron Chernow wrote in the Times last week, we could desperately use a Ferdinand Pecora, the investigator who illuminated the history of the 1929 meltdown in Senate hearings on the eve of the New Deal. The terrain to be mined would include not just the usual Wall Street suspects and their Congressional and regulatory enablers but also the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a strangely neglected ground zero in the foreclosure meltdown. The department’s secretary, Alphonso Jackson, resigned in March amid still-unresolved investigations over whether he enriched himself and friends with government contracts.

The tentative and amorphous $800 billion stimulus proposed by Obama last week sounds like a lot, but it’s a drop in the bucket when set against the damage it must help counteract: more than $10 trillion in new debt and new obligations piled up by the Bush administration in eight years, as calculated by the economists Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz in the current Harper’s Magazine.

If Bernie Madoff, at least, can still revive what remains of our deadened capacity for outrage, so can those who pulled off Washington’s Ponzi schemes. The more we learn about where all the bodies and billions were buried on our path to ruin, the easier it may be for our new president to make the case for a bold, whatever-it-takes New Deal.

A new poll out right now and more from "W", the Chief Knucklehead

There's so much information coming out right now, about this last nightmarish 8 years of the Bush Administration it's dizzying.

Truly.

If only Molly Ivins were here to write about it--she was so right about this idiot.

Get this:

It seems "W" said "So what?" when told that there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq before he invaded that country in 2003. (Link to story and video here:
http://crooksandliars.com/cernig/bush-admits-al-qaeda-wasnt-iraq-invasion-so)

So what??

Are you effin' kidding me?

So what, George?

SO MORE THAN 4,219 AMERICAN SOLDIERS WOULDN'T BE DEAD!

So more than 100,000 Iraqis wouldn't be dead.

So thousands of American soldiers wouldn't be crippled by your stupid war.

So many more thousands of American soldiers wouldn't be suffering from PTSD.

So thousands of Iraqis wouldn't be crippled by your illegal, invasive, tragic war.

So we wouldn't still be in Iraq.

So we wouldn't have squandered the heretofore good American name and reputation if we didn't go in.

So there wouldn't be 2 million Iraqi refugees in the Middle East right now because their home country was blown apart, completely in violation of international law.

So there wouldn't have been an Abu Graib.

So there wouldn't have been all these pointless tragedies, stemming from this clusterbuck you created.

Anyone can go on and on here.

So what?

So we've squandered how much American capital on this mess so now we're in the largest debt of our country's history, just when we need money and infrastructure and jobs and much, much more, at home?

Holy cow.

How flip can one get?

Answer: "George Bush flip", that's how, and it's the worst, ever, like his Presidency.

And how does the American people feel about the "Knucklehead in Chief" now, at the end of this hellish nightmare?

Sure, most want him out of office.

According to a just-released poll from CNN, 75% of us want him out. (Link to original story here: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/12/26/bush.poll/index.html)

And that stands to reason.

But, get this--only 28% think he's the worst President ever.

Further proof, ladies and gentlemen, that Americans just don't know history--even their own.

What your government is doing in your name

From Slate Magazine, just now:


A Timeline to Bush Government Torture

Newly public evidence sheds greater light on Bush officials' efforts to develop brutal interrogation techniques for the war on terror.
By Mark Benjamin

Jun. 18, 2008 | For years now, the Bush White House has claimed that the United States does not conduct torture. Prisoner abuse at places like Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, it has asserted, was an aberration -- the work of a few "bad apples" on the night shift. When the CIA used "enhanced" interrogation techniques such as waterboarding (simulated drowning), the abuse, according to Bush officials, did not add up to torture.

But as more and more documents from inside the Bush government come to light, it is increasingly clear that the administration sought from early on to implement interrogation techniques whose basis was torture. Soon after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Pentagon and the CIA began an orchestrated effort to tap expertise from the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape school, for use in the interrogation of terrorist suspects. The U.S. military's SERE training is designed to inoculate elite soldiers, sailors and airmen to torture, in the event of their capture, by an enemy that would violate the Geneva Conventions. Those service members are subjected to forced nudity, stress positions, hooding, slapping, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and, yes, in some cases, waterboarding.

SERE training has nothing to do with effective interrogation, according to military experts. Trained interrogators don't work in the program. Skilled, experienced interrogators, in fact, say that only a fool would think that the training could somehow be reverse-engineered into effective interrogation techniques.

But that's exactly what the Bush government sought to do. As the plan rolled forward, military and law enforcement officials consistently sent up red flags that the SERE-based interrogation program wasn't just wrongheaded, it was probably illegal.

On Tuesday, the Senate Armed Services Committee conducted a hearing on the evolution of abusive interrogations under the Bush administration. Through a series of memos and documents released by the committee, some old and some new, the following timeline has now been established. Committee chairman Carl Levin, the senior Democrat from Michigan, discussed this timeline at length in his opening statement.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

July 2002 -- Richard Shiffrin, a deputy general counsel in the Department of Defense, called Lt. Col. Daniel Baumgartner Jr. from the military's SERE school. Shiffrin wanted information on SERE training techniques. Baumgartner testified on Tuesday that during this period, he received similar requests from the Defense Intelligence Agency and "another agency" he declined to name.

July 25 and 26, 2002 -- Baumgartner responded to the Pentagon request by sending two memos to the Pentagon's general counsel's office describing SERE training techniques. The memos discuss (among other things) sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, stress positions, waterboarding, slapping, sensory overload and diet manipulation. The hearing on Tuesday did not go into what information was sent to the DIA or the "other agency."

Aug. 1, 2002 -- The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel sent memos to Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel, about the definition of torture. It sent another memo to the CIA. The memo to Gonzales defined torture as pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." The CIA memo remains classified.

Week of Sept. 16, 2002 -- Interrogators from Guantánamo Bay traveled to the SERE school at Fort Bragg, N.C., for training by SERE staff.

Sept. 25, 2002 -- David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's counsel; acting CIA general counsel John Rizzo, Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes; and Michael Chertoff, then head of the Criminal Division at the Justice Department; all traveled to Guantánamo. They attended briefings on "intel techniques," according to a military after-action report.

Oct. 2, 2002 -- Jonathan Fredman, chief counsel to the CIA's counterterrorism center, went to Guantánamo. While there, Fredman discussed with military officials a classified memo on aggressive interrogation techniques prepared by a psychologist and psychiatrist who had attended SERE training at Fort Bragg, according to minutes from the meeting. In attendance was Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, a staff judge advocate at Guantánamo. Fredman explained that for the CIA, the Justice Department had to approve the use of "significantly harsh" techniques. He also agreed to show the military officials a copy of a CIA request regarding the use of those methods, so the military officials could see what such a request looks like. Among other things, military officials asked if the CIA used waterboarding, as taught through SERE. "If a well trained individual is used to perform this technique it can feel like you are drowning," Fredman replied, according to the minutes. "The lymphatic system will react as if you're suffocating, but your body will not cease to function. It is very effective to identify phobias and use them, i.e.; insects, snakes, claustrophobia." The meeting minutes also show a discussion about hiding detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Oct. 11, 2002 -- Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, who was in charge of Guantánamo, sent a memo to his superiors at U.S. Southern Command requesting approval of the use of three categories of increasingly brutal interrogation techniques. They included stress positions, exploitation of phobias, forced nudity, hooding, isolation, sensory deprivation, exposure to cold, and waterboarding. Attached was a memo from Beaver, justifying the legality of the techniques.

Oct. 25, 2002 -- U.S. Southern Command Cmdr. Gen. James Hill forwarded the request to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Early November 2002 -- Push-back: In a series of scathing memos, alarmed military officials from all four services raised questions about the legality and effectiveness of the techniques under consideration. The Air Force cited "serious concerns regarding the legality" of the techniques. The chief of the Army's international law division said some of the techniques, like stress positions and sensory deprivation, "cross the line of 'humane' treatment.'" He added that the techniques "may violate the torture statute." The Navy called for further legal review. The Marine Corps wrote that the techniques "arguably violate federal law."

Nov. 23, 2002 -- The interrogation of a prisoner named Mohammed al-Khatani began at Guantánamo. The list of SERE-based indignities visited upon Khatani is long. Among them: Khatani was forced to stand naked in front of a female interrogator, was accused of being a homosexual, was forced to wear women's underwear and to perform "dog tricks" on a leash. He received 18-to-20-hour interrogations during 48 of 54 days. (Last month, the Convening Authority for military commissions "dismissed without prejudice" the charges against al-Khatani.)

Nov. 27, 2002 -- Despite the concerns raised by military leaders, Haynes, the Pentagon general counsel, sent a memo to then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recommending approval of all but three of the techniques requested for use at Guantánamo by Dunlavey. Among the things Haynes recommended for approval: stress positions, forced nudity, use of dogs and sensory deprivation.

Dec. 2, 2002 -- Rumsfeld approved Haynes' memo authorizing the harsh techniques for Guantánamo. He added a now infamous handwritten note about forcing prisoners to stand for long periods: "I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?" A copy of the memo signed by Rumsfeld was sent from Guantánamo to Afghanistan.

Early December 2002 -- Senior staff at Guantánamo drafted standard operating procedures for using SERE techniques during interrogations. According to the procedures, SERE training techniques "can be used to break real detainees during interrogation." That included slapping, stripping, stress positions and hooding.

Dec. 17, 2002 -- Push-back: FBI officials balked at the Guantánamo standard operating procedure, writing in a memo that law enforcement officials "object to these aggressive interrogation techniques."

Dec. 20, 2002 -- Push-back: Alberto Mora, then general counsel of the Navy, meets with Haynes, the Pentagon general counsel. Mora strongly objects to the techniques approved by Rumsfeld for Guantánamo. A memo describing the meeting shows Mora told Haynes that the techniques approved by Rumsfeld "could rise to the level of torture."

Dec. 30, 2002 -- Two instructors from the Navy SERE program arrive at Guantánamo. The next day, they school 24 members of the interrogation staff about slapping and stress positions.

January 2003 -- The officer in charge of the intelligence section at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan viewed a PowerPoint presentation on the techniques approved by Rumsfeld on Dec. 2, 2002.

Jan. 9, 2003 -- Push-back: Mora met with Haynes again and objected to the interrogation techniques.

Jan. 15, 2003 -- Push-back: Mora urged Haynes to rescind the interrogation techniques authorized at Guantánamo. Mora said that if the abuse were not rolled back, he would sign a memo declaring that some of the more aggressive techniques approved by Rumsfeld "were violative of domestic and international legal norms." Rumsfeld rescinded his Dec. 2, 2002, memo authorizing harsh interrogation techniques.

Jan. 15, 2003 -- Rumsfeld established a "working group" to develop interrogation techniques to replace his Dec. 2, 2002, memorandum he had rescinded under pressure from Mora.

Jan. 24, 2003 -- A military attorney in Afghanistan produced an interrogation memo, which remains classified. A military report later divulged that the memo included some techniques approved by Rumsfeld on Dec. 2, 2002, including the use of dogs and forced nudity.

March 14, 2003 -- John Yoo, from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, drafted a memo on interrogations claiming that anti-torture law would not apply to some interrogations. Rumsfeld's working group has been widely criticized for disregarding the input of military attorneys such as Mora, and following Yoo's guidance.

Early 2003 -- Special Mission Unit forces in Iraq developed interrogation protocol based on techniques in use in Afghanistan. Interrogations included yelling, loud music, light control, exposure to heat and cold, sleep deprivation, stress positions and use of dogs for intimidation. The interrogation officer in charge of Abu Ghraib obtained a copy of the Special Mission Unit policy and submitted it to her command as proposed policy for use by conventional U.S. forces in Iraq.

April 16, 2003 -- Based on his working group's recommendations, Rumsfeld approved another list of interrogation techniques for use at Guantánamo. It authorized dietary manipulation, environmental manipulation and sleep "adjustment." It also said other techniques might be approved on request.

Aug. 13, 2003 -- Rumsfeld approved an interrogation program for a specific prisoner at Guantánamo, Mohamedou Ould Slahi. Documents from the plan remain classified. A Department of Defense inspector general report cites an FBI agent who saw a draft of the plan. The agent said it was similar to the plan for Khatani.

September 2003 -- SERE instructors are deployed to Iraq to assist interrogators, in response to a request from commander of the Special Mission Unit Task Force.

Sept. 14, 2003 -- Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, in charge of U.S. forces in Iraq, issued a standard operating procedure for interrogation that authorized stress positions, environmental manipulation, sleep management and use of dogs.

April 2004 -- Prisoner abuse by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib comes to light and becomes a worldwide scandal. Pictures showed forced nudity, stress positions, hooding, sexual humiliation and other SERE-based techniques.

-- By Mark Benjamin