Worst Case Scenario

If the Taliban decide Bergdahl has information they want, they can waterboard him until he talks. They can compress his body and cover him with insects, they can rob him of sleep and deny him food, they can beat him and slather his body with his own waste, they can shove sticks into his rectum, they can rape him, and they can murder him.

Heart-Wrenching Propaganda Video of Bowe R. Bergdahl, the U.S. Soldier Captured by the Taliban.

Worst Case Scenario

William Rivers Pitt | OpEdNews | July 22, 2009

The coward wretch whose hand and heart
Can bear to torture aught below,
Is ever first to quail and start
From the slightest pain or equal foe.- Bertrand Russell

The torture debate in America got real three weeks ago.

Oh, the debate has been around for years now, of course, ever since the photos of what happened in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq came to light. Men covered in feces, bent double and lashed to bedframes, their faith humiliated by the menstrual blood smeared on their faces, their bodies savaged by dogs, and worse, reports of the rape of women and children.

Yes, the torture debate has been around for a while now, recently revisited by President Obama, who condemned and discontinued the practice, and by enablers of torture like Dick Cheney and John Yoo, who have labored mightily to defend it. It’s been quite the hot topic among the chattering classes of American political discourse, a dialogue in three parts: one group condemning the practice, another group championing it, and a third group – the media professionals – taking no position and trying not to offend anyone, so they can get the big names back on the set for the Sunday shows.

Three weeks ago, however, the whole nature of the torture debate changed irrevocably when an American soldier from Idaho named Bowe Bergdahl somehow fell into the hands of the Taliban in Afghanistan. They have him now, and God help him, because it was the United States government under the administration of George W. Bush that set the terms for how anyone captured can and should be treated.

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Helicopter Ben is always good for a laugh

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44 Charged by U.S. in New Jersey Corruption Sweep

Agents led suspects from F.B.I. headquarters in Newark on Thursday. The inquiry began with questions on money laundering.

DAVID M. HALBFINGER | NYT | July 23, 2009

A two-year corruption and international money-laundering investigation stretching from the Jersey Shore to Brooklyn to Israel and Switzerland culminated in charges against 44 people on Thursday, including three New Jersey mayors, two state assemblymen and five rabbis, the authorities said.

The case began with bank fraud charges against a member of an insular Syrian Jewish enclave centered in a seaside town. But when that man became a federal informant and posed as a crooked real estate developer offering cash bribes to obtain government approvals, it mushroomed into a political scandal that could rival any of the most explosive and sleazy episodes in New Jersey’s recent past.

Peter J. Cammarano III, leaving the courthouse in Newark, was elected Hoboken mayor in June. He is accused of agreeing to help a supposed developer with his projects in exchange for cash.

It was replete with tales of the illegal sales of body parts; of furtive negotiations in diners, parking lots and boiler rooms; of nervous jokes about “patting down” a man who turned out to indeed be an informant; and, again and again, of the passing of cash — once in a box of Apple Jacks cereal stuffed with $97,000.

“For these defendants, corruption was a way of life,” Ralph J. Marra Jr., the acting United States attorney in New Jersey, said at a news conference. “They existed in an ethics-free zone.”

Mr. Marra said that average citizens “don’t have a chance” against the culture of influence peddling the investigation had unearthed.

Ralph J. Marra Jr., above center, acting United States attorney in New Jersey, said average citizens “don’t have a chance” against the culture of corruption unearthed.

Even veteran political observers were taken aback by the scope of the investigation. The mayors of Hoboken, Secaucus and Ridgefield were among those arrested.

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Related

Life Can Imitate Art: Indictments Describe Deals More Fit for a Crime Movie (July 24, 2009)

Syrian Sephardic Communities Shaken by Charges Against a Leading Rabbi (July 24, 2009)

Millionaire, Patron and Now Informant (July 24, 2009)

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The Cold War’s Hot Kitchen

A “typical American house,” Moscow, 1959: Nixon explains, Khrushchev complains. Photograph by the author.

WILLIAM SAFIRE | NYT | July 23, 2009

EXACTLY one-half century ago, one of the great confrontational moments of the cold war seized the world’s attention: Nikita Khrushchev, bombastic anti-capitalist leader of the Soviet Union, and Richard Nixon, vice president of the United States with the reputation of a hard-line anti-communist, came to rhetorical grips in the model kitchen of the “typical American house” at the 1959 American exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow.

I was in that kitchen, not because I then had anything to do with Nixon, the exhibition’s official host, but as a young press agent for the American company that built the house. The exhibit was designed to show Russians that free enterprise produced goods that made life better for average Americans. However, my client’s house was not on the official tour.

Instead, “Nik and Dick,” as the adversaries were promptly dubbed, were steered into the RCA color television exhibit, a consumer marvel at the time. This display of technical superiority must have irritated the Russian leader, who noticed the taping going on and demanded “a full translation” of his remarks be broadcast in English in the United States. Nixon, in his role as genial host, readily agreed, expressing a hope for similar treatment of his remarks in Russia.

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