Doonesbury examines the myth of the fiscally responsible Republican Party.

It’s long, but go read it anyway; here’s the final graf:

What we do know is that any useful information collected at the Black Sites has come at an enormous cost. The fact that “90 percent of the information was unreliable” and the rest is suspect is a problem. But a far greater problem is that, as a consequence of embracing the KGB model [designed to produce confessions, not information], we have made ourselves suspect and unreliable. The CIA’s secret interrogation program, like the lawless detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, is a major obstacle to any meaningful victory in the “war on terror.”

The goal of terrorism is typically to disrupt and frighten the target society, subverting their calm state, so that more attention is paid to the terrorist’s cause. It almost never works at creating change the terrorist would like, but it frequently succeeds at least in damaging the society targetted, not in the least because political leaders in these societies often play directly into the terrorist’s hands by capitalizing on the fear for political gain, or to increase their own fiefdoms.

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell is one such functionary; Bruce Schneier notes the following dialog from an oft-linked interview McConnell gave with the El Paso Times:

Q. So you’re saying that the reporting and the debate in Congress means that some Americans are going to die?

A. That’s what I mean. Because we have made it so public. We used to do these things very differently, but for whatever reason, you know, it’s a democratic process and sunshine’s a good thing. We need to have the debate.

Wow. “If we talk about security policy, people will die.” Um, bullshit. Democracy cannot thrive in an environment of secrecy. Certainly some intelligence should be secret, and some planning, but a hard line must be drawn between legitimate operational security and shadowy surveillance practices turned on regular citizens.

McConnell’s interview is interesting for a number of reasons, as pointed out at BoingBoing; perhaps most interesting is that he explicitly confirmed what the government has been refusing to comment on, even in court: that commercial telcos have been helping them spy on Americans. Also worthwhile are the links at the end of Schneier’s post, especially those to Salon.

He’s the American citizen arrested 6 years ago on charges he was working to build and detonate a “dirty bomb” on behalf of Al Qaeda. His case got interesting quickly, since the government maintained that he wasn’t entitled to any legal protections because he was held as an “enemy combatant”.

The courts eventually intervened, and the government was forced to try him in the regular courts, finally according him the same rights that ANY of us should have. Remember, this is a CITIZEN that the government simply declared to be beyond the reach of the rule of law. If that doesn’t make your blood run cold, we don’t know what will.

He may well have been a bad guy, but we’ll never really know, now, because our own government basically destroyed Padilla over the course of his 6-year incarceration (much of it in solitary confinement, and subject to CIA “interrogation techniques” designed to dismantle Padilla’s mental health) and only then tried him in public. He was found unfit to stand trial by a forensic psychiatrist, but they overuled her and tried him anyway. He was found guilty on all counts yesterday. From Lindsey Beyerstein:

Over Dr. Hagerty’s objections, Padilla was deemed fit to stand trial for conspiracy to murder people abroad and providing material support to terrorists operating in Bosnia, Chechnya and other foreign countries. A Florida court found Padilla guilty on all counts, Thursday.

By destroying Padilla, the government cheated us all out of justice. If Padilla had gotten the speedy trial that he was entitled to as an American citizen, he might have been legitimately convicted while he was still of sound mind. Instead, the government tortured an American citizen and thereby undercut the legitimacy their prosecution.

Glenn Greenwald has more:

For a substantial time, Padilla was denied all access to the outside world, including even access to a lawyer. In court, the Bush DOJ repeatedly argued that the President possesses the power to imprison even U.S. citizens indefinitely and with no charges simply by decreeing them to be an “enemy combatant,” with no review of any kind and no opportunity to contest the validity of the accusations.

The administration repeatedly contended that it was exercising this extraordinary and definitively tyrannical power — a power literally denied for centuries even to the British King — because it claimed that dangerous terrorists like Padilla could not be tried in a U.S. criminal court. Today’s verdict — along with scores of other terrorist convictions obtained with full due process rights both in the U.S. and other places, such as England — gives the lie to that claim.

All along, the Bush administration could have, should have, and was constitutionally obligated to charge Padilla with crimes if it wanted to imprison him. There is no more defining American liberty than the right to be free of arbitrary executive imprisonment, and like so many other basic liberties, the Bush administration violated and assaulted this right for no reason whatsoever.

[…]

Worse still, the notion that Padilla received a “fair trial” is dubious, to put it mildly, and will undoubtedly be vigorously contested on appeal. Last year, the New York Times obtained a copy of a video from Padilla’s imprisonment which showed techniques that can only be described as torture — systematic sensory depravation and gratuitous humiliations which clearly broke Padilla as a human being in every sense that matters, all before he had been charged, let alone convicted, of anything.