The Republican Guantanamo Bay Torture Camp Fetish

Strangely absent from the public view has been outgoing Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, the fanatical authoritarian who is stepping down from a safely gerrymandered Michigan congressional seat for a career in right-wing talk radio. Rogers was a Sunday morning fixture for months as he defended the NSA Stasi for unconstitutional mass surveillance and data-mining as well as continued to pull out unsubstantiated allegations that former government contractor turned patriotic whistleblower Edward Snowden was a Russian spy. Well this Sunday he has made his return to the morning slimefest to champion the US offshore torture facility and concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay.

The occasion for the puffy fascist's return to national television is that the recently abducted alleged mastermind of the 2012 Benghazi embassy attack Ahmed Abu Khattala is now in The Homeland awaiting trial in a - GASP - civilian court. Rogers, a real knuckle-dragger who used to work for the FBI Gestapo appeared on CNN's State of the Union to decree that Khattala was an "enemy combatant" - that wonderful little designation dreamed up by Bush administration legal eagles to circumvent the Constitution and should be thrown into captivity at the blot on the American global reputation at Gitmo. Rogers primary beef is that Khattala has to this point been "uncooperative" when interrogated by US goons and there is nothing like some torture and waterboarding in the balmy military occupied extrajudicial facility in Cuba to loosen his tongue and cop to the embassy attack.

According to a story in Politico (the actual SOTU transcript was not available) in a story entitled "Rogers: Khatallah process brings up more questions", Rogers who is a pathological liar for his history of bogus statements on Snowden and Glenn Greenwald makes the case for Gitmo as:

“Think about the sheer expense, the manpower, the planning to remove him from the battlefield, put him on a U.S. ship, steam him across the ocean to the United States to be presented to a U.S. federal judge, and we had to ask ourselves, is this, are we looking at what's happening in Iraq and Syria, is this a legal matter? Is this a criminal engagement or enemy combatants we need to strike and hold in a different way?” the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said on CNN's "State of the Union."

If this tactic is to be used during the apprehension of anyone engaged in terrorism around the world, the Michigan Republican said, “we better start building prisons by the dozens." The prison facility at Guantánamo Bay is already capable of holding such suspects, he said.

Rogers said that the time investigators spent interviewing Khatallah on his trip over the Atlantic was not enough and that he has been “compliant but not cooperative.”

“You can't say you'll do it in 10 days or three days or seven days. Remember, he's affiliated with Al Sharia in Libya, which is certainly affiliated with Al Qaeda — these are dangerous folks. If he doesn't give us anything, and we get him to put him in jail, what have [we] accomplished? I argue we've spent a lot of money and not gained anything valuable for pushing back on terrorists around the world,” Rogers said.

Rogers is once again just pulling stuff out of his ass. Foremost is the insistence of using the term "terrorists" as an all-encompassing one to describe what are effectively religious militants, such is al Qaeda and ISIS (which the US to some degree likely overtly or covertly supports) who are engaged in civil wars as such. The entire pretense of the phony war on terror is bullshit in that "terrorism" is a tactic and acts of war in the myriad of conflicts that Uncle Scam is fueling produces an array of militants, freedom fighters, holy warriors, insurgents etc and to label them all as "terrorists" is dishonesty of the utmost. But Rogers knows this very well being that the Guantanamo Bay legal limbo and torture facility is ultimately going to house American citizens, most of them domestic political dissidents and opponents of the fascist system that gives Rogers and his fellow traitors a hard on. What would the purpose be of building a totalitarian system of surveillance and the militarized police forces that support it if there aren't prisons into which to throw the targets?

This is all going to be coming home to roost very soon when the political climate is just right to go live with the full blown imposition of tyranny - the trigger could be an economic collapse (which is looming) or that new 9/11 event that Dick Cheney has been making the rounds promoting as though he knows something that the rest of us don't. Either of which would suit Rogers and his fellow torture fetishists in the GOP like Ted Cruz, Peter King, John McCain and Lindsey Graham as well as the legion of lesser known although equally depraved authoritarians for they will be the ones who are involved in deciding exactly who is going to end up in those prisons when the time comes. 

Time to Let the American Enabling Act Expire

In an all too rare display of chutzpah in post-September 11, 2001 America which has been hammered home incessantly as 'the day when everything changed' for nearly twelve and a half years by fascist opportunists there is a growing move to pushback against Obama's NSA Stasi and its illegality. Without delving into the depths of speculation and conspiracy trafficking it is apparent that the USA PATRIOT Act was to 9/11 what the Enabling Act was to the Reichstag Fire in the terms of historical analogies. While admittedly less ostentatious than the depraved Nazi regime and their orgy of state sanctioned thuggery and oppression, this anti-American piece of legislation has largely served the same purpose in empowering a criminal state to act with impunity. With the firewall of the surveillance state and all of its proctor - like the unhinged fascist demagogue Mike Rogers who is popping off today about stringing up journalist Glenn Greenwald by his balls for doing his job - flying like antibodies to protect a diseased system against any attempts to implement even the most tepid of controls over the NSA spying monstrosity which are destined to fail. The corruption is just too deeply entrenched and there is too much money and power at stake to expect a failed political system to function by implementing the now laughably outdated term of 'checks and balances'. So it is now being proposed to just let the American enabling act expire which would be a good start, having a national holiday every September 10th to celebrate the public burning of this fascist travesty and toast the trial and imprisonment of all who have foisted it upon us would be ideal.

That being said and according to a story in The Guardian (the state media is too busy performing necrophilia on the corpse of Phillip Seymour Hoffman to be bothered with covering actual news) members of the House Judiciary Committee boldly challenged Obama/Holder lackeys from the Justice Department. In demanding that the NSA bulk collection of telephone "metadata" be reigned in and the USA FREEDOM Act be supported that the most insidious piece of legislation in the lifetimes of all Americans currently alive be allowed to simply expire come renewal time in June of 2015 -  a mere decade after a sunset clause was to have rid of us all of this abomination. The "metadata" phone collection also does not cover the actual content collection which the Obama regime and the filth like Mike Rogers are so desperate to keep secret therefore the regular "two minutes hate" sessions denouncing Greenwald and former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden who are both rising to the top of that kill list that El Presidente presides over. That it is Congressman James Sensenbrenner, a father of the PATRIOT Act himself who is now one of the most vocal opponents is telling, it is his very own Frankenstein monster careening through the village today.

I excerpt from the Guardian piece, entitled "House committee urges US government to get behind NSA reform bill":

Members of Congress who want to end the National Security Agency's mass collection of Americans’ phone data sharply warned the Obama administration on Tuesday to get behind a bill to end the controversial practice, or risk losing the counter-terrorism powers provided by the post-9/11 Patriot Act.

Deriding the paucity of legislative alternatives after President Obama's announcement last month that he wants to transfer the responsibility for bulk collection out of the NSA, congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, the co-sponsor of the USA Freedom Act, told deputy attorney general James Cole at a House judiciary committee hearing that "you will get nothing" if the administration does not endorse the bill.

AND -

John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the panel, warned that permitting bulk data collection to continue unabated risked congressional support for the entire portion of the Patriot Act the government claims authorizes it, known as Section 215, a provision set to expire on 1 June 2015. "We should address bulk collection today, or we risk losing all of Section 215 this time next year," Conyers said.

AND -

Much as support for bulk surveillance is a bipartisan position in the House intelligence committee, opposition in the judiciary committee is bipartisan. Liberal Democrat Zoe Lofgren and conservative Republican Darrell Issa, both of California, probed Cole to say on the record that the NSA phone records trove includes legislators' call records, something the NSA has been hard-pressed to deny on the record.

"202-225 and four digits. Do you collect it?" Issa asked Cole, referring to the prefix of office numbers for members of the House of Representatives.

"Probably we do," Cole answered.

Issa rejoindered that he had been in touch with the deputy prime minister of Lebanon after accusations emerged that the official had given money to Hezbollah, warning that a senior member of Congress was only two degrees of separation from terrorists.

It is about damned time that Congressman Issa stopped pissing away taxpayer dollars on politically motivated witch hunts and devoted some time and effort towards getting these fascists not only under control but stripped of their God mode power to spy on everything that millions of law abiding American citizens do. Not only that but to also address the ongoing data-mining and exactly why that massive NSA facility sitting in a remote area of Utah is needed if the American Stasi is NOT collecting content for future persecution of dissidents. The USA PATRIOT Act should be stricken from the law of the land and the Constitution restored. All that it is going to take is a bit of effort from a failed and feckless Congress but at least there are signs of life albeit they are faint.

Were this to be allowed to happen I would be the first one to volunteer to kick in some money to deport Mike Rogers to a country where they have a similar contempt for journalists - Egypt seems to be a prime location these days and if that doesn't work there are plenty of other authoritarian regimes that would love to have a deranged swine like this guy as a key member of their intelligence service goon squads.  As I have previously noted, he conjures up valid comparisons to  the similarly minded thug Reinhard Heydrich and would very fittingly have belonged in a prior historical era given his blatant and constant state of venomous contempt for anything other than the most tyrannical of political systems.

There will be no stopping this ongoing use of the Constitution as so much toilet paper until the USA PATRIOT Act is revoked and relegated to our national history as the shameful attempt to eliminate our very cherished freedoms that it has always been. 

(Image: Dees Images)