I bought a bargain basement trio of action/sci-fi films for brainless entertainment over the Easter holidays.  We watched the last one tonight-Independence Day.

What's stuck in my mind now is the image of the Will Smith character dragging, verbally abusing and taking out his frustrations on by kicking, his alien captive.  What's more, it's meant to be funny, and, since I don't remember it from the first time round, maybe back in 1997 I laughed along with everybody else.

I feel a bit sick now. We are the stories we tell ourselves.

It is too early for it to be up on YouTube, but Keith Olberman had an interview with Janis Karpinski, the retired U.S. Army Brigadier General in charge of Abu Ghraib.  The general generally excoriated Rumsfield, Cheney and Bush for allowing the scapegoating of the "bad apples" under her command, some of whom are now doing time, when it is now public knowledge that they were operating under orders to employ newly designed "enhanced interrogation techniques" which were developed at the direction of and delivered by representatives of the  very top echelons of the Bush Administration, including Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfield.  In effect, she asked, if these techniques were so important to national security why did not these worthies stand up and say that these soldiers were following their orders.

Rachel Maddow then "disambiguates" the origin of those orders and their purpose by citing the now vastly more complete public record to show that the new techniques were developed from US military training procedures designed to familiarize pilots and others likely to be captured with techniques to which they might be subjected.  She noted that these techniques were understood to have been used by the Chinese Communist regime to obtain false confessions for propaganda purposes and the purpose of exposing U.S. servicemen to them was to enable them better to resist them and "return home with honor."

She notes that the urgency to deploy these techniques peaked before there were any prisoners on whom to use them, that the FBI, who had an excellent record of getting cooperation from and convictions of prisoners such as those involved in the '94 bombing of the World Trade Center had objected to and withdrawn from all of these interrogations, and makes a clear case that they were employed deliberately and specifically to create  false confessions corroborating the Bush Administration's justifications for preemptive war in Iraq.

Karpinski: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677#30356123

The Maddow segment, (the first segment) is not up yet.  The link is to the interview on Tuesday with Phillip Zelikow, a former State Department Attorney, who wrote a memo explaining why the use of the new techniques was a bad idea.  The Bush Administration attemped to retrieve and destroy all copies.

Maddow:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#30335366

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

AP:

We all remember how Dr Rice bristled at the suggestion that US had lost its high moral ground. Now we have proof of her hypocrisy. Is it the start of unravelling of Bush administration misdeeds or just damage control exercise to absolve Bush and Cheney?