Guantanamo Captive 900, a 17 year old orphaned boy who doesn't know his date of birth, was taken prisoner by the United States almost six years ago, in October of 2002. Although human rights activists have long suspected that about two dozen children and teenagers have been disappeared into Bush's Carribean Gulag, only in recent months the name and location of Mohammed Jawad have been revealed.

From an earlier post by Valtin:

Jawad, who was arrested as a teenager in Afghanistan in December 2002, is the first child soldier to be tried as a "war criminal" in modern times. In U.S. custody, he has suffered beatings, threats, physical isolation, sleep deprivation, been subjected to 24-hour bright lights, and more. His attorneys have called for letters to be written to the Convening Authority at Guanatanamo, asking them to withdraw and dismiss the charges against Jawad.

The Admin. of G W Bush has threatened the UK in a email. The email was read in open court to what should be the embarrassment of every American.

In an email to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which was sent on to the court, Stephen Mathias, a legal adviser to the US state department, said that the disclosure of information would cause "serious and lasting damage to the US-UK intelligence-sharing relationship and thus the national security of the UK, and the aggressive and unprecedented intervention in the apparently functioning adjudicatory processes of a longtime ally of the UK, in contravention of well-established principles of international comity."

This is the ongoing story of Binyam Mohamed, the detainee that was Rendered to Morrocco and had his penis sliced with scalpels. A British Court has ordered the release of documents that may prove that both the Brits and the US knew of this torture and more.

First of all I want to say this diary is not about denigrating the service of our military or making light of the heroism of our POWs. There are things about McCain's POW experiences that need to be put into perspective, because being a POW like John McCain doesn't automatically make one presidential material or particularly heroic. If this is true of any POW it is true of McCain in spades. Follow me below the fold for some straight talk.

In a speech to the American Legion today, Dick Cheney again defended the use of torture by the CIA.

You've got to admire the sheer scale of Cheney's hypocrisy.  For a draft dodger to stand up in front of a group of veterans, some of whom may have been tortured, and defend our country's use of "alternative interrogation techniques" takes some serious cojones.

Cheney said the CIA program involved "tough customers and and tough interrogations," but said the information obtained from prisoners prevented attacks and saved American lives.

Crossposted at Sandstorm.

Senator John McCain never misses an opportunity to remind people that he spent over five years as a POW in Hanoi. What he fails to see is that every middle class American has been a POW for the last eight years, in a class war waged by the Bush administration.

It's Democratic Convention time in Denver, and this week we're seeing some of the most promising '08 House and Senate candidates on display. Many have been struggling for a turn in the spotlight all year, as the presidential race continues to monopolize attention, volunteer energy and fundraising dollars.

Orange County, California's 46th Congressional District has been represented since 1988 by delusionally far-right Republican Dana Rohrabacher. But this year he faces a stiff challenge from Huntington Beach mayor and former city council member Debbie Cook.

Barack Obama and Debbie Cook in Newport Beach, CA

Rohrabacher is one of the worst Republican clowns in Congress, and Cook is a champion on all the issues that matter. The 46th district is ready to vote for a credible alternative to Rohrabacher. This race is winnable and Debbie Cook deserves to be on every progressive's list for donations and support.

More below the fold...

On a few occasions over the past couple of weeks, I have mentioned an initiative with respect to going on the attack against John McCain. With that, I have created a Google Group called "Know Your McCain" and we are looking to gather information (old and new), create viral videos, write blog posts and use social networking to spread the message about how dangerous John McCain is.

You can look for diaries with the tag "Know Your McCain", and some diaries will have the "Know Your McCain" in the title as well.  If you are interested in joining the Google Group or helping out with the Facebook group, please send me an email (address is in my profile).

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There are some Vietnam veterans groups who are looking to attack McCain based on the "collaboration" that he gave his captors.  While I am not going to give any opinion on whether McCain’s statements or "broadcasts" are off limits, or even relevant, I think there is a much deeper issue here that needs to be explored.  And since things have to be boiled down to bite size pieces so that many people can understand it, I’ll just state the following:

We were reminded recently that it's not politically correct to "hit the girl" or "criticize the little black man-child."  What about holding accountable ambitious politicians that happen to be former POWs?  Is there some unwritten rule that places them above public scrutiny?  Time and again, we have seen McCain campaign invoke his POW experiences to disarm critics and draw attention away from the fallacy of his candidacy.  Whether it’s McCain or one of his apologists, the story is the same, "I/he was a POW for Christ-sakes."  The recent height of hilarity was McCain’s defense of his "man-of-many-houses" status by invoking the POW meme, aided and abetted by Tom Brokaw’s unabashed obsequiousness.  I am waiting to hear, any day now, that McCain’s unremarkable tenure at the US Naval Academy has been somehow retroactively explained on the basis of his "future" POW experience.

I have never been tortured. But I have worked clinically with those who have, including U.S. POWs. I can tell you it breaks the mind and the body, the soul and the spirit, in a way that can never be forgotten.

Now John McCain cites his experience as a POW and torture victim as an anodyne to every mildly injurious political attack. While his painful experience as a POW matters in the history of the man, in our nation's history, what matters now is that McCain has betrayed that experience, and the lives of thousands he could both know and not know. In doing so, he also betrayed the ideals of American fair-play and justice, going back to George Washington (who forbid his revolutionary army to engage in torture, even if the British did). As everyone should know, those ideals were not realized fully, and we are still fighting for them today. But McCain has trampled them in the mud.

After reading this article about McCain's Ambien problem, I realized I had never read a summary of all of his mental problems that make it obvious he is unsuited to be president.

From the article:

In a presidential race marked by references to preparedness in the face of the 3 a.m. call, the revelation that presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain has taken the sleeping pill Ambien during his travels raises concerns that the rare side effects of the medication could impair his judgment.

Mental Impairment Reasons that Disqualify McCain from Being President:

More after the break...

Romney's probable draft-dodging during Vietnam is likely to keep him off the McCain ticket. It doesn't help Mitt's chances that he was in France under a draft deferment as a "clergyman" while John McCain languished as a POW in North Vietnam.

Almost immediately, two thoughts come to mind when I hear Lynndie England's name: The infamous photo of the nude Iraqi prisoner on a leash and The Stanford Prison Experiment.

In sentencing testimony, England, who had faced a maximum of nine years behind bars, said she was sorry for her actions but that she remained an "American patriot."

Lynndie England is incurious and unsophisticated. She doesn't read the newspapers. Were it otherwise she'd be as puzzled as her limited intellect would permit.

And the question she'd ask, if she could find anyone else to discuss such matters with is "was it fair?"

Defense attorneys for Mohammad Jawad, currently on trial in Bush's crooked military tribunal system at Guantanamo, are asking for a letter campaign by the public on Jawad's behalf. Jawad is the first child soldier to be tried as a "war criminal" in modern times. In U.S. custody, he has suffered beatings, threats, physical isolation, sleep deprivation, subjected to 24-hour bright lights, and more.

Last week, the California Legislature passed Senate Joint Resolution 19 (SJR 19), a resolution aimed at preventing California health professionals from engaging in coercive interrogations of detainees at Guantánamo and other U.S. military prisons.  This resolution makes California the first state in the nation to condemn the use of torture in the 'War on Terror', and helps protect California health care professionals by informing them of their legal and ethical obligations to 'do no harm'.  SJR19 also gives health professionals a legal reference to remove themselves from abusive situations should they have to contravene the orders of a military superior.

Erick Erickson, the editor of the far right Republican blog RedState, sent an e-mail to RedState supporters this morning urging the University of Illinois/Chicago to release documents related to Barack Obama's participation in the Annenberg Challenge on Excellence in Education, founded by Bill Ayers. For those of you not familiar with Ayers, he was a co-founder of the militant Weather Underground that took over Students for a Democratic Society in 1969. He has since reformed and is now a distinguished professor at the University of Illinois/Chicago.

Ayers' past is now being exploited by the far right in a shameless attempt to connect him to Barack Obama. In fact, there is absolutely no evidence that Obama and Ayers have had anything but an academic and philanthropic relationship. This is nothing more than an attempt to associate Barack Obama with a so-called "terrorist," who was never convicted, in the far right's broader attempt to cast Obama as different, foreign, "the other."

Erickson's e-mail and more commentary beneath the fold.

Charles J. Hanley, special correspondent for Associated Press (AP), has written a compelling, fascinating and sad tale of the execution of purported Korean "Mata Hari", Kim Soo-im, at the start of the Korean War. He linked her torture and death to the recent revelations about the more than 100,000 murders of leftists or suspected leftists sympathizers in 1950 by the U.S.-allied (and some would say puppet) regime of South Korea.

I'm sure you've already read theSullivan article that mentions that according to the Bush Administration's definitions McCain was not actually tortured during his time in Vietnam.

The fact McCain voted against a bill that would have prohibited the CIA from using some of these said techniques makes it an issue that sticks to McCain as well.  Soon the thought came to me, how could this be better brought out to the general public.  I could actually make a blog and write about it, or make yet another diary on the subject, though kosand  jpadgetthave beaten me to it.  What would be better would be if some collective internet action could generate attention.  A sort of internet protest...a wikipedia bomb.  The problem is I don't know if this would be a grand gesture or just ignored as random wikipedia vandalism.  

Details below the fold.

Andrew Sullivan makes an excellent point.

In all the discussion of John McCain's recently recovered memory of a religious epiphany in Vietnam, one thing has been missing. The torture that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar?

According to the Bush administration's definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured.

Cheney denies that McCain was tortured; as does Bush. So do John Yoo and David Addington and George Tenet. In the one indisputably authentic version of the story of a Vietnamese guard showing compassion, McCain talks of the agony of long-time standing. A quarter century later, Don Rumsfeld was putting his signature to memos lengthening the agony of "long-time standing" that victims of Bush's torture regime would have to endure. These torture techniques are, according to the president of the United States, merely "enhanced interrogation."

No war crimes were committed against McCain. And the techniques used are, according to the president, tools to extract accurate information. And so the false confessions that McCain was forced to make were, according to the logic of the Bush administration, as accurate as the "intelligence" we have procured from "interrogating" terror suspects. Feel safer?

Crazy, huh?