Child Rape? That’s the word from Seymour Hersh from a speech given a while back. Here’s a little of the transcript from salon.com:

“Debating about it, ummm … Some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib … The women were passing messages out saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It’s going to come out.”

It has now come out, of course. These instances at Abu Ghraib are the shame of the Bush era, certainly, making even the routine use of torture on adults look tame. That torture, though? New revelations show that the Bush torture regime may have used David Vitter for inspiration. It’s called “prolonged diapering,” and was evidently used to cause discomfort and shame in the subjects of the torture. Here are reports at washingtonindependent.com and rawstory.com.

I’m sure the Republicans will have excuses, but it appears that Dick Cheney’s excuse that torture was necessary to save us is falling apart. So what’s the excuse now, that it was all frat boy pranks, as Limbaugh has suggested? The investigation into torture clearly needs to go to the folks who authorized it, and while the investigation authorized by Eric Holder appears to be looking at the low-lever perpetrators, I’ll bide my time here. There just might be a firestorm over this crap in the next few days, only this time there are no Huggies to hold it in.

The GOP is already saying that exposing torture will cause terrorist attacks, as ugly a response as possible. From the Public Record:

The latest correspondence came on Wednesday, in a letter to the attorney general that said an investigation into the CIA’s interrogation practices, no matter how limited in scope, would jeopardize the “security for all Americans, “chill future intelligence activities,” and could “leave us more vulnerable to attack.”

The senators resorted to fear-mongering, invoking the terrorist attacks on 9/11 to try and dissuade Holder

“We are deeply concerned by recent news reports that you are ‘poised to appoint a special prosecutor’ to investigate CIA officials who interrogated al Qaeda terrorists. Such an investigation could have a number of serious consequences, not just for the honorable members of the intelligence community, but also for the security of all Americans,” the letter says.

The letter was sent to Holder by Senate Republican Whip Jon Kyl of Arizona, Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and was also signed by Senators Richard Burr, R-N.C., Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., Tom Coburn, R-Okla., John Cornyn, R-Texas, Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.

sure, the question “do Republicans have any sense of shame?” has been answered many, many times, but it’s still a good question to ask. Seems they’ve got some torture panels here they want to remain secret while at the same time they are imagining death panels. Lies and cover-ups their only reaction? Seems so.

Surely it should have dawned on Senator John Cornyn Tuesday that there’s a new regime in town and that Barack Hussein Obama will not tolerate torture. Surely he hard this section in Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.

Maybe Cornyn didn’t understand the Inaugural address, and that’s why he’s holding up Attorney General nominee Eric Holder’s confirmation? Well, if Senator Cornyn did not understand Barack Obama’s stand on torture, then the executive orders Barack Obama signed today just might get through Cornyn’s thick skull. Heck, maybe Cornyn needs some help from George Bush to understand this, after all, Cornyn is thought to be one of the stupidest Senators in the Senate. But back to Obama’s executive orders today. He is closing Gitmo within a year, forming a commission to figure out what to do with the inmates at Gitmo, some of whom are dangerous, eliminate torture by US personnel by requiring the strict adherence to the US Army Field Manual, and special circumstances concerning Ali al-Marri. Sounds to me like there’s a new sheriff in town.

But Senator Cornyn wants to leave that sheriff without his chief officer, the Attorney General. Why does Cornyn oppose Eric Holder’s nomination? Holder has yet to say whether he will or will not prosecute cases of torture perpetrated by US personnel. Cornyn is defending those who have tortured on the floor of the Senate. He’s taking up the cause Bush didn’t have the stones to do when he failed to give a blanket pardon to all who tortured in Bush’s name.

Senator Cornyn isn’t the only one who wants the torturers and those who ordered them to go scot free. Here’s a bit from the Washington Post report:

But even as Cornyn was getting out of the way of one appointee to President Obama’s Cabinet, he raised new questions about another. The Senate Judiciary Committee decided yesterday morning to delay a vote to send Holder’s nomination to the full Senate while lawmakers attended the morning National Prayer Service with Obama. The hearing was rescheduled for yesterday, but Republicans then requested a one-week delay on the nomination that Democrats were required to grant under committee rules.

. . .

Holder has generated more controversy than any other Obama nominee and was sharply questioned in an appearance before the committee last week. Many senators, including some Democrats, said they were troubled by his role in the pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich in the final days of the Clinton administration.

Led by the ranking Republican on the committee, Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.), GOP lawmakers also said they had more questions for Holder about whether he would favor prosecuting Bush administration officials for their involvement in warrantless wiretapping and harsh detainee interrogation practices. Cornyn said he would press for Holder to take a stand on the Military Commissions Act, which the Texas Republican described as providing interrogators with immunity from prosecution if they believed they were acting legally.

So Snarlin’ Arlen is right there with his buddy John Cornyn. I’m sick of Arlen Specter. He may have a reputation for bipartisanship, but Arlen Specter failed to protect us from Bush’s authorization of the use of torture, he failed to protect us from Bush’s politicization of the Justice Department, he failed to prevent domestic spying, and he now looks to be a failure in tracking down just how the Bush Administration instituted its regime of lawlessness. Maybe he’s got a magic waterboarding theory or something that makes everybody immune.

OK, I’m angry at Arlen Specter once again. If there is any man in the US Senate who knows his own complicity in allowing the Bush Administration destruction of the Department of Justice, it should be Specter. And if Specter has a hope in Hell of negotiating his way to victory in 2010 against Allyson Schwartz or Pat Murphy or Joe Sestak, then he needs to show that he understands that the rule of law is important. Murphy and Sestak, at least, will pound him on the issue, and they’ve both got battlefield cred. Any of those candidates will use this opposition to Eric Holder as Specter trying to give one last bone to Bush, who abused the constitution far worse than any President we have had in years. For Specter’s own sake he needs to get behind Holder immediately.

I know someone who is having lunch with Mr. Specter tomorrow. OK, I know several someones, and I just might pass along a question and see if one of the folks, Specter donors all, will ask it. Give me some suggestions, please, but make them politic, something that can be asked in a roomful of people who know the constitution well and are dedicated to defending it.

My first reaction to the story on CNN about the first public Christmas to be celebrated in Baghdad was quite wary. A hot air balloon supporting a huge poster of Jesus is not going to go over very well among the Muslims there, is it, no matter whether they are Sunni or Shiite. And I am not often impressed by the kumbaya nature of the depiction of the celebration, with one woman, a Muslim, explaining why she attended.

On a large stage, children dressed in costumes representing Iraq’s many ethnic and religious groups — Kurds, Turkmen, Yazidis, Christians, Arab Muslims not defined as Sunni or Shiite — hold their hands aloft and sing “We are building Iraq!” Two young boys, a mini-policeman and a mini-soldier sporting painted-on mustaches, march stiffly and salute.

Even before I can ask Interior Ministry spokesman Major-General Abdul Karim Khalaf a question, he greets me with a big smile. “All Iraqis are Christian today!” he says.

Khalaf says sectarian and ethnic violence killed thousands of Iraqis. “Now that we have crossed that hurdle and destroyed the incubators of terrorism,” he says, “and the security situation is good, we have to go back and strengthen community ties.”

In spite of his claim, the spokesman is surrounded by heavy security. Yet this celebration shows that the security situation in Baghdad is improving.

Many of the people attending the Christmas celebration appear to be Muslims, with women wearing head scarves. Suad Mahmoud, holding her 16-month-old daughter, Sara, tells me she is indeed Muslim, but she’s very happy to be here. “My mother’s birthday also is this month, so we celebrate all occasions,” she says, “especially in this lovely month of Christmas and New Year.”

I suppose this celebration of Christmas in a country wracked by violence ever since the US invasion seven years ago is going to be touted as a good thing. Heck, Dick Cheney may use this as evidence as to why it was OK to torture, spy on Americans, get hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, etc., etc. That wouldn’t surprise me at all. But Cheney is trumped by the celebrants themselves. On display at the celebration are some dioramas made by school children, and in them you can see the kind of terror and pain Bush/Cheney’s invasion of Iraq brought (from CNN):

In the middle of the park there’s an art exhibit, the creation of 11- and 12-year-olds: six displays, each about three feet wide, constructed of cardboard and Styrofoam, filled with tiny dolls dressed like ordinary people, along with model soldiers and police. They look like model movie sets depicting everyday life in Baghdad.

Afnan, 12 years old, shows me her model called “Arresting the Terrorists.”

“These are the terrorists,” she tells me. “They were trying to blow up the school.” In the middle of the street a dead “terrorist” sprawls on the asphalt, his bloody arm torn from his body by an explosion. Afnan tells me she used red nail polish to paint the blood. A little plastic dog stands nearby. “What is he doing?” I ask. “He looks for terrorists and searches for weapons and explosives,” Afnan says.

Afnan was likely six years old or so when Dick Cheney and George Bush invaded Iraq on the series of false pretexts Cheney is still defending. As I understand it, Christianity was not persecuted in the days before the US invasion, so Cheney and Bush cannot lay claim to having brought freedom of religion. Afnan’s diorama of ethnic and religious violence was brought to her directly from Bush and Cheney. Indeed, in a remarkable performance for its baldfaced defense of wrongdoing, Dick Cheney appeared on Fox News Sunday and laid out a case for Bush Administration successes, a performance stunning in its tenuous grip on reality, at least the reality young Afnan sees. From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Cheney, speaking less than a month before he and President Bush leave the White House, was blunt and unapologetic about his central role in some of the most controversial issues of the last eight years, including the invasion of Iraq, warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens, and harsh interrogation tactics. Cheney also said he disagreed with Bush’s decision to remove embattled Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in 2006, saying that “the president doesn’t always take my advice.”

“I was a Rumsfeld man,” Cheney said. “I’d helped recruit him, and I thought he did a good job for us.”

The interview was the second in less than a week for the normally reclusive vice president, and it comes as part of a broad effort by Bush and his aides to focus attention on issues that they consider major accomplishments of their two terms in office. In an interview with ABC News last week, Cheney suggested the administration would have gone to war with Iraq even without erroneous intelligence showing that Saddam Hussein had developed weapons of mass destruction. Cheney also said in that interview that he approved of the administration’s use of coercive interrogation tactics, including a type of simulated drowning known as waterboarding, against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and others.

Dick Cheney seals his reputation for all time as the puppetmaster behind the throne who supported policies of spying on US citiznes, invading Iraq, supporting Rumsfeld’s failed strategies, torture, etc. Perhaps because the performance was on Fox News Cheney’s immediate viewing audience did not sit in shock at the man responsible for the disasters of the last seven years. Perhaps those viewers even cheered. The rest of us know that Cheney’s policies have mangled our constitution, have destroyed our reputation in the world, have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents, and have led to the terror in young Afnan’s art project.

Again, a Republican such as Dick Cheney proves he has no sense of shame.

Oh, Jesus loves me, yes I know. Heck, the Bible tells me so. But I’m not an evangelical, so I didn’t know the corollary to that, that Jesus, according to many evangelicals, thinks torture is just OK. From a Pew study, via Andrew Sullivan and Human Rights First:

A new poll released Thursday (Sept. 11) finds that nearly six in 10 white Southern evangelicals believe torture is justified, but their views can shift when they consider the Christian principle of the golden rule.

The poll, commissioned by Faith in Public Life and Mercer University, found that 57 percent of respondents said torture can be often or sometimes justified to gain important information from suspected terrorists. Thirty-eight percent said it was never or rarely justified.

Oh, I guess it isn’t so bad as this. When reminded of the golden rule, which the evangelicals polled did not, evidently, use to form their decisions, they were quick to change their answers. Hmm, I guess that means their religious beliefs are not so central to their lives or something.

Jesus himself was tortured. He took it well, but he knew he was being tortured for us. I’m thinking he didn’t actually advocate torture, but these evangelicals polled here don’t seem to have everything figured out, so maybe they are identifying with those who tortured Jesus? Could they be as confused as all that?

Oh, this seems like a big joke. The Terrorist Watch List Counter at the ACLU web site just passed one million. As I write this it is 1,000,167. OK, according to Reuters that’s 1,000,000 records on the watch list, and that corresponds to 400,000 people. That’s a freakingly big list, and it is impossible to believe that all the people on it belong on it. Perhaps the Bush Administration thinks we are all criminals. (No comments needed on THAT!) But the Bushies think the list is one of the most important tools in the War on Terror! Huzzah! Here’s a bit of the Reuters article:

The Terrorism Screening Center, which maintains the list, has already put in place several steps to ensure the list is accurate and up-to-date, spokesman Chad Kolton said.

He cited a report last year by the Government Accountability Office that said there was general agreement within the federal government that the watch list had helped to combat terrorism.

“The list is very effective. In fact it’s one of the most effective counterterrorism tools that our country has,” he said.

Let’s see, the subset of this list, the “no-fly” list, has caught Ted Kennedy, John Lewis, and Yusuf Islam, not one of whom, in the wildest demonic fantasy of Dick Cheney, could be called a terrorist threat. No, I don’t imagine the list, as it is managed by the Bush Administration, is an important tool in the fight against terrorism. But I have no problem imagining Bush Administration people thinking so.

By the way, is Dick Cheney on the list? Given his history of violence, I was just wondering why he isn’t on the list. Surely he deserves to be on the list more than this guy.

This one is self explanatory. It is a habeas corpus hearing for a man held at Gitmo. Here’s the report of the New York Times:

In the first case to review the government’s secret evidence for holding a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal appeals court found that accusations against a Muslim from western China held for more than six years were based on bare and unverifiable claims. The unclassified parts of the decision were released on Monday.

In the first case to review the government’s secret evidence for holding a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal appeals court found that accusations against a Muslim from western China held for more than six years were based on bare and unverifiable claims. The unclassified parts of the decision were released on Monday.

I’m not sure I can match that snark by the judges involved, appointed by Bush, Clinton and Reagan. I’ll let their opinion stand.

Some of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are claiming they were tortured. One in particular claims he was forced to do dog tricks and that they gave him enemas against his will. (Man, I don’t even want to think of the guy who volunteered to perform that bit of “interrogation!”) But, and it should surprise us not one little bit, the interrogations were filmed, and the films have been inexplicably lost. Gosh! Maybe the dog ate them or something! Here’s some of that story from The Guardian:

The former head of interrogations at Guantánamo Bay found that records of an al-Qaida suspect tortured at the prison camp were mysteriously lost by the US military, according to a new book by one of Britain’s top human rights lawyers.

Retired general Michael Dunlavey, who supervised Guantánamo for eight months in 2002, tried to locate records on Mohammed al-Qahtani, accused by the US of plotting the 9/11 attacks, but found they had disappeared.

The records on al-Qahtani, who was interrogated for 48 days - “were backed up … after I left, there was a snafu and all was lost”, Dunlavey told Philippe Sands QC, who reports the conversation in his book Torture Team, previewed last week by the Guardian. Snafu stands for Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.

Saudi-born al-Qahtani was sexually taunted, forced to perform dog tricks and given enemas at Guantánamo.

The CIA admitted last year that it destroyed videotapes of al-Qaida suspects being interrogated at a secret “black site” in Thailand. No proof has so far emerged that tapes of interrogations at Guantánamo were destroyed, but Sands’ report suggests the US may have also buried politically sensitive proof relating to abuse by interrogators at the prison camp.

Other new evidence has also emerged in the last month that raises questions about destroyed tapes at Guantánamo.

. . .

The erased tapes may have violated a 2005 court order to preserve “all evidence [of] the torture, mistreatment and abuse of detainees” at Guantánamo. The order was retroactive, so it also applies to the 2003 loss of al-Qahtani’s records.

Lawyers representing other Guantánamo detainees are asking whether tapes of their clients’ treatment may also be erased. “You can’t just destroy relevant evidence,” said Jonathan Hafetz, of the Brennan Centre for Justice in New York.

David H Remes, a lawyer for 16 Guantánamo prisoners, said the CIA’s destruction of interrogation videos shows the US government is capable of getting rid of potentially incriminating evidence.

“[In Guantánamo] the government had a system that automatically overwrote records,” Remes told the Guardian. “That is a passive form of evidence destruction. If a party has destroyed evidence in one place, there’s no reason to assume it has preserved evidence in another place.”

More than 24,000 interrogations were videotaped at Guantánamo, according to a US army report unearthed by researchers at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.

I’m thinking if I’m a defense lawyer for one of the defendants at Gitmo I’d make sure it is on the record that the military, in its infinite wisdom, couldn’t figure out how to gather evidence, and that the evidence that they may or may not have tortured prisoners seems to be lost. Of course, any damning evidence is likely there — only what the defense will claim is exculpatory, or at the very least evidence or illegal coercive procedures, has been lost. LOST!

I know where to find those tapes, though. I’m sure it’s in the bathroom where Ann Coulter held her book signing this weekend. We all know that ugliness and brutality are Coulter’s brand, so it would be no surprise if those tapes simply gravitated to her and ended up in the bathroom stall where she held a book signing this weekend.

The Miami Herald has uncovered this story, and it’s got a military man at its center accusing the Bush Administration of timing trials for terrorists to the election cycle. This is an important story. We’ve known for a long time that the Bush Administration will manipulate anything for political gain. The US Attorney scandal showed us that. This time the charges are being brought by Navy Lieutenant Commander Brian Mizer, who they’ll claim hates America, I’m sure. Here’s a bit of the story from the Miami Herald:

The brief filed Thursday by Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer directly challenged the integrity of President Bush’s war court.

Notably, it describes a Sept. 29, 2006, meeting at the Pentagon in which Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, a veteran White House appointee, asked lawyers to consider Sept. 11, 2001, prosecutions in light of the campaign.

”We need to think about charging some of the high-value detainees because there could be strategic political value to charging some of these detainees before the election,” England is quoted as saying.

A senior Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, declined to address the specifics, saying “the trial process will surface the facts in this case.”

”It has always been everybody’s desire to move as swiftly and deliberately as possible to conduct military commissions,” he added. “But I can tell you emphatically that leadership has always been extraordinarily careful to guard against any unlawful command influence.”

The brief quotes England as a stipulation of fact and cites other examples of alleged political interference, which Mizer argues makes it impossible for Salim Hamdan, 37, to have a fair trial.

It asks the judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, to dismiss the case against Hamdan as an alleged 9/11 co-conspirator on the grounds that Bush administration leadership exercises “unlawful command influence.”

This isn’t a war on terror. This is a war on Americans. The Bush Administration is pushing this prosecution, of a driver, for God’s sake, in order to bolster the campaign of John McCain and other Republicans. It’s up to McCain himself to answer these charges. Indeed, I’d like to see some RNC memos, no doubt suggesting the scheduling of the trial. Think here, people! If they had the evidence against this driver, then they could have tried him any time since they caught him years and years ago. I say they can wait until after the election if they’ve waited this long.

What is this, incompetence for not being able to charge Hamdan over the course of many years? Or is it political conniving on the part of the White House, once again using terrorism for political gain? Or both?

Meanwhile, in the War on Terror, Osama bin Laden still walks free. Nope, they haven’t come near to catching the man actually responsible for attacking the World Trade Center. They got his driver, and they’re going to crow about that. And that’s how we make fun of him. Let’s ask them if they got bin Laden’s manicurist, too. How about his Podiatrist or his shoe shine boy? Why aren’t they going on trial with Hamdan? Let’s make fun of Bush and the GOP trial strategy and ask about the whereabouts of the real culprits, the other folks who helped make Osama bin Laden’s life easier.

Thanks go to Wings of Justice and Buzzflash.

You make the call. First up is the woman airline passenger from Texas whose sole problem was she tried to get on an airplane with jewelry on. On her nipple, sure, but it was merely jewelry. They made Mandi Hamiln remove the mipple ring with pliers. From the AP wire:

A Texas woman who said she was forced to remove a nipple ring with pliers in order to board an airplane called Thursday for an apology by federal security agents and a civil rights investigation.

“I wouldn’t wish this experience upon anyone,” Mandi Hamlin said at a news conference. “My experience with TSA was a nightmare I had to endure. No one deserves to be treated this way.”

Hamlin, 37, said she was trying to board a flight from Lubbock to Dallas on Feb. 24 when she was scanned by a Transportation Security Administration agent after passing through a larger metal detector without problems.

The female TSA agent used a handheld detector that beeped when it passed in front of Hamlin’s chest, the Dallas-area resident said.

Hamlin said she told the woman she was wearing nipple piercings. The women then called over her male colleagues, one of whom said she would have to remove the jewelry, Hamlin said.

Hamlin said she could not remove them and asked whether she could instead display her pierced breasts in private to the female agent. But several other male officers told her she could not board her flight until the jewelry was out, she said.

She was taken behind a curtain and managed to remove one bar-shaped piercing but had trouble with the second, a ring.

“Still crying, she informed the TSA officer that she could not remove it without the help of pliers, and the officer gave a pair to her,” said Hamlin’s attorney, Gloria Allred, reading from a letter she sent Thursday to the director of the TSA’s Office of Civil Rights and Liberties.

The guards, evidently the male ones, ended up snickering as Ms. Hamlin was forced to remove the nipple ring with a pair of pliers in order to board the flight. This is America in the age of Bush — no civil rights, and snickering while you endure pain if you decide to protest that you have rights. We should be surprised that they didn’t try to waterboard the woman.

Now our next example, a Bush aide, Felipe Sixto, who has had to resign in the last day due to some financial improprieties that he’s going to be charged for. No, he didn’t commit these alleged crimes while working for Bush. That isn’t alleged. The Bush people are merely incompetent in screening their workers. Again, this is from the AP story:

An aide to President Bush has resigned because of his alleged misuse of grant money from the U.S. Agency for International Development when he worked for a Cuban democracy organization.

Felipe Sixto was promoted on March 1 as a special assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs and stepped forward on March 20 to reveal his alleged wrongdoing and to resign, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said on Friday. He said Sixto took that step after learning that his former employer, the Center for a Free Cuba, was prepared to initiate legal action against him.

The alleged wrongdoing occurred when Sixto was chief of staff at the center, where he worked for more than three years before moving to the White House.

The matter has been turned over to the Justice Department for investigation, Stanzel said. He said Bush was briefed on the case and felt that the appropriate action was being taken.

The Center for a Free Cuba describes itself as an independent, nonpartisan institution dedicated to promoting human rights and a transition to democracy and the rule of law in Cuba. Frank Calzon, the center’s executive director, said it receives “a couple million dollars” a year from USAID for rent, travel and equipment such as shortwave radios and laptops. He said the center welcomed the investigation and pledged complete cooperation.

Mr. Sixto will likely not have to subject himself to the painful application of pliers to his private parts in order to board a commercial flight, but it seems obvious that he’s the only criminal mentioned in this article.

No, no, this isn’t the start of a bad joke.

On the other hand, maybe it is:

One man went into a Glen Burnie, Md., Toyota dealership to buy a car, only to be told that a name check revealed he was on a U.S. Treasury Department watchlist of suspected terrorists and drug dealers. He had to be “checked for tattoos,” he said, to make sure he wasn’t the suspect…

Are you friggin’ kidding me? The economy is in the tank, car dealers aren’t selling cars, and one of the credit bureaus wants the car dealer to check the guy for tattoos to make sure he’s not someone with a similar name on the government’s terrorist watch list? I seriously don’t recall knowing that the watch list is extended to credit bureaus, who are now apparently required to enter this information on people’s credit reports.

Jeez. What’s next? Some burger flipper at McDonald’s demanding a cavity search when someone with a “similar name” tries to pay for a Big Mac with his/her Visa card?

We are soooooo far down the rabbit hole that we don’t know what “up” looks like anymore. And check out Kevin Drum’s post on the same topic - not so much his post (which totally misses the point), but the comments to his post…

Update: From the comments at Drum’s place, here’s a link to the ACLU’s web page on terrorist watchlists. Nearly 1,000,000 people are now on the list.