How I predicted the false torture confessions

Last month, we found out that the real reason the Bush administration tortured prisoners was the same reason that evil people always torture prisoners -- to extract false confessions. In particular, as we learned from Col. Lawrence Wilkerson yesterday, Vice President Richard "Dick" Cheney was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq, so he ordered interrogators to torture prisoners until they said that Saddam Hussein was helping Al-Qaeda. Well, who could have predicted such a thing?

Me, that's who.

Way back in the fall of 2006, as Congress was debating the Military Commissions Act, the Providence Journal ran a hideous editorial defending the use of torture. It was such an odious pile of excrement that I felt compelled to issue a line-by-line rebuttal (a fisking, as we bloggers say) on my old blog, Newport 9. The Newport 9 blog no longer exists, but I felt the ProJo's atrocity deserved a wider airing, so I cross-posted my piece to a Daily Kos diary. That diary is still there, so I'd like to take this opportunity to quote a section of it:

While experts disagree on whether torture works,

Major, major weaselness here. Whenever people want to muddy the waters on an issue, they always resort to the old "experts disagree" dodge: "experts disagree" about global warming, "experts disagree" about cigarettes causing cancer, "experts disagree" about evolution, and on and on and on.

Anyone who isn't a moral cripple knows that torture doesn't work. All torture lets you do is make somebody say what you want them to say. Here's how it goes:

INTERROGATOR: Was Saddam Hussein working with bin Laden to attack America?
CAPTIVE: Of course not, they hate each others' guts.

INTERROGATOR: Wrong answer.

CAPTIVE: AAAAAAAAAHHH!! AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!! AAAAAAAAAHHH!! AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!! AAAAAAAAAHHH!! AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!

INTERROGATOR: Now, I'm going to ask you again. Was Saddam Hussein working with bin Laden to attack America?

CAPTIVE: YES!! YES!! AAAAAHH!! AAAAAHH!! ANYTHING YOU SAY!! AAAAAHH!! AAAAAHH!! AAAAAHH!!

INTERROGATOR: Williams, contact the President, tell him we've confirmed the link between Saddam and bin Laden.

There you have it, folks, proof of my awesome powers of predictiveness. (And yes, it's true that my Daily Kos User ID is 2558, making me one of the Secret Masters of the Great Orange Satan. Bow down and worship me, you ignorant masses!)

So, how did I do it? Did I have a time machine that I used to travel to the year 2009 to learn the truth about Bush's torture regime? Sadly, no. I had to rely on that rarest of faculties, simple common sense. I knew that torture didn't work, and that a person being tortured will say whatever his interrogators want him to say. I knew that the Bushies were using the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to invade Iraq. Egro, logic suggested that the Bushies were using torture to gain a false link between 9/11 and Iraq.

QED.

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign

From the Newport Daily News comes, via a great big notice taking up most of page A2, a public hearing on a zoning ordinance amendment dealing with signs. The public hearing will take place on Wednesday, April 8, at 6:30 p.m. in the Council Chambers on the 2nd floor of City Hall. You can find the codified ordinances of Newport online here, and the section where the changes will be made are in Title 17, ZONING, within which can be found Chapter 17.76, SIGNS. As near as I can make out from the notice, the following changes will be discussed:

1) Add an opening paragraph to the "Intent" section of Chapter 17.76 to include four bullet points explaining why signs need to be regulated.

2) Add the phrase "to promote community aesthetics and public safety" to paragraph D of the "Intent" section.

3) Add definitions in the "Usages" section for A-frame sign, awning, business frontage, banner sign, directory sign, and incidental business sign.

4) Replace the word "license" with the word "permit" throughout Chapter 17.76, and change "director of public works" to "director of planning, zoning, development and inspections" in the "Applications" section.

5) Raise the price of a sign license permit from a graduated fee based on the sign's square footage to a flat $35 per sign fee "plus an additional $25.00 is Historic District review is required."

6) In the section on removing unlawful signs, a paragraph is added noting that signs installed on public property or right-of-way "shall be forfeited to the public and subject to confiscation by the City." Also, the city can charge the sign's owner for the cost of removing and disposing of the signs. This would presumably include political signage as well as signs of the "Newport Personals" variety.

7) Add "no parking, entrance, and loading only" to the list of permitted signs in the "Signs permitted in all areas" section, and add a paragraph on business internet address signs.

8) Streamline paragraph F in the "Signs prohibited in all areas" section, and amend paragraph M to allow businesses in certain zones to put up temporary signs between 8:00 a.m. and 11:00 p.m.

9) In the "Business signs" section, paragraph B is amended so that businesses can put up as many business signs as they want as long as they don't take up too much space.

10) In the "Off-premises advertising" section, a paragraph is added allowing directory signs to be put up in the Waterfront Business zone. Also, the paragraph on billboards is amended to prohibit enlarging billboards or adding flashing lights or LEDs to them.

11) Add a new section on "City Council authorization" that allows the City Council to authorize the placement of signs on public property.

12) Add a new section on "City Manager approval -- signs on public property" allowing the City Manager to approve placement of directional signage to private parking lots on public property.

So, if you've got strong views on the subject of signage regulations, be sure to be at City Hall on April 8 to let your voice be heard.

More trouble for Coaty

From the January 28, 2009 issue of the Newport Daily News comes word of more trouble for former 75th District Representative Steve Coaty. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court Disciplinary Board filed charges against Coaty alleging that he forged a former client's name on papers filed with the Department of Corrections, and also that he forged a former client's name on a settlement check, endorsing the check and depositing it in his client account.

Another former client, Debra A. Mack, claimed that her civil suit against the City of Newport was dismissed because Coaty failed to show up for a court hearing. The board has charged Coaty with incompetence, failure to "act with reasonable diligence," lack of communication with his client and filing baseless claims against his former client and her new attorney, Richard "Mike" Fisher.

Debra Mack's legal odyssey began in May 2002 when she tripped and fell on a Newport sidewalk. She hired an attorney to sue the city, but he turned the case over to a partner (none other than District 73 Representative J. Russell Jackson), who in turn referred her to Coaty. The board alleges that Coaty failed for several months to produce Mack's medical records, and when the city's attorney filed a motion to dismiss the suit, it was granted on June 2, 2008 when then-Representative Coaty failed to show up for the scheduled hearing. Coaty never informed Mack that the case had been dismissed; Fisher happened to be in the courtroom that day, and since he was a family friend he told her. When Mack contacted Coaty, he promised to get the dismissal overturned and the case brought to court in July, but he never did.

Mack finally got fed up and hired Fisher to represent her. He requested that Coaty turn over his case files on Mack, but he never did. Instead, he sued Mack and Fisher on September 17. Mack then went to the Newport Daily News and told them what had happened, and two weeks before the election the paper ran a story on Mack's troubles with Coaty. On election day, Coaty lost his re-election race to Democratic challenger Peter F. Martin by 2823 votes to 2336.

As the NDN notes, Coaty's victory in the December 2007 special election "quickly became a rallying point for House Republicans, who felt Coaty's victory in a Democratic district signaled a turn of the political tide for Republicans in the state." Their hopes were dashed on November 4, 2008 when Coaty lost his seat, along with fellow Republicans Bruce Long of Middletown, William McManus of Lincoln, and Nicholas Gorham of Coventry. The Republicans also lost control of open seats in Districts 28, 41, 66, and 70.

Did Debra Mack's story cost Coaty his seat? Coaty's own lawyer, Christopher Gontarz, seems to think so. When he heard the NDN was running this story, he contacted them and said, "A Welsh politician, Nye Bevan, once said 'Politics is a blood sport.' It's certainly true in Rhode Island and it's especially true on Aquidneck Island." Is Coaty being targeted by the state's Democrats, or is Gontarz just being a WATB?