You want grim? I'll give you grim

How about this from Wednesday's Washington Post:

Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush was being stubborn with his American captors, and a series of intense beatings and creative interrogation tactics were not enough to break his will. On the morning of Nov. 26, 2003, a U.S. Army interrogator and a military guard grabbed a green sleeping bag, stuffed Mowhoush inside, wrapped him in an electrical cord, laid him on the floor and began to go to work. Again.

It was inside the sleeping bag that the 56-year-old detainee took his last breath through broken ribs, lying on the floor beneath a U.S. soldier in Interrogation Room 6 in the western Iraqi desert. Two days before, a secret CIA-sponsored group of Iraqi paramilitaries, working with Army interrogators, had beaten Mowhoush nearly senseless, using fists, a club and a rubber hose, according to classified documents.

In short, they beat him to death. Then they tried to cover it up.

Hours after Mowhoush's death in U.S. custody on Nov. 26, 2003, military officials issued a news release stating that the prisoner had died of natural causes after complaining of feeling sick.

Then they classified his autopsy. And now, as two Army soldiers face murder charges,

court records have been censored to hide the CIA's involvement in his questioning, and reporters have been removed from a Fort Carson courtroom when testimony relating to the CIA has surfaced.

This is what it's about. This is what the White House wants to be free to do. This is how that sleazy cabal of thugs and goons filling the upper reaches of the Executive Branch want to be able to act: no controls, no restrictions. No law, no regulation, no treaty should constrain them. They are not even to be limited by their own rules, their own declared standards. Nothing. They are tonton macoutes. They are secret agents with double-0 prefixes. They are generals with "execution authority." And none may question.

John McCain got up off his knees long enough to propose a couple of amendments to the War Department authorization bill

that would bar the U.S. military from engaging in "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of detainees, from hiding prisoners from the Red Cross, and from using interrogation methods not authorized by a new Army field manual.

That is, what the amendments would do - and pretty much all they would do - is require the members of the Shrub gang to follow their own regulations and international law expressed in treaties to which the US is a signatory. And in case you've forgotten, treaties are supposed to be the law of the land on an equal footing with the Constitution. From Article VI:

This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.

But none of that mattered; the White House agents of darkness of course opposed them even though they were intended as alternatives to head off a more stringent measure being proposed by some Democrats. They actually said the measures would

usurp the president's authority and - in the words of a White House official - interfere with his ability "to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack"

and declared the White House would

oppose any restrictions on the president's ability to conduct the war on terrorism,

even to the point of vetoing the entire DOD authorization bill. Considering the nature of the amendments at hand, most of which the White House could embrace with a lot of happy talk about how superior is our morality to that of the "terrorists," the word "any" here is apparently to be taken quite literally.

McCain and his partners in crime John Warner (R-VA) (whose position as chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee doubtless adds some clout to the group) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) wouldn't back off, forcing Bill Frist (R-Stem Cell) to postpone consideration of the bill after a failed vote to limit debate.

Unlimited, unrestricted power is what these goons want. The Congress is not to be involved, the courts are not to be involved, and the public certainly is not to be involved except as a cheering backdrop for El Leader. So what happened with Mowhoush? Simple: It went a little further than they wanted and they wound up with an unwanted body they couldn't easily explain until a couple of low-on-the-feeding-chain grunts of the sort who serve both as cannon fodder and as useful idiots for the higher-ups could be tossed to the wolves in an orgy of self-congratulation about our higher morality.

Remember when it was just, what was the phrase, a "few bad apples" or something like that, at Abu Ghraib?

Oh, yeah, Abu Ghraib. Whatever happened with that?

Lawyers for the Defense Department are refusing to cooperate with a federal judge's order to release secret photographs and videotapes related to the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal[, the New York Times for July 23 reported].

The lawyers said in a letter sent to the federal court in Manhattan late Thursday that they would file a sealed brief explaining their reasons for not turning over the material, which they were to have released by yesterday.

The result, as the ACLU, which was one of the parties that filed the suit in question, noted in a press release last week, is not only that the DOD continues to "drag its heels on coming clean" but that

"it is also withholding its reasons for doing so," said Amrit Singh, an ACLU staff attorney. "This exemplifies the government's disregard for democratic constraints on the use of executive power."

In fact, not only did the government redact significant portions of its brief and supporting affidavits, it redacted the conclusion!

However, in what was released it quoted

a statutory provision that permits the withholding of records "compiled for law enforcement purposes," that "could reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of any individual."

At issue here are some 87 photographs and four videos, generally believed to show abuse far worse than the photos released last year, which may well be why the DOD is fighting so hard to keep them hidden. But back on June 1, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of Federal District Court in Manhattan ordered their release after having

rejected arguments from the government that releasing the photographs would violate the Geneva Conventions because prisoners might be identified and "further humiliated," but he ordered any identifying features to be removed from the images.

Now, claiming wildly that the photos and video were for "law enforcement purposes" and prattling on about their desire to protect the prisoners' "safety" - now there's a candidate for Absurdity of the Year - it sounds to me like the DOD is coming back with a rehashed version of exactly the arguments Judge Hellerstein already rejected. Disregard for democratic constraints, indeed - and arrogantly expressed.

A hearing has been scheduled in federal court in New York for August 15 to address two issues: whether the public has been improperly denied access to information as a result of the government's redacted briefs, and whether the government should be compelled to release photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib.

Hopefully, Judge Hellerstein will be neither intimidated nor buffaloed. In fact, I hope he's downright pissed.

Footnote: There is one way in which the McCain amendments would change the White House's current practice: One would end the legal limbo of "enemy combatants," a category created out of whole cloth by the Shrub gangsters specifically for the purpose of evading legal requirements related to their confinement and treatment. McCain's motion would create a legal description of what constitutes such a "combatant," in return for which, it would write into law the current procedure of tribunals, the very ones under challenge as not meeting the requirements for access to the courts for such prisoners as laid down by the Supreme Court. Even that was not enough; the WHS* want it all. These are not well people.

*WHS = White House Sociopaths