For weeks now, Republicans have been talking about how we can't bring Guantanamo detainees to the US as if we'd be bringing them in for a picnic. They have pretended that bringing them to the US is the same thing as releasing them out in the middle of Kansas or Oklahoma (or right by Ground Zero as the dumbass Peter King suggested). We've talked about this on our show from time to time to mock them mercilessly, but I didn't bother writing about it because who would be dumb enough to believe this inane talking point? Well, now we have our answer. Almost the entire Senate.

They just voted 90-6 to say that the Obama administration cannot have the funds they need to close Gitmo and bring the detainees for trial here in the US. Rep. King was outraged at the idea that the people who carried out 9/11 would be tried near Ground Zero. Where the hell else would they be tried? That's where the crime happened. That's how our system works. Where are we supposed to try them - on Mars?

Well, the Bush administration came up with the novel idea of turning our military base at Guantanamo Bay into a legal version of Mars. And since it's been ongoing for almost eight years now, everybody seems to find that a credible solution. But that's crazy. The United States cannot create a legal black hole where we put anyone we don't like and hold them there indefinitely. That was the whole problem with the Bush administration and Gitmo in the first place.

Imagine if another country took our soldiers and held them on an island and said to us, "Don't worry, no laws apply there, so we can legally do whatever we like to your guys and keep them there forever." Would we be assuaged by that nonsensical and clearly illegal explanation? Of course not. That's why we were going to get rid of Gitmo. Anyone remember any of this? I thought we had an election about this.

So, let's get to the main and most obvious point here - bringing detainees to America does not mean we release them in America. The people who planned and carried out the first World Trade Center bombing are now in the United States! Everyone, panic! Oh no, that's right, they're locked up in a Supermax prison in Colorado, from which they will never emerge. Problem solved. Why is that so hard to understand?

FBI Director Robert Mueller testified today in Congress that if they are even held in a prison in the US, they could radicalize the other prisoners. Here are some of the other prisoners at the Supermax in Colorado - the Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols, World Trade Center bombers Ramzi Yousef and the Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, the Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph. Who are the Gitmo detainees going to radicalize, the Unabomber?

This is absurd. If we're going to try people for crimes they have committed against the United States, of course we have to try them in the United States. We have plenty of prisons that are completely secure and that they have absolutely no chance of breaking out of and that they can spend the rest of their lives in.

Under the breakout theory (another one probably inspired by a Fox network show, Prison Break this time - do these idiots get their ideas from anywhere else?), couldn't they break out of Gitmo, get on a raft, come to the Florida and then spread like a virus through the US (at which point, you'd have to get Jack Bauer to go collect them all). Maybe we should move them further away from the mainland. Maybe we should try them in the Artic Circle?! If they thought the treatment at Gitmo was bad, wait till they get a load of Santa and his reindeer games!

So, the final concern is if they're found not guilty and have to be released. Has no one considered that at that point we would know that they are not guilty? Is that not a relevant consideration to anyone? I get that people are worried they are going to get off on a technicality or something inane like that (yeah, they're going to let Khalid Sheikh Mohammed slide because someone filled out the wrong paper work), but what about the people we actually imprisoned wrongly? Like the Uighurs, for example.

I don't want anyone to think I'm biased because my last name is Uygur (it's the Turkish spelling of Uighur) because what I'm actually biased by is the fact that they are not fucking guilty. We've been holding these guys who we know did not plan any attacks against us for six years now.

First of all, can anyone do diplomacy anymore? Here's how you solve this supposedly unsolvable problem. Of course, you don't return them to China where they might be tortured or killed, as Newt Gingrich has suggested. I understand why it's politically untenable to release them here in the US. So, you broker a deal. Here's a country that might work with us - Turkey. You give them some trade concessions, so some rich Turks in the textile industry get a little richer and the government who gets paid by those guys take these Uighurs off our hands.

There are already plenty of Uygurs running around Turkey anyway, I know because they're my family (all kidding aside, the Uygurs in Turkey are not related to the Uighurs in China, they have just taken on the name as a sign of respect because the Uighur Turks have a long and proud history of emphasizing education and writing). Turkey is a moderate Muslim country and for the right price they're almost always ready to make a deal. Look, this is just a suggestion from a layman who doesn't know the intricacies of local politics in these countries. But there's no way there isn't some Central Asian Republic that can't take a couple of Uighurs for the right price. Let's go, call the banker, let's make a deal.

The case of the Uighurs also applies to anyone else who might be found not guilty, whether it's because they're actually innocent or because we somehow couldn't convict them. You don't have to release them in Wichita or Akron or Fifth Avenue. You can make diplomatic deals to send them to other willing countries. Will we have to sacrifice some things to get them out of the country even though we brought them here by detaining them in the first place? Yes, but that's the price you pay for your mistakes. Especially, if you're not willing to pay the political price of releasing them here.

The bottom line is we were supposed to bring these guys to justice. Instead we've done the exact opposite; we have taken them out of the justice system. The legal black hole we have left them in is obviously unacceptable. Bringing them to the US for trials is sensible, just and safe. So, let's get beyond these senseless talking points meant to scare the American voters (and Democratic politicians, who are far easier to scare). The minute Ted Kaczynski makes a run for it out of the Supermax in Colorado is the minute I'll agree that it's unsafe to bring the Gitmo detainees here. To paraphrase George Bush, don't denigrate our correctional officers. They know perfectly well how to keep people locked up in the US.

The Senate needs to stop giving into Republican fear mongering and recognize that it's about time that we brought the Gitmo detainees to justice here in the United States.

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This is an unbelievable moment. Dick Cheney's PR offensive over the last month actually worked. Barack Obama just crumbled and will follow Cheney's command to not release the new set of detainee abuse pictures.

By the way, if you hadn't figured it out by now, that's why you saw every Cheney in the world on television arguing that torture works and that releasing more information would gravely harm the troops. They weren't worried about what was already released; they were worried about what was going to get released. They were trying to pre-empt the most damaging thing of all - the pictures that show the torture.

Just talk about torture doesn't really do it for the American people. But when they see pictures, they get it. That's why Bush had to apologize profusely and throw a few low-level soldiers under the bus when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out. You think there would have been anywhere near that level of controversy or accountability (such that it was) without the pictures?

How many Americans have heard of Bagram Air Base and how we tortured people to death there? A scant few. How many would have heard of it if there were pictures of detainees shackled from the ceiling in a Palestinian hanging or bleeding to death? Pictures are worth a billion words.

You know why? Television! If something isn't on television, it didn't happen. And television producers are obsessed with visuals (makes some sense since it's a visual medium, but their obsession winds up dumbing down the news if there aren't any pictures or video to go along with an important story).

Television has a multiplier effect. The New York Times story on how we beat a man named Dilawar to death at Bagram just sits there and whoever reads it, reads it. And then, it's done. On television stories spread and multiply and get spread to other channels and other mediums. Television doesn't just report the news; it decides what the news is.

So, that is what this whole fight has been about - the pictures. And now Obama adopted Cheney's position that it endangers national security to release the pictures and he will be saddled for the rest of time with the obligation to fight Cheney's battle for him. And anytime any reasonable person makes a case that as a free and open democracy we should know what our government did, the right-wing will counter with, "Even Obama thinks it endangers national security!"

The reason why this is such a maddening argument is that it is so f'in obvious that the real problem isn't releasing the pictures; it's what we did in the pictures. The argument that Obama so stupidly accepted just now shifts the blame from the people who committed the abuse to the people who want to uncover it and put an end to it.

If you released the pictures and show how the "enhanced interrogation" memos directly led to these abuses, there would be no more torture debate. Everyone could see with their own eyes the horrific results of torture. Now instead, Obama has not just protected the torturers, but empowered them. They now get to claim they tried to protect America and that anyone who tries to show their misdeeds endangers America.

The news reports will tell you that Obama listened to his generals on this. Yes, who put Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Ray Odierno in their current positions? Oh yes, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Very fair and balanced advice you would get from them. This isn't about protecting the troops; it's about protecting their own behinds. They might have been in the chain of command that allowed this abuse to happen. Expecting unbiased advice from them is ridiculous.

Now, it looks to the rest of the world that we are trying to hide something, that we have not turned over a new leaf, that it is the same old lies and duplicity - and that Obama is on it. This was colossally stupid.

And to add insult to injury, we have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that Dick Cheney still runs DC no matter how unpopular and despicable he is. He still has the Democrats eating out of his hand. Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic.

There should be an overwhelming Democratic and media revolt over this decision. The Democrats cannot be like the Republicans and bow their heads at all of the president's decisions. They should fight him tooth and nail on this. Don't hold your breath. Other than Feingold and a few others, they will all immediately lay down.

But I come back to a question that keeps popping back up - are there any real journalists in this country? Has everyone become so obsessed with access and so cowed by possible governmental reaction that they don't actually do their job anymore? They seem so damn frightened by what the big, bad government might say about them.

If there's a real journalist in this country, they will get their hands on those pictures and release them to the world. We did what is in those pictures. The longer we cover it up, the more culpable we all become. Not showing the pictures doesn't make the reality of what happened go away. It only aids and abets the torturers who did the crimes and stained this country's name. They should all be thrown into the sunlight. This is what the press is supposed to do.

Now, are so-called journalists going to act or are they going to just sit there and take it again? We're going to find out if we have attack dogs in the press that uncover the truth as it actually is or if we just have a bunch of lap dogs that can't wait for their master to give them the crumbs off his table.  This is a litmus test. Is this an free and open country, or isn't it?

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At first when I heard Ross Douthat, the new conservative op-ed writer at the New York Times, had suggested that the GOP should have run Dick Cheney as the presidential candidate in 2008, I thought he was another ridiculous right-winger. I thought he was seriously going to argue that Cheney would have won. But it turns out he had a different point, a very interesting point.

Douthat's argument was that no one represents the conservative viewpoint in America better than Cheney does. So, if you really want a litmus test of whether the Republican Party is losing elections because they are too far left or too far right, what better way of doing that than running the man who best represents the right?

This way, if he had won, we would have found out the Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys of the world were right. The problem with the Republican Party had been that they were being too soft and moderate. No one is harder than Cheney. But if he lost, they could get it through their thick skulls that the country is not that far right and the Republican Party erred by going too far away from the American middle.

But you know, it's not too late! Why not run him in 2012? He'd be younger than John McCain was when he ran in 2008. Cheney certainly seems lively and engaged in the national debate now. It's not like he's withdrawn from national politics. In fact, you might be hard pressed to find a more prominent Republican leader right now.

The only reason I can think that the Republicans wouldn't run him as their dream conservative candidate is that they know they are full of shit. They are perfectly aware that Cheney would get slaughtered, eviscerated, destroyed, pwned and waterboarded by almost any Democrat in a national election, let alone the widely popular Obama.

These conservative talk show hosts claim that the Republican Party does not defend its positions forcefully enough. They certainly can't say that of the former vice president. He's out there defending torture and intensely aggressive foreign policy every week.

If you ask me, it looks like he is pleading with Al Qaeda to hit us again so that he can be proven "right" in his mind. It seems like he's trying to send a not so subtle message to Osama bin Laden to strike so that he could run around gloating that we were hit as soon as we stopped torturing people. But that's not how the right sees it. They think he's doing God's work out there, defending the seemingly indefensible. And that he is the one man trying to keep this country safe. Ok, great. Then have at it, hoss.

Why not run on this ideology in 2012? Use the same fear tactics Bush used twice, that the conservative talk show hosts love and see if you can get the American people to buy into it. Do you believe or don't you? If torture rocks so much, why don't you get its biggest advocate to defend it and fight for it on the campaign trail?

Come on, I dare you. I triple dog dare you. Make the most conservative man in America your candidate, if you got the guts. You're not going to back down from a battle of ideas, are you? You're not going soft on us, are you? Come on, do it! Run Cheney in 2012. Make our day.

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Alright, we have a new internship program we're starting at TYT. We've decided that our best employees (in fact, all of our employees) have come from previous internship programs.

So, we've created an e-mail account that you can write in to if you'd like to participate.

tytjobs@gmail.com

Read more below:

I don't think we're going to be able to take everybody and sometimes not being in LA will be a problem. But we're hoping we can develop some positive relationships here.

To be clear -- we promise nothing. There is no pay (we are The Young Turks after all and when's the last time we had excess money lying around).

But what you can get is a) excellent experience b) an interesting job for your resume (we're pretty well recognized in digital media; in fact, in all of media) c) a kick-ass reference from me if you really deliver for us d) an opportunity to join the TYT staff at some point.

We have a wide variety of needs, ranging from sales (we're very interested in anyone who might have solid sales experience in the past, especially if it's in our field) to web marketing. We're the experts in creating buzz online, but we need your help to do it.

So, if you e-mail in to us with what you'd like to do and what your background is, we will look through it and get back to you if we think there's a good fit. Thanks for considering this.

I am not quick to call something racist. In fact, I wrote an editorial pleading with everyone not to call the NY Post chimp cartoon racist. I went on MSNBC and defended that position. I'm afraid calling someone racist often times shuts off dialogue and should be reserved for only the clearest and worst cases. I also defended Don Imus and insisted he should not be fired for his comments.

So, I have some credibility here when I say conservative talk show host Jay Severin should absolutely be fired for his racist comments against Mexicans on the radio. I hesitate in writing about this because Severin is a pathetic nobody who might be looking for national attention by making these kinds of incredibly ignorant comments. But, on the other hand, there have to be consequences for this kind of deeply hateful speech. And if people don't argue forcefully enough against it, there won't be enough pressure on the station to get rid of this hateful racist.

So, what did he say that's got me so worked up? Check it out, and you be the judge:



As you heard in the video above, Severin has been suspended by WTKK-FM in Boston. But that is not nearly enough. If you don't get fired for this, what do you get fired for?

Here are just some of his prize quotes from the show:

"So now, in addition to venereal disease and the other leading exports of Mexico - women with mustaches and VD - now we have swine flu."

He described Mexicans as "the world's lowest of primitives."

"When we are the magnet for primitives around the world - and it's not the primitives' fault by the way, I'm not blaming them for being primitives - I'm merely observing they're primitive."

"It's millions of leeches from a primitive country come here to leech off you and, with it, they are ruining the schools, the hospitals, and a lot of life in America."

"We should be, if anything, surprised that Mexico has not visited upon us poxes of more various and serious types already, considering the number of criminaliens already here."

He also said that emergency rooms had "become essentially condos for Mexicans."

And on a 2004 broadcast, he compared Muslims to a fifth column in this country and said in response to a caller who thought people should reach out to Muslims: "You think we should befriend them; I think we should kill them."

But unfortunately calling for the murder of Muslim-Americans has become so commonplace and acceptable these days that he didn't even come close to getting fired for those comments. So, I guess he figured he had free reign to attack the other half of M&Ms.

Or maybe he's just desperate because his ratings have dropped to 14th in the market in the demos. By the way, if you weren't outraged enough already. You want to know how much he makes for spewing this kind of hate and being the fourteenth best radio show in his timeslot? One million dollars, plus bonuses!

I believe a person has to do a lot to cross the line into a firing offense. Talk show hosts have an interesting but tough job. You usually have to talk for three hours a day, often unscripted. You have to entertain your audience and push the boundaries to spark interesting conversations. That is part of the reason why I give talk hosts huge leeway and why I defended Imus. But there has to be a line somewhere. And this is clearly it. Jay Severin should be fired immediately.

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UPDATE: Here's how you can contact the station in Boston who hired Severin (even though he lied about winning a Pulitzer Prize and having a Master's Degree in Journalism from Boston University; and he had already said the comments on killing Muslims in 2004). Write them an e-mail or call them here. Remember, they have suspended him for now, which means they are trying to decide whether they should fire him or keep him. What do you think they should do? Let them know.

Is there anyone in the country more reliably moderate than retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor? She is a lifelong Republican who was the critical vote that put George Bush into office in 2000. For which liberals will probably never forgive her.

She's also the person who said about Republican attacks against an independent judiciary, "It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings." She was also the deciding vote against overturning Roe v. Wade. For which conservatives will never forgive her.

Both sides might have a bone to pick with her, but there is no question that she has maintained a stubborn impartiality throughout her long career. This is why I think she might be just the right person to head an impartial investigation of the possible torture committed under the Bush administration.

I personally don't favor a truth commission, simply because we already know most of what happened, the real question is what are we going to do about it? But if there is a nonpartisan Truth Commission, O'Connor should probably lead it.

I would go even further and ask her to be the special independent prosecutor in a criminal investigation of torture by the Justice Department. Now that we largely know what was authorized under Bush and how it worked its way down the chain of command and what the results were (and why it was done), what we really need is someone to determine if specific laws were broken.

O'Connor might not have a lot of experience in hands-on prosecution of cases, so admittedly independent prosecutor would seem to be a strange role for her, but I'm not proposing she get in the courtroom and try these cases herself. I think the proper role for her is to figure out if anyone has actually committed a crime here and determine if prosecution is necessary in the first place. And then if that determination is made, there are plenty of capable prosecutors in the country.

My hunch is that O'Connor, given her cautious nature, would be very reluctant to call anything a crime by the president or his deputies. But if she got overwhelming evidence that in fact a crime was committed, she would have the courage not to ignore that evidence. If the evidence in this case eventually passes the O'Connor barrier, then the American people can be confident that this issue was not politicized but given the judicial scrutiny it deserved.
 

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