Jesse Ventura has a new book out, 63 Documents the Government Doesn’t Want You To Read, and PrisonPlanet.com has highlighted what may be document number one:
Just two short months prior to 9/11, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld oversaw a significant change to DoD procedures for dealing with hijacked aircraft, making it the personal responsibility of the Defense Secretary to issue intercept orders.
Commanders in the field were stripped of all authority to act.
The document, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction CJCSI 3610.01A (dated 1 June 2001) was issued for the purpose of providing “guidance to the Deputy Director for Operations (DDO), National Military Command Center (NMCC), and operational commanders in the event of an aircraft piracy (hijacking) or request for destruction of derelict airborne objects.”
The new instruction, signed by S.A. Fry (Vice Admiral, US Navy and Director, Joint Staff) superseded previous procedures put into place in 1997.
This document states that “In the event of a hijacking, the NMCC will be notified by the most expeditious means by the FAA. The NMCC will, with the exception of immediate responses as authorized by reference d, forward requests for DOD assistance to the Secretary of Defense for approval.”
Reference d refers to Department of Defense Directive 3025.15 (Feb. 18, 1997) which allows for commanders in the field to provide assistance to save lives in an emergency situation — BUT any requests involving “potentially lethal support” (including “combat and tactical vehicles, vessels or aircraft; or ammunition”) must still be approved by the Secretary of Defense. So again, the ability to respond to a hijacking with intercept orders was removed from commanders in the field.
Of course, on 9/11 no such intercept orders were issued to NORAD, and three of four hijacked airliners were able to hit their targets with precision accuracy, paving the way for literal modern military crusade into the middle east, and now into Africa.
In his book, Ventura analyses the document, now known the 9/11 stand down order, and investigates whether it was part of a deliberate plot to prevent the US military from responding in a timely fashion to defend America from the most deadly attack in its history...
Jesse Ventura Exposes 9/11 Stand Down Order
Steve Watson
April 5, 2011
http://www.prisonplanet.com/jesse-ventura-exposes-911-stand-down-order.html
Showing posts with label Donald Rumsfeld. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Donald Rumsfeld. Show all posts
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Friday, July 2, 2010
Media, Access and McChrystal
http://www.fair.org/blog/2010/06/24/media-access-and-mcchrystal/
Media, Access and McChrystal
06/24/2010
Peter Hart
There's been a discussion (some of it neatly summarized on the Daily Show) of elite journalists' reaction to the explosive comments made by Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staffers to Rolling Stone freelancer Michael Hastings. One admission came via a Politico story, captured by NYU's Jay Rosen (6/24/10):
And as a freelance reporter, Hastings would be considered a bigger risk to be given unfettered access, compared with a beat reporter, who would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.
Rosen notes that this line in the Politico piece was subsequently removed, perhaps because it revealed too much:
Think about what the Politico is saying: an experienced beat reporter is less of a risk for a powerful figure like McChrystal because an experienced beat reporter would probably not want to "burn bridges" with key sources by telling the world what happens when those sources let their guard down.
This is revealing, perhaps, but completely unsurprising. Journalists have been admitting to this sort of thing for years. Take one example (cited in FAIR's Extra! Update, 12/01) from an American University forum (10/1/01) where PBS correspondent Ray Suarez was asked about the failure to pose difficult questions to certain elite guests:
Well, yeah, access is like oxygen when you're a reporter. And if you're going to do something I guess that's going to jeopardize access in the future, you better be pretty sure that this person who is going to perceive what you are about to do to them as burning them is someone that you can do without in the future after you burn them. That's a tough straddle. It shouldn't be, but it is.
For an example of how a beat reporter normally operates, take ABC Pentagon correspondent Martha Raddatz's assessment of Gen. David Petraeus (Nightline, 6/23/10):
A warrior and a scholar, Petraeus is sometimes jokingly referred to as a water walker, since almost everything he touches seems to turn to gold.
Or recall the days when Donald Rumsfeld was considered a rock star by the Washington press corps. FAIR's Steve Rendall ran down the worst of that here:
"Sixty-nine years old, and you're America's stud," Tim Russert told Rumsfeld when he interviewed him on NBC's Meet the Press (1/20/02); Larry King informed him that "you now have this new image called sex symbol" (CNN's Larry King Live, 12/06/01). Fox News' Jim Angle (12/11/01) called him "a babe magnet for the 70-year-old set."
"I love you, Donald," Margaret Carlson announced on CNN's Capital Gang (12/23/01), where the Time magazine columnist appears regularly in the role of left-of-center pundit. Carlson's Time magazine colleague, veteran defense correspondent Mark Thompson, told the Chicago Tribune (10/22/01), "Although he has not told us very much, he has been like a father figure."
Tags: David Petraeus, Politico, Rolling Stone, Stanley McChrystal
Media, Access and McChrystal
06/24/2010
Peter Hart
There's been a discussion (some of it neatly summarized on the Daily Show) of elite journalists' reaction to the explosive comments made by Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staffers to Rolling Stone freelancer Michael Hastings. One admission came via a Politico story, captured by NYU's Jay Rosen (6/24/10):
And as a freelance reporter, Hastings would be considered a bigger risk to be given unfettered access, compared with a beat reporter, who would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.
Rosen notes that this line in the Politico piece was subsequently removed, perhaps because it revealed too much:
Think about what the Politico is saying: an experienced beat reporter is less of a risk for a powerful figure like McChrystal because an experienced beat reporter would probably not want to "burn bridges" with key sources by telling the world what happens when those sources let their guard down.
This is revealing, perhaps, but completely unsurprising. Journalists have been admitting to this sort of thing for years. Take one example (cited in FAIR's Extra! Update, 12/01) from an American University forum (10/1/01) where PBS correspondent Ray Suarez was asked about the failure to pose difficult questions to certain elite guests:
Well, yeah, access is like oxygen when you're a reporter. And if you're going to do something I guess that's going to jeopardize access in the future, you better be pretty sure that this person who is going to perceive what you are about to do to them as burning them is someone that you can do without in the future after you burn them. That's a tough straddle. It shouldn't be, but it is.
For an example of how a beat reporter normally operates, take ABC Pentagon correspondent Martha Raddatz's assessment of Gen. David Petraeus (Nightline, 6/23/10):
A warrior and a scholar, Petraeus is sometimes jokingly referred to as a water walker, since almost everything he touches seems to turn to gold.
Or recall the days when Donald Rumsfeld was considered a rock star by the Washington press corps. FAIR's Steve Rendall ran down the worst of that here:
"Sixty-nine years old, and you're America's stud," Tim Russert told Rumsfeld when he interviewed him on NBC's Meet the Press (1/20/02); Larry King informed him that "you now have this new image called sex symbol" (CNN's Larry King Live, 12/06/01). Fox News' Jim Angle (12/11/01) called him "a babe magnet for the 70-year-old set."
"I love you, Donald," Margaret Carlson announced on CNN's Capital Gang (12/23/01), where the Time magazine columnist appears regularly in the role of left-of-center pundit. Carlson's Time magazine colleague, veteran defense correspondent Mark Thompson, told the Chicago Tribune (10/22/01), "Although he has not told us very much, he has been like a father figure."
Tags: David Petraeus, Politico, Rolling Stone, Stanley McChrystal
Sunday, September 20, 2009
"Close Friend" Throws Out Suit
http://www.truthout.org/091509S
Cheney and Rumsfeld's "Close Friend" Throws Out Suit Against Alleged Abu Ghraib Torturers
Tuesday 15 September 2009
Jeremy Scahill Rebel Reports
Should Judge Laurence Silberman have recused himself from a case involving alleged torture for which his buddies were ultimately responsible?
On September 11, the US appeals court for the District of Columbia announced in a 2-1 decision that it was throwing out a lawsuit against CACI International and L-3 Communications Titan unit, which are being sued by Iraqi civilians for their alleged role in the torture and abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison. The companies provided interrogators at the prison at the height of the abuses there. The suit alleges that employees of the companies conspired with U.S. Army reservist Charles Graner, who was convicted of prisoner abuse on January 14, 2005 and is currently serving 10 years at Fort Leavenworth, and others to torture prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Several of the plaintiffs are Iraqis whose torture was depicted in graphic photos revealed over the past several years.
The judge who wrote the majority opinion, Laurence H. Silberman, said: "During wartime, where a private service contractor is integrated into combatant activities over which the military retains command authority, a tort claim arising out of the contractor's engagement in such activities shall be preempted."
The decision was swiftly celebrated by the private security industry. "The court's decision today is an important step toward resolving all legal matters regarding the company's mission and duties in Iraq," Jody Brown, executive vice president for public relations at CACI, said in a statement. "We have said from day one that these lawsuits are completely without merit and designed to pursue a political agenda."
"This is big, and this is the kind of good news the contracting community needs," wrote one security contractor on his blog. "Precedents like this are what we need for further protection in the future for similar cases."
Scott Horton, the great military and constitutional law expert wrote at Harper's that Silberman's opinion "reflects an amazing ignorance of or indifference to the basic concepts of the law of armed conflict:"
That law imposes a rule of absolute accountability on any persons fielded in a conflict, including contractors. It does not permit impunity or immunity. Not every aspect of the law of armed conflict is subject to private enforcement in the courts. But the prohibition on torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading conduct is. The United States agreed in ratifying the Convention Against Torture that it would provide individuals who were tortured with legal recourse. The Alien Tort Statute, which formed the basis for the suit, has historically been used in federal courts to give foreigners compensation for claims of torture. But Judge Silberman decided to grant the contractors immunity from such suits.
In a dissenting opinion, Judge Merrick B. Garland wrote:
The plaintiffs in these cases allege that they were beaten, electrocuted, raped, subjected to attacks by dogs, and otherwise abused by private contractors working as interpreters and interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison. At the current stage of the litigation, we must accept these allegations as true ... No act of Congress and no judicial precedent bars the plaintiffs from suing the private contractors - who were neither soldiers nor civilian government employees. Indeed, the only statute to which the defendants point expressly excludes private contractors from the immunity it preserves for the government ... the Department of Defense has repeatedly stated that employees of private contractors accompanying the Armed Forces in the field are not within the military's chain of command, and that such contractors are subject to civil liability.
"Republican legal architects talk about a culture of accountability, but what they are introducing is actually a culture in which corporate surrogates torture, rape, and abuse with no consequences whatsoever," writes Horton.
Beyond the legal issues here, which Horton deftly tackles, there is another issue: Judge Laurence Silberman himself. Silberman was appointed to the bench by President Reagan in 1985, but he had already made a name for himself in right wing political circles. Several journalists have dug deep into Silberman's alleged involvement with the arms-for-hostages deal, his exoneration of Iran-Contra figures Oliver North and John Poindexter and Silberman's role in promoting the career of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. For a good summary of Silberman's career see this excellent article by Michele Goldberg on Salon.com. Goldberg writes:
[Silberman] has been near the febrile center of the largest political scandals of the past two decades, from the rumored "October surprise" of 1980 and the Iran-contra trials to the character assassination of Anita Hill and the impeachment of President Clinton. Whenever right-wing conspiracies swing into action, Silberman is there.
A veteran of the Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan administrations who is close to Vice President Dick Cheney, Silberman has a reputation as a fierce ideologue who doesn't let his judicial responsibilities get in the way of his Republican activism.
Judge Silberman also counts among his "close friends" former vice president Dick Cheney and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld - going back to their time in the Ford Administration. Rumsfeld was ultimately the official responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib at the time of the alleged torture of the plaintiffs in this case and Cheney was a major architect of the torture program. One of Bush/Cheney's key "torture lawyers," John Yoo, clerked under Silberman. Silberman also was chosen by President George W Bush to co-chair the Iraq Intelligence Commission. The 600+ page report Silberman's commission produced placed the blame for "intelligence failures" squarely on intelligence analysts and exonerated officials, like Cheney, who worked tirelessly to politicize intelligence to fit the White House's political agenda and its drive to invade Iraq. In June 2008, Bush awarded Silberman the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2004, former Nixon staffer Kevin Phillips said, "In the past, Silberman has been more involved with coverups in the Middle East than with any attempts to unravel them."
Should Silberman have recused himself from this case?
In 1994, the Supreme Court found that "Disqualification is required if an objective observer would entertain reasonable questions about the judge's impartiality. If a judge's attitude or state of mind leads a detached observer to conclude that a fair and impartial hearing is unlikely, the judge must be disqualified." [Liteky v. U.S., 114 S.Ct. 1147, 1162 (1994)] There are also these decisions: Courts have found that Section 455(a) of the Judicial Code, 28 U.S.C. §455(a) "requires a judge to recuse himself in any proceeding in which her impartiality might reasonably be questioned." [Taylor v. O'Grady, 888 F.2d 1189 (7th Cir. 1989)]. In Pfizer Inc. v. Lord, the Court stated that "It is important that the litigant not only actually receive justice, but that he believes that he has received justice." [456 F.2d 532 (8th Cir. 1972)]
Do Silberman's relationships to Cheney and Rumsfeld whose policies ultimately led to the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib constitute "reasonable questions" about his "impartiality?"
Cheney and Rumsfeld's "Close Friend" Throws Out Suit Against Alleged Abu Ghraib Torturers
Tuesday 15 September 2009
Jeremy Scahill Rebel Reports
Should Judge Laurence Silberman have recused himself from a case involving alleged torture for which his buddies were ultimately responsible?
On September 11, the US appeals court for the District of Columbia announced in a 2-1 decision that it was throwing out a lawsuit against CACI International and L-3 Communications Titan unit, which are being sued by Iraqi civilians for their alleged role in the torture and abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison. The companies provided interrogators at the prison at the height of the abuses there. The suit alleges that employees of the companies conspired with U.S. Army reservist Charles Graner, who was convicted of prisoner abuse on January 14, 2005 and is currently serving 10 years at Fort Leavenworth, and others to torture prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Several of the plaintiffs are Iraqis whose torture was depicted in graphic photos revealed over the past several years.
The judge who wrote the majority opinion, Laurence H. Silberman, said: "During wartime, where a private service contractor is integrated into combatant activities over which the military retains command authority, a tort claim arising out of the contractor's engagement in such activities shall be preempted."
The decision was swiftly celebrated by the private security industry. "The court's decision today is an important step toward resolving all legal matters regarding the company's mission and duties in Iraq," Jody Brown, executive vice president for public relations at CACI, said in a statement. "We have said from day one that these lawsuits are completely without merit and designed to pursue a political agenda."
"This is big, and this is the kind of good news the contracting community needs," wrote one security contractor on his blog. "Precedents like this are what we need for further protection in the future for similar cases."
Scott Horton, the great military and constitutional law expert wrote at Harper's that Silberman's opinion "reflects an amazing ignorance of or indifference to the basic concepts of the law of armed conflict:"
That law imposes a rule of absolute accountability on any persons fielded in a conflict, including contractors. It does not permit impunity or immunity. Not every aspect of the law of armed conflict is subject to private enforcement in the courts. But the prohibition on torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading conduct is. The United States agreed in ratifying the Convention Against Torture that it would provide individuals who were tortured with legal recourse. The Alien Tort Statute, which formed the basis for the suit, has historically been used in federal courts to give foreigners compensation for claims of torture. But Judge Silberman decided to grant the contractors immunity from such suits.
In a dissenting opinion, Judge Merrick B. Garland wrote:
The plaintiffs in these cases allege that they were beaten, electrocuted, raped, subjected to attacks by dogs, and otherwise abused by private contractors working as interpreters and interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison. At the current stage of the litigation, we must accept these allegations as true ... No act of Congress and no judicial precedent bars the plaintiffs from suing the private contractors - who were neither soldiers nor civilian government employees. Indeed, the only statute to which the defendants point expressly excludes private contractors from the immunity it preserves for the government ... the Department of Defense has repeatedly stated that employees of private contractors accompanying the Armed Forces in the field are not within the military's chain of command, and that such contractors are subject to civil liability.
"Republican legal architects talk about a culture of accountability, but what they are introducing is actually a culture in which corporate surrogates torture, rape, and abuse with no consequences whatsoever," writes Horton.
Beyond the legal issues here, which Horton deftly tackles, there is another issue: Judge Laurence Silberman himself. Silberman was appointed to the bench by President Reagan in 1985, but he had already made a name for himself in right wing political circles. Several journalists have dug deep into Silberman's alleged involvement with the arms-for-hostages deal, his exoneration of Iran-Contra figures Oliver North and John Poindexter and Silberman's role in promoting the career of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. For a good summary of Silberman's career see this excellent article by Michele Goldberg on Salon.com. Goldberg writes:
[Silberman] has been near the febrile center of the largest political scandals of the past two decades, from the rumored "October surprise" of 1980 and the Iran-contra trials to the character assassination of Anita Hill and the impeachment of President Clinton. Whenever right-wing conspiracies swing into action, Silberman is there.
A veteran of the Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan administrations who is close to Vice President Dick Cheney, Silberman has a reputation as a fierce ideologue who doesn't let his judicial responsibilities get in the way of his Republican activism.
Judge Silberman also counts among his "close friends" former vice president Dick Cheney and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld - going back to their time in the Ford Administration. Rumsfeld was ultimately the official responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib at the time of the alleged torture of the plaintiffs in this case and Cheney was a major architect of the torture program. One of Bush/Cheney's key "torture lawyers," John Yoo, clerked under Silberman. Silberman also was chosen by President George W Bush to co-chair the Iraq Intelligence Commission. The 600+ page report Silberman's commission produced placed the blame for "intelligence failures" squarely on intelligence analysts and exonerated officials, like Cheney, who worked tirelessly to politicize intelligence to fit the White House's political agenda and its drive to invade Iraq. In June 2008, Bush awarded Silberman the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2004, former Nixon staffer Kevin Phillips said, "In the past, Silberman has been more involved with coverups in the Middle East than with any attempts to unravel them."
Should Silberman have recused himself from this case?
In 1994, the Supreme Court found that "Disqualification is required if an objective observer would entertain reasonable questions about the judge's impartiality. If a judge's attitude or state of mind leads a detached observer to conclude that a fair and impartial hearing is unlikely, the judge must be disqualified." [Liteky v. U.S., 114 S.Ct. 1147, 1162 (1994)] There are also these decisions: Courts have found that Section 455(a) of the Judicial Code, 28 U.S.C. §455(a) "requires a judge to recuse himself in any proceeding in which her impartiality might reasonably be questioned." [Taylor v. O'Grady, 888 F.2d 1189 (7th Cir. 1989)]. In Pfizer Inc. v. Lord, the Court stated that "It is important that the litigant not only actually receive justice, but that he believes that he has received justice." [456 F.2d 532 (8th Cir. 1972)]
Do Silberman's relationships to Cheney and Rumsfeld whose policies ultimately led to the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib constitute "reasonable questions" about his "impartiality?"
Friday, September 11, 2009
Twenty Minutes With The President
http://www.prisonplanet.com/twenty-minutes-with-the-president.htmlTwenty Minutes With The President
Reported by Charlie Sheen
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with our 44th President of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama, while he was out promoting his health care reform initiative. I requested 30 minutes given the scope and detail of my inquiry; they said I could have 20. Twenty minutes, 1200 seconds, not a lot of time to question the President about one of the most important events in our nation’s history. The following is a transcript of our remarkable discussion.
————————————————————————————————————————
Charlie Sheen – Good afternoon Mr. President, thank you so much for taking time out of your demanding schedule.
President Barack Obama – My pleasure, the content of your request seemed like something I should carve out a few minutes for.
CS – I should point out that I voted for you, as your promises of hope and change, transparency and accountability, as well as putting government back into the hands of the American people, struck an emotional chord in me that I hadn’t felt in quite some time, perhaps ever.
PBO – And I appreciate that Charlie. Big fan of the show, by the way.
CS – Sir, I can’t imagine when you might find the time to actually watch my show given the measure of what you inherited.
PBO – I have it Tivo’d on Air Force One. Nice break from the traveling press corps. (He glances at his watch) not to be abrupt or to rush you, but you have 19 minutes left.
CS – I’ll take that as an invitation to cut to the chase.
PBO – I’m all ears. Or so I’ve been told.
CS - Sir, in the very near future we will be experiencing our first 9/11 anniversary with you as Commander in Chief.
PBO – Yes. A very solemn day for our Nation. A day of reflection and yet a day of historical consciousness as well.
CS – Very much so sir, very much so indeed…. Now; In researching your position regarding the events of 9/11 and the subsequent investigation that followed, am I correct to understand that you fully support and endorse the findings of the commission report otherwise known as the ‘official story’?
PBO – Do I have any reason not to? Given that most of us are presumably in touch with similar evidence.
CS – I really wish that were the case, sir. Are you aware, Mr. President, of the recent stunning revelations that sixty percent of the 9/11 commissioners have publicly stated that the government agreed not to tell the truth about 9/11 and that the Pentagon was engaged in deliberate deception about their response to the attack?
PBO – I am aware of certain “in fighting” during the course of their very thorough and tireless investigative process.
CS – Mr. President, it’s hard to label this type of friction as “in fighting” or make the irresponsible leap to “thorough,” when the evidence I insist you examine regarding 6 of the 10 members are statements of fact.
(At this point one of Obama’s senior aides approaches the President and whispers into his ear. Obama glances quickly at his watch and nods as the aide resumes his post at the doorway, directly behind me.)
PBO – No disrespect Mr. Sheen, but I have to ask; what is it that you seem to be implying with the initial direction of this discussion?
CS – I am not implying anything Mr. President. I am here to present the facts and see what you plan to do with them.
PBO - Let me guess; your ‘facts,’ allegedly supporting these claims are in the folders you brought with you?
CS – Good guess Mr. President.
(I hand the first folder of documents to the President)
CS – Again sir, these are not my opinions or assumptions, this is all a matter of public record, reported through mainstream media, painstakingly fact checked and verified.
(the President glances into the folder I handed him)
CS – You’ll notice sir on page one of the dossier dated August of ‘06 from the Washington Post, the statements of John Farmer, senior council to the 9/11 commission, his quote stating, “I was shocked how different the truth was from the way it was described.”
PBO – (as he glances down at the report, almost inaudible) …. um hmm….
CS – He goes on to further state “The [NORAD Air Defense] tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years….”
(the President continues to view the documents)
CS – On pages two and three, sir, are the statements, as well, from commission co-chairmen Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, commissioners Bob Kerrey, Timothy Roemer and John Lehman, as well as the statements of commissioner Max Cleland, an ex-Senator from Georgia , who resigned, stating:
“It is a national scandal. This investigation is now compromised. One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9/11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up.”
He also described President Bush’s desire to delay the process as not to damage the ‘04 re-election bid. They suspected deception to the point where they considered referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. Mr. President, this information alone is unequivocally grounds for a new investigation!
PBO – Mistakes were clearly made but we as a people and as a country need to move forward. It is obviously in our best interest as a democratic society to focus our efforts and our resources on the future of this great nation and our ability to protect the American people and our allies from this type of terrorism in the coming years.
CS – Sir, how can we focus on the future when THE COMMISSION ITSELF is on record stating that they still do not know the truth??
PBO – Even if what you state, might in some capacity, begin to approach an open discussion or balanced debate, I can’t speak for, or about the decisions certain commission members made during an extremely difficult period. Perhaps you should be interviewing them instead of me. Wait, don’t tell me; I was easier to track down than they were?
CS - Not exactly sir, but let’s be honest. You’re the President of the United States, the leader of the free world, the buck stops with you. 9/11 has been the pretext for the systematic dismantling of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Your administration is reading from the same playbook that the Bush administration foisted on America through documented secrecy and deception.
PBO – Mr. Sheen, I’m having a difficult time sitting here and listening to you draw distorted parallels between the Bush/Cheney regime and mine.
CS – Mr. President the parallels are not distorted just because you say they are. Let’s stick to the facts. You promised to abolish the Patriot Act and then voted to re-authorize it. You pledged to end warrantless wire tapping against the American people and now energetically defend it. You decried the practice of rendition and now continue it. You promised over and over again on the campaign trail, that you would end the practice of indefinite detention and instead, you have expanded it to permanent detention of “detainees” without trial. This far exceeds the outrages of the former administration. Call me crazy Mr. President, but is this not your record?
PBO – Mr. Sheen, my staff and I authorized this interview based on your request to discuss 9/11 and deliver some additional information you’re convinced I’d not previously reviewed. Call me crazy, But it appears as though you’ve blindly wandered off topic.
CS – Sir, the examples I just illustrated are a direct result of 9/11.
PBO – And I’m telling you that we must move forward, we must endure through these dangerous and politically challenging years ahead.
CS – Mr. President, we cannot move forward with a bottomless warren of unanswered questions surrounding that day and its aftermath.
PBO – I read the official report. Every word every page. Perhaps you should do the same.
CS – I have sir, and so have thousands of family members of the victims, and guess what; they have the same questions I do and probably a lot more. I didn’t lose a loved one on that horrific day Mr. President and neither did you. But since then I, along with millions of other Americans lost something we held true and dear for most of our lives in this great country of ours; we lost our hope.
PBO – And I’d like to believe that I am here to restore that hope. To restore confidence in your leaders, in the system that the voting public chose through a peaceful transfer of power.
(An odd moment of silence between us. Precious time ticking away).
CS – Mr. President, are you aware of the number of days it took to begin the investigation into JFK’s assassination?
PBO – If memory serves I believe it was two weeks.
CS – Close. Seventeen days to be exact. Are you aware sir, how long it took to begin the investigation into Pearl Harbor?
PBO – I would say again about….two weeks.
CS – Close again sir, eleven days to be exact. Are you aware Mr. President how long it took to begin the investigation into 9/11?
PBO – I know it must have seemed like a very long time for all the grieving families.
CS – It was a very long time Mr. President – four hundred and forty days. Roughly 14 months. Does it bother you Mr. President that it only took FIVE HOURS for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after the initial attack to recommend and endorse a full scale offensive against Iraq?
PBO – I am not aware of any such purported claim.
CS – I have the proof Mr. President, along with scores of documents and facts I’d like you to take a look at. Here.
(I hand him another file – much thicker than the first)
PBO – I see you came prepared Charlie.
CS – No other way to show up Mr. President. When in doubt over prepare I always say.
PBO – Now you sound like the First Lady.
CS – That’s quite a compliment sir.
PBO – As you wish. Please continue.
CS – Sir, I’d like to direct your attention to the stack of documents in the folder I just handed you. The first in from the top is entitled “Operation Northwoods”, a declassified Pentagon plan to stage terror attacks on US soil, to be blamed on Cuba as a pretext for war.
PBO – And I’d like to direct your attention to the fact that the principle draftsman of this improbable blueprint was quickly denied a second term as Joint Chiefs chairman and sent packing to a European NATO garrison. Thank God his otherworldly ambitions never saw the light of day.
CS – I wouldn’t be so certain about that Mr. President.
PBO – I could easily say the same to you Charlie.
(the President checks his watch)
CS – The next document reads “Declassified staged provocations.” Now, Honestly Mr. President I wish I was making this stuff up. I’m certain you are familiar with the USS Maine Incident, the sinking of the Lusitania, which we all now know brought us into WW1, and of course the most famous, the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
PBO – Of course I am familiar with these historical events and I’m aware that there’s a measure of controversy surrounding them. But to be quite frank with you, this is all ancient history.
CS – Mr. President, it has been often said; “Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.” And I concede to you sir, these events are the past.
PBO – A vastly different world young man, shouldering a radically disparate state of universal affairs.
CS – No argument sir, I‘m merely inviting you to acknowledge some credibility to the pattern or the theme. Case in point; the next document in your folder. It was published by the think-tank, Project For a New American Century and it’s entitled “Rebuilding Americas Defenses”, and was written by Dick Cheney and Jeb Bush. To quote from the document sir – (the President interrupts)
PBO – “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”
CS РTouch̩, sir. Your thoughts on this statement Mr. President?
PBO – I would call this a blatant case of misjudgment fueled by an unfortunate milieu of assumption. For some, the uninformed denial of coincidence.
CS – Interesting angle sir. Nevertheless, Vice President Cheney didn’t stop there. In early 2008, Pulitzer prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh and MSNBC, both reported that Cheney had proposed to the Pentagon an outrageous plan to have the U.S. Navy create fake Iranian patrol boats, to be manned by Navy Seals, who would then stage an attack on US destroyers in the Strait of Hormuz. This event was to be blamed on Iran and used as a pretext for war. Does any of this information worry you Mr. President? Should we just ignore it, until these realities can be dismissed years from now by our children, as ancient history as well?
PBO – Of course this information worries me, yet it’s not nearly as worrisome as you sitting here today suspiciously implying that 9/11 was somehow allowed to happen or even orchestrated from the inside.
CS – Mr. President I am not suspiciously implying anything. I am merely exposing the documents and asking the questions that nobody in power will even look at or acknowledge. And as I stated earlier, I voted for you, I believed in your message of hope and change. Mr. President I have come to you specifically hoping for a change. A change in the perception that our government has not yet made itself open and accountable to the people. These are your words Mr. President not mine. The lives of thousands were brutally cut short and those left behind to suffer their infinite pain are with me today Mr. President. They are with me in spirit and flesh, and the message we carry will not be silenced anymore by media fueled mantras insisting how they are supposed to feel. Deciding for them, for 8 long years, what can be thought, what can be said, what can be asked.
PBO – And I appreciate your passion, I appreciate your conviction. In spite of your concerns, in spite of what your data might or might not reveal, what you and the families must understand and accept is that we are doing everything we can to protect you.
CS – Mr. President , I realize were very short on time, so please allow me to run down a list of bullet points that might illuminate some reasons why we don’t embrace the warm hug of Federal protection.
PBO – We’ve come this far. Fire away.
CS – Please keep in mind Mr. President everything I’m about to say is documented as fact and part of the public record. The information you are holding in your hands chronicles and verifies each and every point.
PBO – You have five minutes left. The floor is yours. Brief me.
CS – Thank you Mr. President. Okay, first; On the FBI’s most wanted list Osama Bin Laden is not charged with the crimes of 911. When I called the FBI to ask them why this was the case, they replied: “There’s not enough evidence to link Bin Laden to the crime scene,” I later discovered he had never even been indicted by the D.O.J.
CS – Number 2; FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, was dismissed and gagged by the D.O.J. after she revealed that the government had foreknowledge of plans to attack American cities using planes as bombs as early as April 2001. In July of ‘09, Mrs. Edmonds broke the Federal gag order and went public to reveal that Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the Taliban were all working for and with the C.I.A. up until the day of 9/11.
CS – Number 3; The following is a quote from Mayor Giuliani during an interview on 9/11 with Peter Jennings for ABC News. “I went down to the scene and we set up headquarters at 75 Barkley Street, which was right there with the Police Commissioner, the Fire Commissioner, the Head of Emergency Management, and we were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade Center was going to collapse. And it did collapse before we could actually get out of the building, so we were trapped in the building for 10, 15 minutes, and finally found an exit and got out, walked north, and took a lot of people with us.”
WHO TOLD HIM THIS??? To this day, the answer to this question remains unanswered, completely ignored and emphatically DENIED by Mayor Giuliani on several public occasions.
CS – Number 4; In April 2004, USA Today reported, “In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties.” One of the targets was the World Trade Center.
CS – Number 5; On September 12th 2007, CNN’s ‘Anderson Cooper 360’, reported that the mysterious “white plane” spotted and videotaped by multiple media outlets, flying in restricted airspace over the White House shortly before 10am on the morning of 9/11, was in fact the Air Force’s E-4B, a specially modified Boeing 747 with a communications pod behind the cockpit; otherwise known as “The Doomsday Plane”.
Though fully aware of the event, the 9/11 Commission did not deem the appearance of the military plane to be of any interest and did not include it in the final 9/11 Commission report.
CS – Number 6; Three F-16s assigned to Andrews Air Force Base, ten miles from Washington, DC, are conducting training exercises in North Carolina 207 miles away as the first plane crashes into the WTC. Even at significantly less than their top speed of 1500 mph, they could still have defended the skies over Washington well before 9am, more than 37 minutes before Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon, however, they did not return until after 9:55am.
Andrews AFB had no armed fighters on alert and ready to take off on the morning of 9/11.
CS – Number 7; WTC Building 7. Watch the video of its collapse.
CS – Number 8; Flight 93 is fourth plane to crash on 9/11 at 10:03am. V.P. Cheney only gives shoot down order at 10:10-10:20am and this is not communicated to NORAD until 28 minutes after Flight 93 has crashed.
Fueling further suspicion on this front is the fact that three months before the attacks of 9/11, Dick Cheney usurped control of NORAD, and therefore he, and no one else on planet Earth, had the power to call for military sorties on the hijacked airliners on 9/11. He did not exercise that power. Three months after 9/11, he relinquished command of NORAD and returned it to military operation.
CS – Number 9; Scores of main stream news outlets reported that the F.B.I. conducted an investigation of at least FIVE of the 9/11 hijackers being trained at U.S. military flight schools. Those investigations are now sealed and need to be declassified.
CS – Number 10; In 2004, New York firefighters Mike Bellone and Nicholas DeMasi went public to say they had found the black boxes at the World Trade Center, but were told to keep their mouths shut by FBI agents. Nicholas DeMasi said that he escorted federal agents on an all-terrain vehicle in October 2001 and helped them locate the devices, a story backed up by rescue volunteer Mike Bellone.
As the Philadelphia Daily News reported at the time, “Their story raises the question of whether there was a some type of cover-up at Ground Zero.”
CS – Number 11 – Hundreds of eye witnesses including first responders, fire captains, news reporters, and police, all described multiple explosions in both towers before and during the collapse.
CS – Number 12; An astounding video uncovered from the archives shows BBC News correspondent Jane Standley reporting on the collapse of WTC Building 7 over twenty minutes before it fell at 5:20pm on the afternoon of 9/11. Tapes from earlier BBC broadcasts show news anchors discussing the collapse of WTC 7 a full 26 minutes in advance. The BBC at first claimed that their tapes from 9/11 had been “lost” before admitting that they made the “error” of reporting the collapse of WTC 7 before it happened without adequately explaining how they could have obtained advance knowledge of the event.
In addition, over an hour before the collapse of WTC 7, at 4:10pm, CNN’s Aaron Brown reported that the building “has either collapsed, or is collapsing.”
CS – Number 13; Solicitor General Ted Olson’s claim that his wife Barbara Olsen called him twice from Flight 77, describing hijackers with box cutters, was a central plank of the official 9/11 story.
However, the credibility of the story was completely undermined after Olsen kept changing his story about whether his wife used her cell phone or the airplane phone. The technology to enable cell phone calls from high-altitude airline flights was not created until 2004. American Airlines confirmed that Flight 77 was a Boeing 757 and that this plane did not have airplane phones on board.
According to the FBI, Barbara Olsen attempted to call her husband only once and the call failed to connect, therefore Olsen must have been lying when he claimed he had spoken to his wife from Flight 77.
CS – Number 14; The size of a Boeing 757 is approximately 125ft in width and yet images of the impact zone at the Pentagon supposedly caused by the crash merely show a hole no more than 16ft in diameter. The engines of the 757 would have punctured a hole bigger than this, never mind the whole plane. Images before the partial collapse of the impact zone show little real impact damage and a sparse debris field completely inconsistent with the crash of a large jetliner, especially when contrasted with other images showing airplane crashes into buildings.
CS – Number 15; What is the meaning behind the following quote attributed to Dick Cheney which came to light during the 9/11 Commission hearings? The passage is taken from testimony given by then Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta.
During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President, “The plane is 50 miles out.” “The plane is 30 miles out.” And when it got down to “the plane is 10 miles out,” the young man also said to the Vice President, “Do the orders still stand?” And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said, “Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?”
As the plane was not shot down, in addition to the fact that armed fighter jets were nowhere near the plane and the Pentagon defensive system was not activated, are we to take it that the orders were to let the plane find its target?
CS – Number 16; In May 2003, the Miami Herald reported how the Bush administration was refusing to release a 900-page congressional report on 9/11 because it wanted to “avoid enshrining embarrassing details in the report,” particularly regarding pre-9/11 warnings as well as the fact that the hijackers were trained at U.S. flight schools.
CS – Number 17; Top Pentagon officials cancelled their scheduled flights for September 11th on September 10th. San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, following a security warning, cancelled a flight into New York that was scheduled for the morning of 9/11.
CS – Number 18; The technology to enable cell phone calls from high-altitude airline flights was not created until 2004, and even by that point it was only in the trial phase. Calls from cell phones which formed an integral part of the official government version of events were technologically impossible at the time.
CS – Number 19: On April 29, 2004, President Bush and V.P. Cheney would only meet with the commission under specific clandestine conditions. They insisted on testifying together and not under oath. They also demanded that their testimony be treated as a matter of “state secret.” To date, nothing they spoke of that day exists in the public domain.
CS – And finally Mr. President – Number 20; A few days after the attack, several newspapers as well as the FBI reported that a paper passport had been found in the ruins of the WTC. In August 2004, CNN reported that 9/11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah’s visa was found in the remains of Flight 93 which went down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
At least a third of the WTC victim’s bodies were vaporized and many of the victims of the Pentagon incident were burned beyond recognition. And yet visas and paper passports which identify the perpetrators and back up the official version of events miraculously survive explosions and fires that we are told melted steel buildings.
(The Senior aide appears again beside the President whispering in his ear. He then quickly moves off).
PBO – Well Charlie I can’t say this hasn’t been interesting. As I said earlier you’ve showed up today focused and organized. Regardless how I feel about the material you’ve presented, I must commend your dedication and zeal. However, our time here is up.
(the President rises from his chair , I do the same).
CS – Mr. President! One more second!
(The President starts towards the door – I follow him quickly step for step).
CS – Mr. President, I implore you based on the evidence you now possess, to use your Executive Power. Prove to us all Sir, that you do, in fact, care. Create a truly comprehensive and open Congressional investigation of 9/11 and its aftermath. The families deserve the truth, the American people and the rest of the free world deserve the truth. Mr. President -
(He pauses. We shake hands).
CS – Make sure your on the right side of history.
(The President breaks the handshake).
PBO – I am on the right side of history. Thank you Charlie, my staff and I will be in touch.
(I watch as he strides gracefully out of the room, the truth I provided him held firmly by his side; in the hand of providence.)
Author’s Note: What you have just read didn’t actually happen… yet.
This is an open letter to the President requesting a new investigation.
Charlie Sheen.
For media requests on this subject email sheen@infowars.com
A comprehensive bibliography containing all of the evidence presented above can be viewed at http://www.prisonplanet.com/20_minutes_bibliography.html
Friday, August 7, 2009
Many Children Were Tortured Under Bush
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2009/07/22/president-carter-many-children-were-tort
President Carter: Many Children Were Tortured Under Bush
July 22nd, 2009
Ralph Lopez
While congress says it is gearing up to investigate what is old news, that CIA and Special Ops forces are killing Al Qaeda leaders, a decision of far different gravity is being contemplated by Attorney General Eric Holder. The new insistence of Congress on its oversight role, conspicuously absent throughout 8 years of Bush, is suddenly rearing its head in the form of questioning a policy which has been in place with no controversy for years. The U.S. has been hunting and killing Al Qaeda leaders outside of official war zones since 2004, when the New York Times reported that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had signed an order authorizing Special Forces to kill Al Qaeda where they found them.
As recently as September 2008 CBS reported that Special Forces struck Qaeda leadership in Pakistan.
The decision faced by Holder, whether or not to appoint a Special Prosecutor on torture, is of a different gravity altogether. A weight of evidence keeps building which indicates torture was employed on innocent men, that it didn't work, and that it didn't prevent any attacks. And it gets worse.
Bush's own FBI Director Robert Mueller recently confirmed to the New York Times what he told Vanity Fair a year ago, that "to [his] knowledge" torture didn't prevent a single attack. Former Legendary CIA Director William Colby has said that torture is "ineffective."
Harper's Magazine's Scott Horton nows suggests there are two Eric Holders at war with each other: Holder the good soldier who knows well the preference of his boss for prosecutions to not take place, and Holder the servant of the law who is aware that what he does now may determine what is likely to happen again.
It is becoming clear that such an investigation, if it happens, will not stop with a few low-ranking scapegoats. Horton notes:
"President Obama’s assurance to CIA officials who relied on the opinions of government lawyers in implementing these programs, an assurance that Holder himself repeated, would have to be worked in. That suggests that the focus would likely be on the lawyers and policymakers who authorized use of the new techniques."
And CIA whistleblower Ray McGovern writes this week:
the buck stops - actually, in this case, it began - with President Bush. Senate Armed Services Committee leaders Carl Levin and John McCain on Dec. 11, 2008, released the executive summary of a report, approved by the full committee without dissent, concluding that Bush's Feb. 7, 2002, memorandum "opened the door to considering aggressive techniques."
What changed with Holder? Horton writes in "The Torture Prosecution Turnaround?":
Holder began his review mindful of the clear preference of President Obama’s two key political advisers—David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel—that there be no investigation. Axelrod and Emanuel are described as uninterested in either the legal or policy merits of the issue of a criminal investigation. Their concerns turn entirely on their political analysis...Holder initially appeared prepared to satisfy their wishes.
This attitude seemed to change after Obama's speech at the CIA, when Emanual and Axelrod moved out front to say there would be no prosecutions. According to Horton:
"In the days after Obama’s speech at the CIA, both Axelrod and Emanuel insisted that the White House had made the decision that there would be no prosecutions. According to reliable sources, that incensed Holder, who felt that the remarks had compromised the integrity both of the White House and Justice Department by suggesting that political advisers made the call on who would or would not be criminally investigated."
To make things worse for the Bush administration, evidence is emerging that they can no longer even rely on exhibit A and B of the Torture Works theory, Al Zabudaya and Kalid Shiek Mohammed, the latter of whom is still confessing to everything short of being the real Boston Strangler. I guess if I'd been waterboarded 82 times I'd be babbling too. The FBI Special Agent who interrogated Abu Zubayda, recently breaking a 7-year silence after reading the "torture memos," wrote in the New York Times:
"One of the most striking parts of the memos is the false premises on which they are based. The first, dated August 2002, grants authorization to use harsh interrogation techniques on a high-ranking terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, on the grounds that previous methods hadn’t been working. The next three memos cite the successes of those methods as a justification for their continued use.
It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence...This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives."
Then there is the political risk to the Obama administration that Axelrod and Emanual have miscalculated, and that, in fact, the rest of the president's agenda is hamstrung while a growing number of Americans call for existing laws to be enforced. What is haunting Americans could be, in Washington jargon, "sucking oxygen" out of the debate, and "moving forward" is a pipe dream until pending business is dealt with. Spontaneous and planned rallies calling for a Special Prosecutor are growing, not diminishing. In addition, the worse revelations may be yet to come in the horrifying saga of what happened when, as Major General Anthony Taguba says:
[a] permissive environment [was] created by implicit and explicit authorizations by senior US officials to "take the gloves off"...
President Jimmy Carter wrote that the Red Cross, Amnesty International and the Pentagon "have gathered substantial testimony of torture of children, confirmed by soldiers who witnessed or participated in the abuse." In "Our Endangered Values" Carter said that the Red Cross found after visiting six U.S. prisons "107 detainees under eighteen, some as young as eight years old." And reporter Hersh, (who broke the Abu Ghraib torture scandal,) reported 800-900 Pakistani boys aged 13 to 15 in custody.
Journalist Seymour Hersh's (who broke the Abu Ghraib scandal) bombshell before the ACLU some years ago has been in a temporary slumber, as there is question as to whether the videotapes in possession of the Pentagon were among those claimed to be destroyed. Destroyed or not, there is still the conscience of soldiers and agents who bore witness to contend with, as the reign of political terror against whistleblowers which characterized the Bush administration subsides. Hersh said:
" 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."
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said at the time:
"The American public needs to understand, we're talking about rape and murder here. We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience. We're talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges."
History is just beginning to sort out the Bush era, with stubborn facts showing a resilience that Fox News talking points cannot, and more emerging. Today, even among Republicans, it is difficult to find those who will embrace Richard Nixon, though for a while he was every bit the perceived victim of "left-wing hate" that Bush and Cheney are now. Incredibly, to compare Nixon to Bush-Cheney is to do a deeply flawed man a disservice. Nixon inherited Vietnam. He did not orchestrate from whole cloth a campaign to link Saddam with 9/11, and strenuously push to war despite the objections of his countrymen and the world. Nixon spied on political enemies. He did not use a tragedy to illegally spy on millions, the true numbers of which we still do not know because congress has never investigated.
It's almost possible to feel sorry for the shifty, friendless Nixon. It is less possible to feel so for the smirking Bush, who thought nothing of telling soldier's families that war critics were saying that their loved ones "had died in vain."
A compilation in November 2008 of other evidence of alleged incidents involving children at the time recounts:
-- Iraqi lawyer Sahar Yasiri, representing the Federation of Prisoners and Political Prisoners, said in a published interview there are more than 400,000 detainees in Iraq being held in 36 prisons and camps and that 95 percent of the 10,000 women among them have been raped. Children, he said, "suffer from torture, rape, (and) starvation" and do not know why they have been arrested. He added the children have been victims of "random" arrests "not based on any legal text."
-- Former prisoner Thaar Salman Dawod in a witness statement said, "[I saw] two boys naked and they were cuffed together face to face and [a U.S. soldier] was beating them and a group of guards were watching and taking pictures and there was three female soldiers laughing at the prisoners."
-- Iraqi TV reporter, Suhaib Badr-Addin al-Baz, arrested while making a documentary and thrown into Abu Ghraib for 74 days, told Mackay he saw "hundreds" of children there. Al-Baz said he heard one 12-year-old girl crying, "They have undressed me. They have poured water over me." He said he heard her whimpering daily.
-- Al-Baz also told of a 15-year-old boy "who was soaked repeatedly with hoses until he collapsed." Amnesty International said ex-detainees reported boys as young as 10 are held at Abu Ghraib.
-- German TV reporter Thomas Reutter of "Report Mainz" quoted U.S. Army Sgt. Samuel Provance that interrogation specialists "poured water" over one 16-year-old Iraqi boy, drove him throughout a cold night, "smeared him with mud" and then showed him to his father, who was also in custody. Apparently, one tactic employed by the Bush regime is to elicit confessions from adults by dragging their abused children in front of them.
-- Jonathan Steele, wrote in the British "The Guardian" that "Hundreds of children, some as young as nine, are being held in appalling conditions in Baghdad’s prisons...Sixteen-year-old Omar Ali told the "Guardian" he spent more than three years at Karkh juvenile prison sleeping with 75 boys to a cell that is just five by 10 meters, some of them on the floor. Omar told the paper guards often take boys to a separate room in the prison and rape them.
-- Raad Jamal, age 17, was taken from his Doura home by U.S. troops and turned over to the Iraqi Army’s Second regiment where Jamal said he was hung from the ceiling by ropes and beaten with electric cables.
-- Human Rights Watch (HRW) last June put the number of juveniles detained at 513. In all, HRW estimates, since 2003, the U.S. has detained 2,400 children in Iraq, some as young as ten.
-- IRIN, the humanitarian news service, last year quoted Khalid Rabia of the Iraqi NGO Prisoners’ Association for Justice(PAJ), stating that five boys between 13 and 17 accused of supporting insurgents and detained by the Iraqi army "showed signs of torture all over their bodies," such as "cigarette burns over their legs," she said.
-- One boy of 13 arrested in Afghanistan in 2002 was held in solitary for more than a year at Bagram and Guantanamo and made to stand in stress position and deprived of sleep, according to the "Catholic Worker."
Attorney General Holder is a man of conscience who now serves both President Obama and the law. A Newsweek piece last week says he has no illusions that:
Such a decision [to appoint a Special Prosecutor] would roil the country, would likely plunge Washington into a new round of partisan warfare, and could even imperil Obama's domestic priorities, including health care and energy reform. Holder knows all this, and he has been wrestling with the question for months. "I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president's agenda," he says. "But that can't be a part of my decision."
There can be redemption for a nation which faces its past. One that does not can only become more monstrous.
President Carter: Many Children Were Tortured Under Bush
July 22nd, 2009
Ralph Lopez
While congress says it is gearing up to investigate what is old news, that CIA and Special Ops forces are killing Al Qaeda leaders, a decision of far different gravity is being contemplated by Attorney General Eric Holder. The new insistence of Congress on its oversight role, conspicuously absent throughout 8 years of Bush, is suddenly rearing its head in the form of questioning a policy which has been in place with no controversy for years. The U.S. has been hunting and killing Al Qaeda leaders outside of official war zones since 2004, when the New York Times reported that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had signed an order authorizing Special Forces to kill Al Qaeda where they found them.
As recently as September 2008 CBS reported that Special Forces struck Qaeda leadership in Pakistan.
The decision faced by Holder, whether or not to appoint a Special Prosecutor on torture, is of a different gravity altogether. A weight of evidence keeps building which indicates torture was employed on innocent men, that it didn't work, and that it didn't prevent any attacks. And it gets worse.
Bush's own FBI Director Robert Mueller recently confirmed to the New York Times what he told Vanity Fair a year ago, that "to [his] knowledge" torture didn't prevent a single attack. Former Legendary CIA Director William Colby has said that torture is "ineffective."
Harper's Magazine's Scott Horton nows suggests there are two Eric Holders at war with each other: Holder the good soldier who knows well the preference of his boss for prosecutions to not take place, and Holder the servant of the law who is aware that what he does now may determine what is likely to happen again.
It is becoming clear that such an investigation, if it happens, will not stop with a few low-ranking scapegoats. Horton notes:
"President Obama’s assurance to CIA officials who relied on the opinions of government lawyers in implementing these programs, an assurance that Holder himself repeated, would have to be worked in. That suggests that the focus would likely be on the lawyers and policymakers who authorized use of the new techniques."
And CIA whistleblower Ray McGovern writes this week:
the buck stops - actually, in this case, it began - with President Bush. Senate Armed Services Committee leaders Carl Levin and John McCain on Dec. 11, 2008, released the executive summary of a report, approved by the full committee without dissent, concluding that Bush's Feb. 7, 2002, memorandum "opened the door to considering aggressive techniques."
What changed with Holder? Horton writes in "The Torture Prosecution Turnaround?":
Holder began his review mindful of the clear preference of President Obama’s two key political advisers—David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel—that there be no investigation. Axelrod and Emanuel are described as uninterested in either the legal or policy merits of the issue of a criminal investigation. Their concerns turn entirely on their political analysis...Holder initially appeared prepared to satisfy their wishes.
This attitude seemed to change after Obama's speech at the CIA, when Emanual and Axelrod moved out front to say there would be no prosecutions. According to Horton:
"In the days after Obama’s speech at the CIA, both Axelrod and Emanuel insisted that the White House had made the decision that there would be no prosecutions. According to reliable sources, that incensed Holder, who felt that the remarks had compromised the integrity both of the White House and Justice Department by suggesting that political advisers made the call on who would or would not be criminally investigated."
To make things worse for the Bush administration, evidence is emerging that they can no longer even rely on exhibit A and B of the Torture Works theory, Al Zabudaya and Kalid Shiek Mohammed, the latter of whom is still confessing to everything short of being the real Boston Strangler. I guess if I'd been waterboarded 82 times I'd be babbling too. The FBI Special Agent who interrogated Abu Zubayda, recently breaking a 7-year silence after reading the "torture memos," wrote in the New York Times:
"One of the most striking parts of the memos is the false premises on which they are based. The first, dated August 2002, grants authorization to use harsh interrogation techniques on a high-ranking terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, on the grounds that previous methods hadn’t been working. The next three memos cite the successes of those methods as a justification for their continued use.
It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence...This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives."
Then there is the political risk to the Obama administration that Axelrod and Emanual have miscalculated, and that, in fact, the rest of the president's agenda is hamstrung while a growing number of Americans call for existing laws to be enforced. What is haunting Americans could be, in Washington jargon, "sucking oxygen" out of the debate, and "moving forward" is a pipe dream until pending business is dealt with. Spontaneous and planned rallies calling for a Special Prosecutor are growing, not diminishing. In addition, the worse revelations may be yet to come in the horrifying saga of what happened when, as Major General Anthony Taguba says:
[a] permissive environment [was] created by implicit and explicit authorizations by senior US officials to "take the gloves off"...
President Jimmy Carter wrote that the Red Cross, Amnesty International and the Pentagon "have gathered substantial testimony of torture of children, confirmed by soldiers who witnessed or participated in the abuse." In "Our Endangered Values" Carter said that the Red Cross found after visiting six U.S. prisons "107 detainees under eighteen, some as young as eight years old." And reporter Hersh, (who broke the Abu Ghraib torture scandal,) reported 800-900 Pakistani boys aged 13 to 15 in custody.
Journalist Seymour Hersh's (who broke the Abu Ghraib scandal) bombshell before the ACLU some years ago has been in a temporary slumber, as there is question as to whether the videotapes in possession of the Pentagon were among those claimed to be destroyed. Destroyed or not, there is still the conscience of soldiers and agents who bore witness to contend with, as the reign of political terror against whistleblowers which characterized the Bush administration subsides. Hersh said:
" 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."
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said at the time:
"The American public needs to understand, we're talking about rape and murder here. We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience. We're talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges."
History is just beginning to sort out the Bush era, with stubborn facts showing a resilience that Fox News talking points cannot, and more emerging. Today, even among Republicans, it is difficult to find those who will embrace Richard Nixon, though for a while he was every bit the perceived victim of "left-wing hate" that Bush and Cheney are now. Incredibly, to compare Nixon to Bush-Cheney is to do a deeply flawed man a disservice. Nixon inherited Vietnam. He did not orchestrate from whole cloth a campaign to link Saddam with 9/11, and strenuously push to war despite the objections of his countrymen and the world. Nixon spied on political enemies. He did not use a tragedy to illegally spy on millions, the true numbers of which we still do not know because congress has never investigated.
It's almost possible to feel sorry for the shifty, friendless Nixon. It is less possible to feel so for the smirking Bush, who thought nothing of telling soldier's families that war critics were saying that their loved ones "had died in vain."
A compilation in November 2008 of other evidence of alleged incidents involving children at the time recounts:
-- Iraqi lawyer Sahar Yasiri, representing the Federation of Prisoners and Political Prisoners, said in a published interview there are more than 400,000 detainees in Iraq being held in 36 prisons and camps and that 95 percent of the 10,000 women among them have been raped. Children, he said, "suffer from torture, rape, (and) starvation" and do not know why they have been arrested. He added the children have been victims of "random" arrests "not based on any legal text."
-- Former prisoner Thaar Salman Dawod in a witness statement said, "[I saw] two boys naked and they were cuffed together face to face and [a U.S. soldier] was beating them and a group of guards were watching and taking pictures and there was three female soldiers laughing at the prisoners."
-- Iraqi TV reporter, Suhaib Badr-Addin al-Baz, arrested while making a documentary and thrown into Abu Ghraib for 74 days, told Mackay he saw "hundreds" of children there. Al-Baz said he heard one 12-year-old girl crying, "They have undressed me. They have poured water over me." He said he heard her whimpering daily.
-- Al-Baz also told of a 15-year-old boy "who was soaked repeatedly with hoses until he collapsed." Amnesty International said ex-detainees reported boys as young as 10 are held at Abu Ghraib.
-- German TV reporter Thomas Reutter of "Report Mainz" quoted U.S. Army Sgt. Samuel Provance that interrogation specialists "poured water" over one 16-year-old Iraqi boy, drove him throughout a cold night, "smeared him with mud" and then showed him to his father, who was also in custody. Apparently, one tactic employed by the Bush regime is to elicit confessions from adults by dragging their abused children in front of them.
-- Jonathan Steele, wrote in the British "The Guardian" that "Hundreds of children, some as young as nine, are being held in appalling conditions in Baghdad’s prisons...Sixteen-year-old Omar Ali told the "Guardian" he spent more than three years at Karkh juvenile prison sleeping with 75 boys to a cell that is just five by 10 meters, some of them on the floor. Omar told the paper guards often take boys to a separate room in the prison and rape them.
-- Raad Jamal, age 17, was taken from his Doura home by U.S. troops and turned over to the Iraqi Army’s Second regiment where Jamal said he was hung from the ceiling by ropes and beaten with electric cables.
-- Human Rights Watch (HRW) last June put the number of juveniles detained at 513. In all, HRW estimates, since 2003, the U.S. has detained 2,400 children in Iraq, some as young as ten.
-- IRIN, the humanitarian news service, last year quoted Khalid Rabia of the Iraqi NGO Prisoners’ Association for Justice(PAJ), stating that five boys between 13 and 17 accused of supporting insurgents and detained by the Iraqi army "showed signs of torture all over their bodies," such as "cigarette burns over their legs," she said.
-- One boy of 13 arrested in Afghanistan in 2002 was held in solitary for more than a year at Bagram and Guantanamo and made to stand in stress position and deprived of sleep, according to the "Catholic Worker."
Attorney General Holder is a man of conscience who now serves both President Obama and the law. A Newsweek piece last week says he has no illusions that:
Such a decision [to appoint a Special Prosecutor] would roil the country, would likely plunge Washington into a new round of partisan warfare, and could even imperil Obama's domestic priorities, including health care and energy reform. Holder knows all this, and he has been wrestling with the question for months. "I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president's agenda," he says. "But that can't be a part of my decision."
There can be redemption for a nation which faces its past. One that does not can only become more monstrous.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
The Top 43 Who Helped Make Bush The Worst
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/01/17/bush-43-worst/
The Top 43 Appointees Who Helped Make Bush The Worst President Ever
Next week, “change is coming to America,” as President George W. Bush wraps up his tenure as one of the worst American presidents ever. He wasn’t able to accomplish such an ignominious feat all by himself, however; he had a great deal of help along the way. The ThinkProgress team heralds the conclusion of the Bush 43 presidency by bringing you our list of the top 43 worst Bush appointees. Did we miss anyone? Who should have been ranked higher? Let us know what you think.
1. Dick Cheney — The worst Dick since Nixon. The man who shot his friend while in office. The “most powerful and controversial vice president.” Until he got the job, people used to actually think it was a bad thing that the vice presidency has historically been a do-nothing position. Asked by PBS’s Jim Lehrer about why people hate him, Cheney rejected the premise, saying, “I don’t buy that.” His top placement in our survey says otherwise.
2. Karl Rove — There wasn’t a scandal in the Bush administration that Rove didn’t have his fingerprints all over — see Plame, Iraq war deception, Gov. Don Siegelman, U.S. Attorney firings, missing e-mails, and more. As senior political adviser and later as deputy chief of staff, “The Architect” was responsible for politicizing nearly every agency of the federal government.
3. Alberto Gonzales — Fundamentally dishonest and woefully incompetent, Gonzales was involved in a series of scandals, first as White House counsel and then as Attorney General. Some of the most notable: pressuring a “feeble” and “barely articulate” Attorney General Ashcroft at his hospital bedside to sign off on Bush’s illegal wiretapping program; approving waterboarding and other torture techniques to be used against detainees; and leading the firing of U.S. Attorneys deemed not sufficiently loyal to Bush.
4. Donald Rumsfeld — After winning praise for leading the U.S. effort in ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan in 2001, the former Defense Secretary strongly advocated for the invasion of Iraq and then grossly misjudged and mishandled its aftermath. Rumsfeld is also responsible for authorizing the use of torture against terror detainees in U.S. custody; according to a bipartisan Senate report, Rumsfeld “conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees.”
5. Michael Brown — This former commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association was appointed by Bush to head FEMA in 2003. After Katrina made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane, Brownie promptly did a “heck of a job” bungling the government’s relief efforts, and was sent back to Washington a few days later. He was forced to resign shortly thereafter.
6. Paul Wolfowitz — As Deputy Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2005, Wolfowitz was one of the primary architects of the Iraq war, arguing for the invasion as early as Sept. 15, 2001. Testifying before Congress in February 2003, Wolfowitz said that it was “hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself.” Wolfowitz eventually admitted that “for bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction,” as a justification for war, “because it was the one reason everyone [in the administration] could agree on.”
7. David Addington — “Cheney’s Cheney” was the “most powerful man you’ve never heard of.” As the leader of Bush’s legal team and Cheney’s chief of staff, Addington was the biggest proponent of some of Bush’s most notorious legal abuses, such as torture and warrantless surveillance, and is a loyal follower of the so-called unitary executive theory.
8. Stephen Johnson — The “Alberto Gonzales of the environment,” EPA Administrator Johnson subverted the agency’s mission at the behest of the White House and corporate interests, suppressing staff recommendations on pesticides, mercury, lead paint, smog, and global warming.
9. Douglas Feith — Undersecretary of Defense for Policy from 2001-2005, Feith headed up the notorious Office of Special Plans, an in-house Pentagon intelligence shop devised by Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz to produce intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq. A subsequent investigation by the Pentagon’s Inspector General found the OSP’s work produced “conclusions that were not fully supported by the available intelligence.”
10. John Bolton — As Undersecretary of State, Bolton offered a strong voice in favor of invading Iraq and pushed for the U.S. to disengage from the International Criminal Court and key international arms control agreements. A recess appointment landed Bolton the job of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, despite his stringent animosity toward the world body. Today, he spends his time calling for war with Iran.
11. John Yoo — As a lawyer for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Yoo authored a series of legal memosdetainee to be buried alive.
12. Ari Fleischer — Bush’s first press secretary helped redefine the role as that of liar-in-chief rather than informer of the public, earning a reputation as “the world’s most dishonest flack.” Whereas his successors sometimes looked uncomfortable lying, Fleischer was having fun, spinning a cowed and gullible press corps through two massive tax cuts and the initiation of a war undertaken on false pretenses.
13. John Ashcroft — In 2003, as Bush’s first Attorney General, Ashcroft approved waterboarding and other torture techniques on detainees. Ashcroft’s nomination was controversial, as he had a history of opposing school desegregation. The chief architect of the invasive Patriot Act, Ashcroft maintains to this day that Bush is “among the most respectful of all leaders ever” of civil liberties.
14. Henry Paulson — Even as the financial system was crashing down around him, Treasury Secretary Paulson insisted for months that the banking system was “safe and sound.” Once he decided that the economy needed saving, Paulson requested nearly unfettered authority to send billions of taxpayer dollars to banks with no oversight.
15. L. Paul Bremer — This Presidential Medal of Freedom winner took over the Coalition Provisional Authority in May 2003. Under his mismanagement, the insurgency exploded in Iraq. Bremer claimed he had all the troops he needed to secure the country, overestimated the strength of the new U.S.-trained Iraqi army, disbanded the Iraqi army leaving thousands of Iraqi soldiers with no income and no occupation, and enacted a de-Baathification law that barred many experienced Iraqis from government positions.
16. Bradley Schlozman — As a recent DOJ Inspector General report demonstrates, Schlozman was a central figure in Bush’s politicization of the Justice Department. Violating civil service laws, Schlozman used political and ideological considerations to ensure that only “right-thinking Americans” received jobs. He eventually lied to Congress about his efforts.
17. J. Steven Griles — A former energy lobbyist and no. 2 official in the Interior Department, Griles went to jail for lying to Congress about illegal favors he did for corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Griles also abused his position “to unlock nearly every legal barrier to exploitation” of our nation’s oil and mineral reserves. Before his conviction, Griles left the White House to become a lobbyist for ConocoPhillips.
18. Condoleezza Rice — As Bush’s national security adviser, Rice was another strong advocate for invading Iraq, once famously warning that the U.S. should attack Iraq and not wait for solid proof of its WMD because “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Rice also ignored an urgent warning from the CIA before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that a strike inside the U.S. was imminent.
19. Scooter Libby — Cheney’s former chief of staff was a key player in the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame as part of the Bush administration’s quest to punish Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, for publishing an op-ed debunking one of the White House’s main justifications for invading Iraq. Libby was ultimately convicted of perjury and obstructing justice in a federal investigation into Plame’s outing but later had his 30-month prison sentence commuted by Bush.
20. Monica Goodling — Goodling was the most notorious graduate of Pat Robertson’s Regent University during her tenure in the Justice Department. As the White House liaison at the DOJ, she based the department’s hiring of candidates on their sexual preference, GOP loyalty, and adherence to conservative ideology.
21. Alphonso Jackson — As Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Jackson let the U.S. housing market crumble while he was busy giving lucrative contracts to his golfing buddies, retaliating against Bush critics, and erecting giant photo homages to himself.
22. Michael Hayden — As director of the National Security Agency, Hayden ran Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program and misled Congress about the program’s legality. After moving to the CIA, he dismissed the destruction of evidence implicating the CIA in torture as “in line with the law.”
23. Lurita Doan — The former head of the General Services Administration (GSA)who doled out a no-bid contract to a friend, Doan famously hosted a meeting of White House political operatives where she asked how GSA employees could “help ‘our candidates’ in the next election.” After the Office of Special Counsel called for her firing, she was forced to resign
24. Gale Norton — A former industry lobbyist and Bush’s first Secretary of the Interior, Norton pushed a radical ideological agenda “through regulatory rollbacks, suppression of science, preferential treatment, and collusion with industry” — including doctoring scientific findings on the impacts of oil drilling on caribou. After resigning under the cloud of ties to Jack Abramoff, she joined Shell Oil.
25. Lester Crawford — After promising to act on the morning-after contraceptive pill during his confirmation hearings, the former FDA Commissioner “indefinitely postponed nonprescription sales of emergency contraception over the objections of staff scientists who had declared the pill safe.” Crawford resigned after just two months on the job and later pleaded guilty “to charges that he hid his ownership of stock in food and drug companies that his agency regulated.”
26. Harriet Miers — Well-known for being Bush’s failed Supreme Court nominee, Miers also thought it was “important” to her as White House Counsel that Rove protege Tim Griffin was installed as a U.S. Attorney, making her a central figure in the U.S. Attorney scandal. She is said to have called Bush “the most brilliant man she had ever met.”
27. Hans Von Spakovsky — Originally a political appointee in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, Spakovsky “injected partisan political factors into decision-making” and used every opportunity “to make it difficult for voters — poor, minority and Democratic — to go to the polls.” In 2008, Spakovsky withdrew his name from consideration for the FEC, following months of opposition from lawmakers and civil rights groups.
28. Tommy Franks — As head of U.S. Central Command from 2000 to 2003, Franks oversaw Osama bin Laden’s great escape from Afghanistan, gave orders for the stabilization of Iraq via PowerPoint, assumed that the U.S. would draw down to 25,000 troops by the end of 2004, and had American soldiers stand idly by as chaos and lawlessness took hold after the invasion.
29. Thomas Scully — As chief administrator for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Scully was the White House’s head negotiator on the Medicare prescription drug bill. Scully threatened to fire chief actuary Richard Foster if he revealed that Bush’s Medicare Part D legislation “would cost 25% to 50% more than the Bush administration’s public estimates.”
30. Julie MacDonald — A top Interior Department appointee, MacDonald “interjected herself personally and profoundly” and “tainted nearly every decision made on the protection of endangered species” over a five-year period, intimidating the staff with “abrupt and abrasive, if not abusive” tactics. MacDonald also leaked government documents to a young acquaintance whom she met while playing “internet role-playing games.”
31. William Haynes — As the former general counsel at the Defense Department, he was part of a five-person team of high-level administration lawyers, dubbed the “War Council,” that tossed the Geneva Conventions aside and hatched out the legal framework for torture in secret meetings.
32. David Safavian — Safavian was (twice) tried and convicted for his role in the jack Abramoff scandal. Safavian was found guilty of “lying and obstructing justice” in an attempt to cover-up “his many efforts to assist Abramoff in acquiring two properties controlled by the GSA.”
33. James Connaughton — As chairman of the White House Council of Environmental Quality, Connaughton wrote EPA press releases downplaying the danger of the air quality in lower Manhattan following 9/11. “A former lobbyist for utilities, mining, chemical, and other industrial polluters,” Connaughton insisted “there’s a lot of disagreement” about humans’ impact on global warming, and he touted a bogus study purporting to show that the 20th century was not unusually warm.
34. William Luti — A former Navy officer and Cheney aide, Luti was dispatched to the Pentagon in 2001 to work underneath Feith to find “evidence” to support his boss’s belief in conspiracy theories linking Saddam to al Qaeda. Luti was an integral component of Cheney’s campaign to pressure intelligence professionals to conform their judgments to administration policy rather than reality.
35. Susan Orr — As Assistant Deputy Secretary for Population Affairs, this former Family Research Council officialIt’s not a medical necessity that you have [contraception].”
36. Christopher Cox — Under Chairman Cox, the Securities and Exchange Commission censored internal reports showing that it ignored critical signs pointing to Wall Street’s meltdown. Cox’s SEC also failed to detect Bernie Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme, despite a decade of warnings.
37. Elliott Abrams — An Iran-Contra convict pardoned by Bush 41, Abrams was named by Bush 43 as the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations. As a foundingIsrael’s 2006 bombing of Lebanon into Syria and advocated a Fatah coup after Hamas won the February 2006 Palestinian elections.
38. Philip Cooney — A former oil lobbyist who served as chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, Cooney doctored climate reports to “soften” words and phrases linking greenhouse gas emissions to global warming. After his political interference was revealed, Cooney left the White House to become a lobbyist for Exxon.
39. Colin Powell — Though Bush called him “an American hero” when he appointed him to be the first African-American Secretary of State, Powell placed an ugly “blot” on his record when he pushed the Bush administration’s faulty case for the Iraq war in a speech to the U.N. on Feb.5, 2003, using inaccurate information. Liberal hawks and the media rallied around Powell’s false case, calling it the “winning hand” for war.
40. Elaine Chao — The Labor Secretary made it through all eight years of the Bush administration, driving morale at the Labor Department so low that staffers threw a “good-riddance party” to cheer her departure. She leaves behind a “deeply troubled department” that “spent eight years attacking workers’ rights, strong workplace health and safety rules, and unions while they carried the water for Big Business.”
41. Julie Myers — After being hired as head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement based on little more than her personal connections, Myers made herself famous by awarding “Most Original Costume” to an employee who dressed up in blackface and a prison costume for Halloween. She was also heavily criticized for conducting politically-motivated immigration raids.
42. Wade Horn — As Assistant Secretary for Community Initiatives at the Department of Health and Human Services, Horn funneled millions of tax-payer dollars into right-wing abstinence-only programs. Shortly before he resigned, it was revealed that he had given nearly $1 million “to the National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI), where he was the president for at least three years until joining the Bush administration in 2001.”
43. George Deutsch — As a young, inexperienced press officer for NASA, Deutsch “told public affairs workers to limit reporters’ access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word ‘theory’ at every mention of the Big Bang.” He resigned in 2006 after it was discovered he had lied on his resume, falsely claiming that he had a journalism degree from Texas A&M.
Dishonorable Mentions: Bush appointees who didn’t quite make the list included a child pornography aficionado, a patron of hookers, a shoplifter, a mail fraudster, an operator of an illegal horse gambling ring, and a CIA official who took bribes in the form of prostitutes.
The Top 43 Appointees Who Helped Make Bush The Worst President Ever
Next week, “change is coming to America,” as President George W. Bush wraps up his tenure as one of the worst American presidents ever. He wasn’t able to accomplish such an ignominious feat all by himself, however; he had a great deal of help along the way. The ThinkProgress team heralds the conclusion of the Bush 43 presidency by bringing you our list of the top 43 worst Bush appointees. Did we miss anyone? Who should have been ranked higher? Let us know what you think.
1. Dick Cheney — The worst Dick since Nixon. The man who shot his friend while in office. The “most powerful and controversial vice president.” Until he got the job, people used to actually think it was a bad thing that the vice presidency has historically been a do-nothing position. Asked by PBS’s Jim Lehrer about why people hate him, Cheney rejected the premise, saying, “I don’t buy that.” His top placement in our survey says otherwise.
2. Karl Rove — There wasn’t a scandal in the Bush administration that Rove didn’t have his fingerprints all over — see Plame, Iraq war deception, Gov. Don Siegelman, U.S. Attorney firings, missing e-mails, and more. As senior political adviser and later as deputy chief of staff, “The Architect” was responsible for politicizing nearly every agency of the federal government.
3. Alberto Gonzales — Fundamentally dishonest and woefully incompetent, Gonzales was involved in a series of scandals, first as White House counsel and then as Attorney General. Some of the most notable: pressuring a “feeble” and “barely articulate” Attorney General Ashcroft at his hospital bedside to sign off on Bush’s illegal wiretapping program; approving waterboarding and other torture techniques to be used against detainees; and leading the firing of U.S. Attorneys deemed not sufficiently loyal to Bush.
4. Donald Rumsfeld — After winning praise for leading the U.S. effort in ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan in 2001, the former Defense Secretary strongly advocated for the invasion of Iraq and then grossly misjudged and mishandled its aftermath. Rumsfeld is also responsible for authorizing the use of torture against terror detainees in U.S. custody; according to a bipartisan Senate report, Rumsfeld “conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees.”
5. Michael Brown — This former commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association was appointed by Bush to head FEMA in 2003. After Katrina made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane, Brownie promptly did a “heck of a job” bungling the government’s relief efforts, and was sent back to Washington a few days later. He was forced to resign shortly thereafter.
6. Paul Wolfowitz — As Deputy Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2005, Wolfowitz was one of the primary architects of the Iraq war, arguing for the invasion as early as Sept. 15, 2001. Testifying before Congress in February 2003, Wolfowitz said that it was “hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself.” Wolfowitz eventually admitted that “for bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction,” as a justification for war, “because it was the one reason everyone [in the administration] could agree on.”
7. David Addington — “Cheney’s Cheney” was the “most powerful man you’ve never heard of.” As the leader of Bush’s legal team and Cheney’s chief of staff, Addington was the biggest proponent of some of Bush’s most notorious legal abuses, such as torture and warrantless surveillance, and is a loyal follower of the so-called unitary executive theory.
8. Stephen Johnson — The “Alberto Gonzales of the environment,” EPA Administrator Johnson subverted the agency’s mission at the behest of the White House and corporate interests, suppressing staff recommendations on pesticides, mercury, lead paint, smog, and global warming.
9. Douglas Feith — Undersecretary of Defense for Policy from 2001-2005, Feith headed up the notorious Office of Special Plans, an in-house Pentagon intelligence shop devised by Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz to produce intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq. A subsequent investigation by the Pentagon’s Inspector General found the OSP’s work produced “conclusions that were not fully supported by the available intelligence.”
10. John Bolton — As Undersecretary of State, Bolton offered a strong voice in favor of invading Iraq and pushed for the U.S. to disengage from the International Criminal Court and key international arms control agreements. A recess appointment landed Bolton the job of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, despite his stringent animosity toward the world body. Today, he spends his time calling for war with Iran.
11. John Yoo — As a lawyer for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Yoo authored a series of legal memosdetainee to be buried alive.
12. Ari Fleischer — Bush’s first press secretary helped redefine the role as that of liar-in-chief rather than informer of the public, earning a reputation as “the world’s most dishonest flack.” Whereas his successors sometimes looked uncomfortable lying, Fleischer was having fun, spinning a cowed and gullible press corps through two massive tax cuts and the initiation of a war undertaken on false pretenses.
13. John Ashcroft — In 2003, as Bush’s first Attorney General, Ashcroft approved waterboarding and other torture techniques on detainees. Ashcroft’s nomination was controversial, as he had a history of opposing school desegregation. The chief architect of the invasive Patriot Act, Ashcroft maintains to this day that Bush is “among the most respectful of all leaders ever” of civil liberties.
14. Henry Paulson — Even as the financial system was crashing down around him, Treasury Secretary Paulson insisted for months that the banking system was “safe and sound.” Once he decided that the economy needed saving, Paulson requested nearly unfettered authority to send billions of taxpayer dollars to banks with no oversight.
15. L. Paul Bremer — This Presidential Medal of Freedom winner took over the Coalition Provisional Authority in May 2003. Under his mismanagement, the insurgency exploded in Iraq. Bremer claimed he had all the troops he needed to secure the country, overestimated the strength of the new U.S.-trained Iraqi army, disbanded the Iraqi army leaving thousands of Iraqi soldiers with no income and no occupation, and enacted a de-Baathification law that barred many experienced Iraqis from government positions.
16. Bradley Schlozman — As a recent DOJ Inspector General report demonstrates, Schlozman was a central figure in Bush’s politicization of the Justice Department. Violating civil service laws, Schlozman used political and ideological considerations to ensure that only “right-thinking Americans” received jobs. He eventually lied to Congress about his efforts.
17. J. Steven Griles — A former energy lobbyist and no. 2 official in the Interior Department, Griles went to jail for lying to Congress about illegal favors he did for corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Griles also abused his position “to unlock nearly every legal barrier to exploitation” of our nation’s oil and mineral reserves. Before his conviction, Griles left the White House to become a lobbyist for ConocoPhillips.
18. Condoleezza Rice — As Bush’s national security adviser, Rice was another strong advocate for invading Iraq, once famously warning that the U.S. should attack Iraq and not wait for solid proof of its WMD because “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Rice also ignored an urgent warning from the CIA before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that a strike inside the U.S. was imminent.
19. Scooter Libby — Cheney’s former chief of staff was a key player in the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame as part of the Bush administration’s quest to punish Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, for publishing an op-ed debunking one of the White House’s main justifications for invading Iraq. Libby was ultimately convicted of perjury and obstructing justice in a federal investigation into Plame’s outing but later had his 30-month prison sentence commuted by Bush.
20. Monica Goodling — Goodling was the most notorious graduate of Pat Robertson’s Regent University during her tenure in the Justice Department. As the White House liaison at the DOJ, she based the department’s hiring of candidates on their sexual preference, GOP loyalty, and adherence to conservative ideology.
21. Alphonso Jackson — As Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Jackson let the U.S. housing market crumble while he was busy giving lucrative contracts to his golfing buddies, retaliating against Bush critics, and erecting giant photo homages to himself.
22. Michael Hayden — As director of the National Security Agency, Hayden ran Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program and misled Congress about the program’s legality. After moving to the CIA, he dismissed the destruction of evidence implicating the CIA in torture as “in line with the law.”
23. Lurita Doan — The former head of the General Services Administration (GSA)who doled out a no-bid contract to a friend, Doan famously hosted a meeting of White House political operatives where she asked how GSA employees could “help ‘our candidates’ in the next election.” After the Office of Special Counsel called for her firing, she was forced to resign
24. Gale Norton — A former industry lobbyist and Bush’s first Secretary of the Interior, Norton pushed a radical ideological agenda “through regulatory rollbacks, suppression of science, preferential treatment, and collusion with industry” — including doctoring scientific findings on the impacts of oil drilling on caribou. After resigning under the cloud of ties to Jack Abramoff, she joined Shell Oil.
25. Lester Crawford — After promising to act on the morning-after contraceptive pill during his confirmation hearings, the former FDA Commissioner “indefinitely postponed nonprescription sales of emergency contraception over the objections of staff scientists who had declared the pill safe.” Crawford resigned after just two months on the job and later pleaded guilty “to charges that he hid his ownership of stock in food and drug companies that his agency regulated.”
26. Harriet Miers — Well-known for being Bush’s failed Supreme Court nominee, Miers also thought it was “important” to her as White House Counsel that Rove protege Tim Griffin was installed as a U.S. Attorney, making her a central figure in the U.S. Attorney scandal. She is said to have called Bush “the most brilliant man she had ever met.”
27. Hans Von Spakovsky — Originally a political appointee in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, Spakovsky “injected partisan political factors into decision-making” and used every opportunity “to make it difficult for voters — poor, minority and Democratic — to go to the polls.” In 2008, Spakovsky withdrew his name from consideration for the FEC, following months of opposition from lawmakers and civil rights groups.
28. Tommy Franks — As head of U.S. Central Command from 2000 to 2003, Franks oversaw Osama bin Laden’s great escape from Afghanistan, gave orders for the stabilization of Iraq via PowerPoint, assumed that the U.S. would draw down to 25,000 troops by the end of 2004, and had American soldiers stand idly by as chaos and lawlessness took hold after the invasion.
29. Thomas Scully — As chief administrator for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Scully was the White House’s head negotiator on the Medicare prescription drug bill. Scully threatened to fire chief actuary Richard Foster if he revealed that Bush’s Medicare Part D legislation “would cost 25% to 50% more than the Bush administration’s public estimates.”
30. Julie MacDonald — A top Interior Department appointee, MacDonald “interjected herself personally and profoundly” and “tainted nearly every decision made on the protection of endangered species” over a five-year period, intimidating the staff with “abrupt and abrasive, if not abusive” tactics. MacDonald also leaked government documents to a young acquaintance whom she met while playing “internet role-playing games.”
31. William Haynes — As the former general counsel at the Defense Department, he was part of a five-person team of high-level administration lawyers, dubbed the “War Council,” that tossed the Geneva Conventions aside and hatched out the legal framework for torture in secret meetings.
32. David Safavian — Safavian was (twice) tried and convicted for his role in the jack Abramoff scandal. Safavian was found guilty of “lying and obstructing justice” in an attempt to cover-up “his many efforts to assist Abramoff in acquiring two properties controlled by the GSA.”
33. James Connaughton — As chairman of the White House Council of Environmental Quality, Connaughton wrote EPA press releases downplaying the danger of the air quality in lower Manhattan following 9/11. “A former lobbyist for utilities, mining, chemical, and other industrial polluters,” Connaughton insisted “there’s a lot of disagreement” about humans’ impact on global warming, and he touted a bogus study purporting to show that the 20th century was not unusually warm.
34. William Luti — A former Navy officer and Cheney aide, Luti was dispatched to the Pentagon in 2001 to work underneath Feith to find “evidence” to support his boss’s belief in conspiracy theories linking Saddam to al Qaeda. Luti was an integral component of Cheney’s campaign to pressure intelligence professionals to conform their judgments to administration policy rather than reality.
35. Susan Orr — As Assistant Deputy Secretary for Population Affairs, this former Family Research Council officialIt’s not a medical necessity that you have [contraception].”
36. Christopher Cox — Under Chairman Cox, the Securities and Exchange Commission censored internal reports showing that it ignored critical signs pointing to Wall Street’s meltdown. Cox’s SEC also failed to detect Bernie Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme, despite a decade of warnings.
37. Elliott Abrams — An Iran-Contra convict pardoned by Bush 41, Abrams was named by Bush 43 as the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations. As a foundingIsrael’s 2006 bombing of Lebanon into Syria and advocated a Fatah coup after Hamas won the February 2006 Palestinian elections.
38. Philip Cooney — A former oil lobbyist who served as chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, Cooney doctored climate reports to “soften” words and phrases linking greenhouse gas emissions to global warming. After his political interference was revealed, Cooney left the White House to become a lobbyist for Exxon.
39. Colin Powell — Though Bush called him “an American hero” when he appointed him to be the first African-American Secretary of State, Powell placed an ugly “blot” on his record when he pushed the Bush administration’s faulty case for the Iraq war in a speech to the U.N. on Feb.5, 2003, using inaccurate information. Liberal hawks and the media rallied around Powell’s false case, calling it the “winning hand” for war.
40. Elaine Chao — The Labor Secretary made it through all eight years of the Bush administration, driving morale at the Labor Department so low that staffers threw a “good-riddance party” to cheer her departure. She leaves behind a “deeply troubled department” that “spent eight years attacking workers’ rights, strong workplace health and safety rules, and unions while they carried the water for Big Business.”
41. Julie Myers — After being hired as head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement based on little more than her personal connections, Myers made herself famous by awarding “Most Original Costume” to an employee who dressed up in blackface and a prison costume for Halloween. She was also heavily criticized for conducting politically-motivated immigration raids.
42. Wade Horn — As Assistant Secretary for Community Initiatives at the Department of Health and Human Services, Horn funneled millions of tax-payer dollars into right-wing abstinence-only programs. Shortly before he resigned, it was revealed that he had given nearly $1 million “to the National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI), where he was the president for at least three years until joining the Bush administration in 2001.”
43. George Deutsch — As a young, inexperienced press officer for NASA, Deutsch “told public affairs workers to limit reporters’ access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word ‘theory’ at every mention of the Big Bang.” He resigned in 2006 after it was discovered he had lied on his resume, falsely claiming that he had a journalism degree from Texas A&M.
Dishonorable Mentions: Bush appointees who didn’t quite make the list included a child pornography aficionado, a patron of hookers, a shoplifter, a mail fraudster, an operator of an illegal horse gambling ring, and a CIA official who took bribes in the form of prostitutes.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
White House ‘Meeting of the Bada Bing Club’
http://www.pensitoreview.com/2008/04/12/turley-bush-torture-conspirators-like-a-meeting-of-the-bada-bing-club/
Turley: White House Torture Planning Was Like a ‘Meeting of the Bada Bing Club’
Jon Ponder Apr. 12, 2008
Suggests Cheney, Rice, Powell and Other White House Officials Committed War Crimes
In the 1990s, Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor and constitutional expert, was a strong advocate for impeaching Pres. Bill Clinton because Clinton lied about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky while under oath in a deposition for a civil lawsuit.
The issue today is far more serious. According to ABC News, starting in 2002, senior Bush officials, including Vice President Cheney and Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice, who was then the national security adviser, were involved hands-on in drafting torture guidelines for the CIA. Because torture is illegal under U.S. and international law, Jonathan Turley says he believes the drafting of these guidelines was a war crime.
Late Friday afternoon, George Bush confirmed to ABC News that Cheney, Rice and the other officials — including then Sec. of State Colin Powell, then Attorney Gen. John Ashcroft, then Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, then CIA Director George Tenet and their aides — were working at his behest.
This new development — the president’s admission that he commissioned alleged war crimes — is being ignored in the media today (Saturday). It will be interesting to see if it makes it onto the Sunday political shows, including even ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopolous.”
The transcript for Turley’s “Countdown” interview follows:
OLBERMANN: What if the step-by-step and case-by-case details of the torture of detainees had been discussed at the highest levels of government, inside the White House? It might prove to be the core to unraveling an entire administration‘s policy on torture. It might even one day find its way into a trial of war criminals. In our third story on the COUNTDOWN, such meetings were regular occurrences in the Bush White House.
The group called itself the National Security Principals Committee. It held dozens of top-secret decisions in the White House. This according to an ABC News investigation, sourced with unnamed, high-ranking officials. The Principals included Vice President Dick Cheney, then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of State Colin Powell, also the CIA Director at the time, George Tenet, and then Attorney General John Ashcroft, who according to a top official said, quote, why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.
The Principals signed off on exactly how the CIA would interrogate supposed top al Qaeda suspects and approved of combined techniques, including, but not limited to, water boarding. A choreography, if you will. Such meetings began in the spring of 2002, according to the ABC report, after the CIA had captured a top al Qaeda operative, Abu Zubaydah, who the CIA has since confirmed was one of the three al Qaeda suspects who were, indeed, water boarded.
All the Principals present approved at each discussion, reportedly, yet the CIA wanted the principals to sign off on each case, each time. When then director George Tenet sometimes made elaborate presentations, and that was even after a so-called golden shield was issued—that was in an August 2002 memo from the Justice Department giving formal legal authority to government interrogators to use enhanced interrogation techniques.
Let‘s turn now to George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley. Jon, good evening.
JONATHAN TURLEY, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY: Hi, Keith.
OLBERMANN: If this is accurate or nearly accurate, what is the fullest interruption, as you see it, of what went on in those meetings?
TURLEY: This is one meeting of principal. They‘re not talking about the LE kind. What you have are a bunch of people talking about what is something that‘s a crime. For those of us who look at the criminal code and see torture for what it is, this is like a meeting of the Bada Bing club. These people are sitting around regularly talking about something defined as a crime.
Then you have John Ashcroft standing up and saying, maybe we shouldn‘t be talking about this at the White House. Well, obviously, that‘s quite disturbing. It shows that this was a program, not just some incident, not just someone going too far. It was a torture program, implemented by the United States of America and approved as the very highest level. And it goes right to the president‘s desk.
And it‘s notable that this group wanted to get lawyers to sign off on this, and they found those lawyers, people like Jay Buyby (ph), and John Yoo. And those people were handsomely rewarded. In Buyby‘s case, he became a federal judge after signing off on a rather grotesque memo that said that they could do everything short of causing organ failure or death.
OLBERMANN: The point that you made up—mentioned there that Attorney General Ashcroft said, why do this in the White House, why do it at such a high level; between the location and the resumes, you said it goes to President Bush‘s desk here. Is it the smoking gun that President Bush authorized torture by the United States of America?
TURLEY: We really don‘t have much of a question about the president‘s role here. He‘s never denied that he was fully informed of these measures. He, in fact, early on in his presidency—he seemed to brag that they were using harsh and tough methods. And I don‘t think there‘s any doubt that he was aware of this. The doubt is simply whether anybody cares enough to do anything about it.
OLBERMANN: The meetings, obviously, were not conducted to serve the purposes of historians or those of us who analyze this situation. It looks like it was 100 percent CYA. The question I have here, am I reading this right; did the lower-level interrogators, did the lower-level people in that food chain of principals, people like the director of the CIA, come out ranked a lot lower than, say, the vice president of United States in any kind of ceding of cabinet positions—were they there to protect themselves at the cost of the most powerful people in the nation? In other words, did they play these people? Did they—who was being protected here?
TURLEY: Well, you know, as a criminal defense attorney, we call meetings like this meetings of the designated defendant, because they are people who are signing off and will have to bear witness and bear responsibility. And here you have the CIA, which is basically saying, we‘re not going to have a repeat of the 1970s, where you guys have us go exploding cigars and trying to take out leaders and then you say you didn‘t know about it.
So the CIA has learned a lot. So these meetings certainly cover them in that respect. And they establish a rather clear record, that this was a program that was done with intention, knowingly done, and repeatedly a subject for meetings at the White House itself.
OLBERMANN: If there‘s a paper trail regarding this, John, is this—is this a war crimes trial waiting to happen somewhere some day?
TURLEY: It‘s always been a war crimes trial ready to happen. But Congress is like a convention of Claude Raines actors. Everyone‘s saying, we‘re shocked, shocked; there‘s torture being discussed in the White House. But no one is doing anything about it. So what we have is the need for someone to get off the theater and move to the actual in going and trying to investigate these crimes.
OLBERMANN: And all the attorneys talk about movie characters; they‘re all Burt Lancaster, the Ernst Janning character in “Judgment at Nuremberg,” all the people who authorized this. Jonathan Turley of George Washington University I‘ll save you a seat down front if we ever have this trial.
TURLEY: Thank you, Keith.
Topics: Impeachment, Worst President Ever, Torture
Turley: White House Torture Planning Was Like a ‘Meeting of the Bada Bing Club’
Jon Ponder Apr. 12, 2008
Suggests Cheney, Rice, Powell and Other White House Officials Committed War Crimes
In the 1990s, Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor and constitutional expert, was a strong advocate for impeaching Pres. Bill Clinton because Clinton lied about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky while under oath in a deposition for a civil lawsuit.
The issue today is far more serious. According to ABC News, starting in 2002, senior Bush officials, including Vice President Cheney and Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice, who was then the national security adviser, were involved hands-on in drafting torture guidelines for the CIA. Because torture is illegal under U.S. and international law, Jonathan Turley says he believes the drafting of these guidelines was a war crime.
Late Friday afternoon, George Bush confirmed to ABC News that Cheney, Rice and the other officials — including then Sec. of State Colin Powell, then Attorney Gen. John Ashcroft, then Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, then CIA Director George Tenet and their aides — were working at his behest.
This new development — the president’s admission that he commissioned alleged war crimes — is being ignored in the media today (Saturday). It will be interesting to see if it makes it onto the Sunday political shows, including even ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopolous.”
The transcript for Turley’s “Countdown” interview follows:
OLBERMANN: What if the step-by-step and case-by-case details of the torture of detainees had been discussed at the highest levels of government, inside the White House? It might prove to be the core to unraveling an entire administration‘s policy on torture. It might even one day find its way into a trial of war criminals. In our third story on the COUNTDOWN, such meetings were regular occurrences in the Bush White House.
The group called itself the National Security Principals Committee. It held dozens of top-secret decisions in the White House. This according to an ABC News investigation, sourced with unnamed, high-ranking officials. The Principals included Vice President Dick Cheney, then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of State Colin Powell, also the CIA Director at the time, George Tenet, and then Attorney General John Ashcroft, who according to a top official said, quote, why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.
The Principals signed off on exactly how the CIA would interrogate supposed top al Qaeda suspects and approved of combined techniques, including, but not limited to, water boarding. A choreography, if you will. Such meetings began in the spring of 2002, according to the ABC report, after the CIA had captured a top al Qaeda operative, Abu Zubaydah, who the CIA has since confirmed was one of the three al Qaeda suspects who were, indeed, water boarded.
All the Principals present approved at each discussion, reportedly, yet the CIA wanted the principals to sign off on each case, each time. When then director George Tenet sometimes made elaborate presentations, and that was even after a so-called golden shield was issued—that was in an August 2002 memo from the Justice Department giving formal legal authority to government interrogators to use enhanced interrogation techniques.
Let‘s turn now to George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley. Jon, good evening.
JONATHAN TURLEY, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY: Hi, Keith.
OLBERMANN: If this is accurate or nearly accurate, what is the fullest interruption, as you see it, of what went on in those meetings?
TURLEY: This is one meeting of principal. They‘re not talking about the LE kind. What you have are a bunch of people talking about what is something that‘s a crime. For those of us who look at the criminal code and see torture for what it is, this is like a meeting of the Bada Bing club. These people are sitting around regularly talking about something defined as a crime.
Then you have John Ashcroft standing up and saying, maybe we shouldn‘t be talking about this at the White House. Well, obviously, that‘s quite disturbing. It shows that this was a program, not just some incident, not just someone going too far. It was a torture program, implemented by the United States of America and approved as the very highest level. And it goes right to the president‘s desk.
And it‘s notable that this group wanted to get lawyers to sign off on this, and they found those lawyers, people like Jay Buyby (ph), and John Yoo. And those people were handsomely rewarded. In Buyby‘s case, he became a federal judge after signing off on a rather grotesque memo that said that they could do everything short of causing organ failure or death.
OLBERMANN: The point that you made up—mentioned there that Attorney General Ashcroft said, why do this in the White House, why do it at such a high level; between the location and the resumes, you said it goes to President Bush‘s desk here. Is it the smoking gun that President Bush authorized torture by the United States of America?
TURLEY: We really don‘t have much of a question about the president‘s role here. He‘s never denied that he was fully informed of these measures. He, in fact, early on in his presidency—he seemed to brag that they were using harsh and tough methods. And I don‘t think there‘s any doubt that he was aware of this. The doubt is simply whether anybody cares enough to do anything about it.
OLBERMANN: The meetings, obviously, were not conducted to serve the purposes of historians or those of us who analyze this situation. It looks like it was 100 percent CYA. The question I have here, am I reading this right; did the lower-level interrogators, did the lower-level people in that food chain of principals, people like the director of the CIA, come out ranked a lot lower than, say, the vice president of United States in any kind of ceding of cabinet positions—were they there to protect themselves at the cost of the most powerful people in the nation? In other words, did they play these people? Did they—who was being protected here?
TURLEY: Well, you know, as a criminal defense attorney, we call meetings like this meetings of the designated defendant, because they are people who are signing off and will have to bear witness and bear responsibility. And here you have the CIA, which is basically saying, we‘re not going to have a repeat of the 1970s, where you guys have us go exploding cigars and trying to take out leaders and then you say you didn‘t know about it.
So the CIA has learned a lot. So these meetings certainly cover them in that respect. And they establish a rather clear record, that this was a program that was done with intention, knowingly done, and repeatedly a subject for meetings at the White House itself.
OLBERMANN: If there‘s a paper trail regarding this, John, is this—is this a war crimes trial waiting to happen somewhere some day?
TURLEY: It‘s always been a war crimes trial ready to happen. But Congress is like a convention of Claude Raines actors. Everyone‘s saying, we‘re shocked, shocked; there‘s torture being discussed in the White House. But no one is doing anything about it. So what we have is the need for someone to get off the theater and move to the actual in going and trying to investigate these crimes.
OLBERMANN: And all the attorneys talk about movie characters; they‘re all Burt Lancaster, the Ernst Janning character in “Judgment at Nuremberg,” all the people who authorized this. Jonathan Turley of George Washington University I‘ll save you a seat down front if we ever have this trial.
TURLEY: Thank you, Keith.
Topics: Impeachment, Worst President Ever, Torture
Sunday, February 24, 2008
US satellite strike escalates military space race
http://wsws.org/articles/2008/feb2008/miss-f22.shtml
US satellite strike escalates military space race
By Joe Kay
22 February 2008
The decision by the US to shoot a missile at a dysfunctional spy satellite has provoked sharp protests from Russia and China and threatens to escalate competition over the control of space.
The US Navy made a successful strike using an SM-3 missile late Wednesday night, according to Pentagon officials. The missile was launched from the USS Lake Erie, located off the coast of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean. The interception took place about 150 miles above the Earth’s surface.
The US military has claimed that the action was necessary for safety reasons—in particular, to prevent the satellite’s fuel tank from reaching ground intact. Many scientists and military experts have dismissed these arguments, however, pointing to a far more likely rationale: the attempt by the US to showcase its military capacity and send warning signals to potential adversaries, particularly China.
Little is known about the exact intended purpose of the satellite that was destroyed. It was launched in 2006 by the National Reconnaissance Organization (NRO), the section of the Pentagon responsible for spy satellites. It quickly ceased to function and would have fallen back to the Earth sometime in March.
In an indication of the importance the US government attributed to the missile launch, Defense Secretary Robert Gates personally gave the final order and closely monitored the progress of the missile.
The incident comes just over a year after China shot down one of its own weather satellites in a move that signaled the country’s threat to US dominance of space. The January 2007 test was condemned by the US and other powers. For its part, Russia has vigorously opposed US plans for constructing a missile defense system that would include radar systems near Russia’s European border.
Both Russia and China denounced the US missile strike, seeing it as a provocative act. Chinese Foreign Minister Liu Bianca said the US action “may influence the security of outer space and may harm other countries.”
People’s Daily, the Chinese state newspaper, wrote, “The Untied States, the world’s top space power, has often accused other countries of vigorously developing military space technology,” but did not shirk from using this technology itself. “The United States will not easily abandon its military advantage based on space technology, and it is striving to expand and fully exploit this advantage.”
The Russian Defense Ministry Information Department warned in a statement last week, “Under cover of discussions about the danger posed by the satellite, preparation is going ahead for tests of an anti-satellite weapon. Such tests mean in essence the creation of a new strategic weapon.” Andrei Kokoshin, former secretary of the Russian Security Council, said on Thursday that the missile launch meant a “new phase in the militarization of space.”
The decision to destroy the satellite was made only a few days after Russia and China issued a statement calling for an international ban on space weapons. The proposal, which is opposed by the US, would expand the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which bans weapons of mass destruction in space.
The US military has official denied any military aim. However, its official explanation for why the action was taken is not credible. According to Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman James Cartwright, the sole motivation was public safety. In particular, he warned that if the satellite was not hit, a hydrazine fuel tank could reach the ground and leak the potentially harmful chemical.
It is highly unlikely, however, that the tank would have reached the Earth intact. Even if it did, it is even more unlikely that it could have harmed anyone on the ground.
Theodore Postol, a professor of science, technology and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, noted in comments on the NewsHour program on PBS Wednesday, “The idea that the hydrazine tank will survive to the ground really makes no sense.” He noted that the extremely high pressures and temperatures generated upon reentry would almost certainly split the tank open, dumping the fuel harmlessly into the atmosphere.
The Pentagon itself acknowledged that even minimal danger from the chemical, supposing the tank reached the ground, would cover only two football fields (about 10,000 square meters). Ivan Oelrich of the Federation of American Scientists noted that this amounts to about one ten billionth of the Earth’s surface. Over 70 percent of this surface is covered by water.
Large manmade objects fall to the earth from space at a rate of about 50 to 200 a year, but there have been no casualties from these objects since the beginning of the Space Age. The idea that the Pentagon would spend $60 million to counter the tiny risk involved is untenable. One commentator noted that if safety was the motivation the money would be better spent on improving roads and traffic lights, since far more hydrazine is transported on a daily basis on the ground than is contained in the spy satellite.
Some commentators have suggested that one motivation for destroying the satellite was concern over possible classified information it might contain, including encryption technologies. Jeremy Close, spokesman for European defense firm Astrium, noted, “If part of the satellite was to fall intact to the ground, or partially intact, it might yield valuable information about the type of cryptography used by the satellite to communicate with the ground.”
The main aim, however, was to demonstrate US military capacity. While the ability to destroy satellites is not new for the American military, the Pentagon has moved aggressively to develop its missile technology and flexibility. This is part of a broader attempt to dominate space.
This was the first live strike by the US Navy using its missile launch technology. The vessels used to launch the missile are easily deployed throughout the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It was as much a display of versatility as it was of capacity.
The January 2007 Chinese anti-satellite test was viewed with great concern by the US military. Michael Mosley, the US Air Force chief of staff, compared the incident to the Soviet launching of the first satellite in history, Sputnik, in 1957.
The American military relies heavily on satellites in everything from communications to targeting. The US sees space as its domain and is strongly opposed to any other country developing the ability to control the ultimate “high ground.”
Domination of space has been a longstanding ambition of the American ruling class, going back at least to Lyndon Johnson, who noted that from space “total control of the Earth may be exercised.” The so-called “Star Wars” program of missile defense during the Reagan administration was part of this ambition, though it was largely unsuccessful.
Control of space and missile defense was an early priority of the Bush administration. In 2001, future Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld headed the Commission to Assess US National Security Space Management and Organization. The panel concluded, “It is in the US national interest to...use the nation’s potential in space to support its domestic, economic, diplomatic and national security objectives; develop and deploy the means to deter and defend against hostile acts directed at US space assets and against the uses of space hostile to US interests.” The panel warned ominously of a “Space Pearl Harbor.”
In 2004, the Air Force produced a document calling for maintaining “space superiority,” which it defined as the “freedom to attack as well as the freedom from attack.” In 2006, the Bush Administration released its National Space Policy, which insisted on the necessity for “space control” and the rejection of “new legal regimes of or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit US access to or use of space.”
As the American ruling class seeks to bolster its global position through the use of military force, control over space—which by its very nature is a global frontier—will assumer ever greater importance.
US satellite strike escalates military space race
By Joe Kay
22 February 2008
The decision by the US to shoot a missile at a dysfunctional spy satellite has provoked sharp protests from Russia and China and threatens to escalate competition over the control of space.
The US Navy made a successful strike using an SM-3 missile late Wednesday night, according to Pentagon officials. The missile was launched from the USS Lake Erie, located off the coast of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean. The interception took place about 150 miles above the Earth’s surface.
The US military has claimed that the action was necessary for safety reasons—in particular, to prevent the satellite’s fuel tank from reaching ground intact. Many scientists and military experts have dismissed these arguments, however, pointing to a far more likely rationale: the attempt by the US to showcase its military capacity and send warning signals to potential adversaries, particularly China.
Little is known about the exact intended purpose of the satellite that was destroyed. It was launched in 2006 by the National Reconnaissance Organization (NRO), the section of the Pentagon responsible for spy satellites. It quickly ceased to function and would have fallen back to the Earth sometime in March.
In an indication of the importance the US government attributed to the missile launch, Defense Secretary Robert Gates personally gave the final order and closely monitored the progress of the missile.
The incident comes just over a year after China shot down one of its own weather satellites in a move that signaled the country’s threat to US dominance of space. The January 2007 test was condemned by the US and other powers. For its part, Russia has vigorously opposed US plans for constructing a missile defense system that would include radar systems near Russia’s European border.
Both Russia and China denounced the US missile strike, seeing it as a provocative act. Chinese Foreign Minister Liu Bianca said the US action “may influence the security of outer space and may harm other countries.”
People’s Daily, the Chinese state newspaper, wrote, “The Untied States, the world’s top space power, has often accused other countries of vigorously developing military space technology,” but did not shirk from using this technology itself. “The United States will not easily abandon its military advantage based on space technology, and it is striving to expand and fully exploit this advantage.”
The Russian Defense Ministry Information Department warned in a statement last week, “Under cover of discussions about the danger posed by the satellite, preparation is going ahead for tests of an anti-satellite weapon. Such tests mean in essence the creation of a new strategic weapon.” Andrei Kokoshin, former secretary of the Russian Security Council, said on Thursday that the missile launch meant a “new phase in the militarization of space.”
The decision to destroy the satellite was made only a few days after Russia and China issued a statement calling for an international ban on space weapons. The proposal, which is opposed by the US, would expand the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which bans weapons of mass destruction in space.
The US military has official denied any military aim. However, its official explanation for why the action was taken is not credible. According to Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman James Cartwright, the sole motivation was public safety. In particular, he warned that if the satellite was not hit, a hydrazine fuel tank could reach the ground and leak the potentially harmful chemical.
It is highly unlikely, however, that the tank would have reached the Earth intact. Even if it did, it is even more unlikely that it could have harmed anyone on the ground.
Theodore Postol, a professor of science, technology and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, noted in comments on the NewsHour program on PBS Wednesday, “The idea that the hydrazine tank will survive to the ground really makes no sense.” He noted that the extremely high pressures and temperatures generated upon reentry would almost certainly split the tank open, dumping the fuel harmlessly into the atmosphere.
The Pentagon itself acknowledged that even minimal danger from the chemical, supposing the tank reached the ground, would cover only two football fields (about 10,000 square meters). Ivan Oelrich of the Federation of American Scientists noted that this amounts to about one ten billionth of the Earth’s surface. Over 70 percent of this surface is covered by water.
Large manmade objects fall to the earth from space at a rate of about 50 to 200 a year, but there have been no casualties from these objects since the beginning of the Space Age. The idea that the Pentagon would spend $60 million to counter the tiny risk involved is untenable. One commentator noted that if safety was the motivation the money would be better spent on improving roads and traffic lights, since far more hydrazine is transported on a daily basis on the ground than is contained in the spy satellite.
Some commentators have suggested that one motivation for destroying the satellite was concern over possible classified information it might contain, including encryption technologies. Jeremy Close, spokesman for European defense firm Astrium, noted, “If part of the satellite was to fall intact to the ground, or partially intact, it might yield valuable information about the type of cryptography used by the satellite to communicate with the ground.”
The main aim, however, was to demonstrate US military capacity. While the ability to destroy satellites is not new for the American military, the Pentagon has moved aggressively to develop its missile technology and flexibility. This is part of a broader attempt to dominate space.
This was the first live strike by the US Navy using its missile launch technology. The vessels used to launch the missile are easily deployed throughout the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It was as much a display of versatility as it was of capacity.
The January 2007 Chinese anti-satellite test was viewed with great concern by the US military. Michael Mosley, the US Air Force chief of staff, compared the incident to the Soviet launching of the first satellite in history, Sputnik, in 1957.
The American military relies heavily on satellites in everything from communications to targeting. The US sees space as its domain and is strongly opposed to any other country developing the ability to control the ultimate “high ground.”
Domination of space has been a longstanding ambition of the American ruling class, going back at least to Lyndon Johnson, who noted that from space “total control of the Earth may be exercised.” The so-called “Star Wars” program of missile defense during the Reagan administration was part of this ambition, though it was largely unsuccessful.
Control of space and missile defense was an early priority of the Bush administration. In 2001, future Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld headed the Commission to Assess US National Security Space Management and Organization. The panel concluded, “It is in the US national interest to...use the nation’s potential in space to support its domestic, economic, diplomatic and national security objectives; develop and deploy the means to deter and defend against hostile acts directed at US space assets and against the uses of space hostile to US interests.” The panel warned ominously of a “Space Pearl Harbor.”
In 2004, the Air Force produced a document calling for maintaining “space superiority,” which it defined as the “freedom to attack as well as the freedom from attack.” In 2006, the Bush Administration released its National Space Policy, which insisted on the necessity for “space control” and the rejection of “new legal regimes of or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit US access to or use of space.”
As the American ruling class seeks to bolster its global position through the use of military force, control over space—which by its very nature is a global frontier—will assumer ever greater importance.
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Let’s Toast to Ten Good Things About 2007
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/26/6083/
Monday, December 31, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
Let’s Toast to Ten Good Things About 2007
by Medea Benjamin
As we close this year on the low of Congress giving Bush more billions for war, and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, let’s remember some of the year’s gains that can revive our spirits for the New Year. Here are just ten.
1. With the exception of the White House, this has been a banner year for environmental consciousness and action. Al Gore and the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel Peace Prize. Green building and renewable energy have exploded. Congress passed the Green Jobs Act of 2007, authorizing $125 million for green job training. Over 700 U.S. mayors, representing 25 percent of the U.S. population, have signed a pledge to reduce greenhouse gases by 2012. Illinois became the 26th state to require that some of the state’s electricity come from renewable sources and Kansas became the first state to refuse a permit for a new coal-fired power plant for health and environmental reasons. That’s progress!
2. On the global environmental scene, the Bush dinosaurs were tackled head on. When the US delegation at the UN climate change conference in Bali tried to sabotage the negotiations, the delegate from tiny Papua New Guinea threw diplomatic niceties to the wind and said that if the U.S. couldn’t lead, it should get out of the way. Embarrassed by international and domestic outrage, the U.S. delegation buckled, and the way was cleared for adopting the “Bali road map.” Although it is a weak mandate, it lays the groundwork for a stronger climate agreement post-2012 when the first phase of the Kyoto Protocols ends.
3. Imagine living in a waste-free urban society? Well, it’s no longer a utopian dream but a well-thought-out plan for India’s state of Kerala. The plan to be “waste-free” within five years includes waste prevention, intensive re-use and recycling, composting, replacing unsustainable materials with sustainable ones, training people to produce these materials, and providing funds for setting up sustainably run businesses. The ground-breaking plan, spearheaded by a local grassroots movement, demonstrates how citizen groups can advance pioneering policies to heal the planet.
4. While the war in Iraq rages on, a new war was stopped. The specter of war with Iran loomed large throughout the year, with Washington accusing Iran of killing U.S . soldiers in Iraq and being a nuclear threat. Then in December came the National Intelligence Estimate showing that the Bush administration knew all along that Iran had shelved its nuclear weapons program in 2003. It exposed the Administration claims of an Iranian threat as unjustifiably inflated, and the winds of war were suddenly subdued. Nothing is guaranteed, but a U.S. military attack on Iran is less likely now than it was earlier in the year.
5. This year also brought a decrease in tensions with North Korea. Hostilities flared after North Korea successfully conducted a nuclear test in 2006. But the Bush administration, bogged down in Iraq and pushed by international pressure, agreed to negotiate. Following a series of six-party talks involving North Korea, South Korea, China, Russia, Japan, and the U.S, on March 17, 2007, an historic agreement was reached. North Korea agreed to shut down its main nuclear facility and submit a list of its nuclear programs in exchange for fuel and normalization talks with the U.S. and Japan. During this age of raw aggression, it is a welcome example of putting diplomacy first.
6. The Iraqi people have little to celebrate, but there was one important victory for the people this year. Remember how the Bush administration and Congress were insisting that the Iraqi Parliament pass a new oil law? Touted as a way to “share oil revenue among all Iraqis”, the oil law was really designed to transform the country’s currently nationalized oil system to one open to foreign corporate control. But opposition was fierce inside Iraq, especially from the nation’s oil worker unions. In a rare sign of independence from Washington and concern for domestic opinion, the Iraqi Parliament withstood intense U.S. pressure and refused to pass the oil law.
7. In early 2007, few Americans had heard of the private security company Blackwater. By year’s end, Blackwater had become infamous for the killing of civilians in Iraq. The radical privatization of our military to corporations like Blackwater that are accountable to no one was exposed for all to see. This frightening process is still well under way, with more private contractors in Iraq than soldiers, but at least the issue has now entered the public dialogue. And Blackwater has received such a black eye that it’s unlikely to get a new Iraq contract when the present one expires in May.
8. One victory on both the war and environmental fronts came in Australia, where Labor Party’s Kevin Rudd beat conservative John Howard to become Prime Minister. Howard was an enthusiastic backer of George Bush’s disastrous war on terror, from defending the Guantánamo prison and extraordinary rendition to sending troops to Iraq and Afghanistan. Howard also joined Bush in refusing to ratify the Kyoto Agreement, arguing it would cost Australians jobs. After assuming office on December 3, Kevin Rudd immediately signed the Kyoto agreement and he has promised to remove Australia’s combat troops from Iraq by mid-2008.
9. Sometimes a loss is a win. Hugo Chavez had initiated a constitutional referendum that would have, among other changes, scrapped term limits. His immediate acceptance of a razor-thin margin of defeat before all the votes were even counted showed his democratic colors and made it a lot harder for Bush and the corporate media to label him a dictator. Despite the loss, Chavez remains extremely popular, especially among the poor and working class in Venezuela. And throughout Latin America, the historic transformation led by progressive leaders like Chavez continues to blossom.
10. Last but not least, this year saw the resignation of some of Bush’s closest allies in government - Donald Rumsfeld resigned as Secretary of Defense, Alberto Gonzalez as Attorney General, and Karl Rove as Deputy Chief of Staff. Best of all, we can give thanks that we only have ONE YEAR left of the criminal, war-mongering, constitution-shredding, rights-violating, torture-sanctioning Bush Administration! It’s just GOT to get better than this!
So here’s a toast to a green future, diplomacy, and surviving the last throes of the Bush regime. Que viva 2008!
Medea Benjamin (medea@globalexchange.org) is cofounder of Global Exchange (http://www.globalexchange.org/) and CODEPINK: Women for Peace (http://www.codepinkalert.org/).
Monday, December 31, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
Let’s Toast to Ten Good Things About 2007
by Medea Benjamin
As we close this year on the low of Congress giving Bush more billions for war, and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, let’s remember some of the year’s gains that can revive our spirits for the New Year. Here are just ten.
1. With the exception of the White House, this has been a banner year for environmental consciousness and action. Al Gore and the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel Peace Prize. Green building and renewable energy have exploded. Congress passed the Green Jobs Act of 2007, authorizing $125 million for green job training. Over 700 U.S. mayors, representing 25 percent of the U.S. population, have signed a pledge to reduce greenhouse gases by 2012. Illinois became the 26th state to require that some of the state’s electricity come from renewable sources and Kansas became the first state to refuse a permit for a new coal-fired power plant for health and environmental reasons. That’s progress!
2. On the global environmental scene, the Bush dinosaurs were tackled head on. When the US delegation at the UN climate change conference in Bali tried to sabotage the negotiations, the delegate from tiny Papua New Guinea threw diplomatic niceties to the wind and said that if the U.S. couldn’t lead, it should get out of the way. Embarrassed by international and domestic outrage, the U.S. delegation buckled, and the way was cleared for adopting the “Bali road map.” Although it is a weak mandate, it lays the groundwork for a stronger climate agreement post-2012 when the first phase of the Kyoto Protocols ends.
3. Imagine living in a waste-free urban society? Well, it’s no longer a utopian dream but a well-thought-out plan for India’s state of Kerala. The plan to be “waste-free” within five years includes waste prevention, intensive re-use and recycling, composting, replacing unsustainable materials with sustainable ones, training people to produce these materials, and providing funds for setting up sustainably run businesses. The ground-breaking plan, spearheaded by a local grassroots movement, demonstrates how citizen groups can advance pioneering policies to heal the planet.
4. While the war in Iraq rages on, a new war was stopped. The specter of war with Iran loomed large throughout the year, with Washington accusing Iran of killing U.S . soldiers in Iraq and being a nuclear threat. Then in December came the National Intelligence Estimate showing that the Bush administration knew all along that Iran had shelved its nuclear weapons program in 2003. It exposed the Administration claims of an Iranian threat as unjustifiably inflated, and the winds of war were suddenly subdued. Nothing is guaranteed, but a U.S. military attack on Iran is less likely now than it was earlier in the year.
5. This year also brought a decrease in tensions with North Korea. Hostilities flared after North Korea successfully conducted a nuclear test in 2006. But the Bush administration, bogged down in Iraq and pushed by international pressure, agreed to negotiate. Following a series of six-party talks involving North Korea, South Korea, China, Russia, Japan, and the U.S, on March 17, 2007, an historic agreement was reached. North Korea agreed to shut down its main nuclear facility and submit a list of its nuclear programs in exchange for fuel and normalization talks with the U.S. and Japan. During this age of raw aggression, it is a welcome example of putting diplomacy first.
6. The Iraqi people have little to celebrate, but there was one important victory for the people this year. Remember how the Bush administration and Congress were insisting that the Iraqi Parliament pass a new oil law? Touted as a way to “share oil revenue among all Iraqis”, the oil law was really designed to transform the country’s currently nationalized oil system to one open to foreign corporate control. But opposition was fierce inside Iraq, especially from the nation’s oil worker unions. In a rare sign of independence from Washington and concern for domestic opinion, the Iraqi Parliament withstood intense U.S. pressure and refused to pass the oil law.
7. In early 2007, few Americans had heard of the private security company Blackwater. By year’s end, Blackwater had become infamous for the killing of civilians in Iraq. The radical privatization of our military to corporations like Blackwater that are accountable to no one was exposed for all to see. This frightening process is still well under way, with more private contractors in Iraq than soldiers, but at least the issue has now entered the public dialogue. And Blackwater has received such a black eye that it’s unlikely to get a new Iraq contract when the present one expires in May.
8. One victory on both the war and environmental fronts came in Australia, where Labor Party’s Kevin Rudd beat conservative John Howard to become Prime Minister. Howard was an enthusiastic backer of George Bush’s disastrous war on terror, from defending the Guantánamo prison and extraordinary rendition to sending troops to Iraq and Afghanistan. Howard also joined Bush in refusing to ratify the Kyoto Agreement, arguing it would cost Australians jobs. After assuming office on December 3, Kevin Rudd immediately signed the Kyoto agreement and he has promised to remove Australia’s combat troops from Iraq by mid-2008.
9. Sometimes a loss is a win. Hugo Chavez had initiated a constitutional referendum that would have, among other changes, scrapped term limits. His immediate acceptance of a razor-thin margin of defeat before all the votes were even counted showed his democratic colors and made it a lot harder for Bush and the corporate media to label him a dictator. Despite the loss, Chavez remains extremely popular, especially among the poor and working class in Venezuela. And throughout Latin America, the historic transformation led by progressive leaders like Chavez continues to blossom.
10. Last but not least, this year saw the resignation of some of Bush’s closest allies in government - Donald Rumsfeld resigned as Secretary of Defense, Alberto Gonzalez as Attorney General, and Karl Rove as Deputy Chief of Staff. Best of all, we can give thanks that we only have ONE YEAR left of the criminal, war-mongering, constitution-shredding, rights-violating, torture-sanctioning Bush Administration! It’s just GOT to get better than this!
So here’s a toast to a green future, diplomacy, and surviving the last throes of the Bush regime. Que viva 2008!
Medea Benjamin (medea@globalexchange.org) is cofounder of Global Exchange (http://www.globalexchange.org/) and CODEPINK: Women for Peace (http://www.codepinkalert.org/).
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Bulging biceps fueled by ideological purity
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2004012110_floyd14.html
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Blackwater: bulging biceps fueled by ideological purity
BLACKWATER, the secretive private army now emerging into public view, is a perfect hinge linking two key elements of the Republican political base: America's war machine and a muscular form of fundamentalist Christianity.
Military contractors such as Halliburton and Blackwater are the brainchild of Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. A major goal of Cheney when he was secretary of defense in the first Bush administration was to privatize as much military work as possible, ostensibly to make it more efficient. He commissioned a study by Halliburton, which predictably liked the idea and wound up as America's largest military contractor. Cheney was hired as Halliburton's chief officer, awaiting the return of a Republican administration.
When that occurred, Cheney and Rumsfeld enthusiastically promoted privatization, and went so far as to include private contractors in the "Total Force" of the American military, standing never before given to contractors. When Rumsfeld left the Pentagon in 2006, there were nearly as many private contractors in Iraq (100,000) as American troops (130,000). Contractors provided food, fuel, housing and, in the case of Blackwater, heavily armed soldiers with a license to kill and an aggressive attitude.
Blackwater operated basically without oversight since proconsul Paul Bremer gave it a no-bid $27.7 million security contract in 2003, with immunity from Iraqi law. In 2004, four of its soldiers were ambushed in Fallujah and their bodies desecrated, bringing retaliation that killed hundreds of Iraqis, leveled the city and fueled the insurgency. A month ago, Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians, in an incident that has drawn the attention of Congress and the FBI.
Blackwater soldiers, often with Navy SEAL or Army Special Operations backgrounds, are paid from $500 to $1,500 a day, far more than regular-duty troops. Their image is straight from central casting: young men, tanned biceps bulging from black T-shirts, wearing wraparound sunglasses and brandishing automatic weapons. For young veterans who loved military action but couldn't afford to stay in, Blackwater offered big money and plenty of opportunities to order people around. Blackwater's aggressive guards became the image of American cultural insensitivity, sometimes erasing the best efforts of our uniformed soldiers.
Blackwater is the private empire of billionaire Erik Prince, a major Republican fundraiser and bankroller of several fundamentalist Christian organizations. His private army employs some 2,300 active gunners and boasts a register of 21,000 ready to serve on call. He has the largest privately held arsenal in the country and the expertise and firepower to bring down a small country.
In 2006, Prince expanded internationally, forming a new subsidiary in Barbados, outside American taxes and regulation, to train foreign forces, often funded by American military aid. Elite Blackwater soldiers have conducted secretive "black jobs" for the CIA or other spy agencies.
Despite its financial success, Blackwater is under fire from two sides: Democratic critics who want accountability and families of the four men killed in Fallujah in 2004. The families have sued, alleging negligence.
Blackwater's lawyers assert it cannot be sued because it is part of the "Total Force." But, while Congress demands that it be subject to American military codes and international treaties, Blackwater takes the opposite view — it is not military, it's a civilian contractor. Big money has gone into D.C. lawyers, lobbyists and public-relations spinners to sell this apparent contradiction.
There have always been mercenaries, and a case can be made for limited use of contractors, but the Bush administration has erased the line between a national military and a private war machine. Iraq is our first outsourced war, siphoning billions of taxpayer dollars into the private war machine.
Military contractors have become an integral part of the American military, allowing the White House to understate troop numbers and avoid a military draft. Unpopular wars for oil or ideology can be waged without calling on middle-class families to send their children; mercenaries will fill the jobs if volunteers don't come forth.
In Prince, the Republicans' radical Christian base is wed to the war-machine base, the one providing votes and manpower, the other providing campaign funds.
The resulting combination is one of rigid ideology and eagerness to solve any problem with overwhelming force. The Bush administration convinced itself its views on Iraq were right, pushing aside contrary evidence, then failed to think beyond "shock and awe," with resultant horrors.
In a world of nuance and gray areas, ideological purity and bulging biceps will cause as many problems as they solve. Blackwater seems to epitomize a dark side of our psyche that should be troubling to all Americans.
Floyd J. McKay, a journalism professor emeritus at Western Washington University, is a regular contributor to Times editorial pages. E-mail him at floydmckay@yahoo.com
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Blackwater: bulging biceps fueled by ideological purity
BLACKWATER, the secretive private army now emerging into public view, is a perfect hinge linking two key elements of the Republican political base: America's war machine and a muscular form of fundamentalist Christianity.
Military contractors such as Halliburton and Blackwater are the brainchild of Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. A major goal of Cheney when he was secretary of defense in the first Bush administration was to privatize as much military work as possible, ostensibly to make it more efficient. He commissioned a study by Halliburton, which predictably liked the idea and wound up as America's largest military contractor. Cheney was hired as Halliburton's chief officer, awaiting the return of a Republican administration.
When that occurred, Cheney and Rumsfeld enthusiastically promoted privatization, and went so far as to include private contractors in the "Total Force" of the American military, standing never before given to contractors. When Rumsfeld left the Pentagon in 2006, there were nearly as many private contractors in Iraq (100,000) as American troops (130,000). Contractors provided food, fuel, housing and, in the case of Blackwater, heavily armed soldiers with a license to kill and an aggressive attitude.
Blackwater operated basically without oversight since proconsul Paul Bremer gave it a no-bid $27.7 million security contract in 2003, with immunity from Iraqi law. In 2004, four of its soldiers were ambushed in Fallujah and their bodies desecrated, bringing retaliation that killed hundreds of Iraqis, leveled the city and fueled the insurgency. A month ago, Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians, in an incident that has drawn the attention of Congress and the FBI.
Blackwater soldiers, often with Navy SEAL or Army Special Operations backgrounds, are paid from $500 to $1,500 a day, far more than regular-duty troops. Their image is straight from central casting: young men, tanned biceps bulging from black T-shirts, wearing wraparound sunglasses and brandishing automatic weapons. For young veterans who loved military action but couldn't afford to stay in, Blackwater offered big money and plenty of opportunities to order people around. Blackwater's aggressive guards became the image of American cultural insensitivity, sometimes erasing the best efforts of our uniformed soldiers.
Blackwater is the private empire of billionaire Erik Prince, a major Republican fundraiser and bankroller of several fundamentalist Christian organizations. His private army employs some 2,300 active gunners and boasts a register of 21,000 ready to serve on call. He has the largest privately held arsenal in the country and the expertise and firepower to bring down a small country.
In 2006, Prince expanded internationally, forming a new subsidiary in Barbados, outside American taxes and regulation, to train foreign forces, often funded by American military aid. Elite Blackwater soldiers have conducted secretive "black jobs" for the CIA or other spy agencies.
Despite its financial success, Blackwater is under fire from two sides: Democratic critics who want accountability and families of the four men killed in Fallujah in 2004. The families have sued, alleging negligence.
Blackwater's lawyers assert it cannot be sued because it is part of the "Total Force." But, while Congress demands that it be subject to American military codes and international treaties, Blackwater takes the opposite view — it is not military, it's a civilian contractor. Big money has gone into D.C. lawyers, lobbyists and public-relations spinners to sell this apparent contradiction.
There have always been mercenaries, and a case can be made for limited use of contractors, but the Bush administration has erased the line between a national military and a private war machine. Iraq is our first outsourced war, siphoning billions of taxpayer dollars into the private war machine.
Military contractors have become an integral part of the American military, allowing the White House to understate troop numbers and avoid a military draft. Unpopular wars for oil or ideology can be waged without calling on middle-class families to send their children; mercenaries will fill the jobs if volunteers don't come forth.
In Prince, the Republicans' radical Christian base is wed to the war-machine base, the one providing votes and manpower, the other providing campaign funds.
The resulting combination is one of rigid ideology and eagerness to solve any problem with overwhelming force. The Bush administration convinced itself its views on Iraq were right, pushing aside contrary evidence, then failed to think beyond "shock and awe," with resultant horrors.
In a world of nuance and gray areas, ideological purity and bulging biceps will cause as many problems as they solve. Blackwater seems to epitomize a dark side of our psyche that should be troubling to all Americans.
Floyd J. McKay, a journalism professor emeritus at Western Washington University, is a regular contributor to Times editorial pages. E-mail him at floydmckay@yahoo.com
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