IMPEACH BUSH

July 10, 2007

Gonzales knew of FBI violations

WASHINGTON - Democrats raised new questions Tuesday about whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales knew about FBI abuses of civil liberties when he told a Senate committee that no such problems occurred.

Lying to Congress is a crime, but it wasn't clear if Gonzales knew about the violations when he made his statements to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

One Democrat called for a special counsel to investigate. President Bush continued to support his longtime friend.

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July 11, 2007

Bush again links Iraq violence to 9/11

WASHINGTON — Struggling to stem growing opposition to his Iraq policy even among Republicans, President Bush contended anew Tuesday that the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States are the same as al Qaida in Iraq, a violent Iraqi insurgent group that didn't exist until after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

It was the second time in two weeks that Bush has made the link in an apparent attempt to transform lingering fear of another U.S. terrorist attack into backing for the current buildup of U.S. troops in Iraq.

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July 7, 2007

White House Aide Wants to Testify

WASHINGTON - The attorney for a former White House aide told Congress on Saturday he expects the Bush administration to try to block the aide from testifying on last year's firings of U.S. prosecutors, as the White House and Congress appeared headed for a court battle.

Eggleston asked that any congressional sanctions be directed at the White House, not Taylor, because his 32-year-old client faced "two untenable choices."

"She can follow the president's direction and face the possibility of a contempt sanction by the Senate, with enforcement through the criminal courts, an action that regardless of outcome, will follow her for life," he said.

Or she could try to accommodate the Senate, which would "put her at odds with the President, a person whom she admires and for whom she has worked tirelessly for years," he wrote.

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July 7, 2007

Illegal wiretaps ruled OK

A sharply divided federal appeals court in Cincinnati handed the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program a major legal victory Friday, ruling that the American Civil Liberties Union and several other plaintiffs did not have standing to challenge the program.

The 2-1 decision by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back to a federal trial judge in Detroit and ordered her to dismiss the case, reversing a ruling the judge had issued last year that the program was unconstitutional.

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor had rejected the argument, saying that three publicly acknowledged facts about the government's surveillance program were sufficient to establish standing.

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July 1, 2007

Congress could pursue contempt charges for Bush

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee signaled today that he would seek to hold White House officials in contempt of Congress if they do not comply with congressional subpoenas.

"If they don't cooperate, yes, I'll go that far," said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), when asked on NBC's "Meet the Press" if he would ask Congress to hold President Bush in contempt if he refuses to respond to subpoenas.

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June 30, 2007

The Vice President's Record of Willfully Violating the Law

Vice President Dick Cheney has regularly claimed that he is above the law, but until recently he has not offered any explanation of why.

In fact, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a law that Cheney believes does apply to him, whether that law be major or minor. For example, he has claimed that most of the laws passed in the aftermath of Watergate were unconstitutional, and thus implicitly inapplicable. His office oversees signing statements claiming countless new laws will not be honored except insofar as the President's extremely narrow interpretation allows. He does not believe the War Powers Act should be honored by the President. Nor, in his view, should the President be bothered with laws like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). In fact, it appears Cheney has actively encouraged defiance of such laws by the Bush Administration.

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June 30, 2007

Bush Is Told to Justify Executive Privilege

The chairmen of the House and Senate Judiciary committees yesterday ratcheted up their fight with President Bush over documents on the firing of U.S. attorneys, sending the White House a barbed letter demanding that the president back down from a claim of executive privilege -- or give Congress a detailed explanation for withholding each document.

The committee chairmen told the White House to provide a signed letter from Bush asserting executive privilege, as well as a description of each withheld document, a list of who has seen the documents, and the legal basis for arguing that they may be shielded from public view.

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July 1, 2007

Private Contractors Provide Military With Intelligence

The intelligence was compiled not by the U.S. military, as might be expected, but by a British security firm, Aegis Defence Services Ltd. The Reconstruction Operations Center is the hub of Aegis's sprawling presence in Iraq and the most visible example of how intelligence collection is now among the responsibilities handled by a network of private security companies that work in the shadows of the U.S. military.

Legal questions 'open or dodged'
The deepening and largely hidden involvement of security companies in the war has drawn the attention of Congress, which is seeking to regulate the industry. The House intelligence committee stated in a recent report that it is "concerned that the Intelligence Community does not have a clear definition of what functions are 'inherently governmental' and, as a result, whether there are contractors performing inherently governmental functions."

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June 25, 2007

How does a $2 million project end up costing the government $124 million? Just ask the Department of Homeland Security

Payments to the firm, one of the country's biggest government contractors, soared by millions of dollars a month, the Post says, reaching $30 million, or 15 times the contract's original value, by December 2004. At that point, DHS lawyers warned that the deal had gone "grossly beyond" estimates and advised the department to end the contract and allow other companies to bid for the work.

But it was more than a year before any competitive bidding took place. In the meantime, payments to Booz Allen more than doubled again, thanks to another no-bid deal, to $73 million. Finally, in spring 2006, DHS broke the work into five separate contracts, worth an additional $50 million, and solicited bids.

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June 28, 2007

Costs Skyrocket As DHS Runs Up No-Bid Contracts

By December 2004, payments to Booz Allen had exceeded $30 million -- 15 times the contract's original value. When department lawyers examined the deal, they found it was "grossly beyond the scope" of the original contract, and they said the arrangement violated government procurement rules. The lawyers advised the department to immediately stop making payments through the contract and allow other companies to compete for the work.

But the competition did not take place for more than a year. During that time, the payments to Booz Allen more than doubled again under a second no-bid arrangement, to $73 million, according to internal documents, e-mail and interviews.

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June 25, 2007

UN WMD Report: US and Britain hampered their work in Iraq

The report by the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, or UNMOVIC, did not name its targets but several of its conclusions appeared aimed at the United States and Britain, which invaded Iraq in March 2003.

"Despite some skepticism from many areas within the international community, in hindsight, it has now become clear that the U.N. inspection system in Iraq was indeed successful to a large degree, in fulfilling its disarmament and monitoring obligations," said the unit's 1,160-page summing-up report.

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June 27, 2007

House Report Faults Pentagon Accounting of Iraqi Forces

Despite the substantial number of Iraqi security forces and their increasing willingness to fight -- demonstrated by rising numbers of casualties -- their progress toward taking full responsibility for the nation's security remains mixed, according to a report on the investigation by the oversight panel of the House Armed Services Committee. U.S. commanders now predict that it will take years and tens of thousands more Iraqi soldiers and police to achieve that goal.

The Pentagon "cannot report in detail how many of the 346,500 Iraqi military and police personnel that the coalition trained are operational today," according to the 250-page report. Details of the document were provided to The Washington Post by congressional staff members.

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June 27, 2007

Imperial presidency declared null and void

In private, Bush administration sub-Cabinet officials who have been instrumental in formulating and sustaining the legal "war paradigm" acknowledge that their efforts to create a system for detainees separate from due process, criminal justice and law enforcement have failed. One of the key framers of the war paradigm (in which the president in his wartime capacity as commander in chief makes and enforces laws as he sees fit, overriding the constitutional system of checks and balances), who a year ago was arguing vehemently for pushing its boundaries, confesses that he has abandoned his belief in the whole doctrine, though he refuses to say so publicly. If he were to speak up, given his seminal role in formulating the policy and stature among the Federalist Society cadres that run it, his rejection would have a shattering impact, far more than political philosopher Francis Fukuyama's denunciation of the neoconservatism he formerly embraced. But this figure remains careful to disclose his disillusionment with his own handiwork only in off-the-record conversations. Yet another Bush legal official, even now at the commanding heights of power, admits that the administration's policies are largely discredited. In its defense, he says without a hint of irony or sarcasm, "Not everything we've done has been illegal." He adds, "Not everything has been ultra vires" -- a legal term referring to actions beyond the law.

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June 25, 2007

Report blasts U.S. for failures in fighting terrorism

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A just-released report slams the federal government for failing to coordinate the work of U.S. law enforcement agencies overseas to fight terrorism.

The Government Accountability Office found that in one country a lack of clarity about the roles and responsibilities of the FBI and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency may have compromised several investigations intended to identify and disrupt potential terrorist activities.

The White House has long issued directives asking that U.S. law enforcement agencies assist foreign nations' anti-terrorism efforts.

But the report finds that embassy and law enforcement officials told the GAO "they had received little or no guidance" on how to accomplish that.

The issue of roles and responsibilities "remains unresolved and is still subject to ongoing debates within the administration," it said.

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June 25, 2007

ACLU: Torture used systematically

"Moreover, more than 100,000 pages of government documents released in response to (an) American Civil Liberties Union Freedom of Information Act request reveal that a pervasive and systemic pattern of harsh interrogation techniques have been used by military personnel indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay," the ACLU said in a statement Monday.

"The documents include evidence that detainees have been beaten; forced into painful stress positions; threatened with death; sexually and religiously humiliated; stripped naked; hooded and blindfolded; exposed to extreme heat and cold; denied food and water; isolated for prolonged periods; subjected to mock drownings; and intimated by dogs," the group said.

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July 2-9, 2007 issue

Gonzales Ignored Request for Legal Opinion by the National Archives

Cheney's position so frustrated J. William Leonard, the chief of the Archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which enforces the order, that he complained in January to Gonzales. In a letter, Leonard wrote that Cheney's position was inconsistent with the "plain text reading" of the executive order and asked the attorney general for an official ruling. But Gonzales never responded, thereby permitting Cheney to continue blocking Leonard from conducting even a routine inspection of how the veep's office was handling classified documents, according to correspondence released by House Government Reform Committee chair Rep. Henry Waxman.

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June 25, 2007

The Undoing of the Geneva Conventions

The meeting marked "the first time that the issue of interrogations comes up" among top-ranking White House officials, recalled John C. Yoo, who represented the Justice Department. "The CIA guys said, 'We're going to have some real difficulties getting actionable intelligence from detainees'" if interrogators confined themselves to treatment allowed by the Geneva Conventions.

The vice president's unseen victories attest to traits that are often ascribed to him but are hard to demonstrate from the public record: thoroughgoing secrecy, persistence of focus, tactical flexibility in service of fixed aims and close knowledge of the power map of government. On critical decisions for more than six years, Cheney has often controlled the pivot points -- tipping the outcome when he could, engineering stalemate when he could not and reopening debates that rivals thought were resolved.

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June 24, 2007

Ex-Surveillance Judge Criticizes Warrantless Taps

A federal judge who used to authorize wiretaps in terrorism and espionage cases criticized yesterday President Bush's decision to order warrantless surveillance after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"We have to understand you can fight the war [on terrorism] and lose everything if you have no civil liberties left when you get through fighting the war," said Royce C. Lamberth, a U.S. District Court judge in Washington and a former presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, speaking at the American Library Association's annual convention.

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June 23, 2007

Bush claims oversight exemption too

WASHINGTON — The White House said Friday that, like Vice President Dick Cheney's office, President Bush's office is not allowing an independent federal watchdog to oversee its handling of classified national security information.

An executive order that Bush issued in March 2003 — amending an existing order — requires all government agencies that are part of the executive branch to submit to oversight. Although it doesn't specifically say so, Bush's order was not meant to apply to the vice president's office or the president's office, a White House spokesman said.

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June 22, 2007

Army officer says Gitmo panels flawed

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — An Army officer who played a key role in the "enemy combatant" hearings at Guantanamo Bay says tribunal members relied on vague and incomplete intelligence while being pressured to rule against detainees, often without any specific evidence.

His affidavit, submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court and released Friday, is the first criticism by a member of the military panels that determine whether detainees will continue to be held.

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June 23, 2007

White House Defends Cheney's Refusal of Oversight

The White House defended Vice President Cheney yesterday in a dispute over his office's refusal to comply with an executive order regulating the handling of classified information as Democrats and other critics assailed him for disregarding rules that others follow.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Cheney is not obligated to submit to oversight by an office that safeguards classified information, as other members and parts of the executive branch are. Cheney's office has contended that it does not have to comply because the vice president serves as president of the Senate, which means that his office is not an "entity within the executive branch."

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June 24, 2007

Bush/Cheney Conspired to Strip POWs of Rights

In less than an hour, the document traversed a West Wing circuit that gave its words the power of command. It changed hands four times, according to witnesses, with emphatic instructions to bypass staff review. When it returned to the Oval Office, in a blue portfolio embossed with the presidential seal, Bush pulled a felt-tip pen from his pocket and signed without sitting down. Almost no one else had seen the text.

Cheney's proposal had become a military order from the commander in chief. Foreign terrorism suspects held by the United States were stripped of access to any court -- civilian or military, domestic or foreign. They could be confined indefinitely without charges and would be tried, if at all, in closed "military commissions."

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June 22, 2007

U.S. May Move POWs To Afghan Prison

(CBS/AP) The United States is helping build a prison in Afghanistan to take some prisoners now at Guantanamo Bay, but the White House said Friday that it's not meant as an alternative to the detainee facility in Cuba.

The news comes the same day as the release of an affidavit by an Army lawyer criticizing the evidence used by military tribunals to determine whether detainees will continue to be held.

The Bush administration has said it wants to close Guantanamo Bay and move terror suspects to prisons elsewhere. Senior officials have told The Associated Press a consensus is building among the president's top advisers on how to do it.

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June 22, 2007

Cheney claims a non-executive privilege

WASHINGTON — For the last four years, Vice President Dick Cheney has made the controversial claim that his office is not fully part of the Bush administration in order to exempt it from a presidential order regulating federal agencies' handling of classified national security information, officials said Thursday.

Cheney has held that his office is not fully part of the executive branch of government despite the continued objections of the National Archives, which says his office's failure to demonstrate that it has proper security safeguards in place could jeopardize the government's top secrets.

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June 22, 2007

Cheney Fighting National Archives: the Information Security Oversight Office Since 2003

California Representative Henry Waxman released documents Thursday that revealed Cheney's office has not filed annual reports with a unit of the National Archives, the Information Security Oversight Office, since 2003. The unit is required to monitor how the executive branch of the government handles classified documents, under an order first signed in 1995 by then President Bill Clinton.

Cheney's advisors say his office is not covered under the order, arguing that the vice president's office is not strictly an executive agency.

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June 20, 2007

Iraqi Labor Leaders Blame US for the Bloodshed in Iraq and say Get Out!

The two Iraqi labor leaders, currently in Philadelphia as part of a U.S. tour sponsored by a coalition of American labor unions called U.S. Labor Against the War, say the U.S. is the cause of all the violence in Iraq, and argue that the sooner U.S. forces leave their country, the sooner things will start to get better.

"Did the occupier find us fighting each other when they came to Iraq?" asks Hashmeya, who is president of the Electric Utility Workers Union of Iraq. "No. The fighting among Iraqis started two and a half years after the Americans came."

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June 26, 2007

NSA Spying Program, Uncovering The Truth

The Senate Judiciary Committee has voted to authorize subpoenas related to the National Security Agency (NSA)'s domestic spying program, setting the stage for a Congressional showdown over the surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans. The subpoenas demand certain legal documents that the Administration has withheld despite Congress' repeated requests.

"This subpoena authorization is a critical first step toward uncovering the full extent of the NSA's illegal spying and the role that telecommunications companies like AT&T played in it," said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "Considering that it's been almost six years since the NSA started spying on Americans without warrants and over a year since that spying was revealed publicly, these subpoenas are long overdue. It's high time for Congress to get to the bottom of this mess."

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June 25, 2007

How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties

In the meeting, the officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. "Could you tell us what happened?" Wolfowitz asked. Someone else asked, "Is it abuse or torture?" At that point, Taguba recalled, "I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, 'That's not abuse. That's torture.' There was quiet."

Taguba said that he saw "a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee." The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it. Such images would have added an even more inflammatory element to the outcry over Abu Ghraib. "It's bad enough that there were photographs of Arab men wearing women's panties," Taguba said.

"The whole idea that Rumsfeld projects—'We're here to protect the nation from terrorism'—is an oxymoron," Taguba said. "He and his aides have abused their offices and have no idea of the values and high standards that are expected of them. And they've dragged a lot of officers with them."

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Now that polls show Democrats are in the sewer they may sum up the courage to impeach agency heads that broke the law. If Bush thinks the laws are wrong, why did he sign them or challenge them in court? Imagine this court hearing...Bush signs a law and then tells the court he's not going to obey it because he disagrees with it. The justifies would laugh uncontrollably.

Knowing the current Democratic leadership, Bush could shit on their collective faces and they wouldn't do anything.

June 19, 2007

US agencies disobey 6 laws that president challenged

WASHINGTON -- Federal officials have disobeyed at least six new laws that President Bush challenged in his signing statements, a government study disclosed yesterday. The report provides the first evidence that the government may have acted on claims by Bush that he can set aside laws under his executive powers.

In a report to Congress, the non partisan Government Accountability Office studied a small sample of the bill provisions that Bush has signed into law but also challenged with signing statements. The GAO found that agencies disobeyed six such laws, while enforcing 10 others as written even though Bush had challenged them.

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We know two absolute truths; first, Rumsfeld knew about Adu Ghraid and refused to brief congress and/or Bush and failed to fire him after he failed to inform congress and himself about the grave war crimes committed by US soldiers.

June 17, 2007

White House denies prior knowledge of Abu Ghraib abuse

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The White House on Sunday insisted that President George W. Bush first learned about abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison from media reports, contrary to assertions by a former top general that Bush likely knew about the scandal before it broke.

"The President said over three years ago that he first saw the pictures of the abuse on television," said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel in Crawford, Texas, where Bush is spending the weekend at his ranch.

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Democrats took ownership of this war when they refunded it. They can't argue Bush is an incompetent commander in chief because only a fool would give an incompetent commander in chief more money to fight his wars. So now that Democrats own this war they're responsible for the genocide that's taking place - genocide is a war crime. As for the US military - they're equally guilty of war crimes.

June 18, 2007

Iraq on verge of genocidal war

The man who led the initial American effort to reconstruct Iraq after the war believes the country is on the brink of a genocidal civil war and its government will fall apart unless the US changes course and allows a three-way federal structure. He has also urged talks with Iran and other regional players.

Jay Garner, the former US general appointed two months before the invasion to head reconstruction in Iraq, admitted that before the 2003 war coordination between the various US departments and military had been disjointed.

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Due to criminal behavior the war mongers who took us to war have left, the corrupt appointees are leaving so the only people left serving Bush are the people who spin the brain dead media.

Any other president, VP, AG and Sec. of Defense would have been impeached and removed from office years ago. As long as the country is leaderless nothing will change. Leadership vacuums are always filled so the only question left unanswered is "who will fill it"? - the people who took us to war for no reason, the people who corrupted our government, or those who let one or the other happen under their watch and did nothing about it? Damn pathetic.

June 16, 2007

Justice Department Official Resign Over Attorney Firings

WASHINGTON - A senior Justice Department official who helped carry out the dismissals of federal prosecutors said Friday he is resigning. Mike Elston, chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, is the fifth Justice official to leave after being linked to the dismissals of the prosecutors.

Elston was accused of threatening at least four of the eight fired U.S. attorneys to keep quiet about their ousters. In a statement Friday, the Justice Department said Elston was leaving voluntarily to take a job with an unnamed Washington-area law firm.

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The US government can't find, jail, charge or try any terrorists but by god there are 500,000 of them out there. The war on terror has become a joke.

June 13, 2007

FBI Terror Watch List includes more than 500,000 names

A terrorist watch list compiled by the FBI has apparently swelled to include more than half a million names.

Privacy and civil liberties advocates say the list is growing uncontrollably, threatening its usefulness in the war on terror.

The bureau says the number of names on its terrorist watch list is classified.

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We knew the FBI was abusing the powers they received under the Patriot Act and the Congress reauthorized those abuses when they reauthorized the act. The Patriot Act must be abolished and if we had a worthwhile Supreme Court they'd have found it unconstitutional within days of becoming law. But the way things stand now the government can violate our rights for decades and the Court will do nothing. Individual rights can be abolished within seconds and it takes decades to get them back...does the court have any value whatsoever?

June 14, 2007

FBI Frequently Overstepped in Collecting Data

An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism.

The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau's national security investigations since 2002, and so the mistakes in the FBI's domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials said in interviews. The earlier report found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling.

"The FBI's comprehensive audit of National Security Letter use across all field offices has confirmed the inspector general's findings that we had inadequate internal controls for use of an invaluable investigative tool," FBI General Counsel Valerie E. Caproni said. "Our internal audit examined a much larger sample than the inspector general's report last March, but we found similar percentages of NSLs that had errors."

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Can the Democratic Party be shamed into action?

June 11, 2007

Immigration Judges Often Picked Based On GOP Ties

The Bush administration increasingly emphasized partisan political ties over expertise in recent years in selecting the judges who decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, despite laws that preclude such considerations, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.

At least one-third of the immigration judges appointed by the Justice Department since 2004 have had Republican connections or have been administration insiders, and half lacked experience in immigration law, Justice Department, immigration court and other records show.

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June 8, 2007

Body armor donated by Legion sits unused in Iraq

The body armor that West Seneca's American Legion Post 735 bought for Marines in Iraq is gathering dust somewhere in dusty Anbar province, thanks to Marine Corps orders preventing its use.

And the local Legionnaires who spent nearly $6,000 for the state-of-the- art protective gear are none too happy about it.

"It's asinine," said Mark McMahon, whose purchase of the body armor for his son and two of his buddies prompted the Legion post to buy 20 sets for the West Seneca Marine's entire unit.

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It's good to see there are still some judges who honor their oath of office. It's too bad Congress, the Supreme Court and the White House don't do the same.

June 11, 2007

Court Orders Release Of "Enemy Combatant" In U.S

The 2-1 appellate ruling was a major setback for Bush's contention in the war on terrorism that he has the power to detain people in the United States without charging them.

The court panel based in Richmond, Virginia, ruled that the Qatari national involved, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, must be released from military custody.

"The decision protects legal residents and citizens from secret detention," said al-Marri's lawyer, Jonathan Hafetz of the Brennan Center for Justice in New York.

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This trial proves one unequivocal fact; there are more terrorist in the CIA than in al Qaeda or at a minimum we can't seem to arrest, try and convict as many terrorists as we have in the CIA.

June 9, 2007

In Italy, trial of CIA agents begins

MILAN, ITALY — As President Bush headed for Italy on Friday, a Milan court opened the trial of a group of CIA agents accused of kidnapping a radical Egyptian cleric — the first legal prosecution of one of the administration's most controversial counter-terrorism tactics.

Twenty-six American defendants, including two CIA station chiefs and an Air Force colonel, are being tried in absentia in the 2003 abduction from a Milan sidewalk of the cleric known as Abu Omar.

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Inspector Generals are supposed to protect us from lawlessness, but in this White House the inspector generals are criminals.

The people who thought they were voting for a good Christian man have been exposed as being naive and/or immoral.

June 8, 2007

Scandal Hits Commerce Department: Inspector General Resigns

Commerce Department Inspector General Johnnie E. Frazier retired yesterday in the face of multiple investigations and a formal report recommending that President Bush punish him for violating the whistle-blower protection law.

Frazier, who since 1999 has served as the department's chief watchdog responsible for investigating waste, fraud and abuse, told the administration that he is retiring effective June 29, congressional and White House officials said.

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Our intelligence agencies say torture doesn't work . Why did they (the CIA) torture POWs?

June 8, 2007

EU calls for investigations by Poland, Romania into CIA prisons

BRUSSELS (Thomson Financial) - The European Commission today called on EU member states accused of running secret prisons for the CIA to conduct impartial investigations into this 'as quickly as possible'.

European Commission spokesman Friso Roscam Abbing stressed the need 'for the member states concerned to conduct impartial investigations to establish the truth.'

'Indeed, such investigations should be fully carried out as quickly as possible in order to establish responsibility and for the victims to obtain compensation,' he told reporters in Brussels.

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Now that we're certain the White House, the Justice Department, the Congress and the Courts violated (or allowed Bush to violate) their oaths of office, it's time to clean house. We've never seen so many utterly immoral and worthless leaders in our history. Anyone who voted for a conservative member of the Supreme Court isn't moral enough to serve our nation. The Supreme Court had the power to stop Bush and did nothing. This lazy and corrupt Court will be damned by history.

June 8, 2007

Report claims US ran secret prisons in Europe

The CIA ran secret prisons in Poland and Romania from 2003 to 2005 where terrorism suspects could be interrogated free of US legal restraints, a Council of Europe investigation concluded today.

It revealed that Abu Zubaydah, believed to be a senior al-Qaida member, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks, were held and interrogated in Poland.

None of the prisoners had access to the Red Cross and many were subjected to what George Bush has called the CIA's "enhanced" interrogation, which critics have condemned as torture.

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June 7, 2007

Official: Cheney Urged Wiretaps

Vice President Cheney told Justice Department officials that he disagreed with their objections to a secret surveillance program during a high-level White House meeting in March 2004, a former senior Justice official told senators yesterday.

The meeting came one day before White House officials tried to get approval for the same program from then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, who lay recovering from surgery in a hospital, according to former deputy attorney general James B. Comey.

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June 7, 2007

U.S. Secretly Imprisoned 39

(LONDON)—A coalition of human rights groups has drawn up a list of 39 terror suspects it believes are being secretly imprisoned by U.S. authorities and published their names in a report released Thursday.

Information about the so-called "ghost detainees" was gleaned from interviews with former prisoners and officials in the U.S., Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen, according to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and four other groups.

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The problem is simple. The Bush Administration knew Americans would never support this war if they had to pay for it with higher taxes so they chose instead to do the war on the cheap...borrowing every penny and they chose to cut taxes. The problem then isn't just Bush, or the GOP, it's the American people and the Democratic Party. If Dems asked republicans how they were going to pay for the war, the war would have never started because the republican party wouldn't have supported tax increases necessary to fund the war.

June 6, 2007

Equipment levels worst ever, Guard chief says

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — About half of all National Guard equipment is being used in the Middle East, and the Guard's senior uniformed officer said Tuesday that could hurt the organization's overall readiness at home.

National Guard units have 53 percent of the equipment they need to handle state emergencies, said Lt. General H. Steven Blum. It falls to 49 percent once Guard equipment needed for war — such as weapons — is factored in, he said.

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June 5, 2007

The dysfunctional tribunals

The Bush administration could have saved itself a lot of grief, and the United States a lot of embarrassment, by adhering to the Geneva Convention and other treaties on the treatment of prisoners of war.

But, instead, the administration decided that prisoners taken in the war on terror, principally in Afghanistan, would be tried by a special process it threw together for that purpose. The first try was nothing but a kangaroo court. Since then, the system has been through several refinements and, five years later, it still doesn't work.

There has been only one conviction, and that a plea bargain leading to the defendant's serving a nine-month sentence in his native Australia.

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Even an oaf knows global warming poses a bigger threat to our national security than terrorism ever has. So what is Bush doing about it? He's insuring we don't have accurate scientific data, which would be similar to gutting our intelligence agencies so they'd give him what he wanted to hear about WMD.

June 4, 2007

The Bush administration scales back climate science via satellites

"Unfortunately, the recent loss of climate sensors ... places the overall climate program in serious jeopardy," NOAA and NASA scientists told the White House in the Dec. 11 report obtained by the AP.

The reduced system of four satellites will now focus on weather forecasting. Most of the climate instruments needed to collect more precise data over long periods are being eliminated.

Instead, the Pentagon and two partners — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA — will rely on European satellites for most of the climate data.

But seven other separate climate sensors are still being eliminated or substantially downgraded by lower-quality equipment to save money, according to the report to the White House. Most of the satellites, which were scheduled to launch starting next year, have been delayed to between 2013 and 2026.

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Only three people have been charged with terrorism and yet the Bush White House says it's absolutely necessary to keep the prison open. In what world does this man live? Why hasn't the Supreme Court or the cowards in congress done anything to shut it down?

June 5, 2007

U.S. terror system in limbo after Khadr ruling

A military judge dropped a legal bombshell by dismissing the charges against Omar Khadr, leaving his future in limbo and rocking an already embattled terror system established by the U.S. administration.

Monday's surprise ruling doesn't put 20-year-old Khadr any closer to a trial or release, but the decision could derail the heavily criticized terror tribunals.

On Monday, the judge dismissed the charges against the Canadian native, who has been held at Guantanamo Bay for five years, and the charges brought against Yemen's Salmi Ahmed Hamdam, who was accused of being al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's chauffeur.

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If the Dems had the noise machine the GOP has, this scandal would be headline news on every network for months.

May 24, 2007

Report accuses GSA chief of illegal politicking for GOP

WASHINGTON — Federal investigators have written a sharply worded critique of the beleaguered chief of the General Services Administration, Lurita Alexis Doan, accusing her of violating the law by improperly attempting to use her agency to help Republican political candidates.

"The GSA administrator displayed no reservations in her willingness to commit GSA resources, including its human capital, to the Republican Party," the report says. "Her actions constitute an obvious misuse of her official authority and were made for the purpose of affecting the result of an election."

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Confronted with the fact that the world sees the US as anti human rights, what have the Democrats done...nothing. Does anyone still think we have a two-party system?

June 1, 2007

U.N. EXPERT VOICES CONCERN ON U.S. HUMAN RIGHTS AFTER VISIT

In a world community which has adopted global measures to counter terrorism, the United States is a leader. This position carries with it a special responsibility also to take leadership in the protection of human rights while countering terrorism. The example of the United States will have its followers, in good and in bad. The Special Rapporteur has a deep respect for the long traditions in the United States of respect for individual rights, the rule of law, and a strong level of judicial protection. Despite the existence of a tradition in the United States of respect for the rule of law, and the presence of self-correcting mechanisms under the United States Constitution, it is most regretful that a number of important mechanisms for the protection of rights have been removed or obfuscated under law and practice since the events of 11 September, including under the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, and under Executive Orders and classified programs.

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This man still didn't have a lawyer even though he's been a POW for five years. The US Supreme Court remains utterly worthless.

May 29, 2007

Gitmo suicide was Saudi veteran

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — The detainee who died at Guantanamo Bay in an apparent suicide was identified Thursday as a Saudi military veteran and self-described Islamic holy warrior who denied he ever intended to kill Americans.

The military and Saudi Arabia identified the detainee as Abdul Rahman Maadha al-Amry. Though it gave no details about him, U.S. records say he was 34 and had been held without charges at the prison at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in southeastern Cuba since February 2002.

Al-Amry had no attorney of record, although the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a blanket legal challenge on behalf of all Guantanamo detainees. Lawyers say many detainees have little faith in the American legal system but others simply do not understand it.

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Since the Speaker of House is allowing the lawlessness in this White House to continue without threats of impeachment, she should be removed from office as soon as possible.

May 29, 2007

Fitzgerald: Plame was covert agent

May 29, 2007 - In new court filings, special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has finally resolved one of the most disputed issues at the core of the long-running CIA leak controversy: Valerie Plame Wilson, he asserts, was a "covert" CIA officer who repeatedly traveled overseas using a "cover identity" in order to disguise her relationship with the agency.

Fitzgerald cites Wilson's covert status as part of his argument—advanced in two strongly worded memos filed in recent days—that I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, should be sentenced to up to three years in prison.

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Which begs the question; why are our intelligence agencies using torture? Is it because they're run by outmoded, amateurish and unreliable leaders?

May 30, 2007

Intelligence Agencies: harsh techniques are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable

WASHINGTON, May 29 — As the Bush administration completes secret new rules governing interrogations, a group of experts advising the intelligence agencies are arguing that the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable.

The psychologists and other specialists, commissioned by the Intelligence Science Board, make the case that more than five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has yet to create an elite corps of interrogators trained to glean secrets from terrorism suspects.

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Americans saw our wounded and dead during previous wars. We even honored our dead upon their return. Now, the media allows the military to hide the truth from the American people and instead they're given a script - Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch etc. It's disgusting.

May 28, 2007

Military Rules Ban A Free Press

Since last year, the military's embedding rules require that journalists obtain a signed consent from a wounded soldier before the image can be published. Images that put a face on the dead, that make them identifiable, are simply prohibited.

If Joseph Heller were still around, he might appreciate the bureaucratic elegance of paragraph 11(a) of IAW Change 3, DoD Directive 5122.5:

"Names, video, identifiable written/oral descriptions or identifiable photographs of wounded service members will not be released without the service member's prior written consent."

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We know crimes were committed at the highest levels and the Speaker of the House said she took impeachment off the table. With any luck she'll either lose the speakership or her seat in the next election.

May 29, 2007

Fitzgerald: Cheney Authorized CIA Agent Leak

The investigation, Fitzgerald writes, "was necessary to determine whether there was concerted action by any combination of the officials known to have disclosed the information about Ms. Plame to the media as anonymous sources, and also whether any of those who were involved acted at the direction of others. This was particularly important in light of Mr. Libby's statement to the FBI that he may have discussed Ms. Wilson's employment with reporters at the specific direction of the Vice President."

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The law says there shall be no discrimination based on sex. The Supreme Court thinks otherwise and effectively rewrote the law without the consent of the American people. They should be impeached and removed from office.

May 29, 2007

Supreme Court Decimates Employment Anti Discrimination Law

The decision came in a case involving a supervisor at a Goodyear Tire plant in Gadsden, Ala., the only woman among 16 men at the same management level, who was paid less than any of her colleagues, including those with less seniority. She learned that fact late in a career of nearly 20 years — too late, according to the Supreme Court's majority.

The court held on Tuesday that employees may not bring suit under the principal federal anti-discrimination law unless they have filed a formal complaint with a federal agency within 180 days after their pay was set. The timeline applies, according to the decision, even if the effects of the initial discriminatory act were not immediately apparent to the worker and even if they continue to the present day.

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