BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Riginslinger
Date: 14 Apr 09 - 10:13 AM

Exactly right, Sanity, that's what I've been thinking for years. All of these pieces must fit together somehow.

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 14 Apr 09 - 10:41 AM

IT could be that that was just a symptom, and the source of malaise was the unfortunate confluence of Sicilian immigration policies in the late 1940s, the commercial success of tobacco and Wonder Bread, and the invention of LSD.

A

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: beardedbruce
Date: 14 Apr 09 - 10:45 AM

What about the failure of Wilson to get the League of Nations through the Senate???


Or a few years earlier (1913?), when the Income Tax was created, allowing for unlimited growth of government?




Or the 1790's when the Whiskey Rebellion was put down?

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 21 Apr 09 - 05:49 PM

Last week, President Obama released four Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel memos that had authorized torture. "In dozens of pages of dispassionate legal prose, the methods approved by the Bush administration for extracting information from senior operatives of Al Qaeda are spelled out in careful detail -- like keeping detainees awake for up to 11 straight days, placing them in a dark, cramped box or putting insects into the box to exploit their fears," The New York Times writes. The earliest memo, from 2002, was signed by Jay Bybee, then an Assistant Attorney General and now a federal judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Bybee's memo provided "a legal authorization for a laundry list of proposed C.I.A. interrogation techniques," including waterboarding. The techniques Bybee approved are illegal by U.S. statute and an international treaty to which the U.S. is a signatory. Bybee attempted to give legal cover to illegal acts, and thus broke the ethical, professional, and legal standards that govern lawyers. For this, Judge Jay Bybee should be impeached. The Progress Report has launched a campaign to persuade the House Judiciary Committee to initiate impeachment hearings against Bybee. Already, more than 3,000 of you have taken action. Join our effort to convince the committee to launch hearings.

WHAT BYBEE APPROVED: "[I]n the finest legalese" and with "grotesque, lawyerly logic," Bybee wrote 40 pages of justification for treatment that clearly constituted "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment." He approved a method called "walling," which entailed slamming a detainee against a wall. Bybee claimed that "any pain experienced is not of the intensity associated with serious physical injury." He also gave a thumbs up to slapping a detainee's face as long as the interrogator took off any rings. "The facial slap does not produce pain that is difficult to endure," he insisted. And feel free to place detainees in stress positions, Bybee said: these "simply involve forcing the subject to remain in uncomfortable positions." Most notoriously, Bybee declared that waterboarding -- a technique perfected during the Spanish Inquisition that the United States later prosecuted Japanese officers for conducting against U.S. POWs -- was both legal and safe. "The waterboard…inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever," Bybee claimed. He said that U.S. law bans only techniques that cause "pain and suffering," a phrase "best understood as a single concept, not distinct concepts of 'pain' as distinguished from 'suffering.'" Since waterboarding causes no "pain," Bybee declares it legal. In fact, he wrote, even one separates "pain" from "suffering," waterboarding would still be acceptable: "The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering."

HOW TO IMPEACH BYBEE: The Progress Report is asking readers to sign a petition to be sent to the House Judiciary Committee, urging it to hold hearings on Bybee. After the hearings, the Committee would draw up articles of impeachment, and pass them with a simple majority vote. From there, the articles move to the full House, which can also approve them with a simple majority. The House sends two "managers" to serve as prosecutors in the impeachment trial, conducted in the Senate if a majority agrees to move forward. It takes 67 Senators to convict -- and a conviction would remove Bybee from the bench. Calling for his impeachment in January, Yale Law professor Bruce Ackerman wrote, "[Bybee's] impeachment is not a prelude to a sweeping political vendetta. It focuses on a very particular problem: Jay Bybee may serve for decades on one of the highest courts in the land. Is his continued service consistent with his role in the systematic perpetration of war crimes?" The New York Times called for Bybee's impeachment this weekend, writing that the "memos make it clear that Mr. Bybee is unfit for a job that requires legal judgment and a respect for the Constitution." "His flagrant contempt for the rule of law is utterly inconsistent with his judicial position and speaks directly to his competency to function in that office," stated the Center for Constitutional Rights. "He ought to be impeached," House Judiciary Committee member Jerry Nadler (D-NY) told the Huffington Post yesterday. "It was not an honest legal memo. It was an instruction manual on how to break the law. "Senate Judiciary Committee member Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) agreed that impeachment is "certainly possible." "The idea of the author of one of these memos sitting on the federal bench makes a farce of the whole legal system," wrote the Center for American Progress Action Fund's Matthew Yglesias.

A PATH TO ACCOUNTABILITY: In 2003, Bybee was nominated by President Bush and approved by the Senate to sit on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. During his confirmation hearing, Bybee refused to answer questions, citing executive privilege at least 20 separate times. "If the Senate had known the truth, it would have rejected him," Ackerman wrote. Launching the impeachment process would force Bybee to finally answer questions. And with the Obama administration hesitant to launch prosecutions of any kind, an impeachment hearing might be the closest thing Americans get to a full accounting of Bush's torture program. Indeed, when pressed yesterday on why Obama was refusing to hold Bush administration lawyers who authored the torture memos "accountable," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs stated simply, "The president is focused on looking forward. That's why." Looking forward, however, "it is simply obvious that, if there is no accountability when wrongdoing is exposed, future violations will not be deterred," House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) said yesterday. ...

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 21 Apr 09 - 06:02 PM

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 21 Apr 09 - 06:03 PM

Posted Tuesday, April 21, 2009, at 6:39 AM ET

The New York Times leads with word that Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat who has long been involved in intelligence matters, agreed to push for leniency from the Bush administration on behalf of two lobbyists of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel organization. In calls intercepted by the National Security Agency, Harman apparently agreed to speak up for the lobbyists in exchange for help in convincing party leaders that she should be the chairwoman of the House Intelligence Committee after her party gained control of Congress in 2006. The wiretapped calls were first reported by Congressional Quarterly and the NYT gets three sources to confirm much of the information. The Wall Street Journal banners word that cyberspies managed to repeatedly penetrate the Pentagon's $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter, the "Defense Department's costliest weapons program ever," as well as the Air Force's air traffic control system. The spies were even able to copy "several terabytes" of data relating to the fighter-jet program.

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Little Hawk
Date: 21 Apr 09 - 06:23 PM

In retrospect: they were 8 years during which I made the conscious decision not to visit the USA, because I felt it was ruled by an extremely dangerous and irresponsible government. I kid you not.

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Riginslinger
Date: 21 Apr 09 - 10:13 PM

And the people who control both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, also control Jane Harman. So this is news, why...?

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 21 Apr 09 - 11:02 PM

An interesting retrospective on the composite incompetence which led the U.S. to adopt extreme interrogation techniques reveals it was not eorge's fault, personally.

A

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 22 Apr 09 - 03:56 PM

Report Gives New Detail on Approval of Brutal Techniques

By BRIAN KNOWLTON
Published: April 21, 2009

WASHINGTON — A newly declassified Congressional report released Tuesday outlined the most detailed evidence yet that the military's use of harsh interrogation methods on terrorism suspects was approved at high levels of the Bush administration.

The report focused solely on interrogations carried out by the military, not those conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency at its secret prisons overseas. It rejected claims by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others that Pentagon policies played no role in harsh treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or other military facilities.

The 232-page report, the product of an 18-month inquiry, was approved on Nov. 20 by the Senate Armed Services Committee, but has since been under Pentagon review for declassification. Some of the findings were made public in a Dec. 12 article in The New York Times; a spokesman for Mr. Rumsfeld dismissed the report at the time as "unfounded allegations against those who have served our nation."

The Senate report documented how some of the techniques used by the military at prisons in Afghanistan and at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as in Iraq — stripping detainees, placing them in "stress positions" or depriving them of sleep — originated in a military program known as Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape, or SERE, intended to train American troops to resist abusive enemy interrogations.

According to the Senate investigation, a military behavioral scientist and a colleague who had witnessed SERE training proposed its use at Guantánamo in October 2002, as pressure was rising "to get 'tougher' with detainee interrogations." Officers there sought authorization, and Mr. Rumsfeld approved 15 interrogation techniques.

The report showed that Mr. Rumsfeld's authorization was cited by a United States military special-operations lawyer in Afghanistan as "an analogy and basis for use of these techniques," and that, in February 2003, a special-operations unit in Iraq obtained a copy of the policy from Afghanistan "that included aggressive techniques, changed the letterhead, and adopted the policy verbatim."

Months later, the report said, the interrogation officer in charge at Abu Ghraib obtained a copy of that policy "and submitted it, virtually unchanged, through her chain of command." This ultimately led to authorization by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez of the use of stress positions, "sleep management" and military dogs to exploit detainees' fears, the report said. ... (NYT)

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Donuel
Date: 22 Apr 09 - 04:07 PM

The response to the release of these torture method memos by the right wing pundits sound like Obama, while on worldwide TV, just commited felltio on Bo

Disgusting, Ruinous, Disasterous, etc.

Or as Peggy NOonan said "There are some things that should remain private and then just walk on , walk on and never look back, Some things should remain oneof life's mysteries."

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Little Hawk
Date: 22 Apr 09 - 05:56 PM

I daresay that Himmler and Goebbels and their most avid supporters would have been similarly outraged by a public disclosure of SS torture techniques...

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Donuel
Date: 23 Apr 09 - 05:15 PM

In retrospect I wonder about the friends I might have had in the community. I wonder about the families that may have prosepered and in turn were able to share some aspect of their good fortune instead of now standing in the unemployment line. I wonder about the millions of bodies that have been torn to shreds by bullets and bomb explosions as well as the Iraqi genome that is now poisoned by hundreds of tons of Uranium. I wonder about what advances that could have been made with a renewable energy policy instead of the Cheney war energy policy. I wonder about the damage to streams rivers lakes and oceans under the the most ludicrous enviormental lapse since Nixon. I wonder about the evangelical movement if hate baiting and science trashing policies had not been presidentially endorsed. I wonder what the radical Islamic movement would have done without the daily proof of American bombs and bullets killing virtually indisriminately. I wonder if the phrase 'shock and awe' might have been used to describe something beautiful that had happened. I wonder if the Enronization of virtually every Corporation and bank in America would have spread like the plague it has now become.

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Donuel
Date: 23 Apr 09 - 05:22 PM

I wonder what the tone, tenor and caring of American discourse would be like without the shouting down techniques and insulting attacks that are exclusive to FOX TV and Clear Channel radio.

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 23 Apr 09 - 11:24 PM

Report: Bush Officials Relied On Communist Torture Techniques To Press Detainees For Al Qaeda/Iraq Link

Late yesterday, the Senate Armed Services Committee made public an unclassified version of its November 2008 report, "Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody." The report reveals that top Bush administration officials were so eager to start harsh interrogations on detainees that they often ignored warnings from military advisers, skipped a thorough legal review process, and failed to fully investigate the origins of the dangerous techniques. Moreover, the consequences of their actions trickled down to lower-ranking officers and led directly to the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Here are some highlights from the report:

-- Top Officials Were Unaware Of The Gruesome Origins Of The Interrogation Program. The Bush administration's interrogation program was based on the U.S. military program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE), which is used to train U.S. troops if they are ever tortured by an enemy that doesn't adhere to the Geneva Conventions. However, none of the top CIA, Cabinet, or congressional officials who approved of the Bush administration's recommendations knew that SERE was designed around "torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War...that had wrung false confessions from Americans." These officials were unaware that veteran SERE trainers said the methods were ineffective for getting useful information and the former military psychologist who recommended that the CIA adopt SERE "had never conducted a real interrogation." One CIA official called the process "a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm."

-- Military Officials Warned That Harsh Interrogation Was Illegal And Ineffective. In November 2002, the Deputy Commander of the Defense Department's Criminal Investigative Task Force at Gitmo raised concerns that SERE techniques were "developed to better prepare U.S. military personnel to resist interrogations and not as a means of obtaining reliable information." The Air Force cited "serious concerns regarding the legality of many of the proposed techniques." The Army, Navy, and Marine Corps raised similar issues, citing "maltreatment" that would "arguably violate federal law."

-- Abusive Tactics Were Used To Search For A Non-Existent Al-Qaeda/Iraq Link. In 2006, former U.S. Army psychiatrist Maj. Charles Burney told investigators that interrogators at Gitmo were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between Iraq and al Qaeda, even though they were ultimately unsuccesful. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link...there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."


-- Top Bush Officials Bypassed Military Concerns. Less than a month after the military voiced their concerns, then-Defense Department general counsel William Haynes sent then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a one-page memo recommending that he approve 15 out of 18 of the torture techniques requested for use at Gitmo. Haynes indicated that he had discussed the issue with Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and Gen. Richard Myers, all of whom agreed with him. The only legal opinion Haynes cited in the memo was one that senior military advisers had called "legally insufficient" and "woefully inadequate." Five days later, Rumsfeld signed off on the request.

-- Officials Began Preparing Harsh Interrogation Techniques Before They Were Granted Legal Approval. Military and intelligence officials were "exploring ways to break Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees in early 2002, up to eight months before Justice Department lawyers approved the use of waterboarding and nine other harsh methods," and weeks before the CIA captured its first high-ranking terrorism suspect. In fact, in July 2002 -- a month before the Justice Department approved its list of interrogation techniques -- instructors at a training seminar told intelligence officials that the harsh measures were already deemed acceptable.

-- Bush's Torture Policies Led To Abuses At Abu Ghraib. In one of its conclusions, the Armed Services Committee writes, "The abuses of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. ... Rumsfeld's December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. custody."

UPDATEBrigadier General Janis Karpinski, who ran Iraq prisons -- including Abu Ghraib -- in 2003, told CBS that she was "scapegoated" by the administration for the abuses at Abu Ghraib. "The line is clear," she said. "It went from Washington, D.C. From the very top of the administration with the legal opinions through Bagram to Guantanamo Bay and then to Iraq via the commander from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Stringsinger
Date: 24 Apr 09 - 02:51 PM

The Bush years will be characterized by the overseeing of a so-called president who is
a bona fide sociopath, a casebook study. Cheney is another.

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Riginslinger
Date: 25 Apr 09 - 09:28 AM

I'm not sure that works. If they were both on the same page and in agreement with one-another, does that fit the definition of "sociopath?"

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 25 Apr 09 - 01:42 PM

"The military agency that provided advice on harsh interrogation techniques for use against terrorism suspects referred to the application of extreme duress as "torture" in a July 2002 document sent to the Pentagon's chief lawyer and warned that it would produce "unreliable information."

"The unintended consequence of a U.S. policy that provides for the torture of prisoners is that it could be used by our adversaries as justification for the torture of captured U.S. personnel," says the document, an unsigned two-page attachment to a memo by the military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency. Parts of the attachment, obtained in full by The Washington Post, were quoted in a Senate report on harsh interrogation released this week.

It remains unclear whether the attachment reached high-ranking officials in the Bush administration. But the document offers the clearest evidence that has come to light so far that technical advisers on the harsh interrogation methods voiced early concerns about the effectiveness of applying severe physical or psychological pressure." (WaPo)

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Riginslinger
Date: 25 Apr 09 - 09:47 PM

It all depends on what your definition of "is" is!

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: GUEST,Guest from Sanity
Date: 25 Apr 09 - 10:26 PM

You mean the 'Bush years' are over????
..Then again, maybe they weren't his to begin with....and whose ever they are, are still with us.......(oh no, here come the parrots, going to tell us things aren't what we all know they are....)

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 26 Apr 09 - 10:04 PM

"...Perhaps some new facts may yet emerge if Dick Cheney succeeds in his unexpected and welcome crusade to declassify documents that he says will exonerate administration interrogation policies. Meanwhile, we do have evidence for an alternative explanation of what motivated Bybee to write his memo that August, thanks to the comprehensive Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees released last week.

The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: "A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful." As higher-ups got more "frustrated" at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, "there was more and more pressure to resort to measures" that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration's ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee's memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) "Downing Street memo," in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." A month after Bybee's memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on "Meet the Press," hyping both Saddam's W.M.D.s and the "number of contacts over the years" between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk." (NYT)

---

This was something several of us presented as a likely explanation at the time, and yet were roundly chastised for spreading skeptical doubt.

It shows clearly that there was an independent drive for the war in Iraq, wholly seperate from the national trauma of 9-11, and that the Administration was taking advantage of the shock and horror in the post-9/11 period to pursue their own devices and rationalize them.



A

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Donuel
Date: 27 Apr 09 - 11:58 AM

Lets not forget that a large number of people said NO, spoke up or resigned. A small and sad number of people blew the whistle.

I understand how people were intimidated into agreeing with torture. The urgency to not look weak or be labled an enemy enabler or ironicly enough 'anti American'.

Those who now object to even looking at this travesty are evil on two levels. On one level for supporting an evil past and on the other by seeking to hide the evil from the future.

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 16 Jun 09 - 12:09 PM

"Nearly four years ago, Harriet Miers was one of the-most pursued women on Capitol Hill. President Bush nominated the former White House Counsel for the Supreme Court. And a cadre of television cameras traced the path of the nominee as she traveled from meeting after meeting with senators.

Miers soon withdrew her nomination and Mr. Bush nominated Samuel Alito for the High Court instead.

But on Monday, Harriet Miers came and went from Capitol Hill with barely a notice.

But the stakes were nearly as high as four years ago.

FOX has learned that House Judiciary Committee staffers deposed Miers behind closed doors Monday morning in the Rayburn House Office Building. They wanted to ask her questions about the alleged politicization of the Bush Justice Department.



Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales asked Miers to consider implementing a "targeted for removal and replacement" system for some US Attorneys. It's alleged that the former administration didn't believe these officials were on the same page as the Bush White House. Democrats launched investigations into the dismissals.



The House and Senate Judiciary Committees subpoenaed Miers and other officials to testify about their role in the firings. But Miers refused to appear. The House eventually voted to hold Miers and former White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten in contempt of Congress. But despite the contempt citation, both Miers and Bolten still refused to testify, sparking a constitutional standoff between two, co-equal branches of government.

The House then sued the Bush Administration in an effort to force Miers and Bolten to appear.
In March, Miers and former Bush adviser Karl Rove agreed to testify under oath.

Miers testified today behind closed doors. It remains unclear when Bolten could be deposed. But a senior House Democrat familiar with the inquiry described Bolten as "a tasty little morsel." The senior lawmaker indicated to FOX that Rove "is really the big catch." But there is still no agreement for Rove to appear."

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 16 Jun 09 - 03:25 PM

"Cheney tied to cash theft and possible murder in Iraq
By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer


Jun 16, 2009, 00:22

(WMR) -- According to an informed source, Dick Cheney, while vice president, amassed a fortune in cash stolen by U.S. occupation forces in Iraq from Saddam Hussein and some of his leading officials and advisers.

Sources report to WMR that U.S. troops confiscated "billions" in currency found stored in aluminum containers in various secret caches in Baghdad and elsewhere. Our sources report that the seized cash was transferred to accounts run by Cheney and the money is now being partly used to fund Cheney's growing political opposition movement to the Obama administration, including secretive payments to a "stay behind" group of Cheney loyalists who burrowed into senior civil service positions from political appointee jobs during the Bush administration. Cheney's loyalists are now in key positions to stymie Obama's programs and policies within a variety of cabinet departments and federal agencies.

The recent intelligence about Iraqi cash ending up in the coffers of American officials is not the first time WMR has reported on the theft of Iraqi cash by U.S. forces.

On November 14, 2005, WMR reported: "In one of the worst intelligence fiascoes carried out by the neocon administration of Iraq under Paul "Jerry' Bremer, Saddam Hussein's chief money mover and financial adviser was beaten to death by US interrogators in Tikrit after the U.S. invasion . . . As Saddam's chief financial adviser and money mover, Abu Seger [Sa'ad Hassan Ali], a man who was fluent in American-style English, knew where all the "financial skeletons" were buried -- details of Halliburton's involvement with the UN's Oil-for-Food program, the purchase by Iraq of VX nerve gas and other WMD components from US and British sources in the 1980s, and various counter-intelligence operations run by Saddam against the United States and Britain. Abu Seger was also one of Saddam's trusted counter-intelligence agents . . . After Samara was occupied by US forces, it was discovered that Abu Seger lived in a home on the Tigris River just 200 yards from the main U.S. military position in the city. It did not take long for U.S. troops to break down Seger's door and haul him off to a detention center. Seger's wife Sada, an English teacher, and U.S. military intelligence officers were witnesses to what soon transpired. U.S. forces discovered $30 million in plastic garbage bags in an armoire in Seger's bedroom. Contained in the bags was $14 million in US currency, $28 million in convertible Iraqi dinars, and $12 million in euros. Although the money was counted, signed for by two U.S. military witnesses, and transported to U.S. military headquarters in Samara, it was never seen again. A knowledgeable source present at the time revealed that the $30 million was stolen by U.S. authorities in Iraq."

Amid the other scandals surrounding Cheney, including his countenance of torture, the theft of cash and his possible involvement in the murder of Abu Seger may be added to the former vice president's rap sheet of crimes perpetrated in Iraq and in the United States.

Cheney recently built a multi-million dollar home in McLean, Virginia, a stone's throw from the CIA headquarters. He also owns luxury houses in Jackson, Wyoming, and St. Michael's, Maryland.

Corporate U.S. news media drastically downplayed the amount of cash stolen from Iraq by U.S. forces and that the maximum amount of cash discovered in "cottages" was around $760 million, when, in fact, it was much higher. A handful of U.S. troops were charged with stealing some bundles of $100 bills. According to the May 28, 2004, Los Angeles Times some of the troops who admitted to stealing Iraqi cash tried to tell Army Criminal Investigative Division (CID) investigators that "higher-ups" stole much more, but their information was ignored."

---

( This article, about which I am highly skeptical, is from this site.)

A

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 16 Jun 09 - 04:13 PM

House Judiciary Committee staffers deposed Miers behind closed doors

Pedantic point: Surely in this legal context the word "deposed" is equivalent to "testify", and refers to the person answering questions, not to the people asking them.

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: GUEST,TonyA
Date: 16 Jun 09 - 05:10 PM

from yesterday's Los Angeles Times:

Opinion
Torture, the painful truth
It may be a blow to our self-image, but torture has been part of the American way for decades.
By Ben Ehrenreich
June 15, 2009

Perhaps we protest too much. Torture, after all, is a venerable American tradition. If not quite as homespun as apple pie or lynching, it is at least as old as our imperial aspirations. We were waterboarding captives in one of our earliest wars of occupation, the Philippine-American War, which cost as many as 1 million civilian lives. In 1902, Teddy Roosevelt himself wrote with laconic praise of "the old Filipino method."

Other techniques, crude or sophisticated, have filled the war bag since. CIA interrogation manuals from the 1960s, which lay out the basic stress-position and sleep- and sensory-deprivation techniques later applied at Bagram and Guantanamo, have been public since 1997. Despite our protestations, we have little to be surprised about. The Bush administration's great act of hubris was not to allow torture -- that was nothing new -- but to attempt to shelter it within the law. Now, when President Obama vows that "the United States does not torture" and spars with the former vice president over details, he crosses his fingers behind his back and saves himself a loophole. Via "extraordinary rendition" -- a Clinton administration innovation -- our government is still free to outsource torture and claim it doesn't know. The Obama administration has been relying increasingly on foreign intelligence services to detain and interrogate our suspects for us. Our hands, in a way, are clean.

Yet as more classified documents dribble into the headlines, we hold tight to our outrage. The scandal has been slowly breaking for five full years (I wrote about the abuse of detainees in these pages in April 2004), but still we claim not to recognize ourselves. Despite hundreds of front-page stories, we pretend we didn't know, that it was all somehow kept secret from us. " 'Secret,' " author Mark Danner has observed in the New York Review of Books, "has become an oddly complex word." It refers not to things we don't know but to things we won't admit to seeing. This blindness serves a function. By declaring torture anomalous, by pushing it once again to the margins of legality, we can preserve a vision of U.S. military power -- and of American empire -- that is essentially benevolent.

That vision -- of our nation's messianic role, its unique destiny to shower the world with freedom and democracy -- has for more than a century been at the root of our self-image. Even when we know better, we are loath to let it go, even when we understand that those showers often take the form of 500-pound bombs and that self-determination is not something that can be bestowed at gunpoint. Maintaining military and economic hegemony over the planet remains an inherently bloody affair. Seen from the other side, empire is a synonym for subjugation, and hence for violence on a massive scale.

You don't have to be Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to find our self-regard wanting. All that's required is minimal attention to the fates suffered by the citizens of the nations to which we are currently delivering democracy. Take the residents of the Bala Baluk district of Afghanistan's western Farah province, where, on the evening of May 6, U.S. airstrikes killed either 147 or 20 to 30 civilians, depending whether you prefer to believe, respectively, the people bombed or the ones who bombed them. Survivors described extended families wiped out, a nightmare landscape littered with human limbs. Being waterboarded 183 times suddenly doesn't sound so bad.

That bombing was hardly extraordinary. You may remember the 37 civilians killed outside Kandahar last Nov. 4, the 90 killed near Herat on Aug. 22, the 47 killed in Nangarhar province on July 6 or the 15 killed in Nuristan two days earlier. If not, don't blame yourself. Unless the body count approaches 100, these kinds of deaths barely merit a word on CNN's crawl.

And as our war spreads into Pakistan, such incidents are on the rise. Missiles launched from unmanned drones have killed 700 civilians in Pakistan since 2006 and, we are assured, 14 Al Qaeda leaders. (Obama has been drastically increasing the number of drone strikes, which Leon Panetta, his CIA director, has called "the only game in town.") Meanwhile, back in Iraq, one of the more moderate estimates of the civilian death toll hovers near 100,000. Doesn't it seem odd that it's only torture that appalls us?

As the deaths mount, we will continue to beat our breasts about the treatment of detainees. The outcry is not unjustified. My point is not to relativize torture: We should not torture anyone. But we do, and have done so, both directly and with the help of client states, for many years. Just as in war after war, the alleged costs of our well-being have been borne by people we will never see, most of them noncombatants.

This is the price of global sovereignty, of being, in Colin Powell's words, "the biggest bully on the block." President Bush and Dick Cheney knew this, and they were unapologetic. Obama knows it too, but he has worked hard to let us believe otherwise, to patch up the tattered fantasy that we are the country we imagine ourselves to be.

Our outrage over torture, like the president's rhetoric, lets us maintain the belief that we had innocence to lose. It allows us to deny the everyday violence of empire and to forget the many thousands of lives that we continue to sacrifice for something that we persist in calling freedom. I don't mean that we should be less outraged, but more, and more broadly. The rest of the world cannot afford our good conscience.

Ben Ehrenreich is the author of the novel "The Suitors" and a fellow of the Horizon Institute.
Copyright 2009 Los Angeles Times

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: DougR
Date: 17 Jun 09 - 01:30 AM

Amos: Online Journal? I'm not familiar with that publication Amos. "Informed sources." Who are they Amos?

Crap like this just takes up space on the Mudcat.

DougR

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Peace
Date: 17 Jun 09 - 01:36 AM

Rough day, Doug?

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Little Hawk
Date: 17 Jun 09 - 02:12 AM

TonyA has it right. This is what great empires do. They invade, occupy, exploit, and kill. They kill not a few people, but many, many people. They torture and devastate. They do it so that those running the great empire, meaning the richest few at the top of that empire, can profit. They tell their ordinary citizens that they are doing it for the most laudable of reasons...to spread democracy, to spread education, to improve the lives of other people...and their citizens mostly believe it. But that's not what great empires are after. They're after resources, trade areas, money, and strategic advantage.

Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome, Spain, Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, Japan, the USA.

They all invaded, occupy, and kill when they have the power to do so. They all torture. They always have. Their own people are usually fooled by the excuses they make for their imperial measures. Others are not so easily fooled.

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: 3refs
Date: 17 Jun 09 - 02:27 AM

We all know the golden rule-"He who has the most gold rules!"

When is enough......enough? Or is there such a thing?

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 20 Jun 09 - 01:41 PM

An interesting argumeent for compensation of those whose lives were brutally interrupted, not by terrorism, but by our unthinking and over-zealous reactions to it.


A

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Art Thieme
Date: 20 Jun 09 - 04:38 PM

And bush goes on more speaking tours for big bucks...

Not surprising. Even a dead whale on a flatcar draws crowds.---Art

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 23 Jun 09 - 09:36 AM

In 2002, Justice Department lawyer John Yoo wrote a memo recommending that Jose Padilla, arrested in Chicago in the wake of 9/11 and held on suspicion of plotting a dirty-bomb attack, be classified as an enemy combatant. Yoo also wrote memos arguing that American law does not prevent the president from ordering such enemy combatants tortured. This January, after enduring years of abuse in prison, Padilla sued Yoo for violating his constitutional rights.

And a week ago, Judge Jeffrey White ruled that Padilla's allegations were plausible enough to justify denying Yoo's motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

White was appointed by George W. Bush the year Yoo was writing his memos. White's decision is the first of its kind: Until now, although other lawsuits have been brought, no government official has faced personal liability for his role in the torture or deaths of detainees. But it probably won't be the last. These cases are just beginning to address the fraught questions of justice that have emerged in the aftermath of the Bush era‹what atrocities were committed in the name of national security, who bears responsibility, and how should they be punished? Although neither the Obama administration nor most members of Congress want to deal with these questions directly, they're even more opposed to letting judges (and juries) take a crack at them. Padilla v. Yoo is an example of a surprising development: a conservative judge putting pressure on the Democrats in Washington to create some system of accountability for the Bush administration. It could help spawn more such rulings.(...)   From Slate magazine

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 30 Jun 09 - 04:14 PM

A WaPo columnist writes in his last column for the Post:

I started my column in January 2004, and one dominant theme quickly emerged: That George W. Bush was truly the proverbial emperor with no clothes. In the days and weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, the nation, including the media, vested him with abilities he didn't have and credibility he didn't deserve. As it happens, it was on the day of my very first column that we also got the first insider look at the Bush White House, via Ron Suskind's book, The Price of Loyalty. In it, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill described a disengaged president "like a blind man in a room full of deaf people", encircled by "a Praetorian guard," intently looking for a way to overthrow Saddam Hussein long before 9/11. The ensuing five years and 1,088 columns really just fleshed out that portrait, describing a president who was oblivious, embubbled and untrustworthy.

When I look back on the Bush years, I think of the lies. There were so many. Lies about the war and lies to cover up the lies about the war. Lies about torture and surveillance. Lies about Valerie Plame. Vice President Dick Cheney's lies, criminally prosecutable but for his chief of staff Scooter Libby's lies. I also think about the extraordinary and fundamentally cancerous expansion of executive power that led to violations of our laws and our principles.

And while this wasn't as readily apparent until President Obama took office, it's now very clear that the Bush years were all about kicking the can down the road – either ignoring problems or, even worse, creating them and not solving them. This was true of a huge range of issues including the economy, energy, health care, global warming – and of course Iraq and Afghanistan.

How did the media cover it all? Not well. Reading pretty much everything that was written about Bush on a daily basis, as I did, one could certainly see the major themes emerging. But by and large, mainstream-media journalism missed the real Bush story for way too long. The handful of people who did exceptional investigative reporting during this era really deserve our gratitude: People such as Ron Suskind, Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer, Murray Waas, Michael Massing, Mark Danner, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau (better late than never), Dana Priest, Walter Pincus, Charlie Savage and Philippe Sands; there was also some fine investigative blogging over at Talking Points Memo and by Marcy Wheeler. Notably not on this list: The likes of Bob Woodward and Tim Russert. Hopefully, the next time the nation faces a grave national security crisis, we will listen to the people who were right, not the people who were wrong, and heed those who reported the truth, not those who served as stenographers to liars.

It's also worth keeping in mind that there is so very much about the Bush era that we still don't know.

Now, a little over five months after Bush left office, Barack Obama's presidency is shaping up to be in large part about coming to terms with the Bush era, and fixing all the things that were broken. In most cases, Obama is approaching this task enthusiastically – although in some cases, he is doing so only under great pressure, and in a few cases, not at all . I think part of Obama's abiding popularity with the public stems from what a contrast he is from his predecessor -- and in particular his willingness to take on problems. But he certainly has a lot of balls in the air at one time. And I predict that his growing penchant for secrecy – especially but not only when it comes to the Bush legacy of torture and lawbreaking – will end up serving him poorly, unless he renounces it soon.

Obama is nowhere in Bush's league when it comes to issues of credibility, but his every action nevertheless needs to be carefully scrutinized by the media, and he must be held accountable. We should be holding him to the highest standards – and there are plenty of places where we should be pushing back. Just for starters, there are a lot of hugely important but unanswered questions about his Afghanistan policy, his financial rescue plans, and his turnaround on transparency.

So now I'm off. I wish The Washington Post well. I'm proud to have been associated with it for 12 years (I was a producer and editor at the Web site before starting the column.) I remain a big believer in the "traditional media," especially when it sticks to traditional journalistic values. The Post was, is and will always be a great newspaper, and I have confidence that it will rise to the challenges ahead. (Dan Froom)

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 02 Jul 09 - 10:08 AM

"In the Bush years, federal regulators not only failed to protect borrowers, they aggressively prevented the states from doing it. New York's attorney general sued, challenging the regulators' interference. This week, the Supreme Court ruled that federal regulators cannot prevent the states from enforcing consumer protection and fair lending laws against national banks.

As the current mortgage crisis was building, banks engaged in a wide array of bad practices. They lent to borrowers who could not afford to pay off the loans. They misrepresented loan terms, and they employed deceptive "teaser" rates to mislead their customers.

State attorneys general opened investigations and filed lawsuits. In 2005, then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer of New York asked several national banks about lending practices to determine whether blacks and Hispanics had been charged higher interest rates than whites — and whether the banks had violated fair lending laws.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, part of the Treasury Department, sued to block Mr. Spitzer. It claimed that a regulation it issued under the National Bank Act barred the states from enforcing state fair-lending laws. Two lower courts agreed.

The Supreme Court sided with the states by a vote of 5 to 4. In an opinion by Antonin Scalia — one of the most conservative justices, who voted with the court's four liberals — the court ruled that the comptroller had exceeded its authority under the National Bank Act.

The bank act, which dates to 1864, prohibits state officials from having "visitorial" powers over national banks. "Visitorial" powers, Justice Scalia explained, have to do with directly overseeing corporate affairs. Even though the states cannot supervise banks, he said, they do have the right to enforce their own laws.

The ruling sends a clear message that state officials have the power to rein in banks that behave badly. It was especially timely, since the banking and mortgage industries are trying to kill a proposal by the Obama administration to create a new agency to regulate consumer finance — a job now scattered around the government.

Congress should support that proposal and keep in mind the court ruling by making it clear that any rules the new agency sets are a minimum, and that states may impose more stringent standards." NYT Editorial

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 02 Jul 09 - 11:13 AM

The real reason the invasion was a mistake demonstrates the liability of having unintelligent people with poor intell resources, incapable of understanding the situation on the ground, and arrogant int heir own ignorance, empowered with military decision making.


A

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 05 Jul 09 - 09:02 PM

words and music by John McCutcheon

The election of George W. Bush made us realize that Dan Quayle was a man way ahead of his time. Based entirely on W's speeches.

I was born in West Texas, pretty near California
Far away from Dad's home in DC
When I'm talkin' 'bout myself and
They're talking 'bout myself
All of us are talkin' about me
Now some may retort to personal attacks
Take the high horse then claim the low road
But I'm not revengeful person
I'll simply respond with this ode

When I delivered the State of the Budget Address
I offered a question or two
How can a man still put food on his family
Will the tollbooth to the middleclass become more few?
It's time to make the pie higher
This idea's sure to resignate
This is no time to be subliminable
It's a time to unificate

If there's more trade, there's more commerce
And we'll bring this solution to an end
Even if your business is Hispanically owned
If you speak French or Mexican
We're working for a hopefuller country
No longer vulcanized
Where humans and fish can coexist
And each act civilized

I think we agree, the past is over
Still we're held hostile everywhere
Today we're not so sure who "they" are
But still, we know that they're there
No longer inoculated from what is coming
With a foreign-handed foreign policy
Keep good relations w/ Kosovoans and Grecians
And resist emotionality

We know reading is the basics of learning
And learning…well…I forget the rest
But teach a child to read and he or her
Will sure pass a literacy test
So I ask you, "Is our children learning?"
Will we tolerate failed subsidation
Or will this be where wings finally take dream
Not a cufflink of federalization

So if you're tired of the politics of polls and of principles
It's time that you join this campaign
We're looking for women who while serving our country
Never the house will they stain
Where our priorities is our faith
Where a troop can house his family
We'll find power to power the power of the power plants
No, you'd best not misunderestimates me

Sung:
With every word and every breath
Our language dies a slow, sad death
Hail to the Chief, let's give him hail
Part Yogi Berra
Part Dan Quayle

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 08 Jul 09 - 11:21 PM

WASHINGTON (NYT)— "The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta, has told the House Intelligence Committee in closed-door testimony that the C.I.A. concealed "significant actions" from Congress from 2001 until late last month, seven Democratic committee members said.

In a June 26 letter to Mr. Panetta discussing his testimony, Democrats said that the agency had "misled members" of Congress for eight years about the classified matters, which the letter did not disclose. "This is similar to other deceptions of which we are aware from other recent periods," said the letter, made public late Wednesday by Representative Rush D. Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, one of the signers.

In an interview, Mr. Holt declined to reveal the nature of the C.I.A.'s alleged deceptions,. But he said, "We wouldn't be doing this over a trivial matter."

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Silvestre Reyes, Democrat of Texas, referred to Mr. Panetta's disclosure in a letter to the committee's ranking Republican, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, Congressional Quarterly reported on Wednesday. Mr. Reyes wrote that the committee "has been misled, has not been provided full and complete notifications, and (in at least one occasion) was affirmatively lied to."

In a related development, President Obama threatened to veto the pending Intelligence Authorization Bill if it included a provision that would allow information about covert actions to be given to the entire House and Senate Intelligence Committees, rather than the so-called Gang of Eight — the Democratic and Republican leaders of both houses of Congress and the two Intelligence Committees.

A White House statement released on Wednesday said the proposed expansion of briefings would undermine "a long tradition spanning decades of comity between the branches regarding intelligence matters." Democrats have complained that under President George W. Bush, entire programs were hidden from most committee members for years."

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Wolfgang
Date: 09 Jul 09 - 07:42 AM

The expression "fellow traveler" is never used for people who are members of a (in most contexts, communist) party, only for those who sympathize with its aims.

Wolfgang

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 09 Jul 09 - 10:16 AM

IS your comment in relation to something in particular, Wolfgang? Disjointed remarks are not usually your style... :>)


A

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 09 Jul 09 - 07:37 PM

A lawsuit weighing whether a sitting U.S. president may create a spying program to eavesdrop on Americans' electronic communications without warrants or congressional authorization took another turn Thursday as a federal judge was asked to answer that question with a "no."

The nearly 5-year-old case, despite its tortured procedural history, is the furthest along in challenging the Bush administration's warrantless, electronic surveillance program adopted in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks.

The case was brought by two former American lawyers for a now-defunct Saudi charity. They allege some of their 2004 telephone conversations to Saudi Arabia were siphoned to the National Security Agency without warrants. The allegations were based on classified documents the government accidentally mailed to the former Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation lawyers.

After a mountain of paperwork, a trip to the appellate courts and countless hearings, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled last month the lawyers must make their case without the documents, which both the Bush and Obama administrations claimed were a state secret. So on Thursday, counsel for those lawyers submitted a 41-page brief to Judge Walker, citing a bevy of circumstantial evidence, that they claim shows the two charity lawyers were unlawfully spied upon.

The evidence presented (.pdf) includes speeches by government officials discussing an investigation that concluded with the listing of al-Haramain as a terror organization to the FBI's public disclosure that it monitored Al-Haramain officials.

Jon Eisenberg, an attorney for the al-Haramain lawyers – Wendell Belew and Asim Gafoor, urged Walker to order the government to disclose whether the alleged surveillance "was authorized by a warrant."

Eisenberg said the point of the lawsuit was to prevent future presidents from adopting a so-called Terror Surveillance Program, which was President George W. Bush's once-secret warrantless wiretapping program disclosed in 2005 by The New York Times. Bush said his war powers granted him the power to create the TSP program.

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Stringsinger
Date: 10 Jul 09 - 02:13 PM

Bush has the attributes of a classic sociopath. There are those who relate to that.

Bush was a puppet for big business lobbyists such crooks as Hank Paulson who make Bernie Madoff pale by comparison.

Sociopaths can be personally charming on the outside as they steer their ship.

The problem is the system where Wall Street banking lobbyists control the government while complaining about it being too strong.

My fear is that Obama is turning into Bush on some issues such as wiretaps, Iraq,
Af-Pak and AIPAC.

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 10 Jul 09 - 08:11 PM

"Report: Bush surveillance program was massive
By PAMELA HESS – 25 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday, questioning the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they're still too secret to reveal.
The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to "unprecedented collection activities" by U.S. intelligence agencies under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Just what those activities involved remains classified, but the IGs pointedly say that any continued use of the secret programs must be "carefully monitored."
The report says too few relevant officials knew of the size and depth of the program, let alone signed off on it. They particularly criticize John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general who wrote legal memos undergirding the policy. His boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, was not aware until March 2004 of the exact nature of the intelligence operations beyond wiretapping that he had been approving for the previous two and a half years, the report says.
Most of the intelligence leads generated under what was known as the "President's Surveillance Program" did not have any connection to terrorism, the report said. But FBI agents told the authors that the "mere possibility of the leads producing useful information made investigating the leads worthwhile."
The inspectors general interviewed more than 200 people inside and outside the government, but five former Bush administration officials refused to be questioned. They were Ashcroft, Yoo, former CIA Director George Tenet, former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and David Addington, an aide to former Vice President Dick Cheney." ...

WaPo

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 11 Jul 09 - 10:31 PM

Reporting from Washington (LA Times) -- The CIA kept a highly classified counter-terrorism program secret from Congress for eight years at the direction of former Vice President Dick Cheney, according to sources familiar with an account that agency Director Leon E. Panetta provided recently to House and Senate committees.

The sources declined to provide any details on the nature of the program, but said that the agency has opened an internal inquiry in recent days into the history of the program and the decisions made by a series of senior officials to withhold information about it from Congress.

Cheney's involvement suggests that the program was considered important enough by the Bush administration that it should be monitored at the highest levels of government, and that the White House was reluctant to risk disclosure of its details to lawmakers.

Panetta killed the program on June 23 after learning of it for the first time, four months after he had become director of the CIA. He then called special sessions with both the House and Senate intelligence committees.

The CIA's relationship with Congress has become a source of controversy in Washington in recent months, after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) accused the agency of lying to members about its use of waterboarding and other interrogation measures in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The secret counter-terrorism program was first put in place shortly after those attacks, but it was never fully operational, sources said. Current and former intelligence and congressional officials have offered different viewpoints on the program's significance.

A senior congressional aide said the magnitude of the program and the decision to keep it secret should not be downplayed. "Panetta found out about this for the first time and within 24 hours was in the office telling us," the aide said. "If this wasn't a big deal, why would the director of the CIA come sprinting up to the Hill like that?"

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 12 Jul 09 - 09:16 AM

Attorney General Eric Holder is leaning toward launching a probe into the Bush administration's torture policies, it was reported Saturday.

Sources told Newsweek that Holder, after months of careful consideration, appears likely to appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate whether top Bush lawyers twisted the law in authorizing torture techniques.

The official decision could come in a matter of weeks. If Holder opts to investigate, it will almost certainly increase tensions in a White House that has insisted it wants to focus on the future.

"I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the President's agenda," Holder told Newsweek. "But that can't be a part of my decision."
The development comes three months after it was revealed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003. After Holder read through the reports, he reportedly told a colleague it "turned my stomach."

Daily News

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 12 Jul 09 - 10:25 PM

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on Sunday that the Bush administration may have broken the law if the Central Intelligence Agency concealed a covert spy program from Congress.

Related
Cheney Is Linked to Concealment of C.I.A. Project (July 12, 2009)
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More Politics News
The New York Times reported on Sunday that the agency's current director, Leon E. Panetta, had told the Senate and House intelligence committees that the C.I.A. withheld the information about a secret counterterrorism program on direct orders from then Vice President Dick Cheney.

The Times said that according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter, Panetta ended the program when he first learned of its existence from subordinates on June 23 and briefed the two intelligence committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day.

Ms. Feinstein, a Democrat of California, said on "Fox News Sunday" that Mr. Panetta had told senators last month about Mr. Cheney ordering that the program not be disclosed to Congress.

If Congress were kept in the dark, she said on Fox News Sunday, "that's something that should never, ever happen again."

Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, a Democrat, said that "absolutely" warranted an investigation.

"The executive branch cannot create programs like this one and keep Congress in the dark," he said on ABC's "This Week." "To give the president unbridled authority goes way beyond the United States Constitution."

But Senator John S. McCain said he did not know enough about Mr. Cheney's involvement to say whether laws had been broken.

"The vice president, I think, should obviously be heard from if the accusations are leveled in his direction," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "I think it's, frankly, too early for me to reach any conclusion."

(NYT)

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 17 Jul 09 - 11:17 AM

Illegal, and Pointless

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Published: July 16, 2009

We've known for years that the Bush administration ignored and broke the law repeatedly in the name of national security. It is now clear that many of those programs could have been conducted just as easily within the law — perhaps more effectively and certainly with far less damage to the justice system and to Americans' faith in their government.
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Times Topics: Wiretapping and Other Eavesdropping Devices and Methods
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That is the inescapable conclusion from a devastating report by the inspectors general of the intelligence and law-enforcement community on President George W. Bush's warrantless wiretapping program. The report shows that the longstanding requirement that the government obtain a warrant was not hindering efforts to gather intelligence on terrorists after the 9/11 attacks. In fact, the argument that the law was an impediment was concocted by White House and Justice Department lawyers after Mr. Bush authorized spying on Americans' international communications.

We know less, so far, about the Bush administration's plan to send covert paramilitary teams to assassinate Al Qaeda leaders. But what is overwhelmingly clear is that there was no legal or rational justification for Vice President Dick Cheney's order to conceal the program from Congress. The plan was never put into effect, apparently because it was unworkable. But it's hard to imagine Congress balking at killing terrorists.

So why break the law, again and again? Two things seem disturbingly clear. First, President Bush and his top aides panicked after the Sept. 11 attacks. And second, Mr. Cheney and his ideologues, who had long chafed at any legal constraints on executive power, preyed on that panic to advance their agenda.

According to the inspectors general, the legal memo justifying warrantless wiretapping was written by John Yoo, then the deputy head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and author of other memos that twisted the law to justify torture.

In this case, the report said, he misrepresented both the law and the details of the wiretapping operation to make it seem as if the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was outdated and that Mr. Bush could ignore it. And, according to the report, Mr. Yoo bypassed his bosses at the Justice Department and delivered his reports directly to, you guessed it, Mr. Cheney's office.

For four years, until The Times revealed the warrantless wiretapping, Mr. Bush reauthorized the eavesdropping every 45 days based on memos from the intelligence community and Justice Department. The report said that when the "scary memos," as they came to be called, were not sufficiently scary, lawyers under the direction of Alberto Gonzales, White House counsel and later attorney general, revised them or ordered up additional "threat information." Each ended with a White House-written paragraph asserting that communications were intercepted from terrorists who "possessed the capability and intention" to attack this country.

After Mr. Yoo and his boss, Jay Bybee, left the Justice Department, their replacements concluded that the wiretapping program was illegal. The White House did eventually change parts of the program and then demanded that Congress legalize it, but only after the White House tried to force the Justice Department to ignore its own conclusions and after Robert Mueller, the director of the F.B.I., threatened to resign.

Mr. Cheney has tried to head off a reckoning by claiming that the warrantless wiretapping saved thousands of lives. The report said the C.I.A. could point to little direct benefit. The F.B.I. said most of the leads it produced were false. Others never led to an arrest.

This is not an isolated case. Once the Bush team got into the habit of breaking the law, it became their operating procedure that any means are justified: ordering the nation's intelligence agents to torture prisoners; sending innocents to be tortured in foreign countries; creating secret prisons where detainees were held illegally without charge.

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 17 Jul 09 - 12:08 PM

A federal appeals court in Manhattan on Friday reversed a lower court ruling that had allowed the government to bar a prominent Muslim scholar from entering the United States in 2004 on grounds he had contributed to a charity that had connections to terrorism.
Court Ruling
# American Academy v. Napolitano

The scholar, Tariq Ramadan, 46, a Swiss academic, had lined up a position to be a tenured professor at the University of Notre Dame, but the Bush administration revoked his visa. The government cited evidence that from 1998 to 2002, he donated about $1,300 to a Swiss-based charity which the Treasury Department later categorized as a terrorist organization.

Professor Ramadan had said in an affidavit that he was not aware of any connections between the charity, Association de Secours Palestinien, and terrorism, and that he believed the organization was involved in legitimate humanitarian projects.

In its ruling on Friday, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held unanimously that the government was required to "confront Ramadan with the allegation against him and afford him the subsequent opportunity to demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence that he did not know, and reasonably should not have known, that the recipient of his contributions was a terrorist organization."

The record was unclear whether a consular officer who had denied the visa had done so, the panel said in its 52-page ruling, written by Judge Jon O. Newman and joined by Judges Wilfred Feinberg and Reena Raggi. The appeals court ordered the lower court to give Professor Ramadan an opportunity to demonstrate the claims in his affidavit. ...(NYT)

---

Slow and painful steps to cure the ills of Bushian madness...

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Amos
Date: 17 Jul 09 - 01:22 PM

The Interior Department is dropping controversial plans to dramatically increase logging in western Oregon's forests, some of the nation's densest carbon stores.

The move scraps a Bush-era decision to rezone 2.6 million acres of Bureau of Land Management forests, which would have tripled current logging production and opened old-growth forests to clear-cutting. The attempt prompted a lawsuit by 13 environmental groups after the rule was finalized late last year.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar yesterday called the Western Oregon Plan Revisions "legally indefensible" because BLM had ignored key Endangered Species Act consultation requirements. Also yesterday, Salazar announced that he will ask a court to annul last year's changes to the northern spotted owl's protected habitat, which enabled the timber plan to go through.

Conservation groups proclaimed the announcement a victory not only for wildlife but for the climate, as well.

"A lot more big, old-growth trees will remain standing and continue to suck up carbon," said Michael Francis, national forest director at the Wilderness Society.
(NYT)

---

(Repair, repair, repair....)

Subject: RE: BS: The Bush Years In Retrospect
From: Leadfingers
Date: 17 Jul 09 - 01:57 PM

100