Ed Felien : Jon Stewart, Meet George W. Bush

In defense of the Left,
with love to Jon Stewart

In trying to appear a moderate, Stewart criticized the right for its attacks on Obama and the left for accusing Bush of being a war criminal and comparing him to Hitler.

By Ed Felien / The Rag Blog / October 5, 2010

In a stroke of comedic genius Jon Stewart has called for a "Rally for Sanity" to "Take it down a notch" at the Washington Monument on October 30.

It's part an answer to Glen Beck’s rally to Restore Honor and part Rock the Vote to motivate his younger demographic to get out and vote on November 2. Stewart is portraying the rally and himself as an island of sanity in an insane season when Obama is seen by the Right as a Kenyan Mau-Mau anti-colonialist, socialist, Muslim hell-bent on America’s destruction.

One of the suggested signs for demonstrators at Stewart’s rally would be, "I Disagree With You, But I'm Pretty Sure You're Not Hitler."

In trying to appear a moderate, Stewart criticized the right for its attacks on Obama and the left for accusing Bush of being a war criminal and comparing him to Hitler.

Are there parallels between Hitler and Bush? Is Bush a war criminal?

There are parallels in American history, but the scope and intensity of the repression that Bush initiated and justified by 9/11 went further than any previous President in wartime.

He did not just suspend the right of habeas corpus, the right to a fair trial, and the right to confront your accusers, he kidnapped U. S. citizens and foreign nationals off the streets and locked them up in concentration camps and subjected them to torture. The difference between Bush and Hitler in this is quantitative not qualitative; that is, they both did it but Hitler did a lot more of it.

They both ruled by terror. Bush modeled his government on George Orwell's 1984: War is Peace; the war on terror was really a war OF terror; The Department of Homeland Security (with its permanent orange level of terror alert) created insecurity.

Bush spied on citizens and wiretapped their phones without any legal or ethical justification. He asserted a doctrine of preemptive war that meant he could attack anyone or any country that he felt might become a threat to U. S. vital interests. He declared that his administration was not bound by international law or treaties.

If someone in the government disagreed with him, their careers were destroyed; former Ambassador Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times that pointed out the lies in the State of the Union Address that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq, and Bush officials ended his wife's career as a CIA analyst. Dissent is the lifeblood of democracy and Bush crushed it.

The Nazi Party in Germany was a variant of the European fascist movement. Benito Mussolini was the first successful fascist leader. He led his Black Shirts in a march on Rome in 1922 that changed Italian politics. In an act of sincere flattery, Hitler imitated it by staging an unsuccessful beer hall putsch in Munich the following year.

Mussolini said, "Corporato il stati." The corporation is the state. Hitler believed capitalists should be "masters in their own house." Bush has taken fascism a step further. Mussolini and Hitler merely supported big business while they were pursuing other national objectives, but Bush allowed his family business to direct government policy. In his case, the corporation really did become the state.

The Bush family fortune for four generations has been tied to the business of war. Ever since Great Grandfather Sam Bush sat on Wilson's War Industries Board in World War I and made parts for Remington revolvers, the Bush family has benefited from war.

Sam's son Prescott wanted to make serious money when he graduated from Yale, so he and some of his buddies went to work for Brown Brothers Harriman. Peace had broken out in the 1920s, and the only hope for war profiteers was in the re-arming of Germany (in violation of the Versailles Treaty).

He became Manager of the Union Banking Corporation to trade with Nazi financier Fritz Thyssen. They sold bonds to help finance the re-arming of Germany. They bought a steamship line to ship Remington arms to Germany through a dummy corporation in Holland. He also managed a Silesian coal field that used slave labor from the neighboring Auschwitz Concentration Camp. According to Dutch intelligence sources he took direct management of some of the slave labor camps in Poland to aid Nazi armament industries.

Prescott Bush continued working for these interests for almost a year after the U. S. had declared war on Germany. It was not until October of 1942, when the U. S. seized the assets of Union Bank, the steamship line, the Seamless Steel Equipment (suppliers of steel, wire and explosives to the Nazis) and the Silesian-American Company (the coal mining company), that Prescott stopped supplying the Nazi war machine. Of course, at that point he switched sides and started supplying the Allies.

In 1929 Harriman & Company bought Dresser Industries (manufacturers of oil pipeline equipment) and Prescott Bush became a Director. He continued to run Dresser Industries from the board for the rest of his life. His son, George H. W. Bush, went to work there after graduating from Yale. Dresser was quite successful in selling oil pipeline and drilling equipment. It had a virtual worldwide monopoly. The oil drilling equipment in Iraq belonged to Dresser (through their French subsidiary) in violation of U. N. and U. S. sanctions.

Using lies and distortions, George W. Bush used the tragedy of 9/11 to justify invading Iraq. He wanted control of the oil for his family business. Dick Cheney has always been the chief thug and frontman for the Bush family. When H. W. George was President, Cheney was Secretary of Defense. When Bush lost, Cheney became CEO of Halliburton.

While CEO he bought Dresser Industries from the Bush family (the details were worked out on a hunting trip) for $8 billion. No cash changed hands and Halliburton was only worth $8 billion at the time, so the Bush family must own controlling interest in Halliburton.

When George W. Bush became President he made Cheney his vice president, and with old family friend Rumsfeld as secretary of defense, they were able to steer multi-billion-dollar no-bid contracts to Halliburton. With the U. S. and Bush in control of the Iraq government, they were able to steal 25 percent of the world's known oil resources for the family business.

When George W. Bush was President and head of the family business, we had the perfect merger of state and corporation, the final stage of fascism only dreamt of by Mussolini.

Was Bush a fascist? Was he a Nazi?

Certainly grandfather Prescott was an active and effective collaborator with the Nazis. But it wasn't just the money. Prescott and his father-in-law, George Walker (for whom George I and George II are middle-named), sponsored the Third International Congress of Eugenics on Long Island in the early 1930s, and many of the proposals about forced sterilization and elimination of the feebleminded that were discussed at the conference were later implemented by Nazi Germany.

But is it fair that the sins of the grandfather should be visited upon the children? No. Even if he carries the name(s), even if he inherits the family business and fortune, even if he inherits the political base of fascist elements that were driven from Europe at the end of World War II and became the virulent anti-Communist wing of the Republican Party, he still deserves to be judged on his own actions.

Did he repudiate his family's past connections to Nazi Germany? No.

Did he suppress civil liberties? Yes.

Did he rule by terror? Yes.

Did he embark on total war? Yes.

Did he allow his family business interests to direct government policy? Yes.

Finally, the shelling of Fallujah, the brutal murder of defenseless Iraqi civilians, has as its only parallel the Nazi atrocities at Guernica and Lidice.

Was Bush a Nazi?

We can be certain that history will judge Bush to have been corrupt, arrogant, dictatorial, and brutal. Whether the atrocities he committed place him in the same rank as Hitler is a judgment for later generations, but we would be blind not to see that he is in the same group.

He stands indicted as a petty tyrant, a small fascist who ran the biggest superpower the world had ever seen. The damage he did to the rule of law, to the public treasury, to the national character at home and the horror and suffering he inflicted on innocent people abroad are crimes against humanity. To remain silent is to be an accomplice.

Jon Stewart has a powerful and eloquent voice and a genius for a comedic irony. He could benefit from reading history a little more closely.

[Ed Felien is publisher and editor of Southside Pride, a South Minneapolis monthly.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

The 'Nation-Building' Mirage : A Trillion Dollars and Counting

U.S. Marine in Afghanistan. Photo by Goran Tomasevic / Reuters.
From anti-terrorism to 'nation building':
Paying dearly for Bush's wars

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / May 28, 2010

In October of 2001, President Bush invaded Afghanistan. About a year and a half later (March 2003), he did the same in Iraq. Now it is nearly nine years later, and the occupation of both countries continues. Sadly, nothing has been accomplished.

Both wars were entered into on the promise that they would provide more security for America, but they have not done that. The same terrorist dangers that existed in 2001, continue to exist today. In fact, it may be worse because with each killing of innocent civilians we create more enemies.

Both wars quickly morphed from an attack on terrorists to an attempt at nation-building. We should have learned from Vietnam that democracy cannot be imposed by military power (especially when it involves installing and protecting corrupt regimes), but that evidently is a lesson we still have not learned. Our leaders still seem to think that we can force other countries not only to be like us, but also to be our friends.

In the 2008 election, the American people voted for change, and one of the changes they wanted was to extract America from these unnecessary and failed nation-building attempts. During the campaign, President Obama promised to end these wars and bring our troops home (which is what a majority of the population wants to see). But upon taking the oath of office, he seems to have forgotten his promises. All he has done is continue the tragically-failed Bush/Cheney policies in both countries.

According to the president, at the minimum we must continue both wars for at least another year and a half (until the end of 2011). And both wars could go much longer than that unless certain amorphous goals are met. In other words, we could be looking at a perpetual war presence in both countries, and that seems to be OK with both of our political parties.

On May 30th (just a few days away), the United States will have wasted over a trillion dollars on these two wars. While the Republicans (and far too many Democrats) whine over not having the money to help our own citizens in this terrible economy, there seems to be no end to the spending of money to continue the nation-building and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Congress is currently considering another emergency Defense Appropriation Bill to spend tens of billions more on these two unending wars. Will this new expenditure of tens of billions of dollars (which will be followed by spending even more billions) actually accomplish anything? Probably not, especially since I'm not at all sure the government (or anyone else) knows what we are trying to accomplish or whether these shifting goals are possible to accomplish.

Senator Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) tried to inject some sanity into this continuing tragicomedy. He offered an amendment to the new war appropriations bill which would have required President Obama to provide a flexible timetable for the withdrawal of troops -- a more than reasonable request.

Feingold said,

In light of our deficit and domestic needs and in light of rising casualty rates in Afghanistan and in light of the growing al-Queda threat around the world, an expensive troop-intensive nation-building campaign just doesn't add up for me... Frankly I am disappointed that we are about to pass a bill providing tens of billions of dollars to keep this war going with so little public debate about whether this approach makes any sense.

But the Feingold amendment failed on an 18 to 80 vote. The majority of both Republicans and Democrats seem happy to continue throwing huge amounts of money down the bottomless well of unending war, without knowing what we are trying to accomplish or whether anything at all can even be accomplished. And they don't seem to care how much longer they will have to do this.

One of the saddest things is that while Bush was president there was an active anti-war element in this country, but since the election of President Obama the anti-war element has virtually disappeared (even though he is continuing the same failed policy in both countries). Americans have turned their attention from the wars to the economy, the recession, and the need for millions of new jobs. They don't seem to realize that if it were not for these wars, billions of dollars would be available to tackle these economic problems.

Even if these two wars were necessary and morally justifiable (which they are not), we simply cannot afford them any longer -- not in terms of the enormous amounts of money, the lost American lives, or the slaughter of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is long past the time when these tragic wars should have been stopped.

We must re-ignite the anti-war fervor and get these two wars stopped. It is not just morally right -- it's the only course of action that makes sense.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Fearful Symmetry : A Tale of Two Presidents

Job losses under two presidents -- December, 2007-January, 2010. Chart from Bureau of Labor Statistics / Speaker's Office / TPM Documents.
The red increase in job loss is the climax of Republican White House control. The blue decrease in job loss is Obama and the Democrats. Sort of like when Superman flies around the world counter-clockwise to undo Lex Luthor's fiendish destruction.

-- Juan Cole / Informed Comment

Thanks to Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Obama's Change and the Bush Mess : Have We Forgotten to Remember?

Photo montage by Larry Ray / The Rag Blog.
Remembering why we voted for change:
The Bush mess and the blame game

Eight years of Bush, Cheney, and the cynical political puppetry of Karl Rove, succeeded in driving a deep polarizing wedge into the heart of this country.

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / February 8, 2010

The montage of photos above is not a cheap humorous poke at George W. Bush. It is, instead, a montage of reminders of who ran this country into the ground for eight years as our president leaving a Gordian mess for someone else to deal with.

How could we so quickly forget those almost daily blunders, gaffes, petulance, and national disgraces we endured? George W. Bush has all but disappeared inside his tony gated community in Dallas. The mess he is responsible for has not disappeared and blame for it should not be craftily assigned to the new occupant of the White House.

It seems to be human nature for us to want to forget times that were embarrassing, damaging, and disappointing. And after the Bush legacy turned out to be a jaundiced irresponsible house of cards, it seems easier for many to develop near hysterical rage at the mess itself rather than at those responsible for it.

Bush's historic damage could be a national rallying point, like the ruins of the twin towers, pulling us together to work for national change with patience, sacrifice, and understanding. Instead the damage itself has turned into a cheap political blame game. A kick-me sign for the angry and deluded.

Eight years of Bush, Cheney, and the cynical political puppetry of Karl Rove, succeeded in driving a deep polarizing wedge into the heart of this country. Bush projected to the entire world an "our way or the highway" tough guy attitude. Great sound bites, but his "way" made a mockery of truth, reason, and the law.

Sadly, that "join the posse and let's go shoot up the bad guys" invitation was simple and appealing to lots of Americans. And it still is to a certain group. Suddenly it seemed, we were off to round up and hang Saddam Hussein before you could say "there ain't no weapons of mass destruction."

Unfortunately, the Bush folks with their "shock and awe" invasion had not gotten around to figuring out how to pay for that war. They later decided the U.S. would use its big credit card, expecting the Chinese and other foreign buyers to buy our debt to pay for it. Mission accomplished... again.

At the end of the eight year commute from Crawford, Texas, to Washington D.C., huge piles of lifeless post-Bush toxic fat cat Wall Street gambling debt began to smell and grow. Leaders of the party that happily allowed it to happen began to deny they caused the problem -- that somehow it was all the new administration's fault for recklessly spending so much money and trying to "do too much."

The funereal visage of Republican minority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell, sternly casting the blame on the new president is pure Republican looking glass politics. Obama and and his political HAZMAT team hit the ground his first day in office trying to deal with a sea of red ink and the fiscal flotsam swirling around in it. A grave potential for another great depression loomed. Welcome to the Oval Office.

But those who sanctioned their party's role in letting Wall Street bring our nation to the brink of a major depression immediately began loudly blaming the new leadership for all the problems. That kind of old, cheap political role-reversal tactic should make concerned Americans very angry. But chaos, loss of income, and an almost adolescent expectation of some sort of instant fix makes many reassign blame somewhere, anywhere.

A large majority was eager to welcome the new "Change We Can Believe In." But before the outgoing tenants could leave town, eight years of hidden party trash and dirty Wall Street linen that had been stuffed out of sight burst the seams of the White House for all to see. It was important to the outgoing leadership that the new tenant somehow be blamed for the irresponsible, out of control problems.

Kentucky Senator McConnell and the unified "No" vote chorus he conducts began immediately to try to fix the new horse race. Using latent and not so latent racism present in so many of their party, as well as so-called independents, they began a steady attack on the messenger, Barack Obama. Easier to blame the black president whom so many already refuse to accept as "their president" for not having cleaned up everything his first year in office than to pitch in and help with the clean-up. Just say no.

Americans who had been unconcerned about buying things with money they did not have, and who gleefully bought expensive houses for nothing down like there was no tomorrow, were now suddenly losing homes, jobs, savings. Suddenly they are all upset and concerned about the economy and want someone to blame. Memories of eight years of suffering Bush and Cheney abuses have drifted to the edges of today's short memory span, it seems.

The new guy and all his highly intelligent advisers are telling Americans how tough things are with no sugar coating. Obama explains, in detail, the depth of the problems and calls for tough change. Instead of using vapid four word sound bites that sound so good, Obama tackled the unexpected problems he inherited head on, while also repairing America's tattered international image. The harsh reality of it all seems to many to be "change they don't want to believe in." Everything is now grim and uncertain.

Those in a blind state of denial include many of Obama's own majority party Democrats who, much like Senator McConnell, want to ignore reality so they can fight for their narrow political interests just like the elephant was not in the room.

Playing a blame game will not haul us out of the huge mess we are in. Taking a minute to reflect on the montage of photos above might, however, help us remember where a majority of this mess came from and why a majority voted for change.

But change rather than sound bites requires a lot more of Americans. Health care for all Americans has been shoved aside for more than 70 years because it requires dedicated support and buy-in. Genuine Republican support in drafting a National Heath Insurance plan could have made that a reality. But it was easier to vote no and play like we are on an all expense paid weekend in Oz. But the curtain has been pulled back.

President Obama clearly believes that a positive American spirit will ultimately prevail. A majority of Americans clearly still want the change they voted for and should not let a small but loud populist uproar from pontificating short-sighted dour losers drown out reason and resolve.

The natural instinct has always been for progressive and truly involved Americans to pitch in and be part of a solution to tough problems. Throwing blind tantrums and brewing up more anger at feel good tea-parties is good only to fill the endless dead space of side-show cable TV.

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor. He also posts at The iHandbill.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Bush to Haiti : You've Got to be Kidding!

George Bush and Bill Clinton: a marriage made in Haiti.
Back to the scene of the crime:
Bush ousted Haiti's Aristide, blew it with Katrina

This is just the last straw for me with the phony baloney bipartisanship fetish.

By Larry Piltz / The Rag Blog / January 15, 2010

Is it hurricane season already? George W. Bush is bringing his Katrina and Aristide-related skills to Haiti.

This is just the last straw for me with the phony baloney bipartisanship fetish. Teaming Clinton with Bush, either going to Haiti or to front for its rescue and recovery funding efforts, just totally tears it. There is no equivalence between the two leaders. None whatsoever.

First, Clinton made an effort to restore democracy to Haiti. Bush pulled a coup d'etat in Haiti and had its President Aristide kidnapped and dumped in Africa. Bush's actions caused the murder of hundreds of innocent citizens in Haiti and tormented the island nation, not to mention leaving known human rights abusers in charge of the coup regime. Nice plan, George.

Second, under no circumstances and in no rational person's imagination could Bush represent anything but efforts at destruction and subversion, not rescue or recovery. Look around the world today. Look at Iraq -- destroyed. Look at Afghanistan -- criminal neglect and return of the Taliban. Look at Pakistan -- frighteningly dangerous deterioration in a nuclear nation's security.

Sure, the U.S. Navy helped out after the Indian Ocean tsunami, but that was because Bush had pushed us unnecessarily into war against practically the entire southern half of Asia. We happened to be there. Call it a lucky mistake.

Third, which is related to #2, look at New Orleans. Just look at it. No, it's not returned to anything near normal since the levees failed after Katrina. Not even half-normal. Bush ensured that New Orleans was ethnically cleansed, created a refugee diaspora, and ensured that people in the flood and its immediate aftermath suffered far worse than would have been necessary under Clinton's FEMA, which Bush largely dismantled through Brownie-style privatization efforts. Though just maybe Bush can claim a little bit of credit for Reggie Bush. No relation. Go Saints.

Fourth, the world's financial system collapsed under Bush, largely due to his laissez-fail ideology. Where's the money to rebuild anything? Not even Haiti. Let alone America, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Bush is no Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter. Hell, he's not Bush the Elder or even Gerald Ford. Bush gives ridiculous pep talks with that buffoon Giuliani at so-called positive thinking seminars. Bush wisecracks at a hunting convention. Bush buys the house next door to his Dallas home and tears it down, leaving it empty so he can have a bigger side yard. Next he'll be cutting ribbons at gun shows. What a guy! At least there won't be any more important memos to ignore.

Since it looks like he's going to be the new Bush in the new millenium's traveling Clinton-Bush puppet show, maybe it could be considered community service, to begin to make up for throwing the world into chaos and suffering for who knows how long. But he'll have to work it off for the rest of his life, and then pass on his debt to society to his children and grandchildren, and many more begats after that.

So cool it with the stupid obsessive-compulsive bipartisan kabuki theater, media mavens and nebbish "centrists.” Your idiotic "push me-pull you" story line never was real. Regarding Haiti, I've never met Bill Clinton, I wasn't Bill Clinton's friend, and Bill Clinton was no angel when it came to imperialism, but George W. Bush, you are no Bill Clinton, though George, you may yet get the credit you deserve for being Herbert Hoover, with a side of war crimes thrown in.

God save the people and animals of Haiti, and God save them from George W. Bush, this time.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Dick Cheney : Assassination Nation

Dick Cheney: More tales from the dark side

Peter Berger, a security analyst at the American Enterprise Institute thinks that, judging from Congressional reaction, the program must have involved much more than killing some Al Qaeda people.

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / July 27, 2009

We have learned that Vice President Dick Cheney, in 2002, recommended sending troops into the Buffalo area to apprehend the “Lackawanna Six.” These people were accused of involvement in terrorism, which Cheney thought was enough of an excuse to bypass legal barriers to the use of soldiers to seize property or carry out police functions.

One wonders if he was interested in creating a precedent for the use of troops in American cities on a more regular basis. We know that he and his friend Donald Rumsfeld have been involved in continuation of government planning since the Reagan presidency and we suspect that all these contingency plans involved a greatly expanded role for the military.

We also know that under the Bush-Cheney administration, a Northern Command was established and that special units from it are now functioning in the U.S. to protect military property and that of defense contractors.

Rather than obsessing over why Dr. Louis Henry Gates dissed a Cambridge policeman, the mainstream media and we citizens should be showing more interest in health care reform, and far more important, the actions taken by Dick Cheney and George Bush that endanger the very health of this democratic republic.

So far, the Obama administration has not taken these matters very seriously. When Barack Obama took power, he refused to support calls for a truth commission to look into violations of the law connected with detention, torture, and domestic surveillance. He promised to close the Guantanamo detention center but retained others and continued rendition. His Justice Department defended the Bush Administration’s use of the state secret privilege and it did nothing to protect whistle blowers, firing one employee who outed Bush Administration abuses. Now Obama is threatening to veto any legislation that would curb the state secret privilege.

In Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the CIA had repeatedly lied to Congress, but some evidence developed showing she knew something about torture before she claimed she had. She said little about it then because she had concluded only a change of administration would resolve the matter. It was also clear that the agency was not telling the Congressional leaders everything.

Leon Panetta, the new Director of the CIA, defended his agency against her charges. Then, in July, he told Congressional intelligence committees that after 9/11, the Bush administration opened a new covert operation that Congress had not been told about. Democrats expressed shock, but Republicans said it was an on and off operation of little consequence. However, Peter Berger, a security analyst at the American Enterprise Institute thinks that, judging from Congressional reaction, the program must have involved much more than killing some Al Qaeda people.

Panetta terminated the program and told the Congressmen that the agency had been misled about what was going on in the program. Apparently, the CIA was more interested in training people in Afghanistan to carry out these tasks. CIA people are telling the press that few were involved in the executive assassinations operation with the possible exceptions of general counsel John Rizzo and deputy director Stephen Kappes. The only part of the CIA involved in the military-directed assassinations program was the Special Activities Unit, which had a number of former Delta Force people.

Some CIA people are delighted to see Cheney in hot water and hope he pays a heavy price for his death squads. They see Cheney as abetting a long-term Pentagon plan to swallow up the CIA. This dispute continues in the Obama administration in disputes between Admiral Dennis C. Blair, Director of National Intelligence, and Director Panetta. Don’t expect Cheney to face too much heat. A serious investigation would be politically damaging for Obama, and Cheney has left a number of “stay-behinds” who are embedded deep in the national security and cabinet departments who can obstruct any investigation.

It was soon learned that Vice President Dick Cheney had ordered the CIA not to brief the Congress about it and that it involved finding and killing terrorists abroad. Some thought it was the same “executive assassination teams” that Seymour Hersh had uncovered in March. Some believed it also involved in domestic spying and the killing of several foreign leaders, an Iranian nuclear scientist, and a Hezbollah military leader.

After 9/11, teams sought to find and kill Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders in Afghanistan and Iraq. The precedent for this was the Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War. The assassination program was expanded into George Tenet’s Worldwide Attack Matrix . It targeted enemies in numerous countries, including, possibly, the United States.

Some have attributed the murder of Abu Seger, Saddam’s money man, to the executive assassination plan. He knew where Saddam had huge stashes of cash. He was beaten to death by interrogators, even though those who arrested him had already found $40 million in plastic bags in his bedroom. But that was chickenfeed. Some attribute a 2002 Iranian plane crash to the operation because the downed craft carried Ukranian and Russian scientists. At least five other Iranian plane crashes have been attributed to this operation.

The bungled assassination of a politician in Kenya created embarrassment and the apparent shelving of the program. One cannot help wondering if British scientist Dr. David Kelly was offed by these people. Kelly told a former British ambassador that if Iraq were invaded,” I will probably be found dead in the woods.”

Due to problems with the CIA, Cheney came to rely upon people from the Joint Special Operations Command. Most of the personnel came from Delta Force. The JSOC was created in the Reagan administration and could have been used on occasion for sabotage and assassinations. The present commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McCrystal, commanded JSOC beginning in September, 2003.

It, in turn, works with the Mossad’s “Kidon” Department, which does assassinations and kidnappings. Indeed, the Cheney program was based upon the successful Israeli program of preemptive assassinations. As the rift between the Rumsfeld Pentagon and the CIA widened, the agency began to back away from joint operations, seeing them as potential threats to its normal operations. Hersh maintains that the CIA withdrew early and all the wet work was done by the Pentagon’s people.

On the other hand, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, once a top aide to Colin Powell, told Rachel Maddow the CIA did get involved in the assassinations, though it noted that much of the work was probably done by people from Delta Force. He added that it was laughable to claim the CIA never lied to Congress.

Some knowledgeable Pakistanis believe that the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on December 27, 2007, was carried out by elements within Al Qaeda and the Taliban that were indirectly controlled, probably through the Pakistan ISI, by Cheney’s assassination apparatus. She was shot in the neck and chest before the bomb went off. Perhaps the assassination was an effort to keep General Perez Musharraf in power, suggesting a professional hit.

Investigations of Bush era crimes will damage Democratic political prospects because the MSM lacks the integrity to separate these investigations from mere political witch hunts. In previous eras, there would have been some Republicans in national life who would have been very concerned about assassinations, the state secret privilege abuses, domestic spying, and more. Alas, that is not the case today. Almost all will simply parrot the McConnell-Boehner line that probing the Cheney-Bush abuses is nothing but politics. These matters go to the very fabric of our republic, and steps must be taken make certain these actions are not precedents for future abuses.

[Sherman DeBrosse, the pseudonym for a retired history professor, is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog and also blogs at Sherm Says and on DailyKos.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Darth Vader Redux : Cheney and the CIA's 'Executive Assassination Ring'

President George W. Bush and George J. Tenet, then director of the CIA, meet at the agency headquarters in 2001, the year the secret program began. Photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP / Washington Post.
Dick Cheney and the CIA:
The hits just keep on coming

By mcjoan / July 14, 2009

CIA linked to Bhutto's murder? Video Below.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the secret CIA program Dick Cheney ordered kept from Congress was aimed at capturing and killing al Qaeda members.

According to current and former government officials, the agency spent money on planning and possibly some training. It was acting on a 2001 presidential legal pronouncement, known as a finding, which authorized the CIA to pursue such efforts. The initiative hadn't become fully operational at the time Mr. Panetta ended it.

In 2001, the CIA also examined the subject of targeted assassinations of al Qaeda leaders, according to three former intelligence officials. It appears that those discussions tapered off within six months. It isn't clear whether they were an early part of the CIA initiative that Mr. Panetta stopped.

Those discussions must have "tapered off" when Cheney decided that it was more important to start torturing detainees to get false intelligence to justify an invasion of Iraq. And then of course, the actual invasion of Iraq, which pretty much ended any real effort to fight al Qaeda--the enemy actually responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

This report contradicts other reporting that the program was "an 'on-again, off-again' attempt to create a new intelligence capability and said it was related to the collection of information on suspected terrorists that was instituted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks." If true, it goes far beyond intelligence collection. It also circles us back to the speculation that arose when the story first broke that the program might be related to Sy Hersh's allegations of an "executive assassination ring" that reported to Cheney.

That's one possibility, but it raises more questions, as Zachary Roth details. Would the reaction of Panetta and the Democrats be warranted by this program?

Perhaps most importantly, a program, launched immediately after September 11 to capture or kill top al Qeada operatives just doesn't seem sufficiently radioactive to have provoked the kerfuffle it has. To be sure, Congress outlawed targeted CIA assassinations in the 1970s in response to the excesses of 50s and 60s, and the issue played a key role in the move during the same period to give Congress greater powers to oversee the agency. And if the program allowed CIA to act without the consent or knowledge of liaison services in the countries where the targets were located, that's obviously a big deal.

Still, the US military has openly been trying to get Osama Bin Laden and other top Qaeda leaders "dead or alive" since shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Would CIA involvement in that effort be so explosive that it would not only need to be kept from Congress in the first place, but would also have been shut down by Panetta as soon as he learned about it?

By the same token, it was Democratic lawmakers who brought the issue into the news last week by complaining that they had for years been kept in the dark on the unidentified program. Would they have chosen to initiate that spat when it seems to allow them to be portrayed as opposing an effort to hunt down al Qaeda terrorists?

Or, was it something else entirely? TIME says maybe domestic spying:

[T]wo former ranking CIA officials have told TIME that there's another equally plausible possibility: The program could have required the Agency to spy on Americans. Domestic surveillance is outside the CIA's purview -– it's usually the FBI's job –- and it's easy to see why Cheney would have wanted to keep it from Congress.

Both officials say they were never told what was in the program, and that they're only making calculated guesses. But their theory gibes with other reports, quoting ex-CIA officials, that say the program had to do with intelligence collection, not assassinations.

"People may want this to be about hit squads bumping off shady Saudis in Geneva, but that's very unlikely," says one official. "More likely, it was a plan to spy on some suspicious American citizens or organizations, without telling the FBI."

The IGs' report released last week demonstrated that there was a greater CIA involvement in the NSA warrantless wiretapping scheme than was previously known, but did it go beyond threat assessments to its own spying program? You couldn't put it past either the CIA or Cheney.

Source / Daily Kos

CIA linked to Bhutto's murder?



Thanks to Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

U.S. National Debt : Cliffs Notes for Conservatives

Graphic by Larry Ray / The Rag Blog. With apologies to Cliffs Notes.
Cliffs Notes for Conservatives

I find it both bewildering and angering when Republican conservatives lambaste President Obama for the present state of indebtedness on America's balance sheet as if it was all his fault, spending like a drunken sailor. As if the previous eight years never happened.

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / June 24, 2009

As soon as Barack Obama's hand left the Lincoln bible after taking his oath of office as President of the United States of America, the race was on within the tattered ranks of the Republican party to see who could scream "tax and spend" the loudest.

The same conservatives who uttered not a dissenting word during the past eight years of Republican "spend and spend" now sputter forth about their perceived perilous excesses of President Obama.

It is time for a review of some hard facts and numbers.

Mr. Obama has calmly and deliberately taken charge, faced with inherited wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the threat of a global financial meltdown, and a laundry list of national and international challenges. And all the while he is pressing ahead and funding promised new programs and change. His Republican detractors, ranting about the national debt, seem to have forgotten George W. Bush's early months as president.

Mr. Bush inherited a federal budget that had been balanced for three consecutive years and a surplus of $236 billion, the largest surplus in American history. Even sweeter, we were running an on-budget surplus no longer diverting surplus from the Social Security Trust Fund to fund other government programs. This conservative largess, of course, came from the previous Democratic administration.

When Mr. Bush took office, the national debt was $5.727 trillion. By September 2008, the national debt had soared to more than $9.849 trillion, an almost 72 percent increase during Mr. Bush’s two terms. And those are the debt figures before the basically unregulated, free-for-all banking and financial system received Mr. Bush's $700 billion Wall Street bailout money.

And as President Obama walked into the Oval office, Mr. and Mrs. George W. Bush were closing the deal on their mansion in a Dallas, Texas gated community, leaving the biggest increase in the national debt under any president in U.S history as a going away present to the American people.

Mr. Bush must have erased the collective memory of his record national debt from the minds of the Republican party. With stern faces they attempt daily to paint the accumulated national debt as President Obama's dangerous "socialist" agenda to send America to the poorhouse. Well, we have already been sent there, and Barack Obama did not do the sending.

Here's a quick review:

• Shortly after taking office, President Bush spoke to the the Republican Congressional Retreat in Williamsburg and blithely declared that his budget would “pay down the national debt."
• President Bush raised the national debt limit eight times during his administration.
• On July 30, 2008, President Bush signed the Housing and Economic Recovery Act, which contained a quiet little provision raising the debt ceiling to $10.615 trillion.
• One week before leaving office, Bush asked Congress for the remaining $350 billion of the $700 billion Wall Street Troubled Assets Relief Program or TARP bailout package.That same last week, Bush signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 raising the national debt ceiling for the eighth time to $12.104 trillion to accommodate the $11.3 trillion all time record debt he left the incoming administration.
• George W. Bush's $11.3 trillion record debt comes to more than $37,000 each for every man, woman and child in the United States. And it will get worse because of what is is costing to clean up after him while still moving ahead on badly needed changes like national health care to rein in its current out of control cost.

I find it both bewildering and angering when Republican conservatives lambaste President Obama for the present state of indebtedness on America's balance sheet as if it was all his fault, spending like a drunken sailor. As if the previous eight years never happened.

Mr. Boehner, Mr. Steele, Mr. Cantor and the rest of the GOP spokespersons du jour should all be given special pocket calculators with a built in factor of $11.3 trillion that is automatically deducted from any figures they use to attack the Obama administration.

The factor could have a new four letter mathematical name, the Debt factor, a word that also works perfectly to describe the Bush presidential legacy.

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor. He also posts at The iHandbill.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Bush Lawyer: Prolonged Indefinite Detention Already Widespread

A flag waves behind the barbed and razor-wire at the Guantanamo Bay detention center. Photo by AP.
Richard Klingler:

'the wartime framework underlying [these tactics] have settled well within the mainstream of the American tradition,' setting the stage for 'a broader recognition of the established legal basis for indefinite detention.'

By Daphne Eviatar / June 9, 2009

At the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this morning titled “The Legal, Moral, and National Security Consequences of ‘Prolonged Detention,’” it was actually Richard Klingler, a former lawyer in the Office of White House Counsel under President George W. Bush and former general counsel on the National Security Council staff, who presented the dilemma most starkly in his testimony. From his prepared remarks:

The debate over indefinite detention often wrongly focuses on Guantanamo Bay. The current practice is considerably more widespread, and any limitations on indefinite detention would have correspondingly wide implications. The U.S. military indefinitely detains enemy combatants, including members and supporters of al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, on a wide scale in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as at Guantanamo, and press reports indicate that U.S. officials work closely with our allies to detain al Qaeda members in other countries.

“Prolonged” detention is thus not something proposed for the future, for just a small subset of Guantanamo detainees. It is, instead, a practice that this Administration is already conducting on a widespread scale, will continue to pursue, and has already defended repeatedly in federal court. No matter how Guantanamo detainees are handled, this Administration will continue, directly or indirectly, to detain hundreds if not thousands of enemy combatants indefinitely in many places for many years to come.

And he added:

“The extent of the current Administration’s continued use of war powers against terrorist organizations is hard to overstate. The Obama Administration has pursued nearly every aspect the prior Administration’s conduct of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and against terrorist networks globally. As a formal matter, this Administration has embraced nearly all the components of wartime and related Executive powers asserted by its predecessor and then subject to controversy. In addition to continuing indefinite detention in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo, and committing to do so for a subset of Guantanamo detainees even once transferred elsewhere, the Administration has, for example:

• continued, according to the Attorney General, a valuable foreign intelligence surveillance program, unsupported by warrants, that critics had characterized as “warrantless wiretapping”;
• continued to use provisions of the previously controversial PATRIOT ACT, including the most contested provisions, which the current FBI Director has defended and sought to have reauthorized;
• asserted through a Presidential Signing Statement that the Executive Branch would treat certain statutory provisions infringing on the President’s constitutional powers, as determined by the President, as “precatory” or “advisory”;
• denied habeas corpus rights to detainees held by the military at Bagram, Afghanistan and elsewhere beyond Guantanamo, avoiding judicial review of detention decisions previously criticized as creating a “legal black hole”;
• continued the robust use of the “state secrets doctrine” to prevent disclosure in litigation of national security information;
• fought against disclosure of documents, under the Freedom of Information Act, where the military finds that release would harm the national security;
• declined to extend the protections of the Geneva Conventions for prisoners of war to members of al Qaeda;
• continued to act against designated financiers of terrorism, and against would-be travelers placed on “terror watch lists,” without affording the affected individuals the due process protections demanded by critics; and
• committed to continue use of military commissions, virtually unmodified beyond formal recognition of requirements previously imposed by military judges. [All emphasis added.]

The upshot of all this, said Klinger, is that “the wartime framework underlying [these tactics] have settled well within the mainstream of the American tradition,” setting the stage for ” a broader recognition of the established legal basis for indefinite detention.”

That was clearly not what Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) hoped to establish by holding today’s hearing, which also included testimony from a range of established international law and human rights experts about the dangers such tactics have created. But Klinger’s testimony, although perhaps framed to legitimize the Bush administration’s actions now under assault, did make clear the importance of Congress taking a hard look at what the current administration is doing under its watch.

Source / The Washington Independent

Also see Statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold on 'Prolonged Detention' / CommonDreams / June 9, 2009

And go to Incoming: More Torture Documents By Dan Froomkin / Washington Post / June 10, 2009

Thanks to S.M. Wilhelm / The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Medical Professionals 'Led the Way' : The Psychologists of Torture

Licensed psychologist and Army Col. Larry James was the director of Guantanamo's "Behavioral Science Consultation Team," which oversaw the use of harsh interrogation techniques widely condemned as torture. Photo by Army Spc. Shanita Simmons / from In These Times.
Medical professionals designed and helped to implement Bush administration interrogation practices.

'The conclusion that these interrogation techniques cause no lasting harm is the equivalent of psychological malpractice,' says Physicians for Human Rights' Steven Reisner.

By Frederick Clarkson / April 23, 2009

One of the key, if underreported, findings in Tuesday's bombshell Senate report on the Bush-era treatment of U.S. military detainees was the role of civilian and military psychologists in devising, directing and overseeing the torture of prisoners.

While the report highlights the role of senior Bush administration officials in approving "aggressive" interrogation techniques, it also exposes how medical professionals helped to transform the Pentagon's torture resistance program into tactics used against prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and CIA "black" sites.

Understanding the role of these professionals should be a "specific focus" of an investigation into the use of these tactics, according to Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), which has condemned the tactics as illegal and medically unethical.

In a series of reports available on its Web site, PHR details the tactics, which it says include beating, sexual and cultural humiliation, forced nakedness, exposure to extreme temperatures, exploitation of phobias, sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based organization, which won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1997, says psychologists "led the way" in legitimizing the Pentagon's approval and use of the tactics. It has joined the Senate committee in calling on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate who should be held accountable.
From Korea to Gitmo

The carefully worded U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee report reveals how the torture tactics developed directly from the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training program, which was designed to help downed American pilots resist torture.

The SERE program was based on interrogation methods used by the Chinese during the Korean War that aimed to elicit false confessions from American prisoners for propaganda purposes. Designed to enhance resistance to torture, the SERE program was reverse-engineered by psychologists working within a joint Army and CIA command to become the Bush administration's "enhanced interrogation methods."

Early in the Senate report, we learn that the SERE program's adaptation began with two senior military psychologists. In December 2001, Dr. James Mitchell, the senior SERE psychologist at the Pentagon's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, asked his former colleague Dr. John "Bruce" Jessen to review a recently obtained al Qaeda interrogation resistance training manual.

"The two psychologists reviewed the materials and generated a paper on al Qaeda resistance capabilities and countermeasures to defeat that resistance," according to this heavily redacted section of the Senate report. Mitchell and Jessen became CIA interrogation consultants the next year.

In April of 2002, Jessen created an "exploitation draft plan" for Guantanamo detainees. According to this plan, Jessen would direct SERE training of interrogators at the "exploitation facility," which would be "off limits to non-essential personnel." The Senate report makes several references to changing conditions at GTMO whenever the International Committee of the Red Cross came to visit.

Eventually, Guantanamo became known as a "Battle Lab for new interrogation techniques," which were then applied at military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan and at CIA detention centers.

Military and law enforcement professionals repeatedly warned against the application of SERE tactics, but the Senate report shows that their use was urged by top Bush administration figures eager to find information linking Al Qaeda and Iraq. (And it concludes that their use at Guantanamo Bay, authorized by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, led to the abuse of detainees there – as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq.)

The Senate report notes that SERE-based interrogation techniques were presented to Guantanamo personnel in September of 2002, despite the objections of instructors from Fort Bragg. In an interview with the Army's Inspector General, Army psychiatrist Major Charles Burney said "interrogation tactics that rely on physical pressures or torture...do not tend to get you accurate information or reliable information." According to Burney, instructors repeatedly stressed that harsh interrogations don't work and that the information gleaned "is strongly likely to be false."

Nonetheless, the SERE techniques came to be used by members of the newly created "Behavioral Science Consultation Teams" (BSCT), a joint operation of the Army and CIA. The first of those teams worked at Guantanamo.
The role of 'safety officers'

The Senate report confirms the intimate involvement of health professionals in designing, supervising and implementing the Army and the CIA's "enhanced" interrogation program. (The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel memos, released April 16, revealed that medical professionals had served as "safety officers" during waterboarding and other interrogation sessions.)

"The monitoring of vital signs and giving instructions to interrogators to start and stop are some of the most severe abuses of the Hippocratic Oath and medical ethics imaginable," said Nathanial Raymond of PHR. "Strangely, the memos and the statements of former senior Bush Administration officials use the presence of medical professionals in contravention of their professional ethics as a defense, when it is in fact, itself, a crime."

Tactics used by psychologists and supervised by medical personnel clearly constituted torture and a grave breach of medical and professional ethics, according to both PHR and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

In a February 2007 report made public earlier this year, the ICRC states that health professionals who participated in the interrogation process "constituted a gross breach of medical ethics" at times amounting to "participation in torture."

Steven Reisner, PHR's advisor on psychological ethics, believes that U.S. psychologists were busy perpetrating torture even before Justice Department lawyers wrote their opinions justifying the interrogation practices.

"These individuals must not only face prosecution for breaking the law," Reisner says, "they must lose their licenses for shaming their profession's ethics."
Debate among psychologists

The role of psychologists in torture became a hot issue within the American Psychological Association in 2005, when the board of the organization of mental health professionals endorsed psychologists’ role in interrogations as consistent with APA ethics, for the purpose of making it safe, legal and effective. But a 2007 resolution of the APA membership proscribed member involvement in a number of interrogation tactics. Then, in 2008, the organization passed a further resolution against members' presence at any facility where U.S. and international law was being violated, unless they were working for the benefit of the people held.

Prior to the 2008 APA resolution, Guantanamo's public affairs office published an article in January 2008 describing the Behavioral Science Consultation Team as "integral" to the success of Guantanamo.

In that article, Army Colonel Larry James--a licensed psychologist and the director of Guantanamo's Behavioral Science Consultation Team--says he feels validated by the APA's approval (at an August 2007 convention) of psychologists working in military detention facilities.

"It's clear given the vote at the APA convention that there is overwhelming support for psychologists who wear the uniform all around the world in defense of this nation," James says.

"During my time here, I am proud to say that I have not seen a guard or interrogator abuse anyone in any shape or form," he continues. The article reports that James worked with another licensed psychologist, a behavioral science specialist and leaders within the Joint Detention Group and the Joint Intelligence Group.
Push for accountability

Since 2005, however, PHR has been working to hold accountable health professionals it believes were complicit in torture. The APA "has never comprehensively addressed the troubling ethical entanglement of some members of its leadership in the intelligence apparatus," PHR's Sara Greenberg wrote Wednesday.

"In January 2005," Greenberg writes,

the American Psychological Association issued its Report of the Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security, which seeks to legitimize the involvement of psychologists in interrogation; a role that is fundamentally inconsistent with ethical principles and both US and international law. In concluding that psychologists have a central role in interrogations, the Task Force gave short shrift to the ethical and human rights implications of coercive interrogation practices used by U.S. forces that relied on psychological expertise. Nor has the APA sanctioned its members responsible for designing and implementing torture.

PHR contrasts the APA's flip-flopping with the unequivocal opposition to torture expressed by other leading organizations of health professionals, including the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association.

With the debate over how to hold Bush administration-era officials accountable for alleged torture now at a fever pitch, PHR spokespeople have fanned out in the media, calling for the psychologists who justified, designed and implemented the interrogation programs to lose their professional licenses and face criminal prosecution.

"The conclusion that these interrogation techniques cause no lasting harm is the equivalent of psychological malpractice," Reisner recently told the Inter Press Service. "How can you compare U.S. soldiers who volunteered for SERE training, and could have stopped their interrogations at any time, with the effects on a prisoner who has been 'disappeared,' is in fear for his life, and believes he will never see his family again?"

[Frederick Clarkson is a Massachusetts-based independent journalist. He is the editor, most recently, of Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America (Ig Publishing, 2008).]

Source / In These Times

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Leon Panetta's CIA : Getting Away With Torture

CIA Director Leon Panetta at his ceremonial swearing-in on Feb. 19, 2009. Photo by Jonathan Ernst / Reuters.
Hope Abandoned:
Obama Protects CIA Torture Memos

By Chris Floyd / April 11, 2009

It was obvious from the moment that Barack Obama appointed Leon Panetta to head the CIA that there was going to be no serious investigation -- much less prosecution -- of the high crimes of torture committed by the agency at the order of the Bush White House. Panetta, a Clinton retread (who actually began his career in the Nixon administration), has always been a bland, feckless, obedient servant of the Establishment; he has no outside power base, no pull, no heft, no popularity -- nothing that would enable him to grab hold of the CIA with both hands and clean that fetid, blood-encrusted house. And of course, it was precisely this kind of powerless figure that Barack Obama wanted in the post.

The appointment was very typical of the Obama operation. Panetta had made a few very mild statements over the years that would allow him to be passed off as some kind of "progressive" in the witless, substanceless "process stories" that the corporate media do for new government appointees. This would be enough to keep the progressive "base" -- which was overwhelmingly inclined to give Obama every benefit of every doubt -- lulled long enough to get the patsy into the job.

Of course, to actually get the job, Panetta had to make it clear to Congress that he wasn't going to stir up any trouble on the torture front, and was willing to play along with anything the Unitary Executive might order him to do. But the corp-media made little of this, concentrating instead on Panetta's rote assertions that "America doesn't torture," and his embrace of the Army Field Manual as the standard for CIA interrogation. (Of course, the vaunted manual also allows practices that any rational human being would consider torture, but that's another story.)

Once Panetta was confirmed in his figurehead director's role, the Obama White House then confirmed its true intentions regarding the rogue agency. It has put the actual running of the CIA into the hands of one of the top figures involved in the Bush torture program. Scott Horton at Harper's points us to the remarkable story by investigator John Sifton, detailing Obama's retention -- and promotion -- of Bush's willing torturers. From Sifton, at The Daily Beast:

"On Monday night the confidential report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program was published on the website of the New York Review of Books. The report confirms previous allegations about CIA abuses against detainees. Unlike earlier reporting, however, the document is based on irrefutable first hand information: interviews with detainees and U.S. officials. The document describes in stark detail the CIA’s use of forced standing, sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation, assaults, and waterboarding. It also discloses the participation of CIA medical personnel in torture....

"The New York Times reported that Leon Panetta, the current CIA director, has taken the position that “no one who took actions based on legal guidance from the Department of Justice at the time should be investigated, let alone punished.” Yet a number of CIA officials implicated in the torture program not only remain at the highest levels of the agency, but are also advising Panetta. Panetta’s attempt to suppress the issue is making Bush’s policy into the Obama administration’s dirty laundry.

"Take Stephen Kappes. At the time of the worst torture sessions outlined in the ICRC report, Kappes served as a senior official in the Directorate of Operations—the operational part of the CIA that oversees paramilitary operations as well as the high-value detention program. (The directorate of operations is now known as the National Clandestine Service.) Panetta has kept Kappes as deputy director of the CIA—the number two official in the agency. One of Kappes’ deputies from 2002-2004, Michael Sulick, is now director of the National Clandestine Service—the de facto number three in the agency. Panetta’s refusal to investigate may be intended to protect his deputies. Since the basic facts about their involvement in the CIA interrogation program are now known, Panetta’s actions are increasingly looking like a cover-up."

Sifton also makes a very important point about the Red Cross report on torture that has been almost entirely ignored (which is not surprising, given that the Red Cross report itself has been almost entirely ignored by the corporate media that gives us the "news" of the day):

"Another overlooked fact is this: the ICRC report is an important legal document that contains well-sustained allegations of criminal conduct with legal significance. Unlike earlier claims in books, magazines, and newspapers, the ICRC’s allegations are official notices from a legally recognized entity. The ICRC, after all, is not Human Rights Watch, the Washington Post, or The New Yorker, all of which have reported on the CIA’s secret prison program. The ICRC is an official entity recognized under the Geneva Conventions and various other earlier international treaties relating to armed conflict and prisoners of war. The ICRC is specifically tasked under the Geneva Conventions to visit prisoners and communicate with detaining powers to uphold the conventions’ spirit and purpose. Its interpretations and statements on matters of international law are held as legally authoritative. As such, the ICRC’s allegations have legal significance beyond previous disclosures. In effect, the document itself is evidence in a criminal case.

"Note in particular the report’s date, February 14, 2007—Valentine’s Day. On that date, the U.S. government was put on notice about the allegations of CIA torture. (The ICRC also wrote to the U.S. governments about the issue of disappearances at several points in 2003-2006.)

"Under international law—the Geneva Conventions, the Convention against Torture, and basic precepts of customary international law—the United States has a positive obligation to investigate and prosecute persons alleged to have committed torture and other violations of the laws of war. As of Valentine’s Day 2007, and possibly earlier, the U.S. government was obligated to investigate and prosecute the abuses detailed in the report. The United States’ failure to do so is a recurring breach of international law."

The United States has formally adopted the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture; they are not some kind of "foreign devilment" messing with our sacred sovereignty: they are the law of the land. But it is clear that the Obama Administration does not have and never had the slightest intention of obeying the law and instigating the required investigations and prosecutions of the high crime -- the capital crime -- of ordering and committing torture. And the reason for this refusal is also clear: the Obama Administration wants to retain the power to torture, to conduct "paramilitary operations" with secret armies and single assassins, to carry out mass, illegal surveillance of the population with no legal accountability, to do "whatever it takes" to keep the machine of war and domination churning at full strength. That is why they have retained apparatchiks like Kappes and Sulick; that is why they are not only defending the Bush gang's egregious assertions of authoritarian power, but are actually seeking to expand them, as Glenn Greenwald and others have detailed.

It is understandable that people hunger desperately for change after the open, scalding evils of the Bush years. It is understandable that they would seize on an attractively packaged figure who made a few progressive noises, carried a great deal of genuinely symbolic weight due to his race, and was more personable, cool and articulate than his god-awful predecessor. It is understandable that many people would want to give this figure the benefit of the doubt, to turn a blind eye to the many warning signs that emerged during the campaign, and hope for the best. After all, who would not rather live in hope?

But hope must be grounded in reality; and it must be invested in the right place. When reality gives it the lie, then it must be abandoned. There is no hope to be found in the Obama Administration: no hope for genuine change, no hope for a clean break (or any kind of break) from the relentless and ruthless promotion of empire, oligarchy and militarism. By his own choices -- his appointments, his policies, his court actions, his rhetoric -- Barack Obama has demonstrated beyond all doubt his sincere and abiding commitment to "continuity" in the most pernicious and corrosive elements of America's lawless hyper-state. To place one's hope in such a figure is a crippling, disastrous folly.

The only hope that can be associated with the Obama Administration is the long-shot, rapidly fading, outside chance that they could be forced -- very much against their will -- into at least slowing the militarist-oligarchic juggernaut by strong, sustained, massive, informed political opposition from the public. (And no, not the "tea-bag" fantasies of the fascistic Right, whose only real complaint about Obama -- aside from the unspoken one about his skin color -- is that he is not militarist and oligarchic enough.)

I don't believe this will happen, that this kind of genuine and fruitful dissent will arise on a scale large enough to pressure the administration into making changes in order to save its own political skin. Nor do I, as some do, place any "hopes" -- if that's the word -- that some outside power (or combination of powers) or calamitous event (or combination of calamitous events) will force the juggernaut onto another course. As in the case of the present global financial collapse, the reaction of the elite to such circumstances will be to do more of the same, to try more and more desperately to return to the status quo -- or, as today, to exploit the panic and chaos of disaster to extend their own power and privilege even further. And with a militarist elite that possesses an arsenal capable of bringing the world down with them if they can't hold on to power, I can't contemplate such a Götterdämmerung of suffering and death with anything like "hope."

But I also know that I don't know what the future might bring. So whatever small hope I still have resides in the flickering possibility of engendering the kind of large-scale, genuine, fruitful dissent described above. I realize that this is a rather slim reed to hang on to; yet it is a mighty oak when compared to a hope invested in leaders who protect and promote torturers, who perpetuate -- and laud -- mass war crimes, who expand tyrannical powers, and who sell their children's birthrights to a keep a tiny, rapacious elite in ascendancy. I will take my slim reed over such brutal delusions any day.

[Chris Floyd is an American writer and frequent contributor to Counterpunch where this article also appears. His blog, Empire Burlesque, can be found at chris-floyd.com.]

Source / counterpunch

Thanks to David Hamilton / The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Bush Scandals : The List. (Not a Pretty Picture)

British Artist Jonathan Yeo created this portrait of President Bush using a collage of images cut out from 100 porn magazines. This piece was unveiled in August 2007 at the Lazarides Gallery in London. Interestingly enough, Yeo was commissioned by the George W. Bush Presidential Library to paint an official portrait of the 43rd President, but before he could begin working on the portrait he was fired. Instead of scrapping the project all together he decided to change directions and finish the piece anyway…with porno mags. Image by Jonathan Yeo / WebUrbanist.

Hugh's List of Bush scandals: 'Most are breaches of the public trust, many violations of Bush's Oath of Office. The rest are crimes and War Crimes.'

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / February 4, 2009

Any American who has a simmering anger after eight years of George W. Bush as president will want to bookmark the links below to a web site simply titled:

“Hugh Makes a List … because there are just too many scandals to remember”

A progressive named Hugh started making a list of Bush scandals in late 2006. A blog, firedoglake, provided its initial exposure. Firedoglake loves challenges, so Hugh didn't even have to ask for help. The first entries were very brief. One site remembers,

Hugh edited each entry by adding enough information so that even a mainstream media reporter would understand what event or action the entry implied or recognized. All of these entries - there are finally 400 - are worse than a president getting a hummer from another adult under the Oval Office desk. Most are breaches of the public trust, many violations of Bush's Oath of Office. The rest are crimes and War Crimes.

Hugh’s List is a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 site. We are offering our readership free access to this scholarly and unique undertaking.

The Table of Contents itself is breathtaking:

The detailed list is here.

Here is a brief excerpt from the first paragraph of the last entry.

# 400: An Absent President

Of the 2922 days Bush was President he spent all or part of 1,020 of them on vacation (35% of his time in office). This includes 487 days at Camp David, 490 at his ranch in Crawford, and 43 days at his family’s compound in Kennebunkport. If there is one word which typifies this and Bush, it is AWOL. The man has been AWOL his whole life. You have only to look at his academic career or his lack of it. […]

Unfortunately for us, the Presidency is a real full-time job. In it, Bush stayed true to form. He was not just physically absent from it much of the time. He was intellectually and morally absent from it all the time.

But the blame does not belong to him. It never does with an AWOL man. No, it belongs with us who, as a nation, for 8 years took a vacation from ourselves and our responsibilities. We had not just an AWOL President with Bush but an AWOL age. Now Bush is gone, as AWOL as ever, and we are left to deal with his legacies.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Great Job, Junior!

Creator's Syndicate / The Bush Legacy / About.com.
'I mean, how incompetent do you have to be to send truckloads of ice to Maine and Montana while Hurricane survivors are still without power in Mississippi and Louisiana?'

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / January 22, 2009

AIDS in Africa.

I recently made the bald unsupported assertion that Bush II must have been correct about something or done something right.

Directing serious resources to fighting AIDS in Africa. Serious problem to which Clinton gave lip service but Bush gave money. An expenditure that has no short term benefit for the US.

Yes. Bush did something right.

It only took me two days to come up with that.

When I look back on the last eight years, I am flabbergasted at how God-awful the Bush Administration was in every sense. I thought Reagan was the Prince of Darkness but at least he put some people in high positions who were fundamentally competent, so you knew basic stuff would get done even if the government overall was steering in a direction you did not like.

I mean, how incompetent do you have to be to send truckloads of ice to Maine and Montana while Hurricane survivors are still without power in Mississippi and Louisiana?

And how can you look back on it and regret an unfortunate photo? Land Air Force One? What about a few pallets of bottled water and MRE's for the people in the Superdome? How stupid is that?

Heckuva job, Bushies!

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Adios

Political cartoon by Joshua Brown / Historians Against the War / The Rag Blog

Thanks to Dr. S. R. Keister / The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Dubya Bids Adieu : Still Delusional After All These Years

Bush says bye bye. Photo courtesy of Boston Globe.
'If there was any value in the speech it was this: it should remind us of the importance of refusing to allow this delusional revisionism to stand.'

By Arianna Huffington / January 16, 2009

Thursday night's valedictory speech was quintessential Bush: delusional from beginning to end.

He made Afghanistan sound like a swell place to take a vacation when, in truth, only those with a death wish venture out these days without an armed convoy.

He lauded Iraq as "a friend of the United States" -- without ever mentioning the fact that if Iraq has a BFF it is Iran, not America.

He said his Medicare prescription drug plan "is brining peace of mind to seniors." Hardly. It's been widely derided as a poorly conceived, chaotic mess.

He claimed that, on his watch America's "air, water, and lands are measurably cleaner." Who is doing the measuring, the same eco-unfriendly companies to which he handed both his environmental policies and our public lands? This is a man whose administration refused to open emails from its own EPA because they contained information about greenhouse gas emissions that are endangering public health.

In a particularly jaw-dropping moment, Bush asserted that when people "live in freedom, they do not willingly choose leaders who pursue campaigns of terror" -- a remarkable claim given the fact that Hamas, which has kinda been in the news lately, has leaders who "pursue campaigns of terror" and were willingly chosen by people given the freedom to elect who they wanted.

Another striking moment was watching the great pride the president took in saying that even though we might not have liked all of his decisions, we have to admit that he "was willing to make the tough decisions." The Crawford Cowboy to the end.

Yes, he made tough decisions... but what is the value in that if the decisions you make are consistently wrong? And Bush has made the wrong decisions again and again and again.

He was wrong about Iraq and Saddam and WMD. He was wrong to take his eye off the ball on Afghanistan. He was wrong about tax cuts being the answer to our economic woes. He was wrong about Wall Street being able to regulate itself. He was wrong about Katrina. He was wrong about torture. He was wrong about extraordinary rendition. He was wrong about warrantless wiretapping. He was wrong about Gitmo. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

The speech was spin at its most dangerous. It's easy to feel a pang of pity for a guy who was on top so long and is now heading out the door. But the more sympathy he evokes, the more susceptible we are to the lies he is telling. Before we know it, his revisionism becomes accepted as the truth.

So if there was any value in the speech it was this: it should remind us of the importance of refusing to allow this delusional revisionism to stand.

Source / The Huffington Post

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Cheney : Faces Nation, Won't Face Truth

'Cheney wrapped up his version of "Through the Iraqi Looking Glass," double-speaking his way through torture, detention, Guantanamo, wiretapping without warrant, and the administration's basic trampling of the Constitution.'

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / January 4, 2009

Appearing on CBS's "Face the Nation," this morning, Vice-President, Dick Cheney, with as straight a face as he is capable of displaying, declared, "I think we're very close to achieving what it is we set out to do five years ago when we first went into Iraq." Then, after essentially declaring "Mission Accomplished," Cheney turned and winked smugly at his invisible sidekick, Harvey Haliburton.

At the very moment Cheney was continuing his mad fairy tale, breaking news headlines included: "U.S.-installed Iraqi ex-PM says Bush "utter failure," and "40 Shia pilgrims killed by a female suicide bomber at shrine in Baghdad."

His delusional ramble was nothing new to veteran TV journalist, Bob Schieffer, host of "Face the Nation," who has interviewed Cheney dozens of times. "How do you think we got it so wrong?" Schieffer asked. "I mean, we thought he had weapons of mass destruction and he didn't; we thought we would be greeted with open arms and we weren't. What happened?" Not missing a beat for reflection, Cheney replied, "Well, I don't look at it as we got it so wrong, Bob." "We got a big part of it wrong," Schieffer continued. "There weren't any weapons of mass destruction." "Correct." Cheney replied, "The original intelligence was wrong, no question about it. But there were parts of it that were right. It wasn't 100 percent wrong."

It looks like Cheney will ride off into some Wyoming sunset, actually believing his own cherry-picked version of the actual facts which are on the record. New York Times columnist and respected author, Frank Rich, in his book, "The Greatest Story Ever Sold" offers a detailed, 80 page time line of the whole evolution of the Iraq invasion. It starts with the September 15, 2001 Camp David meeting where Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, speaking to his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, advocates attacking Iraq, noting the scarcity of "good targets in Afghanistan." The whole intricately detailed and documented time line is available online in PDF format at http://www.frankrich.com and someone should read it to Cheney nightly for the rest of his unnatural life. The truth is not going to go away.

Cheney wrapped up his version of "Through the Iraqi Looking Glass," double-speaking his way through torture, detention, Guantanamo, wiretapping without warrant, and the administration's basic trampling of the Constitution. Meanwhile, the international press was quoting former interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, basically selected and approved by Mr. Cheney, as saying "His insistence on names like 'democracy' and 'open elections', without giving attention to political stability, was a big mistake. It cast shadows on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Egypt and I believe this will be remembered in history as President Bush's policy."

History will remember both Bush and his mad mentor, Cheney, perhaps in the context of the observation of William Shakespeare, "The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream."

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor. He also posts at The iHandbill.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...