The World IS Round

No longer should there be any "debate" about the following subjects.

Climate change/Global warming is real.

• Mankind significantly contributes to this phenomenon by pumping 70 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere daily.
• It is not too late to do something about climate change to fend off the worst repercussions.

Waterboarding is torture.

• The Bush Administration has engaged in this activity, and others which are considered torture throughout the civilized world.
• High ranking Bush Administrations, including Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Cheney and Bush have known and/or ordered these procedures, well aware that they were indeed torture.
• These administration officials also were well aware that they could be found criminally liable for their involvement in these torture activities under both US and International Law.
• These same administration officials have engaged in a criminal conspiracy to cover-up their felonious activities related to torture.

Warrantless Domestic Surveillance of US residents is illegal and Unconstitutional.

• The NSA and other agencies of the US Government have electronically eavesdropped on US citizens and legal residents within our borders.
• The availability of retroactively obtaining warrants under FISA makes any suggestion that the warrant requirement is too cumbersome ridiculous.
• The telecoms knew they were acting illegally when they bowed to pressure and threats of retribution from the administration to allow the NSA and others access to their customers' private data.
• The administration pursued this illegal and unconstitutional activity well before 9/11/01 while ignoring terrorist threats from abroad.
  

Valerie Plame was "covert."

• Cheney, Rove, Addington and Libby, among others, deliberately exposed her status while being fully aware of said status for no other purpose than retribution against her husband.
• George Bush knew who leaked her name to the press, and why, and did nothing about it except pardon Libby so nothing further could be done to expose the conspiracy.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and other high ranking administration officials knew that the chances of Saddam Hussein possessing WMD's was highly remote and provided little or no justification to engage in a war of aggression.

• The administration deliberately "fixed the intelligence around the policy."
• The administration deliberately conflated 9/11 with Iraq, knowing there was no connection whatsoever.
• Secure access to Iraq's oil, and a personal/familial vendetta against Hussein are the only "real" reasons we went to war with Iraq in the first place.

The war in Iraq is a disaster.

• Despite the "Surge," and a decrease in the death rate over the last 6 weeks, this year was worse than the year before, and the year before that.
• A marked increase in airstrikes, and ethnic cleansing have contribute to the stark rise in casualties over last year, completion of targeting missions and cleansing of the mixed neighborhoods has contributed to the recent decrease in the rate of killing.
• We have destroyed our reputation throughout the world by our conduct of the war, possibly to an irretrievable degree, no matter what the eventual outcome of the conflict.
• We have severely damaged our ability to form alliances, degraded our military capability, and crippled our intelligence gathering institutions by our conduct of the war.
• There will be tremendous bloodshed if we leave precipitously, and tremendous bloodshed if we stay.
• The Iraqi people will never accept any government, or power structure put in place while under the current US occupation.
  

For these, and so many other reasons, our government is infected with a hoard of felons and war criminals whose daily existence now serves no other purpose than to escape responsibility for their crimes.

There is no "balance" to be fair about these issues. Any so called "journalists" who engage in the petty he said/she said presentation of events that are well settled are looking to fill time, gain ratings, and engaging in the laziest and most disingenuous form of behavior. They are co-conspirators with the mafia fiefdom our republic has now become.

When someone starts talking about the personal loyalty of the ideologically pure being the sine qua non of anyone ever considered for a job with the Bush administration; pay attention, because you may have found that rarest of breeds -- a truth-teller in the media.

They Don't Need To Lie To Us To Scare Us

It's one thing when A NASA spokesman said that denying the Associated Press’s request to see a database on safety lapses in U.S. aviation on the grounds that it might scare the public.

It's typical, bureaucrats trying to save face, keeping us in the dark to protect themselves from embarrassment. Wrong as it is, the public's right to know the facts of the situation certainly outweighs the natural human tendency to put themselves in the best light even if it distorts our ability make informed public policy decisions. But it is forgivable, understandable.

But when the usually serious Media Matt says, "Holy Shit!" it's worth paying attention. The Higazy case is neither forgivable nor excusable, especially the court's complicity in the government's cover-up. Sure, it is understandable if you understand that the Rule of Law now means we make up rules as we go along, changing the very nature of common language to fit a new interpretation of the law which now has exactly the opposite effect that the ills it was enacted to aleviate. (Well, they are making their own imperial reality, of course.)

You can decide for yourself exactly what National Security interest justifies this level of secrecy.

Basically, the FBI coerced an innocent man into confessing by threatening his family with torture, eventually the man's innocence became clear and an appeals court ruled in his favor, but the opinion was swiftly pulled off the web.

National Security? Can't give the "enemy" any insight to our torture enhanced in-terror-gation "methods" can we. Folks, this isn't the CIA dealing with an enemy spy or the military pressing an "unlawful combatant," this was a guy who was at the wrong place at the wrong time and wearing the skin and nationality of someone with the wrong color -- and had a suspicious gizmo with him that allegedly could communicate with jets.

The FBI thought they had a 9/11 conspirator in their grasp and in true Jack Bauer like form, were willing to take extraordinary means to extract information. That's not the debate here. We'll leave that for another time. As a wrongfully accused and illegally confined legal resident, he did what you do and sued for false arrest, But by redacting what the FBI did to Higazy, the court is complicit with what so many classification decisions come down to -- covering up an embarrassment. Or at least they attempted to.

The government admit in the basics for purposes of the summar judgment motion, that the confession the FBI obtained was "coerced." And it appears that the Plaintiff, Abdallah Higazy, was not himself subject to torture, but only threatened that his family might be in for a world of hurt back in Egypt. He told the FBI what they wanted to hear, which wasn't the truth. Higazy has not been put under a gag order, or silenced like Valerie Plame, or Sibel Edmonds. So just what, or who is being protected here? Since the original decision has been preserved for all time thanks to the Intertoobz you can read the redacted part of the case under the fold.

Higazy alleges that during the polygraph, Templeton told him that he should cooperate, and explained that if Higazy did not cooperate, the FBI would make his brother “live in scrutiny” and would “make sure that Egyptian security gives [his] family hell.” Templeton later admitted that he knew how the Egyptian security forces operated: “that they had a security service, that their laws are different than ours, that they are probably allowed to do things in that country where they don’t advise people of their rights, they don’t – yeah, probably about torture, sure.”

Higazy later said, "I knew that I couldn't prove my innocence, and I knew that my family was in danger." He explained that "[t]he only thing that went through my head was oh, my God, I am screwed and my family's in danger. If I say this device is mine, I'm screwed and my family is going to be safe. If I say this device is not mine, I’m screwed and my family’s in danger. And Agent Templeton made it quite clear that cooperate had to mean saying something else other than this device is not mine.”

Higazy explained why he feared for his family:

The Egyptian government has very little tolerance for anybody who is —they’re suspicious of being a terrorist. To give you an idea, Saddam’s security force—as they later on were called his henchmen—a lot of them learned their methods and techniques in Egypt; torture, rape, some stuff would be even too sick to . . . . My father is 67. My mother is 61. I have a brother who developed arthritis at 19. He still has it today. When the word ‘torture’ comes at least for my brother, I mean, all they have to do is really just press on one of these knuckles. I couldn’t imagine them doing anything to my sister.

And Higazy added:

[L]et’s just say a lot of people in Egypt would stay away from a family that they know or they believe or even rumored to have anything to do with terrorists and by the same token, some people who actually could be —might try to get to them and somebody might actually make a connection. I wasn’t going to risk that. I wasn’t going to risk that, so I thought to myself what could I say that he would believe. What could I say that’s convincing? And I said okay.

There are two basic questions I have here. Just how many similar episodes don't we know about because the government was entirely successful in it's cover-up? And, Just what kind of people have we become?

Gee, Jay, How's That Intel Report Coming?

Monday Update: 69 82 Iraqis Killed, 73 75 Wounded

Are there no honest men (or women) in Washington?

Executives at the two biggest phone companies contributed more than $42,000 in political donations to Senator John D. Rockefeller IV this year while seeking his support for legal immunity for businesses participating in National Security Agency eavesdropping.

The surge in contributions came from a Who's Who of executives at the companies, AT&T and Verizon, starting with the chief executives and including at least 50 executives and lawyers at the two utilities, according to campaign finance reports.

So, I guess that means that the administration gets exactly what it wants in the FISA capitulation bipartisan compromise bill, including immunity for the telecos. Chalk another one up for Cheney. His pet Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee has come through for him again, with a little help in the spare change department. For a Rockefeller, this guy comes cheap.

More on Jello Jay under the fold.


I mean, didn't you think that it was all too convenient that Jay Rockefeller (D-Verizon) always seemed to cave when it looked like standing up to the dodges, lies and secrecy of the administration was the right prescription. Now the excuse is that they're too busy looking the other way on domestic spying to stand up to President 24%.

Well, now we know. don't we. They never were going to seriously look into the manipulation of intel leading up to the war and release the so-called Phase II report. You did hear that they were "shelving" that, didn't you?

The Phase II investigation is supposed to focus on two things: "examining the role of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans and...contrasting the statements of public officials with what the intelligence community was saying at the time."

Oh, that's right. I forgot it was just supposed to quietly go away and only live on in myth, like the Kennedy assassination investigation into that magic bullet thingy. But come on. I don't need Jay Rockefeller to tell me they fixed the intelligence around the policy -- that they were going to trump up some reason to go to war against Iraq even before 9/11. They didn't need Curveball to con them into invading. He was just conveniently available to add to their house of cards.

Of course in a nation where 33% of the people STILL believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11, and 41% are pretty sure there was some kind of direct connection between the hijackers and Iraq, people like me will always believe that Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Elliot Abrams cooked up enough smoke and mirrors at Cheney's direction to make Bush believe what HE will always believe -- that there was some sort of rational explanation why we went into Iraq in the first place.

No doubt in some twisted corners, twisting the intelligence was seen as a patriotic duty.

Allowing this administration and their buddies to get off -- again -- scott free, is beyond the usualy spinelessness of the Democratic Leadership, something we've grown accustomed to ever since Pelosi's "Off the Table" moment. But hey, I've always wondered what a guy named Rockefeller was doing in the Democratic Party anyway. True, his clan were never really considered true conservatives, and 42 Grand is chump change to the Rockefeller family.

But a populist? Someone who was going to "take it to the man," he is not. BooMan is livid about the Intel Committee finding better things to do . . . than their job . . .

I call bullshit. Where is the urgency? You call this 'absolute committment'? I call it a total whitewash. At this point we should be moving onto Phase III: How the Intelligence Community is using psychological operations to maintain support for a failed war. And Phase IV: How the intelligence is being fixed around the policy of obliterating Iran.

We've seen this before...it was called Iran-Contra, and it was far less serious that what we are facing now. I saw Fred Thompson, on a post-debate show last night, tell Alan Colmes that Iran is trying to take over the entire Middle East and that we are therefore justified in spending hundreds of billions on discretionary defense spending. He told Colmes 'to read something' and then he might understand that our budget problems are all about entitlements and have nothing to do with preventing the 1000-year Persian empire.

The Republicans are out there in some alternate reality...a reality that has no connection to reality. Their ideology is dangerous. And the Democrats are covering their ass.

This has to stop.

Thanks to Avedon, you can read a little bit more on Rockefellers new BFF's at Democracy Now.

What's Really The Turkey Story?

Drugs, guns, cash, genocide, helicopters, state secrets, al Qaeda and 9/11 connections, corruption at the highest levels. Speakers of the House, different ones from different parties, sit on a resolution pronouncing the 1915 slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians a genocide right before it's to be presented to Congress for almost certain passage.

Is Turkey where the thread starts, the one that can be pulled to unravel the whole diabolical plot? Or is it just a fantasy? More likely something in between, revelations that could expose mendacity, greed and incompetence some very important people would pay anything to just go away.

Booman speculates Dennis Hastert's imminent resignation from Congress may have something to do with it, and he cites the usually incoherent Sibel Edmonds as the connection point -- Sibel considers herself the most gagged US citizen in history. Like the man who knew too much about our seemingly sinister dealings with Pakistan, Edmonds was at the right place and the right time, knowing how to speak the right language to learn things some very powerful people don't want exposed to the light of day.

It may be even bigger than that.

Although she meanders about what she learned as a translator of wiretaps on various, nefarious Turkish characters, her revelations -- allegations against some of the most powerful people in our midst -- especially the non-action taken by our government to follow up on her evidence while taking great pains to stifle her is extremely suspicious. Too much for mere coincidence. There's something there, something the secretive Bush administration doesn't want us to learn.

She reported her story directly to investigators that Hastert, who was going forward on a genocide resolution in 2000 just like the current vote, was tabled at the last minute. The wiretaps she translated concerned the price the Turks thought necessary to get Hastert to kill the resolution was $500,000 -- but the F.B.I. classified the results of the investigation and Edmonds was further shut down by the little used state-secrets privilege invoked by the Bush administration.

What exactly are her allegations? Frankly, her rambling discourse makes is hard to nail down, but Shayana Kadidal, one of the lead attorneys on the Center for Constitutional Rights' challenge to the NSA domestic surveillance program does an admirable job:

What was it she was trying to tell her supervisors that got her fired? Among other things: that a translator sent to Guantánamo to translate Farsi detainee interviews didn't speak that language, and that foreign diplomats suspected of spying in the U.S. were having their wiretaps translated by their own relatives who worked for the FBI. Rather than let those serious national security breaches see the light of day (and perhaps become subjects of an embarrassing outside investigation), the FBI fired her, and then successfully managed to deprive her of her vindication in court, courtesy of the state secrets privilege.

Kadidal documents the evolution of the state-secrets doctrine, something so foreign to the spirit of American jurisprudence it is no surprise it was derived from foreign law, not Congressional statutes. "What has experience taught us about the privilege in practice? Sadly, five decades of living with it has shown that the privilege is frequently invoked to cover up executive mistakes." You want to talk about "activist judges?" Talk about the one's carrying water for Bush/Cheney and their efforts to keep us all mushrooms -- kept in the dark and fed bullshit. They've enabled a return to tyranny unseen since Henry IIIV.

The state-secrets doctrine is bad law. Always has been. And as the conservative jurist Edmond Burke said, "Bad Laws are the worst sort of tyranny."