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Topic: The Unmentionable Turd Floating in the Presidential Hot Tub. (Read 805 times) |
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Hermit
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The Unmentionable Turd Floating in the Presidential Hot Tub.
« on: 2007-07-03 19:21:40 » |
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"Bush said he had weighed his decision carefully to erase Libby's prison time for lying and conspiracy. He said the jury's conviction should stand but the prison term was too severe." - MSNBC
No report I have seen has raised the issue that the reason Libby's sentence was so severe was that his lies and misdirections effectively made it impossible to investigate, and if warranted, to charge, Cheney and potentially Bush, with "High Crimes and Misdemeanors". Which means that Bush is acting to shelter somebody who saved his administration from due process, thereby once again thoroughly subverting the rule of law. It also, quite unsurprisingly, means that Bush is stating that he disagrees that he and Cheney should be investigated for their massive breaches of US and International law, including the Wilson leaks which were clearly initiated by at least Cheney, and which Bush repeatedly lied about, claiming that authorisation for the leaks had not come from his administration.
While perhaps not unexceptional, I thought this latest omission by the relentlessly pro-the-powerful, US Press, worth noting.
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Hermit
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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Re:The Unmentionable Turd Floating in the Presidential Hot Tub.
« Reply #1 on: 2007-07-04 04:16:00 » |
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[Homer]<reading horoscope> "Today will be a day like any other day"...Doh! It just gets worse and worse!
[Blunderov] Heart of darkness time again. Send psychotics, criminals, mental deficients, fugitives from justice, rapists and the factory floor sweepings of every continent to the most violent region on earth. Add powerful mind altering drugs wherever possible and retire to a safe distance. Later when it all goes horribly wrong, claim deep moral outrage and demand the death penalty.
I'm so impressed by American justice. Fuck yeah.
yahoo.com
Death penalty sought in Iraqi slayings By BRETT BARROUQUERE, Associated Press Writer
Tue Jul 3, 7:16 PM ET
LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Federal prosecutors filed notice Tuesday that they will seek the death penalty if former soldier Steven D. Green is convicted of killing an Iraqi family and raping a 14-year-old girl.
The notice, filed in U.S. District Court, cites 12 alleged offenses related to the slayings, including that the deaths were premeditated, involved sexual abuse and were committed with a firearm.
Green, a former 101st Airborne Division soldier, was indicted Nov. 1 in the rape and murder of the girl and the slayings of three others in her family in March 2006.
"The defense is obviously disappointed that Attorney General (Alberto) Gonzales is seeking to execute a former soldier," Green's public defender, Patrick Bouldin, said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.
The attorney general has to approve all federal death penalty cases.
Bouldin declined to provide further comment.
Green was charged in a federal indictment with conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to commit aggravated sexual abuse, murder, aggravated sexual abuse, aggravated child sexual abuse, obstruction of justice and four counts of use of a firearm in a crime of violence.
Green, a 22-year-old former private first class from Midland, Texas, served 11 months with the 101st Airborne Division, which is based at Fort Campbell on the Tennessee state line. He received an honorable discharge and left the Army in May 2006. He was discharged because of an "anti-social personality disorder," according to military officials and court documents.
He is being tried in civilian court in Paducah, Ky., because he was discharged before he was charged. No trial date has been set.
Green's father, John Green, declined to comment Tuesday.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Marisa Ford also declined to comment on the filing.
Justice Department spokesman Bryan Sierra said he could not confirm whether any other soldier has been tried as a civilian for crimes committed while serving in Iraq.
Green was arrested in June 2006 in North Carolina as he traveled after attending the funeral of a soldier who was kidnapped and killed in Iraq, investigators said. Since then, he has been held in Kentucky without bond.
Three soldiers already have been convicted in military court for their roles in the attack in Mahmoudiya, a village about 20 miles south of Baghdad. A court-martial for a fourth soldier is scheduled July 30.
But Tuesday's notice means Green could face the harshest punishment among the five men charged.
Two soldiers avoided the death penalty by making plea agreements with military prosecutors for lesser sentences ranging from 90 to 100 years. A third soldier was sentenced to five years in prison but will not serve more than 27 months. Each of the soldiers agreed to help prosecutors prepare a case against Green.
The rape of the Iraqi girl and the slayings of her and three family members were among the worst in a series of alleged attacks on civilians and other abuses by military personnel in Iraq.
Investigators said the soldiers set fire to the girl's body to destroy evidence.
Soldiers have testified in military courts-martial and investigation hearings that the 13-month tour for Green's unit, the 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, was bloody and grueling.
Dozens were killed in the unit's yearlong deployment and half of the battalion, including Green, sought help for combat stress.
An Associated Press investigation in January found that an Army psychiatry team diagnosed Green as a threat to Iraqi civilians four months before the rape and murders.
According to military documents, Green was treated with drugs to regulate his mood before returning to duty in a violent stretch of desert in the southern Baghdad suburbs known as the "Triangle of Death."
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Blunderov
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Re:The Unmentionable Turd Floating in the Presidential Hot Tub.
« Reply #2 on: 2007-07-04 04:26:23 » |
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[Blunderov] (This comment from Majikthise was pertinent too I thought.)
Scooter scoots
Isn't it odd how the justice system in Texas never made a shadow of a mistake when it was handing out the death penalty while Bush was Governor, but the very first time a high-ranking official in his administration gets nailed and sent to the pokey, the sentence was just too harsh?
Oh well. Bush himself said it back in 2004:
"If there's a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is," Bush told reporters at an impromptu news conference during a fund-raising stop in Chicago, Illinois. "If the person has violated law, that person will be taken care of."
Scooter was taken care of, that's for sure.
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Hermit
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Re:The Unmentionable Turd Floating in the Presidential Hot Tub.
« Reply #3 on: 2007-07-04 12:48:18 » |
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Actually, I agree with Bush (who is clearly out of contact with *any* kind of reality) that American penology is generally vicious, harsh and brutally excessive (as clearly shown by the US having the highest per capita incarceration rate, more than ten times that of other industrialized nations) and vastly exceeding historical American incarceration levels when crime rates were much higher than they are today.
This of course suggests that a significant question is why Bush is not intervening when it his not his co-conspirators being treated too harshly.
Apropos of something, Patrick Foy writing on the Taki's Top Drawer (and appended belowe), has written a delightfully reasonable - yet appropriately spicy article on the issue I raised above. He suggests that Bush had no option but to keep Libby out of jail, lest deals be made with prosecutors revealing further malfeasance.
Kind Regards
Hermit
“Scooter’s” Can of Worms
Source: Taki's Top Drawer
Authors: Patrick Foy
Dated: 2007-07-03
Since we last addressed the topic, Irving “Scooter” Libby was assigned a federal prison number. It certainly looked like he was headed for a Federal correctional facility, all because he refused to tell the truth about what was happening inside the Cheney Regency in the aftermath of “Operation Iraqi Freedom”. But now--surprise! surprise!--Scooter has just been handed a stay-out-of-jail card by the White House. Surely none of Taki’s Top Drawer readership will be amused or amazed. The free pass is perfectly reasonable in view of the close relationship among the co-conspirators involved.
In response to certain readers’ comments to my Bush & Cheney: It’s Time to Resign article of June 26th [Hermit: Another article worth reading], I wrote, “Libby’s conviction convicts Cheney directly and Bush indirectly of malfeasance--unless we assume that Bush is totally out of the loop. I see no choice for Bush but to pardon Libby. I do not see how Cheney can allow his chief henchman to sit in jail. Libby might talk to prosecutors or, almost as bad, write a tell-almost-all book.” In short, this “commutation” of Scooter’s jail time was to be expected, for the simple reason that those handing out the free pass may well have been complicit in the crimes for which Scooter was convicted. Under these circumstances, sending “Scooter” to the Big House would have been unseemly.
I suggested, instead, that Cheney and G.W. resign. They have chosen to issue a commutation, with a full pardon probably coming later. This commutation is in contrast to “Bubba” Clinton’s pardon on January 20th, 2001 of “Scooter” Libby’s long-time client, the New York/Israeli fraudster Marc Rich. That outrage came as a bolt out of the blue to most innocent bystanders. What both pardons do have in common, of course, is corruption and brazenness. They stink to high heaven, and for good reason. We are witnessing rot at the very top of the American political Establishment. The good news is that it might wake up and shake up whatever honest individuals might be left in Washington and in the country at large.
The kickoff to the current “Scooter” affair was the outing of CIA undercover agent Valerie Plame Wilson. The CIA requested in the summer of 2003 that the Justice Department look into the matter. It could normally be assumed that high-level White House officials would not be involved in blowing the cover of a CIA operative who has been working across town, specializing in global non-proliferation of WMD. Most especially, it might be expected for this Administration, because G.W. and Cheney had loudly proclaimed the necessity of going to war to protect the country from WMD, albeit nonexistent ones. Certainly few could conceive that such mischief directed against the CIA might happen at the direction of, or in connivance with, the Vice President of the United States--and for purely inside-the-beltway political reasons. All such assumptions, expectations and imaginings would be a mistake.
“Scooter’s” supporters like to argue that it was the rough-and-tumble, voluble Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, who was in fact the guy who off-handedly spilled the beans to reporter Robert Novak when he informed Novak that Valerie Plame was married to Ambassador Joseph Wilson and that she was a CIA agent--so what’s the big deal? Something like that did happen, granted, but it is almost beside the point when viewed in context. The Justice Department investigation quickly turned upon the larger issue of just what kind of nefarious campaign of disinformation and character assassination was being conducted behind the scenes at the White House in the wake of Wilson’s revelations in the New York Times with respect to the bogus connection between Niger “yellowcake” uranium and the regime of Saddam Hussein. The White House, meaning the Regent Cheney, went into attack mode just as soon as that article hit the newsstands and the talk shows. What Wilson asserted instantly deflated the WMD threat of Saddam Hussein almost to zero. “Scooter” was the Regent’s chief-of-staff as well as an assistant to the cut-out occupying the Oval Office. It is reasonable to assume that “Scooter” was engrossed in the vindictive campaign to discredit Wilson and his wife, and that he was doing it at the direction of Cheney.
Thanks to god-awful bad luck for Cheney and his “neocon” network in control of the Executive Branch, Federal prosecutor Patrick “Bulldog” Fitzgerald ended up in charge of the investigation. Last Friday, June 29th, the Associated Press reported that Fitzgerald soon realized there was something peculiar going on. There was more to the case than just the outing of Valerie Plame. The “Bulldog” was confronted with the fact that he, his staff and the FBI were being routinely snookered by “Scooter”, who was arguably the third or maybe even the second most powerful individual inside the White House. Fitzgerald no doubt wondered why “Scooter” would want to deceive the grand jury and the FBI, especially since he (Fitzgerald) already knew about Armitage’s gossipy conversation with Novak. To quote the AP:
Midway through his CIA leak investigation, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was pretty sure of two things: First, he wasn’t going to charge White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby with revealing a covert operative. And second, he thought Libby’s testimony was a bunch of lies.
Documents unsealed in the case Friday revealed that when Fitzgerald subpoenaed New York Times reporter Judith Miller in 2005, he was already building a perjury and obstruction case against Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. ‘Libby’s account of conversations has been largely inconsistent with every other material witness to date,’ Fitzgerald wrote in court documents.
As noted in passing on June 26th, the only conceivable reason for “Scooter” not to tell the truth, to deliberately commit perjury, would be that he was attempting to cover something up for his boss, the Regent Cheney. We now know that Regent Cheney occupies a separate universe within the Executive Branch of the Federal Government, answerable to no one, including the FBI, the Congress and the U.S. Constitution. This is not speculation. We know it to be true because “the Office of the Vice President” has stated as much, only in different words. This being the case, why should Cheney’s chief of staff be expected to be straightforward with any outside inquiry? Like his boss, “Scooter” would feel the same entitlement to stonewall, conceal and obfuscate. It would only be natural. In fact, it would be a badge of honor in service to the cause.
And what was there to conceal that was so important that it required perjury and obstruction of justice, both of which deliberately stymied Fitzgerald from getting to the bottom of the affair, which prevented him from connecting the dots linking Karl “Valerie Plame is fair game” Rove with the talking figurehead in the Oval Office with Armitage over at the State Department and back to “Scooter” Libby and to the all-powerful but completely unaccountable Regent himself, Dick Cheney? Perhaps what these characters needed to hide at all cost was the fraudulent nature of the war itself, in all its “neocon” ramifications, the very subject about which Ambassador Wilson had just barely touched upon. Perhaps “Scooter” and Regent Cheney and Cheney’s Cabal were terrified that “Bulldog” Fitzgerald might stumble upon a can of worms, and inadvertently open it. About which, more anon.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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