Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
  
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Torture Scandal May Cripple Bush
« on: 2007-12-22 14:36:17 » |
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[Blunderov] Hope springs eternal - could this be the issue to sink Bush? I doubt it; it seems scandal fatigue has immunised his administration against the usual consequences of folly.
With a year to run, and in view of the supine Judascrat 5th columnists, perhaps the best that can be done is to overload the criminal unregime with credible and serious legal threats for the remainder of its term. Perhaps further mischief can be prevented in this way.
Did anybody else smell a large whiskered rat when they saw the report of the fire in Cheney's offices at the White House?
Picture: Fire in the Hole
Ah Prometheus! Patron saint of failing restaurateurs and shady politicians the world over. Perhaps Cheney has been taking the correspondence course of our local hero Jacob Zuma who has lighted the the way, so to speak, of the gentle art of selective firestarting ; somehow fires have had a habit of breaking out in his premises and habitations shortly before they were to be raided by authorities in search of evidence of corruption. Strange but true.
Getting back to Cheney, it would surprise me to learn that nothing more than carpeting and fabric had been consumed by the flames. I'm betting that some documents were involved too. Everyone knows how incendiary these can sometimes be.
http://www.countercurrents.org/gelken221207.htm
Torture Scandal May Cripple Bush
By Chris Gelken
22 December, 2007
Countercurrents.org
The President is playing dumb and denying everything, and White House lawyer Joseph Hunt assumed an aggrieved air and asserted that it was “inconceivable” that the missing Central Intelligence Agency interrogation video tapes could possibly have contained images of torture.
Well, to be more precise, he said they did not contain evidence of torture at Guantanamo Bay. Whether or not they carried sordid images of waterboarding and other coercive interrogations carried out at one of America’s secret foreign gulags was not made immediately clear.
But since the tapes in question apparently did come from elsewhere, and Judge Henry Kennedy’s 2005 order on preserving evidence related only to Gitmo-based interrogations, then it would appear there is no case to answer.
So has the Bush administration managed to dodge the bullet?
“I honestly don’t think so,” Jeff Steinberg, Senior Editor of Executive Intelligence Review, told PressTV in a televised interview. “I don’t think that technicality has a great deal of credibility. Number two, I think the overall situation is that once again we finding the Bush administration engaged in a patter of cover-up, deception.”
Steinberg said the mere fact that they are again claiming that waterboarding, which most people have come to accept was depicted on the tapes, is not torture. “That,” he said, “is simply not a matter for the opinion of Vice President Dick Cheney or his top lawyer, David Addington.”
Steinberg explained that it is a principle of international law that waterboarding in a form of torture, and warned of an impending storm of denial, obfuscation and downright lies.
“I expect that we’re going to see this as yet another pile up of cover-up and corruption by the White House,” he said, “a steady stream of scandals very reminiscent of Watergate.”
The White House lawyer’s assertion that the tapes contained nothing that the administration should be ashamed of is essentially contradicted by statements made earlier in the week by a retired CIA agent in an interview with ABC’s John Ross.
The former agent described how captured al-Qaeda chief Abu Zubaydah had broken after just 35-seconds worth of the treatment that simulates drowning. The agent, however, denied taking part in the interrogation or knowing that the process was being video taped. He also denied any knowledge of the tapes’ disposal.
Steinberg told PressTV the interrogation described by the former agent could possibly be the subject of the tapes, but couldn’t know for certain. One thing Steinberg was clear about, was his belief that at least some of the information that is causing so much embarrassment in the Oval Office was leaked by the CIA itself.
“I believe, and my sources in Washington tell me, that some of the information that has come out and has resulted in the latest scandal has come from within the CIA. People inside there, who detested the fact that people ‘went off the reservation’ and violated the law,” he said.
Steinberg said many agents were angered that intelligence was cooked in the run up to the Iraq War, “and my understanding is there is a certain kind of internal house cleaning aspect of what’s going on here.”
Steinberg said he expects to see a lot more information coming out and revelations of far more renditions, examples of torture and other illegal activity than has so far been reported or hinted at.
“And I think we are also going to discover that not very much useful intelligence came out of all of this,” he said, “because these techniques inherently do not work. People who are being put through a near death experience will say anything, make up anything to escape the torture.”
Physical torture, Steinberg said, is an inherently flawed method used by an inherently flawed administration, “and a lot of chickens are coming home to roost right now and I think its all for the good.”
Dogged by scandals at the notorious Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, under pressure over failures in Iraq, and embarrassed by new intelligence estimates that undermined the administration’s efforts to bully Iran into submission, the White House is under siege.
Steinberg says efforts to smother this latest disgrace will be extensive.
“I am virtually certain that we are going to find this whole cover-up went to the highest levels of the Bush administration,” he said, “All of the policy decisions related to the denial of information to Congress and other investigative agencies came directly out of the office of the Vice President.”
But keeping secrets is difficult, especially when one’s own neck is at stake.
“I would not be surprised to find out a few months from now that there is evidence of some kind that President Bush himself lied at his press conference yesterday [Thursday] and that to one degree or other was fully aware and informed about those tapes and how and when they were destroyed.”
Steinberg said he would not rule out the possibility of the administration facing legal sanction, the threat of impeachment or continuing criminal investigation after the incumbents leave office.
“There will clearly be an attempt to find a scapegoat,” Steinberg said, “but we’ve been around this block so many times over the past seven years that the credibility of the White House and top government officials is near zero.”
Steinberg is cautiously optimistic that this time the administration may have gone too far. “I honestly, at this point, do not think there is a high probability they are going to get away with it. I might be being optimistic, but that’s my take on the mood around the city and around the country.”
http://mparent7777-2.blogspot.com/
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Over 1000 lawyers demand hearings into unconstitutional and potentially criminal activity by Bush Administration
BLOG | Posted 12/21/2007
Lawyers Stepping Up
Katrina vanden Heuvel
We are lawyers in the United States of America. As such, we have all taken an oath obligating us to defend the Constitution and the rule of law…. We believe the Bush administration has committed numerous offenses against the Constitution and may have violated federal laws…. Moreover, the administration has blatantly defied congressional subpoenas, obstructing constitutional oversight …. Thus, we call on House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers and Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy to launch hearings into the possibility that crimes have been committed by this administration in violation of the Constitution…. We call for the investigations to go where they must, including into the offices of the President and the Vice President. -- American Lawyers Defending the Constitution
Over one thousand lawyers – including former Governor Mario Cuomo and former Reagan administration official Bruce Fein – have signed onto the above statement demanding wide-ranging investigative hearings into unconstitutional and potentially criminal activity by the Bush administration.
In a conference call with reporters yesterday, Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and winner of the 2007 Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship, said: "The majority of lawyers in this country understand that the Bush administration has really gone off the page of constitutional rights and off the page of fundamental rights, and is willing to push the Congress to restore those rights." Ratner said he was "dismayed" that a Democratic majority has failed "to push on key illegalities… the torture program, and now the destruction of the tapes involving the torture program; the warrantless wiretapping, the denial of habeas corpus, the secret sites/rendition program, special trials, and of course what we now know is the firing of US Attorneys scandal…. The minimal that absolutely is needed to get us back on the page of law is to have serious investigative hearings that go up the chain of command and figure out who is responsible for what."
Ratner noted that even with regard to the US attorney's investigations, where Congressional committees held Harriet Miers, Josh Bolten, and Karl Rove in contempt, leadership has failed to enforce these actions by bringing the resolutions to a vote. "Just announcing that investigations will be held and subpoenas will be issued is terribly insufficient unless Congress is willing to enforce the subpoenas by issuing contempt citations," Ratner said. "Congress has a constitutional duty to oversee the activities of the executive branch and our entire system of government is threatened when Congress simply folds before an obstinate executive. Issuing contempt citations against Bolten, Miers, and Rove should be Congress's first order of business in 2008."
Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild, discussed the administration's torture program violating three US-ratified treaties and the US torture statute; the illegal War in Iraq violating the US-ratified UN Charter as a war of aggression; and Attorney General Michael Mukasey's conflict of interest in overseeing investigations into the torture program and the destruction of the CIA interrogations tapes.
Also speaking with reporters was Jesselyn Raddack, a former Justice Department ethics lawyer who served as an advisor during the interrogation of John Walker Lindh (the "American Taliban"). Raddack said, "My e-mails documented my advice against interrogating Lindh without a lawyer, and concluded that the FBI committed an ethics violation when it did so anyway. Both the CIA videotapes and my e-mails were destroyed, in part, because officials were concerned that they documented controversial interrogation methods that could put agency officials in legal jeopardy…. " Raddack pointed to the Department of Justice's investigations of Enron and Arthur Anderson for obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence, and the need for the same aggressive oversight and legal proceedings in these scandals.
This is a vital effort by those charged with defending our constitution, as Ratner said, "This lawyers' letter and the growing number of signatures we'll have on it, and prominent people – it's a way of saying to Congress, ‘You need some backbone. You need to have a serious investigation, wherever it might go, on these issues that really have taken the United States out of the mainstream of human rights.' It's absolutely critical… We've opened up the door to illegality…. Unless we have accountability on those illegalities, we're going to be facing a very bleak future in which fundamental rights will not really be obeyed."
Posted by CRIMES AND CORRUPTION OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER NEWS mparent7777 Marc Parent CCNWON at 8:48 AM
http://mparent7777-2.blogspot.com/2007/12/over-1000-lawyers-demand-hearings-into.html
www.gelken.com
chrisgelken.blogspot.com
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