White House Authorizes Torture?

In the news today is an article that claims just that. Read on for an excerpt...

The meetings were held in the White House Situation Room in the years immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks. Attending the sessions were Cheney, then-Bush aides Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

....snip.....

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., lambasted what he described as "yet another astonishing disclosure about the Bush administration and its use of torture."

"Who would have thought that in the United States of America in the 21st century, the top officials of the executive branch would routinely gather in the White House to approve torture?" Kennedy said in a statement. "Long after President Bush has left office, our country will continue to pay the price for his administration's renegade repudiation of the rule of law and fundamental human rights."

...snip...

Full Article Here

Wonkett on the OVP

Loved the Wonkette rap on the VP here: Linky

so much so that I want to put it here, at least in part. Enjoy...

The Cheney Story

Dick Cheney is so evil, the Post has started a blog about him. In a lengthy four-part series, the Post will lay bare the Dick Cheney story, and basically summarize and clarify everything we already know about him with but new, entertainingly terrifying anecdotes and interviews.

Like yesterday’s story of Dan Quayle visiting the new Veep in 2001:

“I said, ‘Dick, you know, you’re going to be doing a lot of this international traveling, you’re going to be doing all this political fundraising … you’ll be going to the funerals,’ ” Quayle said in an interview earlier this year. “I mean, this is what vice presidents do. I said, ‘We’ve all done it.’ “ Cheney “got that little smile,” Quayle said, and replied, “I have a different understanding with the president.”

Cheney was not content to sit around and wait for Bush to die — after all, Bush jogs, it could be years yet, and there’s only a limited supply of orphan blood to keep Dick on his swollen, clotted feet. Instead, Dick invented a new job for the Vice President. He would not be content to bang gavels in the Senate and appear on Celebrity Jeopardy, as his predecessors had.

Cheney preferred, and Bush approved, a mandate that gave him access to “every table and every meeting,” making his voice heard in “whatever area the vice president feels he wants to be active in,” Bolten said.

He keeps all his papers in ridiculous cartoon safes, and stamps every document that he sees with “Top Secret” — like even the lunch menu and those little certificates they hand out when the Little League World Series champions meet the president. He asserts that he is, himself, his own branch of government. Here, for a laugh, is how he responded to the collapse of the second tower on 9/11:

Cheney made no sound. “I remember turning my head and looking at the vice president, and his expression never changed,” said the witness, reading from a notebook of observations written that day. Cheney closed his eyes against the image for one long, slow blink.

While everyone else cried or shit their pants, Cheney decided to hire some lawyers, reinterpret constitutional law, and figure out how to get away with throwing away most of a century’s worth of war crimes precedent and policy.

As a couple other occasional stories have shown us, David Addington is the second-most evil man in the administration. Alberto Gonzales, as usual, comes off as a fucking moron willing to allow his name to be attached to any crazy document drafted by the OVP.

Dick Cheney also didn’t care about black people. A particuarly fun subplot of the first Bush term is the way NSA adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell never had any clue what the hell Cheney was doing, as he took complete control over policies supposedly under the purviews of their agencies. All documents prepared for Rice were secretly funneled to Cheney, and she and Powell seemed to learn what their administration was up to primarily by watching CNN.

Today’s installment is all about torture. If you happen to be interrogating someone who may not have anything to do with al-Qaeda, or the Taliban, or the Iraqi insurgency, or maybe just looks funny, it’s very important reading. FYI, you can do almost anything you want to him.

That same day, Aug. 1, 2002, Yoo signed off on a second secret opinion, the contents of which have never been made public. According to a source with direct knowledge, that opinion approved as lawful a long list of specific interrogation techniques proposed by the CIA — including waterboarding, a form of near-drowning that the U.S. government classified as a war crime in 1947. The opinion drew the line against one request: threatening to bury a prisoner alive.

We can’t believe those left-wing loonies in Cheney’s office would dare to restrict our boys from using every tool at their disposal during a time of war. If the CIA wants to cover suspected terrorists in honey and bury them up to their necks then goddammit they must have a pretty good reason to! Jack Bauer blah blah!

(Rice and Powell learned about that memo two years later, after reading about it in the Post — they are totally the comic relief of this whole story.)

Thankfully, even as Cheney’s power ebbs, ever so slightly, in these final years of the Bush presidency, as he finds himself often reduced to merely standing in bushes hundreds of court-mandated feet from journalists assembled at press conferences, even as reasonable-by-comparison officials join the administration, even as Bush himself has seemed to soften his “I can torture anyone I want for any reason” stance, we can all rest easy knowing that the damage he’s down to our nation, and the entire world, will not soon heal in this lifetime.

A year after Bush announced at a news conference that “I’d like to close Guantanamo,” plans to expand it are proceeding. Senior officials said Cheney, standing nearly alone, has turned back strong efforts — by Rice, England, new Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and former Bush speechwriter Mike Gerson, among others — to give the president what he said he wants.

Also he totally shot an old man in the face last year just for fun.

Angler [WP]

George Tenet interviewed by John Stewart

Enjoy

George Washington's Blog: 9/11 in Review

Here is a perspective that some will be familiar with, and others will not.

George Washington's Blog

Rove Superhighway of Backdoor WH Access?

It appears that the RNC set up a second system for communication for key WH officials to use in order to avoid anything getting on the record and to avoid the laws which are meant to guarantee access to what our President is doing. Shocking? or not noteworthy? Well, when the likes of Abramoff are the people getting access to the WH through the system you have to wonder what else has been going on...

Full Article

Snippits below..

When Karl Rove and his top deputies arrived at the White House in 2001, the Republican National Committee provided them with laptop computers and other communication devices to be used alongside their government-issued equipment.

The back-channel e-mail and paging system, paid for and maintained by the RNC, was designed to avoid charges that had vexed the Clinton White House — that federal resources were being used inappropriately for political campaign purposes.

Now, that dual computer system is creating new embarrassment and legal headaches for the White House, the Republican Party and Rove's once-vaunted White House operation.

Democrats say evidence suggests the RNC e-mail system was used for political and government policy matters in violation of federal record preservation and disclosure rules.

In addition, Democrats point to a handful of e-mails obtained through ongoing inquiries suggesting the system may have been used to conceal such activities as contacts with lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who was convicted on bribery charges and is now in prison for fraud.

Democratic congressional investigators are beginning to demand access to this RNC-White House communications system, which was used not only by Rove's office but by several top officials elsewhere in the White House.

The prospect that such communication might become public has further jangled the nerves of an already rattled Bush White House.

Some Republicans believe that the huge number of e-mails — many written hastily, with no thought that they might become public — may contain more detailed and unguarded inside information about the administration's far-flung political activities than has previously been available.

"There is concern about what may be in these e-mails," said one GOP activist who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject.

"The system was created with the best intentions," said former Assistant White House Press Secretary Adam Levine, who was assigned an RNC laptop and BlackBerry when he worked at the White House in 2002. But, he added, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, last week formally requested access to broad categories of RNC-White House e-mails.

...snip...

Waxman told RNC Chairman Mike Duncan in a letter that such exchanges "indicated that in some instances White House officials were using nongovernment accounts specifically to avoid creating a record of communications" that could be reviewed by congressional committees or released under the Presidential Records Act.

..snip..

Levine, the former Bush press aide, said he saw senior White House colleagues, including Rove and his top staff, moving fluidly between the two computer systems, which often sat on officials' desks along with their government computers.

But Levine said he found the two computers with their separate purposes and log-in procedures confusing and inefficient. So he quietly slid his RNC laptop into a desk drawer, deciding to use the telephone rather than e-mail to communicate anything that was not considered official government business.

"In retrospect," he said last week, "I was lucky."

Martial Law: Now Easier Than Ever...

From and Editorial in the New York Times on February 19, 2007...

Original Article Here

A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night. So it was with a provision quietly tucked into the enormous defense budget bill at the Bush administration’s behest that makes it easier for a president to override local control of law enforcement and declare martial law.

The provision, signed into law in October, weakens two obscure but important bulwarks of liberty. One is the doctrine that bars military forces, including a federalized National Guard, from engaging in law enforcement. Called posse comitatus, it was enshrined in law after the Civil War to preserve the line between civil government and the military. The other is the Insurrection Act of 1807, which provides the major exemptions to posse comitatus. It essentially limits a president’s use of the military in law enforcement to putting down lawlessness, insurrection and rebellion, where a state is violating federal law or depriving people of constitutional rights.

The newly enacted provisions upset this careful balance. They shift the focus from making sure that federal laws are enforced to restoring public order. Beyond cases of actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or to any “other condition.”

Changes of this magnitude should be made only after a thorough public airing. But these new presidential powers were slipped into the law without hearings or public debate. The president made no mention of the changes when he signed the measure, and neither the White House nor Congress consulted in advance with the nation’s governors.

There is a bipartisan bill, introduced by Senators Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and Christopher Bond, Republican of Missouri, and backed unanimously by the nation’s governors, that would repeal the stealthy revisions. Congress should pass it. If changes of this kind are proposed in the future, they must get a full and open debate.

US Attorney Ordered to Resign

In political news...lots of US Attorneys fired by this Administration in the Western United States. Hmm, is it coincidental that the West Coast is Blue territory?

I don't see why the branches are enmeshed where it comes to US Attorneys...seems counter to checks and balances.

The implication surrounding these dismissals, however, is rumored to be a preemptive move on the part of an administration that is increasingly worried about being held accountable for their actions in a legal manner.

Source Article Here
Another Article Here

Former U.S. Attorney John McKay said his resignation was ordered by the Bush administration without explanation seven months after he received a favorable job evaluation.

"I was ordered to resign as U.S. attorney on Dec. 7 by the Justice Department," McKay said Wednesday in a telephone interview from the Washington, D.C. "I was given no explanation. I certainly was told of no performance issues."

McKay, who had led the Justice Department's Western Washington office, previously said only that he was resigning because it was time for him to move on.

His comments came one day after Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty acknowledged to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Justice Department had fired seven U.S. attorneys in the West in the past year, most of them for "performance-related" reasons he would not divulge.

The dismissals have been heavily criticized by Democratic lawmakers and others.

"John McKay has worked diligently for our region and it is deeply disconcerting that he could have been let go for political reasons," said Sen. Patty Murray (news, bio, voting record), D-Wash.

Robert Lasnik, the chief federal judge for the Western District of Washington, said he and fellow judges could not understand the firing and were dismayed that the Justice Department implied there was anything wrong with McKay's performance.

"This is unanimous among the judges: John McKay was a superb U.S. attorney," Lasnik said. "For the Justice Department to suggest otherwise is just not fair."

All U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president and may be dismissed for any reason, or no reason at all.

A provision in the reauthorization of the Patriot Act that took effect in March allows the attorney general to appoint U.S. attorneys indefinitely without Senate confirmation. Some Democrats have complained that the White House is using that provision to reward political allies by replacing U.S. attorneys who fall out of favor.

The Seattle Times reported Thursday that in his last performance review, McKay received a highly favorable report from a 27-member team from the Justice Department's Evaluation and Review Staff.

House Panel Seeks Administration's Documents

A House Panel headed by Democratic Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman says that the White House Administration is not handing over documents that have been requested in their inquiry into how the administration has handled government scientific reports having to do with climate and the environment.

The allegations are that the administration has strong-armed scientists into taking out mention of global warming and climate change from reports and in other instances inserting their own verbiage and altering that of the scientists to change the meaning of the entire report.

Link Here

Excerpt to follow:

Two private advocacy groups, meanwhile, presented to the panel a survey of government climate scientists showing that many of them say they have been subjected to political pressure aimed at downplaying the threat of global warming.

The groups presented a survey that shows two in five of the 279 climate scientists who responded to a questionnaire complained that some of their scientific papers had been edited in a way that changed their meaning. Nearly half of the 279 said in response to another question that at some point they had been told to delete reference to "global warming" or "climate change" from a report.

The questionnaire was sent by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private advocacy group. The report also was based on "firsthand experiences" described in interviews with the Government Accountability Project, which helps government whistleblowers, lawmakers were told.

New Executive Powers?

In the news today, our fearless leader has proclaimed the power to do what he wants with American's mail despite the law that says otherwise. His rationale is the same one used to defend warrant-less wiretapping. Now it is warrant-less postal snooping.

Full Article at the New York Daily News

President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant, the Daily News has learned.

The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open people's mail under emergency conditions.

That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it.

Bush's move came during the winter congressional recess and a year after his secret domestic electronic eavesdropping program was first revealed. It caught Capitol Hill by surprise.