April 10th, 2008
When will this group of thugs be criminally prosecuted for violation of international and domestic laws, not to mention the irreparable harm they’ve done to the reputation of our country?
Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned.
The officials also took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, were discussed and ultimately approved.
A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the meetings described them Thursday to the AP to confirm details first reported by ABC News on Wednesday. The intelligence official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the issue.
Between 2002 and 2003, the Justice Department issued several memos from its Office of Legal Counsel that justified using the interrogation tactics, including ones that critics call torture.
“If you looked at the timing of the meetings and the memos you’d see a correlation,” the former intelligence official said. Those who attended the dozens of meetings agreed that “there’d need to be a legal opinion on the legality of these tactics” before using them on al-Qaida detainees, the former official said.
[...]
The former intelligence official described Cheney and the top national security officials as deeply immersed in developing the CIA’s interrogation program during months of discussions over which methods should be used and when.
Anyone that still defends this group of thugs is either a sadist, has not been paying attention over the past seven years, or does not believe in the democratic liberal principles that founded America.
October 27th, 2007
From the department of “You gotta be shittin’ me…”
This summer the House Judiciary Committee launched an effort to collect tips from would-be whistleblowers in the Justice Department. The U.S. attorney firings scandal had shown that much was amiss in the Department, and with the danger of retaliation very real, the committee had set up a form on the committee’s website for people to blow the whistle privately about abuses there. Although the panel said it would not accept anonymous tips, it assured those who came forward that their identity would be held in the “strictest confidence.”
But in an email sent out today, the committee inadvertently sent the email addresses of all the would-be whistleblowers to everyone who had written in to the tipline. The committee email was sent to tipsters who had used the website form, including presumably whistleblowers themselves, and all of the recipients of the email were accidentally included in the “to:” field — instead of concealing those addresses with a so-called blind carbon copy or “bcc:”.
How is this even possible… the staff person that sent this out should be castrated and flogged.
October 11th, 2007
Yet one more example of why we like Jon Stewart, via CrooksandLiars.com:
CHENEY: You know, I think when the history books are written, that we will look back on this period of time and we will say, on 9/11, we really thought within six months, we would be attacked again, maybe six weeks. It’s been more than six years and that is not an accident. I think this administration - my husband and the President - deserve a lot of credit for that.
STEWART: Okay.
CHENEY: Good (laughter)
STEWART: Well, alright. There was, I mean, there was the anthrax thing. And then there was-well, you know, the first time they bombed the World Trade Center, it was eight years until we got attacked again. And they weren’t apparently doing anything…
CHENEY: Well, yes, but there were many attacks in between 1993 and the World Trade Centers coming down in 2001. Remember the USS Cole, for example. There were worldwide bombings going on, the bombings in embassies in Africa. So the terrorists weren’t reluctant to damage American interests and kill Americans. Friends?
STEWART: We are friends, it’s just…you know they have been doing that all these past six years. They’ve been…I mean, you know, the Spanish bombing and the English bombing and all the bombs in Iraq…
CHENEY: Yes, but I’m talking about American interests [emphasis added]
STEWART: Aren’t we interested in…? Alright, I assumed that they were our allies.
You gotta check out the video.
