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.
March 31st, 2008
As if I didn’t have sufficient cause to worry about all the private info I’ve willingly handed over to Google (oh, how I love Gmail and Google calendar and Google Docs and Google Apps and Google sitemaps and Google Analytics and… and …), I now have to wonder about this match that’s straight out of 1984:
Google has been recruited by US intelligence agencies to help them better process and share information they gather about suspects.
Agencies such as the National Security Agency have bought servers on which Google-supplied search technology is used to process information gathered by networks of spies around the world.
Google is also providing the search features for a Wikipedia-style site, called Intellipedia, on which agents post information about their targets that can be accessed and appended by colleagues, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
All right, let’s set my paranoia aside, and admit that organizing and building a wiki-style tool for the intelligence community is pretty cool and, too, one of those, “Shit, why weren’t they doing that already?” kind of moments.
And now, back to dealing with my paranoia, Shit, just what else will Google, NSA, CIA and the Telecomms collaborate on next, and just how badly will we get screwed?
April 8th, 2006
In keeping with the Norman Rockwell theme we’ve seen over the past couple of days around the liberal blogsphere, initiated by Harry Taylor’s Freedom of Speech moment, Dood Abides, over at DailyKos.com, brings us “No Leaking”:
“No Leaking” is inspired by news that…
President Bush authorized White House official I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to disclose highly sensitive intelligence information to the news media in an attempt to discredit a CIA adviser whose views undermined the rationale for the invasion of Iraq, according to a federal prosecutor’s account of Libby’s testimony to a grand jury.
The court filing by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald for the first time places Bush and Vice President Cheney at the heart of what Libby testified was an exceptional and deliberate leak of material designed to buttress the administration’s claim that Iraq was trying to obtain nuclear weapons. The information was contained in the National Intelligence Estimate, one of the most closely held CIA analyses of whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the war.
Washington Post | Friday, April 7, 2006
You can find more of Dood Abides’ inspired works here.
February 16th, 2005
The “Jeff Gannon” (his real name is James Guckert) Male prostitute/Conservative plant in Bush’s White House begs the following question (from this NY Observer article) :
“Imagine the media explosion if a male escort had been discovered operating as a correspondent in the Clinton White House. Imagine that he was paid by an outfit owned by Arkansas Democrats and had been trained in journalism by James Carville. Imagine that this gentleman had been cultivated and called upon by Mike McCurry or Joe Lockhart — or by President Clinton himself. Imagine that this “journalist” had smeared a Republican Presidential candidate and had previously claimed access to classified documents in a national-security scandal.
Then imagine the constant screaming on radio, on television, on Capitol Hill, in the Washington press corps — and listen to the placid mumbling of the “liberal” media now.”
And this from earlier in the same article:
“The intrinsic media interest of the Guckert/Gannon story should be obvious to anyone who has followed his tale, which touches on hot topics from the homosexual underground and the investigation into the outing of C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame to the political power of the Internet. But our supposedly liberal media becomes quite squeamish when reporting anything that might humiliate the Bush White House and the Republican Party.”
[...]
“What Mr. Guckert seems to have been is not a journalist but a Republican dirty trickster. He was schooled at the Leadership Institute — an outfit run by veteran right-wing operative and Republican National Committee member Morton Blackwell. (It was Mr. Blackwell who distributed those cute “purple heart” Band-aids mocking Mr. Kerry�s war wounds at the Republican convention last summer.) His former employers at Talon News include leading Republican fund-raisers and former officials of the Texas Republican Party who have been active in partisan affairs for the past two decades.”
“How did this character obtain a coveted place in the White House? What did the White House press staff know about him? How does his story fit within the larger scandal of payola punditry, with federal funds subsidizing Republican propagandists in the press corps? Did someone in the Bush administration give him a classified document?”
