Gore Vidal muses on his “drunken shit” of a mother, a possible love child, death, the Bush administration, and his titanium knee. Oh, and there are some classic descriptions of his many literary nemeses:
“Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.”
Newt Gingrich, discussing his book, Days of Infamy:
This is … one of the great tragedies of the Bush administration. The more successful they’ve been at intercepting and stopping bad guys, the less proof there is that we’re in danger. And therefore, the better they’ve done at making sure there isn’t an attack, the easier it is to say, “Well, there never was going to be an attack anyway.” And it’s almost like they should every once in a while have allowed an attack to get through just to remind us.
We’re so good at keeping you safe that you think we suck; so, we’ll let a few people get blown up just to prove that you’re wrong.
Speaking of Newts.
Of all the news I read today, this is the most awesome:
MINNEAPOLIS—A convicted felon who became a motivational speaker — and used his life experiences to warn teens about the dangers of drugs and crime — is accused of going on a bender, threatening to kill his girlfriend and her son, and smashing a former prison buddy in the face with a statue of John Wayne.
And he was just getting started . . .
Jeff Jacoby, the Boston Globe’s token voice of the unhinged right wing, chastises George Bush and his administration in his latest column. Interestingly, he chastises Bush for not being Bushy enough.
(And the the timing of JJ’s column is just delicious, given today’s news).
To his credit, I guess, Jacoby makes the sound, if obvious point that the United States should do a better job of supporting brave dissidents who stand up to authoritarian regimes.
The rest of the column reads like the author’s application letter to an insane asylum.
The point? We need more Bush Doctrine, not less. More Iraqs, not fewer.
Bush was the leader who pledged at his second inauguration to support “democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” He let it be known that the truculence of rogues and dictators would not be indulged. “Some,” he said pointedly, “have unwisely chosen to test America’s resolve - and have found it firm.”
Whatever became of him? The president who in the wake of Sept. 11 posed a stark choice to the sponsors of jihadist violence - “You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists” - where is he now? And, more important, where is the foreign policy he once stood for?
For some time now it has been apparent that the Bush Doctrine - with the single exception of Iraq - didn’t survive the Bush presidency
So, let’s see then. The one place where the Bush Doctrine has been applied is Iraq. And what we need to do is to be more consistent in applying the Bush doctrine. Got it.
Then we can print up some more of these, and have some more of this and this, presumably.
As usual, JJ is dy-no-mite!
These are not care-free times. Recession is in the air. Americans face not only soaring gas prices and foreclosures, but also a generalized sense of economic uncertainty.
And the startling growth in economic inequality in America is alarming. Like, you know, it’s eve-of-the-Great-Depression kind of alarming. Some of the trends:
The top one percent of households received 21.8 percent of all pre-tax income in 2005, more than double what that figure was in the 1970s. (The top one percent’s share of total income bottomed out at 8.9 percent in 1976.) This is the greatest concentration of income since 1928, when 23.9 percent of all income went to the richest one percent.
And:
Between 1979 and 2005, the top five percent of American families saw their real incomes increase 81 percent. Over the same period, the lowest-income fifth saw their real incomes decline 1 percent.
But this is no time to be a gloomy Gus! Why not focus on the good news?
From the Boston Globe:
The recession gripping the country has left a broad swath of Americans agonizing over $60 gas fill-ups, ballooning grocery bills, and homes lost to foreclosure. But for the region’s class of superrich, downtimes have made for a bonanza of deals on luxurious pleasures, from sports cars and yachts to pieds-a-terre and airplanes.
At the Rolls-Royce dealership in Wayland, the Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead is sold out into next year, and orders are still rolling in. Ferrari Maserati of New England in Foxborough notched more sales in April than in any of the previous 14 months. Boston Yacht Sales of Weymouth last week closed on three boats valued at a total of $1.6 million, helping to push business up by 9 percent over last year. Business has been so brisk at Shoreline Aviation in Marshfield that the wait time to purchase a sleek Cessna Citation jet is two years. Million-dollar condo sales, far from stalling like some other sectors of the real estate market, have continued at a pace about like last year’s.
How long before we actually become Brazil?
A few days ago, Andrew Sullivan described the Clintons as being “riddled with narcissism and pathology,” running an “ugly,” “feckless,” loser of a campaign.
With those words in mind, I am detecting a new tactic from the Clinton campaign. It seems the new idea is to convince all those suggestible, uneducated citizens who comprise their base that an evil conspiracy has formed to dupe them into giving up on Team Clinton. While the rest of us are just media-fed zombies who think that Barack Obama has an unassailable delegate lead, Bill knows the truth. While campaigning in the “boutique” state of South Dakota, Bill Clinton is reported to have said this about his wife and Barack Obama:
Oh, this is so terrible: The people they want her. Oh, this is so terrible: She is winning the general election, and he is not. Oh my goodness, we have to cover this up.
Ok, this is the “general election” that happens in November, right? Six months from now? Just checking.
This next part is completely crazy:
She is winning the general election today and he is not, according to all the evidence.
If you notice, there hasn’t been a lot of publicity on these polls I just told you about. It is the first time you’ve heard it? Why do you think that is? Why do you think? Don’t you think if the polls were the reverse and he was winning the Electoral College against Senator McCain and Hillary was losing it, it would be blasted on every television station?
You would know it wouldn’t you? It wouldn’t be a little secret. And there is another Electoral College poll that I saw yesterday had her over 300 electoral votes. … She will win the general election if you nominate her. They’re just trying to make sure you don’t.
Definitely a conspiracy here, just like the “suicide” of Vince Foster. Or the Whitewater deal. Except this conspiracy is vast and involves virtually every media organ in our nation–including FOX! It’s diabolical! Hillary Clinton is actually winning the election that won’t happen for half a year; if it weren’t for this evil, meddling cabal, we’d all know the truth!
Seriously, how much contempt for your supporters must you have to shovel this horseshit at them?
Images from the phoenix lander are now coming in. The craft landed just before 8pm EST this evening and will look for signs of water on the planet Mars. I don’t know why, but this blows my mind every time.
Of course, there is this reality back here on planet Earth:
The human tragedy wrought by the global drinking water crisis is profound, but has not been enough to move the world to solve what is perhaps its worst health problem. More than 1 billion people on the globe lack access to safe drinking water, more than 2 billion lack sanitation. Most troubling, 2 million to 10 million people — mostly children — die every year from contaminated water. That’s more than 5,000 children who die daily.
Today’s Washington Post contained this little gem:
[T]he next day, with renewed vigor, Clinton compared her effort to seat delegates from Florida and Michigan to the abolition of slavery . . . .
Just when you thought it couldn’t get more insane. It was hard enough to stomach the fact that Clinton had initially supported the disenfranchisement of Florida and Michigan voters and then–when it became politically expedient–suddenly became their most strident defender.
But now she’s making metaphors about the abolition of slavery where she magically transforms from Simon Legree into Frederick Douglass. Poof! And let’s not forget that a black man, who won the delegate math for the nomination several months ago, has to put up with this shit from a white, millionaire, former first lady.
I’m sure the Clinton speech writers are already workshopping her July 4th speech:
This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a woman in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon her to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today?
Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!”
To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world.
My subject, then, fellow citizens, is “Counting the Votes in Florida and Michigan.” I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave’s point of view. Standing here, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July.
Expect another dazzling performance of oratory, like this one:
Sorry for the brief posting hiatus here at IHWYJS. We’re back!
In Dublin, diplomats are meeting to discuss a treaty banning cluster bombs.
Guess who isn’t going to show up? Right. But even though the Bush Administration doesn’t feel the need to join over 100 other nations in discussing this matter of life and death, apparently the United States is still making its presence felt. By “bullying” our allies into gutting the treaty.
Cluster bombs and the effort to eradicate them don’t get much press coverage in the U.S. But because of the way they operate, they are strongly opposed by international human rights and peace activists. Here is the problem, in brief:
Cluster munitions are large weapons which are deployed from the air and from the ground and release dozens or hundreds of smaller submunitions. Submunitions released by air-dropped cluster bombs are most often called “bomblets,” while those delivered from the ground by artillery or rockets are usually referred to as “grenades.”
Air-dropped or ground-launched, they cause two major humanitarian problems and risks to civilians. First, their widespread dispersal means they cannot distinguish between military targets and civilians so the humanitarian impact can be extreme, especially when the weapon is used in or near populated areas.
Many submunitions fail to detonate on impact and become de facto antipersonnel mines killing and maiming people long after the conflict has ended. These duds are more lethal than antipersonnel mines; incidents involving submunition duds are much more likely to cause death than injury.
To make matters even more horrific, since the bomblets are small and often brightly-colored, they tend to attract the attention of children. So the use of cluster bombs results in large areas of the earth being covered in small, brightly-colored de facto land mines. As a result, cluster bombs have been a major cause of civilian casualties from Vietnam to Kosovo to Iraq and beyond.
Jody Williams, who won the Nobel Prize for her efforts to ban land mines, weighs in on the Globe opinion page.
Taken by themselves, the administration’s effort to undermine the cluster bomb ban, and its refusal to attend the conference are quite regrettable. (And seriously - they could have at least found one eager, young, low-level D-Bag in the administration, armed with a Pepperdine degree and a brief case, and sent him to Dublin. You know - show up!)
But given how this matter fits into the larger picture, it is difficult to fathom how the United States can have any credibility on the world stage in matters of war and peace and arms control. For instance, when the United States rails against the potential development of nuclear weapons by Iran and North Korea, what does the rest of the world see?
The rest of the world sees the country that invented nuclear weapons. It sees the country that spent much of the second half of the twentieth century stockpiling nuclear weapons. It sees the only country (and this seems a significant point, does it not?) that has ever used nuclear weapons.
The rest of the world sees the country that tried to undermine the 1997 land mine treaty. The rest of the world sees the country that can’t even be bothered to worry about the civilian impact of cluster bombs. The rest of the world sees the country that is one of the few nations on earth that has developed and stockpiled chemical weapons.
And while the U.S. has nuclear and chemical weapons*, and has used the former, the rest of the world also sees America as the country that launched a disastrous preemptive war based on false claims about those same kinds of weapons.
And just to make matters worse, the United States decided to use cluster bombs.
*(Thank you to commenter Mr. Hand for pointing this out: it should be said that the United States has been in the process of destroying chemical weapons, according to its treaty obligations).
Tomorrow, Democratic voters in the great state of Oregon will go to the polls to register their decision between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
As a former resident of Oregon, I can say that it is emphatically the whitest place on planet earth. And I can’t help but notice that all the major pollsters’ data predict a solid black guy Obama victory. Public Policy Polling has even broken down the numbers for us, declaring that
Obama is winning pretty much across the board. He dominates among male voters (60-31) while also maintaining a small edge with female voters (48-45). He is leading with every racial group, and also leads across three of four age groups. The only demographic Clinton has the advantage with is senior citizens, among whom she leads 50-41, a margin too small for her to have much of a chance of knocking off Obama.
I guess when Hillary said that she was stronger with “hardworking white” voters she meant to exclude the ones that live in Pacific Northwest states with names beginning with “O.”
Olbermann gets it.
Part I was just so much fun, we had to come back for more.
This time, Pat helps us make sense of the current racial climate, and of the Jeremiah Wright flap, too.
It is all here, gentle readers, in Pat’s Brief for Whitey. Here’s the scoop: according to Pat, black people need to quit all the whining and realize how good they have it!
Sure, there are some advantages to being black. For instance, you are far more likely than whites to live below the poverty line, live in prison, live in a neighborhood with substandard schools, live without health insurance, and more likely to be a victim of violent crime if you happen to be black in America.
Pat Buchanan’s advice?
Thank your lucky stars!
Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America.
Fair enough. But this time, it has to be a two-way conversation. White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to.
This time, the Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard. And among them are these:
First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.
Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.
For, Pat tells us, despite continuing disadvantages for African Americans in income levels, social mobility, educational opportunity, and just about every other damn thing that matters, it is whitey who is getting the short end of the stick:
Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks — with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas — to advance black applicants over white applicants.
And, he says, it gets worse:
As for racism, its ugliest manifestation is in interracial crime, and especially interracial crimes of violence. Is Barack Obama aware that while white criminals choose black victims 3 percent of the time, black criminals choose white victims 45 percent of the time?
Is Barack aware that black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse?
It looks like white people just can’t catch a break in this country. Thanks for setting us straight, Pat.
If this is what the national conversation on race is going to look like, uh, well…
Hmm. I can’t seem to finish that sentence. I think I just ran out of sarcasm. I’ve used it all up.
I discovered this bit of wisdom while trolling the official website of Pat Robertson. On a page entitled “Bring It On: The War on Terror,” one of Pat’s viewers wrote in with this fantastic question:
I hear so many people saying that Jesus would just turn the other cheek in terms of Iraq. Is Jesus a pacifist? I know He turned over the tables in the Temple, but do you believe that Jesus would ever go to war?
Pat’s Response is illuminating:
It is about time for IHWYJS (that’s what the cool kids call ihatewhatyoujustsaid.com), to make a contribution to our long-awaited “national conversation on race.”
As you already know, the Clinton campaign has already weighed in. Wow. And there’s more. Also this.
But for our money, there is no one quite like Patrick J. Buchanan when it comes to clear-eyed, no-nonsense thinking on the subject of race. Ever the thoughtful commentator, Pat is offering America, and the world, exactly what it needs right now: white paranoia. How could the guy who gave us the culture war be wrong?
Here’s Pat, in all his glory, in his post titled “The Way Our World Ends” (and I swear I am not making this stuff up. Go look at his website! He actually wrote this, and so much other inanity besides):
An Augusta, Ga., group, The National Policy Institute, has meshed the figures on fertility rates with the continents and races on Planet Earth — to visualize what the world will look like in 2060.
In 1950, whites were 28 percent of world population and Africans 9 percent, a ratio of three-to-one. In 2060, the ratio will remain the same. But the colors will be reversed. People of African ancestry will be 25 percent of the world’s population. People of European descent will have fallen to 9.8 percent.
More arresting is that the white population is shrinking not only in relative but in real terms. Two hundred million white people, one in every six on earth — a number equal to the entire population of France, Britain, Holland and Germany — will vanish by 2060.
The Caucasian race is going the way of the Mohicans.
White people! Vanishing! (Actually, I guess I’ll be one of those white people who vanishes by 2060, too. But Buchanan will also have vanished by then. So, you know, there’s an upside to all of this).
More Buhcanan-y goodness:
By 2050, a fourth of all the people of Eastern Europe will have vanished. Ukraine will lose one-third of its population. Russia, 150 million at the breakup of the Soviet Union, 142 million today, will be down to 108 million. Such losses dwarf what Hitler and Stalin together did to these countries.
Now I think I must be drunk. Because I could have sworn that PJB just compared falling birth rates based on free will and individual choices to the holocaust and Stalinist repression. (And hey - did you notice? More “vanishing”).
Man - this stuff is really killing Pat:
…Western Europe’s populations are being sustained by immigrants from the Maghreb and Middle East, Asia and Africa — and the baby boom among these black and brown peoples is lifting and changing the face of the Old Continent forever. Islam is returning to Iberia, Italy and the Balkans. The Third World is coming to colonize the mother countries.
It is Pat Buchanan’s worst nightmare coming true: vanishing white people, and booming brown people. And finally:
Hopefully, the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, who are about to inherit the earth as we pass away, will treat us better than our ancestors treated them in the five centuries that Western Man ruled the world.
Otherwise, we all go out with a bang.
Precious.
Thanks, Pat, for giving us the big picture. In part II, we’ll examine Pat’s take on the more immediate racial politics of the day. In the meantime, if you are reading this and you happen to be white, be forewarned that you may vanish at any moment.
It appears that the US Congress is so outraged by the NFL and New England Patriots head coach, Bill Belichick, that they demand an investigation. But why are they so upset?
It’s called “spygate.” Turns out that Belichick has been taping his opposing teams’ defensive signal calls since 2000, when he took over as head coach of the Patriots. After the story broke, the NFL impounded all the evidence; however, for reasons that are unclear, the organization destroyed Belichick’s tapes and notes after fining the disgraced coach and penalizing the team its first round draft pick.
Now Congress demands to know why.
In a hearing yesterday, Republican senator–and Philadelphia Eagles fan–Arlen Specter criticized the NFL:
“[The teams] are enormous role models for everybody,” Specter said. “If you can cheat in the NFL, you can cheat in college, you can cheat in high school, you can cheat on your grade-school math test. There’s no limit as to what you can do. I think they owe the public a lot more candor and a lot more credibility.”
Left unchecked, the transitive property of cheating could spiral out of control–like a pass from Ryan Leaf.
As a former attorney, Specter also sought to place “spygate” within the framework of US jurisprudence. Drawing on the natural law that inspired our Constitution, Specter argued that Americans “have a right to have honest football games.” And he further asked, “What if there was something on the tapes we might want to be subpoenaed, for example? You can’t destroy it. That would be obstruction of justice.”
I, for one, applaud Senator Specter’s solemn concern for our rights and the rule of law, especially since it involves illegal surveillance, destroying evidence, and obstruction of justice.
After they return integrity to the game of football, I wonder if Congress might consider working on some related problems:
C.I.A. Destroyed 2 Tapes Showing Interrogations
The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about its secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.
The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terrorism suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. The tapes were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that video showing harsh interrogation methods could expose agency officials to legal risks, several officials said.
Or this:
Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts
Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.
Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.
If you are concerned at all about the 2008 presidential election, you will want to watch this video over at Gawker.
(By the way - if you’re not concerned at all about the 2008 presidential election, what the hell is wrong with you?)
An old friend (and a man of decidedly philosophical bent), after “several” pints, once described the foundational problem of democracy this way:
“What are you gonna do about the stupid people, man? What about the [expletive] stupid people?”
Hmm.
Luckily, the mainstream media is doing a superb job of analyzing the truly important issues facing our nation: flag lapel pins, Rev. Wright, and the voting tendencies of elderly, Catholic, ethnic, working-class, heterosexual, right-handed, male, pet-owning, bipedal, dentist-fearing, mid-size sedan-driving Led Zeppelin fans.
But there are still some busybodies out there, like Eza Klein over at The American Prospect, who insist on rambling on and on about trifling side issues, like the major candidates’ positions on health care.
Klein’s analysis is here.
McCain’s position? He wants to use the magic of the market (which has served us so very well), rather than the power of government and the concept of shared risk to cure what ails us. The effect? People will have access to health care. Just, you know, less of it. Less access to health care.
Of course, this isn’t necessarily true for everyone. If you are lucky enough to have full health care coverage, say from the government, you’ll be fine. Like if you’re as lucky as er, Senator McCain.
Less access to health care. Because that’s what America needs. America - number one in Hummer limousines, number 43 in infant mortality rate. Take that, Faroe Islands!
Huzzah!
Remember intrepid journalist and master contrarian, John Stossel? He’s the man committed to helping you accept that “Everything You Believe is Wrong.” For example, you’d be wrong to criticize people who exploit the victims of natural disasters in order to reap record profits:
If you want to score points cracking down on mean, greedy profiteers, pushing anti-”gouging” rules is a very good thing.
But if you’re one of the people the law “protects” from “price gouging,” you won’t fare as well.
Consider this scenario: You are thirsty — worried that your baby is going to become dehydrated. You find a store that’s open, and the storeowner thinks it’s immoral to take advantage of your distress, so he won’t charge you a dime more than he charged last week. But you can’t buy water from him. It’s sold out.
You continue on your quest, and finally find that dreaded monster, the price gouger. He offers a bottle of water that cost $1 last week at an “outrageous” price — say $20. You pay it to survive the disaster.
You resent the price gouger. But if he hadn’t demanded $20, he’d have been out of water. It was the price gouger’s “exploitation” that saved your child.
It saved her because people look out for their own interests. Before you got to the water seller, other people did. At $1 a bottle, they stocked up. At $20 a bottle, they bought more cautiously. By charging $20, the price gouger makes sure his water goes to those who really need it.
The people the softheaded politicians think are cruelest are doing the most to help. Assuming the demand for bottled water was going to go up, they bought a lot of it, planning to resell it at a steep profit. If they hadn’t done that, that water would not have been available for the people who need it the most.
Take heart, Chinese earthquake victims, your country has embraced the free market!
In 10 years everyone will wax nostalgic over the good ol’ days of the Cold War:
At least 40 developing countries from the Persian Gulf region to Latin America have recently approached U.N. officials . . . to signal interest in starting nuclear power programs, a trend that concerned proliferation experts say could provide the building blocks of nuclear arsenals in some of those nations.
At least half a dozen countries have also said in the past four years that they are specifically planning to conduct enrichment or reprocessing of nuclear fuel, a prospect that could dramatically expand the global supply of plutonium and enriched uranium, according to U.S. and international nuclear officials and arms-control experts.
Much of the new interest is driven by economic considerations, particularly the soaring cost of fossil fuels. But for some Middle Eastern states with ready access to huge stocks of oil or natural gas, such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the investment in nuclear power appears to be linked partly to concerns about a future regional arms race stoked in part by Iran’s alleged interest in such an arsenal, the officials said.
A troubling NY Times article exposes an effort by the Pentagon to shape the media narrative using a bevy of “military analysts” whom they control:
To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.
The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.
Glenn Greenwald has a detailed and deeply troubling analysis of the Pentagon’s document dump regarding the “military analysis program.”
UPDATE 1:
Greenwald reprises the story again today with extensive evidence of a planned, illegal, domestic propaganda effort.
UPDATE 2:
A detailed legal analysis of this domestic propaganda.
Unless Cheney, Rice, Ashcroft, Powell and Rumsfeld concluded this meeting with an insane sportfuck orgy on the conference table, I fear nobody will be impeached and nobody will care:
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 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.
Here is the ACLU’s legal reasoning for a special prosecutor.
The war in Iraq will cost upwards of 3 trillion dollars. How would you spend it?
As a fan of the television show Law and Order, I know that sometimes detectives Briscoe and Greene cross the line to obtain information or evidence for the prosecutor. One time, Jerry Orbach put a toothpick in a guy’s lock so that the perp couldn’t enter his house and destroy a video before the warrant was issued. In this instance, and in many others like it, the judge found the discovery “tainted” and threw the evidence out. Then Sam Waterson gets really pissed off and give us that poignant, I’m-so-outraged-and-angry-that-I’ll-dramatically-stare-off-into-space expression that he’s mastered.
I’m sure Waterson’s head would explode if he read today’s New York Times which details the goings on within the military commissions in Guantanamo Bay:
“I think they are listening to my telephone calls all the time,” said John A. Chandler, a prominent lawyer in Atlanta and Army veteran who represents six Guantánamo detainees.
Several of the lawyers, including partners at large corporate law firms, said the concerns had changed the way they went about their work apart from Guantánamo cases. A lawyer in Chicago, H. Candace Gorman, said in an affidavit that she was no longer accepting new clients of any type because she could not assure them of confidentiality.
The new filing, by the Center for Constitutional Rights, came in a 2007 lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act in which Guantánamo lawyers are seeking records to determine whether they have been targets of surveillance.
The Justice Department declined to comment Tuesday. But in a legal response in March, its lawyers said they could neither confirm nor deny that detainees’ lawyers had been targets of such surveillance “because doing so would compromise the United States Intelligence Communities sources and methods.” [. . .]
Guantánamo officials say they monitor attorney-client meetings for the safety of lawyers with video cameras but that meeting areas are not wired for sound.
But several lawyers said their clients had told them that shortly after detainees met with lawyers, interrogators had asked the detainees about topics that had been discussed.
But it doesn’t end at eavesdropping on privilged conversations. Evidence or statements procured through torture? A-ok. Habeas Corpus? Never heard of it. Try to time convictions to coincide with US elections to benefit Republicans? Yep.
George Bush has presided over the most lawless and tyrannical administration in the history of the United States. He has revoked habeas corpus; presided over wholesale warrantless wiretapping of US citizens; ordered torture; and promulgated a theory of executive power that renders the other branches of government null and void.
Yet, the president has issued a “proclamation” declaring this day “Law Day”:
The right of ordinary men and women to determine their own future, protected by the rule of law, lies at the heart of America’s founding principles. As our country celebrates the 50th anniversary of Law Day, we renew our commitment to the ideals on which this great Nation was established and to a robust system of ordered liberty.
The American legal system is central to protecting the rights and freedoms our Nation holds dear. The theme of this year’s Law Day, “The Rule of Law: Foundation for Communities of Opportunity and Equity,” recognizes the fundamental role that the rule of law plays in preserving liberty in our Nation and in all free societies. We pay tribute to the men and women in America’s legal community. Through hard work and dedication to the rule of law, members of the judiciary and the legal profession help secure the rights of individuals, bring justice to our communities, and reinforce the proud traditions that make America a beacon of light for the world.
Nearly 800 years ago, the Magna Carta placed the authority of government under the rule of law; centuries later, the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution marked tremendous advances in the march of liberty. These documents established enduring principles that guide modern democracies. Today, we are reminded of that past and look toward a hopeful future as we work to secure the liberty that is the natural right of every man, woman, and child.
On Law Day, U.S.A., our Nation celebrates our belief in the equality of each person before God and renews our commitment to strive to bring America ever closer to its founding ideals.
This has to be one of the most spectacular absurdities of all time.
