1. “Murder Trumps Torture Says Bugliosi
The legendary Los Angeles County prosecutor and top selling true crime author, Vincent Bugliosi, continues to make the case that he argued in detail in his New York Times best seller, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. His crime, according to the esteemed former prosecutor: deliberately deceiving the United States into an illegal war that resulted in the deaths of 4,200 U.S. soldiers and more than 1,000,000 Iraqi civilians.
He has the help of a citizens group called ABA Publishing headed by Arminda and Bob Alexander with Jude Morford. The all volunteer group recently sent Bugliosi’s cover letter and book to 2,200 local prosecutors across the country.
Bugliosi is offended by the prominence of proposed torture charges to the exclusion of what he argues is the much larger charge: murder. .
Prof. Jonathan Turley of the George Washington University School of Law was asked what charges were the most likely if there’s ever a serious investigation into Bush administration criminal activities. Turley noted:
The two most obvious crimes in this administration are the torture program and the unlawful surveillance program. Despite the effort to pretend that there is some ambiguity or uncertainty on these crimes, the law is quite clear.“
http://www.911blogger.com/node/19790
2. “Obama’s obscene remarks in Iraq
It is hard to know where to begin on Obama’s remarks in Iraq yesterday during a visit described unnecessarily by our press as a “surprise” since that is the only sort of visit a US President can make to Iraq. What is more appalling? The casual obscenity of a US President calling upon a nation that the US has been beating, brutalizing, and raping (that is when not using like a pawn in geo political games) for decades to “take responsibility for itself” or the fact that he has absolutely no idea of how much like a criminal sociopath he sounds when making such remarks?
It isn’t Obama’s fault. He is, after all, a product of the imperial Beltway and thus has never been exposed to anything approaching reality . . . to anything that lies outside the allowable parameter of opinion on Iraq. This parameter runs the gamut from the kook “right wing” belief that still believes Iraq was behind 9/11 and that the WMDs were there but just got moved to Syria . . . to the “left wing” opinion that the Iraq war, though fought for noble reasons and with good intentions, was the wrong war at the wrong time but since “we” are there “we” should make the best out of it.
Not for a second are we ever exposed to the stark reality of Iraq: that DC, in our name, has brought murder, pain, and misery to the lives of millions of Iraqis for self serving opaque agendas that had no good intentions or noble reasons behind them and they hate us, with good and just cause, and want us gone, completely, from their country.
I want to make something clear here. Obama’s remarks yesterday in Iraq were not extraordinary or atypical in any way for an American politician, official, or military commander to make. Rather, they were par for the course in their staggeringly narcissistic and sociopath like assumptions.
Within any rhetoric out of our imperial Beltway on Iraq are underlying assumptions such as that Iraqis should be grateful to the United States for invading their country on false pretenses, destroying its infrastructure, and turning their nation into our battle ground for a ludicrous war on a tactic wielded by a largely mythical organization that is conveniently and fluidly defined.
…
Obama also called the Iraq war an “extraordinary achievement”.
The “extraordinary achievement” that Obama called the Iraq war is a nation that high ranking American officials can’t visit pre-announced. It is an “extraordinary achievement” with an “unknown” civilian casualty component- killed civilians by the way- the US military didn’t even deem worthy of counting. It is an “extraordinary achievement” with as many as four million people (or nearly 20 percent of the population) either displaced or refugees. It is an “extraordinary achievement” with a capital city being walled off- as if an ancient city under siege- from the rest of the country and only allowing four access points. It is an “extraordinary achievement” still, six years on,without the same levels of pre-war clean drinking water.
But for Obama it is time this country of Iraq, this ungrateful country that has had the good fortune to be blessed with the presence of our moral troops, picked from the cream of our society, who have nothing but respect for them and their culture- to step up and “take responsibility” for their country because we are just so sick of doing such a good job for them.“
http://www.examiner.com/x-3665-Boston-Libertarian-Examiner~y2009m4d8-Obamas-obscene-remarks-in-Iraq
3. “Obama Administration quietly expands Bush’s legal defense of wiretapping program
In fact, a close read of a government filing last Friday reveals that the Obama Administration has gone beyond any previous legal claims put forth by former President Bush.
Responding to a lawsuit filed by a civil liberties group, the Justice Department argued that the government was protected by “sovereign immunity” from lawsuits because of a little-noticed clause in the Patriot Act. The government’s legal filing can be read here (PDF).
For the first time, the Obama Administration’s brief contends that government agencies cannot be sued for wiretapping American citizens even if there was intentional violation of US law. They maintain that the government can only be sued if the wiretaps involve “willful disclosure” — a higher legal bar.
…
“Everything for which Bush critics excoriated the Bush DOJ — using an absurdly broad rendition of ‘state secrets’ to block entire lawsuits from proceeding even where they allege radical lawbreaking by the President and inventing new claims of absolute legal immunity — are now things the Obama DOJ has left no doubt it intends to embrace itself,” he adds.“
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Obama_Administration_quietly_expands_Bushs_legal_0407.html
4. “I am under a lot of pressure to not diagnose PTSD”
A secret recording reveals the Army may be pushing its medical staff not to diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder. The Army and Senate have ignored the implications.“
http://www.salon.com/news/special/coming_home/2009/04/08/tape/
