1. You mean 182 times somehow wasn’t enough?
“CIA interrogators used the waterboarding technique … 183 times and 83 times on another al Qaeda suspect
…
Bush administration officials had claimed such methods were needed to get information but the repeated use of the waterboard on Zubaydah and Mohammed were sure to raise questions about its effectiveness.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090420/us_nm/us_usa_security_interrogations
2. “Former 9/11 Commission Vice Chairman Makes Bizarre Comments about Intelligence Failures before Attacks
Former 9/11 Commission Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton recently made some bizarre comments about the Zacarias Moussaoui case in an interview for Vanity Fair. The interview was used for a wide-ranging and very interesting oral history of the Bush White House. Hamilton’s comments appear to show complete ignorance of a key aspect of the investigation of which he was vice chair.”
http://hcgroups.wordpress.com/2009/04/20/former-911-commission-vice-chairman-makes-bizarre-comments-about-intelligence-failures-before-attacks/
3. More false flags and government lies:
“It’s entirely appropriate that Blair would bring up the Vietnam War, a conflict that involved the commission of war crimes as a deliberate strategy knowingly employed. There was Operation Phoenix, in which entire areas were designated free-fire zones and field commanders had standing orders to eradicate everything that moved – and did. Is this serving honorably? To this day, the fire-bombing of Dresden and the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are routinely defended by respectable historians and pundits, who point to the alleged necessity of defeating a greater evil, namely Hitler and Hirohito.
It matters little that neither the destruction of Dresden nor the nuking of two Japanese cities was necessary to end the war: the point is that the rulers of the U.S., and their intellectual amen corner, are great believers in “American exceptionalism.” What this means is that when other nations commit war crimes, it is okay – indeed, it is incumbent on us – to bring them to justice. When we do it, however – well, we’re the exception, you see.
This exceptionalist perspective is all the vogue these days. If you’re in debt and can’t pay the bills, you must cut down on expenses and save every penny – unless you’re the American government, in which case it’s spend, spend, spend! If country A attacks country B in violation of every international precedent and code of conduct, then it is called aggression – unless country A is the United States of America, in which case it’s called “liberation.” If torture is plain evil, it must therefore be punished when the perpetrators become known – unless you’re an American government official, in which case you get an automatic Get Out of Jail Free card, and a federal judgeship, to boot!
American exceptionalism – ain’t it grand? It’s the perfect expression of 21st-century Americanism in that it embodies the national zeitgeist of entitlement, the idea that we are a specially privileged lot, given a special mission in the world. This gives us a pass to commit acts that, when done by others, are crimes, but in our hands are magically transmuted into acts of virtue, even heroism.
The Bush administration took this exceptionalist principle to unprecedented lengths, yet it is incorrect to claim, as the Obamaites are doing, that this administration is abjuring torture. CIA chief Leon Panetta has testified that they will not rule out “renditioning” prisoners to countries where torture is routine. So instead of torturing our own prisoners, we’re going to farm it out to overseas contractors – behavior that would normally be considered ignoble in the extreme, except when engaged in by the U.S. government.“
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/the-torturers/
4. “Monotony in the Americas
Instead, of course, President Obama, who at various times during his brief political career has shown signs of understanding just what an abject failure the drug war has been, promised to double-down on the strategy that has failed for decades: more money for law enforcement, more military weapons, more consultation from U.S. experts who have been so successful at stemming the flow of drugs into this country. It could have been Bush talking.
The predictable result will be to weaken the cartels that are somewhat vulnerable or have some shortcomings at the dark arts of concealment, bribery, and assassination, and open more of the market to the most vicious and ruthless criminals in the country. That is the inevitable eventual outcome of official efforts to ramp up the war on drugs into a real rather than metaphorical war, even though there may be brief periods when the cartels seem weakened and the flow of drugs is temporarily interrupted.
What is turning out the be the case, however, is that in foreign affairs Barack Obama is a conventional establishment liberal who differs in minor particulars from previous Democratic presidents since Truman – and thus differs only slightly, mainly in emphasis and tone, from recent Republican presidents. Republicans tend to prefer unilateral action and an us-vs.-them attitude, while Democrats like to think of themselves as more multilaterally inclined, showing respect for and consulting with our valued allies and acting whenever possible through international institutions like the UN – which makes certain kinds of conservatives and neoconservatives accuse them of weakness and placing foreign interests ahead of American ones.
But Republicans and Democrats alike view the United States as the “indispensable nation,” the undisputed leader of not just the “free world” as in the old Soviet days, but of the entire world. They may focus on different sparrows around the world – Georgia for some, Darfur for others – but they share the notion that ideally not a sparrow should fall without the U.S. at least considering action to rescue it.
…
You could argue that once again Obama showed that he is not Bush, which has some significance. But in terms of policy, it is looking like change we can barely discern.“
http://original.antiwar.com/bock/monotony-in-the-americas/
5. “The Next Forgotten War
Human beings have strong emotional immune systems, and human societies have a remarkable capacity for collective forgetfulness. Milan Kundera, writing of the effect of the news cycle on historical memory, once said: “The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the war in the Sinai desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.”
Likewise, the histories of our time might say: there was an American invasion and occupation of Iraq, a war that amounts to a crime, but it was quickly followed by other wars, a financial crisis, and an economic depression – and we found that we had enough problems on our plate without worrying too much about the past.
Americans are leaving the Iraq War behind; it is seen as an embarrassing episode, best unmentioned in polite company. The Obama administration is stacked with liberal hawks who supported the Iraq War, and figures from the former Bush administration are signing book deals and making the rounds of press conferences and interviews, propagating meae culpae of the “mistakes were made” sort. A war of choice is being quietly transformed into an unfortunate but ultimately unavoidable mistake, one caused not by politicians and public intellectuals cocooned in their hubris and their reckless ideologies, but by an “intelligence failure.”
…
And yet as the Iraq War itself demonstrated, the memory of war’s horrors never seems quite strong enough to prevent the next war and provide for a lasting peace. Can individual citizens and educators change that? Can a nation’s conscience overcome its lust for political power and international primacy? There is hope – in the contemporary world we find a wide range of nation-states and polities, each more or less violent, more or less war-prone, and more or less democratic than the next. By remaining politically awake, working to improve our understanding of the world, and struggling to live our values personally and politically, we can use our small strength to work toward a better world.“
http://original.antiwar.com/mccarl/the-next-forgotten-war/
6. Amazing – but not surprising:
“Wiretap Recorded Rep. Harman Promising to Intervene for AIPAC
Rep. Jane Harman , the California Democrat with a longtime involvement in intelligence issues, was overheard on an NSA wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department to reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel organization in Washington.
..
Seemingly wary of what she had just agreed to, according to an official who read the NSA transcript, Harman hung up after saying, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”
http://static.cqpolitics.com/harman-3098436-page1.html?docID=hsnews-000003098436
7. “Harman Is A Poster Child For What Has Been Wrong With Congress For The Last 8 Years
As Congressional Quarterly’s Jeff Stein, Glenn Greenwald, Raw Story and others point out, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales blackmailed Harman into support warrantless spying on Americans by threatening to prosecute her for her little AIPAC episode if she didn’t play ball.
As dramatic as that is, that’s not Harman’s only scandal.
For example, Harman was briefed on the use of waterboarding in 2002, and yet did nothing to stop it.
Moreover, she knew by 2003 that the CIA had videotapes of the torture of alleged 9/11 plotters, and yet covered up that fact as well. She not only failed to tell the public, but she also hid the existence of the videotapes from the 9/11 Commission.“
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/04/is-there-more-to-harman-story-than.html
8. Harmon:
“But the real crux of Stein’s scoop is that then-Attorney General Alberto Gonazles intervened to kill the criminal investigation into Harman — even though DOJ lawyers had concluded that she committed crimes — because top Bush officials wanted Harman’s credibility to be preserved so that she could publicly defend the Bush administration’s illegal warrantless eavesdropping program
…
As for those wondering what the possible crime would be, the allegation is that Harman agreed to use her influence as a member of Congress to intervene in a pending criminal proceeding directed at AIPAC officials in exchange for receiving something of value (namely, AIPAC’s lobbying for her to be appointed Chair of the House Intelligence Committee). It’s exactly what Pete Domenci was accused of: trying to influence DOJ prosecutions for political ends, though in the case of the allegations against Harman, it’s even worse, since the suggestion is that she agreed to interfere in the criminal proceedings in exchange for AIPAC’s support of her quest to become Intelligence Committee Chair.”
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
