The PDA Has Become A Gang Of Irrelevant Washington Whipped Wimp Dupes.
There is an legendary story out there about [former U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt] FDR. [...] This is Harry Belafonte’s version of what Eleanor Roosevelt said to him [about FDR]: she said that when FDR would meet with civil rights leaders who would make demands that he didn’t think was politically possible at the time, he would say “that sounds like a great idea - I want to do it. Now get out there and make me do it. Create the conditions in which I can do it.”
Whether you think of Barack Obama as FDR incarnate, a messiah figure, or more rationally as an attractive, intelligent mortal being for whom you hold the greatest of hopes for greatness, I can tell you this: he needs us to make him do it. He needs that mass movement, that global mass movement, putting pressure on him because the moneyed/positioned crazed forces of public enslavement are exerting every quality and pressure that defines a field boss of old. And when he takes this tiny little tentative stand - “no more [Israeli] settlements [in the Occupied Palestinian Territories]” - suddenly this is a crazy progressive position. How about no settlements?
I am so sorry, so filled with pain and disappointment. It is over, whether you realize it is or not; the cyber space choir is about to lose its contract. If you dutifully feed the cyber space choir with your credit card; you would be vomit-inducing disgusted if you walked into the rooms that pose as institutional offices of the choir conductors.
It is all a façade, a sham that provides sustenance for our ego driven self-anointed leadership. They are not wall pounding, waste basket-kicking, cursing revolutionary advocates. For the most part they are word spewing…wimpy phonies…wordsmiths of patriotism and agitation they have no inclination to join in participation.
We can all keep one another informed of event and issues, but there are few prepared to deal with those issues as they must be ultimately dealt with. There is going to be no change unless we force that change. No number of signatures on petitions consigned to Congressional shredders, no number of ignored phone calls, no number of waste-basketed faxes, no number of deleted emails will make a difference, because like Congressional/media ignored Saturday political theatrics; they have become a pure waste of time and energy! And that includes current irrelevant enthusiasm for the topic: Strategy re. the 2010 Congressional Election- for right now. Folks who are still involved in this type of nonsense are mere manipulated Washington Whipped Wimps…pretentious PDA hypocrites and duped denialists beyond treatment.
If you want to know what really matters in Washington, don't go to Capitol Hill for one of those hearings, or pay attention to those staged White House "town meetings." They're just for show. What really happens - the serious business of Washington - happens in the shadows, out of sight, off the record. Only occasionally - and usually only because someone high up stumbles - do we get a glimpse of just how pervasive the corruption has become.
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The Balance Begins to Tip Against Cheney
Jul 13, 2009 ... With new revelations about the former veep ordering the CIA to lie to Congress, Democrats finally start talking about an investigation that ...
Dick Cheney's accountability moment may finally be arriving.
After years of pulling punches, Democrats in the Senate are throwing them at Cheney, following the revelation that the man who operated as something akin to a co-president during George Bush's first term ordered the CIA to withhold information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress.
There "absolutely" needs to be a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation of Cheney's assault on the system of checks and balances outlined in the essential sections of the US Constitution, argued Senate majority whip Dick Durbin.
"The executive branch of government cannot create programs like these programs and keep Congress in the dark. There is a requirement for disclosure," the chamber's number-two Democrat said on ABC's This Week program. "(Any investigation) has to be done in an appropriate way so it doesn't jeopardize our national security, but to have a massive program that is concealed from the leaders in Congress is not only inappropriate; it could be illegal."
Bush's Secret Spy Programs
When Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 last year, it mandated that the inspectors general of the different branches of the intelligence community that participated in President Bush's surveillance operations, known as the President's Surveillance Program, conduct a comprehensive review of the program. (INSERT…U.S. Wiretapping of Limited Value, Officials Report. Report: Bush-era surveillance went beyond wiretaps).
Friday, the inspectors general released their report, confirming that the Bush administration carried out "unprecedented," massive surveillance activities that stretched beyond the warrantless wiretapping program that had previously been revealed. Soon after the New York Times reported on the existence of a warrantless wiretapping program in 2005, Bush described the effort as his "Terrorist Surveillance Program." But the IG report makes clear that the term describes only one aspect of the overall surveillance program. In 2007, former deputy attorney general James Comey's testimony before Congress implied that "other programs exist for domestic spying" outside warrantless wiretapping, the existence of which then-attorney general Alberto Gonzales acknowledged in 2007. In constructing the legal rationale for the "Other Intelligence Activities," Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) lawyer John Yoo "did not accurately describe the scope" of the activities, which led former attorney general John Ashcroft to give "his legal authorization to the program for the first two and a half years based on a 'misimpression' of what activities the N.S.A. was actually conducting." The report found that the administration's "extraordinary and inappropriate" secrecy around the program not only allowed it to be built upon flawed legal arguments, but also "undermined its effectiveness as a terrorism-fighting tool."
Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), a former ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, told the Associated Press that "she was shocked to learn of the existence of other classified programs beyond the warrantless wiretapping." Harman said that when she asked Gonzales two years ago if the government was conducting any other undisclosed intelligence activities, he denied it. "He looked me in the eye and said 'no,'" said Harman. Indeed, the report found that Gonzales walked right up to the line of lying to Congress by providing "confusing, inaccurate" statements about the National Security Agency's surveillance activities to lawmakers in 2007. The Justice Department Inspector General concluded that while Gonzales "did not intend to mislead Congress," his testimony "had the effect of misleading those who were not knowledgeable about the program." In an interview with the AP, however, former CIA director Michael Hayden insisted that "that top members of Congress were kept well-informed all along the way." "One of the points I had in every one of the briefings was to make sure they understood the scope of our activity 'They've got to know this is bigger than a bread box,' I said," said Hayden.
As the New York Times' Eric Lichtblau and James Risen note, "the report found that the secrecy surrounding the program may have limited its effectiveness." At the CIA, "so few working-level officers were allowed to know about the program that the agency often did not make full use of the leads the wiretapping generated." The FBI found that "the exceptionally compartmented nature of the program" frustrated agents who were assigned to follow-up on its tips. Knowledge of the program was so closely held, according to the report, that a top aide to Vice President Cheney, David Addington, could personally decide who in the administration was "read into" the classified program. For the early years of the program, Yoo was the only OLC lawyer "read into" the program, which meant that he was the sole lawyer in the department analyzing the legality of the program. According to the report, senior Justice Department officials "criticized the assignment of a single OLC attorney to draft the legal rationale for the program. These officials noted that OLC traditionally adheres to a rigorous peer review process for all legal memoranda it issues." Yoo's boss at the time, Jay Bybee, told the DOJ IG that he was "surprised" and "a little disappointed" to learn that Yoo worked on the program without his knowledge. Neither Bybee nor Gonzales could explain how Yoo became responsible for analyzing the legality of the program. Because the inspectors general "lacked the authority to compel testimony," five former Bush administration officials -- Ashcroft, Yoo, George Tenet, Andrew Card, and Addington -- refused to be questioned.
CHENEY'S 'DIRECT ORDERS':
One day after the IG report was released, the New York Times revealed another example of the Bush administration's efforts to keep Congress in the dark about the intelligence communities activities. Last week, seven House Democrats on the Intelligence Committee released a letter revealing that CIA Director Leon Panetta had "recently testified to Congress that the agency concealed information and misled lawmakers repeatedly since 2001" about an unidentified CIA operation that was an "on-again, off-again" effort until Panetta stopped it in June. The Times reported on Saturday that Cheney gave "direct orders" for the program to be concealed from Congress. Yesterday, an intelligence official hinted to the Washington Times that the program "involved assassinations overseas but declined to provide further details." The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that the now-terminated initiative "was an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives." The WSJ also reports that in 2001, the CIA "examined the subject of targeted assassinations of al Qaeda leaders," but "it appears that those discussions tapered off within six months" and it "isn't clear whether they were an early part of the CIA initiative that Mr. Panetta stopped." Congressional Democrats are now calling for the program and the lack of congressional notification to be investigated. "The executive branch of government cannot create programs like these programs and keep Congress in the dark," said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL). Though some Republicans acknowledge that it's "wrong if somebody told the CIA not to inform the appropriate members of Congress," several GOP lawmakers have sought to defend Cheney and resist an investigation.
TORTURE -- HOLDER LEANS TOWARD APPOINTING CRIMINAL PROSECUTOR:
In April, President Obama revised his position on whether to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's use of torture. After initially stating "that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards," Obama said "that is going to be more of a decision for the Attorney General within the parameters of various laws, and I don't want to prejudge that." Over the weekend, Newsweek's Daniel Klaidman reported that Attorney General Eric Holder "is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's brutal interrogation practices," though a final decision has yet to be made. The Washington Post followed up on that story with sources saying that any investigation "would apply only to activities by interrogators, working in bad faith, that fell outside the 'four corners' of the legal memos." Top administration aides have previously expressed concern that an investigation "might spawn partisan debates that could overtake Obama's ambitious legislative agenda." If the Post report is accurate, the investigation would not include high-level policymakers who authorized the torture tactics and provided the legal framework for America's torture regime. Salon's Glenn Greenwald writes that an investigation that fails to hold Bush administration officials accountable would be, in effect, the worst of both worlds, because it would "bolster the principal instrument of executive lawlessness -- the Beltway orthodoxy that any time a President can find a low-level DOJ functionary to authorize what he wants to do, then it is, by definition, 'legal' and he's immune from prosecution when he does it, no matter how blatantly criminal it is." A final decision is expected "within the next few weeks."
It's grasping at straws, I know, but I'm looking for a benign explanation of the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush administration.
Criminal law says that facts aren't enough to establish guilt. There also has to be mens rea -- a guilty mind. Crooks don't just perform illegal acts; to be convicted, their intent must also be shown to be crooked.
There are plenty of ugly facts about the past eight years already on the table. Prisoners were waterboarded, which is torture by any definition, and videotaped evidence of it was destroyed. The government intercepted the domestic phone calls and emails of millions of Americans without obtaining the court orders legally required to spy on them. The CIA expanded its counterterrorism operations without conducting the mandated briefings of congressional oversight committees.
The list of publicly known illegalities goes on and on, and if a special prosecutor or commission were empowered to look under more rocks, it's a safe bet that more vermin would turn up. What could possibly excuse the failure to investigate such lawbreaking?
Republicans in Congress are charging that CIA director Leon Panetta's shutting down a secret Bush-era program the moment he belatedly was informed of it, and his telling Congress about it less than 24 hours later, is just political theater, an attempt to distract from the controversy over House speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-CA) charge that the CIA had lied to her about waterboarding.
But the media's kneejerk acceptance of this framing, its buying the idea that this dispute is typical Washington posturing, is both lazy and cynical. On Sunday morning, I heard an MSNBC anchor and a reporter from Politico speculate that if Attorney General Eric Holder appoints a special prosecutor, it could be because the president's poll ratings are dropping, and this move would change the subject from Obama's problems to people's reasons for disliking Bush. The TV pair went on to agree that this whole surveillance and torture donnybrook is basically a partisan dispute, as if the rule of law were a left-right issue, as if the meaning of the Constitution were merely in the political eye of the beholder.
For his part, the president says he wants to look forward, not backward. By that standard, there would have been no Nuremberg trials. The president's defenders say that prosecuting Bush-era criminality would take all the oxygen out of the room, that it would deplete his political capital, that it would create a media circus which would distract the public and doom progress on health care, energy and the economy. By that standard, the Iraq war should have so consumed the Bush administration that it would have had no mojo left over to deregulate Wall Street, fire U.S. Attorneys, cut millionaires' taxes, gut clean-air standards, politicize science, theologize policy or put any of the other right-wing notches in its belt.
If our country actually were to shake off its amnesia, what mens rea could possibly spare the architects of our national shame from accountability? "They were told it was legal" -- the 21st century version of "they were only following orders" -- is the low bar that's already been established for torturers. "He only knew what they told him" is the best that can be said for the embubbled Bush, as though ignorance of the facts and of the law were an acceptable criminal defense.
But what of Cheney, who knew the facts and the law? What frame of mind could exculpate him from ordering the CIA not to brief the intelligence committees of Congress and not to inform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court? What mental state could get him off the legal hook for using John Yoo as the Justice Department's secret apologist for torture, surveillance and every other arrogation of presidential power? What thought process could absolve him from ordering kidnappings and secret detentions in Eastern European hellholes, and from passing off to Congress as truth the worthless confessions extracted under torture? What intent could clear him from blowing CIA agent Valerie Plame's covert status, or distorting and falsifying CIA intelligence, or concealing and destroying evidence of his actions?
Here's the best I can do on Cheney's behalf: He meant well, and he knew better. He truly believed that Saddam Hussein was about to give weapons of mass destruction to Al Qaeda. He was completely convinced that the restrictions that Congress put on the CIA and the NSA starting in the 1970s were dangerous impediments to learning the truth and nailing the bad guys. He had no doubt that if the president did something, it by nature could not be illegal. Laws? He didn't need no stinkin' laws, not when they were written by legislators cravenly unwilling to do what it takes to protect and defend America, and interpreted by judges pathetically incapable of distinguishing good from evil.
He was smarter than us, and he loved his country more than us, and if the Constitution stood in his way, well, who the hell's going to care about a piece of paper when sarin takes out Chicago and anthrax takes out New York and a dirty bomb takes out LA?
But motive is not a legal defense.
Cheney's mens rea was this: I am above the law. And now -- because of the media's ADD and our leaders' lack of will -- the rule of law, the future of health care, and pretty much everything else on the national agenda is being held hostage by the threat of more "Obama's-helping-the-terrorists" screeds from the ex-vice president.
We have all been witnesses to terrible crimes these last eight years. Will we hold Cheney and his ilk accountable for what they did? If we don't, it will be more than a pity. It will itself be another crime.
This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and e-mail me there if you'd like.
UPDATE: Note to self, after reading comments: Irony and sarcasm don't work online -- at least, they don't work when the writer's as ham-handed as me. Plain and simple, here's what I think: Cheney should have been impeached. Now that he's out of office, he should be prosecuted, shamed and described in history textbooks as an arrogant despot who undermined democracy, cost countless lives and caused damage that will take years to undo.
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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/24869.html
The House Intelligence Committee’s Pursuit Of A Full-Scale Investigation Into Whether The CIA Misled Congress Raises The Stakes Dramatically For Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
If the inquiry shows the CIA concealed information about a covert antiterrorist program, Pelosi may be vindicated for her accusations that the CIA lied to Congress. But the fresh publicity surrounding this CIA program — reportedly designed to assassinate terrorists — has given Republicans yet another chance to paint Pelosi as a weak-kneed Democrat who lets her politics hamper the ability of intelligence agencies in the war on terror.
House intelligence committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas) took a major step toward the launch of a formal investigation Monday, sending a letter to Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the committee’s top Republican, asking him for his opinion on whether there should be an investigation.
Across the board, Republicans say they intend to revisit questions they raised earlier this year about what and when Pelosi knew about the CIA’s use of waterboarding tactics.
“The Democrats are the ones who made it their mission to attack the CIA in 2009,” Hoekstra told POLITICO on Monday. “I don’t have to revisit these things. Democrats are revisiting these things.”
Republicans pounced on news of the Reyes investigation, believing it could backfire on Democrats.
“The speaker’s liberal allies are keeping her accusations against the CIA front and center by trying to score political points on intelligence-related issues — which does nothing to make the American people safer,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner.
Pelosi herself has been muted in her response to the revelations that the agency had misled Congress. Last week, CIA Director Leon Panetta told House intelligence committee members that the CIA had misled Congress for eight years about the program in question. Then, in an article posted to its website on Saturday, The New York Times reported that Panetta notified House and Senate intelligence committee members in June that former Vice President Dick Cheney had ordered the concealment of a surveillance program from Congress.
In her weekly news conference with reporters on Thursday, Pelosi kept her distance: “I know what you know. ... The intelligence committee has the oversight responsibility for intelligence in the House, and its equivalent committee in the Senate. I’m sure they will be pursuing this in their regular committee process, and that’s the way that it will go.”
Pelosi didn’t say whether she thought there should be a full-fledged investigation into the charges on Thursday. But she certainly sounded open to the idea.
“I think that it behooves the committee to take whatever actions they believe are necessary to get more information on that subject as to whether the intelligence community was directed by the vice president to create a program and intentionally withhold that information from Congress,” she said Monday.
Democrats say they get the politics on this one and don’t want to give Republicans an opportunity to hammer Pelosi on an issue where she already fumbled earlier this year.
“If she engaged in this, it would over politicize the situation,” said a Democratic aide familiar with the intelligence committee’s work. “It’s an easy shot for [Republicans].”
“The speaker has been pretty clear that these decisions are going to be made at the committee level,” said another Democratic aide familiar with the workings of the intelligence panel. “She doesn’t need to involve herself in this. The Republicans want to make this about her — and it’s not about her.”
But Pelosi is getting peppered with questions about the intelligence flap — on Monday, she was asked about the matter in a news conference intended to discuss House Democrats’ long-awaited health care reform plan — and the momentum for investigations in both chambers is gaining force.
Democrats say they want a bipartisan investigation but don’t expect much support from Republicans.
“It’s unfortunate, but I think they feel they need to be partisan, and I don’t think it needs to be partisan,” said Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), a member of the intelligence committee. “That’s their politicization, and I think it’s unfortunate.”
There is increasing pressure for the Senate to get involved, as well.
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) has said the Senate Intelligence Committee should “absolutely” investigate the program. And on Monday, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said “the failure to notify the congressional intelligence committees of the program prior to last month was a violation of the National Security Act, and individuals who ordered that Congress be kept in the dark should be held accountable.”
Republicans seem poised to fire up campaign ads questioning why Democrats are hampering an intelligence community that has helped prevent terrorist attacks since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“The longer Democrats are talking and obsessing about the CIA, the more they are prolonging an already disastrous narrative for Nancy Pelosi and their party,” said Ken Spain, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “Why Democrats would want to keep this in the news is mind-boggling.”
Patrick O'Connor and Manu Raju contributed to this story.
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Will Eric Holder Be the Anti-Torture Hero?
In an important article for Newsweek, "Independent's Day," Daniel Klaidman manages not only to present a convincingly intimate and sympathetic first-hand portrait of Eric Holder, the first African-American Attorney General in U.S. history, demonstrating how "[h]is first instinct is to shy away from confrontation, to search for common ground," and how he remains haunted by his role in the pardon of Marc Rich at the end of the Clinton administration, but also to explain how "[f]our knowledgeable sources" told him that Holder is "leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do."
With Pelosi's Blessing, Dems Push Ahead With Probe Of CIA
The Hill - Washington,DC,USA
“The Republicans attempted to use this as an issue, but with more and more evidence coming out about the Bush-Cheney administration circumventing Congress ...
See all stories on this topic
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/politics/bulletin/bulletin_090714.htm
Democrats Continue To Push For CIA, Cheney Probes
Media analyses cast the growing debate over Bush-era anti-terror tactics (including possible congressional and Justice Department investigations) as putting President Obama's policy agenda at risk. The Christian Science Monitor says the "growing clamor in Washington for investigations...is putting...Obama in a difficult political position." The Democratic party's "liberal base could revolt if Obama tries to block a look at the past," and yet "such an investigation could also damage the prospects for Obama's healthcare and energy plans, polarizing lawmakers along party lines and making it more difficult to attract GOP votes for his agenda." TheAP notes that "Congressional demands for an investigation grew" yesterday, presenting "a delicate dilemma for the...administration."
The Washington Post, quoting "US intelligence and congressional officials," reports that the CIA ran the "secret program" at the heart of the current controversy "for nearly eight years," but "current and former intelligence officials said the program never progressed to the point where notifying Congress was required." Likewise, the New York Times notes that "officials and some Republican lawmakers said that the spy agency was not required to brief lawmakers on specifics about the program," as "the program was only nascent, and because Congress had already signed off on the CIA's broad authorities after the Sept. 11 attacks."
The Politico reports this morning that the House Intelligence Committee "is expected to launch a full-scale investigation into charges that the CIA concealed a covert spy program from Congress, according to congressional sources." Roll Call says that "Democrats who spent weeks defending" Pelosi "after she accused the CIA of lying to lawmakers about its interrogation of suspected terrorists are" now "going on offense," with "events" giving them "momentum to...shape debate on issues of CIA credibility."
On the CBS Evening News, Rep. Pete Hoekstra was shown saying: "I'm sure that there's a lot of programs that we've never been briefed on that an Administration may have thought about doing but never implemented." In an interview with the Washington Times, Liz Cheney said the calls for a congressional probe "appear to be an attempt by Capitol Hill Democrats to give political cover to embattled House Speaker Nancy Pelosi."
CIA Program At Issue Involved Hit Teams To Kill Al Qaeda Leaders AFP reports that the CIA "refused Monday to comment on reports that it had drawn up a top secret plan to kill members of the Al-Qaeda terror network, a program which was then halted by new CIA boss Leon Panetta." The Los Angeles Times says that according to "former US intelligence officials," the "secret CIA program halted last month by Director Leon E. Panetta involved the establishment of elite paramilitary teams that could be inserted into Pakistan or other locations to capture or kill top leaders of the Al Qaeda terrorist network."
Panetta's Support Within CIA In Jeopardy? The Wall Street Journal reports that CIA director Panetta's "decision to kill the assassination initiative has put him in a tough spot" as "lawmakers' rapid-fire calls to investigate Bush-era efforts like the secret assassination program threaten to undermine that support."
Investigating Torture: What is Eric Holder Talking About? What Will Obama Do?
NOT much, without our visible resistance. I know there's excitement because Holder is finally -- and seemingly, honestly -- talking to the press about how he's agonized over the details of the Bush era torture, and is leaning towards some investigation. Rahm Emmanuel and much of the Democratic leadership doesn't want to go there. Michael Ratner and other defenders of the detainees are rightly worried that any probe will avoid going to the top and opening up huge issues of executive privilege and criminality.
Barack Obama, traveling the world this week, can't get away from the spectre of war crimes and torture that hangs over his administration. This week, Newsweek featured a long piece based on interviews with Attorney General Eric Holder, indicating some of the struggle going on inside the Obama administration over what to do about the torturers of the Bush era, some of which are still working for the government, others of which are spreading their pro-torture message elsewhere. See Is Texas Harboring a Torture Decider? by Ray McGovern onwarcriminalswatch.org.
Some of those on the Intelligence Committee are very angry that Cheney -- for more than 8 years -- seems to have gotten the CIA to lie to Congress about its executive assasination program. The New York Times covered the program Saturday, and The Wall Street Journal covers it today. Leon Panetta says he stopped the program when he heard about it, this month, and that it was never developed. I remember when some of all this ground was covered by the Church Committee in 1975, when the CIA was curbed somewhat from its free-lance murder, coup, and counter-revolution programs -- ironically, or not, also revealed by Seymour Hersh as the "family jewels" of the CIA -- the Church rules have steadily been supplanted by the gloves-off, going to the "dark side" crimes of the Bush era.
There's also international pressure on Obama to investigate the war crimes of General Dostum of Afghanistan, one of the US' favorite war lords during the initial 2001 invasion. War Crimes and the White House: The Bush Administration's Cover-Up of the Dasht-e-Leili Massacre, also discussed this morning on Democracy Now. After the Pentagon said the massacre wasn't its problem, Obama made statements this weekend that there would be an investigation.
What WE do, visibly, is very important! There can be no "wait and see" or "hope for the best" and for the good intentions of the Obama administration to take over. This is an uphill fight for justice, and we demand...Release the torture photos, prosecute the war crimes!
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By Debbie
Nuclear devices thus represent the epitome of terror weapons and, therefore, symbolize the Holy Grailfor any organization that seeks to grab the attention of the world's political, media, and public bodies. ...Any government organization that can send one hundred pounds of Starbucks® coffee to remote Afghanistan upon mere request is worth noting (Schroen 2007, 220). Unfortunately, intelligence has very little to do with convenience and much to do with “dealing with ...
Right Truth - http://righttruth.typepad.com/right_truth/
Instead of enacting further gun control legislation, Congress needs to significantly reduce these restrictions on law-abiding citizens to corral would-be terrorists into areas ripe for ambush by limited federal personnel. Instead of conducting town hall meetings about the economy and press conferences dealing with the environment, the President must use the media to keep the threat of global terrorism at the focus of national attention. Instead of reducing Islamic terrorists to mere criminals, the United States government needs to remind everyone that this is not a police exercise, but a national war of will. That not only do the gloves come off, but the uniforms as well – that each of us is now a soldier in the war against radical Islam.
I’ve Seen 1,200 Torture Photos
CIA Had Secret Plan to Assassinate Terror Foes --Initiative at Heart of Spat With Congress Examined Ways to Seize, Kill Terror Chiefs
A secret Central Intelligence Agency initiative terminated by Director Leon Panetta was an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill 'al Qaeda' operatives, according to former intelligence officials familiar with the matter. The precise nature of the highly classified effort isn't clear, and the CIA won't comment on its substance. According to current and former government officials, the agency spent money on planning and possibly some training. It was acting on a 2001 presidential legal pronouncement, known as a finding, which authorized the CIA to pursue such efforts.
New reports of massive spying, criminality by US government
By Patrick Martin
Reports in the American press on Friday and Saturday reveal massive illegality in the US government and intelligence apparatus. They demonstrate not only routine violations of democratic rights through illegal spying and wiretapping both at home and abroad, but also disregard for legally required reports to Congress... The military/intelligence apparatus operates according to its own rules, disclosing or withholding information from its supposed civilian superiors only when it is felt politically necessary. What is being revealed... is the existence of a "state within the state," a secret government that continues to function regardless of the individual who inhabits the White House.
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