Red State Renegade

Remember when we were the good guys?

Yesterday the ACLU filed a lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing, alleging that the firm, since 2001, “has provided direct and substantial services to the United States for its so-called ‘extraordinary rendition‘ program,” (this being the method in the ‘War on Terror’ of secretly transferring a person to countries allowing harsh interrogation techniques in order to torture them outside the jurisdiction of a state which prohibits it).

The suit, filed on behalf of three men flown to states like Morroco, Syria, and Egypt for brutal interrogations, marks the first time a blue-chip American firm has been accused of profiting from torture.

It alleges the company was responsible for more than 70 such renditions, and quotes a senior company official as claiming “We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights — you know the torture flights. Let’s face it, some of these flights end up that way.”

One claim involves Binyam Mohammed, a 28-year-old Ethiopian citizen and British resident (now at Guantanamo Bay), who was flown to Morocco, then tortured at a series of detention facilities:

“He was routinely beaten, suffering broken bones and, on occasion, loss of consciousness due to the beatings. His clothes were cut off with a scalpel and the same scalpel was then used to make incisions on his body, including his penis. A hot stinging liquid was then poured into open wounds on his penis where he had been cut.”

Ironic, then, that a report commissioned by the Intelligence Science Board of the CIA on the current state of interrogation methods, recently criticized such techniques as outmoded, amateurish and unreliable.

From the N.Y. Times:

The science board critique comes as ethical concerns about harsh interrogations are being voiced by current and former government officials. The top commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, sent a letter to troops this month warning that “expedient methods” using force violated American values.

In a blistering lecture delivered last month, a former adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called “immoral” some interrogation tactics used by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon.

But in meetings with intelligence officials and in a 325-page initial report completed in December, the researchers have pressed a more practical critique: there is little evidence, they say, that harsh methods produce the best intelligence.

“There’s an assumption that often passes for common sense that the more pain imposed on someone, the more likely they are to comply,” said Randy Borum, a psychologist at the University of South Florida who, like several of the study’s contributors, is a consultant for the Defense Department.

Maybe this administration watches a little too much Jack Bauer?

YIKES…How do these people live with themselves now?

As far as I am concerned, it’s been well proven from many angles that the Iraq war was a wet dream of the Boy King, who was set on attacking Iraq and simply needed to find a way to justify it.

The icing on the cake was the Downing Street documents, a series of memos prepared in 2002 by the British Intelligence service in which they admit that the claim that Iraq had links with al Qaeda was ‘frankly unconvincing,’ but since George was determined to invade Iraq, ‘the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.’

Old news. Yet the evidence continues to come out.

A very important, yet little-noted book appeared on the scene about a month ago, keying on the intelligence leading up to the ‘Yellowcake Uranium’ claims in the State of the Union speech that were later debunked - the same claims that led to the outing of Valerie Plame as a covert CIA Agent.

The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq covers Alan Foley, who, as the head of the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC), was a front-and-center cheerleader for the Iraq war.

WINPAC led the CIA’s analysis of Iraq’s purported WMD, so Foley himself was at the center of the effort to drum up support for the dubious war.

The book, written by award winning authors Peter Eiser and Knut Royce, reports:

One day in December 2002, Foley called his senior production managers to his office. He had a clear message for the men and women who controlled the output of the center’s analysts: “If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.” The directive was not quite an order to cook the books, but it was a strong suggestion that cherry-picking and slanting not only would be tolerated, but might even be rewarded.

Other books back up this assertion. In A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies, James Bamford reports on a high up CIA case officer who spent years running agents overseas. He had been reassigned to the unit charged with finding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, but told Bamford that no one in his group ever found any indications of WMD in Iraq.

Bamford continues:

Nevertheless, there was a great deal of pressure to find a reason to go to war with Iraq. And the pressure was not just subtle; it was blatant. At one point in January 2003, the person’s boss called a meeting and gave them their marching orders. “And he said, ‘You know what—if Bush wants to go to war, it’s your job to give him a reason to do so’… He said it at the weekly office meeting. And I just remember saying, ‘This is something that the American public, if they ever knew, would be outraged’…He said it to about fifty people. And it’s funny because everyone still talks about that — ‘Remember when [he] said that.’”

In Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy, Lindsay Moran comes out like a female Jack Bauer in a real life “24” series.

She writes:

During my short tenure in Iraqi Operations, I met one woman who had covered Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program for more than a decade. She admitted to me, unequivocally, that the CIA had no definitive evidence whatsoever that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed WMD, or that Iraq presented anything close to an imminent threat to the United States. Another CIA analyst, whose opinion I’d solicited about the connection between Al-Qa’ida and Iraq, looked at me almost shamefacedly, shrugged, and said, “They both have the letter q?” And a colleague who worked in the office covering Iraqi counterproliferation reported to me that her mealy-mouthed pen pusher of a boss had gathered together his minions and announced, “Let’s face it. The president wants us to go to war, and our job is to give him a reason to do it.”

This shit is way worse than watergate, so why doesn’t it make bigger news?

The testimony of James Comey to the Senate judiciary Committee two weeks ago was originally about the firing of the eight U.S. attorneys…but it unearthed something startling about the illegal NSA wiretapping program.

The video of his testimony plays out like a hollywood movie or a Sopranos episode, and illustrates (even more than usual) what a bunch of crooks and thugs this administration is.

As Newsweek reports, The head of the FBI, the head of the Department of Justice, and 30 other top officials threatened to resign because of the illegal program and the Tony Soprano-like visit to a sick, weak John Ashcroft in order to coerce him to sign off on the program, one which he already considered illegal:

So consider these scenes from March 2004, described by two former top Justice officials who, like other ex-officials interviewed by NEWSWEEK, did not wish to be identified discussing sensitive internal matters. Attorney General John Ashcroft is really sick. About to give a press conference in Virginia, he is stricken with pain so severe he has to lie down on the floor. Taken to the hospital for an emergency gallbladder operation, he hallucinates under medication as he lies, near death, in intensive care. On the night after his operation, he has two visitors: White House chief of staff Andrew Card and presidential counsel Alberto Gonzales. As described in public testimony, they want Ashcroft to sign a document authorizing the government’s top-secret eavesdropping program to go on. The attorney general, who thinks the program is illegal, refuses.

Back at the Justice Department, there is an equally extraordinary scene. Appalled by the White House’s heavy-handed attempt to coerce the gravely ill attorney general, virtually the entire top leadership of the Justice Department is threatening to resign. The group includes the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum and the chief of the Criminal Division, Chris Wray. Some of them gather in the conference room of Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who describes Ashcroft’s bravely turning away the president’s men from his hospital bed. The mood that night in the conference room was tense—and sober.

“This was a showdown,” says a former senior Justice Department official who was there. “Everybody understood the choice they were making and the gravity of the situation. Everybody knew what the stakes were.” A different source estimated that as many as 30 top DOJ officials would have resigned.

Days later the Boy King was questioned about the incident and deflected the question in his normal, awkward manner (See video):

“There’s a lot of speculation about what happened and what didn’t happen and I’m not going to talk about it…It’s a very sensitive program…”

But why does the press and the Congress let him get away with this?

From a live MSNBC poll - keep in mind it is not considered a scientific poll and is perhaps indicative of a liberal audience.

Then again…In many cases, the word ‘liberal’ is equivalent to ‘informed.’

A work in progress - more reasons why Bush should be impeached. Even though I am sticking to a few key points, it’s hard to write this and keep it all timely.

I get anxious wondering if the Bush house of cards will fall on it’s own before I get to finish. Luckily there’s only one more part (I hope)…Then I can send it, thus ensuring another dispatch of the black helicopters:

CONTINUED FROM PART 2, posted May 20:

…Equally questionable is the President’s use of signing statements to openly disregard legislation passed by Congress.

Normally, an administration having serious concerns about a bill can use the presidential veto to express dissatisfaction, a tool allowing congress to re-examine or rewrite the legislation.

But until recently this president has never vetoed a bill, and has instead used such signing statements to effectively exercise a line item veto, a tool deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1988.

The Court declared that the line item veto violates the Constitution’s Presentment Clause, which says that after a bill has passed both Houses, but “before it becomes a Law,” it must be presented to the President, who “shall sign it” if he approves it, but “return it” (veto the bill in its entirety), if he does not.

While other presidents have issued an occassional signing statement, George Bush has issued nearly 800 such statements. Worse, while predecessors used such statements largely as a means of interpreting legal ambiguities or clarifying a law’s purpose or significance, Bush’s statements blatantly assert that he has the right or the intention to disregard or ignore numerous sections of the bills because of powers accorded to him by the Constitution.

Examples of laws quietly nullified in this manner include the much-debated ban on torturing detainees, oversight provisions in the USA Patriot Act, restrictions against using US troops in combat against rebels in Colombia, and numerous requirements to provide information to Congress.

An American Bar Association task force of legal experts (including a former FBI director, a former federal appeals court chief judge, and former Republican officials) resolved that Bush should stop issuing signing statements to bypass the law, and declared that:

“The use, frequency, and nature of the President’s signing statements demonstrates a ‘radically expansive view’ of executive power which ‘amounts to a claim that he is impervious to the laws that Congress enacts’ and represents a serious assault on the constitutional system of checks and balances.”

One panel member (a formal federal prosecutor) declared that these practices, if continued, “threaten to throw this country into a constitutional crisis.”

Will they ever learn?