A Time for Change

There’s a lot of strange people out there.  The Smoking Gun has a rather interesting note from a very angry Montana citizen, 36 year old Erik Slye, who was rather upset about jury duty to say the least.  You can read that here.  Yikes.  

Now what makes me think he was a teabagger?

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When your party is shrinking by day and all else fails, what do you do?  The Republicans keep falling back on old themes, like fear mongering.  The perpetually tan John Boehner has released a new hysterical ad aimed to drive the right wingnuts off the deep end by making them think that President Obama is making America less safe than it was under Bush. <choke>  As if.  

It has really creepy music and seems rather ominous and shows video of the Pentagon in flames on 9/11:

The campaign-style video, created by a Boehner aide in his Capitol office, begins with the question, “What are Democrats doing to keep America safe?”

Then, with ominous music in the background, it splices sound bites from news reports and Republicans talking about the dangers of President Obama’s decision to close Guantanamo Bay and to release Bush-era memos about harsh interrogation techniques.  According to CNN:

The video’s climax races through images of Obama hugging the Saudi king, shaking hands with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and ends with an image of the Pentagon burning on September 11, 2001, followed by a final question: “Do you feel safer?” 

Boehner spokeswoman Antonia Ferrier defended using the 9/11 image.

“The events of September 11 happened. Pretending they didn’t won’t make America any safer. And ignoring the fact that it happened is even worse,” Ferrier said.

When asked by CNN why he released what some will view as an alarmist video, Boehner said he is trying to “push the administration to tell us: What is the overarching strategy to take on the terrorists and defeat them and to help keep America safe?” 

Oh, ok, scaring the vulnerable to death by airing a commercial is a good way to have a dialogue with the President about his overarching strategy to take on the terrorists and defeat them and to help keep America safe.”  If they think this is so effective, why didn’t they do this with George Bush? Were they not concerned about the cost of the war, being “fiscal conservatives.”  What about his post-war plan for Iraq (that did not exist by the way).  

Democrats said such “politics of fear” are scaring voters away from the GOP.

“Is it any wonder that voters and senators alike are running away in droves from the Republican Party? Looks like they have taken a page from the discredited Rove/Bush/Cheney playbook. This ad is nothing more than a pathetic attempt to play up the politics of fear and smear,” said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s spokeswoman, Katie Grant, said, “Republicans are once again resorting to fear tactics because they have no new ideas or constructive policies to offer. The American people have already rejected their politics of fear, and this will be no different.”

Yet Republicans are forging ahead with the strategy because it proved effective for them during the 2004 election when Senator Kerry was portrayed as weak on terrorism.  The problem is that Americans do not see President Obama as weak :

A GOP source said the idea for the video was born out of strategy sessions among Boehner, his staff, and other Republican leaders about the fact that they believe Obama is increasingly politically vulnerable on the issue of terrorism.

That view is shared by Republicans in the Senate.

“This is one of those cases where good policy makes good politics,” said a Senate GOP leadership aide, in describing their decision to pound away at Obama for saying he’ll close the Guantanamo Bay prison.

In fact, GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell made a rare appearance at a Senate appropriations hearing Thursday to publicly question Defense Secretary Robert Gates about closing Guantanamo Bay.

McConnell chastised Gates about the fact that Obama announced his decision to shut the prison before making alternative plans for the prisoners there.

Yet when John McCain tried the same stunt during the 2008 general election it was unsuccessful because the economy trumped security.  Makes sense to me, if the economy s bad, we as a country are more vulnerable.  In any event, in a recent CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll earlier in April suggested Americans do not agree with Republicans that Obama is making them less safe. When asked whether the president’s actions increased chances of a terrorist attack in the United States, 26 percent said yes and 72 percent said no.“

The Republicans are not listening.

To make matters even worse, they have used shots of Congressional Latinos in the video to give viewers the false impression that they are dangerous.  Per Huff Po:

The web ad inserts a pic of Barack Obama sitting with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus among pictures of terrorists, Obama bowing to the Saudi Prince, and the President shaking hands with, super villain to the right wing, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

After years of immigrant bashing, recent over heated rhetorical statements about Latin American leaders, and even a renewed claim by Republican pundit Pat Buchanan that Hispanics threaten the very survival of the country, the patience of CHC towards GOP leadership members may be used up.

The Republicans are showing an intolerance to a huge group of people in our country.  They are upset and they have every right to be.  The Republican claim that they want to be the party of inclusion, but their conduct shows that they are the party of white, old and intolerant.

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Along my “Who Is Tyrannizing Who?” theme this week, the “Down with Tyranny” blog had anexcellet post about the “fair and balanced” nature of the Faux News and the Faux News psychotainers who have gone from nitty to flaming over the top loons in 100 days.  There is, of course, nothing “fair and balanced’ about Faux  News.  If you read Scott McClelland’s book, which I recommend (not for the writing) if you want a behind the scene look into the insanity of the Bush White House, he readily concedes that all of these right wingnut talking heads were used by the Bush White House to repeat talking points.  Everyone from radio to TV go memos from the White House and they used each other.

Thanks Tyranny and to Media Matters for compiling it.  Fair and Balanced?  Ha!  Sure.

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I saw this video on Kos today and had to laugh.  She is claiming that it is an “interesting coincidence” that swine flu issues have popped up under Democratic presidents:

“I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter,” said Bachmann. “And I’m not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.”

This woman is something else.  Does she do this stuff deliberately or is she clueless?  She is a lawyer so she had to have a few brain cells to rub together because law school isn’t easy.  As for Markos, well, I think he has just about had it with her, calling her the “new Palin” and saying this:

Here’s what I find interesting: Michele Bachmann is so partisan or so stupid (or both) that she thinks she’s actually being coy enough not to be called out on this insidious piece of shit.

Gerald Ford was president during the 1976 swine flu outbreak. And Michele was probably as dumb as a fucking bag of rocks at that time, too.

Alrighty then.

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more about “Pro-Guns, Anti-Obama – Page 1 – The D…“, posted with vodpod

The Daily Beast has a very good article and video on interviews conducted at gun shows showing the manner in which the FauxNews psychotainers, the NRA and their ilk have embedded the idea in their gun lovin’ sheeple that President Obama is out to destroy the American way, collect all of their guns and put people in FEMA camps.  Sound crazy?  Take a few moments to fish around the web a bit and you will see that “gun enthusiasts” have gone off the deep end.  There is plenty of web traffic discussing the need for revolution because of our President who, to this day, has yet to put a single individual in a FEMA camp.

I suppose I was naieve when I thought people would calm down after he took the oath, thinking that when people see that the Earth would not be engulfed in flames, maybe his presidency would not be seen as the end of days.  It really might have happened that way but for the right wingnut media and psychotainers whipping up their dittoheads to a rabid frenzy.  Guns and ammo are in short supply in a country where the amount of guns int he stream of commerce is already staggering.

The Daily Beast article is not only timely, following shortly in the wake of the Department of  Homeland Security Report, but also an important view into an element of society that the average person does not generally encounter.  Ladies and gentleman, these are the people who feel that armed revolution may be necessary, is inevitable or will be on its way.  Speaking casually about the potential assassination of our Presdent if we move to try to enact some rational gun control legislation is incomprehensible to most Americans.  Not so in in this culture.

Fueled by the screeds of radio hosts Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, and the lesser-known but increasingly influentialonline conspiracist Alex Jones, many gun-show attendees I spoke to were convinced Obama planned to usher in a Marxist dictatorship. They warned that the president’s power grab would only begin with mass gun seizures. “If Obama takes away our guns,” a young, .45 pistol-toting man from Reno told me, “it’s just a step into trying to take away everything else.”

Indeed, in their minds, average Americans opposed to the Obama agenda would be herded into FEMA-run concentration camps by a volunteer army of glassy-eyed liberal college graduates. “When they start imprisoning Americans, and people start seeing that we’re the enemy, then that’ll make it hot,” predicted one Antioch-based young man sporting a button for former Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul. “People talk about a revolution,” the young man continued, “an armed revolution. I think police crackdowns on individuals will tip the scales.”

More than a few gun dealers and attendees echoed the young man’s seeming enthusiasm for armed revolt. One Contra Costa, California-based gun dealer named Rich predicted during an otherwise casual off-camera conversation that “some nut” would assassinate Obama within one year of any Democratic attempt at gun-control legislation. While the prospect of organized right-wing violence against the federal government seems far-fetched at this point, the paranoid rhetoric I documented suggests the militia movement that organized against President Bill Clinton’s policies during the 1990s could experience a dramatic resurgence by mobilizing resentment againstObama.

If a new militia movement coalesces, its members will have no shortage of sophisticated assault weapons to choose from. At the gun show in Reno, I witnessed the sale of rocket-propelled-grenade launchers and bazooka guns; I watched a California-based dealer demonstrate how rapidly he could field strip his .308-caliber sniper rifle, then stash it in a deliberately innocuous-looking backpack and a briefcase that “looks just like a camera case.” Nearby, I interviewed another dealer retailing a brand of.50-caliber assault rifle that was banned in California because it could supposedly down an airplane. He told me by slightly altering the bullets his gun fired, and by converting the gun from semi-automatic to bolt-action, he was able to sell it in California once again.

(Weapons like these are useful to Mexican narco-cartels, too. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms’ Phoenix field division claimed that “many gun shows attracted large numbers of gang members from Mexico and California. They often bought large quantities of assault weapons and smuggled them into Mexico or transported them to California.”)

Though big guns were the main attraction, a handful of retailers in Reno appealed to some visitors’ apparent enthusiasm for Nazi memorabilia. Swastika-emblazoned flags, photographs of Hitler and his henchmen, and anything related to the Third Reich were available at several booths. There was obviously no way to gauge the percentage of show attendees who adhered to the racist fringe, but the prominence of so much Nazi regalia suggested they maintained a significant presence. In fact, I learned about the gun shows I attended from a Web sitethat features a prominent banner ad for the Council of Conservative Citizens, America’s largest white-supremacist group.

On April 4, a neo-Nazi wannabe named Richard Poplawski murdered three Pittsburgh police officers with a high-powered assault rifle. By all accounts, Poplawski was an avid follower of right-wing talkers including Alex Jones and Glenn Beck who “grew angry recently over fears Obama would outlaw guns.”

In the wake of Poplawski’s massacre, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report warning of the mounting threat of “right-wing extremism.” “Heightened interest in legislation for tighter firearms control,” theDHS asserted, “may be invigorating right-wing extremist activity, specifically the white-supremacist and militia movements.” With its focus on right-wing gun culture, the report compounded the already palpable paranoia of gun-show enthusiasts. An organizer of the Antioch show told me the heightened specter of government scrutiny prompted numerous dealers to demand a total ban on cameras of any kind inside the show.

The total irony of this entire situation is that President Obama is not a threat to this nation, but rather the people who threaten revolution and who cause death and injury to other Americans are.  This hysteria that has been created by psychotainers such as Glenn Beck can be linked to the murder of three police officers.  Just last weekend, another man, Joshua Cartwright, murdered two more police officers because he was concerned that President Obama would take his guns away.

The gun enthusiasts and teabaggers have the audacity to talk about tyranny.  Listen to comments like the following that I received on this blog in response to a post on Joshua Cartwright having murdered two police officers because he was irrationally afraid that President Obama would take his guns:

 

Gerald Submitted on 2009/04/28 at 11:43pm Barack could save a lot of lives if he just gave up on his gun banning agenda.

 

Now that is tyranny.  At a minimum, such talk is an attempt to create a chilling effect on a national debate that is long overdue in this country.  This is just one example of  some gun owners’ attitude that “If we don’t like what you do, lives will be taken, you may be assassinated and havoc will be wreaked unless you do as we say and let us sell rocket-propelled grenade launchers and bazooka guns at gun shows.” They don’t care about the cost to society. There is no concept of the “greater good,” which is the very foundation of this country.  Some in the gun culture are out of control and as far as I am concerned the Department of Homeland Security report was right on target.

Some gun owners, not all, need to remember that this is a nation of laws and just because they don’t like playing nicely with others does not mean you get to bully, threaten, harass and injure or kill in the cause of your Second Amendment right.  Once YOUR rights infringe on the greater good, the Constitutional protections fade.  Constitutional rights are not absolute.

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I posted over the weekend about two (2) more officers who lost their lives due to gun violence.  This was only one of three violent shooting sprees that happened last weekend and which appears to have become a regular part of our lives.  Not much was known at the time why 28 year old Joshua Cartwright would murder two police.  We know now that he was delusional courtesy of the NRA fear mongering and Faux News psychotainers, which is reminiscent of Richard Poplawski who recently killed himself and three police officers in Pittsburgh in a deliberate ambush.  

According to the Huffington Post, it started out as a domestic violence incident when an argument broke out over the whereabouts of Clearasil and escalated from there.  Elizabeth Cartwright, Joshua’s wife, escaped to a hospital, but Joshua’s anger remained at a high level:

According to the police report, Elizabeth Cartwright said her husband “believed that the US Government was conspiring against him. She said he had been severely disturbed that Barack Obama had been elected President.”

It isn’t the first shooting incident in recent weeks after which a crazed gunman’s political ravings have made headlines. On April 4, after Richard Poplawski killed three police officers, several of Poplawski’s friends told the Associated Press that Poplawski “feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns.”

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The AP reports that Cartwright exchanged fire with the deputies after being stunned with a Taser:

“When that Taser released after five seconds, he came up shooting,” Interim Okaloosa County Sheriff Edward Spooner said.
“He went from just being disagreeable to using deadly force in a matter of seconds. It was a very aggressive move with a concealed weapon on his part.”

Spooner said that between 30 and 40 rounds were exchanged between Cartwright and the two deputies.

You can read the police report at Huff Po.  I hope Faux news psychotainment central is happy. I am counting 5 officers down over this hysteria over Barack Obama’s election.  Glenn Beck and others at Faux News just keep fanning the flames of this type of lunacy for their own PROFIT people.  THEY are making MONEY from your gullibility in actually believing the garbage that they feed you.

Oh, there’s more, as if that was not enough.  The FBI arrested a man in Oklahoma earlier this month for posting threatening messages on his Twitter account.  What did these messages say?  Here you go courtesy of Huff Po:

• “The WAR wWIL start on the steps of the Oklahoma State Capitol. I will cast the first stone. In the meantime, I await the police,” wrote Daniel Knight Hayden, 52, according to messages included in the FBI affidavit (posted below).
• Another Twitter post began “START THE KILLING NOW!” Yet another: “Send the cops around. I will cut their heads off the heads and throw the[m] on the State Capitol steps,” he wrote in one message.
• Special agent Michael S. Puskas said that Hayden posted threats under the Internet name “Citizen Quasar.” Puskas says agents also found a MySpace account using the name “Citizen Quasar” and on Blogger.com an on line diary using the name “Quasar.”
• 7:59 p.m. “The WAR will start on the steps of the Oklahoma State Capitol. I will cast the first stone. In the meantime, I await the police.

While he was not considered a threat, is this really what Faux News and the Republicans want to promote???

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The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Offic…“, posted with vodpod

The media has gone over the top in their overage of the swine flu “pandemic” because I actually think the miss the fear mongering and gloom and doom of the Bush administration.  So along comes swine flu to give them the chance to breath life into 24/7 news media coverage that hypes the flu into a pandemic and gives the right wingnuttery out there the idea that the plague is upon us and the end is near.

I kid you know, the following showed up in my google search stats: “Obama swine flu end of days gods wrath.”  <hearing thunder crack>.  Well, if you are as sick of this coverage as I am, you will like this video.

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THIS IS HUGE! When Franken is seated the dems have 60 nad the Seanate is then filibuster proof.  There will still be some conservative Democrats who will not necessarily vote with the Democrats.  The Washington Post reports:

Specter’s decision would give Democrats a 60 seat filibuster proof majority in the Senate assuming Democrat Al Franken is eventually sworn in as the next Senator from Minnesota. (Former Sen. Norm Coleman is appealing Franken’s victory in the state Supreme Court.)

“I have decided to run for re-election in 2010 in the Democratic primary,” said Specter in a statement. “I am ready, willing and anxious to take on all comers and have my candidacy for re-election determined in a general election.”

He added: “Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans.”

Specter as a Democrat would also fundamentally alter the 2010 calculus in Pennsylvania as he was expected to face a difficult primary challenge next year from former Rep. Pat Toomey. The only announced Democrat in the race is former National Constitution Center head Joe Torsella although several other candidates are looking at the race.

The Republicans have been turned on their head today.  At 10:25 a.m., President Obama was told and he called him a few moments later. President Obama gave Sprctor his full support.

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more about “Illegitimate Grandson of an Alligator…“, posted with vodpod

This video is for all of those who are SICK of the right wingnut, tin foil hat wearing, nutters out there who are still filing frivolous lawsuits and tilting at the windmill of Barack Obama’s birth certificate.  

On another note, <whispering>I don’t think any of you will find this hard to believe, but Huffington Post reports that an Ohio State University Poll shows that (yikes) the right wingnuts don’t understand that Colbert is making fun of them BIG TIME. <ok, now I’m crying from the laughter>.

Here’s the tidbit from Huff Po’s cite to the poll:

This study investigated biased message processing of political satire in The Colbert Report and the influence of political ideology on perceptions of Stephen Colbert. Results indicate that political ideology influences biased processing of ambiguous political messages and source in late-night comedy. Using data from an experiment (N = 332), we found that individual-level political ideology significantly predicted perceptions of Colbert’s political ideology. Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism. Finally, a post hoc analysis revealed that perceptions of Colbert’s political opinions fully mediated the relationship between political ideology and individual-level opinion.

I think a lot of conservatives are going to pissed when they realize that Stephen Colbert’s performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner was not, in fact, an awkward and ineffective attempt to praise President George W. Bush, but actually a bitter and satiric criticism of his incompetence!

Satire seems to be a form of humor that right wingnuts struggle with and this is not the first ime that I have noticed that.  Go ahead, try to find evidence of humor or any comprehension of real satire or irony.  Not happenin’.

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Jay Bybee – Judge 9th Circuit Court of Appeals

Author of torture Quack Memos

The American News Project interviews Scott Horton, who has been on top of the torture issue from day 1, and Yale Law Professor, Bruce Ackerman, concerning the now infamous Bybee  memoranda.  During the interview, Harper’s Scott Horton, a lawyer himself, explains how the torture memos came about and why these memos are so legally fake.  Basically, Bybee’s memos were the result of “cobbling together” some sort of rationale for committing war crimes.  You can see the video here.

I hope you get the change to see it as it is particularly useful for putting the legal quackery of these memos in context.  It’s actually really quite shocking to those of us in the profession.  he should never have been confirmed for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. 

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more about “msnbc.com video: Craigslist suspect s…” (please click on link to view video)

According to a report on the Today show this morning, Phillip Markoff’s family visited him in jail this weekend and he told them to go away and forget about him because a lot more would be coming out about the case.  According to a gay man who exchanged email with Markoff, that they exchanged explicit sexual photos and messages and that Markoff contacted him after he posted an ad on Craigslist for “M4T,” which means that Markoff was a male looking for transexual.  

Markoff used the Yahoo! sexaddict5385 email to solicit an encounter with a transexual.  Today confirmed that the Yahoo! account was the same one he used for Julissa Brisman.  Markoff was looking for a “casual encounter,” but they never met.  

This case gets stranger and stranger all the time.  Is it any surprise that the wedding has been called off.

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This is NOT America

Frank Rich has written a very good Op-Ed piece  on the torture issue.  It touches on many of the aspects of this issue that we have been discussing her for months and especially over the last few months.  A new ABC News poll discussed on MSNBC live, 51% of Americans want an investigation of  Bush era torture. 44% oppose President Obama’s decision to release the torture memos.  But this is the interesting statistic.  48% say that we should nevertheless consider torture in certain cases notwithstanding the plethora of evidence that torture does not work to provide good and reliable intelligence. See this post as just one example.   How about when torture was used to try to get some evidence to buttress the Bush administration claims that there was a link between al Qaeda and Iraq. You can see that post here.  Now, Dick Cheney is scrambling to try to paint the torture in a different light and to support his claims that torture works when it dies not.  He’s an incredible, paranoid loon.  See the Rachel Maddow piece on that is just excellent.

more about “Rachel Maddow video: In Veep Trouble” (please click on link to view video)

Bush, Cheney and gang did not exactly “tolerate dissent” indeed. See here.  Those at the top just destroyed what went against their agenda.  The people at the top should most definitely pay.

That brings us full circle to a post I made exactly one week ago.  We could have and should known about the torture and according to this poll as early as right after 9/11, yet some say we did not know.  At the very least, as Frank Rich wrote “We’ve learned much, much more about America and torture in the past five years. But as Mark Danner recently wrote in The New York Review of Books, for all the revelations, one essential fact remains unchanged: “By no later than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it.” When the Obama administration said it declassified four new torture memos10 days ago in part because their contents were already largely public, it was right.”  So we knew or should have known.  Why the public debate then about the release of these memos revealing the depravity of the Bush administration?  The information was in the public realm.  It’s not like al Qaeda does not monitor our media.

The other thing is that notwithstanding the horrific nature of the torture, there are apparently a good number of us who still want to authorize the commission of war crimes if you believe the poll cited above.  What is wrong with us?  We are OK with war crimes? <wide eyed and horrified in disbelief>

As for the 52% who do not want torture and the 51% who want an investigation into it, you have some sticky issues such as the President talking about whether or not there will be torture prosecutions when he should leave that up to his attorney general.  What happened to not politicizing the Department of Justice.  I’m just sayin’.

Then there is the discussion about whether lower level CIA and DOD personnel should be prosecuted  for war crimes when it is presumed that they were (1) relying on orders and/or direction from above and (2) presumably relying on legal advice from the OLC.  If our intelligence community is ticked off and paranoid, they might not exactly be focusing on our national interests. Think about that.

I think the answer lies in the information that we have, especially now that we have more information that at least some of the rank and file were not in agreement with their “orders” to torture.  In fact, more than a few were very opposed, including a young soldier who was so impacted she committed suicide.  Thanks Skye for that post.  So where does the blame lie because the buck has to stop somewhere?  Frank Rich’s column has the answer.  When you realize WHY the Bush administration was so anxious to torture that they did it before they received the quack memos authorizing it, you realize that they had a mission and the real mission was not uncovering terrorist plots, but find evidence for their dirty little war against Saddam Hussein:

Still, it’s not Bybee’s perverted lawyering and pornographic amorality that make his memo worthy of special attention. It merits a closer look because it actually does add something new — and, even after all we’ve heard, something shocking — to the five-year-old torture narrative. When placed in full context, it’s the kind of smoking gun that might free us from the myths and denial that prevent us from reckoning with this ugly chapter in our history.

Bybee’s memo was aimed at one particular detainee, Abu Zubaydah, who had been captured some four months earlier, in late March 2002. Zubaydah is portrayed in the memo (as he was publicly by Bush after his capture) as one of the top men in Al Qaeda. But by August this had been proven false. As Ron Suskind reported in his book “The One Percent Doctrine,” Zubaydah was identified soon after his capture as a logistics guy, who, in the words of the F.B.I.’s top-ranking Qaeda analyst at the time, Dan Coleman, served as the terrorist group’s flight booker and “greeter,” like “Joe Louis in the lobby of Caesar’s Palace.” Zubaydah “knew very little about real operations, or strategy.” He showed clinical symptoms of schizophrenia.

By the time Bybee wrote his memo, Zubaydah had been questioned by the F.B.I. and C.I.A. for months and had given what limited information he had. His most valuable contribution was to finger Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the 9/11 mastermind. But, as Jane Mayer wrote in her book “The Dark Side,” even that contribution may have been old news: according to the 9/11 commission, the C.I.A. had already learned about Mohammed during the summer of 2001. In any event, as one of Zubaydah’s own F.B.I. questioners, Ali Soufan, wrote in a Times Op-Ed article last Thursday, traditional interrogation methods had worked. Yet Bybee’s memo purported that an “increased pressure phase” was required to force Zubaydah to talk.

As soon as Bybee gave the green light, torture followed: Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002, according to another of the newly released memos. Unsurprisingly, it appears that no significant intelligence was gained by torturing this mentally ill Qaeda functionary. So why the overkill? Bybee’s memo invoked a ticking time bomb: “There is currently a level of ‘chatter’ equal to that which preceded the September 11 attacks.”

We don’t know if there was such unusual “chatter” then, but it’s unlikely Zubaydah could have added information if there were. Perhaps some new facts may yet emerge if Dick Cheney succeeds in his unexpected and welcome crusade to declassify documents that he says will exonerate administration interrogation policies. Meanwhile, we do have evidence for an alternative explanation of what motivated Bybee to write his memo that August, thanks to the comprehensive Senate Armed Services Committee report on detaineesreleased last week.

The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slam dunk.

But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.

Last week Bush-Cheney defenders, true to form, dismissed the Senate Armed Services Committee report as “partisan.” But as the committee chairman, Carl Levin, told me, the report received unanimous support from its members — John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman included.

Levin also emphasized the report’s accounts of military lawyers who dissented from White House doctrine — only to be disregarded. The Bush administration was “driven,” Levin said. By what? “They’d say it was to get more information. But they were desperate to find a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.”

 

If the 51% of you who want investigations are outraged and feel your pulse rising, please know that I am with you.  If we go forward with prosecutions, we need to go forward with the people at the top, the same people who lied to us about the evidence for going to war in Iraq, which led to Bush and Co. having to try to manufacture evidence from torture because there certainly was plenty of credible data that torture does not produce good intelligence.  The only conclusion that we can draw — they didn’t care.  They just wanted something they could point to to cover their backsides.

It is an affront to everythig that this country stands for that Dick Cheney trots himself out of  his hovel to defend himself when there is no defense  for torture. 

The investigations and prosecutions, if a case can be made, should start at the top.  The very top.

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Binghampton,  NY

There is an article written by John Rosenthal at Huffington Post, a GUN OWNER, calling for the enactment of “national gun laws that promote and require gun safety and accountability on the part of gun owners, clubs, dealers, manufactures and law enforcement rather than the current gun policy, dictated by the special interest gun lobby, that allows unrestricted access to all guns by all people including kids, criminal and terrorists? If we did we could reduce the number of annual gun deaths and injuries to a fraction without any undue hardship on law abiding gun owners like myself.”   Bravo John Rosenthal!

I agree with his view on gun violence in this country:

In the wake of the recent senseless death of an 8 year old with an Uzi automatic weapon at a gun club in Massachusetts,  it’s critical that we as a nation recognize that this child’s gun death was just one of the 5 kids under 10 years old and 83 Americans total that died that day and every day from gun violence. Clearly 8 year old Christopher Bizilj’s gun death was entirely preventable and a result of adult negligence and irresponsibility. On the other hand it’s hard to legislate common sense and we shouldn’t need a law that prevents 8 year olds from using machine guns. That said this tragic death highlights a failed US gun policy that allows kids, criminals and terrorists to access military style weapons and handguns without any reasonable restrictions or even detection in 32 states where there isn’t even a criminal background check requirement for all gun sales. Hence the United States is the gun violence capital of the world and here are the just a few of the startling numbers.

Here are a the statistics that this GUN OWNER cited in his post:

5 Average number of child deaths in gun-related accidents or suicide EVERY DAY

9 Number of kids under 19 years old killed by guns EVERYDAY

32 Number of states in the US that allow ANYONE to purchase firearms without an ID or criminal background check

40 Percent of gun sales in the US occur without an ID or background check requirement

40 Percent of American households that contain both children and guns

83 Average number of Americans killed by guns EVERYDAY

1,260 Average number of annual firearm homicides in the European Union (pop 376 million)

10,821 Average number of annual firearm homicides in the US (pop 282 million)

34,000 Average number of Americans killed by guns EVERY YEAR

$33,000 Average medical cost (80% uninsured) of a gun related death

$300,000 Average cost (80% uninsured) of a gun related injury

70,000 Average number of gun-related injuries EVERY YEAR

655,000 Number US service men and women killed in all Foreign Wars combined

1,035,000 Number of gun deaths in the US over the past 30 years

$4 million NRA contributions to George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign

$18 million NRA contributions to Congressional candidates in the last four election cycles

$40 million NRA promised contributions to John McCain’s 2008 Presidential campaign

$34 billion Annual US medical and productivity costs of gun injuries and deaths

Some gun control does not mean a ban of all weapons, but c’mon 8 year olds with machine guns?  How many triple shooting deaths a day do we need?  

ENOUGH.

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You’re All That I Have

Spitting Games

** Chocolate **

** Love is a Losing Game **

OK, I have received some very kind email about this blog, but many of you have asked me about who I am?  So, in response to that, I have posted some more personal things of late, including the post about happiness yesterday.  

I think the “who I am” question is always a work in progress, but generally I think people are the most important thing in your life and you should never, ever forget that.  Your real friends are there for you at any time.  You have to give back in life not only because it should make you feel good, but simply because giving back makes us not only uniquely human, but humane.  For the rest of my personal outlook on people,  just check out the “Now” page and you will see the rest.  

I love to laugh more than just about anything and along with that I just plain enjoy being really quite silly.  I know!  Who knew when I write about torture 5 days a week.  Things I find amusing for some reason are my best friend, my favorite bloggers are damn funny, funny accident videos, right wingnuts, my cat Marlowe and I enjoy laughing at myself pretty regularly, among many other things.

I am a very loyal friend and will be there for you no matter the time of the day or night.

I love good wine and rather amazingly love making my own soup when I have time.

I like to play tennis, badminton and golf.  I love swimming and days at the beach.  I really enjoy hiking and cycling.

I rarely watch TV because of my crazy and irregular hours, but I do watch news shows.  I love movies because they are a fantastic escape. 

I really like writing, but find that really, really good writing takes time, which is not something that I have.

I am a a progressive moderate who feels strongly about certain issues and I imagine that passion comes accross in this blog from time to time.

And last but not least, I adore music, which explains the videos above.  I liked Snow Patrol (the top 3) before theyhit it big with ”Chasing Cars.”  The 3 songs above are among my favorites and back when their sound was a bit more raw, which I like.  I don’t care for overly produced music with lyrics to nowhere.  Snow Patrol is the complete opposite of that.  Their lyrics mean something to me or else I just couldn’t listen.  I have loved them since 2003 and  I have flown to several different cities to see them in concert and will continue to go because they put on a fantastic show.

The last video is the inimitable Amy Winehouse who I have also adored for years!  This song is particularly beautiful.  The first time I listened to it, I was slowly coming down from a nice wine tasting buzz as I travelled through North Carolina while watching the sunset over the mountains.  A fabulous day, a great song and a phenomenal talent.

My best friend once asked me if  I will still be going to concerts when I am 80 and I replied, “If I am still alive, yes.”  So when you see those fans jumping up and down in the first few rown on the first video, you just may see me.

So, there you have it.  Have a great Sunday.  

Jessica Spurgeon mug shot

I was once standing inside my law office when I watched a criminal being pursued by police through several buildings and alleys. He eventually jumped up on a rather large fence and pulled himself over it only to find himself in the local FBI compound!  So here’s another one for the stupid criminal tricks from.

Heather Adams lost a pricey watch a few eyears back, but saw it on Jessica Spurgeon’s Facebook photo.  Spurgeon was a guest at a 2007 dinner party, where she helped herself to a lot more than food.  McAdams called police and Spurgeon told some wild tales before she finally admitted taking “$1,116 mother-of-pearl diamond encrusted ticker.” According to TruTv, she faces grand theft charges.  

On the other hand, maybe you need to be more careful about who comes over for dinner.

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