A Time for Change

I previously posted this week that Newt Gingrich was charged with and fined for serious ethics problems while he was speaker of the house in the 90′s.  Consider this from the Washington Post dated January 22, 1997:

The House voted overwhelmingly yesterday to reprimand House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and order him to pay an unprecedented $300,000 penalty, the first time in the House’s 208-year history it has disciplined a speaker for ethical wrongdoing.

The ethics case and its resolution leave Gingrich with little leeway for future personal controversies, House Republicans said. Exactly one month before yesterday’s vote, Gingrich admitted that he brought discredit to the House and broke its rules by failing to ensure that financing for two projects would not violate federal tax law and by giving the House ethics committee false information.

There is an interesting history there though. Nancy Pelosi actually led the charge on the investigation that led to Gingrich’s unprecedented censure.  According to the New York Times, Gingrich recently sid of Pelosi “When you become speaker of the House, you no longer have the luxury of being dishonest, demagogic and destructive.”  During that investigation, Pelosi said the same of Gingrich:

Ms. Pelosi essentially accused Mr. Gingrich of all three more than 12 years ago as she urged her colleagues to endorse an ethics committee rebuke of Mr. Gingrich for using tax-exempt money to promote political goals and for providing false information to the special ethics panel Ms. Pelosi was on. She said Mr. Gingrich spoke often of ethics but did not make them a priority and had put the Congress in a bad light.

“Mr. Gingrich’s statements lead me to one conclusion: that Mr. Gingrich, in his dealings with the committee, is not to be believed,” said the future speaker, who urged Republicans to weigh whether Mr. Gingrich should remain the pre-eminent figure in the House. “He is technically eligible. I hope you will make a judgment as to whether he is ethically fit.”

Ultimately, the House voted to reprimand Mr. Gingrich and fine him $300,000 for ethics violations in the most severe rebuke ever visited on the presiding officer of the House.

But on Friday, Ms. Pelosi — not about to be drawn into a discussion of Mr. Gingrich and whether he is seeking revenge for her role in his own ethics case — said she was finished talking about the C.I.A. imbroglio.

“I don’t think about it,” Ms. Pelosi said.

Gingrich has an axe to grind against his former nemesis Pelosi, that much is obvious.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Nancy Pelosi finally decided to zip it up and stand by her prior statements (see video above).   Republicans have been demanding an investigation and some have even said that Pelosi needs to step down (the loudest one have been in trouble himself for serious ethics violations).  Democrats are standing by Pelosi and have fended off an investigation, which would have been ridiculous.  Republicans wanted to investigate Pelosi, but they are against holding any member of the Bush administration accountable?  How ridiculously partisan.

The Washington Post reports today that both Democrats and Republicans have been pouring over the classified intelligence briefing memos at issue and that while the Republicans claim that the documents clearly demonstrate that Pelosi knew about torture techniques being used by the Bush administration in 2002, Democrats disagree.

Republicans who have seen the documents say they present a clear case that Pelosi (D-Calif.) was told about the waterboarding of a key al-Qaeda operative, rejecting her accusation that the CIA intentionally misled her about the interrogation technique, which simulates drowning. “I came away feeling comfortable in saying the speaker owes the [intelligence] community an apology at the least,” said  Rep. Mike Rogers (Mich.), a former FBI agent.

But Democrats, as well as some former intelligence officials, warn that the documents are far from definitive and reflect only after-the-fact recollections from CIA briefers who never intended to produce full transcripts of te sessions. “You can have a lot of interpretation either way,” said Rep. C.A.  Dutch Ruppersberger (Md.), who said he “sped-read” the documents this week.

***

Members of Congress are largely divided into two camps: One says that the CIA intentionally withheld information about the tactics it was already using against detainees, even as it was providing Congress with intelligence that led to an overwhelming bipartisan vote supporting the use of force in Iraq to rid Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction. The other says that Pelosi is covering up her original tacit support of techniques that she now labels as torture.

Pelosi and leading Republicans have asked for the briefing memos to be declassified, each side seeming to think their release will vindicate its cause. And on Thursday, House Democrats blocked a Republican effort to form a special committee to investigate Pelosi’s allegation that CIA officials misled her.

The media has ccompletely missed the point that it was not Pelosi who authorized torture. The issue of what Pelosi knew and when is simply an attempt to divert the media’s attention from the certainty of what the Bush administration knew.  Moreover, what should really be investigated is why Condi Rice had Phillip Zelikow give her a second opinion on torture and then after he had given her opinion that it was illegal that the memos were collected for destruction. In a recent video that I poster on this blog, she had the audacity to defend torture.  She was almost shaking when she confronted a student when her questined her about the subject.  The excuse is always, you don’t know what it was like after 9/11 and the decisions we had to make.  

Can there be any doubt by now that Cheney, Rice, Bush and Rumsfeld had a hysterical reaction to a national tragedy.  They only invaded Afghanistan because they had to, they allowed bin Laden to escape to Pakistan, they allowed the presence of al qaeda and other terrorist cells to escalate to a near point of no return in Pakistan because they were focused on the folly known as the war in Iraq.

I feel ill when I hear the Sith Lord Cheney talk about how they kept America safe.  9/11 happened under the Bush administration watch when he was on vacation.  The intelligence was in Rice’s hands and he had access to it.  It was just not a priority.  Tax cuts for the rich were far more important than national security.  Cheney was more focused on paying off his corporate buddies and insiders.

Bill Clinton had one incident during his administration too so if you use Cheney’slogic, Clinto was able to keep the US safe after that one incident without torture.

Most importantly, the single most important omission from the Cheney revisionist history tour is that he was intimately involved in waterboarding to try to come up with some link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein after the US had already invaded Iraq.  Waterboarding to buttress the lies that took us to war should be a reason to shut down Cheney’s revisionist history tour and to put him in jail.  My preference would be Gitmo since he feels so strongly about keeping it open because as far as I am concerned, Cheney, not Obama, has been the cause of putting America in the most danger ever over the last 8 years.

Go back to your hole Dick and pray that Obama doesn’t come to his sense and let Holder loose on you.  Even if you don’t get prosecuted here, you’ll never be completely free because you will not be able to travel for fear of being brought to judgment in another country for your war crimes.

That is not enough for me, but it is at least something.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

According to CNN, 28 year old Sunday school teacher and young mother, Melissa Huckaby, was charged with additional crimes, including attempting poison a child and “Daniel Plowman.”  She is also charged with kidnapping, raping and murdering 8 year old Sandra Cantu.  

The new charges caused another delay in the murder case, CNN afiliate KRON reported.

The complaint charged that Huckaby “did willfully and unlawfully mingle a harmful substance with food or drink” with the intent to harm the child, identified only as “Jane M. Doe.”

Another alleged poisoning victim was identified as Daniel Plowman, but no age or other information was immediately provided.

The latest charges also include one count of child abuse endangerment relating to the unidentified child, who was allegedly in Huckaby’s “care and custody.” Read the complaint (PDF)

The Daily Beast has provided some additional details about “Daniel Plowman,” who is one of the new victims namedin the complaint.  

What we now know is that prosecutors believe Huckaby on March 2 drugged a 36-year-old man named Daniel Plowman, who lives in Hayward, a town about 40 miles west of Tracy. It was late that night when she allegedly mixed “a harmful substance with food or drink with the intent that the same be taken by a human being,” according to the amended criminal complaint file this week. Hours later, at about 1:30 a.m. the next day, Plowman was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence. He had pulled his car into the drive-through of a McDonald’s about five minutes away from Huckaby’s mobile home. He ordered some food and paid for it just before passing out on the wheel, according to an employee who called police about the incident. When he came to, still disoriented, he drove into a wall. Police showed up and towed his gold-colored Ford Tempo. They took him into custody, but later released him and never pressed charges. I couldn’t track Plowman down for comment, but I heard from neighbors that he dated Huckaby for a while.

So she was drugging boyfriends too?  As for the other little girl, the police have more or less acknowledged that they could have been better about investigating that incident and then maybe Sandra cantu might still be alive.

Huckaby allegedly took her 5-year-old daughter Madison’s playmate out “to the park.” They were gone for four hours, the girl’s mother, Lora Polk, 41, told me. So Polk called the police, who searched everywhere, but the search ended when Huckaby appeared back at Polk’s home and dropped the girl off.

Relieved, Polk hugged her daughter, then took her to get some dinner at a local fast-food joint. But on the way there, the girl started slumping over. She slurred her words.

“Something wasn’t right,” Polk said. “So I rushed her to the hospital.”

Polk nervously waited in the lobby at the nearby hospital for doctors to come back with the results. About five hours after Polk admitted her daughter, she says doctors told her they found benzodiazepine coursing through the little girl’s body. They called the police, who questioned Polk, who accused her of supplying the pills to her daughter but evidently ended the night without an arrest.

Huckaby had said that the cops questioned her in connection to that case. And Polk offered for detectives to search her own home. But police said they just couldn’t form a strong enough case to file charges against anyone. Polk said they called her up after Sandra Cantu’s disappearance to express their regrets that they couldn’t have resolved the mysterious drugging incident back then. Cops didn’t even test the 7-year-old girl for signs of sexual assault until after Huckaby’s arrest—months after the suspect allegedly took the child, who said Huckaby gave her water that “tasted funny,” “like medicine,” said her mother.

This week, it became clear that whatever evidence prosecutors found against Huckaby in regards to the drugging incident was enough to file an amended complaint.

The tragedy is that it was several months too late for Sandra Cantu.