Jul 13 2009

The special powers an (R) next to your name gives you…

written by ekg

A woman goes missing on Christmas eve, she is 8 months pregnant and due to attend a party later that evening. Her husband is 90 miles away fishing, it’s also found out that he had been having an affair and had told his mistress that he ‘lost’ his wife. Months later, the wife’s body, along with that of her unborn fetus is found on the shores of the area where the husband was fishing that day. After an extensive search and investigation, no evidence of even a crime is found…Is the husband guilty?

A teenager on vacation goes missing after a night of extreme partying. She is last seen getting into a car with 3 men unknown to those who had been on vacation with her. An extensive search and investigation produced nothing but a tome of lies from the 3 men, one eventually admits to being with the teen on the beach but says he just left her there and went home. She is never seen again… are the 3 men guilty?

A child is found to be missing a month after the mother last saw her, the mother never considered alerting anyone to this fact even though she claimed to be sure the child had been kidnapped.  During that month the mother partied heavily like she didn’t have  a care in the world. After an extensive search and investigation, and 1000’s of lies told by the mother, the body of the child was found near the mothers home….is the mother guilty?

After years of misleading us for the reasons of ‘national security’ a President is found to have also misled  Congress and implicated the CIA as an accessory to these ‘misleadings’.

A Vice Presidents orders the CIA to shut out top ranking Congressional members on a top secret surveillance program that a new Head of the CIA is aghast to discover. He subsequently orders a full disclosure of this program to members of Congress and an end to said program.

“The constitutional authority and responsibility for congressional
oversight is gone,”-Sen. Arlen Specter

A president wants certain powers to be extended to him to use at his leisure and asks his Attorney General to approve it. The Attorney General is in the hospital, sedated from surgery he had only moments prior, but this doesn’t stop the President from sending henchmen to the bedside of the Attorney General to try and coerce him into signing off on this law. The Attorney General refuses this order from the President because the law is unconstitutional and therefore illegal, and to allow the President to use these guidelines makes him an accessory to the crime. Instead of listening to his Attorney General, the President then has one of the henchmen from the hospital room, his “In House” counsel, approve the tactic over the refusal of the Attorney General and acting Attorney General. The Attorney General later resigns to spend more time with his family and the White House counsel is re-paid for his efforts that night by being raised to the level of Attorney General.

A security briefing memo is constructed by the CIA after tireless hours of investigation and hard work. The memo isn’t as ‘threatening’ as someone in the White House wish it would be so this person adds their own threats to the security memo. That ‘addition’ is later quoted as the reason for  using illegal means to investigate citizens deemed ‘terrorist’ by the previous law enacted by the same administration..because it said “… “individuals and organizations involved in global terrorism possessed the capability and intention to undertake further terrorist attacks within the United States,” and “that the president should authorize the NSA to conduct the surveillance activities.”

Not only did the White House make up it’s own CIA threat memo, but it then quoted that fable as the reason to authorize  the illegally wiretapping of Americans.

The question isn’t ‘are they guilty?”  The question is, why aren’t we investigating this?

When are we going to stop with the word salad of  “He didn’t lie, he just intended to ‘mislead’ you?”

When are we going to say.. “That’s it! enough already! At the very least you people need to answer questions on just exactly what the hell you were doing!“

How can any party that claims to love the Democracy that we live in, stand by while a member of their party goes to such extremes to bypass every part of a democracy. If they are afraid of Socialism because of some healthcare for the poor and downtrodden, then where is the outrage of the power grab that went on unchecked for years? Is one man worth your support in the face of such crimes just because of the (R) next to his name?

At one time I was against any investigation into the Bush administration, I still believe it would be the biggest political mistake of President Obama’s career, but at what point do you just have to look at the American people and say “We can no longer deny this, we can no longer cover this, we can no longer allow this to happen.” and finally order a full scale investigation, that would lead to criminal proceedings if warranted. Yesterday the mistake may have been to go after an ex-President in a way that would cripple all future Presidents out of sheer ‘vindication’ and ‘retribution’ from a malicious political system.  But today, with more and more extremists views and the outright take over by a corrupt White House, the danger of not investigating far outweigh  any others.

“Consequently, it is difficult to attribute the success of (any) particular counterterrorism case
exclusively to the (program),” -inspectors general report

How can we stand up as the beacon for democracy when we don’t even investigate those who tried to steal the democracy away from the American people under the guise of ’safety’ … a ’safety’ they are happy to tell you worked so well that we haven’t been attacked since 9/11/2001 (while omitting the part where they were to ones who were on watch when that attack took place to begin with), was bragged about being from numerous assertions that their excessive measures stopped multiple attacks. This,  has also been found to not only be misleading, but bordering on an out and out lie.

How do we go about calling this the greatest country on the planet when we allow a President to hide or even block  his illegal activities from his own Justice Department. A move which the IG reports calls “extraordinary and inappropriate”, so much so that the Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General,Director of the FBI and… ” more than a dozen officials at the highest levels of government became concerned that if the surveillance program was allowed to continue on as it had been, the government could be engaging in an illegal activity at the direction of the president, and they quietly spoke of resigning en masse.

How do we stand up to other countries where ‘coups’ have ousted members of the Government or forces within the Government have usurped the laws of  that country for their own benefit, when we allow the same thing to happen here? How do we condemn a madman for his ‘genocide’, but when presented with evidence of another mass murder we ignore it because the murderer happens to be on our side today, when he was against us and killing our servicemen yesterday?

The mainstream media is treated like a rape victim of the 1980’s…they are blamed for what they report.  They are called biased and unfair, slanted and ‘liberal’.. they are condemned  for reporting the news. Why are they castigated for telling us what was done to us, but the person doing it is enveloped into a protective shroud all because of his political color.

“Bush officials so restricted access to information about the program that Justice Department
officials couldn’t properly monitor it — or even judge its legality, the inspectors general concluded.”

The ‘liberal’ slant to the media is always the reply to the story, like that somehow excuses the actual facts.  It’s become an ‘eye roll’ that says… “There goes the liberal press again, blaming Bush for an illegal program that Ashcroft, the FBI and members of the DOJ refused to endorse”… The fact this happened isn’t their focus,  the fact that it was reported is..

If the MSM is so liberal with it’s slant.. why isn’t  anyone talking about  the report from the Inspectors General of the CIA, Justice Department, Defense Department, National Security Agency and Office of the National Intelligence Director, on “Google Trends”?

The CIA not only admitted to misleading congress on some programs, but in one case  omitted telling them completely.. But the media and Nancy Pelosi are partisan and slanted for saying the CIA has lied to Congress?

If we cannot look at the facts and come to a logical conclusion all because it’s our own political party that erred.. then maybe it is time to end the Democracy as we know it and evolve into something else. We have  already had a President who usurps laws and governmental offices at his leisure,vilifies anyone who disagrees with him, tries to coerce those around him into doing his bidding and when unable to, conspires to go around them and get what he wants from someone else and then raises that someone to position of the person who originally denied him. Our democracy is already dead and we lived in  a Banana Republic that was run by a dictator and his army of thugs. But for me to tell you this makes me unpatriotic and the one who ignores real criminals like President Obama.

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Jun 26 2009

Introducing… Lil mike

written by ekg

I’d like to take a minute for this “Friday Rewind” to introduce my friend and politically polar opposite, Lil Mike. He has an amazing ability to argue his side of an argument and like me will go on for days on a single subject. At present time, we have logged over 10000 hrs(ok, that may be exaggerated a little) into the “Valerie Plame, Leak case” and I haven’t a single doubt that no two people on the planet,including those involved and the so called ‘experts’, are more well versed than we are when it comes to that subject(that’s not an exaggeration) . We both are abnormally addicted to current issues and researching them in order to prepare for the debate that will follow. There have been many topics that I had no knowledge of until Mike decided to bring them up for debate.. and then I was forced into learning the minutia of said topic in order to keep up with him.. as he has had to do with me…HA!

I can’t say that either of us have ever changed each others mind on any particular issue.. and given our politically polar opposites, that’s not a surprise… what is a surprise are the things we actually agree on. But those are so ‘eclectic’ that they can not be predicted… and that’s what makes it fun.

Mike is the best adversary I’ve ever come across. He can make me laugh,cry,wonder wtf planet he is from.. he can even anger me to the point of having to drown small animals just for the ‘release’.. but through it all, after 10 years we’ve been able to go from such extreme emotions on one topic, to another topic with not a single hard-feeling or ‘carry-over’. Each conversation is a clean-slate no matter how intense the last one, or in most cases, the current one is.

He will be joining The Velvet StraitJacket soon.. and you will soon see that Lil Mike is always right. (even when he’s wrong)

and without further ado.. Your (late) Friday rewind…


Banana Republic


Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, upon capture.
Image via Wikipedia

Some wag once said that Obama keeps all of his promises; they just have an expiration date.  I guess that’s how we got from “President Barack Obama will not pursue the prosecution of Bush-era officials who devised torture policy against detainees” to it “is going to be more of a decision for the attorney general” within a few days.  That was a quick turnaround, even by Obama standards.  However events and leftie blogs pushed Obama rather quickly after the release of the “torture memos,” which reveal the legal underpinning for what is euphemistically referred to as “enhanced interrogation.”

 

The timing strikes me as odd considering just a week ago a Spanish court decided to investigate whether to pursue charges against Bush administration officials who provided the legal underpinning for those interrogations.  Then low and behold, the Obama administration declassifies those very documents written by those Justice Department lawyers.  That could hardly be a coincidence.  The message seems to be that the Obama administration will not attempt to protect and may even assist, in international prosecutions of Bush administration officials, and who knows, maybe even prosecute a few themselves.

 

I took a look at the torture memos out of curiosity and to confirm that things people were saying were in there actually was.  I’ve learned you can’t trust someone else’s interpretation.  Full disclosure:  I didn’t read the whole thing.  I just don’t have the legal background to make a determination if the case the Justice Department attorneys tried to make made sense or not, but I was curious about a few things.

 

First of all, what was the classification of these damn things?  Looking at the pdf of the memo, I could see that the pages were all classified Top Secret (scribble scribble) NOFORN, but what was the caveat or code word that was scribbled out?  I magnified and tried to see through the blackened areas, but no such luck.  Just curious I guess.  I was just wondering if it was a cool sounding codeword, Top Secret Maximum Hammer, or just something dorky, Top Secret Loosie Goosie?

 

Another thing; what was the deal with all the waterboarding?  The original leaks described it as the most successful interrogation technique since “good cop, bad cop.”  Abu Zubaida supposedly broke after 35 seconds.  However page 37 of the memo details something more complicated:

…where authorized, it may be used for two “sessions” per day of up to two hours. During a session, water may be applied up to six times for ten seconds or longer (but never more than 40 seconds). In a 24-hour period, a detainee may be subjected to up to twelve minutes of water appliaction. See id. at 42.  Additionally, the waterboard may be used on as many as five days during a 30-day approval period.

…The CIA used the waterboard “at least 83 times during August 2002” in the interrogation of Zubaida…and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM”

 

So somebody check my math, but that that means either the guidelines for waterboarding are wrong, they ignored their own guidelines, or the number of waterboarding sessions is wrong, since the could not have waterboarded that many times in a month if they followed the guidelines.  Or they are counting applications, instead of sessions.  It’s too vague to tell.

 

As far as I know, I’m the first person to discover this, so somebody give a prize or something.

 

However I’m not the first person to notice the incongruity of it being reported that Zubaida broke after 35 seconds and being waterboarded 83 times in one month.  I don’t see how both of those can be true.

 

But like a 23 minute Arlo Guthrie song, that’s not what I’m here to talk about.  OK well maybe a little, but what I am really worried about is the Obama administration deciding to settle scores.  Since President Obama is the Attorney General’s boss, going from being not interested in pursuing prosecution of Bush era officials to saying it’s up to the Attorney General is tantamount to giving the green light to prosecute.

 

Now I am of two minds on this.  There is one part of me, the mean, hateful part, that would love to see lawyers have to take responsibility for writing legal opinions, and by taking responsibility I mean forced to pull their orange jumpsuits down in a dark corner of a federal prison and get doo doo raped.  I’m not a fan of lawyers as you might notice.  Generally, lawyers don’t have to take any responsibility for their poor performance. Their clients do. These lawyers, if prosecuted, certainly would.

 

Also there is the precedent.  Once one administration opens the door to prosecuting the previous administration for policies it disagreed with, every time there is a change in power, the new administration will do the same.  In 4 years I could sit back and watch members of the Obama administration be indicted for all manner of crimes.  What comes around goes around eh?

 

But that is only one side.  I have a more dominate opinion on this, not one based on score settling, hatred of the bar, or getting revenge on wrongs, real or otherwise, on the current administration at some point in the future, but based on reason, rule of law, and the dangers setting bad precedents.

 

 First of all, I’m not sure there is even a crime here.  There may be a crime somehow under Spanish law, but I’m fairly certain there is no Federal Statute against giving a legal opinion that the current administration disagrees with.  One can imagine the kangaroo courts if we decide it’s OK to prosecute judges for ruling on a decision that’s been overturned, or a legislator who votes for a law that is later found to be unconstitutional.  That would be as criminal as anything those Bush Justice Department attorneys did.

 

The precedent of one administration getting revenge on the previous one would be a bad one.  Senator Leahy’s idea of a truth and reconciliation commission; as if going from the Bush administration to the Obama one is equivalent to eliminating apartheid, or the Nuremberg Trials, is ridiculous.  During every election, we always like to repeat the old canard about “the peaceful exchange of power” but how long would that be true if we up the stakes every time  political parties switch positions of power?  If hundreds of administration officials could expect nothing but indictment if a rival party takes power, are we really not that far from Peron’s Argentina?

 

It’s one thing to indict and prosecute officials who have actually done criminal wrongdoing, but I’ve noticed from my friends on the left is their tendency to want to criminalize policy differences.   They would love to have Bush and Cheney doing the perp walk, weighed down with chains, but ask them what sort of charges its usually something vague, like “war crimes” or just that they were criminals.  Their real crimes?  Holding different policy positions.  Not violating federal statutes.  If we try to prosecute attorneys for writing legal opinions, that won’t be justice, it will be punishment.  Punishment for losing the election.

 

Once we cross that particular Rubicon, it’s damage that cannot be undone. Rome could never go back to it’s Republic, and if we allow score settling after every change of power, we won’t be able to go back either. 

 

 

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Jun 17 2009

Torture; paybacks are a bitch..

written by ekg

There has been a lot in the news about torture over the last few months. Did the US torture? If so, who authorized it? Do we punish the persons who actually did the torture? Do we punish the ones who authorized it? These are all questions that in all likelihood will piss people on both sides off when they are answered.

The “Jack Bauer” scenario is the most prominent reason given for torture.

A  bomb is about to detonate in a heavily populated metropolitan area, a person who knows the whereabouts of this bomb and other details of the plan is captured and he is not talking.

Pop-quiz asshole! What do you do?

Both sides answering this question have valid opinions.  One side screams to torture them until they spill every ounce of information they have. The other side points to this and says “But you don’t know if the information  is real. They could just be telling you anything and while you are out on that Easter egg hunt trying to confirm the information, valuable time will be wasted.” They are the ones who want to use tried and true interrogation tactics in this scenario because they believe those tactics work and they also believe that a time of stress and crisis is when it’s most important to stick to our values.

I agree with both sides.

I guess I’m in the ‘if all else fails‘ camp.

Obviously ‘normal’ police method interrogation works. We’ve seen it’s success across the country on a daily, if not hourly basis. When people are caught for their crimes they want to talk, they want to explain,  they want you to understand why they did what they did but they need to be nudged into it.  That’s where a seasoned detective comes in.  If this type of ‘non-enhanced’ technique did not work, no one would ever confess… but they do.

But does torture work? Dick Cheney says it does. In fact he says that we actually faced a ‘Jack Bauer’ scenario and torture is what stopped this ’second wave’ from happening.  The Head of the FBI says this is untrue, The CIA says this is untrue, and others who have seen the memo’s Cheney is quoting  say this is untrue.  Dick Cheney has also heralded the capture of KSM as proof of tortures value. That has  also been called into  question by the actual interrogator.

Look, it’s not that you won’t get someone to talk by torturing them, I don’t think anyone is debating that point. It’s just that you will get them to talk about everything they think you want them to talk about, whether true or not.

Every example that Dick Cheney uses as his proof has since been found to be lacking in the ‘proof’ arena, and just like he now says Saddam didn’t have anything to do with 9/11.. maybe sometime in the future he’ll change this ‘torture worked’ storyline. Since it looks like he could be tried as a war criminal though, I doubt he’ll ever say that. What he will do is make sure everyone and anyone is aware that this was George W. Bush’s plan.  That’s also  turning out to be just another of Cheney’s fantasies though.

SCHIEFFER: … somewhere down the line. Did President Bush know everything you knew?

CHENEY: I certainly, yes,have every reason to believe he knew — he knew a great deal about the program. He basically authorized it.I mean,this was a presidential-level decision. And the decision went to the president. He signed off on it.

The problem I have with any of this “torture question”, is the hypocrisy of it. The,

“We don’t torture because we changed the definition of torture so we could torture legally”…

…is where I call foul. What made it ok for Jack Bauer to torture the terrorists in 24(besides the whole “it’s a TV show”), was the fact that he was willing to stand up to Congress and lay it all out on the table and take whatever punishment they doled out. That’s when, in my opinion, it’s ok to torture someone for information in the “ticking time-bomb scenario”.If you feel that what you are doing is not only right, but your duty as an American and you are so sure of this that you are willing to face the consequences afterward, then have at it and get all the information you can.

But just like lying about a blow job got a president impeached, lying about torture and your role in it should at least get you a public hearing.

It’s not the acts themselves that bother people, I would wager that if a “Jack Bauer” situation was being played out in real life an overwhelming majority of Americans would either turn a blind eye or slap the interroagtor on the wrist for their actions. But when you lie about, mislead others into believing your lie and then try and cover up your lie.. then the jury isn’t the only one who knows you were committing a crime.

Of course I will be ask …

“What if someone had your child, wouldn’t you torture them to find them?”

Yes… yes I would and if they harmed a hair on my child I would follow them home and cut them up into little pieces….slowly. But, when the police came to arrest me it would only take that seasoned detective about a minute to get me to talk. I would want tell him why did what I did. I would explain what I did to him and my subsequent jury. I would make them live through the horror  I and my missing/harmed child lived through and I would hope for  jury nullification.

Torture for the use of  gaining information, in my opinion is a crap shoot. It might work and it might not. The worst part about this ironically is the ‘ticking time-bomb scenario’. In that scenario there is no time for proper interrogations to be used, no time because the bomb is set to go off at any minute. Yet, there is time to investigate the false confessions which all agree are a part of the torture process? I don’t think so. If there is no time for mistakes then why chose the path which will ensure the most mistakes? It’s for this reason I am going more and more to the side of a “No Torture” policy for information gathering purposes.

That is not to say I am against torturing for punishment..

I will have to turn in my ‘liberal’ card for a month by saying this, but I think there are actual justifications to torture people, but in my world those reasons have to do with their crimes and not to get information out of them. Don’t believe there is a crime that the deserved punishment is some form of exquisite  pain upon the person guilty of the crime?

NEW ORLEANS —  Authorities say a 17-year-old teenager was charged with aggravated rape and first-degree murder of an 8-month-old child.

This is not a ‘redeemable’ child, this animal (because he is most definitely not a man or a human) who at the ripe old age of 17, already has convictions for  “drug possession charges; obscenity; battery on a correctional officer; three counts of battery on a school teacher; theft; weapons charges; and assault” in my opinion is worthy of a life of exquisite pain upon his conviction.

Not ‘torture-worthy’ enough?

CASSVILLE, Mo. —  The two men charged in rape and murder of 9-year-old Rowan Ford had their first brief court appearance Tuesday.

These men, one the child’s step-father, have been charged with ” first degree murder, sodomy and rape charges in connection to the death of Rowan Ford of Stella.” Whose body they just dumped in cave like a piece of garbage that they were done with using.

I  think they could to with a little ‘waterboarding’ just for the fun of it.

Torture for investigative purposes won’t give us the real-time intelligence we need in a ‘ticking time-bomb’ scenario.. but it will damn well make us feel better when we use it for the sole purpose of… ‘pay backs are  motherfucking bitch!’

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