Cheney & Gonzales Indicted!

Wow! While this was the first mainstream report, it certainly is not the most informative. Be sure to read the post that follows, because the picture is much more horrific: This was systematic abuse of immigrants and Native Americans in the service of racism and profit.
Texas Grand Jury Indicts Cheney, Gonzales on Charges Related to Prisons
Associated Press Wednesday, November 19, 2008
McALLEN, Tex., Nov. 18 -- Vice President Cheney and former attorney general Alberto R. Gonzales have been indicted on state charges involving federal prisons in a South Texas county that has been a source of bizarre legal and political battles under the outgoing prosecutor.
The indictments, returned Monday and made public Tuesday, have not yet been signed by the presiding judge, and no action can be taken on them until that happens.
The seven indictments issued in Willacy County also targeted some public officials connected to District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra's own legal battles.
[…] Guerra said the prison-related charges against Cheney and Gonzales are a national issue, and experts from across the country testified to the grand jury.
Cheney is charged with engaging in an organized criminal activity related to the vice president's investment in the Vanguard Group, which holds financial interests in the private prison companies running the federal detention centers. Cheney is accused of a conflict of interest and "at least misdemeanor assaults" on detainees because of his link to the prison companies. [my bold]
[…] The indictment accuses Gonzales of using his position while in office to stop an investigation in 2006 into abuses at one of the privately run prisons.
[…] Willacy County has become a prison hub with county, state and federal lockups. Guerra has gone after the prison-politician nexus before, extracting guilty pleas from three former Willacy and Webb county commissioners after investigating bribery related to federal prison contacts.
Last month, a Willacy County grand jury indicted the GEO Group, a Florida private prison company, on a murder charge in the death of a prisoner days before his release. The three-count indictment alleged the GEO Group allowed other inmates to beat Gregorio de la Rosa Jr. to death with padlocks stuffed into socks. [my bold] The death happened in 2001 at the Raymondville facility. In 2006, a jury ordered the company to pay de la Rosa's family $47.5 million in a civil judgment. The Cheney-Gonzalez indictment makes reference to the de la Rosa case.
None of the latest seven indictments had been signed by Presiding Judge J. Manuel Bañales of the Fifth Administrative Judicial Region.
Last month, Bañales, an appointee of Gov. Rick Perry (R), dismissed indictments that charged Guerra with extorting money from a bail bond company and using his office for personal business. An appeals court had earlier ruled that a special prosecutor was appointed improperly to investigate Guerra.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/18/AR2008111804164.html?sub=AR

Cheney-Gonzales Bust Linked to Immigrant/Native American Abuse

After poking around the internet I've found up with a post which is more detailed and less "diplomatic" in describing the offenses committed by Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales:
Posted by Brenda Norrell - November 19, 2008 at 12:49 am
Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales indicted for criminal conspiracy in private prison profiteering, resulting in prisoner assaults
By Brenda Norrell
WILLACY COUNTY, Texas -- US Vice President Dick Cheney was indicted today for a prison profiteering scheme and charged with abuse of prisoners. Cheney invested millions in the Vanguard Group, an investment management company with interests in the prison companies in charge of detention centers. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was also indicted in the prison profiteering scheme, resulting in ongoing prisoner assaults and at least one murder.
Human rights activists urged a probe into prison profiteering after the private prison corporations GEO Group and CCA (Corrections Corporation of America) [my bold] began receiving enormous federal contracts to build detention centers to imprison migrants. [my bold] GEO's new migrant prisons including prisons in Laredo, Texas and Jena, Louisiana. [my bold] [dear old Jena, home of the notorious lynching tree and the Jena 6 --click on "Jena 6" in tags for more posts on that story]
Human rights activists said the fever-pitched racism mounted toward immigrants at the US/Mexico border was induced for the purpose of prison profiteering by US officials reaping enormous profits. The increased arrests of migrants resulted in profits and a long list of new prison construction contracts for the GEO Group, formerly Wackenhut, [my bold] both with a long history of assaults and murders in prisons.
A Texas grand jury indicted Cheney today and accused him of at least misdemeanor assaults of inmates by allowing inmates to assault fellow inmates. Gonzales was charged with having used his position to stop investigations into assaults committed in a prison for profit in Willacy County, Texas. Both Cheney and Gonzales were charged with engaging in organized criminal activity.
Last month, a Willacy County grand jury indicted the GEO Group, on a murder charge in the death of a prisoner days before his release in 2001. The indictment alleged the GEO Group allowed other inmates to beat Gregorio de la Rosa Jr. to death with padlocks stuffed into socks. The death happened at the Raymondville facility. A jury ordered the company to pay de la Rosa's family $47.5 million in a civil judgment in 2006. The Cheney-Gonzales indictment refers to the de la Rosa case.
Human rights activists protested both Raymondville and Hutto prisons in southwestern Texas in recent years. At Hutto, migrant women and children were abused. ICE refused to allow a UN Rapporteur into Hutto. [my bold]
During the Bush-Cheney regime, prisons of torture and prisons for migrants became synonymous with the name GEO, from Guantanamo to migrant prisons in the south and along the southwest border.
Cheney said Guantanamo was vital in 2005 and detainees could expect to be treated better here than "by virtually any other government on the face of the earth." Geo was awarded a contract for the continued management of the Migrant Operations Center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in Nov. 2, 2006. Recently, GEO received a contract for a migrant prison in Jena, La. GEO also received a contract for housing "criminal aliens" in the US, as stated on the GEO website.
GEO's migrant prisons were not restricted to the US. GEO also assumed a management contract in the Campsfield House Immigration Removal Center in England.
GEO was not the only one profiteering. The Wackenhut Corp. was also profiteering from transporting migrants from the border after their arrests. The two companies split in 2003.
All along the border, while GEO was building prisons, GEO's other half, Wackenhut Corp., was profiteering from the arrest of migrants from the borders.
The United States Customs and Border Protection agency entered into the contract with Wackenhut Corp., to transport arrested migrants from the border. Wackenhut is now the domestic subsidiary of the U.K.-based security giant Group 4 Securicor. [my bold]
It comes as no surprise that the Vanguard Group is also currently a major shareholder in Halliburton, [my bold] the longtime war profiteer in Iraq. Cheney's investments in the Vanguard Group are estimated at between $25 and $86 million, since exact numbers have not been released.
While the US filled its prisons with migrants, with a price on their heads, the number of Native American prisoners soared.
The US Department of Justice recently released a study showing that Native American inmates in Indian country jails increased by 24 percent between 2004 and 2007. [my bold] The figures for Native Americans in all facilities -- tribal, federal and state -- increased 4.5 percent. Suicides, attempted suicides, deaths and escapes were cited as the result of deteriorating prison conditions.
Human rights activists hope the indictments of Cheney and Gonzales are the first of many indictments of the Bush-Cheney administration.
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/brenda-norrell/2008/11/cheney-indicted-prison-profiteering-texas

BushCo., Go Directly to JAIL

Excellent commentary on WHY we must prosecute the criminals of BushCo.
McClatchy Washington Bureau
Commentary: Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue
Joseph L. Galloway last updated: November 18, 2008
With two months still to go before his inauguration as the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama and his transition team are already getting off on the wrong foot, signaling that they have no intention of investigating anyone in the Bush administration for possible war crimes.
What we're talking about here is the torture of detained terrorist suspects in American custody in a grotesque violation of both our treaty obligations under the Geneva Conventions and our historic principles as a democratic nation.
By their own machinations and attempts to redefine and pervert both treaties and our own laws, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Attorneys General John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, Cheney's chief of staff David Addington and any number of lesser suspects sought to shield themselves from, or put themselves above, justice.
They did so knowing full well that what they were doing — clearing the way for interrogators at Guantanamo and in the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret dungeons around the world to do anything it took, short of murder, to extract information from terror suspects.
The "harsh interrogation methods" included water-boarding, stripping and humiliating prisoners, subjecting them to extremes of temperature, putting them into stressful physical positions for hours, the use of psychotropic drugs and doubtless other equally uncivilized practices.
Water boarding has always been treated as a criminal act in this country. Military officers were court-martialed at the turn of the last century for water boarding Filipino guerrillas. More recently, an East Texas sheriff was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for water boarding a suspect and extracting a confession from him.
Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue, and its no way to begin an administration that was elected on promises of change. What it says is that if you're one of the elite and powerful, your violations of the law will be overlooked, no matter how much damage you did to our country’s standing in the world.
What signal does it send to Mr. Bush's gang of unindicted co-conspirators, who've unwrapped a Pandora’s boxful of other offenses — from perverting the administration of justice, to illegally eavesdropping on the phone conversations and e-mails of ordinary Americans, to salting the stream of intelligence with bogus material, to inviting their cronies to loot the Treasury with no-bid military contracts, to lying under oath to congressional oversight committees, to applying political litmus tests to the hiring of civil service employees to the wholesale destruction of White House e-mails and records? Etcetera. Etcetera.
This nation was founded on the principle of equal justice under the law. No one — no one — ought to be able to skate or hold a get-out-of-jail-free card by virtue of having been the most powerful felon in the land, or of working for him.
This signal on torture investigations says that Sen. Obama wants to start his administration as a uniter, not a divider, trying to untangle the unholy mess that the Decider and Co. are leaving behind them in the economy, in our military, in virtually every walk of our national life. It speaks to his desire to reach across the aisle to the defeated Republicans and try to bring them back into the fold as Americans.
That's all well and good, but not if it comes at the cost of lifting the blindfold off Justice’s eyes and letting her pick and choose who'll pay for criminal acts and who won't. That's no way to begin, and no way to continue.
Out in West Texas, crusty old ranchers plagued by coyotes killing their calves and baby sheep shoot the offending beasts and hang their carcasses on the nearest barbed wire fence as an object lesson to the rest of the pack.
Unless the newly empowered Democrats in the White House and on Capitol Hill hang a few coyotes on some fences in Washington, D.C., they're making a huge mistake that will come back to haunt them, and all the rest of us, too.
Unless the truth, the whole truth, is unearthed, justice is done and the Republican closet is emptied of festering transgressions, the next pack will do it again, secure in the knowledge that their positions will protect them from the penalties that more ordinary citizens must pay for the same crimes.
The people of this nation have spoken loudly. They voted to throw the rascals out. They voted for a different way of governing, a different way of law making. They voted for equal rights under the law.
If their desires aren't satisfied — if the new broom sweeps no cleaner than the old one — the next time around they may move things up a notch and throw all the bastards out — and they'd be fully justified in doing so.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/339/v-print/story/56115.html

Rove Found in Contempt of Congress

Next step? Let's hope so...away we go!
House panel votes to cite Rove for contempt
By LAURIE KELLMAN – 34 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — A House panel Wednesday voted to cite former top White House aide Karl Rove for contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena to answer questions about the dismissals of several federal prosecutors as its Senate counterpart explored punishments for an array of alleged Bush administration misdeeds.
Voting 20-14 along party lines, the House Judiciary Committee said that Rove had broke the law by failing to appear at a July 10 hearing on allegations of White House influence over the Justice Department, including whether Rove encouraged prosecutions against Democrats such as former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman.
[...] The House vote occurred as members of the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on allegations of administration wrongdoing ranging from discriminating against liberals at Justice to ignoring subpoenas and lying to Congress.
The Senate proceedings were the latest congressional review of the White House, a constitutionally mandated power that majority Democrats are eager to use. But three months from Election Day, a lame-duck Congress conducting oversight of a lame-duck White House produces mostly talk. There's little time and less willingness to spend the remaining five weeks of the congressional session doing more than holding televised hearings to try to convince voters that President Bush has abused the powers of his office.
The allegations certainly are serious.
Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine, who reported this week that former department officials broke the law by letting Bush administration politics dictate the hiring of prosecutors, immigration judges and career government lawyers, was among the witnesses to appear Wednesday before the Senate panel.
Fine said his office and Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility are investigating the prosecutor firings and whether Bradley Schlozman, former head of the department's Civil Rights Division, used political or ideological criteria to make hiring decisions.
Under questioning by Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the panel's senior Republican, Fine said he uncovered no evidence that any Justice officials involved made false statements to Congress or violated criminal law. Politicization of the hiring process for career positions is a violation of civil law and department policy, he said.
The Senate probe sprang from Justice's firings of nine federal prosecutors that sparked congressional investigations last year and led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
House and Senate Democrats said the findings affirmed their contention that career Justice employees were hired and fired based on whether they were deemed sufficiently conservative, a violation of law. Conyers said earlier that he was considering bringing criminal charges against some of the former officials named in Fine's report who may have lied to his committee. Lying to Congress is a crime, but there's little agreement among Democrats on whether a perjury referral against some of the officials is warranted.
But one Republican acknowledged there's reason to look more closely. And everyone wants more answers by the Department of Justice. The question is what will be done now in the twilight of the 110th Congress and the Bush presidency.
[...] Some Democrats skipped right to thinking what can be done starting in January, after a new president and Congress are installed, probably with more Democrats in their ranks.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who led the investigation into the prosecutor firings, is pressing Fine to say whether making such a disregard of civil service rules a crime would deter the kind of conduct his investigation uncovered.
Similar legislation will be considered in the House.
"I will be asking Chairman Conyers to consider legislation to ensure that the politicization of hiring of career employees at the Justice Department never happens again," Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement.
Associated Press Writer Ben Evans contributed to this story. http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5h-he8f7AdVl4IRQAEFnivpPn6HOAD9289GU00

FEMA, Continuity of Government and 8 Million Americans on Main Core

How can a democracy thrive with a massive apparatus of spying technology deployed against every act of political expression, private or public?

So ends The Last Roundup, Christopher Ketcham's report on massive domestic surveillance, and it is the very question to ask your candidate. Did you know that FEMA was originally devised to provide survival of the federal government, not the people, after a nuclear strike? That’s just one interesting fact among many important items you need to know. I skipped over Mr. Ketcham’s synopsis of the Card/Gonzales Ghoul Trip to John Ashcroft’s hospital bed, presuming most readers know about this infamous night. There’s so much information here it was hard to carve out the essentials, but I hope you will read the entire article. Remember: Just because paranoia is in the mind of the beholder, they probably are out to get us!
The Last Roundup
Is the government compiling a secret list of citizens to detain under martial law?
By Christopher Ketcham
[...] Few Americans—professional journalists included—know anything about so-called Continuity of Government (COG) programs, so it's no surprise that the president's passing reference received almost no attention. COG resides in a nebulous legal realm, encompassing national emergency plans that would trigger the takeover of the country by extra-constitutional forces—and effectively suspend the republic. In short, it's a road map for martial law.
[...] According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.
Of course, federal law is somewhat vague as to what might constitute a "national emergency." Executive orders issued over the past three decades define it as a "natural disaster, military attack, [or] technological or other emergency," while Department of Defense documents include eventualities like "riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, [and] disorder prejudicial to public law and order." According to one news report, even "national opposition to U.S. military invasion abroad" could be a trigger.
[...] Interestingly, plans drawn up during the Reagan administration suggest this parallel government would be ruling under authority given by law to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, home of the same hapless bunch that recently proved themselves unable to distribute water to desperate hurricane victims. The agency's incompetence in tackling natural disasters is less surprising when one considers that, since its inception in the 1970s, much of its focus has been on planning for the survival of the federal government in the wake of a decapitating nuclear strike.
Under law, during a national emergency, FEMA and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, would be empowered to seize private and public property, all forms of transport, and all food supplies. The agency could dispatch military commanders to run state and local governments, and it could order the arrest of citizens without a warrant, holding them without trial for as long as the acting government deems necessary. From the comfortable perspective of peaceful times, such behavior by the government may seem far-fetched. But it was not so very long ago that FDR ordered 120,000 Japanese Americans—everyone from infants to the elderly—be held in detention camps for the duration of World War II. This is widely regarded as a shameful moment in U.S. history, a lesson learned. But a long trail of federal documents indicates that the possibility of large-scale detention has never quite been abandoned by federal authorities. Around the time of the 1968 race riots, for instance, a paper drawn up at the U.S. Army War College detailed plans for rounding up millions of "militants" and "American negroes," who were to be held at "assembly centers or relocation camps." In the late 1980s, the Austin American-Statesman and other publications reported the existence of 10 detention camp sites on military facilities nationwide, where hundreds of thousands of people could be held in the event of domestic political upheaval. More such facilities were commissioned in 2006, when Kellogg Brown & Root—then a subsidiary of Halliburton—was handed a $385 million contract to establish "temporary detention and processing capabilities" for the Department of Homeland Security. The contract is short on details, stating only that the facilities would be used for "an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs." Just what those "new programs" might be is not specified.
[...] Another well-informed source—a former military operative regularly briefed by members of the intelligence community—says this particular program has roots going back at least to the 1980s and was set up with help from the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been told that the program utilizes software that makes predictive judgments of targets' behavior and tracks their circle of associations with "social network analysis" and artificial intelligence modeling tools.
"The more data you have on a particular target, the better [the software] can predict what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will turn to for help," he says. "Main Core is the table of contents for all the illegal information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific targets." An intelligence expert who has been briefed by high-level contacts in the Department of Homeland Security confirms that a database of this sort exists, but adds that "it is less a mega-database than a way to search numerous other agency databases at the same time."
[...] The following information seems to be fair game for collection without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on government supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into the Main Core database.
Main Core also allegedly draws on four smaller databases that, in turn, cull from federal, state, and local "intelligence" reports; print and broadcast media; financial records; "commercial databases"; and unidentified "private sector entities." Additional information comes from a database known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, which generates watch lists from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for use by airlines, law enforcement, and border posts. According to the Washington Post, the Terrorist Identities list has quadrupled in size between 2003 and 2007 to include about 435,000 names. The FBI's Terrorist Screening Center border crossing list, which listed 755,000 persons as of fall 2007, grows by 200,000 names a year. A former NSA officer tells Radar that the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, using an electronic-funds transfer surveillance program, also contributes data to Main Core, as does a Pentagon program that was created in 2002 to monitor antiwar protesters and environmental activists such as Greenpeace.
[Following are several paragraphs discussing Oliver North's surveillance program REX 84, "for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the government to FEMA and military commanders, as well as Texas congressman Jack Brooks’ unsuccessful attempt to find out what North was up to during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings.]
[...] In July 2007 and again last August, Representative Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon and a senior member of the House Homeland Security Committee, sought access to the "classified annexes" of the Bush administration's Continuity of Government program. DeFazio's interest was prompted by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20 (also known as NSPD-51), issued in May 2007, which reserves for the executive branch the sole authority to decide what constitutes a national emergency and to determine when the emergency is over. DeFazio found this unnerving.
But he and other leaders of the Homeland Security Committee, including Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, were denied a review of the Continuity of Government classified annexes. To this day, their calls for disclosure have been ignored by the White House. In a press release issued last August, DeFazio went public with his concerns that the NSPD-51 Continuity of Government plans are "extra-constitutional or unconstitutional." Around the same time, he told the Oregonian: "Maybe the people who think there's a conspiracy out there are right."
More troubling, in 2002, Congress authorized funding for the U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, which, according to Washington Post military intelligence expert William Arkin, "allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control."
[...] Meanwhile, the mystery of James Comey's testimony has disappeared in the morass of election year coverage. None of the leading presidential candidates have been asked the questions that are so profoundly pertinent to the future of the country: As president, will you continue aggressive domestic surveillance programs in the vein of the Bush administration? Will you release the COG blueprints that Representatives DeFazio and Thompson were not allowed to read? What does it suggest about the state of the nation that the U.S. is now ranked by worldwide civil liberties groups as an "endemic surveillance society," alongside repressive regimes such as China and Russia? How can a democracy thrive with a massive apparatus of spying technology deployed against every act of political expression, private or public? (Radar put these questions to spokespeople for the McCain, Obama, and Clinton campaigns, but at press time had yet to receive any responses.) [...]
http://www.radaronline.com/from-the-magazine/2008/05/government_surveillance_homeland_security_main_core_01-print.php

BushCo “Hoodwinked" General Myers

Could this be the story that opens the eyes of the "faithful?" To deliberately undermine and deceive the chief of command in Iraq, BushCo's only goal was the complete destruction of Iraq and destabilization of that region. I hope the American "faithful" will begin to see that the monsters in the White House planned the Iraq chaos as far back as Richard Nixon's White House days with one purpose: to fill their personal coffers and ensure their own comfort and security as the world reels from the troubles brought to them by BushCo. I agree with Mr. Wilkerson that they must be brought to an international criminal court. Read on, from The Guardian:
Top Bush aides pushed for Guantánamo torture
Senior officials bypassed army chief to introduce interrogation methods
· Richard Norton-Taylor · The Guardian, Saturday April 19 2008

US military chief General Richard Myers.
Photographer: Khalil Mazraawi/AFP

America's most senior general was "hoodwinked" by top Bush administration officials determined to push through aggressive interrogation techniques of terror suspects held at Guantánamo Bay, leading to the US military abandoning its age-old ban on the cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners, the Guardian reveals today.
[...] In his new book, Torture Team, Philippe Sands QC, professor of law at University College London, reveals that:
· Senior Bush administration figures pushed through previously outlawed measures with the aid of inexperienced military officials at Guantánamo.
· Myers believes he was a victim of "intrigue" by top lawyers at the department of justice, the office of vice-president Dick Cheney, and at Donald Rumsfeld's defence department.
· The Guantánamo lawyers charged with devising interrogation techniques were inspired by the exploits of Jack Bauer in the American TV series 24.
· Myers wrongly believed interrogation techniques had been taken from the army's field manual.
The lawyers, all political appointees, who pushed through the interrogation techniques were Alberto Gonzales, David Addington and William Haynes. Also involved were Doug Feith, Rumsfeld's under-secretary for policy, and Jay Bybee and John Yoo, two assistant attorney generals.
[...] The Bush administration has tried to explain away the ill-treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by blaming junior officials. Sands' book establishes that pressure for aggressive and cruel treatment of detainees came from the top and was sanctioned by the most senior lawyers.
Myers was one top official who did not understand the implications of what was being done. Sands, who spent three hours with the former general, says he was "confused" about the decisions that were taken.
Myers mistakenly believed that new techniques recommended by Haynes and authorised by Rumsfeld in December 2002 for use by the military at Guantánamo had been taken from the US army field manual. They included hooding, sensory deprivation, and physical and mental abuse.
"As we worked through the list of techniques, Myers became increasingly hesitant and troubled," writes Sands. "Haynes and Rumsfeld had been able to run rings around him." [my bold]
[...] Larry Wilkerson, a former army officer and chief of staff to Colin Powell, US secretary of state at the time, told the Guardian: "I do know that Rumsfeld had neutralised the chairman [Myers] in many significant ways.
"The secretary did this by cutting [Myers] out of important communications, meetings, deliberations and plans.
"At the end of the day, however, Dick Myers was not a very powerful chairman in the first place, one reason Rumsfeld recommended him for the job".
He added: "Haynes, Feith, Yoo, Bybee, Gonzalez and - at the apex - Addington, should never travel outside the US, except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code. In future, some government may build the case necessary to prosecute them in a foreign court, or in an international court." [my bold]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/19/guantanamo.usa

Mukasey's 9/11 Lies

Following up on Glenn Greenwald's request for readers to follow up and "generate the attention for this story that it requires", I hereby join Mr. Greenwald and call for an immediate investigation of Mukasey, Ashcroft, all of BushCo and their entire lying 9/11 scenario. These 4 posts from Glenn's blog on Salon.com should catch your interest.
Michael Mukasey's tearful lies
Michael Mukasey has conclusively proven himself to be an exact replica of Alberto Gonzales -- slavishly loyal to every presidential whim and unbound by even the most minimal constraints of truth while serving those whims.[...]
[...] These are multiple falsehoods here, and independently, this whole claim makes no sense. There is also a pretty startling new revelation here about the Bush administration's pre-9/11 failure that requires a good amount of attention.
[...] Independently, even if there had been a warrant requirement for that call -- and there unquestionably was not -- why didn't the Bush administration obtain a FISA warrantknew about but didn't intercept really amounts to one of the most potent indictments yet about the Bush administration's failure to detect the plot in action. Contrary to his false claims, FISA -- for multiple reasons -- did not prevent eavesdropping on that call.
[...] to listen in on 9/11-planning calls from this "safe house"? Independently, why didn't the administration invoke FISA's 72-hour emergency warrantless window to listen in on those calls? If what Muskasey said this week is true -- and that's a big "if" -- his revelation about this Afghan call that the administration Independently, even if there had been a warrant requirement for that call -- and there unquestionably was not -- why didn't the Bush administration obtain a FISA warrantknew about but didn't intercept really amounts to one of the most potent indictments yet about the Bush administration's failure to detect the plot in action. Contrary to his false claims, FISA -- for multiple reasons -- did not prevent eavesdropping on that call.
[...] to listen in on 9/11-planning calls from this "safe house"? Independently, why didn't the administration invoke FISA's 72-hour emergency warrantless window to listen in on those calls? If what Muskasey said this week is true -- and that's a big "if" -- his revelation about this Afghan call that the administration Michael Mukasey can cry all he wants about the 9/11 attacks. But neither he nor the rest of the Bush administration are the proprietors of those attacks. There were millions of New Yorkers in Manhattan on 9/11 other than Michael Mukasey, who lived and worked there for a long time. Neither Mike Mukasey nor his tearful pleas for unchecked government surveillance power and the erosion of the rule of law are representative of them.
To the contrary, the substantial majority of New Yorkers -- and huge majorities of Manhattanites -- vehemently reject the Bush/Cheney agenda of dismantling our constitutional framework and basic safeguards in the name of these sorts of fear-mongering and manipulative appeals. Unlike Mukasey and other Bush followers, most New Yorkers have ceased quivering in fear long ago -- if they ever did -- and have had their resolve to defend our basic constitutional liberties strengthened, not obliterated, as a result of the 9/11 attack and the subsequent, self-serving exploitation of it by Mukasey's White House bosses. And under no circumstances do Mukasey's tears provide license for this tidal wave of lies in defense of presidential lawlessness, from our nation's highest "law enforcement officer." [...]
Thursday April 3, 2008 07:04 EDT
Why doesn't the 9/11 Commission know about Mukasey's 9/11 story?
(Updated below with response from Philip Zelikow -
Update II – Last week, during a question-and-answer session following a speech he delivered in San Francisco, Attorney General Michael Mukasey revealed a startling and extremely newsworthy fact. As I wrote last Saturday, Mukasey claimed that, prior to 9/11, the Bush administration was aware of a telephone call being made by an Al Qaeda Terrorist from what he called a "safe house in Afghanistan" into the U.S., but failed to eavesdrop on that call. Some help is needed from readers here to generate the attention for this story that it requires.[...]
The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the Mukasey speech and is asking some of the right questions:
Update III - With the help of readers, I was able to find and get in contact with Tom Kean's office, who asked that an email be sent to him requesting comment. The email I sent is here, along with the email I sent to the DOJ (at their request) asking for comment from Mukasey. [...]
Update IV -Chairman Conyers demands answers from Mukasey - House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, along with two Subcommittee Chairs, just sent a letter to Michael Mukasey demanding answers to all the right questions about his 9/11 claims as well as the bizarre (though unsurprising) reference in the Yoo Memorandum to the suspension of the Fourth Amendment inside the U.S. That letter will need to be followed up with action, but it's a good start.
UPDATE V: The DOJ replies to my email referenced above, here.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/03/29/mukasey/index.htm

Former CIA Analyst Expelled from the House

'Swear Him In' Provokes Expulsion

By Ray McGovern
September 10, 2007

If Petraeus is so honest and full of integrity, what possible objection could he have to being sworn in?

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/091007a.html#When:06:45PM