Lead by Example

We, the People were lied to about 9/11 and the reasons to bomb people in Afghanistan, then Iraq.  There has never been any reason to go to war with these countries since the "attack" of 9/11 was perpetrated by Saudis and a couple of misfits, none from those two countries.  Yet we have destroyed them.  Why?  Oil and now, we are learning about precious minerals in Afghanistan, plus pipelines, et al, et nauseum.

If we are to have any credibility in the future of this planet, we must take the lead in holding accountable every single leader who led us down this road to disaaster.  I think that begins with the former president-select, George W. Bush.

Monday, December 29, 2008 

Obama's Duty To Prosecute Bush For War Crimes

Indeed, the rule of law is the "strongbox that keeps all our other values safe." We can write laws that say we have certain freedoms and rights, and we can build courts and elect lawmakers, but if there is no rule of law, then we lose our rights bit by bit until they are no longer recognizable.  While the goppies will cry "partisan witch hunt," even the Bush State Dept. recognizes that no democratic society can tolerate abuses when people are tortured or kidnapped under rendition in violation of our rule of law or tolerate the failure to prosecute in compliance with our Constitution.
Signing the petition drafted by budhydharma and Docudharma is not in defiance of our President-Elect Obama, but rather a sign of support for the difficult times that he and Holder will face when performing their clear constitutional duties.
As President, Obama will have the constitutional duty to faithfully execute our laws.
The constitutional oath of office will require President Obama to faithfully execute the office of President and preserve, protect and defend our Constitution. Our constitution also requires that our presidents "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed."  The principle of the rule of law is partially based on this Faithfully Execute clause which requires our President to comply with laws, our Constitution and treaties because our Constitution established a government of laws, not of men and women.
The Geneva Convention is one of the laws which must be faithfully executed.

Posted by Edger at 8:00 PM

Obama's Duty To Prosecute Bush For War Crimes
by Patriot Daily at Docudharma, Monday December 29, 2008 at 14:14:19 PST
http://ooibc.blogspot.com/2008/12/obamas-duty-to-prosecute-bush-for-war.html

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

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

AG Ashcroft Destroys Your Right to Know

Published on Monday, January 7, 2002 in the San Francisco Chronicle
The Day Ashcroft Censored Freedom of Information
by Ruth Rosen
The President didn't ask the networks for television time. The attorney general didn't hold a press conference. The media didn't report any dramatic change in governmental policy. As a result, most Americans had no idea that one of their most precious freedoms disappeared on Oct. 12.
Yet it happened. In a memo that slipped beneath the political radar, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft vigorously urged federal agencies to resist most Freedom of Information Act requests made by American citizens.
[...] the Freedom of Information Act … allows ordinary citizens to hold the government accountable by requesting and scrutinizing public documents and records. Without it, journalists, newspapers, historians and watchdog groups would never be able to keep the government honest….
[...] Yet without fanfare, the attorney general simply quashed the FOIA. The Department of Justice did not respond to numerous calls from The Chronicle to comment on the memo.
This report then proceeds to list instances of citizens and activist groups using the FOIA for the benefit of the people. It can be found at this older post from CommonDreams.org:

http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0108-04.htm

Imprisoned Journalists Can't Report

I'm providing the complete report from The Raw Story about the what every presidential candidate must address: the continuing attack on journalists and abandoning John Ashcroft's "memo" which essentially eliminated the Freedom of Informaton Act:
AP president: US arrests journalist in Iraq to 'control' information
David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Published: Wednesday March 19, 2008
Associated Press president Tom Curley says his news organization does not buy the government's argument that one of its photographers arrested in Iraq was working on behalf of the enemy, and he alleged the US is rounding up journalists in an attempt to control information.
"To say the least, we see things very differently," Curley commented dryly, regarding photographer Bilal Hussein, who was arrested two years ago and remains in military custody.
Noting that at least a dozen other Iraqi photographers have been detained or arrested, Curley stated, "It's impossible not to conclude that the words and pictures these journalists produced were considered unhelpful to the war effort and that their arrests would have served a broader strategy of information control."
Curley also called on journalists to demand that all the presidential candidates make a commitment to reversing a directive issued by Attorney General John Ashcroft shortly after September 11 that radically restricted the scope of the Freedom of Information Act.
Ashcroft's memo stated, "When you carefully consider FOIA requests and decide to withhold records, in whole or in part, you can be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions unless they lack a sound legal basis or present an unwarranted risk of adverse impact on the ability of other agencies to protect other important records."
Curley told the National Press Club, "When a matter of public policy poses a straight-up choice between the public's rights of access to government and a government effort to infringe or even narrow those rights, journalists cannot pretend to be disinterested observers."
"This is the moment to make it clear to all the presidential candidates how important reversal of the Ashcroft directive is to us and to the people," Curley continued. "We need to ask the candidates at every opportunity ... whether they are willing to appoint an attorney general willing to follow the spirit as well as the letter of the law that protects the people's right to know what their government is doing."
This video is from The Associated Press, broadcast March 18, 2008
Please go to the link below to see the video tape of Mr. Curley’s statement to the National Press:
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/AP_President_chides_Bush_Admin_for_0319.html