Bush administration left the nation wrecked.......

by Jacqueline Marcus

After the election, we believed President Obama would wind things down in the Middle East, and diplomatic solutions would replace costly military operations. For nearly 10 years, we've tolerated inexplicable excuses for invading Iraq and Afghanistan -- all in the name of a vague and meaningless term: terrorism. We invade and bomb people we've never met and then we're surprised that they want to fight back. For eight long years, we've watched the Bush Administration spend billions and billions of our tax dollars for the Iraq invasion that was never connected to the September 11 attack.


(Many of us did everything we could to prevent said horrors and stop them once they began. We in no way tolerated it nor did we support it. We protested in every way we could within the law, except for non-violent acts of civil disobedience.)

In these last nine years, what did the invasions accomplish? The illegal and indefensible occupation of Afghanistan and the expansion to Yemen have only served to increase hate and anger against the U.S. Perhaps if we provided bread instead of dropping bombs on these extremely poor people, rebels would have no reason to plot against us. Nine years later, it has now cost Americans over a trillion dollars to shut down a few hundred Islamic radicals. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost as a result of the U.S. military invasion in this poor region of the world. 


(I do not buy that the whack-jobs known as Al Qaeda are dirt poor Muslims who hate America because they are dirt poor. Osama bin Laden is one of the wealthiest terrorists ever known. The men who allegedly flew air planes into the WTC were all middle class in their countries. The latest nut-job activity was attempted by the son one of the biggest bankers in Nigeria. He was not some poor kid from Jenna. However, it's for damn sure that the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq did more for Al Qaeda than anything Osama bin Laden and his religiously insane comrades could have ever dreamed of doing in the near decade which has followed 9/11/01.The same can be said for the Gitmo debacle, Abu Ghraib, the U.S. gulags in Eastern Europe and the policy of torture which was employed. These terrorists are dangerous and no one should doubt that.Thanks to Bush and Cheney, they are more dangerous now than they were on 9/12/01.) 

Voters are boiling mad at both parties because they want these wars to end. They want their tax dollars to help them. They are sick and tired of a war economy that wrecked and shattered American businesses like a domino effect. Resorts are empty. Shopping malls are empty. The housing market is an endless sea of foreclosure signs. There are more homeless people than I've ever seen in my entire life. Fact: when unemployment rises, so does crime. Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" comes to mind. "As there is always more misery at the lower end than humanity at the top, everything was given away before it was received." Our pro-war Congress gave our entire public treasury away to military spending. It's been reported that the number of Americans on food stamps rose by 50%. We can no longer brag that we're the richest country in the world. The war profiteers destroyed the foundation of our middle-upper class economy, which was once a beacon to the world.


(Amen!)

In November, while in Maui for my struggling solar business, I visited my friend who was staying at one of the Wailea resorts. This luxury resort looked evacuated. There were a couple vacationers from Japan and China, but very few Americans. We could sit in the hot tub or lounge around the pool without seeing a soul; and although it was great to have the entire resort to ourselves, it was rather eerie and frightening.

(The only Americans with the real money don't go to the same luxury resorts that you do. Most people cannot not fathom the kind of places where the Wall  Street crooks vacation.)
  
President Obama seems to feel that he must answer to the war criminal, Dick Cheney, the man who loves to torture prisoners before they're found guilty of the crime. I say this because we know there were many innocent Afghan farmers swept up in the al-Qaeda net, in the wrong place at the wrong time. No matter to Dick Cheney: waterboard them. Well it's time for the media and for the president to remind Cheney that 9/11 happened on the Bush/Cheney watch. It's time to put Dick Cheney on the defense for a change: how many millions did he make from this perpetual war via Halliburton? How many secret, offshore accounts, if any, does he have in his family's names? How many servants does he have? How many cars? How many homes and what are they worth during the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression? 


(Questions we would all like an answer to. Sometimes I think that Dick Cheney believes that he is still in jeopardy legally. A U.S. attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, said publicly that there was a legal cloud over the office of the V.P. Cheney believes that the best defense is offense. That should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention at all in the last 8 years. His whole damn family is trying to protect him and their inheritance of his war profits. Other Republicans are afraid to say anything against him. THEY ARE AFRAID OF HIM!)


The other day, I was at the local hardware store and I happened to notice a soldier standing in line behind me. I mentally debated whether or not to ask him if he's been abroad, and if he could clarify the "mission" to me. Finally, I turned around and said, as politely as possible, "Thank you for serving." He nodded his head. I then asked if he was in Iraq or Afghanistan.

He told me he's been sent several times to both Iraq and Afghanistan. He confessed that "they fixed it so that we would never leave." I asked what he meant. "We've invested too much to just walk away: military bases, equipment, we want the oil…we want control. They say 'stabilize' which really means U.S. control… but they (Afghans-Iraqis) definitely don't want us there." 


(Didn't Junior tell his friends from Houston, who visited him in the White House, that he had fixed things so that the in-coming administration would not be able to withdraw from the war? I seem to recall that his friends returned to Houston with real concerns for his mental health. This was found in a Houston Chronicle article.)

He was pretty candid about it. I asked one last question before thanking him and wishing him well: Are they building a lot of prisons over there? He laughed, "Oh yeah, they call them schools." His tone was somewhat sarcastic. 


(OMG!)

Think about it: What is the difference between a street gang killer and an al-Qaeda terrorist? 


(Street gangs do not have major oil reserves, nor do they threaten Israel or offer areas of strategic logistics in the middle east.)

Answer: No one gives a damn about the street gang member or how many people are killed (there are hundreds of gang related U.S. deaths every day). If he's caught, he'll do time in prison -- whereas, the latter, the al-Qaeda member, is worth billions and billions of dollars in terms of military defense contracts and operations. War is a big business, just ask Dick Cheney, but only for the few, war profiteering elite.


(Let's add up all of the terrorist attacks on U.S. soil by our own religious and conservative far right. Tim McVeigh, the Olympic 1994 bomber, killings of so called "abortion doctors" and so on and so on. The flu kills more people every year than died in all the Al Qaeda attacks. More people die in car accidents. The list is endless. Nevertheless, it would not benefit anyone in the Bush/Cheney White House or Congress to whip up the fear about these killers.) 

We do nothing to end the poverty that leads to desperation, crime, and daily killings in our own cities. There are drive-by shootings every night in Washington DC, Chicago, LA, NYC, Honolulu -- across the country. Imagine turning on your TV and listening to the 24/7 media coverage on national security while bullets are blasting your windows and doors. There's no money for that problem. But there's an endless Pentagon budget worth billions of dollars for a hundred or so al-Qaeda rebels thousands of miles away in Afghanistan, hiding somewhere in the mountains. Go figure. 


(I am beginning to think this will never change. I'm sure it won't until we take Eisenhower's warning about the military/industrial complex, now the military-industrial-security complex, seriously. Until we demand publicly funded elections, the war profiteers and other corporate psychopaths will run the country.) 

No one is talking about the once wealthy business men and women who've been losing their shirts in this war economy. I remember reading in The New York Times that a real estate woman was making up to $180,000 dollars a year. Now she's on food stamps. Why should Cheney care about them? He and his family are sitting pretty with plenty of big bucks. Here's a flash for Dick Cheney: Everyone, including Republican voters, is sick of hearing about national security, especially when Americans are out of work and losing their homes.


(The economy of the country is a big part of national security. Doesn't anyone get that? Bush and Cheney ran this nation into the dirt, including trying to run to wars off the books, so that no one would know just how much the war debacles were costing. The SEC under the Rethugs was totally emasculated. The minute those clowns were elected with a rethug congress, the corporate officers, from sea to shining sea, knew it was party time.)  

Meanwhile, India is building some of the best engineering universities in the world while young American students can hardly read and write. That's what happens when a crooked government gives all the public funding to defense contractors for endless wars that make the few super rich.


(The dumbing down of America is intentional. It's not merely the funneling of big bucks to the Pentagon.) 


If President Obama's goal is to diminish al-Qaeda plots or attacks, then he should withdraw our troops from their countries. That's what Middle East citizens want there, and that's what Americans want here. Otherwise, it's time to start taking third party candidates seriously, candidates who want to end the wars and this war economy that has created the worst depression in our modern history. 


(That won't happen until we have public funding for elections and stringent laws about lobbying along with major jail terms and fines for violation. The corporate special interests will not allow a third party let alone a 4th or 5th.)

BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

Jacqueline Marcus' book of poems, Close to the Shore, was published by Michigan State University Press. She is a regular guest contributor to BuzzFlash.com. She taught philosophy at Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, California, and is the editor of http://www.ForPoetry.com. She is currently promoting green technologies (solar & wind) on the island of Maui. www.GoSolarMaui.com. She is currently working on a new book: Corporate Media and the Erosion of a Civil Society.




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Let The Sun Shine In......

A 9/11 Reality Check

Posted on Sep 8, 2009

By Robert Scheer


What if eight years ago the World Trade Center had been leveled by a small nuclear bomb that took out most of lower Manhattan as well? How many millions of innocent civilians would we have killed in retaliation? Would we still be a free society, or would Dick Cheney have attained the power of a demented king, having moved on from snooping on our phone calls and outing honest CIA agents to destroying the last vestiges of the rule of law?       

(Not to mention the most disturbing domestic Cheney/Rove product, Data mining, millions of Americans. While pretty much useless for the purpose of finding "terrorist cells,"  data mining is a high tech way of keeping tabs on Americans most personal information, along with publicly expressed opinions on blogs and comments all over the web.)

As assaults on a society go, the 9/11 attacks, which left 3,000 dead and are sure to be described in this anniversary week as being among the greatest of historical outrages, were something less than that, given the world’s experience with the ravages of war. The countless Russians and the 6 million Jews killed by those so finely educated Germans come to mind. The 3.4 million Vietnamese, mostly rice farmers, whom Robert McNamara admitted to having helped kill with his carpet-bombing of their country, are a forgotten footnote. Yet we who have never experienced such carnage on our home front all too easily poke out tens of thousands of eyes for each lost one of our own.

Surely two planes crashing into office buildings and another hitting the Pentagon doesn’t compare to the leveling of every major city in Japan with conventional bombing, capped off by the mass murder of hundreds of thousands more at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Speaking of eyes lost, mark the words of Hiroshima’s mayor two years ago: “That fateful summer, 8:15 AM. The roar of a B-29 breaks the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then suddenly, a flash, an enormous blast—silence—hell on Earth. The eyes of young girls watching the parachute were melted.”


We assumed that the Japanese people would readily forgive us and, having been raised in the spirit of total obedience to their emperor, they accommodated our occupation quite well, even injecting industrial-grade silicon into their women’s breasts to satisfy the erotic appetites of our soldiers.

Americans who blithely claim the moral high ground with every pledge of allegiance to a flag that, because it is American, is assumed to have never been sullied by imperial greed or moral contradiction expect no less than instant and full forgiveness for our “mistakes.” Only last month, four decades after he led the massacre of 500 villagers in My Lai, Vietnam, did former Army Lt. William Calley express “regret” for his crimes. He served no time in prison for the point-blank shooting of toddlers, thanks to the commutation of his sentence by Richard Nixon, who might have been anticipating his own need for a presidential pardon.

In blind and wrathful retaliation for 9/11 we wreaked havoc on Iraq, a nation that our then-president knew had not attacked us, and we continue to slaughter peasants in Afghanistan who aren’t able to find Manhattan on a map.


We, a people whose nation has never suffered a long and widespread occupation, easily gave vent to our most barbaric impulses, assuming the absolute right to arrest and torture anyone anywhere in the world without revealing his identity, let alone respecting a single one of those God-given rights that we claim for ourselves alone. And even when we identify the few we hold responsible for the attacks on our soil, we refuse them public and fair trials even after years of torturing them.


Many of our co-citizens were driven to frothing-at-the-mouth vengeance, not merely be the attacks of 9/11/01, but by the out-and-out lies of the Bush/Cheney administration in the weeks and months that followed, eventually leading to the massive bombing, invasion and occupation of Iraq, a nation of people who had zero to do with the events of 9/11/01. 

I knew that there would be an attack on Afghanistan after the Taliban refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, even though they asked for proof and the Bush administration refused to give any information at all. But was that the most expedient way of arresting leaders of Al Qaeda. 

I remember well, Donald Rumsfeld saying, when months past without any sighting of Osama, after Tora Bora, that finding Osama is like finding a needle in a hay stack. Seemed to me that the best way to accomplish that feat would not be blowing the haystack to "kingdom come." 

Now, 8 years later, Osama is either dead of natural causes or is still on the loose. Within months of 9/11, we now know Bush and Cheney, plus various Neocons already had Iraq in their sites before they took office and were moving assets to prepare for war with Iraq long before Congress was asked for a war resolution against Iraq

But we do have a saving grace for our experiment in democracy—although unfortunately it did not exist in the Supreme Court or Congress as a barrier to an imperial vice presidency. It is the power of the lone whistle-blower of conscience, occasionally given voice in what remains of our free press and which can influence presidential elections, as happened quite dramatically this last time around. There are those like Joe Wilson, who exposed presidential fraud masquerading as national security concern over bogus Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger, and more recently the truth-telling of Ali H. Soufan, a former FBI agent and lead interrogator of terrorists.

In Sunday’s New York Times, Soufan, who was involved in obtaining much reliable information from prisoners before they were tortured, observed that the recently released memos cited by Cheney to back his argument that torture was efficient actually “fail to show that the techniques stopped even a single imminent threat of terrorism.”

So, Cheney is again proved wrong, but if there had been a larger attack on 9/11, I doubt whether many free souls would be around now to tell him so.


AP / Alex Brandon

Two Afghan men watch from their motorcycle on Saturday as soldiers with the 20th Special Forces Group go on a training mission in Afghanistan.

---

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
Copyright © 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.

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Let The Sun Shine In......

Didn't "We" Go Into Afghaistan To "Get Osama?"

McGovern, one of our heroes, tells it like it was and is. I doubt we could add to this article.

Could any of us, in autumn if 2000, imagined what a horrible mess we could have been in 8 years later?

Afghanistan for Dummies

By Ray McGovern
September 2, 2009

I’m going to ask for my money back. I’ve seen this Afghanistan movie before. The first time, Vietnam was in the title.

As in an early scene from the Vietnam version, U.S. military officials are surprised to discover that the insurgents in Afghanistan are stronger than previously realized.

And our protagonist, Gen. Westmoreland — sorry, I mean McChrystal — sees the situation as serious but salvageable. As Westmoreland did with President Lyndon Johnson, McChrystal is preparing to tell President Barack Obama that thousands of more troops are needed to achieve the U.S. objective — whatever that happens to be.

As in Vietnam, uncertainty about objectives and how to measure success persist in Afghanistan. Never has this come through more clearly than in the fuzzy remarks of “Af-Pak” super-envoy Richard Holbrooke who has purview over Afghanistan and Pakistan.

On Aug. 12 at the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C., think tank, Holbrooke tried to clarify how the Obama administration would gauge success in Afghanistan.

John Podesta, the center’s president who was President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and served as head of

Obama’s transition team, waxed eloquent not only about his friend Holbrooke but Holbrooke’s team; really spectacular, impressive, multidisciplinary, interagency, truly exceptional were some of the bouquets thrown at team members.

Holbrooke said his Af-Pak squad is “the best team” he’d ever worked with, adding that “Hillary” – the Secretary of State whose last name is Clinton – personally approved “every member.”

It may indeed be a good team but that doesn’t change the fact that it appears to be on a fool’s errand. Each member has considerable expertise to offer, but no one knows where they’re headed.

The whole thing reminds me of the old saw: If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. (Or you might say Holbrooke’s team finds itself in a dark place peering into the distance looking for a light at the end of the tunnel.)

Pressing for Answers

To his credit, Podesta kept trying to get a clear answer from Holbrook about the overall objective in Afghanistan, as well as seeking some metrics to judge progress.

 “There is increasing concern here at home and in allied capitals abroad about the cost of winning in

Afghanistan, and to what end-goals we should aspire,” Podesta said. “I hope to focus on … our objectives in
Afghanistan and how we measure progress.”

Holbrooke was as smooth — and vacuous — as Gen. William Westmoreland and his briefers were in Saigon:

“We know the difference with input and output, and what you are seeing here is input,” Holbrooke said. “The payoff is still to come. We have to produce results, and we understand that.

“And we’re not here today to tell you we’re winning or we’re losing. We’re not here today to say we’re optimistic or pessimistic. We’re here to tell you that we’re in this fight in a different way with a determination to succeed.”

In an apparent attempt to get Podesta to stop asking about objectives and how to measure success, Holbrooke tossed a bouquet back at the Center for American Progress for doing “an extraordinary job of becoming a critical center for our efforts.”

For those who may have missed it, Podesta’s Center surprised many, including me, by endorsing Obama’s non-strategy of throwing more troops at the problem in Afghanistan. (The charitable explanation is that there is something in the water here in Washington; less charitably, the Center may have feared losing its place at Obama’s table.)

Holbrooke’s flattery, though, did not deter Podesta, who kept insisting on some kind of cogent answer about objectives and metrics.

Podesta: “From the perspective of the American people, how do you define clear objectives of what you’re
trying to succeed as outputs with the inputs that you just talked about?”

Holbrooke: “A very key question, John, which you’re alluding to is, of course, if our objective is to defeat, destroy, dismantle al-Qaeda, and they’re primarily in Pakistan, why are we doing so much in Afghanistan? ...

“If you abandon the struggle in Afghanistan, you will suffer against al-Qaeda as well. But we have to be clear on what our national interests are here….

“The specific goal you ask, John, — is really hard for me to address in specific terms. But I would say this about defining success in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the simplest sense, the Supreme Court test for another issue, we’ll know it when we see it.” (Emphasis added.)

Holbrooke almost chokes on the words as they proceed out of his mouth, and then takes a very visible gulp of air. Up until this point, Podesta has been bravely suppressing any outward sign of frustration with Holbrooke’s vacuous comments on U.S. objectives and measures of success.

After the “we’ll know it when we see it” remark, Podesta pauses for a few seconds and looks at Holbrooke — as if to say, and that's it? Then, like a high school teacher ready to move on to the next ill-prepared student, Podesta utters a curt "okay."

“Know It When You See It”

The Supreme Court test involving “know it when you see it” refers to a phrase used by former Justice Potter Stewart 45 years ago. Frustrated at not being able to define pornography in an obscenity case, he gave up and fell back on the “know it when you see it” formulation.

The same phrase was used by a similarly frustrated official, former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, in December 2002, just three months before the U.S.-U.K. attack on Iraq.

Unable to come up with any specific evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, but determined to rebut

Saddam Hussein’s claims that he had none, Wolfowitz quipped, “It’s like the judge said about pornography. I can’t define it, but I will know it when I see it.”

How is it that we let people get away with that kind of rubbish when it means people — Iraqis, Afghanis, as well as Americans — are going to get killed and maimed?

But Holbrooke’s “we’ll know-it-when-we-see-it” measure of success is just the latest sign that the Obama administration has been playing the Af-Pak strategy by ear. The President himself seems generally aware of this, given his readiness to give wide latitude, not clear instructions, to Holbrooke and the generals.

An early hint of the disarray came on March 27, a little more than two months into his presidency, when Obama showed up a half-hour late to the press conference at which he announced a “comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

No explanation was given for his lateness, which required TV talking heads to reach new heights of vapidity for a full 30 minutes. I ventured a guess at the time that his instincts were telling him he was about to do something he would regret.

It soon became apparent that Obama’s 60-day Afghan policy review lacked specificity on strategy but tried to make up for that with lofty rhetoric — kudos to the alliterative speechwriter who coined the catchy phrase “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda.”

More important, the President also took pains to assure us that: “Going forward, we will not blindly stay the course.” Rather, he promised there will be “metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable.”

(Yet the key “metric” appears to be what Holbrooke blurted out on Aug. 12, “we’ll know it when we see it.”)

In Holbrooke, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama appear to have picked a loser. It is bad enough that he does not seem to have a clue about how to measure success toward U.S. objectives — or, at least, cannot articulate them — even before a friendly audience.

Perhaps Secretary Clinton and President Obama were also unaware of his well-deserved reputation for logical inconsistencies, not to mention the delight he takes in bullying foreign officials — the more senior the person, the better.

A former Foreign Service officer who worked on the Balkans confided that he believes Holbrooke actually prolonged the Yugoslav civil war for several years by pushing a policy of covert military support for the Muslim side.

It should come as no surprise, then, if Holbrooke ends up playing a role in deepening the Af-Pak quagmire, if only by adopting a belligerent attitude towards the Pashtuns and also the Pakistani government — not to mention rival U.S. officials.

In sum, Holbrooke will probably prove more hindrance than help in working out a sensible U.S. strategy and objectives. Worse, he is not likely to serve as a much needed counterweight to the generals, who may well succeed in persuading Obama to give them still more troops for an unwinnable war.

George Will Favors Pullout

(I see Will's comments as political more than strategic. It's the GOP's way of putting Obama in a no win situation; the Dems Nixon. These people will do anything to regain absolute power. We should never forget that it was Bush and Cheney who took their eyes off the ball to invade and occupy Iraq. The Iraqis did not have a damn thing to do with 9/11.)

Surprisingly, one of the new voices urging a troop drawdown in Afghanistan is conservative columnist George Will, who showed his human side in an op-ed appearing Tuesday in the Washington Post, “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan.”

Will starts and ends the piece with references to a young Marine who had just lost two buddies. To his credit, Will avoids the customary quote from the poet Horace — “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (“How sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country”) or anything like it.

Will says, in effect, that syrupy sentiments and faux appeals to patriotism do not apply in present circumstances. He would probably be the last to draw this connection, but he has begun to sound like Cindy Sheehan, who has been trying for over four years to get George Bush to explain to her the “noble cause” for which her son Casey died in Iraq.

(God forbid that we should become sentimental about our men and women in uniform! Will talks about syrupy patriotism!!! Puleeze Louise.....Now it is supposedly Obama's war? Give us all a break, George!)

Will ends his article with a heartfelt appeal for substantial troop reductions now, “before more American valor…is squandered.”

On Wednesday, the neoconservative editors of the Post compiled a series of rebuttals to Will’s column in a section entitled "Where Will Got It Wrong," including a lengthy excerpt from a blog post by leading neocon theorist William Kristol, who attacks Will for sentimentality when “it would be better to base a major change in our national security strategy on arguments.”

(Yet another idiot!)

Not surprisingly, given his enthusiastic support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Kristol advocates “a surge of several brigades of American forces” in Afghanistan and a determination “to support a strategy, and to provide the necessary resources, for victory.”

Alongside Kristol’s blog post was an op-ed by Post columnist David Ignatius, another enthusiastic supporter of the Iraq War.

Regarding Afghanistan, Ignatius concludes that “this may be one of those messy situations where the best course is to both shoot and talk – a strategy based on the idea that we can bolster our friends and bloody our enemies enough that, somewhere down the road, we can cut a deal.”

You may recall that President Johnson followed a similar strategy of trying to bomb his Vietnamese enemies to the bargaining table.

Counting the tragedy in Iraq – as well as the one in Vietnam – this is the third time I’ve seen this movie.

[To see a clip of the exchange between Holbrooke and Podesta, click here.]

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

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Let The Sun Shine In......

Osama worked for the CIA?

The funny thing about this, if there is anything funny about it at all, is that there was a time, not all that long ago, when I would have by-passed this post much as I do the the one reporting that Michael Jackson is from the planet Bullshit in the Dogpiss galaxy  and that all his kids are the first true, balanced Alien/earthlings to be born on planet earth, or some other total horse shit. 

After the last 8 years or so, I've become much more open-minded about what is possible and what is not.  Wonder how that happened. LOL

Sibel Edmonds Bombshell: Bin Laden worked for CIA up to 9/11

www.bradblog.com/?p=7332
 

 

 

Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds dropped a bombshell on the Mike Malloy radio show, guest-hosted by Brad Friedman (audio, partial transcript). In the interview, Sibel says that the US maintained 'intimate relations' with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, "all the way until that day of September 11." These 'intimate relations' included using Bin Laden for 'operations' in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. These 'operations' involved using al Qaeda and the Taliban in the same manner "as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict," that is, fighting 'enemies' via proxies. As Sibel has previously described, and as she reiterates in this latest interview, this process involved using Turkey (with assistance from 'actors from Pakistan, and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia') as a proxy, which in turn used Bin Laden and the Taliban and others as a proxy terrorist army.

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Let The Sun Shine In......

DOJ: Courts could harm Afghan effort

Admittedly, Bush and Cheney's GWOT is a fraud. We all know it, if we are honest with ourselves. 

As a born and raised American, hailing from the deep south, I want to be on the moral side of thing for a change. 

As far as I am concerned, everyone who was responsible for the 9/11 and anthrax attacks, in any way,  should be arrested and tried for murder.

Those who are responsible for the war of aggression against Iraq should receive the same justice. 

Anyone who covers for the international war criminals in the Bush administration can only be considered as complicit after the fact and guilty of obstruction of justice.

By: Josh Gerstein April 11, 2009 03:02 PM EST

President Obama’s effort to pursue a new strategy against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban could be jeopardized if some prisoners held by the U.S. military in Afghanistan are allowed access to American courts, the Justice Department argued in a court filing Friday. Government lawyers made the claim in a motion asking for permission to pursue an expedited appeal of a judge’s ruling last week that prisoners who claim they were captured outside Afghanistan should be permitted to pursue habeas corpus challenges to their detention. Judge John Bates ruled April 2 that he would hear cases from non-Afghan prisoners who claimed they were captured outside Afghanistan and taken to the Bagram Airfield near Kabul. “Drawing a jurisdictional line at the border of Afghanistan creates a disincentive to move to Bagram individuals captured in Pakistan, where there is neither a temporary screening and processing facility nor a long-term theater internment facility,” Justice Department lawyer Jean Lin wrote. “This jurisdictional line also provides the enemies of the United States an incentive to conduct operations from Pakistan, using it as a safe haven and using the U.S. court system as a tactical weapon.” The Justice Department noted Obama’s statement last month describing Afghanistan and Pakistan as “as two countries but one challenge.” Friday’s filing notified the court that Solicitor General Elena Kagan had authorized an appeal in the case. The motion suggested that allowing the prisoners to be heard now would also interfere with a 180-day review Obama ordered in January into policies regarding interrogation and detention of terror suspects. Lin asked Bates to suspend his order, arguing that proceeding with the cases “would impose serious practical burdens on, and potential harm to, the Government and its efforts to prosecute the war in Afghanistan. “There is no dispute that Bagram Airfield is in a theater of war where the Nation’s troops are in harm’s way,” she wrote. “Responding to these petitions – and to the potentially large number of other petitions filed by Bagram detainees who may now allege that they are similarly situated – would divert the military’s attention and resources at a critical time for operations in Afghanistan, potentially requiring accommodation and protection of counsel and onerous discovery.” The Obama administration’s stance in the case is aligned with that of the Bush Administration—and infuriating to detainee lawyers. The new administration’s latest arguments, that interference by the courts could aid America’s enemies, is provoking more anger. An attorney for Bagram detainees, Tina Foster, said in a statement Friday that the Obama team’s action signaled “a particularly dark day in American history.” She said Obama was betraying his rhetoric about returning to the rule of law. “The time has long since passed for issuing platitudes about ending torture, rendition, and indefinite detention. President Obama today becomes complicit in the unjust and illegal detention of our clients — who deserve better,” Foster said. In his ruling, Bates said the prisoners’ claim that they were captured outside Afghanistan was pivotal. He said the government should not be permitted to deposit inmates at Bagram simply to put them beyond the reach of the courts. Lin countered that none of the prisoners claimed to have been captured or held previously in a place where they would have had recourse to U.S. courts. The government’s latest motion hints at a possible compromise to be pursued before the appeals court: considering Pakistan to be part of the Afghan theater of war. That would allow prisoners detained in Pakistan to be held at Bagram without recourse, but still permit those whisked there from around the world to bring challenges to their detention.

© 2009 Capitol News Company, LLC

Let The Sun Shine In......

Memos Provide Blueprint for Police State

What amazes the hell out of me is that this seems so surprising to the so-called journalists of the ACNM, when we were screaming bloody murder years ago. These legal rationalizations could have easily been used against dissenters and activists and may very well have been. Knowing what we knew years ago, the Bush administration was using the threat to intimidate anyone who disagreed with them.

Seven newly released memos from the Bush Justice Department reveal a concerted strategy to cloak the President with power to override the Constitution. The memos provide “legal” rationales for the President to suspend freedom of speech and press; order warrantless searches and seizures, including wiretaps of U.S. citizens; lock up U.S. citizens indefinitely in the United States without criminal charges; send suspected terrorists to other countries where they will likely be tortured; and unilaterally abrogate treaties. According to the reasoning in the memos, Congress has no role to check and balance the executive. That is the definition of a police state.

Who wrote these memos? All but one were crafted in whole or in part by the infamous John Yoo and Jay Bybee, authors of the so-called “torture memos” that redefined torture much more narrowly than the U.S. definition of torture, and counseled the President how to torture and get away with it. In one memo, Yoo said the Justice Department would not enforce U.S. laws against torture, assault, maiming and stalking, in the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants.

What does the federal maiming statute prohibit? It makes it a crime for someone "with the intent to torture, maim, or disfigure" to "cut, bite, or slit the nose, ear or lip, or cut out or disable the tongue, or put out or destroy an eye, or cut off or disable a limb or any member of another person." It further prohibits individuals from "throwing or pouring upon another person any scalding water, corrosive acid, or caustic substance" with like intent.

The two torture memos were later withdrawn after they became public because their legal reasoning was clearly defective. But they remained in effect long enough to authorize the torture and abuse of many prisoners in U.S. custody.

The seven memos just made public were also eventually disavowed, several years after they were written. Steven Bradbury, the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General in Bush’s Department of Justice, issued two disclaimer memos – on October 6, 2008 and January 15, 2009 – that said the assertions in those seven memos did “not reflect the current views of this Office.” Why Bradbury waited until Bush was almost out of office to issue the disclaimers remains a mystery. Some speculate that Bradbury, knowing the new administration would likely release the memos, was trying to cover his backside.

Indeed, Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury are the three former Justice Department lawyers that the Office of Professional Responsibility singled out for criticism in its still unreleased report. The OPR could refer these lawyers for state bar discipline or even recommend criminal charges against them.

The DOJ had damned wll better refer them for prosecution, if they expect anyone to have any respect for the law in the future.

In his memos, Yoo justified giving unchecked authority to the President because the United States was in a “state of armed conflict.” Yoo wrote, “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully.” Yoo made the preposterous argument that since deadly force could legitimately be used in self-defense in criminal cases, the President could suspend the Fourth Amendment because privacy rights are less serious than protection from the use of deadly force.

Bybee wrote in one of the memos that nothing can stop the President from sending al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners captured overseas to third countries, as long as he doesn’t intend for them to be tortured. But the Convention Against Torture, to which the United States is a party, says that no country can expel, return or extradite a person to another country “where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” Bybee claimed the Torture Convention didn’t apply extraterritorially, a proposition roundly debunked by reputable scholars. The Bush administration reportedly engaged in this practice of extraordinary rendition 100 to 150 times as of March 2005.

The same day that Attorney General Eric Holder released the memos, the government revealed that the CIA had destroyed 92 videotapes of harsh interrogations of Abu Zubaida and Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, both of whom were subjected to waterboarding. The memo that authorized the CIA to waterboard, written the same day as one of Yoo/Bybee’s torture memos, has not yet been released.

Bush insisted that Zubaida was a dangerous terrorist, in spite of the contention of one of the FBI’s leading al Qaeda experts that Zubaida was schizophrenic, a bit player in the organization. Under torture, Zubaida admitted to everything under the sun – his information was virtually worthless.

There are more memos yet to be released. They will invariably implicate Bush officials and lawyers in the commission of torture, illegal surveillance, extraordinary rendition, and other violations of the law.

Meanwhile, John Yoo remains on the faculty of Berkeley Law School and Jay Bybee is a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. These men, who advised Bush on how to create a police state, should be investigated, prosecuted, and disbarred. Yoo should be fired and Bybee impeached.

Let The Sun Shine In......