Constitutional Lawyer: Bush 'ordered war crimes'

By Nick Juliano

This week's revelation of another secret Bush administration memo that seemed to eliminate any boundaries on the treatment of detainees added to the already substantial evidence that US military and intelligence interrogators have abused and perhaps even tortured prisoners rounded up during the "war on terror."

Former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo wrote in 2003 that Bush's seemingly supreme authority in wartime trumped federal laws "prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes," as the Washington Post reported. For constitutional lawyer Jonathan Turley, the latest memo should be more than enough reason for Congress to begin some serious investigations, but hesitance to really dig into Bush-authorized "war crimes" have precluded them from doing so, he says.

"It is really amazing because Congress -- including the Democrats -- have avoided any type of investigation into torture because they do not want to deal with the fact that the president ordered war crimes," Turley told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann Thursday night. "But evidence keeps on coming out.... What you get from this is this was a premeditated and carefully orchestrated torture program. Not torture, but a torture program."

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Ritter: U.S. War With Iran in the Offing

Press TV
Friday, April 4, 2008

Former Chief Inspector of the UN Commission on Iraq Scott Ritter has claimed that there is an 80 percent chance of a US war with Iran.

Ritter made the remarks at Middlebury College as part of a series of talks facilitated by the Vermont Peace and Justice Center, The Rutland Herald said on Wednesday.

Ritter further noted that the pattern of preparations for such a conflict has been steadily developing and involves Congress as well as the Bush-Cheney administration.

According to Ritter, a war with Iran would speed up the ongoing decline of US standing in the world, and afterward Russia and China would be ready to take advantage of the resulting power vacuum.

Ahead of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the ex-inspector had said that there were no weapons of mass destruction to justify an attack on the country.

81% in Poll Say Nation Is Headed on Wrong Track

By David Leonhardt and Marjorie Connelly / NY Times

Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll.

In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002.

Although the public mood has been darkening since the early days of the war in Iraq, it has taken a new turn for the worse in the last few months, as the economy has seemed to slip into recession. There is now nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems.

A majority of nearly every demographic and political group — Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school — say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off.

The dissatisfaction is especially striking because public opinion usually hits its low point only in the months and years after an economic downturn, not at the beginning of one.

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Murtha: Bush Jeopardized U.S. Defense

Congressman John Murtha says President George W. Bush's 'preventive strike' on Iraq has jeopardized the US defense 'for a long time'.

"A preventive strike is something you say to yourself, there may be some cases for doing it," the Vietnam vet told the Huffington Post.

"We are never going to do another preventive strike because of what Bush did. He has hurt our defense for a long time, maybe for history," congressman Murtha continued.

The Vietnam vet, who is one of the fiercest war critics in Congress, said the Bush administration has created an environment in which diplomacy is anathema.

Murtha added that telling the truth in the Bush era gets one in trouble, suggesting that Navy Admiral William Fallon was forced to resign over his position on the prospects of war against Iran.

The chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee said, "Admiral Fallon made a mistake," by expressing his concerns on Iraq and "trying to make changes in Iraq that need to be done. He was trying to get the troops out."

Senate Drops Aid for Bankrupt Homeowners

Republicans and business-friendly Democrats on Thursday scuttled a plan to give people threatened with losing their homes more leverage in winning favorable loan terms from their lenders in bankruptcy courts.

The Senate killed the bankruptcy plan by a 58-36 vote on the first full day of debate on a bill designed to boost the slumping housing market.

The Democratic-backed bankruptcy law changes, opposed by banks and their GOP allies and a handful of Democrats, would have given judges the power to cut interest rates and principal on troubled mortgages to help desperate borrowers trapped in subprime mortgages keep their homes.

The idea was to give borrowers duped into abusive mortgages leverage in getting their loan terms adjusted. Such power, said the plan's chief proponent, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., would have helped "more people than all of the provisions combined" in the rest the bill.

But Republicans and 10 Democrats, along with Connecticut independent Joe Lieberman, voted to scuttle the bankruptcy provision. Opponents argued that, despite modifications by Durbin, the proposal would hurt more than it would have helped by leading mortgage lenders to ratchet up interest rates and thereby put another drag on the soft housing market.

The defeat of the bankruptcy plan highlighted a weakness that many people find with the bill - that it showers generous tax breaks on money-losing businesses like home builders but does little to help people facing foreclosure.

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Secret Memo Fails to Address Reasonable Doubt or Burden of Proof

By Alicia Hope / GangsterGovernment.com

Any competent lawyer could easily defeat the government's case in front of 12 jurors. The fact that these detainees were threatened in military tribunals with the death penalty, while not being shown the evidence against them, is suspicious(at the very least)!! It is really an indication and evidence that the government knows that it has no case! Oh, I forgot to mention that some detainees were tortured and forced to confess to involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Would those type of confessions hold up in front of a jury of twelve? I think not!

When anyone is making a bold claim, it is not someone else's responsibility to disprove the claim, it is the responsibility of the person who is making the bold claim to prove it. In this case, that would be the U.S. government and they can't prove Al-Qaeda carried out the attacks on 9-11-2001. In fact, if the defense were to bring to the hypothetical court room some experts on physics and architecture(i.e. Stephen Jones and Richard Gage), the government's whole case would fall apart because there would now be reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors that the defendants or Al Qaeda had anything to do with the collapse of the WTC buildings!

In fact, the clear and convincing evidence would point to an inside job! And 9/11 Truth is not old news! It's quite relevant!

ACLU Lawyers need to get these cases in front of a jury! With more than half the country doubting the official 9/11 story, many detainees would be less likely to end up as fall guys for the crimes of the real evil-doers!

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Carlyle Group's Plan to Takeover the Banking System!

So what's Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's call for changes in regulation of the financial markets all about? A clue may have been revealed today by Randal Quarles, former Under Secretary of the Treasury who led the Treasury Department's effort in the coordination of the President's Working Group on Financial Markets and is a current Managing Director at Carlyle Group.

Quarles spoke at a luncheon meeting of the Washington DC-based National Economists Club. His topic: "Restructuring Financial Regulation". Quarles told the luncheon group that he chose the topic in January. Hmmm. Didn't Treasury Paulson just make the proposal to restructure the financial regulatory agencies last week? How did Quarles pick this topic back in January? Short-answer, Quarles is a major insider and his comments should be monitored to get a sense for what insiders are thinking.

In his talk, Quarles said that estimates go into the hundreds of billions in terms of capital that will be required by the financial industry because of losses sustained as a result of the current crisis. He said there will be more financial institutions that will go under in coming months.

He said that public markets will not supply the necessary funds because they don't have the capabilities to study in detail the risks and potential rewards of the complex financials of financial institutions. He said private equity firms have the capabilities to do so and to supply the necessary funds. (N.B. Carlyle Group is a private equity firm).

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'Pig Book' Tallies $17.2 Billion in Pork

A government-watchdog group says the Democrat-led Congress last year broke a promise to slash pork spending and doled out $17.2 billion for pet projects, including $296 million in earmarks by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton — the top spender of the three presidential contenders.

"There was hope that the number and cost of earmarks would be cut in half. By any measure, that has not occurred," said Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), which yesterday released its annual "Pig Book" tally of pork spending.

Congress stuffed 11,610 projects into fiscal 2008 spending bills, the second-highest total ever and more than triple the number of projects in fiscal 2007. The $17.2 billion spent reflected a 30 percent increase over the previous year's $13.2 billion expenditure, according to the "Pig Book."

The projects include $1.9 million for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service, named for Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles B. Rangel, New York Democrat, who requested the earmark; $460,752 for hops research related to beer making; $188,000 for the Lobster Institute in Maine; and $148,950 for the Montana Sheep Institute.

The top three "porkers" identified in the "Pig Book" all were Republican members of the Senate Appropriations Committee: ranking member Thad Cochran of Mississippi with $892 million, Ted Stevens of Alaska with $469 million and Richard C. Shelby of Alabama with $465 million.

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Mexican Mayor Faces Trafficking Charges in N.Y.

The newly elected mayor of a Mexican city in the country's southwestern part of the state of Puebla was returned to New York yesterday to face charges of trafficking multikilogram quantities of cocaine into the United States.

Ruben Gil, 41, who was elected in November, is charged with participating in a "far-reaching narcotics trafficking conspiracy" that involved the transportation and delivery of cocaine to co-conspirators in the New York metropolitan area in 2006 and 2007.

"This arrest exemplifies the commitment of global law enforcement to identify and arrest those individuals responsible for trafficking cocaine into New York," said Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Special Agent in Charge John P. Gilbride, who heads the agency's New York office.

Mr. Gil was arrested in California on March 23 as he tried to fly into Los Angeles. His name was on a watch list because of his suspected drug-trafficking activity.

According to an indictment returned in December in U.S. District Court in Manhattan and statements made during a bail hearing in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, Mr. Gil and co-defendant Martin N. Garcia arranged for the delivery of 11 kilograms of cocaine to New York in November and more than 22 kilograms of cocaine to New York in June 2006.

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DHS Bullying States on Real ID

By Lyndsey Layton / Washington Post

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee criticized the Department of Homeland Security yesterday for pressuring reluctant states to adopt new federally approved driver's licenses, with one accusing Secretary Michael Chertoff of "bullying" the states into compliance under a threat of blocking citizens' travel.

"We ought to engage in a fairer, more productive negotiated rule-making with the states," the committee's chairman, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), told Chertoff. "Maybe people want to have a national ID card in their state. In my state, they don't."

Leahy spoke at a hearing that touched on a range of homeland security issues, from the border fence to the backlog in the naturalization process. But, several times, the conversation between the secretary and the senators circled back to the initiative for a uniform driver's license, known as the Real ID program.

Conceived as a security measure after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, it is meant to strengthen the authenticity of driver's licenses and make it tougher to use them as fraudulent proof of identity. Many states have bristled, saying it poses privacy concerns and creates a financial burden. DHS has estimated the cost at $3.9 billion.

"Bullying the states is not the answer, nor is threatening their citizens' rights to travel," Leahy told Chertoff. "From Maine to Montana, states have said no."

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Data Breaches Hit 8.3 Million Records in First Quarter

At least 8.3 million personal and financial records of consumers were potentially compromised by data breaches at businesses, universities and government agencies in the first quarter of 2008, according to statistics released yesterday.

The Identity Theft Resource Center in San Diego said it tracked public reports of 167 data breaches in the first three months of this year. The center recorded 448 incidents in 2007.

Roughly 4.2 million of the breached records were the result of digital intrusions at the Hannaford supermarket chain, disclosed last month.

Overall, businesses were responsible for about 36 percent of the breaches, followed by schools and universities (25 percent), government and military (18 percent), medical/health care (14 percent), and banking and financial institutions (7 percent).

Only about 13 percent of the breaches were the result of hacker break-ins.

Most of the data breaches in the first quarter appear to have resulted from lost or stolen laptops, hard drives or thumb drives. Insider access and the inadvertent posting of sensitive data to a Web site or through e-mail were also frequently cited reasons for breaches, according to the report.

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What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me About the American Empire

With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a question any more of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed embrace of the idea.

However the very idea that the United States was an empire did not occur to me until after I finished my work as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force in the Second World War, and came home.

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Former Governor Jesse Ventura: WTC Collapse A Controlled Demolition

Former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura vehemently savaged the official 9/11 story on a syndicated national radio show today, saying the WTC collapsed like a controlled demolition and was pulverized to dust as he also highlighted the impossible 10 second free fall speed of the towers.

Appearing on The Alex Jones Show, Ventura said that his initial reaction to 9/11 was much like most people at the time, and he accepted the official story outright, a response he now regrets because he was in a position of power and could have used it to raise a lot of pointed questions.

"I kicked myself when it initially happened that the light didn't go off but I was so shocked that this thing had even taken place that I apologize for not being more aware," said Ventura, adding that watching Loose Change at the insistence of his son was part of the catalyst for his wake up call.

Host Alex Jones is executive producer of Loose Change (get it here), the most watched Internet movie of all time. Ventura said he ran through a rollercoaster of emotions when he saw the film.

"When I finally did watch it I went through every emotion you could imagine, from laughing, crying, getting sick to my stomach, to the whole emotional thing," said the former Governor.

"To me questions haven't been answered and are not being answered about 9/11," said Ventura, before highlighting the collapse of Building 7, a 47-story tall skyscraper that was not hit by a plane but collapsed in its own footprint in the late afternoon of September 11.

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Why doesn't the 9/11 Commission know about Mukasey's 9/11 story?

By Glenn Greenwald

Last week, during a question-and-answer session following a speech he delivered 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.

In that speech, Mukasey blamed FISA's warrant requirement for the failure to eavesdrop on that call -- an assertion which is, for multiple reasons that I detailed in that post, completely false. He then tearfully claimed that FISA therefore caused the deaths of "three thousand people who went to work that day." For obvious reasons, the Attorney Geenral's FISA falsehoods themselves are extremely newsworthy, but it is the story he told about the pre-9/11-planning call from Afghanistan itself that is truly new, and truly extraordinary.

Critically, the 9/11 Commission Report -- intended to be a comprehensive account of all relevant pre-9/11 activities -- makes no mention whatsoever of the episode Mukasey described. What has been long publicly reported in great detail are multiple calls that were made between a global communications hub in Yemen and the U.S. -- calls which the NSA did intercept without warrants (because, contrary to Mukasey's lie, FISA does not and never did require a warrant for eavesdropping on foreign targets) but which, for some unknown reason, the NSA failed to share with the FBI and other agencies. But the critical pre-9/11 episode Mukasey described last week is nowhere to be found in the 9/11 Report or anywhere else. It just does not exist.

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Loose Change Final Cut: The Ultimate 9/11 Exposé

What People Are Saying About Loose Change :

• Loose Change, a documentary ...which just might be the first Internet blockbuster. -Vanity Fair-
• Loose Change is a... blizzard of statistics, photographs, documents, eyewitness accounts and expert testimony set to a trippy hip-hop backbeat. -TIME MAGAZINE-
• Millions of people have heard its message. Like it or loathe it, you can't ignore Loose Change.
-London Guardian-

Readiness Is Dangerously Low, Army Chief Says

Senior Army and Marine Corps leaders said yesterday(4-1-08) that the increase of more than 30,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan has put unsustainable levels of stress on U.S. ground forces and has put their readiness to fight other conflicts at the lowest level in years.

In a stark assessment a week before Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is to testify on the war's progress, Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army's vice chief of staff, said that the heavy deployments are inflicting "incredible stress" on soldiers and families and that they pose "a significant risk" to the nation's all-volunteer military.

"When the five-brigade surge went in . . . that took all the stroke out of the shock absorbers for the United States Army," Cody testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee's readiness panel.

He said that even if five brigades are pulled out of Iraq by July, as planned, it would take some time before the Army could return to 12-month tours for soldiers. Petraeus is expected to call for a pause in further troop reductions to assess their impact on security in Iraq.

"I've never seen our lack of strategic depth be where it is today," said Cody, who has been the senior Army official in charge of operations and readiness for the past six years and plans to retire this summer.

Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, one of the chief architects of the Iraq troop increase, has been nominated to replace Cody. Odierno is scheduled for a Senate confirmation hearing tomorrow.

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Army Can’t Be Sure Body Armor Met Safety Standards

The Army can’t be sure some of its body armor met safety standards, partly because it didn’t do proper paperwork on initial testing of the protective vests, a Defense Department audit said.

Democratic Rep. Louise M. Slaughter of New York, who requested the department inspector general’s report, on Wednesday(4-2-08) demanded the firing of officials responsible. But the Army said the gear is safe and the issue is a disagreement over when and what type of testing is required — principally so-called “first article testing” typically done on a product before a contract is awarded.

The inspector general reviewed $5.2 billion worth of Army and Marine Corps contracts for body armor from 2004 through 2006.

“Specific information concerning testing and approval of first articles was not included in 13 of 28 Army contracts and orders reviewed, and contracting files were not maintained in 11 of 28 Army contracts to show why procurement decisions were made,” the report concluded.

“As a result, DoD has no assurance that first articles produced under 13 of the 28 contracts and orders reviewed met the required standards,” or that 11 of the 28 contracts were awarded based on informed decisions, it said.

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Pentagon: Colleges must hand over names

The Defense Department has announced a new get-tough policy with colleges and universities that interfere with the work of military recruiters and Reserve Officer Training Corps programs.

Under rules that will take effect April 28, defense officials said they want the exact same access to student directories that is provided to all other prospective employers.

Students can opt out of having their information turned over to the military only if they opt out of having their information provided to all other recruiters, but schools cannot have policies that exclude only the military, defense officials said in a March 28 notice of the new policy in the Federal Register.

The Defense Department “will honor only those student ‘opt-outs’ from the disclosure of directory information that are even-handedly applied to all prospective employers seeking information for recruiting purposes,” the notice says.

Directories are an important recruiting tool because they include the names, birthdates, phone numbers and academic pursuits of college students that can be used to identify people with knowledge and interests that are particularly useful to the military.

The new policy also no longer lets schools ban military recruiters from working on campuses solely because a school determines that no students have expressed interest in joining the military. If other employers are invited, the military has to have the same access.

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U.S. must leave Iraq, retired generals say

Setting a withdrawal timetable from Iraq might be a shaky strategic move, but it would provide a morale boost for service members and their families, a former Army War College commandant said Wednesday.

Retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert Scales Jr., testifying before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee about U.S. military strategy in Iraq, said he has no doubt that a major withdrawal of combat forces is coming because the U.S. has “run out of military options” and cannot indefinitely sustain troop levels.

“Regardless of who wins the election and regardless of conditions on the ground, by summer the troops will begin to come home,” said Scales, who headed the war college in 1997. “The only point of contention is how precipitous will be the withdrawal and whether the schedule of withdrawal should be a matter of administration policy.”

White House and Pentagon officials have resisted efforts by some lawmakers to set a fixed timetable for withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq, arguing that insurgents and other groups would try to use the dates to their advantage.

Scales, who was one of the creators of the Army After Next program in 1995 that helped plan for transforming the force, agreed that following a fixed withdrawal schedule “is not a good idea in an insurgency because the indigenous population tends to side with the perceived winners.”

“However, some publicly expressed window of withdrawal is necessary, for no other reason than to give soldier’s families some hope that their loved ones will not be stuck on a perpetual rollercoaster of deployments,” he said.

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Ted Olson's Report of Phone Calls from Barbara Olson on 9/11: Three Official Denials

By David Ray Griffen

Late in the day on 9/11, CNN put out a story that began: “Barbara Olson, a conservative commentator and attorney, alerted her husband, Solicitor General Ted Olson, that the plane she was on was being hijacked Tuesday morning, Ted Olson told CNN.” According to this story, Olson reported that his wife had “called him twice on a cell phone from American Airlines Flight 77,” saying that “all passengers and flight personnel, including the pilots, were herded to the back of the plane by armed hijackers. The only weapons she mentioned were knives and cardboard cutters.”²

Ted Olson’s report was very important. It provided the only evidence that American 77, which was said to have struck the Pentagon, had still been aloft after it had disappeared from FAA radar around 9:00 AM (there had been reports, after this disappearance, that an airliner had crashed on the Ohio-Kentucky border).

Also, Barbara Olson had been a very well-known commentator on CNN. The report that she died in a plane that had been hijacked by Arab Muslims was an important factor in getting the nation’s support for the Bush administration’s “war on terror.” Ted Olson’s report was important in still another way, being the sole source of the widely accepted idea that the hijackers had box cutters.³.

However, although Ted Olson’s report of phone calls from his wife has been a central pillar of the official account of 9/11, this report has been completely undermined.

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