Col. Lawrence Wilkerson joins Keith to expose the extent of the lies Dead Eye used in his bogus attempts to justify his torture program.
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Now I ask you this. Were it not for evil government run health care, Cheney would be dead. If a proven war criminal deserves such benefits, don’t the rest of us?
I did not cover the horrid OPR report, absolving GOP war criminals Yoo and Bybee, because I had already covered its contents when it was leaked last month.
Daphne Eviatar has prepared an excellent article on why the OCR report should not be the end of this matter.
The New York Times this morning writes that the Justice Department's ethics report on the work of the lawyers who approved Bush administration's torture of detainees "brings to a close a pivotal chapter in the debate over the legal limits of the Bush administration's fight against terrorism and whether its treatment of Qaeda prisoners amounted to torture."
The Washington Post says the report represents "the end of a 5-year internal battle" at the Justice Department.
In fact, the Office of Professional Responsibility report is just the beginning of a bigger and more important battle. Legal ethics investigators concluded that former Office of Legal Counsel lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee committed "professional misconduct" in advising the Bush administration that it was not against the law to torture, humiliate and abuse detainees despite longstanding domestic and international prohibitions against doing so. The battle now will be over whether the U.S. government will meet its obligations to thoroughly investigate what happened and hold the perpetrators accountable.
The final OPR report chastises the two OLC lawyers for reaching bizarre legal conclusions that were wholly unsupported by the law. For example, one of their memos claimed that torture was legal so long as an interrogator's goal was to obtain information rather than to inflict severe pain or suffering - even if he knew he would inflict severe pain or suffering in the process. As one OLC lawyer commented on the memo at the time: "The way it reads now makes you wonder whether this is just an anti-sadism statute."
Meanwhile, the memo's now-infamous definition of "severe pain" as necessarily "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death" not only relied on an irrelevant medical benefits statute for its definition, which the OPR report calls "illogical," but actually misquoted the language of that statute so as "to add further support to their 'aggressive' interpretation of the torture statute," the OPR report concludes. Ultimately, the definition could lead an interrogator to believe, the OPR found, "that pain could be inflicted as long as no injury resulted." It's the "leave no marks" theory of torture.
The list of twisted and inexplicable legal conclusions is long and impressive. In another instance, the lawyers relied on extremely narrow interpretations of the international Convention Against Torture proposed by the Reagan administration that the U.S. had never adopted. And they completely ignored far more relevant sources of law on torture, such as federal court cases interpreting the Torture Victims Protection Act, which found torture had occurred in situations far less severe than the brutal interrogation techniques being contemplated in these memos. In one case, for example, a federal court held that imprisonment for five days under bad conditions while being threatened with bodily harm, interrogated and held at gunpoint amounted to torture.
David Margolis, the Deputy Associate Attorney General ultimately overrode the recommendations of the ethics office to refer the lawyers to state bar associations for disciplinary proceedings, because he decided that the OLC's standards for referral were unclear. But the report of the investigators who actually read and analyzed the memos that authorized such brutal conduct as "waterboarding" (controlled drowning), slamming prisoners' heads repeatedly against a wall ("walling"), weeks of sleep deprivation, stress positions, and confinement in a cramped box with insects provides an astonishing look at how the lawyers tasked with providing objective legal advice to the White House on its most sensitive policies completely contorted ordinary logic and legal reasoning to reach the conclusions desired.
Justice Department lawyer Patrick Philbin at one point asked John Yoo why he included a wholly unsubstantiated section in one of the memos that concluded that the president of the United States, as commander in chief, can completely ignore any law he wanted - such as the prohibition against torture. Yoo said it was in the memo because "they want it in there" -- "they" presumably being whoever had requested the opinion. The memo never explained how the prohibition against torture could be construed in any reasonable way so as to conflict with the president's authority as commander in chief.
Whether John Yoo and Jay Bybee face professional sanctions (that's now up to their respective state bars) is far less important than whether we get to the bottom of what really happened at the Bush White House: who ordered these lawyers to come up with legal reasoning to justify torture? The OPR report suggests that David Addington, Chief of Staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, played a significant role. Who was he getting his orders from?
The OPR report is just another piece of the slowly-emerging puzzle of how the country plunged into what Dick Cheney has aptly called "the Dark Side," abandoning its most basic belief in human dignity and the rule of law to zealously combat terrorism in a way that's ultimately backfired; we're now less safe, and mired in a vicious and protracted war.
In concluding that Yoo and Bybee exercised "poor judgment" rather than "professional misconduct", Margolis emphasizes that "his decision should not be viewed as an endorsement of the legal work that underlies these memoranda," which he notes were "seriously flawed" and represent "an unfortunate chapter in the history of the Office of Legal Counsel." In Yoo's case, his conclusions represented a "loyalty to his own ideology and convictions" which "clouded his view of his obligations to his client" and led him to author opinions reflecting "extreme" views of executive power.
Yoo was among the very small group of lawyers entrusted to write these opinions for the White House because he was already known to hold these extreme opinions. That he ignored or contorted opposing views should not have come as a surprise to his employers; that's what he'd been doing all along as an academic.
It's clear from the report, too, that that's what Yoo was expected to do. As John Bellinger, the Bush administration's legal advisor to the State Department told OPR: "Yoo was 'under pretty significant pressure to come up with an answer that would justify [the program]' and that, over time, there was significant pressure on the Department to conclude that the program was legal and could be continued, even after changes in the law in 2005 and 2006."
Some of those memos were also being demanded under very tight time frames to justify particular interrogations.
So who asked Yoo and Bybee to write these memos, and what exactly were the instructions given? Were they pressured to reach a particular conclusion and provide a "golden shield" for illegal conduct that the White House had already chosen to undertake? The report points out that the OPR investigators were not able to access most of John Yoo's e-mail messages from the time period: "most of Yoo's e-mail records had been deleted and were not recoverable." Why did Yoo delete those messages, and what did they say?... [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Huffington Post>
I have little to add. This must not end here.
As Latin America moves to free their people from US corporate slavery, corporate crimes are finding their way to court.
A federal judge recently refused to dismiss a civil suit filed against Chiquita which charges that the company paid leftist (FARC) guerrillas operating near its plantations in Columbia -- during a period when the FARC killed four American missionaries, according to CNN.
The company's position -- which it has held consistently since it voluntarily disclosed the payments to the Department of Justice -- has been that both left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries forced the company in an extortionate manner to make the payments "to protect the lives of its employees."
But that's become an increasingly untenable position -- especially since some of the same paramilitaries who took the payments have come in from the cold, disarming and submitting to Columbia's "Justice and Peace" process -- which allows them to receive reduced jail time for confessing to all of their terrorist crimes. The problem for Chiquita -- and now for Dole (and potentially for Del Monte) -- is that the confessions reveal a much different story.
One of the ex-paramilitaries -- Jose Gregorio Mangones Lugo (aka "Carlos Tijeras") -- was the former commander of the William Rivas Front of the United Defense Forces ("AUC") -- the group that operated in northern Columbia, in the zone where the companies and their suppliers grew bananas. In a sworn statement Tijeras described the AUC's relationship with the multinational banana companies as "an open public relationship" involving everything from "security services" to the kidnapping and extrajudicial assassination of labor leaders fingered by the companies as "security problems."
Tijeras' statement -- which reads like the confessions of a corporate death squad leader and directly refutes his paymasters' version of events -- has now been entered into the record in a case filed against Dole last April in California by attorneys with Conrad and Scherer:
"I've been told that Chiquita has asserted that they paid the AUC funds, but that this was coerced and was a form of extortion. I have also heard that Dole claims to have never paid us any funds. Both of these assertions are absolutely false. In fact, my agreement with Chiquita and Dole was to provide them with total security and other services."
Tijeras is not a lone whistleblower by any means. Salvatore Mancuso, the overall commander of the AUC, also testified in early 2008 that Dole and Del Monte, like Chiquita, had been providing major support to the AUC since its inception. He repeated the accusation to "60 Minutes," which originally aired the segment in September, 2008.
According to these and other witnesses as well as investigators familiar with the bloody history of Columbia, the AUC was originally hired by the companies to drive the leftist FARC guerillas out of the banana-growing region and protect their plantations from "the gangs of common delinquents that robbed their supplies and equipment." (Tijeras) Once the FARC was vanquished and order restored, the banana companies continued to pay the AUC to "pacify" their work force, suppress the labor unions and terrorize peasant squatters seeking their own competing land claims.
Tijeras: "After we restored order and became the local agents of law enforcement, managers for Chiquita and Dole plantations relied upon us to respond to their complaints...We would also get calls from the Chiquita and Dole plantations identifying specific people as "security problems" or just "problems." Everyone knew that this meant we were to execute the identified person. In most cases those executed were union leaders or members or individuals seeking to hold or reclaim land that Dole or Chiquita wanted for banana cultivation, and the Dole or Chiquita administrators would report to the AUC that these individuals were suspected guerillas or criminals."
According to Tijeras, for years the companies provided up to 90% of the AUC's income.
When a case was filed by the families and heirs of dozens of victims against Dole this past April (2009), the company immediately rejected the charges as "baseless allegations" that "are the product of the most untrustworthy sources imaginable" and "nothing more than the false confessions of convicted terrorists from Columbia, who had every motive to lie about their activities in order to minimize their jail time."
(The plaintiffs' complaint is a horrific litany of summary executions, off-the-bus abductions, forced-entry murders and kidnappings, ghoulish disappearances and other crimes committed against trade unionists and land reform activists.)… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <AlterNet>
Frankly, I hope these companies are soaked for an arm, a leg, and other body parts that shall remain unmentioned. If ever there were a case that proves that corporations’ special status having the privileges of personhood without the responsibilities needs to be revoked. Greed machines have no soul. Were it up to me, I would extradite the CEO, COO and CFO of each of these companies to Columbia to face trial and imprisonment there. If that means that my three bananas a week double… triple… quadruple in cost. So be it.
I suspect that the upshot of this will be that these corporate criminals will hire the GOP SS, aka Blackwater (now Xe) to commit their murders.
The private military of Bush, Cheney and the GOP is in hot water again.
Two former employees of Blackwater Worldwide have accused the private security company of defrauding the government for years by filing bogus receipts, double billing for the same services and charging government agencies for strippers and prostitutes, according to court documents unsealed this week.
In a December 2008 lawsuit, the former employees said top Blackwater officials had engaged in a pattern of deception as they carried out government contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The lawsuit, filed under the False Claims Act, also asserts that Blackwater officials turned a blind eye to “excessive and unjustified” force against Iraqi civilians by several Blackwater guards.
Blackwater has earned billions of dollars from government agencies in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks, when the company won contracts to protect American diplomats in Iraq and Afghanistan. The former employees who filed the lawsuit, a married couple named Brad and Melan Davis, said there was little financial oversight of the money.
Last year, an audit by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction and the State Department’s inspector general found that the State Department had overpaid Blackwater $55 million because the company had failed to adequately staff its teams assigned to protect American diplomats in Iraq.
The documents detailing the Davises’ accusations were unsealed after the Justice Department declined to join in the case against Blackwater, which last year changed its name to Xe Services. A Xe spokeswoman did not return a message seeking comment about the case.
In an interview on Wednesday, Ms. Davis said that she and her husband had decided to proceed with the case because “it’s the right thing to do,” and that it was time for “the truth from inside the company” to be made public. If the government is able to recover money from Blackwater as a result of the lawsuit, the Davises could claim a percentage as whistleblowers.
Mr. Davis, a former Marine, performed a number of jobs for the company, including working as a private security guard in Iraq.
Ms. Davis was fired from the company, and she is challenging the legality of her dismissal. Mr. Davis voluntarily resigned from the company.
According to the lawsuit, Ms. Davis raised concerns about the company’s bookkeeping with her bosses in March 2006, when she was handling accounts for the company’s contracts with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. The lawsuit claims she was told to “back off,” and that she “would never win a medal for saving the government money.”
Ms. Davis also asserts that a Filipino prostitute in Afghanistan was put on the Blackwater payroll under the “Morale Welfare Recreation” category, and that the company had billed the prostitute’s plane tickets and monthly salary to the government...
Inserted from <NY Times>
Keith Olbermann had some excellent background on this story.
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Now I know that prostitutes in US Embassies are a common occurrence, but extending that recreation from diplomats to hired thugs at taxpayer expense is absurd. And that is the least of the complaints. Using mercenaries to protect our diplomats is nothing but Bush/GOP scheme to transfer wealth from the lower and middle classes to corporate cronies. This company costs several times what military personnel used to cost. They are a stain on our reputation, and their GOP storm-trooper tactics put our diplomats even more at risk. Obama is clearly on the wrong page by continuing to use them. Isn’t it time we fired America’s foulest and returned it to America’s finest?
In hope we never become immune to the stories of real people suffering from Big Insurance criminal abuse and from having no health coverage. Sometimes, though the stories are so far removed from human decency that indignation is the only appropriate reaction.
PAUL AND MARIA VanNocker are filing a federal lawsuit today on behalf of their 5-year-old son, Kyler, whose insurance company, HealthAmerica, refuses to pay for the latest treatment needed to prolong his life.
The complaint raises lots of questions that I assume will be answered at trial, should it come to that. The question it won't answer is one that's been gnawing at me since I first wrote of Kyler's plight in December:
How do HealthAmerica's overlords sleep at night?
I know my own dreams would be haunted if I acted as arbitrarily, capriciously and abusively - to borrow some pointed adjectives from the complaint - as the VanNockers allege HealthAmerica has regarding their little boy.
The Harrisburg-based company's denial of benefits to Kyler, the lawsuit claims, is the result of "a biased, self-serving misreading and misinterpretation" of everything from Kyler's medical records to the company's own internal documents.
HealthAmerica's Kendall Marcocci told me yesterday that the company won't comment on pending litigation. Center City attorney David Senoff, though, was happy to explain why he is representing the Van Nockers for free in the lawsuit.
"These companies have to be brought to the courthouse to get them to do the right thing," said Senoff, a specialist in insurance disputes. "This child needs this treatment, or else."
He didn't need to explain what "or else" meant.
Readers may recall that Kyler has neuroblastoma, a rare, deadly childhood cancer that attacks the nervous system, creating tumors throughout his body.
He was diagnosed in 2007 and endured a year of medical treatment, with complications he barely survived. Thankfully, it knocked his cancer into remission for 12 lovely months, and he got to revel once again in the glories of childhood.
Last September, the disease came roaring back. This time, only one form of treatment, something called MIBG therapy, could help save his life.
But HealthAmerica refused to pay for the MIBG, which it considers "investigational/experimental" because there is "inadequate evidence in the peer-reviewed published clinical literature regarding its effectiveness." Nor is MIBG approved by the Food and Drug Administration, another criterion that HealthAmerica requires.
How come, then, asks the lawsuit, HealthAmerica covered not one but two prior therapies for Kyler that did not possess these supposed requirements?
In April 2008, the company approved Kyler's use of a drug to treat a life-threatening blood-flow complication, even though the drug wasn't FDA-approved, wasn't manufactured in the United States and wasn't "peer-reviewed."
However, it was the only known drug to treat Kyler's condition, and he responded well to it. Four months later, HealthAmerica paid for another medication that wasn't FDA-approved for neuroblastoma treatment.
Again, Kyler responded well.
So why, pray tell, is HealthAmerica playing the "experimental therapy" card in the case of the MIBG treatment Kyler now needs? Gee, money couldn't have anything to do with the decision, could it?
In my December column, HealthAmerica's Marcocci was emphatic that her company declined Kyler's MIBG therapy not because of its cost but because of its experimental nature.
But that doesn't mean MIBG is ineffective.
"It's considered the standard of care in Europe and the United States for recurrent neuroblastoma," Kyler's oncologist, Stephan Grupp, told me then. "It's not an unproven treatment with no basis in medical science. Actually, the results are often very good."
Regardless of how you describe MIBG, one thing became clear last week when Paul and Maria got the results of Kyler's latest tests to track his neuroblastoma.
The MIBG is working.
Children's Hospital, where Kyler receives much of his care, proceeded with two rounds of MIBG therapy for Kyler - at a cost of $110,000 - despite the VanNockers' inability to pay for it…
Inserted from <Philadelphia Daily News>
Here’s Keith Olbermann’s take on this. His closing is particularly effective.
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I have nothing but praise for the hospital that saved Kyler’s life with no guarantee of payment. I have nothing but scorn for the insurance company death panel that denied his treatment and for the Republicans and DINOs that are blocking reform.
Meanwhile, the uninsured are still dying at a rate of several 9/11s per year.
Since the unlikely election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, hardly a day goes by in Washington without a torrent of speculation on what loss of a filibuster-proof majority will mean for the healthcare reform legislation that both houses have already passed. But as the president recently noted, the intense focus on the process of moving the bill over the finish line has done much to obscure the actual human stakes of the policy being debated.
Particularly striking is the near-total absence of the voices of those most acutely affected by the capriciousness of our current healthcare system, the millions who have no insurance. Despite the fact that 30 million of these folks have arguably the largest stake in the legislative outcome, they're almost totally absent from the national conversation over its fate.
Here at The Nation, we have been working to right this in our own small way. We've spent the last two weeks searching for stories from the uninsured. Despite our chosen tools (Twitter and e-mail), or perhaps because of them, we received 185 responses from a diverse group of people. From recent college graduates, to struggling single parents, to recent retirees, the storytellers ranged vastly in age, background and occupation. However, a common thread held them all together: the anxiety and uncertainty that comes with being uninsured.
Many stories expressed great, unshakeable fear that one medical emergency would ruin them. "I would say my wife and I are one medical emergency away from losing everything, but actually I've pretty much resigned myself in my head to the reality that if I have a medical emergency I am going to die," says a used-book seller in California.
The responses included wide array of opinions and varied hopes for the future of healthcare reform, but what an overwhelming majority agreed upon was that the United States government, particularly Congress, had failed to represent them within the debate…
Inserted from <The Nation>
This article goes on to detail many of the stories mentioned. I hope you will click through. They are worth the read.
Perhaps they took lessons from Bush and the GOP.
Human Rights Watch said on Sunday that Israel has failed to properly investigate alleged crimes committed during last winter's devastating Gaza war as demanded by the United Nations.
"Israel claims it is conducting credible and impartial investigations, but it has so far failed to make that case," said Joe Stork, HRW's New York-based group's deputy director for the Middle East.
"An independent investigation is crucial to understand why so many civilians died and to bring justice for the victims of unlawful attacks," Stork said in a statement.
About 1,400 Palestinians were killed during the 22-day onslaught launched by Israel on December 27, 2008, aimed at halting rocket attacks from the Islamist Hamas-ruled enclave. Thirteen Israelis were killed in the fighting.
The UN General Assembly in November called on Israel and Palestinian armed groups to investigate alleged war crimes detailed in a UN report by the respected former international war crimes prosecutor Richard Goldstone.
But UN chief Ban Ki-moon said on Thursday that he had not yet determined whether both sides had adequately probed the accusations.
Last Friday, the UN chief received a 46-page report from Israel in which it denied violating international law but admitted "tragic results" due to the "complexity and scale" of fighting in heavily populated areas.
In his report, Ban highlighted Israel's assertion that two of its senior officers -- a brigadier general and a colonel -- were disciplined for the firing of white phosphorous shells toward a UN compound during the war.
Also on Friday, the UN secretary general was handed a preliminary report from the Palestinian side in which it said a commission had been set up to look into allegations that Palestinian militants committed war crimes.
Hamas also carried out an investigation into the conflict, and has previously absolved its fighters of any wrongdoing, saying they did not deliberately target civilians.
HRW has rejected Hamas's claims, saying that most of the rockets fired during the war hit civilian areas. "Civilians were the target," the group said, and "deliberately targeting civilians is a war crime."… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Common Dreams>
I readily acknowledge that war crimes were committed on both sides, so I’m not placing all the blame on Israel. However, we need to consider the scale of the atrocities here. Palestinian rockets have killed just a few Israelis. Without minimizing the tragic loss to the families involved, it does not begin to compare with the 1,400 Palestinians killed. The use of white phosphorous against civilians is particularly heinous. I could give a dry description of that horror weapon, but I’ll leave it to one of our Vietnam Vets, who have seen it in action, to give a first hand description in a comment.
A full, independent investigation into war crimes needs to be conducted. I call on the US to stop covering for Israel’s crimes through the use of our veto in the UN Security Council.
The Teabagger Convention opened in Tennessee with 600 attendees, soon to be exaggerated by Faux Noise into thousands. After omitting the Pledge of Allegiance, since they forgot to bring an American flag, they turned to failed GOP Presidential candidate, Tom Tancredo.
The opening night speaker at the Tea Party convention suggested a return to a "literacy test" to protect America from presidents like Obama -- a segregation-era method employed by southern US states to keep blacks from voting.
In his speech Thursday to attendees, former Republican congressman Tom Tancredo invoked the loaded pre-civil rights era buzzword, saying that President Barack Obama was elected because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country."
Southern states used literacy tests as part of an effort to deny suffrage to African American voters prior to Johnson-era civil rights laws.
"Prior to passage of the federal Voting Rights Act in 1965, Southern (and some Western) states maintained elaborate voter registration procedures whose primary purpose was to deny the vote to those who were not white," a website for civil rights veterans explains. "In the South, this process was often called the 'literacy test.' In fact, it was much more than a simple test, it was an entire complex system devoted to denying African-Americans (and in some regions, Latinos) the right to vote."
"Because the Freedom Movement was running "Citizenship Schools" to help people learn how to fill out the forms and pass the test, Alabama changed the test 4 times in less than two years (1964-1965)," the site adds. "At the time of the Selma Voting Rights campaign there were actually 100 different tests in use across the state. In theory, each applicant was supposed to be given one at random from a big loose-leaf binder. In real life, some individual tests were easier than others and the registrar made sure that Black applicants got the hardest ones."
White applicants could be approved even if they didn't pass the test.
"Your application was then reviewed by the three-member Board of Registrars — often in secret at a later date," the site continues. "They voted on whether or not you passed. It was entirely up to the judgment of the Board whether you passed or failed. If you were white and missed every single question they could still pass you if — in their sole judgment — you were 'qualified.' If you were Black and got every one correct, they could still flunk you if they considered you 'unqualified.'"... [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Alternet>
Keith Olbermann gave a short comment that is truly a magnificent explanation of Tancredo’s hypocrisy.
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It’s clear to me that the second precept of GOP Teabaggerism (the first is hate Obama) is racism. Are you as sickened by this as I am?
This is shameful.
A Canadian man who was deported by US officials to Syria, where he was imprisoned and allegedly tortured, has appealed a court ruling preventing him from suing the US.
Maher Arar filed a lawsuit before the US supreme court on Monday, appealing a lower court ruling that rejected his case because it involved national security information.
Arar was arrested by US authorities while transiting through New York's JFK International Airport in 2002, on his way home to Canada from a family vacation in Tunis.
He was detained on information shared by Canadian police that suggested he had ties to "terrorist" groups…
...US authorities held him in solitary confinement and interrogated him for nearly two weeks before deporting him to Syria.
He was imprisoned for a year in Damascus, the Syrian capital, during which time he says he was tortured before finally being released and returned to Canada.
A Canadian commission eventually cleared him of any connections to "terrorist" organisations [sic] and concluded that he had been tortured.
He was awarded $10.5m in compensation.
Arar's suit before the Supreme Court questions whether "federal officials who conspired with Syrian officials to subject an individual in US custody to torture in Syria may be sued for damages".
David Cole, a lawyer for Arar, said: "The courts below ruled that federal officials cannot be sued for sending an innocent man to Syria to be tortured because the case would be too sensitive."...
Inserted from <Aljazeera>
I wish Mr. Arar every success here. What Bush and the GOP did to this innocent man is unconscionable. I think we can translate too sensitive in the lower court’s ruling can be translated as too damning to the Bush/GOP regime. Sadly, given the current makeup of SCOTUS, my hopes are not high.
Where is the coverage of this story in US media?
While I hope for implementation more quickly than it appears, I was most please to learn that America’s top military brass has come out in favor of repealing DADT.
The US's two highest-ranking defense officials have thrown their weight behind President Barack Obama's call to repeal the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy that bars homosexuals from serving openly in the military.
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday that repealing DADT was "the right thing to do," while Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the committee that the policy would be enforced leniently while the Pentagon studies options for how and when to end it.
"Mullen's line is perhaps the strongest statement to date from a top military official at the Pentagon in support of a 'Don't ask, don't tell' repeal," The Hill reports. The New York Times called Gates' and Mullen's announcements "a major step toward allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the United States military for the first time in its history."
During his State of the Union address last month, President Obama said, "This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are."
While gay-rights activists applauded the president's move, some were alarmed by the fact that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were present at the address, sat silently instead of applauding when Obama made the remark. Some saw this as a sign the military brass weren't behind Obama's plans. But today's announcement signaled that top military officials are willing to work on the policy.
In his comments before the committee, Adm. Mullen said it was his "personal and professional belief that allowing homosexuals to serve openly would be the right thing to do."
"I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens," Mullen said. "For me, it comes down to integrity -- theirs as individuals and ours as an institution."
Mullen added that he believed military culture had evolved to the point where "the great young men and women of our military can and would accommodate such a change" -- though he admitted that he did not "know this for a fact, nor do I know for a fact how we would best make such a major policy change in a time of two wars."
Human Rights Campaign, one of the leading gay-rights groups pushing for the repeal of DADT, called today's testimony "a historic step forward.
"When the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense, who also served under President Bush, direct the military to mitigate the pace of discharges while moving toward implementation, we know that Don't Ask Don't Tell is on its way out," HRC said in a statement emailed to the press.
For his part, Secretary Gates made it clear he is following the orders of his commander-in-chief.
“We received our orders from the commander-in-chief, and we are moving out accordingly,” Gates told the committee.
The Pentagon has launched an 11-month study of DADT, which will report back at the end of 2010 on how best to proceed with a change in the policy. Some observers say this means the law won't be changed this year, as Obama had implied in his State of the Union speech.
News reports this week indicate that the Pentagon will take a more lenient approach to enforcing DADT while the policy is reviewed. The Pentagon is expected to limit dismissal of serving members who are outed by third parties, and not by their own actions.
But the move is already attracting criticism from some corners. Sen. John McCain, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said it was the role of Congress, not the Pentagon, to change the policy.
"You are embarking on not whether the military should make a change, but how best the military should prepare for it," McCain told Mullen. "In my view, and I know that a lot of people don’t agree with that, the policy has been working and I think it’s been working well."...
Inserted from <Raw Story>
What makes McConJob’s outburst so distasteful is that in 2006, his position was the exact opposite of what it is today. This must be particularly sweet for Rachel Maddow. The glee sparkled in her eyes as she rubbed McConJob’s nose in his own hypocrisy.
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Did he make a fool of himself or what? Furthermore, Traitor Joe LIEberman and and two other GOP goose steppers proved their own idiocy as well.
I consider this a most disappointing development:
...NEWSWEEK has learned that a senior Justice official who did the final review of the report softened an earlier OPR finding. Previously, the report concluded that two key authors—Jay Bybee, now a federal appellate court judge, and John Yoo, now a law professor—violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted a crucial 2002 memo approving the use of harsh tactics, say two Justice sources who asked for anonymity discussing an internal matter. But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed “poor judgment,” say the sources. (Under department rules, poor judgment does not constitute professional misconduct.) The shift is significant: the original finding would have triggered a referral to state bar associations for potential disciplinary action—which, in Bybee’s case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry.
The report, which is still going through declassification, will provide many new details about how waterboarding was adopted and the role that top White House officials played in the process, say two sources who have read the report but asked for anonymity to describe a sensitive document. Two of the most controversial sections of the 2002 memo—including one contending that the president, as commander in chief, can override a federal law banning torture—were not in the original draft of the memo, say the sources. But when Michael Chertoff, then-chief of Justice’s criminal division, refused the CIA’s request for a blanket pledge not to prosecute its officers for torture, Yoo met at the White House with David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief counsel, and then–White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. After that, Yoo inserted a section about the commander in chief’s wartime powers and another saying that agency officers accused of torturing Qaeda suspects could claim they were acting in “self-defense” to prevent future terror attacks, the sources say… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Newsweek>
My first response was to assume that David Margolis might be a Bush/GOP regime operative, who had burrowed in at the close of the worst administration in history. I went digging for dirt on the man. I found that he has creds as a straight shooter and a reputation for non-partisan service. Therefore I have to consider that there may well be a sound legal reason for his decision. I look forward to the release of the full report and hope that some of the details about the roll top White House officials played in adopting torture will result in legal action. Otherwise, our best hope is that some foreign nation will arrest them during foreign travels and put them before the world court.
As disappointed as we are over this, we must remember that, despite his protestations to the contrary, McConJob voted for torture in the Senate. Had he been elected, we would still be practicing torture, a far worse alternative.
Keith Olbermann’s coverage excelled, as usual. Here are two videos. The first is with Howard Fineman:
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The second was with Markos Moulitsos:
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McClatchy DC has the full text of Obama’s speech.
According to a CBS News Poll, 83% of those interviewed approved of Obama’s proposals. Only 17% did not.
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell gave the Republican response. McClatchy also has the full text of his speech. While more respectful, better constructed, and better delivered that the Bobby Jindal fiasco after Obama’ last address to Congress, it contained only the standard GOP talking points. One thing was clear. McDonnell had not even listened to Obama’s speech before responding, because he did not know that Obama had put domestic fossil fuel development on the table.
Republicans were also polled. ;-)
(The Borowitz Report) - President Barack Obama's State of the Union address has already gotten a big thumbs-down from one key group of voters: Republicans who did not see the speech.
According to an instant poll conducted by the University of Minnesota's Opinion Research Institute, 90 percent of Republicans who did not see the President's speech strongly disagreed with it.
Additionally, 95 percent of Republicans polled agreed with the statement, "If I had seen the President's speech, I'll bet I would have hated it even more."
Davis Logsdon, who supervised the poll, said there were certain difficulties in polling Republican voters: "Many of them would not let us finish asking the question before answering 'No.'"… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Huffington Post>
Although Joe “You Lie” Wilson, promised to be on his best behavior, these Republican leaders just don’t seem to understand is that there are people watching who are trained to read lips.
Tonight in his State of the Union address, President Obama outlined steps he plans to take “to pay for the $1 trillion that it took to rescue the economy last year.” However, he first addressed right-wing criticisms that he is overseeing out-of-control spending by noting the situation he faced when he took office:
By the time I took office, we had a one year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program. On top of that, the effects of the recession put a $3 trillion hole in our budget. All this was before I walked in the door.
The camera then cut to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who leaned over to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and appeared to whisper, “Blame it on Bush.” The two men then laughed. Watch it:
… [emphasis added]
Inserted from<Think Progress>
That was John “McConJob” McCain’s best act since singing “Bomb, Bomb Iran” into a mike he did not know was open.
But even worse was the despicable breech of decorum by reactionary-right activist Justice Samuel Alito.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. responded to President Obama's criticism Wednesday night of a Supreme Court decision last week by appearing to mouth the words "not true."
Obama took issue with a ruling that overturned two of the court's precedents and upended decades of restrictions on corporations being able to use their profits to finance campaigns for and against candidates.
It proved to be a striking State of the Union moment: With six justices seated in their black robes directly in front of him in the House chamber, Obama said: "With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that, I believe, will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections."
As Democrats applauded, cameras showed the justices sitting expressionless. Except Alito.
"Not true, not true," he appeared to say, as he shook his head.
"I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests or, worse, by foreign entities," Obama continued. "They should be decided by the American people. And I urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps correct some of these problems."
The court's 5 to 4 decision, in which Alito was in the majority, said it did not have to address the question of electoral spending by foreign firms, because the law being considered did not differentiate between domestic and foreign corporations... [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Washington Post>
I was impressed with Obama for taking on the Supreme Court to their faces for that horrid decision. While technically the court did not have to address the question of electoral spending by foreign firms, as Alito said, what Alito did not say, a lie by omission, is more important. The court did not have to address the question of electoral spending by domestic firms either. The only question before the court was whether or not broadcasting a single film crossed the line under settled law, well established by precedent. This decision was judicial activism at its worst, and Obama said so.
In summery, the speech was masterful. It was not what I would have said, but although I consider myself a wordsmith, Obama’s talents surpass mine far and away. What remains to be seen is whether or not he follows it up with appropriate action. I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, which I admit is considerable.
This is rich!
In case you missed it, four people were arrested for trying to plant wiretaps in Senator Mary Landrieu's office. One of them was the lead actor in a recent hit job on a community minded organization:
A conservative filmmaker whose undercover videos shone a spotlight on alleged corruption by the liberal activist group ACORN was arrested with three other men and accused of plotting to wiretap the New Orleans offices of Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La. The FBI said in an affidavit that James O’Keefe was among the four men who were arrested Monday. Special Agent Steven Rayes said O’Keefe was helping two others, Joseph Basel and Robert Flanagan, who were dressed as employees of a telephone company ...
When the burglars behind the break in at the Watergate Hotel were first busted, Republicans were quick to call it a meaningless third-rate burglary. It turned out to be orchestrated at the highest levels of power and brought down Republican President Richard Nixon.
Via Media Matters, 31 House Republicans recently supported a resolution honoring today's accused felon. These scary freaks are heroes to a frightening conservative movement that reaches from militias and racists in every dark nook and cranny of the nation clear to the senior Republican leadership in the House and Senate. It's a movement that has been flirting with armed revolution and secession, disrupting political meetings in the tradition of the German Brown Shirts of the 1930s, and carrying semiautomatic rifles to town halls and Presidential addresses. The last time right-wing terrorist nuts were ignored two of them ending up blowing up a building in Oklahoma City and killed 168 innocent people including 19 children… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Daily Kos>
I see three things here.
First, there needs to be an investigation to find out just how high this goes to determine which GOP leaders authorized it and funded it.
Second, Okeefe’s criminal character, the assumption that his ACORN video was not doctored no longer holds water. Congress must immediately refund ACORN.
Third, the 31 GOP extremists who voted to make this guy a hero must be forever tied to that vote. Here are their names and districts:
This is a story I keep coming back to revisit, because it keeps getting worse. The last time I talked about Jamie was here.
In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her co-workers while she was working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad. The attack occurred while she was out with a “small group of Halliburton firefighters,” just four days after her arrival in Iraq. After taking a few sips of her drink, she later woke up in the barracks, “naked” and “severely beaten.” Her “breasts were so badly mauled that she is permanently disfigured.”
In an apparent attempt to cover up the incident, the company then put her in a shipping container for at least 24 hours without food, water, or a bed, and “warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.” Even more insultingly, the DOJ resisted bringing any criminal charges in the matter.
Jones tried to sue the company for failing to protect her, but KBR argued that Jones’ employment contract — created for the company under the tenure of then-CEO Dick Cheney — warranted her claims being heard in private arbitration, without jury, judge, public record, or transcript of the proceedings. Basically, KBR argued that Jones’ brutal rape was a workplace injury — nothing more. But in September, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Jones. “Jones’ allegations do not ‘touch matters’ related to her employment, let alone have a ’significant relationship’ to her employment contract,” wrote the court.
KBR is now petitioning the Supreme Court to reverse the ruling. The contractor is personally going after Jones’ integrity to argue that she shouldn’t have a fair and open hearing. Stephanie Mencimer from Mother Jones reports:
On Jan. 19, it petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals decision allowing Jones to press her case in a civil court rather than in arbitration. Among its many arguments in favor of a high court hearing: that Jones is a relentless self-promoter who has “sensationalize[d] her allegations against the KBR Defendants in the media, before the courts, and before Congress.” … KBR also suggests that much of Jones’ story is fabricated. The company says in a footnote, “Many, if not all, of her allegations against the KBR Defenandants are demonstrably false. The KBR Defendants intend to vigorously contest Jones’s allegations and show that her claims against the KBR Defendants are factually and legally untenable.”
The Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2010 signed into law by President Obama in December contained an amendment by Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) — inspired by Jones’ story — that prohibits defense contractors from restricting their employees’ abilities to take workplace discrimination, battery, and sexual assault cases to court… [emphasis original]
Inserted from <Think Progress>
I’m not going to vent my anger over this case at you today. You’ve seen it several times before. But I want you to consider something. Given Al Franken’s heroic role in this affair, how good a chance do you think he will have in 2014 when ChickenHawk Cheney’s corporate criminal cronies are allowed to take vengeance against him by pouring $millions into ads against him?
Scott Horton has written an article in Harpers that reveals the existence of a previously unknown facility in the GOP Gitmo Gulag. It appears that the deaths of three prisoners there, previously reported as suicides, were actually murders:
…Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.
As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guantánamo to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths “suicides.” In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. “I believe this was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only the prisoners’ families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion.
Two years later, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which has primary investigative jurisdiction within the naval base, issued a report supporting the account originally advanced by Harris, now a vice-admiral in command of the Sixth Fleet. The Pentagon declined to make the NCIS report public, and only when pressed with Freedom of Information Act demands did it disclose parts of the report, some 1,700 pages of documents so heavily redacted as to be nearly incomprehensible. The NCIS report was carefully cross-referenced and deciphered by students and faculty at the law school of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and their findings, released in November 2009, made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling to make its conclusions public. The official story of the prisoners’ deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report—a reconstruction of the events—was simply unbelievable...
...Now four members of the Military Intelligence unit assigned to guard Camp Delta, including a decorated non-commissioned Army officer who was on duty as sergeant of the guard the night of June 9–10, have furnished an account dramatically at odds with the NCIS report—a report for which they were neither interviewed nor approached.
All four soldiers say they were ordered by their commanding officer not to speak out, and all four soldiers provide evidence that authorities initiated a cover-up within hours of the prisoners’ deaths. Army Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman and men under his supervision have disclosed evidence in interviews with Harper’s Magazine that strongly suggests that the three prisoners who died on June 9 had been transported to another location prior to their deaths. The guards’ accounts also reveal the existence of a previously unreported black site at Guantánamo where the deaths, or at least the events that led directly to the deaths, most likely occurred... [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Harpers>
The story is sufficiently complex that for me to post as mush as I would like, I’d have to post the whole thing. Instead, I posted just enough to introduce it and strongly encourage you to click the above link and read the whole thing. Keith Olbermann and Scott Horton discussed the article on Countdown.
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I’m quite concerned that the Obama administration is actively taking part in the cover-up. I see two possible reasons for this.
The first, and most likely, is that Obama is reluctant, per his campaign promise, to stir partisan rancor. If so, Obama is mistaken. The GOP stances on every issue could not be more partisan. They have used Obama’s repeated attempts at bipartisanship against both him and the best interests of America. Obama needs to put that behind him.
The second is that, if certain Democratic leaders were in the loop and signed off on Bush/GOP war crimes, Obama is trying to protect them. If so, Obama is mistaken. If there are Democrats who are complicit in war crimes, then they must also take accountability for their actions.
I’m sure we’ll be visiting this story again, as more information comes out.
