My Favorite Cabinet Member: Eric Holder Jr.

Good man.

While I'm delighted to learn justice may be served, I'm truly disgusted by what may have transpired under the direction of former Vice President Cheney.

I think Republicans perceive that Democrats just kind of celebrate this as 'more bad news' for the GOP and maybe there is some comfort seeing Cheney's neoconservatism cabal fall apart - but I don't think any of this makes anyone happy.

These people - Yoo, Addington, Cheney, Gonzalez, etc. - committed despicable acts.

Let's have all the truth come out and lets hold people accountable for breaking the law.

Shep Smith

At least there's someone at Fox trying to yell some sense into these folks.



Turns out Shep is an honorable guy. Good work. Keep it up.

He's been on a roll over there. He's got the attitude of a second semester senior and I like it.

Meeting in my mind

NOPD broken all over this city. Looks increasingly as though officers murdered this young man after which the administration waged a PR campaign to destroy the victim's reputation.

Disgusting conduct.

In Oakland, young man named Oscar Grant was murdered by a police officer on the same day as Mr. Adolph Grimes and there were days of tense and sometimes destructive protests.

In other local state brutality news, litigation against the city for Gitmo-like conditions at a juvenile detention facility has expanded into a much larger class-action suit.

You can leave children in solitary confinement for weeks at at time.

That's torture.

But this kind of stuff is all in a day's news in this city with this city's criminally broken justice system.

Vitter's Caribbean Cruise

I think he'll like it there, I can't finger why.


LINK!


UPDATE: Wanna get away?

Purge!

Sad weak old man can't even stand to shake Barack's hand tomorrow.

Here's a nice retirement community that I've taken the liberty of picking out on evil grandpa's behalf:

Truth, Torture, and CIA Political Power

Talking Points Memo is trying to figure out whether or not the Democratic Congressional leadership has any interest whatsoever in pushing a proposal to establish a Commission on Presidential War Powers and Civil Liberties.

Three cheers for Rep. John Conyers for making this proposal. He's a national treasure.

(Will he also propose a commission on Katrina?)

I believe that such a commission is essential to our ability to repair our international reputation.

It ought to be a no-brainer for the Democratic Congress.

But unfortunately, it's not that simple. An investigation into civil liberties and war powers would invariably examine torture, rendition, and the C.I.A.

Oyster has an essential post examining some early indications that the C.I.A. is dead serious about being left alone.

How Far We've Fallen

This story slipped through the cracks a little bit for me because of all the other things going on...

How sad is this?

The other day when I saw this headline:

Torture Chamber Found in Iraq,

I had to ask if it was ours.

Read this

From the New York Times: I'll be selecting which terrorists to embolden

At least four top White House lawyers took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy videotapes showing the secret interrogations of two operatives from Al Qaeda, according to current and former administration and intelligence officials.

The accounts indicate that the involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged.

Those who took part, the officials said, included Alberto R. Gonzales, who served as White House counsel until early 2005; David S. Addington, who was the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and is now his chief of staff; John B. Bellinger III, who until January 2005 was the senior lawyer at the National Security Council; and Harriet E. Miers, who succeeded Mr. Gonzales as White House counsel.

It was previously reported that some administration officials had advised against destroying the tapes, but the emerging picture of White House involvement is more complex. In interviews, several administration and intelligence officials provided conflicting accounts as to whether anyone at the White House expressed support for the idea that the tapes should be destroyed.

One former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said there had been “vigorous sentiment” among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes. The former official did not specify which White House officials took this position, but he said that some believed in 2005 that any disclosure of the tapes could have been particularly damaging after revelations a year earlier of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

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Some of these.... these folks...... names such as Alberto Gonzales, Harriet Miers, David Addington....... we've seen 'em before haven't we?

They sound familiar, that is.

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How might we see this play out?

Republican Pete Hoekstra (the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee) absolutely ripped the intelligence community last Sunday, December 16th:

"We want to hold the (intelligence) community accountable for what's happened to these tapes," Republican U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan said on "Fox News Sunday." "We will issue subpoenas ... Our investigation should move forward.

He said he had no confidence in U.S. intelligence leadership. "You've got a community that's incompetent. They are arrogant. And they are political. And they don't believe that they are accountable to anybody....

Strong words. Strong strong words. But I want everyone to take notice of what comes after that series I left y'all hangin with.

...They don't believe that they're accountable to the president."

His point right there was that the President was not abreast of what was going on and that these incompetent, arrogant schmucks were essentially being insubordinate. Never mind he says nothing chastising President Bush (as if a President ought to be held accountable for his or her own government)... You wouldn't expect to see a Republican berating President Bush on Fox News, even if President Bush were to commit gay polygamous incest.

But of course, again, Congressman Hoekstra said that on December 16th. That was before the New York Times revealed the involvement of at least four lawyers extremely close the the President and the Vice President.

Here's what Congressman Hoekstra should say tomorrow morning:

"You've got a community that's incompetent. They are arrogant. And they are political. And they don't believe that they are accountable to anybody. The President, the Vice President, and their friends and advisers do not believe they're accountable to the People."

They Won't Fit in the Paper Shredder

They're video cassettes!

Way way back in 2005, the CIA possessed video tapes of some harsh interrogations of a couple of terrorists completed in 2002. They realized that the tapes might be released to the public and put the agency in a precarious legal bind over their methodology. 

So the tapes were destroyed.

Here's a link to the story.

The immediately shocking thing about this to me was that CIA director Michael Hayden informed members of the House and Senate intel committees about the existence of the tapes and the CIA's plans to destroy them. There were Democrats on those committees. Apparently, nobody lifted a finger.

This was in 2005, weeks before the Washington Post revealed the existence of the secret overseas prisons being used to rough up high profile detainees.

The Iraq War resolution mulligan request is one thing...

"if we knew then what we know now..."

We pay a price when the party supposedly representing progressive values totally sell out in order to not be called cowards or terrorist kissers or something... Why didn't they demand preservation of the tapes? Did they not ask questions as to the nature of the tapes? Or why they were being destroyed? I'm sure there's more to this story, right now the reports do not provide a whole lot of depth.

Boy, wouldn't the following Democrats in the Senate and House (respectively):

John Rockefeller IV (WV), Carl Levin (MI), Diane Fienstein (CA), Ron Wyden (OR), Evan Bayh (IN), Jon Corzine (NJ), and Barbara Mikulski (MD)

Jane Harman (CA), Alcee Hastings (FL), Silvestre Reyes (TX), Leonard Boswell (IA), Bud Cramer (AL), Anna Eshoo (CA), Rush Holt (NJ), Dutch Ruppersberger (MD), and John Tierney (MA)

like to have a time machine right now.

How could they have known that the CIA's interrogation tapes were to become extremely relevant in a debate over the morality and constitutionality of the Bush administration's interrogation policy?

I mean, this was way back in 2005. 

These reports from early 2005 and prior are TOTALLY UNRELATED: 

January 6, 2005: Terror Suspect Alleges Torture

October 27, 2004: Amnesty International: Torture and Accountability in the 'War on Terror'

May 21, 2004: Abu Ghraib Scandal

The Amnesty International link provides a detailed accounting of the Bush administration's record on torture to that point. It wouldn't exactly make one trustworthy of the CIA's decision to start destroying evidence. But how could we expect our elected officials to have read the report or to have had any insight on the matter? I mean that would be unfair.

Waterboarding

Well, if you watch the video below, you might come to the conclusion that we'll all be water-boarded one of these summers.

Or we might be water-boarded just because... (I got scared and worked overtime so I wouldn't have to decide whether or not verbally assault Miss Jenna Bush when she visited yesterday)

The Senate Judiciary Committee, which is dominated by the supposed rational left, has just voted to send Michael Mukasey to the Senate for a full vote on his nomination for Attorney General.

Mukasey is unsure whether or not waterboarding is illegal.

So our supposed Party, the Democrats have provided another rubber stamp...

When are they going to realize that the overwhelming majority of Americans want them to stop enabling this administration and the neoconservative murder of American ideals?

An overwhelming majority of Americans believe that waterboarding is torture and should not be used.

Will Bunch at Attytood weighs in eloquently.

Also I refer you to the political cartoon on page B-6 of the Times-Pic. Sorry I can't find it on their easy to navigate world wide web site.

Update: I forgot to wonder...

Don't y'all think that if the Democrats fought every little Bush proposal tooth-and-nail, even if they were actually being obstructionist terrorist lovers, they might still raise their own anemimc poll numbers? Maybe they should stop being such cowards and try it.