Question: Is it possible to be too cynical with the Bush crowd?
Answer: No.
I give up.
by Tim F| 65 Comments
This post is in: War on Terror aka GSAVE®, Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin.
by John Cole| 35 Comments
This post is in: Assholes, Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin.
This is rich:
Hours before they were to leave office after eight troubled years, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney had one final and painful piece of business to conclude. For over a month Cheney had been pleading, cajoling, even pestering Bush to pardon the Vice President’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. Libby had been convicted nearly two years earlier of obstructing an investigation into the leak of a covert CIA officer’s identity by senior White House officials. The Libby pardon, aides reported, had become something of a crusade for Cheney, who seemed prepared to push his nine-year-old relationship with Bush to the breaking point — and perhaps past it — over the fate of his former aide. “We don’t want to leave anyone on the battlefield,” Cheney argued.
So they guy that perjured himself in the investigation to determine who outed a CIA agent- he’s a soldier. The outed CIA agent? Screw her. Her husband was shrill.
The Battle Credo of the Chairborne CommandoPost + Comments (35)
by Tim F| 69 Comments
This post is in: War on Terror aka GSAVE®, Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin.
Philip Giraldi’s unusually good national security sources make his writings at American Conservative consistently worth following. His take on the Cheney/CIA mystery program is well worth a read, and not just because it agrees with what I wrote yesterday.
The most interesting bit for me was Giraldi’s surprisingly thorough account of how the program ended. According to his sources, a Delta Force team arrived in Kenya on false passports, botched the job and needed to be bailed out by the Ambassador, who, naturally, had no idea they were there. The program didn’t so much end at that point as languish in administrative limbo. Another notable take-home from Giraldi’s piece.
The perpetrators in Kenya also quickly discovered that white boys born in the American south sporting crewcuts and speaking no foreign language had difficulties in blending in as foreign businessmen.
All in all, as Bush era initiatives go, a fairly good day.
by Tim F| 72 Comments
This post is in: Torture, Assholes, Democratic Stupidity, Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin., The Wingularity
Maybe I’m ungrateful, but this trial balloon spelling out Eric Holder’s maybe plans to prosecute torture strikes me as something close to the worst of both worlds. On the one hand Holder looks likely to appoint a federal prosecutor to find out why so many of our prisoners died of organ failure, blunt trauma or drowned in their own blood.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is leaning toward appointing a criminal prosecutor to investigate whether CIA personnel tortured terrorism suspects after Sept. 11, 2001, setting the stage for a conflict with administration officials who would prefer the issues remain in the past, according to three sources familiar with his thinking.
We can probably agree that as far as Republicans are concerned it doesn’t matter how Holder finesses this. Any decision that brings accountability to the torture regime will explode the wingularity into a Congress-paralyzing Big Bang of hysteria, obstruction and exotic particles that the universe has not seen since Joe McCarthy held the floor. The decision is so nuclear that details will almost certainly get lost in the noise.
Given the inevitability of epic mayhem from the GOP, I fail to see what Holder gains by enacting his probe in the least useful manner imaginable.
[S]ources said an inquiry would apply only to activities by interrogators, working in bad faith, that fell outside the “four corners” of the legal memos.
Hard to believe as it may seem, Holder’s probe will take John Yoo’s work, the famous memos that would make your ass dumber if you wiped with them, and treat them as the settled law of the time. Already clear and public evidence that DOJ lawyers drafted those memos entirely in bad faith, on orders from Bush officials who literally dictated what they wanted the memos to say, will be similarly ignored.
The actions of higher-level Bush policymakers are not under consideration for possible investigation.
To put it bluntly, this strategy is a goddamn disgrace. We called it whitewashing when the Bush administration made a few grunts pay for the orders they followed at Abu Ghraib. We called it a disgrace because that’s what it was. What do you think we should call it now? I don’t feel much sympathy for the sadistic creeps who will pay for their superiors’ sins this time any more than than I feel for Chuck Graner and Lynndie Englund. Interrogators who took it on themselves to surpass even the sick boundaries of Yoo’s torture memos deserve to answer in court. Nonetheless, to stop there and call it justice makes me physically ill.
Holder’s likely decision makes no more sense from a purely utilitarian perspective. The kind of investigations that are worth a major prosecutor’s time start at the grunt level so they can build a case against bigger fish. Handling it like this looks almost exactly the same as asking a mafia prosecutor to focus exclusively on the goons who got a little too enthusiastic when they beat up card players behind on their debts. Ordinary citizens would have a hard time seeing that as a terribly serious effort to bring down organized crime.
I will close with props to the eerily psychic feature writers at The Onion. Read this from May 2009.
WASHINGTON—In its first major hearing on the use of abusive interrogation tactics at Guantánamo Bay, a blue-ribbon panel found detainee Omar Khadr mentally unfit to testify about his years of psychological torture. “Because of Mr. Khadr’s fragile state due to unknown hours spent under the most brutal, mentally straining conditions, he cannot be trusted to speak competently on his own behalf,” said Rep. Kit Bond (R-MO), the panel’s chairman. “It is unfortunate that someone with such intimate knowledge of the horrors of waterboarding, stress positions, and induced hypothermia is so emotionally unstable. He bursts into tears at even the mention of mock torture.” Bond added that Khadr’s confession of planning 9/11, the London train bombings, and the Iranian hostage crisis would be kept on the record.
Ha ha. The Washington Post, today.
Other challenges an inquiry into alleged torture might face could include the difficulty of gathering evidence of improper conduct in war zones and questions about the reliability of witnesses who may have been held by the U.S. government for years, legal analysts said yesterday.
It almost makes you want to step back and admire the Bush crowd. For a team who couldn’t policy their way out of a paper bag made of warm air, they had a remarkable knack for putting well-intentioned officials in an impossible bind.
<del>Splitting</del> Waterboarding The BabyPost + Comments (72)
This post is in: War on Terror aka GSAVE®, Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin.
I guess the extent of the criminality and the confirmation of Bush as puppet President is news:
The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.
The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.
I was listening to NPR yesterday, and one analyst stated that the reason Washington is terrified to investigate this is because they know that so many laws were broken so flagrantly that any investigation will lead to the indictment of Bush and Cheney, and that, for obvious reasons, terrifies the Democrats (you can listen to that piece here). It would simply consume Washington and destroy Obama’s agenda, and they want to avoid that at all cost. Holder, on the other hand, may not give two hoots about Obama’s agenda and the delicate sensibilities of the Democrats, and go after them anyway.
I’m not sure what the point of Obama even having an agenda if they don’t go about holding people accountable for what they have done here. Otherwise, we’ll just be going through this again in the future.
I’d also like to point out to everyone that Bill Clinton was impeached over a blowjob.
From the Shit You Already Knew DepartmentPost + Comments (108)
by Tim F| 17 Comments
This post is in: Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin.
As Josh Marshall suggested years ago, Alberto Gonzales in fact used extra-clever word parsing when he described warrantless wiretapping as a “terrorist surveillance program”. You will love what they called the other program.
by DougJ| 20 Comments
This post is in: Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin.
In the fall of 2006, one day after the Justice Department granted permission to a U.S. attorney to place a wiretap on a Republican congressman suspected of corruption, existence of the investigation was leaked to the press — not only compromising the sensitive criminal probe but tipping the lawmaker off to the wiretap.
Career federal law enforcement officials who worked directly on a probe of former Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) said they believe that word of the investigation was leaked by senior Bush administration political appointees in the Justice Department in an improper and perhaps illegal effort to affect the outcome of an election.
At the time of the leak, Renzi was locked in a razor-thin bid for reelection and unconfirmed reports of a criminal probe could have become politically damaging. The leaked stories — appearing 10 days before the election — falsely suggested that the investigation of Renzi was in its initial stages and unlikely to lead to criminal charges.
You know the drill: Americans want to look forward, not backwards, we’ve got enough on our plate right now, etc.