"To achieve victory at the cost of eroding civil liberties would not really be a victory. We cannot change the core identity of our nation and claim success,"

11.15.2006 Gates & the Iran-Contra Legacy By Ivan Eland

11.18.2006 Dem judiciary leader seeks torture documents By Brian Beutler, Raw Story

In a letter addressed to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, chairman-to-be of the Senate Judiciary Committee Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has requested the release of documents that outline the Bush Administration's interrogation policies.
...
One of those documents is believed to be a companion piece to the now-infamous August 2002 memorandum which redefined torture and, as a result, broadened the range of interrogation tactics permitted in the field.

The companion document, the so-called “Yoo Two” document (named after legal counsel John Yoo) is believed to contain a list of actual techniques that have been approved by the Department of Justice—and which are therefore legally protected interrogation methods used by intelligence operatives against suspected terrorists.

(See also ACLU FOIA lawsuit)

McCain isn't alone in wanting the study. On Tuesday, a trio of environmental groups announced they are suing NOAA to release the document.

11.18.2006 UCLA police used a Taser to subdue a student studying in Powell Library
11.17.2006 "Houston Police Run Over Striking Janitors with Horses"

11.17.2006 Clear Evidence 2006 Congressional Elections Hacked From OpEdNews By Rob Kall

“The numbers tell us there absolutely was hacking going on, just not enough to overcome the size of the actual turnout. The tide turned so much in the last few weeks before the eleciton. It looks for all the world that they’d already figured out the percentage they needed to rig, when the programming of the vote rigging software was distributed weeks before the election, and it wasn’t enough,” Castleman commented.
...
Simon concluded, "These machines are completely and utterly black box. The idea that we have this enormous burden of proof that they are miscounting, and there's no burden of proof that they are counting accurately--that, first and foremost, has to change."

This is the untold story of Election ’06. “The real winner in the Nov. 7 election is the grassroots voter protection movement,” wrote Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman at FreePress.org. “That the well-oiled, well-funded Rove/Bush theft machine lost control of (Congress) says just one thing: Somebody was watching.”

The Bush administration has appointed a new chief of family-planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who worked at a Christian pregnancy-counseling organization that regards the distribution of contraceptives as "demeaning to women." ... "The president has said we will look to reach common ground where we can find it. However, he's not going to compromise on his principles."

3.21.2006 "Extended presence of U.S. in Iraq looms large -- $1 billion for construction of American military bases and no public plans" (Here)

See also:

2.14.2006 Tomgram: "A Permanent Basis for Withdrawal? - Can You Say "Permanent Bases"? - The American Press Can't" By Tom Engelhardt (Here)

11.17.2006 Still Waiting for Bipartisanship

The voters sent a clear message last week that they do not want the far right of the Republican Party calling the shots in Washington. But President Bush has ignored the message, resubmitting a group of archconservative, underqualified judicial nominees that Senate Democrats have already said are unacceptable. With the Democrats about to take control of the Senate, it is highly unlikely that these men will be confirmed. But the renominations suggest that when it comes to filling judgeships, Mr. Bush is still not looking for either excellence or common ground.

11.15.2006 The Same Old George By William Rivers Pitt

The first rumblings of the wow-nothing-has-changed-at-all-in-the-White-House phenomenon started last week, when Bush's people intimated that the lame-duck GOP Congress would be tasked to ram through some highly dubious legislation before they get shoved into the minority seats come January. First off, Bush wanted John Bolton, now serving a temp job as UN ambassador, to be permanently confirmed.

If any time was available, Bush also wanted Congress to pass blanket approval for his highly controversial and almost certainly illegal warrantless wiretapping program. To wit, he was hoping his pals in Congress would paper over this particular set of broken FISA laws before the new chairmen come in with subpoena power.

11.14.2006 A Deliberate Evasion of Democracy Through the Administrative Apparatus By Brian Tamanaha

Given the many recent corporate scandals--Enron and Worldcom, CEO's sentenced to imprisonment, disclosures of widespread backdating of stock options to benefit corporate officers, new information about conflicts of interest in consulting groups that set sky-high compensation levels for CEOs--one would think that this is not a propitious time to undertake an effort to reduce corporate regulation and legal accountability.

Indeed it is not. In recognition of this, these two group have designed and scheduled their activities to evade democratic institutions and accountability:

The government now has to file a detailed argument by the end of this month explaining why it believes these documents should not be made public.

To date, more than 100,000 pages of government documents have been released in response to the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. The ACLU has been posting these documents online at www.aclu.org/torturefoia

In a related matter, the ACLU will appear at a federal hearing in Richmond, VA on November 28 in the case of Khaled El-Masri, an innocent German man who was kidnapped by the CIA and transported to a secret site in Afghanistan where he was detained and abused. A district court upheld the CIA’s claim that the case could not proceed without disclosing state secrets. The ACLU appealed the decision, noting that accounts of El-Masri’s abduction have already appeared in news reports around the world and foreign governments have launched their own investigations into the matter.

More information on the El-Masri case is online at: www.aclu.org/rendition

11.14.2006 RUMSFELD UNDER FIRE

War Crimes Suit Filed against Former Defense Secretary

A coalition of human rights groups has filed a criminal lawsuit against former US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld in Germany, accusing him of war crimes. A first attempt to prosecute him in 2004 failed, but the activists feel they have a better chance this time -- and they have a powerful witness on their side.

... If you want to know what has happened in the interim, you can start with the fresh, documentary evidence adduced in award-winning investigative reporter Robert Parry's recent article, "The Secret World of Robert Gates". Parry's article contains unique and highly damaging information on Gates's role in the original "October Surprise" - the unconscionable but successful Republican effort to prevent the release of the 52 American hostages imprisoned for 14 months in the US embassy in Tehran until Ronald Reagan had won the election in 1980. Parry also provides fresh detail on Gates's involvement in the illegal sale of weapons, including cluster bombs, to Iraq in the early eighties.

Another excellent source on Gates's involvement in the secret arming of Saddam Hussein (yes, the same Saddam) and the Iran-Contra scandal is Amy Goodman's interview of Parry and former CIA analyst Mel Goodman on Democracy Now, November 9th.

The move would nullify a Republican-backed provision, slipped into a huge military authorization bill, that set a termination date for the agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. The agency's findings have consistently undermined Bush administration claims of widespread success in the reconstruction of Iraq.
...
In a measure of the momentum behind the bill, it is expected to be introduced in the Senate by Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, along with co-sponsors Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, and Joseph I. Lieberman, who won re-election as an independent in Connecticut.

11.3.2006 Stuart Bowen did his job in Iraq, so he’s getting fired

The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation. (Here)

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who followed the bill closely as chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, says that she still does not know how the provision made its way into the bill. "It's truly a mystery to me," Collins said. "I looked at what I thought was the final version of the conference report and that provision was not in at that time. The one thing I can confirm is that this was a last-minute insertion."

In other words, when no one's looking, Republicans quietly fired the only guy who's standing up for accountability and oversight in Iraq. Typical.

"We have been asked to make sweeping and fundamental changes in law for reasons that we do not know and in order to legalize secret, unlawful actions that the administration has refused to fully divulge," said Sen. Patrick Leahy (news, bio, voting record) of Vermont, the next Judiciary Committee chairman. "If legislation is needed for judicial review, then we should write that legislation together, in a bipartisan and thoughtful way."

The Democratic Party distributed literature and sample ballots backing Duncan near the polls on election day. Democratic Party officials said they didn't know Duncan had died when they placed the ads and printed the literature, but did not know later. (sic)

Former sheriff Frank McGuirt said he had helped Duncan gain enough votes to knock out a board chairman who had served for many years. "I was shocked to know that poor Sam was gone," McGuirt told the Charlotte Observer. "I guess I had just missed that obituary."

11.8.2006 Keillor: The retiring type? Not me

The Current Occupant, who is two years and three months away from retirement, was quoted last week as saying, "They can say what they want about me, but at least I know who I am, and I know who my friends are."
...
You come to office as a uniter and you wind up doing the opposite. You stand for American values and you wind up defending torture and waste of resources. Knowing who you are is a minimal adult requirement, and you don't get there by being an object of attention. Retirement is recommended. The sooner the better.

For big drug companies, the new Medicare prescription benefit is proving to be a financial windfall larger than even the most optimistic Wall Street analysts had predicted.
...
Tony Butler, an analyst at Lehman Brothers, said both volume growth and price increases had driven the industry's rising profits. But he said he did not expect major changes in the Part D plan even if the Democrats took over Congress, since President Bush would probably not sign any legislation that would allow Medicare to negotiate prices directly.

"It's our belief that the White House will veto it," he said.

The neocons insist that it was the execution of the war that was wrong. Actually, it was wrong to go to war with a trumped-up casus belli and without ever debating what could happen if they took a baseball bat to a beehive.

The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the "alternative interrogation methods" that their captors used to get them to talk.

The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation's most sensitive national security secrets and that their release -- even to the detainees' own attorneys -- "could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage." Terrorists could use the information to train in counter-interrogation techniques and foil government efforts to elicit information about their methods and plots, according to government documents submitted to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton on Oct. 26.

David Frum: "I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything." (And Here)

Nancy Goldstein of Raw Story has been reporting on some of the reasons why:

• Part I - The things they carry: Mental health disorders among returning troops
• Part II - To Hell and Back: Spinning the Downward Spiral
• Part III - Full Metal Lockout: The Myth of Accessible Health Care
• Part IV - Big Money: The Compensation Angle

The Virus That Ate DHS
U.S. Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer

"The idea, Mr. Holly said, was simply to return to a non-wartime footing in which inspectors general in the State Department, the Pentagon and elsewhere would investigate American programs overseas." (Here)

See also Billmon on Watchdogs

11.3.2006 Insulting Our Troops, and Our Intelligence By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Everyone says that Karl Rove is a genius. Yeah, right. So are cigarette companies. They get you to buy cigarettes even though we know they cause cancer. That is the kind of genius Karl Rove is. He is not a man who has designed a strategy to reunite our country around an agenda of renewal for the 21st century ­ to bring out the best in us. His “genius” is taking some irrelevant aside by John Kerry and twisting it to bring out the worst in us, so you will ignore the mess that the Bush team has visited on this country.

In Mr. Bush’s world, there are only two kinds of Americans: those who are against terrorism, and those who somehow are all right with it. Some Americans want to win in Iraq and some don’t. There are Americans who support the troops and Americans who don’t support the troops. And at the root of it all is the hideously damaging fantasy that there is a gulf between Americans who love their country and those who question his leadership.