By Dave Lindorff

 When doctors started reporting that some of the victims of the US bombing of several villages in Farah Province last week—an attack that left between 117 and 147 civilians dead, most of them women and children—were turning up with deep, sharp burns on their body that “looked like” they’d been caused by white phosphorus, the US military was quick to deny responsibility.

US officials—who initially denied that the US had even bombed any civilians in Farah despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, including massive craters where houses had once stood—insisted that “no white phosphorus” was used in the attacks on several villages in Farah.

Official military policy on the use of white phosphorus is to only use the high-intensity, self-igniting material as a smoke screen during battles or to illuminate targets, not as a weapon against human beings—even enemy troops.

by Dave Lindorff

In reversing himself and declaring that the US government will not release further photos in its possession of torture being practiced on captives held by the US military and the CIA, President Obama is sounding increasingly like the Bush/Cheney administration before him.

It may well be that, as Obama says, release of those photos could lead to anger in the Islamic world and perhaps to recruitment gains among groups like Al Qaeda that are attacking American troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, but this is only true because at the same time, the Obama administration is opposing taking any legal action against the people who authorized and promoted that torture.

By Dave Lindorff

By Dave Lindorff

Enough is enough. It’s time to free John Walker Lindh, poster boy
for George Bush’s, Dick Cheney’s and John Ashcroft’s “War on Terror,”
and quite likely first victim of these men’s secret campaign of torture.

Lindh is in the seventh year of a 20-year sentence for “carrying a
weapon” in Afghanistan and for “providing assistance” to an enemy of
the United States. The first charge is ridiculously minor (after all,
it’s what almost everyone in Texas does everyday). The second is
actually a violation of a law intended for use against US companies
that trade with proscribed countries on a government “no trade” list
like Cuba or North Korea. Ordinarily, violation results in a fine for
the executives involved.

By Dave Lindorff

For some time now, many Americans have wondered how Congress, the
elected body that the nation’s Founding Fathers saw as the bulwark of
liberty, could have been so thoroughly unwilling to, or incapable of
challenging the dictatorial power-grabs and the eight-year Constitution
wrecking campaign of the Bush/Cheney administration.

There has been speculation on both the far left and the far right,
and even among some in the apolitical, cynical middle of the political
spectrum, that somehow the Bush/Cheney administration must have been
blackmailing at least the key members of the Congressional leadership,
most likely through the use of electronic monitoring by the National
Security Agency (NSA).

By Dave Lindorff

If the day comes that Congress finally does its duty and begins an
impeachment effort against 9th Circuit Federal Appeals Judge Jay Bybee,
the former Bush assistant attorney general who in 2002 authored a key
memo justifying the use of torture against captives in the Afghanistan
invasion and the so-called “War on Terror,” it would be fitting
punishment to watch him squirm as his own words as a judge were played
back to him.

It was as an Appeals Court Judge Bybee, sitting on a case being
heard in 2006 by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, that he wrote the
following words:

By Dave Lindorff

Back in 1965, as a 15-year-old kid, I had a chance to spend half a
year as a student at a boy’s gymnasium (high school) in Darmstadt, the
cultural capital of the German state of Hesse, which had the
distinction of having been one of a handful of cities in Germany
(Dresden was another) that were selected by the Allies to test out the
terror tactic of firebombing. The town was chosen for incendiary
bombardment precisely because it had no military value and thus, no air
defenses (and because it consisted mostly of wooden structures). With
Germany still wreaking horrific damage on the Allied bomber fleet, this
made it an inviting target.

By Dave Lindorff

Six months after the failed Bush administration effort to "rescue"
the US financial system, and after two months of failed efforts by his
own new administration, at an expense to the American public of several
trillion dollars and counting, the Obama administration is announcing
plans to blow another $1 trillion in a massive taxpayer giveaway to
investors who will be subsidized in an effort to get them to buy the
so-called toxic assets on the books of the nation's biggest banks.

The problem with this plan is that its goal--getting these zombie banks to start lending again--is not going to work.

By Dave Lindorff

The actions of Obama's Chief Financial Adviser Larry Summers and
his Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in permitting the payment of $165
million in bonuses to AIG executives (Summers, according to the Wall Street Journal, actually pressed Sen. Chris Dodd, D-CT, to secretly remove a bar to the
payment of such bonuses from the bailout bill) and storm of public
outrage that has followed public disclosure of those payments, provides
President Obama, whose administration is stumbling badly on many
fronts, to turn things around and avoid political disaster.

He should promptly demand Geithner's and Summers' resignations, and
should also fire the CEO of AIG, Edward Liddy (as 80% owner of AIG, the
US has the power to do that anytime). It would also be a good idea at
the same time to fire the CEOs of all the leading banks that are at
this point surviving on government bailouts.

By Dave Lindorff

The dithering and ducking going on in the Obama White House and the
Holder Justice Department over the crimes of the Bush administration
are taking on a comic aspect.

On the one hand, we have President Obama assuring us that under his
administration, there will be respect for the rule of law, and on the
other hand we have this one-time constitutional law professor and his
attorney general declaiming that there is no need for the appointment
of a prosecutor to bring charges against the people in the last
administration, in the CIA, in the National Security Agency and in the
Defense Department and the military who clearly have broken the law in
serious and felonious ways.

What gets silly is that America is either a nation of laws…or it
isn’t. It is either a place where “nobody is above the law”…or it isn’t.

There is really no middle ground here.