Donald Rumsfeld

Rumsfeld Blamed for Torture Deaths

Bob Fertik — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:51:27 -0400

Alex Gibney's 2007 film Taxi to the Dark Side tells the story of Dilawar, an innocent Afghan taxi driver who drove past Bagram Air Force Base at the wrong time and ended up dead from torture.

Dilawar died on 12/10/02, six days after Habibulllah, an Islamic Mullah, was tortured to death. Habibulllah's murder came just two days after Donald Rumsfeld authorized "aggressive interrogation techniques" at Bagram.

But Rumsfeld chose Vice Admiral Albert T. Church to produce a 2004 coverup which cleared Pentagon brass, including himself. Now the Senate Armed Services Committee is putting the blame for Dilawar's murder on Rumsfeld, as Jason Leopold reports:

“Shortly after Secretary Rumsfeld's December 2, 2002 approval of his General Counsel's [William Haynes] recommendation to authorize aggressive interrogation techniques, the techniques-and the fact the Secretary had authorized them--became known to interrogators in Afghanistan. A copy oft he Secretary's memo was sent from GTMO to Afghanistan.”

SASC chairman Carl Levin wants Eric Holder to appoint a Special Prosecutor for the crimes exposed in his committee's report. When will Holder fulfill his obligations under the Convention Against Torture to act?

The Way Forward on Holding the Bush/Cheney Administration Accountable for its Crimes

dlindorff — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 14:59:37 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

As someone who has spent nearly three frustrating years actively
advocating the impeachment of President George Bush and Vice President
Dick Cheney for their many crimes and abuses of power, I have to admit
that not only did it not happen, but that the likelihood of their being
indicted and brought to trial now that they have left office is
exceedingly slim.

While both men are clearly guilty of war crimes, and have in fact
admitted to willful violation of international law and the US Criminal
Code relating to torture and treatment of captives, and while Bush has
admitted to the felony of willfully violating the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA), and while a good case of defrauding Congress
could be made against both men with regard to their claims made to
justify the invasion of Iraq, not to mention a host of other crimes
large and small, I think it is clear that the new administration of
President Barack Obama does not want to be seen trying to put the
president and vice president in the slammer (where they so deserve to
be). For better or worse, Obama has decided to pursue a less
confrontational politics in Washington.

That said, I would argue that there can be a good case made, both
legally and politically, for the convening of a Truth &
Reconciliation Commission, which could put all key people in the last
administration on the stand and under oath and klieg lights to explain
just what they did and why.

Of course, such a commission, if established by an act of Congress,
would on one level amount to letting off the hook people whose criminal
actions have led to the deaths of over a million people, including over
4500 Americans in uniform, to the torturing of hundreds and perhaps
thousands, and to the undermining of the constitutional rights of all
the people of this nation. And yet, it may be the best way to establish
just what the extent and nature of those crimes were, who was harmed,
and how to avoid such reckless and criminal behavior by a president and
an administration in the future.

Furthermore, if properly constituted and empowered, such a commission could still lead to prosecutions in the end.

Here’s how it might work: The commission would call administration
officers, whether former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or Vice
President Cheney. Under oath, they would be asked what their roles were
in, say, the authorization, promotion and covering up of torture. If
they answered truthfully, they would be immune from prosecution for any
crimes they admitted to, but the world would know for all time what
they had done. If they refused to answer, or if they were to lie to the
commission, however, they would be subject to possible indictment for
contempt or perjury—charges that could place them before a judge or
even a grand jury.

Moreover, if lower-ranking members of the administration, called
before such a commission, chose the route of coming clean about their
role in administration crimes, it would both provide evidence that
could later be used to prosecute higher officials who might refuse to
appear and testify before such a commission, and at the same time would
tend to create a public sentiment in favor of prosecution. A key to the success of such an approach is that the enabling legislation would have to hold out the possibility of prosecution for those who refused to participate, or who lied to the commission.

A truth & reconciliation commission would have to be authorized
by an act of Congress, I believe, because only Congress could offer the
necessary waiver from prosecution for a capital crime like torture in
which victims have died, as is the case with the torture that US
military forces and CIA agents have engaged in over the past eight
years. But the new Congress should be willing to support such an act,
because, far from being retribution, the truth & reconciliation
process, which was used in South Africa, and which has been used in
other countries recovering from past criminal rule, could be presented
as a way of getting out the facts, and of restoring the country’s
international reputation, without trying to put anyone behind bars.

Moreover, I think that the vast majority of the American public
wants to see some kind of reckoning made with the past eight years of
secret government, official lying, and criminal actions by many of the
top officials of the land.

If South Africans can respond to generations of a criminal
apartheid regime and a police state with a truth & reconciliation
process, so can we in America.

It is, after all, the truth, not the punishment of criminals, however heinous, that sets us free.
___________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now
available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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White House Lied About Iraqi Yellowcake Buy, But That’s Not the Biggest Scandal

dlindorff — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:32:55 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

A new congressional report is belatedly confirming what many have
long known: that the White House and in particular then White House
Counsel Alberto Gonzales, lied to Congress in 2004 when he told them
the Bush administration was not repeatedly warned by the CIA not to
make the claim that Saddam had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger.

What is astonishing about this report,
which documents that the CIA at least four times tried to prevent Bush
and other top officials from presenting that lie to Congress and the
American public in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, is not that it
documents what has long been known, but that Congress and the corporate
media are still pretending that the claim itself was an acceptable
justification for launching a war.

Set aside for the moment the fact that the claim that Saddam
Hussein had tried to buy uranium ore (so-called yellowcake) from the
desert nation of Niger was based upon forged documents which were
almost certainly the work of Defense Department hacks in the
Rumsfeld/Cheney-created Office of Special Plans (see my book The Case for Impeachment).
Even if this fraudulent deal had been real, how on earth could it have
been used as it was by President Bush and Vice President Cheney to
justify an invasion of Iraq?

Consider that what was being asserted was that Iraq had attempted
(not even succeeded!) to buy 400 tons of uranium ore. This claim was
used by President Bush, in his Jan. 20, 2003 State of the Union
address, to argue that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program. But in the case of a country that does not have a nuclear weapon, a program is years away, perhaps a decade or more away, from the reality of having a usable weapon.

As we have seen in the case of Iran, which has been refining
uranium ore now for at least five years, the mere fact of possessing
uranium ore, and even of having a quantity of gas centrifuges to refine
out the minute quantities of the fissionable isotope U-235 are only the
first and, technologically speaking, the easiest, steps towards
actually constructing a bomb. (Experts say that after all this time,
even if it is actually trying to build a nuclear bomb, which the
Iranian government denies, the country remains years from that alleged
goal.)

If Bush and Cheney had not been lying through their teeth, and
Saddam had actually been buying yellowcake for the purpose of making a
nuke weapon, he would still have had to obtain large numbers of
centrifuges, would have had to power them up and run them for years,
and would have then had to obtain the technology to build and test a
bomb, none of which steps he was even alleged to have taken.

Yet Bush was claiming that there was an imminent threat to
America posed by Saddam Hussein’s yellowcake purchase effort, and that
an invasion had to be launched almost immediately. He used the term
imminent because that is the legal requirement in the UN Charter, to
which the US is a signatory and which is based upon the Nuremberg
Charter established at the end of the Second World War. It states that
no nation may invade another nation unless that nation poses an
imminent threat to the would-be invader.

The yellowcake story, now definitively shown to have been a
deliberate lie, even if true, could not have constituted such an
imminent threat.

Yet not once has this key point been addressed by any member of
Congress who voted to authorize an invasion. Nor does the point get
mentioned in mainstream journalistic reports on the matter.

Average Americans, nearly half of whom reportedly believe that the
earth was formed just 6000 years ago and a fair proportion of whom
believe that the sun revolves around the earth, might be excused for
not understanding this point, but clearly intelligent members of
Congress like former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry
and future secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who both claim they
might not have voted for war “had they had known then what they know
now,” are themselves caught in a lie.

They and other war backers clearly knew in 2002 and 2003 that the
yellowcake story, even if true, was no justification for war. So did
editors and reporters (like Judith Miller and Michael Gordon of the New
York Times, for example).

I have yet to see a single US corporate media outlet explain that
the yellowcake story was simply never a justification for war. It will
probably never happen, and yet many analysts have said it was that
claim by Bush, Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and
others (remember her dark warnings about not wanting a “smoking gun” to
be a “mushroom cloud”?), more than any other that stampeded the nation
into a war that has cost over $1 trillion over five years, and over
4000 US lives and one million innocent Iraqi lives.

Bush, Cheney, Rice, Gonzalez, Rumsfeld and others in the outgoing
administration should all be impeached, tried and jailed for their
lying and treason in embroiling the US in the pointless and criminal
Iraq War, with the yellowcake story a key element in any indictments.
But there needs to be some kind of reckoning too, for the willful
ignorance and deceit on the part of the majority of Congress and of the
press in pretending that an alleged scheme to buy uranium ore was a
justification for launching a war of aggression, which five years on,
is still continuing.

The American people themselves also need to reflect deeply, not
just on how ill served we are by our elected officials and by our
media, but on how gullible we have become, and how ignorant.
__________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2008 and
now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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Prosecuting Bush and Cheney for Torture: No One Can Be Above the Law

dlindorff — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 11:02:07 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

A month before he takes office, it has become the conventional
wisdom in our conventional media that Barack “No Drama” Obama will not
seek or even allow any prosecution of Bush administration officials for
crimes committed over the past eight years—not even for authorizing and
promoting the illegal use of torture on captives of America’s wars on
Iraq, Afghanistan and “terror.”

Take that pillar of conventional thinking, the New York Times.
A lengthy December 18 editorial laid out a solid case that approval for
torture had come from top Bush/Cheney administration officials, and
then concluded that “A prosecutor should be appointed to consider
criminal charges against top officials in the Pentagon and others
involved in planning the abuse.” But then the paper’s editors went on
after that to give Obama a pass, saying, “Given his other problems—and
how far he has moved from the powerful stands he took on these issues
early in the campaign—we do not hold out real hope Barack Obama, as
president, will take such a politically fraught step.” In the view of Times’
conventional-thinking editors, it would appear that the American
government cannot be expected to prosecute criminals and fight a
recession at the same time.

There is no mention of the obvious point that if crimes have been
committed—and in the case of the authorizing of torture, which is
banned by both international treaties to which the US is a signatory,
and by US law, which folded the torture bans into the US Criminal Code
for good measure, they clearly have been—-the president and his
incoming attorney general have a sworn obligation to prosecute them.
That’s what “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution” means,
after all.

A “politically fraught” step? That should apply to not prosecuting criminals, should it not?

Note here that for the Times, and for the rest of the
conventional thinkers who have reduced corporate journalism to such
thin gruel that no one bothers with it any more, “politically fraught”
refers exclusively to the idea that the Right will supposedly be riled
up at any effort to prosecute war criminals in the outgoing
administration. If people on the Left, or even the center, large
numbers of whom believe strongly that the current administration should
be held accountable for its crimes, get upset because there is no
effort to prosecute them, that doesn’t count as “politically fraught.”

A new torture report, just released by the current, only narrowly
Democratic, Senate Armed Services Committee, has definitively laid the
blame for the sickening campaign of torture of captives by American
military personnel and CIA agents, on officials all the way up to
former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Joint Chief of Staff Richard
Myers, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington,
White House legal counsel (and later attorney general) Alberto
Gonzales, and others. It really traces the approval directly up to
President Bush, noting that it was Bush’s signing of an executive order
on February 7 2002, exempting captives in the so-called (and loosely
defined) “War” on Terror from protections of the Geneva Conventions,
which authorized the military’s and CIA’s descent into rampant, brutal
lawlessness.

Others, myself included (in my book The Case for Impeachment,
co-authored with Stanford University law professor Barbara Olshansky,
and published in 2006 by St. Martin’s Press), have long argued that
both President Bush and Vice President Cheney are guilty of war crimes,
especially for their authorization, condoning, encouraging, protecting,
and failure to halt and to punish the practice of torture by American
forces under their control. But here we have a bi-partisan committee of
Congress finally, belatedly, making the same case. How can the new
incoming president and commander in chief not order a criminal investigation of all of those responsible
for crimes that not only were grievous violations of US and
international law, but that, by the admission of key American military
leaders, led to practices at Guantanamo Bay and at Abu Ghraib which
were “the first and second identifiable causes of US combat deaths in
Iraq.”

On its face, I would submit that if as president Obama blocks
prosecution of Bush/Cheney administration war criminals, it will be the
wounded American soldiers and their relatives, and the relatives of
Americans who died in Iraq and Afghanistan at the hands of fighters in
those countries who were recruited into battle by the images of the
torture and abuse who will make his decision “politically fraught.”
(And let’s not forget that failure to prosecute torture violations is
itself a war crime—making Obama himself potentially culpable should he
fail to act.)

I have spent the last two and a half years actively promoting the
idea that President Bush and Vice President Cheney should be impeached
for their crimes against the Constitution, their manifest abuses of
power, and their actual statutory crimes, such as torture and lying to
Congress. Thanks to the political cowardice of the Democratic majority
in the House of Representatives, under the craven leadership of House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the gutlessness of House Judiciary Chairman
John Conyers, the impeachment that was so richly deserved did not
happen. But my failed quest for impeachment does not mean that calls
for criminal indictment for crimes committed should be equally quixotic.

It’s one thing for a bunch of politicians in Congress to decide that
impeachment would be “too divisive,” or to decide that they “don’t have
the votes” to win an impeachment vote in the House or conviction in the
Senate, and therefore to oppose even trying to make the case (I
disagree with that argument completely, and note that it could as
easily have been made in 1973 or early 1974 with respect to Richard
Nixon, in which case he never would have faced an impeachment hearing
in the House or been run out of office for his crimes). But it’s
another thing entirely to argue, as the conventional media drones are
arguing, and as President-Elect Obama has been saying, that there can be no
prosecution of people in the Bush/Cheney administration for crimes
committed during their two terms of office.

What kind of message is this sending to the world, and to the
citizens of the United States? If you commit a crime and you are
important enough, it’s not prosecutable in America?

This is taking the “too big to fail” argument that is being used to
justify the bailout of failed enterprises like AIG, Citicorp, JP
Morgan/Chase, and soon GMC and Chrysler, and turning it into “too big
to prosecute” in the case of politicians.

“No one is above the law” used to be a proud motto of the US legal
system. Now we are about to have our first president who is a constitutional
scholar, and he appears ready, with the backing of the conventional
media, to change that motto to: “No one is above the law, except for
presidents, vice presidents and their top staffs.”

The right answer, of course, is simple. The new president and the
Congress should appoint a special prosecutor and authorize him or her
to determine if there have been crimes committed by the prior
administration, and then, if such crimes are found to have occurred, to
prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law. Once such a prosecutor
is appointed, the White House and Congress should step aside and let
justice take its course.

As for the media, they should stop giving the new president a pass. Instead of, like the Times,
saying they “do not hold out real hope” of such a step being taken,
they should, in editorials, be demanding that it be taken. Meanwhile,
in their news pages, they should be hard at work digging out the
evidence of those crimes, and of the damage done by them.

____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now
available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Experience is Over-Rated

dlindorff — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:25:42 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Sarah Palin stated again, most recently in her interview yesterday
by ABC’s Charlie Gibson, that she has foreign policy experience because
as governor of Alaska she has been in charge of that state’s National
Guard, and because Alaska is, doggone it, “right next” to Russia.

This made me feel pretty good, because it made me realize that I
have a whole lot of skills and experience which I hadn’t really
appreciated before and that I could perhaps use to get myself out of
this freelance journalism profession, which is not all that great from
a financial perspective.

I, for instance, live very close to the garage where my mechanic
works (I mean, I drive past the place every day and even buy my gas
there), so I’m ready to be a car mechanic (I can’t tell you how many
cars I’ve seen being gone over there, and have even sometimes watched a
bit as my own vehicles were up on the lift). I also live literally
across the street from a large forest, which qualifies me to be a
number of things—forest ranger, lumberjack, and perhaps naturalist.

I’ve also been to the doctor many times, so maybe I should hang a
shingle and open up a medical practice. I swear I’ve got all those exam
questions by memory at this point, and they’ve got nurses to do the
stuff with the arm cuff and the stethoscope.

Of course, the real money these days is in law, and there I’ve really got it nailed. Not only do several lawyers live right in my neighborhood,
but I’ve actually been in court and seen lawyers at work. For that
matter, I even had a lawyer argue a case for me once, when I was being
charged with trespassing at the Pentagon. He wasn’t successful at
getting my fine and jail time dropped, but hey, you learn from other
people’s failures, too. Furthermore, I actually wrote a book with a co-author who is a lawyer. With all that experience, I could certainly be an attorney.

Over the years, I’ve spent time at the seashore, and even went on a
one-week ocean sailing trip, so you’d have to admit oceanography is
almost in my blood. Or perhaps I could be a sea captain. I’m sure I
could do at least as well as the captain of the Exxon Valdez tanker.

Come to think of it, back when I was 16, I hitchhiked up to Alaska
with a friend and spent the summer thumbing around the state, so I know
that place like the back of my hand, which means if Sarah Palin gets
elected and goes to Washington, maybe I could be governor of Alaska.
And then, as governor I’d be commander of a National Guard unit, so I’d
be qualified to be a vice president, or, should the opportunity present
itself, even president of the United States. Actually, I’d be maybe
more experienced than Palin for the job, because I grew up in
Connecticut, and thanks to the small size of the states in my native
New England, have actually been living closer to a foreign
country—Canada—than she, living in Wasilla, has been living to Russia.
In other words, when you think of it, my foreign policy experience is
much greater than hers. Besides, I’ve actually visited Canada a few times, which really boosts my experience in international affairs.

I know some people think that jumping into jobs like president or
vice president of the United States based upon what they might perceive
as limited experience is presumptuous, but that’s because they aren’t
being fair and open-minded. And I’ll admit that it’s hard, with
relatively limited experience, to expect someone like Palin or me to
measure up to the standard of someone like our current vice president,
Dick Cheney, who came to his position after having served previously as
presidential chief of staff, as secretary of defense, and as a member
of Congress. I mean, that’s real experience, and it shows in the fine
job he’s done as VP.

But we shouldn’t let examples like Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld,
another guy who took an important government post—in his case Secretary
of Defense—after having considerable prior experience—make us obsess
about experience. I mean, look at our current president. George W. Bush
got elected in 2000, when his experience consisted of just two terms as
governor of Texas, a state where the governor has a largely ceremonial
role and most of the real work of government is handled by the
legislature, and look what a great job he did in the White House!
Furthermore, his only military experience was as a pilot in a Texas
National Guard unit, most of which tour of duty he missed because he
decided to work on his father’s failed election campaign instead, and
because he didn’t want to take any drug tests, and look what a fine job
he’s done as commander in chief.

This should all make Americans lighten up and be less snooty and
judgemental about what they demand in terms of experience in
presidential and vice presidential candidates. Palin in my view has proved her qualifications for the job. Yesterday she sent her young son off to battle in Iraq to fight against "the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the deaths of thousands of Americans" on 9-11 seven years ago. What better evidence do we need of this woman's solid grasp of foreign affairs, history and combat?

________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia journalist and columnist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Torture for the Torturers

dlindorff — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:04:19 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I don’t believe in torture, but right now, I’d like to see a few
people subjected to some of the torture techniques that they approved
for use against US captives in the so-called War on Terror.

I’d be satisfied if they just stuck to the ones used against
15-year-old Omar Khadr—techniques that a US federal judge established
constituted torture under the Geneva Conventions.

I have a 15-year old son, so I’m particularly aware of what an
atrocity it has been the way the US has treated Khadr, and some 2500
other young boys and teenagers that it admits to having captured and
labeled as “enemy combatants” in its so-called “war on terror.”

Khadr, recall, was sent at the age of 14 to Pakistan by his
allegedly terrorist-linked Canadian father to attend a madrassa—one of
those fundamentalist Muslim schools. Like a number of students of those
schools, he was indoctrinated in jihad and ended up fighting with the
Taliban in Afghanistan against the warlords that opposed them. When the
US attacked Afghanistan, in 2001, Khadr got caught up in a war against
America. According to the charge against him, he was arrested in 2002
after US Special Forces found him and some adult fighters hiding out in
a remote compound in the mountains. The Americans called in an air
strike, and then moved into the rubble to find out who was left—quite
probably, according to some testimony in the case—to finish them off.
Someone, still alive after the attack, tossed a grenade which killed
one of the Americans and blinded another. The others sprayed the
wounded fighters, gravely injuring Khadr and killing one of his older
companions.

Khadr was accused of being the grenade tosser, and was reportedly
tortured in Afghanistan, before being shipped off to Guantanamo, where
he remains six years later, facing a military tribunal. He was
interrogated there, not just by Americans, but by Canadians too.

A citizen of Canada, and clearly someone who was captured and held
in violation of the Geneva Conventions, which hold that children are
“protected persons,” not to be held as POWs if captured in wartime, but
rather to be treated as victims of war, Khadr has thus far been
abandoned to his fate by his own government. The Conservative prime
minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, anxious to have Canada serve as a
willing servant of US military power and foreign policy, has not lifted
a finger to help him.

Now a court in Canada has ordered the Canadian government to
release videotapes it was keeping secret of Khadr’s interrogations, and
they make for ugly viewing. Khadr is shown weeping, holding up his
wounded arms, pleading to be given treatment, pleading to be returned
to Canada. It’s a disgusting scene, especially when we learn that he
had already been “softened up” for his Canadian interrogators by
American torture specialists at Guantanamo who subjected this boy to
three weeks of sleep deprivation and god knows what other creative
techniques which we recently learned were copied from the methods
developed by the North Koreans and applied to American captives in the
Korean War.

It all makes you disgusted to be an American—especially with so
many Americans still justifying this kind of grotesque behavior.

But back to my desire to see some torture inflicted. My profound
wish is that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, former Department
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and
Canadian Prime Minister Harper all be subjected to no less than a month
of torture, to include water boarding, at least 2-3 weeks of sleep
deprivation, a variety of 24-stints of being forced into stress
positions (Rumsfeld’s should be standing), some violent slapping
around, and a bit of creative sexual humiliation. Since we don’t know
at this point that anal sodomizing was officially sanctioned, or just
was something that the torturers on the ground came up with that was
then ignored by superiors, I’m willing to let that one be left up to
those performing the torture, but I sure won’t object if it happens.

At this point, I can’t think of anything less than such a
punishment that would be fitting for these monsters who are currently
still running our, and Canada’s, governments.

When I think of what kind of twisted minds these people must have
in order to actually have met in the White House and approved such
methods for use against human beings—human beings who under our
Constitution are to be afforded the presumption of innocence, and who
are promised to be protected against “cruel and unusual” punishments
(or in Harper’s case to have known about it and then not protested,
even to protect a child born in his own country)—it makes me sick to my
stomach.

If there is a hell, I am sure there is in it some special circle
reserved for such monsters, but I think, having seen what was done at
their direction and with their approval to young Khadr (who after all,
if he really ever did toss that grenade, was only doing what any US
soldier would hope to have the courage to do in wartime if his unit
were attacked), that hell is too good for these leaders. They all need
and deserve the special punishment of having done to them what they
ordered or allowed to be done to others.

Sadly, my wish to see them suffer such a fate is unlikely to be
granted. One can at least hope, though, that they will have their names
etched somewhere for posterity on some memorial to the victims of war
crimes and to the eternal condemnation of the perpetrators of such
bestiality.
______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a journalist and columnist based in Philadelphia.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now in paperback). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

Rummy Wants Another Terrorist Attack to Punish American Voters

Bob Fertik — Wed, 14 May 2008 11:41:57 -0400

Jason Linkins at Huffington Post has a shocker:

Rumsfeld On 2006 Election: "The Correction For That...Is An Attack"

An ongoing exploration of the documents related to the Pentagon's "message force multipliers" program has unearthed a clip of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggesting that America, having voted the Democrats back into Congressional power, could benefit from suffering another terrorist attack, and doing so in the presence of the very same military analysts who went on to provide commentary and analysis of the Iraq War...

by far the most extraordinary part of this luncheon is the antipathy the gathered members exhibit toward the American people for having the temerity to vote the Democrats back into power. When Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong bemoans the lack of "sympathetic ears" on Capitol Hill, Rumsfeld offers that the American people lack "the maturity to recognize the seriousness of the threats." What's to be done? According to Rumsfeld, "The correction for that, I suppose, is [another] attack."

Think about this - the man whose job it was (twice) to defend America against attack wants terrorists to attack America to punish American voters for electing Democrats???

But it was not Rumsfeld's thinking alone. It was apparently shared by all the TV generals who were present.

This goes beyond a religious leader saying "God Damn America" - our top generals want a terrorist attack???

This takes partisanship to the level of mental illness. Attaturk is right to call them sociopaths. Either that or they are simply traitors.

Is this how the entire Bush-Cheney administration, Pentagon brass, and Republican Party feel? Do they all want terrorists to attack the U.S. to punish voters for electing Democrats?

This is a huge and deeply disturbing story - reporters and Congressional Democrats must get to the bottom of it.

The Bush Family's Bad Latin Real Estate Investment

dlindorff — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:43:41 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Back in late 2006, it was widely reported in the Latin American media that President Bush, or perhaps his old man, had bought a 100,000-acre farm in a remote area of Paraguay.

What struck people at the time was the choice of country. Paraguay, of course, has gained a certain Club Med status among the world's villains and criminal elements as the place to go when the law's on your tail. The country, ruled for six decades by the dictatorial and fascist Colorado Party of Gen. Alfredo Stroesser, an almost cartoon charicature of a Latin American dictator, has no extradition treaty with any nation.

That's why it has long harbored aging Nazis, bank robbers, and a string of ousted or retired Latin American dictators and their assistants over the years.

Given that President Bush, once he leaves office on January 20, 2009, will no longer have the diplomatic immunity conferred upon heads of state, or the Constitutional protection against indictment by domestic prosecutors, it makes sense that he would be looking for a safe haven from the long arm of the law.

After all, they guy is guilty of a huge laundry list of international crimes, from the Crime Against Peace and Conspiracy against Peace in the UN Charter, to Geneva Convention violations like approval of torture of prisoners, collective punishment of civilians, the killing of children and child soldiers, the failure to protect occupied citizens, the use of banned weapons, etc., etc., and also of domestic crimes, ranging from political use of government employees, conspiracy, treason, lying to federal officials, defrauding Congress, etc.

No wonder he wants to do what Klaus Barbie, Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann did, and hole up in Paraguay.

Only trouble is, Paraguay may not be such a safe haven for long.

Last month, a former Roman Catholic Bishop with leftist, populist tendencies, Fernando Lugo, surprised almost everyone in Paraguay, and no doubt President Bush, by winning the national presidential election, ousting the Colorado Party for the first time in 61 years. There is talk that among other things, Lugo is thinking of returning Paraguay to the community of nations, by signing some of those extradition agreements.

If he does that Bush may be stuck having to hide behind his rump squad of Secret Service agents down at the Crawford Ranch, hoping they can keep the process servers from Brattleboro and Marlboro, VT, with their war crimes arrest warrants, at bay.
__________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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Invasion of the Pumpheads!

dlindorff — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 11:08:54 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Is America at the mercy of an invasion of the pumpheads?

The bizarre behavior of Bill Clinton during this campaign season, which has seen this once smooth-talking and politically uber-sophisticated campaigner repeatedly stick a foot in his mouth and undermine his wife’s struggling campaign, raises the issue of whether he is suffering from postperfusion syndrome—a now recognized cognitive impairment common in patients who have undergone heart bypass surgery.

Referred to in hospital jargon as “pumphead syndrome,” the condition, thought to be caused by debris and bubbles that are created and released into the bloodstream by artificial pumps used to circulate blood while hearts are being operated on—material that can block blood flow in smaller vessels in the brain, causing neurological damage--this recognized condition has been demonstrated in some studies to lead to significant cognitive impairment that can show up in as many as 42 percent of heart surgery patients even as long as five years after surgery.

Clinton underwent quadruple bypass surgery on Sept. 6, 2006, and accordiing to his doctors, instead of keeping his heart going during the procedure, they chose the method that involved shutting down his heart temporarily, and putting him temporarily on a heart pump--the method that can cause posperfusion syndrome.

At least in Clinton’s case, if he is a “pumphead,” the only damage he can do is to his wife’s campaign. He is no longer president or commander in chief. (Well, let me take that back. If she were elected, he could create havoc as First Spouse and chief pillow talker, but let’s not even go there!)

But what about Cheney, a man who has had five, count ‘em, five heart surgeries, each of which offered a 42% chance of causing permanent cognitive impairment? No wonder there are reports that this bizarre, eternally snarling, heavy drinking friend shooter is said to hum to himself loudly and tunelessly in the stall of the White House men’s room!

If we consider the likelihood that the man widely seen as the power in this administration is a pumphead, and that Bush himself, who spent a long time as a drunk and a cokehead (talk about the potential for, not to mention the clear evidence of mental impairment!), we are left with the almost inevitable conclusion that we have been led for the past two terms by a pair brain-damaged men—and that’s not even counting the members of the cabinet and National Security Council, the medical histories of whom we know nothing. Given the advanced age of most of the team, it’s a fair bet that a number of them have had heart surgery too.

Call it “Invasion of the Pumpheads!”

Certainly not everyone who undergoes heart surgery and gets put temporarily on a pump ends up mentally deficient, but the prevalence of the problem sounds to me like a pretty good reason to demand full medical disclosure from all candidates for higher office, and not just for president and vice president, but for cabinet posts too—and judgeships.

For starters, Republican presidential presumptive nominee John McCain, 71 and a known cancer survivor, has not released his medical records. That suspicious failure of candor in a man who has already run for president once, should tell us something right away. His behavior places him squarely in the pumphead suspicion category, especially given that the guy repeatedly fails to recognize the difference between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq, and thinks that the Iranians—nearly all Shia—are backing Al Qaeda in Iraq, a Sunni group that is so anti-Iran that they are publicly calling on the US to attack that country! Even if he hasn’t had heart surgery, if he were elected and took office at age 72, he’d be the oldest president in history, and his prognosis for making it through one, much less two terms in one of the world’s most stressful jobs without having a heart attack seem slim.

Not that seemingly intelligent presidents haven’t been disastrous or haven’t made terrible decisions (think Nixon, Kennedy, Hoover and Wilson). But we’ve just endured two terms of a president with some kind of mental impairment with catastrophic results, and we had one in the 1980s with Alzheimer-afflicted Ronald Reagan, which set the nation on its course to bankruptcy. We certainly don’t need yet a third president of limited mental ability. It’s almost like we’re institutionalizing the concept.
_____________
DAVE LINDORFF is an investigative journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition. His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

A Manchurian Candidate in the White House?

dlindorff — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 08:34:28 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

With a viral campaign underway via email, right-wing radio, and on the street suggesting that Barack Obama is a black “Manchurian Candidate,” secretly trained as a Muslim fanatic who will insinuate himself into the White House, thence to undermine all that we hold dear, perhaps it is time to look at the Manchurian Candidate we already have in the White House, who, together with his handler over in Blair House, has pretty much done all the damage already.

George Bush came to office in 2001 promising a new era of integrity, civility and “compassionate conservatism,” an era of humble American foreign policy, and a bi-partisan approach to government.

What did we actually get?

Once in office, this chameleon president almost immediately set out to embroil the country in a major war in the Middle East against the nation of Iraq. The game plan was laid out at the president’s first National Security Council meeting, attended by Vice President Dick Cheney (the man holding Bush’s controller), Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neal (who later spilled the beans about the session).

Bush also famously ignored all warnings about the imminent attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. How much he and the rest of the administration knew about that attack in advance, or whether elements within the administration may have even helped it along, remains the subject of considerable interest and investigation and may never be answered, but it is clear that there were ample warnings about it, and he did nothing—even rudely blowing off a briefer who tried to alert him to the danger. Moreover, it is known that Israeli Mossad agents (who we know have close ties to both the US intelligence apparatus and to the Neocons who infest the Bush White House) did indeed have advance knowledge, and were set up across New York Harbor with a video camera to tape the attack on the Twin Towers (they were subsequently arrested by New Jersey police, only to be later released and sent back to Israel, through intercession by the US government). As well, we know that unidentified people made a killing by placing negative bets, called “puts,” on the stocks, several days before 9-11, of the two airlines that were hijacked, American and United, and of two investment banks that would be seriously hurt by the building collapses, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. (The puts were placed through an investment bank, Alex Brown, which until a year earlier had been headed by a man who moved over to become the number three person in the CIA.) It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Bush/Cheney administration, at a minimum, wanted an attack on American soil, and a national disaster that would put the country on a war footing.

Certainly instead of rallying the public and defending the nation’s democratic traditions and its Constitution, Bush and his handlers after 9-11 immediately set in motion a concerted scare campaign to undermine both. While urging the public to buy sheets of plastic and duct tape to construct “safe rooms” in their homes, they rammed through Congress a deceitfully named measure, the so-called Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (USA PATRIOT Act), which effectively undermined most of the articles of the Bill of Rights (and which appeared, suspiciously, fully drawn up in bill form, only days after the attacks).

At the same time, the president, only one week after the attacks, obtained an Authorization for Use of Military Force for a military attack on the Taliban government in Afghanistan and on Al Qaeda forces in that country, which he subsequently interpreted broadly as an authorization for a global “war” on terror which he then claimed made him effectively a dictator with absolute power both at home and abroad (the so-called “unitary executive” theory). Under this claim of absolute power as commander in chief in time of war, Bush went on to order the use of torture against captives, foreign and domestic, including US citizens, to strip even US citizens of the right of habeas corpus—that is, the right to have their arrest and detention brought before a federal court—and to establish secret torture centers around the globe and on military installations in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay on the island of Cuba.

As well, even before the 9-11 attacks, the president began a sweeping program of electronic spying, run through the super-secret National Security Agency, on Americans’ telephone and internet activities. It was and remains a program that deliberately avoids seeking warrants and court approval even by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court—a body that has only rejected some five requests for warrants out of hundreds of thousands sought since its establishment in 1978.

Finally, in a perhaps fatal undermining of the Constitution, the president after 9-11 began a practice of simply refusing to enact or obey laws passed by the Congress, effectively rendering the legislative branch an impotent debating club.

Not content to simply explode or dismantle the legal foundations of the American government and rule of law, Bush and his handlers also went about systematically destroying the country’s basic institutions and even its economy.

The education system was fatally ensnared in a test-driven system called “No Child Left Behind,” which has in short order dumbed down public education to an extent shocking even to this already anti-intellectual society, with many schools simply giving up the teaching of art, literature or history, in order to focus desperately on math and reading in order that their students would do well enough on standardized tests to keep the schools from losing their funding.

The dollar has been cast adrift to become the new Lira as the government has gone on an unprecedented borrowing spree to fund endless war and ever-larger military budgets, while erasing the taxes on the wealthy, the super-rich, and corporations. Banks were given free rein to enter into all manner of risky ventures, leading to the current collapse in credit. Corporations were encouraged to ship their production and jobs overseas. Homeowners were encouraged to spend, spend, spend and to mortgage their homes to the hilt and then some. Towns, cities and pension funds were encouraged to invest in fantastic “structured” products that were actually towering card houses. Domestic car manufacturers were encouraged to build every larger, ever more voraciously gas-guzzling vehicles, pumping out ever larger quantities of carbon into the already overstressed atmosphere.

The nation’s infrastructure—its roads, dams, bridges, levies, airports, veterans hospitals etc.--were left to decay, with predictable results, the most dramatic of which was the loss of an entire city, New Orleans, to a routine Category 3 hurricane (after which, the president did nothing to rescue the survivors or fund a recovery).

Surveying at the appalling wreckage left after eight years of the Bush administration, it is hard to recognize the country that he started out with in 2001. A once proud nation—one that only a few years ago was admired around the world and that now is viewed as a pariah and a rogue state—today trembles before a handful of turbaned fanatics holed up in caves in the Hindu Kush, its trillion-dollar high-tech military colossus fought to a standstill in Iraq and Afghanistan by a few thousand brave men and women armed with RPGs, antique AK-47s and home-made roadside bombs. A nation that once was the envy of the world for its free society now has scientists afraid to report their findings, university professors afraid to support outspoken colleagues, members of Congress afraid to defend their Constitution, citizens afraid of their neighbors, journalists afraid of government criticism, lawyers afraid to defend clients...

Hey, this place starts to look and feel an awful lot like the China I lived in back in 1991!

Forget all the nonsense about Barack Obama being a closet Muslim. We already have our Manchurian Candidate in the White House, and he has largely accomplished what he was programmed to do: destroy the country.

The truth is this: If at the end of their second term, Bush and Cheney were to hop on a plane and fly off to a hideout in the mountains on the Afghan-Pakistan border, leaving a "Nya-nya!" note on the White House dining room table, few people would really be very surprised.
_____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist and columnist. His most recent book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006, and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net